Police Exhibit Ref: VN8723
Case Ref: VN87
OIC: Sergeant Samuel Kombothekra
GERALDINE BRETHERICK’S DIARY, EXTRACT 5 OF 9 (taken from hard disk of Toshiba laptop computer at Corn Mill House, Castle Park, Spilling, RY29 0LE)
3 May 2006, 9 p.m.
One side-effect of being a mother is that I have lost some of my fears and some of my imaginative capacity. In some ways, this is quite liberating. I am so overpowered by my own feelings that I cannot believe anyone might feel differently. The perfect example: on Saturday, Cordy and I took Oonagh and Lucy swimming. On the way back we stopped at Waitrose. Both of the girls had fallen asleep. I suggested to Cordy that she and I run in and out quickly, leaving them locked in the car in the car park. I do it all the time with Lucy, but Cordy looked shocked. ‘We can’t do that,’ she said. ‘What if the car explodes? That happened once-I heard it on the news. Some kids died because they’d been left in a car and its petrol tank blew up.’
‘What if we take them with us and Waitrose’s roof falls in and crushes them to death?’ I said.
‘We can’t leave them alone,’ she insisted. ‘Some psycho might kidnap them.’
‘They’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave them to sleep. The car will be locked.’ This, I knew, was a weaker argument than my previous one. A psycho could smash a car window and kidnap two girls, easily. What I wanted to say, but didn’t feel able to, was that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why anyone who didn’t have to cart two five-year-olds around with them should wish to do so. I knew Cordy meant paedophiles when she said ‘psychos’. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a paedophile. It proved impossible, and not only for the obvious reasons. I find it hard to empathise with any adult who would seek out the company of children. I know people do it all the time, often innocently and with no evil intentions, but I still find it implausible. And what you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.
I have also, I discovered last night when Mark suggested we go abroad during Lucy’s half-term holiday, lost my fear of flying. I know with absolute certainty that no plane I am on will crash, because if I died in a plane crash then I would be exempt from all future parenting duties, and Sod’s Law dictates that I won’t get out of it so easily. If I died in a plane crash, I would not have to spend another ten thousand Saturday afternoons standing beside bouncy castles that smell of vomit and sweaty socks, or sitting amid the debris of a game of pass-the-parcel like a tramp on a bed of newpapers while Lucy spits lumps of wet, unswallowed sandwich into my hand. I’m not saying I want to die-I simply know that I won’t.
I told Mark I refused to be forced out of my home and forced out of the country at a time that’s not convenient for me, just because St Swithun’s has decided to award its teachers an extra long half-term. It makes me so angry: you pay a fortune for private education and they take longer holidays than in the state sector. I call that fraud.
Michelle has made it clear that I can no longer rely on her. She’s going on holiday with her fat, ugly boyfriend who never speaks-the trip is already booked. I offered her an exorbitant sum of money to cancel it, but she’s in love (Gart knows how and why, given the absolute lack of provocation from her love-object) and seems now to be immune to my financial incentives. If I get desperate, I might ask one of the mums from school to have Lucy for half-term; one of them’s bound to be planning to ruin those two weeks of her life by spending them doing child things, so she can have my child too. I’ll buy her a new vacuum cleaner or apron or something to say thank you, and Lucy can spend a fortnight picking up tips on how to sacrifice yourself and become the family slave, since life is so much easier for all females who learn this lesson well and do not think to question it.
Mum, who ought to be a great help to me, is out of the question. I rang her last night, but never found out whether she could or couldn’t have Lucy to stay for that fortnight because the conversation didn’t get that far. She told me I ought to want to look after my own daughter during her school holidays.
‘Ought I?’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t. I can’t face a fortnight of not being able to do a single thing I want to do. I might as well spend two weeks bound and gagged in a cellar.’
Saying things I don’t mean, ‘barking worse than my bite’, is a necessary outlet for me, one way of exercising my power and freedom. Mum should be relieved that I’m dealing with my frustration humorously, verbally. I do it-I say these terrible things-to keep myself sane. If just once Mum would say, ‘Poor you, two weeks of being on mother duty, what a nightmare,’ I wouldn’t feel quite so negated. Or, an even cleverer response: ‘You need to start putting yourself first-why don’t you send Lucy to boarding school?’ I’d never do that, Gart forbid. I like to see Lucy every day, just not all of every day. The suggestion of boarding school would stir up my maternal fervour, which (anyone shrewd would by now have worked out) might be exactly what I need.
Sadly, Mum doesn’t understand about reverse psychology. She started crying and said, ‘I can’t understand why you had a child. Didn’t you know what it would involve? Didn’t you know it would be hard work?’
I told her I’d had no idea what it would feel like to be a parent because I’d never done it before. And, I reminded her, she had lied to me. She’d said, over and over again while I was pregnant, that being a mother was hard work but that you didn’t mind because you loved your child so much. ‘That’s rubbish,’ I told her. ‘You love them, yes, but you do mind. Why should loving someone mean you’re willing to sacrifice your freedom? Why should loving someone mean you’re happy to watch your life become worse than it used to be in almost every way?’
‘Your life isn’t worse,’ said Mum. ‘You’ve got a beautiful, lovely daughter.’
‘That’s her life,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s life, not mine.’ And then, because of an article I’d read on the train yesterday, I said, ‘There’s a “conspiracy of silence” about what motherhood is really like. No one tells you the truth.’
‘Conspiracy of silence!’ Mum wailed. ‘All you ever do is tell me how awful your life’s been since you had Lucy. I wish there was a conspiracy of silence! I’d be a lot happier.’
I put the phone down. She wanted silence, so silence was what I gave her. I could have won the argument decisively by pointing out that I am only as selfish as I am, as reluctant to subordinate my own needs to someone else’s, because from the moment I was born she treated me as if I was made of gold. Never did I get even the slightest hint that she had needs of her own and wasn’t simply there to serve me. In Mum’s eyes, I was an infant goddess. My every whim was attended to instantly. I was never punished; all I had to do was say sorry and I would be forgiven, and indeed rewarded for my apology. Lucy will be a more considerate woman than I am, I have no doubt, because she has grown up knowing that she is not ‘the only pebble on the beach’.
My relationship with Mum has never fully recovered from the Big Sleep row. The Christmas after Lucy was born, Mark was away at a conference. Mum came to stay. She bought me an extra little present: a mug with a book cover on it, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I unwrapped it on Christmas morning after four sleepless nights in a row, four nights spent dragging myself round the house like a corpse with Lucy over my shoulder, patting her, trying to persuade her to close her eyes so that I could close mine. ‘The Big Sleep?’ I snapped at Mum, unable to believe she would be so cruel. ‘Is this your idea of a sick joke?’