Page 63 of Insomnia

I stare, surprised. “You were there?”

“Gosh, you really don’t remember much.” She pulls one knee up under her chin, all fluid and catlike, and then lights the joint. “Yes, you came to my house. You ran through the rain. Soaking and terrified.”

“The nice lady,” I say, as pieces of the past fall into place, and I look at her, eyes wide. “That’s what we used to call you.”

“Did you? That’s lovely to hear. I lived in a little downstairs flat at the other end of the street. Your mother was very kind to me. We looked after each other. It’s why, I suppose, in the aftermath, Ispent so long wondering if there was something I could have done to stop her. I don’t think there was. It was such a shock. But I do wish that they’d let me keep you both. It made me so mad they wouldn’t even let me foster you. Especially after the tragedy with that family, and then you both ended up in different foster homes and you could have both been with me all that time. I would have loved you like my own.”

My head is spinning. This I wasn’t expecting. “You wanted to keep us?”

“Of course! I loved your mum. I loved you. I said I’d move, if necessary, because of the proximity to your old home.” She shakes her head slightly.

“But the social services weren’t having any of it. I was a twenty-nine-year-old domestic violence survivor, and there were police incidents on record from before I’d fled my marriage. A miscarriage he caused, leaving me unable to have children of my own.” She speaks matter-of-factly, but I can see ghosts of a life that could have been in her gray eyes behind the wisps of smoke. “Even though I was the victim in that situation, I wasn’t considered emotionally stable enough to tick all the boxes on their forms. I didn’t have a big enough home. Didn’t earn enough money. Was too big a link to your mother. Basically, they’d just decided I wasn’t good enough and that was that.”

“I did come and find you though.” She looks over her tea. “When you were at university. You were pregnant. You looked so happy and you and Phoebe were living together, and I wasn’t sure bringing the past back into your lives was the right thing. So I never actually said hello. Maybe that was a mistake. It’s always so hard to know things in the moment, isn’t it? I suppose that’s why hindsight is so wonderful.”

This is all a revelation and I feel a small flicker of optimism. Maybe if she helps me understand the past, I can shake this fearthat I’m going to repeat it. “You didn’t have any idea that our mother was going to do what she did?” My lawyer’s brain is struggling to believe it. “How? Surely you could see she was falling apart? Not sleeping?” I try not to sound accusatory, but it’s difficult. I don’t understand it at all.

“I know. I can see that from your perspective it must seem crazy, but I’d known your mum from before you were born. She was my best friend in a lot of ways. When your father was there, I didn’t see her much, I don’t think she was allowed out very often—she was too beautiful to live with such an angry man. He was older and resented her beauty, just like he resented Phoebe when she came along, and even though Patricia didn’t want a second child, he insisted that she have one. And then as soon as you were born, he vanished. Tied her down with all this responsibility and left her. He disappeared down south, to Cornwall I think, to live with someone he met on one of his work trips. Died in a boating accident a couple of years later. It’s how she managed to cope on her own when she started struggling. His life insurance paid off the house.”

I don’t ask any more about our father, although it’s strange to hear of him as an actual person rather than just a noun. Father. No shape or meaning to him, but even after everything, it still hurts to hear her say so bluntly that my mother didn’t want me.

“I’m not surprised she never wanted me. Phoebe said that’s when she changed, after I was born. She must have hated me.”

“Oh god, no! Never think that!” Her eyes are wide, surprised, as she leans forward. “She loved you fiercely. So, so much. From the very moment you were born. She loved you both, but you—you were her special girl. There was something about you that made her like a tigress. She wanted to protect you. She hadn’t wanted a second child because—well, there was a history of second children in her family having... problems.”

“You mean going mad?” My stomach churns and my mouth is suddenly greasy. “She used to tell me I’d go mad like her.”

“Madness is a strong word.”

“I’m not sure you can call what she did to Phoebe anything else.”

“Maybe.” She tops up my tea. “But she was such a kind woman. So thoughtful of other people.Attuned,I guess is the word. But she was always a little fragile. Maybefragile’s not right. Ethereal. She said sometimes that she thought she wasput together wrong.That she had bad genes. Her own mother wouldn’t let up on it: whenever she misbehaved, it was because she was the second child. Bad blood. It left Patricia haunted by the past. She was so afraid of it. But oh, she loved you. So much pride in her eyes when she talked about you. How clever you were. How you could read earlier than all the other kids in nursery school. How you made her laugh. How you could get Phoebe out of her black moods.”

I wonder where all these relatives evaporated to when we were left orphans. My mother’s siblings and parents. None came to claim us, although I’m sure the social services would have tried them. Maybe because there were two of us. Maybe they didn’t want anything to do with the second child with bad blood. At least if I do totally lose my marbles, I think wryly, I don’t have to worry in that regard. Phoebe is more than ready to step into the shoes she’s forcing me out of and take over my family.

“So, what happened to her?” I ask. “What changed?”

“I’m not really sure.” She lets out a long sigh. “I mean, this second child thing, it doesn’t even make sense and she knew that. As if your genes know which number sibling you are? It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? She’d laugh about it and talk about how messed up her family must have been to believe it. It’s not like it even happened toeverysecond child. Sometimes generations skipped completely.And I figure, if you look at most families, in every generation there’s someone who finds coping in the world difficult at some point, so it’s not exactly a curse on the Bournett name.”

“That’s a nice way of putting going insane.” I sip my tea. I’m glad she’s got thick ceramic cups like you get in a Chinese restaurant. Anything more delicate and I’d probably break it, I’m gripping it so hard.

“She was filled with dread. Specifically, for you. Looking back, it did start after you were born. Little things at first. Worrying about where you were all the time. Even though Phoebe was the far more accident-prone and adventurous child, she would panic if you were out of her sight. As if some danger might befall you. Then she’d have odd moments when I’d find her staring into space and have to snap her out of it. She’d say she was lost in her own thoughts and laugh it off and that was that. I didn’t question it. But in that last year, those episodes got more frequent, and I could see she was worrying about them.” She takes another long inhale on the spliff.

“The day I realized there might be something wrong with her was the day she almost set the house on fire. I popped over one afternoon to return a book, let myself in—she always left the back door unlocked at that point if she was in—and found the chip pan smoking and about to burst into flames. She was upstairs, staring out the window in the hall that looked over the garden. You were tugging at her legs, crying and so distraught. You were shrieking by the time I reached you, so loud I thought you’d seriously hurt yourself. Your face was bright red and you were shouting “Mummy, Mummy”over and over, but she didn’t even know you were there. She was like a statue, just staring out at the garden, her hands pressed against the glass, her mouth open. Only when I shook her, and I meanreallyshook her, did she finally snap out of it.”

My skin is prickling all over. I have no recollection of that dayand yet I’ve bought a house with a beautiful window that looks out over the garden and I’ve stood at it at night, just as Nina is describing my mother did, my hands pressed against the glass, my mouth open. I cringe, remembering Will finding me like that. And did he hear me—

“That was the first time I heard her say those numbers too,” Nina says, cutting through my thoughts, and I want to cry. I was saying the numbers when Will saw me at our window. Time once again folds in on itself, me and my mother, mirror reflections of each other. Did Nina shake my mother by the arms like I shook Ben? Like she shook me?I just want to sleep!

“She was appalled. And frightened,” Nina continues. “I went with her to the doctor and they did all the tests but found nothing wrong with her. Nothing physical anyway. She withdrew a bit after that. Worrying. Do you remember the practice drills?”

“What practice drills?” I scan the files in my head but nothing pops out.

“She worried that something like the chip pan would happen again and she made you and Phoebe practice running down to my house for help. And if I wasn’t in you were to go to Christine Wright—the librarian who lived on the next street whose husband was always home because he’d had a spinal injury at work.”

I remember Phoebe gripping my hand as we ran through the rain tothe nice lady’shouse. Phoebe has never talked about any drills. She must remember them, surely? But how much do we remember of anything? Memory. We rely on it so heavily for everything we know about ourselves and those around us, but actually we remember so little. Just wisps of emotions or a smell or a moment. Corrupted files in our heads. Pages missing, torn or burned. Disks unreadable. Memories are like time, constantly slipping from our grasp.

“How long before her fortieth birthday did all this happen?”

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