Sophie Hannah: The Wrong Mother

‘Sorry, darling,’ I said. ‘I know you’re scared, but there’s really no need to be. Goodnight. See you in the morning.’ I walked over, pulled her curtains half open, left the room and closed the door.

Her screams intensified. Screams for which there was no cause; her room was no longer dark in any way. I sat cross-legged on the landing, fury ripping through my body. I couldn’t comfort Lucy any more because I couldn’t think of her as a scared child-the screams were too much like a weapon. I was her victim now and she was my torturer. She could ruin my evening, and she knew it. She can ruin my whole life if she wants to, whereas I can’t ruin hers because a) Mark would stop me, and b) I love her. I don’t want her to be unhappy. I don’t want her to have a horrible mother, or to be abandoned, or to be beaten, so I’m trapped: she can make me suffer as much as she wants and I can’t retaliate in kind. I have no control-that’s what I hate more than anything.

The shrieks showed no sign of stopping. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought Lucy was being burned alive in her bedroom, from the noise she was making. After a while she got out of bed and tried to open the door herself. I held on to the handle from the outside to keep it shut. Then she really started to panic. She isn’t used to doors that won’t open. I still couldn’t feel anything but rage, though, and I knew I had to wait, so I sat there until Lucy’s voice grew hoarse, until she was begging me to come back in, not to leave her alone. I don’t know how long it was-maybe half an hour-before I started to feel sorrier for her than I felt for myself. I stood up, opened her door and went back into the room. She was in a heap on the floor and when she saw me she grabbed my ankles and started babbling, ‘Thank you, Mummy, thank you, oh, thank you!’

I picked her up and sat her on my lap in the chair by her window. Sweat dripped from her forehead. I calmed her down and cuddled her, stroking her hair. Once she has made me angry, I can only be kind like this when she’s reached the point of total despair and all the fight has gone out of her. Anything less and it’s hard for me to see her as deserving of sympathy, this well-fed, beloved child who has everything a girl of her age could want-a secure home, an expensive education, nice clothes, every sort of toy, book and DVD, friends, foreign holidays-and who is still , in spite of it all, complaining and crying.

When Lucy is desperate, grateful and limp with the relief of having been forgiven, I find it easy to feel the way a mother should. I wish I could awaken this protective feeling in myself more easily. Once she was sick before I could bring myself to comfort her, and I vowed I’d never let it go that far again.

I patted her back and she soon fell asleep on my knee. I carried her over to her bed, laid her down and covered her with her quilt. Then I left the room and closed the door. I had won, though it had taken a while.

I didn’t say anything to Mark about what had happened, and I was sure Lucy wouldn’t either, but she did. ‘Daddy,’ she said at breakfast this morning, ‘I’m scared of monsters, but Mummy wouldn’t let me have the door open last night and I was frightened.’ Her lip trembled. She stared at me, wide-eyed with resentment, and I realised that my tormentor, my torturer, is only a child, a naïve little girl. She is not as scared of me as I often fear she is, or as I am of myself, or as she should be. It’s not her fault-she’s only five.

Daddy sided with his precious daughter, of course, and now there is a new system: door open, suitable night light in place (not too bright but bright enough). I can’t object without revealing my own irrationality. ‘It makes no difference to us whether her door’s open or closed,’ Mark said when I tried to persuade him to change his mind. ‘What does it matter?’

I said nothing. It matters because I need to close that door. This evening, instead of feeling that I had successfully shut Lucy away at half past eight, I tiptoed round the house imagining I could hear her breathing and snoring and turning over, rustling her covers. I felt her presence with every molecule of my body, invading territory that was rightfully mine.

Still, it’s not that bad. As my terminally cheerful mother insists on telling me whenever I dare to complain, I’m luckier than most women: Lucy is a good girl most of the time, I have Michelle to help me, I don’t know how lucky I am, it’s hard work but it’s all worth it, and everything is basically ‘hunky-dory’. So why do I wake up every Saturday morning feeling as if I’m about to be suffocated for forty-eight hours, wondering if I’ll survive until Monday?

Spoke to Cordy on the phone today and she told me Oonagh is also preoccupied with monsters. Cordy blames the children in Lucy and Oonagh’s class who are from ‘the other side of the tracks’ (her expression, not mine). She said, ‘I bet their thick parents have been stuffing their heads full of nonsense about fairies and devils, and they’ve passed it on to our kids.’ She sounded quite cross about it. She says you pay through the nose to send your daughter to a private school where you trust she won’t encounter any ‘white trash’, but then she does because some white trash types have lots of money. ‘From setting up chains of tanning studios and pube-waxing emporia,’ she said bitterly. I didn’t ask what ‘emporia’ were.

What else? Oh, yes, a man called William Markes is very probably going to ruin my life. But he hasn’t yet, and I admit I’m not in the most positive state of mind at the moment. Let’s wait and see.

8/7/07

It struck DC Simon Waterhouse that, as usual, everything was wrong. He was feeling this more and more lately. The lane was wrong, and the house was wrong-even its name was wrong-and the garden, and what Mark Bretherick did for a living, and the fact that Simon was here with Sam Kombothekra in Kombothekra’s silent, fragrant car.

Simon had always objected to more things than would offend most people, but recently he had noticed he’d started to baulk at almost everything he came into contact with-his physical surroundings, friends, colleagues, family. These days what he felt most often was disgust; he was full of it. When he had first seen Geraldine and Lucy Bretherick’s dead bodies, his mouth had filled with the undigested remnants of his last meal, but even so, their deaths didn’t stand out in his mind in the way he knew they ought to. Each day he worked on this case he felt sickened by his own numbness in the face of such horror.

‘Simon? You okay?’ Kombothekra asked him as the car lurched over the deep potholes in the lane that led to Corn Mill House. Kombothekra was Simon’s new skipper, so ignoring him wasn’t an option and neither was telling him to fuck off. Wanting to tell him to fuck off was wrong, too, because Kombothekra was a fair and decent bloke.

He had transferred from West Yorkshire CID a year ago, when Charlie had deserted. Selfishly, she didn’t leave altogether-she still worked in the same nick, so Simon had to see her around the building and suffer her stilted, polite greetings and enquiries about his well-being. He’d rather never see her again, if things couldn’t be how they were.

Charlie’s new job was a travesty. She must know that as well as I do, thought Simon. She was head of a team of police officers who worked with social services to provide an encouraging and positive environment for the local scum, to discourage them from re-offending. Simon read about her activities in the nick’s newsletter: she and her underlings bought kettles and microwaves for skag-heads, found mind-expanding employment for coke-dealers. Superintendent Barrow was quoted in the local press talking about caring policing, and Charlie-with her new, fake, photo-opportunity smile-was head of the care assistants, arranging for all the scrotes to have their arses wiped with extra-soft toilet tissue in the hope that it’d turn them into better people. It was bullshit. She ought to have been working with Simon. That was the way things were meant to be: the way they used to be. Not the way they were now.