Out of all of us, I am probably the brightest spark, the wealthiest, privileged woman: a fact I credit to my rich biological father and natural mother. My parents hold controversial beliefs. Beliefs that only intensify as they grow older. Karl is a highly successful private gynaecologist. Nessie is a highly controversial geneticist. They have the strangest views about the procreation of human life.
I grew up in our ultra-private abode, a sprawling mansion shrouded in oak and beech forests. The house can only be approached through secure electric gates overseen by six closed circuit tv cameras. Entry is by a variable security code issued by my parent from a keypad in the hall. A long gravel drive bordered by lime and cypress trees leads through a thin cordon of woodland to an expansive weedless lawn, a small lake filled with koi, rudd and lilies, our pristine lawn tennis court, and Berenden.
I keep my secret concealed inside the walled garden behind our palatial Georgian house. The grounds were once meticulously landscaped, tended as if they were newborn beings, by Thomas our dementia-ridden, green-fingered gardener who lived in a mossy potting shed in the furthest corner of the allotment, as far from the house as possible. The allotment made my family self-sufficient in organic fruits, vegetables and potatoes. Thomas kept a cockerel with several laying hens in his reinforced fox-proof wire coop, plus three aged white slatted bee hives for honey, next to his shed.
‘Our lovable village idiot,’ my mother recalls, fondly, ‘How would we have thrived without him?
Alongside the allotment lies a strip of lawn featuring a crystal clear swimming pool and a tall blue and yellow climbing frame. My mother, Nessie, made her daughter swim thirty-six lengths of the pool then climb the frame for an hour each day in all weathers, from the time that I was a little girl until I grew small breasts, fine hair on my arms and legs, and a sensational muscular physique.
As a special treat to celebrate my adolescence, she bought me a soft cyan blue sports bra, a pair of sawn off aquamarine shorts, a new pair of light blue padders, and some elasticated maroon and olive gloves to wear on the climbing frame in case I bruised herself. She also braided my hair.
‘Why must I do this, mother?’ I, her impatient teenager, asked one day, as I climbed as far as the second highest yellow rung, gripping the blue bar above my head, flexing my fabulous biceps, ‘I find it so dull!’
‘Because you are very special, darling,’ she told me, ‘and rather different from all the other girls.’
I kicked my feet out angrily, ‘I don’t want to be different. I want to be normal like everyone else.’
Spreading in uneven rows beyond the strip of lawn is an ancient orchard full of gnarled, twisted, wind-bent trees: apples and pears for juicing, crab apples for jellies, cherries, plums and damsons for jam-making. The gardener kept a fruit press in his bedroom for harvest time and prepared freshly pressed pear and apple juices for the family while his employer made her own berry jams to spread on hot buttered toast and celebrate her teenage daughter’s return from Roedale’s girl’s boarding school. My mother instructed me to never stray into the allotment and the orchard or to disturb Thomas in the potting shed, in case he was resting from his labours, she said, but the truth, the real reason for restricting her daughter’s movements, was much more disturbing, even sinister.
It was a hot, sultry, sticky summer’s evening. The humid air was filled with flies, gnats and midges when I climbed out the pool. I quickly grabbed my mermaid beach towel, peeled off my backless swimsuit, and changed into my climbing gear. As I swung on the frame, I noticed that my father’s bedroom window was open. I dropped to the red tarmac ground, listening to the animalistic groans and moans of an overly mature male and a much younger female mammal – mating.
‘No sign of the old boy,’ I sighed, ‘must be sleeping while mother and father are busy fornicating.’
Taking a deep breath, I entered the forbidden orchard. The further in I ventured the more entangled the rotting fruit trees became. The mosquitoes descended on me without warning, a hideous fuzzy cloud of hungry midges nipping at my bare legs and arms, crawling about in my fine hair, feeding voraciously on my soft scalp, biting at my skin, making me scratch my scalp, armpits, my jawline.
‘Leave me alone!’ I hissed, swatting at the hazy blanket in frustration.
A few feet further on, the trees untwined, the thicket cleared, and I found myself standing inside a perfect circle of grassy turf. At the very heart of the circle stood a granite plinth bearing a bronze statue of a crouching, naked, pregnant woman, her hands on her haunches, her head turned to face left.
Her blank gun metal eyes seemed to appraise me. I was stunned: the woman’s face looked uncannily familiar.
‘What’s she?’ I cried.
‘She’s your mother when she was young,’ a jaded male voice told me, ‘Don’t you recognize her?’
The constant gardener slipped out in front of me from behind a dense crab apple tree like some decrepit dryad. It occurred to me that he might not have been asleep at all. Tom might even have followed me here. There would be hell to play if my mother found out: no more chocolate biscuits, wafers, ice creams or fizzy drinks. No more violent bedtime treats after the official nine o’clock watershed. No more bloodthirsty battle games or social media chats with my friends at school. I decided to humour him. Humouring an older, maturer, man like him seemed to me to be the best thing I could do, given we were alone in the forbidden orchard, with my mother’s effigy watching over me.
‘But why? What for?’ I asked him, ‘Why is she hidden here in the orchard? What is she here for?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough girl,’ he said, creeping forward stealthily, a crazed look in his eyes.
He sidled up to me and grasped my muscled shoulders. His breath stank of cider, or was it perry? Close-up, he was the filthiest, ugliest, most lecherous man I’d ever set eyes on, and I had teased a fair few boys, beyond the boundary, after school. His left eye was glued shut at the lashes. His grizzled, age-etched face was full of wrinkles, folds, big liver spots from too much drinking. His raw red mouth was filled with bleeding gums interspersed with occasional broken teeth. He had an ugly cold sore (a coleslaw, I used to call it, when I was little!) festering on his bottom lip. His neck was full of scrag, covered in days of ingrained dirt, soil, peat, manure, and compost.
And yet, I feared he had made an effort for me today, all dressed up in his best grey pinstripe suit and filthy beige-white open-necked shirt.
Was this fashion parade for me? Or was it for my errant mother? I was about to find out the truth.
‘Give an old man some love, Nessie,’ he pleaded.
Tom tried to kiss me on the lips. His frail body pressed against mine. I felt him unzip his freshly pressed trousers and pull his todger out. Disgusted by his indecent assault, I kneed the pervert in the groin, shoving him off of me. He slumped to the ground. His head banged against the bronze statue. A bright scarlet stream of blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth, a straw-coloured liquid ran from his ears and nose. For one short, dramatic moment I thought, I had killed the man.
Good riddance to him, the dark side of my not-so-innocent mind said.
He began to move and moan, ‘Nessie, come back to me, sweet girl. Come and kiss your Daddy.’
Nessie: my mother! Tom had indulged in illicit sex with my mother? Was this pig my real father?
I stood there for a few minutes watching his body slither towards me, my bloodied snake, listening intently to the pathetic creature. That was all he was to me: a creature, as he begged me for his life.
‘Please don’t hurt me! Please! I’ll be a good man from now on. I’ll lay off your mother. Please!’
The garden spade was propped against an apple tree within easy reach. Petrified yet thrilled at the same time, I took the spade in my tender hands, holding it aloft: my glaive, then I brought it down on him, again and again and again, until the degenerate’s pathetic whining and moaning stopped.
Something primeval snapped inside my mind that made me strip off my bloodied clothes, throw them in a heap at the foot of the shrine: a shrine to motherhood, womanhood, adulthood, girlhood, twinhood and birth, and rub myself all over in his warm, congealing blood. Something, inside me.
Crying with relief, my face, arms, legs and torso smeared in his blood, I ran to the swimming pool shower to rinse and cleanse myself as fast as my strong legs could carry me, unsure of who to tell.
