9. Mother's Ruin

St. Helier, 1920

It is a Friday, and Mallory wishes to die.  It dawns on her rather suddenly, as if she has just remembered how to spell a word that has been bothering her all day.  She wonders if the enormity of such a wish should shock her, but then she realises that this desire for her life to be over has slowly and irrevocably seeped into every corner of her being over the last several weeks.  It is not so much an impulse as it is mere inevitability.

The afternoon is unseasonably cold, so Mallory pours herself a small glass of gin and knocks it back.  It seems rather pointless now to fill the fireplace and bring warmth to the tiny house.  George had called it a cottage, but now Mallory sees it for what it is: a prison.  One she will not remain in for much longer.

Mallory wraps herself up in a heavy shawl and steps out into the wind, closing the door behind her but not bothering to lock it.  The fate of the property will soon be somebody else’s problem.  As she carefully navigates the steep, roughly hewn steps that lead from the house down to the beach, Mallory wonders if it was even rightfully hers to begin with – after all, she and George were never married.

It strikes her as funny now: that her George, her respectable, upstanding, so very English George, had not insisted on taking her as his wife the moment they arrived on the island.  He had spoken of it so often during those first months in Paris; how it was a sign that they had met so soon after the end of the war, that they were to be married and they would raise a large brood together at his late parents’ cottage in Jersey.

It was all such a great adventure then.  It didn’t take Mallory very long to discover that life with George in St. Helier was just as quiet and provincial as the one she had left behind in Normandy.  She didn’t mind, though: George worshipped her, and it was only a matter of months before she was carrying his child.

When George died, killed by a sudden and fatal bleed in his brain, it was like a cruel joke.  Here was a man who had fought in the Great War, a man who had most likely seen and done unspeakable things, felled like a tree in their back garden on a particularly hot August afternoon.  Their baby, three months grown inside her, went with him less than a week later.

Hardly surprising, then, that in the intervening months Mallory’s thoughts have turned to the cold and unforgiving sea that surrounds the island.  Without George, she hasn’t a friend in the world.  The local women don’t trust her.  At first Mallory thought it might be because she was a stranger, foreign even to speakers of her own tongue, but now she puts it down to the simple, ingrained mistrust people feel towards a woman who lives alone, who is deemed unworthy by some higher power of having a husband or a child.  They may as well just call her Mademoiselle Magdalene and be done with it.

She reaches the last of the steps, where stone gives way to sand.  She takes off her shoes to walk towards the sea, letting one dangle from each hand the way she always used to when going for a splash.  When she reaches the water’s edge, she lets go of the shoes, remembering that this time she will not be coming back out.

Mallory Chastain does not believe in God, or Heaven, or everlasting life.  She knows that walking into the ocean won't reunite her with George, or with her baby.  But surely it is preferable to the alternative: a life spent wasting away on this rock.

Her right foot is poised, mid-step, when she hears the cry.  She dismisses it as the wind, or the call of a gull.  She steps into the shallow tide, flinching as the icy water rushes over her feet.  Then she hears it again, clearer this time.  She hesitates, before ignoring it and taking another step into the water.  When she hears the cry for a third time however, louder and clearer than ever, there is no denying its source: a frightened child.

Mallory steps back onto the wet sand and turns in a full circle, straining her eyes in the receding afternoon light, but she can’t see where the cry might be coming from. 

“Hello?”  She calls out.  “Can you hear me?  Where are you?”

A wordless scream is her answer, and then another – this one more urgent, and she can make out a word: that assonant, almost infantile-sounding cry for help.

M’aidez.

She turns back to face the tide, and there it is: a pale, bobbing shape against the slate grey of the water’s surface.  Mallory drops the shawl from her shoulders and wades into the water, howling out as the biting cold threatens to turn her legs numb.  She allows herself to be submerged up to her neck, and clumsily swims towards the child, resisting the weight of her dress as the undertow tugs it downwards.

It is a boy.  His eyes, wide and blue, lock onto her as she struggles against the current: Save me¸ they say.  I’m counting on you.  Praying that he is not a phantom, a wishful figment, Mallory extends her arms towards the boy and closes the remaining yards by kicking frantically.  Her arms close around his solid, tiny body, and she is flooded with relief.  She wants to say something comforting to him, but cannot stop her jaw chattering.

A series of primal, senseless grunts erupt from Mallory as she uses every aching, frozen muscle in her body to pull the child back to shore.  In a daze, she staggers to her feet, takes him by the hand and leads him barefoot towards the steps that will lead them to her house.

She thanks her earlier, suicidal self for leaving the cottage door unlocked: she can barely lift her shaking hand to push it open, closing her fingers around a key would be impossible.  Mallory enters the house first, and the boy dutifully closes the door firmly behind them.  Immediately, now they are out of the wind, it feels warmer.  Mallory retrieves a small stack of blankets from a cupboard and helps the boy out of his soaking wet clothes, wrapping him tightly in eiderdown before doing the same to herself, all modesty forgotten.  Once they are both adequately swaddled, she sets about lighting the fire.

“What is your name?”  She asks, after five or ten minutes of sitting in silence, too glad of the warmth to speak.  The boy doesn’t answer. 

“How old are you?  Eight?  Nine?”

No answer again.

“Where is your mother?”

The boy says nothing, but a brief, pained look crosses his face.  Mallory moves so that she is sitting next to him. She holds out her right hand.  A moment later, the boy places his own small, pale hand in hers. 

“My name is René,” he says, so quietly that it takes Mallory a moment to recognise he is speaking French.

“Hello René,” she replies in her mother tongue.  “I’m Mallory.”

Some unknowable urge compels her to smooth his soft blond hair as it dries, combing it as best she can with her fingers.  A loud, almost thunderous rumble emerges from within René’s blanket.

“Are you hungry?”  She asks.  He nods.  She is about to stand, to go and find some bread and jam, but René refuses to let go of her hand.  A tiny, heart-breaking sound rings in his throat: he is crying.  The poor thing must be terrified, Mallory thinks.  All alone out there, half drowned – such good luck that she found him when she did.  Mallory pulls the boy closer, stroking his hair and rubbing his back as he continues to weep.

And she feels something she has never felt before.  It is similar, but alien at the same time, to what she felt when she was pregnant.  She daren’t believe what this might mean.  Could she have really been given a second chance?  A word forms in her mind, tentative and uncertain: miracle.

She doesn’t immediately notice that the crying has stopped.  Is too surprised to fight back when she feels the tiny, sharp teeth pressing against the side of her neck.  Then René has broken the skin and is sucking fiercely, hungrily, at the blood flowing from her throat.  The last sound Mallory hears before she loses consciousness is that innocent, suckling sound.

Brighton, 2011

Gin makes her maudlin.  She knows this, but it didn't prevent her from knocking back several generous measures earlier in the evening.  The tart, citric flavour becomes more like sour milk as Mallory throws it back up, trembling hands carefully pulling her hair back as she hovers over the toilet in whoever's house this is.  Seth dragged her out tonight, insisting that a party was just what they both needed after everything they've been through. 

A party is the last thing in the world Mallory wants.  If she were to have her own way, she wouldn’t have left the flat at all, never mind gate-crashed some dire rave filled with art students and drug addicts.  It’s their wide eyes she doesn’t like.  It doesn’t matter that their pupils are dilated more by speed than they are by any lingering innocence.  Mallory looks better than most, if not all, of these strung out kids.  But when she looks at those wide eyes, she feels old.

It has been three weeks since they found Billy dead in the bath.  Three long, quiet weeks.  Mallory had forgotten the spell that death casts.  The hush that falls in the aftermath, when raising one’s voice feels wrong, disrespectful.  She and Seth have tiptoed around that flat, their new home, for weeks.  To be suddenly surrounded by sweating bodies, deafened by cacophonous, nonsensical music, is not unlike an out of body experience.

Mallory stumbles out of the toilet and into a larger room, lined with stalls, each covered in pornographic graffiti, and remembers that they are not in somebody’s house.  It’s a club.  How could she forget, with that smell of piss?  She stands at the sink and brings handful after handful of water to her mouth, rinsing out the taste of sick and gin.  How long are you going to keep doing this, she asks herself.  You’re not in Paris anymore.

She applies a fresh coat of vermillion lipstick to her chapped lips, knowing that she needn’t make too much of an effort.  Everybody beyond the door marked Ladies will be so off their heads, they will probably imagine she has grown a third eye and is talking backwards.  And Seth… well, he’s her husband.  They’ve both seen each other look much worse.

St. Helier, 1920

“Don’t be afraid,” René whispers soothingly as Mallory’s eyes flutter open.  The sharp, deep pain that she had felt in her neck before passing out is gone.  She must have imagined it, she decides.  The cold, the exhaustion – she fainted, obviously.

She is lying on the threadbare rug next to the fire, which has died down to embers.  Through the window, she can see it is the middle of the night.

“How long was I…  What happened?”

“I’m sorry,” René says, his blue eyes glistening with tears.  “I was just so hungry… and lonely.”

Mallory pats the side of her neck carefully with her hand – there, she can feel it.  The delicate, soft tissue of a new scar.

“You weren’t drowning, were you,” she says, her voice flat and empty.

“No.”

“What did you do to me?”

“I’m sorry.  I just felt so alone.  I missed my mother.”

“What are you?”

“I… I don’t know.  He never told me the word.”

“He?”

“The man who did to me what I’ve done to you.  He never told me what we are.”

Mallory cups her face in her hands.  I’m dreaming.  I walked into the water and right now I’m drowning.

She feels René’s hand on her shoulder – his small, pale hand.  Tears stream down his white, innocent face.  She should fear him, she realises.  This creature, whatever he is, should be hated and reviled.  Why, then, does Mallory pull him into an embrace?

“Don’t cry,” she tells him.  “It’s alright.”

A deep, yearning hunger permeates her body.  She aches with it, feels as if she has not eaten in days.

“I’m hungry,” she says.  “What do I do?”

René stands, then helps her to her feet.

“I’ll show you, mother,” he says.

Brighton, 2011

“Hello you,” a vaguely familiar voice whispers in her ear.  Mallory spins around and is faced with heavy mascara, blonde hair extensions, and somewhere underneath it all, a girl with a very white smile.  Her name is Cassie.  She’s a dancer, Mallory remembers now.  The exotic kind.  She went that extra mile for Mallory, Seth and Billy one night not too long ago.

“Hello,” she says.  “Um…  How are you?”

“Oh, you know.  No rest for the wicked.”  Cassie winks, before opening her handbag and rummaging around.  She pulls out lipstick and proceeds to add another layer of magenta.

“Hoo-yoo-free?”  She asks, lips pulled into so tight a pout that her words are unintelligible.

“Sorry?”

“I said, how’s your friend?  That gorgeous punk rocker you and your fella were knocking about with.”

“Oh.  He’s… he’s fine.”

“You know, I think about that night all the time,” Cassie continues, whipping a large brush across both cheeks.  The streaks of rouge left behind on her skin make it look as if she has been slapped.  “I’ve had punters ask for all sorts, but that… Pretty wild, ey?”

Mallory smiles, even though it kind of hurts to do so.

“Yes.  Wild.”

“Shame the party’s over,” Cassie says.  “Had to go and spoil it.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said who are you here with?”

“Oh.  My husband.”

“Date night, is it?”  Cassie asks, plunging her hand into her bag again.

“Something like that.”

“Poor George,” Cassie sighs, carefully fixing her eyeliner.  “He deserved better than you.”

“What are you talking about?”  Mallory asks, nauseous once again.  “How do you know about that?”

“Know about what?”

“You said…”  Mallory leans against the sink, dizzy.

“Even René is long gone now, isn’t he?”

“Stop it.”  How can she know these things?  “Just shut up.”

“Mother monster can’t do anything right.  I guess Billy is proof of that.”

Something inside Mallory snaps.  She launches herself at Cassie with a guttural scream, punching and slapping and scratching at her face, barely aware of the girl crying out for help.  All she hears is more taunts. 

“You destroy everything you touch,” Cassie says, and even though Mallory knows this isn't real, knows that Cassie hasn't truly said any of these things, she can't help herself.  Her hands are around the girl's throat.  She could tear Cassie's jugular open with her teeth, but that would be too easy.  Too much like eating.  Instead she squeezes, enjoying the sensation.  She can't see Cassie's eyes watering or her complexion darkening.  All she can see is that night behind the curtain; Cassie on Billy's lap, giving herself to him.  Mallory hates Cassie for this.  For having the same memory.  For having, in some small and casual way, a piece of Billy.

"I could kill you right now," she whispers.  "You'd go out like a light and nobody would miss you.  Not a single person, you little whore."  Cassie is clawing at her hands with sparkling pink nails, but Mallory’s grasp is immoveable.  This is how easily it happens.  All it takes to end a life is to push or prod the wrong part of a person.  A bleed on the brain, a cut to the wrist.  How silly, Mallory thinks.  How inefficient.  Why, after so many years, is this still such a difficult concept for her?

She loosens her grip, and Cassie collapses, coughing and sputtering.  Mallory notices blood seeping from the corners of her lips.  She kneels and reaches out to her, but Cassie flinches away.  She appears unable to speak; only a faint, rasping sound emerges from her mouth.  Purple bruises are already blooming on her face, and she seems to be on the verge of fainting.

“I’m so sorry,” Mallory says, suddenly filled with calm.  She picks up Cassie’s handbag from the floor.  “Everything is going to be alright.”  She pulls out a bright pink mobile phone and dials 999.  “Don’t worry about a thing.”  She pulls the semi-conscious girl towards her, and wraps a comforting arm around her shoulder.  “It’s alright.  Everything’s alright.  I’m going to take care of you.”

~