by Kate Simants
When he’s settled next to her, she says, ‘I can’t believe I just did that.’
They sit in pitch-black silence, the rise-and-fall sound of the drama downstairs reaching them in muffled bursts.
‘I’m not normal,’ she whispers. He feels her move, bringing her knees up, hugging them to herself. ‘I just – I just lost it.’ Then, almost like she’s fine with it, she says, ‘He’s going to kill me.’
Luke turns, tries to make out her face, but it’s totally black. ‘He deserved it, Paige.’
‘No, he didn’t!’ she says sharply, and he wishes he could take it back. ‘No one deserves that. What kind of a headcase does that?’
Luke doesn’t know how to answer.
There’s an ambulance, the sirens getting louder and louder until it stops, right outside. Commotion in the hall.
‘I’m always going to be a fuck-up,’ she whispers eventually.
‘That’s not true,’ Luke whispers back. He wishes he could make it real and not something coaxing and empty like the staff say, like his mum’s nurses say.
‘It is true,’ she says. ‘You can’t go through all of this and be normal. You can’t do well.’
‘How do you mean?’
She shrugs. ‘None of us are exactly geniuses, are we?’ She must feel him flinch because she says quickly, ‘I mean, I’m not saying you, Lukey, I’m not saying you’re thick. But people like us, we don’t end up doing well in school, or going to uni, or getting really good jobs or anything. It’s like it’s all mapped out, you know? And everyone tells us we’ve got the same chances as anyone else. But it’s bullshit. We’re all broken up. You can’t start off with what we’ve got here and make a go of your life. Sorry, but you just can’t.’
Luke wants to say that it’s not true – that Leah’s doing OK, that Rob’s all right, too. But it goes hard in his throat, because Leah’s wiping arses for minimum wage, and what is Rob, really? A thief. A scammer.
There’s a vibration on the floor and her message tone, the sound of a duck quacking, and whatever was pulled tight in there is cut loose, and they giggle.
Paige gets hold of the phone, and when she finds it she’s suddenly lit by the glow of the screen. She inputs the unlock code quickly, but he sees it anyway. 7031. She hasn’t been looking too perky for a week or so, but in that light she looks like death. Her eyes are ghostly, and he wants to look away, but they pull him in.
‘What?’ she says, sensing his eyes on her. She angles the screen away.
‘Nothing, I’m not—I wasn’t looking,’ he says, hurt.
But she doesn’t notice. She chews her lip, frowning as she texts.
Then something comes to him. ‘What about Yardley?’
There’s a slight pause. ‘What about him?’
‘You said he was in care.’
‘Oh, right,’ she says. ‘Yeah.’
‘And he turned out OK.’
She leaves that hanging. ‘But look at everyone else. All our parents. Your mum. Both Jake’s parents were addicts; Cameron’s never met his dad and his mum’s a pisshead and on the game. My mum was a junkie.’ Paige shifts her weight on the hard floor, and rests the side of her face on her knees. ‘She sent me all these letters when I first went into care, saying how she didn’t want to do it but how she was a terrible parent,’ she says bitterly. ‘But all that soon dried up. She’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere by now.’
Being really, really careful not to touch anything he shouldn’t, Luke lifts his hand, feels for hers. ‘I know.’
‘Do you?’
His eyes flutter shut and his face bursts into blistering heat and he thanks God for the dark. ‘No,’ he tells her. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about what you’ve been through.’
She squeezes his hand back and if it wasn’t for the shame of the lie, of only really knowing anything about her because he’s read her file, that pressure on the back of his hand would have been the high point of his whole fourteen months in Beech View. But it’s over as quickly as it happened, and she moves her hand, and the moment’s gone.
‘Sometimes I think I see her, you know? Like outside school, or on the bus. I see people look at me for a minute and I always think, is that her?’
Luke’s eyes are adjusted now and he can just make her out, the shape of her face, frowning hard.
‘It just makes me so fucking angry. I’m angry all the time. And I lie, I let people down, I do such stupid things, and I’m always trying to tell myself it’s not my fault. But it is. It’s me making these shitty choices, not anyone else. I just need to forgive her, and everyone else who should have helped. And then I could be a better person, Lukey.’ A tear slips down her nose, and she sniffs, then rubs it angrily away.
‘But I can’t,’ she says simply. ‘I can’t forgive them. I never will.’
21
Now
Wren puts down the parenting magazine she’s been reading as soon as Ashworth steps out of the interview room. Not a moment too soon, either: the guilt has been ratcheting up with every page as she realises how many things she hasn’t prepared for, hasn’t even discussed with Suzy. Sleep arrangements, buggies, breast vs bottle, the whole nine yards. But even as she flipped the pages, she hadn’t really been concentrating. Too many things cycling in her head: Paige and Luke, Paige and Rob. James, Melanie, Gary. All of them. And, because of what she’s got planned for her extra-curricular work that evening: Leah Amberley, first and foremost.
But that is for later.
‘How did it go?’ Wren asks him. The interview was for shift work in a hospital laundry, a shade over minimum wage to reflect the unsociable evening and weekend hours. He hadn’t wanted to go. She didn’t blame him. ‘Think you got it?’
Ashworth shrugs. ‘Maybe. Think you could probably have found me something shitter though, if you’d tried.’
‘You think you can find something better without my help, Rob, you go right ahead. But if they offer you that and you turn it down, you don’t get a safety net. Benefits have got a whole lot tougher.’
He stares at her. ‘I’m not going on benefits.’
‘No?’ She holds the double door out of the waiting room open for him and they head along the corridor. ‘You’ll be needing to take whatever you get offered then, unless there’s some grand plan you’ve not told me about.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he snaps, but before she can answer he downgrades it. ‘I haven’t got any fucking plan. Obviously.’
They retrace their steps through the labyrinthine hospital and outside. She sees him to the bus stop, says goodbye, then gets in her car. For about ten seconds she tries to talk herself out of making the trip she’s got planned, but her dogged curiosity wins in the end. She just can’t let go of what she overheard between him and Leah.
The drive out to the smart suburb of Westbury is smooth and uncomplicated, and she arrives outside the nursery she’s tracked Leah down to with twenty minutes to go. She tucks herself in a space facing the road, with a full view of the bunting-strung entrance in her wing mirror. By ten to six there is a steady flow of parents pulling up. Wren watches them hurry out of their cars, emerging minutes later clutching sleepy toddlers with tiny backpacks. The stream thins to nothing by ten past.
The lights inside flick off and one by one the staff make their way to their cars. Wren scrutinises each face, but Leah is the last to leave, zipping a padded coat up to the neck and striding out towards the street with the obvious resolve of someone catching a bus. Good: it would be much harder to wring a conversation out of her if she had a car.
Leah doesn’t miss a beat when Wren falls into step next to her. ‘You again. Got bored of hassling me on voicemail?’
‘Slightly. I just want ten minutes of your time.’
‘Yeah? Well, I just want a villa in Ibiza.’
‘I’m not here to cause any trouble.’
Leah sighs heavily and stops dead. ‘What do you want, then? Because you sure as hell don�
�t seem like any probation officer I’ve ever heard of.’
Wren has given this a lot of thought. It’s clear that Ash-worth has some kind of sway over Leah, and trying to get information out of her about him isn’t going to be easy. So she goes at it sideways.
‘It’s not about Rob,’ she says. ‘It’s about Paige, and about Beech View.’
Leah raises her eyebrows, suspicious. ‘Right.’
‘Look, I want him to keep out of trouble, for everything to go smoothly for him. That’s my job. But I want to talk to you because between me and you, I’ve got concerns about the home Paige lived in.’ The slightest softening of Leah’s face, making Wren’s pulse skip with anticipation. ‘I think, of everyone, you’re going to know what I mean.’
‘Concerns like what?’ Leah says, not giving anything away.
‘The kind of concerns that make news.’
Leah uncrosses her arms and starts walking again. Wren follows.
‘She’s not coming back. I don’t see what difference anything I say is going to make.’
Matching her pace, Wren digs in her bag for the pack of cigarettes she’s bought for the occasion, and offers one to Leah. ‘You know they own seven homes across Bristol and South Glos now?’
‘No.’ Leah glances at the cigarettes, refuses with a shake of her head, then mutters, ‘All right then,’ and takes one.
‘They do.’ Wren lights the cigarette, considers taking one for herself but remembers Suzy, and puts them back in her bag. ‘Sixty, sixty-five kids at a time.’
Leah shrugs, but even in the gathering gloom Wren can see her flinch.
‘Look, if there’s something going on that means those kids aren’t safe—’
‘Like what?’
‘Any of the adults there who weren’t… wholly appropriate.’
‘We need to talk in fucking riddles for a reason?’
‘Let’s start with the care workers. Did you hear anything suspicious about a Melanie? Mel?’
‘I know the name. Wanted to be Paige’s mum, by the sounds of her. And Luke’s. Why do you ask?’
‘Just some things I’ve heard,’ Wren parries.
‘From who?’
There’s the sense of a thaw so Wren tells her. ‘James Yardley. You know him, right?’
Leah’s face instantly brightens in recognition of the name. ‘I do, yeah. He’s a good guy.’
‘How so?’
‘Paige liked him. I don’t know why she and Rob ended up doing what they did to him, and it’s none of my business. But Yardley, he was OK. Carried on going door to door trying to find clues when the police got bored with looking for her. He was different. Didn’t want anything in return.’
‘You’re sure about that?’ Wren asks, because not for the first time she knows how it would look to an outsider.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning it’s not exactly a traditional friendship. Wealthy, powerful, decent-looking older man with unsupervised access to a vulnerable, beautiful girl?’
But Leah shoots her a warning look. ‘Don’t even go there. That man did everything he could’ve done for Paige. I’m not kidding. Anyone tells you otherwise they’re talking out their arse. You think I wouldn’t have noticed, if he was a nonce?’
‘OK, I didn’t mean—’
‘Well, then, don’t say it. There’s enough arseholes in the world without decent people getting accused as well.’
Wren raises her palms, surrendering. Then Leah says, ‘Those two posh wankers still running it?’
‘The Polzeaths?’
A nod.
‘Alice is still in charge. But she’s separated from Oliver now.’
‘He got pretty cosy with her.’
‘With Paige?’
The younger woman inhales deeply. Wren hasn’t smoked in years but her blood sparkles with the memory of the nicotine. ‘Made a thing of trying to take her under his wing a bit. The way they do when you look like her.’
‘What are you saying, Leah?’
‘Nothing.’
They take a left, heading towards the main road into the centre. The traffic crawls along beside them, and Leah increases her speed. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘I don’t trust you. I’ve got no reason to trust any of you, for the same reasons that Paige didn’t trust any of you.’
‘Any of who? I’m not—’
‘You’re no different. Saying one thing and doing another. All of them, social workers, teachers, the fucking Polzeaths. They do just enough to tick the boxes. They took what they wanted from us, they decided who we got to be, and they let us get on with it. People like us don’t stand a fucking chance. So don’t come round here telling me how you care what happened to her. She got fucked over and spat out, just like Rob and Luke and everyone. Even worse for their favourites. I did fucking warn her.’
‘Warn her about what?’
‘That she couldn’t trust them!’
‘But why?’ Wren persists.
‘Just leave it!’ Leah shouts. ‘Leave me alone!’
The hand holding the cigarette is shaking now. Wren’s chance is getting away from her.
‘What do you mean by favourites, Leah?’ Wren asks softly.
Leah stops dead and faces her.
‘Enough. Stop calling me,’ she says. ‘I’ve done my grieving for what happened. I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
Wren goes for her trump card. ‘OK. But I need to speak to your grandad. Could you give me his details?’
‘Why?’ Her contempt seems to evaporate in an instant, and she looks as if she might cry. ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘Just need to discuss with him what he’s got that Rob’s interested in.’
‘It’s none of your fucking business!’
Wren tilts her head. ‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘Please,’ Leah says, her voice cracking. Her bravado shimmers and is gone, as if she’s suddenly shed a decade. ‘Please. I’ve caused them so much hassle, they’re only just trusting me again. Please don’t involve him.’
‘I don’t have to, if you’ll give me a straight answer.’
‘It’s just a couple of boxes,’ Leah whines, her eyes on the pavement. ‘Some stuff I was holding for Rob while he was in prison. And I can’t get them for another week and a half, like I told Rob. It’s at my grandad’s. He’s on holiday in Spain and I don’t have a key.’
Wren digs in her bag for her card and hands it over.
‘What’s this?’
‘My number. Just get the boxes, and call me. And I promise I won’t phone again.’
22
Before
‘You need to take a break,’ Mel says, putting the mug down on his desk. ‘It’s gone eleven.’
Luke picks it up without looking at it, takes a sip, but it’s not coffee, it’s hot milk. He pushes it away.
‘Help you sleep,’ she says.
‘I don’t want to sleep.’ He’s got tests all the next week, and yeah, they’re not GCSEs, but if he can’t prove to himself he can pass them, he’s not going to believe he can do it for real next year. He’s got to prove Paige wrong.
‘Half an hour then,’ she says, and she turns to leave.
‘Where’s Paige?’
Mel sighs.
‘I just want to know.’
‘She’s at a swimming gala.’ She goes to the door.
‘At eleven o’clock?’
Mel shrugs slowly like she’s had this conversation before and she can’t be arsed to have it again. ‘She helps clear up, doesn’t she?’
‘Not until eleven o’clock she doesn’t. Where is it, Easton?’ If it’s the pool in Easton he could go down there, walk her back; it’s only twenty minutes.
But Mel doesn’t answer his question. She just eyes him.
‘Where, then?’ There’s the big new place, Paige calls it the competition pool, down in Hengrove; if Cameron’s out maybe Luke can nick his bike, probably do that in half an hour.
‘She’s g
etting a lift back,’ Mel says as he brings maps up on his screen.
He looks up. ‘Who off?’
Mel sighs. ‘Lukey—’ she starts, and she takes a deep breath like there’s something big to say.
‘All right, whatever, fine,’ he says quickly and his face instantly catches fire. He turns his back to her again, flips a page, pretending to make a note. He hears the door click and he thinks for a second she’s left.
‘Luke,’ she says. He turns round, finds she’s still inside. The door’s closed behind her.
‘What,’ he says, his voice flat.
‘You need to give her a bit of space, love.’
He turns, scowling. Shame or rage or something else tears at him right in the gut, but she’s smiling at him, and it just makes it worse and before he can stop himself he says, ‘Yeah? Fuck off. Mind your own fucking business.’
But Mel acts like she hasn’t heard him. ‘I’m only saying it because I can see how much she means to you.’
‘You don’t know anything about anything,’ he says. ‘Just leave me alone.’
‘All right, Luke.’ She opens the door. ‘Half an hour,’ she says. And then she’s gone.
He closes his eyes then and just sits there. She doesn’t know. There’s no way she could know, because what happens to him with Paige, it’s like it’s more than a human being can manage. When he’s with Paige it’s like he’s going to physically split open. Like his skin is just too tight, how he feels is all just too big. And he knows he doesn’t hide it properly, and he doesn’t make her laugh and he’s never got anything good to say, anything that’ll make her think he’s got something to offer her.
And that’s the fucking bottom line, isn’t it?
He doesn’t have anything to offer her. And he’s going to be the strung-along and spat-out friend, the loser, every time. And it’s just fucking bollocks because he could make her happy. He would hold her together and forget everything that’s happened before and he wouldn’t ever judge her, and they could start again and make things OK. But she won’t let him. And Mel knows it, and everyone knows it, and he wants to die.
She’s never going to love him back.