No Longer Safe(102)

She glanced at the phone; it was still purring in my hand. ‘Don’t forget – you covered up Charlie’s death and that carries a prison sentence,’ she sneered. ‘If you say anything, you’re going to be in very deep shit yourself, Honey.’

‘Well – you should know. Being jailed for killing your baby! Making out you were in Hollywood, when all the time you were locked up in Holloway! It’s gone too far, Karen. I’m sick of playing the doormat – feeble little Alice who always goes along with everything. I don’t care what happens to me – I’ve had enough of owing you. I’ve had enough of leverage and blackmail. I’m calling the police.’

‘Wait, Alice.’ She reached out, but I took a step away. ‘Please hear my side of things. At least allow me that, will you?’ Her voice was strained. ‘I want you to know what it was like for me. Will you hear me out?’

I put the receiver down, but warily kept my hand on it. Throughout my misty adoration of her I’d never considered what she might truly be capable of until now.

I glanced over at Brody to check he was okay. He was playing with the little piano Mark had brought and chuckling away to himself.

She leant wearily against the doorframe.

‘I didn’t know enough about shaken baby syndrome at the time and there was no one to help me. I was left completely on my own with a useless lawyer who had it in for me. No one likes a woman who attacks a kid.’

She picked at stray paint on the door frame without looking at me. ‘I was already two months pregnant when we finished at Leeds.’

I gasped. Of course. If she’d had a baby in early 2008 that would be right. She hadn’t said a word at the time.

‘I met a guy called Travis one night at the local cinema and we hung out for a while, but he wasn’t about to ditch his wife and family for me – I knew that.’

‘But weren’t you with Roland, then?’

‘Only as a fall-back. He wasn’t the father.’

She said it so casually. By now, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the way Karen treated relationships with such indifference.

She carried on. ‘Mel was always a sickly child and she seemed to cry non-stop. A number of people – I thought they were my friends – had seen me fly off the handle about it, but never at Mel herself. I never touched her. I punched cushions, I screamed, I threw chairs at the wall, but I never laid a finger on her.

‘It tore the inside out of me, feeling her go limp in my arms, like that. I fought to get her to breathe, I tried everything…’ I heard the bones crunch in her jaw. This wasn’t an act.

‘Can you imagine what that was like?’ she said, desolation flooding her voice.

‘Dreadful…awful…it must have been,’ I said, meaning it.

‘I didn’t know then that it was going to get worse.’

She went over to Brody and picked him up. Straight away, he became agitated, flapping his arms against her chest and kicking out.

‘Mammaa…’ he cried, pulling away from her.

‘I know, sweetheart…I’m sorry.’

She tenderly kissed his forehead and held him like he was the most precious thing in the world.

‘The trial was torture – I was trying to grieve with everyone around me pointing the finger and hating me. Then getting put away like that nearly finished me off. I kept looking for her in prison, even though I knew she wasn’t there. I ached with a pain I never knew was possible.’

I let out a whimper, like an injured cat.

Brody reached out for the playhouse, so she put him back and held up a mobile of feathers and sparkly butterflies for him. ‘I made this,’ she said. ‘He seems to like it.’

She hooked it over the side of the box and returned to me as I stayed where I was, hovering by the phone. I was horrified to my core by what she was telling me.

She pressed her fingers into her forehead, fighting back tears. ‘I don’t know how I got through the rest of my sentence. I lived like a small shrew, going in and out of my cage to get fed and going back in again to sleep. The other inmates hated me being amongst them. I wasn’t one of them, I was a monster in their eyes. They could only see me as a child hater, a baby-killer, and they made me pay for it.

I was beaten over and over. They knew where to cause the most damage. In the end I was rushed to intensive care and they all got what they wanted. I lost the chance to have another child ever again. I was pronounced infertile.’

She dropped her gaze to the carpet and I wanted nothing more than to scoop her into my arms and let her slump against me. But I stayed still. I knew if I moved I might lose my nerve and give in to her. I had to stand against her on this. I just had to.