The Argument

by Victoria Jenkins

  Saturday night’s break-in preyed on her mind throughout Sunday and it continues to do so now. She doesn’t want to believe that Olivia may be responsible for what happened here, in their own home, and yet so much of what her husband says makes sense, as unsettling as that sense may be. She feels violated by the attack on her home and has contemplated going to the police, yet the thought of her daughter being involved has stopped her. This is the hardest part, the bitterest pill to swallow, because Hannah realises that if she is holding back for this reason, then deep in her heart she must believe Olivia guilty.

  She goes into her daughter’s bedroom and stands in the doorway, surveying the place as though it is unfamiliar territory to her and not a room she has entered for every day of her daughter’s almost-sixteen years of life. As children, both girls were instilled with the practice of tidying up after themselves, but in recent months Olivia seems to have forgotten all that she’s been taught about acceptable behaviour. Yesterday’s clothes have been thrown on the carpet at the foot of the bed, which has been left unmade. Dirty cups litter the bedside table; a tea ring stains the wood. It seems that Olivia is intent on doing everything she can to defy her parents’ wishes.

  Swallowing down a lump of frustration at her daughter’s disrespect and ingratitude, Hannah goes to the wardrobe. Inside, Olivia’s clothes are hung up neatly, the items ordered in categories – jeans, t-shirts, jumpers - as though she doesn’t mind being organised in places where it can’t be witnessed by anyone else. Hannah crouches to her heels and pushes aside the shoes that line the bottom of the wardrobe. She knows what she is looking for; it is simply a matter of finding it.

  The thought that her daughter may be hiding the can of spray paint used to graffiti the kitchen cupboards makes Hannah feel sick with a combination of anger and disappointment. Of course, she had known that Olivia’s teenage years would present the family with testing times – it would have been naïve to hope for anything less – but searching her bedroom for spray paint was something Hannah has never envisioned herself having to do, and she can’t escape the feeling of failure that has swamped her since Saturday night. It could be worse, she thinks wearily. She realises some of the kids Olivia’s age are up to all sorts, things she is probably unable to imagine. They say that parents can’t be blamed for everything their child does, but Hannah doesn’t really agree. Why don’t these people know where their children are and what they’re doing? It is their responsibility to raise them to be good, decent human beings. It is the parents’ duty to protect them.

  Hannah reminds herself that growing up in the twenty-first century is very different to having done so in the 1990s, and she feels a pang of nostalgia for a youth she didn’t even enjoy very much. If she was given an opportunity to go back to her own teenage years, she would never take it. Despite how difficult some days seem to be, her life now is everything that she always wanted, and she wouldn’t change a thing. Except Olivia’s behaviour. She would change that in an instant.

  When the wardrobe offers her nothing from its insides, Hannah checks above and below it. She is careful to leave everything as it was when she entered the room, not wanting Olivia to know that she has been in here. It occurs to her that her daughter’s outrage at knowing Hannah has been through her things may be enough to force her into speaking, but it would only lead to another argument and Hannah isn’t ready for that, not yet. If silence means peace for the time being at least, then that is how she will allow things to remain. For now, anyway. She needs time to think, to consider what needs to be done for the best, for the sake of everyone’s happiness and well-being.

  The bedside drawers don’t hold very much, and it doesn’t take Hannah long to look through their contents. She removes a couple of school reports, a packet of hair grips and a hairbrush; a small photo album filled with photographs of Olivia and Rosie as younger children, most of them taken outside in the garden. Hannah pauses her search to look through the photographs, lingering on how young the girls look in each image and how different things were back then, when they were all games and innocence. It wasn’t that long ago really – six, seven years, at most – and yet nothing seems as it was, just that short space of time enough to turn everything upside down. Olivia is changed almost beyond recognition. Hannah realises it would have been naïve of her not to expect things to alter, for Olivia not to become different when she reached her teenage years, but the degree to which her older daughter has transformed was something she wasn’t prepared for.

  Closing the photograph album, Hannah sits for a moment in silence, bathing in the past that lingers invisible in the air around her. She remembers this room as it once was; the pink bed with a white canopy hanging from the ceiling, flocks of flying fairies circling the walls; sequinned curtains that would shimmer in the soft glow of the bedside lamp. She spent hours in this room with Olivia when she was young, whole afternoons role-playing and creating classrooms with the soft toys they would line against the wall and read to. If she focuses enough, she can see their shadows still playing. Her visits here are now restricted to waking Olivia up when she doesn’t want to scrape herself from beneath her duvet or checking that she hasn’t left the room in a state that may be regarded a health hazard.

  Hannah stands from the bed and forces herself from her thoughts. She scans the room, remembering that she is there for a purpose and that she can’t leave until she has found what she’s looking for. Think, Hannah. And so, she does. She remembers what it was to be fifteen, to have secrets she kept from her mother. If she was a teenager, where would she keep her darkest secrets? Hannah kneels on the carpet and gropes under the bed. She lowers her head and puts her ear to the floor, craning her neck to look up at the bed slats. She knows it is unlikely that a can of spray paint could be wedged beneath a mattress, but there it is, something else, waiting here for her. Here is the diary, exactly as she had predicted it might be.

  Back on her feet, her heart pounding with adrenaline, she looks at the clock, remembering that it is Monday and that she needs to be somewhere by midday. It is the same routine every week; it has been like this for quite some time now. She leaves the house by 11.40 and makes the twenty-minute walk to the care home, the route now so familiar to her she could find the place with her eyes closed. She spends an hour there with her mother before returning home, back at the house by 1.30pm. It is a part of the shape of her life now, and she has wondered how long it might continue.

  Hannah goes into her bedroom and puts the diary on top of the wardrobe. She will need to find a better hiding place for it when she gets back home this afternoon, but she doesn’t have time now and she doesn’t want to be late. No one will be back at the house before she is, so there’s no chance of anyone else getting their hands on it before she gets an opportunity to move it.

  Heading back downstairs, she takes her coat from the end of the banister and reaches for the handle of the front door. Her keys aren’t in the lock. She is sure she left them there when she got home earlier; now, the door is locked as she had left it, but the keys are gone. Hannah realises the extent to which the events of the weekend have affected her. She hasn’t felt right since Friday, since Olivia snuck from the house and the argument that followed. The atmosphere has changed, something has shifted and has come undone. Her daughter’s silence has filled the house with more than that, sitting amid them all with the threat of worse to come. There is an unravelling that Hannah fears cannot be tied back up to keep the fabric of their family together.

  There is a box screwed to the hallway wall near the front door where she and Michael keep their keys, but when Hannah checks it now, it is empty. She searches through the pockets of her coat before going into the kitchen, thinking maybe she made a mistake and took the keys there earlier. She looks everywhere she can think of, checking inside the microwave and the fridge - not putting past herself the idea that she may have absentmindedly left them in such a place. She has been so distracted by everything that has been going on that finding h
er keys in one of the kitchen cupboards would come as no surprise.

  When she can’t find them, frustration grips her. She thinks about calling Michael, but she doesn’t want to disturb him at work with something so clumsy and trivial. After everything else that has happened during these past few days, a phone call from home might trigger an unwarranted panic, something Hannah doesn’t want to be responsible for. She doesn’t want to subject him to more than is necessary, not when he already has so many other things to worry about.

  It is gone midday; she is already late, and even if she was able to leave now she wouldn’t get there for another twenty minutes. Resigning herself to the fact that today’s visit won’t happen, Hannah goes to the house phone and dials the number that has been used so often in recent months it’s now stored in her head.

  ‘It’s Hannah Walters,’ she says when the call to the home is answered. ‘Yes, that’s right…can you tell her I won’t be there today? Yes…sorry. Thanks.’

  She hangs up knowing she should feel worse about not being able to visit her mother. The truth is, Hannah doesn’t feel that bad at all. If she’s honest with herself, not being able to go has come as a relief. She knows she should probably be experiencing an element of guilt for feeling this way but try as she might she is unable to summon it. Instead of tormenting herself with thoughts of what she should or shouldn’t be feeling, Hannah flicks the switch on the kettle. The room still smells of paint, and what happened here on Saturday cannot be escaped, no matter how desperately she tries to shut it out.

  The thought of an intruder standing here, just feet from where Hannah now stands distracts her momentarily from thoughts of anything else. The image that is set in her brain shifts and distorts, so that the shadowed stranger she sees in her imagination is no longer such. Olivia replaces the darkened figure, a strange and quietly satisfied look of victory on her face. Hannah sees her lips move; hears the word ‘liar’ mouthed as her daughter fades and disappears.

  Feeling nausea roll in her stomach, Hannah makes herself a cup of tea she won’t drink and sits at the kitchen table, trying to empty her mind of the thoughts that linger there and the image of Olivia that returns to the room. She watches her at the cupboards, armed with a can of spray paint, her resentment escaping her as she scrawls the word LIAR in a shock of blood red. The word is so specific, so intentional. Just how much does Olivia know?

  As Hannah wonders what her daughter might have found out about her, the girl who isn’t really at the other side of the kitchen turns slowly to her. She still looks like Olivia from behind, but when she turns face on her features are different and her clothes have changed, the jeans and t-shirt combination that has become her unofficial uniform replaced by a dress that is too short and torn at the front. There are bruises on her bare arms. There is blood on her face.

  Hannah closes her eyes and puts her head in her hands, her elbows resting

  on the kitchen table. She begins to hum, a tuneless, droning noise that attempts to drown out every other sound that fills her head. On any other Monday, being stuck inside the house would come as something to be welcomed, but now, after what has happened over the weekend and the ghosts that it has left her with, Hannah wants to be anywhere else. The safe place that was once her home doesn’t feel so safe anymore.

  6

  Six

  Olivia

  * * *

  The thought of going to school that morning had made Olivia feel sick. Usually, no matter how bad things were there, school was a more appealing option than home. They had walked in silence that morning, the air yet again thick and heavy with the threat of rain, the last of the warm spring days behind them for the time being. Olivia had walked away from her mother and sister at the usual corner, already feeling her schoolmates’ stares burning through her skin. She wondered what might have been said about her since Friday night, then she asks herself whether she really cares. The answer is, of course she does. She wants to fit in with these people. She needs to believe she can fit in somewhere.

  By third lesson, Olivia hopes that the worst of what might have been said has already come and gone. She heard a couple of comments passed between the girls sitting behind her during registration; she knows she heard the word skank, though she pretended not to have noticed that they were talking about her. The truth was, the word cut into her chest, piercing her heart with a violence that felt physical. She tries to pretend to herself it doesn’t hurt, that she can’t feel the pain, but it does and she can, and it all feels like a whole new rejection, just another to add to the list of knock-backs that have passed before it.

  Thinking about what happened at that party on Friday night makes her face flush with colour, yet she knows that if she could go back and re-start the weekend – if she could go to that party again knowing what would be said and how she would feel afterwards – she would do it all again, exactly the same. Perhaps what she did was wrong – she knows it probably was. But Olivia is sick of being told what is right. She wants to find out for herself.

  English is third lesson, and Olivia takes her usual place near the front, by a window that overlooks the staff car park. She sits next to the other class oddball, a girl called Manon who is new to the school and no one really bothers with. Olivia empathises with her, but she doesn’t want to be her friend. If she gets too close to the new girl that no one seems to want to bother with she will only alienate herself even further from everyone else. When you’re already strange, she thinks, you don’t need the help of other weirdos to make you even odder.

  They are asked to get out their homework, which she finally managed to complete while still in bed on Saturday, a welcomed distraction from the headache and the regret that otherwise consumed her. They have been studying Of Mice and Men in preparation for their exam. It is bleak and depressing, and Olivia doesn’t want to believe any more that bleak and depressing are all that life has to offer. There must be something more.

  ‘Who’d like to start us off?’ Miss Johnson asks. She smiles and glances from row to row, waiting for one of the students to volunteer. Monday’s English lessons always begin in the same way, with the sharing of homework and the inevitable silence that falls as every member of the class tries to avoid drawing any unwanted attention to themselves. Miss Johnson says it’s an opportunity to learn from each other, but Olivia has yet to work out what might be learned from some of the people in the class.

  ‘Aaron,’ Miss Johnson says, resting her eyes on one of the boys in the back row. ‘I assume that’s your homework you’re studying so intently there?’

  Aaron slides his phone from his lap, puts it back into his pocket and rolls his eyes. Miss Johnson never seems to get too much backchat, even from the kids who play up the most during other teachers’ lessons. She is well-respected even though she’s young, still in her twenties, and Olivia guesses it’s because most of the boys fancy her. She is pretty, and she doesn’t talk to them as though they’re still in primary school like a lot of the other teachers do. Olivia likes her, though she doesn’t want to show it too much.

  ‘Actually,’ Aaron says, ‘I have done it.’ He flips through his exercise book and finds the homework. ‘Which bit do you want?’

  ‘How much have you written?’

  He holds the book up; he has written little more than a paragraph, and even that has been scrawled in the biggest writing it seems Aaron was able to manage. Miss Johnson raises an eyebrow. ‘Won’t even get you a pass in the exam,’ she tells him. ‘Doesn’t matter what’s written, even – it’s not enough. Come on, you know you need to write more than that.’ She sighs. ‘Read it to us then.’

  Aaron clears his throat as though he’s about to deliver a sermon. ‘Curley’s wife doesn’t have a name because she is only known as her husband’s property. This shows how women were treated as objects and didn’t have their own identity. She flirts with the men on the ranch for attention and she does it to wind Curley up, which always works. The other men think she is trouble and the
y’re right because everything that happens in the book is her fault and if she hadn’t messed with Lennie then neither of them would of ended up dead.’

  He looks up from his book, pleased with his efforts.

  ‘Okay,’ Miss Johnson says. ‘There’s the start of some good points there, Aaron. You’re going to need quotations in the exam though. When you write that the other men think she’s trouble…’

  ‘Jailbait,’ someone calls out, cutting her short.

  ‘Exactly. An easy one to remember. What do we think, then?’

  She waits for someone to offer their thoughts on Aaron’s homework, but no one speaks. Next to Olivia, Manon shifts uncomfortably in her chair, her head kept lowered to the table. She can feel the girl’s anxiety ebbing from her in waves, static in the air between them, and she feels a sympathy for her that she isn’t sure anyone else in this room could be capable of.

  ‘Aaron says that Curley’s wife flirts with the men on the ranch for attention,’ Miss Johnson says, trying to prompt the class. ‘Is he right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do we make of her behaviour, then?’ She waits before directing the question at another of the boys in Aaron’s row.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘she’s a bit of a slag really, isn’t she?’

  There are a few titters among the class. Olivia feels her own anxiety heighten, as though she and Manon are now encased in the same bubble of awkwardness that separates them from the rest of the class.

  ‘Not the nicest way of phrasing it,’ Miss Johnson says, ‘but some people may see her in that way. There’s a reason for most things, though. What motivates her behaviour? She must realise that people view her in this way, so why does she do the things she does?’