Disappeared, page 10
‘I look bolder,’ Cerys said wonderingly, as she looked at her reflection.
‘Do you like it?’ Lily asked, and now was the time for fear, when the job was done and it was too late to go back.
‘I love it,’ Cerys said with a trembling voice. She looked like a confident woman, one who trod her own path, one the blackness wouldn’t catch. ‘It’s perfect. Clever girl!’
And Cerys glowed, Lily realised, as she looked at her new self in the mirror. A seemingly small gift she had given in comparison to what Cerys had done and was doing for her, but a great one too. The framing of her new self, and Lily knew from the inside how much that was worth.
26
The memories always came at night. Lily could keep them away in the day with the hustle and bustle of work, but they came for her in the dark. At least this one ended in some kind of happiness, unlike most.
She’d stared at the pregnancy test kit as the second blue line appeared. She wasn’t ready for this but Danny said she should be and he’d insisted they try so she’d stopped taking the pill. Danny was always right, after all. They were settled and he’d given her a lovely house to live in but a baby meant the end of everything. He’d never let her go back to hairdressing now and she had felt so good about passing her college course. As good as any A level student felt going to university. It felt like she’d really achieved something. She’d graduated top of her class and it turned out to be something she wasn’t just good at; exceptional, her tutor had described her with pride.
She’d never been exceptional at anything in her life.
She definitely wouldn’t be exceptional as a mother.
The thought of a baby terrified her. What did she know about bringing up a child? She wasn’t the kind of girl who’d bothered much with babies when she was growing up. What if the baby cried every time she picked it up? What if it hated her?
She sat on the toilet, holding the hated and treacherous test kit in shaking hands. She wasn’t ready for this.
And she was scared of telling Danny. She didn’t know why.
No, that wasn’t true – she did. She was scared of having a child with Danny. Of what he might do to her, and most of all whether he’d do the same to a child.
27
The days towards Christmas slipped by on the farm, so smoothly that Cerys found it easy not to mark time or think about how long she’d been there. It was just the blessed relief that the blackness wasn’t with her. She still walked the tightrope of fearing its return, and it was impossible to believe it wouldn’t. She had to get up before winter dawn to see to the sheep every day, her little shaggy friend at her heels, though he still abandoned her for Dilys, of course, as soon as they got back. But now he thumped his tail at her as she passed him in the farmhouse and wandered to her for the occasional lick to her hand.
‘Need to order a turkey,’ Dilys remarked mid-morning as the rain lashed horizontally outside and the lights were on to dispel the gloom. Cerys was glad of the cheer from the little log burner at the armchair end of the long kitchen, which was where Dilys mostly sat during the day. Sammy played on the stairs with some of his toys. Cerys wasn’t sure what the game was but he was happy and occupied.
‘Where from?’
‘I’ll find the phone book – Huw up the valley has them. I always get mine from him, and a good piece of Welsh Black beef too. I’ll order bigger with you all here. You are here over Christmas?’
‘Yes,’ Cerys replied cautiously because this felt like it was going somewhere and she wasn’t sure where.
‘Oh good, don’t know how I’d manage without you at the moment.’ She rapped her cast in annoyance. ‘I thought you might have family to see though.’
Cerys didn’t need to look at Dilys to know the old woman’s eyes were boring into her. She might not see so well now but her instinct was sharp. ‘No, we’re staying here.’
A shiver ran down her neck like a December mountain stream. Her family. Christmas.
What would they be thinking now? She’d been gone a full month. Obviously they’d be looking for her. Would the car have been found? She knew it would be painful for them. She couldn’t really understand any more how she’d thought that there wouldn’t be pain and it would all slip by easily for them. Of course they would be distraught at her disappearing, maybe being dead. But it was done now and she couldn’t make it better. Nor was she strong enough to fix it, especially when she still didn’t know what to do. She needed longer; she needed her mind to become clearer.
How could she bear this? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She shouldn’t still be here. This had never been part of her plan. It was an accident, this stolen time. But Christmas – no, she couldn’t pretend through that. Perhaps it was time to go.
Go to what? And she knew somewhere in the back of her mind; she’d told herself she would one day finish the job she’d gone to start on that hillside. Because she couldn’t ever go back. But she’d never intended to live without them either.
‘Hope I haven’t put ideas in your head,’ Dilys said in a dry voice. ‘I should have kept my big mouth shut because I don’t know what I’ll do if you go.’
She looked up. The old woman gave her a hard stare.
‘I mean it – I need you. Kills me to say it, mark you, but I do.’
Cerys ran a hand through her hair. Its short choppiness still felt strange after years of that old bob but she loved it. ‘I don’t think I can stay much longer,’ she said in a shaky voice.
‘The girl needs you too,’ Dilys said. ‘For all she’s not your daughter.’
Cerys frowned. ‘How did you know that?’
Dilys let out a shout of laughter. ‘She’s never once called you “Mum”. Not once. Never calls you anything, mind, but a girl wouldn’t do that with her mother. And anyway she’s too careful around you, too polite. I don’t know what the pair of you are up to but you’re helping me out, whatever it is, so maybe it’s none of my business.’
Cerys shook her head. ‘You pick up a lot for a woman used to living on her own!’
Dilys cackled, a proper evil old lady sound that made Cerys laugh in return. ‘I didn’t always live up here on my own, you know.’
‘No?’
‘No, I was married once. A long time ago.’
Cerys sat up. ‘Go on.’
‘He died. Far too young. Only forty. It was a heart attack. He had a weakness there, they said.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’
Dilys shrugged. ‘It happens, doesn’t it? We had a good life before I lost him, but no children. I wish there had been, so did he, but we weren’t blessed.’
‘Did you not want to marry again?’
She shook her head. ‘No, no, never fancied it with anyone else. No, I’ve been content on my own.’
Cerys felt the weight of the sadness in her comment about the lack of children and she understood better now why Dilys loved having Sammy about. He came into the room now and Dilys grinned at him. ‘Hey, mischief! I’ve had a good idea. Why don’t we brighten this cast up a bit for Christmas?’ She hauled her leg up onto the footstool. ‘Get your colouring pens out and let’s get some Christmas cheer in here!’
Sammy danced over gleefully to look.
‘See if you can do a big Christmas tree,’ said Dilys. She winked at Cerys. ‘If you can’t act daft at my age, when can you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cerys said, passing Sammy the felt tips.
‘What I learned from Richard passing was to make the most of the time you have. Never to be worrying about what anyone thinks. To do the things you want to, because you never know if tomorrow will come or if you’ll be dust in the churchyard.’
‘Can I draw a reindeer?’ Sammy asked.
‘You go ahead,’ Dilys told him.
Sammy picked up a purple felt tip and Cerys started to pass him a brown one. Dilys waved at her to stop.
‘Do you want the reindeer to be purple?’ she asked him in that odd fierce way she sometimes used, which never seemed to faze him as if he perfectly understood her.
‘Yes,’ Sammy replied with more firmness than Cerys had ever heard in his usually timid little voice.
‘Then you colour it purple, kid. You see, there are people who colour reindeer brown and they colour them very, very neatly and everyone says well done. And then there are people who colour them purple. And if you’re a purple reindeer kind of person, you be proud of that! And don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise!’
Sammy nodded and quietly got on with drawing on her cast.
Cerys surveyed Dilys. ‘I think I wish someone had told me that at his age,’ she said quietly.
Dilys harrumphed. ‘Well, I’ll keep saying it to you now, until it sinks in. Stop worrying about colouring inside the lines of your life.’
‘How did you know I did that?’ she asked.
‘It’s written all over you.’ Dilys cocked her head to one side. ‘The thing with growing older is you can stop caring what people think and be yourself. Now on my own up here, I’ve been able to do that a lot longer.’
‘And I suspect you were always inclined that way,’ Cerys said with a dry laugh.
‘I was,’ Dilys agreed. ‘And it’s time you learned the benefits.’
‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ she asked with mock indignation.
Dilys rolled her eyes. ‘Like I said, it’s written over you.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’ Cerys drew a star shape on the cast for Sammy to colour.
‘Time to choose your own colours now,’ Dilys said, leaning back and watching them.
28
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said on the phone to his mother again. ‘She had everything.’
‘Ungrateful,’ she replied. ‘I did warn you, Danny. Bad blood outs. And look at her own mother. Girls like that, they can pretend, but in the end they can’t run from who they are, and she’s no good. Never has been. You focus on getting Drew back and then divorce her. I’ll send you over some money for a lawyer if you need it but you make sure she doesn’t get a penny from you. Hire somebody good. I’ll ask around over here and see if anyone can recommend somebody good for you. I hate to say this to you, but she probably had her eyes on your money all along. I bet she only had Drew to help her cause when it got to this stage. She’s never loved that kiddie really. I mean, what kind of mother would do this to their own child?’
And he could feel the anger boiling up inside him as she put into words all that he’d been thinking himself at those wakeful 2 a.m. moments that had haunted him ever since Kayleigh left.
Okay, so he’d put a stop to her games. If she didn’t appreciate everything he’d done for her, pulling her out of that sewer she was in, then his mother was right. He’d get Drew back and then he was done with her.
He’d see when they found her what she was up to, and then, if his mother was right, the gloves were off. He’d take Drew from her forever.
That’d teach her.
29
Time to choose her own colours, Dilys had said. And Cerys had felt a great pull of truth in that; but what did it mean for her now?
She’d been an intelligent woman once. Back at university, she’d been bright, sparkling, vigorous. Even when she had the children, she had still been that person. She’d used her intelligence and energy to give her children the best start in life they could have, and to give Gavin a peaceful home he could relax in after he’d spent all day working for them.
But Dilys was right. In all that effort she’d put into making everyone else happy, she’d fallen into a pattern she’d never really chosen. Nobody had made her discard her own interests. It was her who’d let it happen because at the back of her mind she must have thought that was the way looking after her family had to be done.
Cerys laughed as she leaned on the farm gate, one of her favourite places to think, looking out over the hill with the sheep dotted about. They weren’t like the white clouds described in a poem, but rather some muddy grey splats in the distance all cannoning about because some of them had decided to have a burst of energy and gallop, spooking all the others.
Dilys would have had short words to say about how she’d let herself fall into her trap. And she hadn’t even noticed until the blackness descended so far over her that it was a death shroud.
Gavin should have noticed, she thought, with a bitter sense of betrayal. If he cared, he should have been watching out for her. He should have stepped in and helped.
But her mother’s voice in her head answered her. ‘Don’t expect him to be good at things he never was just because that’s what you happened to need then.’
She shook her head in frustration. But what was the good of a marriage if you couldn’t lean on each other when you needed to?
That voice was right though. Gavin was useless at emotional support and always had been. That had been her job. So who was there to hold her up when she needed it? There had been no one.
The sudden rush of sadness she felt as she looked back now and saw the hurt and desperation descend on her through the lens of memory, as she saw the blackness coming, was overwhelming. She bent her head against the top bar of the gate and let some tears fall silently to the ground for a while.
But then, she lifted her head and brushed the remains of the tears away. And the blackness wasn’t there, sucking her in. She had felt sadness and she’d let it out. Up on the hill, her little mud-splats of wool were still frolicking about. The sun was out and was telling her to choose her own colours too.
She shook her head again, but in wonder this time, because she didn’t feel like giving up right now. She leaned her chin on her hands on the top of the gate and watched the sheep until Sammy came skipping out to see what she was doing.
30
Lily slumped into the chair when she got home. ‘It’s been mad today. We’ve not even had time to breathe!’
Cerys put the kettle on as Sammy crawled on his mother’s lap for a cuddle. ‘The postman told me today that they’re having Santa’s sleigh visit in Beaumaris on Saturday, and there’s a little town celebration as he drives through. Should we go?’ She wouldn’t have suggested venturing further afield. Too risky for her, and for Lily too or so she suspected. But Beaumaris would be safe.
Lily frowned, that odd nervous expression that Cerys saw far less of now, but it still returned sometimes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’ll be fun,’ Cerys told her firmly, because Sammy deserved this. Lily needed to learn to enjoy her little boy. Maybe this was part of the problem. Lily didn’t know how to have fun with him.
‘Will it?’ Lily asked in genuine confusion.
‘Yes. Didn’t you love that kind of thing when you were small?’ It was a test really, to see if she was right in how she thought Lily would react. Heartbreakingly she was correct – Lily’s face did that split second crumble that she’d expected before she shuttered up again, just as Cerys knew she would.
And there finally Cerys knew she’d identified part of Lily’s problem. For whatever reason, her own childhood just hadn’t been right. She didn’t need to say anything. It was written over her, as Dilys would say.
‘So you’ll learn to love it now,’ she said softly. ‘It’s never too late. And you’ll learn to see it through Sammy’s eyes and that’s a special kind of magic.’ As soon as the words were out, she realised how much they applied to her too. She also needed to see that special kind of magic again. She missed that so much now her own were grown up and gone, as if there was no sparkle and spell left in life any longer.
They would go, and she’d teach Lily what someone should have taught her a long time ago. It was well overdue that this girl learned the value of that magic. If she was ever to leave here at all, she needed to make sure that was done so that Lily kept that with her. It was what sustained a mother through the long, hard days and the dark, tired nights; past sickness bugs and cleaning up vomit from child and floor, past tantrums and misunderstandings and scribble on the wall, past money worries and fear about pretty much everything. That light in the child’s eyes at times like these, that blew it all away like winter cobwebs when the windows were opened for the Spring.
Cerys planned carefully, using Dilys’s local knowledge as her main informant. Dilys snorted in agreement at the plan. ‘That girl needs some fun,’ she said. They would go down to Beaumaris at two o’clock and get a late lunch at a café. It would be quieter then and Sammy could take his time. Cerys would make brunch to keep him going until then. It meant Lily could still go into work in the morning and finish a few hours early. The whole town would come out for the afternoon events so Angharad always closed the salon at lunchtime on the day of the Christmas Fair.
It felt good to be doing this. She had a purpose again.
Dilys chuckled. ‘You look pleased with yourself.’
‘I am,’ she replied as she cleaned round the kitchen. It sparkled these days. And she remembered how she’d grown too tired to clean her own like this over the past few years, how that heavy dragging in her body had translated to her mind and everything had been such an effort. That had gone, most of it. Where had it started first, in her limbs or her head? It was impossible to say. But she was glad to see the back of it. She almost felt like the woman she used to be again.
‘She needs you,’ Dilys remarked.
‘For now,’ Cerys said, ‘but then she’ll learn and she won’t and that’s how it’s supposed to be.’ Wasn’t it? That’s what had happened with her kids, after all. Gone off and had no use for her now.
‘Did you ever stop needing your mother?’ Dilys scoffed. ‘Mine’s been dead thirty years and I still wish every day that I could see her, get her advice.’
Cerys stopped cleaning and turned round to look at the old woman. ‘What would you ask her today?’
