by Abigail Dean
I considered the options. His family might have moved to another town, or abroad. They might have changed his name.
I was twenty-eight and in New York before a fourth result appeared. It was past midnight, and I was waiting for documents from the Los Angeles office. There were few people left on the corridor. I typed the old combination into the search bar and hit return. At the top of the page was a new link. This was a team listing for the Cragforth Under 15s Junior Cricket team. The Vice-Captain was Noah Kirby.
I leaned back in my office chair and crossed my arms. Noah Kirby, of Cragforth. I clicked through to the results for the season so far. They hadn’t been updated for several weeks, but as of mid-July the team had won two games, lost five, and had one rained off. A trying season. If somebody had emerged at my office door and asked me why I was crying, I wouldn’t have been able to answer them. I didn’t know.
The summer before I started high school, we lived under Father’s regime. On the first day of the holidays, when we scrambled down for breakfast, there was a brilliant gold parcel on the kitchen table.
‘What’s inside it?’ Delilah asked. The parcel was tied with a bow. It was the size of a small television, or a whole stack of books.
‘Six weeks,’ Father said, ‘of good behaviour.’
‘And then we can open it?’
‘That’s not much to ask,’ Father said. ‘Is it?’
It was a slow, dank summer. At the front of the Lifehouse, Father sweated for the empty pews. A congregation of flies weakened at the windows, unable to find their way to the door. The garden at Moor Woods Road was rain-logged, and most of our games involved navigating the swamp. When Father was away, we clambered over the fence and scattered across the moors, combing for sheep bones and slow worms. On the boldest days, we arranged a mission to the river at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, moving single-file and close to the wall, with the nominated lookout – Gabriel, usually – giving us the all-clear at the bends. We washed in the shadow of the mill, in the black tea water close to the banks, and when we returned to the house, the present surveyed us from the kitchen table.
Mother’s womb was still empty. That was how Father said it. When I looked at her, I thought of a cavern beneath her clothes, cool and dark. She had become a strange, rare sight: a blink of white nightdress between a parted doorway, or cracked feet, retreating up the stairs to bed. Each evening, we filed into my parents’ room and kissed her goodnight, while Father watched us. She touched bones new-risen, like rocks at low tide. ‘Small again,’ she said. ‘Like when you were babies.’
There would be another child, Father said. But we would have to be ready. We would have to be deserving. Week by week, he adjusted the rules of the house, tuning to a pitch which the rest of us couldn’t hear. We would wash only our hands, and only to the wrists. The Lifehouse would run three services on Sundays, rather than two. We would demonstrate our self-discipline.
The child would come.
There were lines on my arms where the dirt began, like a tan in reverse. The edge of the pew had printed a bruise at the top of my spine. Our portions had shrunk, and on other days, when he dined with Jolly, Father made nothing at all. When I thought about starting at Five Fields Academy in the autumn, slick with sweat-dirt and the smallest in my year, my stomach ached. The library only had half of the reading list. I hadn’t even got a uniform. And I had seen the students in Hollowfield before, on my way home from the primary school. The girls had curated faces, and wore their uniform so you thought of what was underneath it. They moved in tight, glossy packs, like a whole different species.
By September, we were scavengers. We sniffed at the parcel, hoping to catch a food-smell. We poked at the cupboards and scoured for leftovers at the back of the fridge. Father’s refusal to throw anything away meant that there was always something there, mouldy or unrecognizable. The question was whether you were hungry enough to try it.
It became a game to us, which we called Mystery Soup. The name came from our first discovery: a murky substance sealed by clingfilm, in a drawer at the bottom of the fridge. Evie dipped in a finger, licked it, and nodded.
‘It’s actually pretty good,’ she said.
‘But what is it?’ I asked. She shrugged, and fetched herself a spoon.
‘Mystery soup,’ she said.
Anything could be Mystery Soup: cheese, coated in emerald fur, languishing on the counter; a few scraps of fried chicken, in paper from the takeaway on the high street, which Father abandoned on the kitchen table; a year-old box of cereal, never unpacked from the move. I have an encyclopedic recollection of the meals at Moor Woods Road; they were so precious that I stored them in my memory, to eat again.
A week before school began, with Father in Blackpool, we fanned across the kitchen and searched the cupboards. Gabriel, scouring the drawer where Mother had once kept vegetables, shrieked, and emerged with a handful of pulp, which he dropped onto the kitchen table for inspection.
‘That’s not Mystery Soup,’ Delilah said. ‘That’s disgusting.’
Gabriel waved his hand in her face, and she ducked away, squealing.
It looked like it might once have been a potato. It was the shape of a fist, with soft black patches, and green tufts sprouting from its skin.
‘Bin it,’ I said.
‘You bin it,’ said Delilah, and at that moment, with the five of us clustered around the table, Father opened the kitchen door.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
He was impossibly early. We had been left with instructions to collate passages on determination, in our bedrooms. He took a seat at the table and started to unlace his boots.
‘Who found it?’ he said, and Gabriel, his expression lurching between fear and pride, said: ‘It was me.’
‘And where did you find it?’
‘Nowhere. In the vegetable cupboard.’
‘And what were you doing in the vegetable cupboard?’
‘We were – we were just – checking.’
Now Father stood to remove his shirt, and sat back down in a white vest, tight at the shoulders and gut. His arms dangled behind the chair, and he studied his tableau, not yet satisfied.
‘If you’re so hungry,’ he said, ‘why don’t you eat it?’
Spines and jaws stiffened around the table. Gabriel giggled, and saw that none of us were laughing. The giggle cut with a gasp. He looked from one of us to the next, with wide, imploring eyes. I stared at my feet, and to Delilah, who was looking at her own.
‘I don’t want to,’ Gabriel said.
‘So – you’re not hungry.’
‘I – I don’t know.’
‘Unless you want to starve,’ Father said, ‘you’re going to eat it.’
He sat, waiting.
Gabriel reached out a hand and closed his fist around the pulp. The flesh of it squeezed between his fingers. He lifted it from the table and gave it a long look. Then, with his brows set, and the four of us gaping, he raised it to his mouth.
Father stood from his chair, strode around the table, and clapped Gabriel on the back. The Mystery Soup fell from his hand, and onto the kitchen floor.
‘You didn’t actually think I’d make you eat it,’ Father said. ‘Did you?’
Instead, he took the golden parcel from the table, and carried it from the room.
The night before the new term, I woke to somebody at the bedroom door. For the first bleary seconds, I thought that it was Father. He was on his haunches, arranging something at the threshold. But when he stepped back, into the hallway lights, I saw that it was Ethan.
I hadn’t heard him crying in the night-time since we arrived in Hollowfield. He had shaved his head to the skull, and he was as tall as Father. He no longer seemed to lose his belongings. When he joined Father and Jolly in the kitchen at night, I heard a new, affected guffaw ascend through the floorboards. He had even spoken at the Lifehouse, when only the family was in attendance. He delivered a passionate, sincere sermon on filial duty,
and I thought of the boy in Blackpool, five years before, who didn’t believe a thing.
I cracked the bedroom door, to see what he had left. It was a high school uniform. The standard-issue jumper and skirt. It was faded, but clean. It would fit.
I stopped at his bedroom door the next morning. ‘Thank you,’ I said. He was hunched over a pocket mirror, scrutinizing the skin at his neck, and he didn’t look at me.
‘Where did you get it?’ I said.
He did look up, then. He had an expression of curious disdain. I had seen it on so many strangers’ faces, but on Ethan, it had a savagery of its own.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
Five Fields accepted students from Hollowfield and the four villages around it. Three of these were also suffixed with ‘field’; the last, Dodd Bridge, had been outvoted on naming day. The school consisted of a vast concrete playground, surveyed by classrooms on three sides and a wooden hall on the fourth. The hall had been opened by a minor royal, and must once have been a source of pride, but now it was blackened by moor rain, and smelt of PE. On my first day in secondary school, I sat there beside Cara – one of two hundred eleven-year-olds promised the best seven years of my life – and concluded that I shouldn’t have worried about my hair, or shoes with holes in them. This would be an easy place to disappear.
‘Whoa,’ Cara said, as soon as the welcome address was over. She took my hands and held them out at my sides. ‘You got skinny.’
She looked a little frightened, but mostly impressed.
‘And you,’ I said, ‘you got tanned! How was France?’
We compared timetables. We shared three classes, which I hoped was enough to stick together. In the early autumn, that was the case: each break time and lunch hour, we met in the same spot outside the school hall and ate our sandwiches, huddled against the wooden walls. We didn’t have enough to say to entertain the hour allotted to lunch, but Cara brought in books from home: whatever she was reading, and a spare for me.
There were days when I noticed her glancing across the pages to my lunchbox, and the tweak of one eyebrow. Who survived the day on two pieces of bread and a film of jam, or cold soup cooked the evening before? In turn, I examined the contents of her lunch. There were so many different components: a salad or a stuffed sandwich; fruit or vegetables, preserved in their own bright Tupperware box; a cylindrical tub filled with chocolate biscuits. My mouth opened before I could determine whether or not to ask it: ‘Would I be able to have one?’
Cara was generous the first time, and less generous each time afterwards. A few weeks into term, as she opened a tub of three Jaffa Cakes – that smell, of dark chocolate shot through with orange – she turned to stare at me, and tucked the container closer to her chest.
‘You’ve got to stop looking at my food,’ she said. ‘It’s freaking me out.’
The week after that, approaching the hall, I saw Cara sitting with another girl, Annie Muller. Cara patted the ground on the spare side of her, and I sat down beside them, although my stomach had already started to drop. Annie was mid-monologue as I arrived, and though she waved, she didn’t stop talking to greet me. Her lunch consisted of peanut butter sandwiches; Doritos (Cool Blue); and a banana sealed in a banana-shaped container.
‘They basically just don’t get it,’ she concluded. ‘They don’t understand it at all.’
‘Annie’s parents are being weird about getting her ears pierced,’ Cara said.
‘You don’t have yours done, right?’ Annie said. She leaned over Cara, chewing furiously. ‘So are your parents as crazy as mine?’
I unwrapped my two slices of bread – just margarine, today – and peeled off a crust to eat first. ‘I suppose so,’ I said.
Annie left us just before the bell, and once she had run for the lockers, I looked to Cara for an explanation. She was rummaging in her bag for the afternoon’s textbooks, and it was a slow few seconds before she would meet my eye.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Just because you hate everybody else doesn’t mean I have to.’
I felt a dull heat rise out of my collar and across my cheeks, and it made me cruel. ‘But I’m in History with Annie,’ I said. ‘And she’s stupid.’
‘A bit,’ Cara said, ‘but at least she invites me to her house.’
The discipline of the summer paid off. By late autumn, Mother was pregnant. Father started touching her again. At dinner, they sat side by side, reciting Psalm 127 and smiling over our conversation. They kept having to drop their cutlery to hold hands. When I looked at my siblings, frailer around the table, it seemed like they’d taken a little flesh from each of us, and made something new.
JP selected a wine bar called Graves, two blocks from my hotel. ‘It’s a pretty morbid name,’ I said, when he suggested it.
‘It’s an area of Bordeaux, Lex.’
‘Like you knew that.’
‘Since visiting their website – of course.’
I arrived first. I had spent the previous hour in the bath at the Romilly, with a carafe of red wine, reading Bill’s guide to planning applications. There was a wooden tray which slotted over the bathtub, provided for this specific purpose.
An evening off.
Graves was at the bottom of a black metal stairway, beneath the ground. Bankers’ lamps set in the centre of each table. I held the menu to the dim green light and ordered cognac and champagne. I was halfway down the glass when JP walked in. First I recognized the walk of him, stooped, tilted forward, and then his trench coat, which he had bought because it made him look like a secret agent.
I had loved JP in all of the ways that it’s unwise to love another person. Dido on the pyre. Antony in Alexandria. Bitch in heat. Before I left for university, Mum sat on my bed and tried to explain some matters of the heart, one of her hands stroking the cover over my legs. She seemed confident that I would already know about the sex side of things. Love, she had decided, might be a different matter. I was hot beneath the bedding, and aware that I couldn’t kick it away without her thinking that I was embarrassed.
‘The key thing,’ she said, ‘is that you never lose your self-respect.’
On reflection, this was sweet, and useful for a while. I had been too much of an oddity at high school to attract much attention – OK-looking, but so fucked in the head – but at university I was interesting enough. I could hold court on literature, or, with credit to Mr Greggs, countries that I’d never been to. I studied Olivia’s humour and Christopher’s optimism. I studied The Sartorialist. I wore tight, dark clothes, and a smile that I’d practised. Despite the showers and the CK One, I stank of somebody who might need saving, and men liked that best of all.
Sometimes I recall them: the odd pageant of men who tried to save me. They tried to save me by making love, or dinner, or, on one stilted, final date, a Build-a-Bear. Clever men from solid schools, destined for great things (or good things, at the very least). They parade through my head, with their tentative hands and concerned frowns. They ask why I’m reticent about my family. They touch my surgical scars, deliberately, to demonstrate that they’re not afraid. They come bearing handwritten letters, or handcuffs with fur – with fur – on a special occasion. They lick the wrong parts of my skin and dip their fingers inside me like they’re testing my temperature. They try to convert me. Lie still, they say, it will be different with me. This is always inaccurate. Ultimately, they’re angry and disappointed. Maybe I’m not that mysterious, after all. Why must you request such strange things; why would you ask that I hurt you; why won’t you tell me what happened to you? Maybe I’m just a bitch.
And then there was JP, and I prepared my self-respect, and served it to him, delicate, on a plate.
I spent most of the summer after university in London. Dad dropped me at the station on Friday afternoons, and I sat on the train in the same seat – one hour and seventeen minutes – with butterflies battering around my belly. They had claws; they had teeth. The hot, rattling carriage, and
then the shade of the platform. JP waited behind the barriers at London Bridge, past the initial crowd, and I liked to see him just before he saw me, his eyes sweeping the different faces for mine. Each time we met, it was as if we started again: for twenty minutes we were shy together, one talking over the other, both of us with too much and too little to say. We took the tube to his flat in De Beauvoir, walking from Angel and holding hands, and as he talked about his week and his friends and his ideas for the weekend, the butterflies became drowsy, and slumbered. His flat had long windows facing west, so that the evening light fell in neat stripes across the floorboards, the bookshelves, the bed. He resisted all decoration. There was never anything on the floor.
I tried to remember to urinate on the train, right before it reached London, so that as soon as we were inside he could set me where he wanted to: on the sofa or on the desk, or through and into the bedroom. This sex was always inelegant, half-dressed and hurried, and never lasted long. ‘I need to be inside you,’ he would say, and I enjoyed the needing, as if it was something he would have to do, whether I liked it or not. As soon as he came, we removed the dregs of our clothes – a stray sock, or my bra pushed above my breasts – and lay naked together on the bed or on the rug. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached for me, his eyes creased in a smile and barely open.
‘Tell me,’ he said, during one of the first weekends, starting to touch me. ‘Tell me what you want.’
I rolled onto my stomach and rested my head on my arms.