Macy

Saturday, 24 March

The children are eating ice cream from small tubs with little wooden spoons. They chose their own flavours, they were over-generous with the sprinkles, and now they all sit on the same side of the wooden picnic bench niggling at each other in between mouthfuls. It’s not warm enough for ice cream, but when Shane mentioned it – quietly so they couldn’t hear – I said yes. Mainly to make up for the rubbish week they don’t know they have ahead.

I watch them and think of the times when Nell and Jude and I could be like that. Daddy would take us out somewhere and we’d sit together, Nell and Jude often talking in their secret code, but sometimes letting me be a part of them. Sometimes Daddy would buy us ice cream, but we weren’t allowed to tell Mummy because she would freak out about us eating in the street and having food from vans when they were basically germ palaces.

Over the years, I’ve tried to pinpoint where it was that our lives changed. That we stopped being able to do things like go out to the park, or hang out at one of Daddy’s grocery shops, or even just be a normal family.

I used to think nothing was the same from that moment when Nell and Jude found the dead body on the beach. I know I’m supposed to call her by that name, but if I do, it makes everything about that time seem vaguely romantic, a mystery that has endured through the ages. And for everyone else, I’m sure it is. But the reality, when you’re on the other side of the mystery? Not so romantic. Not so charmingly intriguing.

Nell and Mummy, I’m sure, think our lives were recast when Daddy was arrested that first time. I don’t blame them for thinking that. Seeing the barbarity of how the police took him, hearing the voice of that policeman, feeling the terror from Nell and Mummy and not being able to do anything – those were some of the worst moments of my life. But it wasn’t then.

‘Mama …’ Aubrey says in his well-rehearsed wheedling voice. He’s the youngest, the one closest to still being my baby, and therefore the most likely to get whatever he wants, so the other two regularly get him to ask for stuff.

‘Yes, darling?’ I reply in the same tone.

‘Can we have a tiny bit more ice cream?’ he asks.

I look from Willow’s face to Clara’s face to Aubrey’s face. They all beseech me: Let us have this. We don’t get ice cream very often so, please, Mum, can we? Can we? Can we?

‘Yeah, sure, why not,’ I reply.

This week’s going to hell in a handbasket anyway – why shouldn’t they arrive with rotting teeth and high blood sugar levels?

Daddy had grocery shops called From Our Earth all along the coast, but the one in Hove was the first and the biggest. When people started coming to his shop they were curious about the vegetables and fruits from all over the world that he sold. He told Nell and me that people would come in and spend ages picking up things and saying, ‘And how would I cook this?’ ‘How would you eat this?’ ‘What does this taste like?’

He held tasting sessions, cooking lessons, would give out recipe sheets. It took him a while, but eventually people started coming to From Our Earth on a regular basis. After nearly ten years in the business, he’d bought the shop next door and expanded, going on to open up places all along the coast. The Hove one took up a substantial part of the parade of shops that backed onto the seafront and was as much a part of the community as the fish and chip place five doors down.

The week after Daddy’s arrest, the Hove shop was vandalised. Someone scrawled ‘MURDERER’ across the front window. The next night someone broke the front window. But it wasn’t even then that our lives changed.

Everything was irrecoverably altered when Jude disappeared.

Not the night everyone thinks she left, but the night she actually vanished. That was the night it went wrong. That was the night when I saw the thing that has been slowly driving me crazy for more than half my life. That was the night when I realised I could never really trust my father.