Sally visits most days. She tells her about what she’s been doing at school, or Helena hears the pages of revision textbooks turning, keys on a phone being tapped as she messages someone. But Helena would rather Sally weren’t here as often. She has her GCSE exams on the horizon – she’s such a bright kid that she’s taking them a year early – and she wants her daughter to concentrate on revision. She detests being a distraction.
Sally has always been adamant that, once her exams are complete, she will be returning to the family home. For a year she’s lived with her aunt, uncle and cousins on the other side of London, closer to a school Helena wanted her to attend. Helena eventually agreed to her daughter coming home when her exams are over, but insisted the return only last until she gets her results and stays on atschool for her A levels. With the way she is now, Helena fears Sally might follow her heart, and not her head, and find a school that’s more local. More guilt to add to the ever-expanding pile. The pile that began the day Sally was born to a single, working parent and which has yet to shrink all these years later.
Helena regrets how much time was stolen from them by other people’s problems. How foster parenting – never a nine-to-five job, requiring taking in children with little notice – forced her to not only work unpredictable hours but to rely on family and after-school clubs to care for her own offspring. How her headspace was often occupied by the needs of others. What saddens her the most is the certainty their lives would have been different had Ralf not moved Daisy Barber’s dead body the day Damon killed her.
For a time, it looked as if there might have been a light at the end of their particularly bleak tunnel. When the counselling she had organised for Damon with Dr Dahl failed, Helena turned to an experimental treatment by an ECT specialist who believed electroconvulsive therapy could limit future aggression in criminals. The chances of it working on children, whose prefrontal cortexes have yet to mature, was undetermined. So Ralf was hesitant, but she talked him around. And her gamble paid off.
Helena witnessed the changes in Damon after three sessions in that first week. Sometimes he would return to her home in an almost zombie-like state. He suffered crippling headaches and gaps appeared in his memory: episodes of time and people that, when pressed to recall, he either barely remembered or had no recollection of at all.
She’d use Damon’s vulnerable, confused state to provide him with an alternate history: to convince him he hadn’t been responsible for his mum’s death; that there had been no fire at the flat; that his vague memories of Bobby, Daisy and Callum were merely figments of his imagination. Damon was barely allowed tosleep even when he cried out for it. She wanted to take advantage of his bewildered state to expand upon Fernandez-Jones’s work. One of them hid the past, the other shaped his future.
At times, it made Ralf uncomfortable and he begged her to stop. She knew it was unethical, illegal, and not far removed from brainwashing. But together, she and Fernandez-Jones convinced Ralf they must break Damon down to rebuild him.
It worked, until it didn’t. Damon’s pre-treatment behaviour caught up with them. Ralf was arrested in connection with the murder of Daisy Barber shortly before Damon’s final week of appointments. Ralf asked Helena for her help one last time. He wanted to be erased from his son’s memories. For her to convince him his dad had died years earlier.
‘Why?’ asked Helena in the police cell shortly before his first court appearance. ‘Once you tell the police Damon killed that girl, they’ll release you. I mean, you’ll probably be charged with aiding and abetting or perverting the course of justice, but ...’
Her voice faded upon reading his expression.
Ralf leaned across the table. ‘You can’t tell the police it was Damon who killed Daisy. They must believe it’s me. Every day, Damon is getting better. He needs a second chance.’ Now it was Ralf who’d become the true believer in his son’s treatment.
‘But Ralf,’ she argued, ‘if you plead guilty you will spend the next twenty years in prison.’
‘I don’t care. This is the only thing I can do to protect my son.’
‘If we can show that his ECT is working,’ she said, ‘perhaps we can convince a jury that he no longer has these urges. That he can control himself. He might get a reduced sentence.’
‘Fernandez-Jones will never admit to a court what he’s done to a child.’ He was right, of course. ‘And I told you,’ he went on, ‘Damon could never survive a young offenders’ institute then prison. It would kill him.’
Helena tossed her hands into the air in exasperation. She knew so much of this was of her own making. If she had not pushed him into getting Damon treatment, she might still have the man she loved.
‘And where does that leave us?’ she asked.
Ralf pinched the bridge of his nose and looked down to the tabletop. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she blurted out without preface. There had been no good time to tell him. ‘I was late, so I did a test.’
It had been entirely unplanned. Helen had chalked up changes to her body and her period as perimenopausal. Until morning sickness began.
His face momentarily lit up and the corners of his mouth lifted. For a moment, she thought her news might make him reconsider. But his expression soon soured.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
Then he pushed back his chair, rose, and left the visitors’ room without saying goodbye.
Ralf was charged with manslaughter later the same week – there was not enough evidence for a murder charge – and he refused to see Helena again. A few weeks later, Helena found Damon a space in a boys’ home in Northampton. But he had formed an attachment to her and didn’t want to leave. He’d come so far and she was tempted to keep him with her, partially to entice Ralf into repairing the bond with her he’d broken. But it was out of the question. She couldn’t trust Damon around her baby after its arrival in a few months.
Damon’s first accommodation didn’t work out when other boys bullied him. Despite the apparent success of the treatment, Helen was frightened a rage might build up in him and he might eventually retaliate. So she found him somewhere else, a calmer place, and she received regular updates from its managers, a kindcouple who kept an eye out for her former charge. They reassured Helena that Damon was a quiet and introverted lad who showed no signs of the violence Helena knew he was capable of. His memory loss was a small price to pay for that.
Ralf continued to refuse all her visitation requests, and even after sentencing, failed to respond to her letters. Not even the one she sent containing photographs of their newborn daughter. She called her Sally after the woman referred to in the Oasis song they liked, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’.
It was at that point Helena chose to close the book on Ralf, focusing all her attention on her daughter instead. Being a single mum wasn’t easy, but with the support of sister Carolina and her husband Addo, she raised a daughter to be proud of. Sally was a relatively easy child, but there were still bumps in the road. At eight, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which although benign, created an intercranial pressure inside her skull. Its positioning made it tricky to operate on so it was left but regularly monitored, and steroids were prescribed to reduce inflammation when necessary. It did, however, lead to headaches, nausea and nosebleeds. The latter of which caused her to regularly carry a handkerchief or tissues.
Later, Sally’s mental health took a downward turn after she witnessed a school friend suffer fatal injuries in a car accident. The trauma caused sharp spikes in her blood pressure, which increased the pressure inside Sally’s skull, leading to frequent tension-induced migraines. Combined with the vivid memories of the collision, they altered her focus. She developed a fixation with death, poring over YouTube videos about it; searching online for images of bodies in war-torn regions across the world; submerging herself in gothic literature and accounts of international funeral customs and practices. Helena sought counselling for her. And Sally eventually channelled her childhood preoccupation in a morepositive direction, by choosing subjects that would enable her to study forensic pathology if she earned the right grades.
Over the years, Sally had asked a few questions as to who her father was, and Helena had lied, claiming she was the result of a drunken one-night stand. She appeared to accept her mum’s explanation at face value. Even though Sally was intelligent and mature, it was too much to expect her to understand her father was in jail for covering up a murder her half-brother had committed.
A voice from the doorway pulls her away from the past. ‘Hello Helena,’ it begins chirpily. ‘What have you been up to today?’
