by Natasha West
She was going to have to journey to a far land. Or Corai, wherever the hell that was. She couldn’t stay in the clothes she’d been in for two days. It was hard enough knowing she was going to have to do this. But without some deodorant and a change of knickers? Somehow, it was even worse.
That was why Molly was taking the risk of running into her Mum, for whom she fully intended to leave a note that she’d written in the car. That was the other reason she was here. She needed to let her know that everything was alright. Jamie had broken her phone so she couldn’t send a text. She would have to do it the old fashioned way, pen and paper. The note read;
Mum,
I’m not sure what you think has happened to me but I want you to know that I’m safe. I have to leave for a day or two but when I come back, I’ll explain everything.
Love,
Molly Pop
She’d added the childhood nickname so that her Mum knew it was really from her and not something left by, as far as Vera knew, her kidnappers, something to throw her off the scent. Molly’s plan was to slip in, grab a bag and some stuff, and leave the note on her bed.
But being tied to Jamie by a mystical safety cord was making it a lot harder than it needed to be. As she struggled to worm her body through the gap in the window that she’d managed to prise apart, she felt a small tug at her waist. She looked over her shoulder to see that Jamie had slipped down a few rungs on the trellis.
‘Careful!’
Jamie looked up at her, furiously. She couldn’t believe that her hatred of heights was being tested yet again.
‘I don’t know why we can’t just sneak in through the bloody door’ she grumbled.
‘I’m almost in. I just need a few more feet and then I can pull you inside.’
Jamie considered throwing her toys completely out of the pram by refusing to go along with this. After all, if she didn’t cooperate, Molly wouldn’t be able to go any further. And Jamie didn’t understand why Molly couldn’t just borrow some of her clothes. They were about the same size.
But Molly had been weirdly insistent, despite the insane risk of it. ‘I need my things’ was all she’d say. So they’d all decided they’d have to go along with it, if only to speed up the departure time. Molly was a stubborn little mule, which came as no surprise to the person who’d shoved a gun in her face and still hadn’t been able to budge her. Jamie had arrived at the conclusion that if she kept trying to argue the illogicalness of this move, it would only slow them further.
So, rather than fruitlessly arguing with Molly, she was stuck on this rotting trellis, covered in lilac that was making Jamie’s nose itch, trying to climb up the side of a house.
She hated this sort of thing. Whenever their Dad had sent them on a job, she’d always found ways around any scaling of walls and fences. She’d send Max over first and then get him to open up any gates and doors she couldn’t get through. But Molly wasn’t Max. She wasn’t cutting her any slack whatsoever.
‘Just one more foot’ Molly urged. But Jamie couldn’t hear her. Because Molly’s head was in the bedroom. Only her legs were still sticking out.
In the bedroom, Molly’s top half was trying to grab onto her bedframe, the closest thing to the window. Jamie was climbing at a pace that was excruciatingly slow. Molly thought that if she could pull her own weight inside, she could simply drag Jamie up the last few feet needed to get completely into the room.
Unfortunately for Jamie, there was no way to pass that idea to her from where Molly was. She was desperately trying to get higher, with every passing foot telling her not to look over her shoulder. Don’t look down. Never look down.
But just as Jamie was making progress, she felt a sharp tug at her waist, presumably from Molly trying to throw herself through the window. And as she muttered ‘What the fuck is she-’ the hay fever induced itching in her nose evolved into a full blown sneeze of outrageous size. The full impact banged her face into the trellis and her hands lost their grip on it, ten feet off the ground.
At the moment that Jamie was looking at the place where her hands used to be holding onto the trellis, having the kind of moment only cartoon characters understand - just after they’ve run off the cliff but before they’d begun the plummet - Molly had gotten her ankles over the ledge of the window and was getting up from the carpet. And then came an almighty yank on her mid-section. It was the biggest one yet.
Jamie, falling backwards off the trellis, readied herself for the impact of her back and head hitting the concrete below. But it never came. She opened her eyes and found that she was staring at the sky, fully horizontal, floating centimetres off the ground.
‘Hold on!’ she heard a voice whisper from the window. And Jamie began to rise up, her body starting to tilt forwards, until she was fully vertical and could grip onto the trellis once more.
Molly, on the other end, had felt the yank and rapidly clicked on to what was happening. Jamie had fallen. But Molly reacted quickly, running forward to counteract the force, grabbing onto the door handle of her wardrobe, using it to pull herself along the room, Jamie’s dead weight making progress slow.
Eventually, the weight began to lessen as Jamie obviously managed to get a purchase on the frame. Moments later, a head appeared at the window.
‘Fuck me sideways! I nearly cracked my nut open’ Jamie said, clearly relieved. She clambered through the window, practically falling into the room, and leant over to take a deep breath. The drop had given her a shock. It had only been a fall of a few feet but from Jamie’s perspective, she felt as though she’d fallen off the peak of Everest. And survived.
Molly watched Jamie recovering from her fall and she felt a pang of guilt. Jamie was obviously afraid of heights. Why hadn’t she said anything? Molly might have reconsidered their entrance route if she’d known.
‘Are you alright?’ Molly delicately inquired.
Jamie looked up at Molly and felt immediate embarrassment. Molly was being kind to her. Molly was never kind to her. That meant she was feeling sorry for her.
‘I’m alright. Just pack your bag.’ she said, brusquely.
Molly was affronted. She’d been trying to be sensitive, as tough as she’d found it. But then she realised, in the reverse situation, she would have been just the same. She would rather have rejected kindness than let on that she’d been scared. Molly decided that, just this once, she’d let it go.
‘OK’ Molly said and went to pack her bag.
‘Thanks for saving me’ Jamie said quickly to Molly’s back, as she watched her push clothes haphazardly into her rucksack.
‘No bother’ Molly replied as she zipped up the bag. She didn’t look at Jamie as she said it. She didn’t want to appear smug. And the accident had partially been her fault anyway.
Jamie nodded. It was cool of Molly not to enjoy her moment of lifesaving gratitude. Maybe she wasn’t the worst ever, Jamie speculated.
A sudden thump of feet on the stairs interrupted Jamie’s pondering. Molly turned to Jamie and cried in a stage whisper ‘Quick! Get in the wardrobe!’
In a flash, Jamie did as she was told and Molly closed her in. But not before she whispered ‘Be quiet or we’re both in the shit!’ as she slammed the door.
Jamie stood in the darkness of the wardrobe and it was hard not to think about how she’d ended up there. From a robbery gone wrong to a robbery gone even wronger to a curse to an argument with her Dad to an impromptu performance at a comprehensive school to a dirty shed to a rickety trellis to an almost broken skull to the inside of a wardrobe. There were no two ways about it: it had been a weird twenty-four hours.
On the upside, of all the times Jamie had been kicked out of the beds of various girls because their boyfriends/girlfriends/mums/dads were about to walk in, she’d never quite made it into a wardrobe before. She ended up under the bed usually, with the dust balls. This was definitely nicer. In the current situation, Jamie was willing to call it progress.
Molly didn’t have time for such co
ntemplations. Her Mum was thundering up the stairs and there was nowhere to run. The note was rendered irrelevant. She was going to have to say its contents, face to angry face. Molly wasn’t relishing the thought. A big selling point of the note had been the ‘Hit and run’ of it. She could say what she wanted and get the hell out, on her own terms. That chance was about to vanish.
The door of Molly’s bedroom exploded open and Vera threw herself into the room, racing to her daughter and enveloping her in a diaphragm-crushing bear hug.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded loudly into her daughter’s eardrum. ‘Are you alright? Did they hurt you? I heard a noise and I didn’t dare to think it was you but here you are. Here you are! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!’
Molly, although partially enjoying her Mum’s somewhat scary caregiving, wriggled out of the embrace.
‘I’m OK, Mum. How are you?’ she said, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘I’m… what?! Tell me what happened to you, will you? You were kidnapped! I saw it on the CCTV.’
And that had been the other point of the note, to give Molly a chance to come up with a believable story about what had happened at the Mini-Mart. The truth was far too confusing. Molly thought that her Mum was much more likely to believe a lie than the truth. Never in a million years would she ever buy into this craziness. She would take her last breath arguing for logic, even if the evidence was right in front of her eyes. That was Vera in a nutshell. She was a hard line realist with no time for something as frivolous as magic. So Molly would need to find a much more believable explanation for what the tape had shown. And her own subsequent disappearance.
The simplest thing would have been an incomplete truth. Yes, I was robbed. And yes, they kidnapped me. But I escaped and now here I am. That would have worked. But the consequences for Jamie and Max would have been utterly dire. She still felt angry at them for what they’d done. But they’d all been through too much together today for Molly to simply throw them under the bus. She needed a different tale. Something that would spare everyone.
But Molly hadn’t really had time to come up with the cover story. She’d been too busy racing around the city, trying to solve this stupid problem. So now, she’d have to improvise.
‘Wow! My friends really did a great job with the whole… fake… robbery… thing.’
Vera’s hands dropped slowly off her daughter’s shoulders.
‘What?’
‘Yeah, ha ha’ Molly said, falling quite short of a real laugh. ‘I was just trying to get back at you. Because of the argument. You said the fun was over and I thought, I thought, you know, maybe it didn’t have to be? It was a jape.’
Jape? Where the hell had that 1920’s vernacular come from? Molly could only think it was the total fear she was operating under that was making her use words like ‘Jape’.
‘A… A trick?’ Vera said, in sheer disbelief. Her face was beginning to redden.
‘Yeah, it was just a joke. You said I wouldn’t get robbed and I just wanted to prove how easily it could happen’ Molly said, feeling like she was standing on top of Krakatoa, throwing rocks into its smoky depths, listening to its angry rumbles and laughing as she waited for her imminent death by hot, molten, Russian accented lava.
‘Molly Kaminski’ Vera began quietly. ‘Are you trying to tell me’ she continued, her voice rising with every word ‘that you staged a robbery and kidnap and then simply waited with your friends while I lost my mind! I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE DEAD!’ she screamed, reaching a crescendo.
‘I’ve been working really long hard hours lately, and… I don’t know… I guess I just thought it was a good way to make you realise that I need a break’ Molly said, hoping it was a reasonable explanation for why she had done this terrible thing to her Mother. If she’d actually done it, she reminded herself.
‘Do you understand what you’ve done?!’ Vera shouted. ‘The police have the tapes. They’re looking for you. You’re a missing person!’
That was a shock to hear. How was Molly going to get herself out of that? There were probably laws about it, wasting police time or something. She might get arrested. She might go to prison!
From the inside of the wardrobe, Jamie was in a state of fluctuating emotions. Molly might have just gotten her off the hook with the cops. But it could be at the cost of her own neck, Jamie realised. Why hadn’t they worked this out before? They could have come up with something better. Fuck knows what. But something.
But as with everything that had been going on since last night, she and Molly were just going to have to file that under ‘Bridges to be crossed when we get to them.’ For now, Molly’s Mum was a big enough problem. Vera reminded Jamie of her Dad in a way. There was something there that you didn’t want to fuck with. Still, she clearly loved her daughter. That was why she was so angry. And fair enough. The story Molly had just told her was pretty horrible.
‘Mum’ Molly pleaded. ‘Do you think you can cover for me? With the police? I really am sorry for this’ she said, hoping that her Mother might just give her a break for once. ‘But I didn’t know it would get so out of control.’
‘Cover for you? How am I supposed to do that?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. You’ll think of something, though. Won’t you?’
Vera shook her head and turned away from her daughter. Molly saw how disappointed Vera was and she felt as bad as if she actually had done the thing she was pretending she had. Because her Mum believed she had. So what was the difference? Her Mum thought she’d done something that was completely reckless and idiotic, something she would never really have done. Molly, who’d spent her life always doing what she was supposed to do and always being where she was supposed to be. And it had all gone down the drain in a moment. She’d lost her Mum’s respect.
Amazingly, there was something even more heart breaking about all this. Because the truth was that if Molly hadn’t had to come up with a workable lie on the spot, a thing like staging a fake robbery to teach her Mum a lesson. It would never have crossed her mind. She wouldn’t have done something this cruel. Not ever. Because her Mum didn’t deserve it. As tough as she was on Molly, she’d done her best to be a good parent. She’d raised a daughter alone and set up a successful business to take care of Molly’s future. And now her Mum believed that she had no respect for any of her hard work and sacrifice. Knowing that was the worst of all. Molly felt sick at the thought.
But the truth made less sense. Molly had no choice. She would have to see this thing out.
‘Mum’ she said. ‘Please?! I’m begging you, I’ll do anything you like. I’ll work any shift you like. Forever. But please don’t let them send me to prison.’
Vera turned back to her daughter, one tear running down her face, the first Molly had ever seen, and said ‘You silly, silly girl.’ She walked out.
Molly watched her leave, crushed.
After she’d gone, Jamie opened the wardrobe door slowly. She peeped out.
‘Hey’ she said, nervously. That had been some heavy shit that had just gone down. The vibe was palpably sour. Molly looked like someone had just killed her kitten in front of her. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked.
Molly didn’t look at her. She turned to the bed and grabbed her bag.
‘Come on. We’ll take the door this time.’
‘What if your Mum sees me?’ Jamie asked.
‘What difference does it make now?’ Molly said and walked out, throwing her note down on the bed. Her Mum still needed to know its contents, that she was leaving for a while and she didn’t know exactly when she’d be back.
Jamie quickly followed, not prepared to argue. But she hoped to hell she didn’t run into Molly’s Mum. She couldn’t bear to see how upset the woman must be.
Eleven
Max and Henry were waiting in the back seat of the car, playing thumb wars. Henry wasn’t that into it, but Max had seemed to think it was a good way to pass the time while they waited for Molly and Jamie. So Henry was going alo
ng with as much enthusiasm as he could summon up for having his thumb crushed.
‘Ha! That’s three victories in a row for me’ Max said as he pressed Henry’s thumb firmly under his. ‘I think that makes me the thumb King. King Maximilian of the SUV. My reign shall be brutal and all shall fear me.’
Henry sighed as he took his hand back.
‘What’s up?’ Max asked, sensing Henry’s disquiet. ‘I didn’t crush your self-esteem with my crowing, did I? Because Jamie’s always saying what a horrible winner I am. One time I thrashed her at pool and I went on about it so much, I ended up with her foot on my windpipe. Actually, maybe that’s really a story about Jamie’s anger issues? But either way-’
