The Argument

by Victoria Jenkins

  She tries Michael’s mobile again, but it goes straight to answer phone. She waits for the beep, but when the chance to speak comes, Hannah finds herself saying nothing. She cuts the call, leaving him to be met with silence when he next checks his messages. A part of her hopes it may come across as ominous as it sounds.

  She watches television for a while, not really paying attention to anything that plays out in front of her. At just before 10pm she goes upstairs and gets ready for bed, not bothering to check on either of the girls as she usually does. She falls into sleep quickly, but it is dream-filled and restless. She is too hot, too cold, too preoccupied with everything that the past week has thrown at her. After an hour of tossing and turning, of fighting the duvet off herself only to pull it up around her neck again, she drifts into a deeper sleep where her dreams are vivid and alive, taking her to places she would never willingly allow herself to return.

  There is a man in the darkness; she hasn’t seen him, but she can sense that he is there. He is standing over her, his boots on the soft mud that she is lying in. She can feel the cold wetness of the ground seeping through her clothing, chilling her to the naked skin beneath her dress. She can’t see properly, not just because of the darkness but because of something else, something that hurts her head and stings behind her eyes.

  She feels a hand on her shoulder, and it rips her from the dream.

  ‘Hannah.’

  ‘Christ,’ she says, putting a hand to her chest. ‘Don’t do that, Michael – you could have given me a heart attack.’

  She turns over beneath the duvet, her eyes adjusting to the shapes within the darkened room as she wakens. Her husband is lying on the bed beside her, his coat still on. She catches his smile among the shadows.

  ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’

  ‘Well you certainly did that.’ Hannah pushes herself up and sits back against the pillows. ‘Haven’t you looked at your phone? I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘Sorry, love. Been driving, haven’t checked it. It’s probably still on silent from the meeting earlier.’ His eyes meet hers in the darkness. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I called the hotel. They said no one called Michael Walters was staying there today.’

  ‘I decided to come home. I thought you’d be happy to see me.’

  She is, but for all the wrong reasons, ones she knows are selfish and preoccupied with the hope of making her own life easier. She doesn’t want to have to deal with Olivia alone, and she hopes that he will take the burden of having to find a way to resolve the situation from her. Where Olivia is concerned, Hannah isn’t convinced a resolution can be found, and yet she knows already that Michael has a plan. She is just waiting to see whether he will follow it through.

  ‘I am. Why didn’t they just tell me you’d cancelled your room then?’

  ‘Christ, Hannah, I don’t know,’ he says, standing and removing his shoes. ‘I’d probably got taken off the system by the time you called.’ He removes his coat and hangs it on the hook at the back of the bedroom door. ‘I thought you’d be happy to see me. Why do I feel as though I’m being interrogated?’

  Hannah sits up, leans over and turns on the bedside lamp. Michael is unbuttoning his work shirt. He looks tired, as always – heavy shadows sit beneath his eyes and he’s in need of a shave - and she feels guilty for giving him such a hard time. What happened today is not his fault. Despite the thoughts that flitted through her mind earlier, neither of them is blame for this.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s happened, anyway?’ he asks, removing his trousers and returning to the bed.

  ‘Nothing,’ she lies. The thought of what happened that afternoon crashes down on top of her, sleep having briefly removed the weight of it from her consciousness. She thinks of the internet, of her daughter’s body being shared on social media, and she tries to push the images away from the front of her mind. She doesn’t know how she is going to tell Michael about the shame their daughter has brought upon the family. She has no idea how he might react. ‘It’s Olivia,’ she says, her voice small.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Good,’ Michael says, cutting her short. ‘She’s safe and well, then?’

  Hannah nods. ‘The thing is…’

  He puts a finger to her lips, silencing her words. His fingertips are cold with the lingering chill of night air, and she feels a shiver snake through her, pushing goose bumps through her flesh.

  ‘Whatever it is, Hannah, can it wait until tomorrow, please. Just this once, let’s have a night without drama, shall we?’

  When he kisses her, Hannah responds with more enthusiasm than she knows she has shown him in a long time, forcing herself with a reciprocation that doesn’t come naturally to her, not when she is so preoccupied by everything else. She knows he is right; they deserve some peace and some happiness. Not everything can be about Olivia, regardless of her intent to make it so.

  Michael lifts her t-shirt and she allows him to take it off without resistance. He moves towards her, his bare chest hot against hers, and when he pushes her to the bed, she sinks into the mattress beneath the weight of him, happy to have his body smother hers; grateful in this moment that at least she can be distracted from thoughts of her daughter. When Michael pulls away and pushes himself up on his arms, Hannah thinks he has changed his mind. Instead, he leans over and switches her bedside lamp off, submerging them back into darkness.

  She closes her eyes and waits for the sex to pass, going through the motions in the way she knows is expected of her. She wishes she could feel something else, something more, but she feels detached from herself and from her body, as though she is looking down upon them both, senseless and unfeeling. When he is done, Michael rolls off her, kisses her shoulder and turns his back to her; before long, she is listening to the heavy breathing of his deep sleep and, knowing she won’t find peace for herself for quite some time yet, Hannah lies in the darkness and cries silent tears.

  14

  Fourteen

  Olivia

  * * *

  Olivia lies in bed trying to listen out for sound. Any sound will do, just something to break the monotony of the long hours she has spent here in silence, lying alone and trying not to think too hard about what has happened and what might happen next as consequence. Her legs feel deadened, pinned to the bed, and she longs for sleep, for the break it would allow her from the relentless circling of her thoughts. It felt liberating, being up on that roof, a kind of freedom she has never experienced before. She knows that what she did was stupid, but everyone else her age seems to get away with doing stupid things. For everyone else, recklessness seems to be a rite of passage, gift-wrapped with the gloss of youth, yet for her the rules have always seemed to be different. She isn’t allowed to make mistakes or to learn from experience. She must do as they say, and not as they do.

  Olivia knows the people in her year who have had sex already, as well as the ones who have taken drugs. She knows which of them go out and get drunk in parks at the weekends and which of them have been in trouble with the police. There’s a girl in the sixth form who’s rumoured to have had an affair with one of the teaching assistants, an affair apparently everyone but his girlfriend knows about. The other staff must know – the rumour mill went into meltdown with it back before Christmas – yet the teaching assistant still works at the school, with no repercussions for whatever he’d been getting up to. The same for the student, who’ll be leaving school in just a few weeks’ time. What Olivia did yesterday was nothing in comparison to what some people seem to get up to, yet she already knows that she will pay a higher price for it than any of her classmates would.

  The thought of being stuck in this house and in this room any longer is enough to drive her insane. Some days, Olivia believes she might already be mad. Her thoughts are erratic and disjointed, and quite often she thinks things she isn’t sure are normal. She tries not to linger on them, but so
metimes the more attempts she makes to avoid these thoughts that plague her, the harder they hit, each time darker and more distressing. She wonders what it would be like to be allowed access to the brain of another person, for just ten minutes or so, to know if the way she thinks is normal or if other people are wired differently to her. Would it be a good thing? she wonders. Knowing she’s not that unlike someone else might offer a reassurance she’s aware she is in desperate need of but finding out she’s irredeemably more different would push her even further to an invisible edge she finds herself crawling closer to by the day. Perhaps ignorance really is bliss, and yet Olivia knows this not to be the case. She has been ignorant for long enough.

  If her mother thinks she will start talking to her because of they are forced together inside this house, then she is mistaken; Olivia has come this far and she’s not going to back down now. She knows she is going to be suspended, that much is certain. Olivia has never really broken school rules before – no crime greater than forgetting to underline the date at the top of her exercise book – but she knows flashing your tits from the school roof crosses the boundaries of what the head teacher will regard as acceptable and will be punished with suspension at the very least. She’ll be surprised if there is anything more than this, not when only last year Patrick Backley from year 9 sliced another boy’s arm with a broken test tube he’d taken from one of the science labs and was back in school the following week. She thinks she would have to do something really extreme to be expelled.

  Olivia smiles as she recalls the looks on some of the faces below her as she’d pulled her shirt above her head. They were expecting her to jump. It’s always the quiet ones, that’s what they say, isn’t it? She’s pretty sure that removing her bra was the last thing anyone had expected her to do, and the feeling of shocking people, of doing something completely out of character, was one Olivia isn’t able to put into words. She has always stood out, but this time she could do so on her own terms.

  Her mother is right, of course. She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell too deeply on it beforehand; if she had, Olivia knows she might have talked herself out of it. Anyway, she wasn’t thinking too much about anything; everything happened so quickly. The idea came so suddenly that she knew she would have to do it there and then, else risk losing the moment of opportunity. Now, thinking about what will have already reached the internet if it’s going to at all, the smile that’s sat upon Olivia’s face at the memory fades. She wonders what is being said about her. After Friday, people were already whispering about her, speaking words that just two weeks ago no one might have imagined they would ever use to describe Olivia Walters. Now, she can only guess at what they might be saying.

  But she doesn’t care. It will all be worth it; she feels sure of it.

  She wonders whether Miss Johnson has read her story yet. Perhaps hearing about what happened that lunchtime might have prompted her into reading it sooner than she had planned, though Olivia isn’t sure why that might be the case. She wishes now that she had spoken to Miss Johnson while she had the chance. She has tried to make herself noticeable to her, but their last exchange may only have resulted in Olivia managing to make herself seem even weirder than people already think her. Perhaps she could have told her about Friday and what happened at the party, about everything that’s been going on. Maybe the consequences wouldn’t have been as bad as Olivia feared, and if anyone would understand, she feels certain it would be Miss Johnson. She’s young, she’s female…Olivia imagines that she gets all this. She thinks she probably still gets what it means to be young, in ways that her mother has long since lost and might never at all have been in possession of. She should have just confided in the teacher while she had the opportunity. After everything else, it doesn’t feel as though things can get any worse. Either way, the chance has gone now, and Olivia mourns it like a lost friend.

  Olivia wonders once again about Miss Johnson’s life. She does this quite a lot, picturing her as she might appear outside of school, in her home or out running. She knows that Miss Johnson enters races; she has talked to the class about running half marathons to raise money for charity. Olivia knows that she is currently training for a triathlon, and she wonders if she swims in the sea for practice, maybe down by the pier where Olivia had stood earlier that week.

  Olivia knows that Miss Johnson isn’t married, but she doesn’t know whether she has a boyfriend. In her imaginings, Miss Johnson’s life is like something from a Hollywood film. She wears beautiful clothes with designer labels and eats in fancy restaurants that have menus on which half the items can only be pronounced by the waiters; she goes on dates with handsome men, but she doesn’t need any of them, not if she decides she doesn’t like them enough. She is sophisticated and independent, everything that Olivia would like one day to be. Miss Johnson doesn’t have to do what she is told. She can do whatever she likes, whenever she likes.

  Olivia has never really known what it’s like to have a friend – no one comes to the house and she has never grown close to anyone at school – but if she ever has one, she hopes it will be someone like Miss Johnson, someone uncomplicated and happy; someone she can trust with her secrets.

  As Olivia’s eyes grow heavier and her thoughts become cloudier, she drifts into a sleep, the dream of a different life following her there. She is standing on a beach. It is night-time and the tide is out, and beneath her bare feet the wet sand has oozed between her toes. It is cold and breezy, but she doesn’t care. The noise of the wind fills her ears and the smell that the sea has left lingers in the air around her, and on the tip of her tongue is the taste of the night, as though all her senses have been wakened by just being there, in this spot that she’s never seen.

  She is woken in the night by the sound of her bedroom door. Olivia has always been a light sleeper, woken by the noise of a creaking floorboard or a hushed voice on the landing. She lies facing the wall and waits with her eyes open, her back to whoever has entered the room. Her body flinches as the duvet is pulled back and a stream of cold air hits the bare skin of her neck.

  ‘Olivia.’

  Rosie’s voice is small in the darkness. She climbs on to the bed beside her sister, making too much noise as she tries to rearrange the duvet to cover herself.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I just wanted to see if you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m fine. Or I was until you came in here and stole all the duvet.’ She yanks it back, getting twisted up as she turns to tickle sister’s ribs. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here.’ She says it in a whisper, pulling her hand away before Rosie’s giggles become too loud and disturb the quiet that rests over the house.

  Rosie’s eyes meet hers in the darkness. ‘Mum told me what happened. She said she wanted me to hear it from her before I found out about it from someone else.’

  Olivia sighs and waits for what might come next. Rosie loves an opportunity to reprimand her, as though she is the older sister and knows anything about anything. Usually her matronly lectures are a regurgitation of things their mother has said; anything to help Rosie make herself feel superior. Olivia wonders why she feels the need to prove herself, when it is Rosie who already has the upper hand in everything: she is more loved, more accepted; more normal than Olivia believes she is capable of ever being.

  Instead of the expected lecture, Rosie starts to giggle. She stifles the sound by putting a hand across her mouth. ‘Did you really show half the school your boobies?’

  ‘Boobies?’

  And now both girls are laughing, smothering the noise by putting their heads under the duvet, their shoulders shaking as they try to calm themselves.

  ‘Stop it now,’ Olivia says, knowing how much trouble they will both be in if they are to wake their parents.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Rosie asks, once her snickering has finally subsided.

  Olivia shifts on to her side to face Rosie. She can feel the warmth of her sister’s body, and she wants to wrap an arm around her, comfor
t herself with the heat that pulses from her small form. ‘I’ve got really good boobies,’ she says, gently mocking her sister. ‘I thought people deserved to see them.’

  In the darkness, she can see Rosie isn’t impressed with the response. ‘You’re on the internet.’

  Olivia raises an eyebrow and attempts a smile. ‘Job done then,’ she says lightly, though inside she feels anything but light-hearted. How can she explain why she did it? Sometimes, she can barely explain how she feels to herself.

  ‘Do you ever feel different?’

  Rosie pulls a face. ‘Sometimes, I suppose.’

  Olivia’s eyes widen. They have adjusted to the darkness now; she can see her sister’s bedhead, her red hair sticking out from behind her ears; the tiny crusts of sleep stuck in the corners of her eyes. She has a series of lines along one side of her face where she has been sleeping on a crumpled pillow.

  ‘Come on, Rosie. I mean, really different.’

  She stares at her sister, willing her to look back, and this time properly. They lie like this for a moment, the silence deafening them with all the things they cannot say aloud. Rosie doesn’t speak, but she nods, the gesture enough to tell Olivia everything she needs to know.

  For so long she has thought Rosie hates her, but she doesn’t, she understands that now. They need each other. She puts an arm out and beckons Rosie closer, pulling her into a hug. Rosie lies in the crook of her arm, her head resting against Olivia’s hair. Before long, she has fallen asleep there, and Olivia breathes in the scent of her sister’s red curls, wishing they could lie somewhere else, a white-sand beach or a field filled with buttercups, only the sky above them and nothing but the noise of the birds and the breeze. She listens to the rise and fall of her sister’s breathing, thinking how lovely it would be if they could stay like that until morning.