by Sam Hayes
I grew used to my dad’s absence. He came perhaps once or twice more after he drove off with his arm and his life wrapped around Patricia. I don’t really remember. To begin with, I used to ask her about him. She seemed to know more than I did; wore a dopey expression when she mentioned his name. William Fergus, she liked calling him, as if he were posh. William Fergus took me out in his car, she’d say. William Fergus bought me a hat. William Fergus and I went to the pictures. William Fergus held my hand.
William Fergus, I thought bitterly. Couldn’t even be bothered with his own daughter.
Besides, when she told me they’d held hands, I knew exactly what that meant. We had a television in the home. We saw what grown-ups did after they’d held hands. I ran off when I found out. My tight shoes bit my toes, stopping me from crying, as good as a punishment. But what I didn’t understand was if my dad and Patricia were friends, if they were together, then why did I have to live here? Why couldn’t Patricia be my new mum? Why couldn’t I go home?
Simple, I deduced eventually. My dad hated me.
And so the days went on, turning into weeks, into months, into years. All of us waiting, biding our time for something to happen, something or someone to save us. A few of us went to school. I was one of the lucky ones and was allowed to leave Roecliffe for six hours a day. Until the age of eleven, I walked to the village primary school with a cluster of other trusted boys and girls. We scuffed our way to the playground, where we suffered the taunts of the other kids. We were the ones without parents. The kids no one loved. The dirty kids. The troublemakers. The children who stank and who no one wanted to sit next to or hold hands with. As we got older, some of us went on the bus to the secondary school in town. Sometimes we got beaten, kicked, bullied, but sometimes we just kept quiet and got on with learning.
When we weren’t at school, we drifted around the children’s home. The boys scrapped and fought, broke things, ran away and screamed when they were dragged back. The girls turned inwards, became sullen and quiet, and spent their time making things. Always making stuff from nothing. Rubbish from the bin. Old clothes fit for scrap. Rags were woven, cardboard was glued, and string was crocheted. We made crude dolls. We made bracelets and charms. We made pictures and presents, some of us saying they were for our parents. By then, we didn’t remember what parents were.
All the while we were waiting for something to happen.
Then she came. The girl that would change my life. There had been a quiet patch at the home. ‘No new customers,’ Miss Maddocks joked, when nothing had happened for weeks.
I found her by accident, standing in a puddle of pee. She was crying and her bare bottom had the sting of a handprint – the adult fingers reaching right across its width. She was naked apart from a stained vest.
I was nearly thirteen but my body looked two years older. Everything I owned was too small for me. I was virtually the size of an adult woman yet wore the clothes of a ten-year-old. When I stumbled upon her, the look on her face told me that she thought I was a carer – one of them. To her, I must have seemed a hundred years old.
There she was, standing in the dark corridor with a thousand confusing doors leading off, stretching out her arms to me as I walked past. She wanted me to pick her up. She was making a brave, last-ditch attempt to be loved by someone.
‘Hello,’ I said. I crouched down. She couldn’t have been more than three years old. Tentatively, she wrapped her arms round my neck. Her cherry-red face buckled with anticipation. She wanted to feel the warmth of another human; convince herself that she wasn’t alone. This little girl was acting on pure instinct. She needed someone to love her in order to survive.
‘What’s your name?’ Her face drew close to my neck. Every indrawn breath was a hiccup or sob.
She leaned close and whispered, ‘Betsy,’ in my ear. The stench of urine closed around me.
‘I’m Ava,’ I told her. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ I’d not heard that anyone had arrived, and I’d been here long enough to know how the system worked. Someone would spot the social worker’s car at the end of the drive. The news would quickly spread around the home that another one was being brought in, one grubby mouth whispering to the nearest ear. A writhing cluster of kids would congregate at the big old front door, straining at the window, waiting for the latest catch to be brought in. Then the whooping would begin, followed by ugly catcalls, dancing, play-fighting, poking at the new kid, until they were shooed away by the carers’ impatient arms. I would stand back, palms pressed together in prayer, sizing up the newcomer, before rushing to my bed to defend my belongings.
The little girl began to lick my neck. I prised her away and held her at arm’s length. ‘Where did you come from?’ I angled her into the light from the small window high above us. She wouldn’t speak. ‘Can you talk?’
She stared at me blankly, huge blue eyes set beneath red-gold curls that were matted with dirt and most probably full of lice. Then she pulled up her vest and started sucking on it. She was starving. ‘Come with me,’ I said, wanting to help her. Hot sticky fingers wove their way into my fist as I led her to my dormitory. Two other girls were sitting crosslegged on a bed. One was cutting the other’s hair with plastic play scissors.
I rummaged in my bedside cupboard and pulled out a crumpled paper bag. Sugar showered from a hole and the girl dived to the floor, pressing the grains against her fingers before sucking them clean. ‘You really are starving, aren’t you?’
I tipped the contents out on to my bed. We were given sweets once a week. Usually jellied sugary things bought in huge drums. I’d been saving up, just one or two a week, and now I had a fine stash that I was planning to eat alone, under the bedcovers when I was sad. Survival when those waiting moments turned into years.
The child greedily scoffed the coloured mess on my bedspread. Then she scooped up the fallen sugar until there was nothing but a damp patch left.
‘What’s her name?’ Alison asked. She tugged at her friend’s hair with the blunt blades. ‘Does she want a cut?’
I pushed my fingers through the girl’s hair, opening the knots down to the scalp. As I’d guessed, she was teeming with head lice. I pulled a face and nodded. ‘She’s called Betsy,’ I told them. ‘And cut it all off,’ I instructed Alison. Last time there were lice, Patricia went mad and we had a night awake gagging from the treatment she doused us in.
‘She’s sweet, isn’t she?’ I opened my chest of drawers and pulled out the smallest skirt I could find. ‘She’s mine,’ I warned the others. ‘Finders keepers.’ I handed the skirt to Betsy, but she just stared at it. I opened the waist and the child stepped in, as if it was something she was used to doing, as if she once had a mother.
Patricia was in the doorway, glaring at me. ‘There’s the wretched creature.’ Then she smiled. ‘There’s a bed come free, child. You can have that.’ I’d never quite got the measure of Patricia. She was an unreadable force in the home. Her moods ranged from motherly, to fun, to downright sinister. I always knew if she’d been with my dad. Her mood was as light as meringue.
‘Whose bed will she have?’ I asked. The child launched herself at me. I felt as if I’d finally been given a purpose inside all this waiting. Something hot spread within me, burning my heart, racing through my veins, expanding them, thawing them, taking away the void. ‘She wants to stay with me,’ I told Patricia.
‘She can have Dawn’s bed. Dawn’s gone now.’ The words fell from Patricia’s mouth as if she were spitting out gravel. Her cheeks reddened.
I didn’t say anything. I knew better than that. Sometimes kids left without a trace. Sometimes they went away, then came back days later. Some of them never spoke again. Sometimes we asked what happened to them, and sometimes we got a clout.
‘Can she sleep beside me?’ The little girl had pushed on to my lap and balled up like a kitten. I pressed her safe against me, still feeling the heat driving through me.
‘Did you find out her name?’ Patricia’s thin a
rms winged out from her hips. Her face shot into an arrowed expression, as if it was a test. Tell me her name and she can sleep next to you.
I stared down at the child, desperate to protect her. Close up, I saw the creatures on her scalp, the matting of her hair, the sheen of grime on her skin. I wanted to bathe her, to make her warm, brush her hair and feed her. Someone for me to care about when no one cared about me. My living doll.
‘She’s called Betsy,’ I told Patricia. ‘She said that her name is Betsy and she wants to be my friend. I will look after her. You won’t need to bother with her if you let her sleep next to me.’
At that, Patricia visibly relaxed. She always moaned how busy she was, that they were understaffed, that the council should give the home more money. Carers came and went. Patricia and Miss Maddocks said they’d been working at the home forever, knew everything there was to know about it.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the spare bed shifted next to yours. We don’t know much about where she came from, just that the last children’s home kicked her out because they couldn’t cope with her.’ Patricia shook her head and walked off, stopping after a couple of paces. ‘And don’t let her piss everywhere, Ava, or you’ll be on your hands and knees scrubbing it up.’ She left, satisfied that there was one less thing to worry about.
‘Alison,’ I said grinning, excited by my mission. ‘Set to work.’ I sat Betsy on my bed and let Alison hack off the knots. Within an hour, Betsy had a new style. It was ragged and chopped close to her scalp and made her look like a boy, but when I washed it, my fingers slipped easily between the strands. I picked out the lice one by one and drowned them in the bath.
‘Nasty creatures,’ I told her, showing her one. She smacked it into the water and let out a noise that I hoped was a laugh. Then I rubbed soap all over her, stripping the layers of dirt and revealing pink skin. I scrubbed at her neck and cleaned in between her toes. Then I wrapped her in my towel and sang nursery rhymes to her.
‘You know, Betsy,’ I said as we padded the corridors back to my dormitory. ‘I’ve always wanted a little sister or a brother.’
Betsy suddenly stopped and sat down on the cold floor. She huddled within the towel and began to rock. ‘Bruvver, bruvver, bruvver . . .’ she whined over and over. I scooped her up in my arms and held her tight. It was the first time she’d spoken. A clue to her past.
‘Do you have a brother, Betsy? Where’s your brother?’ She grabbed my hair as I set her on the bed.
She nodded and stared right inside my head. ‘Bruvver gone,’ she said in a voice that reached around my heart. And then she repeated this a dozen more times before stripping off the towel and pulling my bedspread over her head.
Later, I dressed Betsy in some clothes that I’d found in Dawn’s chest. The girl was eight and small for her age when she disappeared. I didn’t really think it odd that Dawn had left all her belongings behind; didn’t really think it strange that my little Betsy stepped right into her shoes as if the other girl had never existed at all.
CHAPTER 25
It’s like the tide going out. A reversal of the influx of pupils I’d watched only a few weeks ago. So much has happened in that time, yet nothing has really changed. From my bedroom window, up in the eaves, the girls look like angry ants, impatient for their parents to take them home.
Katy told me that she’s off to Italy with her parents for the half-term break. A fine punishment for her display of irresponsible adolescent behaviour. Since I saw her with Adam in the woods, I’ve dreamed about her several times. In the morning, I wrote down the details in the hope it might stop them coming. If anything, it’s made them worse. In the last one, the police were exhuming Katy’s naked body from a shallow grave of wet earth in the exact same spot I saw her with Adam. A faceless man was hiding in the shadows. I woke up drenched in sweat, frozen with fear.
I huff breath on to the windowpane and wipe an X in the mist; a farewell kiss for each of the girls as they leave Roecliffe for half-term.There’s a gentle tap-tap on my door. I ease it open from its old frame.
‘Lexi,’ I say. ‘Are you OK?’ She has mascara streaking down her cheeks and the thick eyeliner she keeps getting told off for wearing makes the seam of black look as if she’s been thumped.
‘He’s going to be late,’ she says. ‘Bloody late at half-term. I’ll be the only one left.’ She’s talking about her father.
‘You won’t be alone. I’m not going anywhere.’ The words sit thick as concrete on my tongue.
‘You’d think that he’d want to see me.’ She storms into my room and hurls herself on my bed. She picks up my scarf and winds it through her fingers. ‘You’re lucky,’ she continues. She reaches to my dressing table for a tissue. ‘You can just up and leave whenever you like.’
I am about to tell her that I can’t, that I will be staying at Roecliffe instead of taking a break by the sea, or staying with family, or going on a walking holiday. I will be trying my best to avoid the handful of diehard staff who choose to remain at school, who, like me, have nowhere else to go, but I stop. I know Lexi well enough to know that she would ask why.
‘How late is your dad going to be?’
Lexi doesn’t answer. She picks her way through my scant belongings on the dressing table as if they were her own.
‘You don’t have much make-up,’ she says. ‘And is this what you put on your hair?’ She pulls a face and opens a bottle of supermarket brand shampoo. ‘Yuk. It smells like toilet cleaner.’
I doubt that Lexi has ever cleaned a toilet in her life, let alone knows what the cleaning products smell like, but I humour her. ‘It does fine for me.’ Truth is, money has been tight. My pay has so far been two hundred pounds cash in advance from the bursar who told me, rather impatiently, that until I submit my bank account details, I won’t be getting my salary.
‘If you ask your hairdresser, they will recommend something. Daddy sends me to London every holiday and buys me a day in a salon. They do whatever I ask and it’s all paid for—’
‘Take it.’ I hold out the pale blue bottle. ‘Try it. You might be surprised.’
Lexi’s hand rises slowly and she takes the shampoo. She holds back the scowl that’s forming, and actually finds it in herself to thank me.
‘If it turns your hair to frizz, just pour it into your dad’s girlfriend’s shampoo bottle.’ We both laugh. ‘Now, will you be staying here overnight?’ Sylvia and I have already stripped the beds.
Lexi shrugs. ‘I could be here for the whole week,’ she says glumly. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. And what did you mean when you said a while back that we have lots in common? Did you get dumped at boarding school while your parents went off having fun?’
‘Not exactly,’ I reply. I think of different answers – some are lies, some skirt around fact, and some crush me with the truth. She wouldn’t believe any of it. ‘I was headstrong like you when I was younger. I got angry when other people let me down, just like you’re angry at your father now.’
‘What did you do?’ Lexi sits cross-legged on my bed, hugging the scarf and shampoo as if they are her only worldly possessions.
‘I guess I just changed over time,’ I tell her.
The kitchen staff don’t work during half-term. For those who choose to stay on at school during the break – and those who have no choice – a supply of food is left in the giant refrigerator. I’m staring at it all, wondering if I should offer to cook for the others. But that would mean conversation, a gathering, a meal shared, stories told, questions asked. I pull out a block of cheese and set it on a chopping board.
‘There you are.’
I swing round, knife in hand, mouth gaping open. Adam holds up his palms in mock self-defence.
‘Whoa,’ he says. ‘I was only going to ask if you wanted to join us all. We’re going down to the village pub for a bite to eat. Kind of a celebration.’
‘Celebration?’ A shard of light reflects off the knife, dancing around
the kitchen walls.
‘It’s half-term,’ he says. ‘A bit of peace.’
‘Peace?’ I say, chopping the cheese.
‘Are you going to repeat the end of every sentence I say?’ Adam glances at his watch. ‘Meet us in the hall in ten minutes?’
I stare at Adam, not seeing him, rather someone else entirely. Someone I’d rather be with, someone not quite so tall, someone who would wrap their arms round me and, if I didn’t want to go to the pub, someone who would lead me up to my bedroom and fetch a tray of food for me, lie beside me, comfort me, laugh with me. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m a bit tired.’
I concentrate on the cheese but it’s gone all blurry, as if it’s melting. I wipe my eyes on the back of my wrist.
‘Have you been chopping onions?’ Adam asks. I shake my head. The sniff draws him closer, leaning on the other side of the stainless steel counter. He peers at me. ‘Are you OK, Frankie?’ I know that he’d rather be fetching his coat, stamping his feet impatiently in the hall, waiting for his friends to gather, to walk down to the village pub for some cheer.
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Please go away, I think, even though I don’t really want him to.
‘See you tomorrow then.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ And I wait for the sound of his footsteps to disappear completely before I hack up the entire block of cheese.
The fire is quick to start. It was the matches sitting on a shelf in the kitchen that set me thinking. I turned the box over and over in my fingers, wondering where I might find wood. The library waste bins provided enough old newspapers to set the entire building alight, so I carried a few bundles back to the dining hall and dumped them on the hearth.
‘Logs,’ I pondered, wondering if anyone would notice a couple of missing school benches. I headed off to the basement, feeling my way along the rough damp walls until I found a light switch. A network of rooms and low-ceilinged passages finally led me to a stash of broken furniture that had been crudely hacked up, perhaps for the single winter fire that was allowed.