‘That made sense though,’ Martine said. ‘And so did I. I was researching my family history and I didn’t have a dad on my birth certificate, so the bait they trailed for me was about that. But do you see?’
Laura straightened halfway then shook her behind to dry it. ‘We’ll all be championship twerkers by the time this is over,’ she said. ‘See what?’
‘The story they told Ivy was completely bonkers.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Ivy said. She was interested in spite of herself.
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Martine said. She was squatting now. ‘You fell for it.’
‘Ohhhhh,’ said Laura. ‘I see what you’re getting at. A story about a singles dance for someone looking for partners …’
‘Right,’ said Martine. ‘Makes sense. Like a dad for a fatherless child. But where did that come from that they told you, Ivy? You wanted a cat. And you got a sister.’ She was finished and had bent to slide the metal over the drain, but Laura pushed her away. ‘I’ll get that,’ she said. ‘Your hand’s not healed and with the best will in the world a plaster’s not a magic wand.’
Martine rejoined Ivy at the cardboard, plopped down and stared at her. ‘They told you you were one of them. Swapped, Ivy,’ she said ‘And it was nothing to do with you and your life. Like Kate said. Nothing to do with you.’
‘So?’ said Laura.
‘Well, if it’s nothing to do with Ivy – this sister-swap – then it’s something to do with them.’
‘So?’ said Laura.
‘There’s something I remember,’ Martine said. ‘I heard it, but I was half-asleep.’
‘No! Gawd, not the podcasts,’ said Laura.
Ivy shushed her. ‘Try and remember,’ she said.
‘True crime,’ said Martine. ‘I think. Or extreme … it might have been Oliver Sacks. I keep thinking carpe diem. But it’s nothing to do with that. It’s something to do with family. If we could work it out. Work out what it is they want. What it is they’re doing.’
‘I’m sorry, Martine,’ Laura said. ‘But you’re clutching at straws. What we need to do is send a sign to someone who’ll come and find us.’
If they’d let her be what she wanted to be, Ivy thought, she’d agree with both of them, comfort them, make it all better, like a mother should. But she’d got the message loud and clear. She wasn’t wanted. They didn’t need her. So instead she spoke her mind. ‘What we’ve got to do,’ she said, ‘is face facts. We can sit down here going meep-meep-meep till our batteries run out and it won’t change a thing. We’re going to die.’
SIXTEEN
I stood at the window and followed each drop on its race down the glass to gather at the transom and swell the drip drip drip on to the stone sill. There was a crack at the inner angle and moss growing where the putty should be. I imagined, standing there, that one day the block of stone would split off and fall to the ground. Then the next rain would seep into the fabric of the wall and show as a stain on the plaster. Soon the floor would rot too and this building, so solid-seeming, that had stood here a hundred years, would be gone.
Good red stone slumping like a sandcastle at the high tide wasn’t really what was troubling me. Only, when nothing felt sure any more, and every step was a step towards the unthinkable, it was no wonder that even stone and glass, wood and plaster, concrete steps and iron banisters felt like a little house of straw.
I had been here for two days, five left, and I still didn’t know if it was genius or madness, precaution or paranoia. How far would Big Garry go to shut me up? Should I just give in and call the police? On the little burner I’d bought ten minutes after fleeing BG that horrible, skin-crawling, insane, impossible day?
Calling the cops would mean giving up the takeover, the reparations, the whole plan to balance out what he had done; so much worse in the end than what I thought he’d done. Him and Lynne and Bazz.
At the thought of Bazz, I nearly smiled. I’d never have come up with Airbnb if I hadn’t heard about his pop-up ‘shops’. My dad had given me the rest of it, though he didn’t know. Shetland, Cornwall, London, he’d said, taunting me. Hiding in plain sight, he’d said, bragging about Bazz’s cleverness. And so here I was, in a flat in West Lothian, twelve miles from home.
I changed my mind every ten minutes about whether it was bold or idiotic to be so close to where I’d been born and where I’d lived throughout my childhood. Twelve miles from the town where my dad was the biggest employer after the supermarkets.
But while I kept watch out of the window, I checked for faces I knew and I had come to see that this town might as well be another world, with a different high school where kids made different friends and a different police station where different neds got a reputation with different coppers. Every one of these little towns, I thought to myself, was so turned in on itself, even if they were joined on nose to tail these days. There was no cross-fertilisation, because there was no destination in any of them that would pull people from any of the others. Each had its own chippy and Chinese, its own Turkish barbers and pet groomers. And no one would dream that the butcher two towns over would offer better cuts than the butcher right here who called them by name and remembered their mum.
I was trying hard not to think about why there was an Airbnb here. I refused to imagine what might have happened in this flat before I got here, between the faded, bobbled sheets of the only bed, on the flattened, darkened moleskin of the couch, even on the hard, washable floor of the cheerless bathroom. Instead, I looked out the windows, not dwelling on what I was looking for, what I was frightened of. My dad wouldn’t … to stop me. Would he?
I leaned my head against the glass and looked through the raindrops, trying to find distraction. The yards of the shops below were tucked too tightly against the back wall for me to see whatever went on there, although I heard them banging in and out underneath me, taking flattened cardboard out to store it till bucket day, the folk from the chippy humping big bins of old fat over the slabs. If I opened my window, I’d hear the two girls from downstairs out for a smoke, sitting on the old coal-bunker lid, joshing and plotting. I wished I could go and join them. It had been a lonely few months. But even if I booked myself in for an appointment, I wouldn’t get out the back for a fag break.
I peeled myself away at last and walked the length of the room towards the front. This room, through and through from the street to the back garden, was the best bit of the flat and the reason I had rented it. There wasn’t much else besides: just a barely double bedroom with a painted-over fireplace nipping off one corner; a cold bathroom with chips in the bath and a permanent line round the toilet bowl, and a galley kitchen in an offshoot, where a gutless extractor whined uselessly and never managed to stop the smoke-alarm going off before the toast was ready. But this room was different. The skirtings were deep and the cornicing and centre rose were fancy enough to have made it worth picking them out in a different colour of paint. And sometime in the history of the house, a tenant or maybe an owner had sprung for a good wool carpet in dark red. It had survived the seventies, when it might have been ripped out and replaced with beige and the eighties when it would have been lifted to sand the boards, and now it felt warm and proper under my feet. A good dark red wool carpet with flecks of black in it, no stains and no burns for a wonder.
At the front window I brushed aside the curtains. These weren’t survivals from a moment of prosperity in the lifetime of the flat. These were landlord specials: thin cream IKEA, hanging from not enough curtain rings on a squint rod that was held to the wall by half-extruded Rawlplugs.
There was no one down there. I was being paranoid. He wouldn’t, would he? But then he was probably telling himself the same thing – she wouldn’t really, would she? And I would. I was going to. Just like he had done what he had done, him and Lynne and Bazz too.
I knew more about it now, from googling on my cheap little laptop with the pay-as-you-go dongle I’d bought – for cash – at the nearest Ar
gos that blood-chilling, bone-chilling, heart-chilling day. That, I was nearly sure, was total paranoia. Nearly.
Maybe I’d be more sure I was paranoid if he had been smuggling like I thought, fleecing folk for a quiet arrival, folk that wanted to come. Maybe then he’d have taken my deal, and retired to the sun. Maybe that man, crooked and greedy, would have bitten my arm off.
But my dad wasn’t that man, I knew now. I knew now that they signed papers in English thinking it was for visas. Then it didn’t matter what the papers actually said. They’d believe whatever they were told: six months to pay off the airfare; one more job then back home with a bonus; just till a college place opened up. I still couldn’t believe I had missed the crucial bit of that news report. ‘Women and girls.’ I didn’t think I would ever get it out of my head now: ‘some as young as twelve’.
What broke me, once I started googling, was knowing that often as not they loved their handlers. They loved a man and trusted him and couldn’t believe he wasn’t what they hoped he was, couldn’t believe he was what they watched him be. Not so different from me really, wising up too late. I bet their plans looked quaint to them too now, just like my plan to raise money for migrant shelters and make up for the smuggling.
How would I atone for what had really happened? A business, click and collect, supply and demand, Russian bosses. I was too late to help any of them. Maybe I was even too late to help myself. Maybe I’d be just one more girl who went away. (He wouldn’t, would he?)
There was no one down there except a drunk at the bus stop. Or maybe not a drunk, maybe just a guy having a can till his bus came. A retired couple came out of the pub – the Paraffin Arms it was called, unbelievably. They were dressed in matching fleeces and matching trainers but they were arguing bitterly, glowering at one another as they turned into the stair of their flat. A dog trotted past, all alone. It stopped to sniff up at the litter bin but there was nothing lying around it except Coke tins, all the chip papers neatly inside. So it lifted its leg and trotted on. I watched the empty street for a while, until the drunk finished his can, crushed it and dropped it. Then I set off back through the flat to the kitchen window again.
Over the high wall from the shops’ bin stores, nothing was moving. There didn’t seem to be any kids on the side street that stretched away behind the flat, which was a waste because the gardens were far longer than anything a modern house would ever get, as the builders chunked up the land. They were left over from the days there’d be a drying green and a vegetable plot, a pig at the end and a stable beyond. Most of the stables had been flattened and replaced, but a few had survived, bare brick and dusty windows, garages now.
I rolled my head the other way. Considering it was a stone’s throw to a bookie’s, a chippy and a nail bar, this street was fairly posh, although one of houses had a broken window in a kitchen offshoot, stopped up with cardboard behind the bars. Cardboard aside though, it was cute, a little cottage squeezed in beside a bigger villa, with a steep roof and a bit of fancy ironwork along the peak. It had a cellar door down a set of mossy steps that dropped without railings from the edge of the lawn, just a dark hole against the back of the house. A death trap.
Maybe it was the months of driving a patient transport van and a special needs student bus but it bothered me to see the homeowner running up and down those steps, no safety rail, doing whatever it was she did in there. Washing maybe, or getting stuff in and out of a chest freezer. She lived alone, I reckoned, because I hadn’t seen a husband at the back door or in the long grassy garden. There was just that one little woman, in her slippers on the wet grass, up and down, up and down, like a pigeon at a lever.
But watching a little old lady pottering round her garden wasn’t going to help anyone. Wearing a track in the carpet between the front windows and the back either. Am I going to the cops? I asked myself, standing back so I could see my reflection instead of the view. No. Because too many people will lose their jobs. Am I going back in five days to see if he blinks? Yes. Do I really believe he would …? I looked hard at myself in the glass, watching the rivulets track down through my reflection. No, but … I’ll make sure I’ll be missed if I suddenly disappear. In case I’m wrong. In case he would. In case he means to.
When I was showered and dressed, I let myself out of my front door, clattered down to the street door, and stepped out into the drizzle, hunching my shoulders and pressing the Velcro shut on my coat for the scoot across the road.
The newsagent’s was nearest so I made for it with my head down and my hands jammed in my pockets, hopping over puddles. Inside, it was dark and crammed with tat, the air thick from decades of newspaper ink. The look I got from the man behind the counter was the one he’d give any woman between sixteen and forty that came through his door but he wasn’t a bad sort; as I made my way towards him he straightened his face out and pasted on a customer-service sort of smile.
‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘I’m just moved in across the road. Above Hollywood Nails.’
‘Aye? Looking for work? Because this is my uncle’s place and I’ve got seven first cousins all married and—’
‘A paper,’ I said. ‘Do you deliver?’
‘Deliver! Where have you been living? There’s not been a paper boy in the Haw since I was at school, earning thruppence ha’penny for mine.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘And you’re only across the way.’ He pointed. ‘You could lean out your window.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ I said. ‘It’s just so’s I’m not taking my chances there’s one left. Ideally, I’d like a paper every day and a couple of mags.’
‘Aye, no bother. I can order in for you and keep them back. You’ll need to pay as you go or pay in advance a wee month or two, mind. No offence but I don’t know you from a hole in the ground.’
‘None taken,’ I said, feeling my heart lift as he twisted round and grabbed a ledger from behind him. He thumped it down on to the counter and licked his thumb.
‘A Scotsman every day, please,’ I said. I’d rather have had a Herald but I didn’t want to put his back up and I wasn’t sure which side of the continental divide this was. ‘And a Women’s Fitness and a Better Homes and Gardens.’
I couldn’t have made myself read either cover to cover but they were nice and pricy and the newsagent would wonder why I wasn’t picking them up, if I stopped.
‘Name?’ he said, looking up at me with his pencil hovering.
‘Natasha Dodd.’ I wondered if it would light a spark, twelve miles from Big Garry’s kingdom, but he just bent his head and printed it in the ledger. ‘Tash for every day,’ I added.
He put the pencil down, held out a hand and smiled. ‘Adim. You know they’re cheaper online, don’t you? And they deliver.’
‘Your uncle would string you up if he heard you,’ I said.
‘Your Scotsman’ll start tomorrow,’ Adim said. ‘There’s a couple there if you’re after one today.’ He pointed to a low rack with papers stacked on it. I took one, picked up a Twix and a Coke and handed over enough cash to charge a month’s worth of reading. Feeling stupid, I’d taken out a good wedge, after the burner shop and before Argos. Bazz couldn’t hack a bank, I told myself, even as I keyed my pin.
Adim’s eyes widened at the sight of the money. Should I say something? Tell him I was hiding from an ex with a joint bank account?
‘I’m trying out this strict budget trick,’ I went for in the end. ‘Take out a month’s cash and make it last. No impulse-buys with your contactless.’
‘Not very strict if it covers Better Homes,’ Adim said.
One of the girls in Hollywood Nails looked up from her phone when I opened the door. The other was at a delicate stage in the application of strip lashes.
‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘I’ve been meaning to come and say hello. I’ve just moved in upstairs.’
‘We saw you looking out the window,’ said the girl who’d already got her lashes on. Her face was mesmerizing. She wore foundation so far f
rom skin-tone it was almost green and she’d shaded her nose, jaw and temples with stripes of dark brown; highlighted her forehead, cheeks and chin with streaks of sparkling bronze. Her eyebrows were an inch deep and so perfectly square she must have used a stencil to paint them. Her lips were invisible behind thick matt lipstick the same colour as her foundation.
‘We were thinking of grabbing you and tying you down,’ said the other one. She looked up from her mirror and batted both sets of lashes. She was a more normal colour for a white girl, with bands of deep peach simulating rosy cheeks and lips stained red and glittering with shimmer gloss. They each, I, noticed, wore a selection of the nails on offer, ten different patterned and textured acrylics.
‘Yeah, I’ve let things slide a bit,’ I said, feeling my spirits, which Adim had already lifted, really start to soar. ‘I was thinking of booking myself in for a regular … depends what you do, actually.’
‘Mani, pedi, threading and massage,’ the chalky green girl said, waving her arms around as if the chairs and footbaths, the tables and counters, should speak for themselves.
‘Massage would be fantastic,’ I said. ‘But is it weird to do it to people you know?’
‘We don’t know you, though, do we?’ said the peach and red girl with the tarantula lashes. ‘I’m Aisling, that’s Renny, by the way.’
‘Tash. Natasha.’
‘And no, anyway. It’s not weird. Thanks for asking. I wish it was, number of randoms we went to school with coming in on the mooch.’
‘Were you at school together then?’ I said, accepting a printed menu of treatments and looking it over.
‘We’re sisters,’ said Aisling. ‘Duh.’ I loved them both for that ‘Duh’. I hadn’t realized, in Fraserburgh, Lockerbie and Ayr, how much I had missed my own people, hard as nails, dry as biscuits, impressed by absolutely nowt.
I took a closer look and, right enough, the bones were the same and the pale blue eyes.
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