The Girls (4 page)

Pip and Grace looked at one another. Grace shrugged. ‘What was that all about?’

‘Maybe she was just being friendly?’

Grace shook her head. ‘Weird.’

‘She’s pretty.’

‘Skinny,’ said Grace dismissively.

‘I guess.’

Pip stared into the anemone-shaped head of a clover flower growing by her feet. She pinched it between her thumb and index finger and then brought the honey smell to her nose. A sharp breeze circled the half-moon of the garden, feathering the tendrils of weeping willows, biting through the wool of Pip’s jumper. The last slice of setting sun fell behind a chimney stack and the temperature dropped.

‘I’m going in,’ said Grace.

‘Me too.’

Pip turned briefly to look at Tyler and the boy again. They were sitting side by side on a bench. The bike lay flat on the grass, its back wheel still turning lazily. Tyler’s legs were pulled up into her body and the boy was laughing at something she’d said. Pip wondered how old he was, where he lived, if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. As she watched, the back gate of one of the flats across the lawn opened and three tall, thin girls emerged. One after the other. It was the strange sisters with the weird hair. They walked in height order, louchely, scuffing at the gravel on the path with old sneakers. The smallest one picked up her pace as she neared Tyler and the boy; the other two trailed behind. And then, virtually telepathically, they arranged themselves into a horseshoe huddle around the bench, a silent choreography. Pip saw Tyler nod in their direction; the boy and the sisters all turned to look at them and then they looked away again.

‘Come on,’ said Grace. ‘I’m cold.’

Pip followed her big sister back across the lawn and down the gravelled path that led to their back gate, and as she did she heard the garden whisper in their wake. It talked to itself about the things it knew, the secrets it held close within its pathways and crannies, its bowers and corners. It whispered about the people who lived behind the closed doors and the insular group of children on the bench, and of the days yet to come when the warmth of summer would bring it all back to life.

Clare watched her girls through the kitchen window. It was the first time they’d gone out into the garden without her, just to hang out. She’d seen a young girl come and talk to them. Hard-faced. Pretty. It had looked like something of an interrogation. Not exactly friendly. Then the girl had cycled away and joined up with her little gang at the other end of the garden, three slightly alternative-looking girls who looked like sisters and a tall, mixed-race boy in a dark school uniform. She saw her girls now, casting backward glances at the gang on the benches, then heading back indoors. The sun was getting low. She saw Grace hugging herself to keep warm. It was nearly five o’clock. Time to think about tea.

‘What do you fancy?’ she asked, meeting her daughters at the back door. ‘I can do spaghetti with peas?’

The girls dropped their garden
froideur
as they came indoors and said yum, and yes please. Spaghetti and peas. A favourite family staple. And cheap too, which was just as well now that Clare was living off a finite sum of money.

The girls joined her in the small kitchen where they sat side by side on bar stools at the breakfast bar. Hard to tell them apart sometimes, especially when they were seated and you couldn’t see the two-inch difference in height. The same big square faces and almond eyes. The same mass of brown curls and bright hazel irises. They both looked just like him. Just like their dad.

‘So,’ said Clare, bunching raw spaghetti into her fist and forcing it down into a pan of boiling water, ‘did you see anyone out there?’

‘A girl came and talked to us,’ said Pip. ‘She’s called Tyler.’

‘Oh,’ said Clare, ‘was she nice?’

‘Not really,’ said Pip.

‘Bit of a bitch,’ said Grace.

‘Oh,’ said Clare again, prodding stray sticks of spaghetti under the surface of the water with a fork. ‘That’s a shame. By the way, I forgot to tell you: your onesies came today. From Next. They’re in the hallway.
But don’t rip the bag open!
’ she yelled after Pip who was already halfway out of the door. ‘In case we have to send them back!’

Pip brought the parcel through and together the girls pulled out the clear plastic bags. Pip handed Grace the one in her size and then they both tried them on. Clare watched her girls undressing, absorbed their shapes: broad and strong, already dipping at the waist, Grace in her junior bra, Pip still flat-chested, the pronounced S-bends of their bodies and the small doughy tummies that neither girl was as yet at all concerned about. Their father’s bodies, too. Not Clare’s. Clare had been a painfully skinny child, flat-chested well into her teens, and was still slight and bordering on bony. It would not be long, she mused, until both her girls towered over her, until they could carry her around like a child.

They zipped up their onesies and stood before her, striking poses to make her laugh. ‘You both look adorable,’ she said, pulling open the freezer door. ‘Like lovely overgrown babies.’

The day became dark and Clare began the process of pulling shut the blinds and curtains, of running a bath for the girls, stacking the dishwasher; the girls clean and glowing in their onesies doing their homework side by side, the sound of the TV going on, a mug of camomile and all three of them together, warm and safe in their tiny flat.

At nine thirty she came to kiss the girls goodnight. They were reading by the pale light of table-lamps, Grace leaning against her bedhead, her knees brought up to her chest, Pip curled foetal-style with her book held on its side. Pip glanced up at her and smiled. But there was something brittle about the upturn of her mouth and Clare realised that she was on the verge of tears.

‘When can we see Daddy?’ Pip asked.

Clare sighed and brushed Pip’s forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘I truly don’t know.’

‘When will he reply to my letters?’

‘I really and truly don’t know.’

Grace lifted her head from her book and peered disdainfully at Pip over the top of her knees. ‘Why do you keep going on about it? I mean, seriously, he’s just scary. I don’t care if I never see him again.’

Clare sighed again. They were treading familiar ground.

‘I want to go to see the house,’ said Pip.

‘Oh, God.’ Clare pushed Pip’s hair off her forehead. ‘I really don’t think—’

‘Please. Please, Mum. I’ll go on my own …’

‘Don’t be silly. You can’t go on your own. You wouldn’t even know how to get there.’

‘Yes I do. I’d get the bus.’

‘I really don’t think you’d want to see the house, Pip. I think it’s too early.’

‘But …
why
?’ Pip was crying now. ‘I want to, Mum! I want to see the house. Please!’

Clare exhaled deeply and took Pip into her arms. She felt her shuddering and shivering inside her embrace. For days and days on end they could act like everything was normal, like they were on a lovely little adventure together. And then the reality of their situation would crash through the façade and they’d emerge like a straggle of pile-up survivors crawling from the wreckage. ‘Fine,’ she whispered into Pip’s hot ear. ‘Fine. We’ll go after school tomorrow.’

‘I’m not going!’ said Grace. ‘I never want to see that place again. I never even want to think about it.’

Clare dropped her face on to the crown of Pip’s head. She kissed her hard, breathed her in. What was worse? Denial or fascination? She didn’t know.

‘Do you promise?’ said Pip, looking up at Clare through wet eyelashes.

‘Yes. I promise. We’ll go straight from school. But, Pip, be prepared for a nasty shock.’

Pip nodded her head against Clare’s chest, tightened her arms around her waist, whispered
thank you
.

The house was still shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. It looked monstrous between the immaculate houses on either side. The insurers still hadn’t settled and, given the circumstances, it was possible they never would. It was possible in fact that their beautiful house might sit shamefully like this forever.

Pip’s hold on her hand tightened. ‘It looks scary,’ she said.

‘It is scary,’ said Grace.

She’d come, in the end. At breakfast time she’d said, ‘It would be weird if you two had seen it and I hadn’t. I don’t want to. But I think I have to.’

‘Do you remember …?’ Pip began. But she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Because they all remembered – painfully, clearly. The late autumn night when the three of them had walked home from dinner at a local restaurant and found their house ablaze, their father standing on the pavement in his scuba-diving suit, waving his arms towards the flames, shouting out profanities and nonsense, his eyes wild with madness.

Clare pushed open the metal gate and the girls followed her up the path towards what used to be the front hallway. She pulled back the plastic sheeting and swallowed hard. There it was, her home. A charred, buckled, disfigured nightmare.

Luckily they’d had a joint account, she and Chris. Luckily everything Chris earned as an independent documentary maker was paid straight into their bank account and was easily accessible. But it wasn’t infinite. It would run out one day. And then what? Clare had no skills. No work experience. She could get a job at the school like some of the other mums, but that wouldn’t cover rent in central London. That wouldn’t keep the three of them fed and clothed. So she eked it out. Pound by pound. And hoped that at some point before it ran out Chris would be well enough to work again.

The girls pushed open the front door. The ceilings were propped up here and there by long scaffolding poles. Clare could barely remember what they’d lost now. She saw blackened lumps of furniture that meant nothing to her any more.

‘I hate this, Mum,’ said Grace. ‘Can we go now?’

‘No,’ said Pip, ‘not yet. I want to see it. Properly.’ She walked ahead purposefully, looking this way and that as though evaluating the situation, as though preparing a report.

Grace turned sharply towards Clare when Pip was out of earshot and said, ‘Why did you marry someone who was mad, Mum?’

Clare swallowed. Neither of her girls had ever used the ‘M’ word before to talk about their father. She’d told them it was politically incorrect. That their father was mentally ill. She resisted the urge to reprimand Grace for the transgression and said, ‘I didn’t know he was.’

‘Yeah you did.’

‘Well, I didn’t know how deep it ran. I didn’t know how bad it would get. I thought it was a phase.’

‘You thought you could save him.’

‘What?’

‘You thought you could save him,’ she repeated.

Clare blinked at her eldest daughter. ‘Where on earth did you get that from?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Nowhere,’ she said. ‘I just think it.’

What did a twelve-year-old girl know about the intricacies of adult relationships? Clare wondered. And was she right?

‘I wish I had a different dad,’ Grace said.

‘Oh, Grace, that’s so unfair …’

‘No. It’s not unfair. It’s true. I wish I had a
normal
dad.’

‘But then you wouldn’t exist. You and Pip. You wouldn’t be here.’

‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know, would I? So it wouldn’t matter.’

Pip appeared then, looking pale and shaken. She turned to face the door. ‘Can we go now? I’ve seen enough.’

Clare watched as her daughter strode past her and through the front door. She and Grace followed behind. Pip did not speak the whole way back down Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and when they got home she headed straight into her bedroom without saying a word.

Dear Daddy,

Mum took us to see the house yesterday. It was my idea. I thought it would make me feel better. But it didn’t. All I could think was that it was like a nightmare. All of it was like a nightmare. I try not to think about it. Try to pretend that that wasn’t you on the pavement that night. Just some crazy man we don’t know. Usually that works. But yesterday it all felt really real again. Like it had only just happened.

At the house I went into the kitchen. The table and chairs were still there. They looked like they’d been painted black. There was a vase of flowers on the table. The vase was black and so were the flowers. Everything was black. It looked like it had all been cut out of black paper. Like one of those silhouette books. Except for one thing – the calendar on the wall, the one with the photos of me and Grace on all the months. It was just hanging there. Like nothing had ever happened. And it was stuck on November. It was a photo of me and Grace on the terrace in that house we stayed at in Turkey last year. In our pyjamas. And we looked so happy. And there was stuff written on it, stuff that was going to happen that week. And one of the things was that we were going to go to the animal-rescue centre to look at kittens. And I know it’s not like everything was perfect before that night. I do know that. But things can’t have been so bad if we’d been thinking about getting a kitten. And now I don’t suppose we’ll ever get a kitten. Because only normal families get kittens. And we’re not one of those any more.

I can’t write any more today because I’m feeling too weird.

I still love you though,

Pipsqueak

xxxx

Four

‘Do you want the bad news or the really bad news?’

Leo stood in front of her by the hob, his mobile phone in his hand, looking sheepish.

Adele tapped a lump of mashed potato off the masher and stared at him. ‘Oh God.’ It was going to be something to do with his father. She had guessed by the tone of his voice. The very particular flatness of it, as though he was talking in his sleep.

‘He’s coming. To stay.’

‘Oh.
God
.’ She poured more milk into the mashed potatoes and stirred them hard. ‘When?’

‘Well, that’s the first instalment of bad news. The second is, he’s on his way. Now.’

‘What!’