Through the strip of window embedded in the wall opposite where I sit, I spy the panorama of Brighton: the buildings slotted together like irregular, multicoloured building blocks, and the mysterious misty seascape beyond the buildings. From this angle I can’t see the beach, from this height I can’t see the people. They’re both there, they both exist even though I am looking right at them and I can’t see them. The answer to what I do next is probably the same: staring me right in the face and I can’t see for looking.
What would Joel do? I ask myself.
What would Joel do? I ask the Universe, God, Whoever is out there. What would Joel do? I ask Joel.
The answer diffuses through me – my skin, my lungs, my heart – like an expensive, delicate perfume until it arrives in my mind.
I am not Joel.
It doesn’t matter what Joel would do because I am not him. I am me. And I need to do what I would do.
Slowly I type the password, the key to the secrecy box, into the waiting space. I almost hear the latches being drawn back, the handle being turned and the door being thrown open to Phoebe’s secret life.
It takes seconds to find him. It takes minutes to work out who he is. It takes twenty minutes to read through their message chain. And it takes a microsecond to know that, like the Mount Vesuvius eruption that levelled the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, my explosion is going to level everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity.
My hand shakes as I place the phone on her bedside table. It’s set back onto the last message to Curtis it was on so she won’t know what I read, what I discovered until I confront the bastard and I tell her that I looked.
‘Mum?’ she croaks. She tries to move but doesn’t manage anything beyond a slight shift of her torso – her body probably feels like it is weighted down by boulders, her throat will be arid and tight. She doesn’t open her eyes, probably too much effort at the moment. I clasp my hand around hers.
‘I’m here, lovely girl, I’m here.’ I smile at my daughter who can’t see me but can hear me.
Not being able to touch Joel at the morgue was something that underlined my loss in so many ways in the following days and weeks and months. Since I first clung onto his hand on the flight to Lisbon, I loved to touch him, I loved to be touched by him. Being restrained, ordered not to connect with him physically, added a cruel dimension to losing him. The policeman’s grip on my forearm, a stern restraint from interfering with ‘evidence’, underlined how totally he had been snatched from me – reminded me that my connection to him in the physical world was gone. I promised myself then I would touch the people I loved as much as possible in case I was ever denied that again.
I lean over the bed, stroke my daughter’s face and press my lips to her cool cheek. She usually protests at my touches, doesn’t understand that I need to do this in case I’m not allowed to do it again. Right now, her entire being seems to relax when I make contact with her.
‘I’m right here, beautiful girl. I’m right here.’
LV
‘You need to stay here until I come back,’ I tell Aunty Betty.
She hasn’t had time to change from today’s visit to the post office, which she’s done alone. For the past three days I’ve accompanied her there, which is why Phoebe and I were up and out early, so I could be back in time to take her, but she’s sneaked off to do it alone. I don’t have time or the spare amount of annoyance to bring it up with her now. I do, though, need her to understand how important it is that Phoebe isn’t left alone. I don’t want her waking up alone, to be confused why I’m not there.
‘I don’t understand where you’re going,’ Aunty Betty replies.
‘I have something urgent I need to do. It can’t wait. But I want you to promise me that you won’t leave her. Play the old woman card and I’m sure one of the nurses will get you anything you need. The loo’s right there. Don’t talk to anyone who isn’t a doctor or a nurse and who can’t prove they should be in here. If they can’t prove they should be in here, kick up the biggest fuss you can.’
‘Child, you want me to check if someone can prove they should be in here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would some—’ Aunty Betty stops talking and her usually animated face draws still, wary. She’s a smart woman, she understands what I mean. ‘The letters?’
I nod.
‘You’re going to sort that out now?’
‘No, this is something else entirely.’
She jerks her head questioningly towards a fast-asleep Phoebe.
I nod, gravely.
‘I won’t leave her side.’
‘Don’t tell her where I’ve gone, I’ll do that myself later. If she wakes up and asks for me, call me. If you can’t get hold of me, call either Brighton or Hove police station because that’s where it’s likely I’ll be.’
For a moment, when our eyes meet, I have a flash of Joel staring at me, and the way her mouth is set reminds me of how his mouth would contort itself right before he would ask me not to do something.
‘You do what you’ve got to do,’ Aunty Betty says.
If she’d asked me not to do it, I would have thought twice. I would have tried to find another way. But I have to do this. He deserves to experience this now, while I am this angry. If I’ve had time to calm down, to be reasonable, to decide to talk it out, I’ll let him get away with it. And he’ll do it again. He’s probably done it before.
‘Thanks,’ I state.
A kiss and a hug for Phoebe. I turn from her, a mountain in my throat from how fragile she is, how close I came to losing her. I bend to hug Aunty Betty, the moment awkward and unnatural. I keep doing it though, despite her whole body stiffening in my arms, I’m going to keep my promise to myself – I’m going to touch the people I love before it’s too late.
*
From my house I retrieve the items that I need right now.
I stuff them into my black soft-leather bag, grateful once again that I’m not one of those people who can carry her life around in a bag no bigger than a cigarette packet. Before I leave, I’m seized with a sudden need to run from room to room, to check that there’s nothing else I need. I pause in the living room, stare at the picture of Joel with the children on the mantelpiece.
I’m sure he’d tell me not to do this. I’m sure he’d tell me to find another way. It would work if he was here, he’d do it his way and the consequences wouldn’t be as extreme. In my chest my heart is beating in staccato again, my breath is shallow and ragged.
Maybe I shouldn’t do this.
Trust me … other adults don’t want you falling in love … so they won’t tell you the truth … you can’t get up duffed your first time … so don’t worry about the pill … and don’t ask your mum … she won’t understand … she’ll tell you anything to stop you … no one cares for you like I do
The words of his texts replay themselves in my mind and the rage descends all over again. He doesn’t get away with this, this man who has groomed my daughter, he doesn’t walk away from this unscathed.
*
I’m probably a bit too shaky to drive, but I do it anyway because I need to do this now. Waiting on more taxis, trying to avoid making chit-chat with the driver will only delay this and will only make me doubt myself again. I need to do this while the Sun is still up, while it’s early enough in the day for me to possibly get away with it, while the blood is still bubbling and fizzing in my veins.
*
He does a half-day today. Gives him time at home for other pursuits, so I’m as sure as I can be that he’ll be there when my finger presses hard against the doorbell.
My heart sounds in my ears, drowning out the gushing of my adrenalin-laden blood. Inside my head is a loud place right now.
He answers the door and his first instinct is to grin. To flash his flawless smile, and to open his perfect mouth and say, ‘Saffron! This is an unexpected pleasure.’
I can see why she likes him. If you are four
teen, I’d imagine you’d form an attachment to someone who treats you like an adult, who plies you regularly and consistently with confidence boosters and compliments the way a party rapist would ply you with booze. I can see why you’d think that this was what you wanted when you feel responsible for your father’s death, your mother is distracted by grief, your brother is too little to understand and you think you know and trust this man. He is an attractive man if you are fourteen and scared and looking for love and understanding wherever you can get it.
‘My daughter is in a hospital bed right now, because of you.’
‘Phoebe?’ he asks, confused. ‘Is she all right?’
‘No, but she will be. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure she is. And if that means going to the police about you sending her sexually explicit material and seducing her, then that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Wait, I never—’
‘Don’t even bother lying about it. I saw the text messages.’
‘No, no, it wasn’t like that. It was a silly thing. I saw her on her way home one night after school so I gave her a lift. It was all perfectly innocent.’
‘“I get hard just thinking about your lips.” That’s innocent, is it?’
‘Saffy, out of context, that can be taken—’
‘She’s fourteen!’
‘She doesn’t act fourteen,’ he says. ‘Girls mature much faster and they know what they want—’
‘Fourteen! Even if she was sixteen you’d be a pervert but fourteen?’
‘No, Saffy, it’s not like that. It was only a bit of fun,’ he protests.
‘Fun? Really?’
I reach into my bag. My fingers close around the handle of what I retrieved from my kitchen and pull it free from my bag. ‘I’ll show you fun,’ I say, brandishing my blue and white iron, the white and grey striped cable wrapped around its base. It’s heavy and solid – exactly what I need for this.
‘Darling, what’s taking so long?’ Imogen appears behind her husband in the gash of the open doorway. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says coldly. ‘What do you want? And what are you doing with an iron?’
‘I’m showing your pervert husband what fun is,’ I say. Along their posh, well-to-do road in this posh, well-to-do area of Brighton, the cars seem to have all come from the same template of car ownership: a colour palette of navy blue, silver or black; a sleek design, a sunroof, an expensive manufacturer badge at the front, matching extravagant model type on the back. Ray’s car stands out though – sleek, pricey and lavish like the others, but it is an eyesore metallic bronze that makes it easily identifiable to the woman with the iron.
I pause for a moment beside his pride and joy, to ensure he is watching, and he can accurately predict what is about to happen.
‘No!’ he shouts.
His car’s blemish-free bonnet shudders violently as I bring the iron down upon it with my full weight behind it. A jagged-edged dent appears beneath and around the iron.
‘Are you having fun yet?’ I shout at him.
I bring the iron down again, another shudder quakes through the car and another part of the bonnet crumples in like screwed-up paper.
‘Stop this, Saffron! Stop this right now!’ Imogen screams. Her hands are on her face, her eyes are wide with horror. How she looks is how I’ve felt almost every day since that day – paralysed by the horror of what is happening right before my eyes.
Around me, people spill out of their front doors to see what is going on in their usually quiet and placid street; others pull back curtains or hold apart blinds.
‘I’m calling the police!’ Imogen shrieks and disappears into the belly of her house.
Ray is incapacitated. Not only by shock, but also by circumstance – he needs to come up with a plausible explanation for this. He needs to formulate different stories with different wording that will work on Imogen and his neighbours.
I slam down the iron again. ‘How about this? Is this fun?’ This dent caves in the front left side of the car. Another slam, another devastating dent. ‘FUN?’
I wriggle the iron at Ray, a man as white and immobile as a statue. ‘This is brilliant fun, isn’t it?’ After two heavy, determined blows, the driver’s-side window gives a sickening crunch before the glass buckles and smashes into beads that scatter mostly over the front seat.
With one last blow to the bonnet, which is now like a crater-filled planet, I leave the iron embedded there.
Heaving air into my lungs, I stand and regard Ray. He is tall, he is well-built, he is handsome. He is a disgusting specimen of a man.
Between gulps of oxygen I say, ‘You stay away from my daughter,’ loud enough for our audience to hear, and noisy enough to drown out the sound of my heart thundering in my head. ‘You stay away from other little girls, too. Because I don’t care how many perverts make statements in the papers, or how many crappy TV dramas pretend it’s all right, or how many paedophile apologists tell you the teenager wanted it, grown men going with children is NEVER all right. And if I see you near my daughter again in her lifetime, I WILL come after you again.’
Ray has not moved. Even though I can hear the sirens in the distance, and I see Imogen in the doorway behind him, he does not move. He is stuck. Everyone around us has heard what I’ve said, including his stricken-looking wife. His lies will have to be epic to get out of this.
You should have thought of that before you started sexting my daughter, I want to say. You should have considered the consequences before you started to browbeat her into an abortion by telling her ‘I can’t love you in this state, you need to sort it’. You should have cut off all communication when she stopped responding to your texts instead of stepping up the mixture of sex talk, love talk, and ‘get it sorted it’ talk to try to get her to re-engage.
‘I think we understand each other now,’ I say to him.
Imogen is frozen, petrified, in her doorway with her thin hands still on her face. The look of horror is gone, replaced by a mask of shock and despair. I know how you feel, I want to say. But of course I don’t. People said versions of that to me after Joel died and I wanted them to stop it. They didn’t know. No one knew. How could they when they didn’t know him like I did and they weren’t me? I don’t know exactly how Imogen is feeling now, but I can suspect. I can imagine what it feels like when the world around you starts to collapse but you’re expected to keep on standing through it all. I would never say that to her, though. I would never presume to tell her that I know how she feels when I can only really guess.
My gaze shifts to the pavement beneath my feet. I’ve done what I needed to do, I’ve delivered my message visually as well as verbally, and I don’t want to keep looking at Imogen’s face.
Two police cars draw up and I do not move. There’s no point. I wasn’t sure one of them would do this, but they have, so I am not going to compound my troubles by resisting arrest. I simply stand where I am, waiting for them to come for me, to ask me my name, to tell me my rights; I am waiting for them to put handcuffs on my wrists, to bundle me into the police car and take me away from here.
Waiting. I always seem to be waiting.
LVI
My cell is quite cosy, all things considered.
I sit with the thin, PVC-coated mattress beneath me providing no kind of padding between my bottom and the hard metal of the bed. The rough-surfaced breeze blocks of the wall are painted an odd off-white that I suppose is meant to make the room appear larger than it is. High up on the wall there is a window with frosted, thickened (I assume) glass. At the foot of the bed there is a metal toilet and a metal, wall-hung sink. It smells in here, of course: a mixture of sharp, chemical-heavy disinfectant, stagnant water in the toilet, as well as the sweat of whoever has recently languished in here. Maybe it’s deeper than that, maybe that stench comes from the crimes of those who’ve been in here; maybe it rolls off them and seeps into the walls, lurking there like a communicable disease, waiting for another criminal to add to it, buildi
ng incrementally into a smelly putrid disease that crawls nefariously up the nose of the next occupant. Maybe everyone adds to the smell so no two arrestees smell the same thing or leave with the same crime infection inside them.
I dismiss, then wrestle away those mad thoughts because, I remind myself, this cell is cosy.
It is not small, confined and claustrophobic. It is not making me want to scream and claw my way out through the metal door, or to climb the walls to the window to smash a chunk of air into here.
They’ve taken my trainers as well as my bag and coat and belt and socks. My shoes, I assume, will be standing outside, facing my cell door, like all the other shoes I saw lined up outside the cells when I was brought here.
My heart jerks to attention and my whole body jumps as the door is unlocked and swings open. It’s the he one who was once my Family Liaison Officer. He pauses in the doorway. I vividly see what I am about to do: leap up, knock him aside and make a run for it. I’d have to stop to scoop up my trainers and I’d get nowhere without my bag, and would I even remember the way out of here? It’s a ludicrous idea but haven’t most of my actions been unhinged of late?
The he one sighs, deeply, the sigh of a confused, frustrated, concerned friend and arranges his face to reflect his sigh before he comes to sit as far away as he can on the narrow, short bed. At least he’s left the door open. At least he’s given me the option of doing a runner.
‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon, Mrs Mackleroy.’
‘I wanted to see if you’d get my name right twice in a row. And, hurrah! You did. Well done.’
The he one doesn’t find this funny but he is mildly amused. ‘What’s going on, Mrs Mackleroy? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw your name on the detention sheet. Criminal damage?’
He is genuinely concerned for me. I’m almost overwhelmed by the wave of affection I feel for him suddenly. He’s so young and he seems to have changed so much in such a short amount of time. ‘What’s your name?’ I ask him.