Chapter 8
Bella lay rigid in bed after yet another nightmare.
They were getting more frequent, more vivid, more terrifying.
Sometimes Justin would be with her and he would wrap her in his arms and hold her until her limbs loosened and her heart stopped pounding, but there was nothing he could do to stop the bad dreams from coming.
He knew, as well as she did, that they were happening because of Jamie Clarke.
It had been quite a shock, when she’d been told he was getting out of prison.
She had thought it might never happen because he had refused to admit what he’d done to her mother.
But first he’d been moved to an open prison, then he was up in front of the parole board, and then she had been contacted by her victim liaison officer, who had dropped the bombshell.
Bella had written a victim impact statement and could have gone to the hearing to read it out, but the thought of coming face to face with Clarke had been too terrifying.
In any case, she had been told it would be unlikely to make any difference to the decision, which would be based on his risk to the community, not on how she felt.
And then last week, Kathy, her VLO, had contacted her to give her the news that a bed had come up in a hostel and he had been released.
Kathy couldn’t tell her where the hostel was, only that it was nowhere near where she lived, and that he would be given conditions, including an exclusion zone, to stop him from coming into contact with her.
Even so, Bella had found herself obsessing about exactly where the hostel might be and where he might end up living after that.
She imagined it would be somewhere in South London, where he had lived before he went to prison, and when she had suggested this, Kathy hadn’t corrected her.
Bella now lived north of the river, but her dad and Jenny, her stepmother, still lived in the same house in Streatham.
What if she bumped into him during a visit?
she’d asked. Kathy hadn’t ruled this out as a possibility.
He had to spend at least eight weeks in the hostel, she said, and after that, he had to be allowed to choose where to live and go about his day-to-day life.
Bella knew she could avoid Streatham. The truth was that she didn’t often visit her dad.
After her mum died, she’d had no choice but to go and live with him and she had stayed for ten and a half years, but they had never really got on.
In fact, they had clashed so badly during her teens that when she was finally old enough to leave home, her social worker had helped her get this flat, which she’d found through a housing association because she had been considered vulnerable, and it had been her home ever since.
She had done OK, though. She had even managed to leave school with three A levels and had done a foundation year in art at Middlesex University.
But her heart hadn’t been in it and she had left to work as a teaching assistant at a primary school in Tottenham.
She liked the school and the staff and she loved the children, and then two years ago, she had met Justin, who taught Year Four.
Justin kept telling her that she should go back to uni and do her teacher training, but she didn’t want the responsibility that came with being a fully qualified teacher.
She couldn’t commit to him either. Sometimes she’d feel scared and would need him, but other times she would feel trapped by him.
There was a void inside her that she worried nothing would ever fill.
Sometimes she dreamed of running away. She would exit the school gates at half past three and wander through the stifling streets of Tottenham to the tube station, where she would get on the Victoria line, but instead of changing at Euston, she would imagine staying on until Victoria, then crossing the road to the coach station.
There were hundreds of destinations you could go to from there.
She could get on a bus – any bus. She could go literally anywhere.
She could go up north to Scotland, or south to Plymouth, or through the Channel Tunnel to Europe – to Paris or Brussels or Warsaw – or to the airport, where she could get on a plane to the other side of the world.
She had suggested this to Justin, more than once. ‘We could just take off,’ she said. ‘Grab our passports, put our finger on a map and just go.’
But Justin had a five-year-old kid from a previous relationship and he would always say, ‘When Robbie’s older.
’ Bella knew he didn’t want to go away anywhere with her.
He liked his life how it was and simply wanted her to get her shit together so that they could marry and she could be a stepmum to Robbie, but although she thought Robbie was cute, she didn’t want to be a stepmum.
She had one of those and knew what it could be like.
But she never did run away either. She never seemed to be able to make a decision about anything.
It had been suggested to her that she was subconsciously too afraid – or too guilty, or both – to find happiness after her mother’s life had been cut short, and Bella did find it hard to imagine being older than thirty-three, the age her mum was when she died.
Justin kept saying what a great mum she would make and how, once she had her own children, everything would fall into place, but Bella wasn’t sure this was the answer.
She loved the children she worked with and she was happy to take Robbie out at weekends, but she didn’t feel ready to be a mum herself. Something was holding her back.
What she really wanted was to know her own mother better – to find out more about her.
But her dad wouldn’t talk about her – he never had.
He had simply clammed up whenever Bella raised the subject, and there was no one else who seemed to have known her well.
Bella’s maternal grandparents had never really recovered from what happened to their daughter and didn’t want to talk about her either.
They lived in Chester and Bella had spent time with them as a child, but their sadness had been all-consuming and she had felt smothered by it, and by them.
Her mum had been an only child, like her, and although people pretended to have known her well – the Blenheim Road neighbours, for instance – there was no one who could tell her who she really was.
What she thought about, what she cared about.
Bella missed her mum every day, but she could barely remember anything about her either.
It was the worst combination. There was a gaping void in her life that she couldn’t fill with happy memories the way other people did.
She couldn’t summon up the kitchen at Blenheim Road without remembering what had happened in there, and so she had blocked out everything.
But the nightmares were here to remind her. Jamie Clarke was here to remind her.