The Blamed

by Emily Hourican

Genres: Family Life; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

' Insightful and astute writing ... Emily Hourican has a wonderful understanding of human nature' Louise O'Neill The summer she turned twenty-five, Anna felt invincible. In love for the first time, in a strange city far from home, she could be a new person. All that she had ever wanted was there for the taking. But the glorious possibility of those long sultry days ended in a reality far starker than she could have imagined. Now, fifteen years later, Anna is struggling to get through to her teenage daughter Jessie -- named in memory of Anna's best friend -- who has developed an eating disorder. Mother and daughter were once close, but now Anna feels as if Jessie's every word and action is a mystery. Though sometimes she wonders if Jessie can see right through her. And when her daughter starts to report dreams about the namesake she never met, Anna -- increasingly unnerved by just how much her daughter seems to know -- is forced to face the secrets of that summer when her life changed in one unravelling moment, and the brutal truth about the part she had to play.

Release date: July 16, 2019

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 352

Sample

Now

‘What’s wrong with him?’

She said it in French, disapproving more than curious, certainly not helpful, in a voice cracked with age and self-righteousness.

‘Glass,’ Anna muttered. ‘Stuck in his foot.’

Rudi continued yelling, so loudly that a crowd began to gather, drawn by the promise of drama. He sat heavy on the warm sand, foot drawn up onto his other knee, as Anna knelt in front of him, brushing away the dust. She swiped at the thick paste of blood and sand that smeared the sole of his chubby foot to get a better look at the cut. It was deep. The blood told her that much. Would it need stitches? If so, where would she go? Who, among these casual watchers, would help her?

Around them, outside the circle made by Rudi’s cries and Anna’s frantic repetitions of ‘It’s okay, lovie, it’s okay’ – charms
already broken by the disaster she should have prevented – questions and suggestions flowed.

‘What happened?’

‘What did he do?’

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’

The crowd – all women – addressed themselves to the first who had spoken, their queries laconic rather than urgent. This wasn’t their emergency, so they settled in to enjoy it. They were censorious too, staring accusingly at Anna, as if she had stabbed the child. Or, at least, had failed to protect him. If you were French, this would not have happened, they seemed to say. In the heat of their gaze, Anna felt herself to be careless, lazy, without standards. Her chaotic foreignness had allowed this disaster, so, although they were prepared to stand and watch, the women did not offer to help.

The glass, green and Gothic, was stuck deep into Rudi’s pudgy foot. The soft sand must have offered some hidden thing, Anna thought, a rock, perhaps, against which the glass had leveraged. Rudi, running unsteadily with a full bucket of water, had done the rest.

Trying not to think of severed tendons or tiny slivers working their way into Rudi’s bloodstream, Anna plucked out the glass, then washed off the blood, slopping seawater from Rudi’s bucket onto his sticky foot.

‘Weren’t you clever to bring this?’ she said, forcing calm into her voice, trying to distract him from the pain.

A man from the crêperie at the far end of the little beach came over with a white plastic first-aid kit. He was small and
dark, sympathetic, where the women, still murmuring to one another, were not.

‘Merci. Vous êtes très gentil.’ Anna knew that once she had got rid of the blood, and put a plaster over the wound, the drama would dissipate. The crowd would disperse and Rudi’s sobs would quieten. By the time Maurice came back, there would be no trace of trauma, nothing to stop him tousling Rudi’s hair and saying, ‘I’m sure you were a brave boy,’ with the same useless bonhomie he would have adopted had Anna told him Rudi had made a magnificent sandcastle.

Trying not to think about sand or glass embedded and festering, she promised herself she would soak the foot later in antiseptic, stuck the largest plaster in the first-aid box over the cut, and made Rudi lie on his back with his foot against her shoulder. Sure enough, the women were moving away now, in little knots and pairs, ready to continue their discussion of Anna’s failings over un thé, perhaps.

She looked at Jessie, wanting to say something about the French Revolution and the tricoteuses because she thought it might draw her in. She had known not to ask her daughter for help at the moment of crisis, but now she hoped for a smile at least. But Jessie, with all the superiority and indifference of fourteen, ignored her. Her little brother’s yells had seemed to cause her nothing but annoyance. As Anna watched, she turned on her front and closed her eyes.

‘Shall I make you a sandcastle?’ Anna asked Rudi, because she knew he would say yes. She pulled him onto her knee, ignoring the rough grind of sand between them, because she wanted to feel the warmth of his body curled into hers. He snuggled close and relaxed, rather than tensed, as Jessie did now whenever Anna came near her.

She looks at me as if I make her feel sick, Anna thought. It was the way Jessie looked at so much now. As if the world were made up of ugly, rotting things that could only be viewed through narrowed eyes, jaw tightened with disgust.

After a while, Rudi went to get more water, the empty bucket bouncing against his leg. He was limping, but only a little, and seemed not to notice it in his excitement at the building project.

Anna watched him at the water’s edge, trailing his bucket in the surf, determined to fill it to the brim, unaware that each time he laid it on its side, as much water poured out as in. He, at least, still did the things he wanted to do, without calculating their effect on others. Beyond him, the sea stacks at the mouth of the little cove shimmered in a light that was almost silvery, which made Anna unhappy for reasons she didn’t understand. Maybe it was just the lack of heat in the day ‒ it so clearly wasn’t summer. The morning mist hadn’t fully cleared and there was a chill in the ragged sheets drifting in and out, like scraps of gauze trailed by an invisible hand.

It wasn’t holiday season, was distinctly off-peak, and the small Breton town seemed ready to retreat into itself. Why did we come? Anna wondered. Because we felt we deserved it? That we had earned it, in doctors’ visits and painful introspection? Or because we wanted to avoid reality for a while, do the things normal families do? Like holidays, where they take time off together and relax. Unwind. The word made her stab angrily at the sand with Rudi’s little blue trowel.

‘I got the papers.’ Maurice sounded pleased with himself.

‘Rudi cut his foot.’ Shading her eyes against the sun, Anna began to tell her husband about the glass, the blood, the women judging. She tried the line about the tricoteuses, because she liked it, but Maurice ignored it, as she had known he would.

‘He’s alright, though?’ he asked briskly.

‘Yes, he’s fine.’

‘Good.’ That was as much as he wanted to know. Everything else belonged to the realm of the imaginary, which was also the realm of the unnecessary – the many things with which Maurice did not concern himself. And maybe he was right, Anna thought, although that didn’t stop her from moving away from him, closer to Jessie, who had blanked the exchange. Maybe it is self-indulgent to contemplate the might-have-beens and almost-weres. Maybe it’s neurotic of me to do it, she thought, reassuring myself in the retelling that nothing bad had happened? That I managed the situation so that disaster did not, after all, befall us.

Neurotic. She thought about the word. Was it hers, or had she picked it up from Alison, in one of the family sessions?

She looked at Jessie again. Lying down, the knobs of her spine were less obvious, but as soon as she moved – to get water, her book, adjust the towel – they reared up out of her back like the coils of a sea serpent.

‘You must feel like you’re walking on eggshells’, her mother had said when Anna tried to describe the cold fury Jessie turned on her.

‘I feel like I’m crawling over them,’ Anna had replied. ‘Like a slug.’

Her mother had stayed silent at that.

The beach was emptying now, while the terraces of cafés and restaurants filled. Again Anna wondered at the clockwork-like precision of this country: failure to eat lunch at twelve thirty or one o’clock was inconceivable. Their own late arrival on the beach, a haphazard trail that began with Maurice and Rudi, then Anna, carrying bags and rugs, and finally Jessie, meant they were rarely ready for lunch when lunch was ready.

Jessie was wearing an ancient Mickey Mouse T-shirt, cut off and tied so that it ended just below her ribs, and a pair of black bikini bottoms. Where had she found the T-shirt? Anna was certain she had thrown it away years ago. Mickey, faded, leered jauntily at her. Jessie’s choice of something so childish, worn provocatively, made perfect sense.

All morning, Jessie had been the object of sly glances from men and women. The women stared openly, the men obliquely. Did they see what Anna saw, or what Jessie saw, or something else entirely?

Did they realise that it was Anna who had put what flesh there was onto those bones, just as surely as if she had taken Plasticine and stuck it on hard, even as Jessie sought to shrug it off?

Aware of the gaze of those around her, Jessie had stretched out, elongating her gangly limbs and pointing her toes. Anna, watching her, as she always did now, had felt sickened that they would stare so nakedly, and that Jessie had all but smirked back. She took each sideways glance as a compliment, each expression of curiosity or shock as jealousy. A girl who had been happy and invisible to the world, now tense in the glare of its searchlight. She looks like the problem, Anna realised – buttery brown hair, thin, toned from too much running, tanned, the childish T-shirt tied high to reveal her ambiguous body. She looked like the girl other girls might want to be, Anna knew, but she was like that because she couldn’t bear to be herself.

She had made herself an object of envy, but also of pity, a plea for protection. And yet, although she invited these things, she rejected them too.

It was, Anna thought, with the part of herself that could still appraise and observe, like staging a car crash, then claiming to be disgusted with those who craned their necks to gawp.

In making herself small, Jessie made herself vulnerable, but also superior: ‘I’m small and weak and feeble but I’m better than you.’ In the same way she demanded her mother’s attention, yet refused it. She made it impossible for Anna to come close, or to step away.

Jessie tossed her hair over her shoulder, lifting it up from the nape of her neck as if it were too heavy. The honey-coloured streaks were fake, just as the tan was fake and the eyelashes. Only the effort was real.

‘Lunch, Jessie?’ Anna said.

‘I’ve just had breakfast.’ Jessie paused between each word, the better to convey her irritation at having to say them.

‘Hardly “just”,’ Anna said. ‘Hours ago.’

‘Not hours. About an hour and a half.’ She spoke precisely, just as she did everything precisely now. ‘And I’m not hungry.’

‘Okay. Fine.’

Anna stopped herself asking what Jessie had eaten. She had seen the bowl and spoon going into the dishwasher at their tiny
rental house, but had missed the bit where Jessie ate whatever had been in the bowl. ‘Don’t make it all about food,’ the psychologist had said. ‘You don’t want every conversation with her to be a trigger.’ Trigger. Association. Stress factor. All these words with new and urgent meanings.

‘What about you?’ Anna said, half-turning towards Maurice. As always, she found herself confronted with the problem of what to call him. Never marry a man whose name you hate, she thought. Maurice. She had always hated it, and its abbreviations even more: Maur, Mo, Ricky. At first, she had got round the problem by calling him ‘darling’ or ‘love’, but that no longer came naturally. When Jessie was small, she had called him Moss, which was probably the best option. She should have made it stick, Anna thought now, but she had so badly wanted Jessie to call him ‘Dad’. Now Jessie, too, avoided calling Maurice anything. He was ‘him’ and ‘you’ to both of them. Perhaps that’s where the rot starts, Anna thought. The Man Without A Name. Except to Rudi.

‘Dadda, we’re making a sandcastle,’ the little boy said firmly, arriving back with his bucket and the delight that only he, now, could bring to them.

Jessie didn’t have a name either, Anna realised. At least not one of her own. Calling her Jessie, after a dead girl, had seemed a good idea at the time because Anna had wanted to keep her best friend alive. But, of course, she couldn’t. Instead, she worried more and more that she had infected Jessie with something of death, which was consuming her from the inside. As if her beginning had been tied in with another’s end.

She had tried calling her ‘Jess’, to differentiate, but had soon found herself slipping into the familiarity of ‘Jessie’. It had seemed a good way to remember the friend who had meant so much. And when it was too late to change, Anna had come to realise how much of her daughter’s life was a hand-me-down.

A name that wasn’t her own. A mother she had to share. A father who wasn’t hers. Poor Jessie, she thought. No wonder she wanted to make such a statement with the things that did belong to her: first her hair and clothes, then her body.

‘Dig.’ Rudi put the trowel into Anna’s hand and lay on his stomach in the sand, flipping at it with his spade, sending a shower of grit into the air.

As well dig as brood, Anna decided, bending to join him.

Jessie

Alison told me to write and keep writing, express everything I feel, the things that happen, what people say and how that makes me feel. I knew she was going to say it because that’s what people say in these situations, but also because I did two sessions of sitting and not talking to her, and she faked being really cool with that. I could see it was making her tense, though, and she felt we had come to an impasse – that’s what she called it, stupid cow, as if saying it in French was cool – and she needed to move it on and this was her way of doing that.

Also, she hopes I’ll make a mistake and tell her what’s ‘wrong’ with me, and then she can tell me back, like she’s just discovered it all by her stupid self.

So I’m writing everything down, but only because I’m not doing any of the other things she wants me to do. Anyway, it’s not for her. It’s for me. I’ve got a different place where I write the things I show her, and the two are nothing like each other.
Hers is for her and anyone she decides should see it: her boss, to prove what a great job she’s doing; my parents, whoever. Mine is just for me.

And it doesn’t matter what I write for her. Everything I give her she looks at and says: How did that make you feel? What would that look like? Always in a voice without expression, which I hate. It’s as if she’s afraid that any expression will ‘trigger’ me – I might get carried away and start doing what her tone tells me to do: get excited or angry. Like I’m a puppet. So she keeps her voice to a dull drone and I follow it, staying low and level.

The place where I write the real things? The password is husk. I like that word. Husk. Husky. Husky voice. Husky dog. I looked it up. It means the dry outer covering of fruit or seeds. It’s lovely, like something secret where the inside and the outside don’t match.

I hate Alison, but only because she’s stupid, and because I’d hate anyone who had to do what she does – sit in a room with me for an hour every few days and talk about me. About why I do or don’t do things. About what I feel and how feeling that makes me feel, as if my whole life is little tunnels that meet up and twist around each other when it’s separate bits that don’t touch. But I don’t really hate her, not the way I hate some of the others.

I hate this holiday for three reasons.

The house is tiny. It’s called a gîte. We’re all crammed in together. I can hear them breathing and Rudi talking in his sleep. His bed is so close to mine, I could roll onto it. Maurice crackling his newspaper and using the folded edges to clean his nails. That’s gross. Sometimes he sticks his little finger into his ear and waggles it around really hard. Whatever comes out he wipes on the corner of the paper. Then he carefully tears it off, folds it and leaves it on the table.

I hate it being so easy for them to watch me and see what I do. I hate the watching. Anna says I make them do it but I think she enjoys it. She always used to watch and stare anyway. Now she has an excuse.

I hate hearing Anna speak French. She’s good at it. She’s like someone else when she speaks it. She moves her hands a lot and is animated. Flirtatious. It makes me hate her even more because she shouldn’t be playful. And because I hate watching her try to pretend everything is normal with us. I see her doing it with Alison too. She makes her voice all low and reasonable to show everyone what a great, reasonable person she is, so they’re both talking in low, flat tones, like a bumbling, fuzzy ball they pass back and forth to each other.

I bet she does the same in meetings. It’s totally fake. She can scream and shout at me just as much as I can scream and shout at her. Neither of us gets the prize for being calm and sensible. I’ve watched her face go dark red when she’s angry with me, and listened while she screamed so loudly her voice has gone scratchy and broken. That’s when she stops.

Then she gets a look on her face like she’s seen something terrible. She looks at me like I frighten her.

She doesn’t do it so much – lose it like that – any more. Not since I got older. She does a different thing now: she stops whatever she’s doing and just breathes, with a hand on her chest, to calm herself. I hate that almost more than I hated her screaming at me.

Back then, after the screaming, she would go all weak and hardly be able to stand up. Her legs would wobble, like she’d had a shock. She’d be so, so sorry, and cry, and say could I forgive her, and I always said of course, and then she’d make something specially nice to eat – pancakes with bananas she fried in butter and sugar, or hot chocolate with loads of cream. It was nice, after it was terrible.

She’s never lost it like that with Rudi. I guess he doesn’t scare her the way I did. But I’ve seen Maurice looking at her sometimes, when she gets really annoyed, and I know he’s wondering if she’s going to. He kind of hovers when she gets angry, like he’s going to grab Rudi and run if she starts shouting, though I don’t know where he’d go. He never hovered like that with me. Or grabbed me and ran. But I did see him try to say things to her sometimes to calm her when she was screaming at me. It didn’t work much.

He didn’t protect me from her, but I protected her from him, even though she doesn’t know that.

Like, once, he asked me did I ‘mind’ when she got angry like that. He looked all worried, his face bunched up, like a squeezed fist, and he asked me sideways, so he didn’t have to look right at me. I knew he didn’t want to, in case I said something that would force him to do things. Actually, I think he was sorry as soon as he asked.

I said I didn’t mind. ‘Mind’? Seriously? What a jerk he turned into. And to think how much I liked him at first, when he was new and fun and Anna listened to him and he made her laugh.

We’ve only got another few days here and then we can go home. I can’t wait. I want to get back to the places I’m used to,
where I can work out what I’m doing and need to do. Here, I just have to go along with what they want. There’s no point doing anything else. Other girls have told me to ‘ride it out’. They mean just put my head down, keep quiet and go along with them.

Anna calls it ‘picking your battles’ and she’s a great one for that. Always going on about how good she is at letting people at work get away with little things so she can go in hard on bigger things.

I guess I know what she means now. I pick my battles too. And because I have a bigger battle, I don’t care so much about all the little ones that used to get to me. The battles with Harriet. With Jenna. With Zach.

I didn’t tell them I was coming here on holidays. I thought they didn’t need to know. That’s a battle I pick now too: how much to tell anyone. Before, I would tell them all everything, Anna first. It’s what we always did, her and me. I’d tell her about school and teachers and hockey and gymnastics and friends, and she’d tell me about work, and try to teach me things about life and people through what she’d done. I used to listen to what she wanted me to learn, so I could use it in my life.

‘Never act in anger’; ‘Think first’; ‘Think backwards from what you want the outcome to be, then decide how to get it.’ So pleased with herself, like she’d discovered the secret of life or something. So calm, so certain. Mostly.

She’s like a never-ending fountain of life lessons. One of those YouTube motivation tutorials. A free one.

Maurice hates being here too. I can see he does. But that doesn’t make him and me any closer. My enemy’s enemy isn’t always my friend. Sometimes he’s just another, smaller, enemy.

I think that’s why everyone said how ‘grown-up’ I was when I was a kid: I was like a little carbon copy of Anna. All careful and reasonable and with the same expressions and words – her friends used to laugh. Sometimes I said things to make them laugh. Other times I wouldn’t notice until something came out by accident, and then they laughed.

They loved it. Gran didn’t. Her face would twitch and she would peer at me. The same way she didn’t love me calling Anna by her name, instead of ‘Mummy’. ‘It sounds wrong,’ she would say, face wrinkled like a raisin. ‘Rude.’

‘It’s not rude,’ Anna would say. ‘It makes sense. I like it. We’re not some kind of archetypal mother and daughter. We’re friends, aren’t we, Jessie?’

And I would smile at her and say, ‘Best friends,’ because she loved that.

It hasn’t been true for the last few years. I had other best friends. I don’t now, but that doesn’t mean she’s back in the game.

Doing things her way didn’t work for me. Alison tries telling me that just because something doesn’t work it doesn’t mean it was wrong from the start, or that the person who told me was malicious; just that it didn’t work. She thinks too much about it.

I’m learning so much from this: what’s important, what’s not. How to get what I want without showing what it is. It’s like I have an inner flame that they’re all trying to blow out. Knowing I have it makes me feel I really am special, like Anna used to tell me I was. She would tell me again and again, and I’d pretend to believe it but I never knew what she was talking about because I was just ordinary, and then I realised that she meant she’s special – or she wanted to be – and that therefore I had to be, too. Because if I wasn’t special, then she, as my mother, couldn’t be.

Her. Always her.

And then the point, oh, the point: that she is so great, so hot, that she made it happen – got the job, the husband, even with a slow start and a child. Damaged goods, broke, without enough money for shampoo, yet she won out. Anyone would want to hide from that. And I do.

There’s a line I keep thinking of from a film about Muhammad Ali that she made me watch. She loves Muhammad Ali. I used to too. But in the film he’s dancing around the ring and he’s crowing, ‘How is that man going to hit me if he can’t find me?’ And he’s right there, dancing in plain sight, but he says George Foreman won’t be able to find him.

That’s me. If I don’t show myself, they can’t find me.

Now

‘Where will we have dinner?’

‘Must we think about that now?’ Anna turned her head towards Maurice. The sun had come out fully at last, late in the afternoon, and she was drowsy. She could see he was impatient, bored by the beach, but the crash of waves against the quieter bluster of the wind hypnotised her. Beside her, Rudi played with a heap of shells, chatting quietly to himself, while Jessie was fully asleep on the towel. She was so fragile, thought Anna, looking at the arms and legs, like bits of string, against the bright stripes of the towel.

‘She needs to sleep,’ she said, lowering her voice.

‘Sleep is hardly her problem,’ Maurice said, not lowering his. ‘More often, getting out of bed is.’

‘True, but that doesn’t mean she’s sleeping; just that she won’t get up. Remember what Alison told us? That sleep and food are the priorities.’

‘Fine.’ He was clearly irritated by the new ordering of their lives, by any mention of therapy. ‘But food is exactly what I’m suggesting. Or we’ll end up leaving it too late again and not finding anywhere decent.’ Finding somewhere decent was a big part of what Maurice liked to do on holiday. And by ‘decent’ he meant somewhere he could tell his friends was a ‘great place. Only tiny, but the freshest seafood you ever tasted. Literally from the boat, into the kitchen …’ Anna used to enjoy doing it too – ‘lobster straight out of the sea, fifteen minutes from pot to plate, carrots from their own garden’ – at the start, when being loved by him was something new and exciting, something she could return. But she had long since lost interest. Just another of the things they no longer did together.

‘So why don’t you . . .