Sophie Hannah: The Wrong Mother

Geraldine Bretherick. No, it can’t be her. And yet I know it must be. A daughter called Lucy. Also dead. Oh, God, oh, God. How many Geraldine Brethericks can there be who live in Spilling and have daughters called Lucy? Geraldine Bretherick. I nearly pretended it was my name today after my accident, when I didn’t have the guts to tell the women helping me that I’d rather be left alone.

‘Are you okay?’ Nick asks. ‘You look a bit odd.’

‘Sally, what’s going on?’ demands the voice at my ear. ‘Did Nick just say you look odd? Why, what do you look like?’

I force myself to speak, to tell Esther that everything is fine but I have to go-the kids need attention. People who don’t have children never challenge that excuse; they shut up quicker than a squeamish chauvinist at the mention of ‘women’s troubles’. Unless they’re Esther. I cut her off mid-protest and take the battery out of the phone so that she can’t ring back.

‘Sally, don’t… Why did you do that? I’m waiting for a call about cycling on Saturday.’

‘Ssh!’ I hiss, staring at the television, trying to focus on the voiceover, what it’s saying: that Mark Bretherick, Geraldine’s husband and Lucy’s father, found the bodies on his return from a business trip. That he is not a suspect.

Nick turns back to the screen. He thinks I’m eager to watch this because it’s the sort of news I ‘like’, because it’s domestic and not political, because the dead woman is a mother who looks as if she might be my twin, and lives near us. And the dead girl… I check the caption again, trying to use as many facts as I can get my hands on to beat down the horrible haze that’s fogging up my brain. Maybe I got it wrong, maybe the shock… but no, it definitely says ‘deaths’. Lucy Bretherick is dead too.

The girl in the photograph looks nothing like Zoe, and I can’t explain the relief I feel. Lucy has long dark hair like her mother’s, and she’s wearing it in two fat plaits, one with a kink in it, so that it turns halfway down and points back towards her neck. Her two hair bobbles have white discs with smiling faces on them. Her grin reveals a row of straight, white, slightly prominent teeth. Geraldine is also smiling in the photograph, and has her arm draped over Lucy’s shoulder. One, two, three, four smiles-two on the faces and two on the bobbles. I feel sick.

Geraldine. Lucy. In my head, I’ve been on first-name terms with these people for a little over a year, even though they have never heard of me. Even though we’ve never met.

The voiceover is talking about other murder-suicide cases. About parents who take their children’s lives and their own. ‘Little girl was only six,’ says Nick. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Mother must have been fucked in the head. Sal, put the battery back in the phone, will you? Can you imagine how that child’s dad must feel?’

I blink and look away. If I’m not careful, I will start to cry. I can feel the pressure at the back of my eyes, in my nose. If I do, it won’t occur to Nick that I have never before been reduced to tears by a news report. Usually if children are involved I shudder and order him to change channels. It’s easy to put horror to one side if one isn’t personally involved.

At last the picture disappears. I couldn’t take my eyes off it and I’m pleased it’s gone. I don’t want to see those faces again, knowing what happened. I nearly ask Nick if any of the news reports he’s seen have explained why-why did Geraldine Bretherick do this? Do the police know? But I don’t ask; I can’t cope with any more information at the moment. I’m still reeling, trying to make it part of what I know about the world that Mark Bretherick’s wife and daughter are dead.

Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry. I want to say these words aloud but of course I can’t.

When I next focus my attention on the screen, three men and a woman are talking in a studio. One man keeps using the phrase ‘family annihilation’. ‘Who are these people?’ I ask Nick. Their faces are solemn, but I can tell they’re enjoying the discussion.

‘The woman’s our MP. The bald guy’s some pompous wanker sociologist who’s helping the police. He’s written a book about people who kill their families-he’s been on telly every night since it happened. The guy with glasses is a shrink.’

‘Are… are the police sure? The mother did it?’

‘It said before they’re still investigating, but they reckon it’s a murder by the mother followed by suicide.’

I watch the bald sociologist’s pale lips as he speaks. He is saying that female ‘family annihilators’-he makes quote marks in the air-have been much less common than male ones until now, but that he is certain there will be more in due course, more women who kill their children and themselves. Across his chest, a caption appears: ‘Professor Keith Harbard, University College London, Author of Homewreckers: Extreme Killing Within the Family ’. He is talking more than anyone else; the other speakers try and fail to interrupt his flow. I wonder what he would classify as a moderate killing.

The woman sitting beside him, my MP, accuses him of scare-mongering, says he has no business making such grim predictions on the basis of no evidence. Does he know how counterintuitive it is for a mother to kill her own offspring? This case, she says, if indeed it does turn out to be murder-suicide, is a freak occurrence, will always be a freak occurrence.

‘Mothers do kill their own kids, though.’ Nick joins in the debate. ‘What about that baby that was thrown off a ninth-floor balcony?’

It’s all I can do to stop myself from screaming at him to shut up. At all of them. None of them knows anything about this. I don’t know anything about it. Except…

I say nothing. Nick has never been suspicious of me and he must never be. I shiver as I imagine something terrible happening to my own family. Not as terrible as this, what’s on the news, but bad enough: Nick leaving me, taking the kids every other weekend, introducing them to his new wife. No. That can’t happen. I must behave as if my connection with this story is the same as Nick’s: we are both concerned strangers with no personal knowledge of the Brethericks.

Suddenly the discussion is over, and there is a man on the screen, with an older man and woman on either side of him. All three of them are crying. The man in the middle is speaking into a microphone at a press conference. ‘Are they relatives?’ I ask Nick. Mark would be too upset to talk about the deaths of his wife and daughter. These people must be close friends, perhaps his parents and brother. I know he has a brother. There’s no family resemblance, though. This man has dark brown hair with streaks of grey in it, sallow skin. His eyes are blue, with heavy lids, and his nose is large and long, his lips thin. He is unusual-looking but not unattractive. Perhaps these are Geraldine’s relatives.

‘I loved Geraldine and Lucy with all my heart,’ says the younger of the two men, ‘and I will always love them, even now they’re gone.’

Why didn’t Mark tell me his wife was the image of me? Did he think it would make me angry? Make me feel used?

‘Poor sod,’ says Nick.

The man at the microphone is sobbing now. The older man and woman are holding him up. ‘Who is he?’ I ask. ‘What’s his name?’

Nick looks at me strangely. ‘That’s the madwoman’s husband, ’ he says.

I am about to tell him he’s wrong-this man is not Mark Bretherick, looks nothing like him-when I remember that I am not supposed to know this. The official story, the one Mark and I drafted together, is that we never met. I remember us laughing about this, Mark saying, ‘Although obviously I won’t go round saying I’ve never met or heard of a woman called Sally Thorning, because that’d be a bit of a giveaway!’