My days are mostly spent curled up in my bed, staring blankly at images on the television screen, the sound muted, as I’m completely uninterested by what is going on in the world. I’ve stopped measuring time by the comings and goings of the neighbours because it doesn’t matter if it’s 8 a.m. or 2 p.m., it’s all the same. It’s time I don’t need or want. I judged autumn by the leaves floating past the window and Halloween by the youngsters dressed in their ghoulish costumes roaming the streets. And when fireworks illuminated the horizon in bright colours I knew it was Bonfire Night. Soon I’ll be watching carollers singing songs I can’t hear as I spend my third Christmas locked up in here. But I know that I won’t see a fourth.
The balance of power between Nina and I has shifted and while she might control my present, my freedom, what I eat, when I’m allowed downstairs or when I might bathe, she cannot control my destiny. And my destiny is to die soon. My lumps have expanded and spread to the lymph nodes in my groin and armpits. I’m in constant pain and my lungs hurt when I take deep breaths. I’m often sick, exhausted and increasingly confused. There are abscesses on my ankles from the cuff that are infected and I’m always coughing. The only satisfaction to be had from this wretched life is knowing that when I’m dead, Nina will have no one left to hurt.
I often dream about Dylan and how I could have done more to save him from Nina’s brutality. It’s always the same scenario. He will appear at my bedroom door and I will try and scream ‘Run!’ at him. But a pair of hands I feel but cannot see constrict my throat. He can’t understand my warnings and by the time he reads my lips, it’s too late. Nina is behind him, wrapping a chain around his neck and dragging him down the stairs and out of sight. It’s her eyes that haunt me, full of darkness and purpose. She knows exactly what she is doing. When I awaken, I feel his loss as powerfully as I would have had I kept him close to me his whole life.
Nina rises and turns on the stereo behind me. The opening bars of ABBA’s ‘Ring Ring’ begin and after she sits, I feel the vibrations of her foot tapping against the leg of the table. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve listened to this, hasn’t it?’
I don’t respond, and I don’t think she has noticed that I haven’t said a word since she came upstairs to change my chain. She continues talking regardless, recounting her day, describing the new books that arrived at the library, what she’ll bring home over the next few weeks. I don’t care. I have long since stopped reading.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out two tablets I recognise as painkillers. ‘You’ve barely touched your toast,’ she says. ‘And you’re not supposed to take these on an empty stomach.’
I don’t need her to tell me how they work. Last week she tried withholding them from me until I ate, but I didn’t give in. Perhaps I was cutting my nose off to spite my face because for the rest of the night, I was poleaxed by the pain. Tonight, my insides already feel as if they are being twisted and I know I’m in for an even more difficult time. I reluctantly do as she says and start to eat.
‘That’s better,’ Nina continues, and pushes the tablets towards me. I want to hurl every swear word I can at her but I hold back. Instead, I swallow my anger with my medication.
Nina has yet to make any mention of Dylan following his death months and months ago. Two days later and when she finally brought me a tray of food, I yanked open the door and demanded to know what she had done with his body. ‘Whose body?’ she replied blankly.
‘Dylan!’ I yelled. ‘Your son!’
‘Maggie, what are you talking about? I don’t have any children, you saw to that. Remember?’
I cocked my head and glared at her, searching her expression for an indication that she was being dishonest. But her look was not that of a woman who was pretending. It was of someone who genuinely didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. It was as if her brain had erased Dylan from her memory completely. That last psychosis must have been different to the others. When it passed, I can only assume it took away other memories with it. I considered whether trying to bring about their return was a battle worth persisting with. However, if I could unlock the room in her brain in which she had hidden her son, what might I be unleashing when she learned she had killed him? Would she discover she had done the same to her father and Sally Ann Mitchell? Would I really want to be trapped in a house with a person who learns all that about themselves?
‘I’m tired and confused,’ I replied instead. ‘Sorry.’
I passed on sharing dinner with her that night so she brought it upstairs for me. I picked at it, my thoughts dominated by all that I would never know about my grandson. I hoped he had led a good life, a happy life, a life full of love and light. But I will never truly know.
Since then, there have been times when I’ve considered if Nina’s been right all along; that I do have vascular dementia and that I’m trapped inside a prison of my own mind, which is why I’ve never been able to escape. Maybe this isn’t my house; perhaps I’m in a care home, we are unrelated and she is charged with looking after me. Perhaps Dylan’s death was a figment of my imagination too, because Dylan never existed. Maybe I’m acting out my relationship with my own mother, with me playing her part. Or perhaps Nina keeps me chained up because she has no other choice, as I am a danger to myself and to others. I’ve stabbed her, hit her, kicked her; I’ve done all I can do to leave, yet I am still here. Maybe it’s all a result of my own psychosis? Am I the sick twisted one and not her? Am I the unreliable narrator in our story?
My only certainty is that a disease is living inside my body and feeding from me. Every waking moment I am conscious of my cancer, slowly growing, asserting its dominance and spreading into all my nooks and crannies. It can’t be long now before it reaches further into my brain and renders me completely useless. I can’t wait for that moment to arrive. Because then I will have truly escaped this house and my daughter. Only then can we separate. Only then can we be ourselves. Only then will I be happy.
Only then will I be free of her.
‘I almost forgot, I have something for you,’ she says, interrupting my thoughts. She picks up a cupcake on a plate from the floor. There’s a candle in it shaped in a number three. She pulls a box of matches from her pocket, strikes one and lights it.
‘Happy anniversary,’ she says, and gives me a smile. I don’t know what she’s expecting in return but I give her nothing. ‘Can you believe how quickly the last three years have gone? Sorry but I didn’t have time to get a proper cake made. I’ll be better organised next year. Blow it out and make a wish.’
I do as I’m told; I let out a puff of air then I make my wish. And I have a feeling it might come true a lot sooner than I expected.
CHAPTER 77
NINA
Tiny green shoots with snow-white tips are sprouting from the mound of earth above his grave in the garden. I bought a bag of seed mix a few weeks ago then sprinkled and raked the contents into the soil. Despite the cold weather, I’ve been watering that section regularly and it’s paying off. They’re going to bring colour and beauty to such a dark spot by spring.
I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately and have spent time out here to feel closer to him. Maggie thinks that I have blanked Dylan from my memory, but she couldn’t be more wrong. He is in everything I do and always will be. I talk to him often, even when I don’t get a response. When Maggie’s time comes – and I don’t think it will be long – I will bury her here too.
I feel a chill in the air so I button up my cardigan and make my way back into the house. I spy Elsie upstairs at her window, making no effort to hide behind the curtains or disguise that she is watching me. She wants me to see her, she wants me to know she is there, watching, waiting, desperate for me to slip up. But I won’t. Ever. She knows nothing of what’s gone on behind these closed doors, I’m sure of that. I give her a wave and my broadest smile but she doesn’t reciprocate.
I place a large frozen pizza and garlic bread on a tray and slip it into the oven. I swam my fifty lengths this morning so I burned my calories in advance and am rewarding myself. I have about fifteen minutes to spare so I make my way downstairs into the basement, my eyes drawn to the dusty old sofa Maggie never got rid of. It’s one of the only reminders left of all the rubbish she’s hoarded and stored down here. Most of it ended up in the skip I hired, leaving me plenty of space to make this a more practical environment.
By my feet is a plastic crate containing half a dozen albums full of family photos, but Dad isn’t in any of them. Maggie has got rid of almost all of them. When I start leafing through them, I stumble across a family holiday we took in Devon when I was a little girl to see Aunty Jennifer. ‘Oh my God, I was so fat!’ I chuckle, and point to the rolls on my arms and legs as an infant version of me sits naked on a potty.
More pages follow and fragments of long-forgotten memories appear in dribs and drabs, some making me laugh out loud, others making me feel melancholic. In one recollection, I can’t be more than three or four years old and I’m dressed in a pink swimming costume with a sponge in my hand and I’m helping an out-of-shot Dad to clean the car. In another, I’m lying stretched out on the back seats of it, no doubt listening to ABBA or Madonna playing from the speakers, and staring at the back of Dad’s head as he drives. I loved him so much.
I’ve been having dreams about him lately and I keep waking myself up out of them, as they don’t feature the man I remember. The landing is dark and I’m standing outside a crack in the door of his office, listening to him telling someone on the phone that they’re his ‘only girl’. (That’s how I know I’m dreaming; he’d never say that to anyone but me.) ‘It won’t be long before we’re together,’ he says to whoever it is, and then he spots me and hangs up. He follows me to my bedroom and he’s talking on and on, telling me I’m his only girl, I’ll always be his only girl (but what about thatotheronly girl, then? I want to ask him). He goes on talking, I’ve never heard him talk so much. He says that while he loves me to the moon, he doesn’t love Mum any more and he’s leaving us. He’s met someone new and wants to be with her. As he disappears, I’m furious that he wants to ruin my perfect world and leave me and I want to make him hurt like he is hurting me. I reach for something ... but then I wake up and remind myself that he was the kindest, sweetest, most dependable man in the world. And although he’s been out of my life for almost twice as long as he was in it, the gap he left was unfillable. Until Dylan appeared.
‘You’d have liked him,’ I say. ‘He’d have been a brilliant granddad.’
