‘Kill baby!’ And she jabbed at her stomach. ‘Kill baby!’
She bent over Roxy, and grabbed her face in her hands. ‘Kill baby! Kill baby!’ Over and over again she said it, and she was still saying it when Mrs Dyce appeared, running towards them. She was shouting Aneeka’s name, trying to drown out her words.
She dropped down beside them and hugged Aneeka close. Aneeka seemed even more terrified. She tried to push her away, so violently that she almost sent her sprawling on the ground. But Mrs Dyce still gripped her firmly and lifted her to her feet. ‘Come with me, Aneeka. Come, my dear.’
Aneeka was shaking her head, trying not to go. She held on to Roxy’s robe and looked into her eyes. Hers were filled with panic and fear. It was as if she wanted Roxy to help her. Something in Roxy wanted to run after her, wanted desperately to keep her here with the rest of the girls.
Finally, she couldn’t stop herself. ‘She said, “kill baby”, Mrs Dyce!’ She shouted it up the corridor and there was a hushed silence from everyone. Except Mrs Dyce. She didn’t even lose a step, or look back. She waved a hand behind her to quieten her.
‘I’ll come back later and speak to you, Roxy.’ That was all she said, and then she was gone, closing the door marked PRIVATE on a sobbing, terrified Aneeka.
One by one the girls all started drifting back to their rooms as if nothing had happened.
Roxy couldn’t believe it. ‘Am I the only one who’s worried about that? She said … “kill baby”.’
Anne Marie put her arms round her. ‘She probably wants rid of it,’ she said coldly. ‘And she hasn’t got enough English to ask politely, “Could I have a termination, please?”’ She said it in a very posh accent and Roxy knew she was trying to make her feel better, but it had the opposite effect. It made her angry at her friend. She didn’t think there was anything funny about what had happened. She looked at Anne Marie.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Frankly, yes I do,’ she said. ‘But we’ll ask Mrs Dyce later.’
‘“We’ll ask Mrs Dyce later”,’ Roxy mimicked Anne Marie’s Irish brogue. ‘And whatever Mrs Dyce tells us, we’ll believe.’
‘You,’ Anne Marie pinched at her cheeks, ‘are a little revolutionary! Do you know that?’
How could Roxy explain to anyone, even to herself, that every time she put her suspicions behind her, a new one popped up, like weeds in a garden.
* * *
She couldn’t sleep all that night, thinking about Aneeka, wondering what was happening to her and her baby. Mrs Dyce spoke to Anne Marie and her at breakfast. She came into the kitchen and told them very gravely, ‘I’m sorry about last night, girls. That must have been very upsetting for you all. I think Mr Dyce and I made a grave error of judgement in bringing Aneeka here. She was very disturbed. But we wanted to help her so much.’ She paused for a moment, as if it was too hard for her to carry on. ‘She didn’t want this baby. I’m sure you realised that already. It brought great shame on her family. She would never have been able to go home with a baby.’
‘So how is she now?’ Anne Marie asked softly.
‘She’s had her wish, I’m afraid. She lost the baby.’
Anne Marie gasped.
‘We did everything we could to save her,’ Mrs Dyce continued. ‘But it was no use.’
‘So where is Aneeka now?’ There was no softness in Roxy’s voice.
‘We’ve sent her on to the next house.’
‘Not to hospital? Shouldn’t she be in a hospital?’
‘Mrs Dyce is a nurse, Roxy. She knows what she’s doing.’
For the first time Roxy lost her temper with Anne Marie.
‘Honestly, Anne Marie, do you just believe everything?! Aneeka’s terrified. She’s screaming, “Kill baby!” and now, very conveniently, her baby is dead. OK, I’m willing to believe that, but if she lost the baby, then she must need special treatment. Surely the delivery room here isn’t equipped for every emergency.’
Mrs Dyce was annoyed now, tightlipped, but still with a ready answer.
‘If anything went badly wrong, Roxy, I can assure you we would have no hesitation in sending both mother and baby to hospital. Do you honestly think, after all we’ve done for you, that we would risk any of your lives?’
She sounded annoyed again. Even though her voice remained as ever, soft. Maybe she had a reason to be annoyed, Roxy thought.
‘Anyway, I have had a very difficult night. I just wanted to let you know about Aneeka. And to apologise.’
Anne Marie was quick to assure her that there was no need for that apology. But not Roxy, and she could see that Mrs Dyce was perfectly aware of that. Roxy felt sick, as if a lump of lead lay inside her along with her baby.
After her chores were done Roxy went back to bed. She couldn’t stop thinking about Aneeka. How frightened she’d been last night. And now they’d never see her again. Like the other girls, she had passed through the doors leading to the delivery room, and disappeared. They could have been zapped up by aliens, or been transported into another dimension. The thought scared her.
Anne Marie came in and sat on the bed beside her. ‘I wish you’d stop your worrying.’ She stroked Roxy’s brow with her soft hands.
‘I don’t want to go into that delivery room alone, Anne Marie,’ Roxy said. For it seemed to Roxy that when you went in there you were never seen again.
‘Neither do I,’ Anne Marie said.
Roxy knew then what they had to do, and it brightened her up right away. ‘Me and you will be birth partners. We’ll help each other through it, OK?’
Roxy’s cousin had had a baby and her birth partner had been her sister. She remembered that now. Remembered how close it had brought the two sisters, sisters who had always argued constantly.
‘Birth partners?’ Anne Marie smiled. ‘Well, isn’t that a grand idea.’
Birth partners.
Now, neither Anne Marie nor Roxy would be alone in the delivery room.
Chapter Seventeen
If there had ever been a hotter summer Roxy couldn’t remember it. Anne Marie became so heavy she could hardly bear to move in the heat. Roxy did most of her chores for her, though she had to admit that Mrs Dyce made sure Anne Marie hadn’t much to do anyway, fussing round her like a mother hen.
At times like that Roxy felt guilty about all the horrible things she thought about the Dyces. Mrs Dyce was exactly as she appeared to be: a good woman, doing her best to help girls like them, risking prosecution if she was caught. Why look for something sinister when there was nothing else there?
Anne Marie was happy when Roxy thought like that. She wanted so much for her friend to love Mrs Dyce the way she did, but Roxy could never go that far.
‘Have you told her yet that we’re going to be birth partners?’ Roxy kept asking, knowing full well that Anne Marie hadn’t.
‘I’m picking the right moment. I know she won’t be happy about it.’
Roxy couldn’t understand what the problem would be, but she was sure Mrs Dyce would have an objection, one Anne Marie would agree with.
‘You won’t let her talk you out of it, will you?’ And although Anne Marie promised over and over that she wouldn’t, Roxy was still unsure.
Roxy grew tired of sitting around the house with the other girls, girls she couldn’t talk to, who usually sat huddled together. And when Anne Marie would have her afternoon rest, Roxy took to wandering in the grounds once more. She was always on the lookout for Stevens. She didn’t want to see him again. She had explored the house, and her curiosity was satisfied there. She knew more of Dragon House than any of the others. But on hot sticky afternoons, she wanted to be out, feeling whatever breeze there was in her hair.
It was on one of these afternoon rambles that she found an open gate. She had wandered up an overgrown path and suddenly, there it was, hanging on a broken hinge, with its wrought iron swirls of dragon tails and tongues of fire. Dragons were everywhere here. The gate lay open and inviting, almost
asking her to walk through. Had someone here forgotten about this way out?
Roxy looked all around her, sure that this was a trick of some kind and that someone, Stevens or Mrs Dyce, would leap out at her from the long grass and hold her back. She stood for a long moment waiting and watching. The path remained empty. There was not a sound, not a breath of a breeze, not even a crackle through the dry grass. She was completely hidden from view by bushes and trees. Somewhere in the distance, a bird was calling, but otherwise all was quiet. Roxy was alone. She stared out through the gate.
There lay freedom. The outside world she had been denied for so long. And Roxy couldn’t resist it.
She had a feeling that as soon as she stepped through the gate the air would be clearer and cooler. There would be a warm wind and the shimmer of heat would show her the house was only a mirage and she would see a village, houses, civilisation. It would be as if she had stepped out of another dimension. But as she walked on the overgrown path, nothing changed. The path only continued through more long grass and trees and bushes. It seemed to be leading nowhere. She stumbled on, sure she had been walking for miles. She kept expecting to see some kind of road sign, but there wasn’t even a road. Only this dried-out path. What would she do, she wondered, if she found an isolated farmhouse, or saw a village in the distance? Knock on the farmhouse door? Pop into a village store? No. There would be too many questions if she did that. But there was no farmhouse, no village. If anything the path grew denser and her face was constantly scratched by bushes, and nettles stung her ankles. She could be in another world. Roxy imagined herself in a distant alien planet, totally alone. Marooned, like Robinson Crusoe.
Finally, exhausted, she sat on the stump of a tree. So much for her foray to freedom!
She might as well go back, and she was sure she would find the way. She hadn’t diverted from the path, she could see it winding back in the direction she had come, disappearing into the shimmering undergrowth.
Yet, going back now seemed like such a cop-out. She was free. It suddenly hit her that she was free. She could go anywhere she wanted.
She could go home.
Home seemed so much in her distant past that she could hardly remember it. What were her mum and Jennifer doing now? In July? They were probably off on their summer holiday. Majorca. It had been booked before Roxy had run away. That was a lifetime ago. Yes, they would be there now, with Paul. Roxy could hardly imagine them cancelling it on her account. And they would have had her letter by now, telling them she was safe.
After a letter like that they would be able to go off to Majorca with a clear conscience.
Yet, thinking of them made her feel like crying. They seemed like people from the past, that she had read about. For the moment, her family was Anne Marie. My sister, my friend, she thought warmly.
Roxy patted her bump. ‘And you, little man,’ she whispered. She had decided for herself that her baby would be a boy. ‘You’re all the family I need.’
Her clothes were sticking to her in the heat and she was desperate for something to drink. She would have brought some water with her if she’d known she was going trekking. It was time to go back, she decided. Her long thick curls were only making things worse and not for the first time this summer she thought about cutting them off.
Anne Marie had objected strongly when she had suggested it. ‘You can’t do that, Roxy,’ she had said. ‘Your hair says so much about you. You just wouldn’t be Roxy without all that flaming red hair.’
Roxy smiled as she remembered that and she fanned herself with her dress, trying to get some cool air about her face. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of honeysuckle growing somewhere close by.
That was when she heard the music, drifting towards her from somewhere in the distance.
‘Summertime, and the living is easy …’
It reminded her of her dad, playing his radio while they sunbathed in the garden, his last summer. There was something comforting and reassuring about music from a radio drifting through the summer air.
Nearby, someone had a radio switched on.
Roxy stood up and stretched to see beyond the bushes, but she could see nothing. She was too small. She began to walk, following the music like one of the Pied Piper’s children.
The song finished and a voice announced what the next piece of music would be. A lazy instrumental began to drift through the sultry summer afternoon.
Roxy at last pushed her way through the undergrowth and there it was. A silver grey Aston Martin convertible, parked a hundred metres or so down a dusty overgrown track. Her eyes scanned the area; searching for the driver. James Bond must be somewhere nearby, she thought with a smile. Probably peeing in the bushes. There was no one to be seen, not a hint of a human being, but he must be close to have left the car radio playing. Roxy moved closer, as stealthily as her bump allowed. She felt almost guilty, as if she was doing something wrong. He’d be back any moment. Had to be. Yet, like someone hypnotised, she crept closer, straining her ears for voices approaching, twigs crackling, footsteps striding through the brittle grass.
She would be caught.
And then what?
What did it matter? She wasn’t doing anything wrong. If she confided in this James Bond, he would take her to a police station. By tonight she could be home. Always, just when she was sure she had put home behind her, it was the first thing that came to her mind. Home.
The music finished and the announcer began a summary of the news. It had been so long since Roxy had heard any news that she listened intently. There had been a train crash in London. Several people had been killed.
Her mother and Jennifer could have been on that train, though it was hardly likely. But they could have been in some other accident that she’d never heard about. One of them, both of them, could be dead, and she didn’t even know.
The thought made her head swim and she clung on to the car door for support. It was the heat. She had walked too long and too far.
A plane had been hijacked on its way to India.
She imagined her mother on a plane, a gun held to her head by some fanatical terrorist. Did they hijack package tours to Majorca?
The body of a young girl had been washed up in the Thames two weeks ago and had still not been identified.
That was the final story. And it chilled Roxy. Was her mother listening to that same bulletin, thinking, worrying that the young girl might be Roxy? Had she already gone to identify the decomposing body? The sudden picture of her mother watching, white-faced, as an undertaker pulled back the sheet from a corpse, holding her breath, expecting to see her daughter, her Roxy, lying there, made her feel so sick she almost vomited. How could she have done such a cruel thing to her mother?
Mrs Dyce was right. Maybe listening to the news wasn’t a good idea after all.
A sudden idea came to her. She reached inside the car and pushed the button on the radio and the station changed from the old middle-aged sounds to the roar from one of the pop stations.
That would bring James Bond back pronto if nothing else would. Time for Roxy to be off. At the last minute she grabbed the newspaper that was lying on the front seat, proof of her adventure when she got back and showed it to Anne Marie. Now she had given James Bond two mysteries to baffle him as he drove off through the afternoon. Two mysteries he would never solve.
She wanted to stay and watch for his return. She wanted to see him look around, scratching his head and wondering who on earth had changed the stations on his radio and taken his paper. But there was nowhere safe to hide and see. And she was tired now, exhausted and thirsty.
It took her an age to find the gate again. And as she searched she wondered if she would ever find it and if she did, would it be locked?
And if it was, would it matter?
But at last there it was, still open. The dragons on the lopsided gate looking slightly drunk.
Yet Roxy hesitated before she stepped back inside. She was free. No one at the hou
se knew where she’d gone. She could go back to that car, tell the driver she needed help. He would take her to a police station, and by tonight, she could be in her own bed.
She would keep the secret of Dragon House, of course. She’d never tell anyone about that. Not from any loyalty to the Dyces, but because of those other girls the Dyces were helping. The illegal immigrants, the asylum seekers, and Anne Marie.
Anne Marie.
Without Roxy, Anne Marie would have no birth partner, she would have to go into that delivery room alone. Roxy had promised her she would be with her. Anne Marie was like her sister, her best friend. Roxy knew then that she could never let her down.
It was because of Anne Marie she went back.
Chapter Eighteen
That night Roxy told Anne Marie all about her little adventure. Exaggerating, of course, making it sound much more exciting than it had really been. In Roxy’s version, the driver had almost caught her, and she had had to hide in the undergrowth while he searched around for her. When she’d found the gate, Stevens had been lurking there, and she’d had to distract him by throwing a stone into the distance to make him move off and investigate.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do things like that, Roxy. It could be dangerous. You don’t know what kind of perverts you might meet up with. And you’re so vulnerable at the moment.’ Anne Marie stroked Roxy’s bump gently. ‘You’ve got two people to look after now.’
That only made Roxy laugh. ‘Wherever I go, he goes.’
When she’d returned she had stuffed the newspaper under the mattress and now she pulled it out dramatically.
‘Look what else I got.’
Anne Marie jumped up and closed the door of their room as if they were doing something suspicious. ‘You shouldn’t have brought that back. You know Mrs Dyce doesn’t like us reading the news.’
Sometimes Roxy had to admit that Anne Marie annoyed her. ‘Goodness, what’s she going to do, shoot me at dawn? I mean, it’s a free country, Anne Marie. I can read anything I want.’
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