The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  ‘You said that though,’ Erin says, trying to maintain a veneer of civility. ‘Down by the front. You told me Raf asked you to make sure Bobby was safe with me.’

  Amanda cocks her head, face dripping with concerned confusion. ‘I thought you’d want someone being there for Erin.’ She speaks to Raf as if she wasn’t in the room. Erin looks at her hands, they’re shaking. She knows she should feel angry, but her outburst of violence has soaked up any residual feeling she has in her body and replaced it with pure, juddering adrenaline. ‘You were upset about it, you told me.’ She goes towards him, simpering almost, but he backs away.

  ‘I was worried, yeh.’ He darts a stern look at Erin. ‘I am worried about how you’ve been, Ez.’ Erin looks at the floor. ‘I’m frightened about how you are being, but I never asked to have you followed. That’s insane.’

  ‘You said, Amanda, that’s what you said. That Raf asked you to keep an eye on me after he saw the video.’

  ‘I thought, he might want me to keep an eye on you. That’s what I said. Not that he asked me to follow you. I remember that that’s exactly what I said. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.’ She looks to Raf. There’s a steeliness in Amanda’s tone Erin’s only heard her use when Bobby’s gone to hit or nibble her. That might have been what Amanda said, she can’t remember. ‘I’d never want you to think I was spying on you Erin, and –’ she glances at Raf, Erin might be imagining it but it seems like something passes between them – ‘I’ve grown really attached to Bobby, and stress, tiredness, hormones, I’ve seen it with my work back home, it can make mums behave in a way they wouldn’t normally. Like the video –’ she looks at the mess on the kitchen floor – ‘I know you’d never do something like that, something that aggressive, but that was before this person started attacking you. I can’t imagine how strung out you must be feeling now.’ Amanda has her arms wrapped round her waist and there’s something strained in her expression, worried almost. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if something had happened to Bobby. I shouldn’t have skulked around without you knowing. That was wrong –’ she takes Erin’s hands in hers, her cold fingers massaging her wrists – ‘and I hope you can forgive me for that.’

  ‘No harm done,’ Raf says curtly. Amanda smiles, touches the crystal on the shelf above Erin’s shoulder and turns back to Raf. ‘Just a misunderstanding like I thought,’ he says. ‘No harm done.’

  ‘Let’s get this up off the floor,’ Amanda says, too chirpy. ‘I reckon I could salvage a couple of bowls. Cheesy stuff at the top’s the best bit anyway.’

  She gets plates and scoops some of the pasta up into it. Erin stares at Raf, desperate for him to look at her, but he just stands in the shadow of the corridor that leads to Bobby’s room, jaw tensing, a gale of thought blowing behind his eyes. He snaps out of it, blinking the fact that the mother of his baby has just thrown a boiling dish at him away as he heads across the room to help their guest clear up the mess that Erin’s made as if they’re all happy families now. Bobby coughs, a whimper comes through on the monitor. Erin wants him to burst into a full-on wail so she can run to him and escape the toxicity that overlays the others’ put-on normalcy. She looks at the crystal next to her, sparkling with what seem like dots of some internal light source. She touches it, holds on to one of its spires, grips it harder until her fingers stops shaking.

  42

  ‘I don’t want to go away for a few days.’

  ‘You assaulted me.’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  ‘You don’t think what you did was assault? Fuck’s sake, Erin.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s not OK.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. Raf makes a sound between a grunt and a laugh. ‘Are you asking me to move out?’

  ‘No. No, I’m saying exactly what I mean. You need a break from Bobby, from Amanda, from social media, from me even, from everything. You need time to reset. I don’t recognise the person that threw a dish of boiling pasta at me.’ It sounds like he’s saying the word ‘pastor’ and Erin feels her nose wrinkling with indignant irritation. She’s lying in bed, covers pulled up to her neck. Raf stands by the window. It’s eleven o’clock. He went for a run after Amanda left them and she’s been sat up here in bed, stewing, considering, trying to make sense of everything that’s happened in the last few hours.

  She’s gone back over their conversation and Amanda’s right, she never expressly said that Raf had asked her to follow them, but she allowed Erin to believe it. As if she was trying to provoke some kind of contretemps between her and Raf. And then all her bullshit about wanting to be on hand, in case Erin needed her, but not telling her? It’s lies and she wants to tell Raf, she wants to tell him that they need to get rid of Amanda, she needs to tell him that she’s worried about her being around them. But then the thought of the two of them, on their hands and knees together in the kitchen clearing up the mess she made, the edginess in his eyes when he looks at Erin now, now that he’s been the victim of abuse, her victim, she feels that, for the first time in their relationship, he might not take her side. But she can’t help herself.

  ‘She’s been putting honey in Bobby’s bottle. She tell you that?’ She expects him to turn away from the darkness outside in shock but he doesn’t. His shoulders slump and he lets out a sigh.

  ‘Manuka honey?’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘No, but it’s from New Zealand, everyone in Oz uses it for coughs and colds.’

  ‘With babies?!’

  ‘Sometimes, yeh.’

  ‘She’s trying to turn him against me, she’s trying to turn you against me.’

  ‘Would you listen to yourself, Erin? Fuck!’ He kicks at one of the cardboard boxes next to the radiator. He leans forward, his arms wide like a bird of prey, and speaks into the window ledge. ‘You threw a two-hundred-degree dish at me.’

  ‘I know, I thought –’

  ‘I know what you thought and it’s not –’ he turns to her – ‘rational. What you’re saying isn’t rational. None of it is the behaviour of someone thinking rationally.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want you to cancel whatever Instagram things you have this week.’

  ‘I can’t, there’s a meeting about a –’

  ‘Say you’re ill. Hand, foot and mouth, from Bobby, something contagious. Do whatever it is on the phone if you have to. But you can’t go. I’ve got two projects to finish this week but I’m going to ask Amanda to take Bobby. If you refuse to go to your mum’s and have time away, I want you to rest. Here.’ He produces a blister pack of pills and throws it onto the end of the bed, keeping his distance as if she were some wounded animal. ‘These will help you sleep. Pretty hardcore antihistamines. I think you need to sleep. We all do but, shit, I don’t know, Erin. What you’ve done to me is not OK.’

  ‘I know.’ Her voice sounds like that of a chastened toddler. She looks down at the pills. She’s never taken any sort of medication to help her sleep before but the thought of a blissful night of oblivion feels quite seductive right now. Raf goes into the bathroom and she can hear him brushing his teeth. She’s so angry at herself. By losing it in such spectacular fashion, she’s lost her voice. She’s lost her right to think or feel anything about Amanda, about what she thinks Amanda’s doing. She pops two of the pills from the blister and, when she sees there’s nothing in the glass by her bed but the cloudy remains of limescale, swallows them dry. She turns onto her side. Turns off the lamps and listens to Raf’s mechanical brushing. What is Amanda doing? she thinks. She can’t be the troll if she doesn’t have a camera. She was following her, but she did watch Erin screaming at her baby, she has observed her struggling, nearly losing it three or four times. Maybe she was right to want to protect Bobby. Tonight Erin’s seen how violent she can be. Perhaps she’s lucky it was six-foot-three-inch Raf she attacked and not her son. The thought makes her shudder.

  She hears Raf pausing at the door of the bathroom about to say something but
then he sighs and leaves the room. Her phone lights up on the bedside table. A notification. She turns it over and closes her eyes.

  43

  Erin scrolls through the four pictures of Bobby Caz has sent her from baby sensory class in her cocoon of duvet and doubled-over pillows. Her friend has rung a couple of times in the last two days. She wants to come round and visit but Erin’s put her off. It feels like she knows that Erin’s not really ill, that she’s got a sense, perhaps from Amanda at the groups she’s seen her at, that there’s something much deeper going on than a bout of norovirus.

  She’s tried to do what Raf’s asked. She’s cancelled the two events she had this week, though she has one she can’t miss for Phibe tonight, and let Amanda take Bobby while she rests, while she, Raf’s word, ‘resets’. The antihistamines worked that first night but she hasn’t taken the others Raf left for her. Both he and Amanda have been treating her like she’s mentally ill. Before he’s gone off to work for the day and as soon as he gets back, he comes up to her room, hovers by the doorway, and asks if there’s anything she needs, asks how she’s feeling, whether she’s had any thoughts about what happened the other night. His tone is clinical, like he’s trying to be her therapist. But reflecting on it, perhaps he’s always talked to her like that. He’s always approached problems in a clinical manner. She never met his dad but it must be from him. And that’s what she feels like to him now, a problem patient he needs to cure. Maybe that’s always been the appeal for someone like him.

  She looks at the big group photo of everyone with their babies staring at the camera. Lorna’s there and Erin zooms in on her. Crow’s feet pinch the sides of her eyes, she looks exhausted, spindly arms wrapping the twins with their too-big heads. Kristina’s there, her Eden dressed in what looks like an Elizabethan ruff. Then there’s Amanda and Bobby at the heart of the photo. She seems older than in real life, her cheekbones softer, hair more mussed than usual, and although there’s no resemblance to speak of, Raf’s genes so dominating the shape of every one of Bobby’s features, no one would think that she wasn’t the baby’s mother.

  Erin’s spent hours in the last two days looking at the photostream of Bobby that Raf set up when he was born. The boy always looks concerned in pictures. But there’s a few, a few where he’s looking at Erin and she’s looking back at him and she sees it, love. Pure unbridled love in both of their faces and she knows she would never hurt him, not like she hurt Raf. And she feels so annoyed at herself for not having seen it, amid the screaming and the painful feeds and, to her shame, her eyes glued to the screen of her phone, he loves her and needs her and he’s in pain and he’s confused and she can be the person to soothe him through all of that tumult.

  She notices something on Bobby’s wrist at the bottom of the image. She zooms in but she can’t see much detail. The class is full of fancy dress, bubbles and all sorts of other baby paraphernalia. There’s a bit where everyone’s given a little silk scarf so perhaps someone’s tied something onto him. Erin takes a screenshot and then zooms in on the image. It’s not a scarf. It’s a bracelet. The picture has started to pixelate, but it’s a bracelet with what looks like beads on it. Or stones.

  Erin sits up in bed. Why is he wearing a bracelet? And why hasn’t he been wearing it around the house when Erin’s been with him? That means Amanda must be putting it on him when they’re out of the house. She hadn’t wanted to leave Bobby with Amanda but she didn’t feel she had a choice. She had assaulted Raf, if he was telling her she needed a break, she couldn’t say no, but the honey in the milk, the cuddling, lying about the painting and now this. She has to tell Raf, she has to get him back on her side, make him understand that Amanda is up to something, but if she mentions a bracelet, she can picture the conversation, picture him sighing, turning away from her, clutching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, perhaps insisting that she goes to see someone.

  Erin looks on Mercedes’ Instagram and sees that Amanda is out with them at the playground near the seafront and she bolts out of bed and down the stairs, outside into the garden, the mud soaking into the bottom of her slippers as she gets over to Amanda’s studio. There has to be something, there has to be some clue as to what it is she’s up to. The first thing Erin sees on the table is Amanda’s crystal arrangement, but the stones are different now. The grey obelisk still stands in the middle, the pale pink stones, the bright red rubies, the hot-pink crystals with white, the same ones she found in the bag. But now there are blue stones interspersed, small royal-blue pebbles arranged in a triangle among the lines of stones. She hovers her phone over the top and takes a picture. She looks at the pattern that the stones make on her camera and sees the shape of a star, a five-pointed star. A pentagram, the shape she’s seen so many times in schlocky scenes of high school séances. Hadn’t she noticed the shape before or is this new? There’s nothing here that tells her anything, but these blue stones, what do they mean? And why has the shape changed?

  She looks underneath the sofa bed and sees the jar is still there. She pulls it out but it’s different as well. The glass has been covered with some sort of purple material that’s been taped up with parcel tape. Erin tries to find a chink in the opaque material to shine her phone light into but there isn’t one. There’s a faint smell from the jar, something furtive. Erin puts it back in its hiding place but then makes a note on her phone of what she remembers being in it, a doll, chilli powder, was there some mud? She writes it down anyway, no idea what this list is for, but it feels good to be out of bed and doing something proactive. Raf might be right. She might be losing the plot. Perhaps all of this, all of her suspicions of Amanda, are driven by some cynical outlook that thinks anything remotely spiritual is in some way suspicious, but ever since Erin saw this woman, this interloper in her house, topless and holding her baby boy sleeping to her breast, she hasn’t been able to shake the idea that there’s something much darker going on than a lovely friend of the family helping out with some childcare.

  The built-in wardrobe behind her is slightly ajar and Erin opens it up to see Amanda’s rucksack. Erin rifles her hand through the two main sections but they’re both completely empty. She hears a rustling outside and swings round, panicked, face hot with embarrassment but it’s only a seagull that’s landed on the decking outside the studio. She puts the bag back in the cupboard but as she does she feels something in a pocket of the top flap. She unzips the pocket and pulls out Amanda’s passport. It looks brand new. The only stamp in it is from this trip. She flicks to the back page and sees that the passport’s starting date is 3 January. Erin tries to think back to when she arrived, it was near the end of January. She checks on her phone to see when the digital detox weekend was and, yes, it was the 25th.

  Can that be a coincidence? Is it possible that she got her passport just for this trip? If so, that makes her claim that she saw the pink painting and just got on the plane even more preposterous.

  Then she reads something that makes her sit down on the edge of the sofa. Amanda’s date of birth. 15 November 1985. She’s a few months younger than Erin. She’d always assumed Amanda was at least five or six years older than her. Why? Because she was friends with Raf when they were kids so it seemed they must have been similar in age but Raf’s seven years older than Erin.

  She blinks three, four times, and swallows the lump in her throat. Seven years’ age difference. Raf left Australia when he was around twenty-one, so when they were friends, close friends, a formative friendship as she put it on that first night Erin met her, Amanda was, at most, fourteen.

  44

  ‘You OK?’ An attractive twenty-five-year-old with skeletal arms and floral tattoos around her neck comes up to the desk at the front of Raf’s co-working space. Erin hasn’t seen her before.

  ‘Is Raf not here?’ Erin points over to his double monitors.

  ‘He was.’ She turns to the scrum of freelancers beavering away at laptops. A burly man with a huge beard looks up from his desk that’s litt
ered with expensive-looking camera equipment. Sev, Erin’s been introduced to him in town by Raf, a photographer who joined the space at the same time as her fiancé, stands up, acknowledges her shyly.

  ‘I think he had a meeting,’ he says, a mild hint of an Italian accent, ‘at Marine Gallery.’ Erin pinches her brows. Why is he having meetings here, in town? All his clients are in London. She sees the girl glancing down at the pyjama bottoms that protrude from her big Puffa sleeping-bag coat. Sev’s giving her a strange look as well, something furtive in his eyes. She catches herself in the screen of a huge iMac on the reception desk, and Erin sees why: she looks like she’s just escaped from an institution. Her skin looks drawn, red spots around her chin and her hair looks like a pile of straw a farm animal’s made a bed in. God, Erin thinks, she must follow my feed. She knows that Sev does, Raf’s explained in the past that he’s seen this or that post because Sev has mentioned it. She’d ditched her dressing gown and changed her slippers for shoes, but that aside she’d come straight down here from her supposed sickbed. Raf wasn’t answering his phone and she was so desperate for some answers, to try and understand why the hell he was such close childhood friends with someone seven years younger than him, that she ran down here without much thought, but now she feels self-conscious.

  She thanks them and leaves to walk down on the seafront, away from the main traffic of people, towards the harbour and Marine Gallery. She’s been trying to go over the timeline of Raf’s childhood, as she knows it, in her head. His mum left them when he was eleven. They moved from Melbourne when he was still a teenager. She can’t remember him ever saying an exact age but she’s pretty sure that he said he was in his teens. Even if by teenager Raf meant nineteen, that would make Amanda twelve. Erin thinks back to when she was in her late teens, she wasn’t the most popular girl in school but she had a good group of friends and they would barely allow a twelve-year-old sibling to hang around with them let alone choose to be close friends with one.