The steps grow closer. Heavy breathing. I sense anger. I feel it grip me.
‘Heidi.’ Alex’s voice is hard and cold.
I turn to look at him – see disappointment and anger in his eyes.
‘Was there really a need for that?’ he asks.
I blink back at him. My usual reaction is to say no. To apologise. To push down at the feelings and all the memories that weigh heavy on my chest every single day. But it feels different now and I want to tell him. I want to tell him everything – even though it will change our lives. I want to be brave.
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘There was a need for it. All this, what we’re doing, Alex. It’s all bullshit. While he lies up there, being waited on hand and foot. The people he hurt are running themselves into the ground trying to make his last few months bearable.’
‘You keep saying that,’ Alex says. ‘That he hurt people. That he is a bad man. But why, Heidi? He’s a bore, for sure. He takes advantage of your good nature. He holds political and religious beliefs that I don’t agree with it. But a bad man? He raised you for years. He didn’t have to.’
I open my mouth to tell him. Know it would shut him up. But then, what if it changed how he thinks of me? Would he be angry that I’ve kept it from him? And all those people, Kathleen included, who thought I was mad, that I was a naughty little girl who told lies for attention, would they tell him all about the girl I was? The trouble I caused?
The fire I started. If I close my eyes I can still taste the acrid smoke as it started to choke me. Still remember heavy hands, pulling me away. Still remember kicking out at them. I just wanted it all, myself included, to burn.
How could he look at me the same if he knew it all? At best, he’d see me as a victim. At worst, he would see someone who had been driven to madness. Would he ever be able to trust me to be alone with Lily? I know I had struggled while pregnant with those same fears – fears that were allayed for me the moment she was placed on my chest and I knew I’d do everything to protect her. To protect my family.
I feel a bubble of shame and grief and anxiety rise up. I see Alex search my face for an answer, but it’s not one I can give right now. Not without ruining everything.
‘You’re right,’ I say, and I know my voice sounds funny. Angry. Frustrated. ‘You’re always right.’
And still he searches my face for signs of the truth and I just look at him, not daring myself to talk, until he gives up. He throws his hands in the air, then plunges them deep into his pockets as he turns away. ‘I think I hear Lily,’ he says. ‘I’ll go check on her.’
I know as well as Alex does that Lily isn’t making a noise, he just needs an excuse to leave. I stay in the garden, even though it is starting to rain. Fat drops of ice-cold rain land on my face, stinging me where my skin is rough and sore from the tears I didn’t even realise I had been crying.
They start, as these things do, slowly at first. Little drops. Warning signs leaving me enough time to get inside if I want to. It’s like they’re telling me to go. To run. Take shelter. Now they come in greater numbers, but still I know I can get into the house relatively untouched if I just move. But I can’t move. I’m frozen in the middle of all this and the rain rushes at me, soaking me through to the bone until I am so wet, so icy cold that the hailstones that have started to fall don’t hurt. I am untouchable. I don’t care about the storm. I have always been right in the middle of one.
Chapter Seventeen
Heidi
Now
I offer to make Alex a cup of tea when we get home. He refuses, says he is tired and takes Lily from me and goes upstairs. We barely spoke on the drive home and I can’t shake the feeling that everything is slipping out of my control.
I’m tense and even though my body aches with tiredness, I know I’ve gone past any notion of sleep, so I make myself a cup of very milky tea and curl up in front of our gas fire watching the faux flames flicker and dance. Ironic, really, that I can find flames comforting.
Well, ironic or worrying. One of those.
I think of the chain of events that led to that point – when I ended up in hospital, missing the second semester of my first year at university and having to start all over again come the spring.
Did it all start that day in Fiorentinis? Or the day my mother died? Or was it the first time he came into my room to ‘comfort’ me?
So much is blurry now, you see. After all these years. But some details are crisp and clear in my head and they never leave. The senses of things. Smell. Touch. Pain.
I shake my head, trying to shake all those memories from it. If only it were that easy.
But it’s not, of course. And it’s only going to get harder over the next week and months. I have to find a way to cope, otherwise I’ll not only push Ciara and Kathleen further away, but I’ll also push Alex away. That is truly unthinkable.
I have to stop taking my anger out on other people. Even people such as Ciara and Kathleen. People I’d tried to make like me all those years ago. People I’d wanted to love back then, but who never loved me back. I owe them no loyalty, but they aren’t responsible for what Joe did any more than I am.
Eventually I drift off into something approximating a sleep, only to be woken at 4 a.m. by a hungry baby in need of a feed. When I’ve satisfied her needs, I climb into bed beside my husband and whisper to his sleeping form that I love him, and our daughter, more than he could ever understand.
When morning comes, I apologise to him for being insensitive. I tell him I’m stressed but I love him. He pulls me into a hug, kisses the top of my head and whispers that he loves me and just wants me to be happy. I stop myself from crying. I just plaster on a smile, tell him I am happy and send him on his way to work.
I have the same fake smile plastered on my face when I arrive at Joe’s house and offer an apology to Ciara and Kathleen, which I’m making to try to smooth the waters.
‘I’m sorry if I came across as clinical and cold last night,’ I say, trying my best to maintain eye contact even though it is almost physically painful to do so. ‘This is difficult. For us all. I was feeling stressed and I didn’t mean to upset anyone.’
They nod and we sit in uncomfortable silence until we hear the tinkle of the bell Kathleen gave Joe to summon us when he needs anything.
Ciara is first to her feet. I take the break in the awkwardness as a chance to move myself.
‘I’ll peel some potatoes for dinner. There’s chicken and veg there, too,’ I say, getting up and going to the kitchen, where I pull the bag of spuds from the vegetable rack and look for the peeler.
Kathleen is behind me before I’ve had the chance to shed even one slice of skin from the mud-covered potato in my hand.
‘Can I ask you something, Heidi?’ she says, and I turn to watch her sit down, wincing as she does so, on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘My knees,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Seems all that road-running has left them in a bad way.’
I mumble something sympathetic and wait for the big ‘something’ she wants to talk to me about.
‘Why do you hate him?’ she says eventually, her eyes sad. ‘You always did. All those years when he just tried to look after you. You made it so hard for him, you know, but he never gave up on you. You never give him credit for that. I know he’s not perfect. Believe me. But does he really deserve to be hated?’
I blink at her. I don’t know what to say. Can she really not know?
I shrug, feeling a tingle of nervousness start at the top of my spine, enough to send little shockwaves through my head.
‘That’s it?’ she says with a strange laugh. ‘A shrug to explain it all.’
I shrug again, scraping at the potato with the peeler, not realising that my finger has moved perilously close to the blade. One strike and I take a layer of skin with it, yelping as I do so.
The sight of blood, which comes before the sting of the cut, makes me feel woozy.
Kathleen, sore knees and all, jumps to her feet, forces my bleeding finger under the running tap, and I watch the water turn pink, mingling with the soil from the potatoes as it hits the steel surface of the sink. I watch it. I feel the pain bite. I’m reminded of a release. Of a coping mechanism. Kathleen pulls my hand from the water, wraps a clean piece of kitchen towel around it, squeezing tight. So tight it’s painful.
‘Hold that for a bit,’ she says. ‘We’ll get a proper look at it in a minute. Does Joe have plasters?’
I nod to the thin cupboard beside the cooker, where Joe stores an old tin first-aid box.
‘I … I’m sure it’s just a scratch,’ I stutter. ‘I was … I was distracted.’ I can see the crisp white kitchen towel start to colour with my blood. I need to sit down.
‘You certainly were,’ Kathleen says, pausing for a moment, looking at me intently.
She hands me some more kitchen paper, then sets about fishing in the first-aid tin for a suitable dressing.
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