The Family I Lost: A totally gripping and heartbreaking novel about family secrets Read online

  THE FAMILY I LOST

  A TOTALLY GRIPPING AND HEARTBREAKING NOVEL ABOUT FAMILY SECRETS

  ALI MERCER

  BOOKS BY ALI MERCER

  The Family I Lost

  The Marriage Lie

  My Mother’s Choice

  His Secret Family

  Lost Daughter

  Available in Audio

  The Marriage Lie (available in the UK and US)

  My Mother’s Choice (available in the UK and US)

  His Secret Family (available in the UK and US)

  Lost Daughter (available in the UK and US)

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Four

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Five

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  His Secret Family

  Hear More from Ali

  Books by Ali Mercer

  A Letter from Ali

  The Marriage Lie

  My Mother’s Choice

  Lost Daughter

  Acknowledgements

  *

  For Lyn and Ray

  FOREWORD

  JULIE

  1978

  Their daughter stands out in the drab visitors’ room like anything that catches the light when it is gloomy. Her hair is in wispy bunches and she’s wearing a pale green velvet-and-net fairy dress with bedraggled wings at the back. She is sitting up very straight at a bolted-down table opposite her dad.

  Julie has warned her that although her dad could give her a quick hug when he first saw her, after that he’d have to stay seated and would not be free to get up and move around. Lisa had accepted this without question, just as she had accepted without question the news that he had done something bad and was in prison, which, now she was nearly five, she was fully old enough to know was where bad people went. She loved him, and it was obvious she didn’t really believe that he was bad.

  The distinction between ‘bad man’ and ‘man who did a bad thing’ had seemed important to Julie at the time, something for both her and Lisa to hang onto. A small, redemptive possibility after all the tragedy and disaster. But now they are all here in this room that smells of disinfectant and sweat and old cigarette smoke, and she can’t kid herself that it really matters.

  After all, he’s still here. And the dead are still dead. And her family will never forgive her.

  Her mum, her dad, her sister – they have all decided that Lisa counts for nothing. Out of everything that has been said and done since that summer afternoon at the farmhouse, that is perhaps what cuts most deeply. She doesn’t really care any more about them deciding to cut her off. She understands it. But Lisa? How could they do it? How could they reject an innocent child out of hand like that?

  She clears her throat and says in a low voice to her ex-husband, ‘How are you getting on?’

  It’s a stupid question, because she knows just by looking at him. He looks terrible – puffy-faced, tired and bleak. But she has to say something. They have less than an hour, and a clock mounted on the wall on the far side of the room is ticking the time away. Prison officers are stationed here and there, watching, and all around them other families are keeping their voices low and their eyes down, leaning across the bolted-down tables, not touching. There seems to be an unspoken mutual agreement that the prisoners and their visitors will allow each other as much privacy as possible.

  Mike shrugs. ‘It is what it is.’

  She remembers her dad saying, I hope they lock him up and throw away the key. She had been horrified by that, but if she is honest with herself she isn’t sure how she feels about Mike coming out one day either. It’s not that she wants him to suffer – how could he suffer any more than he has already, and will continue to do? Whether he’s inside or not will make no difference to that. They are both serving a different kind of sentence, one that will never end. A sentence of grief and guilt and regret. What she’s not sure about is him back on the outside, free to be a dad to Lisa again.

  In the past he’d been no great shakes as a dad – sometimes there, sometimes not, unreliable, usually broke. But after everything that’s happened… Would he want to redeem himself? Would he try?

  How would Lisa, who is so sweet and docile now, feel about him when she is a little older and more independent and has a mind of her own, and finds out what he has done? Come to that, how would Lisa feel about Julie herself?

  Anyway, all that is a long way off, and for now, what Lisa doesn’t know can’t hurt her…

  Lisa is sitting bolt upright next to Julie, her legs crossed neatly at the ankles and her hands clasped on the table, wide-eyed, on her very best behaviour. She’d got up early without protest to come here – a three-and-a-half-hour journey by train and bus, the same again ahead of them when the visiting hour is up. Lisa had been scared of the sniffer dogs but hadn’t made a fuss, which was just as well because the very last thing Julie had needed at that point was for her to kick off.

  She’s a good kid. Always has been. She deserves all the love in the world. Not to be rejected by most of her family for something that was not her fault.

  Julie says to her, ‘Why don’t you go and have a look at the toys?’

  There is a small play area – really just an empty corner – next to them, with a few of the kind of toys you might find in a doctor’s surgery or a hospital waiting room: one of those metal frames with wooden beads threaded on curvy wires, some stacking cups and a tub of plastic bricks. Nothing that would hold any immediate appeal for Lisa.

  Lisa looks doubtful and casts an appealing glance in her dad’s direction, as if asking Julie to reconsider. Obviously, she remembers that Mike isn’t allowed to get down and play with her. But Mike doesn’t say anything and Lisa obediently climbs down from her seat, goes over to the play area and starts pushing the beads along the wires on the frame. Julie has the impression that she’s trying to play as quietly as possible, as if to avoid drawing attention to herself and annoying her parents or anybody else.

  Mike says, ‘It’s so good to see you. Both of you.’

  She keeps watching Lisa. She can’t bring herself to meet his eyes. ‘She’s a bright little thing,’ she says. ‘She’s getting ever so good at reading now. Her writing’s coming on, too.’

  ‘I can believe it,’ Mike says, and hearing the pride in his voice makes it possible for her to face him. It’s so strange to see his wrecked face wreathed in smiles, but there it is – he looks almost happy.

  ‘Maybe she’ll write to you, one day,’ she says.

  His expression abruptly changes. His smile disappears, and he is sombre again. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t expect her to. How’s your sister?’

  She shrugs. She shouldn’t, but she does. Because what has her sister got to do with her now? Nothing. Next to nothing.

  ‘All right, from what I know,’ she says.

  ‘What about your parents?’

  Another, slightly bigger shrug. ‘I asked them to let me have our stuff from when we were staying there, and they wouldn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean? What stuff?’

  She hesitates. It would have been better not to say anything. She doesn’t want to push him over the edge, and this is no place for an outburst. Especially not with Lisa watching.

  ‘Julie… what stuff?’

  ‘Clothes. Books. Unopened birthday presents,’ she says. ‘I didn’t pack half of it. I was on complete autopilot. I mean, I don’t actually remember leaving the place at all.’

  He glances across at Lisa. ‘How’s she doing with it all? Does she ever talk about it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think she remembers.’

  And this would be a blessing, surely, if it was true. Wouldn’t it be better if Lisa could forget? If they could move on just as the two of them, mother and child, as if there had never been anyone else…

  But then the memory comes back to Julie very vividly and painfully – the night, not that long after it all happened, when she had found Lisa weeping in the dark, her pillow soaked with tears.

  She had asked what was wrong but Lisa had just carried on crying and it had been obvious she couldn’t find the words to say it. So Julie had stroked Lisa’s damp hair back from her forehead and she had said, Everything you lose comes back to you eventually. I promise you, one day,
when you need it the most, the person you’re missing now will be right there to help you through it. And even though this was a promise she could in no way guarantee, Lisa had seemed to believe her, and to be soothed, and had calmed down enough to go back to sleep.

  ‘I hate knowing that your family won’t see you any more,’ Mike says. ‘Or Lisa either.’

  ‘You know what, in a way I think it makes things easier. It’s just her and me now. That’s all I have to worry about.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Single mum and single daughter. I guess that’s manageable, isn’t it?’

  She feels the blood rush to her face, a sure sign of guilt. He sounds so bitter, and what he’s said is so close to what she has just been thinking herself. His words hit home like an accusation: You want to forget, don’t you? You want to deny all of it, and all of us. You can’t bear the truth and you’re more than ready to live a lie. You want to pretend it never happened.

  But he’s in here, inside, doing his time. It’s down to her now to decide how to handle things. What right does he have to make her feel bad about it?

  ‘Mike, this is not the time to go picking a fight,’ she says. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I came, and I brought Lisa with me. Isn’t that enough?’

  She breaks off, suppresses a sob and leans forward to rest her head on her arms on the table.

  ‘Don’t make a scene,’ Mike says in a low voice. ‘You’d better sit up. There’s a prison officer looking over this way. If they think you’re getting upset they might ask you to leave.’

  ‘I’m not getting upset. I am upset,’ she says, and then she does sit up because they have even less time left now, and she owes it to Lisa to see this through, if only for the rest of the visiting hour.

  Lisa hesitantly returns to the table, and Julie gives her one of the snacks she has been allowed to bring in with her – everything else is sitting in a locker outside the visiting room. It’s a chocolate bar, and after Lisa has finished it her hands are sticky and Julie wipes them with a tissue. She is conscious of Mike taking all of this in, as if trying to imprint it on his memory – the normality of it, the ordinary, everyday to and fro of caring for a child.

  Mike asks Lisa how she’s been getting on at nursery school, and she says her class has been talking about what they want to be when they grow up. After a brief, wounded pause he asks her what she has in mind. It costs him an effort to ask, Julie can see that. Probably because the last thing Mike would ever want is for their little girl to end up being anything like him.

  After all, what is he now? A prisoner. A criminal, convicted of one of the most serious of all crimes. No – the longer Lisa can go on not knowing what he has done, the better…

  Julie expects Lisa to say she wants to be a fairy, or an artist, or a gardener – all answers she has given to the same question in the past. But instead, Lisa sucks in her cheeks as if thinking hard and then says, ‘I want to be a coping lady.’

  ‘Yeah? A coping lady? What’s that, exactly?’ Mike’s face has brightened again. It’s almost unbearable to see how tenderly he is looking at their daughter – it’s like a light that has come on somewhere inside.

  ‘A coping lady helps people cope,’ Lisa says, as if this is something everybody should know about and have access to. ‘You phone up, and she comes and helps you.’

  ‘They must be very busy, these coping ladies,’ Julie says. ‘Given all the problems everybody has. Their phones would be ringing all the time. Some people probably wouldn’t even be able to get through.’

  Lisa looks briefly troubled by this. Then her face clears. ‘I think they sometimes just know, without you having to ring,’ she says.

  ‘I should think they’d be very expensive, though,’ Julie says. ‘I mean, some problems are pretty hard work.’

  ‘Maybe they sometimes work for free,’ Lisa says thoughtfully. ‘Or you just leave them a fifty-pence piece, like the tooth fairy. Or a carrot and some sherry, like for Santa.’

  ‘Well, that’ll see you right, if you’re paid in carrots and sherry and fifty-pence pieces,’ Mike says, and he laughs. He actually laughs.

  With that the tension between them seems to lift, and for the rest of the hour they manage to talk and there are no poisoned silences, no recriminations and no distress. It’s like magic. As if, for the time they have left, they have agreed to set everything else aside, and just be here with their daughter.

  But then, just before they are due to leave, Mike leans forwards and says to Julie, ‘You make sure you take good care of her,’ and there’s something even more final than goodbye about it. As if he’s not expecting there to be another visit.

  Her throat suddenly feels too tight to speak, and all she can do is nod.

  He knows. He knows she’s not going to want to come here again. He knows, and he’s not going to make a scene. He’s not going to make it hard for her. It’s as if he has already forgiven her. Even though it means that on top of everything else he has lost, he is going to lose Lisa too.

  As she walks out holding Lisa’s hand she can feel his eyes on her back, following them both. She senses something stirring in her wake as if it has just been released and cast forward into the future, as quiet and potentially powerful as a promise whispered to a sleepy child.

  But she doesn’t look back. Lisa does, or tries to, just for a moment, and Julie tightens her grip on her hand and hurries her along. Then they are on the other side of the door, and she knows with dreadful and inexplicable certainty that they will never see him again.

  PART ONE

  LISA AND AMY

  Winter 2008 to Spring 2009

  ONE

  LISA

  December 2008

  Lisa comes across the little red address book in one of the drawers in the kitchen, along with an old electricity bill reminder, a flier from the local Chinese takeaway and an assortment of junk: paper clips bent out of shape, biros with chewed ends and a lidless, dried-up tube of glue. It’s the first thing she’s come across in an hour or two of searching and sorting that might actually be worth keeping, and as she opens it a frisson runs down her spine.

  There it is, under her fingers on the yellowed, gold-edged pages. Mum’s handwriting, never quite on the line, a spiky, sloping scribble that looked as if it had been dashed off at speed.

  It had always been hard to read, as if Mum didn’t actually want anyone to be able to make out what she was writing down. Her shopping lists had been a nightmare. But then, by the time Lisa was fourteen, she’d graduated from running errands to planning their meals, budgeting for them and doing the shopping and cooking herself.

  In spite of how long Mum had kept that same address book, most of the pages are almost empty. That’s not much of a surprise. Mum had been what you might call a very private person. A loner, was how Lisa described her to other people. A bit of a recluse. She didn’t volunteer any other information about her family if she could help it.

  She has also always avoided the subject of her mum’s close and intimate relationship with the gin bottle. But that particular bit of denial has become harder to maintain lately, given how drunk they’d said her mum had been when she died, and given the number of empties Lisa has found stashed here and there around the place.

  Clearly, Mum had felt ashamed enough of her drinking to want to hide the evidence from the neighbours. Or maybe it just hadn’t been possible to fit it all in her recycling bin.