by West, Sam
Still smiling, he got his feet. There was a shit load to do before tonight. And oh yes, it was going to be one hell of a night. To his surprise, he realised that his stretched taut cheeks from his rictus grin were damp with tears.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I am so disappointed in you, Claire. Really, I am.”
God, talk about driving your point home, thought Claire. Her dad had been lecturing her for almost half an hour now and her backside was going numb on the kitchen chair. Her mum was upstairs, getting ready to go out because she and dad were going out for an early dinner. Probably so they could talk about what a ‘horror’ she was in peace.
“So to sum up, you will come and work for me at I Can’t Believe It’s True! until you go to University in October.”
“But Dad, why can’t I just get another job? I’ll be really weirded out with you breathing down my neck twenty-four hours a day.”
“I’m sorry, Claire, but that’s just the way it is, take it or leave it.”
And by leave it, his implication was pretty clear – find somewhere else to live.
“You’re being too hard on me.”
“I don’t think we are. And you will babysit tonight. Don’t give me that look, young lady, it’s non-negotiable.”
Her mother took that moment to sweep in through the kitchen door and her dad scraped back the kitchen chair, getting to his feet.
“Darling, you look beautiful,” he said, kissing her briefly on the mouth and patting her arse in the stylish, wide-legged linen trousers.
It’s not right that my own mother makes me feel like a fat frump.
Claire was far from fat, but she felt like a beast next to her mum. Her mum, all five foot two of her, was dressed in a crisp, off-white shirt tucked into those linen trousers that showed off her tiny, twenty-two-inch waist. She looked like a movie star. In comparison, Claire, dressed in a baggy white jumper and skinny, stone-washed jeans that were badly in need of a wash and were sagging around the knees and arse, felt like a fat scruff. She slunk down in the kitchen chair, trying to magically shrink herself down to five foot two instead of the five foot ten she was.
If only I had small breasts and a smaller butt like Mum, she thought wistfully, because mine are waay out of control.
When her mum untangled herself from her husband and turned to look at Claire, her smile dropped like lead.
“So has this little misunderstanding been sorted out?”
Claire sighed heavily. “Yes, Mother.”
“Good. Honestly Claire, I don’t know why you act like this. You should never have taken a year out and just gone straight to University like your brother.”
Claire scowled. Her brother was such an arse, and it defeated her why she was the only one that could see it.
“Yes, well, I am not my brother, am I? We can’t all be as perfect as Ryan, can we?”
“Did someone mention my name?”
Speak of the devil…
Her brother sauntered into the kitchen, all easy-charm and languid grace that was unusual for a nineteen-year-old, especially one so tall. His floppy blonde hair – the same golden shade as hers and their mother – shone under the bright, overhead lighting. He looked so sickeningly healthy.
You wouldn’t think he shoved so much coke up his nose.
“Looking gorgeous, Mum,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.
Her mum blushed. “Thanks, sweetie.”
Claire cringed. Couldn’t they see what an actor he was? He was just so fake, it made her blood boil, it really did.
Ryan turned his megawatt beam of a smile onto his father, leaning casually against the worktop with his arms and legs folded.
“I’m taking your mother out for an early dinner,” James said, “so you two will have to fend for yourselves.”
“I’m cool, thanks. I’m meeting up with Mike tonight, we’re going to grab an Indian.”
“Why does he get to go out with his friends, and I don’t,” Claire pouted, knowing full well that she sounded like petulant teenager, but not being able to stop herself.
“Because he is only home for the Easter holiday, so therefore he can do pretty much what he pleases because he doesn’t live here,” her mum said.
“That’s so unfair.”
“Maybe you can talk some sense into her,” her dad said to Ryan. “Come on, love, we’ll be late.”
As soon as they were alone in the kitchen, her brother’s sunny smile dropped, his blue eyes turning as cold as a bright, winter’s sky.
“You’re such an arse, Claire. You can’t even fuck up properly. Why would you let yourself get caught out like that? I’m going out,” he said, heading for the door.
“Maybe I should tell them about your cocaine habit.”
He stopped dead, taking a moment before he turned around to face her.
“They would never believe you. I’ll just say it’s you taking it. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
Instantly, she was transported back to when they were kids, to when he used to hurt himself and claim it was her that had done it. She’d lost count of the amount of times he’d chucked himself down the stairs and said that it was her who had pushed him. Or that time he had stabbed the back of his own hand with a fork and blamed her. He had always made sure to hurt her in places where it could only be an accident, from a scraped knee as a result of a hard shove, to the worst thing he had ever done, which was hold a jam-jar with a trapped wasp inside it to her cheek until it had stung her. She still had nightmares about that one.
But thankfully, his bullying ways had stopped by the time they had turned twelve, to be replaced by a cruel indifference when their parents’ backs were turned.
That and something sleazier she didn’t care to think about.
“I’m not scared of you anymore, Ryan.”
“Scared of me? Why on earth would you be scared of me? What a funny thing to say.”
Not for the first time, she wondered if he was a borderline, functioning sociopath, or something. Her gaze slipped to his hand; it still bore the scars from the fork prongs, a constant reminder to Mum and Dad what a spiteful little brat she was.
He had always been a mean little bastard, and he still was.
“I really hate you, Ryan.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “You are such a stupid, fat cow.”
His scarred hand reached into the back-pocket of his jeans and he pulled out a clear little packet, full of white powder. He proceeded to empty it out next to the breadbin, and pulled out a twenty and a debit card from his wallet.
“You can’t do that here,” she gasped.
“I’ll do as I please. Besides, you’re stressing me out. I need to do a line before I meet Mike and I can’t be arsed going back upstairs.”
Claire glared at him, her heart racing in indignation. He ignored her, bowed his blonde head, and snorted up the neat line that he had efficiently shaped with a debit card.
“That’s better,” he said, rubbing his nose.
His pupils were huge in his blue eyes, and she looked away, sickened by him. Keeping her gaze averted, she went to pass him, but he was blocking the doorway.
“You know, sis, I’m going to fuck a right fatso tonight. She’s almost as fat as you. And she’s old. Like, twenty-five, or something. I mean, who does she think she is, thinking a hot young guy like me would actually be interested in her? I’m gonna nail the stupid fucking slag in the arse until she fucking bleeds. Nice tits, though,” he said, his gaze pointedly lingering on her chest, which thankfully, was hidden by the baggy pullover.
“You’re disgusting. Get out of my way.”
She barged past him, his laughter ringing in her ears. “What’s the matter?” he called after her. “Can’t you take a joke? You seriously need to lighten up…”
His voice faded away as she took the stairs two at a time to get away from him. In the safety of her bedroom, she slammed shut the door and leaned against it. She found she was shaking uncontro
llably, and she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like Ryan had never been a pig to her before; she guessed it was just because she had gotten used to him being away.
She perched on the edge of her bed, praying that Ryan wouldn’t come into her room and continue to taunt her. She doubted that he would; it wasn’t really his style. Her room was her space, and, for whatever reason, he seemed to respect that.
She lay down on her bed with a big sigh, waiting for the time until she had to go the McQueen’s to babysit.
CHAPTER FIVE
To Mary, the silence in the living-room was deafening. James was reading The Guardian, the newspaper held high and acting as a barrier between them. The dinner out had passed uneventfully, and now they had the house to themselves. The laptop scorched her thighs as she stared vacantly as the screen – a perfume review site that she really couldn’t give two craps about. Sighing heavily, she looked round the tastefully decorated living-room, from the purposely clashing soft-furnishings – one leather sofa, one floral upholstered, and a stripy armchair – to the Persian rug over the light-oak floorboards. Everything was so neat, so ordered. Everything was as it should be.
Yet that bad feeling remained; a vague sense of unease that gnawed away at the edges of her mind.
Claire knows. Somehow, she found out the truth about us…
What if their carefully ordered life was to come crashing down around their ears? What if they had lost her?
“Perhaps we were too hard on her,” Mary said, unable to tolerate the silence a second longer.
“You’ve certainly changed your tune.” He put down the paper and sighed heavily. “Well, come on then, if you want to talk, let’s talk. You wanted to avoid the subject at dinner.”
She met his gaze. “Maybe we shouldn’t have forced her to babysit tonight. Maybe it would have been better if we sat down and talked it through, you know, like a proper family.”
“A proper family? And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Inside, she shrivelled. That was out of order, and she knew it. She hadn’t meant it to come out quite that harsh, but she would be damned if she would back down and admit she had said something wrong.
“I just think that maybe I flew off the handle a little bit. Not you, me.”
“Women,” he said, running his hand through his dark hair. “I wish they’d make their bloody minds up.”
The comment wasn’t really meant – it was just designed to irritate her – but it had worked on the most superficial of levels.
“Sometimes, James, you’re such a sexist pig.”
The slightest smirk tugged at his lips, and despite herself, she couldn’t help returning it.
Still as handsome as ever.
“That’s why you married me.”
“Sod off.”
But she said it with a smile. She did love him, and always had done. From the first time she had met him, she had known he was ‘the one’. There had just been something about him, something special. Something different from all the other boys she had known. Even to this day, she still wasn’t quite sure what that ‘something’ was. Maybe it was the sad look that flitted across his brilliant green eyes when he thought no one was looking, the melancholy air that set him apart from the others.
He has the tortured soul of a poet, she thought, not for the first time. Not only that, he genuinely had no idea how good-looking he was.
“Do you think we should call her? Check she’s okay?”
“Of course she’s okay, what possible harm could befall her while babysitting for the McQueen’s? That’s not really the problem, is it?”
“So what is the problem?”
You know what the problem is, she said loudly in her head. Maybe she knows. Somehow, someway, she knows. And now she hates us and is acting out…
“The problem, James, is that she obviously feels that she can’t trust us. She’s never lied to us like this before, she always been such a sweet kid. It’s like she has something big on her mind…”
She let the implications of her words hang heavy in the air. James’s silence was all the proof she needed that he knew exactly what she was talking about.
“She’s a teenager, a bundle of hormones. So she lied to us, so what? It doesn’t mean anything…”
He was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. Mary didn’t move from her spot on the floral sofa. She supposed it was the standard, unspoken agreement between the average couple; if night had fallen then it was the man’s job to open the door. She figured that the chances of a murderous psychopath on their doorstep was slim to none, but even so, one never really knew that for certain, did they?
Sure enough, James got to his feet. “I’ll get that, shall I?”
“Yeah,” she smiled. “It could be a psychopath.”
“Yes, I suppose it could well be,” he said with the faintest trace of a smile.
“James?” she said to his departing back.
He stopped dead, his hand resting on the living-room doorknob. “Yes?”
“It’s just a teenaged thing, don’t you think? Hormones, and all that?”
“I’m sure it is, darling. Best get that door. It’s probably sales.”
Mary stared after him, wanting to say more in her quest to seek reassurance. She listened to his footsteps retreating down the hallway, fading into nothing.
* * *
James walked down the hallway, lost in thought, frowning to himself. Maybe Mary was right, maybe Claire knew more than she was letting on.
No. Impossible. We’re just jumping at nothing, everything’s fine.
Sadness clutched at his heart and blanketed his mind. He hated feeling like this. He knew himself well enough by now to recognise when one of his black moods were coming on. Or a ‘funk’, as he liked to call them. Mary wasn’t stupid, sometimes the full weight of his past bore down on him and he felt like he was suffocating with his secrets. Buried by his own inadequacies and betrayals. He was never unkind to her, or purposely shut her out, but she still sensed something was eating away at him. There were only so many times he could say that work was stressing him out.
And sometimes, when he got to feeling like this, he would do things behind her back that he had no business doing…
No. Stop. What happened wasn’t my fault. My past has nothing to do with anything. And it has nothing to do with Claire.
Was that even true? He wasn’t even sure what he believed anymore. And what would Mary think – the only woman he had ever allowed himself to love – if she knew the truth about him? The whole truth.
Don’t go down this road, he told himself sternly. He really had to stop picking at his distant past like an old scab. It was funny really, the things that sometimes triggered him, usually the most innocuous of things…
James violently pulled open the door, as if that action alone would dislodge the nasty, festering thoughts.
“Hello, Mr Atwood.”
James stared in confusion at the man on his doorstep.
What the hell was Paul Breed doing here? How does he even know where I live?
“Paul,” he said, keeping his voice neutral and bringing himself up to his full height and puffing out his chest. “What are you doing here?”
He was dressed all in black and had a rucksack slung over one shoulder.
A sense of unreality washed over him. It was the most disorientating, dreamlike sensation; that feeling of unease before a dream turns into a nightmare.
Fleetingly – and stupidly – he wondered if Paul had already found another job as a door-to-door salesman after being sacked that very same afternoon. Perhaps this was a coincidence, their house just happening to be on his ‘knock-list’.
“I thought you and I could have a little chat. Man to man.”
This situation is spiralling out of control…
James blinked. What situation, for goodness sake? There was no situation.
James pointedly looked at his watch with all the calm arrogance that he
could muster. But his heart pitter-pattered against his sternum like the wings of an aggravated insect and his hands shook.
“I’m sorry, Paul, but it’s late. I’ve finished work and I’d like to be alone with my family. So if you don’t mind, perhaps you can come and see me tomorrow morning at work and we can continue with this conversation then.”
He began to shut the door, but it wouldn’t close. Paul’s booted foot was rammed in the crack. For the briefest second, his vision swam and panic surged upwards from his guts. He got himself under control pretty quickly and met Paul’s icy-green gaze head-on.
For the first time, he noticed that Paul’s eyes were the exact same shade of green as his own.
He has my mother’s eyes.
Why hadn’t he noticed that fact before? Maybe he had. Maybe, for the exact same reason he had hired him, he had fired him.
It can’t be true.
“Hmmm. As tempting as that offer is, I am going to have to respectfully decline. The thing is, we have so much to discuss, don’t you think? About my past. About why you saw fit to abandon me.”
In a rush that almost knocked him off his feet, James got it. “Not in front of Mary.”
When it came down to it, it wasn’t such a big shock after all. Because deep down, he had always known. Somehow, for twenty-five and a half years, he had always known. For twenty-five and a half years, he had secretly been waiting for this moment.
A smile tugged at the corner of Paul’s lips – lips so much like his own – a deep, blood-red; thin, wide and curved.
“When, then? At work, in front of the secretary? In front of all your staff?”
Just the thought of that brought James out in a cold sweat. “No, fine, not at work. But not now, either. Not in front of Mary.”
“When, then?”
“Tomorrow. We’ll do this tomorrow. I’ll take the day off work we’ll go somewhere, just you and me. We’ll sort this out. Do you want money?” he said in a rush. “I can give you money.”