‘Ah,’ said Phil. ‘Those ones.’ Growing up in the area, he had heard all the stories about the isolated coastal and rural communities. And knew from experience that most of them were true, at least at one time.
‘If a baby died in a family, then one would go missing from another family to replace it.’
‘That kind of thing, yeah.’
She nodded. ‘And nobody would ever say anything.’
‘No,’ said Phil. ‘Because then they would have to admit where the first baby came from.’
Sophie laughed. ‘You’ve heard them as well.’
‘But those villages aren’t that isolated now, are they?’ said Phil.
Sophie stopped laughing. She looked almost regretful.
‘Main roads and all that.’ But they were still bleak, he thought. Windswept and inhospitable.
Sophie sighed.
‘So where are we talking about?’ said Phil, probing for her home town. He mentally scanned a map of the Essex coast. ‘Was it coastal? Jaywick? Walton? Not Frinton?’
She didn’t respond.
‘What about on a river? Bradfield? Wrabness?’
A flicker of something behind her eyes. He hoped there was someone watching on a monitor to catch it.
‘So come on,’ he said, trying to hurry her up. ‘You’re telling me a story. About your family. I’m here, I’m listening.’
Sophie put her head back, her eyes upwards, as if receiving a signal or instructions from some unseen source. ‘There were four of us…’ she began. ‘Me, my brother, my father…’ She paused, her eyes changing, an unreadable expression on her face. ‘And my mother…’
She stopped talking again, lost in her reverie.
‘What about your mother?’ Phil prompted her.
Sophie’s head snapped forward, her eyes on Phil once more. ‘She died.’
‘She died.’
‘Or… disappeared. I don’t know which. Something like that.’
‘So then it was just the three of you.’
She screwed up her eyes, her forehead, as though she was thinking hard. ‘I remember… other kids. Or at least I think I remember other kids. I don’t know.’ She shook her head as if to dislodge the memory. Like it was an awkward shape that didn’t fit in properly. ‘Anyway, there were the three of us left. Me, my brother and my dad.’
‘And this was when you were Gail?’
She looked confused for a moment, then smiled. ‘I was never Gail. Not till I came here, to Colchester. I was always Sophie. Or Sophia.’
‘Sophia.’
‘My mother loved film stars.’
‘Sophia Loren,’ said Phil.
Sophie nodded. ‘Right.’
‘And your brother?’
‘Heston. After-’
‘Charlton Heston.’
Another nod. Then her face darkened. ‘Yeah…’
‘Go on then, Sophie,’ said Phil, trying to get her back on track. ‘You were telling me about your mother. She died? Or disappeared?’
‘Yeah…’
Phil waited. Nothing. She needed another prompt. ‘And then what happened?’
‘It was just the three of us. And that’s how it always was from then on.’
‘And were you… happy?’
Another darkening of her eyes as more memories swam through her mind. ‘My father…’ Her forehead creased up. ‘My father… he had… needs…’
Oh God, thought Phil, here we go. He had been expecting this. The damage that came first, that led to the madness. He dropped his voice still further, asked a question he knew the answer to. ‘What kind of needs?’
‘Man’s needs.’
‘And… you took care of them?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’ Her voice seemed to have shrunk, regressed. Smaller, more childlike. ‘I had to take care of them.’
‘And how old were you then? When he started?’
She shrugged. ‘When Mother died. Disappeared. From then on.’
‘Remember how old you were?’
She shook her head. ‘Little,’ she said, in a voice matching the word.
Phil swallowed hard, kept going. ‘Just you? Not your brother?’
Another furrowing of her eyebrows, another darkening of memory. ‘No. Just me.’
She fell silent. Phil waited, wondering whether to interject, hurry her along. Then she began speaking again.
‘He did try, though.’
‘Who? Your father?’
‘No… my brother. He tried. Tried to stop my father. From… doing stuff to me.’
‘And did he succeed?’
She looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he had actually asked that question. ‘Course not. He was just a kid. Our father smacked him about if he did that, played up. Really smacked him about.’
‘He hurt him?’
She nodded.
‘Bad?’
She sighed. ‘He was always on at him. Heston wasn’t good enough. Heston was useless. Worthless, no good. Heston couldn’t even do what Sophia did for him, he was that useless. Then he would beat him. Hit him. Whip him. Anything he could.’
‘And did he ever hurt you? I mean apart from…’
She shook her head. ‘No. Never. I could do no wrong. Not like Heston. He could do no right.’ She fell silent again. Then gave a small, unexpected laugh. ‘You know what? What was funny? Heston got really jealous.’
‘Because… you were getting the attention?’
Sophie nodded. ‘He hated what our father was doing to me. He was always shouting, what’s wrong with me? Why won’t he do it to me? Because he was jealous that our father was doing it to me instead of him. Because that was love. What my father was doing to me was showing love, he said. And Heston hated not having that.’
Phil was silent. He couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
‘So,’ he said eventually, ‘how long did this go on for?’
Sophie shrugged. ‘Dunno. Well, yeah. I do.’ Her hands on the table began to tremble. ‘I…’ Her head went down, her hair flopping forward, making her features unreadable.
Phil waited. Sophie had reached the stage, he thought, that often happened in interviews like this. No matter what they had done or what had been done to them, they wanted to unburden themselves. Speak it out into the open. Remove the weight from themselves. Not caring about transference, that the person listening would then be carrying that weight.
But not this time. All Phil could think about was what she had done to Clayton.
She continued talking. ‘He…’
Phil’s voice dropped even further, barely above a whisper. ‘He made you pregnant.’
She nodded, head still down. Her hair swayed backwards and forwards as she did so.
‘And…’ Phil’s voice careful, compassionate. ‘And did you… have the baby?’
She shook her head. ‘I… it died. In me. I wasn’t… wasn’t strong enough, he said…’
Phil felt rage and confusion rising within him. Sophie had done some awful things, he thought, but they didn’t happen in a vacuum. Someone had formed her, made her capable of doing them. And that man was a monster. Phil
