When I was five I looked up from a drawing I was doing and asked my mum to show me pictures from when I was a newborn baby; a fifteen-year-old Loll changed the subject, told me a firm no. My mum’s hands started to shake as she dropped a boil-in-the-bag rice into a pan. Loll looked at me and moved her head slowly side to side – a warning, as Mum kept her back to me.
Loll had already started to protect my mum, even then.
And then a few years later, Loll and I were out shopping. I was sitting on the floor of a River Island changing room while Loll tried on sixteen different bikinis; none fitted her giant boobs.
‘Why don’t they make them in bra sizes?’ she muttered.
I shrugged. Watched the shoes go by beneath the curtain. There was not a glimpse of a hill beneath my own T-shirt yet. These were not concerns of mine.
‘Can’t Mum take you somewhere to get one?’ I asked.
A topless Loll scoffed, pulling her bra back on. ‘Don’t presume that adults have the answers,’ she said darkly.
I looked up from the shoes. ‘What happened with Mum when I was little?’
I don’t know where I got the confidence from but it came out and Loll stood there, hands on bare hips. Her body had caught up now; her mind had been an adult for years.
She seemed to be considering something.
‘Move up,’ she said and squeezed onto the floor in that tiny cubicle next to me.
I knew there had been something. Once I heard Loll shouting at Mum about a time when she was left waiting outside the front door for so long that she wet herself. She was ten years old.
‘When you were born, Mum suffered some sort of … psychosis,’ Loll told me then. ‘She got help. But not soon enough.’
When I was older again, Loll told me Mum had tried to kill herself when I, as a baby, was in the room. It was ten-year-old Loll who had found us and flushed away the rest of the pills. And who had never dealt with how that impacts a person. I wonder why Loll can’t relax? Because she hasn’t relaxed since she was ten years old.
I told Marc all of this. All of it.
When you are newly in love there is such a relief in tipping all of your life out for this person to see. Here I am. You love me, so you won’t mind it, and now it’s not just mine. At that stage all you do is share, share, share whether it’s bodily fluids or early life trauma.
It helped, too, in explaining to Marc the strange ways in which my family worked. He hadn’t met my mum yet: it was best, before he did, that he had some background. So he could tread as carefully as the rest of us did.
I cried as I told him. He stroked my hand. Listened well. He did, back then.
‘Thank you,’ he said when I had finished speaking. It seemed a weird thing to say, but I think he meant for trusting him with the densest of family truths.
And then, when I got pregnant we knew it was a risk for me too. Loll had been fine, both times, but it was luck of the draw. That didn’t mean a thing.
We went to the meetings to monitor me, as a genetic risk, through my pregnancy. To the counselling.
When I went missing, he panicked. If people knew the real reason I left they would know. Would see Nice Guy Marc for who he was.
So he decided that the most personal of things made the perfect lie to shift attention away from him.
Remembered the parts he knew about postpartum psychosis and thought: hey, that’s handy.
Told my friends that I had it when he knew that I did not. Because he knew the real reason I ran.
He knew it was because of him.
I stand there for a few seconds after he falls, waiting for something to happen but there is nothing.
It is too dark to see, too dangerous to go near the edge.
Instead, with careful steps and a thudding chest, I walk away in my proper hiking sandals. Good grip. Best there is. Thank God for that trip to Decathlon when I left the airport.
My heart hammers harder.
The path crunches beneath me.
My brain whirrs.
Is he dead?
Of course he’s fucking dead.
I am not far now, from the house that sits alone, in the middle of nowhere. It’s how Marc wanted it, not another soul around. Best not to think about why.
One foot in front of the other, as I smell the thyme, thyme, time after time, as I feel the mush between my legs smart, as the silence becomes overwhelming.
I remember then, how he spoke to me in those last moments, the same as he did when labour started, when I said I would leave him.
Like I was pathetic.
Like he could tell me anything, and I would buy it.
He thought I wouldn’t hurt him when my vagina throbbed and bled, when my breasts swelled. When I whimpered and asked for his hand to hold.
He thought I didn’t have the strength.
What a basic lack of understanding about womanhood.
I have never been more physically weakened; I have never had more strength. To get to my child. To clear up his lies. To shore up my future. To shore up her future.
When I walk back towards the house, war is over, man has walked on the moon: something has shifted.
But not in a bad way.
It’s lightness.
It’s freedom.
And when I get inside, in through the back door, I find them there, of course.
They shriek at me but I reach for Fleur, speak over them.
At the same moment, I see them register Marc’s absence.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ I say. But my voice is giving a shopping list, a weather report.
‘Okay,’ says Adam. Careful.
I tell them what happened. Cuddle Fleur closer. She writhes until she is comfortable but then settles on my shoulder.
Adam draws a sharp intake of breath. Hesitates.
Aurelia nods. Makes eye contact with me. Nods again.
I pat Fleur’s back gently.
‘I’ll call the police,’ Adam says. ‘You talk to Steffie in the meantime. Make sure you … know what happened.’
I nod. Sure. I tap a rhythm on my daughter and it soothes.
I know Adam wonders. Maybe always will.
But if he does suspect it, he doesn’t sound angry with me.
In fact, what I hear is understanding.
I am in so much shock that I don’t notice Aurelia take a phone call and leave the room. It’s only when she comes back in and speaks that I look up.
‘It’s Loll.’