The Hidden Girls

by Rebecca Whitney

  ‘Your mum’s cat.’

  He laughs. ‘Thought that mangy old thing died months ago.’

  ‘She said it was unwell and mustn’t leave the house.’

  ‘Huh, she’s full of surprises. Shows how good she is at keeping secrets from me. She knows I’d only tell her to have it put down.’ Liam leans his whole body away from the window to wrench the catch, but the double glazing won’t budge. The cat hurtles up the path and out of sight; no evidence of being old or ill, so it can’t be Frieda’s. ‘God, she’s irritating,’ Liam says. ‘Bloody woman.’ He smacks the wall with his palm, then picks up a plant pot and hurls it to the ground, where it breaks. Ruth flinches, thinking of Sandra’s airiness and how much of her day must be spent trying to float above Liam’s wants and needs: buy the latest gadget, make yourself attractive, be sexually available – as well as all his other weird character tics Sandra’s always complaining about. Liam shouts at the ground, ‘Why does she always get in my way?’

  No wonder Frieda doesn’t want her son in her house, this man who makes a big deal out of everything, who’s so blinded by whatever it is he wants that he’s willing to break her window just to get inside. And for what? Some home comforts? He probably wouldn’t even bother with the vet; he’d simply turf his mum’s only companion onto the street. Ruth makes a fist of the keys and closes ranks round her neighbour’s secret. Again Liam attempts the window, the frame finally shuddering in his hands.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Ruth takes on the same tone the doctor uses with her, sensing she’s not dealing with a rational person. ‘It’ll cost a fortune to get mended. Plus, it’s not safe to leave the place open. You know what it’s like round here. Those kids on mopeds. They’ll probably burn the place down.’

  Liam grunts and steps away. He lifts the back doormat and kicks about on the ground, mumbling. Ruth buries the keys deep in her pocket.

  ‘When you see your mother,’ she calls, ‘please send her my love. Tell her . . .’ Liam stares. ‘Tell her I’ll look after her packages.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘From the postman. Or the courier. You know. They deliver here when she’s not in. I’ll keep her stuff safe until she gets home.’

  He squints at Ruth, then leaps over the fence. She takes a step back into the room as if she’s expecting Liam to launch himself through the window, wishing she could swallow the words that were meant as code for Frieda, to show that she’s understood what’s being asked of her, and how difficult it must be to have a son like Liam. He disappears. Seconds later there’s thumping on her front door. Ruth’s heart jolts to the beat. She waits. Knocking again, softer this time. Ruth pulls the window shut, hides the keys in her bedside table and goes downstairs.

  ‘I need you to give me a call,’ Liam says as she opens the door to him, his jeans tight and tailored, trainers so new and white they almost sparkle; the same outfit he always wears, everything so clean he must have duplicates, like he’s found or been given a formula of how to look and doesn’t have the imagination to try anything new. ‘If something turns up. You know, for my shop.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, I will.’

  ‘Or anything else that comes for her for that matter.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She shuffles from one foot to the other. ‘But I don’t mind hanging on to it, I mean, if it’s something for your mum.’

  ‘Yeah, like some weird potion or something illegal.’ His eyes widen, trying to draw Ruth into his pact by playing on her good citizenship. ‘I’ll get rid of it for her, along with the rest of that stuff in her house. All that crap’s got her into this mess in the first place, and I’ve got her very best interests at heart.’ Again, Liam’s words have the hokey tone of being performed in a school play.

  ‘But it’s no problem. I mean, perhaps I could visit her when she’s up to it, take whatever comes for her to the hospital so she can open it herself.’

  ‘That’s really not necessary.’ Some innate compactness in Liam’s body begins to uncoil. ‘But it’s very kind of you anyway.’ His shoulders soften. One arm rests at his side, and he raises the other, elbow against the doorframe: the embodiment of chilled. He directs a full smile at Ruth.

  She falters in the sudden and surprising glare of his attention, wholly unused to anyone, even Giles, looking at her this way. Liam is ultra groomed and classically good-looking, nothing like her type at all, but he’s switched something on that’s almost magnetic and a forgotten excitement pings in her chest. He looks deep into her eyes. Ruth flushes as if he’s seen a secret piece of her. Momentarily, she’s struck by the possibility of being desirable, and it disarms her. She runs a hand through the mess of her hair and pulls her cardigan tight round her waist, annoyed at herself for caring what Liam thinks, while also being unable to stop. He continues to lean against the doorframe, muscles straining at the crisp white T-shirt he wears even in the winter, as if the cold’s not going to tell him what to do. She can’t help but take him in, in the way that Barry would look at her breasts, and she’s shocked at herself. Not for the first time, Ruth imagines how it might be for Sandra to be the focus of his devotion, and if it wasn’t for Liam’s possessiveness, she’d be a tiny bit envious.

  His smile is lopsided, boyish. ‘And you’re right, of course. I’ll make sure she gets her stuff in hospital. I don’t think she’ll be well enough for visitors for a while, but I’d be really grateful if you could let me know if anything turns up.’

  Ruth’s flustered by his continued attention and too shocked by his directness to deny him what he wants. ‘OK, sure, I’ll give you a call.’

  ‘Good.’ His smile drops. ‘Just call Sandra. She can come and get it from you.’ Ruth receives the reminder of Liam’s loyalty like a punch. He’s telling Ruth not to raise her hopes, as if she would, as if she even wanted to, but she’s been tricked by his flattery that played on her very obvious desire to be vital, attractive, human even, and she’s furious with herself for letting him think he’s got her gagging. He walks away without saying goodbye, back to same old rude Liam.

  ‘Send my love to your mum,’ she calls. ‘I hope she gets better soon.’

  As Liam’s car door shuts, Ruth notices that Sandra’s in the passenger seat. Ruth waves brightly, but Sandra’s head is turned away, the moment too slight to tell if Sandra witnessed Ruth and Liam’s weird flirtation on the doorstep. Her friend’s face is in profile: high, proud and serious with the effortlessness of one born into beauty, who never expects that advantage to be taken away. Ruth pushes against the small fear of having betrayed her friend, ashamed by how openly she received Liam and how blatant were her needs. The ribbon of her vanity unravelled with the gentlest tug, and Sandra probably witnessed the lot. The car zooms away.

  Steam pumps into the alleyway from the boiler vent on Frieda’s exterior wall. These are Ruth’s last moments of freedom for the day as Giles could be home any minute. The keys to Frieda’s house are at only a staircase’s distance, though surely the cat would have been fed this morning and the plants won’t die from one afternoon without water. Ruth closes her front door and makes a cup of super-sweet tea to settle her nerves, her concern for Frieda again tempered by annoyance at this huge imposition from a woman she barely knows, let alone all the trouble it might stir up with Giles. But Frieda’s ill, perhaps high on whatever drug she’s been self-prescribing, and Ruth more than anyone should understand the woman’s desire for some control over her health. Maybe it would be best to confess to Frieda’s letter when Giles gets home, but then he’ll want to know why she didn’t simply give Liam the keys in the first place, and whatever just occurred between the two of them feels somehow tainted with disloyalty. If she does tell Giles, he’ll give Liam the keys for sure, then Liam will know she lied. And how will that sit with Sandra?

  Ruth slurps her tea, savouring the dregs at the bottom that are thickened with undissolved sugar. The prospect of a small break from her own space by entering the comforting secret of next door is not unattractive. She im
agines herself alone there, the change of scenery like a mini holiday, where no one would judge or expect anything from her, not even Frieda with her mad ideas. If Ruth is careful about when she goes into her neighbour’s house – if she goes – she could stay a while, perhaps even read her book while Bess lies on the fluffy rug. Ruth’s back softens with the memory of the doughy sofa cushions and she wipes a finger round the inside of the cup, scooping the last of the tea-stained sugar into her mouth.

  11

  As night comes in, the weather turns from winter-lite to hard winter, and the sky bulges with the threat of cold. Ruth shivers as she puts out the rubbish and tidies gardening tools into the shed.

  ‘Why don’t you leave it till the morning?’ Giles calls from the lounge.

  Ruth moves slowly, eking out the time. ‘It might rain.’ The front door is ajar, and she pushes it onto its latch to muffle Giles’s concern.

  She’s alert to any movement on the pavement, anyone who might be turning into Frieda’s front yard, and the possibility that Liam has secured a set of keys. Ruth’s wheelie bin is out front. She decants the couple of rubbish sacks into Monica and Barry’s bin, then pulls her own bin down the side alley and into the back garden under the pretence of keeping it from the street’s junior arsonists. She parks it against the back wall. The plant pot Liam smashed earlier lies where it was dropped in Frieda’s yard, leaking earth, but the rest of the house is as secure as before. Anticipation rises in Ruth, as does dread. Only she has been invited inside.

  She dusts off her hands as she comes back up the alley. A car passes, headlights flashing on the glass of Frieda’s upstairs window, and for a second it appears as if a curtain is tweaked to one side. Ruth freezes, staring at Frieda’s first floor. She recalls the noise of the cat creeping across the floorboards. Perhaps the animal is scrabbling at the window, desperate for food, medicine or the company it’s used to. She thinks of its nails and teeth sinking into her skin, her fear compounded by the likelihood of the cat’s mange and fetid litter tray. But what if Frieda were to return from hospital and find her beloved pet had died because Ruth didn’t get to it soon enough? If Ruth confesses everything to Giles now, she could go next door immediately and get it over with, or perhaps Giles could deal with the cat himself. She pauses inside her options, only to return to the lies she’s already told and how the deception could wound her. With her sights trained on the window, she wills an absence of movement to prove the cat’s OK and can wait one more night. Nothing moves, nothing changes. The twitching curtain was all in her mind’s eye.

  Giles pokes his head out of the door. ‘Ruth, it’s freezing!’ She drops a gardening fork with a clatter and leaves it where it fell to go inside.

  Bess wakes in the night for her bottle. For once, Giles gets up to feed her, then Ruth takes over as she knows he needs to be fresh for a big work meeting tomorrow.

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ she says as she brushes past him in the darkness. The backs of their hands connect by accident.

  He stops, turns to her, kisses her forehead – ‘You’re welcome’ – before returning to bed.

  Ruth’s dozing on the chair in her daughter’s room after the bottle’s been emptied when a scraping noise outside disturbs her. Her eyes are gritty with sleep as she puts Bess in her cot. She opens the window and calls into the back garden. ‘Is someone there?’ A couple of thuds, then silence. She squints into the black night. Nothing. She’s banned from calling the police, and there’s no point saying anything to Giles; he’ll only dismiss what she’s heard or log it as her slipping back into illness. It’s probably Ruth’s fox anyway, looking for the food she didn’t put out earlier because she forgot, because she was preoccupied with worries about another animal. The chicken shed is open. The fox will be warm at least.

  A moped buzzes past and further up the road a bright patch flares the night sky. Smoke fills the glow of a distant street light. A wheelie bin’s on fire, the pyrotechnics of bored kids. She waits for the siren before taking herself back to bed, relieved now the emergency services are involved, happier still that the problem has nothing to do with her. She falls into a luscious sleep, and in the night, she and Giles make love for the first time in a long time. Through the mud of her half-dream, Ruth has a moment when she’s not sure if it’s Giles or Liam’s hands she pulls towards her. She quickly banishes the thought.

  The alarm clock of Bess wakes Ruth with the dawn. Even in the semi-darkness there’s a subtle change to the bedroom, a dampening of sound and an alien glow through the curtains. Ruth peers outside to be met by a world in opposite. The bins, weeds and plastic furniture are all blanketed white, their imperfections smoothed to a collection of humps, freshened by the buff of snow.

  Giles wakes, blinking into the bright morning as he checks news outlets for weather updates. Most transport links are closed and there are warnings to travel only in an emergency. He makes a few calls but everyone’s phones are off, all probably taking the opportunity to lie low. If no one else is working, then neither can Giles. Without the routine rush to deal with business, the little family is more relaxed than usual. The weather’s given them a sick note, a gratis day, and they indulge themselves by eating a slow breakfast and brewing tea in a pot rather than mugs, going back for second and third pourings. In the background, the TV updates them with stories of milkmen delivering against the odds and farm animals stuck in knee-deep snow. Somewhere on the planet, wars are still being fought and sea levels continue to rise, but if the news is giving everyone a break, Ruth is content to pretend they’re safe too, even if only in this moment. Bess is on the floor on her play mat, and after weeks of practising she finally turns herself from her back onto her tummy, lifting up her head in triumph, eyelashes curling in a perfect fringe towards her forehead. The little girl’s excitement flutters around the room, gathering them close, and if Ruth were to be granted one wish now, it would be for the snow to never melt.

  In this small holiday of family cohesion, Frieda’s chaos is too close to home. Ruth washes up at the kitchen sink, concentrating on the sudsy plates to avoid looking at her neighbour’s house. She works at baked-on cheese on a casserole dish as the opposite wall radiates its displeasure across the alley. Ruth feels a headache coming on and goes upstairs to search for paracetamol in her bedside table, fumbling through junk in the drawer. Frieda’s keys scrape to one side, reminding Ruth of what needs to be done, what cannot be avoided forever. She stuffs her cardigan with the letter still in its pocket into the wardrobe, aware of what those few words could detonate if Giles were to read them. With the benefit of another good sleep last night, Ruth can’t get her head around why she didn’t give Liam the keys in the first place. If she’d stopped overthinking when he’d asked, the problem of going into Frieda’s house would now be gone, the responsibility handed over to a son who has more rights than her. Ruth’s been taken hostage by a woman she barely knows, and lurking in the shadows is the knowledge that Liam lit something grubby inside her, but which had nothing to do with what she and Giles came together for last night. Her judgement was coloured by her vanity, and now she’s thick in the mess of her lie, all her own fault.

  By late morning, a few cars venture along the street clearing a grey gully through the snow. Giles’s phone rings as opening rail lines and buses pave the way for the city’s return to work. His missed meeting has been rescheduled for later this afternoon. Husband and wife kiss at the door. Giles hugs Ruth for longer than usual, whispering close to her ear, as if too much volume might unbalance them.

  ‘It hasn’t gone, Ruth.’ He holds her tight round the waist, the press of his body against hers a tempting memory of last night. ‘We just forgot how to look.’

  She puts both arms round his neck and buries her head in his shoulder, terrified her face might scare the good stuff away.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, gently pulling himself from her grip. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go.’ He kisses her lips. ‘We can continue this later.’

  Rut
h remains in the doorway as Giles cycles down the street, her thoughts whirling back to last night, the long wait having made their love as intense as when they were first together; they’d become strangers again and were able to put their best and boldest selves forward. But with daylight has come the reality that the tiniest error, the minutest of slip-ups on Ruth’s part, will bring the whole lot crashing back down.

  Fat feathers of snow fall into the alleyway and Frieda’s front yard as the weather regains its bluster. The postman’s footprints mark a path to Miss Cailleach’s front door where a few pieces of junk mail stick out of the letter box. The regimen of the house continues while Frieda lies in hospital; for whatever reason, she’s entrusted Ruth with her most valuable possession, and Ruth needs to repay her ill neighbour by feeding her cat, for today at least. By tomorrow Ruth will have had time to think of another plan, perhaps tell Liam she went searching under plant pots and found keys after all.

  Ruth puts Bess in her cot for a sleep. It’ll be an hour before the baby wakes again. Ruth sways anxiously, passing Frieda’s keys from one hand to the other; if she leaves Bess at home, the visit next door will be quicker, plus she’ll be close enough to get back if her daughter wakes. Ruth loads her pockets with latex gloves and hand sanitizer, clips the baby monitor to the waist of her jeans with her coat over the top and Chubbs the front door, trying the lock several times to check it’s secure.

  Tyre skids on the road are refreezing and a fresh deposit of dog mess has melted a hole in the snow. As Ruth steps out of her gate, Monica from next door is loading another sack in her uncollected bin.

  ‘Ruth!’ she says, smiling widely. ‘How about this weather, eh!’

  Ruth stiffens. ‘I know.’ She waits for Barry to step out of the gate as well, but he doesn’t.

  ‘We should have a coffee sometime.’ Monica rubs her hands against the cold. ‘You know, get Bess to meet Danny properly. There’s only a couple months between them.’