The Back Road

by Abbott, Rachel

‘No wine, thanks. Water’s fine.’ She paused. ‘Max, have you used my computer for any reason this morning? It’s not a problem, of course, but I just wondered.’

  Max grabbed a bottle of fizzy water from the fridge.

  ‘Now why on earth would I want to do that when we have a super duper twenty-seven inch iMac in the office? Why are you asking? Have you got lots of exciting secrets on there?’ Max wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, and turned back to the task of helping with the lunch.

  Leo decided to say nothing. Perhaps it was Ellie, although she couldn’t think when she would have had the chance.

  Max was rummaging around in the fridge and pulling out bags of salad and tomatoes when Ellie came into the kitchen, looking even more harassed than before.

  ‘Max - did you go out at all this morning with the twins?’ she demanded in a slightly breathless voice.

  ‘Good grief - what’s with the twenty questions today?’ Max responded, laughing and shaking his head. ‘What’s got into you two? Yes, as a matter of fact, I took the twins to the swings. We were out for about forty-five minutes. Why?’

  ‘Did you lock up – properly, I mean?’

  Max had clearly begun to realise that Ellie was genuinely concerned about something.

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s not like the old place, is it? There was nothing to nick there - but now I’m really careful. Why?’

  ‘Because while we were all out, somebody’s been in our house.’

  21

  A Single Step : the blog of Leo Harris

  A game of charades

  Definition of ‘charade’: An absurd pretence intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance

  Definition of ‘absurd’: wildly unreasonable, illogical, foolish or inappropriate

  How much are you pretending to be something or somebody that you’re not? Are you acting out your own charade, and have you thought about how foolish and inappropriate your actions are?

  Within our working lives, and perhaps even amongst friends, we see deceptions played out before our eyes: people who pretend to be happy when they are aching with sadness, or to like each other when they feel nothing but contempt. Perhaps these are actions of self-preservation, driven by a will to hide our pain from a wider audience.

  Within a relationship, though, pretence is indeed both unreasonable and illogical. Admit to being the person you really are. Never play that deadly game of charades.

  “The more definitely his own a man’s character is, the better it fits him.” Cicero

  A hand shot out and the screen went blank. That stupid bitch Leo. What did she know about charades?

  It was easy to delete her words, but less easy to erase the feeling of rage they had provoked. Well, some relationships had to have secrets. Some things were too difficult to explain, or for other people to understand. So sometimes you had to act the part - pretend to be somebody you’re not. Didn’t she understand that?

  Look what happened when the truth was told; when people showed who they really were. They got hurt. Honesty was rarely the answer. There was safety in lies.

  Perhaps it would have been better if Abbie had never known the truth. She would never have guessed.

  I only got to touch her once. I stroked her hair and tried to kiss her. I held her hands, and told her what I wanted. I told her we could be close – she only had to keep our secret, and I would let her go. But she screamed and cried, as if I were a monster. She rejected me like I was nothing. Nothing! After everything I’d done to be close to her. I knew how to stop her, though. I knew what would frighten her enough to make her quiet.

  Then she got away.

  And then the accident.

  I thought Abbie was dead, but it wasn’t my fault. She shouldn’t have rejected me. She shouldn’t have run.

  It was no good thinking of what might have been. There were things to be done. The evidence that Abbie had been here, in this house, must be disposed of. The shoes and the phone - what could be done with them?

  Some pretty pale blue ballet pumps were pulled from the bottom of a supermarket bag where they lay hidden below a pile of newspapers that were waiting to be recycled. Stuffed inside one was a shocking pink mobile phone. The SIM card had been disposed of in a plant pot full of earth in the back garden. Nobody would look there. But the rest needed a bit more thought.

  Tomorrow was rubbish collection day. That’s where they could go. But not in our bin. Lots of people put their bins out the night before, so a late night walk on the other side of the village should solve the problem. Perhaps it would be a good idea to smash the phone to pieces first.

  That was one problem solved. The other was a much greater one.

  The driver looked straight at me, at where I was hiding in the woods. It’s a face I’ll never forget, bleached white by the headlights, black eyes darting frantically from side to side to check if anybody was watching. And there I was. Perhaps for now we’re keeping each other’s secret, but for how long?

  Abbie can tell nobody.

  But the driver knows who I am, and can’t be allowed to expose me.

  There were plans to be made, and there was one person who was going to help. She wouldn’t like it, but she wasn’t going to be given any choice.

  22

  Day Four: Monday

  To Leo’s disappointment, Sunday had never settled back into the peaceful and harmonious atmosphere of that brief period before lunch. The more Ellie insisted that somebody had been in the house, the more Max had told her that it was her imagination. Not only had she thought that the bathroom cupboard had been tampered with, but she was sure somebody had been through her drawers. Max had joked about the intruder probably being after her knickers, but Ellie had been furious with him for taking it so lightly.

  The trouble was, Leo was fairly certain that somebody had been looking at her computer. But nothing had been stolen, and surely they would have taken her laptop if they were so interested in it? If Max had left the door open by mistake and some kids had come in - the obvious answer as nothing was missing - he wouldn’t be doing it again in a hurry. So it had felt better not to add fuel to the fire.

  Now it was a new day, and much as she was dreading it Leo thought it was time she faced up to another of the traumas of her childhood. She was going to walk into the village, and hope and pray that she could replace the old memories that still haunted her with new ones, much as she had done with Willow Farm.

  She had driven past the shops on Friday evening for the first time in years. Ellie and Max had always lived on the other side of the village and it had been easy to reach their house by coming down the back road, but to get to Willow Farm she could no longer ignore Little Melham, so it had to be dealt with.

  She stopped outside what used to be the sweet shop, and gazed at its old-fashioned facade. It had always looked like a shop out of a fairy story, with its semi-circular bay window made up of over a hundred small panes of glass. She had counted them once. On the outside not much had changed, but Leo could see that now it was a newsagents too. Sweets alone would be unlikely to sustain a shop in a village these days, particularly as she could bet money on this being the sort of place where health conscious parents frowned upon their precious offspring eating sugar in any form.

  Right Leo, in you go.

  She didn’t allow herself time to think as she purposefully pushed open the door and walked inside. This shop had the worst memories of all, so it was the best place to start. For most of the other shops, she had merely been a customer as part of her three times weekly grocery trip. The shopping was one of her chores, and the hardest. The only good thing was that it kept her out of the house. If there was too much to carry in one journey, she had to make several. She was known for having the biggest muscles ever seen on an eleven year old girl’s arms, but if Ellie ever offered to help - which she often did - she was told it wasn’t necessary. Ellie had to get on with her piano practice, or her homework. Leo, on the other hand, had to do her homework after
dark when everybody was in bed, sitting on the floor of her room with a piece of fabric over her lamp in case anybody was walking the corridors.

  But the sweet shop was the scene of her most degrading experience. On the day in question, she had already completed her second trip to the village. There had been potatoes to buy, and onions, carrots and other heavy vegetables. And then there had been the meat and the bread. Leo thought she’d finished but was sent back one more time to get some aspirin, which she could easily have managed on either of the previous journeys.

  And that’s when she did something stupid.

  Most days as she walked through the village, kids from school would be hanging around the church or the bus shelter. Usually she got jeers and catcalls because she wasn’t one of their crowd, but this day was different. When she came out of the chemist, there was a group of about eight of them sitting on the church wall, and for once they spoke to her. Even to be noticed by them was such a rare event that when they called her name, she tentatively went over to join them. She supposed she should have realised that they didn’t actually want to talk to her, but they did want something.

  ‘Oy - you - Leonora,’ one of the lads called. It always raised a laugh when she was called by her full name, because these were the kids from the rough end of town, and they thought it was a posh name. If only they’d known. She knew this lad - Neil something or other. He was in the year above her, and fancied himself something rotten. She wasn’t sure why, because he had floppy, greasy hair and a huge zit on his chin, but it was the first time anybody had paid her any attention.

  As she got closer, she could see that some of the girls were sniggering and whispering to each other, but the lads seemed to want to talk to her.

  ‘All right?’ Neil asked. She nodded, not quite getting up the confidence to speak.

  ‘Listen, Le-o-nor-ra,’ he enunciated each syllable and turned to his friends with a smirk. ‘We need you to do something for us. That old bag in the sweet shop has banned us from going in - so get us some chocolate will you?’ He pronounced ‘You’ as ‘ya’ which Leo thought sounded cool, but she would never get away with it. She’d get cracked around the head at home, and she would sound ridiculous probably.

  ‘Okay,’ she answered. ‘I don’t mind. Give me the money, then.’

  They all burst out laughing, as if she’d said something hysterically funny. Or stupid, more likely.

  ‘Tut, tut, Nora. Is it okay if I call you Nora? You don’t pay for them, you silly tart. You nick ’em. A couple of Curly Wurlies and a Toffee Crisp will do fine.’

  Leo hesitated. She wanted to be accepted, but she had never stolen anything in her life, and had no desire to start now. But if she refused, they would jeer at her even more and it would spread round school like wildfire that Leonora Harris was too chicken to nick a couple of bars of chocolate.

  If she’d had money of her own, she would have bought the chocolate and lied, but she didn’t. There was enough of her stepmother’s money to buy one thing - and she’d have to say she’d lost the change and take the punishment. Perhaps she could pay for the Toffee Crisp and steal the Curly Wurlies. If it meant that the other kids finally accepted her, maybe she could do it.

  Leo knew they were watching her as she walked towards the shop, and she tried to look confident. She swallowed hard as she pushed the door open. Mrs Talbot was standing behind the counter, serving some children and their mother. They were choosing from the penny tray, and taking their time about it. The chocolates were on display shelves down the side of the shop, with the big jars of sweets that had to be weighed out on the toffee scale right behind the counter.

  Mrs Talbot was a large woman, which everybody joked was from eating too much of her own stock. She always wore one of those cross-over aprons with a loud pattern, and her face was set with lines of what looked to Leo like constant irritation. For now, though, Mrs Talbot was being all sweetness and light to the mother of the well-behaved children.

  Her face flushing with the fear of what she was about to do, Leo glanced quickly over her shoulder and hurriedly placed the two chocolate bars in her shopping bag. She picked up the Toffee Crisp, and advanced towards the counter, her palms sweating with fear. If this is what it felt like to be a burglar, she thought, she couldn’t understand why anybody would want to do it.

  Mrs Talbot said nothing and finished serving the family. Leo was relieved. Obviously she hadn’t noticed a thing. Mrs Talbot even walked to the door with the customers, opening it to show them out with a smile, and wishing them a good day. But then Leo’s fear returned in full force, because Mrs Talbot had closed the door. And locked it.

  Without saying a word, she had walked over to her telephone and picked it up. She dialled three numbers, and Leo thought that without a doubt it had to be the police. But she was wrong. Mrs Talbot was calling directory enquiries, and asking for Leo’s home number. This was, after all, a village. Everybody knew where she lived, and where she had come from. Now, she wished it had been the police that Mrs Talbot was calling.

  It hadn’t taken long at all for her stepmother to arrive, and what came next didn’t bear thinking about. To Mrs Talbot’s credit, even she had looked shocked at the hard slap across the face that Leo had received, but Leo knew that was nothing to what she was going to get when they got home. And then, to her eternal shame and degradation, her stepmother grabbed a handful of Leo’s hair, twisting it to get a better grip, and dragged her from the shop, past all the sneering kids on the church wall, and took her home. Leo had never set foot inside the shop from that day to this.

  But now here she was. A comfortable looking lady of about sixty stood behind the counter. Dressed in a pink cotton top with short sleeves and some elaborate beading around the neck, she had a pleasant smile, and to Leo’s surprise her face lit up when she looked at her customer.

  ‘Leo Harris - well, I’ll be blessed,’ she said, beaming at a stunned Leo. ‘It’s good to see you, lass. I’d have recognised you anywhere. Come to visit Ellie, have you? I bet those twins are running you ragged.’

  Leo was momentarily lost for words.

  ‘Oh, don’t look so worried, love. It’s me - Doreen Talbot. I know I’ve changed a bit. I’ve been ill, but I’m okay now. I feel twenty years younger, and I’ve been waiting a long time to apologise to you.’

  Leo finally found her voice.

  ‘Mrs Talbot, what can I say? I had no idea that you were still here, but I don’t know why you feel you need to apologise to me. I stole from you. I am so ashamed that I did that. I could blame peer pressure, but I should have been strong enough to resist.’

  Mrs Talbot leant against the counter on her folded arms.

  ‘Listen, Leo, we all know you had a dreadful time with the old battle-axe. But nothing prepared me for the way she treated you that day. If it had been nowadays, I’d have called child services or whatever they’re called. I’m sorry, love. If I’d known and if I hadn’t been feeling so ropey myself in those days, I’d have handled things different.’

  Leo didn’t know what to say. But Mrs Talbot hadn’t finished.

  ‘We all knew, you know,’ she repeated. ‘Not only about you and how you came to be here, but everything else that went on. It’s a village. We talk. Your stepmother was evil, there’s no doubt. But then she had a lot to put up with, I suppose.’

  Not entirely sure that she understood what Mrs Talbot was getting at, it suddenly didn’t matter to Leo. Feeling as if her last battle had been fought and won, she was about to thank Mrs Talbot and leave when she spotted the local paper with the headline about the hit and run on the back road splashed across the front page. Mrs Talbot followed Leo’s gaze and pointed to the image of a happy looking Abbie.

  ‘And there’s another poor young girl. A bit of a solitary soul, or so I’m told. Not many friends. Just like you were at that age, if you don’t mind me saying so lass.’

  Not knowing how to respond to this, Leo thanked Mrs Talbot for being so forgiving, and sho
ok her hand.

  The lightness that she felt at being exonerated from the shoplifting incident was replaced with sadness for Abbie Campbell. It sounded like she was a loner too, and Leo knew better than most how difficult that could be. Conflicting emotions were fighting for supremacy as she closed the shop door.

  ‘Hello! This is a nice surprise.’ She heard the voice before she noticed him, and blinked to bring the day back into focus.

  ‘Tom. It’s good to see you. I was miles away.’ Leo suppressed her confused thoughts and attempted a smile. ‘I’m sorry we missed you yesterday, it would have been good to meet Lucy.’

  ‘I came to say thanks to Max and Ellie, but thought you and I might fix up to have lunch some time, if you’re at a loose end. Because I certainly am,’ Tom said, with a sheepish grin.

  He indicated the wine bar right behind them.

  ‘It’s a bit early for lunch yet, but do you fancy a cup of coffee if you’ve nothing better to do?’

  * * *

  Tom was genuinely pleased to see Leo. Since Lucy had left the evening before the house had felt empty, so he’d done his usual trick of coming for a walk to the village. Tomorrow he was going to start phoning around because until the right job came up, the least he could do would be to offer his services for training or mentoring, and if that failed he would look up a few charities where he could help out. He wanted to be around people. He was fast realising that solitude didn’t suit him.

  He admired Leo’s casual look, which was perfect for an English summer’s day. He had the feeling that she only ever wore black with a splash of white, but with that dark red lipstick and the sunglasses, she instantly stood out from the crowd. Her black cotton skirt finished just above her knees, showing her lightly tanned legs to perfection, and she was wearing a short, loose, black and white sleeveless top.

  He felt a bit scruffy in his jeans and T-shirt. He hadn’t even bothered to shave this morning. He needed to get his act together, or he would become a complete slob if he didn’t watch it. Leo didn’t seem too worried though as they took their seats at a table just inside the wide-open sliding doors. Believe it or not, the sun was too hot to sit outside, which made a change from the incessant rain they had been enjoying this summer.