People LIke Her(82)
Irene was talking to me from the doorway, but it was like someone trying to make themselves heard over a howling wind across a wide river.
When I opened my son’s eyes and shone a light into them, they were as dull and lifeless as the eyes of a fish on a slab.
Emmy
He always pauses at that point, Dan. Shuts the book. Takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. As if reliving that moment. As if overcome by emotion.
There must be three hundred people in this tent. It feels as if every single one of them is holding their breath.
Dan looks around, locates his glass of water, takes a swig from it. His thumb is still inserted at the spot he left off reading in the book he is holding to his chest. I can see the photo of us holding hands, looking meaningfully into each other’s eyes, on the back of the dust jacket. These Little Squares: The Bare Truth, by Mamabare and Papabare. Half a million copies sold in the first six months.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking a little, addressing his words somewhere over the top of the audience, up toward the roof of the tent. He puts his glass down as he clears his throat.
Christ, what a ham.
On every face I can see is the same look of sympathetic concern. The same look I used to get when I shared my maternal struggles with a room of paying mums. Shit, he might actually be better at this than me. I’d say 80 percent of the eyes focused on my husband are at the very least a little misty. In the third or fourth row a woman is blowing her nose loudly. One girl in the front row has an arm around her friend’s shaking shoulders.
Am I imagining it, or does Dan make a quick little gesture as if he is wiping a tear away from his eye? If so, that’s a new flourish. I wonder how long he’s been planning that. He certainly didn’t do it the last time we did one of these festival readings in Edinburgh two weeks ago.
Don’t get me wrong. I think both Dan and I found that part of the book hardest to write. To force ourselves to go through it all again. Actually, if I’m honest, I barely remember being in the hospital, let alone that horrible house. While it is permanently etched into Dan’s memory, I have only the vaguest sense of those terrible hours.
They tell me the very first thing I did, when I woke up in that stinking bed, and then again on the hospital ward, was ask where Bear was. I can remember the brightness of the room, the unfamiliar ceiling, the expression on Dan’s face. They were doing all they could, he said. Bear was very malnourished, very weak, very dehydrated. Thankfully the ambulance had got there quickly. Thankfully Dan and Irene had not arrived even an hour or two later.
The police found the woman’s car, abandoned, in a parking lot somewhere on the south coast, about a ninety-minute drive away. Her wedding ring was in the glove compartment. Her shoes were on the floor in the front. Jill, her name was. They found it on a hospital parking pass on the dashboard.
“In my darker days, the harder nights, I have cursed these little squares, questioned whether I should really be sharing my life with what is now nearly two million of you, as Papabare. Of course, I understand my wife’s urge to switch off from social media entirely, and I totally respect it.
“But as a writer, I felt compelled to do the only thing I know how to, to process those dark moments—which is write my story, our story, alongside my incredible partner, my wise and luminous wife. In part, we have our talented editor to thank for that too.” Dan smiles at her as he says this. She is standing just stage left, clutching what I notice is a very expensive Prada handbag.
“I know that it would be easy to blame social media for what happened to us—for the suffering that terrible woman inflicted on our family,” Dan says, shaking his head, biting his lip. “Perhaps—and I know this is an awful thing to say—the fact I know that woman is dead and can’t hurt us any more than she already has makes it easier.
“But what I also realized in the process of writing this book—now, extraordinarily, a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller—is that when we really needed them, this amazing community came together. That for every evil soul like Jill, with an axe to grind for no reason at all, there are a thousand hearts brimming with kindness.”
I survey the tent—clocking my mother at the back grabbing another glass of prosecco from the penned-off VIP area, tottering slightly on her heels—and wonder what they would think if they knew the truth. The reason that lunatic woman blamed me for her daughter and granddaughter’s death.
I didn’t know it for a long time. Dan didn’t tell me about the letter until I’d regained some of my strength. With the eagle eye she usually reserves for contracts, Irene noticed my name on a brown envelope sitting on the living room table, and before the police arrived at that house—while Dan was screaming, cradling our son’s limp body in his arms—she pocketed it.
She really is unflappable, my agent.
She didn’t even tell Dan about the letter for a fortnight, presumably while she watched how the media storm panned out, how the situation would work out for us. Whether we were worth sticking with at all. She watched as the story turned me into a genuine, bona fide celebrity—not just Instafamous, but famous famous. There were Indonesian radio stations, Australian talk shows, American cable news, Newsnight and Panorama and even Ellen all clamoring for interviews.
More important, she monitored Dan’s reaction to the global acclaim—how he handled the endless news stories about the novelist-turned-detective who, when the situation demanded it, turned into a cross between Sebastian Faulks and Sherlock Holmes to save his wife and child from certain death. The fact Irene gave them his author’s photo from a decade ago wouldn’t have hurt. Anyway, all the international interest, the world’s attention? It turned out Dan fucking loved it.