When I read about their stories I was revolted. They stayed with me. I just couldn’t get them out of my head.
I’d been a freelance writer for several years and I guess a book is always floating somewhere in the back of your mind. But it seemed almost like the idea just sprang into my mind, fully formed, like it had been nestling in the shadows all the time. I spent some time on a synopsis and had pitched it to a fair few publishers. I knew Mum was proud of me – she had wanted to write herself and even considered going into publishing when she was a teenager. She once told me she did work experience but had been put off. She wouldn’t say why. But she was pleased, I think, in that way that parents are, that I was doing what she had failed to. Anyway, the book was not met with the unbridled enthusiasm I had expected. In fact, I had had a series of rejection letters and was just about to go back to the drawing board, when I got a call from Emma of Portillion Books. She loved my sample chapter, and what she called my ‘fresh new unstuffy voice’. The proposal, she said, had been presented in an acquisitions meeting and got a rapturous reception. Consequently, I had been given a contract.
I was elated.
But there was a fly in the ointment: Portillion Books were the literary part of the Robert Cutt empire. The owner of a fleet of fast food restaurants, a football club, a few social networking sites, several magazines and two new private academies in London, Cutt was a powerful tycoon and a generous donor to the Conservative Party. The current rumour was that he was hoping to be made a Lord with a view to fast-tracking to a cabinet position. Political commentators were speculating that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had already reserved him a parking space.
In our house Cutt’s name was a swear word. He wasn’t known for his great pay and conditions and cracked, as in broke, most of the unions his workers had been affiliated to. Plus, he was generally a bit of a git. Ruthless, you know the sort – did well out of the banking crisis. You could see corruption all over his face whenever his mug was in the papers.
I came from a firmly socialist background. Mum, a History teacher, and Dad, with his background in trade unions, constantly railed against continued control and acquisition of British media till Dad departed when I was sixteen. Dan had been less vehement when he came on the scene in my early twenties, but only fractionally. Unsurprisingly, Cutt was our antichrist.
But I was desperate to get my book published and I kind of felt that I’d have to swallow down my righteous outrage to get the witches’ stories out. It was a compromise, true, but I was prepared to make it. A whole chunk of me didn’t like or approve of that, but I was weak. And okay, okay, if I’m honest, there was the ego thing going on. It was, I justified to myself, only the book wing of Cutt’s empire, after all.
Mum, on the other hand … When I’d sprung it on her she’d had a mixed reaction. At first she was over the moon to hear I’d at long last got a book deal, but then, when I told her who it was with, her expression dimmed. She’d started trying to say something about jewellery. I don’t know if she was making some point about wealth or something but whatever it was she’d got so distressed that the nurse, Sally, had to come in and sedate her. It was horrible. I didn’t ever want to see that again.
So you can see why, on that particular day, when she was really not looking very well at all, I was trying really hard to sound upbeat and positive about it all.
‘I’m due to meet Emma next week.’ My voice sounded purposefully cheery. ‘I’m so excited. I’ll get the contract, then as soon as I sign it they’ll give me part of my advance. Isn’t that great? I mean it’s so tough being freelance. A lump sum will really help out. And it’s my chance to get the stories of the witches out there. Maybe I can find our ancestral witch. And if we are related, then surely it’s a kind of duty too?’
Mum was frowning and doing her best to say something, but I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I wanted her just to listen and be proud of me and to say it was okay.
And it wasn’t only that which made me fill up every inch of breathing and conversation space in her room in the hospice that afternoon. No. At the back of my mind there was the notion that what she truly wanted to tell me was that she loved me and I couldn’t let her. Don’t get me wrong – we did tell each other quite often, but there was something in the atmosphere that afternoon that made me desperately not want to hear it. Almost as if I did then there would be finality in the words. For if she told me she loved me and I told her I loved her too everything would be harmonious, and she would be able to slip off away into the everworld, her work here done.
And I didn’t want that. I wasn’t ready to lose her just yet. So I didn’t let her speak.
God, if only I had. I should have. I should have let her tell me.
She so wanted to. In fact, she was struggling with all her might to tell me.
And now, I know what it was, I am ashamed.
She was seriously worried – rightly so.
If I’d let her speak she would have told me the truth. Then maybe I would have been forewarned. And forewarned is, as they say, forearmed.
But I didn’t, did I?
I gabbled on and on until the nurse came in and had to administer the drugs. And then Mum was tired. When I came back in, she had fallen asleep. So I went home.
And it was that night, as the moon sailed upwards, my mother, along with her unspoken words, finally let go.
But I couldn’t.
And now I was haunted by my stupid stupid actions. Hearing the word ‘sorry’ in my dreams, waking up to unknown sobs.
I moved my legs off the bed and crept into the shower.
Unfortunately there are some stains that just won’t wash away.
Chapter Three
I thought grief would be the worst thing.
Though Mum’s health had been on a steep decline, and I more or less expected it, when death actually came it still shocked me.
During the first few days after she went, there had been pain. Then the sharpness of it eroded, and I was left with this sense of great guilt. Which was worse. Though this guilt was an energiser. It could have made me go round the bend it was so great. But I found a way of handling it – as soon as it came upon me in the mornings, I went into action, hoping that physical exertion might knock regret from its number one spot at the forefront of my mind. It kind of felt that if I didn’t do that, then it would engulf me entirely. Then I could see myself just sitting in the flat, crying and crying on my own. I didn’t want that. Mum wouldn’t have wanted that. So I went with the extreme activity option.
That morning, after I had rinsed as much shame as I could out of my hair, I combed it out in front of the living room mirror. In my twenties I’d earned the nickname ‘Lois Lane’ amongst my friends and peers, partly because I shared a terrier-like commitment to my cub reporter’s role on the local rag. It wasn’t quite the Daily Planet, but I was proud of what I did and used to talk about it non-stop. But there was also a physical resemblance to the actress in the TV series of Superman, Teri Hatcher. We were both dark, had well-defined eyebrows and had short, sassy bobs. I didn’t mind the comparison.
In the mirror today, a pale reflection stared back. I looked worse than I’d expected: my eyes, though grey, had a purple darkness about them – the surrounding skin was dry and blotchy and pink from bouts of unscheduled weeping. My hair, black like Mum’s, was broken up with russet lowlights though there was a good inch of regrowth that needed attention. And I was thinner. Maybe half a stone less than I was two weeks ago. Most people wouldn’t mind that, but it made me look gaunt: although Dad was unusually tall (six foot three), my slight frame had come from the maternal