I learned to tell lies as a child—I had to to survive—but I’m getting too old to be doing it now. I’m suffocating in them.
I told Doll there was no way Liam could be involved but I know he probably was.
He did some drugs when he was younger. Well, quite a lot, but he never touched any of the nasty stuff. I’d have known. I’d had practice with Mum.
I was living in Brighton by the time we met. I’d been in foster care in Wales until I was seventeen and I couldn’t wait to leave but I didn’t want to go back to London. I’d always wanted to come back to Ebbing. It was such a brilliant place—I was only little but we were outside all the time. Out of Mum’s hair.
We were outside all the time in London too, but there was trouble round every corner. Street kids don’t play nice. They’re always out for what they can get. What they can get you to do. I was too young to matter to them but Phil was older. More visible.
But Ebbing is small and I thought someone might remember Mum. Might imagine I was like her. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” my foster mum used to say. So I went to Brighton, where I could be someone else but still feed seagulls. Liam thinks I’m mad—he hates them. Says they’re criminals with wings.
He sat next to me on a bus and smiled at me and said sorry for the plaster dust coming off him in clouds. Got me talking, found out which pub I worked in, made me laugh. Made me give him my phone number.
I tried to ignore him but Liam didn’t give up. Then he told me he loved me one night as he walked me home to my little flat. And I cried. Proper crying for the first time in years. The thing is, I hadn’t realized that I’d needed to hear that from someone. I was nineteen and alone. I’d forgotten what it was like to be wanted. Liam wanted to be my family and I was so tempted. But I made him promise there’d be no more getting high with his mates. And I trusted him.
I loved looking after him in our little flat high above the seafront—cooking vegetables in my only saucepan to go with the shop pies and washing his T-shirts in the sink, like a proper wifey. I knew he struggled with moving on from being one of the lads some days but Cal was the turning point. Liam’s face when I told him I was pregnant and then when he held his son for the first time. I’ll never forget it. You could see the change in him instantly.
But nothing is forever, is it?
“It was only a bit of weed, Dee,” he said when I smelled it on him. “I just needed something to make me feel better with the baby waking every five minutes.”
I put him on the sofa so he could get some sleep at night and sniffed the air around him like a police dog every time he came home. But the mania to keep him on the straight and narrow exhausted me. I decided to let him be.
Until the night he fell asleep on the sofa with the baby on his knee and Cal rolled himself over. I lurched forward and caught our son—and the smell of Liam’s last joint on the baby’s hair. That was the finish of it.
“I’ll never do it again, Dee.” Liam wept as I packed. “Please don’t leave me.”
“Don’t put this on me! You’re the one putting our child’s life at risk.”
He went down on his knees and begged me. And I remembered one of the dads doing the same with my mum but she’d gone anyway. She’d always left, dragging us with her. I sat and wept. I didn’t want to be her. I didn’t want Cal to be me.
“I will never let you down again, Dee,” Liam whispered.
And I agreed I’d stay if we could move away.
We found a house to rent in Ebbing. I suppose it was where I’d always been heading: like a homing pigeon circling back to a place where I’d felt safe—happy, even.
* * *
—
I go back downstairs and start putting washing into the machine. One of my bras has got caught round Liam’s shorts, and when I finally pull them apart, a crumpled paper comes out of a pocket. Bloody tissues—I tell him every day to empty his pockets. It’s a serviette from McDonald’s. When did you go there? I think. There’s something written on it—a number that has smudged on the thin paper. And a name.
Thirty-six
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019
Dee
Cal is delivered home an hour after the police leave. Mikey’s mum, Liz, can’t meet my eye and I wonder if she’s heard about Liam being arrested. But she doesn’t say anything.
“Here he is,” she says. “He’s been good as gold. We’re always happy to have him. Anytime. You know that, Dee.”