I head back up the stairs, legs trembling. Again, I go to my room and open and close the door. Then I stand on the landing, listening. After a few minutes, I hear the kitchen door open and close. Mum has taken Grace into the garden.
I slip inside the study.
The laptop starts quickly. I remove the notebook containing Mum’s passwords from the top drawer. I hesitate when I see that she uses Grace’s birthday, then I type it in.
The screen opens onto the last thing Mum was working on: a Word document. I stare at with a complete lack of comprehension. It’s a letter to Tom.
Tom,
I’m leaving you. It isn’t you, it’s me.
Grace is better with Mum. She raised me right and she’ll raise her right too. Leave her where she is and move on. I’ll fight you if you try to get her back.
I know you can meet someone else and be happy. By the time you read this I’ll have left the country. Don’t try to find me.
I’ll always love you but we aren’t meant to be together.
Bridget
I stare at my name at the bottom and for a moment I wonder if wrote it and forgot, like I’ve been forgetting other things, but I wouldn’t have; I’d never have said Mum could keep Grace.
I don’t know if she’s already sent this. I have to contact Tom. I launch Internet Explorer, planning to use my Gmail but there’s no connection. The line really is down.
I want to cry but what would be the point?
I lean back in the chair trying to think clearly. The mist over my brain is terrifying and I want, almost as much as anything else, to find out the side-effects of taking ketamine. When did she dose me? And why? I can’t get on the Internet so there’s no way to find out.
There’s nothing else I can do here. My eye falls on the still open notebook and the list of passwords. The oldest is at the top titled: Government Gateway.
A sudden thought surprises me. This is Mum’s notebook. Why would she need a Government Gateway password? The obvious answer is for filing tax returns, but she closed the business just after Dad died.
A sudden memory surprises me. I’m standing in the study doorway and I’m holding a Barbie, I’m looking in, watching Mum work. Dad grips my shoulder and I look up.
‘Don’t disturb your mum while she’s doing the finances.’
‘Finances?’ I frown.
‘Money stuff.’ Dad tickles me. ‘Boring money stuff.’
Mum barely looks up. ‘Take her away, Edward. I need to finish this.’
The book in my pocket is digging into my thigh and I pull it out. It’s bent now, a crease through the centre of the bright cover. I open it to the first page.
I am the Seed:
poems by children aged five to thirteen.
These are the winning entrants of the national poetry competition run by Faber and Faber Books on behalf of Greenways Garden Centres.
I find the contents page with trembling hands and, before I even locate the name, I know what I’m going to see: You Found Me, by Frances Dobson, Age 6.
Her poem is on page twelve.
Deep in the earth you dig.
You make a hole with strong fingers. You drop me in.
You give me water and sunlight
Then I grow. I show you my petals.
How did you do it?
You found me.
‘You found me,’ I whisper. Beside the poem is a picture of a smiling Frances Dobson. And beside the image clearly written in Mum’s neat copperplate writing, which is nothing like Dad’s spiky scrawl, two words:
This one.
Something clicks in my mind like a light has gone on. I blink in its illumination and it’s lucky I’m sitting down. Mum picked Frances out. From a book. Like it was a goddamn catalogue.
I look at the boxes of invoices and receipts. The ones that Mum had filled. Dad hated doing the finances. It wasn’t him who had taken twenty thousand, it was Mum. She had Frances Dobson watched. Then she had her taken. But why?
I look at the year on the box: 1998. I was six then, the same age that Frances was when she vanished. I look like Betsie Dobson, I …
‘I’m Frances Dobson,’ I whisper. The sound of the name strikes something inside me. ‘Frankie and Dobbie.’ I clench my fists. ‘I never forgot. It was always there!’
Bile leaps into my throat and I swallow it back. I can’t throw up in here, or she’ll know where I’ve been. I wrap my arms around my chest, suddenly freezing, and the serpent in my belly uncoils. It rises, showing its teeth and this time I don’t know if I can stop the rage from taking me over.
The poetry book goes back in my pocket with the photographs. I’ll need them to show Naomi Shaw. Now I have to get Grace; we’re leaving.
Footsteps stifled by the carpet, I stamp downstairs: When you love what you have, you have all you need; A lie hurts forever. I hesitate at that one. Then I take it from the wall. Now it is in my hands I can feel the ghost of the needle, the way I frantically stabbed the material desperately trying to get it finished, hurting myself over and over again so that she would speak to me. She has lied to me my whole life. I hurl it away from me and the frame hits the bannister. Glass smashes and I keep going. A job worth doing is worth doing well; Manners cost nothing; Honour thy father and thy mother; Home is where the heart is.
I stumble past the painting of Mum and her parents and into the kitchen. Then I pause. Mum keeps her keys on hooks in the pantry and I’ll need the key to the padlock on the front door. I open the pantry door. There are two keys hanging there. One is my car key, and I snatch it gratefully. I grab the other and put both in my pocket. We’re getting out.
I burst into the garden. Autumn sun shines on the patio flagstones and the lawn is perfectly green. Flowers are regimented into beds: one of roses, smelling of Turkish Delight, one of azalea, one of fuchsias just in flower, their pink and purple heads nodding at me as if to say ‘where have you been?’
Grace is asleep on a large cushion with a blanket over her. The shadow of the house falls over her face and there’s a half empty bottle of milk beside her. There’s no way she should be asleep at this time of day, no way.
Gillian said that Grace was being drugged. But Mum said Gillian wasn’t there and there’s no sign of her now so how could I have heard her say so? Dizzily, I run to Grace and pick her up. She flops loosely in my arms. That’s wrong: she should have stirred, made a sound, resettled. In my head I start to scream.
‘Grace!’ I want to shake her awake but you can’t shake a baby. I don’t know what to do. Cold water maybe. I’ll need to take her to the kitchen.
‘What do you think you’re doing? You’ll wake her.’ Mum turns around. She’s digging a flower bed on the other side of the garden and the spade in her hands is heavy with mud.
‘Wake Grace?’ I cry. ‘Wake Grace? Look at her. She’s not asleep, she’s unconscious! What have you done?’ Drool slips from my daughter’s open lips.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, she’s just very tired. It’s the fresh air.’ Mum walks towards me, holding the spade. ‘You shouldn’t be here, I sent you to your room.’
‘I’m not a child.’ I carry Grace towards the kitchen, deeper into the shadow cast by the house. ‘You can’t just send me to my room.’
‘My house, my rules,’ Mum says. She hefts the spade.
‘I know what you did.’ The door is right behind me but I don’t go through it, not yet. Grace is hot against me, her breath wet on my collarbone, her limbs limp. ‘I’ve got proof. You took me from the Dobsons. I’m Frances Dobson!’
‘Don’t be absurd, Bridget.’ Mum tilts her head to one side. ‘You’re being very badly behaved. Good behaviour …’
‘Is a sign of dignity.’ My response is automatic and I shake my head to clear it. ‘Fuck good behaviour.’
Mum gasps. ‘Bridget!’
‘I’ve got proof. I’m taking Grace and going to the police.’
‘Take her from here and social services may never let you see her again.’ Mum looks almost sorry.
‘You’re drugging her!’ I sob. ‘I heard Aunt Gillian – ketamine.’
‘Hallucinations.’ Mum says calmly. ‘You can’t have heard Gillian saying anything because she was never here. It’s just like when you were on the train. You’re hearing things as well as seeing things.’
‘I didn’t—’ I bite back my denial, shift Grace so I’m holding her with one arm, and pull the poetry book from my pocket. ‘I’m not hallucinating this.’
Mum freezes. ‘Where did you get that? Give it to me.’
I slip it back in my pocket. ‘This one, it says. In your handwriting. You chose me.’
‘You think the police will believe anything you say? After lying about the kidnapped girl.’
‘I wasn’t lying, Mum!’ To my relief, Grace stirs slightly in my arms.
Mum sighs and smooths one hand over her slacks. There’s a smudge on one knee, red in the sunlight, and she frowns at it. Then she meets my gaze again and leans on her spade. ‘You didn’t see a kidnapping, Bridget.’
As I open my mouth to object, she keeps speaking.
‘You remembered one.’ She shakes her head. ‘It was those drugs you were on, the anti-depressants, they started to bring it all back.’
‘I …’ I stop, I think, picturing the girl being taken from the station, wearing her blazer and her lace-trimmed socks. All the little details I couldn’t have seen. I think of her face, there and gone in a moment. The same face as the one in the photograph: this one.
‘Frances Dobson,’ I whisper.
You found me.
There was no little girl to find. I’d almost lost my daughter, all for a child who didn’t even exist.
‘Oh God,’ I whisper. ‘Grace!’
‘Stop being melodramatic.’ Mum rolls her eyes. ‘Growing up, you had everything you wanted. You think you’d have had the same if I’d left you with the Dobsons?’ She laughed. ‘I doubt you’d have even been able to go to university.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘You’re the statistician. Think about it: poor, northern, female. Rising tuition fees.’ Mum waves her hand airily. ‘You’d have been pregnant at sixteen.’
‘You really believe that.’ I stare. ‘You honestly think the remote possibility of being a teen mum is worse than being kidnapped?’
Mum sighs. ‘The Dobsons were hardly parents of the year, Bridget. Look what happened to them, alcoholics both. You’d rather you’d had alcoholics for parents?’
‘They only drank because they lost me.’
Mum snorted. ‘I was there, Bridget. I watched. Grant drank a lot even then. Betsie forgot you twice, did you know that? She left you outside a post office one day and in a supermarket another. I only didn’t take you home with me then because it was so busy.’ She leans closer. ‘Think! Would we have been able to take you if she hadn’t left you alone? What kind of mother forgets her own child?’
‘What kind of mother drugs her own child?’ I grip Grace tighter, trying to warm myself as chill frosts my heart. She genuinely believes she saved me, gave me a better life. ‘How much did Dad know?’
Mum looks at me for a long time and then she shakes her head. ‘I told him it was a private adoption.’
‘And the twenty thousand?’
‘I couldn’t do the job alone. I had to pay someone. He worked for your dad, needed the money.’
‘Then … there’s no kidnapping ring. It was all you.’
‘Kidnapping ring?’ Mum’s laugh pierces my ears. ‘You really have been fantasising, haven’t you, Bridget. Did you tell that to the police too?’ She carries on laughing, pulls the blade of the spade out of the grass and steps nearer. ‘Now, put Grace down before you hurt her. You aren’t well.’
I shake my head.
Mum is still talking. ‘You were a good daughter, Bridget, until you went to university. Until you left me. But it’s all right, we’re together again now, the three of us. Life is hard, you’ve learned that now. But I can protect you from it. You don’t have to be hurt by Tom anymore. He won’t come looking for you, I’ve fixed that. You don’t have to commute and miss Grace. Or work so hard that you’re so exhausted you start seeing things. I can look after Grace for you. All you have to do is focus on being the perfect daughter. Once I get rid of your car, no-one will even know you’re here. Can’t you be happy with what you have?’
I sway: her suggestion is hypnotic. Would it be so bad to live in my childhood home, to let myself be looked after, to have no worries? There’s a voice inside me saying that I should be grateful, I should be happy, happy with what I have. My hold on Grace starts to loosen.
Then another voice:
Deep in the earth you dig.
You make a hole with strong fingers. You drop me in.
‘Frances?’ I whisper.
You give me water and sunlight
Then I grow. I show you my petals.
Grace stirs again, and I shake my head. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. Grace and I are leaving.’
‘You can’t.’ She glides nearer and I see, with a jolt, that she is in striking distance with the spade. I put my hand in my pocket and touch the keys. One for the door, one for the car. It’s time to go.
I turn and race for the kitchen. Mum walks slowly behind me, shoes ticking on the patio. She doesn’t seem in any hurry to stop me. Relief straightens my shoulders and I reach the front door. The key is in my hand before she’s reached the hallway. I look at her standing in front of the picture of her parents. She’s still holding the spade in front of her. All four watch me, unmoving, eyes glittering.
I shift Grace again and tilt the padlock, trying to slide the key in, but it doesn’t go. I try again. Then I rattle it desperately. Why won’t it fit? My knees tremble, I don’t feel well, not at all. I can’t get us out.
‘Bridget, darling!’ Mum calls. ‘Are you looking for this?’
I turn. The key for the front door is between her fingers.
‘Give it to me!’ I meant to sound threatening but I’m pleading. Mum laughs without humour.
I look again at the key I’m holding. It’s old. I should have known the second I saw it that it isn’t for the front door but, then, what is it for?
‘Give Grace to me.’ The spade swings at Mum’s side, almost idly. I look around, frantic. How do we get out? The door is locked, the windows are locked and triple glazed, I can’t smash them. There’s a wall around the back garden that I have no way of climbing. I need space to think, somewhere Mum can’t reach me.
There’s a door under the stairs: the cellar door. I look at the key in my hand. This has to be the cellar key; it can’t be anything else. I can lock the door behind me, wake Grace, take some time to plan.
But I’m not allowed in the cellar.
You make a hole with strong fingers.
‘All right,’ I whisper. I’m speaking to Frances, but Mum doesn’t know that.
‘Good girl,’ she says, leaning the spade on the wall beside her, holding her arms out for Grace.
I walk towards her, Grace sagging over one arm. The cellar door is halfway between us. I grip the key.
When I reach the door, I stop and Mum sighs. ‘Faster, Bridget, don’t be difficult.’
Moving fast, just as ordered, I whip around and slide the key into the lock. It turns smoothly and the door opens.
‘You bad girl – don’t you dare!’ Mum shrieks. The tone in her voice terrifies me and I look up. She’s grabbing the spade again. I gasp and leap through the door. There is a short staircase in front of me. I hold onto Grace tightly, snatch the key from the lock and slam the door behind me, as fast I can. The door shudders as Mum hits the other side. Gasping I turn the key and stumble backwards, leaving it in the lock.
‘Come out of there, Bridget,’ Mum screams. ‘You aren’t permitted. It’s forbidden. You come out of there, right now!’
My heels rock on the top stair and I grab the rail just in time to arrest our fall. There’s a light switch beside me. I flick it on and the cellar floods with light.