The Argument (ARC)

by Victoria Jenkins

He couldn’t have heard her the first time, as this time he sits up and turns to her, putting a reassuring hand on her arm to try to calm her down. ‘Were you dreaming?’

  She feels like swearing at him, though she never would. It’s something they have never done, not even during their worst arguments. There seems something so disrespectful about swearing at the person you’re married to or swearing at anyone for that matter. Hannah prides herself on having a greater self-control than most, and she is grateful for the fact that her and Michael’s is a marriage that has never been blighted by raised voices and angry words.

  A clattering from downstairs answers his question without Hannah having to speak. Michael clambers from bed and pulls on the trousers he left on the chair in the corner just hours earlier. ‘Wait here,’ he tells her as he goes to bedroom door, but she is already out of bed. She follows him to the landing, ignoring his request to stay where she was. Michael moves slowly along the landing, edging tentatively towards the top of the stairs. It has fallen quiet again downstairs, as though there was never anyone there at all, and Hannah wonders for a moment if whoever was there has heard them and is already gone. She wonders if she really heard anything, or if her mind has played cruel tricks on her, the memories that have plagued her thoughts now infiltrating the present.

  ‘Olivia,’ she hears her husband say.

  Hannah quickens along the landing. Looking past Michael, she sees Olivia standing on the stairs in her pyjamas, her hand clutching the banister.

  ‘Get back up here,’ Michael tells her.

  For once, Olivia does what her father asks of her without argument. She steps on to the landing and passes Hannah wordlessly, avoiding any eye contact. She looks so pale in the half-light, wan and ghostlike, a shadow of the girl she was just this time last year. She goes soundlessly into her room and closes the door behind her.

  Hannah follows Michael down the stairs; she has more important things to focus on than her daughter’s silent protest. She watches as Michael picks up an ornament from the hallway table; a tall ceramic vase she has never really liked and can’t remember how she came by. He passes the living room; the door is open, and though the room is bathed in darkness it is possible to see that everything is as it was left the night before. The kitchen is at the back of the house, knocked through into what was once a separate dining room. This part of the house is Hannah’s pride and joy, the kitchen gifted to her by Michael as a ten-year anniversary present.

  Michael raises the vase above his shoulder as his free hand moves to the kitchen door handle. He pushes the door open with a firm shove, stepping back and gripping the vase in both hands now, ready to swing it if necessary. They wait, but there is no sound; no intruder comes charging towards them as Hannah feared they might. The room is thick with darkness, and Michael must step forward again to flick the light switch.

  There is no one there. Hannah follows Michael into the room, her heart slumping in her chest at the sight of what awaits them. The patio doors have been smashed near the handle; the key that was left in the lock now dropped on to the tiled floor. But it is the row of cupboards that lines the far wall that Hannah can’t take her eyes from. Sprayed across their ivory doors in red paint the colour of fresh blood is the word LIAR. It screams at her from across the room like an accusation.

  ‘Oh my god.’ Hannah’s hand moves to her mouth involuntarily. She scans the room, looking for anything that might be missing, something that might suggest a robbery. Other than a mug that has been knocked from the draining board and has broken into two pieces – one half sitting at the foot of the cupboards, the other resting at the side of the fridge – everything seems to be in place. Nothing appears to have been taken. ‘We need to call the police.’

  Michael picks the key up from the floor and locks the doors before moving to the drawer in which the bin bags are kept.

  ‘I took the key out of the lock earlier,’ Hannah tells him, hearing her voice falter. ‘I took it out before I went upstairs to bed, and I put it in the box in the hallway.’

  Michael looks at her, not needing to speak to make his uncertainty known.

  ‘Michael, I did, I swear. That key shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Well it is.’

  She watches as he tears a bin bag from the roll, followed by another two. He splits their sides so that they are open and then searches the drawer for a roll of masking tape.

  ‘Don’t worry about it now,’ he says. ‘What’s done is done.’

  ‘Michael,’ Hannah urges, feeling frustrated as she watches him begin to tape the opened bin bags across the hole in the smashed glass. ‘We need to call the police.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he says. ‘I just want to stop this breeze - it’ll be freezing in here in no time.’

  The surge of adrenaline racing through Hannah’s body has kept her from feeling the cold until now, but as soon as Michael mentions it, she realises he is right. It is early May and though the weather has been mostly kind to them for the past few weeks, tonight it has been raining on and off and if it starts up again, there is nothing to stop driving rain from entering the kitchen and further damage being done. Night air fills the room, chilling her bare legs. But as her eyes rest again upon the word sprayed across the cupboards, she realises nothing could be as chilling as those four letters that glare at her.

  LIAR.

  Which of them does it refer to: her, or him?

  Her mind takes her back to the key in the lock. She didn’t leave it in the back door; she knows she didn’t. In her head, she acts out of her movements of that evening, repeating them over and over, knowing that she took that key and put it away but watching the memory of it fade until she begins to doubt herself.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she says, thinking aloud. She goes to the sink and takes a glass from the draining board before finding a packet of painkillers and swallowing two, seeking respite from the headache that has come from nowhere and has filled her head with its immediate insistency. She watches Michael as he finishes taping the bin bags across the door. If the person who was here wishes to return, she thinks, there is little to stop them from doing so.

  ‘How did they get in?’

  Michael stops what he is doing and turns to her, his face suggesting it is a stupid question.

  ‘I don’t mean the door,’ she says. ‘I mean the garden. How did they get into the garden?’

  Their house is a fortress, the garden protected by high walls. They designed it when the girls were young, with safety and security in mind. They love their privacy and they chose this house for its corner plot, away from the neighbours on a quiet cul-de-sac on which break-ins like this never happen. Yet there is a first time for everything, Hannah thinks, and she wonders why the house that was targeted was theirs.

  ‘Over the wall,’ Michael says, finishing his job of blocking out the night air. ‘Must have been, there’s no other way. Probably teenagers.’

  ‘Plural?’

  ‘Or just the one,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘I don’t know, do I?’

  He stands back and observes his handiwork, his face giving away his thoughts. He appears to be thinking the same as Hannah, that a bin bag and a bit of masking tape won’t do much to keep out a repeat offender.

  ‘Whoever it was, they won’t come back,’ Michael says, giving voice to Hannah’s unspoken fears.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t,’ he admits. ‘It’s just very unlikely.’

  Hannah stares at the cupboards, the word ‘liar’ staring back. ‘Why would a teenager write that?’ She could comprehend vandalism, just about, but the word seems so specific and deliberate. A teenager would break in and leave a signature or an expletive, surely, not something that seems aimed at someone for a reason. It makes no sense that someone they don’t know would break in at random, take nothing, and leave them with this.

  ‘Will you call the police now?’ she asks, when Michael doesn’t respond to her question.

  Hannah has ne
ver made a call to the police in her life and she doesn’t want to start now. They are going to ask what that word on the cupboards might refer to, and what is she supposed to tell them? She has no idea what it means or who it is directed at, yet at the same time it manages to make her feel sick to her stomach. Just knowing that an intruder has been here in her home, in her safe place, is enough to make her scream, which she does inside her own head, silently and where she can control it.

  ‘If I call them now, they’re going to come over here tonight,’ Michael tells her.

  Hannah raises her eyes to the ceiling. That’s exactly what they want, isn’t it, to get someone over here as soon as possible so they can find out who’s responsible. They need to report this – she wants to know who has been here – but she doesn’t want the girls knowing more than they need to. It is only as she thinks this that she remembers Olivia on the stairs; she will still be awake, perhaps having listened to all their conversation from the landing. She saw her go into her room, but neither of them knows whether she has since come back out.

  She goes to the kitchen door and closes it. ‘What are we going to tell them?’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘The girls. This will terrify Rosie – she’ll have nightmares for weeks.’

  ‘You think it’s best they don’t know about it?’

  ‘Olivia already knows though, doesn’t she?’

  Hannah watches her husband’s face carefully, studying his features as they shift and change. ‘We don’t know how much she knows. Perhaps she didn’t see anything. Anyway, she won’t tell Rosie, not if we ask her not to.’

  She raises an eyebrow. Her husband obviously has greater confidence in their older child than she currently does. She berates herself for the thought, wondering if perhaps she is being unfair on her. Olivia is headstrong and defiant, but she isn’t cruel. She never has been – not until recently, at least - and Hannah can’t see why she might start to be so now. To her, yes, but not to Rosie.

  ‘Where was Olivia?’ Hannah asks. ‘When you saw her on the stairs, how far down was she? How much would she have seen? The kitchen door was shut, wasn’t it? Perhaps you’re right, maybe she didn’t see anything.’

  She can hear herself rambling but can’t help it. Her thoughts are spilling from her with the same confusion in which they are entering her head, sporadic and random, each one catching her off guard.

  Michael shakes his head. ‘She was halfway down. Whoever was here was already gone.’

  His focus moves to the cupboards; Hannah watches him study the sprayed letters, the paint running in tiny streams from each one, like bloodied tears staining a face.

  ‘Why is Olivia refusing to talk to you?’ he asks, speaking without looking at her.

  Hannah shifts uncomfortably. They already had this conversation. When he got back from his work trip, Hannah had to explain their daughter’s silent and strange behaviour. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth, that Olivia had been to that party they had told her she couldn’t go to, so she had given an altered version of it, that Olivia was angry about missing out and had fallen silent in protest of them having stopped her.

  ‘She’s just being a teenager. She hasn’t got her own way and she’s letting me know she’s not happy about it.’

  Michael looks at her now, his eyes widened with an unspoken suggestion.

  Hannah waits for a moment, expecting him to say something, and when he doesn’t speak she reads his silent words, refusing to accept them as a possibility. ‘No,’ she says, with a shake of head. ‘She can’t have.’

  ‘Why not?’ Michael challenges.

  Hannah doesn’t have to consider her answer, not when there are a hundred reasons why what he is suggesting is ludicrous. It couldn’t possibly have been Olivia who did this. ‘She’s angry, but she’s not malicious.’

  ‘Kids react in temper all the time,’ Michael says. ‘They act on impulse - they don’t think things through.’

  Hannah shakes her head again. There is no way that her daughter would do this to her. She knows how much she loves that kitchen, and anyway, what would LIAR even mean, anyway? BITCH she may have been able to believe – Olivia would never dare speak the word aloud to her, but Hannah is sure that’s what she thinks of her – but LIAR has no relevance. It makes no sense.

  ‘Where would she have got spray paint from?’ she argues weakly, as though this is her only reasoning for Olivia not being responsible. In truth, there is so much more that doesn’t make sense about what Michael is suggesting. The house has been broken into, from the outside. They saw Olivia and she looked calm; she didn’t look like a girl who had just done what Michael obviously thinks her capable of.

  Olivia seemed calm, Hannah thinks again, and then the strangeness of the fact occurs to her. If she had heard someone break in and had headed to the staircase at the sound of noise from the kitchen, then why would she seem calm? Why wasn’t she panicking? A normal reaction would have been for her to be scared.

  She thinks back to last night and to Olivia arriving home drunk from that party she wasn’t supposed to have gone to. She had been calm then too.

  ‘She could have got the spray paint during a lunch break,’ Michael suggests, and for a moment Hannah has forgotten what she asked him, her thoughts having led her down a path along which she doesn’t want to be taken.

  She shakes her head. ‘She doesn’t leave the school grounds until home time. They’re not allowed.’

  He pulls a face. ‘You think she follows every rule like she’s supposed to? Come on, Hannah. We don’t know where she is every minute of the day, do we?’

  His words send a burst of guilt pulsing through her. He doesn’t know what really happened last night; she has thought about telling him, but there just hasn’t seemed to be a right time to do it. Michael has been busy in his office for much of the day after arriving home, and by the time evening came Hannah hadn’t wanted to ruin the good mood he seemed to be in. Now she isn’t sure whether she did the right thing in staying quiet.

  ‘She couldn’t have done it,’ she says, but she hears the doubt in her own voice.

  Michael shifts closer to her and puts a hand on her arm. ‘I know you don’t want to believe it, love, but there’s every possibility she might have. She wasn’t in her bed when we got up, was she? I didn’t hear her leave her room, did you?’

  She knows he has a point, and the more she allows herself to consider it, the more she realises that there could be a truth in what Michael says. By the time they were woken, Olivia might have already been downstairs. They assumed that she was halfway down the stairs, but what if she was on her way back up? Hannah shakes her head, not wanting to be led any closer to the thoughts her brain is presenting. She doesn’t even want to consider it a possibility, because if what Michael suggests really is true, then just how out of control have they allowed their daughter to become?

  ‘I don’t want to believe it any more than you do,’ Michael says, reading her thoughts. ‘And perhaps I’m wrong, I hope to God I am. Maybe I’m being unfair to even think it. It could have been anyone, couldn’t it – someone drunk or high on drugs, someone who got the wrong house, even.’

  He puts his arm around her and pulls her closer to him, wrapping her in an embrace. Hannah rests her head on his shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of his aftershave. She feels better already just for being next to him, and now she feels guilty for what happened earlier, for not showing him the enthusiasm she knows he deserves.

  ‘Let’s not worry about this mess tonight,’ he says. ‘We’ll sort it out in the morning.’

  Hannah shakes her head. ‘I don’t want Rosie to see this.’ As soon as she says it, she realises she is already considering Olivia a suspect. She knows she should probably feel ashamed to even think it of her own daughter – after all, if her daughter is capable of this then what does that say about her as a mother? – but she cannot help herself.

  ‘Why smash the door though?’ she asks,
clinging on to a hope that Olivia is innocent.

  ‘To make it look like a break in. Look,’ he says, holding her by the arms and moving back from her. ‘Do you still want me to call the police? I’ll do it if you really want me to, but if anything points towards Liv then we’re not going to be able to protect her. If she’s involved, they’ll find out, and I hope to God she’s not, love, I really do, but once they pick up on something, we won’t be able to protect her. They’ll want to know what’s been going on here, about this argument and everything. She’ll have a record for life and if they think she’s out of control in some way, we’ll end up with social services involved.’

  Hannah exhales loudly, knowing that everything he says is right. This is what she had feared – what she has always feared – and she has always known that Olivia was different. She can’t help it perhaps, but that isn’t the point. Her recent behaviour has been challenging to say the least, and they both know that Olivia is trying to test them, pushing her parents to see how far they will be stretched before they snap. They need to intervene now before this goes too far. Hannah needs to protect her. She needs to protect Rosie.

  She moves back into her husband’s arms, easing her chest against the warmth of him as he rubs her back through her nightdress. Whenever anything has gone wrong before, he has always been her first and only support system, the only person who can make her feel as though everything will be okay.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Han,’ he says gently. ‘I hope I’m wrong, but we need to be sure first, don’t we?’

  She nods but says nothing. She knows he is right.

  ‘There’s some gloss in the garage,’ he says. ‘I’ll paint over it – the girls might not notice. If they do, I’ll think of something.’ He leans down and kisses her forehead. ‘Go and get some sleep.’

  She nods again but knows she won’t go back upstairs, not until he goes there with her. She doesn’t want to get back into bed alone; as well as that, she doesn’t want to risk seeing Olivia. The thought that she might be responsible for this lodges itself in her brain, refusing to be budged by any reasoning or doubt. The look on her daughter’s face when they saw her on the staircase has set itself in stone in her mind, the look so distant and yet so filled with something else. Smug, Hannah thinks. She doesn’t want to admit it even to herself, but Olivia looked smug at the sight of her parents’ panic.