The Argument (ARC)

by Victoria Jenkins

  Hannah sits up. The paramedics are exchanging looks above her head.

  ‘We need to take you to hospital, Hannah,’ the one called himself Gary is saying.

  She stands, though doing so makes her sway, the bedroom shifting out of focus around her. She feels a hand on her arm trying to help steady her, but with a shove she frees herself of it and stumbles out on to the landing. There is something she needs to find; something she needs to see again. Carly. The letter. She needs to see that letter. Could she have been this wrong all this time? Was she really that naïve, was she so lonely and so desperate to be loved, that she allowed herself to fall into a trap that would become her entire life?

  Hannah goes into her bedroom, ignoring the protestations of the paramedics who follow her out on to the landing. Someone else is coming up the stairs, a woman wearing a police uniform, and Hannah darts into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. She goes to the wardrobe and scrabbles about on its floor, searching for the shoebox and the letter that is still taped inside.

  ‘Mrs Walters!’ The police officer is knocking the bedroom door. ‘Mrs Walters, you need to let me in!’

  With shaking hands, Hannah unfolds the letter. She has only read it once, yet that once was enough for the contents to seep deep into her brain, marking her with a stain she knows is permanent. She wanted to ignore it, but she knows she can’t any longer.

  * * *

  Dear Hannah,

  You don’t know me, but my name is Carly. I have been having an affair with your husband for the past two years. We met in a bar and things just went from there. I thought he loved me, but I realise now how wrong I was. When we met, I didn’t know that he was married or that he had children. I found out about six months after we started seeing each other, when he convinced me that the marriage was already on the rocks, that you were already living separate lives and it was just a matter of time before he left you to be with me. By the time I found out about you, he had me hooked. I loved him and I believed that despite his secrets, he loved me. He promised to look after me and my son. I thought he meant it.

  There are things I need to tell you, things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. Michael can be very persuasive, and I realise now just how brainwashed I have been by him. I broke into your home. I wish I hadn’t done it, but Michael asked me to, and just days ago I would have done anything he asked of me. I would have believed anything he said. He told me that he couldn’t explain everything to me yet – he said he would tell me everything when we were together properly. He said you’d done things that had let him down, and he wanted to leave, but he needed to do it without hurting the girls. He told me that helping him do what he asked me to would make it easier for him to leave, that the sooner I did it the sooner we could be together, a proper family. He wouldn’t explain why he wanted me to do what I did in your kitchen, but he said that you had done bad things, things he wanted you to know weren’t a secret anymore. He convinced me that you were the liar, but I should have seen long ago that the only liar is Michael.

  There is something else too. Michael asked me to call you and pretend to be someone from the school. I wasn’t happy with it, what he was asking didn’t seem right, but he kept on at me, saying it was the only way we were going to get to be together. He told me that you were a danger to the girls, that you didn’t treat them well, that he wanted you to feel the way that you had made them feel. He promised me it would be the last thing he would ask of me, but after I’d done it, I realised he wasn’t going to leave you. Trusting him has been the biggest mistake of my life.

  I told Michael that I knew he was never planning to be with me and that I was going to tell you everything. He raped me. I’m sorry just to come out with it, but there’s no other way to tell you. Afterwards, he told me that I couldn’t go to the police – that there was evidence of our affair and that once they had my DNA, I could be linked to the break in at your house. I didn’t know he’d gone to the police about it, but now I do this all feels like a set up. He said if I told anyone what had happened that no one would believe me, that I would look like a jealous girlfriend trying to get revenge after being rejected. He said that if I got arrested for the break in then my son would be taken away from me, and I am too scared that he is right to risk it.

  Please destroy this letter after you’ve read it. I am scared of Michael and what he is capable of, what he might do if he finds this, but you need to know who you are married to. I am covered in bruises, but none of them in places they can be seen. Michael is far too clever for that, isn’t he? He only allows people to see what he wants them to see. It’s only now I realise how manipulative and controlling he is. You need to protect yourself and your daughters. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, I really am, but please don’t ignore what I’m telling you. You have to get away from him. Michael is dangerous.

  Carly.

  * * *

  Hannah ignores the sound of the fist that is being beaten against the locked bedroom door and the repetition of her name as it is shouted over and over by the police officer out on the landing. She knows it is only a matter of time before the door is broken open and she is taken away, and all her secrets will be spread beyond the safety of the front door, there for everyone to criticise and judge her by. She closes her eyes and pictures the young woman who had stood on her doorstep just days ago, focusing on the details of her face, the lost, faraway look that was ingrained in the deep brown of her eyes. Surely it isn’t possible for someone to have been so naïve as this Carly claims herself to have been, she thinks. If everything she says is true, she would have seen Michael for what he really was a long time ago, wouldn’t she?

  With her eyes still closed, the face that rests in front of Hannah changes, merging into another, this one far more familiar to her. Hannah raises a hand to the back of her head, touching the soft flesh of her skull, split and bloodied. She feels hot tears escape her closed eyes, and as the door of the bedroom is forced open and a wave of noise hits the silence that has in these moments gripped her, she looks back at her younger self, not wanting to recognise her.

  * * *

  Twenty-Six

  * * *

  Olivia

  * * *

  Olivia wakes to the sound of a car engine and to a bumping, lurching movement that shudders her into consciousness. She is submerged in darkness, and when she puts out her hands to either side of her, they are met with the coldness of metal. Everything comes rushing back to her, images of the evening that has just passed hurtling through her mind like oversized hail stones raining down upon her, so big and so fast they threaten to knock her out once again. Her head fills with a pain that is new to her, one more powerful and worse than any other she has ever experienced. She feels sick. Where is Rosie? She prays to someone she has never believed in that wherever she might be, she is safe.

  When she screams, her voice makes hardly a sound. Her throat is raw and the breath in her lungs is ragged and broken, barely there at all. She puts both hands flat to the boot of the car and bangs against it with all the energy she has left in her frail and tortured body. Her wrists still throb with the cuts made from the cuffs, and a lack of food and drink has weakened her, making her even more lightheaded. She wants to cry but Olivia is past it now; she knows that she must reserve what little energy she has left for whatever comes next.

  Why didn’t she do it before? she thinks. She could have contacted the police a long time ago or walked into Miss Johnson’s classroom one lunch time and just told her what was going on. She wishes now that she had, but Olivia understands the futility of wishes, knowing that she has never been able to rely upon them in the past, no matter how hard she might have put her faith in their possibilities. The truth is, she loves her parents. She hates what they do to her and to Rosie and she hates how their treatment of her makes her feel, yet she cannot help but love them because they are all she knows. Olivia wants them to be different, to be the kind of parents that as a little girl she would imagine h
erself having. For years she had believed that they would change, that there would be something, one day, that would make them see things differently and they would stop all this. They would be a happy family, the kind Olivia has always wanted to be a part of.

  She knows differently now. Her parents can’t change. This is who they are.

  The fear of the unknown has kept Olivia silent; the uncertainty of social services and care homes and separation from her sister enough to convince her that she might be better off enduring the treatment of the devil she knows. What would her life become if everyone knew the truth about her family and the way they live? She and Rosie would never be able to escape it, and though they have been trapped in one place, Olivia feared that an exposure of the truth would see them caught somewhere else, somewhere neither of them would have any chance of leaving.

  It isn’t long before the car comes to a stop and the engine is cut. She hears her father get out and slam the door, and a moment later the boot is opened. Olivia kicks out desperately, flailing her limbs in a bid to fight her father back. He is too strong and his movements too swift, and she is pulled from the boot as though she is weightless.

  When he pulls her from the cramped space of the boot, Olivia attempts to make out the shapes that are around her. They are outside, somewhere open and windy, though it is so dark that she feels she may as well still be in the boot of the car. Her bare feet are on damp grass, cold and scratchy against the soles of her feet. A keen breeze whips at her hair, raising tiny goose bumps along her skinny arms.

  Her father holds her by the scruff of her pyjama top, his other arm wrapped around her chest. She writhes to try to free herself, but his grip around her tightens and when he begins to move, she finds herself lifted from the ground, her attempts to free herself all in vain. The weight she has lost during that past year is making this easier for him; she doesn’t know as she has never checked, but she can’t be much more than a hundred pounds. He carries her as though she is little more than a doll, his efforts made easier still by her lethargy and lack of reserves.

  ‘You won’t get away with this,’ she shouts as she struggles to free herself, still not wanting to dwell on whatever ‘this’ might be. She knows she is right that this is over now; things have gone too far for either of her parents to get away with everything they have been doing. Rosie will have raised the alarm by now. Whoever she tells will go to the house looking for Olivia, and they will find her mother there. She wonders whether she is alive or dead, and the thought that her father has killed her hits her with a sudden blow, like a punch to the side of the head. She knows she shouldn’t care, but she does. Despite everything she has done – despite everything she hasn’t done – Hannah is her mother. Olivia wants to believe that this still counts for something, though the last thread of hope she clings to is one that is frayed nearly to the point of snapping loose.

  ‘You’re a girl who flashed herself to half the school and now you’re all over the internet. The shame was too much – you couldn’t take it anymore.’

  His words are cold and detached – they echo in the empty space that is vast around them - but there is something in his voice that betrays them, some shakiness that tells Olivia he doesn’t mean everything he says. There is a breaking at the edge of every syllable, a crack that is carried in the uncertainty of his voice, each word as fragile as an eggshell, easily broken. Whatever he is planning to do, she thinks, he doesn’t really want to do it. Yet he is going to do it anyway. Perhaps he sees no other way out, and Olivia realises that for him at least, there isn’t one.

  In the distance, her eyes now attuned to the darkness that surrounds them, she makes out the sight of the pier on which she stood just days ago. It is lined with tiny gold lights that glow in the darkness like a string of flickering fireflies. It is beautiful here, she thinks, though she would never have known. It is frightening how much darkness can lurk behind the closed doors of somewhere so close to such loveliness.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ she says, her own words broken.

  She feels sick. She has wanted to be noticed, for someone to realise that something isn’t right with her and with the life she has been living, but everything she has done that past week has made things easier for him. Will anyone even miss her? she wonders. Rosie. The thought is enough to pull her from her self-pity, from the notion that whatever his plans are, he can’t do anything to her that she doesn’t now embrace the thought of.

  With a desire to live that shocks her with its ferocity, Olivia lowers her head and sinks her teeth into the bare flesh of her father’s lower arm. She bites so hard that she breaks his skin and as she tastes with a dizzying mix of disgust and fury the metallic tang of his blood, he cries out and stumbles. As he loses his footing, Olivia writhes from his grip and runs.

  ‘You little bitch!’

  He is already too close behind her, and Olivia steps on something sharp and stinging, something that slices the sole of her foot and makes her scream out in pain. She runs through the burning sensation that threatens to slow her down and hold her back – she thinks she may have stepped on a piece of broken glass, though she doesn’t allow her mind to linger on the possibility for too long in case it should slow her escape - but too soon she feels him behind her, and there is nothing she can do when he pulls her legs from beneath her.

  ‘You’re nothing but a little tart,’ her father says breathlessly, as Olivia’s body slams to the ground. ‘You’re just like your mother was. It would be better for us both if you weren’t mine.’

  The words hit Olivia with the force of a truck, far worse than any physical assault he could launch upon her. She forgets the pain in her foot, as well as the new, searing agony that has lit a flame along the length of her left arm, bent beneath her. The breath has been knocked from her lungs by his words. Behind her, ragged among his awful words and his deafening rage, she can hear something else. He is crying, his sobs tangled in the hatred he feels for her.

  ‘What?’ she manages, speaking the word into the ground, barely hearing the sound its single syllable makes. Is the rapist not her father? Did her mother get the timings wrong? She knew she looked too much like him for him not to be father, she thinks. Though in so many ways it may be better for her if he isn’t, Olivia hasn’t been able to bring herself to believe that Michael isn’t her father. She looks like him, but as far as Olivia is concerned this is where the similarities end. She is nothing like him. She will never allow herself to be anything like him.

  He says nothing but drags her up again, heaving her up like a bag of cement. He is struggling more now, his energies as depleted as hers. He drops her on to her feet in front of him, fighting to get his breath back, and Olivia turns to him, losing her footing. She catches the glint of his eye in the darkness, the dampness that sits at its corner, giving the false impression that he is human despite everything, but it is too little and too late, and Olivia doesn’t believe it. They are actors, her parents, having trained for years in the roles they have created for themselves.

  ‘I’ve tried my best for you,’ he says, his voice breathless, his breathing ragged. ‘Everything I’ve done has been for you girls, but it’s never been enough, has it?’

  His words are a repetition of everything that’s been fed to her by her mother, yet Olivia realises that the opposite is true: this is her father’s mantra, drummed into her mother until she started to believe it as the truth. What they have done has never been about her or Rosie, it has been about him and about their mother, satisfying some perverse desire for control. Her parents are sick, trapped in this tiny bubble of a world they have created for themselves, convincing themselves that they are right and that it is everyone else who is wrong.

  ‘It isn’t normal,’ Olivia says through tears. ‘We’re not normal.’

  ‘We’re as normal as anyone else,’ he argues, his voice filled with frustration. ‘What does it matter to you what everyone else is doing? You’ve had the best of everything all your life, even when yo
u haven’t deserved it. Why can you never be happy with what you’ve got?’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Olivia says, straightening herself and clutching her broken arm. The pain is reaching her shoulder now, a burning that courses through her chest. ‘You’ll never get away with this. Everyone will know what you are – Rosie will make sure of it.’

  Her father titters as though she has said something amusing, but she manages even in the darkness to see the flicker of panic that darts across his eyes, if only for the briefest of moments. The life he planned so thoroughly and put into practice with such care and control is falling apart around him, and this time there is nothing he can do to stop it from happening. He must have known it couldn’t last forever, that at some point one of them would try to break free.

  Of course, he did, she thinks, and he had always known that of the two of them, it would be Olivia who would do it. Perhaps this is the real reason why both her parents have always hated her so much.

  ‘Are you my father?’ she asks. Though she knows it shouldn’t matter now – that all that should matter now is surviving this night and finding Rosie – it does. She needs to know the truth about where she came from.

  When he nods without speaking, a silence admission manages to make itself present between them. For the first time, Olivia realises what he is saying: not that her mother had the timings wrong, but that it was him. She tastes bile in the back of her throat as the truth fills her head with its horrors, its taste thick and sour, and her ears are filled with the scream of the breeze as it cuts against her skin. This can’t be what he means, she thinks. It can’t be him.