The Family Friend

by C. C. MacDonald

  ‘We should go out and look,’ she says, ‘something might have happened to them.’

  Erin waves the pad of Post-its in front of her and goes into Bobby’s room. The smell, she’d never noticed how wonderful her little boy made that room smell. She gets a physical pain in her stomach at how much she misses him. She finds what she’s looking for at the bottom of a storage box under his cot. An unopened packet of crayons, a gift from one of her mum’s friends, that she wrenches open. She pulls out the purple one and rubs it over the indentation to reveal Raf’s message.

  Room 332

  Premier Inn

  Heathrow Terminal 4

  61

  15 June 1999

  He didn’t come home last night. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning and I’ve got no idea where he is. Something must have happened to him and I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do. We don’t have a phone and of course I can’t call the police. If he’s not back by the evening I might have to go out to the local shop and – I don’t know. What if I give away where we are? Donny’s said that the police are on Craig’s side. That he’s enlisted them to look for us. What if Donny’s fine, what if he just got stuck somewhere? Then I will have given away where we are and we’d have to move again just as we’re getting settled. I can’t go look for him myself. If only I had the gallery’s telephone number, but then I don’t even have money for the payphone. Oh God! What should I do?! Something’s happened to him. That’s the only explanation. If he’s hurt, if he’s gone, I don’t know how I’ll carry on.

  16 June 1999

  I’ve been up to our neighbour Colin’s house and called the two big hospitals in Darwin and the one in Palmerston. He’s not there. I was going to call the gallery but then realised I didn’t know what it was called. I rang a couple out of the phone book but I couldn’t stay in Colin’s house for too long. Donny thought he was creepy and wouldn’t have liked it.

  I’m sure he’ll be back soon. He has to come back soon. He never would have left me, so he has to come back. I can’t believe that something terrible has happened. I can’t.

  18 June 1999

  The police came today. I begged them not to call my mum but they have. They’ve been looking for me ever since I left home. I told them that it was me who wanted to go to Darwin, I told them that I suggested moving back out to the sticks, but they keep saying he kidnapped me. They keep saying that he’d abused his position at the school but they don’t know what they’re talking about, he wasn’t a proper teacher, just an assistant, and I didn’t even do art.

  I keep trying to tell them what Craig was planning, I told them he was hunting me down all on his own, told them what he was planning to do to me, how weird he’d been with me whenever I was half dressed at home. I told them that Donny was just trying to protect me from Craig and that he should be the one they lock up, but they’re not listening.

  They don’t have Donny. They keep asking me where he is and don’t seem to believe that I don’t know. They say that our old neighbour Jean was found at the bottom of the stairwell and they think Donny might have pushed her. I told them that it was impossible, that Jean wasn’t steady on her feet, that the stairs in our apartment block are too steep for an old woman, that they shouldn’t have let her live there. But she’s unconscious in hospital at the moment so she can’t tell them that she fell and they’re blaming it all on Donny.

  I wish I did know where he is though, even if it meant us going to prison for fifty years. I feel certain something terrible’s happened to him. He would never have left me otherwise. I keep telling them to ask Craig. I’m sure it’s him. That he found Donny and, when he wouldn’t tell him where I was, he did something to him. It’s the only explanation. I’m scared. I’m wasting time being held in the police station when I should be out looking for him.

  28 June 1999

  He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive. Mum said he’d probably left the country. So I rang all of the airlines that operate out of Darwin International. Many of them wouldn’t speak to me, but when I started telling them that my husband had gone missing, I eventually found one that told me Rafael Donadoni was booked on a flight on 15 January. When I pressed her for his destination, she wouldn’t tell me.

  I’ve found a women’s hostel to stay at in Cairns. Mum wouldn’t have me when she found out what I’d told the police about Craig. She says he’d never dream of doing what I’d said. But she would protect him. I’ve got an interview to assist a childminder in three days. So now I just have to wait until Donny gets in touch to tell me how to join him. I can be patient. I can wait. Because that’s what you do for love.

  Erin puts the notebook down on the train table in front of her. The drama, the passion, the certainty of Amanda’s words, the handwriting, they’re all so young. She was a child and he did that to her. Convinced her she was his muse, pretend-married her in just the sort of ceremony that a spooky, gothy kid would lose their mind for. He separated her off from her family, her friends, then abducted her, telling her it was for her own safety. You can’t tell from the journal whether this Craig guy was a creep, maybe he wasn’t that nice a guy, but he never did anything to her. Raf did do something to her – or Donny as he clearly wanted to be called then, probably to hide his Italian provenance. He was a teacher at her school. He groomed her. Abducted her. Raped her. Moved her around to avoid detection and then, presumably, fled the country without a word when it looked like the net was closing in on him. Erin lifts the notebook up and brings it slapping down onto the table. It wasn’t Raf’s father’s indiscretions with younger students that got them in trouble, that forced him to leave Australia. He was the sick one; he was the depraved one who couldn’t help himself. The move from Melbourne – was that the same thing? Was there another underage girl he and his father had to run away from? Is it a pattern of behaviour? She glances at the time on her iPhone – she scoured their downstairs looking to see where Raf had put it, finding it in the side pocket of one of his bags. It seemed ridiculous to delay, but she somehow felt she might need something more powerful than the useless Nokia he’d given her.

  Then it hits her. She gave her phone over to him willingly, but only because he made her believe that she was delusional, that she was suffering side effects from some form of addiction to her smartphone and that it was the only way to get better. Just as when she’d chosen to distance herself from her brother, who she’d spent most of her life so close to, she did it to overcome the despair she felt after every time she’d visit him and his perfect family. And when she moved to the sea, away from her dissolute friends and controlling mother, it was because starting a new simple life was the only way to cure her tempestuous mental health. And having a baby, now she thinks of it, there was a motivation for that too. She needed to remove herself from the centre of her universe, start living for something real, something tangible, a deep love, that was the only way she would ever find true happiness. But she’d never been to a doctor, she hadn’t spent months having sessions with a therapist to get to these discoveries about herself, to become empowered to enact these various radical curative life changes, no, Raf suggested she needed to do all of it. And none of it was true. Just as the threat of Craig was planted in Amanda’s head as a tool to coerce her away from everything that was there to protect her, to blind her to the fact that the only predator in her midst was the man she felt she loved, Raf had made Erin believe everyone she surrounded herself with was damaging her, and when he’d dealt with all of those competitors but she still wasn’t entirely his, he had to make her believe that she was losing her mind. All of it to disguise the fact that the only person destroying Erin’s life was her fiancé.

  There’s an acrid taste in the back of her mouth and she wants to spit. She notices a mum in her forties, sitting next to a seven-year-old girl reading a book, staring at her. Erin sits down and looks out the window again. She can tell the woman’s a former follower of her Instagram. She’s texting someone. P
robably one of her mates to tell them that BRAUNEoverBRAINS is sat on a train opposite her, that she looks pale, drawn and frankly terrified, and that she’s not with her beautiful baby boy. ‘As usual’ she’ll probably add.

  Erin turns her attention back to the notebook and flicks through the next entries. It’s clear that marvellous ‘Donny’ never does get in touch, but, oddly, it seems Amanda is defiant. She creates various reasons why he hasn’t been in touch, she’s adamant that he will and that she just has to wait. But then the tone changes. The entries become shorter and more factual. Her assertions of confidence in the love of her life become emptier somehow. And then the entries stop.

  Erin leans back in her seat, lets the cover of the book fold over onto her finger that remains on the page. She’s still half an hour from London. The train thuds into a tunnel. She bites at the side of her thumb even though the cuticle’s already bleeding. The hotel, she thinks to herself as she stares at the blocks of black flying past the window, the hotel gives her hope. He wouldn’t have booked them a hotel unless they were going early tomorrow, so as long as she can get there, she can stop it. Stop what though? What is it they’re doing? Erin’s assuming they’re planning to try and escape together with Bobby but can that really be what’s happening? It seems insane that he could be leaving her, that he could be taking their baby away, but he’s done it before, left a woman he claimed to love without a word. And in the last few hours, it feels like everything he’s ever told her about himself, every conversation they’ve ever had, has been total fiction, so why wouldn’t this be happening?

  The train roars out of the tunnel. She can be at the hotel in just over an hour. She feels the judgey mum glancing at her again so Erin gives her a mania-tinged smile that makes it unambiguous that she doesn’t appreciate being stared at and that she’s in a mood you could describe as unhinged. The mum pockets her phone and puts a protective arm around her daughter.

  Erin holds her shaking hands together, squeezing the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, the pain seeming to calm her momentarily. She glances at the little girl opposite, enwrapped in her book. A dull ache comes into her breasts. She hasn’t fed Bobby from them for weeks now and her milk is almost completely gone, but the thought of her little boy feels like it’s getting it going again. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when she gets there. She has no idea what they’re going to do, what they’re going to say when she finds them in a hotel at Heathrow airport, but she is a mother. It’s taken her a long time to come round to it, to understand what it means to be a mother, but that’s what she is, and she needs to get her son back.

  62

  She stares at the pale wood of the hotel-room door. The number ‘332’ in brushed brass in the centre of it. The low light of the hallway, the carpet like blue static, identical door upon identical door. As she holds her hand up to knock, she feels like she’s in a horror film. What they’ve done isn’t explicable, it’s extreme. It’s violent in its extremity, it’s criminal. What does Erin think her intervention is going to achieve? The journal suggests that Raf pushed an old woman down the stairs when she threatened him. He’s not just going to hand Bobby over and suggest they all head home for a cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg.

  Just as her hand goes to knock, the door opens. Amanda grabs her into the room and closes the door behind her.

  ‘Turn off your phone,’ Amanda says but Erin ignores her as she sees Bobby on the ground, knocking miniature shampoo bottles together. Erin swoops down on him and cuddles her baby boy where he is on the floor, settling herself next to him and pulling him up onto her lap, both her arms wrapping around him like the bulky restraint of a roller coaster. Before she even looks for Raf she decides to stay like this. To never let him out of her sight again. Her eyes dart around the darkened hotel room like a woodland animal, alert, waiting for Raf to come out and strike, her eyes fixed on the closed bathroom door. But nothing happens. He’s not here.

  ‘Turn your phone off please,’ Amanda says, her voice firm but kind.

  ‘What the fuck are you –’

  ‘I’m sorry about faking the post-it to get you here, but it was the only way to keep both of you safe. Now please, for Bobby, turn your phone off.’ Erin feels the weight of it in her pocket. Bobby’s little paws tickle at the hairs on her arm, he wants to get back to playing. She makes a circular pen with her legs and puts Bobby in the middle with his toiletries. ‘He uses the Find My iPhone thing, it doesn’t work if the phone’s off.’

  ‘What do you mean he uses?’

  ‘He always likes to know where we are, to make sure we’re OK. But he can’t know we’re here now. He’ll try and stop it.’ Erin turns off the phone. She has no idea what the hell is going on but Amanda said that Bobby wasn’t safe and, with what she’s read on the train, with what she saw earlier in the day, she feels she has to do as she’s told. Amanda comes over to her and makes to sit down in front of her.

  ‘Back off. Sit somewhere else,’ Erin finds herself saying. Amanda gets back up and walks over to the desk near the window. ‘Open the curtains.’ Amanda does as she’s told, flooding the dingy hotel room with daylight. ‘Now, what the fuck is going on? I thought you were abducting my baby.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Amanda says, sitting down on the edge of the chair. ‘I didn’t want to scare you. I would never do anything to hurt Bobby, never, but I needed you to come here and I knew you wouldn’t if I just asked you to.’

  ‘You wrote the Post-it?’

  Amanda nods, looking proud of herself. ‘And I left the screwdriver out so you’d see it. I couldn’t risk us being at your house, he wouldn’t have allowed it.’ She’s smiling still as if this is a nice chat they’re having.

  ‘So you wanted me to find the other Post-it, the one with our address he sent you?’

  ‘I’ve started to become concerned about what he was doing to you. It felt, it felt like it wasn’t loving any more.’

  ‘What wasn’t loving?’

  ‘Making you think you’d set up a different bank account. He – he’s always been strange about money. His mother’s fault. When she left them she took most of his father’s money. It forced them to move from the city. She’d never had a job, and he’s always said that if she hadn’t been able to take that money, she never would have left and they might have worked it out. It’s incredibly traumatic for a boy to lose his mother so young.’

  Erin places a hand on Bobby’s bare knee.

  ‘He set up the bank account? He’s stealing my Instagram money?’

  ‘No, no.’ Amanda laughs. ‘No, I don’t think he needs to steal from you. He set up the account in your name. He felt like he was losing you, with all your Internet stuff. He was scared you might leave if you had the means. I tried to tell him.’ She shrugs, with that gleeful grin that Erin would love to smack off her face right now, ‘I took your side. I told him that he should let you go. I could see from the moment I walked into your house that you weren’t meant to be together. It was so obvious. When I first got there, when you were away, he said that sending me your address was a mistake. He said he’d been feeling down in the dumps, ignored by you, uninspired by his art, and he thought he wanted to see me, but that it had been a mistake. He told me to go and I was going to, but as soon as you walked in, as soon as you sat down and went straight to your phone, I knew you didn’t have what him and I have and I couldn’t leave after that.’ Amanda plays her fingers over what looks like an envelope on the desk. ‘I’m so pleased that this –’ she gestures to Erin on the floor – ‘has worked out so well.’

  Erin looks at the door. She should go. The way Amanda’s talking about Raf isn’t right. He abducted her, he statutory-raped her then abandoned her for twenty years, and she’s making excuses for him like she’s his long-suffering girlfriend. Erin stands up, bringing Bobby into her arms. Amanda makes a face at him, tongue out and cheeks puffed out, looking faintly absurd in a cream lace dress in this soulless hotel room. ‘Miss Havisham’ vi
bes she remembers Caz having said about the way she dresses, having no sense of quite how unwittingly prescient she was being. Erin gets a stab of chill down her back. Why has this woman brought her here? What’s she planning on doing to her? Amanda cocks her head to the side, perhaps seeing the dawning fear in her eyes. Erin goes for the door but the handle just flicks down impotently. It’s locked. Amanda comes towards her, the envelope in her hand.

  ‘This is for you,’ Amanda says, handing the envelope over. Bobby starts using Erin’s ribcage as a climbing frame and she nearly hands him over to Amanda before remembering and wheeling him away from her. She crosses to the corner of the room, rests Bobby on the top of the trouser press and opens the envelope. Inside there’s a plane ticket. British Airways, to Sydney, for Erin Braune plus an infant.

  ‘I’ve packed a bag for you with some of your things, some essentials for Bob. Passports are in there too. I checked with the airline and you can take two tubs of formula with you – that should be enough to get you going.’ Erin watches Amanda swing a plastic bag with two huge cans of formula up onto the bed. ‘Am I right in thinking you’ve got a cousin who lives somewhere in Oz?’

  ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Erin spits the words out with such venom that even Bobby looks shocked. ‘You think I’m going to leave my fiancé, leave my home, with a eleven-month-old? How much did you spend on this ticket? Jesus Christ, Amanda? What the actual fuck is wrong with you?’

  ‘You don’t want to leave him?’ It’s a genuine question. ‘Did you not read my journal? We’re married. If the law was a little more nuanced about age differences in meaningful relationships we’d still be together. We’ve always been supposed to be together, Erin. That’s why it’s not worked between you. It’s not your fault.’ She moves towards Erin, hands outstretched as if to take hers. Erin backs into her corner, brings Bobby closer into her neck. ‘I know it might seem drastic but it’s the only way he’ll let you go. He can’t go back to Oz after what happened with us when we were kids –’