The Hidden Girls

by Rebecca Whitney

  The door slams and Sandra marches from the gate.

  The room is airless; Ruth’s underwater, drowning. ‘It’s not like it sounds. Liam started it, I was just pretending.’

  ‘I wish we’d never moved to this bloody place.’ Giles’s face brews with contempt. ‘You’ve broken it, Ruth, you broke our marriage.’

  ‘I broke it? We had a baby, we were supposed to be doing it together. Do you think what happened to me after I had Bess was my choice?’

  ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t mine.’

  He takes Bess from Ruth’s arms and a prickle of static jumps between the three of them. The little girl turns her head between her parents, the most confused Ruth’s ever seen her, and Ruth’s heart bursts with a love so fierce it’s closer to pain than pleasure. In Bess’s short life, she’s witnessed behaviour Ruth’s closest friends would have found intolerable, did find intolerable, and now Ruth’s sweet baby is wise beyond her years, as the daughter of an addict or an abuser would be. Ruth has brought craziness into her family, whether real or imagined. She has put Bess in danger by leaving her with a relative stranger, and whatever it was that happened next, her baby ended up in the hands of Liam. Ruth does not work, she will never be fixed, she’s not fit to be a mother.

  ‘I’m going to give Bess some food,’ Giles says. ‘Then she needs her bed. I’m calling Doctor Fraser first thing in the morning.’ He fiddles about one-handed in the kitchen making some baby food, clonking the bowls and cutlery on the worktop. ‘I don’t even think you’re aware of the support you need or I wouldn’t have to point it out. Think of Bess and how your behaviour is affecting her.’

  Unworthiness tightens Ruth’s gut. ‘Giles, please.’

  ‘The alternative is that I get you sectioned. I’ll do it if I have to, but I’d rather you went willingly.’ He stirs the cereal in tight circles. ‘I wish you’d remember how much better you got last time you went to the unit, and how fast.’ He shakes his head without making eye contact. ‘This is going to happen, whether you like it or not, but I’d prefer you to be on board. Use the evening to pack a bag or something.’

  At the back of the house, Barry’s big security light snaps on. Hard white light streams through the window. Something’s tripped the sensor; maybe Leila’s been out there all the time, hiding in the chicken shed. Ruth presses her forehead to the cold glass, eyes darting over the allotments as she adjusts to the glare, unsure if she’d scream at Leila or rush to embrace her if she appeared now. A homemade animal trap at the centre of Barry’s messy patch glints in the stark light. Then, from the corner of Ruth’s vision, her fox streaks past the trap without setting it off and escapes into a hole under the railway fence.

  Giles’s phone is directly under Ruth on the windowsill. It glows with a text: Shame you couldn’t make it tonight. Ruth can’t help but be drawn to the words. Everything OK at home? The text is from Faye, and she follows it with a sad face emoji. Without a second thought, Ruth inputs Giles’s password and clicks on the text to open the stream of messages between him and his boss. One yesterday from Giles – Work won’t be the same without you – and last week – You’ve been poached from me – the thread between them lengthy, the messages always framed around work, but it’s impossible not to intuit the longing. A tremor deep inside Ruth shoots to her hand and shakes the phone.

  Giles is putting Bess in her chair to feed her as Ruth turns to face him, phone in hand. Another text illuminates the screen. Ruth reads it out loud, ‘Come back if you can? Have your fave drink waiting.’

  Giles bends from his waist to standing.

  Ruth continues, ‘Boring without U,’ and she hisses the ‘xx’.

  Giles stammers. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘We’re just really good friends. You know how it goes at work.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Look, nothing’s happened.’

  Tears sting Ruth’s eyes. ‘That means you’ve thought about it.’

  He falters. ‘Of course not.’ The hand holding Bess’s bowl of food is stuck mid-air. ‘I wouldn’t . . . you know I—’

  ‘You clearly have more nice things to say to her than you do to me.’

  ‘I’d never do anything.’

  ‘But you’d like to.’

  He takes a deep breath. ‘No, actually, I wouldn’t. Whatever it looks like, I thought Faye leaving was a good thing.’

  ‘Really, why’s that? Because you can’t control yourself, because she’s so amazing compared to your useless wife?’

  ‘Do we really have to do this now?’ He slams the food on the table. ‘After everything that’s happened tonight?’

  ‘Then tell me you don’t want more!’ Ruth moves closer, all of the rage and injury of this evening obliterating any caution. ‘Come on, Giles, you owe it to me. Tell me the truth.’

  He shakes his head at the floor and a huge sigh lifts his shoulders. ‘It’s just feelings, a silly infatuation, that’s all. I desperately wanted it all to go away, and it will, as soon as she’s gone.’

  ‘So you’re attracted to her, more than you are me.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He looks Ruth directly in the eye. ‘But could you blame me if I was? Faye’s been a huge support these past months.’ Even with Faye’s name in his mouth, Ruth recognizes the desire in him, his readiness to protect her honour. ‘Sometimes, I don’t know, it’s just such a struggle to want to come home, back to all this.’

  A rock between them, of a size and density that will take more than the sum of this shabby marriage to climb over. Ruth grits her teeth, leaning into the problem: its power, her rage. ‘So you lied.’

  Giles rolls his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, if that’s what you want to call it. It was a small lie. A white lie. I was dealing with it, though. What would have been the point in telling you, it would only have upset you.’

  ‘But it affected me, our family.’

  ‘Nothing was ever going to come of it.’

  ‘Well, it already has. This silly infatuation has obviously been distracting you for weeks. You had the choice – no, the freedom – to swan off and get someone else to adore you, and all you had left for your sad mad wife was the dregs.’ A car speeds down the road, engine screaming like it’s stuck in the wrong gear. ‘Then you dare to get all macho about me supposedly flirting with Liam!’

  ‘Ruth, you’re getting this totally out of proportion.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She struggles to get words past her tears. ‘You’ve been so . . . so separate, and you made out the problem was mine and mine alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry, OK? I’m not perfect.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ Her spine lengthens an inch or two and her feet stand sure and solid on the ground. ‘But you still expect me to trust you, when you’ve been struggling to control this thing that could take you away from us.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ He flops down on his chair, head in hands. ‘It’s not that bad, Ruth.’

  ‘And yet I’m the one who always gets found out, who’s told she’s a liability. Why do you get to make mistakes and not me?’

  ‘Don’t stretch the logic on this, Ruth.’

  ‘I’m not stretching anything, it’s simply the truth.’ Barry’s security light shuts off and the night filters back inside. ‘You know what?’ She points a finger at him, lips pulled back to frame her teeth. ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do any more.’

  16

  That night, in the last minutes before the sun rises again, Ruth’s mobile rings. She jolts from a feathery sleep and into the panic of darkness. The ringing continues, her phone close, and she takes a moment to remember it’s in her bag at her bedside, airplane mode disabled. She shoves her hand inside the bag, receipts, wallet and keys tumbling before her fingers connect with the cool slim rectangle of the handset. The display flashes up the familiar No Caller ID. Ruth hesitates, heart hammering, remembering the time she imagined Tam’s voice on the other end o
f the phone, but she has to listen now; it might be Leila. She swipes to answer, pressing her ear to the receiver. A high rattle, like someone’s holding a hairdryer up to the mouthpiece, behind which might be a voice, almost inaudible: ‘I’m drowning.’ Then a rapid scrunch as the call cuts off.

  ‘Ruth?’ Giles pulls himself up on an elbow. ‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’

  She spins to face him. ‘My phone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was ringing.’ She’s shaking.

  ‘I didn’t hear it.’

  Her jaw tightens. ‘What a surprise.’

  He takes the jab, his guilt over Faye still a hangover between them. ‘Who was it?’ he asks more quietly.

  Ruth searches for any angle to explain an unknown voice possibly saying two words. His face across the darkness is more exasperated than worried, eyes burning into her. She takes a deep breath – ‘There was no number’ – and chucks the handset on the bed.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it then. Probably just a pocket call.’

  Ruth digs in, because she can, because his betrayal has given her back some power, and Giles is the only other place apart from herself where she can grind her anxiety. ‘Is there really nothing that gets to you? Is your life really that simple?’

  ‘Look, what do you want me to say? I’ve got as little idea who it was as you have, so why don’t you for once just accept the call was nothing important and stop trying to read anything into it?’

  ‘But what if it was important? What if someone’s trying to get in touch?’

  ‘Then they’d have left a message. And anyway, who could it possibly be? Who would call you in the middle of the night without leaving a number?’

  She runs her tongue round dry lips – ‘You’re right’ – and puts her phone to sleep on the bedside table. ‘Sorry.’

  Giles moves his elbow and collapses on the mattress without the support. He turns from her, snoring within seconds. Ruth flops back onto her pillows, wide-eyed at the ceiling, the flicker of the street light over the plaster cracks now so familiar it’s a torture, and for the millionth time her mind probes the day’s events and what could possibly have happened to Leila. The girl’s image is unfaded; urgent and defiant even in absence. Ruth swings between anger and fear as she’s done all night, unable to decide whether Leila simply panicked and ran out on Bess or felt she had no other option but to hand herself over to the petrol station. And then what about the phone call? Was Ruth imagining her sister again or is Leila in even deeper trouble than before? Ruth is still no closer to knowing where or how to find Leila. She envisages the confrontation at the shop if she went in and demanded they give her Leila, the way they’d imply she was mad, manhandle her outside in front of watching customers or call the police to accompany Ruth on her walk of shame home. Last evening, she finally managed to talk Giles down from calling the doctor about another stay at the unit, but the truce they’ve agreed is shaky and any misstep now will re-engage that process. More than anything, Ruth needs to be here, alert and on guard for Leila.

  She shoves the covers aside and sits on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands. Behind her, Giles mutters in his sleep. He’s probably dreaming about Faye and their lust that’s been incubated by secrecy, although perhaps it’s easier for him now everything’s out in the open and he no longer needs to hide the fact that his love for Ruth is – and always has been – conditional. The duvet rises and falls with his gentle breath. Once, a lifetime ago, Ruth would have reached out to him, stroked his back, taken the comfort she needed, blind faith in the desire she could inspire in him. Now she rubs her face, fingers sandpapering her cheeks as she struggles to connect to her jealousy; she knows it’s there, wrapped so tightly in anger, defeat and this strangling loneliness that only sadness makes it through.

  Ruth stands, creeps into Bess’s room where her baby is fast asleep. At the window, she pushes the curtain to one side to rest her forehead on the cold glass. Outside, the night sky is fringed with dawn, the ground below still in darkness. Metres in the distance, though, on the sidings, a small glow. Ruth’s heart quickens – someone’s lit a fire. An aura surrounds it, and something passes through the glow, impossible to tell what from this distance. Perhaps Leila’s hiding out in the scrub like a wild animal, waiting for Ruth to come and rescue her. Ruth runs downstairs for a closer look and tries to open the back door. It’s swollen shut again and she can’t budge it – God knows how Leila got it open earlier. Through the floorboards, Ruth hears Giles turning over in the bed, and she holds her breath for a few seconds until he settles, then puts her face to the window to squint into the night. The fire is hidden from this angle by the trees, but she recalls the picture on Frieda’s wall of the kestrel, backdropped by the roofs and chimneys of the terraces, the perspective only possible if the photo was taken on the other side of the fence. In the far right-hand corner of that picture was the suspended roof of the petrol station. The only place Ruth’s never been on this street is the back of the shop. Somewhere there, hidden from view, is the entrance onto the sidings.

  Ruth grabs her coat and boots from the lounge and puts them on over her nightclothes, not wanting to wake Giles by opening drawers in the bedroom. She inches the front door closed until the latch clicks softly into place and runs round the back of the house, pushing the spare set of keys she found in the kitchen into her pocket. Behind the railway fence, dark trees swing in the wind, their trunks and branches moving in unison as if they’re formation dancing, or being pulled by a tide.

  ‘Leila.’ Her voice is a loud whisper. ‘Where are you?’

  She jogs down the back path, feet thumping on the paving stones as she checks to her right for the fire she saw from her bedroom. The dawn is beginning to loosen the blackness and a form crosses Ruth’s vision; substance in the woods, a shape moving through the lapping trees. She crashes across a neighbour’s allotment and grabs the fence struts, squinting into the dark to make sense of the shadow among shadows. It’s fast, the edge of it in the distance apparent by a linear speed at odds with the smooth sway of the trees. Shorter too, and more compact than the trunks and branches. A head and shoulders perhaps. Of a woman? ‘Leila!’ The shape dissolves into the undergrowth. Ruth races back to the path in the direction of the petrol station, legs powering her across the forecourt, past the closed-up shop and round the back of the building where a haul of litter has been dumped in weeds by the wind: disposable coffee cups, sweet wrappers, plastic bags – the filth everywhere and endless. One of the shop windows is covered in hardboard, the one Leila must have broken, and at the fence a larger piece of board has been propped against the railings. Ruth lifts it to one side to find the entrance, a small break in the bars that have been cut through and heaped to one side. Her whole body is shaking, with fear or cold she’s not sure, and she squeezes through onto a narrow path that cuts into thorny scrub, refusing to engage with her busy brain, sustaining only the motion of her hands and legs to do the thing that needs to be done. A drift of smoke in her throat. She calls a little louder now. ‘Leila, it’s me, Ruth.’

  A few metres of heavy undergrowth hugs the fence before Ruth steps into the woods. Cold air holds the promise of day and last night’s moon fades into the brightening sky like spilt milk. Soft leaves stroke Ruth’s face and the ghost of something passes through her, like walking into a story that’s been tidied away, the edges of it tugging at her, telling her she needs to pay attention: she’s submerged, a forest of kelp, a figure ahead she can’t reach. ‘Tam.’ Ruth’s off-balance on the waterlogged ground. ‘Why didn’t you . . .’ She trips, jolting back to the present. Carrier bags stuck in branches catch the wind like fat, rustling sails.

  In the distance, movement again, a shock of colour running away at speed. Ruth chases through the trees. To her right, the railings are high and smooth to deter climbers, and through the metal struts Ruth spies trampolines and compost heaps, the dirty obelisk of her chicken shed in the distance. Beyond this is the roo
f and walls of home. Ruth’s husband and daughter will still be asleep, as unreachable to her in this moment as they would be if they were on another planet. She’s crossed over to the other side, antimatter to her reality. Her family pulls at her, the impulse to run home reined in only by the need to find Leila, this girl who’s secured a place inside Ruth as firmly as if she were made of her own flesh and blood. Ruth is torn between her two girls, the instinct to protect her own rooting her in this netherworld, though it’s dangerous being on this waste ground with no one knowing she’s here. In her rush to leave without disturbing Giles, Ruth left her phone in the bedroom, and she imagines if she fell now and banged her head, she’d lie unconscious and undiscovered, never returning to Bess who’d grow up thinking her mother had abandoned her. Immaculate Bess, who has been undone daily, minutely, irreversibly by her mother; perfection misplaced, though at least Ruth was present, at least she tried. All those times she’d fantasized about disappearing, and now that the choice might no longer be hers, she realizes with lightning clarity that all she really wanted was to leave her useless self behind and begin again. Bess, my sweet, sweet girl. Ruth wipes the tears from her eyes.

  Hanging from a shrub near her house is the twiggy remainder of the dreamcatcher Frieda gave as a present, which Ruth threw away. Its feathers are limp with damp and the circle is incomplete, perhaps chewed by an animal. A glint of something on the matted ground underneath, where Ruth once discarded the corkscrews, the broken mirror and knives, items she’d imagined her thoughts alone could mobilize to violence. She crouches, hands skimming the grass before coming into contact with one of the smaller knives, its handle rusted, blade clogged with dirt. Holding it again now, Ruth still senses its potential, how every sensor she’d possessed had been switched to high alert, confusing her love for her daughter with fear and convincing Ruth that even the tamest situation could turn bad if she were to make the wrong choice – when really all she was trying to do was protect Bess from anything and everything, even the inconceivable possibility of Ruth herself. Ruth knows this now as surely as she once doubted herself; she was never a threat to Bess. Ruth was simply on her knees in front of the lioness she’d become. She turns the knife over in her hand. Mud makes dust in her palm.