She hears Bobby squeaking downstairs and yearns to go and see him, to hold him. But she catches her reflection in the mirror above the dressing table. She looks ill, skin translucent, greasy, hair dishevelled, and she’s worried he might be scared of her. She thinks of Amanda last night staring at her after having been accused of stealing thousands of pounds, knowing that the woman accusing her is deranged, the anger in her eyes. And yet she’s willingly looking after her son for her. Erin wonders whether she’d do the same. Probably not. Amanda shouts up the stairs to say they’re going for a walk for Bobby’s nap, taking the choice of seeing her son out of her hands.
Erin flicks through another of Amanda’s magazines, this one looks older, more heavily thumbed. The Journal of Wicca. It’s a cheaper-looking affair. All pentagrams, healing and spells. Erin laughs at an interview with a Druid in a purple robe with a beard down to his feet. It feels like the first time she’s enjoyed not having her phone since she gave it to Raf. She turns a few pages and feels a jolt, grabs a pillow to prop herself up.
There’s a picture of a jar with a hairless doll in it. The title of the article: ‘How to get the most out of your spells’. There’s a checklist of ways to ‘maximise the reach of your magick’. Erin runs down it, adding crystals, imbuing amulets and giving them to the target, urine. These people seem to be obsessed with urine, she thinks. But then she sees something has been circled in black biro. ‘The best way to increase the power of your jar spell is to hide it somewhere in pitch-darkness where no one will ever find it. Burying or a locked safe works best.’ Amanda’s moved it. Maybe whatever it was meant to do, drive Erin away, make Raf fall in love with her, wasn’t working so she’s hidden it somewhere.
She cracks the bedroom door open and creeps downstairs. She checks no one’s in the house, before putting her coat on over her pyjamas and heading out to Amanda’s studio, the wedge of magazines held to her chest like precious treasure. She unlocks the door and lets herself in. She checks under the sofa. The jar’s not there. She looks in the wardrobe. No sign. She roots around in the cupboard under the sink. She even goes back out of the studio and looks around for any signs of the earth being disturbed. There’s nothing. No sign of it. She goes into the bathroom and sees it. The little screwdriver she saw the last time she was in here, resting on the surface next to the sink. With a tiny screw next to it.
She looks around the room. Nothing in the cupboard, nothing in the shower. Then she looks up at the ceiling and sees it. A flap vent with what looks like one screw missing on the top right corner. Erin grabs the screwdriver and steps up onto the toilet. She unscrews the remaining three screws and pulls the vent out. The toilet shifts beneath her and she steps down, scared her weight’s going to crack it off the wall, but she can’t reach with one foot down so she steps back up. She puts her hand up into the hole and reaches around the recess like a periscope. She drags out stray plasterboard and dust bunnies but can’t find the jar. She pulls her hand out and looks into the hole, cursing not having the torch on her phone. But it doesn’t look big enough to house that large pickle jar. She steadies herself on the wall and tries to reach further in. There must be something in here, Amanda’s not going to be messing with a vent for fun. Then she finds something, but not what she was hoping for. It’s a book, an exercise book. She steps off the toilet and blows some dust away. It looks old, one of those classy notebooks with a marbled cover in yellow, black and cream. There’s a snapping noise outside. She goes back into the main room to make sure she’s got a view in case Amanda comes.
There’s an envelope wedged into the inside cover of the notebook. Erin pulls it out and puts the notebook on the table next to Amanda’s crystals. There’s a millisecond where she considers the breach of privacy she’s committing but she knows she’s way past that now. In the envelope there’s a single orange Post-it. On it, in block capitals that lean to the right:
34 HILDA’S BAY ROAD
CT8 1BU
UK
It’s Erin’s address. Why has Amanda got her address written on a Post-it? Erin looks at the envelope. An address in Darwin, Australia. Two large international stamps. A postmark.
East Kent
28.11.2018
It’s been sent from here. Raf. Raf sent their address to Amanda in Australia several months ago. She didn’t come here because of a picture, she didn’t come here because of some fucked-up relationship with her abusive stepdad. She came because Raf told her to.
60
The stick-thin receptionist isn’t at her desk at the Lookout. Erin’s called Raf but his phone appears to be off so she’s come looking for him. Amanda will be at the group for another half an hour and, although Erin hasn’t actually thought what she’s going to do yet, she needs to have this conversation without having to worry what Bobby may think about how she’s behaving. Because she’s fairly certain she isn’t going to behave well. He’s been lying to her, he and Amanda have both been brazenly lying to her from the first moment she set eyes on them together in her front room. He sent her their address. He didn’t call her or email her or even write her a letter. He sent a Post-it in an envelope all the way to Australia.
She slaps the desk a few times to get someone’s attention. There aren’t many people here today. Eventually a burly man with a yellow-checked scarf wrapped tightly around his neck looks up.
‘You OK?’ he says, a Welsh accent beleaguered by a heavy cold. She’s not met him before.
‘Is Raf in?’ He gives her a sideways look. ‘Wears a beanie all the time like he’s stuck in the nineties?’ She tries to smile but can only manage a grimace. The man breaks into a lopsided grin.
‘Ah, no. He was. Earlier. Think I heard him saying something to Sev about going to London for work?’
‘Is Sev not here?’
‘He went out about an hour ago.’ Raf didn’t say he was going to London, she thinks. She remembers how he was this morning. Telling her to stay in bed, to take a pill if she can’t sleep, suggesting to her that it might be better not to leave the house, that facing people after what happened on her Instagram might make her unwell. She turns on her heels and barges her way out the double doors into the main space. Where’s she going to go? To the group. She should go and get Bobby, everything Amanda’s told her about how she’s here, why she’s here is a lie, she has to get her baby and then she can worry about finding Raf. But then something stops her. There’s a door with a symbol of a man and a symbol of a woman. The toilets, unisex. She turns round to look through the glass doors, to the corridor behind the bullpen of desks. When she came here after she found Amanda and Bobby together in the nursery bed, Raf came from the back, wiping his hands on a tea towel. She’d assumed he was coming from the toilet, but she’s standing next to the toilet. On the wall she sees an old school sign indicating who’s in and who’s out, desks numbered 1 to 12, studios 1 to 4. Studio 4 is the only one set to ‘unoccupied’.
‘Who is it that has Studio 4?’ she asks the room loudly, head popped back through the double doors. The Welshman looks around and, seeing everyone else entombed in their noise-cancelling headphones, realises it’s on him to answer again. He gets the attention of a woman in a hoodie who’s making what look like artificial flowers. She pulls her hoodie down, takes her headphones out and smiles at the Welshman.
‘Studio 4 – that the big one at the back?’
‘That’s right, yeh.’ The woman nods, then notices Erin by the door. ‘Oh, hiya,’ she says. They’ve met before. She’s called Sara, moved from Walthamstow. ‘Raf was in there this morning but not for long – he left about ten, I think.’
‘In Studio 4?’
‘We all call it the beast cos it’s three times the size of all the others.’ Erin blinks. She didn’t know he rented a studio. Why does he need a studio? How can he afford the biggest studio at this chichi co-working space? She needs to go and get Bobby, but he’s safe, he’s at the class, Caz is there. She can’t leave without knowing why the hell her fiancé has an
art studio he’s never told her about.
‘I’m locked out,’ she says. ‘He’s not answering his phone, must be on the Tube or something. Any chance I can get in and see if he has our spare in there?’ Sara hesitates. The Welshman eyes his desk, keen to extricate himself from any responsibility.
‘Sure,’ Sara says, coming up to get a set of keys from behind the front desk. Erin follows her through the gauntlet of desks, laptops and computer monitors, air plants and succulents. The place has been done up a little since she was last here. Walls painted, electrical cables no longer visible.
As Sara leads her to the back of the building, she looks at the clock on her dumbphone, the group Bobby’s at is on for another twenty minutes. She labours to text Caz and to tell her to call if Amanda leaves with Bobby before the end. If Raf invited Amanda to come over to England then perhaps it has something to do with the baby. Maybe he knew that Erin wouldn’t be a good enough mother so tried to recruit someone better.
‘This room is so beaut.’ One of Erin’s eyes twitches with Sara’s familiarity. Has he been writing Post-its to her as well? No, she tells herself, this can’t be right. He’s never looked at another woman. She’s never been with anyone who’s been so devoted to her. There has to be some logical reason why he invited Amanda to come. Some reason why he lied. Because that’s the kicker. There’s nothing wrong with inviting an old friend, maybe she’d asked for the address and he sent it on a Post-it as some sort of in-joke, but lying about it, making up a story about Lydia and seeing some painting …
They arrive at the nondescript black door. A numeral ‘4’ has been daubed on it in yellow paint.
‘Everyone’s super jelz he’s got it, but, to be fair, no one else here could afford it, and he lets people store their stuff in it so that’s pretty sound.’ They can’t afford it, Erin thinks. And if they can, then Amanda’s reason for visiting them is the tip of an iceberg of lies. Sara takes a key from a large bunch and puts it into the lock. Erin realises her breathing has deepened as if she’s preparing to plunge into freezing water.
Sara opens the door. It’s dark, a curtain drawn over a huge window at the far side of the room, but Erin can see it’s huge. She had no idea this was even here. Sara reaches around for a light switch. The lights click on and what Erin sees forces an audible gasp. She turns the noise into a cough and musters a smile for Sara.
‘Hope you find your key,’ she says as she wheels past Erin and back to her desk.
The walls are stacked with row upon row of canvases. The outside one of each has a picture of a woman with flowing bounds of red hair sat among rocks, turned towards the viewer. Amanda. Erin closes the door, backs into it and slumps down onto her haunches. It’s not a woman, she thinks. It’s a girl. A teenage girl. Younger perhaps. Amanda as a young girl. Erin closes her eyes and rests her head on her knees. She needs to look again but can’t. That girl is thirteen, maybe twelve, is there any way to see them as anything but depraved? When Erin found Amanda’s passport, she knew, deep down, there was something deeply wrong about the age difference, but she was so keen to believe that Raf was the man she’s always known him to be that she ate up his story.
Erin tries to get her breathing under control. She opens her eyes and stares round the room. On the opposite wall there are more canvases, but these all face the wall. There’s a larger one, half finished, on an easel down towards the window, though she can’t make it out from where she is, such is the prodigious size of the room.
She manages to get herself up and walks along the row of pictures of the girl Amanda. Raf’s attempted to make her expressions ambiguous, Mona Lisa smiles, but he’s failed. In one painting her head’s lowered and she has a ‘come-hither’ stare. In another, the face is up and on an angle so she looks wary. In a third, the lips are pursed, it could be fear, it could be hatred. Erin crosses to the other side of the room. The studio is newly painted, the light fittings look expensive. A free-standing metal shelving unit next to the door is heaving with premium-looking art supplies, oil paints, brushes, black leather-bound books, a huge MacBook, padded bags full of what looks like expensive technical equipment. Where has all this stuff come from? Has he bought it? They don’t have any money. He’s always telling her that they don’t have any money.
She grips the top of one of the canvases that face the wall and turns it round quickly, like ripping off a plaster. It’s different. Still Amanda, but Amanda now. Most of the painting, the background and the body, has been sketched, only the face is finished. It’s disturbing. Amanda’s wrinkles have been accentuated and have been painted again and again, smears of black and dark brown, it’s chaotic, as if done in a flurry of strokes. From here she can see the work-in-progress at the end of the room. It shows Amanda, the young girl Amanda, reclining on a bench, shoulders bare, an expression of forced joy. There’s an ottoman on the other side of the easel. She looks at the girlish pictures behind her and it hits her. They’re not from before, he’s painted them here, since she’s been here. There’s dozens of them. When has he been doing it? Is this why he’s been so busy with work, spending all his time here, in his studio, working on these paintings? Does he even have a job?
She can’t be in this room any more. Can’t be surrounded by scores of eyes, scores of Amanda’s eyes, her child eyes, staring at her. What has Raf done? What did he do to her? Why would she let herself model for him while he painted pictures of her prepubescent self? Caz has talked about how abuse suffered as a child can drastically alter how you view the world, what you think’s normal, your morality. She catches one of the faces, an upturned smile, cruel. Bobby, she’s looking after her baby, she has her precious boy. Erin needs to go and take Bobby away from this woman now. She clatters the painting to the floor and bolts out of the room. She must make a lot of noise in the hallway because several freelancers in the main space look up from their laptops to see what the commotion is. Sara gives her a thumb’s up. Erin smiles maniacally and nods her head.
As she blunders towards the entrance, she knocks her hip on the corner of a desk that clatters a Lego structure over into the occupant’s lap. She puts up a hand in apology and gets an irritated acknowledgement. As she walks off, her eyes fix on a row of different colours lining the top of the front desk’s iMac. Post-its. Blue, orange, yellow, green. Green. Sonnet 116. ‘It is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ Raf wrote that note. Raf’s love is never-changing. Raf’s love for Amanda is unshakeable in the face of whatever it comes up against. He told Erin to stay in bed all day. He’s gone to London. And Amanda’s with her baby.
Erin slows her run as she rounds the corner onto the cliff front. She bends forward and puts her hands on her knees, breath heaving. She hasn’t run since giving birth, her hip rags, her chest feels clamped shut. Raf’s not answering his phone. Nor is Amanda. She sees a group of mums walking out of the decrepit cinema cafe that the singing group is held in. Caz is there, laughing with a woman called Carla.
Erin rushes across the road – a grey Transit van has to swerve to avoid her and hoots his disapproval, which makes the emerging mums and dads look over in her direction.
‘Where is she? Did you not get my text?’ she gasps to Caz who, seeing her friend’s distress, picks up Imogen and comes out of the scrum to meet her.
‘Not seen my phone. What do you mean? Who?’
‘Amanda, Amanda’s got Bobby, she was meant to be at the group.’
‘She wasn’t there, thought Bob must have fallen asleep at home,’ Caz says. Erin looks out to the sea. She shuts her eyes, holds them closed. Her boy is gone. ‘Erin, what’s going on?’
‘Let me look at your phone,’ Erin says, eyes still closed, voice robotic.
‘What? What’s happened?’
‘I need your phone.’ Caz hands it over. Erin goes into Instagram. Scans Sophie’s Insta-feed, Mercedes’, Kristina’s. She goes onto the feed of the group Caz has just been in to look at the group photo of the class, as if perhaps her friend so
mehow missed Amanda and Bobby being there. She turns and heads towards home when she realises she still has Caz’s phone. She doubles back and gives it to her.
‘Come on, get in the car,’ Caz says, ‘we’ll find them.’ Erin nods, though she feels catatonic. Where could they be? In London? With Raf? She checks her dumbphone again. Nothing. No returned call from Raf.
‘Let’s check home first.’
Erin leans her head against the cold glass of the window of Amanda’s studio. They’re not here. They’re not in the house. She clenches her fists to stop her hands shaking but it just transfers the tremors into her arms. She’s lost her baby. That woman has taken her baby. Or was it Raf that’s taken him? Or, she thinks, and she knows that even back to that moment when she walked into the house and heard the sound of moaning from Bobby’s bedroom, there was a seed in her head that this could happen, they’ve taken him together.
The shakes have spread to her shoulders now, her chest, and as she turns her head on the glass so her hair smears into it, she begins to make a sound that comes from deep inside her. She looks up and screams at the wooden patio roof, slamming her flat palms against the glass. She stops, hands still on the cold glass now, breathing huge audible huffs out of her nose. She steps away from the glass, thinks about sitting down on the edge of the decking, but then doesn’t. She gets her dumbphone out, still no messages, and is about to call the police when she notices a smear of something on the inside of the glass door. It looks like glue, a slug’s trail of glue, as if a toddler’s got excited with the Pritt Stick. She goes into the room and presses it with a fingertip. It’s not glue but it is tacky. She looks around the room and then she finds the answer. A pad of orange Post-its rests on the draining board of the tiny sink.
Erin goes over to it and sees a biro indentation but she can’t make out what it says. She races back into the main house where Caz and Imogen are waiting for her. Caz must have just watched Erin wailing at the sky because she looks bewildered.
The Family Friend Page 25
