by Frances Vick
Two Little Girls
A totally gripping psychological thriller with a twist
Frances Vick
Books by Frances Vick
Bad Little Girl
Liars
Two Little Girls
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
Bad Little Girl (UK listeners | US listeners)
Liars (UK listeners | US listeners)
Two Little Girls (UK listeners | US listeners)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Bad Little Girl
Frances’ Email Sign Up
Books by Frances Vick
A Letter from Frances
Liars
Acknowledgements
For my family
We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Talmudic saying
One
March 1985
The two little girls, bright specks of blue and pink, leave the school gates, wiggling through the scrum of parents, toddlers, shouting swaggering classmates. Most of the children display that strangely exhausted excitement peculiar to Fridays, when the weekend stretches far ahead like a road through the desert, with scarcely a hint of anything but absolute freedom ahead. Car doors slam, babies shriek, parents chat, doggedly ignoring tugging, bored children who are anxious to get home and play.
It’s starting to rain, just a little, and the air feels sticky, tacky with moisture. The weather forecast says there might be a storm tonight. Someone’s umbrella is forced inside out, and people chuckle. Rubbish is already spread across the street and baffled, resentful cats hide under cars and sheltered doorsteps.
In the middle of all this, the two girls are a bubble of apparent calm. They’re neither smiling nor talking, and when you look closer, they’re not even walking together. The girl in blue is slightly ahead, her face set in an expression of self-conscious tragedy. The girl in pink lags deliberately behind and she looks at the ground, but her face is tight with suppressed, confused emotion.
No-one talks to them, no-one looks at them, but everyone knows who they are: Lisa Cook and Kirsty Cooper. They’re Best Friends Forever. They’re almost one entity. The only difference between them is that Lisa is a liar, and Kirsty… Kirsty is…? Nobody knows what Kirsty is really like any more. She’s been under Lisa’s shadow for such a long time that when (and if) anyone thinks of Kirsty, they think first of Lisa. It’s been like that for a long time, and it will carry on being that way, even after Lisa is declared dead.
But that hasn’t happened yet. That doesn’t happen for a while.
It took Kirsty ages to persuade her mum to let her walk home. She wouldn’t cross any main roads, or talk to strangers, or anything like that! Come on! Come on! Everyone walks home, why couldn’t she? And it’s not like she’d be alone, she’d be with Lisa! What was the problem?
Part of the problem was just that: she’d be with Lisa. Sometimes Sarah Cooper would watch her daughter, her face angled up at her friend like a drowsy flower to the sun, and wonder if they were a little too close. There were times, though Sarah couldn’t be sure if she saw more what she feared than what existed, when Kirsty seemed embattled by the closeness of this friendship.
‘I just think you should make some more friends,’ she’d tell Kirsty sometimes. ‘There’s plenty of fish in the sea!’ There was something about Lisa that made all her platitudes rise to the surface like drowned things. ‘You can’t put all your eggs in one basket.’
But it did no good. In fact, it had the opposite effect; Kirsty was at the foothills of adolescence now, and everything Sarah said was Wrong, and everything Lisa said was, by definition, Right. They’d go to the same school, and live next door to each other when they were older and carry on being Best Friends Forever – it was all worked out. And so Sarah gave ground, agreed to let them walk home together, so long as They Were Sensible and Came Straight Back with No Dawdling and they weren’t to go through the park or by the canal, all right? Do you promise? Promise me? Sarah’s private belief was that, perhaps – no, not perhaps, of course – when they got to secondary school, Kirsty would make more friends, blossom, come into her own, and September was only six months away. Six months is no time, is it?
Despite her intense lobbying, her hard won victory, Kirsty felt a little bit scared on the first walk home. Mindful of the No Park, No Canal rule, she suggested walking through the Marne Way industrial park – it’d take longer, but… And they did it for a week until Lisa said that was a stupid way to walk because it was boring and long and anyway everyone knew that there was quicksand in Marne Way. ‘And that’ll kill you, sure as cancer. I saw it on The A-Team.’
Kirsty wasn’t sure that England even had quicksand, but she’d learned not to argue with Lisa, and so they started taking the different, forbidden path – over the Iron Bridge, over the train tracks, past the secondary school, over the canal bridge and through the park.
‘Your mum’ll never find out,’ Lisa assured her. ‘They never find out. And if she asks just lie. You don’t even have to lie, just kind of nod and smile, or get her talking about something else.’
Lisa had mastered this kind of Jesuitical logic years ago, and her own mother, Denise, was none the wiser. Lisa did all sorts of things that Denise didn’t know about… She stole make-up testers from Boots, magazines from the newsagents. She watched horror films and claimed that they had a video recorder at home – but Kirsty doubted that because those things were expensive and nobody she knew had one. That was the problem with Lisa; she tended to make things up, but finding out exactly what she had made up and what she hadn’t was pretty much impossible, and if she was challenged, she raged. Kirsty feared conflict, would do anything to avoid it. Other kids in school didn’t have her scruples though; they knew Lisa’s uncle didn’t have a plane; that the twittery nonsense she claimed was Japanese was just gibberish she made up on the spot. They had all lost patience, and as a result, Lisa had become steadily more and more unpopular, until she was practically a pariah.
The Iron Bridge – a dark, rusting hulk that wobbled over the train tracks – was frightening. Kirsty couldn’t help imagining falling through the open metal slats of the steps, and, when on the partially enclosed metal walkway, the noise of the trains below rushed up in one angry, animal bellow, she shivered and closed her eyes. Perhaps Lisa was a bit scared too, because it was her idea to bring back an old game they used to play when they were little – they imagined trolls under the bridge, trolls who would reach out to
grab them if they didn’t move quickly, trolls they had to escape by running the length of the bridge in ten seconds or less. They’d stop at the last step, count to three, and run screaming across the walkway, collapsing, mock-exhausted at the other end, loudly congratulating each other for surviving yet another day. The thrill of besting the Iron Bridge almost obscured the guilt Kirsty felt every time they walked down the canal path and through the park.
‘What your mum doesn’t see won’t hurt her,’ Lisa said. ‘Don’t be a baby.’
‘Don’t be a baby.’ That had been the refrain all school year. Lots of things were babyish now, it seemed… Everything on TV was babyish apart from Grange Hill and that was only good sometimes. Care Bears and skipping games were babyish, and so were fish fingers, having a pet rabbit or a hamster (although gerbils were excluded from that list because Lisa owned a gerbil named Funshine) and knee socks. They should wear tights, Lisa said, like ladies did. Denise and Sarah didn’t buy either girl tights, however, so they had to get the look by stretching their knee socks until the elastic cracked and securing the tops around their thighs with rubber bands. They dug in something awful, but complaining about that was babyish too, so Kirsty didn’t any more.
If the Iron Bridge was scary, the canal and the park beyond were scarier still. The water looked like black oil, and it lapped against the concrete bank with a slapping, sucking noise that was faintly lascivious. And then there was the huge, flat expanse of park with the plane trees rustling, looming so high… it was spooky. There were sudden dips in the grass that made you stumble, and sound carried differently – things could seem closer or further away than they were; traffic from the distant road or little wisps of conversation were borne by the wind from far away. Sometimes the opposite happened, and there was no sound at all, just each other and the dark, as if they were floating on the River Styx. Kirsty felt as if the park was a sentient thing, that it played tricks with the sound and the light, simply to frighten little girls who lied to their mothers.
On the walk back home, Lisa would prattle about all the usual things she prattled about – the cerise lipstick she’d nicked from the market, how she was definitely getting a puppy for her birthday (this last was almost certainly a lie, but Kirsty wasn’t going to pick her up on it). Lately though, she’d started using these familiar tropes as a way of introducing her new favourite subject: Boys and How to Get Them to Like You. Walking this hypothetical dog would help her get fit because the ideal measurements for a girl were 34–22–34 and both of them had better start aiming for that now. The lipstick was important – everyone wore lipstick and you had to learn how to kiss so it didn’t smear all over your face. Lisa was practising by kissing the wall next to her mirror. Kirsty should too. She wondered aloud if she had the right kind of face for a perm? She pinched her cheeks to make them pink – because it made you look cute and excited, and men liked it when you look excited. She took to flapping her arms in a mysterious and ungainly chest exercise designed to make her breasts grow, and she bunched up her skirt, doubling it up at the waistband, trying to make it into a miniskirt. It gave her a strange silhouette, like a half-cooked dumpling, but she didn’t seem to notice and Kirsty certainly wasn’t going to tell her.
Kirsty, shamefully, hadn’t made any inroads yet into Making Boys Like Her but secretly she didn’t really want to. She might have succumbed to the knee-sock torture, but she still wore the regulation knee-length skirt and her hair was more often than not cajoled into bunches or held back with plastic hair grips. Lisa had started rolling her eyes at the bunches, so Kirsty surmised that they too were now babyish.
‘We should get matching perms. Maybe I should be the blonde one and you could be, like, a redhead? And I could always wear blue, and you could wear black? Or cerise?’
Lisa had a new plan. They were going to start a girl band together – like Pepsi & Shirlie or Mel and Kim. She even had a name – Angels Times Two – and had painstakingly, and with many rubbings-out, designed a logo of two winged fairies pecking at each other’s lips, their outsized wings all gilded. Well, almost all gilded; Lisa’s gold marker had run out halfway through and she had to colour the rest in with yellow pencil. ‘But it looks ace, doesn’t it?’ Together they wrote song lyrics and laboured over their answers to imaginary interviews in Smash Hits. Angels Times Two demanded synchronised dance routines and crop tops and make-up, and Kirsty better get good at those things and quick, especially the make-up bit, and not just for the band, but for school too because everyone in secondary school wore lipstick and eyeliner and you had to be good at that if you wanted a boyfriend. Wanting a boyfriend was in the natural order of things. Kirsty had been excited about secondary school but now she knew it would be populated by make-up-wearing sophisticates and leering boys that excitement had soured into queasy terror.
She scolded herself for this fear, and hoped against hope that, come secondary school, she’d have changed. She was bitterly ashamed of her ignorance; an ignorance she hadn’t even known she was guilty of until last October, when Lisa got that ring and started telling her all these baffling things that seemed too weird to be true, and quite possibly weren’t… but… what if they were?
Two
October 1984, and Lisa was waiting just outside the school gates. Normally she swung in late, the crust of cornflakes still between her teeth, a smear of breakfast jam on her cheek. Today though, she was early, waving at Kirsty with a gleeful urgency. Her whisper was theatrical, designed to be overheard.
‘I’ve got something to show you!’ She was wearing lipstick. There was a bit on her teeth.
‘You’ve got to wipe that off before Miss Gillgrass sees you.’
‘What? Oh, this?’ Lisa opened her eyes wide, dapped one slick lip with a chewed, stubby finger. ‘Oh, it must still be on since last night. I was out last night. Till late.’
She smiled significantly, and this smile had its predictable effect on Kirsty: a little tug of excitement, a corresponding pinch of anxiety.
‘Where?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out!’ Lisa chanted.
The bell rang. ‘Let’s go,’ said Kirsty.
‘Don’t you want to know? You’re dying to know!’
Kirsty hesitated, letting herself be jostled by the other kids filing into class. ‘Why can’t you tell me now?’
‘Meet me in the toilets at break.’
‘Why can’t you tell me now though?’
‘Because I can’t, that’s why. Meet me in the toilets at break!’
Lisa was given to intrigue. She was exciting that way.
During first break, they hid in the toilets, huddled together in a smelly little cubicle, the shrieks from the playground seeping through the toughened glass of the high windows, but still they whispered.
‘Look.’ Lisa pointed one stubby index finger out and wiggled it inches from Kirsty’s face. ‘It’s an antique.’ It was a brass ring, awkwardly twisted into the shape of a snake, taking up most of the finger – all the way up to the knuckle. ‘It came all the way from Oman. And the eyes? Real rubies.’ She nodded significantly. ‘From Oman.’
‘Is Oman like Argos?’ Kirsty asked after a while.
Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘Oman is a country. Our lodgers, Tokki and Mohammed? They’re from Oman.’
Kirsty had heard about the lodgers, but she’d never met any of them. Where was Oman? It didn’t sound like a real place even. It sounded like a planet from Star Trek or something. Maybe she could go to the library at lunchtime and look it up in the atlas.
‘Can I try it on?’ Kirsty asked.
‘Only if you promise not to tell anybody, all right? No-one.’
‘Tell anyone what? About going to the cinema?’
‘That. And the ring and stuff. Promise!’ This was a tricky thing to respond to. Lisa might mean what she said, or she might mean just the opposite, hoping the word would spread… Kirsty knew from experience that it was better to promise now and reassess later.
‘OK. I promise.’ Lisa pulled the ring over one grimy knuckle and passed it over. Kirsty’s fingers were slimmer, and the ring rattled to the base of her finger. It was an ugly, cheap-looking thing and the eyes were set crookedly. It gave her a nasty feeling somehow, as if she was touching slime. She gave it back hurriedly.
‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’ Lisa breathed.
‘How come you’ve got it?’
‘Tokki gave it me because…’ Lisa struggled to push it on her own finger again, ‘and you can’t tell anyone, about this, ever, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘Promise! Cross your heart!’ She made Kirsty slash at the air in front of her chest. ‘OK.’ She paused dramatically. ‘We’re engaged.’
Kirsty laughed. ‘No you’re not!’
Lisa frowned furiously. ‘I am so!’
‘Kids don’t get engaged… old people get engaged!’
‘Well, maybe I’m not a kid. Unlike you.’ Lisa was all supercilious dignity. ‘No-one’ll ever give you a ring with rubies in it.’
Indignation pushed Kirsty into answering back. ‘They’re not rubies,’ she told her flatly and followed up with something she knew would hit hard: ‘And I bet it’s from Argos really. We’ve got the catalogue at home and when I look I bet it’s there.’
