“I’d had it all planned.” I almost laugh at the naiveté of it now, but then, I was so alone.
“When I finally accepted that there was going to be a baby, I decided I was going to leave it at the local maternity hospital for a nurse to find and look after. I’d seen it on the news, how the nurses gave abandoned babies names—Holly if it was at Christmas, or after the policeman who found it, that sort of thing—and held them tight in their arms. And loving families adopted them and everything turned out fine as far as the public was concerned. Happy endings all round.”
I tried to see my life in terms of a heroine in a novel. Everything clean and tidy. No loose ends.
“I was convinced it was going to be so easy. I was going to pop the baby out like in the drawings in the pamphlets, wrap it up in a white blanket I’d bought secretly, and lay it down quietly in the toilets and walk away. People are in and out of toilets all the time. It wouldn’t take five minutes for the baby to be found.
“But I hadn’t needed to do that. I’d used newspaper and the Boots carrier bag to wrap it instead.”
“Oh, Emma,” Kate says. “And you’ve kept all this inside until now. Until Alice’s body was found.”
“It’s my baby in the garden,” I hear myself shout. “My baby.”
I can see Kate is shaking and she’s gripping the steering wheel to steady herself. I’m frightening her. I’m frightening myself. I sound mad. I must stop this.
“I need to go, Kate. I must tell Harry where I am. She’ll be frantic,” I say.
Kate’s face is pale and she speaks to me as if I’m a patient in a hospital. Low voice, calming rhythms.
“I’ll drive you home, Emma. You must be tired and too raw to think straight. You need time to gather your thoughts.”
It all sounds so comforting and normal. Gather your thoughts. That’s what I should do. It’s what Paul says when he is worried about something. But I don’t need to gather mine. They have been there for years.
? ? ?
Harry is standing on a chair, scanning the dance floor, when we go back in, plucking at her hands and looking anxious.
“Where the hell have you been?” she shrieks as soon as she catches sight of me. “Disappearing like that. I’ve been looking for you for half an hour.”
But she shuts up when she sees my face. I must look awful because she takes my arm and leads me back outside and whispers: “What’s happened, Emma? Where’ve you been?”
“I’ve been talking to Kate, that’s all. I’m sorry I worried you,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice steady.
“What about? What have you been talking about?” she says.
“It doesn’t matter now. I’m a bit tired, Harry. I’m going home. Kate’s going to drive me.”
Harry looks across at Kate. She’s talking to a young bloke near the car, giving him some money for a taxi.
“Have you upset her?” she shouts at her, and the bloke looks frightened, as if she’s accusing him.
“No, she hasn’t, Harry,” I say. I want it all to stop. Can’t face any more emotion. “It’s all been a bit much tonight. Seeing everyone. Lots of memories, not all good.”
She squeezes my arm. “Sorry, Emma. I shouldn’t have made you come. I’ll go home with you.”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.” The strands of the story are still working themselves out in my head and I can’t share them with anyone else just yet, not even my closest friend. Harry would get upset and angry for me and I’d have to deal with her emotions as well as my own. She wouldn’t understand why I had chosen to tell a stranger my secrets, but it felt so safe. I was almost anonymous.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” she calls after me, waving miserably as we pull away.
? ? ?
It’s a long way home, snaking through dark streets, then out into the dazzling lights of the dual carriageway.
We don’t speak much. I give directions. Left here, carry on over the roundabout. But Kate and I are both deep in our own heads. Me, reliving my shame. And haunted by the dread I deserved.
? ? ?
The house is in total darkness when I get in. Paul hasn’t left the hall light on. I stand in the dark for a while, unable to put one foot in front of another, the thoughts crowding in on me.
“Emma, are you okay? What are you doing down there?” Paul calls, his voice sleepy.
“Nothing. Just taking my coat off,” I call back. “Go back to sleep.”
I turn on the light and have to close my eyes to protect them from the dazzle. I open them slowly, testing the glare. Everything looks exactly as it did when I left this evening. Paul’s jacket hanging crooked on a hook, unopened junk mail on the table, my shoes lined up by the mat. But everything has changed.
I have told. The police will come now. I need time to think. To plan.
I feel like one of those wildebeests tiptoeing to the edge of the river while the crocodiles wait round the bend, jaws braced. I think about running away. Hiding. But I pull myself up short. At your age? I tell myself. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s time to face it all.
I make a grown-up plan. I’m not going to let this sleeping dog lie.
SIXTY-SIX
Kate
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
Kate got lost as she drove home. She missed her turn but didn’t realize until twenty minutes later when the landscape became leafier instead of neon-lit.
“Shit,” she yelled at the road ahead. She pulled over but couldn’t let go of the steering wheel. She looked at her whitening knuckles as if they belonged to someone else.
Kate could still see Emma’s face, bright with shock in the darkness of her car, her lips trembling, making her trip over her words when she told her story.
When she shouted that it was her baby . . . Kate thought.
It had really frightened her. The noise and the pain in her voice. That was real. But was her story?
Reporters were often the first call for the delusional or attention-seekers. The sad people who want to be part of the news at any cost.
Kate shivered. Her head was all over the place, scrambling over the questions and answers, looking for what she must have missed.
“Two babies? Two bloody babies? It can’t be,” she said out loud. “What the hell do I do now?”
It was all happening so fast. She felt she was losing control of the situation. Of the story.
When Kate had first read the tiny cutting about the baby’s body, she’d hoped she’d be able to write a moving piece about a forgotten child and the personal tragedy behind its death. A Saturday read, she’d thought. A chance to get away from the treadmill of online news. But disturbing the surface had triggered an eruption of unexpected secrets.
She ought to be thrilled to have landed such a huge story, but Kate felt caught up in the torrent of information.
She knew she was the keeper of secrets: the drugging and possible sexual assault on Barbara Walker, the teenage pregnancy of Emma Massingham, the adultery of Nick Irving. She was entrusted with their hidden stories because she had asked the right questions. But what could she tell? Could she tell anything?
What she ought to do, she knew, was ring Terry to bring him up to speed, but that would mean letting go of the minute amount of control she still had. It would be snatched from her, dissected, discussed, pawed over by people who had never met Barbara, Emma, or Angela.
That’s journalism, Kate, she could hear a former boss saying. You’re there to tell their story, not to be their mother. You get too close.
But you had to get close to get the full story. The college lecturers who taught Media Studies to kids like Joe Jackson banged on about objectivity and balance, but she’d like them to sit down with a rape victim or the mother of an abused child and remain unaffected. Without empathy, without feeling someone’s pain, how could you tell a story like that and capture the truth of the situation?
The problem came when you couldn’t tear yourself away from the feelings and start writing.