The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  He says he still wants me to be the mother of his children. Now he can see what our life can be like, simple, pure, he can see that for us soon.

  They say it’s always darkest before the dawn and I see now that that’s all it was in Darwin. We’re safe now. I’m safe.

  49

  ‘Hi, is that Cariad?’

  ‘To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘Hi, it’s Erin Braune. Anna Mai’s friend?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, hello.’

  ‘I got your mobile number from my agent. Grace Fentiman.’

  ‘I have an appointment in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘This won’t take long. I wanted to thank you for your message identifying what all the different crystals in the picture were, but I was wondering if you could help me work out what they’re all, you know, arranged in that pattern, what they’re actually set up to do.’

  ‘Crystals are ciphers of energy. It would be impossible to say exactly what any arrangement is trying to heal.’ Cariad sounds tense, not pleased to be cold-called like this. Erin expected her to be nurturing, to have a voice like a children’s presenter, but she’s not like that at all. She nudges Bobby’s buggy with her knee. They’re on the seafront. He’s not asleep but the movement seems to stop him crying.

  ‘I’ve googled the individual stones from your message and it seems they could be anything really. Friendship, love, empowerment, confidence. I was just wondering if you could make it more specific for me.’

  ‘This isn’t your grid.’

  ‘It isn’t, no.’

  ‘Crystals are very personal.’

  ‘They belong to someone who looks after my son and I’m concerned she could mean him harm.’

  ‘Crystals don’t allow you to imbue them with any negative energy. I promise you, this grid is not designed to harm anyone. The opposite if anything.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Cariad gives a hearty sigh. There’s a pause. Erin can hear her moving some things around on the other end of the line.

  ‘Is your baby very attached to you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes he is.’ Erin’s not sure why she had to answer so vehemently. She glances down at Bobby who is looking up at her with a dreamy admiration.

  ‘Rhodochrosite has the power to bewitch. It bonds people. Binds them. Garnet has a very sexual energy but, combined with the quartz and the rhody, I’d say it was there to rekindle a destroyed relationship. Rose quartz is the heart stone. It’s love. Pure love. So perhaps she’s trying to improve her bond with your son.’ Erin opens her eyes wide and stares out as a swarm of seagulls swoop across the horizon. ‘It’s a very powerful arrangement, I was impressed when I saw the picture.’ Erin hears Cariad, but she’s not listening any more. She thanks the healer and lets her get back to her appointment.

  She leans back on the bench she’s sitting on, dazed by what Cariad’s just told her. Bobby wriggles out of his blanket and she pulls it up over him. She takes off her scarf and lays it over Bobby’s lower half. His tiny fingers bat at the felt animal on the buggy-mobile above him. Erin looks up and sees a crescent moon in the afternoon sky. An empty container ship out at sea. ‘It is the star to every wand’ring bark.’ A line of Shakespeare pops into her head at the exact moment that Erin realises that all her fears about Amanda and Bobby, all her concern about someone taking pictures of her, have clouded her against what Amanda’s really here for.

  ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds,’ she recites to Bobby. She knows the poem by heart – she spent a whole term on Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove. / O no! It is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark.’ She stops and sees Bobby’s fallen asleep. She wraps her arms around her body and speaks the words to herself, ‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.’

  Sonnet 116. Erin hadn’t remembered which sonnet it was when she saw it written on the Post-it on the inside of the studio kitchen cupboard, she’d meant to google it to check, but now she doesn’t need to and the realisation hurts like a sharp kick to the gut. Amanda’s in love with Raf. She’s been in love with him for twenty years. Maybe her stepdad being released was the catalyst for coming but she’s not here for his protection. Her crystals are there to bewitch him, to heal their broken relationship. Erin can’t believe she didn’t see it when Raf told her the story of his and Amanda’s unconventional friendship. Of course she was in love with him. He was older, he saved her. She can’t imagine holding a love like that for twenty years but she also can’t imagine pinning a sonnet up like a motivational poster. Maybe the boyfriend she’s talked about who’s come back into her life, perhaps that’s not Craig, perhaps it’s her fiancé.

  The ice wind picks sand up from the beach and she has to clench her eyes to protect them. She feels numb. Six words repeat in her head again and again. ‘Even to the edge of doom.’

  50

  FROM: grace.fentiman@rfgtalent.com

  TO: erinbraune@outlook.co.uk

  RE: Post updates

  Hi Erin,

  Hope you’re having a fab week. I just wanted to drop you a quick line because I was talking with my assistants about your content and we were thinking perhaps it might be helpful to pass things by us for a little copy edit before uploading. We do it for most of our clients, but because your posts are always so funny we’ve never thought it necessary until now. We wanted to help you get back in touch with what people responded to in the early days, your breezy tone that has just the lightest touch of the sardonic. It’s totally understandable with what’s been going on, but some of your stories have come across a little over-serious?

  I can’t imagine how personal the trolling must feel, but, thanks to your incredible work and an increased social media marketing spend our end, it fortunately hasn’t affected the growth of your followership and 100k is in touching distance. I can’t stress again how much of a game-changer it would be to get into the macro-influencer sphere.

  I’m chasing payments for you from Phibe and others. It’s coming up to the end of financial year so brands often delay things around this time. But I’m on it.

  Let me know what you think. So excited to break into the big time with you.

  Best,

  Grace

  X

  51

  ‘Poetry instantly turns me off, but some people like it. Maybe it’s just that.’

  ‘Caz –’

  ‘And even I’ve heard of the “marriage of two minds” one.’

  ‘Putting up a Post-it, that’s a positive-mind therapy thing. My friend Pete had them all around his flat when we were at drama school. They’re like mantras. And hers is “Love is an ever-fixed mark”. That’s what she’s telling herself every time she looks at the inside of that cupboard.’

  ‘Right,’ Caz says, plinking a teaspoon around her mug of tea. Erin was waiting outside Caz’s three-bed Victorian on a grotty road by the station when she got back from work. She needed to tell someone what she’d discovered and it couldn’t be Raf. The way he was last night when he saw how distraught she was, it’s been the first time in a week or so that he hasn’t treated her like she’s rabid. ‘I think it’s weird,’ Caz says, matter-of-factly, ‘for sure, everything you’re saying is weird. Crystals, jars with old dollies in, weird. But that doesn’t make her dangerous.’

  ‘She’s been lying to us from the off. She didn’t see the picture and fly over here. She planned to come. She’s probably been planning to come and claim him for years.’

  ‘People who’ve suffered childhood trauma, they don’t always act in a way that people might see as rational.’

  ‘She didn’t have to lie to us.’

  ‘She’s ashamed. I had a feeling something like that had happened to her. When I asked her why she decided to leave Oz in their summer to come to this windswept hellhole, she said she’d needed
to make a change, she needed a chance to reset. And my fucking sonar went off. I thought it might have been a messy divorce, some prick of a husband that she didn’t want to talk about, but this makes so much more sense. Being vague about everything, deflecting, being super nice to everyone, desperate for people’s love, it’s overcompensating. I’ve worked with kids that’ve suffered like her and they all need something to cling on to, so for her it’s crystals and herbs, and maybe you’re right, maybe it is your Raf, someone who was kind to her at that time. But that doesn’t make her a threat to you. She loves you, the way she talks about you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She thinks you’re hilarious, always saying it, not sure what she’s talking about myself,’ Caz says with a wry smile. Erin shakes her head, brow creased. She’s told Caz everything Raf told her about Amanda’s past, everything Amanda has done, the cuddling, the honey, the crystal grid designed to bewitch, to repair fractured relationships, the sonnet, and Caz thinks it’s normal, normal behaviour for someone who’s endured a childhood abuser. Erin doesn’t know anything about how something like that would affect a person in their childhood whereas Caz has spent her entire career working with those sorts of cases. Her friend gets up and walks to the wooden worktop, still covered in the plastic bearing the name of the DIY shop her husband bought it from.

  ‘Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?’ Erin asks.

  ‘No,’ Caz says, sounding tired, bored even.

  ‘He was a famous occultist, like the most famous one.’

  ‘Let me guess, Amanda’s got a picture of him above her bed and that means she’s going to kill you all in your sleep.’

  ‘The troll’s handle uses letters from his name. A security expert who works for my agent thinks it’s significant and he asked me if I knew anyone who was into the occult.’ Caz twists a valve on her sink and water bursts out of a bare copper pipe into a clatter of plates that she begins vigorously rinsing.

  ‘You think she’s the troll as well? Christ.’

  ‘Do you know anyone else around here who has pentagrams in their room?’

  ‘The same letters? You mean – You’re willing to accuse someone who’s looked after your kid for free for two months because of some anagrams?’ She shuts off the tap with a clatter, turns and leans back, as if trying to get as far away from Erin as she can without leaving the room. ‘Why? Why would she do it?’

  ‘She’s obsessed with Raf.’

  ‘And how does making you look shit on the Internet help her with that?’

  ‘I –’ She’s right, Erin thinks. She’s become so fixated on what Xavi said, what Cariad said about the meaning of the crystals, she’s become so set on the culprit being Amanda, that she’s never stopped to ask herself why she’d troll her. Caz sits down, puts her hands on the table and starts to speak. Her tone is less banterous than normal and Erin can see the authoritative social worker Caz’s wards see every day.

  ‘I know you were worried about getting depressed after how you started feeling when you were pregnant and I totally get that. Journaling is a big thing we try and get people with mental health problems to do, and I know it really helped you. But it’s gone too far now, surely you can see that in yourself. Even if this guy weren’t taking pictures of you. When we’ve been together, with the kids, when you’re not looking at your phone, you’re desperate to. I see it in your eyes. You look manic, a lot of the time now. It’s scary how much you need it.’ Erin thought Caz would tell her to run Amanda out of town, she secretly hoped she might come and do the dirty work for her, she hadn’t expected the excoriating spotlight to fall on her. ‘I think it’s distracting you from the fact that you’re not quite right, you know? After Bobby. So many women suffer with some sort of depression or anxiety after giving birth, most even, I’d say.’ Erin’s breath rattles in her nose as it quickens, she can’t believe what Caz is saying. ‘I mean, I did. Ask my mum, ask himself, I was a basket case after Stanley. It’s just, Amanda? Lovely Amanda who recommended me the supplement for my bad back, which is actually really fucking working, thanks for asking.’ Erin looks up at Caz and she softens, smirks and is almost laughing as she says. ‘You’re saying that mad hippie wants to steal your husband? That she’s taking pictures of you and putting them on the Internet?’

  Caz grabs a Bourbon cream from the plate on the table and bites into it. ‘You’re fucking brilliant, Erin. You’re a great mum and a great laugh and I miss you.’ She reaches her hand across the table and Erin takes it, clinging on to it like the ledge of a clifftop. ‘And yeh, get rid of Amanda if it’s messing up the vibes in your house. But – Listen, do you wanna know what I think?’

  ‘You’ve just spent about twenty minutes telling me what you think.’

  Caz squeezes her hand. ‘Get off your phone, love. Just for a bit.’

  As if it’s heard her, Erin’s phone buzzes loudly in her pocket. Caz can see she’s not got her attention any more.

  ‘Don’t abstain on my account,’ she says, releasing her hand and slouching back in her chair.

  ‘It’s fine.’ Erin says, ignoring it. But then it starts ringing. ‘Sorry.’ Erin gets her phone out and sees it’s Grace. A sliver of ice runs up her spine. Grace doesn’t call any more. All of their communication recently has been by email. Erin goes to the glass doors that lead out to the garden and answers the phone.

  ‘Hi, Grace.’

  ‘Did you do something with Xavier?’

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘There’s another photo.’ Erin swallows. Dread fills up her insides like a hair-clogged drain. Erin clicks the door handle to try and get out into the garden but it’s locked. Caz is there and opens it for her.

  ‘We just –’ Erin steps onto the muddy grass. ‘He was at the pub and we had a cigarette.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned that you smoke on your feed.’ Annoyance strains Grace’s voice. Caz hands Erin her phone, Instagram open, and she sees the picture. The pub with its blacked-out windows and peeling facade makes it look like a far more sordid venue than it is. There she is, shoulders exposed in her green sequinned jumpsuit, hunched in to Xavi with his mane of hair and thick beard, faces close, laughing, a bead of burning-red cigarette glinting in her right hand. She zooms into her face and one eye is a little squiggly, hair stuck to her forehead. She looks drunk. It could be an Edward Hopper painting the level of detail the photographer has managed to capture. ‘Erin, you still there?’

  ‘We were just talking and I don’t really smoke. It’s, it’s nothing like the photo looks.’

  ‘But it doesn’t look good.’

  ‘No.’ She hadn’t imagined it, Erin thinks, there was someone there behind the van. The troll was there, in London, watching her the whole evening. Watching her through windows. Following her down alleys trying to scare her. If she’d knocked herself out when she fell, would they have done something to her? ‘Why haven’t you taken it down?’

  ‘We took it down but it’s been reposted. Three times now. We’ll keep doing so but if they keep posting it, continuing to take it down might look worse.’ Erin looks down and the photo’s gone. But it doesn’t take much scrolling through her mentions to see that people have seen it, people are talking about it and, most importantly, some people have screenshotted it. ‘It’s also calling in quite big favours to get this stuff removed, Erin. They don’t just do it for anyone and there comes a point where they just won’t any more.’

  ‘Right, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have to be hyperaware of how your behaviour could look if it’s taken out of context. I know it’s not your fault.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’re all on your side. Let’s speak later.’ They end the conversation and Erin finds herself marooned in the middle of Caz’s lawn. She can feel her friend watching her from just inside her kitchen. She’s seen the picture. What must she be thinking? That Erin’s an alcoholic, smoking party girl? That she’s been having an affair? Caz won’t but everyone else will. Raf might. Raf might
and it might be the final straw. And who’d be there to pick up the pieces?

  ‘Erin, come in, it’s freezing.’ She looks at the end of Caz’s garden. Two small birds are twitching around a collection of suet balls hung on a bird table, beyond it the door to the alley behind Caz’s house, the same as in her garden. She pictures Amanda’s lustrous waves of red hair bouncing along and coming through the gate, looking towards the house furtively before going into her little box-home like she did the early morning after she’d come back from London. Caz was right, it didn’t make sense Amanda posting the pictures. At least the other pictures didn’t make sense, but this one does.

  52

  Modern Witchcraft Encyclopedia

  Jar spells are one of the oldest and simplest forms of magick. Though normally associated with curses and curse-breaking, they can also be a form of love magic if items like honey, flower petals or heart-shaped charms are used.

  What you need:

  A container – jar, bottle, sealable receptacle

  A poppet – a doll that looks like the target of the curse, a photograph of them, some nail clippings or hair.

  A medium – the substance through which you’ll transfer energy, be it good or bad, to the target. There are many different types of medium.

  E.g: