Letters To My Daughter's Killer - [29]

Did you know she was pregnant? Is that another lie? You’ve obviously no aversion to beating a pregnant woman. You pathetic little man. That’s what bullies are, aren’t they? Insecure, fearful, riddled with self-loathing. And attacking others is a way of feeling bigger, stronger, of exercising power. Is there much violence in prison? I imagine you on the receiving end as the days till your trial creep by. I’d gloat, except that’s not who I want to be any more. Loathing you, despising you, on and on and on, is a way of giving power to you. I’m sick of you in my head, in my teeth and my blood and my spine.

You need exorcising. Will this work? This calling to account, the search for understanding?

I do not know.

But I have nothing else.

Ruth

CHAPTER TWENTY

17 Brinks Avenue

Manchester

M19 6FX

Florence is like a limpet. She sticks so close. She must be half convinced I’ll disappear next. And no wonder. Remember how she clung to your legs when they came to arrest you? How she followed you around before then? Her diligence, her attempts to hold on to the only parent she had left came to nought, and now she is to all intent and purposes an orphan.

She sleeps with me and wets the bed every night. She is with me from waking until bedtime and often finds ways to spin that out, so it can be nine or after until she is asleep.

My response to her clinginess is ambivalent. Having lost Lizzie, I want to gather Florence tight to me and never let her go. And it is true, the thought of leaving her at school and coming home alone brings anxiety spinning through me. Haven’t you learnt anything? my body seems to say. You let Lizzie free, let her be independent, let her fly, and look how that turned out. The danger is that I’ll smother Florence, wrap her in cotton wool and make her overdependent on me, incapable of functioning properly. This need to keep her close alternates with a hunger for some solitude, some peace, some time for me, to try and get my head round what has happened. When I am not smothering her, she is suffocating me.

I know she needs a constant, reliable, loving person with her, and that has to be me, but I find the relentlessness of it so tough. I draw solace from her presence, don’t misunderstand, but there are times when I just want to bow down and weep for Lizzie. Times I want to lie in bed all day or just sit in the back yard and stare at the walls. I am so very tired, I don’t know how my legs hold me up, or how I can still string a sentence together.

In the night, when my resources are at their lowest, I frighten myself thinking that my selfish need for space, for time apart, will reap ill rewards.

The sun is shining, it’s unseasonably warm, hot enough to sunbathe; certainly we need the sunscreen on. I am going to tell Florence what you have done – well, what you are suspected of doing. She is outside, she has been digging the soil out of the planter – the one that fell off the wall, the morning they came for you.

Milky is sprawled on the path, soaking up the heat, one eye twitching open each time Florence bangs the trowel on the ground.

I make her a drink of juice and add a straw, take it outside.

She is hunkered down and has taken off the sunhat I’ve lent her, safety-pinned to fit.

‘Here,’ I say, ‘if you’re not going to wear the hat, you need more cream on.’

She shrugs.

‘I’ll get it,’ I threaten, and she snatches the hat up and pulls it on, glowers up at me from under it. ‘Good girl.’

I have rehearsed what to say with both Tony and Bea. Keep it simple. Let her respond, take my cues from that. She has not asked about you since that day. But I have found her looking under the beds and in the wardrobe, and when I ask her what she’s looking for she says, ‘I’m not.’

She may be looking for you, or for Lizzie. Unable to accept you’ve gone. Hoping that if she’s good, you’ll both come back. She’ll go home and Bert will be there and everything will be all right again.

Florence takes the juice and has a drink. A ladybird lands on my blouse. ‘Look, Florence.’

She looks, gives a nod, puts her drink down and resumes scraping the soil up.

‘You know about Mummy being dead,’ I say.

She hesitates, lets go of the trowel, her head bent to the ground, her face obscured by the hat.

‘It is very sad,’ I continue. ‘Mummy won’t come back. She can’t come back and we miss her such a lot.’

Florence presses her hand on to the compost. Is any of this going in? Getting through to her?

‘You might feel cross or lonely or sad inside. I do. And you remember the other day, the men came and Daddy went with them. Well, they think maybe Daddy hurt Mummy. He…’ I don’t want to say ‘killed’. ‘He made her dead, they think. So he’s got to stay in a special place, called prison. He’s not coming home.’

‘Is he coming to Nana’s?’ she says, hopefully. Of course -this isn’t home.

‘No, he’s got to stay where he is for now, until they decide if he did hurt Mummy and make her die. Do you want to say anything?’

She ignores me, uses her fingers to scatter the soil.

‘Is there anything you want to know – about Mummy or Daddy?’