I steel myself and ring her back. ‘Rebecca, it’s Ruth.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.
‘I know. Oh Rebecca.’
‘What happened?’
‘We don’t really know anything yet.’ I have learnt that I’m not the only one wanting answers; it’s natural to seek understanding, comprehension for something so hard to believe. ‘Nothing will happen for a while, with the funeral,’ I tell her. ‘They, erm… they have to wait so an independent post-mortem can be done if there’s going to be a trial.’
There has to be a trial, doesn’t there? What purgatory would it be to never know who’d hurt Lizzie, to never know the truth?
You were a bogeyman back then. I reinvented you time and again during that long day. The vicious stalker with a fatal obsession, back to carry out your threats. Those sick letters, awful warnings preyed on us all for months. We should have acted, protected her.
Or I pictured you as the prowler, a blurred photofit with dead eyes and jail tattoos, peering in through the windows, sizing up the house, or Lizzie. Watching. Perhaps waiting for Jack to leave. To do what? What were your intentions? Did you plan to take her life, or did something go so terribly wrong that you beat her to keep her quiet?
I wondered if you slept. If you curled up somewhere, safe and warm, muscles relaxing, breath becoming shallow, thoughts fading. Of course I preferred to think of you as frantic, sickened, haunted, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. I had glimpses of you ‘coming to your senses’, the guilt and horror at what you’d done growing so large as to be unbearable, so you would have to confess. Turn yourself in and beg for forgiveness.
Even then, part of needing to know who you were was because I needed someone to blame. Someone to hate.
Ruth
Sunday 13 September 2009
Tony comes back about nine. He comes back and I’m relieved he comes alone. And he and Jack and I drink and talk about Lizzie. An impromptu wake, I suppose.
Our anecdotes are punctuated by expressions of disbelief and sudden urgent questions as we pick over the few stark facts we have. Time and again we are brought up short, confronted by her death. Almost a rhythm to it, waves breaking over us, cold and salty, a merciless tide.
Jack listens intently to the reminiscences that Tony and I share of Lizzie’s childhood. The birth was a nightmare, with the baby in distress and me being rushed for an emergency C-section. And it turned our world upside down, not necessarily in a good way at first. The operation left me very weak and it took a long time for me to regain any strength and energy. Which Lizzie snatched from me. She had colic and screamed for hours on end, she kept me marooned in the house, exhausted and weepy and slightly mad. Whenever I managed to get us both up and out, wherever we went, she cried the place down. She failed to thrive, which made me feel like a failure, and I gave up trying to breastfeed, but the formula only seemed to aggravate her colic. We spent money we didn’t have trying every possible solution: cranial massage, homeopathy, Reiki healing. Nothing helped.
