The phone slipped from my grasp and fell to the floor. The protective plastic case prevented the screen from cracking, and I scrambled to pick it up and listen to it again. Were my ears playing tricks on me? Was I imagining this? I pressed play again. No, it was for real.
Blood filled my head and made me woozy. I felt as if I were rocking back and forth, but my body wasn’t moving. I feared I might collapse, so I grabbed hold of a shelf too hard, pulling it from its wall brackets and sending it crashing to the floor. Paint spilled across the concrete like lava, splashing my shoes and bare legs. I needed to calm myself, but I couldn’t. This clip had the potential to destroy everything I had spent so long working towards.
I had deleted every file from that Dictaphone, so where in God’s name had this come from? And why today, five months later?
Think, Laura, think. There must be a way out of this.
Only there wasn’t.
In the blink of an eye, somebody else had taken control of me.
What do you want? I replied, and pressed the send button. Ten anxious minutes passed and still there was no response. I struggled to breathe, as if I were having a panic attack.
Anchor, Laura, I told myself. Think of your anchor.
I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and pictured Henry’s face, but not even he could keep me tethered this time. I held my hands over my mouth, bent double and screamed until my throat was raw.
EPILOGUE
EFFIE
I watched upstairs from behind the blind in my bedroom window as Dad stood at the end of the garden, alone and lost in thought.
Once again, he was staring aimlessly across the playing fields, like he wanted to be anywhere but trapped in this prison we were supposed to accept as our home. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d given us one of his big beaming smiles that made everyone around him feel warm and fuzzy. Nowadays he looked as miserable as I felt. Mum had done this to him. She had turned him into a ghost I scarcely recognised.
I couldn’t bear to see him like this any longer. It was time to set the wheels in motion and put an end to this, before she killed him. I attached the file stored in my Cloud to the email and hit the send button.
I lay back on my bed, slipped my noise-cancelling headphones on and picked a Best of R & B playlist on Spotify to listen to. What I really wanted to do was creep downstairs and watch Mum completely freak out over why a dead woman was emailing her clips of a conversation she’d had months ago with a dead man. I wanted to see how long she could hold it together before she cracked. It had happened before, when she went schiz over Henry. I hoped she wouldn’t fall apart immediately, though – I wanted her to suffer. I wanted to make her life as hellish as mine and Dad’s.
I missed living with just Dad and Alice. Everything had been so much easier without Mum in the picture. It hadn’t always been that way. In fact, at the start, it had been hard to accept, especially for Alice. Before Mum’s sudden reappearance, the last we’d seen of her was Dad holding her back as two paramedics resuscitated my unconscious brother on a trolley. Mum was hysterical, screaming and with spit flying from her mouth like little white bullets.
‘I’ve killed him! I’ve killed my baby!’ she kept repeating, and made deep, horrible moaning noises I’d never heard anyone make before. I guess that’s the kind of shit that happens when you almost burn your son alive. Anyway, in the end she was sedated and driven away in an ambulance.
Alice and I stayed the night with an elderly couple across the road. They kept offering us drinks and snacks, as if that would make everything okay. They put up two camp beds in their spare room, but at some point during the night, Alice crept under my covers and welded herself to me.
‘Are we going to die in a fire, too?’ she asked, but I couldn’t truthfully tell her that we weren’t.
Over the next few days, Dad’s eyes became redder and redder, and while Mum remained in a psychiatric evaluation unit, Henry came out of his coma and we were told it was unlikely he’d ever be the brother we remembered. At Dad’s suggestion, Alice and I didn’t visit Henry or Mum.
To give him credit, Dad treated us like adults and levelled with us about what Mum had done. He explained that she’d confessed to starting the fire because she blamed the house for all the arguments they’d been having. But she didn’t know Henry was upstairs and Dad had yet to tell the police.
I was much more of a daddy’s girl than a mummy’s girl, but I still hated the thought of Mum going to prison for what had been an accident – albeit a pretty fucking major one. Eventually we agreed it was best if Dad lied to the police and said Henry had a fascination with matches. In return, Dad didn’t want us to go anywhere near Mum, and we agreed not to have anything to do with her until we were older.
Everything changed after that. We moved house and I moved schools. We changed phone numbers and left behind everything and everyone that was smoke-damaged.
I think I missed the idea of having a mum more than her actual presence. She was never one of those hands-on parents like Dad was, so Alice and I learned pretty early on not to expect a lot from her. Sometimes she looked at us as if she wasn’t quite sure how we’d landed in her world. Not Henry, though. She worshipped him. I loved him, too. He was sweet and funny and he was always trying to make Alice and I laugh with a silly dance or funny face. Now, by all accounts, he was little more than a vegetable.
We adapted from being a family of five to a family of three fairly well. In my last school, I’d seen how Farzana Singh had been relentlessly picked on when her mum came off her bipolar meds and started dancing Bollywood-style during parents’ evening. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me in my new school. So from day one I went in there all guns blazing, cocky and confident, and I surrounded myself with like-minded bitches. I told them Mum had remarried and moved to Australia, but all the time that I ruled those corridors, I was just waiting to be unmasked.
I wasn’t sure about Janine when Dad started seeing her. I’d heard so many horror stories from my friends about how their parents’ new partners totally messed with the family dynamic, and I didn’t want Janine doing that to us. But she didn’t try to fill Mum’s shoes and she actually wanted to spend time with us, which is more than Mum ever did. I knew Janine volunteered with Mum at End of the Line, but not once did Alice or I ask how she was. We rarely even spoke of her between ourselves. Janine tried to bring her up a few times, but she changed the subject when it became obvious we weren’t comfortable with the conversation. I overheard Dad talking to Janine about Mum a couple of times, and a small part of me was curious whether Mum was better or had gone full-on Looney Tunes. But in the end, it was easier not to think about her than to remember what she’d done to Henry.
Then, after a two-year absence, Mum came crashing back into our lives without warning. I’ll give her credit, she timed it well. I’d fallen pretty hard for my English teacher, Mr Smith, and I was sure the feeling was mutual, but then he did a one-eighty and totally blew me off. I was gutted and had no one to talk to – I’d lost so many friends when Thom spread it around I’d sent his naked selfie to his family and boss and he’d lost his job because of it. Then my grades suddenly turned to crap and I stopped caring.
I was cautious at first, because the mum I remembered wouldn’t really have cared about what had happened with Mr Smith and me. But this all-improved, brand-new version of Mum was desperate to know everything that was going on in my life. I figured I should be able to trust her with anything.