by Ruth Harrow
After a while, Will comes to assist me, warming the garlic bread and placing a large bowl of it on the table. He is quieter than usual.
I'm just draining the pasta when I hear the front door shut. Dad and Eva are back.
My father appears in the doorway. 'Something smells good. I'm ready for that, I can tell you.'
Eva doesn't drift into the kitchen behind him.
I sigh. 'Has she disappeared into her phone again? I'm surprised she doesn't get repetitive strain the amount of time she spends on that thing.'
I wish I could have avoided getting her the device until she was older, but all her friends have their own smartphones. Besides, I suppose it makes her safer; always having a lifeline to contact me through should she ever need to. Not that she makes many regular phone calls. Not to me anyway.
Dad looks at me, blankly. 'Eh?'
'Is Eva in the lounge? Tell her dinner will be ready soon. She needs to wash her hands.'
It suddenly occurs to me that I didn't hear a second set of footsteps. Nor can I recall the rumble of the stairs after my father entered the house.
'Dad, where is Eva?'
'Oh, Eva? We met some of her friends in town. She is spending a bit of time with them.'
He turns his back on me, busying himself moving around Will setting the table. He lays only three plates.
'What? I don't understand ... What friends? She doesn't know anyone in the village.'
'Of course she does. She made friends with the Hart twins, didn't she?'
'Made friends? She hardly knows them at all. They spoke once for just a few minutes whilst we were eating lunch! I can't believe this.'
I look to Will for support, but he says nothing and continues rummaging in the drawer for cutlery. I sometimes can't understand how he manages to remain so unaffected by anything.
I set down the colander of spaghetti harder than I mean to and some of the strands snake into the sink. 'Where are they, Dad? Which way did they go?'
'What?'
My father looks at me incredulously as I fetch my shoes from the hallway and drop down onto a dining chair to pull them on. 'You're not going to go charging after her, are you? You have to let her live a little, Hannah.'
'Dad, you can't just leave my twelve-year-old daughter to wander the streets with strangers. What on earth were you thinking? I have to go and fetch her before anything happens.'
'Don't be silly. And she isn't wandering the streets either – I left her at the girls' house. She is perfectly safe, I promise.'
I stop slipping my foot into my shoe and look up at him. 'Their house? Why would you drop Eva off at their house?'
Something clicks in my brain. The party. Isn't that what Penny was talking about at dinner last night?
She must have put my father up to taking Eva when he walked her home. How dare she? Dad must have been planning to drop Eva off all day.
No wonder she was so happy to be at the zoo with her parents and Grandfather. She must have been biding her time until she would sneak off to this gathering without me knowing.
'She is at their party, isn't she?' I say, staggered at how inconceivably devious the old man in front of me could be. I slip on my other shoe and stand up. 'How could you do this behind my back, Dad? I made it clear she wasn't to go.'
'What party is this?' Will asks, looking between myself and his father-in-law.
I turn to him. 'The people that have converted the old village hall – their daughters are having a birthday party today. Dad has sneaked Eva over there without telling us!'
'Calm down, Hannah,' my husband says, rescuing the spaghetti and mixing it into the pan of creamy sauce. 'I'm sure it is all right.'
'Are you? We don't know these people. They could be anyone.'
Will sits himself at the dining table opposite Dad. 'I don't see any harm in it.'
'Thank you, Will,' Dad says. 'Why don't you sit down, Hannah. Your mother would say that you're making the room untidy. Let's eat, eh?'
My appetite has completely evaporated.
Dad starts heaping food onto his plate. 'I think it's time you loosened the apron strings a little, Hannah. It's not like I'm new at this, is it? You must think I'm a complete old fool. Well I'm not, you know. I raised you two girls all right, didn't I? Your mother and I made sure you never came to any harm.'
I look at my father selecting himself a large piece of bread. He is clueless.
It is precisely this attitude to parenting that allowed April and I to wander into the worst kind of situation.
I won't let it happen to my daughter.
15
The air is warm out here and I am taken aback; I had completely forgotten it is summer outside my own head.
Halfway down the long lane that eventually leads into the high street, I hear running footsteps behind me.
It's Will.
'Come back to the house, Hannah,' he pants, slowing. 'You're worrying your father. He still has to live in this village after we have gone home, you know. Don't cause a scene.'
'I wasn't planning on it,' I snap back. 'I just want to pick my daughter up, that's all. She has spent enough time at this party anyway.'
'It can only have been half an hour, max. Jesus, Hannah. I think Tony is right, you need to let Eva go a bit.'
'Like Dad did with me and April, you mean? Nothing bad ever happened to us did it!?'
Will swears and shakes his head, looking away towards the hedgerow.
I realise now how breathless I am from my quick pace. 'You're always burying your head in the sand, Will, ploughing on regardless without looking at what's going on around you. You always leave me to make all the tough decisions alone. It is always me that has to be the boring strict one.'
'That's just not true. Look – I'm starving. At least have dinner first. You will have a more level-head. We could even end up with some time to ourselves this evening if we do it right. Let's go back and then pick Eva up in a bit.'
'I'll eat when I have my daughter back.'
Will slows and falls back. 'I'm not going with you.'
'I didn't expect you to.'
I think I hear him swear again under his breath, but then I wonder if I imagined it as a warm summer breeze brushes over my ears, lifting strands of hair from around my face.
I avoid retracing the convoluted steps we took on Sunday with my father leading the tour. I'm furious at him. What made him think this was a good idea?
Instead, I take the quickest route I know. I need to get to my daughter as soon as possible.
My breath sounds ragged as I walk and I realise I am shaking.
An elderly couple says hello to me as I turn onto a row of holiday cottages. I respond with a hurried greeting and they glance at each other when I don't stop to chat.
On the next row of houses, I see a familiar blonde head bobbing to and fro from the open door of one of the houses.
It's Penny. She is loading a blue Ford Focus with cleaning equipment.
I hesitate, thinking of turning back and taking the next street instead. I wonder if she has seen me, but my question is answered immediately. She appears to be having a hushed argument with her brother, David.
Penny's body language is aggressive, but her voice remains deliberately low in order to thwart the many ears inside the holiday cottages on both sides of the road.
David appears to say something. His sister's response is to jab a finger viciously into his chest with hissed words I cannot hear.
For a moment, I am sure that he is about to bring a hand to her face, but he glances down the street and sees me.
I look away, embarrassed that I have been caught watching.
The pair back away from each other and resume packing away their apparatus as I draw near.
Penny sweeps some colour-abused hair behind her ear as I reach her. 'Hiya, Hannah. You OK?'
'Yes, fine. Just going to pick Eva up from her party,' I say jovially, as though I have everything under control and might even be happy
about proceedings.
Penny looks blank for a few seconds before something seems to click. 'Oh, was that today? I remember. It's nice that she got to go in the end. A bit early for it to finish though?'
I shake my head. 'No. The kids are too young for a party to end late, aren't they?'
I put extra emphasis on my words to make the message clearer, but I don't know if Penny gets my point. I'm convinced it was she who put Dad up to it in the first place.
She shrugs and a forced smile spreads across her lower face. 'Well, we have to get off. See you.'
She nods her head towards her brother who slips past me ashen-faced and drops into the front passenger seat, slamming the door shut behind him.
The smell of a barbecue reaches me as my weak legs take me onto Vicarage Lane. I know I'm in the right place as I approach the converted building up ahead. Loud music booms out of an open window.
Justin Bieber's lyrics seem at odds with the traditional stone property whose windows they soar from.
I pull myself together and take a deep breath as I realise I haven't worked out what I am going to say to these people. We haven't ever met. Would they recognise me through their association with my father?
Perhaps they were even one of the faces I didn't recognise at the funeral.
I pad up the front pathway and ring the doorbell. After a few moments, I realise that no one is coming.
I ring again, realising how futile such a small chime must be inside against such din.
I step back and look up at the windows of the house, wondering which room Eva is in. What if she isn't even here? What if she left with the others and went off somewhere? The woods, the river, the quarry ... She could be anywhere if she didn't stay here.
Shouldn't I instinctively know if my child is here or not?
It is times like this I wish I had that mother's intuition other mothers spoke of; I've always struggled with that. I have since concluded that it was all down to the fact I had mere moments with my daughter in my arms when she was born. Minutes later she was rushed away and later put inside an incubator for weeks. Separated from me.
Stepping forward, I knock purposefully on the door this time.
The door opens almost immediately, bringing with it a flurry of noise and activity. My eyes are instantly drawn to a couple of teens on the nearby staircase who are engaged in a full-on embrace, mouths locked, hands in each other's hair. They look a great deal older than twelve.
'Can I help you?'
My eyes snap to the boy who opened the door. He is taller than me and skinny with it too. His light red hair seems to make the dark circles beneath his bloodshot eyes stand out.
My stomach knots with apprehension – he definitely can't be less than sixteen.
'Erm, yes. I'm looking for my daughter, Eva.'
'Who?'
My heart seems to skip a beat. My breathlessness now has very little to do with my journey here.
'Eva,' I say loudly over the music. 'Eva Peterson. She arrived not that long ago.'
Thoughts flurry in my mind as the boy looks at me confusedly and I am aware of a pain in my chest as I take each breath.
'She has amber-coloured hair,' I say, wishing my daughter and I looked more alike. 'Her grandfather brought her here.'
In vain, I attempt to force my frantic mind to remember what Eva was wearing today. Suddenly though, the boy's features draw into comprehension. 'Oh, you mean Tony's granddaughter? Oh, yeah, come through. She's in the back.'
He steps back, holding the front door to let me inside the house. As I pass him I'm sure I detect alcohol on his breath.
I dread to think what condition Eva will be in when I find her. What if someone has slipped her something?
The couple on the staircase have stopped kissing and stare at me as if I'm a different species.
I suppose I am. There are plainly no other adults here as Eva said there would be.
She lied to me.
16
The way Eva rages at me as we walk home seems like nothing next to the relief I feel that I managed to get her back safely.
She is OK. I can barely believe something terrible didn't happen. I need to be more careful in the future. The only person I trust to take care of her is myself and Will. Although he did a terrible job of backing me up earlier.
My daughter shouts at me as she storms ahead up the sloped lane towards the house. She is still furious that I “embarrassed” her in front of her “friends”. She barely knew anyone at that party. Besides, she will never see them again anyway once we go home.
I will make sure of it.
Other than the birthday girls themselves and a handful of their school friends all the other guests were older teenagers. The boy that answered the door was a cousin of the host twins. He took me through to where Eva sat in the lounge surrounded by recent secondary-school graduates drinking beer.
She protests otherwise, but I think Eva drank some too. She had a giddy look in her eyes when I found her and her tirade is flowing a little more freely than usual.
Or am I imagining it?
My heart seems to shrink when I think about what might have happened if I had not gone to rescue her.
It scares me when I think of how intense my own feelings were towards Will when I was a little younger than Eva is now. I would spend hours in the dark of my bedroom longing for him.
But that was different. Eva couldn't feel that way about anyone. She is different. There isn't anyone around she could be that attached to, at home or here. I would know about it. She surely would have told me. Then again, she lied so easily when she told me the Harts' parents would be at home chaperoning the occasion ...
As we step onto the driveway of Dad's house, I have convinced myself that Eva isn't mature enough to be where I was at her age. Things were different then. I didn't play brightly-coloured games on a screen for hours on end. I was trying to act as grown-up as possible.
April was a strong influence; she was four years my senior, yet I was trying to be her equal. Somehow I must have developed too quickly, too eager to catch up with my older sister.
Eva doesn't have a sibling to jostle with; that opportunity was snatched away from us both.
We see Dad stooped over near the front door vigorously pulling up weeds here and there with his bare hands.
Even from here, I can tell he is upset.
'Hi, Dad,' I say, tentatively. 'We're back.'
He ignores me, tugging at a cluster of dandelions beside the front step. 'Hello there, Eva. Didn't expect to see you until much later.'
Eva's response is to storm through the front door, slamming it loudly behind her before I can follow.
Dad straightens up. 'You've only got yourself to blame.'
'Sorry if I am trying to keep my daughter safe. Yet, I'm being treated like I've done something wrong.'
'Welcome to parenthood. It only gets worse as they got older.'
Dad smiles and I feel the muscles of my face relenting too.
'Come on,' he says. 'Let's get inside. I'll make you both a hot chocolate.'
'Good idea. Will makes the best I've ever had.'
'Well, we will have to ask him nicely when he gets back then. I'm not sure I want to wait though.'
'He left? Where did he go?'
Dad shakes his head. 'He said he was going to stop you bringing Eva back so early. I assumed he caught up with you.'
'He did. I thought he came back here.'
'No, Love. He looked pretty worked up himself when he left. He probably just went for a walk. Didn't want to be stuck in the house with an old fart like me. How about that hot chocolate, eh?'
He disappears into the house and I glance over to where mine and Will's car is parked in the corner. It still sits stationary. At least Will didn't drive off in a rage. I've read about so many people having accidents that way.
I'm just about to step inside the house when I notice something on the windscreen of our car.
A piece of p
aper. I pad over to it. Some leaflet distributor had a trek up from the village to get to my father's house.
I slip the item from beneath the wiper blade and I realise it is not an advertisement at all, but a folded white scrap of paper. It is lined and the edge is torn, as though ripped hastily from a notebook.
Has Will left this for me? Is he going to say he has had enough and is staying the night somewhere else? Was our argument earlier worse than I thought?
My mind was too focused on Eva to consider what I was leaving in my wake.
My apprehensive fingers open up the note, suddenly afraid of what it might say.
My stomach plummets as my brain processes the words scrawled angrily on the paper.
Go home, Bitch.
17
Saturday 17th July 1993
I managed to stop myself from crying after April and Will left for the cinema without me. In a way, I was pleased that I managed to overcome myself. It's the first time I've ever been able to stop the howls of misery from escaping me.
Big girls don't cry.
I hope April is upset when she sees what has happened to her dressing table. I don't feel at all bad for doing it either. I hope Mum grounds her. Then she won't be able to see Will.
But then I wouldn't see Will either. Maybe I don't want that to happen, after all.
Part of me wonders if I should go and cover up the marks. But I've left the house now. I can't go back – Mum might notice I'm not being chaperoned by my sister and her boyfriend. I'm never usually allowed out after dinner alone. Only the Wakefield children do that. And everyone says they are bad. My sister and I are forbidden from talking to any of them.
Besides, I spent all that time applying makeup; I don't want to waste it. It is such a sunny, perfect day outside. The heat reaches me through my top and I regret wearing such thick black velvet.
I slip my hands into my legging pocket and as my fingers close around paper I get a new thrill. April will get another shock when she realises the money she slipped carelessly into her music box is gone.