‘Let’s not get started on not very nice,’ I said, and I took a deep breath, and another step away.
‘At least have a coffee with me,’ he said. ‘I can wait next door until you finish.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Really. I’ve nothing to say.’
He sighed. His sighing was as bad as the smirk. I stood there wondering why I’d bothered at all.
‘Are you really going to throw everything away because of one tiny mistake?’ he said.
I stood and looked at him, with his flowers and what I thought he probably considered to be an appealing expression. I thought he probably was ashamed of himself. If I had a coffee with him he would probably say so. But there was no ‘everything’ – we were barely dating – and as for ‘tiny mistake’, well, sisters, it made me want to spit teeth.
‘Yes,’ I said, finding a bit of one of my pre-prepared speeches that fitted. ‘I am going to throw it all away, because like I said, what you did is not okay. It was not a “tiny mistake”. If you think it was you’re in trouble.’ I tried to make my voice gentle. ‘Maybe you should talk to someone about what happened.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘I thought better of you, Loveday. I told you I was ill. I thought you’d be more understanding.’
‘In fairness,’ I said, and I really was trying to be fair, ‘if you’d had the flu, or a broken hip, and slapped me, we’d still be having this conversation.’
We looked at each other, properly, for a minute, and then I turned away and went through the door marked ‘private’, and for the first time in a long time I wondered where my mother was.
When I left the shop that night the flowers were on the pavement by the door. I was going to put them in the bin by the cafe, but it was full, so I laid them down beside it. I thought about asking him to bring my boots back but I decided against it. They were getting hard up anyway, and some things really aren’t worth the grief.
Rob disappeared for a while: he’d told me that he was going to spend some time in Italy and I assumed that was where he’d gone. When he came back he’d show up every now and then, shove flowers through the letterbox, let my tyre down, though that was only the once. In the three years since he’d slapped me, sometimes I hadn’t see him for weeks or months, and then he’d be in bad penny mode for a bit.
Maybe Nathan being around made him worse.
I hate to admit it, but I was scared of him.
CRIME
1999
No book is without worth
I suppose the social services must have planned the timing of their visit carefully, although I didn’t think about it then. It was the October half term. I would be ten when the year turned. I wasn’t keen on my new teacher and I spent a lot of time in the library. We didn’t go to the bookshop any more.
My dad was at the job centre. My mum was in the kitchen. She didn’t do as much baking these days – the price of butter was, apparently, ‘criminal’. She used to say, ‘I don’t believe in margarine’, as though she was talking about yogic flying, or ghosts. But, for whatever reason, she was making a cake. Perhaps because it was the holiday, or maybe it was to sweeten Dad up when he came back from the job centre. I was going to Matilda’s later, for a sleepover, and I was too excited to settle to anything. Anyway, there was a knock on the front door, and I went to open it. There were two women standing there, one tall, one short, both wearing trousers and smart jackets. The shorter one looked a bit pink, as though she’d climbed a hill.
‘Hello,’ the taller lady said. ‘Is Mum in?’
Of course, because the front door was about six feet from the kitchen, my mother’s face was already in the kitchen doorway, looking around to see who was there. Since she’d had a second black eye a few weeks ago she’d been keeping herself to herself a bit more, sending me on errands to the shop, letting me be collected by my friends’ mothers if I was going to their houses, asking my dad to pick me up.
‘Hello,’ she said. She came through to stand next to me, and put her hand on my shoulder for a moment, leaving a floury ghost-hand behind.
The women said their names and checked my mother’s, and asked if they could come in. I heard them say they were from social services. They didn’t look as though they were going to be any fun, although they kept looking at me and smiling, as though it was their first day at school and they wanted to be my friend. It was creepy.
I was glad to be sent upstairs. I didn’t try to listen – I’d discovered Sweet Valley High in the school library and was reading more than ever. But I did hear my mother raise her voice in a complicated, garbled sentence that had my name and the words ‘perfectly safe’ and ‘no right’ in it. Shortly afterwards, the front door closed. I went to the window. As the women walked to the end of the path they turned back and looked at the house; they saw me and waved.
My mother called me downstairs. She looked as though she had been crying. She said that she didn’t want us to tell Dad that the women had been to visit. ‘It’s a bit like when politicians come around,’ she said. ‘You know how cross they make him.’
I did. My father had been, briefly, a star of local TV news when the Tory candidate knocked on our door in the run-up to a by-election, with a film crew in tow. He’d been asked if he would vote Conservative. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, and the candidate had smiled, too soon, ‘when hell freezes over. Get off my lawn.’ Before he said lawn there was a moment where his mouth was moving but all you could hear was a beep. Then there was a close-up of his fist clenching at his side.
‘Okay,’ I said. I didn’t point out the whole ‘secrets are wrong’ mantra that my mother used to have. I was learning that there were new rules in this new world, and I just went along with whatever made everyone’s life easier.
‘And there’s another thing,’ she said. ‘Your friends, LJ. And their mothers. Just – be careful about what you say to them.’ My mother spoke slowly, as though her words were picking their way across stepping stones, ‘Families are all different, and sometimes people whose families are different to yours think they know things about you, but they don’t.’ She looked at me, stroked my hair. ‘People get the wrong idea. Because Dad and I sometimes argue, then some people might think we are unhappy or – or that we hurt each other.’ I nodded, because she’d just described exactly what I thought. ‘So we need to be careful that no one thinks the wrong thing about our family. If any of your teachers or the other mums ask you if everything is okay at home, I want you to tell them that everything’s fine, but Dad is still working hard to find a job. Okay?’
I nodded, although I wanted to shake my head. I wondered what the women in the jackets had said to her to make her talk like this. I knew I was a child and that meant I didn’t always understand everything, even when I thought I did. But I also knew, belly-deep, that what my mother was saying was wrong. I think she knew it too, because her eyes looked sad, and they wouldn’t look at my face.
‘Do you understand?’ She put her hand on my head, and looked at my hair as she stroked it.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but –’
‘That’s enough, LJ,’ she said, not crossly, but not kindly either, and even though I caught at her hand, she turned away.
And I did as I was told, although I sobbed my heart out at Matilda’s later. Her mum came up to the bedroom to see what the noise was about. She hugged me and told me everything would be all right. Her sweater was scratchy against my face and I thought about my mother’s softness and sobbed harder.
Our life went to a flat, dead calm for a while. My parents didn’t talk much but they didn’t shout either. I spent a lot of time in my room, sorting out my shells, re-reading The Railway Children.
Then my dad got trained as a forklift truck driver. He grumbled about having to go on the course, but when he came home he was full of chat about it. He got a couple of weeks’ trial in a warehouse. He said he might start smoking again, and when Mum glared at him he laughed and called her a ‘dow’, which he said was Cornish for ‘cro
ss old lady’. Mum said, ‘Less of the old’, and then they smiled at each other the way that they used to.
They gave him a full-time job at the warehouse and there was talk of Christmas presents and there being life in the old dog yet. I hoped that might mean we were getting a puppy. I would call it Bobbie if we did. My mum started baking again and they laughed a lot, in the evenings, when I’d gone to bed. It felt as though the house breathed out.
We ate fish and chips on the beach, even though it was November and the wind was freezing cold. It was just us and a couple of dog walkers, and the sky the colour of a school shirt that had been washed with Mum’s black dress. When we got home we lit the electric fire and played Scrabble. I won. I don’t think they let me.
I think that Saturday was the last happy day.
* * *
The next evening, I was going to go to Emma’s for tea and to watch the video of Toy Story. The afternoon was dragging. Dad was watching a war film and I was pretending to watch it with him, just because it was nice to sit with him, and I liked it when he explained something about the history. Mum and I had baked scones; she had gone to the shop, and said that she wouldn’t be long.
It wasn’t an interesting film, or Dad wasn’t talking as much as usual, or maybe after months of him being at home the novelty of him being there every Sunday afternoon was wearing thin. I went to the bookshelf. We hadn’t started up the bookshop trips again, and I hadn’t been to the library that week, so I looked through the pile of my books that were starting to seem too childish for me, or had been reread so often that I wasn’t interested in picking them up again. The Secret Seven had lost their charm, and so had Captain Underpants.
The adverts came on, and Dad’s attention switched from the screen to me. ‘Maybe you should try one of your mother’s,’ he said, and he reached into the top shelf, pulling out Jane Eyre, the easiest one for him to reach, although I suppose it could have been any of them. ‘There’s a lot of words in here, kiddo. Rather you than me,’ he said, ruffling through the pages. And then he paused. He flicked back through the book, and pulled a ten-pound note from between the pages. Flicked again, found another. He looked at the money in his hand, his whole body still. And then he looked up at me, and he smiled a not-smile. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘there’s gold in them there hills.’ He put the money in my hand, the book by his feet, and took another book from the shelf, flicked through. A twenty-pound note, a five-pound note, a ten-pound note. Madame Bovary joined Jane Eyre on the floor. And so we went, through the books, more and more notes in my hands. I had never seen so much money.
When the shelf was empty, Dad looked at me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a lot of arghans.’
I nodded. Usually I liked it when he used Cornish words but this time it made me feel cold. I had been keeping count. I was holding almost three hundred pounds, which was more money than I had ever seen, and seemed an unfeasible sum to be contained on one small bookshelf in our pinched living room. There had been a lot of talk about money while Dad wasn’t working; pound coins rescued from handbags and coat pockets on a Sunday evening when my parents did their planning; lists of sums on backs of envelopes. Such a great pile of notes – hundreds of pounds! – should have been a great thing, but I knew that it wasn’t.
Dad was looking from the books to the money to me. ‘Did you know this was here?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. I’d wonder, later, whether I should have said yes. For a long time it was one of the places where I thought I might have influenced the outcome. If I’d said that I did know, then this hidden money would have been a game, a harmless secret, nothing more. But I said no, because it was true, and I had learned the habit and the value of truth all my life. I had been thinking about the women in jackets a lot and every time I did I felt certain that bad things were coming, as though I was reading a ghost story. Up until that knock on the door, I thought that truth was fixed, simple, a harbour wall rather than a tide.
The door clicked open and closed. ‘Clotted cream!’ my mother called. ‘I had to go to two places. But I thought we deserved a treat.’ There were the everyday noises of her putting down a shopping bag on the kitchen bench, hanging up her coat on the back of the door. ‘It’s very quiet in here,’ she said as she put her head around the door, then, when she saw the two of us, the books, the money still in my hands, ‘oh.’ Her eyes were round and fixed on the money. Dad and I were looking at her face. Her mouth wasn’t quite closed.
‘There’s quite a lot of money hidden here,’ my father said. ‘We were surprised. We didn’t know what to say. Did we, Loveday?’
I was mute. I only got my proper name on proper occasions, like at parent-teacher evenings or the doctor. My parents called me LJ, short for Loveday Jenna, and my dad called my mum SJ, short for Sarah-Jane, unless he was angry with her. So even without the ghost-story feeling, I’d have known that it was serious.
I shook my head, looked at my mother, hoping she would say the simple thing – because surely there was one – that would put it alright.
But she had sat down, opposite us, on the sofa. She looked at her hands, drew a breath. ‘Not now, Pat,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about it later.’
‘Actually,’ my dad said, ‘I think, now.’ His voice was quiet and that was more frightening than if he had shouted.
‘Wait until she’s gone out,’ my mother said. She was almost whispering, looking at her hands, still.
‘Don’t use her as an excuse.’ Dad’s fingers were tapping against his leg, a rat-a-tat of flesh and denim. I felt more scared than I was when they were arguing.
‘She wants to know, too. Why she’s been eating scrag-end stews and her arms growing out of her sleeves when you have enough money to make things easier around here?’
‘Now who’s using her?’ my mother said. She put out her hand to me. I tried to move but Dad had his other arm around my waist, a solid bond that I couldn’t easily get myself out of. I couldn’t get up. I don’t think he noticed he was holding on to me.
‘I want to go upstairs,’ I said.
‘You heard her,’ my mother said.
The pressure on my waist increased as my father squeezed and then slackened his hold. I went to the stairs, although suddenly I wasn’t sure whether I should leave the room. I thought about helping my dad to tie his work boots, my finger on the knot, and how if I slid my finger out too soon it would all go wrong.
They weren’t looking at me. I went slowly up the staircase.
‘Don’t try to make me the bad guy.’ Now I was out of sight my father’s voice was gaining volume. Normally I would have done something to make sure I couldn’t hear. My dad had given me his portable CD player when he stopped working away because he said he didn’t need it any more, and bought me Now That’s What I Call Music 43 when he got his forklift job. I could have put my headphones on.
I let myself listen. I suppose I wanted to know where the money had come from too, and what it was for. I didn’t know how much a birthday party cost but I was sure it was less than three hundred pounds.
My mother’s sigh came right up the stairs and around the side of the door, where I’d left it open. ‘I’ve been working, Pat. Just a little bit, now and then. Since school term began.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Ironing, mostly,’ she said. ‘Amanda Carter from the PTA has a business. She saw me ironing the costumes for Bugsy Malone and said if I ever wanted a job I should let her know. I thought maybe we could have a nice Christmas. That was all.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I wanted it to be a surprise.’
Upstairs, I exhaled. Of course. That was the obvious explanation. I had learned, over the last few months, that Christmas was one of the things that Cost Money, along with: school trips, cinema tickets, butter, burgers, going to the hairdresser’s and new shoes. I had got new shoes for the start of the school year, as usual. When I’d shown them to Dad he’d said his were being held together by polish
and the laces.
It had gone quiet downstairs. I wondered if they were kissing.
Then, my dad’s voice, low. ‘I haven’t seen you ironing.’
‘I’ve been doing it at her place.’
‘When?’ The pauses in between what they said were too long. It was as though they were playing chess, thinking about every move before it was made.
‘Some mornings.’
‘Which mornings?’
‘Just some mornings. There’s no fixed –’
My dad, interrupting: ‘Do you think I came down in the last shower? You might have thought I was unemployable but I’m not stupid.’ He’d got loud. I put my hand on my headphones but I couldn’t make myself stop listening to my parents.
The next bit came out in a rush. ‘Mornings when I’ve said I was at PTA meetings or when I’ve known you’ll be out. I go to Amanda’s, we stand and iron for a couple of hours, she pays me, I come home, I didn’t tell you. All right? I lied about where I was and I hid the money. I’m not going to be cross-examined, Pat. I’ll not be put in the wrong for trying to –’
There was a strange sound. It took a minute or two to realise it was my dad, crying. Then: ‘To what?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I think it does. What’s it for?’
‘You need to ask?’
The chess had turned to draughts, fast, like it is at the end of a game. Click, click, click and then you’ve lost.
‘This is your escape fund?’
‘If you like.’
‘So everything we’ve said –’
‘Do not,’ my mother’s voice was suddenly full of fury, ‘even think about the moral high ground, Pat. Ironing with a broken rib is not something that anyone would do unless they felt they had to. And if it had got worse, well, I needed to know I could get us away.’
‘Get you away?’
‘If I’d thought Loveday was at risk –’ My mother’s words, so quiet. My father made a moan that went through me like winter wind on the pier.
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