had been called and Fenny had been whisked away to a nearby hospital. A psychiatric consultant had been engaged and she’d spent the following four months as an inpatient at a unit where the staff wore pink, smiled a lot more than was normal, and insisted that she do a series of daily classes including yoga, meditation and mindfulness. By the end of it, Fenny had been such a flawless student that she was released with cake and good wishes.
They had no idea that she’d have done anything at all never to have to go back to yoga classes again, with a teacher who constantly talked in sing-song hushed tones and insisted that she should love her body and listen to it. Fenny’s body, she was pretty sure, fucking hated her and she didn’t want to listen to anything it had to say, but compliance had got her out of the unit, with a side-effect of making her truly angry. Angry that her husband had smoked forty a day and left her alone as she marched towards old age. Angry that the daughter she’d cried for every day for more than a decade was gone for no good reason at all. Angry at the neighbours who blasted rap music out day and night.
Anger, it turned out, was a cure in itself. She didn’t want to die any more. Countering the rap music with Italian opera, she’d bought a speaker that would drown out a whole festival. She’d joined a bingo club because her husband had spent his life bitching about women who spent money on such frivolities. It had turned out to be rather good fun, too. And she’d stopped looking for her daughter through missing persons websites and family reunion agencies, accepting the reality that there was nothing she could do to bring someone back who was either dead or who wanted to remain lost. Let fate play its games, was her new philosophy. She would simply be carried along on the tide.
Then there’d been a knock at her door at noon one Tuesday. Who the hell worried about answering the door between elevenses and lunch? Nothing bad happened at that time of day, not on a Tuesday in your own home. It wasn’t unusual for one of the other tenants simply to buzz people in without asking for so much as a name. The pizza delivery guy regularly just pressed any old button and worried about checking the flat number when he was indoors, out of the rain.
Fenny had answered the door hoping it hadn’t been the Jehovah’s back to talk her ear off again. She always felt guilty when she told them to get lost but the result of her not doing so was sometimes a thirty-minute polite conversation about how nicely printed their brochures were as she figured out an excuse to shut the door.
Instead, the man at her door was looking sombre and professional.
‘Mrs Hawksmith,’ he said, holding up a badge dangling from a brightly coloured lanyard. ‘I’m from a family reintroduction charity. We have information about your daughter, Alice. Could we talk, if it’s not a bad time?’
She hadn’t given it a second thought. Thirty seconds later, she was brushing crumbs off her couch so he had somewhere to sit without ruining his smart trousers. Her head had been reeling. News of her daughter, after so long … So she wasn’t dead. If she’d been dead, it would have been the polis at her door.
Standing in the middle of her tiny sitting room, Fenny had shifted from foot to foot, wanting to hear the news, dreading what it might be, clinging on to hope she’d long since forgotten existed.
‘Is there anyone here who might support you or are you alone today?’ the man had asked.
‘No, it’s just me …’
Fenny realised in her excitement that she hadn’t even asked the man’s name. Now she wasn’t sure how to backtrack, not that she wanted to waste any time. There was news. It was suddenly worth every birthday and Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every morning when her daughter’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Finally, there was the prospect of something other than the void of loss.
‘Just to clarify, you aren’t cohabiting or flat-sharing at the present time. It’s important to establish that any information we share with you will remain confidential, you see.’
‘Yes, absolutely,’ Fenny had gushed. ‘It’s just me here. If you have some news, I promise not to talk to anyone else about it.’
‘Good,’ he’d said reassuringly. ‘That all sounds fine. Finally, I need to assess your current mental state. We often find that people have very strong reactions to being given news about loved ones who’ve been missing for a sustained period, and the process of attempting a reintroduction can be fraught with difficulties and disappointments. That’s not a journey we recommend people embark upon unless they’re in a good place emotionally.’
Reintroduction. She hadn’t imagined it. He’d said the word. Her daughter was not just alive but was somewhere accessible and in a fit state to make contact. In that moment, she believed in everything. Karma, kismet, destiny, God, four-leafed clovers – the whole shebang. There was a reason she’d decided to blow money on a hotel room to end it all. There was a reason the housekeeping woman had come in at the worst – now the best – possible moment. The endless stretches in yoga had been worth every second of humiliation and fake smiles. The tranquillisers that had made her feel nauseous. The therapy where she’d poured out every sordid or boring detail of her life. They’d all led her here.
She crossed the room – just three steps, but her legs were jelly and she worried she might not make it – to pick up Alice’s photo from the windowsill. In it, her precious seven-year-old had just won a drawing competition. She’d had a real talent, certainly not inherited from Fenny. Drawing faces was what she’d been best at, spending hours of her young life at a table, getting through notepad after notepad.
Fenny still had some of those drawings tucked away in an envelope, hidden in a box with her wedding photos and Mother’s Day cards so dearly prized that she dared not take them out and handle them any more. Inside were the childish declarations of forever love that had become screams of hatred as drugs had made her daughter’s world a place where the only warm arms she welcomed were delusions that came from plastic wraps, and where only handing her money was enough to induce her to profess love.
‘Where is she?’ Fenny had whispered, the muscles in her face rising to produce an unfamiliar picture.
Smiles had been absent from her outlook for so long that forming one was an alien sensation.
‘I don’t know,’ the man said, ‘do you think you deserve to see her?’
Fenny’s smile drooped a little.
‘Deserve?’ she asked slowly. ‘Yes, of course, why would I not deserve to see my baby?’
‘Have you treasured your life, Fenella?’
‘Of course I have. My husband’s gone. He’d have done anything to have looked into our girl’s eyes again. Now I’m the only one left and I’ll have to do that for both of us. She doesn’t even know her daddy’s passed. I’m not sure how I’m going to break that to her.’ Fenny’s legs finally gave way and she lowered herself onto the sofa, taking deep breaths.
‘Your husband couldn’t have prevented his death though, could he? It was cancer that took him, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Um …’ she stalled.
The last thing Fenny wanted was to be impolite to the man who was trying to help her, but she wasn’t sure quite where he was getting his information. Alice would have had no way of knowing about the tragedy that had struck in her absence and Fenny didn’t recall giving any of the reunification agencies the details of her husband’s illness.
‘Yes, lung cancer. I signed up with a few agencies when I was trying to find my daughter. I
