People LIke Her(30)
Dan didn’t notice either.
While he and Coco waited in the queue at Starbucks for his coffee that day, I was two people behind them. As they wandered around Foyles—he checked to see if they had his book in stock; they didn’t—I was never more than one aisle over. I was pretending to check out the pirate ship in the window while he and Coco looked around in the Lego shop. When they paused for a pretzel and a sit-down in the food court, I was one booth away.
By their third shoe shop, Dan was visibly flagging. He had been checking the time on his phone about every five minutes all day. Now he was doing so even more frequently. In his defense, it did seem to take the person who went down to the stockroom an age to come back with shoes in the right size, and then there was some business with the card reader not working properly the first time they tried it . . .
Coco was standing near the door of the shop, beside a display of those trainers with the heels that light up when you walk or jump or run in them.
“Those are lovely,” I commented.
She didn’t look up.
“Hey,” I said. “I found this lying around, just over there, and I thought to myself, Some little girl has been playing with that teddy and dropped it. Is it yours?”
She looked from me to the teddy, then back at me again. Then she thought for a bit.
“I think it might be,” she said eventually.
Grace really used to love it, that teddy. You can see from the state of the thing how many times I had to wash it over the years. How many times it got dropped on the floor of the bus or dragged through a puddle or it managed to fall out of the front basket of her bike and end up covered in muddy tire prints. Even after she had grown up and left home, I always used to leave it on her bed when she was staying at mine for the night. We used to joke, she and I, about how one day she would have a son or a daughter and it would be their teddy. I can’t claim that I had originally intended it that way—not consciously, anyhow—but it did strike me seeing Coco with it in her arms, holding it just the same way Grace always used to, the same way I could imagine a three-year-old Ailsa doing, that there was a certain horrible irony, a certain grim appropriateness, to that particular choice of stuffed toy, this particular use for it.
No one gave either of us a second look as Coco and I proceeded hand in hand along the gallery or when I picked her up in my arms to go down the escalator. The only person who did catch my eye was a gran wheeling a pushchair with a sleeping baby in it, and she gave me a little smile of solidarity. I smiled back, but even as I did so, it occurred to me once again—with the same abrupt, thumping sense of loss, anger, and pain as ever—that I am never going to get to do any of this. I am never going to get to spend the afternoon looking after my granddaughter, never going to get to watch her toddling about the playground, never going to get to push her shrieking happily on the swing, never going to get to see her boldly going down the slide on her own for the first time. I’m never going to get to do any of those things. And neither is my little girl.
I left Coco standing, with the teddy, outside the bookshop window. I figured if I left her there, her father was bound to find her eventually.
Originally, right at the beginning, that was the plan. Just to take her for half an hour, an hour maybe, to give them a scare. To walk off with her, go somewhere safe, and leave her for them to find, eventually. To make them experience that feeling, that sudden, sickening knowledge that someone you love is gone. The panic. The self-recrimination. The gut-twisting dread. That was all I wanted. For them to experience what I had experienced. What Grace had experienced.
Then I changed my mind.
As we were going down in the escalator, I could feel Coco relaxing in my arms. She rested her head on my lapel, playing with one of the buttons on my coat, chattering away about the different places she’d been that day, all the things she was getting for her birthday.
“You sound like you are a very lucky girl,” I told her.
She has no idea. Another time, in a darker mood, I’ll admit I have had thoughts about taking her and not leaving her somewhere safe to find. I know. Once upon a time I would have been as horrified by that confession as you are. Horrified that I could even consider it. Horrified that I was not a big enough person to rise above my own suffering and see that revenge solves nothing, that causing pain to someone else, someone innocent, would do nothing to put things back as they were, would probably not even stop my own hurting in the end. Maybe I have changed. I’ve been feeling for a long time that with what happened, something has come loose in me, that I am no longer the same person I was. I remember talking about it ages ago with one of the grief counselors my GP referred me to. I can remember telling them that I felt I was not a whole person or a real person or a person in the same way as everybody else was anymore. That it was like grief had blasted a hole in me and something had flowed out and I had not been able to stop it and maybe at the same time something else had flowed in.
Holding that child in my arms, feeling the gentle flutter of her pulse against me, her head close enough to my face for me to smell her shampoo—the same shampoo I can remember washing Grace’s hair with—I found myself asking myself if I could really do it. If I could truly hurt an innocent human being. And the honest truth is, knowing who she is, knowing who her mother is and what she’s done to me, I felt myself fully capable in that moment of chucking that child over the side of the escalator, dropping her off a balcony, hurling her headlong into traffic, without a second thought, without a moment’s remorse. And the truth is the only reason I didn’t do any of those things, the only reason I did leave her standing unharmed where I did, was not because I had a moment of stage fright or compassion or even doubt.