36

Izzy sleeps on it.

When she wakes, she has a text from Gabe: How’re you?

She blinks, reading it, then closes the messages app on her phone. He’s an abuser. Her father assaulted one woman, then murdered another.

But what if …?

Her mind idles over the possibilities. He was young. He has an explanation. Neither is an excuse. But she wants to know. She can’t just leave it, loose ends and all.

Should she at least hear him out? Ask him about it? She sits on her bed, looking out over the fields across from her house, thinking.

Does she owe it to him?

No.

She wants to ask him. That is the truth, she realizes, as she unwinds after a busy evening at Alexandra’s.

She wants to dislodge this unhappy stone and replace it with the other feeling that’s been bubbling up through her recently: hope. She’s not felt it for decades. It isn’t coping or making the best of it. It’s the belief that there is something better on the horizon.

She thinks of the newspaper cutting. Who could that be from? Not him. Why would he do that? That is something she can’t fathom. Why would he threaten her? And even if he is a killer, a sociopath, why would he kill her? She thinks of the alibi she ruined for him, but dismisses the thought again. The truth is, if he did kill her mother, she doesn’t know why. And so she has no idea of the danger she’s in. If any. He might be a monster, but he’s definitely an enigma.

So maybe it’s from somebody warning her about him. But does anybody truly know him? She knows him better than anybody, after all.

She wants to ask him about Babs, and so she will.

She dials his number. Turning to him – even after nearly twenty years’ absence – feels natural. Like she is a normal thirty-something with a broken boiler, a picture that needs hanging, the oil in her car topping up. She calls her father like thousands of women have done before her.

Something in the back of her mind is calling her foolish. Reckless. Looking for parents in the wrong places, chasing down danger, but she doesn’t care.

‘Your previous conviction,’ she says, her tone icy. She can’t help it.

She closes her eyes, and wishes she hadn’t called him. That she could see his eyes. Those eyes of his that are nothing like hers, except the way they both squint at the sun; like just-woken animals. She remembers a photograph of them skiing, taken back in 1998. They were both looking at the camera like meerkats.

‘I … oh,’ he says.

She can imagine his mouth moving, forming an O. He will be pulling a hand back through his dark hair. No. She corrects herself: his hair is white now.

There’s an awkward pause.

‘I’ll tell you about that,’ he says, recovering fast.

She shouldn’t be telling him, shouldn’t be on the phone to him, she thinks.

‘But in the meantime, in your entire childhood – which is after Babs – was I ever violent?’

‘No.’

‘Short-tempered?’

‘No. Mum was,’ Izzy says, feeling guilty.

Her father was always easy company. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said of various misdemeanours, changing the TV channel and offering her a Quality Street. ‘The things I did in my youth …’

‘Right,’ he says now. ‘And anyway, we’ve got a good thing going, haven’t we?’ He waits a beat. ‘I’m so enjoying this, Iz. I … I missed you. I waited thousands of days for this, and … God.’

‘Don’t,’ she says, her throat tight. ‘Don’t guilt-trip me. Don’t manipulate me.’

‘But didn’t you miss me?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t allowed to.’

‘Allowed?’

‘Granny and Granddad, it was … it was tough. They were tough.’ Izzy looks down at her jeans, embarrassed. She wasn’t merely taken away physically, she was forced to take sides. Pulled away into her mother’s narrative. A tragic woman murdered by her husband. A husband who wouldn’t tell anybody where she was. A husband who then put everybody through a trial. It was easier, in the end, to take a side.

‘How so?’

‘Your case was off limits. They didn’t … I don’t know. They didn’t care about me. They didn’t let me do anything, or talk to me. It was dark, I guess.’

‘No,’ Gabe says. ‘Please don’t say they made it worse for you.’

‘I never wanted to say.’

‘I thought you’d be well looked after.’

‘I was. I was never hungry, or cold, or whatever.’

‘But you didn’t feel loved,’ he says softly.

‘No. I guess not. Not for me. I had to fit in with them.’

‘Well, I love you,’ he says.

Izzy closes her eyes and leans in to the words. She is drowning in them. She is choked up, unable to speak. He loves her.

‘Anyway. Babs,’ he says. ‘I was seventeen years old.’

She steps out into the garden and holds the hot phone to her ear. The paving slabs underfoot are still warm, even though it’s nearly midnight. Birds are nesting in the trees just beyond her garden, the bushes shivering with their movement.

‘I had this girlfriend, Babs,’ he says. ‘God, I loved her.’

She immediately thinks of Pip, and how much she had loved his floppy hair, his raspberry lips and his adventurous spirit. ‘What happened?’ she says.

‘She was cool,’ he says. ‘Smoked. Bell bottoms. Liked art, liked me. But, Izzy, we were a disaster. The best, when things were good, but we were awful communicators. It was pretty volatile. She lived in this little flat above a greengrocer’s. I always used to take her up an apple, as a joke, on my way through. We’d paint and chat. She loved The Beatles, had this huge poster on her wall of the Help! album. Used to quote their lyrics all the time. Anyway, one day we had one of our rows – the kind that start off about one thing and end up being about things said during the row. Tony witnessed one, once, but this time, someone in the greengrocer’s called the police.’

‘Why?’

‘We were shouting. I was louder, I guess. My voice carried. She scratched my face. I bent her arm behind her back.’

‘Oh,’ Izzy says. ‘Why?’

‘She came at me. But more than that, I was angry. It was wrong. But she was … we’d have these rows where she wouldn’t let things drop. I’d say, “Leave me to calm down,” but she wouldn’t. She’d come after me. She brandished the hot iron in my face once, as a threat.’

‘So you intended to hurt her.’

‘I lost my temper,’ he says measuredly. ‘As did she.’

‘But when men hit women …’

‘That was a two-way street. She hurt my face as much as I hurt her arm.’

‘It doesn’t work like that now,’ Izzy says tightly.

‘Anyway, it went all the way to trial.’

‘What – she accused you?’

‘No. But the police came, and she was honest.’

‘Did Mum know?’

‘Of course,’ he says quickly. ‘And my parents. Go and see my mum, if you want.’

‘She’s on your side, right?’

‘Yes, she is. But she has an interesting perspective. It might help you.’

‘Maybe I will.’

Izzy thinks of the worst of her behaviour when she was seventeen. The way she would career around roundabouts while texting, no regard for lives at stake. The way she would sometimes hoard a hundred mouldy mugs in her room without thinking that her mother had to collect them up, had to take out the rancid, stiff herbal tea bags. That time she kicked her bedroom door when she hadn’t been able to understand her chemistry homework. The faintest of dents was evident, afterwards, which she was ashamed to look at. Could she have ended up in a similar situation, given the right circumstances? An awful row, recorded forever?

She screws her nose up in frustration. Was she trying to twist the facts to suit her? It felt like it, sometimes; like they were malleable, changeable. Like she might be looking at things through prisms that refracted and misdirected the truth, over and over. She couldn’t tell. Who could? She could only go on how she felt, here in the garden, her father explaining himself patiently, quietly, on the end of the phone to her. Her father telling her that he loved her.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Even when I asked?’

He pauses, thinking, she guesses. ‘How did you find out?’ She doesn’t answer that and, eventually, he says, ‘Do you know why people exclude previous convictions at trials, Iz?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘It’s because if there is even a hint of a defendant having done something in the past, the jury can’t move beyond it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘They convict. And, I guess, I didn’t want you to do the same. It’s not relevant. I was a different person then. As you are different to the teenage you.’

‘But it is relevant.’

‘It’s not to me. Because I’m not a murderer.’

She looks across at Thea’s garden. Her kitchen windows are open and she can hear the chink of cutlery. The sound of footsteps on wooden floors.

‘It was just me and crazy Babs. Being teenagers.’

It makes sense to Izzy. His explanation feels authentic. Exactly how she would be if she were accused: defensive, trying to hide things that seemed relevant, but weren’t. She can feel her mind coming around to his version of events, like the slowly turning Isle of Wight tides: she is starting to believe him.

‘Would you say you have a quick temper?’ she says.

‘No. But I do think everyone has a limit. And nobody’s perfect.’

Izzy is glad he says that. She is glad he isn’t delusional.

‘So whose fault was it?’

‘It was both of our faults.’

‘That’s called victim blaming in today’s parlance.’

‘Well, it was what it was.’

Izzy doesn’t respond to that. Instead, she looks up at the sky and wonders who has the answers for her, and if she will ever find them. Her mother, her father … and God, she supposes. Gabe’s God.

‘We split up, afterwards. Which was just as well,’ he adds.

‘Pip and I split up, too,’ she says, though she is still thinking about breaking points and tempers.

‘What happened?’ he asks. He’s asked before.

He keeps asking, and she wishes he wouldn’t.

‘Nothing,’ she says, sitting down on the bench in her garden.

She and Pip used to discuss babies. It seems immature now. But she felt so sure they would make it. ‘I like the name Gigi,’ she’d said once. ‘No. Pole dancer’s name,’ Pip had said, which had made her laugh.

She and Nick never discuss it. Izzy knows her own reasons: how could she be a mother? She has no idea how families work. The idea of giving birth to, and then leaving hospital with, a life she is entirely responsible for fills her with horror. But what about Nick? Sometimes, she thinks he merely can’t be bothered to have the conversation, and that thought fills her with sadness.

‘Nothing happened,’ she says again. ‘Just the usual.’

‘I’m sorry, Iz. I liked him. First loves, hey? I guess it was too much – with his brother and everything?’

‘I guess so. Where are you?’ she asks quietly.

‘In the hostel. Hey, I’m on cooking duty tomorrow.’

‘Me too,’ she says with a smile. ‘I’ve swapped shifts.’ He says nothing but, somehow, she can tell that he is smiling too, down the telephone line to her.

The next night, at Alexandra’s, as she dices an onion which makes her cry, she doesn’t think of his hostel, or that he has to perform chores in order to have a bed. She thinks only of him chopping an onion, eyes watering too, along with hers.