To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  Simone prays that the woman at the door has understood. She thinks she has. She prays she has. She need only call Polly.

  Terry grunts, and she forces herself to respond with the heavy intake of breath she knows he likes – braving him, succumbing to him.

  In the next room, Jasmine is watching TV.

  Perhaps Dominic will come home soon. Simone prays for a chance to talk to him away from Terry. To warn him. To explain.

  Terry is moving faster.

  She prays that the bag does not come loose under the bed.

  She prays the police don’t arrive at the door.

  She prays that she and her children will survive.

  It occurs to Simone that she does not believe in God and doesn’t know who she is praying to, but she prays again anyway.

  One more day she needs. One more day till she is free.

  Sarah

  Sarah knew what she was going to do. Finally. This was her favourite part of any case: sifting the facts, finding the arguments, distilling them down to one, crucial key. Not that Veronica was a case, but her mind carried it that way, accompanying her to the office, and to dinner, and to bed. And just like other cases, the answer had come to her slowly, gradually, a gentle bubbling that had simmered under the skin until at last it was an idea fully formed, presenting itself to her like a pre-packed solution. Or a lightning bolt. When she thought about it, Veronica herself had practically handed the idea to her.

  What would you rather? The game of their youth. The test of their depravity that started it all. Well, how depraved was Veronica now? More than she let on, Sarah betted, more than the wholesome staff or right-thinking parents at Amelia’s school would expect. This was her leverage.

  Veronica still hadn’t sent the letter about Amelia – revelling, Sarah supposed, in the anticipation and the control, the joy of watching her squirm. Probably, she thought it didn’t matter how long the letter took, and it didn’t matter what lies her report contained, because Sarah would never do anything about it. Like always. But she should have been listening more carefully all those years ago. Sarah would do anything to protect her family. Anything. So now, what would Veronica rather?

  The plan was straightforward: arrange to see Veronica, get her drunk, get her more than drunk, wasted, and then… play. Just like when they were children. Except that these days there were phones with cameras, and there was social media, and consequences. Especially for a teacher.

  Nothing illegal. Nothing harmful.

  Those had been Sarah’s self-prescribed parameters, outside, as she was now, of David’s.

  But she would make Veronica tell her what she’d put in the report; she would make her tell her why. She would expose how Veronica had singled out her child, ‘lost’ her work, lied about her, shamed her, pretended she had ‘issues’, used her as bait. And then, then, she would make Veronica understand the other things she had done. She would finally make her see how it felt to be manipulated and trapped, to have one’s confidence stripped and trampled upon, to feel humiliated and small. She would, just for a moment, take away that infuriating Veronica-boldness, that maddening power, and hold up a mirror so that Veronica would be forced to see the weakness that lay within. As Sarah had had to see. To know that actions had impact. That there were consequences. In this case, the consequence would be Veronica staying the hell away from Amelia.

  Lightning-struck, Sarah lay awake in bed. Harry’s podgy feet were nestled in her armpit, his head tucked perfectly into Amelia’s neck. Amelia’s own feet were resting on David’s cheek. Real lightning had been raging for hours, prompting the children’s sojourn into the parental bed, though it was not unusual for them to end up there unprompted. The curtain of the bay window was drawn back slightly and outside, an otherworldly darkness beset the summer dawn. Sarah didn’t know how long she had been awake. Amelia had been the first to come in, sometime around 4am, Harry shortly thereafter, and it was during the alert wakefulness that followed that her plotting had begun. A storm brewing. Atoms crashing. Friction exploding and finding its target on Earth. Sarah appreciated the emblematic appropriateness of the weather, the supernatural might it enabled her to imagine, as though she, a god-like judge, was the source of the obliteration in the air.

  Sarah craned her neck, trying not to disturb Harry’s feet as she searched for the time. The clock on her bedside table showed 5:55am. She often seemed to see a run of repeating numbers like that. When she looked at the time, it would always read 11:11, or 12:12, or some other strangely conspicuous combination, and after a while she had googled it. One explanation was simply that the repetition made the number visually pleasing, so that it was more consciously noted than other permutations, and not really more frequent at all. But there was another account that described spirit guides and guardian angels, using these numbers as a way to grab human attention and impart something important to the viewer. And when Sarah read that, she had immediately thought of Eliza.

  When they were children, her sister had often talked of souls and spirits. The two of them were soulmates, they had decided, connected, and throughout their younger years, caught up by the stories of their mother’s ‘interesting’ friends, they were forever dissecting coincidences and strange happenings. Once, Eliza had even wanted to make a Ouija board, but Sarah had vetoed that. Instead, they had decided that when one of them died (imagining this to be far further into the future than in fact was the case), if it was possible to come back, if it was possible to haunt the other, if ghosts were real, then the dead one should knock over a specific blue vase in their mother’s study, and then the surviving one would know. A few months after Eliza’s accident, Sarah had remembered this, and rushed home to her parents’ house, heading straight for the study, but when asked, her mother said that that vase had been broken years ago.

  Most likely, the numbers were just the visually pleasing thing. Still, Sarah reasoned, if Eliza was trying to find a way to connect, 5:55 was a good way to do it. Especially in the middle of a storm sent from the beyond. Especially at the moment that Sarah had decided to take action, take revenge, not only for herself and Amelia, but for Eliza too. What was Eliza’s message though, blinking through the clock? A blessing, or a warning shot?

  5:56.

  The alarm would sound in four minutes. For four minutes, Sarah turned her eyes towards her sleeping family – peaceful, entwined, shielded by her and David’s force-field of beliefs. For four minutes she watched them this way, and breathed them in; and by 6am she had changed her mind again. Because what on Jupiter was she thinking? What ridiculous notion had made her consider abandoning everything she believed in – honesty, right. In pursuit of what? The winning of a petty, childish game. No, she wouldn’t do it, she would ‘rise above it’, as usual. There were other ways to protect Amelia. Spirits didn’t send storms to pleasantly confirm good choices. They were fury-fuelled means of intervention, warnings to decease.

  At breakfast, Amelia and Harry were entranced by the goings-on in the garden. Half a month’s rain had fallen in an hour and the long summer grass swam beneath a veritable pool on top. The sight of it induced in Sarah’s mind visions of her parents’ dilapidated swimming pool, but she forced her attention instead to the train timetable on her phone. While she searched for a running line, Harry persuaded David to open the garden door and he dashed outside in his nappy and t-shirt, consenting only later to wellies. Amelia, more restrained in her neat school uniform, stood just inside, pointing out the deepest sections of water for her brother to jump in. Both of them giggled, tickled and surprised by the workings of the world.

  “Nothing’s on time,” Sarah said, glancing up to David. “It’s going to take me hours to get in.”

  “Work from home?” David suggested.

  “Can’t. Meetings.”

  He nodded and called the kids back to the table, where he had arranged smiley berry faces on the tops of their porridge. “So, what’s on the agenda today?” he asked them all.

  “I
t’s drama with Mrs Burke,” volunteered Amelia, fastidiously scooping her porridge from the outmost edges, working slowly in on the smile. “And we’re finishing our Matisse collages. And it’s spellings.”

  “And Harry has music group,” added David. “Followed by a very important nap.”

  “And I have a closing statement,” finished Sarah, allowing herself to shift focus for a moment to the case she should have given far more attention over the past weeks. It was unlike her to be so distracted and she wondered if she’d done enough, or if she’d let Veronica control that too. The case came down to a call of ethics rather than precedent in the end, the spirit rather than the letter of the law. But surely the judge would do the right thing, just as she had that morning conceded to. Surely entrenched values would stand firm, like a protective shield around them.

  Later, statement made – in the end rather convincingly – and umbrella in hand, Sarah wondered how she had made it back to Veronica’s road. And why.

  It was lunchtime and Veronica wouldn’t even be there, she would be at school, with Amelia. But something about the pretty, Primrose house had drawn Sarah away from her office in the middle of the pouring day, and back to it, as though it was the scene of something important, or would be. As though it was the ground upon which lightning had struck.

  Still raining, few people were about and the emptiness made Sarah feel conspicuous. Wetness had seeped into the soles of her feet, making them slippery inside her heels, and she leaned gently against a railing. Only one other figure was visible. A little way down the road, huddled similarly beneath brolly, stood a large, black woman, vibrant against cloud. Her skirt was bright orange, tipped at the hem by muddied water, her coat a deep red. Sarah would have noticed this woman even amidst a tightly packed crowd. But after first inspection, it was not the brightness of the clothes that kept Sarah’s attention, it was the gaze of the woman’s eyes. They were focussed in exactly the same direction as Sarah’s had been a moment earlier, staring straight at the house across the street.

  Immediately, Sarah wondered who this woman was, standing there, watching.

  As Sarah stood, watching.

  Watching some more.

  When suddenly, out of the house next door to Veronica’s, stepped a young man. Hooded, he was without an umbrella, but walked with defiance as though he didn’t need one, as though the weather didn’t apply to him. And all of a sudden, the rain began to slow, as if in compliance, and in the distance now the young man seemed to nod, as though satisfied by this thing he had already known. It may be England, but it was summer after all. Damp. Not the time to fantasise about fiery tempests. Rather to calm down. To do the right, measured, expected thing.

  Simone

  There is no time.

  After the social worker left, Simone had done all she could to hide her nerves, to look casual, but she passed by the front window on at least eight occasions, looking for Dominic. He finally materialised just before dinner, but even before they sat down, conversation was commandeered by Terry’s recounting of how Simone had given the social worker what for. He’d loved that. He spoke with his hand on her knee, the warmth of it seeping into her skin and sickening her, but she nodded, and smiled, and laughed in all the right places, noticing with a detached interest how in previous days she would have been fooled by these gestures of his, bolstered high enough for him to later knock down. When finally, Terry released first her leg and then Dominic from the table (Jasmine deliberately fed early and deposited in bed), Simone tried to grab a few minutes alone with her son. She needed to explain the happenings of the last week, she needed to explain her plan. But Dominic decisively closed the door to his room, and by the time she managed to casually walk across the living room and reach for the handle, Terry was requesting her presence on the sofa, insisting on a shared spliff to cap off the day.

  In the middle of the night, she tried again, attempting to creep from their bed into Dominic’s room, but Terry stirred, wrapping himself around her, and the risk was too great. She would get up early, she told herself, catch Dominic before school. She didn’t, however, account for the blurring effect of the spliff, and by the time she managed to pull herself from bed the following day, Dominic was gone.

  Terry, not gone, was in high spirits. He spent the morning chasing Jasmine around the flat, Simone worrying how she would turn shrieks and giggles into stay-home-sickness. But with a stroke of luck, minutes before they were supposed to leave for the pub, during one last frenzied, hysterical dash beneath the kitchen table, Jasmine cracked her head against it, and amid all the crying, Simone carried her to the bathroom for a plaster, and when she returned, informed Terry that Jasmine had been sick. “I don’t think she needs the hospital,” she told him. “But we better stay put and watch it for a bit. You go on, don’t let us stop you. We’ll join you at the pub.”

  “You sure?” he asked, an arm around her waist, a hand beneath Jasmine’s chin, but she kissed him on the cheek, and nodded.

  In the end it was easy. He hadn’t suspected a thing.

  Grabbing the bag from beneath the bed, and adding to it a few extra things of Dominic’s that she hasn’t been able to pack before, Simone picks up Jasmine and bustles her to the door. The pub is only a few roads away and Terry should be there for at least a couple of hours, but he could always have a change of heart, or, in his new spirit of ‘trying harder’, he might come back as a surprise, to help. Nevertheless, Simone finds herself pausing at the door, turning back to the room she is leaving, looking one last time. Move. Move, her mind tells her as she looks. Now. Now. Now. But it has always been more difficult to act than to think of acting.

  No, she is going. She has decided. Besides, Polly is waiting, it is no longer her choice.

  Just a note though, one last thing…

  Tel,

  We’ve gone. You know why. Don’t follow. Stay away or I’ll call the police. When we’re settled, you can see Jas. Not me and not Dom. Somebody will be in touch to arrange it. Don’t do anything stupid. Look after yourself.

  Simone

  She writes a kiss after her name, and then scribbles it out. Did she ever love him? Fear and need had a way of muddling emotion. She can’t tell what she thinks anymore, only that whatever she once felt has vanished – in the tautness of cord around her wrists, and fingers around her throat, and thuds to her son’s head. Now all she knows is that she has to get herself and the children away. And that she wants Terry to know she has made this choice, this decision to leave him, that he hasn’t stamped her out completely. Simone arranges the note so that it is clearly visible on the kitchen table, picks Jasmine back up, checks once more out of the window, and then hurries down the stairs.

  Polly is waiting for her at the school as planned. Walking down the street towards her, Simone’s sense of liberation is almost tangible. The rain has stopped and she feels as though she is flying. She practically skips as she pushes the buggy, loaded with both Jasmine and their heavy bag. It doesn’t matter that she is leaving the pretty streets of Primrose Hill. Past the old estate she goes, past houses growing increasingly shabby, past the liquor shop, past the Asda and the Poundland and the job centre. None of it matters. Poverty is never what trapped her. And now, they are nearly free. She can’t wait to tell Dominic, to see the relief on his face, to watch that heavy, too-adult darkness dissipate from it. To start things fresh.

  But as soon as she nears Polly, she knows that something is wrong.

  “He’s not here,” Polly breathes, shaking her head, rushing down the school steps towards her. Not smiling. She places her hand on Simone’s arm. “He got in a fight at lunch. Ran off about twenty minutes ago, just before I arrived.”

  The thing about flying, is there’s so much further to fall. Quicker than ever before in her life, fear rips through Simone’s skin, burning as it forces its way through clenched pores. Simone flings the buggy into Polly’s hands, turns, and runs back towards Primrose Hill, and him.

  But there is no
time.

  Why did she leave that stupid note? A foolish attempt to show Terry that he hadn’t beaten her, that, in the end, she didn’t need him? Or was it a last wavering, one more desire to connect with him, protect him, explain? Whatever the motivation, it was another poor choice. Another act of senseless, reckless rebellion. Because what if Dominic has gone home already, and Terry is there, and has seen the note? He’ll kill him. He will kill him. He’ll kill him for sure.

  At the top of their road, Simone stops for breath, obscuring herself behind the house on the corner. She takes her mobile phone from her pocket and calls her son, wondering why she hasn’t thought of this sooner, but Dominic doesn’t answer. It rings through to his voicemail and Simone leaves a garbled message telling him not to go home and to call her straight away. There is a seed of thought that Terry might already have Dominic’s phone, so she is wary not to reveal too much about where she and Jasmine will be, or who they are with, or what is happening, but she needs Dominic to stay away from Terry, and also, to know that he hasn’t been abandoned to him.

  Simone looks at her watch. It has been over an hour since Terry left for the pub. He should still be in the midst of it all, but he might by now be wondering what’s keeping them. Tentatively, Simone peers around the wall of the end house and glances down the street, then hurriedly she pulls herself back behind brick.

  He is there.

  Beer in hand, Terry is strolling merrily towards the flat from the opposite direction. He throws an empty bag of crisps into the gutter and stops to light a cigarette, then reaches into his pocket for his key ring, which he casually spins around his finger. On his face sits an expression of contentment, his world at rights; about to unravel. He is nearer to the house than she is, but if Simone sprints, if she runs with all her might, it might just be possible to get there first, to somehow race up the stairs ahead of him and get rid of the note. But where will she say Jasmine is? And what if he notices their missing things? And if Dominic is there, how will she get him away? Simone hesitates, her feet no longer flying but iron-weighted, sinking into prettily paved stone. Terry reaches the doorstep. He lifts his key. If he sees the note and then she turns up, he will kill her. But if Dominic is there, he will kill him.