How I yearned for Rosie and Noah now. Their absence was an unbearable void.
But the chairperson, whose name escaped me, the police and the doctor and the social workers, all seemed satisfied with their officially agreed-upon decisions to put Rosie and Noah on the Child Protection Plan under the category of Physical Abuse. They now universally believed that Rosie and Noah were at significant risk of being harmed by me. The conference had been neatly tied up for now, enough to stand up and leave. Everyone had their duties and roles nicely delineated. Through their eyes, through the prism of their moral and correct judgement, the threat of me had been removed from the equation. I had chosen to move out of my own home and now somehow I was being forced to stay out. Within one hour of sitting in this drab, mean room, I had seen enough to know the tide had turned. DC Miles and Miranda Slater did not simply suspect I was guilty, they knew. Tick. Job well done. Their trajectory was now clear.
I couldn’t stand up. I had lost all ability to move. Everything was moving around me too rapidly.
But Peter could move. It amazed me that he could. It amazed me that he could walk. Towards me.
‘Don’t come near me,’ I said.
As my mother tried to coax me out of the room, I thought back to the ranting and raving of that young woman in the police station and I envied her, spitefully.
I needed that fight in me, but at the same time I didn’t trust it. Spitting abuse had landed that woman in a cell. My temper, my lack of patience, my lack of self-control had brought me here, to this awful room. Finally, I knew how not to be, but I didn’t know how to be. I didn’t know how to fight for my children, without fighting.
A silent scream reverberated around my body, perhaps trapped forever inside me.
* * *
A shaft of sunlight lasered through the crack in the curtains, stubbornly, cruelly rejecting my pleas for darkness. I fumbled for my laptop by my bedside. In one line to Lisa in an email, I could not convey how ill I was: how pointless my breathing had become, how useless my body was to me or my baby, how my thoughts tortured me. My phone lay switched off. I had crawled away from the outside world, tired of the spotlight, worthless in the life I used to own.
At night, I writhed, wide awake, moving from bed to sofa and back to bed again. My eyes ached with exhaustion and misery. I paced from room to room, as though walking towards something, and ending up nowhere, letting one fruitless step follow the next, finding no pathway, no answers. The anxiety crippled me: Were the children safe? What were they doing? Where were they? How were they feeling? Did they miss me? And then the anger came, towards Peter, towards my mother, towards Mira, towards the police, towards Miranda. For holding my children away from me, as though lifting them up from the snapping jaws of a crocodile. I was bitter with loathing and I beat my fists into my mattress, over and over, until I collapsed and curled up in a pitiful ball of self-hatred and powerlessness.
My whole being moaned and twisted at the threat that loomed, the threat that I could never really reach in my thoughts consciously, knowing the very concept of losing my three babies was intolerable. A blinding shot of white blanked out that future. I could not conceive of it, I could not endure it.
Each day was a delirium: an overpowering, endless torment that I had to survive somehow, as the authorities planned my family’s future, without me in it, as the clock ticked towards the fourth of December, when I would hear whether the Crown Prosecution Service had overwhelming evidence to prosecute me for child abuse.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Mira opened the dining room door to reach for the meal that Barry had left outside it. There was a sticky note on the top plate, I love you, and one stuck on top of the bowl that covered her pudding with a felt-tip drawing of two hearts overlapping. ‘Off to the Crown tonight,’ he’d called.
Since their fight, Mira and Barry passed each other in the house like ghosts from different eras.
Mira was looking forward to seeing Rosie after Barry had gone to the pub.
Before meeting Rosie, Mira was determined to complete the photograph album. Over the last few weeks, she had begun to slowly but surely fill it up. Not with all the good memories, as one might expect, but with all the bad.
She had ripped out the photograph of her teenage self, looking happy and carefree, and replaced it with a photograph of her as a baby, crying on the sofa with chocolate smeared down her front. She looked small, dirty and neglected, just as she had felt.
This album was the new truth. Gone was her desire to push it away into brown envelopes or burn it on the compost or shove it back into plastic bags. She didn’t want to tie the knot closed on the worst injustices of her life. She now wanted to smear shit over her mother’s memory. The album was to act like a knife poking into Deidre’s thick guts in revenge. There was going to be no rewriting of history. For posterity, Mira was going to uncover the travesty of her upbringing and castigate those she blamed for it.
However, the album was not going to serve as an excuse – Mira didn’t believe in grovelling excuses – it was going to be an explanation. The photographs spoke for themselves. Somehow, the ugliness of them made her feel better, more like herself, and less like the woman she had been pretending to be all of her adult life. She was sick of pretending. Now the truth was out, she could not put it back.
If Barry understood the circumstances around the forced adoption, if he understood the backdrop of her family life, he might understand why she still yearned to meet her son.
Her joints creaked and snapped as she stood from the floor where she had been picking up the rejected cuttings. She was ready to take Barry the album.
He was sitting with his dinner on a tray in front of the television. She turned the television off and replaced his tray with her album. ‘Before you go to the pub, I wanted you to see this.’
He looked up at her, as though asking permission to open it.
She sat down next to him. ‘Go on. Open it.’
At every photograph, he asked her questions. Her sad stories tumbled out of her.
One page was of Deidre, at five years old, on that sofa, scowling at the camera, brandishing a fistful of sweets.
The next page was of her mother lying sprawled out on that same bloody sofa in her holey, puce leggings with her eyes half-closed.
The next page was a collage of all of the photographs she could find of her mother’s ex-boyfriends. There were six in total.
The next page was a crotch shot of Craig. It was the only one she could find that she hadn’t burnt in the compost. She had been amused that it was of his crotch, considering that his loins were in actual fact more relevant to her life story than his face.
And on and on. There were many more choice moments that Mira thought worthy of the album. With each new page, came an unpleasant reminder of her past. She had reconstructed the reality of her childhood. If she had brought this out to show dinner party guests, they would not coo over how sweet she and Deidre were as babies, they would probably cry for her.
On the last page, she had fixed the final photographs. She had cut around the little blue rabbit from several photographs, discarding the faces of Deidre, Doug and Harry.
Carefully, she had stuck the rabbits into a beautiful flower pattern. It was the same blue soft toy that she had bought her son before he was taken away, the same soft toy that she had sent to Deidre’s baby on his first birthday. At the time, she had thought it would help her feel better to pass it on to another baby, to rid the house of it. Of course it had not worked. The grief had only worsened in the days after she had sent it.