Where the Memories Lie

 

 

I walked up the hallway and found Anna sitting on a stool at the island in the centre of our large farmhouse-style kitchen, which oozed sunlight and was the heart of the house. Her school books were placed in neat rows over practically the whole surface. Pens of various colours were lined up horizontally in front of her. She was so precise about certain things I sometimes wondered if she had OCD, but I always pushed that thought to the back of my mind. We all had it to varying degrees, didn’t we? We all had routines, things that we liked just so. I’d seen far too many labels placed on kids these days. I wasn’t about to put one on my precious girl.

 

I kissed the top of her head. ‘How was school?’

 

‘Good. But I’ve got some maths homework I might need help with. When’s Dad back?’

 

19

 

Sibel Hodge

 

Ethan was the maths genius and always helped Anna out with it. I could only add up with a calculator. I think I had number dys-lexia, or something. When I looked at numbers on a page they all swam together.

 

‘He’ll be back Friday.’

 

‘But he’s always working away at the moment,’ she whined.

 

‘He’s overseeing a big project in York and he needs to be on site. He can’t commute from there to Dorset every day; it’s too far.’ I stroked her hair then peered in the fridge. My appetite still hadn’t returned, and I didn’t fancy cooking. What I fancied was a big glass of wine. ‘He’s going to call later so you can have a chat, though.’

 

‘OK.’ She bent over her notebook and underlined something neatly with a red marker pen and a ruler. ‘I’ve got to do a project on capital punishment for Religion and Ethics.’

 

‘Oh, how nice,’ I drawled. I’d had a meeting with the school recently about them wanting to fast-track Anna through some of her subjects because they’d classified her as ‘gifted’. Ethan and I had debated this for a while. I didn’t think the school should be bandying about those kinds of terms. What about the other kids who weren’t gifted? How would it make them feel? Still, Anna was very intelligent, and we’d decided in the end to go ahead with it. It meant she was learning some of the curriculum a lot earlier than she should’ve been, but she was clearly enjoying it, and from her reports she was doing really well.

 

‘It’s really interesting, actually,’ she said. ‘What do you think about the death penalty?’

 

What a cheery pre-dinner conversation. ‘We don’t have the death penalty in the UK.’

 

‘Yes, I know, but I don’t think I can put that excuse on my homework as to why I haven’t done it. We’ve got to consider the ethics behind it.’

 

20

 

Where the Memories Lie ‘Um . . . well, let me see.’ I shut the door on the pretty much empty fridge. Unless I could make something out of a lone cheese triangle, some dried-up flat leaf parsley, a wrinkly mushroom and a potato with sprouty bits on it, then dinner would be of the takeaway variety. ‘I think if you’re guilty of committing a crime ?

 

and presumably to get the death penalty we’re talking terrible types of murder ? then I think you’d probably deserve it. I mean, take Myra Hindley, for example. What if she’d ever been let out of prison before she died? Or Peter Sutcliffe? People wouldn’t be safe, would they?’ I explained who they were. ‘So the death penalty could be for the protection of the public to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again. Plus, it would hopefully put people off doing such crimes in the first place and the crime rate might go down.’

 

‘Actually, from the research I’ve been doing so far, about 90 percent of top criminologists in America think that the death penalty doesn’t act as a deterrent to reduce murder or violent crimes.

 

And . . .’ she lifted her pen in the air and pointed it at me, ‘doesn’t it actually make you as bad as the criminal if you kill them?’

 

‘No.’