The Blame Game
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I can’t believe this is happening. I can barely breathe. My thoughts whirr and strain to find answers, solutions. I remember with a hard punch to my chest the sight of Saskia on the ground in front of the car.
‘Where is my daughter?’ I shout frantically. ‘Her name … Her name is Saskia. Saskia Pengilly. She’s seven years old, she … she has blonde hair, she was wearing a stripy T-shirt …’
‘We will take you to her,’ the doctor says, and they wheel me abruptly out of Michael’s room towards another ward further along the hallway.
The sight of Saskia on the bed is like a fist slammed into my face. She’s hooked up to machines, there are blood stains on her pink cotton dress, her small, limp hands are bruised and painfully gashed. It is unbearable.
I start to shake, a strangled scream escaping from my open mouth. Even when Reuben starts slapping his head I can’t stop. A nurse appears at my side, pulls the waistband of my shorts down below my hip and sticks a needle in my backside.
Blackness.
‘The lady, she come here for see you.’
A nurse is leaning over me and adjusting a tube in my arm. The room is swaying. Another woman comes into focus. Slim, young. Bobbed black hair, red lipstick. Wide smile. A suit.
‘I’m Vanessa Shoman,’ she says, stretching out a hand. ‘I’m from the British High Commission. The doctor told me that your family had a car accident.’
The knowledge of why I’m here hits me like a wrecking ball. An invisible force sweeping me off my feet and landing me somewhere else in time, outside my own body. Horrifying fragments of the crash flash painfully across my eyes. I wrap my arms around my legs and howl in the space between my knees. I remember crawling on all fours to reach Saskia. She was lying on the ground, about ten feet ahead of the mangled hire car. I remember it was raining and there was glass everywhere. Saskia wouldn’t move. I was screaming for her to wake up.
‘My daughter,’ I tell Vanessa through gulping sobs. ‘She’s seriously injured. I … I don’t know if she’s going to survive.’
I can hardly bring myself to say the words aloud. I can’t stop crying. Reuben is sitting back in his chair, knees to his chest. He looks stricken at the state of me but I’m too helpless to comfort him.
Vanessa rubs my back sympathetically and explains her role as an officer of the High Commission is to help people like me. She assures me she will contact my family and help us get home, but none of it brings any comfort. She tells me we are in a hospital just outside of San Alvaro, one of Belize’s poorest towns. She says the hospitals in this region are understaffed, underfunded, but that a neurosurgeon is coming from Belize City today or tomorrow for Michael and Saskia.
My memories are an explosion of particles that I have to knit together, atom by atom. I remember coming to in the modernist sculpture that used to be the car. I remember Michael slumped like a beanbag in the seat beside me, his right shoulder twisted at an unnatural angle. I was certain he was dead.
What happened after that? How did we get to the hospital?
Vanessa tells me an army truck full of soldiers came across us after the crash. The soldiers dragged Michael and Reuben out of the car, dumped us in their truck and brought us all to the hospital.
‘You were lucky,’ she says. ‘It’s a very remote part of Belize. No towns or villages for many miles. You could have been there a long time before someone found you. Maybe even days.’
She tells me that the soldiers managed to salvage some luggage from our rental car. The bag containing our passports and money is in Michael’s room, but we had other suitcases containing clothes, toys, souvenirs, our mobile phones. Irrelevant, of course, but Vanessa mentions that we were also lucky that the army managed to save them.
‘Save them?’ I say weakly. ‘From what?’
‘From the police. They steal all the time. How many bags had you in total?’
‘I think we had four,’ I say.
She writes this down. ‘How much money did you have in cash?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Any gadgets? Laptops, smartphones?’
I bite my lip. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Credit cards?’
‘I think … maybe AMEX and Mastercard.’
Why does this matter? I don’t care about money. I care about my family.
‘We will check that these are still there. If not, we’ll attempt to cancel the cards for you. But the other bags I don’t think we will ever see again.’
Vanessa folds away her notebook, her information retracted. She pulls another packet of tissues from her bag and passes them to me.
‘You poor thing,’ she says, watching me dissolve into gulping sobs. ‘But it’s good you’re awake. The police will want to get a statement from you as soon as possible.’
Reuben is huddled on the bed next to me. The lights go out, plunging the hospital into darkness. Somehow the darkness makes the sense of loneliness and disorientation ten times worse. I feel trapped in a nightmare. My heart starts to race again. I press my fists against my eyes and weep from my core. It feels like I’ve been torn apart.
I wish Michael was here to tell me that everything is OK. I wish someone could promise me that Saskia is going to make it through. I can’t believe this has happened. I hate myself for being less injured than she is. I would give anything, absolutely anything, to trade places with her.
Earlier I caught my reflection in a broken mirror in the bathroom and had to look twice to check it was me. The left side of my face is yellow and puffed up so badly that my left eye is a mere slit in my face. My hair is pinked with blood and under the dressing on the side of my head is a painful gash. I think my collarbone and wrist are broken. My right ankle might be broken too. I can barely put any pressure on my feet and every movement feels like I’ve torn dozens of muscles.
But I’m alive. We all are. I have to cling to that. It could so, so easily have been otherwise.
Vanessa said that the army brought us here. As I sit up in the darkness I remember a pair of heavy black shoes next to my face as I came to by the car. My image was blurry but I definitely saw them. A ripped denim hem, like jeans. A crunch of glass underfoot.
Michael was unconscious. He was wearing flipflops, not boots. The soldiers would have been wearing fatigues, not jeans. I think the van driver came to inspect the damage to our vehicle after the crash. He was unharmed enough to walk. I’d identify his shoes if I saw them again. Black lace-ups, a scuff on the right toe.
But he didn’t call the police. Vanessa said the army came across us by chance. The driver had left the scene of the crash long before then. I try to imagine him looking over our mangled car, our bodies covered in glass and blood. How could he have looked at Saskia on the ground like that and just raced off without calling anyone? How heartless would you have to be to leave her like that?
I know I saw someone outside the beach hut the other night. Michael questioned me and yes, it was dark but I know I did. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. Dark hair. Short – about five foot eight – with black fuzzy hair. Dark-skinned, stocky. I didn’t see his face.
And the telescope at the other hut that was pointed at ours. It freaked me out. I only stopped to catch my breath on the pier. Curiosity got the better of me so I went for a look around. I knew no one was staying there. But when I glanced inside the window I saw one of the bedrooms with clothes on the floor, the sheets kicked back off the bed as though someone had been sleeping there.
‘I need a story,’ Reuben says. ‘Tell me a story.’
‘I don’t have any books, love,’ I say weakly. ‘I don’t think the hospital has any either.’
‘Tell me a story, Mum. I want a story. Tell me a story.’
I make him turn away from me so he won’t see the tears running down my face. Then, in low whispers, I tell him the story of Angelina Ballerina. It’s the only story I can recall because Saskia makes me read it to her all the time.
When he falls asleep I try to will myself to stand. My legs feel like jelly and I want to throw up from the pain but finally I’m able to pull myself upright. I need to go and check on Saskia. I want to make sure she’s OK. I’m stricken by the thought that, if someone has struck our car deliberately, they won’t stop there.
I try and will my body to do what I so desperately need it to do, but it won’t. I used to be able to push through all kinds of muscle damage and foot injuries, but now I have no strength left and feel dangerously woozy. I sink back down beside Reuben and fall into darkness.
I dream of Saskia coming into our bed for a cuddle.
Morning, Mummy. Can I snuggle with you?
In the dream she curls up next to me and watches Netflix on an iPad while I read. Michael appears in the doorway with a tray laden with cereal bowls, toast, coffee, and a babyccino for Saskia. We stay there until it’s time to take Reuben swimming and Saskia to ballet. The warmth of the blankets, her feet against my calves, her forehead against my lips, butter-soft, and her little fingers laced between mine, both of us wearing sky-blue nail polish flecked with glitter.
Mummy, please stay a little longer. I love our mornings.
7
Michael
31st August 2017
I can hear someone screaming. No, not screaming. A mechanical whine, a machine somewhere that whirs.
I open my eyes and immediately bright light squared off by a window blinds me. My eyes adjust and I see I’m in a room with a small rectangular window to my right. Plaster is peeling off the wall beneath the windowsill. I can hear shouting down the hall. All a bit Mad Max in here. A white sheet is drawn across my legs. My T-shirt and jeans are covered in dirt and blood stains. There’s dried blood all over my arms. I feel like someone’s beaten me with a metal bar.
My mind flicks through reasons that I might be in hospital like a slot machine spinning its three wheels printed with cherries and bells. Three sevens line up, and I remember.
The crash.
It comes to me in vivid, broken flashes. The sound of the car whipping round. I was sure I’d died. I was sure we’d all died. Did we hit a tree? I remember the car coming to rest virtually upside down. Helen was shaking like she was having a fit, her teeth chattering. I told her it was OK, that everything was OK. Her breathing slowed. After a few moments I managed to make out something she said.
He just came out of nowhere.
A tear slid down her cheek.
Who? I said. Who came out of nowhere?
The van. He just slammed into us.
I told her I loved her.
I love you too. I’m so scared, Michael.
I thought those were the last words I’d ever hear.
I think back to last night, when I chased after the guy who’d been trespassing outside our beach hut. I didn’t want to make much of it to Helen but when I got to the top of the bank I saw someone running towards a white van that was parked about a hundred yards away from the hut. I shouted, ‘hey!’, and this guy turns and looks at me, holding his hands at either side of his shoulders as if to say ‘what?’
I stopped dead in my tracks and gave a gasp. He looked exactly like Luke. Same sandy-blonde hair, same build, same face. I felt all the blood drain from my face.
‘Luke?’ I called out. ‘What are you doing here? Luke?’
He took a few steps towards the van, then jumped in and took off, the tyres kicking up white stones. I was so stunned at the sight of him that I didn’t react, at first. Then I started to run after him, thinking that if I could get the registration plate I could report him. He sped off down the path and took a right. There was no way I was going to catch up with him so I cut through the trees. Daft, on hindsight, but I was in a daze. Luke is dead. It could have been Theo. But why here? And why now?
I’m lucky to have made it out. The rainforest is fifty miles thick. One wrong turn and I’d have been in deep kimchi.
The bleep of the heart monitor tugs me back into the present.
I sit up and try to speak but my mouth feels full of cotton wool. I think back to the fire at the bookshop. The bookshop wasn’t just my pride and joy. It was an offering, an act of supplication to Luke. And they burned it down.
We’re not safe here. They won’t stop until we’re all dead.
8
Helen
31st August 2017
I’m woken by a man and woman removing my drip. Both are in plain clothes, the man dressed so casually that I jump when I see him standing so close. Jeans and a colourful Hawaiian shirt with a rosary around his neck. He speaks to me in Kriol.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I tell him. He starts to gesture with his hand but I don’t understand it. After a few minutes of confusion the nurse says ‘X-ray’ and I realise they want to take me for one.
‘Yes. Yes, X-ray,’ I say, nodding. They bring in a wheelchair, tell me to take off my clothes to be gowned. I’m so hot and filmed in blood and dirt that I virtually have to peel them off, which takes a while. Every movement makes me yelp in pain. When Reuben starts to follow after the wheelchair they shake their head and I try to explain that he has to come with me, but they won’t hear of it. I look around desperately for Vanessa.
‘My son … my son’s autistic,’ I say, stumbling over my words. ‘He has to come with me because I’m afraid someone will hurt him. Please …’ The nurse rubs my arm and tries to tell me it’s OK, he is safe here in a hospital, and then they ignore me completely and wheel me down the corridor while Reuben stands in the ward, dumbfounded.
I’m crying and shaking all over when they wheel me into the X-ray room, weakened by fear and shock. The radiographer – a woman about my age, slim, concerned – speaks good English and asks me what’s wrong.
‘We were in a car accident,’ I say, and I’m trembling so badly I can hardly get the words out. ‘I’m afraid someone is going to come into the hospital and hurt us.’
She bends down in front of me and listens.
‘Who do you think will hurt you?’
‘A man,’ I say, gulping back air as though I’m drowning. ‘He was wearing black boots. He crashed into us on purpose … he’s going to come here, I know it!’
She takes my hand and I manage to take a breath. ‘Is there security at the hospital?’
She frowns. ‘Not really. But the police should help. If you had a car accident they will want to find who did this.’
This is comforting enough to help me stop shaking. ‘The police,’ I say. ‘The woman from the British High Commission said they would want a statement but they’ve not come to see me yet.’
She smiles reassuringly.
‘They will be here very soon. It is not a big police force so they may be busy. But they will help. If someone is trying to hurt you, the police will protect you.’
I lie on a cold metal table as she pulls the machine over my collarbone, then my legs and arms.
In my mind’s eye I see myself standing in our ground floor flat in Sheffield. Reuben is in his high-chair in the room behind me shouting and throwing beans across the room. The postman pushes a pile of letters through the letter box and Reuben screams at the sound.
Most of the letters are bills, but there’s a padded envelope sent on by our landlady, Lleucu, from our loft flat in Cardiff. Amongst the letters is a cream-coloured bonded envelope with ‘Haden, Morris & Laurence’ emblazoned in navy lettering across the back. It looks important, so I open it first.
K. Haden
Haden, Morris & Laurence Law Practice
4 Martin Place
London, EN9 1AS
25th June 2004
Michael King
101 Oxford Lane
Cardiff
CF10 1FY
Sir,
We request your correspondence in receipt of this letter to the address above.
Our clients desire a meeting with you regarding the death of Luke Aucoin.
The time to meet about this tragedy is long overdue. Please do not delay in writing to us at the above address to arrange a meeting.
Sincerely,
K. Haden
The letter drifts from my hand to the ground. Reuben continues to shout in the background. I feel like someone’s run through me with a sword. Slowly I sink to the ground and pick the letter up again. Five words scream off the page.
The death of Luke Aucoin.
Those words chill me to the bone, turn my guts to mush. At one point I believed Luke was the love of my life. And yet I caused his death.
I turn and look at Reuben. My first thought is: they’ll take him from me. I will lose him if I face this.
So, I hid the letter. And I persuaded Michael that it was time to move again.
I thought it would all go away.
The voices in my head remind me that there have been dozens of occasions in the past where something has gone wrong and I’ve connected it to these letters. When we lived in Belfast our cat Phoebe died. The vet said it was poison. I worked myself into a complete state, certain it was deliberate, payback for Luke, until a neighbour approached us and apologetically explained that he’d left out rat poison in the back garden and had spotted Phoebe near the tray on the day that she died. And the miscarriage I had a few years before Saskia came along … for about year afterwards I was trapped in the silent torture of being convinced that Luke’s family had done it. I even had the scenario in my head. We were living in London at the time and I took the tube to and from work every day. I was seventeen weeks’ pregnant. The first cramps started about ten minutes after I got off the tube. It would be easy to inject me with something that would start early labour. A light prick that I’d probably never notice.
It’s difficult to explain paranoia. Saying something like that aloud – though I never did, not to anyone – makes it sound ridiculous. But the suspicion was like a monolith in my head, impossible to budge. We buried our little girl in the hospital graveyard, named her Hester. And when the voices of suspicion finally died down, a new one set in: Hester’s loss was karma for Luke.
Other mishaps were similarly difficult to assign to chance: a slashed car tyre, the night I was followed home in Kent, a few week of silent phone calls at three in the morning, two bouts of severe food poisoning. On hindsight it’s unlikely any of these were related to what happened to Luke, but at the time I was sure they were, and I carried that knowledge like a knife lodged in my chest. I could tell no one, not even Michael. My hair would fall out in handfuls and the smallest thing felt physically impossible. Cooking a meal, meeting up with friends … I felt incapacitated, barely able to look after myself, never mind my children. Life stalled and sputtered, but somehow hobbled on.
There is a point when fear is no longer a protective instinct, and it becomes sabotage.
No, I tell myself resolutely through tears. The crash has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with what happened to Luke.
I’m trying hard to convince myself, to drown out the other voices. But they’re too loud for me to silence. They shout in my head like a Greek chorus.
But what if it is? You’re alone in the hospital, completely vulnerable. If they want to come and finish you off they only have to walk through the doors.
When I return to the ward – with the news that my wrist is broken – I breathe a sigh of relief that Reuben is there, hugging a flat rectangular object with a blue rubber casing to his chest. His iPad. The glass is cracked in one corner but otherwise it seems OK. I ask him if he’s OK, and he nods, but then tells me that a man came up to him and asked him where I was.
‘Who was it?’ I say. ‘Was he a doctor? A nurse?’
He shrugs and moves his eyes around the room. He seems agitated, but of course he has every reason to be and I can’t read him.
‘Did the man say why he wanted me?’
‘My headphones are gone,’ he says.
‘How did you get the iPad?’
‘A nurse,’ he says, but doesn’t explain further.
I nod and study his face for clues. This is probably as much information as I’m going to get from him about the man who came. I look around the ward – it’s unusually quiet, all the visitors gone and the patients asleep. Just the sound of the traffic outside and the ceiling fan.
‘Let’s go check on Saskia,’ I say, and he wheels me quickly down the hall to her room. When I see her there in the bed it’s a bizarre mixture of relief and renewed grief that hits me hard.
I take her little hand in mine, staggered by the confirmation by each of my senses that this is happening. Crescent moons of blood and dirt under her nails. Her closed eyes and the frightening chasm between each bleep of her pulse.
Night falls and every time I hear footsteps coming up the hallway I seize up with blunt, raw fear. The ward I’m in is right at the far end of the wing and there is no exit without going up the hallway, so if anyone came to get Reuben and me, we have nowhere to run. The hospital is like something straight out of a zombie movie – there is one bathroom that I’ve spotted and it was crawling with insects, no loo paper, and brown water pouring from the taps. No catering, very little drinking water. Both Reuben and I are weak from hunger. I’ve asked to be moved but the nurses either don’t understand me or feign ignorance. Vanessa hasn’t appeared and I’m worried that she won’t return. She said a neurosurgeon was coming to see Saskia – why isn’t he here?
There is no phone I can use and I don’t have my mobile. Worst of all, they won’t let me sleep in Saskia’s room. Reuben and I take up too much space and the nurses need to be able to access her – it took half an hour of interpretive gestures for me to work out that this was the reason – but it’s utter rubbish, because we only get seen once a day. I’m trying to be brave for Reuben’s sake. He keeps saying, ‘What’s wrong, Mum? What’s wrong?’ and I have to tell him I’m fine, that everything is fine.
But it’s a lie.
9
Michael
31st August 2017
My head hurts like a meteor has landed on it. Someone’s knocking against the windowpane, a thunk thunk that seems to fall into rhythm with the banging in my head. I get up to see who’s knocking and find it’s an insect of some sort, the size of a small bird, trying to get outside. With a gasp of pain I yank the tube out of my arm and struggle forward to let the bugger out. He has a stinger about three inches long but he’s more scared of me than I am of him.
I sit on the side of the bed and discover I’m wearing a snot-green hospital gown, tied at the waist and neck like a weird apron. Nothing underneath. Who undressed me? I’m in what seems to be a hospital, albeit a pretty nasty one. It looks like a building site. Smells like one, too. My back aches like I’ve fallen off a mountain. I’m covered in cuts and bruises. My first thought is that I’m here because of the fire, and my mind spins back to being trapped inside the shop, black smoke swirling. The sensation of my lungs being crushed.
And then the sight of Luke at the beach hut. His hands out at either side in a half-shrug, as if to say, what did you expect? With a shiver I wonder if I saw a ghost. A more rational explanation is that I was half-asleep, or that the trespasser bore an uncanny resemblance to Luke. But it could have been Theo.