The Argument

by Victoria Jenkins

  There is a silence that Olivia feels like a weight pressing down on her, almost as though she knows where this is going and what will happen next. The bubble is closing in around her, stealing her air. She can feel eyes already resting upon her, burning her with the shame that rises in her chest and settles at her throat.

  ‘Ask Olivia,’ Joel Murray pipes up from the far corner of the room. ‘She’ll be able to explain it to you.’

  The room is split with the laughter of some and the questioning silence of others. Olivia realises that most of them know what happened on Friday night; gossip spreads through the school quicker than measles at a nursery. She hasn’t seen the boy that morning; she doesn’t even know whether he’s in school. He’s in the sixth form, so he might not even be there yet; she knows that sometimes they don’t bother coming in until their lessons start. She feels her face burn with shame and embarrassment. She turns her head to look out of the car park, wishing she was able to just get up and run from the class, leave the building and the school grounds and keep sprinting until her legs carry her somewhere where she will never be found.

  When Miss Johnson speaks, her voice is uncharacteristically icy and her tone throws the classroom back into silence. ‘Go outside please, Joel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Outside,’ Miss Johnson repeats, staring at him with a look that says she is not to be pushed any further.

  Joel shoves his chair back, mumbles something and lollops from the classroom with all the grace of a skinny sloth, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘Anyone have anything intelligent to add to the conversation?’ Miss Johnson asks. ‘Why does Curley’s wife behave the way she does?’

  ‘I think it’s a cry for help,’ Sarah Mayhew says.

  ‘Thank you, Sarah. Go on.’

  ‘Well,’ the girl says, glancing over at Olivia, ‘she might not be doing it in the best way, but it’s like Curley’s wife is just trying to get someone to notice her. Curley neglects her, so she’s looking for attention somewhere else. It’s not her fault really, is it?’

  Miss Johnson smiles, as though grateful that she has finally received a sensible response. ‘Exactly. We might not agree with everything she does, but Curley’s wife is a character we should feel sympathy for. She’s a victim of her husband’s abuse, a victim of society’s treatment of women, a victim of a failed American Dream. So with that in mind, please, I’d like you all to add to your homework any of the points that have just been raised that you’ve not already got, and when you’ve done that I’d like you to make a start on the extract question I gave you last week.’

  She waits for the class to settle into their work before going outside to speak to Joel. Olivia watches as Miss Johnson closes the door behind her, careful to keep the conversation from the ears of the class. She sees Joel standing with his head lowered and his hands shoved into his pockets and expects that whatever it is Miss Johnson is saying to him, it is passing over his head unheeded. When they return, he heads straight to his seat without making eye contact with Olivia and Miss Johnson continues the lesson as though nothing happened.

  Olivia wills the rest of the hour away, grateful at the sound of the teacher’s voice telling them to pack away their things and leave their books on the desk to be collected for marking. She is one of the last to head towards the door, but Miss Johnson stops her.

  ‘Are you okay, Olivia?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, responding without making eye contact.

  ‘What happened back then with Joel,’ she begins.

  ‘I said I’m fine,’ Olivia snaps, throwing her bag on to her shoulder. ‘Just leave it, all right.’

  She leaves the class hurriedly, bumping into another student in the corridor. She spends lunchtime in the library, pretending to read a book she hasn’t even looked at the title of. Her stomach rumbles with hunger, but she doesn’t want to eat; she can’t face the stodgy sandwiches her mother has made her, and she doesn’t have any money to buy something from the canteen. She never thought she would find herself feeling this way, but all she wants is for three o’clock to arrive so that she can go home.

  When it eventually does – the afternoon having passed without further event – Olivia walks her usual route home. She usually meets her mother and Rosie along the way, but that day there is no sign of either of them. She doesn’t wait; despite her hatred of the place, all Olivia wants to do is get back to the house. When she turns on to the cul-de-sac on which her family lives, Olivia is stopped by a young woman standing at the entrance to the street. She has a child with her, a small olive-skinned boy of about four or five years old who grips the woman’s hand as he looks at Olivia through a curtain of dark fringe.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, giving Olivia a small smile. ‘Have you got the time, please?’

  Olivia gropes in her pocket for her mobile phone, presses the lock key and tells the woman the time that lights up on its screen. The woman is staring at her as she does so; Olivia can feel her eyes fixed to her face, her attention unnerving.

  ‘Thank you,’ the woman says, and then, nervously, as though she feels it necessary to break the silence, she adds, ‘we’re just waiting for someone.’

  Olivia smiles awkwardly but says nothing. She heads along the pavement, but when she turns back, the woman is still there, her eyes still following Olivia as she heads towards home. The little boy is tugging at her arm impatiently, apparently fed up at being kept waiting around.

  Olivia gets home to a silent house. Her mother is home, she is always home, but she is in the living room and doesn’t come out into the hallway when she hears Olivia come through the front door. Olivia catches a glimpse of her as she heads up the stairs, her mother sitting on the sofa with her back to the living room door, inert as a shop mannequin. She goes straight to her room and changes out of her uniform, feeling cleaner for just being free of it. She is folding her clothes and placing them in a pile on the chair by the window when she notices the photo album on the bed. It has been kept in the drawer of her bedside table for years, and Olivia can’t remember the last time she looked at it. Her mother has been in her room. This is nothing unusual – there is no privacy in this house, not that she’s aware of anyway – but it isn’t common for her mother to go through her drawers. If she brings up clothes, she usually leaves them on the bed and tells Olivia to put them away.

  Leaving her uniform half-folded, Olivia goes to the bed, sits down and pulls open the drawer of the bedside table. She rummages frantically, trying to recall the details of what else might have been in there and what else her mother may have seen. Her heart stutters in her chest as she remembers what else was in her room, and she drops from the bed on to the carpet. She looks under the mattress, frantically groping along the slats of the wooden bed frame, but what she’s looking for isn’t there. The diary has gone. Her mother has taken it.

  7

  Seven

  Hannah

  * * *

  At some point during the afternoon, Hannah fell asleep on the bed. It isn’t like her to have done so; she can never usually sleep during the day unless she’s unwell, which she knows she’s not. Not physically, at least. Mentally, she isn’t so sure. She feels exhausted by everything, run down by the erratic journey her thoughts keep taking her on. She wakes up on top of the duvet fully dressed, feeling cold and sick, panicking even though she isn’t sure why. It is nearly three o’clock; she will be late for the girls.

  As she heads downstairs, the first thing she notices is the open key box by the front door. She left it closed earlier, she knows she did. Hannah’s pace quickens down the last few steps and she snatches the little door of the box, yanking it fully open. Her set of keys is hanging on one of the little hooks inside the box. She takes them out and turns them in her hand, studying them as though there is some sort of mistake and they are not really hers. But they are. And they have been here all day, they must have been. Only, Hannah knows they weren’t.

  She goes in
to the living room and sits in silence, the set of keys still in her hand. She trusts Rosie to walk home from school alone and knows there won’t be a problem with her doing so, but it is Olivia that worries her. After everything else, she hopes her daughter won’t be foolish enough to do anything reckless. She feels confident on this occasion that she won’t. Despite her recent rebellion, Olivia knows there is only so far that she and Michael will be pushed.

  For the first time in a long time, Hannah feels like crying. She isn’t really an emotional person – on the rare occasions that tears do appear, they are usually in anger rather than sadness – but her heart feels heavy today and she feels exhausted by everything in way that she is usually able to overcome and move on from quickly. Today, all she wants to do is go upstairs and climb back into bed, to pull the duvet over her head and forget for a while that her life is as it is, with all its complications and its troubles.

  She knows she is being irrational. No life is without its dramas, she thinks, but it is the lack of control that frustrates her the most. Wherever there is a problem, Hannah likes to be able to find a solution that will resolve it. She needs to feel capable, accomplished; grounded. Olivia is testing all these things, trying to challenge her control in a way she realises most teenagers must. Only, this feels different. Olivia is dangerous, and it is only a matter of time before the fact is proven.

  She arrives home from school earlier than Rosie, which Hannah isn’t expecting; Rosie’s school is closer than Olivia’s. She doesn’t need to look at her to know that it is Olivia; she can tell from the way she clatters in through the front door and almost falls up the stairs, going straight to her room to get changed out of her uniform. Hannah waits for Rosie, who comes through the front door just a couple of minutes after her sister.

  ‘I forgot my homework diary,’ she says, standing at the living room door with a sheepish look on her face, apologetic at her lateness. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Something came up.’ Hannah shrugs the question away. She doesn’t mind Rosie’s lateness; she is too preoccupied with thoughts of Olivia to worry much about Rosie. Rosie is respectful of her mother; she always has been. There is nothing she has ever questioned, not in the way Olivia has.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asks, her mind still distracted.

  ‘Okay. We made a collage - do you want to see?’

  She nods as Rosie comes into the living room and drops her school bag from her shoulder, unzipping it to find the masterpiece she has created. It is too big for the bag and has been folded in half, an impressive array of leaves and twigs glued to a sheet of thin cardboard. Rosie looks at her mother and back to the artwork, turning it to a better angle. ‘It’s a bird,’ she tells her mother, her voice hopeful.

  ‘Of course, it is,’ Hannah says, pulling herself from thoughts of Olivia. She points at each of the bird’s features and names them in turn: a beak, a wing; two clawed feet. ‘It’s lovely, Rosie.’

  Rosie smiles half-heartedly, as though accepting her mother’s lack of enthusiasm as expected. She packs the bird back into her bag. ‘I’m going to get changed.’

  Hannah nods and says nothing as Rosie leaves the room. There is something she needs to do, something she should have done on Sunday. She goes upstairs to Olivia’s room. Her older daughter is sitting on her bed, changed from her school uniform into her pyjamas, a pair with tiny rainbows dotted over the trousers that make her look far younger than she is. She doesn’t appear to be doing anything, which makes Hannah suspicious of what she may be hiding.

  ‘Good day at school?’ she asks, closing the bedroom door behind her.

  Olivia looks at her with a mixed expression of resentment and anticipation, unsure of what is going on or what is about to happen. Hannah hasn’t really pressed the issue of her elected silence, though she feels now that maybe she should have done so sooner.

  There is no response. She hadn’t expected one, but she wonders just how long Olivia can keep up this silent protest. ‘Your father should be home soon,’ she continues, glancing at the clock on Olivia’s bedroom wall.

  Michael is late back from work, but this isn’t uncommon. His job seems to involve increasingly long hours, and she knows she can’t complain. The money he makes is good; it has paid for their beautiful home and it allows her the freedom to not have to work, a freedom for which she is eternally grateful. The only job she has ever had was as a shop-assistant, part-time when she was a teenager. Though she sometimes wonders what it might be like to have a career, she has no regrets about the choices she has made. Having a family at such a young age may never have been on Hannah’s agenda, but she knows that her life is everything she’d ever wanted, and during her hardest days she reminds herself of the fact.

  Hannah appreciates all that Michael does for her and their family, though there are times she wishes he could be around a little more. They had both assumed that as the girls got older things would become easier, but the opposite is proving true, and Hannah sometimes feels as though she is parenting them alone.

  When she thinks of those early days with Olivia as a newborn, much of what Hannah can recall of that time is characterised by sleeplessness and fear. The days merged into one, a phase that seemed to her to be never-ending, and though she knew the feelings she was experiencing were normal to most new mothers, she feared that there was something more, something she couldn’t confess to anyone. Sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to hold her own child. When Olivia would cry – that piercing, shrill squawk that only tiny babies have – Hannah would find herself unable to go to her, wanting only to shut herself from the sound somehow, to run away from her responsibilities and everything her life had so suddenly become. She felt the isolation so intensely at times it seemed it would break her. She reminds herself it didn’t, and that if she could get through those days and those months that preceded it, she can get through anything.

  Hannah has seen the way in which when certain things became easier, others became more challenging. As the relentlessness of Olivia’s colic subsided, it gave way to teething and illness, and there were days when Hannah would forget to eat. She loved her daughter – she tried her very best to love her - but she knew she didn’t love her in the right way, as she suspected other mothers loved their children, and the knowledge of her emotional deficiencies hung over her like the darkest of clouds, exhausting her with the guilt it rained over her in frequent relentless downpours.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll tell your father how your day was,’ Hannah says, snapping herself back to the present. Her words are spoken with the tone of a threat. It is intended. Olivia has got away with too much for too long now; if they are going to sort her behaviour out before things escalate any further, they’re going to have to get tougher in the way they deal with her. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell him why you did what you did.’

  There is a reaction from Olivia, though it is not as Hannah expected. There’s a flicker behind her eyes, but it is doubtful to Hannah whether it is one of recognition. Instead, Olivia seems not to know what she is referring to. Could she have got this wrong? Has Michael got it wrong? Are they holding Olivia responsible for what happened here on Saturday night, when really their daughter is blameless of any fault on this occasion?

  ‘I won’t be made to feel this way in my own home,’ she says, knowing that Michael’s intuition often proves itself correct, as annoying at times as that might be. ‘Whatever you’re trying to do, you won’t intimidate me.’

  She is lying, of course; she is already intimidated. Not by Olivia, but by what she fears she might know. She waits for Olivia to respond in some way, but there is yet again nothing. Her daughter has looked away, no longer tolerating hold eye contact between them.

  ‘Come down and have your dinner,’ Hannah says, making it clear that this is an instruction and not a request.

  Without objection, Olivia slides from the bed and makes her way to the bedroom door. Hannah follows her downstairs and they go to the kitchen. She serves their food in sile
nce, inwardly shaken at the muted defiance her older daughter is so easily capable of. She does know what happened, but she didn’t so much as flinch at the mention of Saturday, which makes Hannah wonder just what exactly Olivia is made of. Does she have no conscience at all?

  As the three of them eat in silence, Hannah looks at Rosie, her head bowed over her dinner as though in prayer. She watches as her younger daughter spears a piece of broccoli with her fork and pops it into her mouth, chewing with her head still lowered, not wanting to be drawn into the strange situation playing out between her sister and her mother. Once again, Hannah finds herself trapped in the thought of what it would mean to keep Rosie this way forever. It would be so much better, so much safer for them all if they were able to.

  She glances between her two daughters, wondering if one will turn out as the other. She doesn’t want to consider the possibility that Rosie may follow Olivia’s example, and without having to fool herself she doesn’t believe it will happen. At Rosie’s age, Olivia was a different creature. She has always been this way, selfish and dramatic; all it needed was for Olivia to reach her teens for these qualities to achieve their full potential. Hannah needs to make sure that Olivia doesn’t try to corrupt Rosie.

  * * *

  She watches Olivia barely touch her meal. She has done this a lot recently, pushing her food from one side of the plate to the other, and in the past year her figure has changed dramatically, the youthful puppy fat she carried around her thighs and stomach has now disappeared, replaced by slim legs and a tiny waistline. Hannah suspects that much of her eating habits – or lack of them – is about control, though she’s not sure what Olivia hopes to achieve by it all. She has always been an attention seeker. Where Rosie is content to get on with things and lead a happy, quiet life, Olivia just seems to want to stand out. It’s a shame for them all that she seems intent on standing out for all the wrong reasons.