Page 80 of The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up
She keeps her eyes fixed on me, doesn’t look away. ‘Another time,’ she says. And then, ‘Are you going to call her?’
‘Call who?’
‘Your mum. If she’s missing.’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll go upstairs and do that. She won’t have gone far, though. You know my mum.’
I hate lying to her. Hate keeping secrets. But sometimes there’s no other way.
41
NOW
I wake up breathing hard, and there is sweat gathered around my hairline. Mum. There was a call, a frantic phone call, and I was about to leave for the shelter when I took it. She didn’t phone often. When she did, it was always something important. I put the phone to my ear, said hello. And then those words.
‘He’s found me. Shelley, please come. He’s found me.’
I didn’t think, didn’t answer, didn’t call the police or Matt or anyone else. I just got in the car and started driving towards her. Because she was my mum, after all, and she needed me. I’d only been driving for a few minutes when it happened. I misjudged the roundabout, thought I had time to get around ahead of that huge people carrier, but I didn’t. I saw the panicked look on the driver’s face, saw that she was doing what she could to stop, as was I. But it was already happening by then. Our cars were colliding, the steel and glass bending and shattering.
I feel sick at the memory. I reach for my phone and call Matt. ‘Are you at the hospital?’
‘Yes. Do you need something? I can come, or phone Dee…’
‘I need to go to my mum. Can you come?’ I hear Mum’s voice in my mind again.Please come.
‘Give me half an hour,’ he says.
I know I can’t ask him to be faster but half an hour seems like an endless amount of time to have to fill. I search for Mum’s number, call her. But there’s no answer. What if he’s killed her? What if, when I was in that hospital and Mick was in the same building, going about his daily life, he knew that my mum was lying lifeless somewhere because of him? I feel cold, go upstairs to pull on a jumper. And then I pace the living room, waiting for Matt.
When there’s a knock at the door, I feel overcome with relief for this man. This man who stands by me and shows up, no questions asked.
‘Can you take me to her?’ I ask. ‘I need to find out if she’s okay.’
‘Do you remember where she is?’
I speak without thinking. ‘She’s in Nottingham.’
‘I’ll drive,’ he says.
It takes the best part of an hour to get there and I am anxious, so I don’t say much. Matt fills some of the silences with questions, but he keeps things light. Doesn’t ask anything that relates to my memory. I want to go into all that, want to peer into the corners and pull out the memories that are lurking there, but that’s for another day. Right now, all I can focus on is this. She called me, asked me to come. And I tried, I went racing off to her, but I had an accident and lost my memory and now almost two weeks have passed and it might be too late.
I remember the question I needed to ask Matt. ‘Have you been in touch with her? While I’ve been in hospital? Does she know what happened to me?’
He takes his eyes off the road for the briefest moment, and I see that he’s weighing something up. I remember him carrying boxes. Helping to move her in. First to that shared house, and then later to the small terraced house she lives in now, alone.
‘Matt, the road!’
He looks away from me, straight ahead, and we weren’t in any danger but I’m nervous about being in a car and I don’t need to tell him why.
‘I haven’t been able to get hold of her,’ he says. ‘I’ve tried, lots of times.’
There’s a stone in my stomach, smooth and heavy, and it’s sinking. ‘And my number won’t have been working, if she’s tried to call me.’
Yesterday, I finally sorted out a proper phone, and I’ve carried my number across. But there’s no way of knowing what calls or messages I received in the intervening days.
When we pull up outside her house, I’m reluctant to get out of the car. There is something to be said for being trapped in this unknowing. If we find out today that she is dead, there’s no undoing that. And yet. There’s the flipside, too. She might answer the door and have a reason for being unavailable and another one for calling me, terrified, saying that Mick had found her. Matt turns to me, unclips his seatbelt.
‘Ready?’
