Page 23 of Good Bad Girl

A police officer leads Clio toward the back of the care home, away from the main entrance which is now a hive of activity. She glances over her shoulder to see the hallway filled withpeople wearing forensic suits. Once outside, she walks along the street until she is far enough away from the care home, the cordon, the police cars, and DCI Chapman to not be seen. Then she takes some deep breaths and tries to calm herself. She managed to keep it together until this moment—it’s amazing what our bodies are capable of when it comes to self-preservation—but now she is trembling all over. Her legs feel too shaky to walk on, as though she might fall if she tries, so she leans against a wall to get her balance. If people knew she had been questioned by the police, about amurder, she doesn’t think she could live it down. She could lose everything she’s worked so hard to hold on to. Clio hasn’t smoked for over twenty years but she’d kill for a cigarette right now. She could killhimtoo. She is tired of always being the one to deal with things and figure everything out on her own, so she tries to callhimagain. His phone seems to be permanently switched off and she wonders what lies he’ll tell this time: working late, dinner with a client, forgot his charger. Or perhaps he’ll surprise her with a new excuse. It seems doubtful, having known him for all these years. Predictably he doesn’t answer, so for now she has no choice but to hail a taxi and go home.

Back in the pink house she locks the doors, then pulls all the blinds and curtains. After that she turns off the lights and heads up to bed. She checks to see if there are any emails from clients wanting to book sessions. There aren’t. Instead, her inbox is clogged full of emails about Mother’s Day. It makes Clio want to unsubscribe from every company that sent them and she deletes them all. Sometimes she wishes she could unsubscribe from her life and sign up for a new one. She tries to sleep, when she can’t she tries to meditate, but the thoughts about her mother and what happened today are too loud.

Clio replays today’s events over and over, trying to imagine a different outcome, aware that her own doubts betray her truefeelings. People only question whether they did the right thing when they fear what they did was wrong.

How did it come to this? The memories flash in her mind like snapshots. Some of the ones that haunt her the hardest are from her early childhood, when it was just the two of them: her and her mother. The worst are from a couple of decades ago. The woman Edith was then is almost completely unrecognizable from the small, frail, elderly woman she saw in the care home today. Thoughts of her mother make Clio feel a mixture of anger, hurt, and guilt, just like always, but she has other things to worry about. Like not being able to afford to pay the mortgage this month. Life seems determined to replace one problem with another; there is always something to worry about.

She will call the bank in the morning, see if they can wait a little while longer.

Then she’ll call the lawyer who has changed her mother’s will.

Clio doesn’t know how to solve the problem of DCI Chapman.

She callshimagain, not caring about the late hour. With each unanswered ring another little piece of her dwindling patience expires. Clio doesn’t leave a message. She stares at the ceiling in the darkened room, longing for sleep but unable to switch off her thoughts. She wonders what she would say to herself if she were one of her clients.

“When did the problems in your relationship with your mother begin?”

That’s the question she would ask but it is a difficult one to answer. It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when her relationship with her mother unraveled, there were so many. There was the time Clio announced she didn’t want to be Catholic anymore. She stopped believing in God around the same time she stopped believing in Santa Claus, and her churchgoing mother didn’t speak to her for weeks. What is a child supposed to do when they don’t believe in the same things as their parents? There was the time Clio ranaway as a teenager, her mother never really forgave her for what happened then. And then there was that terrible Mother’s Day that destroyed whatever was left of their relationship. No wonder they had become strangers who just happened to be related.

She scrolls through a list of words in her mind before finding the right one.

Estranged.That’s the word people use nowadays.

Clio looks it up on her phone, unsure why, as though the meaning of the word might explain why it happened:

estrangedno longer close or affectionate to someone; alienated

The etymology of the word offers little comfort: taken from the French wordestrange, which traces back to the Latin word:

extraneareto treat as a stranger

extraneousnot belonging to the family

Clio used to have a family. She made her own when the one she was born into rejected her. She used to have people to love and be loved by, but not anymore. She glances around the beautiful bedroom and is proud of how far she has come from the horrible little bungalow where she grew up. The pink house really is a thing of beauty, a little big for one person perhaps, but Clio is never really alone. Her guilt and her grief are always with her. Like unwelcome tenants. She wanted her life to be about more than this or, perhaps, what she really wanted was less. It’s funny, the versions of ourselves we show to the world and the ones we leave at home. Clio has been so many different people, to so many different people, that she sometimes struggles to remember how to be herself. Which is even sadder now that all of those people she was trying to please are gone.

The truth, which often hurts more than a lie, is that Clio’s mother didn’t love her. Didn’t like her. Didn’t want to know her. Abandoning a child doesn’t always mean leaving them. The weight of rejection is still heavy even after all these years, but she’s grown stronger as she has grown older, strong enough to rise above it.

Her mother didn’t love her because she wasn’t the daughter she wanted her to be.

That’s the truth.

She picks up her phone and dials again. This time she does leave a message.

“We need to talk. Things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. If this ends badly for me you ought to know it will end badly for you too.”

Patience

I pour what is left of the wine into Edith’s tumbler and my mug. I didn’t think I could eat a thing after what happened earlier, but I’ve managed to devour half a pizza.

“Can I interest you in the final slice?” I ask Edith, holding out the box. Dickens sniffs the air and wags his tail. “Notyou.”

“No, thank you, Ladybug. It was a real treat though, I haven’t had a takeaway for years!”

“Are you sure it’s okay for you to drink another glass?”

“Unless you are expecting me to drive a car somewhere or operate heavy machinery. I did work on a building site once upon a time.”

I smile. “No heavy machinery, not tonight anyway. Didyouenjoy all the jobs you had?”

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