The Stepmother(60)
Then I look again. There’s a letter from the dentist – addressed to someone I don’t know.
Someone called Lisa Bedford.
Forty
Marlena
It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to come down and see me, Jeanie, okay? Honestly, you were always bloody welcome, you know that really – don’t you?
I was just so immersed in my own crap at the time. And you know why; I know you do. You of all people realised just how badly I’d damaged my reputation, how much I had to repay.
It was so bloody important that I helped that girl Nasreen. She’d been so sweet when I did my talk at the college – and maybe, I thought later, maybe she reminded me a bit of you, Jean – her trusting brown eyes, her warm face.
So I was still looking for Nasreen, and I felt like I was getting closer.
After I met Jeanie on that freezing February day, the imam in Luton had greeted me politely, inviting me into his tiny office. He offered me tea in front of the glowing three-bar heater, which I accepted, despite already jangling with too much black coffee.
The imam seemed like a good bloke: straight-up and concerned. My instinct for liars is pretty good – like a radar after all these years.
He said he’d helped many kids wavering near the path to being radicalised. He was, by all accounts, dead set against this ‘wickedness’, as he called it.
‘The truth is we can find no trace of this girl at all through our network in the Middle East.’ He looked sorrowful. ‘We always have our ear to the ground. But no one has seen or heard of Nasreen that we know of. I’m sorry.’
I left, not feeling much soothed. If there was no sign of her in either Turkey or Syria, why did her family and her English boyfriend seem so convinced that she’d gone that way?
I realised later – too late – I’d gotten a little obsessed. Again.
Yes, I was distracted – I admit it.
But you’ve always been so strong, Jeanie. When our f*cking useless mother vanished to a commune in Morocco to ‘cleanse her soul’ just after your eleventh birthday – inspired present as usual, thanks Mum – leaving you in charge of both of us, you did such a good job, the social never even got a whiff of it.
You got me to school, and then you got yourself there too – and you got us home again. You made a few cans of baked beans, some spaghetti hoops and one loaf of thin-slice Mother’s Pride (oh the irony) last for a week. The bag of sugar, that lasted too – that was our treat.
When we ran out of tins, you ‘borrowed’ some money from Mrs Wilmers downstairs. You said it was for the raffle at school, and she could win a hamper or a holiday to Butlins. You said it like it was Barbados – well it was to us – and she gave you three pounds.
You eked it out till our feckless mother returned, suntanned and hungover, not cleansed, with a bag of vodka, two hundred duty-free fags and a worse habit than she’d left with. She brought us nothing.
What a surprise.
But you never even grassed her up to Nan, and you made me swear not to either (though you’d have been doing us a favour if you had). Still, your sense of loyalty was too strong.
Forty-One
Jeanie
3 April 2015
I stare at the letter to this stranger: it’s from Hillfield Dental Practice.
Lisa Bedford.
Who is she, and why is she getting letters here?
I’m being jumpy again. It’s nothing. No doubt she’s just someone who lived here before the Kings, an ex-resident of Malum House. And who is there to ask anyway?
I walk back upstairs, past the locked door, and I peer into Matthew’s study. It feels so empty in the house without him here. I feel empty without him here. Without his approval and without the love I felt so tangibly until only a few weeks ago.
His shiny silver laptop stares at me from his desk.
If I just checked through his emails, I might get some answers about the person who ‘shopped’ me.
I remember the devil’s idea of control: reading everything that came into the house. I remember the results.
I’m not going to stoop to his depths.
But then I pass beneath the attic hatch. I’ve resisted it for too long now.