To calm myself down, I focussed my mind on Rosie’s face, her beautiful blue eyes filled with regret and concern.
A few months back, when I had been out at the supermarket one weekend, Peter had texted me a photograph of Rosie that was meant to act as an amusing begging plea for sweets for movie night. The dark circles that ringed her eyes and the exaggerated desperation in her expression spoke more to me of pain than of fun. I had pretended to be won over, but the image of her face had stayed with me for days. She had looked unhappy, and I wondered now if such unhappiness – undiagnosed, brushed under the carpet – could lead to a lie, a big lie, a lie based on a depth of feeling I had no handle on. It was hard to examine the possibility that the decision we had made to withhold information from her about her maternal donor was festering in her subconscious. However tormenting her tantrums were, and however much I knew I needed to fix them, part of me had hoped that they were some form of cathartic release, an exposure of her frustrations, not the repression of something more hateful or sinister, something that she felt deep down, an unexplained something, something that would lead to an innate confusion about her core identity.
As I pictured that face of hers, my whole being seemed to ache, and I wondered whether I was separate from her at all, whether there was an almost other-worldly communication between us, as though our emotional worlds were interlaced. We seeped into one another; our pain was intertwined, never more so than when we fought. And as I sat in this small, stuffy room, powerless, completely powerless to help her, I felt this more keenly than ever. If she was hurting, I was feeling it. Her pain had become mine. This was love. This was punishment. A just punishment, perhaps, for my own lies.
‘In the meantime, you’d better get it together for this interview,’ Philippa patted my hand.
I squeezed her fingers as though she were my mother, panic charging through me, ‘What if they don’t believe me?’
‘Then you’ll be in deep shit,’ she said, squeezing my hand back.
* * *
Back in the isolation of the cell, bent into the same position as before, the torture of revisiting my fight with Rosie, when I had unleashed my secret, began to churn like a rumination. I am not your real mummy, I am not your real mummy, I am not your real mummy. There was no peace in my repetitive, tormenting analysis of how and why and why and how. All I knew was that the shame of what I had said in a moment of anger wrapped itself around my face like a plastic wrap.
* * *
DC Miles unwrapped the cellophane from a CD and placed it in the black machine that sat on the desk between us.
‘Have you ever been interviewed before?’ DC Miles said, smiling. Her teeth were so white I imagined diamonds embedded in them.
Next to DC Miles, DC Bennett flicked open his black book and wrote onto the top of a clean page but remained silent as DC Miles continued.
‘No,’ I replied.
The double shot of espresso that Philippa had forced me to drink beforehand had sharpened my mind and I felt a little more clear-headed.
‘So you’ve never been arrested?’
‘No, no.’
She tapped onto the touch screen of the machine. Next to me I could hear Philippa’s gravelly breathing as she rolled her pen up and down the notebook that rested on her lap.
‘This interview is being recorded and may be used in evidence if this case is brought to trial. It is 19.32 on November the second 2017. Present here is myself, DC Miles, my colleague, DC Bennett, and then Mrs Gemma Bradley and her solicitor, Miss Philippa Letwin.’
DC Miles opened her purple A4 notebook onto her lap and leant back in her seat, and looked me straight in the eye.
‘You’ve been arrested for the offence of assault causing bodily harm to your daughter. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention now something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Okay,’ she paused, ‘my first question is, are you responsible for slapping your daughter causing her lip to bleed?’
‘No, I have never slapped her. Never in my life.’
‘Can you tell us why your daughter would have said that?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t understand it.’
DC Miles looked over at DC Bennett, and DC Bennett pursed his pointy wet lips.
‘She said the left corner of her lip was bleeding and that she “was crying with pain”,’ DC Miles said, reading from her notebook.
‘I don’t know why she said that. She can be quite a drama queen.’
‘What do you mean by a drama queen?’
‘I mean she gets a bit over dramatic about stuff sometimes and works herself up. She has a really vivid imagination.’
‘Do you ever get angry with her about not doing her homework?’
‘If she’s messing around, I can get cross, yes.’
Philippa cleared her throat. ‘When you say “cross”, what do you do when you’re cross with Rosie?’
‘I shout at her,’ I said, dropping my gaze to my lap where I saw how my fingers picked at the skin around my thumb.
‘And when you shout at her and you feel that cross, do you want to do anything else to her.’
Philippa spoke up. ‘It’s not relevant what she “wants” to do. Please could you stick to questions relating to the charge?’
‘I’m just trying to understand how you feel in that moment when Rosie hasn’t done her homework.’
‘I get frustrated with her, of course.’
‘And angry? Or “cross” as you put it?’
‘All mothers get angry, don’t they?’
She paused her questioning as she read from her purple notebook and smoothed her chocolate brown fringe down with both hands.
‘And on the sixteenth of October, you were visited by PC Connolly and PC Yorke, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me what happened that day.’
‘Rosie had a massive tantrum and she threw a teddy at the picture, which must’ve fallen off the wall, and when I went in, the glass was smashed everywhere.’
‘How did she cut her hand?’
‘She was trying to tidy up the glass.’
‘Why didn’t you do that for her?’
‘By the time I had got in there she had already started picking it up.’
‘Why wouldn’t she ask you to do it? Doesn’t she know the dangers of cut glass?’
‘I would have thought she’d have known, yes,’ I admitted, crushed by the thought of Rosie sitting there amongst the cut glass.
‘Might she have been scared of telling you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Might she have been scared of your reaction?’
‘I suppose she might’ve thought I’d tell her off, yes.’
‘How would you have punished her, by hitting her?’
‘No. I have told you, I would never ever hit Rosie.’ I was beginning to feel a little disorientated.
‘Why was Rosie having a tantrum that day, Gemma?’
‘I sent her to her room because she bit Noah on the arm.’
‘Does Rosie often have violent reactions to situations?’
‘She can get quite physical with me sometimes.’ I was hit hard by the vision of her circling me and screeching, and kicking, and how much she seemed to hate me.
‘In what way?’
‘When she tantrums she hits me and pulls at my clothes and stuff like that.’
‘That must be really hard to take.’
I gulped, trying to swallow a lump in my throat. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘So hard that you want to hit her back?’
‘No. No. I do not hit her back.’ I shook my head, imploringly. No, no, no.
‘Do you ever feel like you are going to snap when she is having a tantrum?’
‘I do shout at her,’ I said, quietly, unsure of myself.
‘How do you think she feels when you shout at her?’
Shrugging, I conceded, ‘Upset, I suppose.’
‘And scared?’
‘That’s a horrible thought, but yes, probably scared too.’
‘Do you scare her to get control of her?’
‘No! I never want to scare her, it just comes out like that.’
‘I suppose you never want to hurt her either, but it just comes out like that.’
‘No. That’s not true. That is twisting what I said.’