‘What made you think he wanted to control me?’ she asked her mother.
‘Ah, just small things: the way he used to have a hand on top of you every time you were here. Youhadto sit beside him, he insisted. He’d have to have his hand on your knee or around your neck. Like he was showing off, that you were his.’
‘It wasn’t like that, Mam,’ Callie said, shaken. ‘That makes it sound weird.’ Though she was starting to wonder whether there was something in what her mother was saying. Up to now, she’d been wondering how she hadn’t seen what Jason and Rob’s business really was. Now she began to wonder what else she’d blindly ignored because she was in love.
‘Making your wife pick between you and her mother isn’t what a good man would do, Claire.’
‘Neither is leaving your wife and child to the mercy of the police and the media,’ Callie said, and began to cry.
Her mam sighed. ‘Lovie, you know I call a spade a spade. Too blunt, your Aunt Phil calls me. Whatever else he was, Jason was clever. If he knew the cops were after him, then he had a plan to get out and that plan didn’t include you, Claire. So you have to think about that long and hard now. It’s time to start making other plans, plans that don’t include Jason Reynolds.’
Pat Sheridan gave the soup another stir. There was silence in the room and then they heard the footsteps of Poppy belting down the stairs with the little bouncing steps of Ketchup along beside her.
‘Ketchup loves it upstairs,’ she said delightedly. ‘He didn’t make any smells, Nana. Honestly.’
Pat and Callie both smiled tightly, smiles that said, let’s pretend everything is absolutely fine even when it wasn’t.
Neither of them knew how to break all these revelations to poor fourteen-year-old Poppy.
Sam
Sam was filled with a sense of anxiety that meant that even when she was absolutely shattered with exhaustion and had a moment where she could possibly lie down and sleep, she couldn’t relax. As soon as she’d put her head on the pillow with the baby monitor beside her, the fears would start. How could she protect India? What happened if someone broke in and tried to kidnap her? What would happen if Sam died? Who would look after India, then? Yes, Ted would be there, but it wasn’t the same. India needed hermother.
And Sam knew she was getting so much wrong. She could feed her daughter and change her and hold her tightly, but Sam was doing it all wrong – sheknewshe was because if she was doing it right, the feeds would be spaced out and India wouldn’t be waking up all the time in the night. On the phone, Joanne had told her it was important to grab sleep any time she could: ‘As soon as their heads hit the pillow, your head needs to hit the pillow,’ Joanne had said calmly as if it really was that simple.
But Sam wasn’t finding it simple at all. When India cried in the night, she bottle-fed her the expressed milk.
Afterwards, Sam was never able to go back to sleep. She was on edge, waiting for something to go wrong, waiting for a disaster.
Her heartbeat raced, and she felt the adrenaline rush within her, the way people who’d taken amphetamines described it: one huge rush, one huge speeding sensation through her whole body. And yet if this was speed, why did anyone try it?
It was horrible, stressful and fearful. It made a sense of doom and fear envelop her.
‘Are you OK?’ Ted would murmur sleepily, turning in the bed.
‘Yes,’ she’d whisper, lying, wishing he’d know she was lying so she could sit up and tell him the truth.
That the fear was so huge. That her milk was drying up because she was so tired. She couldn’t even do that properly. That when she slept, she had terrible dreams and in every dream, somebody was hurting India and Sam could never get to her baby in time to save her.
She often woke from these nightmares sobbing and it took ages for reality to kick in.
Worse, far worse, was the dark hole her mind went into: like an abyss she was standing on the edge of. Inside was darkness: no colour, just dark.
It was waiting for her, softly waiting.
Sam was afraid that if she fell in, she would never come out of the nothingness, never feel joy again.
When India slept, she sat in the chair in her baby’s room and cried, with the abyss waiting for her.
When India was awake, she tried to banish it.
‘I love you so much,’ she crooned to her beloved baby. ‘You are so loved.’
She knew India knew this, knew on a deep psychic level that her beautiful child could feel her mother’s fierce love. Knew all the pain she’d gone through for India to be born. Her star, her shining child.
All those years of treatments.
Injections in the morning from tiny bottles kept in the fridge. Scans to see what was happening.
