The Forgetting(86)
I yank my arm free from his grasp, flesh stinging as if pricked by a thousand pins. ‘Whatever I am without you, it’s got to be better than whatever you’re trying to turn me into.’
He glares at me – such hatred in his eyes – and I force myself to stare back, hold his gaze, refuse to surrender. And it is he, in the end, who looks away first.
I make myself study his face for a few seconds, to be clear in my mind who he is, what he has done. To commit this moment – this feeling – to memory. And then I turn around, link my arm through Zahira’s, breathe against the hammering of my heart, and I start to walk away. I ignore the sound of Stephen’s voice calling behind me, telling me I’m rubbish, I’m hopeless, that I won’t last five minutes without him. I ignore him shouting at me that my life is empty, pointless, that I am weak, pathetic, that I will soon be begging him to take me back. Putting one foot in front of the other, I distance myself from Stephen’s control. I walk away, towards whatever my old life looked like, whatever the past may have held and the future is yet to reveal.
I walk away and I don’t look back.
EPILOGUE
FIVE MONTHS LATER
Snowdrops line the path as I push the buggy through the park. The air is cold, but the February sun is making a valiant attempt to penetrate the chill.
‘Mama! Bir!’
I follow the line of Leo’s pointed finger to the wood pigeon flying overhead, watch it land on a branch ahead of us.
‘Bir-bir!’
Crouching down beside the buggy, I squeeze Leo’s thigh beneath his padded snowsuit. ‘Clever boy. They’re birds, aren’t they? Pigeons. They go coo, coo.’
Leo mimics the shape of my mouth, his lips a perfect circle. ‘Coo! Coo!’ His tongue finds the roof of his mouth and the sound emerges, his face breaking into a wide smile of achievement.
‘That’s it, sweetheart. You’re a pigeon!’ I lean forward, kiss the soft skin of his cheek, the ferocity of my love for him hot in my chest. And yet, even as I watch his wide, trusting smile, I cannot help but worry about the effect on him of the past few months, what implications they may have for his future. Whether those three weeks of my absence will stay with him forever, a fear of abandonment he will never quite lose.
A plane flies overhead and it takes me back in an instant to sitting on the bench beside Dominic as the whole, ugly truth emerged. I think about how the rest of that day unfolded and, even now, I find it hard to recall the details, as though a part of my brain is not yet ready to paint the whole picture.
I remember being back at Zahira’s flat, Zahira sleuthing through Bea’s Facebook profile and finding the veterinary practice where she worked. I remember Zahira phoning Bea, explaining what had happened, and the arrival of Bea and my parents with Leo a few hours later; the rush of tears, embraces, questions, answers. I remember, most of all, the feeling of Leo being placed in my arms: a feeling beyond words, beyond language, my heart expanding like a giant red star until I thought it would explode. So much love, such a fervent desire to protect him. I hadn’t known, until that moment, there was such capacity within me.
‘Swi-, Mama, swi-!’ Leo points a finger in front of him, as though he has every confidence that he knows the way.
‘You want to go on the swings? We’re heading to the playground now, sweetheart.’
He kicks his legs with excitement, claps his hands, and I take hold of the buggy, continue our journey.
It wasn’t until the day after I got home to Mum and Dad’s, when the police came to take a statement, that the full story began to emerge. How I had been born Anna Olivia Nicholson but that everyone had always called me Livvy. How my married name was Anna Olivia Bradshaw, that this was the name on my driving licence, my bank cards, the NHS register. How all Dominic had to do was allow the doctors to call me by a first name I had never used and thereby compound the confusion from my amnesia. My Facebook profile was still in my maiden name because I had used it so rarely since getting married that I’d found no cause to update it. It was one of the police officers who pointed out that Dominic had managed to create further disorientation by copying what I’d been doing most of my life: swapping his second name for his first. Dominic Stephen Bradshaw. Making me call him by a name that would have felt foreign on my tongue. He’d known there was little chance of me uncovering the truth, given how vigilantly he was isolating me from the rest of the world.
It did not take the police long to uncover the extent of Dominic’s deceptions. My parents and Bea showed them the emails and texts he had been sending from my accounts, pretending to be me. There were messages to Bea smoothing over the conflict we’d had before I left Bristol, telling her what he knew she wanted to hear: that I was looking for a job, that Dominic had opened up to me about his relationship with Daisy, that our marriage had turned a corner. Messages to my parents describing how busy I was, visiting nurseries, getting the house sorted, attending job interviews. Messages asking them to look after Leo for just a few more days, each message extending the time I would be apart from him little by little so as to arouse the least suspicion. Messages obfuscating the requests for our address, continuing the pretence that we wanted it to be a surprise for them too, that we didn’t want to share it with them until the day they’d be visiting. Every message innocuous in itself, the collective impact only visible once you surveyed them from a distance, like a pointillist painting whose image becomes clear only when you step back from the canvas. And yet, both Bea and my parents had been worried, had sensed something was wrong; but while I seemed to be insisting everything was fine, there was little they could do.