‘I printed it out in the library,’ she said. ‘Tom said the page might get taken down.’
‘Why? What is it?’
Lena twisted her swing, leaning over to point at the tight-printed text below. I scanned the lines. Something about a school football star, scoring three goals to win a local championship. Pictured here with his foster mother and soon to sit his GCSEs.
Football. Foster mum. ‘I don’t get it. Who is it?’
‘Don’t you recognize it?’
I looked again at the grainy photo, printed out in black-and-white. The boy looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. Handsome, I could tell – shiny fair hair, a wide mouth. He was looking right into the camera. His eyes, they sort of drew you in.
Lena stopped twisting, made her swing completely still. ‘You really don’t recognize him?’
‘No.’ And the shameful thing was, I didn’t.
She pointed at the caption. The print was tiny, blurred. ‘Look at the name.’
I did. And froze.
‘And look at the date,’ Lena carried on. ‘I worked it out. If he’s fifteen in that photo, say, he was only twenty-five when he kidnapped your cousin. Twenty-five. I mean, that’s young, right?’
I stared at the photo, his face clicking with that other image, shown daily, shown multiple times a day on the news. She was right. It was him, the name matched. Cassingham.
‘Right?’ Lena repeated. She pushed her swing back up against mine and I could almost feel her breath on my neck.
‘Why are you showing me this?’ My thumbs had turned white where I was pressing the page. ‘I don’t want to look.’
‘This is the man who took her. Don’t you care?’
‘Of course I care!’
Lena’s mouth went tight. ‘But you act like nothing happened! You were just the same at school. “She’s happy”, “she’s fine”. Have you any idea how weird you sounded?’
‘She is happy! She is fine!’ I crumpled the page and stuffed it in my bag. ‘I don’t have to look. This isn’t my job.’ I stood up. I just wanted to go.
She caught me by the sleeve of my blazer. Her nails, black-varnished, were cold against my wrist. ‘So, what is your job? Pretending nothing’s wrong?’
My swing clipped my knee. I hated it – the way Lena was talking like Abigail was some freak, some victim. She was my cousin and I needed her to be fine. I tried to pull away, sick of my friend’s words. As I did so, Lena’s grip dragged my sleeve up.
She stared. Everything in my chest went tight.
‘Jess. What is that?’
‘It’s nothing.’ I wrenched away, trying to pull my sleeve back down. ‘She was asleep. Having a bad dream.’ I pushed away the images that came flashing – Abigail’s eyes glistening in the dark, Abigail reaching for me from her bed.
Lena stared at the bruises. Five yellow fingerprints.
Then she said everything I didn’t want to hear, words that summed up the chasm between us. ‘Stop acting like nothing has happened to her. Stop pretending that nothing has changed. The stuff she’s been through – you can’t just ignore it. For your own sake, Jess, you need to grow up.’
I got home late and exhausted to find Mum and Dad in the study. There were papers, folders, ring binders everywhere. When she saw me, Mum got up off her knees, dusting invisible lint from her jeans. ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘We’re having a clear-out. You’ll need to sort through your stuff too, so get changed and come and help.’
A clear-out? It was like Mum was trying to change everything too, when all I wanted was for it all to stay the same. Familiar, safe. I didn’t want anything else. I wanted everything to be how it once was. I wished I could have said that to Mum, I wished I could tell her what had happened with Lena. But I knew how she got when she was on a mission, and the ragged edges of my parents’ last argument still filled the house, just waiting for one of us to snag on.
In my room, I stripped off my rumpled uniform and hauled on a clean pair of jeans. In the study, I knelt on the floor as Mum pushed a tall cardboard box over to me. ‘Here. This is mostly your old primary school stuff. Have a look through and give me everything you want to throw away.’ The box was heavy, hard to pull towards me.
Dad was sitting at the desk, turning over pages in a tattered folder. Mum craned over his shoulder. ‘Those are just old water bills. We don’t need to keep them.’
‘Wait. There are other documents in here too.’ He went on turning the pages.
Mum stretched up to pull more stuff down from the shelves. She held out a fan of old dental journals. ‘Throw or keep?’
Dad barely glanced up. ‘Keep.’
‘Really?’
‘Keep.’
Mum dropped them into a pile beside him on the desk, the space already nearly full. I reached into the cardboard box and lifted out a few jotters.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep her indoors the whole time,’ Mum said, like it was a natural follow-on.
I knew at once she was talking about Abigail. She and Dad had probably been talking about her all afternoon. I kept my eyes on the rough jotters. Between the scuffed covers, my old childish handwriting clambered across the pages, sliding up and down the ruled lines. Every other story was about my cousin. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of things: starting school, new people, the smallest changes in routine. But in my worlds with Abigail, it was never like that.
Dad put his ring binder down on the desk. ‘It’s hard to know, Lillian. There’s still a lot for her to adjust to. Maybe it’s good to let her get used to just being in the house-’
‘Her house.’
‘-first. And they still need to find him.’
I kept my head down, kept turning over the smudgy pages. On the top half of the space, left blank for pictures, I’d crayoned in drawings of flowers, starry landscapes, rainbows. Magical worlds I could never quite capture in pencil and crayon.
Mum shook her head. ‘That could take weeks – months.’
‘Not that long, surely,’ said Dad.
But Mum had already changed her mind about Abigail. Her rules could shift and morph in a moment, keeping the rest of us running to catch up.
She lifted a stack of papers – they looked like old study notes, lines of her neat handwriting and streaks of highlighter pen. ‘I’m throwing these out. Pass me the bin bag.’
Dad held up a black plastic sack. Mum tipped them in, then held the sides open towards me. ‘Have you got stuff to put in here too?’
I looked at the spread of jotters on my lap. All my old stories. Worlds I’d never wanted to leave. ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t really looked.’ I turned another page in the jotter. Me and Abigail in bright-coloured crayon. How old were we meant to be here – six, seven?
Mum lifted another armful of papers into the sack, tipping them away with hardly a glance. ‘She was cooped up, Fraser, for years and years. Not just cooped up. Trapped. Held hostage. Don’t you think she needs to know that it won’t be like that now? And another thing… I really think they need to redecorate her room. How is she supposed to move on in a time warp like that?’
Dad stood up from the desk. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s best. Maybe you need to let Anne and Robert decide. Maybe, for a change, we should leave it up to them.’
It felt like a whole set of windows had been suddenly slammed shut.
I stared down at the pile of jotters in my lap. Abigail stared back at me, her hair swirled in bright yellow, crayoned fingers entwined in mine. I needed her, I always had done. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of this too. The intangible tensions I’d always felt in our house. But our happiness together had made everything safe.
Mum held the bin bag out to me, its mouth a gaping hole. ‘Well?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m keeping them all.’
Chapter 9
Thursday 6th June:
Day 11
ANNE
When I went into her room, A
bigail was sitting up in bed, her face puffy from sleep. Even though it was warm, she kept the duvet pulled up to her chin as though needing to hide herself underneath it.
‘What’s all that?’ she said.
I sat down in the chair at the end of her bed and fanned the packages out on top of the duvet. With Abigail’s sizings, I’d ordered a whole wardrobe of clothes online and by now the first few packages had arrived. I wanted her to put them on and to take her outside properly; I was glad Lillian had changed her mind and arranged this simple excursion, a trip to the hairdresser’s. Yet now that it had come to it, my chest fluttered with nerves.
‘I know it was hard for you to choose so I went ahead and ordered some things. I hope you don’t mind, and listen, if you don’t like any of them we can easily send them back, so just say.’
By now her – his – purple jeans and blue acrylic sweater were stuffed deep at the bottom of the laundry basket and who knew when they would ever get washed?
She pulled one of the packages towards her and picked at the seal of tape with a blunt fingernail, peeling it off in a long slow movement, like a magician with a grand reveal.
Inside the layers of slippery plastic was a bright yellow blouse, the colour of sunshine. My face felt hot. ‘Do you like it?’
She pushed her hands up inside the soft cotton and held it out in front of her, then looked inside the bag again as though expecting to find something else. ‘It’s pretty.’
‘Here.’ I pushed the other parcels towards her. ‘There’s lots more.’
She was frowning. ‘These are supposed to be mine? To keep?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What else would they be for?’
Ten minutes later she came out of the bathroom, dressed. The new jeans just about fitted her and eventually she’d decided on a green jumper.
Now I could say it without it being a lie. ‘You look lovely.’
She pulled at the inside seam of the jeans where it ran up the V of her legs, as though it was hurting her. It was true though – she really did look nice.
I stood up. ‘Ready?’
It was warmer now but the day was still overcast, so I gave her my light coat to wear, the one with the hood she could pull up if she needed. The jacket I’d ordered for her online hadn’t arrived yet. She looked so small inside it I wanted to take her hand, the way I used to, hold her tighter than tight. The words from Lillian’s last call still rang in my ears. Cooped up, as though Robert and I were her jailers, not parents trying to keep her safe. That’s all I was trying to do, I’d wanted to say to my sister.
This whole outing was Lillian’s idea; she was allowed to change tack like that and still be right, and yet as soon as she’d suggested it, I’d felt ashamed for not thinking of it myself. We’d both seen how her hair looked, but it was Lillian not me, who’d thought to do anything about it.
As we put on our shoes, Robert came out from the kitchen in his overalls, ready for work. ‘All set?’
Abigail pulled the zipper of my coat right up to her chin. ‘Yep.’
‘Call me if you need me. I’ll be right at the end of the phone,’ and he hugged Abigail and pressed a hot kiss to my cheek.
Outside, my car – a second-hand runaround we’d bought last year – was parked a little way up the road. We didn’t need to drive, it was hardly far, but I wasn’t ready to have her wandering the streets. When I blipped the car unlocked, Abigail pulled open the back door and I had to reach out and stop her. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Here. In the passenger seat.’ She wasn’t a kid any more.
We found room to park one street away from the salon, squeezing into the one empty space. She stepped onto the pavement and I got out too, locking the doors behind us. I pointed over the road to the little walkway that we would cut through. ‘Just across there. That’s where we’re going,’ and I’d hardly finished speaking when she stepped right out from the line of parked cars, straight into the road.
A car horn shrieked. ‘Abigail!’ I grabbed for her, catching her by the hood of my coat. She stumbled as I pulled her backwards. ‘What are you doing?’
She wrenched herself round, angry with me, confused. The anger in my own voice was the kind that whip-rides on panic. ‘You can’t walk out like that! You could have been killed!’
The look on her face, it was as though I had slapped her, and then it hit me – how on earth was she supposed to know? She hadn’t grasped any of this, shut away with him, imprisoned from the world. Here she was, fifteen years old, and still naive as a child of eight. I took a deep breath; I let go of her coat. I had been holding onto her so tight.
‘It’s all right, Abigail, but please just listen. You have to look both ways when you’re crossing a street. You have to listen for cars, you must always look. You have to wait for a gap in the traffic and never cross until it is safe.’
She gazed at me, still only half comprehending. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to remember.’
My sister was waiting outside the salon; no doubt she’d got there ten minutes early. She was wearing a pair of tailored trousers, a smart scarf tucked into the collar of her blouse; I was wearing a jacket with a button missing. I remembered how I’d had such a go at her once, saying: you think you’re leading by example, Lillian, showing us how to be perfect like you. But the way you do it, you don’t realize the effect. You don’t know how you shame people into just giving up. I wondered if she still remembered that now.
She’d taken an afternoon off work for this and I knew how big a sacrifice that was. I was grateful to her, really, and my sister was right, of course she was – how could I not have thought about it? Someone had tried to cut Abigail’s hair, to give her a bob. Him, or Abigail herself? Whoever it was had made a mess of it, anyone could see. Did we expect her just to go about with it like that?
‘Isn’t Jess coming?’ Abigail asked as soon as we came up.
Lillian smiled down at her. ‘She couldn’t. She’s at school.’
Abigail’s face fell, and I thought, how stupid of me – why hadn’t we arranged this so Jess could come too? This was exactly the sort of thing they should do together, not Abigail with two grown-ups, hovering round her like flies.
It was a tiny salon that Lillian had found, tucked away from the market square and high street, and we were the only ones in there. Inside, two stylists were waiting for us, one with blue highlights and the other with a high, straight ponytail. They surely knew who Abigail was. Please be kind, I thought, and don’t make this any more awkward than it already is.
There was a chair at the mirror for Abigail to sit in. The stylist with the high ponytail held a rustling robe out to her and swaddled her in the ink-blue folds. Lillian sat down on the soft couch nearby, her fingers reaching for a magazine. At the mirrors, the girl with blue highlights leant gently down to Abigail. ‘What would you like? Just a trim or more of a change?’ Their eyes met in the mirror.
Abigail lifted the robe to rub at her arm through the green jumper and I knew she was scratching at the nicotine patch there. She still had cravings, hungry cravings, driving her fingers mad, setting them picking at themselves. She wore the patches that Robert had bought for her, two every day. We’d had to explain that cigarettes were bad for her, that there was no way we’d let her have those. We had to show her facts online to convince her; she couldn’t seem to believe that they were harmful.
Now she stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Just to keep it the same.’
I tried to hold my voice steady. ‘It needs cutting, Abigail.’ She must see it, her hair tousled and misshapen, hanging in clumps about her ears.
Up in the corner, a speaker spilled tinny music into the salon. ‘We could do a fringe, for example,’ said the blue-haired girl quickly. ‘Here – I’ll show you.’ With the gentlest touch, she lifted a sweep of hair and laid it across Abigail’s forehead. ‘There, do you see?’
I did – Jess’s features, Jess’s image. The two cousins, how alike they had always been. From the start, their bo
nd had been almost uncanny, and had only grown stronger when they had ended up living together. Me and Lillian. Jess and Abigail. What would have happened if the girls hadn’t come along? To Lillian, getting together with Abigail’s father was the biggest mistake I ever could have made. At nineteen, I thought my sister would never speak to me again: I’d fallen pregnant, the worst mess-up of all. We might have broken from each other then, it really might have gone that way, if Lillian hadn’t discovered just two weeks later that she and Fraser were expecting too.
The blue-haired girl smiled at Abigail and me in the mirror. ‘It’ll look lovely, you’ll see.’ When the girl with the ponytail led her to the basin I finally sat down, at an angle so I could still see my daughter. Beside me, my sister turned the pages of the magazine, image after image of perfect people.
At the basin, Abigail lay back, her white throat exposed to the ceiling. ‘Is that water okay?’ the hairdresser murmured. I leaned in but couldn’t hear what Abigail answered. ‘Close your eyes then. Mind the shampoo.’ The tendons in my daughter’s neck stood out.
‘How is Robert?’ Lillian asked.
‘Robert’s fine.’
She waited. ‘You know, you should just tell me if there’s anything you need.’
Now the girl with the ponytail sat Abigail up and I watched as she neatly bandaged her head with a towel. By the mirrors, the blue-haired stylist was waiting with her scissors.
‘We’re fine,’ I said to Lillian. Why did she always make me feel I couldn’t manage by myself?
I could still feel my sister looking at me and I knew what she was thinking: has she said anything? Has she ended up telling Robert? If she’d come straight out and asked me I would have said, no, Lillian, of course I haven’t. Even though I’ve wanted to, I’ve done what you told me, just like when we were children: keeping mouths closed and stained hands hidden, all because you couldn’t stand being in the wrong, would rather tell a hundred little lies than ever be to blame.
Little White Lies Page 7