Page 72 of 59 Minutes
MRS CARRIE DABB
TEN YEARS AFTER THE ALERT
Mary stands up so fast she nearly trips over, but when Bunny offers her hand, Mary brushes it away.
‘Let me get this straight, you told the school we were all going to London for the memorial service? You used the death of your mama, my daughter Emma , as an excuse to bunk off school.’ It’s not a question.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bunny says, but Mary shakes her head and walks out of the living room and into the kitchen. Still the old footage fills the screen, as it does every year. A reminder, as if anyone could ever forget.
‘Mum, I’m sorry,’ Bunny cries. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you and Gran, I thought you never had to know.’
‘You thought we wouldn’t find out that you’d lied to the school about us all going to London so you could sneak off to Princetown?’ Carrie says. ‘So you could go to a bloody prison ? How could you do this?’
‘No, it … it wasn’t at the prison. The ones who’d shown good behaviour, the prisoners, I mean, the ones they didn’t think would run away.
’ Bunny pauses, as if trying to find the words.
‘You know how there are services all over the country for the people who died in the alert, Mum? Because it’s ten years, it’s a big anniversary? ’
‘Yes,’ Carrie says, quietly. ‘I’m well aware.’
‘Well some of the prisoners got to go to the service in Princetown Church. And he was one of them. My da— Ashley.’
‘That man was allowed out of prison to go to a church service ?’ Carrie says, the words sharp and salty on her tongue. ‘A church service for people like your mama.’
Bunny puts her face in her hands and nods.
‘A church service for people like my mother? My mother who he bloody killed. Your dead grandmother!’
‘I’m sorry, Mummy. I’m so sorry. As soon as I saw him in there in the pew with the others, I knew it was a mistake.
I got up and left and he watched me and he looked …
sad. Like, really, really sad. And then when I was waiting at the bus stop, the siren went off.
The prison siren, I mean. And someone said that meant there’d been an escape and I knew. I just knew it was him.’
‘How could he have even known it was you in there? How would he have recognised you?’
‘His mum sent him pictures. She’s the one who told me about the service.’
‘You actually met up with her?’ Carrie thinks of that isolated compound, the crumbling building with its blocked-up windows.
For years, teenagers would drive out there and put stones through the windows or spray paint the walls.
She almost drove there herself once, set the whole stinking thing on fire.
Pepper, still alive then, had talked her down from his flat in London.
‘You’re no good to your daughter if you’re banged up for arson, Kochanie , and I’m too old to come and break you out.’
In reality, she couldn’t bear to go there again, took circuitous routes to avoid that dark valley. Blotted it from her mental map.
The Curtiss mother had apparently moved back in, years after she first left. With her other sons dead and Ashley in prison, it was her right. Or maybe her penance.
‘I only met her once,’ Bunny says and there’s a defensiveness to her tone. ‘She hates what he did, like, she didn’t go to the service herself, but he’s all she’s got left. Apart from m—’
‘You’re all I’ve got left!’ Carrie cries. ‘You’re all Gran’s got left! Ashley’s mum can’t have you! There’s plenty of wing nut Curtiss cousins still around, she can have them!’
A door creaks somewhere in the house. Carrie thought Mary would go and angrily bash plates around, throw herself into laying out the buffet or clattering tea cups around.
But there’s no noise from the kitchen. It sounds …
that doesn’t make sense. It sounds like Mary has just opened the cellar door, but why would she go down there?
It’s still laid out just as Janet Spencer had left it, the pickles and preserves, the dusty futon, the rolled-up clothes for an apocalypse that never came, but also did.
‘I just wanted to know what he was like.’
‘You know what he’s like because you know what he did!’
‘Yeah, and I have half his genes so if he’s bad then maybe I’m bad and I just wanted to know if …
if there was any good in him. I know you hate him, Mum, and I know you didn’t want me to know the truth, but I do.
The match was 99.99 per cent so it’s like …
it’s undeniable. And I needed to know for myself. ’
‘What do you mean, the match?’
‘An online DNA test. It’s just a tickbox for parental permission and I knew you’d never agree so … I just ticked it myself.’
‘But how did you—?’
‘His mum gave a sample. My …’ she looks towards the kitchen and whispers, ‘my other Gran, I guess.’
‘Jesus, you’ve not just met her, you swapped fluid samples?’
‘She’s not how you think, Mum. I told you, she hates what they did.’
‘But she gave you a phone and arranged a DNA test.’
‘I needed to know where I got this from,’ Bunny says eventually, reaching up to her thick curly hair. It’s long and out of control. Carrie longs to be allowed to brush it again. To tease a ribbon of it loose and twirl it in her hands.
‘And my eyes, Mum. ’Cos yours are blue.’
‘Emma, your mama, she had brown eyes too.’
‘You know what I mean, Mum. It doesn’t mean I didn’t … It doesn’t mean anything bad about you and Mama. Wouldn’t you want to know the truth, if you were me?’
On the screen, against a blue panelled TV studio backdrop, a man in a CND T-shirt is arguing with a woman in a suit.
‘There would have been no incentive for them to hack the system like that if there were no nukes to threaten each other with,’ the man on screen says as the woman rolls her eyes.
‘Be realistic,’ she cuts in, as the host in the middle battles a small smile.
‘People like me are the only ones who are being realistic,’ the man says. ‘No matter how much suspicion the mainstream media throws at us, we’re still the only ones willing to say on camera that it was the state of R—’
The screen cuts away to old footage.
‘Sometimes,’ Carrie says, ‘the truth makes everything worse.’