Fragile

by Sarah Hilary

‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What’ve you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Joe Peach said. ‘Can I come home?’

  13

  Hungry’s was my lookout post in the days after Carolyn came home, where I retreated with enough money in my pocket for a cream cheese sandwich and a cup of tea as I sat watching the house, waiting for her to arrive. There was work to do in Starling Villas, but I carved out this free time because I needed to think about how I was going to deal with Carolyn.

  She was an infrequent visitor in those first few days, always managing to take me by surprise. I hoped to learn her habits and routine, but she didn’t make it easy. Most mornings it was Robin I watched in the hours between breakfast and lunch, his shadow at the library windows, or anchored to his desk. His loneliness had a colour, pebble-grey. I’d have watched him all day if I could. How his cheek thinned as he was thinking, the whiteness at the edge of his mouth, the slope of his left shoulder when he wrote. She’d laughed at his boxes, pushing them aside with the pointed toe of her shoe. Whose bed had she used the night she took Joe home with her? Not Robin’s, unless it was revenge. I understood revenge, better than I understood her.

  I ate my sandwich slowly. The bread was fresh, butter melting into the cream cheese, but I was too distracted to enjoy it. As I finished, Hungry’s proprietor collected my empty plate, returning with a wedge of lemon meringue pie topped by a swirl of cream.

  ‘For our regulars.’ He smiled.

  ‘Thank you.’ I was touched to tears by his kindness.

  The pie was perfect, its pastry thin and sweet with sugar. When my fork met the cream, it collapsed in a cloud of air. I shut my eyes to savour the lemon’s tartness. Rosie loved lemon puddings, said they made her teeth shout. Red stew, and yellow pudding – made with condensed milk and three whole lemons. Meagan couldn’t touch it. She’d a sweet tooth, she said. If that was true, it was the only sweet thing about her.

  ‘Yellow pudding!’ Rosie would wrap herself around my legs as I carried it to the table.

  Joe liked it too. I hadn’t known he had a sweet tooth until I caught him cleaning the tin, sucking condensed milk from his thumb. It made me giddy, watching him. I was fourteen then, and he was only a year older.

  In Hungry’s, the menu said, ‘Lemon Meringue Pie’, but it was better than that. It was sunshine and summer and sweet, sweet sadness. I savoured it, watching the house, for her.

  It’s just me, now. In the Villas.

  Robin had lied to me, betraying my trust. But when I tried to retrieve my earlier anger towards him, I could only find this ache under my ribs. Hadn’t I lied, too? My presence in his house was a trick made possible by the lies I’d told about him to the girl I’d accosted in this diner. Carolyn, not Robin, was my enemy. She no longer lived in Starling Villas. The guest room was impersonal, its wardrobes empty. Why did she keep coming back? To torment Robin, or to be close to him again? What unfinished business was there between them? Robin could have changed the locks, turned her out. Everything else in his life was so neatly nailed down. Why did he tolerate her trespass? And Joe’s, too.

  I’d failed to find any trace of Joe in Starling Villas but he’d left the club with Carolyn – where else could he have gone? Did Robin meet him that night, or was he absent from the house? He did on occasion leave Starling Villas, according to his rota. Perhaps that’s why Carolyn chose that night, knowing she and Joe would have the house to themselves.

  I licked lemon from the corner of my mouth, collecting pastry crumbs with my fork, one after another. I’d been wrong about Robin’s bed. She hadn’t slept in it the night she came home. What then did he get from her visits? Nostalgia? He smelt strange after she’d been in the house, but I didn’t think it was arousal.

  I paid for my sandwich before making my way back to Starling Villas.

  The traffic wasn’t hard to navigate if you knew its crossing points, the lulls created by lights further up the road. I walked between the cars and lorries, unharmed.

  As soon as I entered the house, I smelt her. Carolyn. She’d slipped under my defences, as she kept slipping under his. The free pie soured on my tongue as I realized it was during that brief moment of pleasure she’d evaded my watch.

  On the hall table, she’d dumped lilies wrapped in sodden paper. She’d brought them for me, not as a gift but a chore. I’d have to hunt down a vase, wipe up the water, trim the stalks and arrange the buds. The lilies were her way of putting me in my place. Had she played the same spiteful tricks on his last housekeeper – wearing her down, driving her out? What did Joe see in her? Only Meagan was worse. But he’d loved Meagan, I remembered. I’d had to fight to get him away from her.

  Carolyn was in the library. I caught the pitch of her voice stabbing at the stillness in the house. I pictured Robin with his thumb marking his place in the book he was studying, a crease of concentration on his face, waiting for her to go so he could have his routine back. The rota with its pages so firmly bound – was it his defence against her, or the reason she’d left? Because of his rules, which allowed no space for spontaneity or risk. Risk was overrated, I wanted to tell her. Real risk wasn’t worth it. She was playing a game, poking her perfect fingers at his life to see what would stir. Some people are addicted to making a mess. Order scares them, and they have to subvert it. For some people, chaos is a form of comfort.

  ‘I need a rubber bath plug, please. The cheapest you have.’

  The plug was my excuse for staying out of the house. I couldn’t settle in Starling Villas while she was there. The hardware shop was the other side of the park, smelling of creosote and tar and rubber. The smell of summer. My skin rippled with remembered pleasure. I lingered on my way out of the shop, breathing Joe’s name, my tongue touching the roof of my mouth.

  Three summers ago, the weather had been perfect. The sea giving back a glossy sky, the sun’s heat heavy on our heads. Joe had a job working on the boats in the harbour. He was fifteen, only a year older than me, but it meant he could get a job. I ducked my chores at Lyle’s to watch him work, not caring about the punishments Meagan served up. He moved so smoothly between the deck and rigging, tying sailcloth and hitching rope without making a single mistake. He had a way of moving on a boat that made the sea look like solid ground. A different Joe to the one I’d known all winter, his tiredness and clumsiness gone, as if he’d outgrown it. He fitted in his own skin, now. We both did. Watching him made my blood run fast. Salt spiked his hair and spangled in his lashes, his skin golden, the whites of his eyes so bright they looked luminous. He loved working on the boats. He was horny, he said, the whole time. ‘It’s the heat.’ Kissing me, hungry. ‘And the sea.’

  It was both of us, and the summer – so much skin on show. It was the way he lifted his face to the sun, the way he shone. I could taste him just by looking. Salt burnt my lips when I sucked the thin skin below his collarbone. It was the sea air, and being young. We were invincibly happy, so happy people started to notice. Out on the boats, and in the harbour. I still remembered the first day I knew we were being watched.

  Joe was sanding old paintwork and I was sitting on the harbour wall with his lunch in the shade at my feet. The man’s stare was like fingers in the small of my back. I didn’t turn, not right away. Instead I let my hair loose, combing it into a ponytail with my fingers. When I looked, he was gone. It was a trick of the light or the dazzle from the water, but he was there one second and gone the next. I blinked at the wall where he’d been standing, knowing what I’d seen. A man with fair hair, tall and nearly as tanned as Joe. He’d looked like Joe. But everyone did, that summer. Everyone was Joe. Everyone and everything. When I woke from dreams of Joe, the day was Joe-shaped. At breakfast, the toast was the colour of his skin, our feet touching under the table. I washed his clothes separately to the others’, lingering over them, wringing water with my hands before pulling his shirts into shape for the washing line. At bedtime, the stories I read to Rosie were of knights with Joe’s eyes or sailo
rs with his sun-bleached hair. Even her warm milk and cake were somehow Joe-shaped, Joe-scented. The man by the harbour wall was an older, tougher Joe. It was weeks before I would learn he was the one who first sold drugs to Joe. Down from Chester for the day, looking to hire a boat, throwing in the pill bag as an afterthought. I hadn’t minded his stare on my skin, it had excited me. The sun and the sensation of being watched, the man’s red shadow on the inside of my eyelids. I felt powerful, in control. All summer long, people stared at us. Some days it was Joe who attracted the attention and some days it was me, but mostly it was the pair of us, together. Our love, I’d thought, like a bat signal shouting at the whole world. Pheromones, I knew now. But what is love if not pheromones? Spicing our blood, making us reckless, stupid.

  At the end of each day, I walked home in a fever of happiness. Joe idled barefoot at my side, boat shoes hanging from his crooked thumbs until we reached the turning where the path was pebbled. Sand gritted between my toes, sending little shivers of sensation up the backs of my legs. Sometimes we sat at the flat stone that passed for a seat, where Joe liked to smoke a cigarette. He stole them from Meagan, or she let him take them. She had a soft spot, a blind spot, for Joe. She would slip him cigarettes and later, pills. To keep him quiet, she said. Like the Calpol she slipped to the little ones when they had toothache, or when she did and needed her sleep. I didn’t mind the cigarettes because it was an excuse to look at Joe’s mouth and hands, his forearms newly roped with muscle from the boats. He moved his back to the breeze, flinting the plastic lighter. To shield the flame, I cupped my hands around his. He shut an eye against the smoke, thumbs stroking my fingers. ‘Close your eyes.’ I did. ‘I made you a present.’

  He knotted a red bracelet about my wrist. ‘Now you’re mine.’ He showed me the matching bracelet around his own wrist: ‘And I’m yours.’ He was so intense, so serious. It scared me a bit.

  He held the cigarette smoke in his mouth. Soon I’d taste it, the smoke and Joe’s tongue. He tapped ash at his feet, leaning forward. I watched the loose shape of his fingers, wanting them on my neck, under my vest, inside my shorts. A blue crescent of sweat darkened the back of his T-shirt between his shoulder blades. Looking at it made me thirsty. I reached to touch the bare skin at the base of his neck. ‘Paint,’ showing Joe my thumb. ‘You should get clean.’

  He squinted down at his shirt. ‘Shit.’ He should’ve worn an old shirt, or taken it off.

  Meagan’s rules and her wrath seemed very far away, miles and miles from the cliff path. My thumb burnt where I’d touched him. I’d only wanted to touch, I hadn’t meant to worry him.

  ‘Better not let Rosie see.’ He rubbed at the paint stain on his hem. ‘She’ll tell Meagan.’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘You know she will.’ He shot me a look. ‘She’s always doing it.’

  I didn’t defend Rosie again. Joe was right: she was jealous of the time we spent together and it made her mean. Telling tales was the only revenge she knew.

  ‘Come on.’ I stood, pulling Joe with me. ‘Let’s go to the boathouse.’

  The boathouse was padlocked, but Joe had a key. He said the man he worked for hated getting up early so he’d asked Joe to be the one to open up in the morning. I suspected Joe stole the key but it didn’t matter, because being inside the boathouse was the best thing that’d ever happened to me. It was made of slatted wood with a felted roof like a garden shed. It bolted shut on the inside where the only light was the sun spearing through the slats. Inside, it smelt of wetsuits and buckets and spades, paint and tar and bitumen. The best smell in the world. I took a big gulp of it as Joe put a hand under my elbow and pulled me close enough to kiss.

  ‘Nell. Nell . . .’ Breathing my name into my neck, into my mouth.

  A scorched taste from the cigarettes, but it was Joe’s taste. I licked it from the underside of his lip, then sucked it from his tongue. He let go of my elbow and put both hands on me, on my neck and shoulders and my breasts before pushing a hand into my hair, tipping my mouth to more of the kiss, fingers teasing at the waistband of my shorts. The waistband was loose, shaped to the width of his palm. He could fit his hand inside, easily. If I sucked in the curve of my stomach, his fingers would slide inside. My mouth was wet from the kiss, tender at its edges, fiery as sunburn. I could feel the grit of sand between my toes, a separate sensation to all the others. I’d shut my eyes when he started kissing me but I opened them now to see the blunt head of a hammer hanging from the slatted wood, part of a rack of tools – spanners, screwdrivers, saws, a rubber-necked torch.

  The wall was dry, dusty under my fingers. I propped my hands behind me in case I touched too much of him, too soon. I didn’t want this to be over, never wanted to go back to Lyle’s or Meagan or even Rosie who would tell on us, I knew. Anyone who saw what we were doing would tell.

  Joe was licking my neck, teeth sharp under the softness of his lips. His mouth moved lower, the paint smell in his hair making me rub my face there. A splinter from the wall found my thumb and I flinched, making Joe lift his head to look at me. I worked my hand up between our bodies and he lifted it to his mouth, sucking the splinter from my thumb, using his tongue and teeth to draw it free before spitting it sideways from his mouth. Sweat wet the small of my back. I wanted him worse than I’d wanted anything in my life. When he knelt, everything fizzed and danced, the sun striping the back of his neck and the backs of my hands holding him there. The heat was going out of the day. It would break up soon, light lifting a bar at a time from our skin until there was nothing but darkness and the throb of Joe’s pulse against mine.

  A taxi honked its horn, traffic trailing the road in front of Starling Villas.

  Was that how it was with Carolyn, that night? Darkness and the throb of them, together. No, because that Joe was gone, long before she picked him up in the club where he was selling himself for drugs, trying to stay warm the only way he knew how, and maybe it was the same for her, the only way she knew, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t make her pay in any way I could.

  Someone had to pay. Why not her?

  Back inside the house, her scent was muted. The library door was shut. She’d gone again. Had she?

  I climbed the stairs to Robin’s bedroom, taking a handful of newspaper as an excuse. His mirror looked back at me, indifferently. If I took a hammer and hit it, again and again until my shoulder burnt and blood ran down my cheeks from flying shards of glass, my wages couldn’t begin to cover it. Seven years’ bad luck, just for starters.

  Shutting the door behind me, I stood beside his bed.

  A week ago, his bedroom door had creaked, like all those in the house. I’d rubbed petroleum jelly into the hinges, a cure-all learnt to silence the doors in Lyle’s – the quieter the doors, the more often I could sneak out to watch Joe working on the boats. It was how we were able to leave the house unheard that day two summers ago, the day that changed everything.

  In Starling Villas, the door to the sitting room was the worst offender, until I’d treated its hinges. My second favourite room in the house, its windows hung with rose linen curtains, floorboards softened by matting, a deep planter in its empty fireplace, filled with pink and cream hydrangeas. Carolyn stayed out of the sitting room, declaring it too cold and dull, but I knew the real reason. Under its pendant lamp, her blonde hair showed its brassy highlights. The matting trapped the high heels of her shoes, making her stumble like an old woman. I’d seen her consulting the mirrors in Starling Villas, one after another. But she wasn’t here any longer, didn’t she know that? She’d left and she couldn’t come back, I wouldn’t let her. I’d chase her from this house if I had to.

  ‘You’re not here any longer,’ I whispered. ‘It’s only me in the mirrors now.’

  I bent to smooth Robin’s bedsheets, tucking them tighter than usual around the mattress, my palms chasing away the night’s creases. It was my morning routine, and my proof he slept alone. Without her. Pushing my hands deep under the mattress, my f
ingers caught on something snagging there. I tugged it free, seeing a slim red ribbon fall from the sheet. No, not a ribbon.

  I reached down, knowing what it was before my fingers closed on its familiar knots, before my eyes had time to relay the information to my brain.

  A red woven bracelet. Joe’s bracelet.

  I wore its twin around my own wrist. We’d sworn we’d never take them off. Joe’s bracelet was knotted, not cut. It must have come loose, worked itself free from his wrist while he was—

  ‘There you are.’

  Carolyn Wilder was standing in the doorway, watching me. No warning creak from the door, since I’d silenced it so effectively. She moved until her reflection was in the mirror, two of her, mocking me with their smiles. ‘What’ve you found?’ Her eyes went to my hand.

  I hid Joe’s bracelet behind my back, a childish reaction but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t want her seeing what I’d found in the sheets of Robin’s bed. She’d probably put the bracelet there herself. Or else they’d used this bed that night, she and Joe. Robin didn’t know. He mustn’t know.

  ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet?’ She turned to admire her reflection, sleeking her hands at her hips. ‘And to think he imagines you’re intelligent.’ She pouted, touching the tips of her fingers to the arch of her mouth. ‘He likes you to be intelligent, for whatever reason. The girls he brings here.’

  She twisted to face me. ‘Well, it was his turn. I’d had my fun, and without his scruples. My boy didn’t have any brains to speak of.’ She gave a narrow smile. ‘I expect you’ve found his bracelet in the bed. He was upset about it when we were saying goodbye, upset he’d lost it. I couldn’t see it mattered, a cheap thing like that, but he was attached to it.’

  ‘Dr Wilder didn’t bring me here.’ I felt punched, out of breath. ‘That wasn’t him.’

  ‘True, he said you sprang yourself on him. But you came about the job advert.’ She took a step nearer to the bed. ‘Another of his scruples. He can’t just pick you up in bars. I expect it’s the magistrate in him – you do know he’s a magistrate? – needing to play by a set of rules. Well, you’ve seen his rota.’ Her eyes pinned me in place. ‘You’re not his type, either. He likes them blonde, as a rule.’ The repetition of rule made her laugh. ‘Men are peculiar, don’t you find? I expect that’s why I prefer boys.’