The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

think that someone else might have been able to do the same? Why my long-lost mother would do that escaped me, but that was another question which would have to wait. I needed to work out who she was first. And so I started to think, really think about it, to think again about the people in my life who’ve definitely been acting oddly recently. Remembering too that all of their oddness began shortly after Alison arrived on the scene.

Robin. Barbara. Deborah.

I thought about how Robin had reacted when I told her about my mum reappearing, how utterly shocked she had seemed. How she’d simply stared when I’d first introduced her to Alison, and then seemed to recover before bombarding her with questions. How when I’d told Brenda she’d shrieked with excitement on the other end of the phone, in stark contrast to Barbara, who’d responded with a stunned silence. It had been a similar picture at work: Ruth leaping from her chair, Deborah sitting open-mouthed, gaping at me. She’d said it was ‘impossible’ – that was the word she’d used, wasn’t it?

Could I really be onto something here?

So I thought some more. Thought about how all of these women had appeared in my life in the past couple of years. How they’re all about the right age, too. OK, so my mother’s birthday was last week, at the end of April, and as far as I can remember Barbara’s is in June and Deborah’s in July, but people can lie about their birthdays, can’t they? I’m not sure when Robin’s is, and I wondered why I don’t know and whether that’s significant. And then I thought about how none of them look like my mother at all, not how I remember her at least, but also about the fact that I haven’t seen her for thirty years and people can change so much as they age. What did I know about their pasts, their families, these women? Again, very little about Robin’s. She’s so private; she gives so little away about her personal life, and again that made me wonder. Meanwhile, Barbara is gay, and I thought hard about that.

If my mother was secretly gay, back then when times were so different, could she have married a man because she felt unable to be her true self and then realised she couldn’t live a lie? Maybe.

And Deborah? She didn’t marry her husband Gavin until her mid-forties, and has, she says, no children. Again, was that significant, I wondered? But then I carried on thinking and wondered again why on earth my real mother would arrive back in my life, make friends with me, and not reveal herself to me. I could come up with no rational answer to that, and so I gave up, busying myself with readying the house for the children’s return. Now, Jacob and Crystal are as baffled as I am.

‘It’s crazy. And why did she attack Alison? I can’t believe she won’t tell you who she is. Well, I suppose I can, really … What are the police doing to find her?’ asks Jacob.

‘Not sure. I couldn’t give them much to go on,’ I say. ‘They want to interview me properly in the next day or so and talk to Alison again too, when she’s feeling better. But I believe her when she says she won’t tell them anything, I really do. There’s no CCTV anywhere around here otherwise they could look at that to see who came to the house on Friday afternoon, maybe get a picture they could circulate. They’re going to do some house-to-house enquiries to see if anyone noticed anyone coming or going, but if Alison let her in, well … I mean it wasn’t as if they were scuffling on the doorstep or anything.’

‘So you really think it could be Robin? Or Deborah. Or Barbara? Seriously?’

Jacob’s stopped pacing now and is leaning against the kitchen worktop, picking icing off one of the cupcakes sitting on a plate next to him – the cakes that had been intended for Friday’s abandoned party.

‘Well, they’ve certainly all been in the house recently,’ Crystal says slowly, ‘and they all know Alison of course, and could have talked their way in on Friday afternoon. The police said the DNA was elsewhere, too, not just on the lamp, didn’t they? Do you know where they found it? That might help narrow it down.’

I shake my head.

‘No, I don’t. I was in too much shock to ask sensible questions like that. You’re right, though. That might help. I can ask, maybe?’

‘Do,’ says Crystal. ‘So … what now? Are you just going to confront them, these women? Ask them if they’re actually your mother? How weird is that going to be?’

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘I have no idea how to go about it. I need to think a lot before I say anything.’

‘OK, well … come on, more detail about Alison Allen and her campaign against you. Shall I put the kettle on again?’ Jacob asks, and I nod.

‘Please. This might take a while,’ I say.

And so, fresh cup of coffee in hand, I start talking, relaying the remarkable story that Alison told me yesterday.

‘It was the so-called taxi driver who drove us when we went out for pizza that night, right at the beginning, who fitted the hidden cameras in my bedroom and bathroom,’ I tell them. They’re both open-mouthed, agog, like children at nursery story time.

‘He was actually a friend of Mum— Gosh, it’s still really weird not to call her that. Of Alison’s, I mean, who does that sort of thing for a living. The taxi was just a ruse. She’d stolen my keys the day before – I was going mad trying to find them – and she got him a full set cut. He dropped us off in town and came back and let himself in. They were tiny little pinhole things, apparently. They connected to our wifi so he could access the pictures