The Stepmother(40)

 

Oh Christ.

 

I ran to shut the doors – realising, with a sob of relief, that it was the radio talking.

 

The respite I felt at finding the source of all the noises was tempered by confusion as to why the doors were open. Sometimes the catch stuck and didn’t slide in right; someone must have missed it. But I hadn’t gone out today; I hadn’t noticed they were open…

 

Agata, Matthew’s cleaner, might have been here earlier I supposed – when I’d gone to the shops. I could never remember when she came – but she could have left them open. Except – it was Sunday.

 

There’s always an answer, Jeanie.

 

Fumbling with the handles, I heard a baby start to cry outside in the freezing night.

 

Just a fox barking somewhere nearby, Jeanie. There were so many foxes here, ruling the gardens. Quickly I flung the doors back to push them shut properly.

 

A flicker of light at the end of the garden perhaps – there, shivering across my eyes behind the lightly swirling flakes – and then gone again.

 

Instinctively I looked down, away from the light. That’s when I saw them.

 

Two blackbirds, one much bigger than the other – a mother and a chick, maybe –together beneath a couple of glass bells, perfectly symmetrical on the decking outside the doors, an old wooden clothes peg next to one.

 

Snow speckled the cloches, and it would have been quite picturesque really – except both of the birds, sprigs of holly stuck into their guts, were absolutely and brutally dead.

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty-Four

 

 

 

 

 

Marlena

 

 

 

 

 

Let me tell you a story, now I’ve got your attention.

 

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

 

Once upon a time there were two little girls born to a young mother who named them not for the rose trees in the Grimms’ tale, Snow White and Rose Red, but for the beautiful film stars she would rather have been herself.

 

The mother was already sad, because she realised she hadn’t married a king but a total tosser with a roving eye and a gambling habit – but she quite liked her two daughters. They made her smile, and the older one was very good at taking care of the younger on the days the mother couldn’t get out of bed.

 

Only when the king disappeared with Lynnette from the Cordor estate, the mother was so distraught that she couldn’t stop crying, and soon after she became well and truly hooked on pot and then on mother’s little helpers.

 

Easily done. Valium was all the rage in the late 1970s...

 

When even the dodgy doctor on the high street refused to fill yet another prescription, she asked her Uncle Rog for help. He lit another fag and sniffed: Go down the Breakspears in Brockley – you’ll get anything there.

 

Unfortunately that day the dealer in the pub wasn’t the usual bloke but a new one: a handsome, stress-wise type, pretty eyes and sneering mouth. ‘I can do Valium today, love, and if I ever can’t, think about a hit of smack instead? Does the same sort of thing, don’t it?’ Then he gave her a kiss. ‘You’re very pretty, ain’t you?’

 

And so it was that the mother fell for a man worse even than the horror dad of her two girls.

 

She kept off the heroin for a while – she wasn’t daft. But when the pills began to not quite do their job, well…

 

And so the older girl – the quieter, gentler one – kept looking after the younger, who was a right little livewire, and somehow they stumbled through their childhood together – until they met the bear. But that’s another story, for another day.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Bit clearer?

 

And make of that what you will, but just know this: if you grow up at the knee of a woman so out of it she can’t remember to feed you every morning or take you to school; if you know that she kind of can’t help it herself, but she’s failing as a parent, except you’re too young to actually manufacture that thought properly, so you just think, ‘Oh that’s our Mum, she’s spaced again,’ and you still love her anyway, though you couldn’t define love if you were asked to; if you still hope she’ll love you, despite the fact she’s so off her head most of the time that she wouldn’t know what love was if it jumped out and punched her on the nose – a broken nose, broken more than once from fighting with fellas or falling on her face – well if you go through that for a bit, it will affect you. Yeah, it will.

 

We are a product of what we grow up in. Not necessarily always our genes, it turns out – but a lot about our nurture.

 

Oh yeah, I see your face now. You’re thinking, what the hell – how are they both walking and talking, let alone breathing, if they came through this?