“No, darling, not yet,” I said, smiling at her. “I’m making porridge. Lovely porridge! Be ready in a tick!”
She got up, said louder, “Hannah want biscuit now!”
“No, sweetheart,” I said more firmly. “Breakfast first. Just wait.”
I crouched down to rummage in a low drawer for a bowl, and didn’t hear her come up behind me. When I turned, I felt a sudden searing pain in my eye and reeled backward in shock. It took a few moments to realize what had happened, to understand that she’d smashed the end of her metal spoon into my eye with a strength I’d never dreamed she had. And through my reeling horror I saw, just for a second, her reaction: the flash of satisfaction on her face before she turned away.
I had to take her with me to the hospital, Doug not being due back for several hours yet. I have no idea whether the nurse in A and E believed my story, or whether she saw through my flimsy excuses and assumed me perhaps to be a battered wife, just another victim of a drunken domestic row. If she did guess at my shame and fear, she never commented. And all the while, Hannah watched her dress my wounds, listened to the lies I told about walking into a door, with a silent lack of interest.
Later that evening when she was in bed, Doug and I stared at each other across the kitchen table. “She’s not even three yet,” he said, his face ashen. “She’s just a little girl. She didn’t know what she was doing. . . .”
“She knew,” I told him. “She knew exactly what she was doing. And afterward she barely raised an eyebrow, just went back to hitting those damn pots like nothing had happened.”
—
And after that, Hannah only got worse. Most children hurt other kids; it happens all the time. In every playgroup across the country, you’ll find them hitting or biting or thumping one another. But they do it out of temper, or because the other child hurt them, or to get the toy they want. They don’t do it the way Hannah did—for the sheer, premeditated pleasure of it. I used to watch her like a hawk and I’d see her do it, see the expression in her eyes as she looked quickly around herself before inflicting a pinch or a slap. The reaction of pain was what motivated her. I knew it. I saw it.
We took her to the doctor’s, insisting on a referral to a child psychologist—the three of us trooping over to Peterborough to meet a man with an earnest smile and a gentle voice, in a red jumper, named Neil. But though he did his best with Hannah, inviting her to draw him pictures of her feelings, use dolls to act out stories, she refused point-blank. “No!” she said, pushing crayons and toys away. “Don’t want to.”
“Look,” Neil said, once the receptionist had taken Hannah out of the room. “She’s very young. Children act out sometimes. It’s entirely possible she didn’t realize how badly she would hurt you.” He paused, fixing me in his sympathetic gaze. “You also mentioned a lack of affection from her, a lack of . . . emotional response. Sometimes children model what they see from their parents. And sometimes it helps if the parent remembers that they are the adult, and the child is not there to fulfill their own emotional needs.”
He said all this very kindly, very sensitively, but my fury was instantaneous. “I cuddle that child all day long,” I hissed, ignoring Doug’s restraining hand on my arm. “I talk to her, play with her, kiss her, and love her, and I tell her how special she is every single minute. And I don’t expect my three-year-old to ‘fulfill my emotional needs.’ What kind of idiot do you think I am?” But the seed was set; the implication was clear. By hook or by crook it was my fault. And deep down, of course, I worried that Neil was right. That I was deficient somehow, that I had caused this, whatever “this” was. We left that psychologist’s office and we didn’t go back.
—
That day, the day she killed Lucy, I stood looking in at my five-year-old daughter from her bedroom door, and any last remaining hope I’d had—that I’d been wrong about her, that she’d grow out of it, that somewhere inside her was a normal, healthy little girl—vanished. I marched across the room and took her by the hand. “Come with me,” I said, and led her to my bedroom. Her expression, biddable, mildly interested, only made my fury stronger. I dragged her to the bed and she stood beside me, looking down at Lucy’s head on my pillow, and I saw—I know I saw—the flicker of enjoyment in her eyes. By the time she’d turned them back to me, they were entirely innocent once more. “Mummy?” she said.
“It was you,” I said, my voice tight with anger. “I know it was you.” I loved that bird. I had inherited her from an elderly neighbor I’d once been close to, and during those years of childlessness, Lucy had become the focus of all my attention, a pretty, defenseless little creature to take care of, who needed me. Hannah knew how much I loved her. She knew.
“No,” she answered, and tilted her head to one side as she continued to consider me. “No, Mummy. It wasn’t me.”
I left her standing by the bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen. And there was Lucy’s cage, its door swung open, the headless body lying on the floor beside it cold and stiff. I looked around the room, my eyes darting wildly about. How had she done it? What had she used? She had no access to the kitchen knives, of course. Suddenly a thought struck me and I ran back up the stairs to her bedroom. And there it was. The metal ruler from Doug’s toolbox, lying on
