Matt ruffles her hair and leans in close to her ear. “Because the monster in the wardrobe will get ya!”
I half sigh, half smile. He treats her too much like a little girl sometimes, but I must admit that it’s nice to see April smile. She slinks around Matt and towards me, the smile being replaced by a more pensive expression. I worry about her odd, thoughtful expressions, but then I worry a lot about April. Like I worry about the way she has more of a relationship with Matt. I’m at work all day, often coming home late in the evening. Matt is at home all day, and now with the summer holidays in full swing, he gets to spend all day with April. How can I compete with that?
“What do you think of the new house then?” I ask, softening my voice. I pass her an unwrapped plate and gesture to the appropriate cupboard. “Pretty swanky, eh?”
“I guess,” she replies with a half-hearted shrug.
“You’ll love it once we’re settled,” Matt says, grinning. He leans on the breakfast bar—brand new—and taps the surface with his fingers.
“How come Dad’s lazing around over there and not helping?” I say, trying to make a joke but hearing it fall flat to even my ears. “Come on, get your arse over here and put those pots away.”
Matt salutes me with gusto, and says, “Aye, aye, captain. Christ, your mum’s a right stickler.” The “right” inflecting with his Northern twang to sound more like “rate”.
I watch the two of them start unpacking another box and know that I should be happy. Not everyone has a beautiful family, a good career, and a few half decent friends. Some people live alone with none of those things, not even a healthy body. But that happiness is as nervous as April herself, and, like the fairies in a Disney film, it can’t be coaxed to the surface if it doesn’t want to emerge. I stand there smiling, but all I can think about it is how it doesn’t seem real. And that unsettles me to the very marrow of my bones.
“What about that pizza then?” Matt says. He’s busier poking April in the side than he is helping with the unpacking.
“Hmm?” I mumble.
Before Matt can speak, the doorbell goes. I frown at Matt before putting down an unpacked bowl and moving into the living room. I’m not particularly happy about how there’s not even a hallway between the living room and the front door. I hate how it opens onto the street, it feels too intimate somehow. But once again, I swallow my concerns. Matt said I’d get used to it, so maybe I will.
“Oh, hello.”
An elderly woman stands on the doorstep. The incline of the street, and the way the houses are a little raised and set back, makes me feel like a giant compared to her tiny frame.
“Hello,” I reply.
She lifts a casserole dish with a tea towel covering it, and smiles through lipstick stained teeth. I take the dish from her, trying to arrange my face into an expression that resembles gratitude.
“I’m Edith, I live at 75. I wanted to welcome you to the street,” she says.
I lift the tea towel and examine the contents. There are a few unappetising buns piled up inside the dish. I try not to grimace at the dry texture and flat appearance.
“That’s so kind, thank you. I’m Laura, my husband is Matt, and we have a thirteen-year-old daughter called April. I’m sure we’re going to be very happy here. It seems really friendly.”
“Oh it is,” she says, almost with some force. Her face is made up, despite the deep crevices, which gives her a slightly ridiculous and almost creepy appearance. I can’t stop staring at the mascara clumping in the corner of her eye, or the way her lipstick trails off at one side. “At one time I knew the name of everyone on this street. It’s still friendly, but the community isn’t quite the same. We used to look after each other, you see. That’s how it was in them days. It’s a shame really. If things had stayed the same, I doubt Derek would have died like that.” She wrings her veiny hands together and purses her lips.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise there had been a death. Was he a friend of yours?” I ask, wondering how quickly I can get the conversation to end without appearing rude.
“Lovely man, he was. Salt of the Earth. Would have done anything for you. It weren’t right, you know. A man like that shouldn’t pass away and no one notice for three days. I was with my daughter at the time so I couldn’t know, but her across the street didn’t even notice. Too busy in her own life, I reckon. She’s the selfish sort.”
My eyes flick towards the house directly opposite. I could swear that I see a quick flash of movement, but whatever it is disappears as quickly as it appeared.
“You mean… he died in this house?” I say, suddenly horrified.
“In his arm chair, he was,” she continues, either ignoring or not noticing my discomfort. “Right in front of the window. How she didn’t even see him I don’t know. Ended up that his family found him three days later when they came to bring him his shopping. Awful it was.”
“How terrible,” I say, feeling my muscles tense. It really was terrible. The whole story made my skin crawl. I feel a sudden dislike for this woman coming to my house on our moving in day and telling us such a horrific story. I want her to leave, to get away from us.
“Well I’d best be getting on,” she says. She coughs into her fist, and I hear the sound of phlegm on her chest. “This sunny weather is wonderful, but it means even more watering the garden.” She tuts and rolls her eyes. “Of course her next door never does any gardening. She just sits there with a bottle of wine and watches old muggins here get on with it. Welcome to the neighbourhood.” She leans forward and grasps my arm with her claw-like hand. “We watch out for each other here now. We learnt a lesson when Derek died. No one should be going through all that and not get help.”
My mouth opens and closes like a vacant fish as I struggle to find an appropriate response. But before I can, Edith has scuttled down the front steps and is across the road, moving pretty swiftly for an old woman. I imagine she’s made of the toughest stuff, forged by wartime spirit and childbirth and mining husbands and everything else those Northern women are made from.
“Bye,” I say, before backing away and locking the door.
“What was all that about?” Matt asks.
I hold out the dish. “One of the neighbours brought us these.”
Matt gives me an I-told-you-so smile. “See, nothing bad happens in this street. This is our perfect new start.”
I smile. If I keep smiling, maybe I’ll believe him.
Chapter Three
Hannah
I’m not sure how it happened, whether it was gradual or sudden, but now I blend into the house like a piece of background furniture. Pets and owners start to resemble each other if they develop an over-attached relationship. Well I’m like that with my house. The walls were once a light shade of cream but they appear to have faded into an almost grey colour that matches my skin. I chose brown curtains when I first moved in, and it’s only now that I see the mud colour of my hair and eyes. Even the furnishings—which I chose in different shades of purple and mauve—are the same colour as most of my clothes. There’s a haphazard, untidy feel to the place, the same sight I see when I examine my messy waves of curls in the mirror.
We’re both a little bloated, a little cluttered, and out of fashion. We’re both unkempt and slightly dirty. Neither of us live up to our potential. We’re a little uncared for. A little sad. That’s how an estate agent would describe my house to potential buyers “It’s a bit sad right now, but with some updating it could be very homely.” And that’s how a pimp would describe me. “I’m not gonna lie, she’s getting on a bit now, you know those late-thirties types, but show her a good time and she’ll come round.”
The thing about working from home alone, is that you think about these things. You think about all sorts, from uplifting visions of the future where you get your shit together and everything works out, to the absolute worst scenario where everything goes wrong, to imagining your own death—the mundanity of choking on a peanut or falling down the stairs,
to the absurd home invasion by a serial killer—but most of all you dredge up old memories that you try so hard to keep locked away. And it’s this that keeps me up at night and wakes me up before the sun begins to rise.
That’s why I end up checking my Fiverr account at five in the morning. Edith’s coughs told me she was up by six, so I decided to make myself a strawberry and banana smoothie and switch the fan on. I check the thermostat on the wall and the temperature is already 21 degrees. I open the window, and sit down on the sofa with my laptop on my knees, checking to see if I have any more clients on Fiverr. My account states that I’ll edit and proofread short stories for £30, and I can get quite a few done in a day. I have one story to finish but I’m putting it off. The thought of finishing it makes me tense.
I have one rule when it comes to choosing the stories I proofread—they can’t contain violence or horror. I can’t stand reading stories with blood and guts in them. It triggers a stirring within me, an emotion that I would much rather keep buried. But I let one slip by, a story about a predator stalking a little girl, and every time I try to read it, I feel the same dark panic seeping through my veins. Then the flashes of disturbing memories come; snapshots into a past I’d rather forget.
My body is coiled up tight this morning, so I put the laptop aside and stretch my legs by walking around the room. There’s movement across the road. The Masons are up. I know all their names now, thanks to Edith. It didn’t take her long to go snooping over there. The husband is Matt Mason, but she doesn’t know what he does, not yet. The wife—the pretty woman with mousey hair—is Laura, and their thirteen-year-old daughter is April. Pretty name that, April. The kind of name that sounds good for a young girl and an older woman. So many parents choose cutesy names for their children without thinking of what it would be like for them as an adult. I guess these are the people who start using their middle name, or shorten their first name to a more appropriate nickname. I’d always been a bit jealous of the kids at school who went by their middle name. They were more grown up to me. But, no, I had the most mundane of names—Hannah. A palindrome. A safe bet. You can’t tease a silly nickname out of Hannah Abbott. It’s too boring.
As I’m reaching the dregs of my smoothie, and am considering picking up the stalker story again, I hear a noise that sounds a lot like shouting. With it being so warm this morning, I’d opened the living room window, and now someone’s argument is seeping in along with the still air. The voices are deep and angry. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it, I move closer to the window, drawing back the curtains and letting the low sun light up the dreary room. The voices are coming from the house across the street. Inside, the Masons are yelling at each other with complete abandon. I can just make out the shape of their bodies. Laura stands in the centre of the room while Matt paces around her, his large, bulky man-shape prowling like some sort of beast. I’m immediately intimidated by him, by the fury in his voice, and the way he eats up the room with his presence.
Laura speaks, and I can hear the tears in her voice. There’s a high-pitched hint of hysteria (a term I hate, but that best describes the desperation and anger mixed in her voice). I take another step towards the window, listening as closely as I can. I make out “you’re not listening, we can’t, we can’t.” Soon after, Matt storms out of the house with a duffel bag over his shoulder. I step back, ducking around the curtain so he won’t see me. He runs a hand through his hair, shrugs his shoulders, and stalks off up the road, not even bothering to get in the car.
It’s Laura who slams the door behind him. She disappears from the living room, probably into the kitchen. I’m about to move away from the window and shut the curtains so I can pretend that I didn’t intentionally try to overhear someone else’s argument, but there is movement from the top floor of the house. I look up to see April Mason standing in the window. I pity her in that moment. She’s awake and could have heard the whole argument, seeing as most likely the entire street heard it. She stands there in patterned pyjamas and long black hair, and she waves to me. After a brief hesitation, I wave back.
When I move away from the window, I can’t help but feel shocked. The Masons are so different to what I’d imagined. I think of Matt Mason putting his thick arms around Laura’s middle and Laura play-hitting his shoulder. How can the same couple be screaming and slamming doors the next day? It makes me wonder whether we can really know a person, and really understand what goes on behind closed doors.
They had another fight this morning. I thought about hiding, but then I heard the door slam, so I knew Dad left. I think the fight was about me, because I kept hearing my name. It started off with them loud whispering, trying not to wake me up. Then Dad was shouting and Mum was crying, and I started to get afraid again. I hate it when they fight, but I hate it more when Dad gets angry. I hate it so very much that it makes me cry. I cry and I try not to think about it, try not to think that he does to me and Mum.
Chapter Four
Laura
My fingers shake as I switch on the kettle for a cup of tea. I glance at my watch, it’s almost 7:30, I wonder if I should make a start on April’s breakfast. When we’ve been fighting like this, I feel so guilty that I make her something special. What will it be today? Ready Brek or a bacon sandwich. She used to love Ready Brek when she was little, sprinkled with some sugar or a dollop of honey. But now, I’m not so sure. Now that she’s on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I can’t second guess what she wants or needs anymore.
Am I a bad mother? Matt certainly thinks I am. You would think I am judging from the way he screams at me about her schooling. The problem with Matt is that he wants the best for everything but he has no solution on how to get it. Then all of his anger and frustrations come out on me. I hold back a sob, thinking of the way he was screaming at me. I was frightened. I’ll admit it, I was actually frightened. I felt myself almost shutting down, closing in on myself while he stalked around the room, puffed up and red like a madman.
He wants April to go to a private school, but there is no way in hell we can afford it. My income has to support everything right now: the mortgage, the bills, our food, everything. We’ve downsized because of it. But even now Matt thinks he’s going to get clients, and that he’s going to earn a fortune from personal training. But these clients never actually materialise. It’s always “I’m so close, babe. I know he’s going to sign. You should see his car, he’s loaded!” but then nothing happens and Matt goes into another depression. During these bouts of moodiness, he spends all his free time in the gym, punishing me by leaving as soon as I walk through the door. "You missed tea," he grunts as I walk in from work “It’s in the microwave, you can heat it up”. Most nights I eat my microwaved food in front of the telly with April upstairs in her room reading or doing homework.
Who knew that having a family could make you so lonely? It’s supposed to fix that, isn’t it? That’s why we had a child, to make sure we’d never be lonely again. But now I know the real truth—that having a family doesn’t solve everything. A child won’t automatically become your friend. I’m in this cycle where I work so hard to keep my family that I never see them. While I’m working this hard I’m actually pushing them all away.
I have to brush away tears before pouring the milk over the soft flakes of Ready Brek. I don’t care if she’s too old for it, that’s what I’m making, and maybe if I make it, I can force her to be a child for a little while longer.
“April?” I call. “I’m making you breakfast, do you want to come down?”
Maybe I should put some bacon on just in case? I shake my head. No point wasting food. She probably won’t want it. Kids are different now to when I was a teen, they’re more health conscious. April makes me trim the fat off the bacon, and insists on brown bread with only a tiny bit of butter. “I don’t want my arteries clogged up,” she says.
I shove the bowl with the Ready Brek into the brand new microwave that Matt insisted we buy, like the brand new kettle and toaster, and
the new coffee table. We had a frantic day unpacking and building furniture yesterday. I should have known a blazing row was coming from the way we bickered and picked at each other. I wasn’t holding the leg of the coffee table right so he couldn’t screw in the last screw. And I dropped a vase, the most expensive one. That’s usually what it’s like with Matt, all these little things build up until he explodes.
I turn around and almost scream. “April! Jesus, you gave me a fright.”
She moves a box from off the breakfast bar and sits down, still in her pyjamas. The girl has silent footsteps and an unnerving way of slinking through the house.
“I’m making you Ready Brek. Would you like some sugar on top?”
She shakes her head. “Have we got any strawberries?”
I open the fridge door and have a rummage around. “No strawberries, but we have blueberries, will those do?” I stocked up on a few things after getting the pizza last night. The takeaway made me feel so bloated and sluggish that I decided we needed real food in the house. Plus, I couldn’t sleep, so went for a drive across our old neighbourhood to the late night Tesco in town.
The microwave dings. I gingerly remove the hot bowl, stir, and sprinkle blueberries on top. Then I push the bowl of steaming hot food towards April before working on my cup of tea.
“Did you sleep okay? How’s the new room?”
“It’s all right,” she says. “I like watching the street.”
“Doing a little people watching?” I smile. It’s rare for April to tell me her likes and dislikes. I usually get a grunt or a shrug.
“And listening,” she says. “You can hear people on the street talking and stuff. That old lady likes to talk a lot.”
The smile fades from my face. What must the new neighbours think of us? We’ve only been in the house a day, and already we’ve had a blazing row.
“She’s nosy,” April continues. “She keeps talking about us. I can’t hear what she’s saying because she lowers her voice, but I see her watching our house.”
Saving April Page 2