Because of You I Am , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Sandy Hogarth

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135 pages

English

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'Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run...'When Alice was ten, she shot rabbits with her father. Thirty five years later, she's after bigger prey.Life hasn't been kind to Alice. Abandoned by her father at fourteen, she ran away two years later to 60s London,embracing all the darkness it had to offer when hopes of finding her father are lost. But that was the past and at thirty-seven she meets and marries Jake. They have a son, Adam, and life is perfection. But when he is killed in an accident sixyears later, her entire life comes crashing down.Buried under the weight of grief and guilt, Alice sets out on a path for revenge on the mother who killed her child.Teetering on the brink of sanity, she refuses to acknowledge the truth: what really happened on the way through thepark on the day Adam died? The dominoes fall, sending Alice into dark places. Does forgiveness wait for her on theother side or will she never find her way back to the light?

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Psychological thriller

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	23 avril 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598631
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Sandy Hogarth

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador
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Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
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ISBN 978 1838598 631

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Janet, Michael and Stirling
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Acknowledgements
An enormous thank you to everyone at Matador who have been so very efficient, friendly and helpful at every stage of the publishing process.
The novelists in the Leeds Writers Circle have been immensely helpful and supportive, in particular, Edward Easton, always answering my calls for help.
And the critique and support from Anna Glendenning.
Knowing little about the court system I contacted Leeds Crown Court and there found Yasmin Saldin and the answers to all my questions. My thanks, Yasmin
My thanks and love to Jane, Natalie and Siobhan, and Max, who has reminded me of the joy, curiosity and innocence of the toddler; to the friends who have never given up on me and most of all the love and belief of my partner, Katrina.

To my readers. I hope you enjoy this novel and I would love to hear from you via Twitter @sandyhogarth1, email: sandyhogarth1@btinternet.com

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
1
September 1991
What had I done? Stitch by stitch, I had unpicked myself.

Pee in my pants: wet, warm.
A forty-six-year-old woman. Afraid. Locked in a small box in a moving vehicle.
I opened my eyes, raised a finger to each teared cheek.
I was someone else, an observer. Then the observer vanished too, took my life with them.
No matter.

A road unknown: London to somewhere.
Gates clanged, the sweatbox shuddered, stopped.
Voices, laughter, cigarette smoke.
Hot, too hot. I slammed the toe of my shoe against the door. Pain. Slumped back into the unforgiving seat. Shut my eyes.

Cuffed and led to the steps and down. Gates opened and locked and pushed into a large room.
Uniforms, searches, orders.
An automaton.
Escorted down the long corridors, keys on the officer’s belt locking and unlocking; banging. Eyes examining me as if a piece of dog shit. The whispers had started.
‘Yours, Oldfield, your new home.’ The screw placed her hand on the small of my back and pushed. She was young, a mother perhaps.
I clutched the regulation plastic bowl, cutlery and mug, roll of toilet paper, sickly-smelling soap, blankets, sheets and one towel, to my breast. Arms too short.
A plastic sack sprawled on the floor, spewing out my few belongings.
Behind me, the door banged shut. I jumped, shouted out.
The lock turned. Laughter.
Soon the corridor echoed with emptiness.
Same routine, different prison. Months at the other place had almost taught me subservience, to keep my head down, choose my friends carefully, be someone else. I knew the rules, had been a fighter. Once.
That is what got me here.
My cell: small, fetid, stinking of bleach, body odour and worse. An iron bed with skinny mattress and pillow, both stained; a small table and chair and, at the far end, a stainless steel sink with toilet attached.
I stood, minutes. Maybe hours, unmoving.
Four years, the man in the wig had gifted me, for a premeditated act of revenge.
The other sentence was forever.
I emptied my arms onto the table, onto the floor, and climbed, fully clothed, onto the bed, dragging one of the blankets over me.
Sometime later – minutes, hours – I opened my eyes, threw off the blanket, swung my legs over the side of the bed and slumped over my knees. The sun slipped in through the high cell window, timid, finding its way onto the opposite wall, oddly split by parallel black lines.
I scrabbled through the plastic sacks on the floor and found the photograph and the drawing.
A door slammed. Footsteps; the flap in my door flung open.
Eyes.

Meds four times a day. The pills made me slow, stupid. I echoed inside, so I hid the small ones in my mouth and later flushed them down the toilet. There was a trade in pills, in almost anything. In fantasies. I might accumulate my own stash of white dreams and watch it grow, until I had enough. What was it like to die? Was it dreaming, letting go? I wanted to believe in God, in heaven. Could not.
Could I will my heart to stop?
Banged up: nights, days. No matter.
Everything by the rulebook. Home: a word I had forgot. Inside.
I dragged my nails up my arms, tearing at the cross-stitch of scars, longing for the pain to take away the other, the boy whose name I could not say; small legs pedalling on that too-big bike, head turned back to me, mouth opening, closing. His words.
My words.
He came to me in the noisy dark, with its shouting, banging.
Nights. I stared up through the blur of the window searching for one star. My boy loved the stars, wanted to take Rabby, his brown furry rabbit, and fly into the night sky. He flew, but that was different.
It was Jake, his father, my husband, who was good with stars. Star-man.
I howled loudly enough to send myself mad, except I was already there, took up my own chorus, thrust out my chest, filled my lungs.
I pounded on the door. Laughter pounded back.
A scream. Mine, the same as on that day.

I begged some Sellotape from a screw and stuck his drawing on the wall above the meagre table, where I could see it from my bed. Stars and one word: “MumMum”. His tongue would have been running across his lips, the pencil scrunched in his exquisite small hand.
Oh, for his touch. His photograph was in my pocket; he went everywhere with me. And so did his words; not those a mother wanted to remember.
I wrapped my arms around myself, let my head fall.
I dreamt of him most nights. Last night we were at the seaside. His sturdy short legs waded into the shallows, Rabby hanging from his left hand, disappearing beneath the waves.
‘Teach Rabby swim,’ he’d said, his eyes solemn.
A wave, a dark giant, crushed the horizon. I screamed, ‘Come back. Stop. Come back.’ I couldn’t move, had fallen to the sand.
He waved without turning around. I heard his thin, small voice: ‘Bye, MumMum.’

In the mornings I said, ‘Hello, sun,’ even if it was behind a cloud, and wished it good night. My boy taught me that.
I was because of Jake and my child and their love. The still points of my life.
Time. ‘Once upon a time.’ That was how my father began his stories. Except his last one when he had a secret so big it carried him away. I was fourteen when he abandoned me. I had loved him utterly. Was that when the unravelling began, or was it because I ignored the one who might have prevented it, my mother?
In my head a cacophony of cymbals, of singing: “ Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.
What was the past? Daily rewritten, reimagined.
The cell walls crept ever inwards.

Alice Oldfield. Prisoner No. A45306. Category B prison, somewhere in the Midlands. September 1991.
2
24th June 1983
A man held out a book, his fingers long, milky white.
What was I thinking at that exact moment? The direction of my life? Unlikely. Or the lack of it? Also unlikely. Friday, 24th June, 1983: a date to be etched into my life calendar.
A blue-sky day. I smiled, at strangers, at myself, whoever that was. Alice Reynolds, thirty-seven; hated the Tories and the failed left, consistent in her inconsistencies.
The Iron Lady had recently won a landslide victory on the back of the Falklands War, and Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut, had just returned from space. How I envied Sally. It should have been me. A dreamer always.
I had remade myself after my mother’s funeral nine years ago: night school for those long abandoned A-levels, a BA from the Open University, and had distinguished myself in the Library Association exams. I was in a hurry, had always been that, yet without much purpose.
I passed my early days in the library in the basement of the large red brick building on the main street, with its fully stocked shelves and loyal readers, tearing up discards and sorting. And upstairs, filling shelves.
My promotion changed all that.
I liked to think I was imaginative, open-hearted in the books I chose