Page 60 of The Tapes
He doesn’t laugh, waiting for a response I’m not sure I can give. Perhaps I have a proper reason to be here but maybe I’m a sicko who needs reminding of what I threw away. The hot tub could’ve been mine, the washing line with the drying swimming costumes, the deck with the perfect bloody sun.
I tell Henry everything. That I found a cassette among Dad’s things, with a recording of Mum saying that she wasn’t missing and had instead been killed. That she claimed to know the identity of the Earring Killer – but the recording quality is poor and perhaps she never named the person anyway.
Henry watches me for a moment and presses back in his sofa. I told Nicola’s father and he asked if I recorded it myself. I wanted to tell Liam but he watched me with such a careful stare that I know he was wondering if I’d been drinking again. I talked to my brother and he said the women in our family are trouble and that he wants no part of it.
I just want someone to trust me.
‘Do you believe her?’ Henry asks.
A shrug and, from nowhere, I have to gulp away a lump in my throat. ‘I don’t know. She said she robbed a bank on the same tape.’
That gets a crinkle of the brow. ‘Why’d she say that?’ he asks.
‘You know why.’
There’s the slightest hint of a nod – because my mother loved Henry, and he knew about her fluid relationship with thetruth. She would tell him rambling stories about an exciting youth involving seductions and adventures at a university she never attended. He’d listen and nod, tell her how fabulous it all sounded. They both knew the game but he was polite enough not to say anything.
‘I listened to a few of the tapes,’ I tell him. ‘She calls herself a kleptomaniac and says she stole a book about it. She knew she had impulse control issues.’
‘And she says she didn’t disappear? She thought she was going to be killed?’
‘Right.’
A pause. ‘So… do you believe her?’
A longer silence now. The same question as before. ‘I think I do.’
Henry considers this and then has a mouthful of the water. He swills it around before swallowing, as he always did. Some things never change.
There is another life in which I wasn’t a bad drunk who loved drinking. Where I wasn’t handed an ultimatum between alcohol and my marriage. Or one in which I was – but picked him. Henry thought he was helping and I thought I was right. Neither of us were happy, not then anyway.
‘Do you believe she knows who the Earring Killer is?’
I consider that, too. It’s not quite the same answer. ‘I don’t think she was making it up. She could’ve been wrong but I think shebelievedshe knew who it was.’
Henry drums his fingers on the side of the chair.Tap-tap-tap-tapin rapid succession. He’s done this for as long as I’ve known him.
‘If she says she was going to be killed, does that mean she thought the Earring Killer would get her?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
More drumming of the fingers. Despite everything between us, the ultimatums (his) and the broken promises (mine), our break-up was as amicable as could be. Henry could have challenged me for custody of Faith, and perhaps he’d have won. He didn’t because he trusted that our daughter was better placed with me. He never had to do that for me, yet he did.
‘Have you told the police?’ he asks.
‘Told them what, though? Mum recorded a tape thirteen years ago? In one place she says she robbed a bank, when I know she didn’t – but in another she says she has been killed. Oh, and though she doesn’t say it outright, maybe it was the Earring Killer who got her?’ It all comes out in one breathless release, and then: ‘Plus, you know about me and the police…’
He nods, because, of course, he does. Before he can reply, there’s a crackle from a baby monitor I hadn’t noticed. It’s on a step beneath the main part of the table and Henry stretches to pick it up, tapping something on the front to silence it.
‘I’ve got to nip upstairs,’ he says.
As Henry hurries inside, I shift a fraction back into the dwindling sun. Ahead of the deck, a tidy square of lawn stretches towards a row of solid-wood vegetable boxes at the bottom of the garden. This will be Tiffany’s thing. My former husband is many things, but not a gardener.
I go to have a look anyway.
Mum loved Henry to the point that I sometimes thought she preferred him to me. I was resentful at times – but, ultimately, what’s not to love? He’s kind and funny; patient and understanding. We didn’t break up because I had a problem; we broke up because I enjoyed having it. He loves his kids and I know first-hand he’s a good man. I didn’t deserve him – and, unfortunately, he realised it.
At the bottom of the garden, one of the boxes has a small triangle card with carrots, while the adjacent one is potatoes.There are raspberry vines attached to the fence in the third, then cucumbers in the next. I pluck the card and read it, before slipping it back into the soil, then doing a lap of the garden. Back on the deck, I can hear Henry upstairs singing to his daughter, trying to send her back to sleep with what sounds like a lullaby version of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’.He always wanted Faith to be far more into Oasis than she is, and I guess this is attempt number two.
