by Jo Jakeman
Moths flitted around him, having a dogfight in and out of the halo of gold from the security light. A tentative cough behind him had him half turn, but he was pushed forward again. Ruby stepped into the light.
I reached behind me but couldn’t remember where I’d left the knife. It had been in my hand, and then I’d noticed the fire, and nothing else mattered. I was defenseless.
Naomi said nothing. She was mesmerized by the sight of Phillip and Ruby. Neither of us could comprehend what this meant or why they were still here. I started to back away, wondering where my phone was, whether I could scream for help.
Ruby’s right hand was raised in line with her eye, holding something I couldn’t see. In her left was a red container with a black spout. The kind you get from the garage when your car has run out of petrol two miles down the road. I should have filled up my car when I’d had the chance, because Phillip having to refuel had worked against me. The breakdown that I’d hoped for had nearly resulted in my death.
You bastard.
The hair on one side of Phillip’s head was wet, plastered to his face. His collar was stained dark and his top clung to him, showing the outline of his arm muscles. He reeked of petrol.
“Move,” Ruby said to him, and splashed the liquid at his back. She skirted him as if he were a dangerous animal.
There was something off about the way she was talking to him. Ruby wasn’t helping Phillip anymore.
“Ruby? What’s going on?” I asked.
“You won’t do it,” Phillip said to Ruby, as if I hadn’t spoken. His voice was tight and his entire body taut with malice. I realized then that the item in Ruby’s right hand was the lighter Naomi had left on the window ledge.
“I trusted you,” Ruby said to Phillip. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. Her thumb clicked the lighter and, though it failed to light, Phillip flinched.
Ruby’s face had changed. Gone were the crinkling eyes and the soft lips. Her face seemed more angular in the shadows. Her eyes were glaring and dark. She stood with her feet apart, sturdy and strong, and kept flicking her head as if disagreeing with voices in her head.
“Ruby?” I asked again.
Naomi had stepped away from us all. She could make a dash for it now and get help. I gave her a small nod. Do it. But she shook her head, captivated by the scene playing out in front of us.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said, but I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to Phillip.
Phillip looked at her with disgust and curled his lip at her.
“He—he made me think . . . I thought that you were plotting to take his son away from him. And the house. He told me that you wouldn’t be happy until you’d destroyed him. It didn’t sound fair. I swear I was only trying to do the right thing.”
She didn’t take her eyes off Phillip. Fairness was important to Ruby. Loyalty more so. Her loyalty had been thrown back in her face. Phillip had been wrong to drag her into his scheme and then leave her to die.
“He tried to kill us all,” she said. “Me! Me who’d helped him. I never expected . . .” Her voice broke.
“Get in!” said Naomi, punching the air. “I’ll get the cuffs.”
She ran into the house and I heard her pull open the door to the cellar and switch the light on.
“Wait! I don’t understand,” I said. I’d been fooled too many times and I wouldn’t let it happen again.
I stepped backward until the back of my ankles found the doorstep. I slumped down onto it. My legs didn’t have the strength to hold me up. I was shaking. I watched the scene in front of me as if it were happening to someone else. The energy drained out of me and I was light-headed. It was almost too much to process. Phillip had tried to kill us and now he was back, but this time we held the power.
Phillip glared at me as Ruby pushed him into the kitchen. The stench of the petrol caused me to gag as he passed me by. Ruby was muttering something in his ear, but I couldn’t hear anything above my hammering heart.
I pulled myself back up to watch as Naomi reappeared and cuffed his hands together. Ruby stood by him with the lighter and a faint smile on her face. Satisfied, Naomi stepped back and picked up the knife from where I’d dropped it when I was running to get water.
“Go on,” she said to Phillip. “Give me a reason to use this.”
“I’m not going back down there,” he said.
“Your choice. But I reckon it’s better than the alternative.” She tilted her head at Ruby. Phillip took a couple of steps toward the cellar.
“Ruby,” said Phillip, imploring, “you know I never meant to hurt you. It all got out of hand. You’re better than this. Better than them. Put the lighter away.”
In response, Ruby gave the lighter a shake and lit it. Phillip winced and then tried to laugh it off, like he wasn’t worried.
“You’re not thinking straight,” he said. He shook his head and went through the cellar door like he was doing it out of choice, not because he was being forced.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the step. I stared into the garden. The overgrown lawn, the discarded toys, everything so normal and yet nothing was. I sat so still that the security light clicked off. A rectangle of light fell from the back door out into the night, my hunched shadow at its base.
I could hear the faint murmuring of voices from the cellar. They were clipped and harsh. Ruby’s soft spot for Phillip had hardened. It took a lot to lose Ruby’s trust, and Phillip had broken it with a finality that could have been fatal.
I heard Ruby and Naomi come out of the cellar and bolt the door behind them. They joined me in the garden and the light clicked on again.
“I truly am so very sorry,” Ruby said. “You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now.”
There were pale lines down her face where her tears had washed away the smoke residue.
Naomi pulled over two wooden garden chairs, and they sat down. Naomi put her hand out for Ruby to drop the lighter into the palm of her hand. She took her cigarettes from her pocket and lit up. Sucking deeply and blowing away the smoke through the side of her mouth.
“Where did you find the keys to open the door?” I asked. My throat was scratchy and my voice was weak.
I wasn’t angry, just curious. From now on, I wanted to know everything.
“Phillip told me on the phone where you kept the spare keys,” she said.
I noticed that she was calling him Phillip now. Gone was the endearing and familiar nickname Pip. On her lips it sounded like an angry parent using his full name in order to chastise, to show just how much trouble he was in.
“Go on,” I said.
“He didn’t think you trusted me. I had the spare set in case I needed them to unlock the door for him to sneak in while we were looking at the car. Not that I knew that’s what he was going to do, of course. I hadn’t got around to putting the keys back—you barely left me alone for a minute—so I still had them in my pocket when he set fire to the house.”
“And what?” said Naomi. “You thought, ‘I know, I’ll go and threaten to set fire to the bastard’? Was that it?” Naomi sucked on her cigarette, the orange glow from the tip like a beacon in the dark. She was going to take some convincing. Ruby had let both of us down.
“I don’t know. I was furious. I would have taken the knife if I’d seen it, but the lighter was just there. I didn’t expect him still to be there, really. I thought he would have run. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to confront him. Picking up your lighter was a pointless thing to do at the time. I had some stupid idea I could use it as a weapon, but when I got outside I thought, ‘You silly woman, how’s that meant to scare him?’ and I almost threw it away. And when I got around the side of the house, he was crouched down, watching, with the petrol can behind him. His face . . . You should have seen his face. He was smiling.”
Her voice cracke
d and she began to cry. Naomi put her arm around her shoulders.
“I picked up the petrol can,” she continued, swallowing back her sobs, “and looked at the lighter and it all came together. That was that, really.”
“He can’t have thought you would go through with it, though,” Naomi said.
“Oh, but that’s the thing,” said Ruby. “I would’ve done.”
I looked up to the sky. It was much like it had been on the night that I had the car accident, warmer perhaps but just as endless. I believed Ruby. Despite what she had done earlier, I didn’t believe that even a loyalty like Ruby’s would stand the test of attempted murder. I nearly asked her about the night of the accident, but I’d had all the betrayal I could stand for one night.
“We can’t let him go again,” I said.
The other two nodded.
“But we can’t keep him locked up indefinitely.”
Naomi shrugged like she’d heard worse ideas and said, “Then what the hell are we going to do with him?”
CHAPTER 30
5 years, 5 months, and 1 day before the funeral
Naomi got a buzz from arguing. It was something she excelled at. Half a dozen therapists had told her she was sick. Anger issues, they called it. Anger issues? She didn’t have any issues with being angry. And if any of them were in the same situation as her, they’d be angry too. Sitting in a hospital. On her own. Knocked up. Who wouldn’t be angry?
There was a feeling inside of her, when she raised her voice, like the bubbling of a stream. Her arms became an extension of her anger, lightning rods for the fury, which would burn her from the inside out if she didn’t let it free. If she couldn’t find someone to argue with—and sometimes the goody-goodies refused to—then she would re-create that feeling by pulling a sharp blade over the pale part of her arm. She had learned quickly that if she shouted and screamed they would fold themselves small and back away, but if she cut herself they would send her someplace new. She would rather be sent away before they got bored of her. If you jumped before you were pushed, you at least had a chance of a decent landing.
She’d been moved to a new home. If it didn’t work out there, she’d pack her things and leave. She was old enough to look after herself now. She’d give it until Christmas. Maybe a bit longer, because who wants to be on the streets in winter?
Naomi had been thrown in children’s homes and stuck with foster families. She’d discovered there were two types of foster families: ones where their kids were grown up, flown the nest, Mum and Dad had a heap of “goodliness” going to waste, and they truly thought they could help. As if sitting down and watching Doctor Who on a Sunday night with a “decent” family was enough to turn a wayward child into a straight-A student.
The other ones were in it for the money. Naomi liked to make sure this type earned it the hard way. Most of the time they didn’t even need the cash. One family she stayed with lived on a farm in the Peak District, but there were no pigs or sheep, just a barn full of Range Rovers and Mercedes. They had two sons at private school and Daddy had his own business while Mummy stayed at home and polished her pearls or whatever the hell she did.
“This is your room. You have your own bathroom and a television.”
Patricia said baaaaathroom like she was one of the missing sheep, but she was just playing posh. Naomi could hear it in her voice and was sure that she said “mi duck” and “ey up” like the rest of them.
Naomi could tell, from the moment she clapped eyes on her, that the lady of the manor didn’t think much of Little Orphan Annie. Patricia’s upturned nose cranked up another notch and her thin lips fought to meet over her buckteeth as her eyes rolled up and down the skin and bones in ripped jeans.
“I hardly think you need to come out of your room at all, Naomi.”
And she rarely did, apart from the Easter holidays when she slid into bed with the precious youngest son.
Naomi tried not to think about Nana and Gramps. She missed them in the moments when she forgot to be angry. They had kept her and loved her after her flighty mother, Helen, had taken to wing without a backward glance. She had wanted to have Naomi aborted—not that Naomi had a name at that point, but she’d concealed the pregnancy for so long that it was becoming impossible to face. Nana thought Helen would change her mind when she held the squirming bundle, but, true to her word, Helen left the next morning on the back of a motorbike and never returned.
Gramps was so angry that he took all the photos of Helen and burned them. Nana was only allowed to mention her in whispers over the washing line. When Nana died, Naomi had felt a buzz of excitement beneath the heartache. It was like electrical wires overhead: you might not notice it if you weren’t listening really hard. She hated herself for the twitching dimples in her cheeks, but she couldn’t help but think that now, finally, she would meet her mum. Everyone came back for funerals, didn’t they?
There were women of about the right age in the church—one even held her eye and gave her a small smile—but none of them were her. And Gramps shouted so loudly when Naomi asked about her mum that she didn’t dare ask again.
Nana died when Naomi was nine, and then it was down to Gramps to look after her. He said he didn’t know anything about girls but he knew how to light a fire, and grow pumpkins bigger than yer head, and whistle like a bird, and Naomi couldn’t care less that he couldn’t braid her hair.
One day Gramps took ill and Naomi nursed him as well as an eleven-year-old could. The bustling busybody from the post office came out to drop off a parcel and Naomi said to her, “There’s summat up with ’im. He won’t get outa bed.”
Hilda Grayson told her not to worry, but by that night Naomi was in foster care and Gramps had tubes up his nose. Three weeks later Naomi was back in the same church, front row again, with people she hardly knew passing her tissues. Again there was no sign of her mum, and with no one willing to take her in, she found herself “in the system,” surrounded by people who had never heard of Gramps. No one could tell her stories the way he used to. No one knew how she liked her toast cut into triangles. It was as if Nana and Gramps had never existed and Naomi ceased to exist too. Old Naomi, the Naomi who was loved and cared for, was long gone, buried in the ground between Nana and Gramps. She was reborn into a life where she had to fend for herself.
“I’ve got a mum. She don’t know where I am. As soon as I tell her, she’ll come git me. I won’t be here for long. You’ll see.”
The social worker helped for a while. Helen’s name was on Naomi’s birth certificate, but there was no one of that name on the electoral roll, marriage licenses, nor, thankfully, a death certificate.
After two homes and three foster families, Naomi’s ideas of her birth mother had soured. She could imagine her saying, “I wanted you to have the life I could never give you blah blah blah,” when in fact she wanted the life that having a baby could never give her. Having a baby was a buzzkill and that was exactly what Naomi thought when she fell pregnant with the posh fella’s child. He gave her enough money to make her go through with the abortion and keep her mouth shut. She’d have done it for free. She had no other choice.
The other girls in the waiting room looked ashamed. One woman was older and kept saying, “But I just can’t cope. I got another six at home.” She wouldn’t stop mithering and making them all feel uncomfortable. Naomi just wanted it over and done with.
Shown through to their own pristine beds, they were each given a gown and told to strip. Naomi lay on the bed as they slid a catheter into the back of her hand. For the anesthetic, they said. Naomi tried to read, but the words kept shifting about the page. A nurse told her that they would like to fit a coil while they were in there. Save this kind of thing from happening again.
“Won’t happen. I’m never having sex again,” Naomi told her. But the nurse looked at her like she’d seen her type before and they always did.
“They’ll be up to get you in a minute,” she said. “You’re first on the list.”
She drew the curtains around Naomi’s bed. Naomi lay on her back and the tears fell from her eyes like they would never stop. She wanted her mum. A woman she had never met, a woman who had discarded her as easily as a chip packet. With the start of a life in her belly, she had never felt more like a child.
It was the most traumatizing thing that Naomi had ever had to do, but she had no home, no job, no family. She couldn’t have this child, only for it to be taken into care and become easy prey for another foster father or friend of the family.
She dried her tears. She had to toughen up. Despite her anguish, she was sure she was doing the right thing. For her own mother to have her, then desert her, was the act of a selfish person. Naomi had grown up knowing she’d been abandoned and unwanted. How could she inflict that on another? It was time to stop the cycle. She wouldn’t pass on her unlovable genes.
CHAPTER 31
9 days before the funeral
I walked through the rain, hood down on my coat, umbrella at home. I wanted to be wet and cold, to be anything other than scared of what might have been. My flip-flops paddled beneath my jeans. I’d forgotten to change them for something more suitable. I’d been desperate to get out of the house; it was a wonder I’d remembered a coat. All thoughts were preoccupied with Phillip right now.
He’d spent the morning shouting at us. Mostly he was reiterating what he had written on the wall, but every now and again he let something slip. He was desperate to get out in the next forty-eight hours but wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell us why. He clammed up when we probed.
He tried to get us on our own and whispered lies about the other two. Promising us the world if only we let him out.
We stopped seeing him alone. Stopped seeing him altogether. We gave him bottles of water and a pack of biscuits. Told him to help himself. I was meeting Chris Miller in the morning and until then I just had to keep Phillip out of my head.