I Know Who You Are. Alice Feeney
her teeth. She seems awful cross, so I do as she says.
When all my clothes, including my wet pants, are in the bin bag, she picks up a little white plastic hose that is attached to the tap in the bath. ‘The boiler is on the blink, so you’ll have to make do.’ She hoses me down. The water is freezing and it makes me gasp for my breath, like when I fell out of the fishing boat once at home, and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.
When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.
‘She looks just like her,’ he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.
‘Drink it.’
I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.
‘All of it,’ she says.
When the glass is empty I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pyjamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.
The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.
‘Where has my hair gone?’ I start to cry but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.
‘It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.’
I stare at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pyjama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.
‘Do you want a bedtime story?’
I nod that I would.
‘Has the cat got your tongue?’
I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth. I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure. She walks over to a shelf stacked with colourful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. ‘Can you read?’
‘Yes.’ I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. ‘My brother taught me.’
‘Well, wasn’t that nice of him. You can read this to yourself then. There’s a whole pile of Story Teller magazines here, and cassette tapes too, so you just go ahead whenever you want to. Gobbolino is your favourite.’ She throws the magazine onto the bed. ‘The witch’s cat,’ she adds, when I don’t say anything. I don’t even like cats so I wish she’d stop talking about them. ‘If you can read, then tell me what it says on your top.’
I stare at it but the letters are upside down.
‘It says Aimee,’ Maggie says, reading it for me. ‘That’s your new name from now on. It means loved. You do want people to love you, don’t you?’
‘But I’m called Ciara.’ I look up at her.
‘Not any more you’re not, and if you ever use that name under this roof again, you’ll find yourself in very big trouble.’
London, 2017
I’m in trouble.
The detective has clearly already made up her mind about me, but she’s wrong. The only thing I’m guilty of is fraud, the relationship variety. We all sometimes pretend to love something or someone we don’t: an unwanted gift, a friend’s new haircut, a husband. We’ve evolved to be so good at it, we can even fool ourselves. It’s more laziness than deceit; to acknowledge when the love has run out would mean having to do something about it. Relationship fraud is endemic nowadays.
As soon as the detectives leave, I lock the door behind them, desperate to shut the whole world out. I guess I can now add the police to the list of people who think they know me. They’re in good company, with the press, the fans, and my so-called friends. But they don’t know me. Only the version of myself I let them see. The wheels of my mind continue to drive in the wrong direction, stuck in reverse, and I relive that night, remembering things I’d rather not. We did argue in the restaurant. Inspector Croft is right about that. I tried so hard to reassure Ben that I wasn’t having an affair, but he just got more and more angry.
Successful actresses are either beautiful or they’re good at acting …
The more he drank, the worse it got.
You are neither of those things …
He wanted to hurt me, provoke a reaction.
I keep wondering who you fucked this time to get the part.
He succeeded.
I didn’t mean to slap him, I know I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself. But I’ve spent a lifetime thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and his cruel words echoed my own insecurities so loud and clear, something inside me just snapped. I’ve never felt that I’m good enough at anything; no matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit. If my husband can see it, then surely it’s only a matter of time until everyone else sees it too.
My response wasn’t just physical. I told him I wanted a divorce, because I wanted to hurt him back. If he had let me have the child I wanted, I would in an instant have given up the career he said had come between us, but the answer was always the same: no. He didn’t trust me in more ways than one. We were going weeks, sometimes months, without a shred of intimacy, as though touching me might accidentally get me pregnant. I’m so lonely now it physically hurts.
I’ll never forget what he said as I walked out of the restaurant, or the expression on his face when I turned back to look at him. I don’t think it was just the drink talking, he looked as if he meant it.
I’ll ruin you if you leave me.
I head upstairs, pull off my running clothes and take a shower. The water is too hot, but I don’t bother to adjust the temperature. I let it scald my skin, as though I think I deserve the pain. Then I head into the bedroom to get dressed for work. I open the wardrobe slowly, as if something terrible might be hiding inside. It is. I bend down and remove the shoe box I found in the attic, then sit on the bed before lifting the lid. I stare at the contents for a while, as if touching them might burn my fingers. Then I remove the stack of plain vintage postcards and spread them out over the duvet. There must be more than fifty. The white cotton provides a lacklustre camouflage for the yellowing rectangles of card, so that my eyes are even more drawn to the spidery black ink decorating each one. They are all identical: the same words, written in the same feminine scrawl, by the same hand.
I know who you are.
I thought we had thrown all of these away. I don’t know why Ben would have kept them. For evidence, I suppose … in case the stalker ever returned.
I put the cards back in the box and slide it under the bed. Hiding the truth from ourselves is a similar game to hiding it from others, it just comes with a stricter set of rules.
Once dressed, I head back downstairs and stare at the huge bunch of flowers on the kitchen table, accompanied by the tiny card reading sorry. I pick them up, needing both hands to do so. My foot connects with the large stainless-steel pedal bin and the lid opens obediently, ready to swallow my rubbish, but also revealing its own. My hands hover above the trash, while my eyes try to translate what they are seeing: two empty