by Mel McGrath
‘Did you speak to the grandmother today?’
Tom looked away. ‘You want to know the truth? I had a bit of a thing with the social worker. You know the type: interfering, self-righteous. So I didn’t get round to it.’
I sensed this was a lie. Just then Eddie returned with drinks and Tom took the opportunity of the distraction to go and get the girls and I couldn’t pursue it. Once we were all settled around the table Eddie came over again.
‘Our usual, please, Eddie,’ I said. There was an awkward pause.
‘And what would you like, Ruby?’ Tom said pointedly.
It took me a moment to realise what I’d done, then I reached over and, tapping Ruby on the arm, I said, ‘Ruby, of course you must have whatever you want.’
The girl stared at me with those implacable amber eyes and I thought I detected hatred there or maybe contempt. ‘Chicken McNuggets. From McDonald’s’.
A pained silence spread around the table. Sensing he’d got in the middle of something, Eddie sidled off. Tom threw down a tenner for the drinks, stood up from the table and said, ‘Come on then, we’re going to Mickey D’s.’
As we got into the car, I noticed the sly smile on Ruby’s face. The moment she spotted me looking, the smile vanished.
Back home, Tom waited until the girls had gone out into the garden, then he said, ‘Would it really have killed us to do what Ruby wanted? And did you need to be so rude to her?’
I went to the fridge and poured a large glass of Pinot Grigio. Tom had been moody all evening, for reasons I suspected had something to do with his earlier lie.
‘I’m really, really sorry about what I said. It was an honest mistake.’
Tom sighed and helped himself to a glass of Rioja.
Ruby Winter was sitting on the picnic rug in the garden sucking on a long straw. In the fading sun she was like some exotic plant raised in the dark, spindly and unnaturally white. I sat down next to her.
‘I grew up on the Pemberton Estate, did your dad tell you?’ I said.
Ruby stared at me in disbelief. ‘That must have been, like, a million years ago?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, smiling. ‘I left before you were born.’
Ruby shrugged and went back to her straw.
I started again, summoning a brighter tone. ‘How’s about we go shopping at the weekend, just us girls? We can go to McDonald’s afterwards if you like.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened in the restaurant. I’m just so used to it being the three of us, I wasn’t thinking.’
Ruby was listening but she didn’t say anything.
‘We’re glad you’re here, safe, with us,’ I went on, but even as I said it I knew that, for me at least, it was a lie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I arrived home from work the following evening, Tom told me he’d got through to the grandmother, and that Ruby would be speaking to her later. Finally, some progress – and while I was sad for Ruby, I was also quite looking forward to her moving out. We’d support her and see her regularly but she would no longer be part of our household. Freya would gain a sister and I’d be able to develop a relationship with her without having my nose rubbed daily in Tom’s infidelity. Seemed like a good compromise.
I poured myself a glass of wine in the kitchen then carried it into the living room where Freya was watching one of her Pippi Longstocking DVDs. My daughter had always been a thoughtful, interior child whose courage often failed her. For years, Pippi had been her invisible sister and her alter ego, the stroppy, crusading kid in whose fearless footsteps Freya desperately wished to tread.
I took her delicate hand with its ballet-pink nail beds in mine and she turned to look at me.
‘You know that Ruby’s arrival makes no difference at all to how much your father and I love you, don’t you?’
She nodded.
‘How would you feel about Ruby going to live with her grandmother? We’ll still see her a lot, of course.’
Freya shrugged and twisted her body so that she was no longer directly facing me. She’d always been careful with her opinions, eager to please, and worried about offending.
Tom appeared then and, spotting my glass, just as quickly disappeared into the kitchen to fetch one for himself. When after a while he hadn’t come back I got up and padded after him. The kitchen was empty. I figured he must be hiding in his study. The study door was pulled to but the light was on and I could hear the low repetitive rhythm of Ruby’s voice coming from inside. Through the gap in the door, I saw her perched on Tom’s desk with the phone in one hand. She seemed to be talking into the handset. There was no sign of Tom himself, though. I hadn’t heard him going up the stairs, and was about to slip back into the kitchen on the assumption that he’d gone into the garden when something stopped me and I held my breath for a moment. What I thought I heard was repeated. I stood there listening for a few minutes longer. Ruby was on the phone but she wasn’t talking. She was repeating the word ‘blah’ over and over again. ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah.’ This went on until, pushing the door open, I walked into the room. The instant she saw me she threw down the phone. Her face was flushed.
‘Did you get cut off?’
Ruby bit her lip and slid from the desk. ‘She hung up.’
‘You know what? She probably didn’t realise you were still speaking. Why don’t we call her back?’
‘No, I’m going to my room.’
I watched her go up the stairs then returned to the kitchen to find Tom sitting at the table with a wine glass to his lips flipping through the pages of a gaming mag.
‘What happened to you?’
He frowned and said defensively, ‘I was in the garden.’
I told him about Ruby’s strange behaviour in the study.
‘This is all so weird. She won’t speak to her own grandmother and she’s barely mentioned her mother.’
‘The poor kid’s in shock.’
‘Well, OK, but there’s other weird stuff too. Aren’t you bothered about the boiler man coming a week before the accident? Or the window in the bedroom being shut even though Ruby’s mother almost always kept it open?’ I’d mentioned this to Tom the day Ruby arrived but, just as he did then, he dismissed me with a wave of his hand.
‘I’ve talked to the police. They checked the boiler. It was old. The pilot light went out. End of.’ He seemed rattled and angry and I thought I knew why.
‘How was the chat with Ruby’s grandmother?’
‘Meg. Her name’s Meg,’ he said irritably. I’d touched on a nerve.
‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.
Tom threw down his magazine. His face was a sudden hailstorm, then, just as quickly, it readjusted itself and, in a flat tone, he said, ‘Look, we’re going to need to have a rethink. Meg Winter lives in a tiny one-bed flat on that arse-end of an estate. She has emphysema and she’s basically a bitch. She’s not prepared to take on Ruby.’
‘Is this about money? Because if it is…’ I was willing to pay.
‘Maybe. Social services think there’s some past history with drugs, so I’m not sure they’d let Meg have Ruby anyway.’
It took a moment for what he’d said to register. A feeling of panic rose up. ‘Any other relatives?’
‘An uncle. He’s in prison. No one else.’
‘Jesus, Tom. We can’t do this. We don’t know anything about her.’ I heard myself listing all the reasons why it would be impossible for Ruby Winter to come and live with us. Tom let me finish, but I could see he wasn’t listening.
When I ran out of steam, he said, ‘Actually, we do know something about Ruby: she’s my daughter. You think I want this any more than you do? But what choice do we have, really? We can’t put her into care. She’s family. We’ll talk about getting some help tomorrow.’
‘Help?’
Tom slid the magazine away. ‘Obviously we’re going to need someone in the house. I can’t look after two kids and work.’
> ‘We can’t afford “help”.’ Tom had borrowed money from his father to put into his business. For the last three or four years I’d been paying all the household expenses. The mortgage was huge and Tom had remained very attached to his expensive wine and skiing holidays. And now, what, another mouth to feed? The services of a childminder?
‘Oh, but we could afford to pay a sick old junkie to take the problem away? What we really can’t afford is for me not to be able to work. I’m nearly there, Cat.’ He pinched his fingers. ‘Just a whisker away.’
The anger on Tom’s face had been replaced by a weary resignation. ‘I know, it’s a fucking nightmare.’
The door swung open and Freya’s face appeared. She looked anxiously from one of us to the other.
‘Will you come up and read me a story?’
I nodded a yes. ‘You go up, I’ll be there in five minutes.’
Tom waited until Freya had gone then muttered, ‘You know, this has hit me too. But you might make a better job of trying to like Ruby.’
Then pushing his wine glass away, he sprang up and walked out of the door. Moments later, I heard the front door slam, then the sound of the car engine.
I slugged back the last of the wine, put both glasses in the dishwasher then climbed the stairs. Originally, I hadn’t been minded to sympathise with Lilly Winter, but the visit to the Pemberton had changed things, made me regard her with more compassion, as a woman trapped inside a world from which she could not escape, a single mother who had been forced to borrow twenty pounds to pay a cowboy tradesman to fix the boiler that, as it turned out, would kill her. The visit had also made me glad all over again to have escaped. What it didn’t do is make me any happier about living with her daughter.
From the upstairs landing, I could hear Freya brushing her teeth. Ruby was sitting on the bed in her pyjamas, holding a pen in her fist like a weapon. She looked up as I entered and the patched-on smile appeared on her face but her eyes were big with tears. I went to comfort her. As I approached I saw a series of crude squiggles on her arm. She had picked up a paper clip and, with her right hand, was pressing the cut end of the wire in under the fingernail of her left index finger. Blood had begun to bead out over the top of the nail. I reached towards her and grabbed her right wrist.
‘Please, Ruby,’ I said, extracting the paper clip from her hands. She was crying now, but when I cupped a hand around her head in an effort to comfort her, she stiffened. I felt terrible for wishing that she was somewhere, anywhere else but at Dunster Road. But still I did wish it.
‘You know what happened to your mum wasn’t your fault, don’t you?’
Ruby turned her face to me.
‘Your neighbour Gloria told me a man came to fix the boiler. Do you remember him? You won’t get into trouble, but if you do know anything about him, you need to tell me.’
Ruby looked up and for an instant I thought I saw a pulse of alarm cross her face. There was a chill silence.
‘Ruby?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never saw any boiler man.’ The tears had all but dried up. She turned her back to me. ‘I want to go to sleep now.’
I got up and pulled open the door to find Tom on the landing. Evidently I’d surprised him because he took a step back and angled his body away. His jaw had a peculiar set to it. I couldn’t work out whether he was angry or afraid.
‘I thought you’d gone out,’ I said.
‘Apparently I’m back.’ He spread out his arms. There was something hostile in the gesture. I followed him into our bedroom and shut the door.
‘You of all people should know better than to bring up the accident,’ he hissed, jabbing a finger at me. He’d obviously overheard. ‘You think you know better than the police?’
‘It’s just weird, that’s all.’
Tom was standing on the side of the bed nearest the window now, as if he couldn’t bring himself to be near me. There was a cruel set to his mouth as he said, every word loaded with meaning, ‘You know, I’m really beginning to think this is all making you a bit paranoid.’ He turned on his heels and, with his hand on the door and his back to me, he said, ‘I’ll sleep downstairs tonight.’
I watched him disappear then moved across the landing to my daughter’s room. She was sitting up in bed listening to something on her MP3 player. I lowered myself onto the bed beside her and she flipped off her headphones.
‘How’s about at the weekend you and Ruby and I go and do something you both want to do, OK? Then I thought maybe we could have lunch with Sally. She’s so looking forward to meeting Ruby. And seeing you, obviously.’
Freya shrugged and mumbled something incoherent. I was taken aback. She loved her glamorous, fly-by-night auntie and the feeling was reciprocated. Why was she being so low-key? Maybe she’d heard Tom and me fighting?
‘How does that sound?’ I pressed.
She was frowning now, her mouth set in a little moue. Suddenly, as if out of the blue, she said, ‘I want to swap rooms.’
The remark caught me off guard and I didn’t have a ready reply.
‘Ruby lived in a horrid place and her mum was drunk all the time and you could have rescued her but you didn’t.’
I reeled back, genuinely shocked. No wonder my daughter’s allegiances had shifted if Ruby had been drip-feeding her misinformation about what Tom and I did or didn’t do. On the other hand, we only had ourselves to blame. I realised then that at no point during the last few days had I sat Freya down and talked through what had happened. Not in any detail. And, given Tom’s preference for avoiding difficult conversations, I doubted he had either. Hardly surprising that Ruby had become Freya’s chief source of information. She’d had no one else to turn to.
I sat with her on the bed and told her about the circumstances of Ruby’s conception, about Tom and Lilly not really knowing one another and Tom having no idea of Ruby’s existence till this week. I tried to reassure her that if we’d known about Ruby, we would have intervened.
‘It’s very kind of you to want to swap rooms, sweet pea, but it’s not your job to try to make it up to Ruby for having a difficult time.’
Freya took a deep breath and gave me a long, hard, accusatory look.
‘Well, whose job is it then?’ she said.
The following two days were dominated by work. Joshua Barrons’ scans had to be completed, there were the final amendments to the grant application to make, research data to analyse. When I got home Tom would be in his study working on Labyrinth, and the two girls would be playing in the garden, with the sawing and banging of the basement extension next door providing background accompaniment. Tom took to sleeping on the sofa bed in his study and we spoke only about domestic practicalities. But if everything appeared relatively smooth on the surface, the dynamics of the household, those intangible flows of energy that give a family shape and movement, had fundamentally changed. Without anyone making a conscious decision, there had been a shift. Ruby Winter had become part of the fabric of the place. She was here to stay.
Even as I adjusted to the fact, I didn’t like it any better. Not least because a series of small, unexplained events gave me cause to wonder if the bond between my daughter and my stepdaughter was a relationship of equals. On Thursday evening, a small silver locket Sal had given Freya and to which she had long been terribly attached turned up in Ruby’s room. Both girls insisted they had no idea how it had got there but it was clear in my mind that Freya had either given it to Ruby or Ruby had taken it. After that, a bottle of perfume on my dressing table disappeared. The girls denied all knowledge, but I noticed after it had gone a faint remnant of freesias and musk on the landing. Then, on Friday evening, when I was in the kitchen clearing up, something more significant happened. Freya came thundering downstairs yelling that the hamster had disappeared. The door to the cage was open and she’d searched her bedroom but Harry wasn’t there.
For the next hour all four of us scoured the house and, finding nothing, eventually
had to resign ourselves to the likely possibility that Harry had escaped and been devoured by the cat. Freya was inconsolable, convinced it was her fault, full of self-recrimination and bewilderment, since she was also sure she hadn’t left the cage open. When she’d finally cried herself into a daze, I helped her to bed and sat stroking her hair, reassuring her that Harry hadn’t suffered and that we would explain what had happened to the school then go to the pet shop and get another hamster which she and Ruby could share.
While all this was going on, I noticed, Ruby Winter kept her own counsel but there was something about her withdrawal that felt strategic. She denied all knowledge of the hamster’s whereabouts but I wasn’t sure I believed her. While I’d taken on board the social worker’s entreaties to expect the unexpected in Ruby, and I knew from my own experience of child psychology that numbness along with denial and a simple inability to process the events are some of the ways kids – and adults – cope following a parent’s death, it still felt ominous to me that here we were nearly five days after Lilly Winter’s demise and the only reaction Ruby had shown to that momentous event had been to act out, steal things and cut herself with a paper clip. I worried that we’d allowed a deeply disturbed girl into our house and given her unsupervised access to our daughter. In what world was this a good idea? The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that if Ruby was to stay with us, we’d need to get her some therapeutic help. The sooner the better.
Tom had other ideas.
‘How would you feel if your mother had just died? All she needs is stability.’ We were sitting on the sofa on Friday night, long after the girls had gone to bed. We’d both had a few glasses of wine. Since Ruby’s arrival Tom and I had been drinking far too much. It wasn’t helping, I knew.
I mentioned the paper clip incident. ‘What if Freya copies her?’
