by Heidi Perks
‘Just outside of the Bay, not far.’
‘So how did you get there?’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Hannah sighed, ‘what does all of this matter?’
‘It matters to me, Hannah. Just please tell me where you went. Please. I need to know.’ Kathryn knew she sounded desperate. But she was: desperate to have her daughters where she could see them.
‘Just out. I have no idea what the exact co-ordinates were,’ Hannah snapped as she backed out of the kitchen, her footsteps heavy on the stairs.
Kathryn was momentarily speechless. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that, Hannah! Come back down and apologise,’ she called out, following her out of the kitchen, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Nothing.
‘This is that boy’s influence on you, isn’t it? Two hours in his company and you’re talking to me like this. You won’t be seeing him again.’
The girls’ bedroom door opened and Hannah appeared on the landing. ‘You can’t stop me from seeing him, Mum. I’m sixteen years old.’
‘And while you’re living under my roof—’
‘Oh, please,’ her daughter spat, retreating into the bedroom and slamming the door behind her. ‘Fine, I’ll move out!’ she shouted from the other side of it.
*****
It was quarter past midnight and yet again Kathryn couldn’t sleep. For the last two hours she’d been tossing and turning from side to side; the heat was too much, despite the night air drifting in through the open window. Her head was cluttered with thoughts, the movements in her mind too rapid. The same questions were haunting her over and over as they had since she’d overheard the girls’ conversation. What would happen if Peter came back into her life? Would the girls find out the terrible thing she had done all those years ago? How could they ever forgive her? Of course they couldn’t when she would never forgive herself. She had accepted it was the right thing to do at the time, that she had no choice and that it was best for her and the girls – but what if it wasn’t?
Kathryn crept quietly down the stairs, pulling on a sweater over her pyjamas and putting her cold feet into the boots by the front door. She didn’t know what it was about her feet, or her hands, for that matter. The rest of her body was so hot but coldness pricked at them even in the middle of summer, making them tingle.
Plucking her keys from the rack, she stuffed them into the pocket of her sweater, slowly opening the front door and pulling it carefully behind her. The air was fresh. There was a slight chill in the breeze, so Kathryn wrapped her arms around her waist, scrunching her toes to keep the blood circulating.
She had no idea where she was heading to but started walking anyway: out of the gate, turning right and down the lane, so quiet at this time of night. The first time she had seen a sky lit with so many stars was the night she arrived in Mull Bay. Few street lamps lit the lanes and she was always amazed by how beautiful and clear it was. But despite this, Kathryn felt queasy at the thought of that first night. Whenever the memory came to mind she brushed it away as swiftly as she could. She had done what she was told and moved away, but was it right?
Robert used to say, ‘How does your gut feel?’ when she couldn’t make up her mind about something. That night, if she were truthful, her gut had felt all wrong, but still she hadn’t done anything about it. It wasn’t so easy to sweep away the memories anymore. Partly that was down to Hannah quizzing her all the time but it was also because her mother was no longer giving her the answers.
Kathryn turned left at the end of the lane and followed the road, past the store, past the post office. She realised she was heading to the beach, although she hadn’t been planning to; the roads were just taking her there. The Bay seemed different when she was the only one around. It was nice to think she could do anything she wanted and for once wouldn’t be spotted and talked about.
At the corner Kathryn crossed the road, barely looking for cars as she strolled to the other side, but no one was driving anywhere at this time of night. It was an exhilarating thought. She could run down the path that led to the clifftop, her arms stretched out either side of her, shouting if she wanted to, and there would be no one around to catch her doing it. She could leap down the steps and onto the sand; the adrenalin might even take her into the sea and there would be no one to stop her. Keep going once she was in the water, if she wanted. How long would it be until someone realised what she had done? Hours? Days?
Of course Kathryn wouldn’t go down to the beach. Even in the daylight the vast expanse of sea scared her. At night it was as black as ink and when she stood on the clifftop, her eyes scanning as far as she could, she froze at the thought of being near enough to the water for it to carry her off somewhere. She crouched on the grass at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the beach.
‘Talk to me, Mother,’ she called out to the sea. ‘Tell me how to get through this.’
*****
By the time she left the cliff to go back home, the first shards of light were beginning to crack through the sky. She must have been there for hours. Kathryn felt a little lighter by the time she reached the cottage because she had made a decision: if Hannah was so intent on looking for her father, then she was going to have to make sure she failed. And the only way to do that was to see Peter herself. But before she called the man she hadn’t spoken to for fourteen years, she needed to speak to her mother. There were things Kathryn needed to know, needed to face up to, and she had a feeling Eleanor was the only one who had the answers. All she could do was hope there was some way of getting them out of her.
– Fifteen –
Dear Adam,
My mother didn’t have friends – I don’t think she got the point of them. Kathryn always made comments to me about how mine weren’t a good influence. I knew they weren’t, but then neither was she. My mother had let Peter into our lives and yet it was plain to see she didn’t want him near her. She had buried the memories of my daddy inside his coffin even though he was the one she truly loved. What kind of influence was someone who could ignore her own feelings?
Cara could persuade me to do things, and sometimes I’d do them because I knew Kathryn wouldn’t approve. Maybe I liked to annoy her or maybe it was just to test her reaction. It was the school year in which we were turning fourteen and we thought we knew everything. Cara came to school one day with a 10-inch gap between her knee-high socks and the hem of her skirt. I couldn’t believe she’d got away with it and of course I wanted to wear mine the same. That night I took the scissors out of my mother’s sewing box and cut off a strip at the bottom of my skirt.
When Kathryn saw it the following morning she screamed at me. In the cold light of day I could see the ragged, fraying hemline and realised it looked nothing like Cara’s. She tried to stop me from leaving the house ‘looking like trash’ but I ran out anyway and didn’t turn back. I knew I’d made a mistake but I didn’t want her knowing that. Besides, Cara had told me the day before to do it, so there was no way I wasn’t wearing my new short skirt to school.
‘Shit, Abi!’ Cara had laughed when she saw me getting off the bus. ‘Why did you hack your skirt off? You look like a tramp!’
I could have cried with shame but I bit my lip and swallowed down the lump inside my throat. ‘How come yours looks OK?’ my voice cracked.
She pulled up her un-tucked shirt to reveal the bulge of skirt, rolled over at the waist. I stared at her, my cheeks and neck burning with the pain of humiliation.
‘I can’t believe you were so stupid!’ She was laughing loudly and I could sense people stopping to see what all the commotion was about.
I wanted to run home but I couldn’t give my mother the satisfaction. Then as I stood by the gate, wavering with indecision, I heard someone shout at me from across the playground. ‘Hey, cool look, Abi!’ I knew the voice. It was Tasha Abbot, the tallest, skinniest, most popular yet most terrifying girl in our year. I wanted the ground to swallow me up until I realised she actually meant it. Cara looked conf
used, shocked. She looked angry.
I turned to look at Tasha, who was smiling at me. Not mockingly, but genuinely approving of the look I’d rocked up to school in that day.
And that was it. That was the defining moment where I took myself and Cara into the heart of the coolest group of kids in our year. Where dressing like a Spice Girl and getting your belly button pierced were essential. The ‘wrong crowd’, as my mother referred to them.
Being in Tasha’s gang was fun. We got to discuss the sex they were all having. And if we weren’t having it ourselves, we made it up. I didn’t let on that at thirteen I was still a virgin. I had no desire to have sex with any of the boys at school but it seemed to be the done thing for Tasha’s gang. Don’t get me wrong, Adam. I knew it was wrong, and I knew my new friends were by far the minority, but they were so cool. Everyone wanted to be them or be friends with them – or at least that’s what I thought.
Hanging out with Tasha meant I started getting back late, sneaking out of the house at night, smelling of cigarettes and drinking Diamond Whites in the park on Saturday nights. I was everything a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be. Maybe I was every parent’s worst nightmare, but the fact was I had a disillusioned mother who thought she was making a happy family with a stepfather neither of us liked. She in turn took orders from my grandmother, who was almost frenzied in her approach to parenting: laying down rules that went out in the fifties, and which were all for her own gain. And above all else, a daddy I missed every single day, but who everyone else seemed to have forgotten ever existed.
Kathryn had no idea how to handle me. Eleanor was phoned on a weekly basis. Whenever she was in town, she would turn up to ‘knock some sense into me’ or would tell my mother what to do over the phone. I always knew when Kathryn had spoken to her because my mother would start mimicking her tone. ‘I will not have my daughter speak to me like that’, or ‘I will not tolerate such behaviour in my house’.
I hated living at home. Kathryn was either screaming at me or in denial, and my stepfather couldn’t care less. I was turning into an angry, confused teenager and the only positive I had in my life was my new friendship with the scariest bunch of kids in school.
Then just before we broke up for Christmas a new boy joined: Jason. He had dark hair, which hung down either side of his face, and a scar running across the top of his lip. The word was that he’d got it fighting but he would later tell me he’d fallen off his bike when he was six.
He almost glided across the playground, he was so smooth; his jeans hung beneath his pants and he wore headphones, which he removed when he got to the door but kept draped around his neck. Three other boys from our year had fallen into step beside him but Jason towered above them. I was in love with him – my only problem was so too were Cara and Tasha.
That Christmas we stayed with my grandparents for a week. Peter joined us for the duration, although I sensed he didn’t want to be there. His face was set in a permanent grimace and whenever my grandparents weren’t in the room, he was scowling at Kathryn about something. During the first two days he made frequent retreats into my grandfather’s study, where they sat smoking cigars, drinking Cognac and talking politics. It didn’t seem to bother my mother, him spending so much time without her.
Kathryn used those visits to soak up Eleanor’s wonderful parenting tips on how to control a daughter. She certainly had her own in place so must have felt qualified to offer up advice. I would catch them whispering in corners of the house, my mother’s shoulders hunched forward, head nodding dismally, eyes shining like a rabbit in the headlights when she finally noticed me standing in the doorway.
On Christmas Day, once lunch was over, Peter and Grandpa retired to the study again, this time to drink port. (No, it wasn’t Downton Abbey, this was the nineties.) I was left sitting at an oval mahogany table designed for twenty guests with only my mother and Eleanor for company.
‘You should know, Abigail,’ my grandmother stated, ‘that if your behaviour continues in this manner, you will be sent away to a boarding school in Scotland.’
I waited for the punchline that never came. It seemed she was serious. I looked at my mother but her head was hung so low, I thought it was about to clunk against the dining table.
‘If what behaviour continues?’ I asked.
‘You are a disgrace to this family and your antics will not be tolerated any further. No grandchild of mine will act in this manner. Do you understand that?’
‘Mum?’ I asked my mother, who remained mute and almost unconscious at the table. ‘What do you mean, a boarding school in Scotland?’ Now I was scared. For a long time now I hadn’t felt wanted in our home, but to be sent away to a boarding school – and so far away. I looked at my mother, silently pleading with her to say something, to promise me she wouldn’t send me away, but she said nothing. ‘Do you mean it?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, we do,’ Eleanor replied, standing up to leave the table.
‘Mum?’ I asked again. Why wasn’t she saying anything?
‘That’s all on the subject, Abigail,’ my grandmother told me. ‘It’s your decision how you want to act but I will not have you embarrass me. And I fear that is what you will do.’
Embarrass her. That was what everything boiled down to. Always so concerned with their precious image, how it would affect Charles, how she herself would look. Eleanor let people see what she wanted them to see but if only they knew the person she was behind closed doors. How I longed to show them the Eleanor I knew. Her popularity angered me, but it seemed only I could see how fake and self-centred she was. Eleanor didn’t care for her so-called friends; she cared only for herself.
Charles’s success was also Eleanor’s weak spot. I didn’t realise it then, but I would later, and I would try to use it to my advantage. My grandmother was cloaked in the fear that we would step out of line and damage her precious reputation, and she was willing to do anything to prevent that happening.
You might have thought the threat of boarding school would have worked, but it didn’t. Back at school that January I not only continued seeing my friends, I started hanging out with Jason too. I was angry with Eleanor for thinking she could dictate my life and even more bitter towards my mother for not having the backbone to stand up for me. She was slowly abandoning me, I felt, and so my friends were my only source of comfort.
‘So, d’you wanna go out with me, then?’ Jason asked me one day. Of course I did! I adored him. No one else in the school could strut like he did.
My mother didn’t know. There was no way I would let her into this little secret of mine and have her do everything in her power to make sure I never saw him again.
Jason and I didn’t do much but hang out. In the early evenings I watched him skateboard around the empty park. I waited on the sidelines of football pitches, freezing cold, with no idea of what was happening in the game, and then went back for my tea. But I didn’t push my luck with Kathryn. I started to play the game so she didn’t realise I was still hanging out with Tasha or Cara, or seeing Jason, because the threat of boarding school still hung in the air. She didn’t take much interest by then, though. As long as nothing I did demanded anything of her, I was pretty much left alone.
I was convinced as soon as we got home from Christmas at my grandparents’ house that Peter would leave. In my eyes their marriage was a farce – any fool could see neither of them wanted to be in it. I spent most of that month waiting for the day I found Kathryn in tears because he’d walked out. But he never did; he was still lingering and if anything appeared to be making more of an effort with her, even if it was killing him to do so. Sometimes I caught the expression on his face change when she left the room. The smile he had plastered on for her benefit dropped when he thought I wasn’t watching. I often wondered why he was so angry and miserable when he could have done something about it.
For Peter was everything my daddy wasn’t: Peter was a career man. He would sit at the kitchen table talking into his mobil
e phone, just because he had one. One leg slung over the other, he would run a hand up and down the creases at the front of his trouser legs, a permanent frown on his face as he barked into the phone, ‘Well, just get rid of him, then. We can easily find another man happy to get his wages.’ Peter was climbing a ladder, but it was obvious Eleanor was holding it for him. He was trying to find his way in politics, using my grandparents to get there. They must have known a weasel like him was using them and I still couldn’t understand what they were getting out of it. My mother, however, seemed oblivious to what was going on. She was too busy painting on her own face, one that said, ‘I am happily married’.
At dinner Peter regaled her with stories about women in the office and how relentless they were in their requests for more money they didn’t deserve. And my mother laughed along with him like a fool. I would stare at her in disgust. I despised her for being too blind to see what a jerk she was married to, or too weak to do anything about it. She was morphing into someone I didn’t recognise: if a person could become their own shadow, she was definitely an example of it.
Occasionally I tried to do something about it. I remember one night, March 20th, because it was the night before my fourteenth birthday. Our relationship had been stretched as far as I thought it could go, each of us pulling one end of a piece of elastic, and I was waiting for it to snap. I was annoyed because Jason had a football match he refused to cancel the following night and so I had nothing to do on my birthday. Meanwhile, Tasha was distancing herself from me, spreading rumours I had dumped my girlfriends for a boy. Her jealousy was infectious and Cara had caught the bug, too.
My mother hadn’t asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday so I didn’t suggest anything, but that night Peter didn’t come home from work at the usual time and she suggested making me a cake.
