‘He hurt me too.’ Ciara’s words cut through the noise. They cut through the thumping in my heart and the rush of blood through my veins. They cut through Lily’s crying. They cut through my anger and pain.
I hear them and immediately I freeze. I register their meaning. I stop, drop the hand that was in mid-flight to my side. My anger seeping from me, through my feet, through the floor, leaving as quickly as it arrived.
‘He hurt me too,’ she’d said again. It is enough to change everything.
I look at her. At the expression on her face. For the first time, I see the same pain in her eyes that I see in my own every time I look in the mirror. Even when I think I’m happy. Even when I think I have it sussed and when I think I’m finally ‘over it’. My eyes tell a different story.
Seeing Ciara now, the look on her face, I know she feels it, too. The pain, the betrayal, the hurt and the shame.
My arms are like lead weights. Ciara is crying now. Gulping lungfuls of air. Lily is still howling. It’s only the sharpness of her cry that forces me to move, to turn from Ciara and focus on the tiny child who needs me. The innocent baby.
My girl.
My precious little girl.
I could never have allowed him to hurt her, you see.
When she was born, everything I’d thought I’d pushed to the back of my mind about Joe and what he’d done came back. And with it came such a primal sense of needing to protect my daughter, I vowed to distance myself even further from Joe McKee.
And then he became sick and it all seemed as though karma was finally catching up with him. But it trapped me. No one would understand if I walked away from a dying man, but I’d rather have died myself than tell people what I’d endured. They’d never understand. I doubted they would even believe me. Joe was regarded so highly, and I was always regarded as a strange one, a misfit, the girl who was a bit ‘mad in the head’.
They’d never understand that it was more complicated than it ever appears in the movies. Mind games and manipulation. A destroyed sense of self. I had clung on to ‘love’ as twisted and as damaging as it was. I’d almost persuaded myself it had never happened. Until Lily was born. Until I woke up.
I’m aware of Ciara slumping to the floor behind me as I lift my baby and rock her to me. Hold her close and soothe her. Centre myself as she fusses. She’s hungry. Her physical need reminds me I need to be present.
I lower myself to the floor and bring Lily to my chest. She quiets as she starts to feed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ciara says. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For what I said. Or didn’t say. I’m right, aren’t I? He hurt you.’
I nod, a teardrop plopping onto Lily’s soft hair. It all seems so sad.
‘If I’d spoken up, maybe, just maybe …’
I can’t speak.
She shakes her head. ‘I blocked it out,’ she says. ‘I didn’t allow myself to think about it. I was so angry. It was so messed up. For years, I thought it was normal. He made me believe what we did, no … what he did to me … was normal.
‘When you were ill …’ Ciara blinks at me. ‘Back when you were young, how you behaved, I should’ve known it was about more than your mother dying. But I swear I didn’t. I don’t think I wanted to see it. He told me I was his special girl, you see. His favourite.’ Her voice cracks and she puts her hand to her mouth as if she might throw up.
‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘I know you mightn’t believe this, but it was only when I spoke to Stella last night and she said …’ She pauses.
I can’t speak.
‘She asked me did I think he hurt you, too. I knew straight away he had. I felt it there and then. So much of what happened when we young just clicked into place.’
She is crying. Her fierce, cool, at times vicious exterior has been replaced with a vulnerability I’ve never seen in her before. Not when she was fourteen and screaming at me that she hated me. Not when she didn’t realise I’d heard her beg her daddy to come back.
‘I was so awful to you, Heidi. So awful. Even now, as a grown up. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but you must know I’m really sorry. More sorry than I can ever say.’
There is such desperation in her voice, it’s heartbreaking.
‘I’d have said something if I’d known. I think I would’ve said something.’
‘I believe you,’ I say, my body sagging but also knowing it was always more complicated than that. It was never as easy as just saying something. Just telling someone.
Ciara nods. We are both utterly exposed to each other for the first time.
‘You’ve not told Alex, have you?’ she eventually says.
I shake my head. ‘I haven’t told anyone. I was too ashamed and then I didn’t want people, especially Alex, to look at me like I was damaged goods.’
‘I know,’ she says, because she really does know.
She knows exactly what this feeling is like.
‘He told me no one else wanted me,’ I tell her, feeling strange to say the words out loud for the first time. ‘I had no one. Everyone thought I wasn’t right, you know? Too much trouble. He told me he was the only person who loved me and he was the only person who would take care of me. He told me bad things happened to children in care and that’s where I would end up.’
Saying the words hurt. Bad things had been happening to me then anyway.
Ciara drops her head in her hands. ‘I told you those things too. If I’d known … Oh God, I made it so awful for you. I know it’s no excuse, but I was hurting so much. It was so fucked up. He told me I was his special girl,’ she sniffs. ‘That what he did, what he made me do, was how people showed each other how much they loved each other.’
‘God, when I think about it now, I was so stupid. So naive,’ I say.
Ciara pushes her hair back from her face, shakes her head. ‘We were children, Heidi. We weren’t stupid. We were scared, vulnerable children. And the only way I knew how to communicate with people was to hurt them,’ she says, wiping her eyes, then nose, with the back of her sleeve.
She pulls her knees to her chest and she looks, for all intents and purposes, like the truculent fourteen-year-old again I remember from all those years ago.
I realise we’ve both been trapped in time – stuck in an awful place of shame and hurt for so long that we never got the chance to grow up normally.
‘I don’t blame you,’ she says eventually, and I blink back at her. ‘I think you were brave. I’m jealous, almost.’
She must register the confusion on my face.
‘For what you did,’ she says. ‘I’m not angry. I wish I’d had the nerve to do it myself.’
I blink, tense. ‘What I did?’ I ask.
‘To him. To Joe. You killed him. It was you, wasn’t it?’
I stare at her. I can’t find the words – this is all moving on to a place I was not prepared for.
‘I mean, I get it now, I understand. God, anyone would understand,’ she says, her voice growing in confidence. ‘And I’ll help you in whatever way I can. We can tell the police, together, both of us. We can tell them how sick he was, and I mean in the head. What he did. How he manipulated us. What he took from us. They’ll understand. If we both tell them. They’ll have to take it all into consideration. Trauma and all that.’
I shake my head again. She really thinks I was the one to suffocate the life out of Joe.
‘But, Ciara. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me,’ I say.
She blinks at me. ‘You can trust me,’ she says, more urgency in her voice. ‘I’m on your side now. I understand.’ She sniffs. ‘The pressure you must have been under. Being in this house. Being around him all that time. No one – no one in the world would blame you. I don’t think you have to be scared,’ she says. ‘Once the police know what he put you through, what he put us through …’
She’s repeating herself. Rambling. Becoming manic. Breaking just as I had broken.
‘Ciara, I didn’t do it,’ I repeat. ‘I had nothing to do with it,’ I mutter, but she just shakes her head.
‘I think it would be better to go to the police before they come to you. To tell them before they find their evidence, you know. Don’t they say that these things are always better for you if you come forward yourself? I’ll go with you. We can go now, once you’re finished feeding Lily.’
Her voice has risen an octave or two, become quicker. Her eyes are more manic. She is caught up in her own storm and she isn’t listening to anything I say.
‘Or I could just call them now, you know. I’m sure that DI Bradley would come over if I asked him.’
My chest tightens. Lily wriggles, responding to my body tensing. I lift her up onto my shoulder as Ciara tries to pull herself to her feet, moving towards the phone on the table.
She’s not listening to me. She’s convinced, no matter what I say, that I did it. And I know, despite her apologies and her tears, that she is very good at making people believe her.
Maybe all this, all these tears and confessions, have just been an act as well. I wouldn’t put it past her. It’s just a way of manipulating me further – of making me take the fall for her. The most disgusting of all her attempts to hurt me.
Could she be covering up for her own actions? She had the same reasons to hate him as I did. And there’s no denying that she hates me, too. That doesn’t just disappear in the course of one conversation, no matter the topic.
‘Ciara, stop it! You’re not listening. I didn’t do it. I swear on Lily’s life, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do anything that would risk me being taken away from her.’
‘Lily will be fine.’ Ciara brushes off my pleas. ‘I bet you won’t even serve time, once they know.’
She reaches for the phone and I scramble to my feet, my daughter still in my arms.
‘Stop it!’ I’m screaming now. ‘You’re not phoning the police. I won’t let you.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ she asks. ‘If you think you can intimidate me into taking the blame for something you’ve done, you can think again.’
She’s twisting everything and I can’t keep up. My head hurts.
‘I’m not threatening you,’ I plead, trying to reach out to her.
She shrugs and turns away from me, grabbing the phone with a shaking hand. ‘All this could be over and done with if you’d just admit it. Have we not all suffered enough at this stage? I feel like we’ve suffered enough … And anyone can see you were distracted with everything. Not in your right mind.’
‘Ciara!’ I say firmly, my hand on her shoulder, spinning her round to face me. I know I’m in her face and I’m intimidating her now. ‘You’re not listening to me. I didn’t do it. Why would it be me? You’ve as much of a motive as I have …’
She looks at me as if I’ve just come out with the most ludicrous statement of all time.
‘Well, it was hardly me,’ she says, turning the phone away from me again.
She’s dialling the number. I can hear the phone ring at the other end and I snatch it from her quickly, throwing the phone as hard as I can to the floor so that it smashes.
‘I won’t take the fall for you. Or for anyone else,’ I tell her.
She is glaring at me, her eyes dark, enraged. For the first time in days, anger is not my primary emotion – fear is.