Until the moment they joined the motorway (travelling, Melissa noted, at 55 miles per hour), she told herself there was still time to stop this. None of it was set in stone yet and she could change her mind at any moment. They could still go back. Confess.
She pictured them reversing their earlier work, like a film played backwards at speed. But how would they explain the delay? The fact that the pestle had been cleaned and the floor bleached?
Now they are on the M25, she is suffused with an almost pleasurable feeling of helplessness. After all, they can’t easily turn round here. For now, at least, she must go with the flow.
Bundling her sweatshirt against the window, she lays her head against it and closes her eyes. There’s no possibility that she will sleep – possibly ever again. But her eyes ache and she needs to rest them for a short while.
Soon, the swish and thump of the wipers, the gentle snoring from the dog, and the throb of the engine begin to lull her into an almost hypnotic state. The physical effects of shock combined with last night’s lack of sleep start to drag at her and before long, as she is pitching into a light doze, her mind roams like a fisheye lens around the house at Fernley Close, where her world had collided with Jamie’s for the first time.
***
A small cluttered house on a respectable estate, the hallway was an obstacle course of bags of footballs and plastic cones; Greg was manager of a junior football team. Kathie always grumbled about tripping over it all but there was never any real heat in her words.
They didn’t drink or smoke and they never argued.
Melissa would watch their casual affection and stolen kisses in the kitchen with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Sometimes she would amuse herself by imagining David Attenborough narrating them. ‘And now the male of the species smacks the huge arse of the female, who laughs and tells him he is a “one”.’
They were good, kind people. But Melissa, or Melanie as she was then, was too tightly wound, her heart too sealed away, to let them come near.
Jamie had a long-term foster arrangement at Kathie and Greg’s and he’d believed they would one day adopt him. He confessed that to her one night when they’d crammed into Greg’s shed with a bottle of sweet, sticky sherry Mel had nicked from the back of the drinks cabinet. She’d laughed at him then. Told him he was a deluded fuckwit if he thought Kathie and Greg really wanted him.
Jamie did the puppy dog eyes thing but he no longer threw tantrums.
He understood that Mel wouldn’t spend time with him if he did and was learning to control himself. Really, she was helping him more than anyone in social services ever had.
She had no idea, really, whether they wanted to adopt Jamie. They went overboard in the whole ‘treating you both the same’ thing. They treated her no differently, not in any real sense.
But she felt as though they were able to see the treacly rottenness that lay deep inside her, to see whatever it was that made her difficult to love. You heard about mothers giving their lives for their kids all the time. And yet her own mother wasn’t even able to get out of bed for her. What other conclusion could she draw than that she wasn’t worth the effort?
Kathie and Greg tried to compensate by showing that extra bit of tolerance with Melanie. With Jamie, they acted more like real parents, becoming exasperated, irritated, and finding him comical sometimes. With Melanie it all felt as though it was coming from the ‘Book of Dealing with Difficult Teens’.
This was Jamie’s first and only stint in foster care. His parents had died within a few months of each other; wiped out in a house fire. He had no other family. At least he’d had one before, she thought. He seemed to inspire a soppiness in people. Poor little Jamie. Diddums.
Who cared about her, Melanie Ronson? Exactly no one. And so she’d begun to look for small ways to undermine Jamie in Kathie and Greg’s eyes. She was quite impressed with her own creativity, especially when she took one of his trainers and used it to track dog shit onto the hallway carpet. And because he was naturally forgetful, it was easy to make sure he lost his bus pass twice in one fortnight, or couldn’t find a chemistry textbook the night before a test. All too easy.
So after a while, she upped her game by luring Jamie with the odd grope here and there to carry out various dares. One of them had been to tell Greg to fuck off when he told Jamie to go up to bed.
When he’d done it, there had been a shocked silence in the room for a few moments in which Jamie’s face had seemed to crumple with shame. He’d been sharply reprimanded by Kathie and, later, she found him in his room, face down on the duvet, tearful and red-cheeked. Jamie was upset, okay, but it all worked out well for him. She’d turned him over, unzipped his flies and taken him in her mouth for the first time. It hadn’t been any fun and she’d only done it for a few moments before finishing him off with her hand.
Before long, he’d do anything for her.
None of it brought her any pleasure and she didn’t really know why she was doing it. Maybe it was just envy because Kathie and Greg favoured him. Or maybe it was just the fact that, despite everything that had happened to him, he seemed to have a kernel of hope inside him, when she knew there was none really.
And then they had been caught, one rainy afternoon when the theme tune from Bullseye played on the telly downstairs, and the smell of Kathie’s roast beef and overcooked carrots permeated the air. Naked in Jamie’s bed where they had accidentally fallen asleep, entwined together.
***
Melissa’s thoughts are beginning to dissolve into sleepy scraps when she feels the van slowing down. At first, she thinks they must have reached their destination, and, alert now, she sits up, wiping a little drool from the side of her mouth.
But for some reason they appear to be on the hard shoulder of the motorway. Melissa looks to Hester, whose shoulders are high and rigidly set, her hands gripping the steering wheel. She stares straight ahead, her mouth open a little, giving her an odd, idiotic look.
‘What’s going on?’ says Melissa groggily.
As she gropes for the bottle of water by her side, something hot and wet brushes against her hand. She gives a little shriek. That dog is staring up at her expectantly with its horrible leaky eyes. She pushes it away surreptitiously.
‘What’s happened, Hester?’ She is suddenly wide awake.
There’s a pause. Hester clears her throat. ‘We seem to have broken down,’ she says in a tight little voice.
Melissa almost levitates off her seat. ‘What the fuck?’ she yelps. ‘Broken down?’ She looks around wildly. ‘We can’t have broken down! What are we going to do?’
Hester is taking deep, noisy breaths, in and out. She turns to Melissa. ‘We’re going to have to call the AA,’ she says in a strangled voice.
‘What? What?’ Melissa drags her hands across her scalp and lets out a hysterical, high-pitched laugh. ‘Call the AA? Call the AA? Has it escaped your knowledge that we have a fucking dead man in the back of this van?’
Hester closes her eyes for a second in the patronizing manner of a parent who is being pushed to the limit. When she speaks, her voice is low and measured.
‘Of course I hadn’t forgotten. But unless you have taken an advanced mechanics course – and I know that I haven’t – then we have no choice about this. And there is no reason for the AA to look in the back of the van, is there? Even with my limited car knowledge I am aware that the engine is at the front of the —’
But the end of her sentence is cut off because Melissa has wrenched open the car door and is clambering out. Bertie gets up excitedly, tail wagging, and Hester cries out and only just manages to grab his collar in time to stop him from exiting with her.
Melissa marches to the front of the van and kicks viciously at the bonnet. Her Ugg boot offers little protection; pain shoots through her foot. She screams ‘Fuck!’ at the top of her voice and then starts to slap ferociously at the bonnet. A car goes past, impossibly close and fast, and she forces herself to try and stop this loss of control. Anyone could go by and see them. The police even.
Hester, now out of the van, runs around to where Melissa stands and fans at her face, gasping. ‘Oh my goodness!’ she says, ‘you really have no idea how fast and how close it all is when you are driving, do you?’
Melissa starts to shiver. It has stopped raining but the air is chill. She yanks her hood up and over her head. ‘What should we do?’ she murmurs. The fight has drained from her as quickly as it arrived. She needs Hester to make a decision. She is incapable.
‘Are you in the AA or the RAC?’ says Hester in her practical, clipped voice.
Melissa wants to laugh again. And again, it isn’t funny at all. ‘I’m in the AA. But what if—?’ That hysterical whine is back now inside her head; the feeling that she is a hair’s breadth away from screaming.
Hester cuts her off. ‘There is no reason for the mechanic to look inside the van. None at all. It will be fine. You’ll see. Get your membership card for me.’
Obediently, Melissa goes to the car and finds her purse.
The AA assure Hester that two women stranded on a motorway in the middle of the night qualify as the very highest customer priority and a mechanic will be with them in no more than forty minutes. This feels like a very mixed sort of blessing.
Despite Hester’s plaintive pleas that they must sit ‘on the bank, away from the vehicle’, Melissa clambers back into the van and wraps an old tartan blanket she finds between the seats around her shoulders. It smells of the dog but she doesn’t much care.
Neither does she care about any supposed danger in staying in the van. There is nothing that could induce her to sit out there, where the roaring hornet drone of passing traffic feels like the cruellest of jokes that could be played right now.
Maybe it is justice, she thinks, pulling the blanket even tighter around her shoulders. The circle was closing.
The past is hurtling towards her like the cars that now rip past them.
***
After she and Jamie had been separated, Melissa spent the remaining year of her care in a children’s home about twenty miles from the house in Fernley Close. As soon as she was eighteen, she moved to London and, working as a waitress in a greasy spoon in Archway, she had moved into a squat in Arnos Grove.
This, she’d thought, was the real start of her life. Everything that came before had been practice for living.
When she thought of that house, it was a cocktail of smells that she remembered most: fishy rot from the damp patch on the ceiling. Burnt-sugar woodiness of the ever-present weed. Stale armpits, feet, and breath from the bodies that covered every scrap of floor space after a party. And always, the carbon smell of burnt toast. They all ate so much toast then, slice after slice turning black in the broken toaster, late at night when the munchies made them limp and liquid from giggling, or on those grey mornings after, when no one wanted to speak too loudly and coming down felt like drowning.
Melissa squeezes her eyes shut and wipes fresh tears from her cheeks now.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers to no one. ‘I’m so sorry.’
For a few moments she is broken. Lost in the guilt again. She pictures a car slamming into the van and thinks it would be a good thing. A few seconds of terror and pain and it would all be wiped out. The slate would be clean again.
But then she thinks about her daughter and panic thrums across her skin. Oh God, Tilly. Baby.
She pictures Tilly’s eyes widening in shock as some spotty copper breaks the news that will change her life for ever; her hands, habitually covered by her sleeves like they’re in mittens, snaking around her middle, and her whole body collapsing in on itself in misery.
And what about Mark? Whatever he has done, he doesn’t deserve this.
Melissa rummages in her bag for a tissue and blows her nose. She looks at Hester sitting high on the bank, anxiously peering at the traffic and tries to force herself to be calm again.
She has to get through this with the only resources she has.
Decisively, Melissa reaches into her handbag for the emergency make-up she keeps there. Holding her phone awkwardly on her knees as lighting, she attempts to repair her face. Taking a few minutes to apply liner, more mascara, and a slick of lipstick, she snaps the overhead mirror back into place. Hester is now watching her from the bank.
What a strange woman she is, thinks Melissa. So buttoned-up and repressed, but totally and utterly calm about the scene she witnessed in Melissa’s kitchen. It’s almost as though she is slightly enjoying it all. Melissa feels a ripple of distaste, even as she tells herself she mustn’t be unfair. Something is bothering her about the helpfulness though. It feels disproportionate. But she doesn’t have the space in her head to allow these thoughts to expand and fester.
She remembers how Hester was before. Too keen, too ready to be involved with her business and to offer her opinions. She had a way of taking over, of ingratiating herself into every corner of Melissa’s life that had been uncomfortable. And now what?
Now they were bound. Melissa has no one else.
Melissa tries to force her thoughts back on track, to the here and now. She wonders whether they should somehow get Jamie’s body onto the road.
Images of his body being pulped by passing cars bombard her. She can almost hear the sickening thumps of metal hitting flesh and she swallows bile. It could cause an accident. Yet more deaths.
No. There’s no other way. For now, they just have to push forward with the plan.
This reminds her of the phone and she quickly looks for it in her handbag, glancing up to check there are no slowing lights of the AA. Clambering out of the van again, she climbs up the bank and looks at the thick bushes growing there.
Jamie’s iPhone is an old model whose curvy shape feels strange and bulky in her hand. She had believed it to be turned off but she accidentally touches the home button and the screen saver blooms into life.
A baby beams out at her, all blonde hair and cheeks flushed rosy from teething. The merry blue eyes have the distinctive folded lids of Down’s syndrome.
Melissa scrabbles about in her brain for any mention of a child in their conversation but can find none. Then a casually tossed remark floats into her mind.
‘It’s time to grow up.’ She hadn’t asked him what he meant at the time.
Would knowing he was a father have made any difference to what she’d done? Would it have been different, if her fingers had found only the scrubbed kitchen surface behind her? Or if she had been a few inches shorter, or taller?
It was the work of a couple of seconds. And it couldn’t be undone now. It was too late.
There’s a sour, dirty taste in Melissa’s mouth and a terrible heaviness in her heart. There will never be a time when she feels any better. She believes this absolutely.
Glancing down at the phone again, a realization slams into her and she scrabbles to turn it off. Can’t they track people by where they’ve used mobiles? Shit. The smiling cherub’s face disappears.
Melissa brings back her arm and throws the phone into the bushes with all her strength. She doesn’t hear it land.