Page 60 of Good Bad Girl

“Please don’t start that again.”

Frankie smiles. “Mydaughter is perfect. She’s clever, she’s kind, she’s funny... and she’s beautiful. Inside and out. It will be her birthday soon, she’s almost nineteen—”

“Well, you didn’t do your research as thoroughly as you should have. My daughter was born in September and would be—”

“A little older than that, yes. I didn’t know her real birthday when I took her—how could I? So I made one up. And I wanted to pretend she was a little younger and delay her turning eighteen because... well, childhood goes too fast, don’t you think?”

“I think my mother genuinely believed that this girl,yourdaughter, was her missing granddaughter. That’s why she did what she did. It’s quite the scam you people have going on.”

“My daughter wouldn’t scam anyone. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

Clio laughs. “Oh, yes she does.”

“What does that mean?” Frankie asks, but Clio ignores her and turns the radio back on.

A minute later Frankie switches it off again. “I don’t understand why you don’t believe me?”

“Because I know that you’re lying.”

“How?”

“For starters, my little girl had a head of blond curls just like her father. I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on that in the newspapers.”

“Her hair was blond when I took her, but it darkened when she was a toddler. Have you never heard of blond babies growing up to have dark hair?”

“Please. Stop. Talking.”

“I just want to understand why you won’t believe what I am trying to—”

“Because my daughter isdead,” Clio says matter-of-factly. “I feel it. I know it. Here,” she says holding her hand over her heart. “The hospital is the next left. If you drop me off at A and E I’ll be able to find my way from there.”

They drive in silence for the final few minutes, until Frankie pulls over outside the main entrance. “Do you want me to wait?” she asks.

“What for?” the woman in the pink house says.

“I feel bad that you’re alone, but maybe you prefer it that way. Take this, please,” Frankie says. She reaches over, opens the glove compartment, and pulls out an envelope.

Clio stares at it as though it might contain poison. “What is it?” she asks.

“Proof.”

Clio

Clio has been at the hospital for over an hour. She was directed to a large waiting room filled with sorry-looking people, and nobody has spoken to her since. She’s phoned her brother, five times, but Jude didn’t answer. So she is dealing with their mother all by herself, again. She doesn’t sit down, even though there are plenty of chairs. They look grubby and the people sitting on them look less than appealing too. Clio has never been fond of dirt. Or people. She disinfects her consultation room every evening after the last client of the day has left. Their problems make her feel dirty. As do hospitals. The stench of death and despair is making it difficult to breathe. When she can’t stand not knowing what is happening for a minute longer, she stops pacing and approaches the nurse behind the desk.

“I’m Edith Elliot’s daughter,” she says, noticing how the nurse’s face softens instantly. Her eyes fill with sympathy Clio neither wants nor needs.

“A doctor will come out to talk to you about your mother as soon as they can.”

Clio can’t stand not knowing what is going on, not being in control. She hates the sympathetic nurse, she hates the doctors for keeping her waiting, and she hates her mother for causing her endless heartbreak. She hates everyone and everything in this moment and just wants it all to stop. Most of all, she hates herself for feeling and being this way. The maps inside our minds that lead to happiness and sadness are all self-made. We are not born with mapped-out lives, we are the cartographers of our own destiny. Children only know how to love until the world—or their mothers—teach them how to hate.

After what feels like a long time but might only have been a few minutes more, while other people all seem to come and go around her, a doctor finally appears in the doorway. He is too young, too thin, and too tall—as though life has stretched him—and she hopes this isn’t the doctor she’s been waiting for.

“Clio Kennedy?” he asks, as though her name is a question. As if she is a puzzle that nobody—including herself—quite knows how to solve. Clio doesn’t answer straightaway. She feels so alone in this moment, but she couldn’t think of a single person to call to be here with her. Grief is only ever yours, just like guilt; it isn’t something you can share. Clio doesn’t feel like herself. She is struggling tofeelanything at all. But when the tall, thin doctor says her name a second time, she steps forward, finally leaving the aptly named waiting room.

The doctor looks weary. He speaks to her out in the corridor as though he is too busy to go anywhere more private. Doesn’t have time to deliver this news in a more sensitive way. Clio is grateful for that. She doesn’t want this to take any longer than it needs to either.

“I really am very sorry,” he says at the end of his speech, and she wonders how often he says those words to strangers. Every shift? Every hour? “I read your mother’s notes. She had been prescribed heart medication after a previous episode. Was she taking the pills?”

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