Hold My Hand

by Serena Mackesy

  “No,” she says, “it was a breeze. I'm only dong it out of spite.”

  Mark goes red. Looks away, abashed.

  “No, look – I'm sorry,” she says. “That was unfair. I'm just so used to – it used to divide up fairly evenly, you know, between the people who despised me and the ones who wanted all the gory details. I had to tell them at her school, so he couldn't come and pick her up, and it was like giving an interview to a tabloid newspaper. Every detail, they wanted, and you could see the gloat, the it's-not-me pleasure, under their sympathy. And my downstairs neighbour, he used to just turn his face away when we passed him in the hall, like we had leprosy or something. It doesn't matter what they say in the press, how much they try to educate people; people still have this feeling, you know. That it's not just a question of luck that some husbands turn out to be monsters and some turn out to be pussycats. They've read all the stuff about abuse going on down generations, and they've translated it into some people attracting it. That somehow you must stay because you like it.”

  She remembers his fists. The pulpy sound as he caught her eye, the flash of pain as her head snapped back on her shoulders. The white shock on Yasmin's face as she looked down at her own snapped wrist. The looks in the hospital: she says it was her husband but she could have done it herself. It's not just men, you know. Women aren't angels…

  I'll find you, Bridget. You can't hide.

  “He tied me up,” she says. “He used to tie me up, and leave me there. He had handcuffs and he'd fix me to the bed, and if I tried to stop him he'd make it worse. And he'd go out to work, and Yas would be in her cot, and she'd be crying, and there'd be nothing I could do. I'd just lie there and listen to it all day and wait for him to come home and see what he wanted to do…”

  It's not a cathartic unburdening. She doesn't feel better as she tells him. Problems shared are often wounds reopened. She glances up at him, and his expression is unreadable. Then he swallows and looks down.

  “I'm sorry,” he says. “I had no idea.”

  “No-one ever does,” she replies. “The guys he worked with – they all think he's a good guy. A laugh. I could tell what they thought of me when they saw me. The dowdy wife, dragging the menfolk down. They thought it was a joke. Going off to nightclubs with him, watching him pull while I waited at home. And that guy – the guy downstairs. He thought I was the scum of the earth. I remember him once, one Sunday, turning round on the stairs and just hissing at me. Like, can't you stop that baby crying? Do you even think about your neighbours? And I couldn't – I had a black eye, for God's sake, and he behaved like he couldn't even see it… and I don't want to go back there again. I can't.”

  “Bridget, you should tell the school, at least. They should know. In case… you know…”

  She looks up again. Fixes his eye. “Leave it, Mark,” she says. “It's my decision. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have involved you.”

  “Yeah, but you have. I'm – Bridget. Look, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you think there's the remotest chance he could find you… at least take my number. If you're worried. Call me, or Tina. Either of us. We won't mind. We'll come. We'll probably be quicker than the police.”

  “I admire you,” he says, and she feels a jolt of surprise. “Now I know, I really admire you. You're a brave girl, and though I know it's a futile promise, I have a feeling you're going to be okay, now. But Bridget, there's a fine line between brave and stupid.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I know.”

  “Promise me,” he says.

  “Yes. Can we change the subject?”

  “Okay,” says Mark. “That's fine. As long as you know.”

  “I know,” says Bridget. And to her surprise, she finds herself believing it. She gets up and finds some tea mugs. Mark Carlyon sits at the table and watches her move about the room. I understand, now, he thinks. Why she's so unwilling to meet men's eyes. How come she's so careful with her information. She's got guts. I just wish there was something I could really do to help her.

  “So tell me,” he says as she goes to the fridge and gets out the milk, “about these electrics. At least I can sort those out for you.”

  Chapter Forty

  “Willy was a sheepdog, lying in the grass

  a bumblebee came along and stung him on the –”

  She jumps high in the air, lands with a thump. She's been doing it, revelling in the circularity of the rhyme, for the two minutes it has taken to negotiate the corridor.

  “- ASK no questions, tell no lies,

  I saw a policeman, doing up his –”

  Jump. Thump

  “- FLIES are bad, bugs are worse.

  Mary had a little lamb and she was very silly,

  She threw him up into the air and caught him by his –”

  Jump. Thump.

  “WILLY was a sheepdog, lying in the grass.

  A bumblebee came along and stung him up the –”

  Jump. Thump. She reaches the bottom of the attic stairs; pauses as she hears a voice drifting downward.

  “ARSE!” she bellows.

  The voice pauses, as though its owner is listening, then picks up again. It's Tessa: singing in that plummy voice of hers. It's Greensleves she is singing – though Lily, of course, not having benefited from a private education, doesn't recognise the tune.

  She climbs the stairs.

  Tessa is in the far attic, beyond the dormitory room where the three refugee girls used to sleep and where Lily sleeps still, behind a door which has been locked since she arrived here. Of course Tessa would have the key. They're only keeping light-fingered interlopers out, not hiding some terrible secret.

  Lily is intrigued. She's always wanted to know what was behind that door: has always suspected that the room contained treasures.

  She hovers at the doorway. The first thing she notices is dust. Dust and dust-sheets. The room is crowded. More than crowded: crammed. They must have moved a lot of the contents of the dormitory room into here in a hurry, because there's no sign of organisation about the way things lie. It's an Aladdin's cave of a place: jumbled and cramped, but full of intrigues. Lily steps into the room. She can't see any sign of Tessa. Starts as she catches sight of a figure half-hidden by a dustsheet, then half-giggles when she realises that it is herself, reflected in a full-length console mirror.

  “Try this one,” says Tessa's voice from the far side of the room.

  Lily tenses. Who's she in here with? She didn't see anyone arrive this morning, or any time since Tessa came back on half-term. She's been moping about the place like a wet weekend: no-one to play with now the others have left, and Lily being given a wide berth.

  “Silly back,” says Tessa. “It's dressing-up clothes, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it gets broken. Nobody's saving them for posterity.”

  Lily works her way up a narrow, winding aisle between looming cliffs of stacked boxes. Emerges into a cleared space to see Tessa kneeling on the splintery floorboards, in amidst a group of three tin trunks. Waves of fabric and feathers and diamante tumble from their lips. Lily gasps. She's never seen anything like it. Clothing from her grandparents' era and clothing from a world that was swept away forever by the Great War. Velvet, brocade, lace, silk. Full-length gloves in ivory satin. Hats the size of bicycle wheels, trimmed with Marabou and silk arums. Evening dresses of satin and damask and crepe de chine. Embroidered hems and puffball sleeves and yokes covered in beading. Tessa holds out a tiara of paste and copper leaves to one of three dolls which she has lined up against the wall. She is wearing an Edwardian S-waist ballgown, oddly flat without the undergarments designed to shape it, the quilted bosom lank and bathetic over her liberty bodice. The dress is a good foot too long for her, and trails away over her feet like giant swaddling bands.

  “No?” she says. “Well, if you're not going to, you don't mind if I do, do you?”

  She takes the tiara and places it on her blonde locks. Tucks a curl behind an ear and preens for her indifferent china au
dience.

  Beautiful, thinks Lily. Imagine having so much money that you just dump this stuff in trunks. That you think it's fit for children to play with rather than wearing it yourself. The things my Mum could have done with that lot. She'd look fantastic. Too good for Portsmouth docks. If she had clothes like this, she could go to the classy hotels, mix with the nobs. Not have to take what she can get from oil-smeared grease-monkeys on shore-leave for the night.

  She longs for Tessa to look up, welcome her, let her try on the embroidered capes, the pink satin bedjacket, the silver silk flapper dress with the fringe of a thousand sparkling beads. Knows it won't happen.

  She steps forward and says: “What are you up to?”

  Tessa jumps, turns in her direction. Looks guilty for a moment, as though she's been caught doing something she shouldn't. Looks her up and down, top to toe. And then something predictable happens. Tessa tilts her chin, swivels her eyes toward the ceiling and turns her back.

  “What's that lot, then?”

  Tessa doesn't answer. Lily steps forward, comes to stand by her elbow. “I said, what's all this?”

  Tessa's eyes flick towards her, flick away again. She picks up the nearest of the dolls and puts it in her lap. Takes, from the left-hand trunk, a child's christening gown: cream ruffled lace with a matching bonnet attached by a ribbon. Starts pushing the doll's head through the neck-hole. The doll, far too small even for something designed for a three-month-old baby, pops out of the top, looking swamped.

  “You're not still playing with dollies?” asks Lily. “At your age?”

  Lily now she's nine years old, is itchily aware of her own maturity. She sniggers, nastily. If Tessa's going to persist with being snotty, then she's not going to try to be nice in return.

  “I haven't played with a dolly since I was five,” she informs the stiff-turned back.

  “There,” says Tessa to her doll, self-consciously, “You look lovely.”

  Lily tries another tack. She longs to be invited to join in, to plunge her hands in among the textures, to rub her face against those soft jewel colours.

  “You look like a Christmas tree,” she says. Not unkindly. Christmas trees, in her book, are among creation's loveliest inventions.

  Again, no response. As if I was a ghost, thinks Lily.

  She bends to look at the contents of the nearest trunk, the one that contains the dresses. Reaches out for an edge of scarlet brocade that has caught her eye, feels a hand slap against the back of her hand. Jumps back, shocked and says: “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  “I could have sworn,” says Tessa to the dolls, “that I heard a dog barking.”

  The dolls stare back, impassive.

  “Or maybe it's rats,” says Tessa. “Something certainly stinks around here.”

  “Hello?” says Lily. “I'm right in front of you?”

  “Some people,” Tessa tells the dolls, pointedly, “don't know when they're not wanted. Have you noticed that?”

  Oh, I see, thinks Lily. I'm in Coventry again. Very clever. Very grown-up. Must have learned this at that lah-di-dah school of hers. It's just the sort of thing they teach Young Ladies to do, because Young Ladies aren't allowed just to give someone a clout and have done with it. Cow. Still, what do you expect? Her mother's daughter, after all. I thought she was better than the rest of her family, but of course she's not. Just more cowardly in the way she goes about things.

  “I'll tell you what,” says Tessa, “it's getting really stuffy in here. I know what you mean about the smell. Shall we go to my bedroom? It's more comfortable there. More private.”

  “All righty,” says Lily. I'm not going to play along with this nonsense. I will make her acknowledge me.

  “No,” snaps Tessa. “I didn't invite you.”

  “Right,” says Lily. “So you can hear me, then.”

  “Go away,” says Tessa. “Mummy says I'm not to have anything to do with you.”

  “Why?” asks Lily.

  “You're a bad influence,” says Tessa. “Mummy says you can't be trusted to behave.”

  “Tessa!” cries Lily. She feels a great wrench somewhere near her heart. She's been looking forward to Tessa coming home. To having another child in the house, someone her own age, not just the baleful mother stalking silently past her, lips pursed. Tessa used to speak to her in the Summer, when there was no-one else around. They were almost friends. They dammed the stream together, one afternoon. She'd hoped they would be friends.

  I'm alone. I'm all alone. Why are they doing this to me?

  “Go away,” says Tessa.

  “Why? You don't have to do what they tell you!”

  Tessa looks, abruptly, up at her, standing by the tailor's dummy, wringing her hands. “But I do,” she says. “I'm sorry, Lily, but I can't. Mummy says you're a liar and a troublemaker, and she says she'll give me the slipper if she catches me talking to you. I can't.”

  Tears prick at Lily's eyes. This is so unjust. So unjust.

  “Your mother is a cow,” she says.

  Tessa struggles to her feet. “No!” she shouts. “Don't you dare call my mother names! She took you in when no-one else would and you should be jolly well grateful! Go away, Lily! I don't want to talk to you!”

  Lily, enraged, shoves her. Tessa stumbles, catches herself on her own hem, narrowly avoids plunging into the nearest trunk.

  “That does it!” she runs at the houseguest, shoves back so hard and so suddenly that Lily is caught off guard, falls against the dummy, crashes to the ground beside it.

  “Just don't!” shouts Tessa. “Don't come near me! I don't want to have anything to go with you! Just go away!”

  She gathers up the knee-length skirt and cotton blouse she has discarded on the floor and stalks to the stairs, skirts hitched up around her knees.

  “You don't half look like an idiot,” Lily calls at her haughty back. Silly moo. As if she wanted to be friends with a toffee-nosed suck-up anyway. She rubs her ribcage where she's caught it on the sharp-turned leg of an old chaise longue, fights the urge to cry. “Bugger off, then! See if I care!”

  Tessa doesn't reply. Leaves the floor, goes downstairs.

  “I don't care,” says Lily, aloud to the empty air, “I don't bloody care.”

  She stays there a while, staring at the roof timbers. I don't care. I won't be here forever. I'll get away one day.

  As she sits up, her eye is caught by the clothes in the trunks. Might as well make the most of it while they're open. It is a glory of colour and feel. Motheaten, some of it, and grimed with decades, but Lily has never seen such riches all in one place. She crawls across the floor, settles down among the opulence. She fingers the fabrics, strokes the softness of a discarded feather boa, holds up a 1920s Cleopatra headdress of beads which match the flapper dress, allows it to twinkle in the dim light like a chandelier. It fills her with a strange, unquantifiable longing.

  She strips off her faded gingham dress and drops it on the floor; selects a long bias-cut gown in champagne slipper-satin and pulls it over her head. No need to waste time with hooks and zippers: Lily is so slight that, although its original owner must have been light as gossamer in her partner's arms as they whirled across some long-forgotten ballroom floor, the dress hangs from her scrawny frame and highlights the bones that ridge her sternum. In the right-hand trunk, she finds a pair of satin mules, scuffed from overuse, slips them on and hobbles, cloche in hand, over to the mirror. Turns this way and that to admire herself in her finery.

  “Don't mind if I do,” she says. Pulls the front of the neckline down to reveal her non-existent cleavage, the way she's seen her mother do as she prepared to go out of the door at night.

  Padding along the corridor, Tessa bumps into Hugh. Feels suddenly awkward, dressed in her cast-off finery. She's not felt comfortable around Hugh since he went to Eton, she realises. It is as though her brother went away and some intrusive, condescending stranger came back in his place. She hadn't even realised he was back yet.


  “Hullo!” he says. “What are you wearing?”

  She looks down at herself. “Oh, just some stuff from the dressing-up box,” she says.

  “Dressing-up box?”

  “You know. In the attic.”

  “Dressing-up? The mater'll have your guts for garters if she finds you in that lot in the house.”

  “I'm going to get changed in my room.”

  “All right, then. So. How's school?”

  “Fine,” she says. “You know. Ghastly.”

  “Same here,” he says. “So which of the lumpen proles is there left, then? Or have we got the place to ourselves at last?”

  “Typical,” says Tessa. “The only one left is the horrid one.”

  “What? Lousy Lily?”

  She nods.

  “Hah!” he says. “Street-urchin still here, eh? Never mind, Tess. Where is she?”

  Tessa jerk her head toward the attic stairs. “Up there,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” says Tessa. “That's why I'm down here. She started shoving me.”

  “Well, we'll see about that,” he says.

  Tessa freezes, looks at him.

  “What?”

  “Don't,” says Tessa.

  “Shut up, Tessa,” says Hugh. “It's none of your business.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Come on,” he says. “Let's go to the pub. Tina's down there and I bet you could do with a change of scene.”

  He's washing his hands at the kitchen sink. His hands and his lean, well-muscled forearms. They seem to be covered in black grease, which surprises her as she didn't think things like black grease were part of the electrical canon.

  “Um…”

  “She can go and stay at ours. Our Mum's sitting tonight and I don't suppose she'll mind another.”

  She can't think of another excuse, though she finds the invitation strangely unnerving. She's not been out out – the sort of out that has no justification attached other than having fun – since… since she can't remember. Since Yasmin, she supposes. Kieran started going out by himself soon after she was born, and never offered to include her. And, like many people who play away themselves, he was full of suspicion and jealousy when it came to the idea of her going out without him. After she got a couple of fingers broken in a slamming door for wanting to go on a hen night, she got more wary of asking permission, and it didn't take long for the old friends, discouraged by her noncommittal responses, to drop away and find other, more sociable, companions.