Fragile

by Sarah Hilary

  I counted the steps as I climbed to the attic. There were thirty-nine.

  In my new bedroom, the old mattress creaked and sagged. I had to shut my eyes not to see those who’d slept in the stale sheets. A spider was crouched in the corner above my pillow, a furred black scrawl on the white tiles. But the pillow was mine, like the bed and the bathroom. Everything on this top floor of Starling Villas was mine. Tomorrow, I’d start searching. Every cupboard and shelf, each drawer of his desk. For the drugs that had lured Joe here, or some sign of the woman who’d taken him from the nightclub. Or evidence of another kind to explain the strangeness of the house, and of him. Dr Robin Wilder. If he’d been part of the scheme to lure Joe here, I’d make him pay.

  He stayed in his library, buried in his boxes, most of the day. Shirtsleeves rolled back from his square wrists, dressed in grey flannel trousers two shades lighter than his eyes. My only change of clothes hung from the shower rail in my bathroom, waiting for the creases to fall out. Dr Wilder didn’t care what I wore, or how I looked. It was peculiar how little interest he showed in me, this stranger he was allowing to live in his house and cook his food.

  ‘Start with the kitchen, please. That needs the most work.’

  His rota was long, pages and pages of it, bound inside a clear plastic wallet. He’d typed the rules using a bold font. Had he typed it quickly, while I was settling in? Or had he taken the rota from a drawer in his desk (one of those I would search), wiping it clean of his previous housekeeper’s fingerprints before handing it to me? ‘Say if anything’s unclear. I’ve tried to use plain English. This, for example.’ He reached to point at the page. ‘You do understand?’

  I read the rule out loud, about a certain drink to be served at the same time each night. It was hard to concentrate with his wrist resting on mine. Reciting his instructions slowly, I placed an equal emphasis on each syllable. He didn’t pull away and nor did I, until I’d reached the full stop.

  ‘Good,’ he said then, and paused. ‘You can always ask if there’s anything you don’t understand. I’ll expect you to ask. Otherwise, just get on with it. I find that’s best.’

  My wrist felt chilled without his and seemed to be all bone, as if a layer were missing and I’d find it later when I was sweeping. That’s what dust is, after all: the sloughing of skin. His nostrils flared, catching my scent. I’d washed off the worst of the streets. What was he smelling? Orange energy drinks and cheap soap, sleepless nights and sorrow? I was certain my skin told my secrets. So often I woke with a rash on my throat as if every one of my lies was written there, for anyone to read. Each sour black word and deed, branded on my body.

  ‘I’ll expect you to ask,’ he repeated, stepping away.

  How can I describe that first contact, his wrist on mine, a moment which came and went with the reading of his words? Such a small thing and so painfully, impossibly tender.

  My afternoon was elbow grease and bleach, battling the dirt that had settled over everything since he last had a housekeeper. I managed a third of the work before it was time to cook his supper. After serving the meal, I returned to the task. The house was dark around me but it was comforting to work in the light from his lamps. The sooner the house was clean, the sooner I could get to my real work. When at last I stood, my back stabbed and my legs shook. I had to grip the banister as I climbed to the top of the house. Below me, I heard the small sounds of Dr Wilder going to his bed.

  In my attic, I leaned on the lip of the window, looking out at London. Not the city seen from the tops of skyscrapers where the danger dwindles to a neat grid of roads, but here where the houses once stopped, three or four floors above the pavement. High enough for birds to come edging along the ledges, near enough to see the bald spots on passing businessmen. The city was lit by neon and the sulphurous yellow of street lights. I propped my aching wrists on the windowsill, watching the Thames as it ran through the city, away and away. Mapping my journey in my mind’s eye, the way I always did, no matter how far I travelled from the three of us. Joe and me, and Rosie. I’d take a train and then another. Shutting my eyes, I smelt the bitter brakes and sour bodies as the windows filled with stations north and west. At last, the breaking sky, secret.

  Wales is castles and princes, the strongholds of centuries. It gives up its shorelines to holiday crowds but the mountains are ours. True Wales is deep pockets and welts, pools where water lies flat and green, waiting. In summer, your toes grip the weed coating the stone ledges that reach into water so cold you bite the inside of your cheek. Wales is mist stealing your hand from in front of your face, the sea hoarding the summer’s heat long after the land has surrendered.

  Under my grip, the attic window peeled its paint, scabbing my palms.

  I kept my eyes shut. I wasn’t in London, I was in Wales. A train and then another. I’d walk the last mile, the ache of the incline in my shins, blue knots of gorse on all sides, slate slipping under my feet. I’d crouch and take a slice of it, blade-thin, into my hand, waiting for my heat to creep across its smoothly whetted surface. There at the side of the lake, so deep between the rocks, drawing down the sky and all its stars, spreading the yellow moon like butter on its skin. My favourite place in the world, but I could never go back.

  Below me, Dr Wilder slept in the bed whose sheets I’d smoothed and drawn tight. I wondered if he understood what he’d let into his house.

  5

  The postman brought his usual dribble of bills, thin brown envelopes that Meagan fed to the swivel-lidded bin. Nothing which’d help her find that little bitch. But the world was turning, summer on its way out. The first cold night would change everything. The stove wouldn’t light, so she ate beans cold from the can, watching the road through the kitchen window, its tarmac twisting away like an oily river. It led to Lyle’s, that road. She’d not been up it in months. Hardly dared show her face outside the flat, even at this safe distance and after all these weeks. The beans shed their skins against her teeth. She picked at them, thinking about cake and broken plates.

  By her ninth birthday, Nell Ballard was doing all the baking at Lyle’s, letting the littler ones decorate the cakes, cleaning up their mess without being told. Meagan took a tough line, the only line. Her kids didn’t trust kindness; why would they? Look what’d happened to Felicity Barrow, ‘Call me Fliss’, with her nose in the air and her homemade dresses. She didn’t look so proud after little Tallini seduced her husband before running off with their credit cards. No one ever robbed Meagan Flack, and it was common knowledge she took in the worst of them. So what if she turned a profit on the nuisance of keeping house for kids whose parents had babies not because they wanted them but just because they could? She thought she’d seen it all, from teenage pregnancies to benefit fraud, but Florence Ballard set a new record. She had Nell when she was too young, then wanted shot of the kiddie when it was time to get married – not to Nell’s dad, who’d never been in the picture, but to a man after a family of his own thank you very much, not leftovers from anyone else. He’d expected Nell to appreciate his point of view. To top it all, she was made to admire the fat baby that came soon after they’d packed her off to Lyle’s.

  ‘We can arrange that, yes?’

  Playing the proud dad, insisting Meagan bring Nell to meet her new half-sister. Except the baby wasn’t that, was she? No half about it, since they’d turned Nell’s bedroom into a nursery, stuffing it with plush bunnies and bunting. He’d been boasting all week about his new baby, wetting its head with his mates down the pub, showing photos to anyone who’d look. Running short of people to impress until he remembered the girl who should’ve been his stepkid, the one he’d dumped on Meagan so he could start his new family. Social Services saw a chance of reconciliation, but Meagan knew better. If Nell had been a bit older, maybe – useful as a babysitter. Social Services dug their heels in, all the same.

  ‘The weather’s nice enough,’ Meagan had compromised. ‘We can meet up the park.’

  Give Nell the chance to
run off, she’d thought, without it looking like a scene.

  Nell said nothing when Meagan told her the plan, just pulled on her coat and shoes. She didn’t take Meagan’s hand, the way some kids would’ve done. Not fearless, just too used to living with fear. Chances were she didn’t even know she was afraid. It took them that way, kids raised with fists or without love. It rewired their brains. They never got better.

  In the park, Nell looked for her mum but Florence had stayed home. It was just him with the new baby. ‘Come and see how beautiful she is!’ Standing there in his pricey parka, full of himself.

  Nell walked to the pram and looked inside.

  ‘She’s sleeping right now. Sleeps through the night already! Mum said she can’t believe it after you, says I must have the magic touch, ha-ha!’

  On and on, as if Nell was one of his workmates, happy to hear his boasting. She stood, staring into the pram. The baby had a halo of yellow hair, and rosy pink cheeks. Picture perfect, tucked up to her fat chin in snowy folds of blanket. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ Bouncing on his toes, beaming.

  Meagan got a chill, thinking back on it. Silent, skinny Nell with her dark eyes fixed on the baby. She didn’t say a word on the way home to Lyle’s, or for days after that. Meagan told Social Services it was a one-off, no more visits. It wasn’t fair on the girl, and it made her own job harder.

  A week after the park, she told Nell, ‘Table needs laying.’

  Nell laid the table without complaint, but two plates got smashed along the way. Two plates and a baby mug she’d brought with her to Lyle’s, painted with angels and bows. Meagan didn’t hear the smashing, only found the pieces later, razor edges wrapped in newspaper and put out with the bins. She’d thought of those sharp edges seven years later, the day Rosie Bond went missing. Nell was fifteen by then, all fresh curves that snagged the eyes of the dads who came to Lyle’s, and the boys who lived there. Boys like Joe Peach. All that summer long, Nell was in vest tops and shorts, and, My God, Meagan had thought, this is going to end with someone getting hurt.

  She’d missed a trick, all the same. Too busy watching the men and boys when she should have been watching Little Nell, no little about it now. Florence Ballard and her beau had moved away the summer before. Another fat baby had followed the first, and of course the local schools weren’t good enough. Social Services delivered the news, leaving Meagan to break it to Nell, only where was the point in that? They were gone, and good riddance. Nell had troubles of her own, filling those shorts the way she did, her neck suddenly so lovely. Eyes for no one but Joe Peach, and the little girl who looked a lot like the one in the pram. Rosie Bond, with her big blue eyes and pink pout of a mouth.

  From her kitchen window, Meagan saw a car turn onto the ribbon of road, coming from the direction of Lyle’s. It wasn’t coming for her, not this time. She was out of those woods, as far as it went. Exiled to this damp dump of a flat, empty of everything but spiders and flies. She ran a tap to rinse the spoon, still picking her teeth free of beans. When she’d finished, she lit a cigarette; first thing she’d done after they’d handed her the keys to this place was take the batteries out of the smoke alarm. She watched the car until it was out of sight, leaving the street empty again.

  Nearly five months they’d been gone, Nell and Joe Peach. Since just after the memorial service, which everyone called a funeral. They’d gone to ground, in London most likely. Nell would’ve promised to keep Joe safe but her promises were worse than worthless, he’d know that by now. The first cold night would bring them back to her. All Meagan had to do was sit tight, and wait. Because she wasn’t done with Little Nell, not by a long stretch. She hadn’t even got started.

  6

  Our life together in Starling Villas was dictated by his rota, the plastic-sleeved leash on which he kept me in those first few days. It was such an odd way to run a house. Not even Meagan Flack, who’d kept me on her own leash long enough, had bothered writing down the rules. In Starling Villas, I was kept busy below stairs, too busy to search the house the way I wanted to, but there was time. I was prepared to wait.

  Breakfast, the rota said, was to be served in the library. An omelette made from eggs beaten in a bowl then tipped into a hot pan where a sliver of butter was browning. No seasoning, just a grating of hard cheese. His diet was austere, to the point of being penitential. For what, I wondered, was he punishing himself? The omelette smelt good. I tore a corner of bread and wiped up the froth of butter, laying it on my tongue to savour its sweetness.

  In the library, he’d cleared a passage for me through the boxes. Already he’d emptied a couple of them, flattening the cardboard for recycling. He ate at a table under the window, away from his desk. The cutlery was silver, worn with age. Worth something, but not much. Not enough.

  As I laid the plate in front of him, he said, ‘Thank you,’ but didn’t speak again.

  I’d nearly set fire to my sleeve, making the omelette. His old stove didn’t like the cleaning products I’d used on it last night, spitting flames at me. I thought of the old joke, ‘What did your last slave die of?’ Dr Wilder’s last slave hadn’t cared about cleaning his stove, or being turned out onto the streets. It made me uneasy, for a reason I couldn’t name. Her neglect, and her departure. He’d had one or two housekeepers, wasn’t that what he’d said? Where were they now?

  While he ate his omelette, I sat at his kitchen table to write out a shopping list. He’d left cash in an unsealed envelope, £120 in ten-pound notes, more money than I’d seen in a long time but still not enough, certainly not to risk losing this new roof over my head. His rota said, ‘Shop locally and stay within budget but don’t compromise on quality.’ It sounded like a test. What were the penalties, if I failed? There are always penalties, Meagan taught me that. All those years under her roof, when I was in charge of meals and shopping, along with everything else. I’d been on the streets for only six weeks, but I’d known how to make someone else’s small change stretch to two meals. Poverty, like misery, sharpened my wits. But you can only plan for so much. Hadn’t Meagan taught me that, too?

  Forty minutes after serving breakfast, I returned to the library with a fresh pot of coffee. Thanks to the rota, I knew where in the house I would find him at any given hour, although (in theory anyway) it armed him with the same knowledge about me. Setting down the pot of coffee, I saw he’d opened another of the boxes and that it held large white envelopes with black barcodes, each envelope stamped ‘Private and Confidential’. He was back at his desk, bent over his work. A sleek silver MacBook was set to one side, sitting among the papers like a spaceship in a vintage car lot. His rota said the MacBook wasn’t to be touched at any time. The same rule applied to his phone and sound system. It made me wonder if his last slave died of an electric shock.

  ‘How is your room?’

  I was surprised he’d spoken, and more surprised to be asked a question implying an interest in my comfort. Was it a reward for how well I was following the rules? ‘Thank you, it’s fine.’

  ‘I expect it’s cold.’ He didn’t look up from his work. ‘You’ll find hot-water bottles in the airing cupboard, and blankets.’

  When I didn’t speak, he raised his eyes to look at me, blinking as he did so. I’d fastened a white tea towel as an apron over my charity-shop black dress. Max Mara, it fitted me perfectly, its length modest but flattering, its neckline the same. I’d been told I had good legs, and that my neck was lovely. I’d put my hair up, his old stove lending a clean sheen of sweat to my skin. My only jewellery was a red woven bracelet, damp from the sink. Joe had made the bracelets to sell on the streets, back before his fingers grew too shaky for the knots. He and I wore matching bracelets, always. I wondered where he was, and whether he was wearing it now.

  Dr Wilder withdrew his gaze, bending back over his book. His left hand reached for his coffee, finding it without looking because I’d placed the cup with its handle turned towards him. I waited, but he’d said all he wished to say. Carrying the tra
y from the library, I closed the door behind me, soundlessly. I had a great deal to be getting on with.

  I’d heard of fake houses in London and New York where a dignified facade was needed to hide a sewage works or electrical plant. Starling Villas was like that, telling lies with its elegance and age. I wanted to bury my hands in the house – bring up its secrets. For now, I could clean.

  His bedroom was my favourite in the house. In the morning, if I was quick, I’d catch the heat of him, hiding like a cat under the covers. I searched both bedside cabinets and in the suitcases under the bed, finding nothing of interest. No photos of blondes in black satin coats, smiling from silver frames. He slept alone. I don’t know why that was such a comfort. Only the ugly mirror unnerved me, its gilt fraying under my duster. It had a flaw, a bubble trapped inside the glass that swallowed my reflection, snuffing me out. If I stood in front of this spot and turned my head from left to right, my face vanished, reappearing on the other side of the flaw. Blink, and you missed me. I stood in that spot on my second morning in Starling Villas, making a solemn promise to myself to see this through. Like the one I’d made to Joe when I was fighting for our lives in Lyle’s, trying to make him see why it wasn’t safe for us to stay there any longer.

  ‘She knows, Joe. She knows and she’ll tell. She hates us.’

  It wasn’t a lie, but nor was it the whole truth. Meagan hated me, but she loved Joe. It’s why she fought so hard to keep him. She didn’t care about Rosie, or even about what had happened to Rosie, but she cared about Joe. And she hated me, with every bitter wire-wool fibre of her being.

  In Dr Wilder’s bedroom, I turned my head and let the mirror take me, just the mist of my breath on its old glass. ‘He doesn’t know,’ I whispered. ‘He thinks I’m nothing, no one. He has no idea why I’m here in his house. He imagines it happened by accident, that his job fell into my lap.’