The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  ‘I think you need a coffee, Erin.’ Lorna’s there, without her mothership buggy. She must have been in the queue behind her. ‘Hi, Fabian, how you doing?’

  ‘Er, yeh.’ Fabian comes back towards them, his hackles drop. ‘Fine, fine, Lorn, how’re the kids getting on?’

  ‘Much better than poor Bobby. He doesn’t sleep a wink, does he, Erin?’ Lorna gives her a nod, she’s prompting her to use it as an excuse.

  ‘No, no. Lorna’s right. Think I need a coffee. Sorry. Sorry about –’

  ‘Give my love to your mum, Fabian,’ Lorna interjects, putting an arm around Erin, levering the broken sliding doors open, and shepherding her out into the street.

  ‘What a mess!’ Lorna says, picking out a hunk of melon from her fruit pot. Erin leans on the arm of a sofa in the coffee shop opposite the bank. Lorna marched her in here, bought her a cappuccino, and asked her if she wanted to talk about it. And even though most of it was said in a stage whisper in order not to wake Bobby, it seems that Erin did want to talk. She told Lorna everything and, contrary to her reputation, she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed hearing about what Erin thinks has been happening to her. And, like brainstorming a character’s motivations with a director, it feels like going through everything that’s happened since Amanda’s arrived has helped clarify everything for her, if not for Lorna. It makes so much sense, Amanda’s plan. Become a fixture at their home, gain their trust; when she saw that Erin wasn’t making as much money as she expected, she then actively facilitated her going out to work. She was always ushering her out the door, telling her not to worry. Then trolling her so she was distracted, so she wouldn’t think to check why she hadn’t been paid yet. But now she’s not on Instagram any more. Amanda must know that the money will dry up, Erin thinks. Has she gone already? Did she see Amanda last night? Has she seen her this morning?

  ‘So you haven’t got any money of your own?’

  ‘What?’ Lorna’s question snaps Erin out of her train of thought.

  ‘No savings, no credit cards? Nothing in your account?’

  ‘I’ve spent my month’s allowance.’

  ‘Allowance?’

  ‘I didn’t have a job before having Bobby so I haven’t had maternity pay. Raf pays into my account every month.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘How much does he give you?’ Lorna bites a grape in half. It seems that unburdening everything to Lorna, taking away any chance for her speculative mind to speculate, has changed their relationship and it now feels like she’s talking to a mortgage adviser.

  ‘Er, a hundred and fifty a month.’

  ‘That’s not much.

  ‘It’s normally plenty. We’ve got a joint account as well. It must be all the trains I’ve had to take.’

  ‘So you don’t –’ Lorna stops herself. Closes her eyes, does a little shudder of her head. ‘No, don’t worry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, are you sure it’s Amanda that’s stole from you?’ Erin stands up from the sofa.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘When we first met, that bloody awful walk on the beach when I was knackered and snippy and being a total bitch about everyone, you told me you’d been in loads of debt when you met Raf and he helped you out with it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have told you that,’ Erin says. Lorna shrugs as if to say, then how did I know about it?

  ‘I just know that some men feel threatened if their partner suddenly starts earning lots of money.’

  ‘You think it’s Raf?’ Erin says, almost laughing, incredulous. What the hell was she thinking telling Lorna all of her problems, unburdening herself to the biggest gossip she knows? Of course she has a theory. There’s nothing she doesn’t have some wild theory about. Erin gathers her handbag up from the sofa.

  ‘I thought I’d got it wrong about you,’ she says, ‘but you can’t help yourself, can you? It was the same when you saw Amanda and Raf walking together, you were desperate to reveal some sordid affair. But it’s not there. Raf has never done anything to hurt me. He dedicates everything, absolutely everything to me.’

  ‘Erin –’

  ‘Thanks for the coffee.’ Erin slides past chairs and out towards the exit. Bobby’s stirring slightly with the movement. She looks back to Lorna, shaking her head, sadness brimming under her fringe of straw-coloured hair.

  58

  Erin has texted Raf. She’s texted Amanda. Which took an age to do on her terrible old phone. Bobby woke as soon as she went into the cold but has been babbling to himself contentedly as they’ve walked along the front towards home. They’re going to sit down, like adults, and they’re going to try and work it out together. Amanda will deny it and that’s fine. Erin is going to ask her to leave and tell her that the police will be informed.

  She wanders up her street. Bobby seems to recognise it and bounces with excitement, reaching to grab clusters of leaves from the hedge that borders the house on the corner. His joy is almost infectious. She feels she finally has something. Before it felt like she was clutching at straws but, even if she doesn’t have proof it’s Amanda, she has the email. Someone has stolen from her and who else could it be? When she gets to their bungalow she sees Raf standing at the window, waiting for her. He doesn’t look amused. She wasn’t expecting him to have got home before her.

  ‘You OK?’ He asks the question before she’s through the door frame.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ she says. Raf raises an eyebrow, nods his head and lets out a sigh. He goes to sit down at the table that has a view out to the road and grabs one of the place mats from the table and begins rolling it up into a cigar shape. Erin puts Bobby down on the play mat. She puts Hey Duggee on the TV, glances over at Raf to see if he’s going to object to their son watching a screen before five o’clock, but he doesn’t. Erin observes Amanda clacking her way through the back gate. The sun blares down on their little garden and Amanda, her maroon coat over a flowing powder-blue dress, walks in and out of the shadows caused by the neighbours’ overhanging trees, towards the house.

  ‘Hey, guys, everything good?’ she says as she heads through the door to face them sitting at the table like they’re about to interview her.

  ‘We need to talk about something,’ Erin says. Amanda looks at Raf who shrugs back at her. Erin sees his jaw clench, she knows how much not telling him what this is about will be enraging him, but she doesn’t care. When he hears what’s happened he’ll be shocked. He should feel guilty. He should feel ashamed for allowing this manipulative bitch into their home. Amanda’s about to sit but, spotting Bobby on the floor, extracts a tissue from her coat pocket and goes over to him to wipe his nose. ‘Do you want to sit down, Amanda?’ Erin stops her in her tracks. She comes back to sit down, brow furrowed though smiling still.

  Erin slides across a printout of the email chain Zoe sent over to her. Amanda reads it and gives a nervous laugh. She looks at Raf for some sense of reassurance.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Ez?’ He snatches the papers up and reads what they say. ‘What, you got a new bank account?’

  ‘She did.’ Erin’s index finger flies out from her fist and points at Amanda like a gunshot.

  ‘Sorry, I did what?’ Amanda puts prayer-hands to her chest and widens her eyes.

  ‘You sent my agent an email with new bank account details so you could steal my money. That’s why you came here in the first place.’

  ‘Erin, stop’ Raf puts a hand on her wrist.

  ‘I won’t go to the police. But I want to see the card. I want you to show Raf the card. Then I want my money back and for you to get out of our lives today.’

  ‘I – I’m so – I didn’t do this, Erin, I swear. I didn’t even know –’

  Raf stands up and shoves the chair into the table. He walks over to the shelving unit and Erin almost thinks he’ll sweep all the books off, but instead he leans against it.

  ‘This is too far, Ez. Too much. You’ve crossed a
line,’ Raf says, but Erin won’t be cowed this time. She has the evidence.

  ‘The money hasn’t gone into my account because of this. Nine thousand pounds, that’s how much my agent has paid me, or at least thought they’ve paid. But it’s not in my account. How do you explain that?’ Erin’s up now. Amanda sits still, looking up at Raf, plaintive, begging him to rescue her. Confess, Erin internally screams at her. Confess to this, she thinks, glaring at her, there’s nowhere to hide, I’ve caught you out. But now she looks sad, pitying almost. Erin would like to slap the light out of her glistening green eyes.

  ‘Come on, Amanda,’ she says, trying to smile, cajole her, looking almost sympathetic. ‘I’m sure you had your reasons, but please, please don’t make this more painful than it already is.’ Raf storms out to the hall, almost knocking Bobby as he goes. He comes back with Erin’s laptop and places it on the table in front of Erin. He opens the screen up.

  ‘Does she know your password?’

  ‘No, but that’s – I could have left it open.’

  ‘When would that have happened?’

  Erin glances at Amanda whose gaze is fixed on the surface of the table. Erin hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t thought about how she might have got into her email. Erin doesn’t put much effort into passwords and security so she’d assumed it must be easy but Raf’s right. He types in the password, goes straight into her email. He pulls the laptop over to face him. Erin and Amanda both seem to be in a state of paralysis, and with Bobby motionless in front of the television, it’s as if Erin’s accusations have cast some sort of spell over everyone apart from Raf. She looks at his back as he hunches over her laptop doing something. She remembers what Lorna said in the cafe.

  ‘It was you,’ she says. He ignores her, tapping and clicking at the laptop’s mousepad. ‘It must have been. You’re the only one who knows my passwords. Lorna was right. You don’t want me to have any money of my own. It had to be –’ Raf turns the screen round. There’s an email from her sent items, from 26 February. A message to Raf’s email address.

  Hey babes,

  Thinking of setting up a business account for Instagram. What do you think?

  Ciao bella

  ‘You just wrote that,’ Erin says, squinting at the screen. Raf sighs and walks into the kitchen. He fills a sippy cup with water and takes it over to Bobby. The boy bats it away at first, but after Raf offers it to him a third time, he takes it and sucks water down. Erin looks closer at the screen. Checks the date again. Tries to think about how someone could fake all of these messages.

  ‘I got it when I was on a call. Forgot to go back and reply. Only just remembered. You did it, Erin. You set up the account.’

  ‘Should I go?’ Amanda’s chair scrapes as she backs away from the table.

  ‘Maybe go read Bob a story, thanks,’ Raf says, coming round the sofa towards Erin. Amanda goes to get Bobby and carries him in the direction of his room. Raf takes Erin’s hands in his. She looks up at him, hat still low over his hair, and he gives her the same beatific look he gives Bobby just after he’s come out of a screaming fit. As if she’s a troubled soul who needs his succour. ‘Now –’ his voice is gentle, his fingers massage up her wrists – ‘I don’t know if you don’t remember doing it or, or if this, acting like this, is because –’ he lowers his voice – ‘Amanda’s still here.’ Erin glances over to Amanda who’s stopped at the end of the corridor that leads to the bedroom. She’s watching them with a worried look in her eyes. ‘Which is it?’ he says, snapping. Erin hadn’t even clocked that he’d asked a question. She blinks, thinking, almost twitching, wanting to scream. What is going on? Is Raf right? Is she suffering from some form of psychosis? Have all the hours staring at the phone made her delusional? Could she really forget having done something like that, something practical that would have involved her getting her ID together, filling in application forms?

  ‘I definitely didn’t do this, I couldn’t have done this. I wouldn’t just make it up.’

  ‘What about the jar? The jar with the doll? I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose, Ez, but, you’re tired, you’ve got this thing about Amanda.’

  ‘I didn’t do this. Set up a bank account that I don’t remember!’

  ‘You really don’t remember? Are you sure? I get how much you want her to leave, and I want her to as well, but I’m not sure you’re thinking’s right on this, and I’m not sure you’re well enough.’

  ‘I’ve been saying I haven’t been paid yet for weeks. You think I’ve been concocting some elaborate lie for all that time to try and get rid of Amanda?’ She flips her hand over and bats his touch away. He gives her a warning look. That night, the night she threw the dish at him, floats between them. He lifts her handbag off the back of one of the chairs.

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘I didn’t do this.’ She feels tears prick, the wave of emotion stuttering her words. Because as he gets her wallet out of her bag, as he flicks his long fingers through the card section, she knows what he’s going to find. And she knows that he might be right. That the troll might be right about her. She’s losing her mind.

  ‘Oh God.’ Raf turns away from her and walks to the door, carrying the wallet with him. Erin’s breath shallows, she feels herself standing on her tiptoes, almost trying to peak over Raf’s shoulder to see what he has. ‘947383 –’ he turns, reading from a bank card – ‘82. I’m sorry, Ez.’ She goes to him and grabs the card from his hand. It’s for a business account, her name, ‘Mrs E. Braune’, written below the long number.

  ‘This isn’t mine,’ she says without conviction. ‘I didn’t do this. I know I didn’t.’ Raf steers her towards an armchair and she sits, staring at the card in her hand. It has her name on it. Not Amanda’s, not Raf’s, not anyone else’s, hers. She throws her head into her hands and begins to weep silently. Raf puts a hand on her shoulder but she shrugs him off.

  She rubs the tears down into her cheeks. Through her fingers she sees Amanda half out of Bobby’s room watching them. She’s staring at Raf. She bites her top lip, shakes her head almost imperceptibly. Erin sees an expression she’s never seen before. Rage.

  59

  ‘I want you to stay here today,’ Raf says. It’s the morning after. He’s standing in the door frame. He slept in with Bobby last night, as he has virtually every night for the last few weeks. She’s stopped asking whether he had a bad night – according to Raf, he’s always had a bad night. ‘Erin?’ She nods.

  Amanda took care of Bobby’s bedtime last night. Raf got Erin a bowl of cereal and suggested she go to bed. She lay there, eight o’clock in the evening, staring at the water mark in the eaves of her bedroom ceiling. She was trying to process the emails, the card, the jar, the honey, the troll, but none of the thoughts would click over in her mind, as if her brain’s starter motor had gone kaput. She feels hollow. Her body, her mind, feel as if there’s nothing inside them.

  ‘Will you promise me? Stay in bed today. Rest. Take a pill if you need to. I’m going to see if I can get someone to come and talk to you, a doctor, a nurse maybe. I was googling last night, I think you might be having a stress-related breakdown.’ He checks her reaction but there isn’t one. ‘You have been under a huge amount of stress. First Bobby, being so hard those first eight, nine months, feeding him, you weren’t sleeping, I wasn’t sleeping, we weren’t always as nice to each other as we should’ve been. And I’m sorry, for my part, I’m so sorry about that. Then all this extra work, you were out of your mind responding to everyone, even before the whole thing with Grace and her putting you out to work. And, and the troll.’ He looks down at the duvet, reaches his hand towards her but stops short. ‘I’m thinking I’ll try get a loan. Take time off. To care for you. Anyway, I better go, go get cracking. I think Amanda’s taking Bobby to a singing class at the old cinema?’

  ‘Tabby’s Rock and Rhyme,’ Erin says, flat.

  ‘Probably, yeh. There’s a sandwich on the side for you.’

  ‘Great.�
�

  ‘I love you.’ Erin flicks her eyes to him.

  ‘I know.’

  She takes half of one of Raf’s pills and spends the rest of the morning in and out of sleep. She wakes and looks at her dumbphone. A message from Raf checking in on her. When she looks over to the door, she sees the tray Raf left with a sandwich on it now features a still-steaming cup of tea. Next to the tray there’s a pile of magazines, Vice, Wonderland, they look new. Raf’s at work so it must have been Amanda. But they don’t seem like her kind of thing. She removes the top two to see it must have been Amanda, because there’s a magazine called Destiny and Soul. Raf definitely wouldn’t have bought that. Erin finds herself touched at the gesture.

  She grabs the tea and scooches back into her duvet-cocoon with the pile of magazines and lays them all out on the bed. She flicks through Destiny and Soul and, as expected, it’s a bunch of claptrap. Then she turns the pages of Wonderland until she gets to an interview with Rhia Trevellick, the girl who was given the part in the indie movie that she’d managed to miss out on when she was stuck in a cabin in Connemara. She’s just signed on as the lead in a big Netflix fantasy show. She looks amazing in the pictures, short choppy hair, insanely beautiful clothes but not too Hollywoodified. Erin doesn’t feel as envious as she would have done yesterday. Perhaps it’s the sleeping pill, perhaps it’s the dawning realisation that she might be having a breakdown, but she’s almost happy for Rhia – she was there, she was good in the film, she’s made good choices since and always seems nice, fair play to her.