Where the Memories Lie
By: Sibel Hodge
Again. The guilt was just piling up by the second. Anna’s concerns were legitimate. Well, apart from the ghost bit. She was just being a normal twelve-year-old. Even I found it hard eating and sleeping and breathing just metres away from where Katie had been buried.
But what choice did we have? We couldn’t stay in someone else’s house indefinitely. Ethan and I would need to make a decision about selling the barn now, but who would want it? A body buried underneath it would completely put off any prospective buyers, unless they were someone like Fred West.
No, the whole thing was a mess, and at that moment I hated Tom. How could he do this to us? How could he put us all through it? Put me in such an impossible position. I was damned if I didn’t tell someone about it and damned if I did. He’d said he wanted to Where the Memories Lie
protect his family but he was just poisoning us all, breaking up the thing he valued the most. He had us all fighting and crying. Part of me wished Tom had kept his horrific secret until his death. Some things are better not known.
My first thought was to go to Durdle Door and walk along the cliff edge, but it would only remind me of Tom and I wanted to forget about him for a while. Even if Nadia and Ethan didn’t approve, I still needed to give my condolences to Rose. I tried to put myself in her place as I’d asked Ethan to do. How would I feel if Jack confessed to killing Anna and Katie came round to apologise? How could I hold it against her, his daughter? The sins of the father are not the sins of the rest of the family. In my scenario, Katie wouldn’t have been any more responsible for Anna’s death than I was now for hers. So I absolutely had to go. It was the right thing to do.
I almost wished I was invisible as I hurried past the primary school, which was thankfully now closed for the summer holidays.
The mums dropping off their kids were always the worst for village gossip. ‘I heard that so and so’s dad was off shagging so and so’s mum’; ‘Did you see how much weight so and so’s put on? She’s enormous! What are the parents feeding her?’; ‘Well, I heard so and so forgot her kid’s sports day. Poor little thing had to do the village fun run in her skirt!’ (That had probably been me they were talking about, actually.) It was one of the few things I hated about being a parent. That many women together in one place could never be a good thing, I always thought.
I passed a grungy teenager sporting a black Mohican with bleached tips, dressed in black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt and black Doc Martens (in the height of a sweltering July day, seriously? Hadn’t anyone told him black absorbed the sun the most?). He chewed on some gum and blew a huge bubble with it as I walked by.
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Sibel Hodge
As I headed past the surgery, I saw Emily Carver, a widow whose husband had died of bowel cancer last year.
Don’t let her see me. Please don’t let her see me.
I increased my pace, head down, hoping she’d be turning off before she got to me, but no such luck.
Oh, God! Please don’t let her have heard the news.
I beamed at her brightly and asked how she was, the words com-ing out automatically. Even my professional nursing smile was fixed firmly in place. Hopefully she didn’t notice me holding my breath, bracing myself for her to ask what was all this she’d heard about Tom and Katie and our garage. Luckily for me, she’d been stuck in the house for weeks because she’d had that horrible virus that was going round, so she hadn’t heard what was going on. I shuffled from one foot to the other, trying to listen politely as she raved on about how it was the hottest July day for twenty-eight years, and wasn’t that amazing, just in time for the kids breaking up, too. Blah, blah, blah, who gives a shit? I thought.