I Know Who You Are

Essex, 1987

I’m stuck halfway up the longest staircase in the world and I’m crying, because I think my daddy is dead. I don’t know why else a strange man in a strange place would say he was my new dad. He keeps talking, but I can’t hear him any more, I’m crying too loud. He doesn’t sound Irish like Maggie and me, his voice sounds strange and I don’t like it at all.

‘Get out of the way, John, give the child some space,’ she says, when we reach the top of the stairs. I can see four wooden doors. None of them are painted and all of them are closed. Maggie takes my hand and pulls me towards the door that is furthest away. I’m scared to see what is behind it, so I close my eyes, but this makes me trip and stumble a little. Maggie holds on to my hand so tight that my feet just have to catch up.

When I open my eyes again, I can see that I am in a little girl’s bedroom. It isn’t like my bedroom at home, with the patchy brown carpet and grey curtains that used to be white. This room is like something I’ve only seen on TV. The bed, table and wardrobe are all painted white. The carpet is pink, and the curtains, wallpaper and bedspread are all covered in pictures of a little red-haired girl and rainbows.

‘This is your new room. Do you like it?’ Maggie asks.

I do like it, so I’m not sure why I wet myself.

I haven’t had an accident in my pants for a really long time. I think maybe the walls made of corks, the tall stairs, and the man with the gold tooth might have frightened the pee right out of me. I feel a hot trickle of it run down the inside of my leg, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I hope Maggie won’t notice, but when I look at the pink carpet, there is a dark patch between my shoes. She sees it then, and her smiley round face changes into something cross and pointy.

‘Only babies wet themselves.’ She hits me hard across the face. I’ve seen Daddy hit my brother like that, but nobody has ever done it to me before. My cheek hurts and I start to cry, again. ‘Grow up, it was just a slap.’ Maggie picks me up, holding me as far away from her as she can with straight arms. She marches back out into the hall and through the door nearest the top of the stairs. It’s a small kitchen. The floor is covered in lines of strange, squishy green carpet, with words written on it, and the cupboards are all different shapes and sizes and made from different-coloured wood. Another door at the end of the kitchen leads to a bathroom. Everything in it is green: the toilet, the sink, the bath, the carpet and the tiles on the wall. I think Maggie must really like the colour. She puts me down inside the bath and leaves the room, then comes straight back, with a big black bin bag. I worry that she wants to throw me away with the rubbish.

‘Take your clothes off,’ she says.

I don’t want to.

‘I said, take your clothes off!’

I still don’t move.

‘Now.’ It sounds as if the word got stuck behind her teeth. She seems awful cross, so I do as she says.

When all my clothes, including my wet pants, are in the bin bag, she picks up a little white plastic hose that is attached to the tap in the bath. ‘The boiler is on the blink, so you’ll have to make do.’ She hoses me down. The water is freezing and it makes me gasp for my breath, like when I fell out of the fishing boat once at home, and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.

When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.

‘She looks just like her,’ he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.

‘Drink it.’

I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.

‘All of it,’ she says.

When the glass is empty I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pyjamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.

The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.

‘Where has my hair gone?’ I start to cry but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.

‘It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.’

I stare at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pyjama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.

‘Do you want a bedtime story?’

I nod that I would.

‘Has the cat got your tongue?’

I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth. I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure. She walks over to a shelf stacked with colourful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. ‘Can you read?’

‘Yes.’ I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. ‘My brother taught me.’

‘Well, wasn’t that nice of him. You can read this to yourself then. There’s a whole pile of Story Teller magazines here, and cassette tapes too, so you just go ahead whenever you want to. Gobbolino is your favourite.’ She throws the magazine onto the bed. ‘The witch’s cat,’ she adds, when I don’t say anything. I don’t even like cats so I wish she’d stop talking about them. ‘If you can read, then tell me what it says on your top.’

I stare at it but the letters are upside down.

‘It says Aimee,’ Maggie says, reading it for me. ‘That’s your new name from now on. It means loved. You do want people to love you, don’t you?’

‘But I’m called Ciara.’ I look up at her.

‘Not any more you’re not, and if you ever use that name under this roof again, you’ll find yourself in very big trouble.’

Fifteen

London, 2017

I’m in trouble.

The detective has clearly already made up her mind about me, but she’s wrong. The only thing I’m guilty of is fraud, the relationship variety. We all sometimes pretend to love something or someone we don’t: an unwanted gift, a friend’s new haircut, a husband. We’ve evolved to be so good at it, we can even fool ourselves. It’s more laziness than deceit; to acknowledge when the love has run out would mean having to do something about it. Relationship fraud is endemic nowadays.

As soon as the detectives leave, I lock the door behind them, desperate to shut the whole world out. I guess I can now add the police to the list of people who think they know me. They’re in good company, with the press, the fans, and my so-called friends. But they don’t know me. Only the version of myself I let them see. The wheels of my mind continue to drive in the wrong direction, stuck in reverse, and I relive that night, remembering things I’d rather not. We did argue in the restaurant. Inspector Croft is right about that. I tried so hard to reassure Ben that I wasn’t having an affair, but he just got more and more angry.

Successful actresses are either beautiful or they’re good at acting …

The more he drank, the worse it got.

You are neither of those things …

He wanted to hurt me, provoke a reaction.

I keep wondering who you fucked this time to get the part.

He succeeded.

I didn’t mean to slap him, I know I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself. But I’ve spent a lifetime thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and his cruel words echoed my own insecurities so loud and clear, something inside me just snapped. I’ve never felt that I’m good enough at anything; no matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit. If my husband can see it, then surely it’s only a matter of time until everyone else sees it too.

My response wasn’t just physical. I told him I wanted a divorce, because I wanted to hurt him back. If he had let me have the child I wanted, I would in an instant have given up the career he said had come between us, but the answer was always the same: no. He didn’t trust me in more ways than one. We were going weeks, sometimes months, without a shred of intimacy, as though touching me might accidentally get me pregnant. I’m so lonely now it physically hurts.

I’ll never forget what he said as I walked out of the restaurant, or the expression on his face when I turned back to look at him. I don’t think it was just the drink talking, he looked as if he meant it.

I’ll ruin you if you leave me.

I head upstairs, pull off my running clothes and take a shower. The water is too hot, but I don’t bother to adjust the temperature. I let it scald my skin, as though I think I deserve the pain. Then I head into the bedroom to get dressed for work. I open the wardrobe slowly, as if something terrible might be hiding inside. It is. I bend down and remove the shoe box I found in the attic, then sit on the bed before lifting the lid. I stare at the contents for a while, as if touching them might burn my fingers. Then I remove the stack of plain vintage postcards and spread them out over the duvet. There must be more than fifty. The white cotton provides a lacklustre camouflage for the yellowing rectangles of card, so that my eyes are even more drawn to the spidery black ink decorating each one. They are all identical: the same words, written in the same feminine scrawl, by the same hand.

I know who you are.

I thought we had thrown all of these away. I don’t know why Ben would have kept them. For evidence, I suppose … in case the stalker ever returned.

I put the cards back in the box and slide it under the bed. Hiding the truth from ourselves is a similar game to hiding it from others, it just comes with a stricter set of rules.

Once dressed, I head back downstairs and stare at the huge bunch of flowers on the kitchen table, accompanied by the tiny card reading sorry. I pick them up, needing both hands to do so. My foot connects with the large stainless-steel pedal bin and the lid opens obediently, ready to swallow my rubbish, but also revealing its own. My hands hover above the trash, while my eyes try to translate what they are seeing: two empty black plastic bottles that I’ve never seen before. I pick one up to read the label. Lighter gel? We don’t even have a barbecue. I put the empty bottle back and push the flowers down on top of them inside the bin, a mess of petals and thorns hiding everything that lies beneath.

Sixteen

Essex, 1987

I wake up in the pink and white bedroom with a terrible tummy ache. I can see daylight behind the curtains covered in rainbows, but when I pull them back, there are bars on the windows and a big grey sky. I’m hungry and I can smell toast, so I creep over to the door and listen. My fingers reach up for the handle, it’s higher than the ones at home. As I slowly open the door it makes a shh sound on the carpet, so I try extra hard to be quiet.

The walls in the hallway all look as if they have peeled, and it’s very cold. Something bites my feet when I take a step forward, and it hurts. When I look down, I see that the floor out here is also covered in the green, spongey stuff I saw in the kitchen last night. Thin orange strips of wood are all around the edges, with little silver spikes sticking out of them. When I bend down to touch one, a bubble of blood grows on my finger, so I put it in my mouth and suck it until the pain goes away.

I follow the smell of toast, careful not to tread on any more little spikes, and stop when I reach the first door. It’s locked, so I carry on. The next door is slightly open and I can hear a television behind it. I try to peek through the crack, but the door tells on me by squeaking.

‘Is that you, Aimee?’ asks Maggie.

My name is Ciara, so I don’t know what to say.

‘Come on in, no need to be shy, this is your home now.’

I push the door a little harder, and see Maggie sitting in bed next to the man with the gold tooth. His smile has holes in, as though he has worn it too often, and he has little bits of white toast stuck in the black hair on his face. I see the television reflected in his glasses, and when I turn to look at the screen it says TV-am, before changing to a picture of a man and woman sitting on a sofa. The walls in this room are like the walls in the hall, all patchy and bare, and there is no carpet in here either, just more of the springy green stuff.

‘Come and get in with us, it’s cold. Move over, John,’ says Maggie, and he smiles, patting a space on the bed between them. I’m shivering, but I don’t want to get into their bed.

‘Come on,’ she says when I don’t move.

‘Hop in,’ he says, pulling back the covers.

Bunny rabbits hop. I am not a bunny rabbit.

I can see that Maggie is wearing a nightie, her skinny legs sticking out from beneath the sheets. Her long, black, curly hair is hanging down over her shoulders, and I wish mine was still as long as that. I climb in next to Maggie, but only because her happy face looks as if it might change into her cross one if I don’t.

Maggie’s bedroom is a mess, which seems strange to me, because she looks like such a neat and tidy person. Dirty cups and plates are everywhere, piles of newspapers and magazines lean up against the walls, and clothes are thrown all over the floor. The duvet smells, I’m not sure what of, but it isn’t nice. We all sit and stare at the TV, then my tummy rumbles so loud I’m sure everyone hears it.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’ Maggie asks when the adverts come on.

‘Yes.’ Her face changes and I add, ‘Please,’ before it is too late.

‘What do you fancy? You can have anything you want.’

I look over at one of the dirty plates with crusts on. ‘Toast?’

She pulls a pretend sad face, like a clown. ‘I’m afraid your dad ate the last of the bread.’

I’m confused at first, then remember that she means the man with the gold tooth.

‘Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours, I’m going to make your favourite, back in a jiffy.’

I don’t know what a jiffy is.

Maggie leaves the room and I’m glad she doesn’t close the door. I don’t want to be on my own with John. He looks like he is wearing a rug on his chest, but up close I can see it’s just more hair. He seems to have an awful lot of it. He reaches past me, and I lean out of his way. Then I watch while he picks up a packet of cigarettes and lights one, tapping the ash into an empty cup while he laughs at something on TV.

Maggie comes back with a plate, which is strange, because she said she was going to make my favourite breakfast, which is porridge and honey. My brother used to make it for me at home and I always ate it in my favourite blue bowl, even though it was chipped. My brother said it could still be my favourite bowl, even when it wasn’t perfect any more. He said things that are a little bit broken can still be beautiful.

‘There now, get that down you,’ says Maggie. Her cold bare legs touch my feet as she climbs back under the covers.

‘What is it?’ I ask, looking down at the plate.

‘It’s your favourite, silly! Biscuits with butter. Make sure you eat them all, we need to fatten you up a bit – you’ve gotten far too skinny.’

I think I look the same as yesterday and the day before that.

I look from Maggie to the plate and back again, unsure what to do. Then I pick up one of the round shapes, and can see that it has its own name written underneath it, just like my new name is written on my pyjama top. I whisper the letters inside my head: D I G E S T I V E.

‘Go on, take a bite,’ Maggie says.

I don’t want to.

‘Eat. It.’

I take a small bite, chewing slowly. All I can taste is the butter and it makes me feel a bit sick.

‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you?’

‘Thank you, what?’

‘Thank you, Maggie?’

‘No, not Maggie. From now on, you call me Mum.’