Cross Her Heart(42)
Little Crystal is two now. Her turning three can’t come quickly enough. To be three would mean she was past Daniel’s age. Maybe her dreams of him will then fade. Maybe this sense of terrible dread will go. She doesn’t believe it. The dreams and the dread will be with her forever, and they’re so much worse since Crystal was born. At first she thought the dreams were Daniel’s ghost wanting to punish her more from beyond the grave, but in her heart she knows that’s not true. Daniel was a good boy. And he was only two and a half.
She goes upstairs and cradles Crystal to her thin chest, soothing her. The little girl’s clothes need washing, as do most of her nappies, and the whole of their small house smells vaguely of shit and warm milk, but Jon hasn’t left her any money again and she’s out of washing powder. This cannot go on. She needs to call Joanne. She has to. She may deserve this awful life with a man who drinks too much and calls her a killer and says she revolts him whenever she tries to appease him, but her Crystal, her Ava, doesn’t. If they stay here, who knows how it will end? What he’ll do?
Last night was a wake-up call and she needs to act. To finally show some spine. Every time she closes her eyes she sees it: the bottle smashing against the wall to the right above her head. Little Crystal, sitting on the floor, shocked into stopping crying at her parents’ fight for a moment, covered in broken glass and alcohol.
It killed his anger in its tracks. He loves their daughter, she knows that, but she knows violence and what he did was enough to chill her to the bone. To make her realise how he blames her for everything through his alcoholic haze. She’s grown up a lot in the past three years, the long years since the perfect night when she told him her secret. She’s learned a lot about people. She knows he loves her, but she knows he hates himself for it. He can’t look at her most of the time and when they have sex she can feel his disgust. It’s worse since Crystal came along. Her sweet innocence is a constant reminder of what Charlotte did.
You’re a monster. That’s what he said last night. How can I love a monster? His words are worse than blows, but the blows can’t be far off. She’s had to gauge these things before. It’s all building to some awful conclusion, and she’s terrified he’ll take it out on Crystal, however much he says he loves her, because she knows how easy it is for things to go horribly wrong.
She holds the pudgy little girl too tightly, until she starts to cry. She doesn’t scream or wail, but lets out a gentle sob as if she can pick up on her mother’s anguish. She can, of course, and maybe she’s afraid to cry loudly now, even when Daddy’s out of the house.
Jon won’t be back for hours. He’s not at work, he’s at the pub or the bookie’s or round a mate’s house. He only works a few hours a week now and that won’t go on forever. His drinking is too out of control to hold down a job. She used to be able to see the man she fell in love with still inside him, but not any more. Not now it’s all turned to shit. Worse than shit. This awful loathing that emanates from him.
She has to call Joanne. This is the end of the line. Failure has to be faced. Maybe it will be fine, maybe she’ll be able to stay who she is now and move to a little flat in the same town – maybe even her old flat. She won’t be able to work until Crystal goes to school, but it could maybe be almost like before she met him. She’d have routines like when she was happy.
It won’t be that way, of course. Joanne’s already unhappy about the situation. She thinks it’s ‘precarious’. Jon’s ‘highly unpredictable right now’. And she’s right. He should have taken the counselling he was offered when they came clean about him knowing. But he didn’t. He said he was fine. He loved her. That was before the pressures of fatherhood and the pressure of carrying her secret every single day for years and years.
This is the other thing she’s learned over these years. The secret is her own. It’s her burden and sharing it doesn’t lighten the load, it simply doubles it. She can’t stay here if she leaves Jon, that’s just wishful thinking. Joanne, and the police, and all those people who make her decisions won’t let her. Jon’s threatened often enough that if she takes Crystal away, he’ll ruin everything. Tell everyone. Finish her. When he’s sober, he says he’s sorry, but how often is he sober? You can’t trust a drunk, she knows that too.
Crystal is crying and she has to do what’s best for her. She burns with shame when she finally calls the probation officer, but Joanne is nothing but professional and suddenly it’s all out of her hands. Plans are put in motion. It would seem they were readier for this than she is. All that’s left for her to do is leave him a letter. She tries to write how she feels, and also to be cold with him. He needs that. He needs to start again as much as she does. Her hand shakes as she writes. She doesn’t love him any more. This is true. She’s afraid of him. This is also true. She writes one final line before folding the paper and leaving it on the kitchen table.
Don’t come after me. Don’t try and find me. Don’t try and find us.
Calm now, she was always calm when someone else took control, she gathers what she needs and the pieces of her legacy life – passport, NHS certificate, everything that made this ghost of a person real. They’re useless now, a skin that will soon be shed, but Joanne will want them back, and even if she doesn’t, Jon shouldn’t have them.