Like a dog about to fight, I bristled. ‘No.’
My nerves were frayed. The effort of our day came down on me like a ton of bricks. The surface of our moods had been glassy smooth, but our ongoing troubles lay deeper, churning underneath like a riptide beneath our smiles.
I turned the ignition.
‘Don’t start the car!’ she screeched. ‘Don’t start the car!’
‘Drop it. The answer is no!’ I barked.
‘Please. I just want five minutes. That’s all. What’s the big deal?’
I was entrenched. There was nothing she could say to change my mind. ‘Don’t ruin the lovely day we’ve had together.’
‘I’m not! I just want to play a game. That’s all.’
I clutched the wheel to quell the intense resentment that was worming like a parasite through my flesh. I couldn’t concede defeat. ‘No. And don’t ask me again.’
‘You’re so stupid!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs.
In an aggressive, unsafe manoeuvre, I swerved into a small driveway and slammed on the breaks. The car behind me beeped angrily. I didn’t care. My hands shook as I scrabbled frantically in my handbag for her iPod and I chucked it at her.
‘There you go! There you go, you little brat! I hope it’s worth it.’
‘Ow! It hit my leg.’
‘I try my best. I really do. I try my best to give you everything you want and it still isn’t good enough, is it? Why are you being like this to me? Why? Why?’ I ranted, hitting the steering wheel with one hand over and over again. I hated her. I hated myself. I hated us. There were no tears, just hot-faced loathing.
‘You look funny,’ she laughed.
It took all of my willpower to hold back the venom, to methodically push the handbrake down and pull the car out of the lay-by, to continue home.
‘Do you want to upset me? Is that it?’ I whined, a lump of desperation in my throat. I clicked on the indicator into Virginia Close and the feelings of inadequacy and regret clawed at my insides.
‘I don’t care.’
‘You are insatiable. I give and give and give and nothing is ever good enough.’
‘La, la, la, la, shut up, shut up, shut up,’ she sang from the back.
Anger flooded my bloodstream. In a split second, a mindless, animalistic ferocity took me over. Flipping, I rasped in a deep guttural booming voice, hurting my throat, ‘Go on then! You carry on like that and I’ll never take you on a day out ever, ever again!’
‘I don’t want to anyway. I wish I had a different mummy,’ she yelled, her voice nearer to my ear.
A surge of raw, reciprocal hatred rose up from my gut. My wrath knocked away barriers of intellect or reasoning. I stopped thinking, stopped feeling, stopped pretending, stopped holding back. Uninhibited malevolence shot through my clenched teeth, ‘That’s lucky then, because I’m not your real mummy!’
There was a hefty, savage silence.
My whole body quivered with shock and I grabbed at my throat with one hand as if strangling away the foul words that had already escaped, the car wobbled.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said quietly.
I pulled up outside our gates by the roundabout, too stunned to speak again, too cowardly to turn back to look at her. I wished I had struck her instead. It would have been a lesser blow.
Neither of us moved to get out; an excruciating purgatory.
What had I done? How long I had kept the secret, how successfully, and now the spirits of that secret were howling around my head as though I had opened a chest of demons.
Eleven years ago, the hot flushes, the mood swings, the night sweats and the irregular periods hadn’t been considered abnormal symptoms of coming off the pill. When my periods had stopped completely, the doctor with the ear hair and untrimmed eyebrows had delivered his news, informing me of my diminished ovarian reserve and FSH count of over fifteen, informing me that I would never be able to conceive my own child.
‘There we go then,’ I had said to him across his wide desk.
‘It’s a lot to take in,’ the doctor had said, glancing over at the box of tissues on the mantle as though someone had died.
I had held my breath, holding in the desire to shout at this tweed-suited old man, irritated by his sad smile. Why was he sad, when I wasn’t? I had thought.
The memory was paralysing. Why had I not been sad? My hands were glued to the steering wheel.
Rosie’s deathly whisper punctured my eardrum. ‘It’s not true is it, Mummy?’
Powering my reluctant limbs into action, I climbed out of the car and round to open her door. The ghastliness of her whitened face was as dreadful as anything I had ever witnessed before in my life.
‘Of course it’s not true. I was just angry.’ I bent in to scoop her out of the car, just as I had when she was a baby, her face upturned to mine, the mass of me oppressive. Me, the vile mother. She, the frightened child.
‘You promise?’ she asked, her wide eyes rimmed red in horror.
‘It’s not true! Of course I’m your real mummy,’ I stuttered, the half-truth breaking my heart.
I lifted her up, and her legs encircled me, the weight of her almost bringing me to my knees.
Rosie’s chest heaved against my body in quiet sobs. ‘Why did you say it then?’ she asked, sounding utterly baffled.
‘I was just angry. So, so angry. You know when you’re angry you say things you don’t mean? Like when you say “I hate you, Mummy”, do you mean that when you say it?’
‘No, of course not!’ she cried.
‘And listen,’ I said, burying my head into her neck. Her hair smelled the same as it had from the first ever moment I had held her. ‘I should not have shouted at you like that. It was totally wrong and I am truly, truly sorry. Nobody should ever shout at you like that, whatever you might or might not have done. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded gravely, adding, ‘And I’m sorry for screaming, too.’ And she broke down again. The poor child would have no choice but to believe me. I was all she had.
Chapter Twenty-Two
TOP SECRET
* * *
I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. I’LL LEARN YOU A LESSON FOREVER. I DON’T CARE THAT YOU SAID SORRY. I WISH IT WAS TRUE. I HATE YOU MORE THAN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘Don’t eat this, will you?’ Mira said to Barry.
‘Why are you keeping it?’
‘Just in case.’
‘In case of what?’
‘In case we fancy it.’
‘You hate Battenberg cake.’
Mira couldn’t look at Barry. She knew he would be blinking wildly through his thick lens.
‘You’re not up to something are you, Mira?’
‘What could I possibly be up to?’
‘I don’t know, love.’ Barry kissed his wife on the top of her head as she read the newspaper.
‘Bye,’ she said, adding, ‘Don’t forget my glue-dots and the hoover bags.’
‘They won’t have any glue-dots in the hardware store.’
‘Go to the newsagents then.’
He left without responding. Mira knew he was unimpressed when she spoke to him that way. She didn’t really care. She wanted him out of the house so that she could get ready into her running kit.
Initially, she had been offended by Rosie’s rebuff, but in the four days this week that Rosie had run from her Mira had rationalised it. It was a hard thing for a child to admit that their mother might be hurting them. It wasn’t a rejection of Mira, per se, it was a natural reaction. Rosie was bound to be defensive, and Noah was just a silly little boy who followed his big sister without thinking for himself. Interesting, too, that neither of them had told their parents of how they ‘bumped into Mrs Entwistle’ every day.
So, Mira regarded her afternoon task as another part of her routine. She’d get there in the end – if there was somewhere to get to – and today might be that day.