Fear of Falling

by Cath Staincliffe

  My knees went weak. He didn’t mean it, did he?

  A volley of bangs. What was she doing? Kicking the drawers? Booting the door in? At least if she was destroying some inanimate object she wasn’t attacking herself.

  ‘That’s exactly what she’s expecting, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That if she’s foul enough we’ll walk away, abandon her like everyone else did. Prove to her that she really is worthless.’

  ‘And if we carry on?’ he said, holding his hands out for answers. ‘All of this? Fights at school? Another exclusion and she’ll be sent to a pupil referral unit.’ He jabbed a finger towards the window. ‘She’s doing God knows what with those scumbags out there. They could be grooming her.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ I rounded on him. ‘But I can’t give up on her. I couldn’t live with myself.’ I didn’t know how else to explain it. We were all she had. Adopting her had been a lifelong commitment, a promise. Not one I could possibly break. Yes, she was wild and uncontrollable, difficult and angry, but she was also that lost little girl. Edgy and scared and so very hurt. I couldn’t add to that hurt. ‘I can’t put her back in care. I won’t. She’s our daughter. I’m her mother. I won’t do that.’

  ‘Well, I can’t do this any more.’ His face worked with emotion. ‘This is killing us, Lydia.’

  Ice water flooded my guts. Was he leaving us? Leaving me?

  ‘I can’t breathe. You know?’ he said. ‘It’s hell. Day after fucking day. I love her, Christ, I love her but she—’ He sat down. He rubbed at his face and groaned.

  ‘What if we move?’ I said quickly. ‘Move somewhere else? I could give up work, home-school her. Get her away from these people. From the bullying at school.’

  ‘Move where?’ he said.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘How would we manage?’

  ‘I’ve the money coming through from my mum’s house.’

  ‘And what about the parlour?’ he said.

  ‘You said yourself the lease is going to cost double. We could find somewhere cheaper. Or go mobile. Less overheads.’

  ‘What happened to no big changes?’ He made quote marks with his fingers.

  ‘That’s working out really well, isn’t it?’

  We laughed, an abrupt release.

  I looked up to the ceiling, listened. All quiet. ‘I think she’s finished. When’s the lease up?’

  ‘July.’

  ‘Will you think about it? Please?’

  ‘OK.’ But he sounded defeated. Had he already reached the end of the road, made up his mind? It was not an unfamiliar story. People who’d adopted, struggling with kids who were disturbed and out of control. I’d caught a radio documentary about it: ‘Children like this split couples apart,’ the narrator had said. ‘They destroy families.’ It seemed such a brutal view. But painfully true.

  I bent to sweep up the glass, tipped it away and got out the bin bags. ‘Better go and see the damage.’

  Mac pushed his chair away from the table to come with me.

  There was a sick feeling inside me, the hollow fizzy nausea of stress. How could I cope if Mac said no? Would I have to choose: my marriage or my daughter? It was hard enough for me to manage with Mac at my side. But without him?

  Chapter Thirty

  Bel and I had a table in the window. The waiter brought our drinks and took our orders.

  ‘I just wish it wasn’t Whitby,’ Bel said, for the umpteenth time. ‘There isn’t even a direct train service.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s the only option.’ I looked out of the window at the pedestrianised area, the planter full of grasses and herbs. A young lad, homeless, sitting on a sleeping bag, a can of lager in his hand, his eyes red and feverish-looking.

  ‘You’ll go mad.’

  ‘We’re all mad as it is. And a bit of support would be a refreshing change.’

  She pulled a face.

  ‘If we stay here, things will just carry on getting more and more bloody disastrous. We can’t say no. Niall’s letting us stay there rentfree while we do the place up. When it sells we get a share of the profit.’

  ‘Don’t fancy taking Freya, too, do you?’

  You don’t know you’ve been born. I looked at her. ‘Freya is a good kid.’

  ‘She’s so uptight, you know what she’s like. It’s like living with my mum. Well, not my mum,’ she corrected herself, ‘the lifestyle police. Holier than fucking thou. Every little thing is an argument. Fourteen units a week, air travel’s killing the planet, bacon gives you cancer.’

  It was true that Freya could be bossy and opinionated, everything was black or white, and she’d leap to judgement. But she’d just become a teenager: of course she knew the answer to everything. ‘She cares about stuff. That’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘And she worries about you.’

  ‘No. She just likes feeling superior. She and her little gang of acolytes.’ Was Bel’s prickly response to Freya bound up with her relationship with her own mother, cold and distant, or perhaps to Bel’s struggles when Freya was small? Whenever I did try to unpick it more, Bel clammed up or changed the subject. She lacked the ability or the willingness to look dispassionately at her own behaviour. Mac and I had had to reveal ourselves to each other, excavate and analyse our family dynamics, our emotional make-up, as we’d prepared to adopt, but Bel had no such understanding.

  ‘And Thomas encourages her,’ Bel said. ‘You know what he came out with the other day? I swear too much.’

  ‘Fucking liberty.’

  She laughed. ‘More or less what I said. He went into a strop for days. Radio silence. I was thinking about asking him to move in. But . . .’

  ‘Let me guess, you’re going to get rid. You don’t think there might be some sort of pattern developing?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘He’s a nice guy. Can’t you work something out?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe that’s it. Too nice.’

  ‘You’d rather have a bastard who messes you about?’ I said.

  ‘No. It’s just that tipping point. Everything was exciting and fun at the start, and I liked his company. We had actual conversations about stuff and the sex was fucking amazing. See what I did there?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And then . . .’ She levelled her hands like scales, then tilted one up, one down. ‘He’s predictable and he’s always snapping or moaning at me, and he makes this humming sound when he’s getting excited which is just—’

  ‘Enough!’ I said.

  ‘Freya won’t approve. Something else for her to hate about me.’ She took a drink. ‘I do love her, you know,’ she said. She turned to stare out of the window. ‘I just don’t like her. Never have. She gets under my skin. You’re not supposed to say that, are you? That’s me. Shit mother. Shit friend.’

  ‘Hey.’ I pointed to her and back to myself. ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Except you’re fucking off to Whitby,’ she said.

  ‘Two words: Santa Monica.’

  Our meals arrived. I leaned over and breathed in the scent of coconut and lemongrass. The prawns were plump, the rice colourful. I bit into a prawn and savoured the taste. ‘It’s good Freya’s got friends,’ I said. ‘These days . . . they’ve all got so much more to deal with, all the stuff going on . . .’ I trailed off, blew out my cheeks.

  ‘Chloë still being bullied?’

  ‘I think so. She was barely at school this last term. Getting her there, getting her to stay was hard enough, and zero-tolerance policies don’t work so well with someone like Chloë. But bullying’s everywhere. Out there on social media. She’s a freak. She’s a psycho. She should kill herself. Her birth-parents were serial killers and paedos.’

  Bel winced.

  ‘You take stuff down but it’s done the rounds. Chloë doesn’t always tell us. If those parents knew what their kids were saying . . . but then they all think Chloë’s the problem, that she’s disturbed and causing all the trouble, she’s the threat. Because she can’t control
her reactions.’ I put down my fork. ‘Sometimes I just freak out. It feels like there’s some self-fulfilling prophecy – that whatever we do she’s still heading for disaster. Her dad was violent, he was in prison when she was born, her mum was a drug-user, their lives were a total fuck-up, and she seems hell-bent on heading in the same direction. I know that’s not fair. I hate thinking like that.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  Bel’s phone rang. ‘Hi . . . Where from? . . . Isn’t there a bus? OK . . . Well, I’ll be about forty minutes.’ Shook her head at me. ‘When can they learn to drive?’

  ‘Not for a while. You going to be OK?’ I nodded to her glass. Her third.

  ‘Don’t you start! The curry will have soaked it up. So, we’ll come and visit, eh?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be back here now and again. The place will be a building site for the next year, I guess.’

  ‘Fine, you come here,’ she said. ‘To pastures new!’ She raised her glass. ‘And roll on empty nests!’

  It was dusk when we arrived in Whitby, and there was a sea fret coming in over the land.

  I pulled up in the car, Mac behind us in the van he’d bought to use as a mobile tattoo parlour.

  The cottage, two knocked together, was caught in the glare of the headlights. Huddled low to the ground, single-storey, built in big blocks of dun-coloured stone, with a tiled roof, small windows and low doors. It looked as if it had grown there.

  ‘It’s creepy,’ Chloë said.

  ‘Looks better in daylight,’ I said. Niall had already repaired the cottage roof, had it insulated, and installed triple-glazed windows throughout. The rest of the renovation was up to us either to do or to organise. ‘Let’s get our stuff into the caravan.’

  We’d hired a two-bedroom caravan to live in until the house was habitable.

  Mac unlocked it and put the lights on.

  It looked clean and fresh. The couches were upholstered in golden velvet, and yellow curtains decorated with sprigs of flowers hung at the windows. But it felt damp and smelt musty. There were dehumidifier traps on the windowsill and in each bedroom.

  I switched on the heaters.

  The three of us ferried bedding, suitcases, boxes of groceries and toiletries, pots and pans from Mac’s van.

  ‘Water?’ I said to Mac.

  ‘There should be a container under the van. Tap’s by the house. You want to come, Chloë?’

  ‘OK.’

  He had a torch and I watched the beam flash across the yard to the cottage.

  Once they’d loaded the drum and hooked it up, I filled the kettle.

  With cups of tea and drinking chocolate made, I put on the stew I’d brought to heat up.

  Chloë played with the TV, surfing channels. ‘No Netflix,’ she said.

  ‘Only Freeview,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have to use the laptops for anything else,’ Mac said, ‘but the Wi-Fi should be working.’

  Chloë snapped off the set, threw the remote onto the couch at her side. Face miserable.

  ‘It will feel strange at first,’ I said, ‘for all of us. Take time to settle in.’

  ‘It’s horrible. What if I want to go home?’ she said.

  ‘This is home now,’ Mac said.

  ‘We talked about this,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve talked about it,’ Chloë said.

  The muscles in my back tightened. I stirred the pan. ‘Just give it time,’ I said. ‘And we can find out about the stables in the morning.’

  I’d promised Chloë she could go riding as much as she wanted. ‘Maybe they’ll let you volunteer,’ I’d said. ‘Mucking out and grooming and looking after the animals.’ She’d been keen on that idea.

  I hoped the horses were a way of rekindling an interest that might eventually give Chloë a direction in life and a route into work. We’d agreed it would be asking for trouble to try to enrol her in a new school after the problems, the bullying, the fights, the exclusions she’d had at her old one. So I’d home-school her.

  Chloë wasn’t academic. She was so different intellectually from either of us. The fantasies I’d had of helping my child with special projects at home, of glowing school reports and after-school science clubs, of eventual visits to university open days had evaporated when she was still small.

  Once we’d eaten, Chloë went to her room. Mac and I had a beer and watched Doctor Foster on TV, a new drama about a cheating husband and his vengeful wife.

  We were ready to turn in early. I took a breath, knocked on Chloë’s door and went in. She was sitting up in bed and using her phone. She glowered at me. I ignored her expression.

  ‘Try to get some sleep,’ I said. ‘If you want anything, give us a knock.’

  She didn’t look at me. Her thumbs flicked over the phone.

  ‘Who are you texting?’

  Silence.

  ‘Right, we’re off to bed. Night-night.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to her about the situation that I hadn’t already told her.

  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘See you in the morning.’

  I fell asleep reasonably easily but woke in the night. I thought I heard crying and held my breath to listen. But there was only the faint sound of the wind outside, Mac’s breathing, and an occasional chinking noise, which must have been something knocking against the caravan. Perhaps the cry had been the sound of trees in the wind or a gate creaking or the bark of a fox.

  Mac and I spent the next day working out what we needed to do in the cottages. They were still cluttered with pieces of old furniture, sagging couches, bedsteads, broken drawers. One bedroom had an old wardrobe that almost reached the ceiling. It was burled walnut, heavy and ornately carved, frosted with white mould. I wondered who had brought it there, what lives had gone on before us.

  The new window frames in their protective wrapping looked out of place next to the rotting carpets and rickety chairs.

  A look around confirmed that there was nothing salvageable or saleable in the contents. We needed to rip out and remove everything we could. Mac phoned for skip hire. The whole place reeked of mildew, and black mould bloomed in the kitchen and bathrooms. Great grey swags of cobweb festooned every corner: large hairy spiders scuttled for cover as we shifted pieces, and woodlice nested under the carpets. Everything was thick with dust and I sneezed repeatedly.

  I persuaded Chloë to give us a hand in the kitchen. The wall had been knocked through between the two original kitchens so they could be merged into one. The back doors had been removed and the stonework between them replaced with wide patio doors. But the remaining walls still had old fitted cupboards and cabinets. Chloë helped to prise them off the kitchen walls and break them up with a lump hammer.

  Then she complained that it smelt rank and went back to the caravan.

  We stopped for tea and bacon butties at midday. I rang the stables and arranged to call round with Chloë that afternoon.

  The owner, Barbara, was tall and thin, stooped, with a raw, weatherbeaten complexion and a warm smile. I guessed she was in her late sixties but she could have been older. She sized Chloë up and asked about her experience.

  ‘She was riding once a week until a couple of years ago, then lost the habit,’ I said. ‘She’s home-schooled so it doesn’t have to be evenings or weekends for sessions.’

  ‘We have classes, if she’d like to get to know some of the other girls,’ Barbara said.

  ‘We’ll think about that,’ I said. ‘But for now can we book some solo lessons?’

  We negotiated three afternoons that worked. ‘Wednesday’s tricky,’ Barbara said. ‘We have special groups then, autistic children – we do a trek with them – but the other weekdays are fine.’

  There had been times when we thought Chloë might be autistic, or on the spectrum. The rages, the lack of eye contact, the physical anxiety. But when she was tested they said not.

  ‘Oh, and we’ve not got a hat – she grew out of it,’ I said.

  ‘Should be able
to sort you one out. Now, I think you should start on Brandy.’ She led Chloë over to the stalls and I followed them. ‘She’s a very placid horse. And Pippin, next door but one. She’s taller, friskier. You could move onto her once you’re comfortable back in the saddle. You can try Brandy in the arena now, if you’ve time.’

  ‘Can I?’ A moment of eagerness, so rare.

  ‘Shall I stay?’ I said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Chloë said.

  I left my number with Barbara and arranged to go back in forty-five minutes.

  I drove into town and called at the dentist’s where I registered the three of us, then did the same for the GP. I also made enquiries about getting Chloë some help from CAMHS and found out that the waiting list in the area was approximately ten months, unless the young person was suicidal. Ten months.

  Our experience in Leeds had been disappointing. Chloë had attended twice: she had been restless and uncooperative, then refused to go again. Still, I had to try to get her some help so I asked them to go ahead and make an appointment for her to see the GP and hopefully get a referral.

  I arrived back early and sat on one of the benches in the stableyard. The autumn sun was golden, warm on my face.

  A female blackbird flew down to a stone bird-bath built on a pedestal. She drank and then splashed about in the water, splaying her wing feathers. Other smaller birds I couldn’t name were busy in the beech hedge.

  Chloë and Barbara came trotting in from the arena. ‘She’s got a good seat,’ Barbara called. ‘She’s a natural.’

  And I dared to hope that we’d made the right decision in coming here. That things really were going to get better.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Living where we were meant it was difficult but not impossible for Chloë to get into Whitby on her own. It would take an hour and three-quarters to walk. There was a local bus service up on the main road but they only ran every two hours. With the car we could be there in twenty minutes.

  That first week, I took her to explore our new town. I parked in the centre and we walked up the winding streets and through the avenues full of large guesthouses to the top of the west cliff, to Captain Cook’s statue and the whalebone arch.