‘No, darling, not yet,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘I’m making porridge. Lovely porridge! Be ready in a tick!’
She got up, said louder, ‘Hannah want biscuit now!’
‘No, sweetheart,’ I said more firmly. ‘Breakfast first, just wait.’
I crouched down to rummage in a low drawer for a bowl, and didn’t hear her come up behind me. When I turned, I felt a sudden searing pain in my eye and reeled backwards in shock. It took a few moments to realize what had happened, to understand that she’d smashed the end of her metal spoon into my eye with a strength I never dreamed she had. And through my reeling horror I saw, just for a second, her reaction; the flash of satisfaction on her face before she turned away.
I had to take her with me to the hospital, Doug not being due back for several hours yet. I have no idea whether the nurse in A&E believed my story, or whether she saw through my flimsy excuses and assumed me perhaps to be a battered wife, one more victim of a drunken domestic row. If she did guess at my shame and fear, she never commented. And all the while Hannah watched her dress my wounds, listened to the lies I told about walking into a door with a silent lack of interest.
Later that evening when she was in bed, Doug and I stared at each other across the kitchen table. ‘She’s not even three yet,’ he said, his face ashen. ‘She’s only a little girl, she didn’t know what she was doing …’
‘She knew,’ I told him. ‘She knew exactly what she was doing. And afterwards she barely raised an eyebrow, just went back to hitting those damn pots like nothing had happened.’
And after that, Hannah only got worse. All children hurt other kids, it happens all the time. In every playgroup across the country you’ll find them hitting or biting or thumping each other. But they do it out of temper, or because the other child hurt them, or to get the toy they want. They don’t do it the way Hannah did – for the sheer, premeditated pleasure of it. I used to watch her like a hawk and I’d see her do it, see the expression in her eyes as she looked quickly around before inflicting a pinch or a slap. The reaction of pain was what motivated her. I knew it. I saw it.
We took her to the doctor’s, insisting on a referral to a child psychologist – the three of us trooping over to Peterborough to meet a man with an earnest smile and a gentle voice, in a red jumper, named Neil. But though he did his best with Hannah, inviting her to draw him pictures of her feelings, use dolls to act out stories, she refused, point-blank. ‘NO!’ she said, pushing crayons and toys away. ‘Don’t want to.’
‘Look,’ Neil said, once the receptionist had taken Hannah out of the room. ‘She’s very young. Children act out sometimes. It’s entirely possible she didn’t realize how badly she would hurt you.’ He paused, fixing me in his sympathetic gaze. ‘You also mentioned a lack of affection from her, a lack of … emotional response. Sometimes children model what they see from their parents. And sometimes it helps if the parent remembers that they are the adult, and the child is not there to fulfil their own emotional needs.’
He said all this very kindly, very sensitively, but my fury was instantaneous. ‘I cuddle that child all day long,’ I hissed, ignoring Doug’s restraining hand on my arm. ‘I talk to her, play with her, kiss her and love her and I tell her how special she is every single minute. And I don’t expect my three-year-old to “fulfil my emotional needs”. What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ But the seed was set, the implication was clear. By hook or by crook it was my fault. And deep down of course I worried that Neil was right. That I was deficient somehow, that I had caused this, whatever ‘this’ was. We left that psychologist’s office and we didn’t go back.
That day, the day she killed Lucy, I stood looking in at my five-year-old daughter from her bedroom door and any last remaining hope I’d had – that I’d been wrong about her, that she’d grow out of it, that somewhere inside her was a normal, healthy child – vanished. I marched across the room and took her by the hand. ‘Come with me,’ I said and led her to my bedroom. Her expression, biddable, mildly interested, only made my fury stronger. I dragged her to the bed and she stood beside me, looking down at Lucy’s head on my pillow and I saw – I know I saw – the flicker of enjoyment in her eyes. By the time she’d turned them back to me they were entirely innocent once more. ‘Mummy?’ she said.
‘It was you,’ I said, my voice tight with anger. ‘I know it was you.’ I loved that bird. I had inherited her from an elderly neighbour I’d once been close to, and during those years of childlessness Lucy had become the focus of all my attention; a pretty, defenceless little creature to take care of, who needed me. Hannah knew how much I loved her. She knew.
‘No,’ she answered, and tilted her head to one side as she continued to consider me. ‘No, Mummy. It wasn’t me.’
I left her standing by the bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen. And there was Lucy’s cage, its door swung open, the tiny headless body lying on the floor beside it cold and stiff. I looked around the room, my eyes darting wildly about. How had she done it? What had she used? She had no access to the kitchen knives, of course. Suddenly a thought struck me and I ran back up the stairs to her bedroom. And there it was. The metal ruler from Doug’s toolbox, lying on her table. I’d heard her asking him for it the day before – for something she was making, she’d said. It lay there now, next to her craft things and I stared down at it as nausea rose in me.
I hadn’t heard Hannah follow me from the kitchen until she slipped into the room and stood beside me. ‘Mummy?’ she said.
My heart jumped, ‘What?’
Her eyes fell to my belly. ‘Is it all right?’
The slight lisp, that pretty, melodic voice of hers, so adorable – everybody commented on it. I bit back my revulsion. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Is what all right?’
She considered me. ‘The baby, Mummy. The little baby in your tummy. Is it all right? Or is it dead too?’
I put a hand to my belly as defensively as if she’d struck me there. Her gaze bored into me. ‘Why would the baby be dead?’ I whispered. ‘Why would you say that?’ There’s no way she could have known of course that she’d touched upon my greatest fear – that this new baby, our second miracle, would not survive, would not be born alive. It was the stress of my relationship with Hannah that caused this paranoia, I think. I almost felt as though I would deserve it, because I’d made such a mess of everything with her. My unborn baby would be taken from me, as penance.
As I gazed into her eyes, fear stroked the back of my neck. ‘Stay right here,’ I said. ‘Stay here until I say.’
That night I described to Doug what had happened. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked him. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘We don’t know it was Hannah,’ he said weakly.
‘Who the hell was it, then?’
‘Maybe … God, I don’t know! Maybe it was a fox, or one of the neighbours’ kids mucking about?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘We have foxes in the garden all the time,’ he said. ‘Are you sure the back door was closed?’
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘It was open. But …’
‘We’ve had to tell Hannah before about leaving the cage door unfastened,’ he added.
This was also true, she loved to feed Lucy, and though she knew she wasn’t allowed to open the door without me there, it was possible she had fiddled with the latch. ‘OK, but what about what she said about the baby?’ I demanded.
Doug rubbed his face tiredly. ‘She’s five years old, Beth. She doesn’t understand about death yet, does she? Maybe she’s feeling anxious about having a new sibling.’