The accusation hit me like a hammer, another piece of a horrific, bloodstained puzzle. No. No. I didn’t want to believe him. He was a liar, a cheat. He had found us to do exactly this, to lie, to hurt us, to break us apart. But I couldn’t block out the whispering, the voice in my subconscious that I had so firmly repressed for years.
Vivian just stared at him, eyes like coals. I could almost feel the wrath inside her, pulsating. Was it ever not there, that secret fury? My mother, falling.
‘She’s dead.’ His voice cracked. I snapped back to him, my attention wrenched away from my daughter, who was still sitting on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees, so tiny and frail, a doll.
‘What? My mother? You know she is – I told you she was.’
‘No. My sister. My sister is dead.’ Tears spilling now, running down his face. ‘She killed herself. She couldn’t go outside, she wouldn’t eat. She had panic attacks if we left her alone. Her face… how could you not know your own daughter was sick in the head?’
Hearing it from someone else, the painful idea that something was wrong with Vivian, churned everything up. It had never really gone away, however deeply I had tried to bury it, bury us, in a place where I thought I could watch her every move.
Her silence was deafening.
‘Please, Liam, please don’t do this to yourself.’ I tried to touch him, but he reared back, so close now to the edge that it made me nauseous. The sky moaned as the wind picked up, the first droplets of rain spattering the hard soil underneath our feet, the smell of the earth filling my head.
‘Rachel, you don’t understand. I know you don’t believe me.’ The pain in his breaking voice lashed me. This wasn’t happening. Then something in his face changed, and a small strange smile appeared through the tears. ‘I have to make you see her.’ He looked down. Another breath. ‘I wasn’t in London last week, Vivian. I was fucking your mother.’
He watched her, waiting.
‘No!’ she screamed.
I felt the colour of shame suffuse my cheeks as Vivian sprang up. There was no denying what had happened, she wasn’t stupid. It was obvious he was telling the truth, and I knew my guilt was written all over my face. And her reaction was every bit as awful as I had feared it might be, from the second I found the drawing of her naked body.
London
The days had been passing in an awful haze since the funeral. It was the first day that she’d come back to work, to stilted smiles and uncomfortable how-are-you’s. No one ever seemed to know what to do with grief. It was too big.
Rachel had spent the morning ploughing through the emails that had accumulated in her absence, her thoughts straying constantly to Vivian on her own first day back in school. Even in all the time they had been together these past weeks, she had barely set eyes on her little girl except for when she remembered to feed her and put her to bed. She had tried to speak to her about her Nana, but her own heartbreak had got in the way, resulting in her sobbing and clutching at her daughter until the poor thing wriggled away and ran up to her room. She was too young to understand.
She was just thinking about getting herself a coffee to keep herself going when her phone began to vibrate in her handbag. It was the school number. Feeling nauseous – Vivian must have got upset, it was too soon to have gone back – she tapped the screen to answer. The word ‘accident’ wiped out every thought in her head; she couldn’t hear what the person on the other end of the line was saying. Accident. Hospital.
Dropping everything, she grabbed her bag and ran from the office, not even stopping to explain where she was going. The journey seemed to take for ever, each stop on the tube an agony of waiting. All the other people, just sitting there, oblivious to the panic that was swamping her.
By the time she reached Whipps Cross hospital, shoving money at the taxi driver who had been outside the station, she was drenched in sweat. What had happened to Vivian? Where was she? She ran into the A&E, scanning the crowd. The man at the door tried to stop her, to speak to her, but she saw Miss Avon sitting on a chair at the back of the waiting room and brushed him aside, and ran to her.
‘What’s happened? Where’s Vivian? Oh, my god!’ As she reached her daughter’s teacher she realised that the whey-faced woman was covered in blood, streaks of it down her skirt, a perfect, small bloody handprint above the waistband, glaring against the pale material of her shirt. ‘Where is she?’ She felt her stomach contract with terror. Not again, not her daughter. She’d just lost her mother, she couldn’t lose Vivian too. I promise, I promise, she thought, I’ll do anything if she’s okay, anything at all to keep her safe.
Miss Avon looked up at her, her eyes glittering.
‘It’s not Vivian’s,’ she whispered, clenching her fists in her lap, looking down at the bloodstains.
‘What? I don’t understand, what’s happened?’
‘It’s not Vivian’s blood. It’s Lexie Coleman’s. Vivian attacked her. She stabbed her face with my scissors – she took them when I wasn’t looking… her little face…’ Her own face crumpled, and she looked like she was about to vomit. ‘She stabbed her in her eye. She’s blinded her, she could have killed her. What is wrong with her?’
The look of disgust on the teacher’s face turned Rachel’s world upside down. Her own blood was ringing in her ears, she was
