“What do you want for dessert? Yoghurt or banana?”
“Banana.”
“So maybe she wants to come and play sometime?” asks Bridget.
Yasmin swivels to look at her. Damn me for desperate, using my child as a way of making friends for myself. The kid's got to have an adult attached somewhere.
“Maybe when Chloe comes tomorrow?”
Yasmin sounds suddenly condescending. “I don't think that'll be necessary, Mum,” she says.
She's a bit offended. “Oh. All right, then. Sorry.”
“It's okay,” says Yasmin. “We see plenty of each other. It's just – she doesn't really like grownups.”
“Fair enough.” There are a fair number of grownups who don't like children, after all.
“She says you're okay,” says Yasmin, propitiatively.
“Well, I'm honoured.”
“She just doesn't – want to be friends. With you.”
“Fine,” says Bridget. “Whatever.”
“Sorry,” says Yasmin.
“Believe me,” says Bridget, “I'm not upset if a nine-year-old doesn't want to be friends with me.”
Only upset enough to sound like a nine-year-old myself.
The mobile rings in another room.
“Phone's ringing,” says Yasmin.
“Thanks, smartarse. Where is it?”
“It's your phone,” says Yasmin. “As you're always pointing out.”
“You're not getting down 'til you've finished.”
Yasmin shrugs, American-adolescent style. “Whatever.”
She can't help smiling as she leaves the room. That's the worst thing about disciplining children: the urge to laugh when cheekiness is done with flair and imagination. The phone's in her handbag, she remembers now. In the sitting room. It's on its third repetition of Chocolate Salty Balls when she puts her hand on it, buried down in the bottom under the empty diary and the spare tights. She hits the on button as she pulls it out, puts it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“You are so in for it now,” he says.
“Kieran,” she says. Thinks about hanging straight up, stays on the line. I have to get a new phone, she thinks. Can he find me by my records?
“When I find you,” he says, “you are so fucking in for it.”
“Go away, Kieran,” she says.
“Don't even think,” he says, “about telling me to fuck off.”
“I didn't. I told you to go away.”
“Shut the fuck up! Shut it!
What do you want, Kieran?”
“I want to give you a last chance. Tell me where my daughter is or I'll find out, and when I do…”
“That's why I'm not telling you,” she says.
“You've got to stop calling,” she says.
“Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it?”
“I'm not going to answer. From now on, when I see it's you, I'm not going to answer. If you're going to call and threaten us, I won't answer.”
He ignores her.
“I want to speak to my daughter.”
“Tough,” she says harshly. “She doesn't want to speak to you.”
“It's not up to you.”
“It is,” she says.
“I'll fucking – you wait, Bridget. Just you wait. You can't stay hidden forever.”
She can't resist goading him, the distance giving her a sense of power she would never have had a month ago.
“You sound fucking pathetic. Little man, little Hitler. Don't you know it was your threats that made us go away in the first place? You're fucking pathetic. That's why you used to take it out on me, wasn't it? Beating up your family because you couldn't stand up for yourself when it came to people your own size.”
“Fuck you, Bridget,” he says.
“Yeah,” she sneers. “That's good. You always had a way with words, didn't you, Kieran?”
“Aah, fuck you!” he repeats. “You can't do this! You can't keep me away from my daughter!”
“Or what?” she says triumphantly. “Or you'll call the police?”
Silence.
“In case you'd forgotten, Kieran Fletcher,” she snarls, “the police were already meant to be keeping you away from her. A small matter of a thing called a restraining order, yes? You remember?”
“You're a lying bitch,” he says, sulkily.
“Yeah, but I'm not, am I? Fuck you, Kieran. It's because you couldn't control yourself that we've had to go away, and you're never getting back into our lives. Never, do you hear me? You can go fuck yourself and you can threaten me all you want, but you're never seeing her again. Fucking free with your fists cunting bastard!”
Her voice has risen to a shriek as she speaks. She hates him, hates him with boiling rage. Hates him for the years of fear, for the broken skin and broken bones, for the look in her daughter's eye she's not seen for weeks now.
“You will never find us. Do you hear me? It's over! Go and find someone else to bully!”
Bridget stabs a thumb onto the off button, throws the phone onto the sofa. It bounces off a cushion, slips to the floor, skids under the chair. Bridget hugs herself, wipes a lock of hair from her eyes. She feels shaky, strong, weak, tearful, brave. She feels free and trapped, enraged and at peace. She has told him. Finally told him. All of it, to his face, no fear of reprisal, no repercussions. Right, she thinks. And now we go on with our lives. I'll get a new phone. Leave that one down there. Let it ring until it dies.
She turns round to return to the kitchen.
Yasmin stands in the doorway. She is shiny white. As if she'd seen a ghost.
Chapter Thirty
“Mummy?”
She swims up out of sleep, heavy as though lead weights have been attached to her limbs. The clock reads 3:17. Her mouth is dry and furry.
There's a small figure in the doorway.
She smacks her lips together, unglues her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “What is it, baby? What's up?”
“Can I get in with you?”
“What's happened?”
“I saw Daddy in my room.”
“Oh, darling.”
She lifts the duvet and opens the bed up. Yasmin crosses the room and climbs in beside her. This is wrong. Supernanny would be wagging her finger if she saw me now. But it's after three and my baby's in a state.
Yasmin smells of talc and No More Tears. Bridget puts her arms round the frail body, breathes her in.
“He was standing at the foot of my bed,” says Yasmin. She sounds – defeated, exhausted.
“Oh darling,” she says again. She'd been half-expecting this. Whenever there was an incident with Kieran in London, Yasmin would be clingy and nervous for days, following her from room to room and kicking up a fuss whenever they left the house. I can't expect it all to clear up in a few weeks. She's lived her whole life with the shadowy promise that one night he might get in; you don't shrug that sort of history off just by moving.
“You know it was a dream, don't you?”
She feels Yasmin's hair scrape across her cheek as she nods. “But I dream about him.”
“I know. So do I, sometimes. But, darling. They're only dreams. Nothing in a dream can hurt you. It's just – stuff inside your head. Dreams are good. They're memories cleaning themselves out.”
“Then why do they have to be so scary?”
“Because –” she doesn't really have an answer for this. Except that she suspects that it's something that afflicts most species. She remembers the way Jinx, the fat tabby they had when she was Yasmin's age, used sometimes to caterwaul in his sleep, legs pumping as though he were running. Hunting or being hunted? Either, or both: but it was plain to see that what he was seeing was real to him. “I don't know, darling. It's just one of nature's little tricks.
“Chloe says that if you die in a dream you die for real.”
“Yuh, I know. Everyone says that. Of course, there's no way to actually tell if it's true.”
But I've always s
aved myself, haven't I, in nightmares? Always come to just before I hit the ground, or summoned the will to soar upward again, an inch from the pavement.
“I don't want him to find us,” says Yasmin
“I know, baby, I know.”
“He won't find us, will he?”
“No,” she says, definitely, defiantly. “And he won't be calling again anymore, either. I'm going to get a new phone, and then he'll never be able to call us again.”
“Do you promise?”
How can I promise? How can I promise something I can't be certain of? How do parents lie so blithely to their children, just for the sake of convenience?
She shifts, pulls her daughter closer to her bosom, kisses the top of her silky head.
“I promise, baby,” she says. “You're safe here. There's nothing here that can hurt us.”
Chapter Thirty-one
At least they're not rationing water, he thinks. Even though I can't have a bath more than three inches deep to save fuel and I've three sons I haven't heard from in weeks, at least my pansies don't have to suffer.
He's even managed to scrounge a sack of mature horse manure from the stables at the dairy – an unheard-of triumph, and probably illegal given that everything is supposed to be going toward agricultural production, but the Bodmin Road flowers were his pride and joy before Adolf and his hordes, and he'll be blowed if he lets them fail because there's a war on.
Arthur Boden replenishes his watering can for the fifth time from the greenish supply in the horse trough, and sloshes his way up to the far end of the platform. It's a beautiful day – a blazing day, perfect for watching the dogfights further along the coast over the channel – and he has taken his jacket off while he works. It's easier, in these days of shortages, to get the sweat stains out of a shirt than to get a uniform cleaned. He hums as he lugs the can, screws his eyes up against the light.
There's a small girl sitting on the bench behind the flower trough. His display is so grandiose, and the child so scrawny and drab, that he hadn't noticed her. He doesn't remember her coming through the ticket office, but he's only been on duty since noon. She has a battered brown suitcase with her which looks like it's made of cardboard. She wears a dress that may once have been made of red gingham, but its general greyness makes it hard to tell. It doesn't fit her, is far too large, and has been darned at the armpits, make-do-and-mend style. It's her hair that really attracts his attention, though. It stands out from her scalp as though it has been roughly shaved, and recently. Nits, he thinks. That one's had nits.
He pauses in front of her, feels the watering can bounce off his shins.
She gives him a look.
“What?” she says. Challengingly.
“There's not another train due in for four hours,” he says. “Are you sure you're in the right place?”
“What's it got to do with you?”
Arthur Boden puffs himself out, annoyed that his authority should be called into question. “I'm the stationmaster, that's what, young lady,” he informs her, “and I've got every right to be finding out about people's business. There's a war on, you know.”
“Yer, yer, yer,” says the child. “Change the record, Mister. This one's got a scratch on it.”
“Well, there's no need to be rude,” he says. Walks off to water the pansies, muttering under his breath about young people and modern times.
She doesn't move from her spot on the bench while he drenches the half-tubs of compost, feels the plants breathe out gratitude and pleasure as the water reaches their roots. It's funny, he thinks, how, once you're responsible for a garden, it becomes so much more alive. You can practically see plants taking a stretch, laughing with pleasure, when you give them a drink. A bit like people, really. In the Legion on a Saturday night. I must remember to tell Ena about that when I get home
The child starts kicking her legs, swinging them into the space beneath the bench, fingers gripping the slats to give her better purchase. What a way to pass a summer afternoon, just a sitting on an empty station finding grownups to be rude to. That's not country behaviour. I'd have got a clip round the ear if I spent more than ten minutes on the village bench. The country's going to wrack and ruin, that's about the truth of it, the blitz driving London slum dwellers all over the place like rats off a sinking ship, bringing their city ways to places where they're not wanted. You can't turn your back on half of them or they'll be away with anything that's not nailed down.
He glances at her again. Nasty, mean little face, he thinks. Poor little mite. Probably hasn't stood a chance, wherever she's come from. Nothing but bread and dripping to eat, never seen a vegetable before she came here and not a breath of fresh air from one day's end to the next. He softens, re-approaches.
“You off somewhere?”
The child rolls her eyes insolently, lets loose a groan. “I tolja,” she says, “it's got nuffink to do wiv you.”
“Well, there's no need to be rude,” he says again. “I'd be well within my rights to order you off this station if I felt like it.”
“Well, bully for you. Aintchoo the big almighty.”
Arthur sits down on the bench beside her. He's a kindly man, really, under the veneer of officialdom. Doesn't like to see kiddies on their own. Doesn't feel it's natural. He digs in his pocket and finds the eighth of Mint Imperials he got off the ration at the beginning of the week, in their crumpled paper bag. Puts one in his mouth and offers the bag.
She looks at him suspiciously.
“Go on, have one,” he says. “They're not poisoned.”
She gazes at the sweets, looks up at him, back at the sweets.
“They won't be here forever,” he says.
She snatches a sweet from the top, crams it into her mouth as though afraid he'll change his mind. Sits there with it pressing her cheek out like a gobstopper, and sucks and sucks.
“What do you say?” he asks.
“You ain't supposed to be giving sweets to children,” she says.
“And you're not supposed to be taking them,” he reminds her.
She shrugs. “Well,” she says. “Fanks.”
“You're welcome,” he says. “Been evacuated, have you?”
She shrugs again. “Ain't going to stay evacuated, neither.”
“Going back to London, are you?”
“Don't be stupid,” she says, “Portsmouth.”
“Ah, right,” he says.
“My Mum's there.”
“Ah, right,” he says again.
They sit, and suck, and she swings her legs in the sunshine.
“Missing her, are you?” he asks.
She shrugs again. Swaps her sweet into the opposite cheek. “Dunno about that, but I bloody hate it here.”
“Ooh,” he says, ignoring the swearword, though his own children would have been standing in a corner by now, “I'm sorry to hear that. You told anyone you were off, did you?”
“Course not. Ain't nobody spoken to me since Tuesday anyway. I'm in Coventry.”
Five days, he thinks. That's a fair old time to put a child into Coventry for.
“What, no-one?”
“No-one. Buggers. Snobs, the lot of 'em.”
“I daresay,” he says. He imagines some old-fashioned Cornish family, landed suddenly with this foul-mouthed larrikin. Chances are they wouldn't be too happy. But five days… “Where you been staying?”
“Meneglos.”
“That's a fair old way. What did you do? Walk here?”
“Don't be stupid,” she says. Sneers. “They was all going in to the cinema in Bodmin. Only when we got there she suddenly goes Lily you're not coming in with us cause I'm not to be trusted, apparently, so she says I've got to sit in the car and not touch nothing for two hours while they're all in there watching Pimpernel Smith and I thought, bugger that for a game of soldiers. I'm making myself scarce.”
“I don't blame you. Don't you think they'll be worried, though?”
She's broken through to the mi
nt's soft, powdery interior, concentrates on it for a second or two before replying: “Course not. Glad to see the back of me, more like.”
“All right,” he says. “You know best, I daresay.”
“She's told me so often enough,” says Lily.
“Has she? And who's “she”? The cat's mother?”
“Mrs Bloody Blakemore,” she says. “bloody Bitch Blakemore, I call her.”
“Do you?” he asks. The name has a familiar ring to it. One of the big houses around Wadebridge way.
“She's a snob and no mistake,” says Lily.
Probably not wrong, he thinks. Still, what am I meant to do? These people are in loco parentis. She'll probably be worrying herself sick.
“So you don't like it there, then?”
“I want my Mum,” she says firmly. “At least my Mum didn't used to lock me in bloody cupboards.”
Mmm, he thinks. A vivid imagination, as well.
“And she hits me, and all,” she says.
“Hits you? What for?”
“Who cares what bloody for? I ain't done nothing bloody wrong but she blames me for everyfink.”
“Oh, dear,” he says. “It does sound like you've been having a hard time of it.”
“Can I have another one of them?” She nods at the mints.
That's my ration for the month. The cheek of it. Doesn't even say please.
“All right,” he says, unwillingly, regretfully. Offers the packet once more, sees his precious sugar allowance disappear into that toothless maw.
“Tell you what. I was just about to make myself a nice cup of tea. Don't suppose you'd be interested, would you?”
“Don't mind,” says Lily.
“I'll take that as a yes,” he says. “Tell you what. You wait here and I'll bring it out. It's a nice day. Might as well make the most of the sunshine.”
“Toodleooo,” she says.
Arthur Boden walks back up the platform to the station house. He doesn't like it when he has to do this: interfere. But what can you do? They all hate it, without exception, these poor mites, dragged away from their families and dumped in strange places, with strange people and their strange habits. He's had one staying who screamed the first time she saw a cow. She'd never even heard of cows, certainly didn't know they were where milk came from. But you can't have them wandering about willy-nilly all over the train system. Anybody could get them, and even if they did make it home, there's no guarantee that home even exists any more.
Hold My Hand Page 18