by Keane Jessie
‘It’ll be OK,’ said Nipper. He dug in the tiny pocket at the side of his trunks and came up with a small square packet. ‘Look. I’ll wear this. I’ll take care of you, don’t worry. Feel it, Milly. Feel how much I want you.’
He was pushing her hand down between their bodies. Milly’s hand closed over a long column of hot flesh. It was startling.
‘God, that feels good,’ he sighed.
‘We can’t,’ said Milly weakly. ‘Someone could come.’
‘God, I’m going to come if you keep your hand there,’ he said, stepping back a little and looking down the front of his body. ‘Nobody’s about,’ he said, tearing the Durex open with his teeth. ‘Come on Mills. Slip your swimsuit off, we’ll be quick.’
But I don’t want it to be quick, thought Milly. She wanted it to be slow, magical. She couldn’t say it. Instead, she nervously pushed the unflattering black swimsuit down, exposing her soft pale body.
Nipper was snapping the Durex onto his cock as if he’d done this a hundred times before. That made Milly pause. But then he was pushing her eagerly toward the bench.
‘Just lean over and rest your hands on there,’ he said, pushing her down. ‘Oh yeah, Mills. Your beautiful arse, I love it . . .’
And then he was behind her, pushing into her. There was a moment’s resistance, and then . . . Milly screwed her eyes tight shut and held her breath . . . it was OK. He was in. And it wasn’t magical or slow or any of the things she’d expected. It was quick and it was just like the animals in the field; it was no different at all. Nipper panted and swore and slid in and out of her at ever-increasing speed. He grabbed at her breasts and squeezed them hard, hurting her. Milly wondered if this was how it was for all women. Because that’s what she was now: a woman. This was what men and women did.
She turned her head and opened her eyes, wanting to tell him to stop, that she wasn’t sure about this, that this was all wrong, not how it should be at all. Then she froze.
Through the half-glassed door, she was looking straight into the mocking gaze of Harlan.
Milly let out a shriek. Harlan was standing right there outside the door, watching them.
Nipper didn’t stop; he probably thought her cry was one of pleasure. He kept thrusting at her and then suddenly he let out a yell and it was over. He gave her breasts one last hurtful squeeze and then drew back, laughing, triumphant. Milly was shivering despite the tropical heat inside the pool house. She was embarrassed, humiliated.
‘Christ, that was good,’ Nipper was saying, pulling off the Durex and snatching up a towel to dry himself.
She thought of the news on the TV, saying Princess Diana had given birth to William, a future king. It was a fairy tale, the royal marriage. Milly wanted that sort of romance in her own life. But instead, she had this.
‘Harlan was out there. He was watching us,’ Milly managed to say.
She struggled back into her swimsuit, feeling sore. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. In her dreams, her and Nipper having sex was something that happened on their honeymoon, after they were married, because he couldn’t live without her and he told her so, all the time. You’re the love of my life, Milly. I adore you. Only in reality Nipper had never said that to her, not once, and she knew he never would. And now they’d had sex and she felt cheap and used and dirty.
‘Harlan?’ Nipper was laughing, like it was a joke. ‘Was he? That dirty bastard! Well, maybe he learned something.’
Milly surged past Nipper and opened the door and stepped out into the fresh air. Harlan was back on his sunbed, but when she came out he looked across, grinning, and said: ‘Having fun, Milly?’
Milly didn’t answer. She was aware of Nipper coming out behind her and she didn’t want to stay here a minute longer. She tore off indoors, and went upstairs.
67
Outside Harlan’s room, Milly paused.
That rotten shit.
She remembered all too well when he’d come into the house for the first time, looking all around him like he would eat the damned place if he could. He’d had a choice of rooms, but weirdly he’d chosen the smallest, the most enclosed – with no view. Harlan had a taste for small spaces, whereas Milly hated them. He loved nothing better than being in that little cubby-hole down in the reptile house where the various feeds were kept, reading his books about all the weird and frankly creepy things him and Dad kept down there.
Self-pity swamped her then. She’d been humiliated and hadn’t received a single bit of sympathy from Nipper. She was sore, uncomfortable. God, what did she have in her life, really? That arsehole for a brother. Well he wasn’t even a brother, not really. He was adopted. And she hated him. Mum was always sitting in a corner crying, scribbling in her journals and she still swore that sometimes she could hear baby Jake crying. That was just spooky, bloody awful. Then Mum would be carted off to the clinic again to be given heavy-duty pills to calm her down, and she’d be like a zombie.
Milly was busy cataloguing all her woes. She had no affection from Dad, it was obvious she was a disappointment to him, a girl. No affection either from Nipper, he’d screwed her like she was a tart or something, there didn’t seem to be any actual love involved. She was rotten, academically. Thick as shit. She knew it. Which would have been fine, if only she’d been good-looking, like Belle. Belle was her friend, but unlike Milly she had other friends, other interests. She was always off doing stuff. Most of the time, Milly felt so damned lonely. So she took refuge in books, in food, and then her arse just got bigger and bigger, she was swelling up like a balloon, she hated her whole damned life.
She stood there, looking at Harlan’s closed bedroom door. When he was younger, there’d always been a sign on it: KEEP OUT!
Now the sign was gone, but she knew damned well that Harlan didn’t like anyone in there. Then she thought of him grinning through the pool house window at her, the bastard. She bit her lip and opened the door and went in, closing it quickly behind her. She looked around. It was a normal boy’s room, but scrupulously tidy. That was Harlan, wasn’t it. His brain might be a sewer, but outwardly everything was order and calm. He kept a blue-lit tank on one wall, and it held a lizard, standing still as a statue. Crickets jumped around in the cage, unaware of their danger.
Milly went over to the window. She could just about glimpse the pool from here, and she could see Harlan, still laid out on his sunbed. Nipper was in the pool’s shallow end. Belle was sitting on the edge of it, shouting instructions, which Nipper was ignoring. Jill was standing beside her daughter as if on guard, with her hands on hips.
Milly started looking around. She’d never been in Harlan’s room before. She was curious. It would be useful, having an insight into Harlan, even if she did hate the perverted twat. She thumbed through his CDs. Heavy metal, all of them. He had box files stacked on his shelves, royal blue in colour, and she pulled one out, opened it. Just boring bloody leaflets about keeping exotic pets. She snapped the file closed and went on to the next. More about keeping tarantulas and snakes, pages about caring for gerbils, which apparently were territorial and ate each other at the drop of a hat.
Oh yuck.
The lizard moved, its tongue shooting out. One cricket down, three to go. Milly shuddered. She detested lizards and always avoided going down to the zoo that Dad and Harlan loved so much, where the bigger ones were. The snakes there revolted her. There were boas down there big enough to swallow you whole. The caimans in the big central pool had grown and now they were large as adult crocodiles, and there were warning notices up all over the place. DON’T FEED THE CAIMANS. IF YOU HAVE TO HANDLE A YOUNG CAIMAN, WEAR STEEL-REINFORCED GLOVES.
Well, she was never going to handle one of those damned things. They might look cute when they were tiny, but they were nothing but fucking predators, weren’t they? There was something ancient and intensely cold about them that made her stay well away.
She pulled out the third box file: it would be more of the same, she knew it. Harlan had an obsessive
streak. She flipped the lid open and stopped dead, staring in surprise. It wasn’t about the pets. There were no files inside. There was just an old cassette tape machine, a cheap ALBA one, complete with a plug-in lead. Why the hell would Harlan have an old thing like this, when Charlie bought him nothing but the best and the latest gear?
Milly pressed the OPEN button; there was a tape inside.
‘Well that’s odd,’ she said out loud. She crossed the room and took another peek out of the window. No change down there. She removed the tape deck from the file and found the nearest socket and plugged it in. Then she pressed PLAY but it wouldn’t, it was obviously at the end of the tape. She pressed REWIND and it spun back. Clicked when it reached the beginning. Again, she pressed PLAY. There was silence for a while, and then . . .
Oh fuck . . .
All the hairs on the nape of her neck stood up.
It was a baby, crying. A baby she knew.
Milly slumped down onto Harlan’s bed in disbelief.
God, what the hell was this?
She was listening to baby Jake, crying.
68
Summer began to fade into autumn. The thing between Milly and Nipper drifted on.
‘I’m so pleased I’ve got him,’ Milly was always saying of her hulking great boyfriend, as if trying to convince herself. If Milly was pleased, that was fine with Belle, even though she personally thought that Nipper was a knuckle-dragging moron.
Meanwhile, Harlan wanted to be Belle’s boyfriend, but that door remained firmly closed.
‘He’s a creep,’ said Belle to anyone who would listen, including Milly.
The two girls were often sitting out on the lawn behind the gatehouse together, Sony Walkmans on, whispering, giggling, listening to Irene Cara singing ‘Fame’ and Survivor doing ‘Eye of the Tiger’. Their lovely ‘Uncle’ Beezer drove them into town, bought them sweets, made them laugh at his dumb jokes. They both adored him.
‘Yeah, Harlan is a creep,’ agreed Milly, arranging her legs so that the fat between her thighs didn’t stick together quite so painfully. The two of them were eating Twisters and discussing everything.
Milly frowned, as she always did when their chat turned toward Harlan. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but she couldn’t forget what she’d found in Harlan’s bedroom. That had triggered other things in her brain – like the crazy things Mum had said to her, before yet another admission to the mental institution. That Uncle Beezer had seen Harlan going into Jake’s nursery on the morning he’d died, and Harlan had always hated little Jake because he’d taken Harlan’s place in Charlie’s affections. Then Mum, falling down the stairs, her feet slipping on Harlan’s skateboard.
She could have been killed.
And ever after, Nula had reacted to Harlan with fear – whenever she was at home, which wasn’t often. The death of her baby and the weirdness of her adopted son had screwed with her brain big time. Poor Mum, no wonder she was crazy.
‘You really like Nipper,’ said Belle. ‘Don’t you.’
Milly thought that maybe ‘like’ was too strong a word. She knew she wasn’t aiming high, having him for a boyfriend, and she wasn’t keen on all the sex stuff, but it seemed to make him happy, so she did it. She was pleased to be a ‘normal’ girl, like any other. She lived in terror of missing her bleeds, but he was careful, and – well – that was a woman’s life for you, she’d figured that much out.
She wished she had a proper mother to talk to, but there was no way that any of this shit could be discussed with Nula. The slightest stress, and she went totally off her tree. But Milly was literally dying to share her secrets with somebody. She didn’t want to even think about the dinner she’d sat through last night, with Dad and that oily little Colombian Javier Matias with his greased-back hair and his paunchy stomach. The guy was her dad’s age, and yet he’d – ugh, disgusting or what? – seemed to be flirting with her through most of the meal. And Dad had sat there smiling throughout, as if this was perfectly OK with him.
Milly wasn’t happy about all this; she liked things the way they were. Dad was comfortably loaded because of his furniture business, and up to now that had meant that nothing was ever expected of her. She didn’t have to get involved in the outside world, and she liked that fine. She didn’t want to be pushed toward this business contact of her dad’s; Javier repulsed her.
Belle was closer to her than anyone else right now. Her best friend in all the world. Belle had always been good to her, tried to include her in things, even coming to her defence when Amanda and Gillian, that snobby pair from the stables, had bullied her, grabbing her school bag and emptying it into a ditch, and then nicking the hard hat Nula’d bought her in the hope she’d get into riding like Belle, which of course she hadn’t.
Milly would never forget Belle giving those two the walloping they deserved and ordering them to hand back the hat. Faced with an infuriated Belle instead of soft quiet Milly, they’d backed off and never bothered either of them again.
‘It must be nice,’ said Milly, sprawling out lazily on the grass and staring at Belle’s face, turned up to the sun, ‘to be pretty.’
Belle looked at Milly. ‘You’re pretty,’ she objected.
Milly gave a small sad smile. ‘No I’m not. I’m a dog.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Belle, turning toward her, hitting Milly with the full wattage of that beautiful face of hers. ‘You’ve got lovely eyes.’
Damned with faint praise, thought Milly.
‘Oh don’t bullshit me. They’re like piss-holes in the snow. I don’t actually know what Nipper sees in me.’ But really she did know. Nipper liked sex; and Milly put out.
‘He sees a lovely person,’ said Belle. She was staring off into the distance, licking the last of her lolly from the stick, then tossing it aside and sighing. ‘None of the boys I fancy will approach me, whereas the ones I can’t stand seem determined to have a go, if only to prove that they’re not the losers everyone thinks they are.’
Milly had to smile at that. ‘You’re so full of crap,’ she said, flopping back onto the grass and staring up at the clouds scudding across the sky. ‘I thought you and Nige Pope were getting it on these days?’
Nige Pope was tall, gangly, red-haired and sweet. He was the brainiest boy in the school and destined, everyone thought, for great things.
Belle frowned. ‘What, Einstein? We were. He’s lovely. But most of the time he’s too busy with his textbooks to bother about me.’
‘You’ll meet someone nice, one of these days,’ said Milly, rubbing Belle’s arm consolingly.
Belle gave a smile. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ But she wondered where? Who did she ever meet, out here in the sticks? Sometimes, she felt so restless. So confined.
‘So who comes on to you that you don’t want to, then?’ asked Milly after a pause.
‘Oh, you know.’ Belle frowned. ‘People.’
‘Who, though? Come on.’
Belle flopped back too. For a while she lay there, looking at the sky in silence. Milly didn’t push, she just waited.
‘Harlan,’ said Belle at last.
Milly sent her a sideways look, holding one arm up over her eyes to shield them from the sun. She’d suspected this. She’d seen how Harlan was too touchy-feely with Belle, how Belle always flinched away from him. ‘Is he a pest?’
‘He’s a pain in the arse,’ said Belle. ‘Never seems to take no for an answer, the prat.’
Milly was silent for a moment. Wondered whether she should say anything. Then she said it anyway. ‘I found something, you know. In Harlan’s room.’
Belle propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Oh? What?’
‘Something weird,’ said Milly.
‘Well come on. Tell me. Something to do with those things he keeps down in that reptile house of his, I suppose.’
‘No, nothing like that. I shouldn’t have looked in his room, I do know that.’
‘What’s in there that’s so shocking? I know he keeps lizards up
there in a tank. He asked me to go up there once and see them. Which I did not. They’re cold-blooded, aren’t they. Like him. I can see why he likes them so much. So come on, what was it? What did you see in there?’
‘It was a tape recorder. And . . .’ Milly hesitated. Would Belle blab about this to anyone? She wasn’t sure. But she had to say it now, or choke on it. ‘I played a cassette tape that was on it.’
‘And?’ prompted Belle.
‘It was a tape recording of the baby. Of Jake. Crying.’
Belle was very still.
‘Do you remember how my mum used to say she could hear the baby, crying? And they thought she was imagining it, didn’t they? Before she was committed that first time.’
Belle sat up sharply. ‘You’re fucking joking.’
‘I wish I was. Mum told me that Uncle Beezer saw Harlan at four in the morning after Jake’s christening party, going into Jake’s nursery.’
Belle was suddenly pale. ‘Then they found Jake dead.’
Milly nodded.
Belle dragged her hands through her hair. ‘Hold on. Wait. Maybe it wasn’t Jake crying. Maybe it was some other kid, and Harlan recorded it to freak your mum out. He’d think that was funny.’
Milly shuddered and hugged her knees. ‘No. It was Jake. I’d know Jake’s cry anywhere. I could never forget it. Never.’
‘Yeah, but . . . they didn’t find anything wrong with Jake’s death, did they. They said it was cot death. Awful, but it does happen.’
‘Belle – what if Harlan smothered him?’ shot out of Milly’s mouth. She’d been thinking it for weeks, and it made sense. She thought of the agony of sitting through Jake’s funeral, the pitifully small coffin up there at the front of the church. It haunted her. Her little brother, gone, never to return. ‘What if Harlan killed the baby? And what if he left that skateboard on the stairs deliberately, knowing Mum was always first down in the mornings? What if he’s been playing that tape to make her go crazy?’