Fragile

by Sarah Hilary

  Sleeveless with wide shoulder straps of satin, its neck low and cowl-shaped. I turned the hanger in my hand. The back of the dress was slashed in a deep vee where the shoulder straps met a diamond clasp stitched onto the high waistband. A stern little circle of stones which would imprint itself on the wearer’s skin when she sat, or lay down. It was an achingly sexy dress, slim at the hips, with the whisper of perfume in its heavy folds. I brought it close, the satin grazing my lips. Under the perfume, it carried a woman’s russet scent. His mother’s? The style made that a possibility, but it felt too new. The gown had been made to measure, for someone narrow, snake-hipped and small-breasted. The sort of woman who might wear a belted black satin coat, naked underneath. The sort of woman who picked up stray young men in nightclubs and took them home with her.

  I crossed to the ugly mirror, holding the gown in front of me. It would never fit my curves, but it was beautiful. The silver shuddered against me, as if the satin were breathing. I looked taller and more remote, unreachable. My hair was suddenly darker, my lips redder, my eyes darker. I ran my palm down the dress where it lay along my hip.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I swung to face him, the gown against me, clinging to my thighs.

  Dr Wilder stood in the doorway to his bedroom. ‘I asked you a question.’

  I didn’t recognize his voice, it was so altered by anger. But I recognized the rage in his eyes. I’d seen it in other men’s eyes, and women’s too. The room slipped sideways, away from me.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was tidying—’

  ‘Put it back.’ He took a step towards me, his body rigid, teeth together. ‘Now.’

  I gathered the cold folds and shoved the gown inside the wardrobe, snagging the hanger at the rail as I fought the slipperiness of the satin. I felt his eyes on me, burning and freezing at the same time. My heart filled my whole chest.

  As I shut the wardrobe door, he said, ‘Now get out.’

  His anger was so familiar, far easier to navigate than his calm. I drew a breath, holding on to it for a long moment before I said, ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

  He expected me to run from the room, but I stood my ground. Counting time in my head, the way I’d learnt to do when Meagan’s anger bubbled over. Running only made her worse.

  Slowly, my heart unclenched. The room stopped tilting, and settled into place.

  Dr Wilder stared at me, his face pale and carved.

  I saw him struggling to find a way back from anger to coolness – the distance he’d put between us with his rules. He flexed his hands, forcing his fingers loose from the fists they’d formed. I wanted to tell him it was all right, I understood. His anger made sense to me, perfect sense. I was even a little relieved to see it, it was so familiar to me.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ll learn from it. It won’t happen again.’

  After a long moment, he nodded. He stood aside to let me leave the room, the blades of his shoulders against the door. We passed so close, I thought we’d touch. But he was too careful for that, standing very still with only the adrenal scent of his skin to give away what had happened.

  I was afraid as I went ahead of him down the stairs, afraid he’d hear the triumphant hammering of my heart: I was right I was right I was right.

  A woman lived here. She lived here. This was the house she and Joe had disappeared into that night. After the club where she stole him from under my nose, not knowing we were together, bound together by a secret so black its stain would never wash away.

  Starling Villas was the house.

  It happened here. I was right.

  8

  The Spar would be closing soon. Meagan should get going if she didn’t want a supper of mouldy bread. The memory of Nell’s fruit cake pricked the inside of her mouth with saliva. The little bitch could cook, whatever her other failings. She poked inside the fridge at nothing very much of anything at all. It was the Spar, or starve. She’d have to run the gamut of the town’s attention but she was used to that. After the funeral, it felt as if all of Wales knew what’d happened at Lyle’s.

  She pulled on her coat and hat, dragging the door shut with the key in its lock to be sure it stayed closed. Good luck to any fool who thought to rob the place. The left sleeve of her coat was green from the wardrobe, stinking of damp. She lit a cigarette to get rid of the smell. Curtains twitched as she went up the road. What did they see? Just an ordinary woman at the wrong end of middle age, going about her business.

  A pair of teenagers sat on the wall outside the Spar, kicking their feet, hands hunched in the pockets of their parkas. Summer had slunk away, almost overnight. Good. A day closer to settling her scores. The girl on the wall gave Meagan a vacant glare as she went into the shop, her boyfriend muttering, his elbow in the girl’s ribs, the pair of them spoiling for a fight. The whole town was spoiling for a fight, a slag heap of disappointments held together by grudges. Pick at any part of it and the whole lot’d come sliding down to bury you. There were days when Meagan would’ve welcomed that, but she wanted them home with her first. Nell and Joe Peach.

  Funny to think they fought like cats, the first time they met.

  Joe hadn’t been in Lyle’s five minutes before he sat in Nell’s space on the settee. One of the little ones went to him, climbing into his lap. Rosie Bond, it must’ve been, who was welded to Nell day and night. Joe didn’t make a fuss, just lifted his arms out of his lap to make room for her, sitting with his console held over her head, his eyes on the game, but mistily, as if he wasn’t serious about playing or winning. He was asking for it, and Nell told him so. Told him with her feet, and then with her fists.

  In the Spar, Meagan added a bottle of cider to her shopping basket. After the pram in the park and the smashed china, she’d kept an eye on the girl, of course she had. But she’d failed to see it coming, even with the fight to flag it up, Nell flinging herself at Joe. She caught him off guard. He hadn’t figured her for a threat. In a room of kids, it was the adult he watched out for, the man in the priciest suit or the woman in the tightest dress. He’d learnt to spot his predators, had Joe. Nell taught him a lesson that first day. Rosie slipped to the floor as they fought, her thumb in her mouth, watching every move they made. She wasn’t frightened by the fight, it wasn’t hurting her. Nothing phased Rosie, unless it was the loss (always temporary, thanks to Nell’s sharp eyes) of her best bear.

  When the village gathered to say their goodbyes, the wreath was white roses with blue forget-me-nots spelling out her name: R-O-S-I-E. People brought toys and balloons, the way they do when a kiddie dies. That day, Nell hid her face in Joe’s shoulder, the pair of them so tragic it was nearly comical. Meagan knew to nip it in the bud: ‘Shape yourselves. People are watching.’ The press and Social Services, Rosie’s parents who’d caught the whiff of money coming off the scandal of her death. And Nell and Joe with their arms twisted together, all the long way home to Lyle’s. You’d’ve taken them for newly-weds, never guessed they’d fought like cats before they were even introduced. Never guessed at the rest of it, either. Meagan saw to that: ‘Shape yourselves, you two.’

  No one broke up their battle, that first day. There was only Meagan and she’d enough on her plate. ‘You like us to fight,’ Joe accused her, weeks later. ‘It keeps us busy. And it uses up our anger and energy, so there’s none left for you.’ He was smarter than he looked, Joe Peach.

  ‘I’ll put a stop to it when I see fit,’ Meagan told him.

  Fostering was a fool’s errand. She hated kids and she hated Lyle’s but she didn’t stop there, hating the whole town. ‘Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas’, she called it. But she should’ve seen what was coming down the line. For Joe Peach and Nell Ballard, and their precious Rosie Bond.

  That first day, after Rosie was put to bed, the pair of them took up camp in the bathroom. Nell showed Joe where the plasters were kept. She’d found a tin of antiseptic cream, smearing it onto his bruised cheek. Meagan stopped to watch, standing in
the corridor with an unlit cigarette in her fingers. Neither of them noticed her, too wound up in one another. Joe sat on the side of the bath, his hands between his knees, chin tilted under the light. Nell stood on one foot, bare toes crooked around her calf as she concentrated on his face, treating the marks she’d left with her fists. When Joe shut his eyes, Nell’s toes curled tighter.

  Trouble, Meagan had thought. It’d stirred at her stomach. Nell Ballard and Joe Peach were going to be trouble. Six years Nell had been with her by that time. She’d settled into Lyle’s so deeply it would’ve hurt Meagan to root her out; she counted on the girl for too much. Her idea, she’d thought, but now she wondered whether it hadn’t been Nell’s plan from the off. She was the one who kept it all ticking over, feeding those who wouldn’t feed themselves, stockpiling ways to soothe the kiddies when they were fretful or sick. ‘Cheaper than Calpol,’ Meagan called her. She’d stopped Rosie Bond’s tantrums, when nothing else would. Rosie was a chubby cherub with a talent for winding herself round whichever finger was your weakest. Tied Nell up in knots, she did. With Rosie in tow, Nell dug herself deeper into Lyle’s. By the time Meagan noticed, it was too late. By the time Joe arrived, it was terminal.

  ‘This isn’t like other places,’ Nell said as she smeared the cream onto the boy’s bruised face. ‘It might look the same, but it’s not.’

  Meagan stood outside the bathroom, listening to her telling him all the unwritten rules, how to navigate his new home. She didn’t know Meagan was listening, or she didn’t care. She’d recognized Joe, the way Joe recognized the men in expensive suits and women in tight dresses. Only Nell fancied she’d found an ally, not an enemy. He was sweet, was Joe, and soft. ‘Soft lad,’ Meagan called him.

  ‘She’s mean,’ Nell told Joe as he sat on the side of the bath. ‘And she hates us. But she needs me. You can make her need you, too.’

  Joe held his hands between his knees, listening. He wasn’t the only one. Meagan listened with her ears pricked, shivers running up and down her spine. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure how much Nell understood about Lyle’s, and about her. But Nell understood all right, naming every one of Meagan’s buttons, giving soft lad the inside track. Hard to forgive her for that.

  When Joe asked why she stayed with Meagan, Nell told the story of the Egyptian plover and the crocodile. ‘The Nile crocodile has a lot of teeth, and most of his food gets stuck in his teeth. When that happens, he sits very still in the water with his mouth wide open. The plover sees this invitation and flies down to clean the crocodile’s teeth, making a meal of the trapped food.’

  It was a story she’d read to Rosie, from a picture book. Joe listened in silence. Then he said, ‘You’re the plover bird, and Meagan’s the crocodile. But who’s the food?’

  Nell put the lid on the tin of antiseptic cream, shutting it up in her fist.

  Joe said, ‘Is it Rosie?’ He shifted his shoulders, wincing from her bruises.

  He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, Meagan thought, letting the kiddie climb into his lap. But Rosie might. Rosie would. Who’s the food?

  ‘It’s all of us.’ Nell put the tin in the bathroom cupboard and turned to face Joe, seeing Meagan standing in the corridor. Her hands closed into fists, lips pressing together. ‘Every one of us,’ she told Joe, but her eyes were fixed on Meagan.

  In the Spar: ‘That everything, is it?’ The woman on the till didn’t bother looking up.

  ‘And a packet of Silk Cut.’

  Every one of us. Meagan had shuddered in spite of herself. She was not a religious woman but, God help anyone, she’d thought, who comes between Nell Ballard and the thing she loves.

  Outside the Spar, the teenagers had moved on. A boy of about ten was hanging from the rail, grubby blond hair falling over his face, skinny jeans ratted at the knees. He fired a look at Meagan from brown eyes flecked with amber, like a tiger’s. He wasn’t a pretty boy, but something about him reminded her of Joe. She held out the packet of cigarettes, watching as he came upright towards her. The cellophane sizzled as he stripped it from the box. ‘Take two,’ she offered.

  He did, handing back the box. ‘Thanks.’ His voice hadn’t broken, thin as a girl’s.

  The cigarettes went into his pocket. For his mum? Meagan had hoped he’d smoke them, warm himself up a bit. If she’d had enough food, she’d have invited him home. She was lonely, and he looked the same. He needed a decent meal inside him, and a hot bath. She could make up a camp bed on the couch. But he’d never have come. Like the rest of the town, he knew to keep away from the flats at the end of the estate. She took her own cigarette from the packet, propping it between her lips.

  He pointed at the sleeve of her coat, where the damp had done its worst. ‘Green,’ he said.

  She snapped her lighter at the cigarette. Green was what her old ma had called newborns, or those who couldn’t see which way the wind was blowing even when it was blowing a gale. ‘Not me, sunshine. I was born with a full set of teeth.’ She bared them, nodding her approval as he backed away. ‘Born and raised.’

  9

  The next morning, autumn was touching its teeth to Starling Villas. The summer had lasted six weeks. A fortnight ago, Joe and I sat sunbathing on the Embankment, only shivering after it went dark. But even then the days had been getting shorter. Cigarettes weren’t enough; it’s why he went to the club to get warm, in the only way he knew how. We’d found places to stay when we first came to London after leaving Lyle’s. For three months, we slept on strangers’ sofas or in their beds, before we ended up on the streets. Joe blamed me for that, our hard landing. He hated London, that’s what he said, the cold crouching in all the cracks. I told him it was the same everywhere. Sun turned to mist in a moment, especially by water. All summer long, our lake was green as glass but in the winter it was white, the hard months ahead showing in that first yawn of fog. ‘Don’t you remember?’ I said. ‘How Rosie thought it was smoke, that the lake was on fire?’ But Joe didn’t want to remember. He was sick, he said, of remembering.

  In my attic bathroom at Starling Villas, I dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, fastening my hair away from my face. Rosie was like Joe, I remembered, hating the cold but refusing to wear a hat or gloves, saying they made her look lumpy. Her mum and dad had called her Doll and Princess, dressing her in designer clothes, piercing her ears while she was in nappies. Then they bored of her, because princesses shouldn’t cry or shriek or bounce on your bed when you’ve a hangover. They gave their doll to Meagan Flack, or the social workers did. Rosie cried a lot at first, weeks of weeping before she crawled into my lap for a cuddle. It made Meagan laugh. ‘Turned you into a proper little mum, hasn’t she? Should’ve got her months ago, spared myself some trouble.’ Meagan with her hard palms and quick fists. It filled me with rage, to remember. Long before the funeral she was telling me to move on – ‘Plenty of others needing a cuddle. Pick one of them’ – as if all the kids at Lyle’s were the same and there was nothing to choose between us.

  Dr Wilder was working in the library, head down over his papers. A lick of shaving foam sat behind his right ear, creamy against his neck. A wife would lean across and wet her finger, wipe the cream away. I set the plate of toast at his elbow, with a fresh press of coffee. His cardigan smelt of paraffin lamps, a safe-dangerous smell. At supper last night he’d said nothing of the silver gown, his anger like his work, tidied away for the day. I hadn’t taken fright, and that puzzled him. As I laid his cup and saucer on the desk, his eyes were on me, wondering. If he’d asked, I’d have said it soothed me, his anger. But he didn’t ask. He’d been working hard, emptying more boxes of their envelopes marked Private and Confidential. I missed his anger, locked away inside the puzzle of his loneliness. It made me want to wipe the shaving foam from his neck and rest my fingers on the pulse that beat there, to mark my place.

  After breakfast, I searched under the stairs for a hard-bristled brush. I filled a bucket at the kitchen sink, adding disinfectant and hot wa
ter from the stove. The fat pigeon was on the window ledge but she clattered away when a plume of steam rose from the water.

  Carrying the bucket to the hall, I knelt on the tiles with my back to the library, soaking the brush until the hot water hurt my hands. Pushing it at the floor felt primitive, Dickensian; where was my steam mop? But there was a pleasure to the labour, the scratch of the bristles, the slow staining of the water in the bucket. I worked towards the front door, thinking of the silver dress hanging in the wardrobe where I’d left it. I’d expected him to move it to a new hiding place, but he’d warned me well enough. He didn’t understand – how could he? – that his anger was a comfort to me. Fear had been flitting just out of reach since I’d set foot inside Starling Villas. Yesterday, he’d let it in. I understood the house and him a little better now.

  ‘How long until you’ve finished?’ He was standing in the doorway to his library, holding his cup of coffee in its saucer, his face brisk with enquiry.

  ‘The tiles?’ I sat back on my heels. The cuffs of my T-shirt were wet, clinging. In the steam from the bucket, my hair curled loose from its ponytail. ‘I can try to be done in forty minutes.’

  He studied the length of the hall, from his feet to the front door. ‘Forty minutes.’

  ‘I can try.’ I balanced both hands on the brush, leaning my weight into it. ‘Is the noise disturbing you? Would you rather I started upstairs?’

  ‘There’s the kitchen.’

  ‘I finished that on my first night. Before I went to bed.’

  ‘And the shopping?’

  ‘That too.’ I lifted the back of my hand to wipe my hair from my eyes.

  How much longer would he stand there with me kneeling at his feet, dripping dirty water? What did he want from me, really? I was so focused on what I wanted, it was easy to forget he too had a motive for letting me live here. I searched his face, finding nothing to help me. Dangerous to think I understood him because of his anger over a dress. Is this what his last slave died of – beating her fists against the rock face of his indifference, looking for a way in? I was tired. My back blazed, and my eyes. I wanted to lie down. To eat, and sleep. I wanted to finish scrubbing his floor.