by Judy Astley
‘Has she just stormed out for a while to show that she can or has she run away?’ she asked Matt eventually, when at nearly seven that evening there was still no sign of her. ‘I mean suppose she’s run off somewhere with Tom, should we call the police?’
Matt opened the pristine fridge and upset the symmetry by removing a couple of bottles of beer. ‘And say what? “We’ve got a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s been out most of the day”? I think they’ll want it to be at least an all-nighter before they get interested, especially round here. This bit of London is full of girls of her age staying out: the middle-class ones with over-liberal parents and the others. Covers almost everyone. And Zoe isn’t back yet either, they’d want to know why you’re not just as worried about her.’
Jess opened one of the beers and drank straight from the bottle. Cleaning was thirsty work but had been suitably mind-numbing when she needed it. Certainly in the kitchen she hadn’t left much for Monica to do on Monday. There was even a lamb casserole in the oven, one of those comfort-food items that was supposed to stick families, as well as your ribs, together.
‘Tasha’s probably at that friend’s house,’ Matthew suggested. ‘Claire, the one I saw her with the other day.’
‘I just wish she’d ring if she is. I want her to know we want her to come home. She hasn’t taken her mobile, she said last week that it had run out of time – I think that was a hint that I was supposed to buy her a voucher.’
Matthew hugged her. ‘Don’t worry, she’ll turn up. Nights are still cold. She won’t be out on the streets. Give her a call at Claire’s, I’m sure she’ll be there.’ Just then the front door was slammed shut but it was Zoe, not Natasha, who came running in.
‘Mum, Dad, come quick! Emily has collapsed and I can’t get her to wake up! Angie isn’t there, she’s gone out with the bloke who delivered the new fridge and …’ She stopped, gasping for breath. ‘Come now!’
Emily was lying in her mother’s kitchen, sprawled out on the floor with her legs at strange angles like a corpse in a bad TV drama.
‘Shall I get an ambulance?’ Zoe stood hopping from foot to foot, biting her thumb. ‘Emily! Get up!’ she yelled, prodding at the girl with her toe.
‘No, don’t kick her, that won’t help,’ Matt said. ‘Let’s put her in the recovery position and see how she goes from there. An ambulance might be a good idea.’
‘No!’ Emily opened her eyes and groaned. ‘I’m OK, I’m just feeling a bit woozy …’ Her eyes rolled in her head, quite terrifyingly, Jess thought. She took Zoe’s arm and pushed her out into the hallway.
‘Zoe, has she taken anything?’
‘What? Like what? Only aspirins. She’s always taking aspirins. She says her head hurts.’
‘Has she eaten anything?’
‘No.’ Zoe’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I told you, she never eats. You were supposed to tell Angie.’
‘I know. I haven’t seen her since you mentioned it though.’
‘But you’ve had ALL DAY!’ Zoe wailed. ‘Angie was here this morning. You could have come over. You could have talked to her! All you think about is Natasha! Suppose Emily dies?’
Then it will be all your fault was the bit Zoe wasn’t saying. ‘She isn’t going to die, not today anyway,’ Jess told her. Matthew had hauled Emily up and sat her on one of Angie’s slinky kitchen chairs. He looked at Jess, indicating without Emily seeing that she weighed about as much as a kitten.
‘Come back with us,’ Jess told Emily. ‘We’re going to give you something to eat and drink, nothing big or heavy, just enough to keep you upright. And then when your mum gets back I think we all need to have a talk about what’s been going on, don’t you?’
Emily nodded miserably and gave Zoe a feeble smile. ‘Thanks a lot Zoe, now you’ve really landed me in it.’
Twelve
The answerphone was on. Natasha listened to her own voice (gratingly bright and overeager, as if she was about twelve) asking her to leave a message after the beep, decided she couldn’t, on the spur of the moment, think of the appropriate attitude to come up with and hung up quickly.
‘They’ve only bloody gone out, haven’t they? You know, like they don’t care?’ she complained to Claire. They were sitting in Claire’s kitchen where they’d been for the past two hours. Scattered remains of pizza base lay strewn about on the table among several empty Coke cans. Claire picked up a shaving of pizza crust and put it in her mouth.
‘They could be trawling through the streets looking for you,’ Claire said. ‘It’s only eight o’clock. You could have left them a message, let them know you’re OK. We’re the ones who should be going out.’
Natasha pulled a face and slumped over the table, her head in her hands. ‘I don’t feel like going anywhere. I’m too depressed. I can’t believe Tom was with Mel, how does he even know her?’
Claire gathered up the pizza debris, loaded it into the box it arrived in and went to squash it all into the bin.
‘You keep going over the same old stuff, Tash, you’re beginning to sound like one of those whingers off Neighbours or something. It’s getting boring. Can’t we just go into Richmond or Putney and see what’s going on? I want a life, I don’t want to waste a Saturday night, even if you do.’
‘OK, OK, I’ll come.’ Natasha ran her hands through her hair. ‘My hair feels filthy though. I only washed it yesterday.’
‘That’s town living for you. You were out in the rain this morning, getting pollution poured all over your head.’
‘And aircraft fuel and other stuff.’ Natasha giggled. ‘Eddy-up-the-road’s always saying we’re being bombed from holiday flights with shit and kerosene. You’ll have to lend me something to wear,’ she said. ‘I only brought stuff to be warm sleeping in a car in, not stuff to go up the pub.’
Talking about Eddy reminded Natasha of the day she and Tom had climbed into his house. Tom might be in someone else’s house right now. He might be pulling Mel onto another crease-free embroidered duvet cover. Maybe there were loads of other girls too: other people’s homes where he got friendly with the mum so he could have a permanent supply of good food and somewhere warm to be. He hadn’t climbed in through her window every night, and he hadn’t died of cold in the Sierra, so perhaps he had a sort of rota. She didn’t want to think about it. Claire was right, they should go out and get themselves some life.
* * *
It wasn’t easy to convince Angie that there was a problem. Jess didn’t blame her – it must be a nice comfortable life having her children tidied away at school in the termtime. The school was being paid to take care of Emily and Angie had trusted them to do exactly that, assuming they would not let her merely limp through the term with a growing eating disorder and then send her home to have a serious health crisis. Luke never had any problems, Angie tried to reason, and she’d brought them up the same, so what had to be so different about Emily? Emily, persuaded with difficulty to drink some orange juice, eat (tediously slowly, barely a crumb at a time) half a slice of toast and then forced to stay sitting at the kitchen table until it was too late for her to go and sick it up, was now in Zoe’s room complaining that there was nothing wrong with her.
‘Why did nobody say anything? Why haven’t I had a letter?’ Angie wailed to Jess. Jess could hear denial in her voice: if there hadn’t been a letter, if whoever had been allocated the role of Emily’s pastoral carer hadn’t got in touch, Angie was reasoning that surely it wasn’t that serious.
‘But you can see for yourself. Look how her clothes hang on her, and how her face has caved in. And next time she passes out she might not be in the safety of her own home, with people who care about her.’ Jess was trying to keep her patience. At the back of her mind she was still thinking about Natasha and the morning’s row. Helping Angie come to terms with Emily’s problems, it occurred to her that maybe they should just swap daughters, see if they could do any better with each other’s than they had with their own. At least now she knew where Natasha
was, and was hugely relieved she hadn’t run off with Tom. Claire’s mother Veronica had phoned and said (very quietly, for fear the two girls would hear her) that it was all right for Natasha to stay one night, but after that she was going to have to tell her to go home. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to be a refuge for runaways, she’d admitted. ‘My older daughter’s best friend once had a family, er, upheaval, and moved in for three months, which was not convenient, so of course, you can quite understand …’
Jess was uncomfortably conscious of being pushed towards expressing excessive gratitude while at the same time being warned off from expecting any more than the one stingy night’s bed and board for her daughter. Claire, over the years, had spent many a whole weekend giggling nights away in Natasha’s bedroom and she’d spent a damp week in a Devon cottage with them one summer. But then that was when times were good and easy, not to mention more innocent. Perhaps, Jess had thought, attempting to feel charitable, Veronica was concerned that Natasha shouldn’t think she was taking sides. Less charitably, she also suspected that Veronica might not want her darling daughter to be infected with whatever bad behaviour her friend was up to. Veronica, a pillar of the local Conservative party and an eager school PTA participant, would not wish to be mistaken in any sense for a liberal parent.
‘So what do I do?’ Angie sat chewing her nail extensions and looking desperate. ‘I’m supposed to be going out with Steve tonight. Can Emily be left? Do I have to stay in with her and get her to nibble biscuits every ten minutes?’
Jess felt quite sorry for her, but sorrier for Emily. Angie hadn’t a clue about any illness that couldn’t be cleared up with a couple of paracetamol and a few extra hours in bed.
‘I’ll find some phone numbers for you,’ she said, rummaging through the filing drawer in her desk where she kept a bulging file of references that might come in useful for work. ‘There are people who can help but you have to trust them. I can’t pretend the process is likely to be easy. She might have to stay in a hospital for quite a while.’
‘Oh she won’t want to do that,’ Angie laughed. ‘It’s the holidays. She wants to be out having fun. But then …’ Angie pulled on a piece of her hair. ‘She hasn’t got the energy, really, has she? Poor girl. If only she’d said something.’
‘She couldn’t have. That’s part of the problem,’ Jess told her gently. ‘If she’d been able to do that she’d have been halfway to getting herself better.’ She pushed a sheet of paper at Angie. ‘Here, take this, make the calls. Steve will still be around tomorrow.’
Matt finished his beer and wondered about having another one. He was quite hungry but didn’t want to order food from Ben. That would feel too much like having sneaked out for a solitary supper to avoid being at home, and besides, he quite fancied the idea of going out to eat a bit later with Jess, if she could tear herself away from the house. He thought about phoning her and getting her to come and join him, but she might think it was Natasha and get frantic or furious when she found it was only him.
The Leo wasn’t very busy, but then it was still quite early in the evening. On Saturdays the tables filled slowly and the place was rarely full before ten. Even Eddy wasn’t in: Matt wondered if he was seeing Paula again tonight. If he started having a regular thing with her he might not be around so much, which would be a pity. If he really worked on this theme Matt could make himself feel very much like a small boy whose best mate had gone off with someone else. Eddy’s won’t-grow-up humour and general air of permanent bad behaviour was such an entertaining novelty after all those years spent in a job where arriving in the office twenty minutes late was interpreted as some kind of suspect political manoeuvre.
Matt strolled over to the counter. ‘Hey, Ben have a drink with me.’ Maybe that would stave off the hunger, especially combined with some of the olives off the bar. He’d give it a bit longer before he went back. Perhaps Angie would have gone back across the road by then, maybe Natasha would have come home, made up with Jess and decided to concentrate on her GCSE coursework and give up boys for the next year. Perhaps fat pink piggies were formation-flying over the Grove. He waved a tenner at Ben who pulled a single Heineken from the cold cabinet, opened it and handed it to Matt. ‘Not for me thanks mate, got a whole evening to get through. Micky’s off tonight, some cousin of his died and he’s gone to see the family. Anyway, haven’t you got a home to go to, or does that sound too much like a proper pub landlord?’
‘It does, and frankly at the moment I don’t think I have. It’s full of women having traumas. It’s like living in the middle of some God-awful problem page. I had to get out, it’s definitely no place for a man.’
* * *
On Sunday morning Natasha walked home very slowly from the bus stop. The extra few minutes were to give Tom a last chance to show up. He should have been waiting for her, lurking in the square or even behind the laurels outside Claire’s house. There was no reason for him to have known she was there, Natasha knew that, but as he’d so far had a knack of turning up where she was when she didn’t expect him, it didn’t seem too much to hope for.
Natasha wasn’t particularly keen on Sundays. It was a day that didn’t really count. She always felt as if she was merely hanging around waiting for Monday when real life could kick in again. Jess was a firm believer in a proper roast lunch on Sundays; all the family had to be there, unless, like Oliver being in Australia, or when Zoe went on the school ski trip, they had a really sound reason not to be. It meant that the day was broken in half – there wasn’t time to do anything before lunch except hang about sleeping for as long as possible, and the afternoon sort of drifted by into the evening filled with nothing but last-minute homework and really bad television. The parents slopped about, cooked, read the papers all day, did bits of gardening and fell asleep early in the evening, bad-tempered from too much wine. Other families went out and did things, trawled round the shops as if it was just some ordinary day, went swimming or out on visits to places. Jess and Matthew had never quite got themselves round the fact that Sunday had moved on from the static non-day it had been in their youth, and seemed to be doing their best to pass this feeling on to their children.
There was laughter coming from the square by the Leo. Natasha could hear people mucking about before she could see them. There was the sound of a can being kicked, a yell of ‘Goal!’ Her heartbeat’s pace picked up a bit: the laughter was young, some of it might be from Tom. She turned the corner feeling as nervous as if she was about to have her BCG shot all over again, but Tom wasn’t there. There was just the usual bunch of Briar’s Lane year tens, including Mel who was leaning against the bench, wearing a very short black skirt (with bare legs even though it wasn’t warm enough yet and she was winter-pale) and smoking a cigarette. She glanced across at Natasha and gave her a broad grin and a wave. ‘Y’all right Tasha?’ she yelled. Natasha smiled and nodded back. If there’d been no-one else around she might have gone up to Mel and asked her about Tom, how she knew him, how well she knew him. With the others there it would take too much nerve. They’d crowd round, wanting to know the full story. Mel might go challenging, ask things that made her sound hard, like ‘Whad’you wanna know for?’ Natasha, on balance, was glad it was just the grin and the wave. Mel might tell her things she’d prefer not to know.
George hadn’t a clue that anything unusual had been going on. For this Jess was thoroughly thankful, as it meant that the atmosphere over lunch could almost border on the normal.
‘So did you find him then? That young lad you were looking for yesterday?’ George asked Natasha as soon as they sat down. There was a brief tense moment, for George was possibly the only one who wasn’t that interested in her reply, and then Natasha grinned at him and said, ‘No. I wasn’t really looking though. Went to my mate Claire’s and later we went into Richmond and met up with some friends from school. It was a bit boring really.’ Shrugging, she made a fast start on her roast lamb and didn’t meet anyone’s eye, but somehow it was ackno
wledged that enough information had been given about what she’d been up to and the subject didn’t need to be pursued.
‘Emily’s in a hospital with a special anorexic unit. She had to go in last night, like an emergency?’ Zoe told her as the two of them cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. ‘She’s way under six stone and she’s got to stay in till she’s at least six and a half.’
‘Jesus, poor her. Still, at least she’ll get sorted.’ Zoe glanced at her sister, wondering. Natasha looked miles away, her mind gone off to some place where she didn’t seem to be very happy. She wished there was school tomorrow so the two of them could go on the bus together and get back to being like proper friends again. Somehow she didn’t think Tom would be climbing in through the windows any more. Natasha looked as if she’d been dumped, but was just that bit too moody and distant to be asked about it. Stuff would work out though, she assumed. It had over Emily, it would with Tash.
… foolish parents thinking holidays give an opportunity for a few uninterrupted hours of coursework. A couple of hours in the evening, with time off for EastEnders, cups of coffee, the video that has to be watched now because it’s due back tomorrow, plus several phone calls to sympathize with their friends over how much homework is making them suffer doesn’t really add up to much that’s down on paper. Two maths questions and Zoe requires Nurofen and a lie-down on the sofa. Natasha specializes in preparation techniques, in which the right pen, paper, selection of paper clips, hole puncher have to be arrayed on the desk top. Some may have to be shopped for …
Paula wasn’t going to like this. She was expecting a blow-by-blow account of whatever trauma there’d been at the weekend, not a cop-out little piece about homework in the school holidays. She’d already called twice this Monday morning to ask ‘Is everything all right now?’ using that voice of profound sympathy to disguise shameless curiosity. It was all Jess could do to stop her calling in, hoping to catch the entire family at each other’s throats. Paula with her single life, in her perfect Kensington apartment with her clean perfect furniture, flowers of the latest and best taste and her slinky-sleek cat that never seemed to shed fur, must be feeling the lack of a turbulent family battleground and be strangely keen to acquire one second-hand.
