The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  The Home

  SARAH STOVELL

  Dedicated with love to the memory of my unforgettable friend,

  Nicola Carter

  1978–2019

  She always said that if we ever got married, ours would be a black wedding in the tiny stone church by Meddleswater. She wanted the ceremony in the half-light of a December morning, when the lake would lie hard as glass, the church barely visible in the mist from its waters.

  I can picture her now, sweeping up the aisle towards me, no father on her arm, no mother of the bride at the front of the church, no train of bridesmaids behind her. There would be only her, white-faced and spectral, her black dress whispering across the floor, her eyes shrouded behind a veil, and at her throat the choker I bought her. There might be flowers, too – black tulips in her hands, black roses at the altar.

  And we would be married, she and I, and we’d step into another life, the life we’d dreamed was waiting for us after this one, where we could be together without others trying to part us, where no one would tell us we were too young, or too broken, or too fragile to know what we were doing.

  Because we were young, it was true. We were fragile, too. But we weren’t fragile like flowers. We were fragile like bombs.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Part Two

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Part Three

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  Part Four

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  Part Five

  79

  80

  81

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One

  1

  This isn’t how we’d planned it. They’ve just found her on the ground outside the church, wailing beside my body.

  She’s going to make lots of mistakes over the next few days, but hanging around my corpse is her first. She should have run. She should have run far away from here, back to the arms of strangers, or the arms of anyone who’d have her…

  No one knows what to do with her. The police are murmuring about her age, putting her at around fifteen. They’re right. But on the inside, she’s ancient as the world. We both are.

  They can’t stop her crying. They can’t get her to move. She’s shouting and protesting and holding on to me, but I am already cold.

  I’m furious with her for doing this. She used to say she’d come with me. ‘If you go, I’m going too,’ she’d say, taking my hand in hers and looking me straight in the eye. It was a promise as sacred as a wedding vow, but like everything else between us, it ended up broken long ago.

  I’m going to haunt her. I’m going to make her think she’s losing her mind and tip her slowly over the edge until she can bear it no longer and joins me here.

  Would that be murder? Maybe; but no more murderous than what she’s just done to me.

  2

  This isn’t a proper interview room, not like the ones you see on TV, with hard chairs and no windows and mean-faced coppers. This is a room designed especially for people like me: young suspects they don’t want to frighten. They’ve put sofas in here and plants, and a rug and a small table with mats to rest your drinks. You can see it’s meant to be comfortable, and they’ve even got women officers to interview me so I don’t get too agitated. Non-threatening. That’s the sort of word they’d use to describe it, but it’s actually bollocks. They want to put you at ease and make you talk, but there’s nothing more threatening than a room designed to be non-threatening so you’ll be tricked into saying too much and getting arrested. Sinister, that’s what I’d call it. Sinister as hell.

  The whole day has been a blur. All I know is that she’s dead. My girl is dead, and they forced me away from her. Then they brought me here, where they gave me tea made with crappy teabags, as if that would be enough to calm me down and make me talk.

  We’ve been at it for hours.

  ‘Please tell us your name.’

  ‘It’s none of your business what my name is.’

  ‘We are the police and we found you beside the body of a young girl. It is every bit our business what your name is.’

  ‘Blah, blah, blah.’

  That annoyed them.

  I can tell they’re drawing on every bit of their patience. They’re going to need it.

  ‘We need to talk to you,’ one says. ‘When you’re ready, we’ll have to ask you what happened and who the girl is, so we can let her family know.’

  I stay silent. They’d found no ID on her body. Nothing at all. All they know is that she was young and blonde and she doesn’t match any of the missing persons on file. They don’t even know she’s pregnant. I suppose the whole future of this case relies on me now, but I’m in no fit state to co-operate. Look at me, I want to say to them. I’m insane with grief.

  ‘Was the girl who died a relative of yours?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘A good friend, then?’

  Again, I shake my head.

  The officers stop the questions and hand me more tissues. My face must be a mess. They see my tears as suspicious, I can tell. I’m meant to be hollowed-out and silent with shock.

  After a while, they try again. ‘We understand your distress,’ one of them says.

  I want to shout at her. No, you don’t. You haven’t got a clue. She’s dead and I am here, and I don’t know how I’ll ever bear this.

  But I don’t say it, so she carries on. ‘But it’s really important we find out who this girl is. Her family will be worrying and we need to tell them the truth as soon as we can.’

  I don’t know what comes over me then. It’s like I’ve left my body and I’m watching myself from somewhere above the spot where I’m sitting. I look straight at the two of them. ‘Fuck off,’ I’m spitting. ‘Just fuck off. She hasn’t got any fucking family.’ Then I hold out my hands as if I’m reading a book and recite, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. No one gives a shit about the end of you.’

  With no warning, her voice suddenly fills the room. What about you? she asks. Do you give a shit? Are you sorry?

  I look around at the police officers to see if they’ve heard it, too, as clearly as I just did. They don’t seem to have. They’re sitting there, sympathetic but tough, ready to charge me with bad behavio
ur.

  It wasn’t meant to be this way. It should never have come to this.

  3

  We lived in a children’s home, she and I. It was where we met, six months ago now. They kept us cloistered away from the world, not because we were dangerous – although we were working at that – but because the world was bad for us. We weren’t like other kids. We didn’t have parents that loved us and lived for us and would die for us. We had parents who harmed us. Not on purpose. They never did it on purpose. They did it because they couldn’t help it. They did it because they knew no other way to be. Cruelty was built into them, handed down through long generations of cruel people who had no idea about love and how to show it.

  That was one view of it all, anyway. A generous view, but one I chose to believe because it was easier than the alternative.

  It was my first children’s home. Before this, they’d sent me to a girls’ secure unit. They said it wasn’t a prison, but the doors and windows were all locked. I wasn’t there because I was bad, though. I was there for welfare. That’s what they called it. Welfare. Banged up for my own safety. When my time was over, they sent me to this old home, smash in the middle of nowhere, with no boys, no shops, no booze, nothing. Nothing at all that could do anyone any harm, just miles and miles of mountains and lakes, which I knew from the start would have their own dangers. No one had thought of that. No one had considered the fact that I was an expert in sniffing out ways to die.

  The home is called Hillfoot House, and you can’t get there unless you walk to it. Anyone who comes here – which is no one – has to leave their car in a layby half a mile away, and that’s after they’ve driven far off the main road, down long tracks full of potholes and over a ford that’s impassable after rain. They might as well have grown a forest of thorns around us.

  The house is on the edge of a hollow that dips towards the dark waters of the tarn below and is hemmed in on all sides by the mountains. It’s beautiful, but the beauty isn’t calm. It’s ferocious, like us. I suppose that’s why we loved it here, for a while.

  It’s winter now. Christmas Day. A perfect morning to die. There’s mist rising from the lake and fresh snow on the highest fells. As the weeks wear on, this scene will be transformed. The mountains will strip their winter hue and shift slowly to green, their lowest slopes purpled with foxgloves, their rocky peaks lit by the spear of the sun.

  I never dreamed I’d become so attached to a landscape as I’ve become to this one. When I first came here, I resisted. ‘Why did you send me to this place in the middle of butt-fuck Egypt?’ I asked my social worker. ‘It’s boring. It’s so boring, I want to scratch my eyes out.’

  But there was a theory behind it. There’s a theory behind most things they do for us. They change with the fashion, but this one had something to do with mindfulness and the healing power of the natural world. Most kids like us have never seen beauty before. We grew up in the darkest hearts of the cities, in overcrowded tower blocks and rundown terraces, where vandalism was high and nothing green grew, so management like to think that if they house us in the mountains, where we can hear only the gentle bleat of lambs and the cold rush of water over rocks, the pain we all try to hide might somehow be eased.

  It’s a noble idea, and not complete horseshit, though of course it’s too late for us. It was too late for us before we’d even crossed the doorstep. Landscape can only go so far. What we really needed was to undo time, to restart our lives from the beginning, and there wasn’t a hope of that.

  Inside the house are six bedrooms – one for each girl and one for each of the staff members who have to sleep there every night. It’s quite cosy in some ways, if you catch us in one of those moments when no one is kicking off. There’s always a fire burning in the living room, because most of us have only ever been poor, and they want to teach us about warmth and how important it is, so that when the time comes to budget our own money we’ll make heat a priority.

  There are three girls here at the moment, if you include me, but Lara’s the only one in her bed this morning. Lara is twelve – pretty young to have been handed over to institutional care, but she’s a difficult case: no real trouble, just impossible for anyone to connect with. She’s only been here since September. Before, she’d been in foster care with a couple in Manchester, but that had fallen apart because she never spoke. For months, apparently, she’d lodged herself into the corner of their inglenook fireplace, curled her knees up to her chest and stayed there from morning till night. If anyone came near her, she’d turn to face them and hiss like a cat. Her foster carers, who’d never been able to have their own children, had started out committed and full of hope that they could be the ones to help this troubled girl, but in the end, they gave up. She was beyond them, beyond all reach of love and good intentions.

  She still is. She reminds me of my sister. Stupid really, because she’s a lot older than my sister would have been if she’d lived, but I can’t help it. I often thought I’d like to sweep her up and away from this life and look after her, like I hadn’t ever managed to with Jade, but it’s ideas like that which got me into this mess.

  It’ll be harder than ever for Lara today. Christmas is never a good time for children in care, although the unlucky staff who ended up on the festive rota have done their best with some decorations from B&M Bargains (a six-foot inflatable elf, some tinsel and a fake tree that smells unmistakably of plastic), a frozen turkey and a nicely wrapped present for each of us. There are no stockings. Even Santa can’t be bothered with kids in care.

  When she wakes around eight, Lara can hear the clatter of staff in the kitchen, starting the second day of their three-day shift – the kettle boiling, cupboards opening, the warm pop of the toaster, weary voices wishing each other a merry Christmas, and all of them longing to be anywhere but here.

  ‘Girls still asleep?’

  ‘Must be.’

  Lara stays in her room, listening. The house is old. You can hear every movement and every word spoken.

  An hour or more passes before anyone says anything about waking us up. The staff prefer it when we sleep late. It makes their jobs easier and their days shorter. If we stay in bed, they can laze around on the sofas, watching TV and reading magazines, or baking. Clare used to make flapjacks and brownies, and leave them in containers on the wall outside with an honesty box saying ‘£1.50. Please help yourselves’. It was meant to be a moment of joy for walkers as they passed, still miles from the nearest pub. Her idea had been that, eventually, we’d all join in with the work of it, and then any profits could go towards a weekend in Blackpool, but I went outside one day and nicked the cash for fags. Clare stopped bothering after that.

  It’s after ten by the time Lara hears Danny’s voice in the room below her. ‘We should probably wake them. It’s Christmas Day. Not even Annie will want to sleep through lunch.’

  Gillian and Clare agree. It’s their job to bang on our doors and rouse us from sleep because if Danny tries it, who knows where he might end up? Troubled girls like us can’t be trusted not to make false allegations against every man we meet. You can’t blame us for that, though. We have to get in there first, get them away from us before the allegations have a chance to become real. We’ve learned better than to let anyone near us.

  I watch Lara listening to their footfall on the wooden staircase. She sucks in her breath. I can tell she knows what’s coming.

  There’s a light rapping on doors along the landing outside her room, then silence. Then more rapping, louder, and Gillian’s cheery voice calling, ‘Merry Christmas, Annie! It’s after eleven. Time to wake up!’

  Silence.

  ‘Hope! Wakey, wakey! It’s Christmas Day!’

  More silence.

  Lara curls up on her bed, brings her knees up to her chest and closes her eyes. No one is going to say anything to her. She doesn’t speak, and as far they’re concerned, she doesn’t see or hear, either.

  4

  These women have had enough.
They’re bringing in the men now because they think men can force it out of me. A quick, hard kick to the stomach and it’ll be there for them: the truth like vomit all over the floor.

  The door opens and a policeman comes into the room. He’s tough-looking and walks with a swagger, as if he thinks he’s good-looking. He isn’t.

  ‘Good morning, young lady,’ he says, and sits on the sofa opposite me, beside the two women.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I say.

  He looks at me sternly, trying to scare me. ‘If you continue like this, not co-operating or telling us what happened, we’ll assume you’ve got something to hide and we’ll have to arrest you. Then you’ll be shut up in a cell for the day, while we investigate who you are.’

  I sit in silence.

  He goes on: ‘Now, I know you’re distressed. My colleagues have told me all about it. We’re going to have to keep you here until you’ve answered our questions. It would help if you were to co-operate with us and tell us who you are and who the girl is whose body we found this morning, but we’ll find out, anyway. The forensics team are working on it as we speak. They’ll have ways to identify her. So why don’t you just make it easier for everyone and answer our questions?’

  I know you’re distressed. He hasn’t got a clue.

  I want to say, Have you ever had your skin stripped off and rocks thrown at your bare flesh so your heart is nothing but a gaping wound? But then I think it would sound dramatic, so I just shrug and say, ‘Depends what you ask.’

  ‘How about you start by telling us whether you knew that girl?’

  ‘Course I knew her.’

  Stupid question. I knew her well. I knew her inside out, in every sense. My mother would have known what that meant. She’d lower her voice sometimes and say, ‘In the Biblical sense? Did you know her in the Biblical sense?’ ‘No, no, Mother. Of course not,’ I would say. Of course not. Not me.

  The copper carries on. ‘You’re clearly devastated by what happened. You must have been close.’