The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  As she walks through the piss-stinking tunnel underneath the promenade above her, she sees Marine Gallery, an asymmetrical modernist building overlooking the harbour. It’s not huge, about the width of two shops, but its architecture makes it stand out from the rest of the Victorian terrace across the road from it and marks it out as a destination for all the London day trippers.

  Through the window she sees Raf talking to a serious-looking young woman with a sharp Joan of Arc hairstyle wearing what looks like a black smock. Erin walks into the gallery and both of them turn to face her. The woman’s face transforms into an amused grin while Raf’s falls into chagrin.

  ‘Erin, hi, we were just talking about you.’ The woman walks over to Erin and shakes her hand. There’s something of the countryside about her despite her chic attire. ‘You feeling better?’ She holds Erin’s eye as if trying not to make a point of looking at her dishevelment. ‘Sorry, Carmel, I run the gallery.’

  ‘I know, yeh. Great to meet you. Could I borrow Raf for a minute?’

  ‘You can have him,’ she says, a joke but does Erin sense a note of unkindness? ‘I’ve got a thing to be at. I’ll let you know,’ she says to Raf. ‘So, so wonderful to meet you, Erin, and please come in and see us more and bring that gorgeous boy of yours. We could always do with a bit of free promotion.’ She squeezes Erin’s shoulder and sweeps off.

  Raf shakes his head in irritation and sighs before moving past her and out onto the stone terrace outside the gallery. Erin stops at the glass door before she ventures out into the cold and looks at him as he stares out to sea. He’s put his maroon hat on and wears the heavy orange waterproof coat, expensive for someone who always claims money is tight, the one he’s worn every day in the winter since they first met, that she knows so well, and she wonders if that’s all she really knows about him.

  ‘Amanda was born in 1985,’ Erin says, matter-of-fact calm, standing a few feet behind him. There’s a ripple along Raf’s shoulders but he doesn’t move. It’s just started to spit but there’s no wind so she knows he’s heard her. He walks down towards the harbour arm.

  45

  ‘Her stepdad. Craig. She never told anyone but he, he was, when she was really little, threatening her. When he was drunk. She told me she thought he was going to do something to her, make her do something to him.’

  ‘Shit,’ Erin says. They’re huddled over in a shelter down on the promenade. The beach is deserted, the concrete walkway in front of them littered with shattered slabs of chalk fallen from the cliffs above them. ‘Didn’t her mum know?’

  ‘Her family set-up was pretty fucked.’

  ‘Wasn’t her mum a doctor?’

  ‘What and that’d make her a saint? Look at my dad. But no, she was a nurse, Janey. Dad took a shine to her at the Tropical Medical centre he got a job at after we moved from Melbourne. I don’t know if anything happened between them. Knowing him, probably. Things between her and Craig were pretty rough, they drank a lot, had parties at their house. Pretty sure he hit her.’ Raf pauses, clears his throat. The implication that just a couple of days ago he was the one on the end of a spousal assault hangs between them like the smell of burning plastic. ‘Anyway, I, er, I ended up babysitting Amanda once or twice when they had a party. She’d come over to Dad’s, we’d hang out in the garden. She was smart, bit mad, but quite funny. I felt sorry for her.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  He looks at her, back at his hands. He’s picking at the cuticle of his index finger. ‘Ah, eighteen, nineteen maybe when we arrived there.’

  Erin clenches her jaw, bites her upper lip. She wants to press him for more detail, to ask him exactly what date it was they moved. Since finding the passport she realises how vague Raf’s always been about his and Amanda’s friendship. Those first few days she was with them, Erin was so caught up in the excitement of all the things taking off in her own life, she didn’t take the time to interrogate what sort of friendship leads someone to drop in from across the other side of the world. He didn’t have many friends, she’d always loved how content, how dedicated to her he always seemed. So who was this friend of her fiancé?

  ‘She started spending time at our house,’ he says. ‘Amanda said she thought Craig was scared of me, he was short, a real bogun scumbag. I don’t know. She was a little kid. She saw me as her protector I think. Then I moved from Dad’s place to live in Darwin. She wanted to come and see me but I told her it wasn’t allowed, then Craig got wind of it, thought I was trying to get her to run away from home, there was some other boy, from school I think, so Craig accused me of covering for the mystery boyfriend as well. Anyway he started throwing threats around so I told him I’d tell social services what he’d been saying to her unless he left me and her alone. That ended it, I thought. Thought I’d done my bit. He was a piece of shit that guy.’

  ‘She was what, twelve?’

  ‘You went through her bag to find her passport?’ He looks at her for the first time since she came into the gallery. She stands up and walks away from him. She needs to stay calm. They’d told her they were family friends, allowed her to think they were two relatively isolated teenagers thrown together by their parents’ work. She’d pictured them being fifteen maybe, she thought they would have skulked together at neighbourhood barbecues while the grown-ups talked about health policy or lack of research funding. She’s not thought there could be something this complex, scared young princesses, fairy-tale wicked stepdads and Raf the accidental knight in shining armour.

  ‘Amanda’s lying about how she found us. Your dad’s painting’s never been on my Instagram. That’s why I was looking in her stuff. And –’ she has to swallow hard, swallow down the desire to start shouting, to start losing it – ‘I’m pretty glad I did. Because she is lying to us, maybe about everything, and now I hear you’ve got some weird past where you what, saved her from her abuser? The idea she’s come for a winter jaunt to the Kent coast seems a little far-fetched all of a sudden.’

  Raf’s looking at the ground. Strands of sodden seaweed clog the walkway and he kicks at a jumble of it.

  ‘I told her to say about the picture.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Craig went to prison. Three years after I left. I didn’t know any of this until she got here. One of her teachers flagged that they didn’t think she was safe and the police got involved,’ Raf licks his lips, struggling to get the words out. ‘Craig had been messing with Amanda. It had been happening when I was still there as well. He tried to tell her they were in love. She’s, she’s fucked up about it. Janey tried to cover for the bastard, but they locked him up for it.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Yeh, he was released a couple of months ago. That’s why she’s here.’ Erin massages her wrist, only just noticing that the rain’s got heavier so she ducks into the weeks-old weed smell of the shelter.

  ‘How did she find us then?’

  ‘She wrote to Lydia’s daughter Anya. That was true. That’s how she got our address. Lydia had worked in the hospital with Dad and Janey for a while before she moved back to England so Amanda knew her surname. Found her on Facebook I think.’

  ‘Why didn’t Anya give us a heads-up that she was coming?’

  ‘She didn’t know. Amanda just said she wanted to write to me. Perhaps she did initially. But then she saw Craig in a bar in Alice Springs, he was all full of how he still loved her, I mean, what a mindfuck all those years later, and, ah, I think she, I don’t know how she felt, scared maybe, but here she is. She didn’t want you to know. She’s not told me much, no details.’

  ‘She mentioned an on–off boyfriend who’d come back into her life,’ Erin says, voice distant. Raf narrows his eyes.

  ‘I think she thought she’d rebuilt her life, but then seeing him must have thrown it all on its head. Look, I don’t know why she came here. Maybe she needed to be somewhere she could feel safe for a bit.’

  ‘With you.’ He throws his hands up, I guess so, before scratching his
head through his beanie. She knows it makes her a bad person, she knows she should feel some sympathy for Amanda and her harrowing childhood, but her first thought, the thought that’s now raging in her head, is about Bobby. Is he safe with her? Are they safe with her? Erin knows that she invited Amanda into the bosom of their home but what Raf’s just told her has done nothing to assuage her fears about her. She hasn’t got a family, her concept of family has been warped by her stepdad, she’s broken, she has deep childhood scars that sound like they’ve been recently reopened. The crystals are one thing but Amanda’s been trying to turn her baby against her, trying to make him love her more. A woman whose childhood was taken away, who’s sought refuge with the family of an older boy who looked after her for a year or more, is trying to turn her baby against her and, the thought hadn’t landed before, perhaps her fiancé too.

  ‘Do you not think …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Should we not ask her to leave?’ she asks, trying to sound as innocent as possible.

  Raf looks up from the litter-strewn ground at her, brows wrinkled in confusion. ‘That’s what you take from this?’

  ‘Everything’s been so messed up since she arrived.’

  ‘How do you know? You’ve barely been here.’

  ‘I think there’s something wrong with her and –’

  ‘No,’ he says, standing up, and the shelter suddenly feels much smaller. ‘I’m not doing this.’ He walks out into the open before turning back to her. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you. I tell you about a woman who’s done everything for you, who’s picked up the slack at home because you’d rather swan about with your mad new mates, and when you find out she’s had an unbelievably tough time as a kid your reaction is to throw her out?’ Erin reaches out a hand instinctively, he’s twisting her words, that’s not what she meant. ‘You going to hit me now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I googled it. Every single website says that if your partner throws something at you, assaults you in any way, you should walk out. They said that it crosses a line that it’s virtually impossible to come back from.’

  ‘I lost it, in the moment, I lost control and I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry doesn’t undo it though. Doesn’t suddenly make me forget that you burned me.’ He holds his hand up, a bandage wrapped around the palm where he batted the pasta dish to the floor. ‘I’m too weak. That’s my problem, I’m too bloody weak.’ He grits his teeth, moves closer to tower over her. She doesn’t know what to say, she should have known that he’d react to her saying she wanted Amanda to go like this. But she’s his fiancée, he should be on her side. He shakes his head. ‘I can’t even believe it, can’t believe it,’ he says, before pulling the orange hood over his head and storming out into the weather.

  46

  Erin downs a shot of Jägermeister and as Anna Mai claps her on the back in sorority, the aftertaste makes her think of Manuka honey. Amanda in her house, having put Bobby to sleep, having dinner with her fiancé, talking about her.

  Anna Mai’s drunk. She was steaming into the warm wine at the Phibe pre-launch ‘hype’ event that was held, somewhat inappropriately, in the crypt of a central London church. It was the first time Erin had met the whole team at Phibe, not all women despite what she’d been told to post when she first signed up, and she’d found their excitement at her being there awkward. People all around the room were still stealing glances at her, but it felt less in admiration and more a sordid curiosity, as if she were a weeping stranger whose sad story they’re desperate to know. Every time someone told her how thrilled they were to meet her, how much they loved her feed, how inspirational they thought she was, it seemed hollow to Erin now. There’s a line from The Seagull, the Chekhov she did at university. A famous writer is given a compliment and he responds that he finds people’s admiration of his life sickly, ‘like sticky sweets a child gobbles up, to an adult’s palate, in some way nauseating’. All of her followers’ love, all their adulation, she thinks, what does any of it actually mean?

  On the train up it had hit her, what Raf had said. He could leave her. The man she’s decided to make a life with, away from her brother and mum, alienating herself from them in the process, the man she’s had a child with, the man she’s entirely dependent on for money, for support, for a roof over her head, would be entirely within his rights to leave her because she lost control. She lost control because some anonymous arsehole is making her look bad on Instagram, a social media platform, something that she knew nothing about until fairly recently, something that didn’t even exist ten years ago. So tonight’s had none of the joy, none of the sweet release from domesticity that have made her other Insta nights out so electric.

  Anna shakes her shoulders to the beat of the music and indicates they go and sit at a booth in the corner of the seedy pub-cum-club that they’ve dragged themselves to with a couple of hangers-on from the event.

  Erin settles herself into the booth and slurps her Tom Collins. She knows drinking is probably the last thing she should do, but it’s been her go-to in good times and bad for so long she doesn’t quite know what else to do. Anna Mai’s standing up at the end of their table, struggling to pull her gold-sequinned bolero jacket off and mumbling something off-key about paedophiles in relation to how much she’s sweating. Erin looks at her friend, with her Farrah Fawcett tumbles of golden hair and wonders what it is about her that’s so magnetic. She can’t remember the content of a single conversation they’ve had, only that they always laugh a lot. Which is surely a good thing, and yet now, even that feels meaningless. She has real friends, close friends from school and university, that she’s drifted away from in the years since she and Raf got together, because he thought that spending time with them with their success and ebullient contentment was making her sad, but this – however beautiful Anna is, however snappy her incessant wisecracks, Erin never feels remotely nourished by their time together.

  Anna Mai sits down opposite and Erin notices a circle of beads wrapped around her upper arms. She pulls Anna’s arm closer and looks at them, they’re purple, translucent.

  ‘What the fuck? I’m not that kind of girl,’ Anna slurs with a laugh in her voice, but she clearly didn’t enjoy having her arm jerked across the table.

  ‘Who gave you this?’ Erin asks, attempting to still the tone of accusation. The beads are crystals, Erin’s sure of it. Has Amanda got to Anna Mai in some way? Is she here? Erin scans the room, a ragtag group of pissed-up students and ropy-looking Hackney locals standing, predatorily, at the side of the dance floor.

  ‘So,’ she says, leaning forward as if about to share a secret, ‘I’ve not been allowed to “Gram” it up yet, but I’ve been seeing this amazing healer, Cariad Bloom, I think she’s got like eighty thousand followers or something, she’s big, impossible to get an appointment, but my agent hooked me up with her and it’s been a bit of a game-changer. These are ametrine. From the Anahi Mine in Bolivia. The genuine ones have so many wonderful properties, focus, self-empowerment, but what Cariad really prescribed it to me for was trying to give up smoking, it’s meant to get rid of compulsions.’

  ‘Didn’t you have a cigarette outside with that awful Pete guy?’

  ‘Yeh, but that’s the first one I’ve had in three weeks, so I feel like it’s really working.’ Erin nods. She’s surprised Anna Mai’s into crystals. Her whole brand is based on being a sort of nineties-style ladette who happens to have kids. Hungover trips to Legoland, guilty looks to the camera as her children eat McDonald’s, and of course, sticking with her smoking habit, which, Erin has to assume, the ending of is soon to feature heavily on her feed.

  ‘Can I show you a picture?’

  ‘Your troll sending you dick pics yet? Has he got a big one?’

  ‘Look,’ Erin says, ‘crystals.’ She gets up the picture of Amanda’s collection of crystals from her studio. Anna Mai looks at it, one eye squinting a bit which Erin’s sure is more to do with the booze than her
eyesight.

  ‘It’s a pretty standard crystal grid. Cariad has one in every room of her house and has designed one for me that, I have to be honest, I haven’t got round to getting all the things for yet. Because they cost a fortune – at least the ones I’ve been prescribed do.’

  ‘Do you know what it’s for?’

  ‘What, like, what healing properties?’ She tries to zoom in on some of the image but shakes her head. ‘Na, impossible to tell and I’m really no expert at all. The one in the middle will be a conductor of some kind and the light pink ones are probably rose quartz, just because rose quartz seems to be used for everything.’

  ‘And what are –’ Erin’s tentative to hear the answer – ‘the properties of rose quartz?’

  ‘You fucking name it. Friendship, love, kinship, warmth, peace, tenderness. All those sort of soft, warm, lovely bubbly ones. I think it’s used to heal trauma as well. You name it,’ she says, having no knowledge she’s already said that. ‘Send me this.’ Anna hands the phone back to Erin. ‘I’ll ask Cariad next time I see her.’

  ‘That’d be ace.’

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Anna slouches back into the cricket-green velvet of the booth, a snarl on her face.

  ‘Nothing, I’m fine,’ Erin says, taking the straw out of her cocktail and taking a big slug of it.

  ‘You’ve had a face like a smacked arse-piece since I’ve seen you tonight. Tell me. If it’s that nob following you around and putting pictures up, might help to call him a cunt a few times to someone that understands what it’s like. I’ve had all sorts. Jesus, some bloke DMed me the other day and said, “You’ve got a face that’s begging to be raped.” I mean, fucking hell. I’ve got a thick skin and everything but I just started crying. It’s not even the sentiment, what he’s saying, it’s just how can someone just casually be so fucking horrible to me for no reason? So yeh, tell me. Tell me what the fuck is bothering you because bottling it up clearly isn’t working.’ Erin looks at Anna Mai and she does want to talk. She does want to tell someone about what she did to Raf. She doesn’t know much about Anna’s relationship with her husband Tristan, but she’s certainly done stories where she’s talked about shouting at him, calling him names. She definitely gives the impression that there’s a volatility in their marriage. And Anna’s got a temper. She often calls out people who are being nasty to her online, by name, talks about how influencers need to fight back, so Erin’s sure she’d be OK with it, perhaps she’s even done something similar to Tristan before.