by Jemma Harvey
This time, the silence was much shorter, punctuated by an intake of breath. ‘Is she okay?’
‘I think so. She will be. She’s a bloody star,’ I added, getting weepy again.
‘I’m coming.’ The sawdust had trickled away; her tone was brisk. ‘Just give me time to wash and dress: I’ll be as quick as I can. Wait for me?’
‘Yeah.’
I sat down with Meredith in front of Shrek, but very little of the film registered on me. Lin must be worrying, I knew, but that was tough. I had no intention of calling her; Georgie and I would go round there. (I couldn’t possibly confront Lin alone.) It occurred to me that we couldn’t take Meredith with us so we’d need a babysitter. I called a neighbour, giving her few details but stressing the urgency of the situation. Meredith wasn’t too happy at the prospect of being left with a stranger, but as it was a woman, and they were to remain in my flat, she accepted it. ‘We have to deal with Ivor,’ I told her. ‘We’ll fix it so you never have to see him again.’ I wasn’t sure how – I had no plan of action – but it didn’t matter. We’d fix it. I knew I ought to call the police, but not yet, not till we’d spoken to Lin. They would have to be involved, sooner rather than later – presumably Meredith would need to make a statement to some specially trained, sympathetic officer (didn’t they video children nowadays, so they wouldn’t have to appear in court?) – but all that was for the future. The first thing was to tell Lin, and get Ivor out of her house, out of her life.
We’d finished Shrek and moved on to Indiana Jones before Georgie arrived. Meredith had begun to be hungry at last; I gave her some tabouleh from M&S which I had in the fridge and some chocolate which I found at the back of the vegetable drawer, left over from pre-diet days. She greeted Georgie with something that was almost a smile and turned her attention back to the film.
I took Georgie into the kitchen to fill her in. She didn’t look good: the fading tan gave her a sallow pallor and the disorder of her hair seemed less artistic than usual. But the tag-end of her hangover had evidently been consigned to history: her manner was sharp and alert, like a flick-knife with the blade ready to spring. She didn’t say anything about last night; nor did I. She just listened.
‘We have to go see Lin,’ she said when I’d finished.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh God . . .’
I knew she’d started thinking, as I had, not of what Ivor had done (or tried to do) to Meredith, but of what he’d done to Lin. Lin with her romantic ideals and loving heart – Lin standing there in Waitrose with fairy dust in her eyes – Lin saying she’d found her Mr Right, her soulmate, her one and only love. Lin who thought wishes really did come true.
If he fried in hell for all eternity, it wouldn’t be too long. (Not that I believe in hell, or capital punishment, or any of those things, but there are times when primitive emotion takes over.)
‘What do we do?’ I asked.
‘Go round there.’ Restlessly, Georgie opened and closed the kitchen drawers, a purely nervous action, like biting your nails. Or not. I saw her take out a fruit knife with a four-inch serrated blade and thrust it into her waistband, where it was in imminent danger of puncturing her stomach.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I thought it was for cutting up fruit,’ she murmured, with an echo of her old self. ‘It’s just a precaution.’
I didn’t like it, but I didn’t say any more. We left Meredith with my neighbour, and went out.
I hadn’t thought about it, but I should have realised that Georgie was on the edge. The disintegration of her relationship with Cal, the paralysing discovery of her own depth of feeling, the realisation that she too could plumb the abyss of drunken humiliation – these things had pushed her beyond the limits of normal human reactions. Most of us have a sense of proportion, an internal equilibrium that keeps us rooted in the real world; but Georgie’s equilibrium had gone with the raggle-taggle-gipsies-oh, leaving her off-balance, off-message, no longer safe to be around. But I was too absorbed with the problem of Lin and Ivor to notice. I remember very vividly the terrible shrinking sensation in my stomach when we arrived outside her house. They say the seat of emotion is in the heart, but it isn’t. The heart may quail or leap occasionally, in response to powerful stimuli, but it’s the stomach that bears the brunt of the punches. Fear, panic, revolt, anticipation – that’s where it gets you. Right in the gut. We stood on Lin’s doorstep and rang the bell, and my stomach ran the gamut of every emotion in the book. Lin opened the door. She looked too anxious to be surprised to see us.
She said: ‘What?’ and ‘Come in’, in an abstracted way, glancing over her shoulder to where Ivor appeared from the living room.
‘Meredith’s run away,’ he said, looking grave. The hypocrite. ‘Lin wants to call the police, but I don’t think . . .’
‘I’ll bet you don’t,’ said Georgie.
Lin didn’t seem to register her tone, but Ivor did; I saw it in his eyes. For an instant, it was like looking into the eyes of a calculating machine – or it would be, if machines had eyes. I could see his brain doing sums.
‘I feel awful,’ Lin was saying, on the edge of tears. ‘We told her off – we locked her in her room – what else could we do? She’d behaved so badly . . . You have to have discipline. Ivor’s right about that: he knows kids. I suppose I’ve been lax; I’ve let her get away with things for so long. She must’ve climbed out the window . . . I can’t think where she could’ve gone. I’ve called some of her friends, but she isn’t there . . .’
I said: ‘It’s all right, Lin. She came to me. It’s all right.’
‘Oh God. Oh Cookie – !’ She hurled herself on my chest, hugging me, passionate with relief.
Lax, mouthed Georgie. She was looking at Ivor the way a snake looks at a bird – but Ivor wasn’t a bird.
He joined Lin in expressing his gratitude and thanks, though we hadn’t done anything. ‘Where is she?’ Lin demanded. ‘Why haven’t you brought her back? Is she okay?’
‘I left her with a neighbour,’ I said. ‘She’s fine. We wanted a word with you first.’ Like Georgie, I was looking at Ivor.
His expression was a masterpiece: rueful, regretful, compassionate, a little sad. If there was an award for Most Appropriate Expression Under Very Awkward Circumstances, he’d have won hands down. But I knew him now; I could feel the well-oiled confidence underneath, the vein of smugness. ‘She threatened to tell people I’d been abusing her,’ he said on a sigh. ‘You must realise it’s nonsense, but . . . well, you know what she is. I’m afraid she’s a lot too clever with that computer of hers. I didn’t want to tell you, darling –’ this to Lin ‘– but she’s been accessing porn sites. She says it’s for the twins. But . . . I caught her looking at child porn last night.’
Lin stared at him, her colour draining. He took her hand, looking kind, so kind, sorrow and sympathy coming out all over his face like a rash. In that moment, I could have killed him.
But I wasn’t the one with the knife.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she did mention what you tried to do. Funny how convincing she was. I think Lin should get her film career off the ground right now. With that sort of talent, she’d be an Oscar winner from scratch.’
‘Meredith’s a very good liar,’ he said gravely. He was good at gravitas. ‘The trouble is, she’s always got away with it. You wouldn’t believe how savvy kids are nowadays. They know it all, poor things. Colleagues of mine have to deal with this sort of accusation all the time.’
A little of Lin’s colour returned. She said: ‘Ivor would never . . .’
‘She wasn’t lying.’ My voice was one I’d never heard myself use before. ‘She did get pornography for the twins: they’ve hit puberty with all its urges, and it was a way of augmenting her pocket money. But it was Ivor who accessed the child porn. That wouldn’t interest Sandy and Demmy: they like tits. And it certainly wouldn’t interest Meredith: she’s still young enough to think sex is yukky. She may think it for a long tim
e now.’
‘It’s not true,’ Lin whispered.
‘What was the first thing you told him, when you met in the chatroom?’ I must’ve sounded hard – implacable. I had to. ‘You wanted to get the worst over with, didn’t you? So you explained you were a single parent with twin boys and a girl. A difficult girl. He must have thought Christmas had come early.’
‘No . . .’ Lin’s whisper had shrunk till it was almost inaudible.
Ivor had begun to protest, with just enough weariness in his tone to give it conviction. Georgie, untypically, wasn’t saying anything. She’d moved round, so she was standing beside and a little behind him. Her left hand went under her D&G T-shirt and reappeared with the knife. Then her right grabbed his arm, and the blade whipped round – and stopped.
Everything stopped. Ivor’s weary protest, Lin’s awful whisper. I can’t remember if I was talking, but if I had been, I shut up.
The tip of the knife was embedded in his trousers, low down next to the fly. From the look on Ivor’s face, metal was touching skin.
‘The truth,’ Georgie said. ‘Now.’
‘I’ve told the truth. You’ve been watching too many documentaries . . .’
‘Now.’
The knife-hand moved. Lin screamed. At the same moment Ivor’s body jerked backwards – twisted – he seized Georgie’s left arm, deflecting the knife, flinging her aside. Lin tried to clutch him in relief but he threw her off too, shoving past me, bolting through the front door like a bat out of hell. Evidently he’d had enough. Lin ran after him, calling his name. ‘Fucking psychos!’ he cried, half turning. One hand held his groin: there was a hint of red showing between the fingers. ‘Fucking psycho bitches! I’m getting out while I still can. I’ll send for my gear.’
‘But what about me?’ Lin wailed.
‘Sorry, but . . . with friends like those, there’ll never be a man in your life.’ He went off down the street, his walk breaking into a wobbling run – not easy when you are trying to keep hold of your genitals and are clearly in pain. I might have laughed, if there had been any humour left in the world. But Lin’s face left no room for laughter. We got her into the living room, attempted to relate Meredith’s story as calmly as possible, but she didn’t want to listen, or listening, didn’t want to believe. I stayed with her while Georgie went to fetch Meredith. She kept accusing me of destroying her life, and then collapsing into a sobbing so violent I was afraid she would choke herself.
‘If it wasn’t true,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t have run off like that.’
Then Georgie arrived, with Meredith, and when Lin saw her daughter’s face she knew it was true.
The next few days were an ongoing nightmare. The police were called and statements taken; there was endless praise for Meredith’s courage and resource – not to mention the fact that she was extremely articulate for her age – which, while it didn’t heal her, did help her to cope with the trauma of what she had been through. Mummy’s betrayal seemed to cut as deep as the abuse; only time would close that particular wound.
Lin was torn between intolerable guilt and the pain of Ivor’s perfidy, one moment hysterical with grief, the next struggling to scrape herself together for the sake of the children. She didn’t want people to know what had happened, so we couldn’t summon relatives from Scotland to support her, but we told Alistair in confidence so she could take time off, her doctor gave her a sick certificate, and Vee Corrigan looked after the twins as much as possible. Georgie and I came round every evening after work, stayed the night regularly, and did what we could for her – which wasn’t much, because all you can do in such a scenario is to be there. There was no remedy but time, no panacea but to listen as Lin went through it all, over and over again. She showed little anger against Ivor: it was all turned inward on herself.
Georgie, with real nobility, never said I told you so.
Investigations revealed that, while Ivor had no record, there had been complaints against him in the past. But the children concerned were all very young, and none of the allegations had been substantiated. He had left one school rather abruptly, no reason given; the headmaster, now retired, admitted in an interview that there had been ‘issues’ with some of the girls, but insisted he’d had no suspicion of ‘anything really wrong’. He had just thought it best for Ivor to leave, and had passed the problem – and the responsibility – on to someone else. One girl, then eleven, now eighteen, made a statement.
Ivor was traced, arrested, bailed. He did come back for his things, fleeing down the steps when Georgie opened the door. We don’t know when the case will come to court, but he’s got an expensive lawyer (so there’s money somewhere) and he’s going to plead Not Guilty. Lin’s horrified at the prospect of Meredith being a witness, even though, as I thought, she’ll be questioned elsewhere, on video. Meredith is nervous of it, but hugely proud of the most famous sicky of her career. Because of that, she doesn’t have to see herself as a victim, and even at nine years old, that matters. Whether you win or lose, it’s the fightback that restores your self-respect.
She now says she wants to be a detective when she grows up.
Georgie and I never really made it up – we didn’t need to – our falling out just wasn’t important any more.
There was an occasion in Lin’s kitchen when we talked about it, just a little. (Lin was upstairs with Meredith.)
‘Cal’s back next week,’ I said. ‘Are you going to patch things up with him?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I can.’
‘But you love him,’ I said, for the umpteenth time. ‘He loves you. Real love, not lies and fairy dust. Isn’t it worth putting up with anything for that?’
And, when she didn’t answer: ‘There was nothing between us. Nothing that mattered. Just . . . Cal being a bit flirty, because you’d hurt him, and perhaps a little because he felt safe with me. He knew I wouldn’t take it seriously.’
‘It’s okay.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘It isn’t that. I lost it the other night – I mean, completely lost it. I’ve never done that before, over anyone. Supposing it happens again. What if, next time, I ring the right doorbell?’
‘There won’t be a next time,’ I said, being positive, but it didn’t reassure her.
We had to field all Lin’s telephone calls: she couldn’t cope with casual conversation and dreaded inquiries about Ivor. She flinched every time the phone rang. Inevitably, Andy Pearmain was one of those on the line. Andy? I said soundlessly, making a beard-stroking gesture in the vicinity of my chin. No! Lin responded, shaking her head violently. Don’t tell him anything! I duly explained to Andy that Lin was ill – no, nothing serious, just some bug the kids had brought home from school – and I was there to help out. Could I take a message? Andy provided a fount of information about Dryden and Acme City, the gist of which I scribbled down on a piece of paper. I threw in a question about Sir Harold Chorley, and noted down more details. Jerry Beauman’s activities didn’t seem quite so absorbing right now, but they did offer a diversion. Andy went on to ask about Ivor, and why wasn’t he taking care of Lin instead of me. Lin and I swapped a succession of agonised grimaces, after which I said hesitantly that he had to go to the school, a parents’ evening or similar, but should be back later. Lin gave a vague nod of approval and then began to cry, silent tears snaking down her cheeks. Andy said: ‘I see,’ sounding unconvinced, and added that he would call back soon to arrange when he was coming to London. I didn’t think I was imagining his proprietorial attitude towards Lin, but there was no point in commenting on it.
‘He can’t!’ she said tragically when I repeated his last remarks. ‘What am I to do? I can’t face him. You’ll have to put him off.’
‘Me?’
The next problem caller came to the door late on Saturday afternoon. Georgie and I were both there, losing to Meredith at Monopoly. I escaped bankruptcy to answer the bell, and found myself confronting a man of forty-odd who looked faintly familiar. He must have been good-looki
ng once but he wasn’t wearing well: his jaw-line was blurred and beginning to be jowly, his thinning hair was a little too long on the collar, and his waistline bulged over the top of his jeans. To complete the picture, his eyes were pouchy and he had the sort of incipient beard that only works if the man is ruggedly beautiful, like Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn. Otherwise he just looks the way this one did: badly in need of a shave. I was trying to recall if I had met him at a party or a launch recently when light dawned.
‘Lin here?’ he asked.
Sean Corrigan.
I’d seen him as one of the guest stars in a who-dunnit series a few weeks earlier, Midsomer Murders or something like that. He’d changed a lot from the youthful Irish charmer Lin had fallen so desperately in love with; even the brogue had faded, at least in everyday speech, revived only in appropriate roles. His drinking binges still happened from time to time, to judge from his appearance, but the tabloids weren’t very interested any more, and, at a guess, his high living had shrunk to low living, which is much the same but without the celebs and attendant paparazzi.
I said: ‘Yes, but she hasn’t been too well lately . . .’
‘Mum told me. I’m going to find the bastard and kick the crap out of him. Can I come in?’
‘I’ll ask.’
He came in anyway, pushing past me, breaking in on the Monopoly game. I saw Lin’s face look startled but not too horrified. Sean said: ‘Mavourneen,’ holding his arms out to her. Evidently he still used that one.
Lin said: ‘What on earth—?’
‘You should’ve called me,’ Sean said. ‘I’ve always been here for you, haven’t I?’ No comment. And then: ‘What were you after, letting a man you hardly knew come and live with you? And you with the children and all.’
‘Why not?’ Lin retorted, uncharacteristically tart. ‘I married you, and we barely knew each other.’
‘D’you want him out?’ Georgie said, giving Sean the steel-hard look of a woman who had recently knifed a man in the balls (if not too far in).
