I slumped down and covered my face as well as I could by leaning into my left hand, away from the window on my side.
‘Are you all right back there?’ DC Miles asked.
‘Fine,’ I replied. I was so far from all right it was as though I had left the body of the woman she was asking. Thoughts jumbled, charging and crashing in different directions. Rage towards Mira bloomed in black clouds through my mind, dissipated only by helpless confusion and fear. Was this really happening? Even as it was happening, it wasn’t possible.
Why hadn’t Peter called? Peter would be on my side. He knew me. We knew each other so well, too well. After sixteen years of being with him, I could predict most of his moves, most of his reactions. On Sundays at the White Horse, he would always order the same half pint of bitter to start and choose the same newspapers if they were free, and curse under his breath if they weren’t. He knew my habits just as well. He knew I would always order a double shot in my latte at the end of my meal, and that I would talk too quietly for him to hear, just in case there was a mother at school at the next table, and en route home, he knew that I would always comment on the beauty of the rolling hills, and remind the children of how lucky they were to live here. He knew me. Surely he would not believe I was capable of assaulting Rosie.
When I had shut her wrist in the door, I might have been cross but it had been an accident. When I left her in her room while I danced with Noah, I was separating myself, as all the parenting books told me to do, to protect her. I couldn’t have predicted the broken glass. How could I be in this police car, now driving past the clock tower on the high street, having been arrested? It was beyond comprehension.
A tight feeling began to build in my chest as I sucked in every particle of air I could find, but the sweet taste of the air-freshener that bobbed from the mirror made me want to gag. I was about to be led into a police station as a child abuser; it took my breath away. I had no frame of reference.
As we drove cautiously through the high street, I tried to recall those intense fights with Rosie, in anticipation of questions, but the details wouldn’t come. I could have been calmer with her, wound her up less, I don’t know. My memory was messy and more about feeling than detail, like watching a screen-burst of our rage. The autumn wreath bouncing on the carpet, her fingers shooting through the door that I slammed; the teeth marks on Noah’s arm, her shoulders squeezed by my hands; the beat to a disco track, the blood on her palm. In the eyes of a stranger, cruelty and carelessness and neglect could have fuelled each scenario. I dreaded the police officers scrutinising me, forcing me to relive the shameful details. Laid out on the table, it would look bad. More so, they might have ways of tricking me into revealing more than I should, more of what my mind had put me through in those stressful minutes, more about what I had felt capable of doing to her. The legal parameters of domestic assault were a mystery to me, but I knew I had been wrong to think those things. I might not have actually hit her, but I had certainly wanted to.
Chapter Thirty-Two
TOP SECRET
Dear Mummy,
Daddy said I was allowed to take my diary to Vics’ house. Beth is asleep. She makes a funny noise when she breathes. I’m glad it’s not too quiet though. I am scared when it is. I’m so scared anyway. I don’t think I will be able to sleep all night and my pillow is wet from all my crying. I am worried you will never come back. I know that Daddy says you have gone to a police station but I keep imagining that you have gone into the dark, dark woods where there are serpents and dragons to kill you and then what would I do without you? Daddy said you were going to be asked some questions just like the police asked me. The pretty police officer was really nice. She smiled a lot. She will be nice to you too, Mummy. The other woman Miranda Slay-something was a bit weird. She was a social worker and she had big teeth and a long grey ponytail that she kept stroking like it was her snake pet. She creeped me out. Also I don’t think grown-ups should have pink dangly pens like hers. I like your smart black pen that you use for your work and I want to have one when I am grown-up. I hope you don’t have to talk to snake-lady.
Daddy says you will be home later. Sometimes Daddy says stuff just to make me feel better and then it makes me sadder because I know he is lying. You never lie to me. I think that is really cool. I want you to come home, mummy. Please, please come home. I’m sure you can hear me.
INVISIBLE INK ALERT: I want so badly to say how sorry I am. When the police wanted to talk to me again on the flowery sofa in that weird house that was not like a real house that Harriet took me to with that big weird window mirror I was too scared to tell them that my imagination was getting very big and it felt like I was writing a composition at school that I couldn’t stop writing and it ran away with me like the dog with the spoon. I feel bad because I broke the one rule that they said was the only rule in the room. (I wondered what other rule they had in the upstairs room of the house and I thought about all those different rules in all the different rooms in the world and my eyes went cross-eyed – only in my head. If I really went cross-eyed I would look like a weirdo). Then they asked me what the difference between telling a lie and telling the truth was. The story went like this: If someone stole my pencil case at school and then told me they hadn’t stolen it even though I knew they had, was this a lie or the truth? .... DUH! DUH! DAH! Even Noah could answer that dumb question.
It’s just I wasn’t really lying, mummy, I promise you. Mrs E said some stuff about her mummy slapping her and there being blood on her lip then I kind of imagined you slapped me like it was a film and then I thought I could taste the blood and see the red dripping down my lips and I was so angry with you for saying that thing about not being my real mummy that it was like the anger was boiling up inside me and the story just came out and it kind of became like real and it got stuck in my head and I couldn’t get it out until it was really real, real. Now I am imagining it again and I am thinking that maybe it was real. Was it real mummy? The blood was crimson. Crimson is the word that the writer used in that book you read me about those wolves when they died in the white snow and I remembered it and thought about the crimson blood dripping down and down onto my white school shirt, white like the snow. Get it? When I told the police about that white shirt and the crimson blood (but I said red instead of crimson and I did not tell them about the wolves) I thought they looked a bit worried like they were watching the same scary film that was in my head and I felt flutters in my stomach and I didn’t want them to stop listening to me so I went on about it a bit.