by Clare Boyd
The doorbell rang and Mira jumped up, smoothed her skirt and answered the door. Never could she have imagined being so nervous about a child coming to tea.
‘Hello, dear, come in,’ she said, and she led Rosie, straight-backed and arms crossed over her chest, into the kitchen.
Mira poured the tea and sliced the cake. Neither of them talking. For some reason, it didn’t feel awkward for Mira.
Within minutes of Rosie sitting down, she had wolfed down a whole slice of Battenberg.
‘Can I have another slice,’ Rosie asked.
‘Sure,’ Mira said casually.
She would delay the second slice of cake.
‘So, how was your weekend? You and your mum went somewhere special together did you?’
‘How did you know that?’ Rosie asked.
‘I saw you in the car remember? Your mum seemed to be in a bit of a hurry.’
‘We went to London to see a show.’
‘How splendid. It must have been nice to have a day out with mum.’
‘Mummy loves musicals.’
‘What were your favourite bits?’
‘I loved the bit where he does that amazing acrobat show.’
‘Acrobats? Well I never. That sounds marvellous.’
‘It was awesome!’ she cried. Her eyes were dead behind the stage smile.
‘You’re a very lucky girl to get to go up to London and see a show.’
Rosie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Can I have more cake now?’
‘In a minute, Rosie,’ Mira said, sternly, deciding to get straight to the point. Mira didn’t believe in this wishy-washy protocol that the teachers at school believed in, where you had to let the child take the lead, wait for them to say something or ask them to draw a bleeding picture. Nonsense, Mira thought. She knew that the very nature of abuse encouraged secrecy in a child.
‘Is there something you want to tell me, pet?’
‘No?’
‘I know you’re a smart little girl and I know that your mum would not like you coming round here, which makes me wonder why you did.’
‘I wanted some cake.’
‘Did you and your mum have another fight?’
Rosie’s gaze was fixed on the cake in front of her.
‘I think that maybe you did.’
‘Mummy is very clever, you know.’
‘Yes?’
‘She, like, runs this massive company and she can even fire people.’
‘That sounds very impressive.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘She must be very busy.’
‘Yes, really busy, like a VIP.’
‘It must be exhausting being so very clever and important all the time.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is that why she gets so cross?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Has she ever hurt you, pet?’
Rosie stayed silent.
‘You can tell me you know. I am on your side.’
Rosie stared at Mira. ‘Why?’
‘Maybe because my mum wasn’t very nice to me when I was little and I know how it feels.’
‘Why wasn’t she nice to you?’
‘I don’t really know.’ Mira couldn’t tell a ten-year-old the reasons.
‘What did she do?’
‘She slapped me once,’ Mira said, surprising herself with the confession, while also maintaining a safe disconnectedness from it.
Rosie sucked in her breath and gaped at Mira. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘My lip bled, just here,’ Mira said, dabbing at the left-hand corner of her mouth, as though it was bleeding again after all these years.
‘Ouchy,’ Rosie said, sucking in her breath and staring at Mira’s lip as though she saw blood too.
Mira swooped in with the question she had been waiting to ask. ‘Do you ever bleed when your mummy hits you?’
There was a beat of silence.
‘Yes, I really bleed and it hurts so much and makes me cry. That’s why you can hear me screaming all the time.’ Her face took on a sickly translucence and her blue eyes blinked madly at Mira.
Mira felt like she had swallowed a beautiful butterfly. The information Rosie had delivered fluttered in her stomach, but having wanted it so much she felt sad to have trapped it.
‘I’m so sorry, pet,’ Mira whispered, slumping down, feeling the weight of the child’s words on her shoulders. The bitter sting of her own mother’s slap came to her again.
‘I think I’d better go home now,’ Rosie said, and she stood up and walked out of the house, going the wrong way first, into the living room, and then correcting herself and heading away.
Unable to rally herself out of what felt like a stupor, Mira watched her go.
Then Mira called out to the door, which slammed open against the wall in a gust of wind. ‘Don’t you want that second piece of cake, love?’
It took gargantuan effort to rise from her chair to clear up tea.
After the kitchen was spotless, she shut herself away in the dining room. Her head was swimmy with self-doubt as she mulled over Rosie’s confession. A hotness grew across her left cheek.
She rubbed at it, letting it collapse into the heel of her hand, propping her head up while she absent-mindedly sought out each and every photograph of Craig from the pile. It was like plucking currants out of a bun. She wasn’t completely present in her task; her mind was elsewhere, on Rosie. She was thinking about what the poor child had divulged, about the responsibility that lay on her shoulders.
Having counted fourteen snap shots altogether, she turned them through her fingers, which were sticky. Sticky but cold. The photograph that rested momentarily on top of the pile was of Craig in blue jeans standing just inside the front door of her childhood home. Deidre had taken so many random shots of him back then, like some kind of obsessed super-fan.
Mira had a flash of his lanky figure in that same doorway. She was back inside that house again, staring at him, unable to believe he was there on the doorstep.
With one sweaty hand on the glass, she had held it open for him.
‘Deidre about?’ Craig had asked, tugging at his quiff.
‘She’s at work,’ she had answered pointlessly, knowing he knew this.
He had sauntered in anyway, his broad shoulders curled inwards.
‘I could murder a cup of coffee.’
The clatter of his car keys on the kitchen table. Instant coffee with a splash of milk and two sugars. A cigarette from the glass. Chat about his day. Even chat about Deidre. Important to keep up the pretence.
‘I was just doing my homework.’ The words sounded babyish, and she regretted reminding him of the age gap.
‘Oh yeah?’ He flicked his ash and with his other hand he picked at a spot on his forehead.
‘I’m watching a film. I have to write an essay on TV adaptations. Want to watch it?’
He raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Back in my day, we never watched TV for homework.’
Mira took him through to the living room, where she had drawn the curtains, a pink dusk cast over the room.
The black and white still of Pride and Prejudice was paused on Laurence Olivier’s face, imperious and disdainful, as though he was real and could see through to them. If Mira hadn’t liked him so much in the film, she would have stuck two fingers up at him for judging her.
Craig sat down right next to her on the couch, thigh to thigh, and reached over her for the can of coke she had half-drunk. The intimacy of this gesture made her head spin.
‘Go on, then, let’s watch it.’
She pressed play.
Having thought he would laugh at the way the actors talked or the poor quality of the grainy black-and-white, he sat still and quiet. She stole a look at him. He was rapt, elbows on knees, a wrinkle in his brow.
She was trying to concentrate on taking notes in her file, but his breathing, his smell, the darkened room, the romance of the film, his profile near hers were too distracting.
There was no way she was going to get her notes done with him here, so she lay back into the sofa, contented enough to know that she could watch the film again later when everyone was in bed.
He lay back next to her, wriggling his arm through under her neck, pulling her into the crook of his armpit. It felt like luxury, lying there with him.
In these moments, Craig seemed to give her permission to unpack herself.
She had learnt how to put herself away, how to create a façade that was so far away from who she was inside. She was accustomed to being disagreed with, competed with, shouted at and controlled, knowing that she could survive all these ignominies if she made sure she didn’t react to them. Until Craig, she had begun to doubt the relevance of her voice in life, doubted its value, lost perspective on her basic needs. Craig’s attentions had reawakened her.
‘Deidre’d never watch a weird film like this.’
‘We can turn it off?’
‘Nah, I like it.’
What he didn’t know was that Deidre and their mother were due back early that evening, after a Trade Union meeting about equal pay. With each minute that went by, she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t bring herself to spoil the moment. He would think they had over two hours before they would clatter through the front door. In reality, they only had about half an hour. There was time to tell him, to draw away from his body, to act normal. There was time.
And then his hands reached between her legs and normal was forgotten. Although the desire was there, she wished he would slow down. He unzipped his jeans and shoved them down hurriedly. She tensed up, tried to close her legs. He gently prized them apart, not looking into her face, just down there, focused, shaking with desire.
‘This is my first time,’ she whispered, pushing him away with a lack of conviction. Part of her wanted it to happen, part of her didn’t. She knew they were now stepping over a line. Kissing and touching were one thing, underage sex was another.
‘Have you got any...?’ She was too shy to say the word ‘condom’ out loud.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, kissing her on the mouth briefly before pushing himself inside her.
The stretching and ripping sensations ruined any enjoyment. She recognized this coming-of-age moment, and how different her expectations had been. While he grunted and gyrated on top of her, lost in his own pleasure, she winced with pain, astonished that she was actually losing her virginity. She imagined how she had wanted it to be: candles and kissing for hours in bed with him, without the burden of secrecy, free of Deidre and her mother forever. She let the image go, accepting that her life would never turn out to be quite as lovely as her dreams had been.
Equally, she had never thought that life could turn out to be quite as hellish as her nightmares.
The act had lasted about ten minutes. After which, they had wriggled back into their clothes. The film was back on. She was nestled into him again, thinking that she should have just stayed there all along, worrying about the wetness down there, unsure whether it was from his body or from hers. She was sore, throbbing and stinging. But also glowing from a sense of achievement.
Her mother and sister’s arrival had happened very quickly.
Possibly they had dozed off. There was no time to pull apart. Deidre was standing in front of them, over them, seconds after the lounge door was opened. ‘What the fuck?’ Deidre said, under her breath.
The pink curtains were ripped back by Mira’s mother. The grey light from outside settling onto the sad scene.
Craig shoved Mira away. ‘She came onto me. You know what she’s like,’ Craig said.
He leapt up and scampered away, Deidre charging after him, leaving Mira lying crumpled into the corner of the sofa, her arm covering her burning face. The shouting between Deidre and Craig continued outside.
Mira’s mother stood by the window where she had drawn the curtains. She was silhouetted. A grey lumpy mass.
Mira uncurled herself, her heart racing, her body cold. She ran to the door, to get up to her bedroom where she could hide her shame away. Then her mother made a sudden movement, darting in front of her, stopping the door with her foot, trapping Mira.
The front door banged. Deidre stamped upstairs. Craig’s car hurtled and screeched out of the driveway.
When Mira first felt her mother’s slap, she hadn’t realised what the pain in her lip was or where it had come from. Then she saw her mother massaging the palm of her right hand with her thumb. Mira had tasted the blood seeping onto her gums. She looked into her mother’s eyes. With the light from the windows now illuminating her face, Mira could see the mottled pallor of her mother’s skin. Her eye sockets sunken, her breath reeking of cigarettes. Mira read years of confusion and regret in her eyes; unless she had been seeing her own confusion and regret reflected back at her. Whatever her mother was thinking or feeling in the moment, it wasn’t hatred. For the first time, both Mira and her mother were fused, with something that felt like misplaced recognition. A smile had formed on Mira’s lips, designed to acknowledge some kind of love, or connection to her mother, at least. Her mother’s slap. The only time in their life that her mother had touched her physically with violence. The engagement of sweaty hand to face almost flattering. Years of disinterest brought into focus; one moment of attention and truth, so sharp and specific.
‘Get out of my house,’ her mother said.
There was no smile on her mother’s face. But there were no tears in Mira’s eyes. She felt nothing. Mira had not been frightened to leave home. She was fifteen years old but she felt older. She caught a bus straight to Craig’s flat. He had opened his door wearing only a pair of tracksuit pants, and looked to the floor, snorting, as though at a private joke.
‘Shit, this is all I need.’ He had pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead.
But strangely, Mira didn’t sense the unkindness.
‘I’ll go.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he sighed, standing aside to let her in.
His flat was pokey and over-heated with magnolia-painted woodchip walls and curtains at the windows that reminded Mira of hospitals. The steady flow of traffic from the main road out of town rumbled through the double glazing.
‘Your sister’s a fucking nutcase.’ He had pressed the volume down on the television with the remote control and then pulled on a T-shirt that had been slung over the back of a chair.
They had perched on the edge of his nylon sofa opposite his television, a football game flickering away on mute.
‘Mum slapped me,’ she had said, touching her split lip.
Their eyeballs had followed the little red and white footballers running around the pitch.
‘Did Deidre go mental at you?’
‘She stayed in her room.’
‘I feel bad for her, if I’m honest.’
‘D’you still love her?’
He had taken a swig of beer before he answered. ‘Nah.’
A strong urge to slap him had come over her, just as her mother had slapped her an hour before.
She hadn’t, of course. To be allowed to camp out there with him, she had to play nice. She would have done anything to put off going back home.
At this point, there was still hope. Hope. Pain. In her lip, in her shoulder, hunched in her jaw. Where was she?
A low ceiling, green walls, the carpet on her cheek, a table leg in front of her face. She was under the dining room table, her knees up to her chest, with the fourteen photographs of Craig bent in half in her smarting right hand. The edges were cutting into her skin. Although there was nobody to see her like this, she was ashamed of herself. A grown woman curled under the table like a dog. How had she not remembered moving from the chair to the floor? Had she been sleeping?
On all fours, she crawled out from the table through the chairs’ legs and stood up. The prints were like razorblades. She had to get rid of them. It might be the only way to stop the trundle of memories rolling over her hard-won sanity.
She che
cked her watch. Barry would be home any minute. She nipped out of the back door and down to the bottom of the garden.
The smell of the compost heap made her gag. Her knees were wet through. She pressed the photographs deep into the stinking pile. The unwanted reminders of him would be gone tomorrow when the bonfire was lit. She imagined the edges of his face curl and melt, burst into flames and end as black satin cinders that would blow away in the wind and leave her be.
When she took PC Yorke’s card out of the cubbyhole in the bureau, she turned it over and over. Her fingers smeared the card in soil. She stared at the filth smudged across the embossed writing, obscuring the numbers. She spat on it to clean it away, and dialled. She had to save that little girl.
‘Save who?’ Barry said. He had glue dots in his hand. ‘Are you all right, love?’
Oh God, Mira thought, had she said those words out loud?
‘Hello, PC Yorke speaking,’ she heard in her other ear.
She hung up. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say it. If she said it out loud, with Barry listening, it would be real, and Mira wasn’t ready for it to be real yet.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The hill up from the station had seemed steeper than ever. It was later than usual. After a meeting over-running and a delayed train, it had been a long Thursday; longer still due to four nights without sleep. It was the fifth night since I had vomited up and swallowed back down my long-held secret, and I feared life would never return to normal again. Because I’m not your real mummy. I’m not your real mummy. I’m not your real mummy, echoed round and round in my head. Every time I thought of Rosie’s face afterwards, my chest constricted, and every minute of every day holding back the truth from her felt like trying to drag a rollercoaster back from the brink of a monumental drop.
I forced myself through the front door.
Harriet unpacked the dishwasher as she listed the afternoon’s events.
‘Noah finally got his handwriting pen,’ Harriet said with a motherly pride.
‘About time,’ I said, just to cancel out her misplaced satisfaction.
‘And Rosie popped round to see Beth.’
