Beneath the Surface

by Heidi Perks

Lauren sighed. ‘Of course she has to know. She’ll find out at some point anyway. You’re being stupid if you think you can do this without her hearing about it.’

  There was silence until Lauren spoke again. ‘I really wish you’d forget all about it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Hannah. ‘Now I’ve started thinking about it, I know it’s exactly what I want to do.’

  What do you want to do? Kathryn wanted to shout through the closed door. What is this secret I’m going to hate?

  ‘I’m going to find our dad,’ Hannah said. ‘And when I do, I’m going to ask him what really happened in our past, because sometimes I have a feeling Mum isn’t telling us everything.’

  Kathryn froze. She would have liked to slip away to the safety of her bedroom but her legs were like lead, anchoring her feet to the carpet outside her daughters’ door. Oh no, she thought, this can’t be happening! Her heart was beating too fast, and clutching a hand to her chest, in turn she dropped the mug of tea, its dark brown liquid spreading across the carpet, splashing against the skirting board.

  She stared at the mess. Get a cloth, a voice inside her screamed. Clean it up before it stains! Her head was pounding at the thought of Peter, though, and how there was no way she could ever let the girls find him, and all she could do was sink to the floor and watch as the fibres of her cream shag pile soaked up what was left of her tea.

  – Twelve –

  Dear Adam,

  I shunned the idea of looking for the girls on Facebook over and over again. I knew all it might take would be a few clicks and I would see their sixteen-year-old faces looking back at me. But every time I considered the idea, I became paralysed with fear of the unknown. As soon as I saw them I’d be opening up a Pandora’s box that I would never again be able to close the lid on.

  At least that was how I felt until this morning when a rush of courage swept over me and before I could talk myself out of it I started searching. I typed in their names – Hannah and Lauren Webb, but nothing. I tried Eleanor’s surname, Bretton. I even tried my own, Ryder. I couldn’t imagine why Kathryn would change their names to my dad’s but it was worth a shot. I searched the endless photos of Hannahs and Laurens around the UK but the more faces I looked at, the more I wondered if I would even recognise the girls now. Maybe I pass them on the street every day and I don’t know it. Maybe they’ve been standing in front of me in a queue and I could have held out my arm and touched them, but I didn’t see their little rosebud mouths or freckly noses in their teenage faces. I have no idea what the girls look like any more and now what I want, more than anything, is to know.

  Sometimes when children go missing people do special pictures of them years later, showing what they might look like now. I want to see them, Adam. I can’t bear that I have no idea what they look like any longer. The only pictures I have are in my head, of the way they looked at two years old. How would I ever recognise them now?

  *****

  The night they left I opened the door to my grandmother. She was draped in a long fur coat that skimmed her ankles. It made me feel sick to look at her, no interest in what animal suffered to dress her. She nodded to the police car on the road and asked why it was parked outside our house. I told her they were inside; I said my mother had disappeared.

  ‘Say that again,’ she said slowly.

  I told her again that Kathryn had gone, and the girls too. We continued to stand on the doorstep. I could hear the two police officers talking in the living room and saw Eleanor look over my shoulder and into the hallway beyond. She hesitated, then looked back at me. ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Why do you think the police are here? I’m scared,’ I added suddenly, though hating to admit it to her. ‘Where are they?’

  She looked at me again with her hard cold eyes and then pushed me aside and strode into the house, full of purpose. I wondered what she was going to say to them, whether they would recognise her from the newspapers. I had a sudden feeling that everything would be taken out of my hands and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

  *****

  I left my job today. Maggie asked me what I plan to do with my time and I told her if I were better qualified, I’d love to study. She said it was a great idea – many mature students were learning new crafts later in life – and asked why I thought I needed to be better qualified. I told her that I had dropped out of school at the age of seventeen with only a handful of GCSEs. I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a student.

  ‘How many GCSEs do you have?’ she asked me.

  ‘Five,’ I said. ‘All grade C.’

  ‘That’s not bad, Abi.’

  ‘Considering, you mean?’

  ‘No, not just considering.’ She paused. ‘Why don’t we talk about what was happening at that time, at home?’ she suggested hesitantly. ‘Your last couple of years at school.’

  We’d touched on this time in my life twice before, a while back. But both times I’d clammed up and she hadn’t brought it up since. She says she knows when I don’t want to talk about things because I start biting my bottom lip. I hadn’t realised I did it until one occasion when I bit so hard it bled.

  To be fair, it was a miracle I managed to get five of anything. But there was a time before that when I really enjoyed school: learning excited me.

  When I was thirteen our art teacher, Miss Jennings, asked us to collate a picture made from scraps of rubbish. I wanted to do it well because I was keen to get a good grade. Miss Jennings suggested I took Art as one of my options for the following year and I liked the thought of it so I made an extra effort with the collage. It became a map of the world. I carefully chose materials to represent countries. Italy’s heel was filled with dried penne and the sea made out of labels from tuna and sardine cans. She gave me an A* and asked me to show it to the headmaster, who told me he was impressed with such a show of originality. I was so excited! I rarely took much home to show my mother but of course I wanted to take that.

  As I approached the house I heard raised voices. I didn’t often hear her and Peter arguing but that evening they were. I made a big deal about closing the front door, wanting them to know I was back so they would stop shouting, which they did. I went into the kitchen, where my mother stood by the sink with her back to me.

  ‘Mum …’ I approached her. ‘I got an A* for this at school today.’

  She turned around to look at what I was holding but she wasn’t smiling. She took the picture out of my hands and stared at it. I wanted to take it back – I was scared her eyes were going to burn a hole right through it.

  ‘Huh,’ Peter muttered. ‘Art. That’s not going to get you anywhere in life.’

  He swirled his whisky around in its glass, downed it and then left the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

  My mother threw my picture down and called after him. I think she aimed for the table but it slid past it, ending up on the floor. ‘Peter!’ she shouted. ‘Peter, don’t do anything rash!’ And then she was gone, running up the stairs after him.

  I picked my picture off the floor and held it between my hands. I was so angry, with them and with myself for feeling like I would cry. Art might not get me anywhere – it didn’t get my dad anywhere – but I wasn’t going to stop because of what Peter thought. I contemplated my picture, how I had foolishly hoped it might take pride of place on the fridge. Then I ripped it up, sending the tiny pieces scattering like confetti. After that I was even more determined to do what I wanted and didn’t bother taking anything else back to show my mum.

  Later that year the school were holding a parent and students’ evening, but Cara had got us tickets to see the Backstreet Boys on the same night. We were only thirteen but I wasn’t surprised when she told me her parents didn’t mind her going. They believed Cara should ‘be free and explore herself’. They didn’t realise she was letting half the school explore her too, and I don’t think they would have been quite so liberal had they known how free Cara was with
cigarettes, alcohol and boys.

  My mother disliked her and never tried to hide it. I saw the way her eyes narrowed whenever I brought Cara back to the house, following her, waiting for her to do something wrong. As soon as Cara left she would tut and say, ‘I don’t trust that girl. She thinks too much of herself.’ Kathryn knew she was a bad influence and she was right. But Cara was fun and I enjoyed being with her. Plus she was popular and I didn’t want to pass up the chance to be best friends with one of the cool girls.

  So I decided to sneak out to the concert with Cara and didn’t bother telling my mother about the parents’ evening. I knew she’d come down on me hard when she found out I’d omitted to tell her about the school meeting. They would send a letter, asking why they hadn’t heard back from her. It was the first time I’d taken such a risk but I chanced it because I didn’t really care.

  If she ever noticed, or if she ever got a letter, then she chose not to say anything to me, but I was so sure she’d find out that I found myself waiting for a punishment that never came. I told Maggie that was probably the start of it. Of me thinking that if she couldn’t be arsed to reprimand me, then I couldn’t be bothered to do as she told me.

  Maggie wanted to know more about Cara. ‘She sounds as if she was influential,’ she said.

  ‘She showed an interest in me,’ I told her. ‘I was going to take that anywhere I could find it.’

  ‘So did the two of you stay friends for a while?’

  I nodded. ‘Until just after my mother left, then I went off the rails a bit and her parents eventually noticed what their little girl was up to, too. When Kathryn left, I stayed in the house for about six weeks, but as soon as my grandmother gave me a chunk of money, I moved out and rented a room in a shared house. That’s when I started living life a bit more freely and Cara’s parents decided it was too much. They shipped her off to a private college where she could take her A-levels without me screwing things up for her. I didn’t hear from her again.’

  ‘Why did your grandmother give you money?’ she asked. ‘Was it much?’

  I nodded. ‘It was more than a teenager should have responsibility for anyway. She handed it over in an envelope and said it was up to me how I spent it but I wouldn’t be getting any more. It lasted me just over a year. I kept it in its envelope under my mattress. I was lucky no one ever found it as I didn’t have another penny from her after that.’

  ‘It’s funny really, isn’t it?’ I said to Maggie after a while. ‘That I was the one considered a bad influence on Cara in the end.’

  ‘Take me back to that turning point,’ Maggie said, ‘the term before Christmas when you were thirteen. Your mother started showing signs of indifference towards you. Did that become the norm until she left?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, there were times when she was all over me and I could hardly breathe.’

  ‘In what way?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Controlling. Making sure I adhered to the rules.’

  ‘Her rules?’

  ‘I doubt it. The rules passed down from my grandmother more likely.’

  My mother was like a puppet, with Eleanor pulling the strings. This was particularly the case when things went wrong. Kathryn would throw everything into a suitcase and pack us both off to the house her parents had just moved to in Yorkshire. My mother was usually running on empty by that point. It happened just after my daddy died. I was only seven but I felt like neither of my parents were around. Daddy was no longer there, and while my mother was still there, she might as well not have been. She could barely bring herself to cook us tea. After having tinned ravioli six nights in a row I told her I couldn’t eat it anymore. Even now the smell of it reminds me of those weeks after he died.

  My mother bathed me, got me dressed for school, sometimes took me to the park, but all of this was done with minimal conversation. Her eyes were like glass. She used to stare right through me as if she could no longer see me. I wondered if they had taken her to the same place as my daddy had gone. Or maybe she just wished they had. She certainly wasn’t the same after his death.

  That was when Eleanor came along and changes were made. We no longer spoke of him; his photographs were taken down. My mother was allowing Eleanor to cleanse us of his memory. But all they had done was remove the good bits of our lives, and either my mother couldn’t see that or she didn’t have the energy to fight it.

  It happened every time Kathryn came across an obstacle. She would mutter, ‘I need Mother,’ and we would traipse up to Lordavale. When Eleanor saw us at the door, her eyes would roll to the back of her head. She looked like she wanted to scream but she never did. Usually she grabbed my mother’s arm and pulled her into the house, pushing her into a room where she raised her voice and talked at Kathryn at length. I often wandered around the gardens until they were finished. Often the doctor would be brought up to see her, a strange, squat-looking man who looked like a weasel, I always thought. I didn’t like him. To me he looked shifty, and I was glad I’d never had to see him when I was a child.

  My mother would then emerge, injected with a new surge of power, and once Eleanor was happy Kathryn could function in a manner deemed acceptable we were sent back to London. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Eleanor was performing her own lobotomy on my mother on those occasions.

  ‘Do you think your mother suffered any mental issues?’ Maggie asked when I told her that.

  I shrugged. ‘I think she was caught under Eleanor’s spell. And she was very weak. But I don’t know, maybe she did. I was never told.’

  ‘It certainly sounds as if Eleanor had a way of manipulating Kathryn.’

  Eleanor had the ability to manipulate everyone around her. My mother was pliable; she would bend into any shape Eleanor wanted. But I never thought I would, not until the day they left, when Eleanor later convinced me it was in my best interests to stay away. For a while I believed her when she said it would blow over, and my mother would be back as soon as she was better. ‘Give her time,’ she told me, ‘and once this has all calmed down, it will work out.’ She never told me how. But then as the days became weeks and I was more demanding with my questions, my grandmother could see I was becoming a bigger threat to her than she’d anticipated. ‘Take this,’ she said, desperately thrusting the money at me. It was more money than I’d ever seen. I thumbed through the banknotes, adding up thousands in my head, and then eventually found my first piece of solace at the bottom of a bottle of vodka.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to Maggie. ‘She has a way of dealing with everyone, once she finds their vulnerable spot.’

  I only pray she isn’t looking for it in the girls.

  – Thirteen –

  Hannah decided to tell her mum she was seeing Dom that Thursday. They were meeting in the café on the high street and so she knew it was only a matter of time before it would get back to Kathryn. The gossip would run like a river through the lanes of the Bay until it reached her. Oh, Kathryn, we saw your daughter in the coffee shop today with that Dominic boy. No, Hannah, of course. Isn’t he older than her? What do you think about it, Kathryn? Personally I’m not too sure about the Wilson family. Did you ever hear…? Then they would add a pinch of gossip that was most likely made up, because things like the truth didn’t seem to matter to the women of the Bay.

  Hannah said Dom was helping her with a school project that had been set for the summer holidays. Kathryn didn’t react at first, making her wonder whether she could just slip out of the room unnoticed. When Kathryn eventually asked what the project was about and who had set it, Hannah surprised herself at the speed at which the lies came out of her mouth. The story sprung to the tip of her tongue at pace. Lauren was within earshot and she knew her sister would back her up, if need be. She could almost feel Lauren’s disapproval boring into her back, but knew she would never do anything to drop her in it.

  She wished she didn’t have to lie. It would be so much better if her mum were the type who sat her girls round a table and wanted to know al
l about their boyfriends. Got nervous with them if they were waiting for a call and excited when they were finally asked out. Asked the boys over for dinner, and laughed with them, wanted to know what their interests were, winked when they left the room and admitted she thought they were good-looking.

  But her mum wasn’t like most, her own dating experience being so limited. Kathryn had told them she was thirty-one when she met their dad and, as far as they knew, there hadn’t been anyone serious before him. And then he ended up leaving her on her own to raise two small children in a village where she knew no one. Hannah supposed that went a long way towards accounting for her mum’s odd behaviour.

  Dom was already in the coffee shop when she arrived. His chair was facing the door but his head was bent forward, an expression of concentration fixed on his face as he tapped his thumbs on his mobile. The bell on the door rang as Hannah walked in and he automatically lifted his head before standing up to pull out a chair for her.

  ‘What can I get you?’ he asked.

  ‘A skinny latte, please,’ Hannah smiled.

  Dom came back with two lattes and a slice of Victoria sponge, which he cut in two, pushing one half towards her. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the type of girl who says no to cake,’ he said.

  Hannah grinned and picked up a fork from the plate. ‘I never say no to cake.’

  Dom laughed. ‘Good! I can’t stand girls who are forever saying they’re on a diet. It’s boring.’

  Hannah wondered how many girls he knew well. Someone as good-looking as Dom had probably been on many dates. She knew of at least three ex-girlfriends who would be bitching about her once they knew she was going out with him.

  Dom ran his fingers through his mop of curly blond hair and grinned at her. He was a surfer and had the look to suit. His hair was bleached with sunlight, his skin golden brown. She imagined the shape of his toned body underneath his T-shirt. She’d seen it many times before, when he stripped down to his shorts on the beach. Dom was always one of the first to rip his top off and run into the sea, whatever the time of year. But Hannah preferred fantasising about its contours hidden beneath his clothes.