ALL NORMAL FAMILIES are alike but every abnormal family is abnormal in its own way. Sandy Beach’s family was overrun by stuff. And William’s included a too-tidy mother, a sister who was terrified of spermatozoa and William himself, of course, who walked around in the shadow of death blinking alternately.
No-one should be surprised at Lucy’s willingness to indulge in a little skulduggery with Managua, because at the age of eleven Lucy had murdered her mother.
It happened like this. The person who made Lucy’s family abnormal was her mother. When William sought advice from a psychotherapist in a last-ditch attempt to save his doomed marriage to Lola, he was told that in selecting a partner we are often searching for what we feel to be the missing piece of ourselves. That might have been a load of hogwash, but if not, then it explains the seeming incompatibility of Lucy’s parents.
Her father was relentlessly sociable. He struck up conversations with total strangers in the street; he knew everyone in the small fenland village where they lived; when Lucy went to the nearest town, Ely, with him, he seemed to be acquainted with everyone there too.
Her mother, on the other hand, was fearful not only of strangers but also of people she knew. Even her friends, if you can be said to have friends when you never let anyone inside your house. She exhibited some symptoms of agoraphobia, a condition that is often mistakenly described as a fear of wide-open spaces, an erroneous attribution of the classical root of the word to ager, the Latin for field, when actually it derives from the Greek agora, the market place, making agoraphobia a fear of crowds. In truth, Lucy never noticed her mother being too concerned about crowds or market places if there were bargains to be had. She never missed the Ely bus on Thursdays, enduring greetings from fellow passengers to elbow her way into the thick of the action with the rest of them, pushing and barging in the hunt for a snip.
No, Lucy’s mother’s particular fear wasn’t of people per se, but of people coming to the house. She lived in terror of unexpected visitors, well, all visitors really. There were no expected ones because she never invited anybody round. Her reaction to them reminded Lucy of an old film she’d seen on TV, a Clark Gable war film set in a submarine entitled Run Silent Run Deep. When Lucy and her two older sisters heard the crunch of a footstep upon the gravel front path of their small council house, or were surprised by the sudden shock of a fist upon the front door, it was as though their mother had screamed, ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’ Indeed Lucy, always the most audacious of the three, once uttered those very words only to earn from her mother a quicksilver slap on the cheek. Not for her levity, you understand, but purely because of the practical risk of her tipping off the caller that the family was in.
Lucy’s mother never shouted ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’ because she would never have shouted anything. What she did was hiss, sotto voce, ‘Get down!’ The effect was the same. As soon as she spoke, Lucy and her sisters hit the floor. Their mother was not long in following, pausing only to close the curtains, switch off the radio and kill any lights that were on. She lived in fear not only that the family might be heard, but that a person so intrusive as to go calling on people would have no compunction about trolling around outside the house, peering into the windows and listening for the radio, refusing to accept the family’s apparent absence.
In some cases, Lucy’s mother’s fears were only too well realized. This might occur when someone really did need to see her or her husband urgently.
Or it might be that someone felt annoyed by Lucy’s mother’s perceived rudeness (as opposed to psychological disorder) and was determined to catch her out. Or rather, in.
Take the Reverend Mr Diggle, the local minister, when he came collecting for various manifestations of the poor. You could always tell it was him. He was over six feet tall and his silhouette through the upper frosted-glass half of the front door was enough to block the light. The Reverend Mr Diggle had an uncompromising, Come out, come out, wherever you are! knock that made the door shake in its frame. This was the signal for Mum to order, ‘Get down,’ and they’d all hit the deck as though someone had hurled in a hand grenade.
If the TV was on, the person nearest was expected to crawl across the floor and turn the off switch. And then, as the set was visible to someone peering through the front window – but only someone over six feet and standing on tiptoe (as well as on the pansies in the flower-bed beneath the window) – the same person would have to roll three or four times across the floor to the sheltering safety of the settee, as though evading enemy gunfire.
That is the prelude to how Lucy came to kill her mother. The actual event took place one afternoon in Cambridge when the eleven-year-old Lucy was waiting for the bus home from the girls’ high school. She was the only girl in the village who attended the high school because she was the only one to have passed the 11-plus. Everyone else, including her sisters, went to the comprehensive.
Lucy had only been at the school for a term, a short enough time for her to still feel awe and terror at the sight of a prefect. So when she saw Christine Bexley approaching her, she tried her best to make herself small in the hope that Bexley wouldn’t see her. Bexley was the worst prefect in the school, bar none. If you caught her attention you were certain to get a punishment from her.
Lucy looked at her feet, knowing that, as with a dangerous dog, eye contact was the last thing you wanted. After a minute or so of staring down she raised her eyes and found Bexley standing over her.
‘Put your beret on straight, you little tart,’ snapped Bexley.
Lucy reached up and made the necessary adjustment. Bexley walked around her like a sergeant major inspecting a new recruit.
‘Your blazer is undone, do it up.’
‘I can’t,’ said Lucy miserably. ‘The button came off.’
‘Then you’d better get your mummy to sew it back on,’ sneered Bexley. The way she said mummy made it an insult implying that Lucy was a little kid who would still call her mum that. The high school was posher than the comprehensive, but not so posh that the girls called their mothers mummy instead of mum.
This was what induced Lucy to matricide. Even as the words slipped from her mouth, she sensed that the ambiguity in them was not an accident. At some deep and mysterious level, she meant them to be misconstrued. ‘I haven’t got one,’ she said in a tiny voice.
Bexley coloured. ‘Oh, I’m . . . er, well, sorry. I um didn’t know.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Lucy magnanimously. She didn’t feel dishonest, well, not totally. Technically, they could still be talking about the button, although it would probably be stretching it to suggest that Bexley would be so apologetic about a missing button.
‘Well, just get one put back on by . . . uh . . . someone,’ said Bexley. ‘We don’t want you catching cold now, do we?’ This was followed by a smile. It was the first time in recorded history that Bexley had ever smiled. You could tell from the awkwardness of how the smile looked on her face, the way that it was conscious it didn’t really belong there, that she wasn’t used to doing it.
At that point Lucy’s bus came. She boarded it grateful that its intervention had prevented any interrogation as to the circumstances of her mother’s passing. She was also thankful that she had escaped punishment. But that night, lying in bed, she felt the guilt and fear of detection that all murderers, except for psychopaths, experience. From this time on, she began to dread a knock on the door almost as much as her mother ever did.