I can tell she doesn’t believe me. I’m not sure I do either.
Mum smiles and puts down the uneaten cake, then takes a sip of her tea instead, before adding another squeeze of honey to her cup.
“Don’t you worry about me. I can take care of myself.”
There are at least two sides to every story; yours and mine, ours and theirs, his and hers.
I always prefer my own.
But maybe it’s for the best, that no one else ever knows the truth about what happened. I doubt they would believe me anyway. Nobody suspects a little old lady with dementia of killing people.
I’ve never really had a problem with my memory. If there are things I’ve forgotten over the years, it’s because I chose to forget them. But the cancer diagnosis was real. Which meant I would be leaving that house one way or another, and someone else would move in and find my past mistakes buried in the garden.
The idea of people knowing the truth about what I did to my husband all those years ago was almost too much to bear. Bad stories about people stick like honey, and I didn’t want to be remembered that way. Most of my life was spent being and doing good. He was a violent man, and I’ve always thought of it as self-defense, not murder. Of course I wish things could have been different, but regret is not the same as an apology. I am not sorry for what I did; I just never wanted anyone to find out.
Burying my husband beneath the vegetable patch seemed like such a clever idea. It was somewhere I thought nobody would ever think to look. I found his wedding ring one day, while digging up potatoes. He was the real reason I could never leave that house, but I know Anna has taken care of things for me now.
For years, I thought she left home when she was sixteen because, deep down, she knew what I had done. Anna found me covered in blood, as well as mud from the garden, on the afternoon I killed him. She decided to leave Blackdown as soon as she finished school the following year, and rarely came back. I thought it was my fault; that she hated me for taking her father away from her.
I made myself content with looking at old photos of my only child, then a few years later, made do with watching her on my TV screen, reading the news. She looked so happy and healthy without me in her life. So I accepted the rare visits and infrequent phone calls, grateful whenever she did get in touch.
It was Jack’s idea to let me look after Charlotte for the night, so that he could take Anna out for her birthday. I’d hardly spent any time at all with my baby granddaughter, so I was delighted when Anna agreed to it. I thought it might bring us closer together; Anna having a daughter of her own, and knowing how it feels to be a mother. But Charlotte died. It wasn’t my fault, but it felt like she blamed me anyway.
The drinking started again after that. It numbed my pain. When people in town confused me being drunk with me having dementia, I had an idea. A good one. It brought Jack back into my life, which I hoped would mean Anna would come home out of pity too. All I had to do was pretend to be a bit forgetful, and wander the streets a few times in my nightdress. Jack insisted on me seeing a doctor; that’s the only reason I found out about the cancer, not that I told him or anyone else the truth about that.
When I started clearing out the house, I left Anna’s room until last. I’d kept it exactly the same as it was when she still lived there. I noticed some soot around the bottom of the fireplace, which was strange given it hadn’t been used for years, not since she left.
I got my cleaning kit out, and reached up inside the chimney to brush away the grime that had gathered. That’s when a dirty, singed, torn-up letter fell down into the grate. I stared at it for a while, before picking up the pieces of paper covered in Anna’s familiar handwriting. She’d obviously tried to burn them, but they had got sucked up into the flue instead. I knelt down on her bedroom floor and arranged the pieces like a puzzle.
It was a suicide note.
I don’t know how many times I read it, but day turned into night outside the window, and the thoughts inside my mind were just as dark.
She described the terrible things that had happened on the night of her sixteenth birthday, and I felt sick with disgust and mad with rage all at once. I read about the drugs Helen Wang had given her, the men Rachel Hopkins tried to make her have sex with, and how Zoe Harper mutilated our cat as a warning not to tell anyone.
It was a long time ago, but I remembered that night.
We rarely had guests, but I agreed to leave Anna alone with those girls from St. Hilary’s, thinking that they were her friends. She was so excited that I couldn’t say no. I watched her spend every evening for a week making friendship bracelets for each of them, and even gave her the red-and-white thread from my sewing basket.