All the Little Things

by Sarah Lawton

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I say, but I remember the way he touched me and uneasiness runs right through me, making me shiver.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Of what? Being kissed?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I can fix that,’ and before I know what’s happening she brushes my hair away from my face, fingers slipping through, and kisses me hard on my mouth. For a second I think I feel her tongue against my lip, a dart of warm satin, but then she sits back before I can push her away.

  ‘Now you’ve had your first kiss,’ she says, giggling, and then she lies back down, falls asleep again.

  I don’t understand what is wrong with her. What the hell was that about? The firm belief I had in Molly, who I thought she was, is starting to erode and break away into sharp pieces in my mind. I feel unsure, like I’m losing control. I don’t like to lose control. It brings back bad memories. I can’t let what happened before in London with her happen again here with Molly. I won’t. I’ve worked too hard.

  I run my hand over my stomach and I can feel rough, sore grazes on it from where Tristan must have scratched me trying to grab me. I hate him, I absolutely hate him. How dare he do that to me? It’s bad enough when he tries to hang around with us, spotty, always foul-mouthed. He makes me sick. I end up lying awake for a long time, watching the pale light shine through the window silver onto Molly’s hair.

  It looks like she’s burning.

  London

  ‘Is she asleep?’ Rachel had crept into a quiet house to find her mother in the kitchen, washing up.

  ‘Yes, she went up at seven, love. School is tiring her out.’

  ‘I’m sorry I missed bedtime again, this campaign is insane.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’

  Rachel decided not to answer the rhetorical question, which had been accompanied by a stern look. She knew her mother was unhappy with the hours she had been putting in since her promotion, but she loved her new job, and she had to prove she had been the right choice.

  ‘How did she get on? Was she okay today?’

  ‘Seemed to be. She’s a quiet little thing at the best of times, she didn’t say much.’

  ‘I’ll pop up and tuck her in and get changed.’

  ‘Okay, love. Dinner’s nearly done. I got some of those nice sausages from the butchers.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Rachel hung her handbag on the end of the banister as she went up the stairs, pulling her hair out of its tight clip as she did. It felt dry and frizzy from the irons she tortured it with every morning, but it looked much smarter straight. She hadn’t been that wild-curled art student for a long time. Pushing into her small bedroom, she cast a reproachful eye at the single bed she’d had growing up and was inhabiting again. Her little nest egg could not turn into a deposit for their own place soon enough, useful and comforting as it had been to live with her mum after everything.

  She quickly took off her suit and hung it up, smoothing the sleeves and picking lint off the pencil skirt. Stripping her restrictive shirt and tights off with a sigh of relief, she swapped them for loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt. She left the confines of her room and quietly popped her head around the door to the even smaller box room, where Vivian lay sleeping.

  The little girl was curled up like a bean in the middle of the bed, the covers puddled beneath her feet. Rachel padded into the room and slid her hands beneath her daughter, gently pulling her up to the pillow, tugging the covers up to cover her. She smiled, and kissed her gently on her silky head, stroked her cheek. Such a good girl. As she left she smiled again at the sight of Vivian’s little uniform neatly folded on the tiny dresser ready for the morning. It didn’t seem possible that five years had passed since she had come back, since Vivian had been born.

  At the doorway she looked back again, feeling the tug of guilt that she was missing so much time with her, that she only ever seemed to see her asleep or to wake her up with a brief hug as she left the house. She told herself she was setting her a good example, showing her a strong and independent woman who provided for her family. It wasn’t like Vivian’s father ever would. Even the thought of him in their lives made her feel dizzy with burgeoning panic. They were better off like this, they were safe.

  Back in the kitchen Carol was dishing out steaming mash and topping it with sausages and gravy. It really was a time warp. She felt sixteen again, caught out misbehaving as she sat down and began to eat, her mum not looking at her as she did the same; wondering if they would ever move past the parent-child dynamic. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

  The prickly atmosphere continued past dinner and the washing up, but was alleviated somewhat by the appearance of a large bar of Galaxy chocolate from Rachel’s handbag, presented along with a gin and tonic.

  ‘I am sorry, Mum,’ she ventured. ‘I know I’ve been taking the piss recently, but I have to be there, or it looks bad. I can’t just leg it at five.’

  Her mum sniffed and took the chocolate, taking the paper off and peeling back the foil. ‘I’m not the one you need to apologise to. I get to see you now, but Vivian hasn’t seen you since breakfast yesterday.’ Carol swept the piece of fine auburn hair that always fell into her face back past her ear, and tried to straighten the frown off her face, the deep lines that appeared between her eyebrows above her glasses.

  ‘I know, I know. I changed my meetings around tomorrow so I can take her to breakfast club. And it’s Friday, so I’ll have the weekend with her. I’ll take her to the Leisure Lagoon, and ice cream after.’

  ‘She’ll like that,’ said Carol, snapping off a line of chocolate and passing it to Rachel, who was settling in with her own drink and unsuccessfully trying to smother a yawn. ‘I know it’s important to you, after everything with that man, but you won’t get these years with her back. She’ll be grown up before you know it.’

  ‘Mum, I know. It’ll be fine, I promise.’

  As Rachel let the gin and sugar do their work, the stresses of the day slipped away. They tuned into a reality TV show and as Rachel’s mind drifted to the next day’s work, she gave no further thought to Carol’s warning. After all, Vivian was just a little girl. School was far more exciting than spending time with her mum. Weren’t friends everything at that age?

  Rachel

  I left Steve with another one of his friends who had turned up, setting the world to rights and slurring every third word at about ten o’clock so I could get home while there was still some light. I was too lazy to go round the long, lit-street way and would always rather cut across the field, which I did, inhaling with pleasure the grassy scents of summer evenings.

  I hadn’t had anything to drink, so I managed to navigate keys-in-door with ease. I wasn’t expecting the girls to be back but there were two pairs of shoes at the bottom of the stairs and all the lights were on, so I thought they must have come back early. I wondered if I would be dealing with the midnight puking club if they’d had a bit too much – it wouldn’t have been the first time one of her friends had been ill. I sometimes thought I should be more firm with the drinking, but I was doing exactly the same at her age and would have felt like such a hypocrite. And after all the trouble we had to get away from in London, the awful time she had at primary school, I was just glad she had some lovely friends and I didn’t want to rock the boat. And to be fair, Vivian never seemed to be drunk; she always wanted to be in control. If anyone in our house was drinking too much, it was me, as a salve to my self-enforced penance here in the middle of nowhere and the guilt I felt over letting her down so badly when she was young.

  I decided to have a midnight feast of cheese and pickle on the last of the bread, and a pint of squash, and mock myself for the rebel life I was living. I couldn’t help but think about Steve teasing me earlier about my sex life. I pretended I was just being coy, when in fact I was just too embarrassed to confess that the last time I had had sex was around
the time Viv was conceived.

  It’s not a period of my life I like to think about, but sometimes I can’t help but poke at it, like it’s a badly healing scab that pulls and itches. Bleeds.

  I met Vi’s father at art college in Manchester and fell in love – or lust, probably – at first sight. He was perfect: acid green eyes against dark hair and creamy skin, my absolute favourite colour combination. He seemed to feel the same way about me and we fell into an intense relationship that revolved around skipping lectures in favour of long mornings in bed followed by long afternoons in the scuzziest dives we could find in Moss Side. Ciaran was an observational artist – he could catch someone in just a few quick strokes of a pencil, and favoured people who had been ground down by their lives. Drunks in bars and the women who paraded for their attention.

  I didn’t like his fixation with people who he looked down on; I didn’t like that he thought he was so much better than them, when we weren’t – who is? But Ciaran thought he was the next great social commentator, Lowry for the twenty-first century, dredging through life for specimens to make people ‘think’. Part of me hated him for dehumanising people, but that was smothered by the part of me that wanted him, wanted him in me, all the time. I was addicted to his attention and the way he fucked me, worshipped my body like I was the most amazing woman in existence. I’d never felt before that I was the centre of someone’s world and it was intoxicating and I was lost in it, in him.

  He attacked me after I got my first commission. We were in our second year and I’d done a line of sketches inspired by the Cottingley Fairies hoax for a class, which my tutor had shown to a friend who was a buyer for department stores. He wanted to commission them for a wallpaper print for little girls’ nurseries. It was a small fortune to me, and I had thought Ciaran would be thrilled, but I was to find out later that it didn’t suit his struggling artist trope – to make money, from art? We went out to celebrate with the cheapest fizzy wine we could find, a lot of it, and when we got home, he broke a glass pane in our flat door using my head.

  I wanted to leave him, of course I did – I hadn’t been raised to stay with a man who hurt me, but I also hadn’t been raised to understand how you can fall under someone’s spell so entirely. I let him take me to A&E for butterfly stitches and then I let him take me home to bed where he made me come again and again while he whispered how much he adored me, how I was the rock he wanted to build his life on, he was sorry, so sorry, it would never happen again.

  It did happen again. It always does. He smashed my hand in the same door because I had embarrassed him by talking to his friend about football. He hated the game, never watched it, though I did because I had always watched it with my father, before, and it reminded me of him. But only men should talk about football, apparently. I had shown him up. I’ve never watched it since, and the fingers on my left hand never did heal straight. I was just grateful it wasn’t my right.

  I can pinpoint the night I got pregnant with Vivian. I had offered to lend him some money, fed up of his whines of being skint. He hadn’t replied, but I could feel his anger simmering and growing and I tried to distract him the only way I knew how, with my body. And I thought it had worked, until he began to be rough, using hard thrusts that hurt me and made me gasp with pain, rigid hands that left bruises. I turned my face away and he lunged, biting me where my shoulder met my neck, so hard I thought he had taken a piece of me. He finished with a bloody-mouthed shout, slapped me and then left me there, in our bed, bleeding.

  I didn’t even leave him to protect her initially, I was that worn out and weak, still in love with him despite his fists and his teeth and the words that hurt worse than either. I thought we could have a family, that the baby would fix everything, fix him, but when I told him I was pregnant he was beyond furious. He didn’t want a milky sow hanging around his neck, a baby to throttle him with inanity and despair like he’d done to his own father, a talented musician who never made it after being ‘trapped’ by his mother and himself. That beating was the worst, including several kicks to the stomach that I thought had ended everything. I should have gone to the police but instead I ran home with nothing except bruises and scars, and shame, to London to live with my mother again in her little house in Walthamstow, praying that he wouldn’t follow me.

  By some miracle, despite weeks of bleeding, I didn’t lose Vivian. My fairy commission was enough to get by on while I slowly built us a life, painted a fantasy. Vivian never once asked me about her dad, although I was expecting it, planning for it, and she looked nothing like him at all, which was the purest sort of relief. I didn’t want to see his acid eyes ever again.

  I had thought I would never want to be in love again, or even have sex with anyone ever again but, as always, thinking of Ciaran, of his hands on my body, stirred something dark inside me, and I went to bed and masturbated until I fell asleep, dreaming of dark wings and sharp teeth, of wicked hot breath on my neck and of cold, clever fingers between my legs.

  * * *

  When I woke up I felt overheated and sweaty and guilty about going out yet again the night before, and an echo of the strange dreams followed me around until I dispelled them with a cold shower. There were no movements from Vivian’s room so I peeped my head round the door ever so quietly. They were both in her bed, cuddled up together, which I couldn’t imagine was making them hot at all and I smiled before retreating downstairs for tea and toast, which I took outside into the garden to have while I listened to the birds waking up.

  * * *

  I was working on the final draft for the book when I heard someone pad into the studio behind me. It was Molly, looking pale, her eyes black and smudged with make-up, her long hair straggling down her back.

  ‘Are you okay, sweetheart?’ I asked her, putting down my pen and turning to her. She looked at me, her throat moved but she didn’t say anything. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she stepped into me, putting her head down next to mine, her arms round me. I could feel her shaking. I put both my arms around her and hugged her. ‘Darling, tell me, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling away and scrubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘I’m just a bit hungover. I think I need to go home and sleep it off.’ She looked so sad, I had to try and not laugh at her woebegone expression.

  ‘I’m not very sympathetic if it’s self-inflicted, Molly’ I told her, and she managed a small, tight smile. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay for breakfast? I can make pancakes?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She sniffed. ‘Can I have another hug?’ I obliged, happily. I never got any affection from Vivian, and often worried that Molly didn’t get enough from her mother. She spent so much time at our house I did wonder if she saw me as a substitute in some way. As she left I glanced up at Vivian’s window and saw a flash of her pale face looking out at us, and my stomach dropped. I knew she would be jealous, and I didn’t want that.

  Molly left using the back gate and I went back to the house. I put more bread in to toast and flicked the kettle back on, calling to Vivian as I did. She eventually slouched down the stairs, but didn’t come into the kitchen. I took her breakfast into the front room instead, where she scowled at me.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll eat it,’ I replied, sitting down on the armchair and tucking a leg up. ‘What’s up with you this morning? Are you feeling hungover, too?’

  ‘No.’

  I ate the toast as slowly and loudly as I could manage, watching Vivian. She was deliberately staring out of the window but I could see a small muscle twitching in the soft skin under her jaw.

  ‘Do you have to make so much noise? You’re a grown woman.’

  ‘I can do what I like in my own house, Vivian. Are you going to tell me what was wrong with Molly this morning? Have you had a row? You know you’re supposed to tell me if you’re feeling out of sorts about anything.’ I watched her breathing steadily, exactingly. Controlled and even, in and out.

/>   ‘No, we didn’t have a row. She just got really drunk yesterday. It was gross.’

  ‘Was she ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, what happened? What was gross?’

  ‘Nothing, Mum! For god’s sake not everything is a massive issue. Just leave me alone for once.’

  It was like getting blood from a stone. Feeling my own frustration bubbling up, I left her to it, resolving to keep a close eye on her in the coming days, monitor her moods.

  I spent the rest of the weekend pottering around in the garden being ignored by my daughter, as usual, trying to rescue my poor plants from the heat. There was a hosepipe ban, so I put a bucket in the shower and collected what I could from there and other waste water, and I was fairly pleased with my efforts – everything seemed to be alive and still thriving despite the drought. I knew I’d need to keep on top of it, though; last summer, the heat was a killer.

  Vivian

  As soon as I wake up a black mood envelops me. I don’t want to go to school today. I don’t know what to do about Molly. I saw her, out in the garden with my mother on Saturday. She thinks she can have her, too. Does she want everything that doesn’t belong to her? Maybe Serena was right about her. Maybe I have been blind.

  Our phone chat was completely dead the whole weekend and that’s never happened before. It always annoyed me, pinging all the time, never leaving me alone, demanding my time, but now it’s silent I miss it: absence leaves a hole.

  I get ready for school slowly; I’ve been awake for hours already. Mum is already pottering about – she gets up stupidly early, too – I can hear her making tea, the roil of the kettle. Why is she drinking tea when it’s already boiling outside? I feel like we’ve been transported to some Louisiana swamp. There’s probably an alligator at the bottom of the garden. With any luck it will eat me on the way to school. I imagine it slithering out of the undergrowth to snap me in its mouth, crunch my bones, make me bleed red rivers into dying grass.