Bethan’s voice: ‘It’s my friend. He needs help.’
Mrs White, shrill with hysteria: ‘Patrick! Don’t you dare let her in!’
‘Cathy. Someone’s in trouble—’
‘I’m warning you, Patrick!’
‘Cathy, please—’
And now, at last, my legs give way. I fall on to my hands and knees. I lift my head and see Emily, at an angle by the door. Syrupy light spills languidly on to the unblemished snow. She is wearing a blue dress, sky-blue, Virgin-blue, and at that moment I love her so much that I would be happy to die in her place –
‘Emily,’ I manage to say.
And then the world shrinks to a speck; the cold rushes in to engulf me, footsteps come running towards me and –
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
14
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.
Posted at: 00.23 on Friday, February 22
Status: restricted
Mood: drained
The Press has a poor vocabulary. It works according to certain rules. A house fire is always described as a blaze; a blonde is always bubbly. Murders are always brutal, as if to distinguish from the more compassionate kind. And the death of a child (better still, a tot) is invariably a tragedy.
In this case it was almost true: a mother’s love tested beyond endurance; friends who failed to notice the signs; a husband too willing to rally round; a freak combination of circumstances.
They blamed the media, of course, as they would for the death of Diana. The ultimate tabloid accolade of being known by one’s first name alone is reserved for Jesus, royalty, rock stars, supermodels and little girls who have been kidnapped or killed. Headlines love those dismembered names – those Hayleys and Maddies and Jessicas – implying some kind of shared intimacy, inviting the nation’s collective grief. Wreaths and angels and teddy bears; flowers piled knee-high on the street. Emily’s legend was reinstated, of course, in the wake of that terrible tragedy.
Tragedy? Well, maybe it was. She had so much to live for. Her talent. Her beauty. Her money. Her fame. So many legends had already grown about her little person. Afterwards, those legends grew into something almost approaching a cult. And the surge of grief that surrounded her death was like a group ululation that mourned and repeated: Why Emily? Why not some other little girl?
Well, I, for one, never mourned for her. As blueeyedboy might say, shit happens. And she was nothing special, you know; nothing out of the ordinary. He told me himself that she was a fake – a rumour that was buried with her under that white headstone – but death made her untouchable, just one step removed from the holy choir. No one doubts an angel. Emily’s status was assured.
Everyone knows the official tale. It needed little embellishment. After her TV performance that night, Emily went home with her father. A quarrel – the cause of which remains unknown – flared up between the estranged couple. Then came one of those incidents that no one could have predicted. A young man – a boy, a neighbour of theirs – collapsed outside the Whites’ house. It had been a cold night; snow lay thickly on the ground. The boy – who might have died, they said, if his young friend hadn’t asked them for help – was suffering from exposure. Patrick White took both children inside and made them cups of hot tea, and while Feather tried to determine why they’d been there in the garden at all, Catherine White was left alone – for the first time in months – with Emily.
At this point, the time-scale becomes unclear. The sequence of events that night may never be fully understood. Feather Dunne always claimed that she last saw Emily at six o’clock, though forensic evidence suggests that the child was still alive up to an hour later. And Brendan Winter, who saw it all, claims not to remember anything –
In any case, the facts are these. At six or maybe six thirty, while the others were dealing with Brendan, Catherine White ran a bath, in which she drowned nine-year-old Emily before getting in herself and taking a bottle of sleeping pills. And when Patrick went to look for them later, he found them curled up together in the bath, stellated with fragments of glitterbomb –
Oh yes. I was there. I’d refused to leave Brendan alone. And when they discovered Emily, we were peering around the bathroom door; invisible as only children can be in such traumatic circumstances . . .
It took me some time to understand. First, that Emily was dead; next, that her death was no accident. My memory of things exists in a series of images bound together by hindsight; a scent of strawberry bubble bath; glimpses of naked flesh seen through a bathroom mirror; Feather’s useless peacock screams and Patrick repeating, Breathe, baby, breathe!
And Brendan, watching silently, his eyes reflecting everything . . . In the bathroom, Patrick White was trying to revive his daughter. Breathe, dammit, baby, breathe! – accenting each word with a hard push aimed at the dead girl’s heart, as if, by the force of his own desire, he might somehow restart the mechanism. The pushes, increasingly desperate, degenerated into a series of blows as Patrick White lost control and began to flail at the dead girl, thumping her like a pillow.
Brendan pressed his hands to his chest.
‘Breathe, baby. Breathe!’
Brendan began to gasp for air.
‘Patrick!’ said Feather. ‘Stop it. She’s gone.’
‘No! I can do it! Emily! Breathe!’
Brendan leaned against the door. His face was pale and shiny with sweat; his breathing, rapid and shallow. I knew all about his condition, of course – the mirror-response that made him flinch at the sight of a graze on my knee, and which had caused him such distress the time his brother collapsed in St Oswald’s Chapel – but I’d never seen him like this before. It was like a kind of voodoo, I thought; as if, even though she was already dead, Emily was killing him –
Now I knew what I had to do. It was like in the fairy story, I thought, where the boy gets the ice mirror in his eye and can only see everything twisted and warped. The Snow Queen, that was the story’s name. And the little girl had to save him . . .
I took a step in front of him, blocking his view of Emily. Now it was I who was in his eyes, mirrored there in winter-blue. I could see myself: my little red coat; my bobbed hair, so like Emily’s.
‘Bren, it wasn’t your fault,’ I said.
He flung out a hand to ward me off. He looked very near to passing out.
‘Brendan, look at me,’ I said.
He closed his eyes.
‘I said look at me!’ I grabbed him by the shoulders and held on to him as hard as I could. I could hear him struggling to breathe –
‘Please! Just look at me, and breathe!’
For a moment I thought I’d lost him. His eyelids fluttered; his legs gave way, and we fell together against the door. And then he opened his eyes again, and Emily was gone from them. Instead there was only my face, reflected in miniature in his eyes. My face, and his eyes. The abyss of his eyes.
I held him at arms’ length and breathed, just breathed, steadily in and out, and gradually his breathing slowed and shifted gently to match my own, and the colour began to return to his face, and tears spilled from my eyes – and his – and I thought once again of the story where the girl’s tears melt the fragment of mirror and free the boy from the Snow Queen’s curse – I felt a surge of fierce joy.
I’d saved Brendan. I’d saved his life.
I was there now, in his eyes.
For a moment, I saw myself there, like a mote inside a teardrop. And then he pushed me away and said:
‘Emily’s dead. It should have been you.’
15
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine.
Posted at: 00.40 on Friday, February 22
Status: restricted
Mood: intense
I really don’t remember much about the rest of that evening. I remember running outside in the snow; falling to my knees by the path; seeing the snow angel that Brendan had left by the front door. I ran to my room; lay down on my bed unde
r the blue-eyed Jesus. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I was dead; a thing with no voice. My mind kept going back to the fact that Bren had chosen her, not me; that in spite of everything I’d done, Emily had beaten me.
And then I heard the music . . .
Perhaps that’s why I avoid it now. Music brings too many memories. Some mine, some hers, some belonging to both of us. Maybe it was the music that brought me back to life that day. The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, played so loudly from inside the car – a dark-blue four-door Toyota sedan parked in the drive of the White house – that the windows trembled and bulged with the sound, like a heart that was close to breaking.
By then, the ambulance had gone. Feather must have gone with it. Mother was working late that night – something to do with the church, I think. Bren was nowhere to be seen, and the lights were out in Emily’s house. But then came this gust of music, like a black wind set to blow open all the padlocked doors in the world, and I stood up, put on my coat and went outside to the parked car. The engine was running, I noticed, and a rubber pipe fixed on to the exhaust led into the driver’s side window, and there was Emily’s father, sitting quietly in the driver’s seat; not crying, not ranting, just sitting there, listening to music and watching the night.
Through the car window, he looked like a ghost. So did I, against the glass; my pale face reflecting his. All around him, the music swelled. I remember that especially; the Berlioz that haunts me still, and the snow that covered everything.
And I realized that he, too, blamed himself; he thought that if things had been different, then maybe he could have saved Emily. If he hadn’t let me in; if he’d left Brendan outside in the snow; if someone else could have taken her place.
Emily’s dead. It should have been you.
And now I thought I understood. I saw how I could save us both. Perhaps I could make this my story, I thought, instead of it being Emily’s. The story of a girl who died, and somehow made it back from the dead. I had no thought of revenge – not then. I didn’t want to take her life. All I wanted was to start again, to turn on to a clean page and never think of that girl any more, the girl who had seen and heard too much.
Patrick White was looking at me. He had taken off his glasses, and without them, I thought he looked lost and confused. His eyes without the lenses were a bright – and oddly familiar – blue. Yesterday he had been someone’s daddy – someone who read stories, played games, gave kisses at bedtime, someone who was needed and loved – and who was he now? No one; nothing. A reject, an extra – just like me. Left on the pile while the story goes on somewhere else, without us.
I opened the passenger door on his side. The air was warm inside the car. It smelt of roads and motorways. The hose, attached to the car exhaust, fell out as I released the door.
The music stopped. The engine went off. Patrick was still looking at me. He seemed unable to speak, but his eyes told me all I needed to know.
I closed the door.
I said: ‘Daddy, let’s go.’
We drove away in silence.
16
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 01.09 on Friday, February 22
Status: restricted
Mood: contrite
Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘The Final Cut’
No, it wasn’t exactly my finest hour. Don’t think I’m proud of what I said. But, in my own defence, let me say that I’d suffered a great deal already that day, and that suffering gets passed around in ever-increasing circles, like the ripples from a flung stone as it strikes the water’s surface –
It should have been you. Yes, that’s what I said. I even meant it at the time. I mean, who would have missed Bethan Brannigan? Who was she in the scheme of things? Emily White was unique; a gift; Bethan was nothing; nobody. Which is why, when Bethan disappeared, she was caught in the headlines, pipped at the Post, eclipsed in the mourning for Emily.
Front-page headlines: EMILY DROWNED! MYSTERY DEATH OF CHILD PRODIGY.
In the wake of such momentous news, everything else takes second place. LOCAL GIRL DISAPPEARS barely makes it to page six. Even Bethan’s mother waited until morning before reporting her daughter’s absence to the police –
I have very little memory of what happened after that. I made it home; that much I know. Ma noticed I was feverish. She put me to bed, where I was to stay. Headaches, stomach cramps, fever. The police came round eventually, but in the circumstances I was unable to tell them much. As for Mr White, it took them forty-eight hours to realize that he, too, had vanished –
By then, of course, the fugitives were long gone. The trail was cold. And why, they thought, would Patrick White have kidnapped a child he hardly knew? Feather revealed a motive, confirmed by Mrs Brannigan. The news that Bethan was Patrick’s child delivered a much-needed blast of oxygen to the story – and once again, the hunt was on for the missing girl and her father.
Patrick’s car was found by the road fifty miles north of Hull. Brown hairs taken from the back seat confirmed that Bethan had been in the car, although of course there was no way of knowing how long ago that had been. Meanwhile, bank receipts showed Patrick White emptying his savings account. Then, after three cash withdrawals of ten thousand pounds each, the credit trail stopped abruptly. Patrick was running on cash now. Cash is nicely untraceable. Sightings of a man and a girl were reported to the police from Bath. Two weeks and a city-wide search later, these reports were dismissed as a hoax. More sightings, this time in London, were also judged unreliable. An appeal from Mrs Brannigan met with a similar lack of result.
Nearly three months later, with no solid evidence to the contrary, folk were beginning to wonder whether Patrick, unhinged by the tragedy, hadn’t staged a murder-suicide of his own. Ponds were dredged; cliffs investigated. In the Press, Bethan acquired the first-name status that often precedes a grisly discovery. Candles were lit in Malbry church, To Angel Beth God Loves You, et al. Mrs Brannigan led a series of prayer campaigns. Maureen Pike held a jumble sale. Still the Almighty stayed silent. Now they kept the story alive merely on speculation; the life-support of the world’s Press, a machine that can be kept running indefinitely (as in the case of Diana – twelve years gone, and still in the headlines) or switched off at the public’s whim.
In Bethan’s case, the decline was fast. A cut rose swiftly loses its scent. BETH – STILL MISSING wasn’t a story. Months passed. Then a year. A candlelit vigil in Malbry church marked the anniversary. Mrs Brannigan was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as if her God hadn’t tortured her enough. That made the papers for a while – TRAGIC BETH’S MUM IN CANCER SHOCK – but everyone knew the story was dead, covered in bedsores and waiting for someone brave enough to turn off the machine at last –
And then they found them. By accident; living in the back of beyond. A man had been rushed to hospital after suffering a sudden stroke. The man had refused to give his name, but the young girl accompanying him had identified him as Patrick White, and herself as his daughter, Emily.
A STROKE OF LUCK! blazoned the Press, never at a loss for a suitable cliché. But the story itself was less easy. Eighteen months had passed since Bethan Brannigan had disappeared. During most of that time she and Patrick had been living in a remote Scottish village, where Patrick had home-schooled the child, and where no one had even suspected that this bookish man and his little girl might be anything other than what they had appeared to be.
And this child – this shy and reticent fourteen-year-old who insisted her name was Emily – was so unlike Bethan Brannigan that even her mother – now bedridden, in the terminal stages of her disease – was hesitant to identify her.
Yes, there were similarities. The colouring was similar. But she played the piano beautifully, although she never had at home; referred to Patrick as Daddy and professed to remember nothing at all of the life she had led eighteen months ago –
The papers had a field day. Rumours of sexual abuse were the m
ost common, of course, although there was no reason for any such assumption. Next came the conspiracy theories, digested versions of which were disseminated in all the best journals. After that, the deluge – dumbed-down diagnoses from possession to psychic transference; from schizophrenia to Stockholm syndrome.
Our tabloid culture favours simple solutions. Quick fics. Open-and-shut cases. This case was unsatisfactory; messy and unfathomable. Six weeks into the investigation, Bethan had still not opened up; Patrick White was in hospital, unable – or unwilling – to speak.
Meanwhile Mrs Brannigan – still known to the tabloids as Bethan’s Mum – had sadly since given up the ghost, giving the papers one more excuse to misappropriate the word tragedy, which left poor Bethan alone in the world, except for the man she called Daddy –
It must have come as a shock to learn that Patrick really was her father. Certainly, they mishandled it; and then Dr Peacock compounded the harm, changing his will in her favour, as if that could somehow erase the past and banish the ghost of Emily –
It can’t have been easy for her, poor thing. It took years to recover even the semblance of normality. Taken into care at first, then into a foster home, she learnt to fake what she did not feel. Her foster parents, Jeff and Tracey Jones, lived on the White City estate. They’d always wanted a daughter. But Jeff’s good humour turned sour when he’d had too many drinks, and Tracey, who’d dreamed of a little girl to dress up in her own image, saw nothing of herself in the silent, sullen teenager. All emotion suppressed and concealed, Bethan found her own ways of coping. You can still see the scars of those early years, their silvery traces down her arms, beneath the ink and filigree.
Talking to her, looking at her, there’s always the sense that she’s playing a part; that Bethan, just like Albertine, is only one of her avatars, a shield thrown up against a world in which nothing is ever certain.
She never told them anything. They assumed she had blocked the memory. I know better, of course; her recent posts confirm it. But her silence ensured Mr White’s release; the charges against him were quietly dropped. And although the Malbry gossips never stopped believing the worst, father and daughter were finally left to get on with their lives as best they could.