The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  Hope looked at me with amusement. ‘Say fucking, Annie, for God’s sake.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can’t say flipping. You’ll get beaten up if you speak like that. They’ll think you’re posh.’

  ‘Who will?’

  She waved her hand towards the window. ‘Everyone. No one likes someone stuck up. Listen,’ she said and looked at me seriously, ‘I reckon you’ve had a pretty sheltered life. Now you’re in care, it’s different. You’ll get out of here at sixteen and they’ll move you to a flat like the one I grew up in. You get hard people in places like that. I mean really hard. You won’t have a hope of surviving if you don’t toughen up a bit.’

  ‘I am tough,’ I said, because I felt like I was. I was still here, still surviving.

  ‘You’ve got to get rid of that posh edge, though.’

  ‘What posh edge?’

  ‘All that flipping, for a start. All the brains. Stop talking about GCSEs. Be a normal fuck-up like the rest of us.’

  A normal fuck-up. I wasn’t even meant to be here, not really. It was just that no foster carer could handle me when I was ill. I’d never thought about it too much, but I had this plan to go back to school one day, when I got out of here. Catch up on everything I’d missed. Become a doctor like they said I should.

  I said, ‘I don’t really want to be a fuck-up.’

  She was silent for a moment, then she sighed and said, ‘You’re sweet, Annie. I wish I was more like you.’

  ‘I liked school,’ I told her. ‘It was hard to keep going after everything that happened with my mum, and when I got ill I had too much time off so kind of gave up. But I’m keeping up with English and maths here, and I want to go back one day. Eventually. Maybe do some ‘A’ levels or something.’

  She stared at me. ‘Really?’ she said, as if I’d just announced a plan to take over the world.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you just want to … I don’t know … get away from all this shit?’

  ‘Course I do,’ I said. ‘That’s how I plan to do it.’

  She appeared to be thinking about what I’d said because she fell silent again. She shook her head. ‘It’s too late for me. I’ve missed too much and I’m thick as pig shit. I just want to drink and sleep, and then eventually die, when I’m brave enough.’

  I was shocked then. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I hate being alive, truth be told. I hate being me. Really, it’s hell. I used to drink a lot after my sister died, before they put me in secure. Whole bottles of vodka, and then I’d pass out. It was peaceful. You can’t feel anything when you’re blacked out and no one comes near you with their greedy cocks or their stinking breath. They just leave you to lie there, blank in your own little world. It’s much better. Now I’m here, though, I can’t drink anything. That’s why I sleep so much. It’s the closest I can get to being pissed. You should try it. Just lie on your bed and count to fifty and then sleep comes and takes you away from this shit for a while. That’s how it would be to die, I reckon. Peaceful. Like being in the deepest, warmest sleep forever.’

  Her voice had taken on that dreamy quality again, the one she’d had when we were looking out at the tarn, as if she really were longing to drift away.

  I shuddered. ‘Don’t talk like this,’ I said.

  She shook her head, as if in apology. ‘I can’t help it,’ she told me. ‘All these plans for the future … They’re pointless, Annie. It’s too late for me. I won’t be here much longer. I’ll be gone before next year.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said again, and I reached out and took her hand in mine. I liked her by now and although I knew there was nothing I could say to ease whatever awful memories made her feel like this, I began to think that I could be her friend and that if she knew she had a friend, she might stop wanting to die.

  27

  Hope

  Ace Clarke was part of my life from when I was six months old. My mother tried to get by without him at first, despite him constantly encouraging her to come back to work so she’d have the money she needed to feed me. The social workers were on her back from pretty much the minute I was born. I was undernourished, they said, underweight. Breastfeeding was a failure so my mother had to give me formula, but it was too expensive. She could only afford two bottles a day and the rest of the time, she topped me up with cold, boiled water.

  She was afraid to go back to work. She was worried they’d find out how she earned her living and then they’d definitely take me away. No one would let a child be brought up by a woman like that.

  In the end, though, she had to. As much as anything else, it was driving her mad, being cooped up in that flat all day while I threw tantrums and did nothing, so she said, but cry.

  Ace lived in Tynemouth, in one of the long Georgian terraces that overlooked Longsands Beach and the pier. In their heyday, these buildings had housed the North East’s wealthy men and all their fashionable wives. They’d been the settings for lavish parties and marriage scandals, and back then, their ivory-painted facades had gleamed in the light. Now, they carried a look of faded seaside glamour. The exteriors were peeling; the elegant columns had fractured; the sash window frames were damp and rotting. Many had been converted into flats owned by neglectful landlords, others were victims of abandoned renovation projects and now stood empty, with weather-beaten ‘For Sale’ boards waving optimistically in the coastal winds.

  Ace owned all six floors of 5 Crescent Avenue. He lived on the top three. The rest he rented out to sex workers who wanted to be free from the dangers of the streets. He wasn’t a pimp, didn’t like that term. Pimps were bastards. Ace had helped many a woman whose pimps had left her beaten and broke, and he’d brought them all here, where they could work in safety. He looked after them. He was a big man – tall, wide, muscular – and knew how to target a punch with enough precision to put its recipient in A&E. Everyone knew not to mess with Ace’s girls.

  My mother was one of Ace’s girls. One of his best. She was good-looking, for a start, and brought in regular clients. He wanted her back. He said he’d look after me upstairs while she rented out a room below. He told me they were great, those days with me, and he looked forward to them. He’d never been married, didn’t have children of his own or any nieces and nephews, so babies were new to him. When I wasn’t crying, he liked me, found me charming. He liked to watch me as I sat in front of the TV, gripping my bottle of milk, transfixed by the bright colours and the sounds on the screen. It melted his heart.

  The trouble was, I never stayed content for very long. I’d start crying and he wouldn’t know what to do with me, and I’d end up lying on the floor, my whole body writhing, my red face covered in snot and tears, and the noise was awful. It felt to Ace – and to my mother, too, I knew – as though this sound had been deliberately designed to drive the poor bastards who had to listen to it so crazy they would do anything to shut it up. Anything.

  It was weird, he thought, how you could go from feeling quite smitten with someone to actually hating them in less than five minutes. But Christ, he’d tried everything. ‘Come on, Hope,’ he’d said at first. ‘It’s not as bad as all that.’ But I was still going on. Clearly, I thought it was as bad as all that. There was a selfishness to my refusal to shut up. How could a kid still be wailing like this, when he’d done everything anyone could know to do? He moved towards me and tried picking me up, but I increased the pitch of my screams as soon he touched me, then started banging my head against the rug.

  ‘You were always mad,’ he told me, many years later when he related this tale. ‘Mad as shit, but we loved you, anyway.’

  He left me in the sitting room with the TV and took himself to the kitchen, where he grabbed a can of Stella from the fridge. Jesus. No one could look after a toddler all day without a lager, and if they said they could, they were lying.

  He heard the sharp-heeled footfall of one of the girls coming up the stairs and hoped it was my mother. It probably wou
ld be. She’d been working for hours with her regular, the man who was in love with her. He barely seemed fussed about the sex. He just wanted to be in a room with her and spend half a day talking and talking – intimate but not dirty, my mother had said. ‘Like his wife?’ one of the other girls asked. ‘No. Like his mother,’ she told them, and they’d laughed. That was the part of the job she said she found toughest. Sleeping with strangers was easy. It was the emotional drain of pretending she gave a shit about them that she hated.

  The door opened and she appeared in the kitchen, wearing a green dress with a gold scarf and gold shoes. She reminded him of those birds you saw on TV sometimes – the ones who paraded their bright colours to attract a mate. And she did attract them. She was gorgeous, one of the most popular girls he knew. Up for anything, but sweet with it. Caring. A rare jewel.

  She plonked herself down on a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘Oh, God. Is that Hope crying?’

  Ace said, ‘I had to leave her there. She’s been driving me a bit nuts. You want a Stella?’

  ‘Please.’

  He passed a can to her. She cracked it open and took a long slug. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘God, what a morning.’

  ‘Aaron?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not him. He cancelled. This new one. Fat bloke. Fat as a walrus. I’d have suffocated under him, so had to go on top. Thought I was going to burn my arse on the lightbulb.’

  Ace laughed.

  My mother gestured towards the room next door. ‘How long’s the little one been crying?’

  ‘Ages. I couldn’t stop her.’

  She sighed and stood up. ‘I’d better go and see her. Poor thing. She’s probably tired.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ve got twenty minutes till my next client. I’ll see if I can get her to sleep. Give you a break.’

  Ace watched her walk away. The dress was so tight over her arse, you could see the ripple of flesh beneath. She was a good money-spinner, this one. And as for me, that daughter of hers … Well, if I’d inherited anything like my mother’s charms, he’d be on to a winner with me, too. Twelve years from now if he was lucky. Fifteen, max. Already such a sweet, pretty little thing; he was sure I’d grow into something completely adorable. He just needed to look after us, keep us safe, love us.

  28

  Annie

  We learned this patch of the Lake District by heart. We knew its miles of paths, its high mountain tarns, its rocky peaks and deep, green valleys. We knew the abandoned places too, the woodland and hills that walkers hardly went near, and we found ourselves a spot far up in the highest fell behind the home, where a lone waterfall would appear after rainfall and create a clear, ice-cool pool in a hollow among the rocks.

  That summer was hot, though not without rain. The Lake District was never without rain. This we were still discovering. We were young, and it had never occurred to either of us before that it was possible to become deeply attached to a landscape, to begin to learn its wildness and all its intricacies, but suddenly now it was happening to us.

  ‘We’re like hippies or something,’ she said, as we sat on the edge of the rocks and dangled our feet in the pool.

  ‘I know. Weird, isn’t it?’

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘It hurts less here.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  I did know. I knew exactly what she meant. She’d given words to the way I’d been feeling for a while now, and she was exactly right. Up here, surrounded by the grey faces of the mountains, and hearing only the force of water above us, everything hurt less.

  Back at the home, though, it was different. Back at the home, the roots of our pasts pulled us down again. Everything about it was a reminder: the bolted door to the office that held all our dark histories; the ever-changing rota of staff; the silent telephone; the lovelessness.

  And Lara. Creepy, silent Lara.

  ‘What do you think’s wrong with her?’ Hope asked me.

  I shrugged. ‘No idea.’

  ‘But there has to be a reason for it. A reason why she doesn’t speak.’

  ‘Of course there’s a reason. She’s probably got some really bleak past.’

  ‘Bleaker than mine?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No one’s is bleaker than mine.’

  She was always like this – competitive about who’d had the worst life and the strongest right to steadfast unhappiness.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘What? Do you think she’s had it worse than me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Hope. For God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m going to find out.’

  ‘How? It’s not like you can ask her.’

  ‘No. But there are ways.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Break into the office. Read her files.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘I bloody can.’

  ‘They’ll kick you out.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  So she did it. A few weeks later, Danny – who was an idiot sometimes – left his keys lying on the kitchen island, and she pocketed them. Just like that. She burst into my room triumphantly. ‘Look what I’ve got,’ she said, waving them in front of me. ‘The keys to the office. I’m going in. Tonight.’

  I felt the thud of panic. I didn’t want her finding out about my history, the madness and the illness. I had this feeling she’d stop being my friend if she knew, and I’d come to rely on her friendship. If ‘friendship’ was what you could call it. What we shared now felt deeper and weirder than friendship. But we weren’t like family either, because we understood each other far better than families did.

  I said, ‘Don’t, Hope.’

  ‘Why? Are you scared I’ll find out things about you?’

  ‘No.’

  She noted the look on my face and softened her voice. ‘Listen, I’ll only raid Lara’s files, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I didn’t see that there was anything else I could do. If I protested too much, she’d become too intrigued and hunt out everything about me.

  She waited until all the staff had gone to bed and then she did it. Shortly after 1.00 am, she came into my room, switched the light on and said, ‘Oh, my God. It’s bad.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Lara. All her family are dead. Guess how?’

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘And guess who did it?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? Her dad, probably.’

  ‘Yep. Killed her mother and her baby sister. Shot the shit out of them. Right in front of Lara.’

  ‘And left Lara alive?’

  ‘If you can call it that.’

  The horror of it silenced me.

  ‘I should try and be her friend, maybe,’ she said. ‘I understand her.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, and felt weirdly jealous. I didn’t want her being friends with someone else, and understanding them. I wanted her to be all mine.

  29

  Hope

  Mum said I was a nightmare, right from the very beginning, and told me a lot of stories about my early life that were meant to prove this point. For a long time, I believed her. Ace used to back her up, as if he were my dad or something – which, let’s face it, he might have been – so I mostly spent my early years finding ways to put right the appalling horror of me. It meant I pretty much did everything they told me to, which was no good for me at all.

  The social workers were on to my mother from the start. They kept a careful eye on her, paying visits to our flat to make sure she was feeding me right and watching her behaviour for signs of booze or madness.

  Three years in, and she was at the end of her tether. I still spent most of my time lying on the floor, crying and screaming. They told my mother I’d grow out of it, but I wasn’t showing any signs of doing that at all, and she was pretty damn furious about it.

  ‘She’s always like this,’ my mother said, looking helplessly at me raging on the carpet in front of a television that no longer held my attent
ion. ‘I don’t know what to do with her. She needs to know she can’t get her own way all the time.’

  ‘What do you do when she’s like this?’

  ‘I try everything. Really, I do. Give her sweets, pick her up, cuddle her. But nothing works. She ends up hurting me, so I just have to put her down and ignore her. It can go on for ages. Hours. She’s always been difficult, ever since she was born. I think she might have ADHD or something. I took her to the doctor, but he said she’s fine. I’m thinking of taking her back, though. Get a second opinion. I need help with this kid. Someone has to help me. The health visitor said I should put her in a warm bath when she gets like this, see if that calms her down. I tried it once, but she kicked and screamed so much I swear I thought she was going to drown herself, so I had to take her out. And I haven’t got that sort of money. I can’t go wasting hot water four times a day on a kid who won’t stop yelling at me.’

  ‘What do you do with her during the day?’

  ‘I go over to Sure Start sometimes. I do that when I can. But she doesn’t always behave over there, and it gets stressful when she kicks off in front of people. And then I get angry and I feel like everyone’s watching me and thinking what a bad mother I am, but I’m doing my best. Honest, I really am trying. But she’s a difficult child. She acts like she hates me, and I don’t know what to do about it, and I’m so tired.’ She put her head in her hands then and started to cry. ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do. I try and get some kip and she just wakes up and I get angry with her then for being so selfish and not giving me a minute’s peace, and I know it’s not her fault. She’s just a baby really … Please don’t take her away from me. I just need some help.’

  ‘We’ll help you, Bex. We’ll do what we can,’ they said.

  They were always full of promises, my mother told me, but nothing ever happened. No one ever did help. That was why she ended up on drugs again.