A Twist of Fate

by Joanna Rees

  ‘Can Michael do it like that?’ Thea asked Johnny, circling round towards him.

  ‘Oh yes, Michael can do it just like that,’ a voice said, impersonating her.

  Thea turned to see her best friend and rival, Michael Pryor, riding into the paddock on Buster, the scruffy and stubborn brown pony that was the joke of the riding stables, but which Michael always managed to ride like a dream.

  Unlike Thea, Michael didn’t have any correct riding attire. He was wearing tatty old jeans and a checked shirt under a denim jacket, and his honey-blond hair curled down across his brow from beneath his green woolly hat.

  ‘He can do it just like that, but faster,’ he goaded, riding up beside her with a twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said, her cheeks burning. ‘You mean faster than this?’

  She kicked her heels into Flight and took a run up at the jump, willing her horse to make it over without a mistake. He did it and she felt a flush of satisfaction as she turned and saw Michael sitting back on his saddle, applauding her.

  ‘Too easy. She can go higher, right, Johnny?’ Michael called. ‘I’ll help you raise the bar.’

  Johnny nodded. In spite of Mrs Douglas’s earlier warning, he knew that Thea was more than ready to take on the bigger jumps. Plus he knew there was no way in hell that she’d shirk from Michael’s challenge now.

  ‘You OK?’ Johnny asked, seeing the dark circles under Michael’s eyes, as he helped him with the jump.

  ‘I did Guido’s shift,’ Michael said in explanation.

  Guido the gardener had a bad back, so Michael had covered for him, but Johnny knew he’d never let on to Thea that he was exhausted. It just wasn’t in the boy’s nature to complain.

  From the other end of the paddock, Thea watched Michael and Johnny stand back. The bar seemed at least two feet higher than before.

  ‘We can do it,’ she said, patting the soft neck of her horse, before circling once more, then setting Flight off cantering straight towards the jump.

  This time, though, she got it all wrong. Instead of sailing majestically over the jump, before rounding on Michael and grinning in triumph, as she’d planned, Flight missed his stride coming into the fence and, worse, landed awkwardly, throwing Thea clean out of her saddle and hard onto the ground.

  Michael was the first to reach her. ‘Thea, Thea,’ he gasped, sliding to a halt on his knees by her side. ‘Oh God. It’s all my fault.’

  Thea took a breath, determined not to cry in front of Michael. So she’d messed up. So what? That didn’t mean she’d give him the satisfaction of seeing her be a baby about it. But then she saw that he wasn’t laughing at her at all.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, staring into her eyes.

  She’d never noticed how lovely the golden specks in his hazel eyes were.

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ She managed to sit up. ‘Don’t they say: pride before a fall?’

  Johnny arrived just as she was saying this and smiled with relief that she was clearly OK. He reached down and ruffled her blonde hair. It broke his heart that she sometimes said such grown-up things when she was still only a little girl. He helped her to her feet.

  ‘Nothing broken, I hope?’ he said, picking up her riding hat and handing it back.

  ‘Not this time,’ Michael said, putting his arm around Thea’s shoulder and giving her a hug.

  ‘Ow,’ she winced, knowing her shoulder was almost certainly going to bruise. But she knew Michael hadn’t meant to hurt her, so she said more gently, ‘Get off, or I’ll get boy fever.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, just don’t tell Mrs D or your father what happened, or he’ll probably fire me,’ Johnny said. He was smiling as he said it, but he meant it. Griffin Maddox could be a tough bastard to work for, and this little girl was the apple of her father’s eye.

  Thea laughed. ‘Of course not.’ The thought of ever getting any of the staff in trouble appalled her. She’d always thought of them being almost like family too.

  But just as they were both about to help her back onto Flight, something snagged Thea’s attention. She shielded her eyes against the bright sun, with her now-muddy white riding glove.

  A sleek black limo flashed between the avenue of trees. ‘Look! It’s Daddy.’

  ‘I’d better go warn Mom,’ Michael said, flashing a look at Johnny. ‘She wasn’t expecting them back till the weekend.’

  But Thea wasn’t listening, she was already running away from him, diagonally across the paddock, her hat toppling from her head, as she waved her arms, with a wide happy smile on her face.

  She arrived, breathless, at the paddock gate as the black limousine drew up parallel with her on the gravel drive. She stood up on the wooden rung of the gate, her heart beating with anticipation. She hadn’t seen her parents for the best part of a month, but surely, them being here could only mean one thing: her mother was better.

  Mama was home.

  But her hope fluttered and faded as Anthony, her father’s chauffeur, got out. He usually had a wink for her, or a smile, but today he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He walked quickly around the car and opened the far passenger door.

  Griffin Maddox stepped out, blinking into the morning light, and placed his black trilby on his head with a weary sigh. When she thought of her father, Thea always remembered him dressed in a cowboy shirt – throwing her up in the air and laughing. How he always told her that she was the light of his life. How he’d one day teach her everything he knew. How everything that was his would one day be hers.

  But today the shadow of dark hair on his cheeks made his usually handsome face look haggard and worn.

  ‘Daddy,’ Thea called, but all he did by way of response was weightily lift his forefinger to his lips to signal her to be quiet. He was a tall, powerfully built man, who’d rowed for Harvard in his youth. He was dressed in a fine camel coat, opened to reveal an immaculately tailored suit, but he moved stiffly as he walked around the car.

  As she climbed quickly over the gate, Anthony opened the nearside passenger door and that’s when Thea saw her mother’s familiar leg stretch from the car down to the ground.

  Thea stumbled and stopped, still five yards from the car. She felt her breath catch in her throat, as Anthony and her father helped her mother to stand.

  Her mother looked so different. So desperately frail. She was wearing a brightly coloured swirly silk scarf wrapped around her head, but it only served to emphasize how much paler and more gaunt she was.

  Thea ran up to her mama and threw her arms around her, pressing herself against her fur coat. Her mother felt terrifyingly thin beneath it.

  ‘You’re home,’ Thea said, finally stepping back and forcing a brave smile onto her face.

  ‘Oh, Thea, my Theadora,’ her mother said softly. ‘My beautiful gift from God.’

  She took Thea’s head in her hands and gently kissed her brow. Thea’s nose wrinkled. Despite her familiar perfume, her mama smelt strange – of chemicals and something else Thea couldn’t put her finger on.

  Her voice sounded different too. A scratchy, difficult whisper. She reached out her hand to Thea’s face. Her touch was so cold that Thea couldn’t help recoiling as she stared into her mother’s sunken eyes.

  ‘Didn’t they make you better, Mama?’ Thea asked. She couldn’t stop herself. Everything she’d dreaded, everything she’d prayed for each night not to happen, was coming true.

  Her mother didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. As Thea looked into her eyes, she saw something terrible there, magnified by the pools of tears. Something she had no name for yet, but which she’d one day come to recognize as sorrow of the deepest kind. The sorrow of saying goodbye.

  Thea felt anger swell up inside her. Her father was Griffin Maddox. He had all the money in the world. As well as Dr Myerson, their family doctor, he’d paid for the best physicians. Grown-ups like her father were meant to be able to fix everything. So why hadn’t they fixed her mama?

  Thea felt her chest shudder, tha
t familiar prelude to tears, but knew instinctively that she had to be strong. That this was the only way to make her mama happy. And being happy could fix a person, right? Thea was certain it could.

  She reached inside her pocket, remembering the present she’d made. She’d been carrying it around for weeks now, hoping and praying that Mama would be home, or that at the very least her father would let her go to the hospital to visit her there.

  She’d cut the red silk herself and had embroidered it with careful stitches as Michael’s mom, Mrs Pryor, had taught her. It was covered in fluff now from the inside of her pocket, but it didn’t matter, she supposed. She pressed the small heart into her mother’s hand.

  ‘I made it for you, Mama. I knew you’d come home,’ she said.

  Alyssa Maddox gripped the heart in her hand and held it to her chest, then closed her eyes. Thea’s father held her shoulders as she started to shake.

  ‘Getting you was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ Alyssa Maddox whispered, her eyes now glistening with tears. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to know that, Thea.’

  Why was Mama talking like this? Like she’d run out of hope. They’d just have to get her new doctors. Better doctors, who could make her well.

  ‘Come, Lis,’ Thea’s father said, gently. ‘You mustn’t be out in the cold.’

  He tried to turn her back towards the car, but she stood her ground.

  ‘No. I want to see Thea ride,’ Alyssa Maddox said, with a hint of her old defiance. ‘Just . . . just once,’ she said, her voice turning paper-thin again.

  ‘OK, watch,’ Thea said, her eyes shining brightly, determined to lift her mother’s spirits again.

  She turned and, knowing she had to go fast, she half-climbed, half-vaulted the paddock fence, landing with bent knees, knowing that she had to perform – that this somehow was the most important thing she would ever do for her mother.

  She took off, running, back towards Johnny.

  Mrs Douglas was waiting for her in the paddock, holding Thea’s riding hat ready for her. The old woman looked strange, standing in the middle of the mud in her sensible black coat. Why was she in the way, again? But Mrs Douglas wasn’t taking any notice of Thea for once. She was looking behind her towards her parents.

  Thea pulled the hat down on her head.

  ‘I gotta show Mama how well I can jump,’ she called to Johnny.

  He nodded, helping her up onto Flight’s saddle, securing her feet into the stirrups.

  ‘Give me a moment to lower the bar,’ he said.

  ‘No, I can do it,’ Thea told him sternly, yanking on the reins to force Flight to raise his head from where he’d been cropping the grass.

  They circled around and Thea stared at the jump. Then, digging in her heels, she raced Flight right at it. Her heart soared as they sailed over.

  She couldn’t have done it better. A broad grin broke across her face.

  A second jump was blocking her view of the limousine. As she brought Flight around it, she looked at Johnny for approval, but saw that he too now was staring towards the driveway.

  Thea’s smile died then. Her mother hadn’t seen her jump. She’d collapsed and was lying stretched out on the ground. Thea’s father and Anthony were kneeling on the gravel beside her. Together, they raised Alyssa Maddox up and quickly bundled her into the back of the car.

  Thea galloped the horse to the paddock fence, just in time to see the limousine completing its turn and setting off at speed away from her and the house, towards the road that led back into town.

  And that’s when Thea saw it: the red heart she’d made for her mother, lying forgotten on the gravel, abandoned, crumpled and torn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  May 1980

  It was lunchtime, and after the long morning shift in the industrial laundry attached to the Bolkav State Orphanage, 183 children barged and jostled their way into the draughty canteen to take their places on the filthy benches beneath the buzzing strip lights.

  All together like this, they were a sorry sight. Ranging from toddlers to teenagers, they had many things in common, including headlice, worms and bedbug bites. Despite laundering clean bed-linen and uniforms for powerful State officials, they were dressed in ill-fitting and worn beige boiler suits – all of which had an ingrained stench of urine and sweat that was generations old.

  In the lunch queue, holding her dented metal tray, impatiently waiting her turn at the counter for her allocated bowl of cabbage stew, nine-year-old Gerte Neumann, known to her closest friends as Romy, stood out from the crowd. Even beneath the grubby stains on her face, her violet-blue eyes and high cheekbones set her apart as a thing of beauty, and her happy demeanour and wide smile made the younger children orbit her like planets around the sun.

  But today something far more tangible marked her out as someone special too. She was wearing a sparkly clip in her roughly cropped dark hair – a hard-won treasure in a game of dice. But she might as well have had a neon sign pointing down at her head, such was the level of provocation the clip was bound to cause.

  Any pretty item was rare in the orphanage. The few broken toys, torn books and trinkets that were stolen from the pockets of the uniforms sent into the laundry swiftly became currency used to curry favour, or purchase food, medicine or cigarettes.

  ‘Take it off, Romy,’ her best friend, Claudia, whispered in her ear, looking up the queue towards Fox, one of the meanest of the elder boys, who was nearly at the serving hatch, where the cook was mechanically handing out ladlefuls of stew.

  It had been Claudia who’d given Romy her nickname years ago, declaring Gerte too ugly a name for someone so pretty. Now Romy looked to where Claudia was staring and pulled a face.

  Everyone was frightened of Fox, especially Claudia. He had a shaven head and his face and scalp were dappled with scar tissue, where his mother had sprayed boiling water on him as a baby so that she could use him to beg. He was thin, with sharp coppery-brown eyes, and that, along with his reputation of getting away with everything, had earned him his nickname.

  ‘Stop worrying so much,’ Romy said to her friend. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’ She looked at Fox again and then up to the far end of the canteen.

  There, walking in between the rows of chipped wooden benches, Ulrich Hubner, the youngest of the orphanage guards, smacked his cane into his hand and surveyed his charges, muttering to himself at the din.

  Ulrich himself had grown up here. A vicious bully as a child, he’d developed into an even more unpleasant man, and Professor Lemcke, the Orphanage Director, spotting his potential for instilling fear in others early on, had given him a job the moment he’d turned sixteen.

  Ulrich hated and loved this place in equal measure. He loved how easy his job was, particularly considering that his only alternative would be to work back-breaking shifts in the nearby steel works. But he hated the children here. Not just for what they were – nobodies, who could and did disappear – but also because they reminded him on a daily basis that he had come from nothing too.

  But it wasn’t all bad. Oh no, not now that he’d infiltrated his way into Professor Lemcke’s lucrative side-business. In fact recently a whole new world had opened up. Beneath his guard’s uniform, Ulrich felt his fat member twitch. Those photographs of those little sluts . . . they’d excited him beyond his wildest dreams.

  Just as his mind began spinning off into another deliciously depraved fantasy, an explosion of noise jerked his attention to the queue at the opposite end of the hall. Already the other children had bunched up into a tight, frantic circle around Fox and Romy, clattering their metal trays as the gleeful cry of ‘Fight’ went up.

  ‘Give it back,’ Romy hissed, but it was too late. With a sneer, Fox chucked her hair-clip upwards and back over the crowd. A hand shot up and snatched it out of the air. No doubt one of his stupid friends, Romy thought.

  Romy grabbed Fox’s arm, bending his right forefinger back to breaking point.

  ‘Bitch!’ he sh
outed, breaking free as he slammed a tray hard against her, sending her flailing backwards into the crowd of screaming children.

  Fox was almost twice her height, but he didn’t frighten Romy. She leapt right back at him and swung her fist hard, aiming straight for his nose.

  But he was too good a fighter. He ducked and she missed. He seized her, spinning her round by the hair, as the other children continued clattering their spoons on their trays.

  Ulrich muscled in, blowing his whistle, violently elbowing the children aside. He snatched up Romy, as if she weighed no more than a doll. He marched her out of the canteen, bellowing at the screaming children behind him to shut up. Romy made a show of kicking and screaming under his arm, stealthily plucking the packet of cigarettes that Ulrich had recently taken to openly displaying sticking out of his back pocket, no doubt as a reminder to all the other kids of his recent and rapid social rise. She slipped them into the secret inside pocket that she’d sewn into her boiler suit.

  Professor Lemcke, the Orphanage Director, stared out of his office window towards the billowing steam coming from the laundry’s chimneys, then swivelled in his chair to face the door, as Ulrich banged it open and deposited the panting, red-faced girl on the patterned linoleum in front of the professor’s large metal desk.

  The office was austere. Photographs of government officials dominated one wall, a patch of black mould crept down the other. The orphanage buildings should have been condemned long ago.

  Professor Lemcke had a condemned look about him too. He was forty-nine and extremely tall and gaunt, his cheeks sunken beneath his wire-framed glasses.

  ‘You again,’ he said, as Ulrich left.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Romy protested. ‘Fox started it—’

  Professor Lemcke held up his hand. Yes, he thought . . . Neumann. That was this one’s name. A troublemaker. Popular with the other children too, which was even worse. But she was an attractive child and in a few short years she would, of course, prove useful to him, so he didn’t want to damage her permanently just yet.