‘I was still in shock lying there when she hit me two more times before I passed out. When I came round she was gone. I don’t know, some kind of homing signal or something kicked in. I just wanted to be with her. Wanted to see her. So I started to go to where I knew she would be – on the seafront. I don’t really remember much else. I mean, I know I was on the seafront, so I must have been able to find her, but the only thing I really remember after that was waking up here.’
‘That wasn’t an easy listen,’ Alain says to me as we walk back towards where he’s parked his car. We were all subdued after Logan had spoken. Quiet and contemplative. We left not long after that as it felt awkward and uncomfortable to be sitting there, chatting about anything else and we obviously weren’t going to keep going over and over his attack.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ I reply.
At Alain’s car, we stand in the same awkward atmosphere we thought we’d left behind in Logan’s room.
‘Poppy,’ Alain suddenly says. He has clearly come to a decision about something, wants to say something significant. Something that will change a lot of things.
I know what he is going to say and I’m not sure I want him to do it. To name it. I don’t want anyone to name it, but I especially don’t want him to say it.
‘Yes, Al?’
‘I . . . erm . . . well . . . do you want to go shopping for an engagement ring in the next few days?’
I beam at him. Grateful that he doesn’t do it. If he had, it would have ruined everything between us. ‘That would be brilliant. Let’s take Betina with us, otherwise we’ll be in big trouble.’
He grins at the consequences we’d face if we even thought about leaving our daughter out of something like buying an engagement ring. She’d carried on screaming ‘What did I miss?’ for a good few minutes before we’d explained that we were getting married and Daddy was coming to stay with us for ever.
‘Are you coming home now?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘I have a couple of things to do. But I’ll be back at a decent time. Certainly in time for bed.’
What I have to do won’t take long, but it is important and necessary.
poppy
Now
She still parks in the same place as she did all those years ago.
She has a different car, but she parks it in the same place near her office. I know this because I started watching her again. Not lots, nothing like when I was stalking her back in the days after I left prison. It’s just now, I need to talk to her. And I fear if I go to her house she won’t open the door after last time.
So I checked and her car is different but her job is the same and her parking spot is the same. And here she is, leaving work, checking all around like she always does because she’s used to someone following her. My legs don’t want to move, don’t want to approach her, but they have to. They have to go and do this.
‘Hello, Serena,’ I say, coming up behind her.
Her arm freezes mid-push of the button to open her car door. A beat or two later, she inhales deeply then turns towards me. ‘Are you stalking me again?’
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘But only for a couple of days.’
She lowers her head in frustration. ‘Why? What do you want? To ask me to get my daughter to admit she’s an abuser again? To find out what you can get me locked up for?’
‘No, nothing like that. Look, I need to talk to you.’
‘Get lost, Poppy.’
‘I am lost. But I still need to talk to you.’
She runs her hands over her face, and I watch her beautiful features contort in anger and frustration. ‘About what?’ she almost screeches. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’
‘Logan’s . . . Logan’s lying and I don’t know what to do about it.’
We’ve come to Granny Morag’s beach hut. Technically, it’s mine, yes, but it doesn’t feel like mine. It’ll always be hers, even when I pass it on to Betina. This place was so much about Granny Morag and I like to think of it as hers because she was the one person whose belief in me never wavered, not for a moment. If I think of it as hers, then she’s still here with me.
The locks open quite easily because Alain regularly brings Betina down here, especially now that we’re officially into summer. They had quite a cool little routine going without me, where he would pick her up from school and bring her to the beach before getting something for dinner. Serena marches in and sits on the left-hand side of the bench at the back of the hut. We painted the bench seat a bubblegum-pink to match the door colour that Betina chose so it’s like being inside a stick of rock in here.
Serena took a lot of convincing to not swear at me and drive away, and then even more to come here to talk to me. I don’t blame her, not after the stunt I pulled the other week. She perches on the bubblegum-pink seat and waits for me to talk to her as promised.
‘Do you still love him?’ I ask her. I have to know. I have to know if it’s just me who’s defective, who has something wrong with her.
‘No, Poppy, I don’t.’ She knows who I’m talking about without me having to name him. And she confirms what I knew: there is something wrong with me. ‘And neither do you,’ she adds. ‘You just think you do.’
‘That’s just it, I don’t think I do, I actually do. I can’t tell anyone else, especially not Alain. I still have feelings for him even though he’s been dead thirty years.’
‘Evan asked me why I loved him a while ago. Not why did I stay with him, not why didn’t I leave, but what was it about him that I loved. I thought it was my memory loss that had made me forget the specifics of what I loved about him. And then Evan said that maybe I didn’t love him, not in the end. Maybe I had loved him at the start, but I just convinced myself I did as time went on because it was the only way to cope with the trauma. And afterwards, looking back, it was the only thing that could account for my staying for so long. No one believed us when we said what he was like. Much easier to believe we were slutty, murderous vixens than accept he found a way to terrify two people into staying with him no matter what. Better for your brain to believe you loved him than to accept you endured all that brutality for nothing.’
‘Your husband said that?’
‘More or less.’
‘Dr Evan is really wise.’
‘Stay away from him, Poppy. I’m not fifteen any more.’
‘Didn’t mean it like that.’ I say that in a distracted manner because I’m trying assimilate what she’s just said. If that’s true, that would make so much sense. It would explain everything. Everything. Why I still feel this way. Why I have so much hate for him but always find it tempered with love. Or maybe just tempered by a need to find a way for my mind to cope with it all. Love erases all mistakes, after all. Love makes everything all right, doesn’t it?
‘Why am I here, Poppy?’ she asks after more than a few minutes have passed.
‘I think Logan is . . . I think Logan is lying. About what happened the day he was hurt. I’ve heard his story three times and each time it’s different. And not just a little different or, you know, embellished. It’s different, like he’s forgotten what he said before and is making it up.’