‘I mean,’ she persevered, ‘she’s not exactly… she’s… I’ll just say she’s unexpected.’

Her husband turned from the counter, walked across the kitchen and stood motionless, still with his back to them, staring out of the window into the small back garden. He had suffered a heart attack a few years previously and had been reduced by it in surprising ways. He was quieter now, he seemed to occupy a lesser space than before and when he moved he moved as though reluctant to disturb the air. ‘I’m not the man I was,’ he had said and she had touched his shoulder and replied, ‘No one is.’

‘We don’t get badgers anymore,’ he said now. ‘They used to tunnel under the fence from that patch of scrubland. I’ve left water out every night, but I’ve not seen one in months.’

No one spoke then, and she looked away from him to her son. She reached for his hand and felt him flinch but she did not let go.

‘You know her far better than I do, Benny, than we do. We just want what’s best for you.’

Ben wasn’t prepared for that. His blood was up, he didn’t want to just let it go. ‘And you know what that is, do you? Better than me.’

His father chuckled to himself. ‘Better than I,’ he corrected. He walked over to his wife and kissed her forehead, continued towards the door. ‘The American Dream,’ he said to his son, ‘it’s your dream. It’s not our dream.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Madeline’s room was at the back of the house, on the first floor. From the window she could see into three gardens. When she was younger she used to spend hours looking into them, watching other children play. Her bedroom door had a lock on it, but she hadn’t needed to use it since her foster father had died three years ago. He’d died a slow, prolonged death that had blackened the entire house for months until one morning the noise from the end of the hallway suddenly stopped. She’d savoured every moment of his suffering and both wanted it to go on forever and wanted him gone. But the escape that she’d expected didn’t come with his passing. The damage had been done and the thing he’d put inside of her would always be inside of her now.

She ran away six times. The first time was when she was seven years old. She spent the night curled up in the corner of one of the gardens that she could see from her window. In summer the flowerbeds on the edge of its neatly trimmed lawn looked so safe and magical, especially if you leant in close, like she often did, they were a faraway land then; yellow and white butterflies would flutter among the petals and she thought if fairies did exist that’s where they’d be. At daybreak she crept back home without anyone noticing she’d been gone. The last time she ran away it was different. She was cursed with growing into a woman’s body while still a girl, and had no trouble finding a bed to sleep in. She would have run away again if he’d lived, but instead she repainted the walls of her room, threw out her mattress and began the process of burying him again. Since then, each new face had been an attempt to blur his old one. She imagined that if she had one hundred cuts, or two hundred, or more, it would be harder to distinguish the pain of a single one. By the time she realised it hadn’t worked she was scarred for life.

Madeline turned away from the window and knelt beside her bed, reaching beneath it for the small tin that contained her papers and stash. She rolled three spliffs and then returned to the window to smoke them, one after the other. The gardens were empty. Fine rain almost too light to settle swirled about in the breeze. There was a knock on her door which she ignored. This was her quiet place. There are always quiet places to go if you know where to look, or noisy places that can be made quiet. Madeline had been seeking them out since as soon as she could walk. ‘Where’s she gone now?’ they whined. ‘Such a nuisance,’ they grumbled. She had listened to their voices from her spot under the table, on the windowsill behind the curtain, in the cupboard, perched atop the vacuum cleaner with bare knees tucked up under her chin. She didn’t know why she ignored them, had needed to ignore them, knew only that being completely alone was as vital to her right then as breathing. Someone had picked up a snow globe long ago and shaken it in front of her. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘That’s how I feel.’ They thought she meant the character inside, but she had been referring to the glass bubble itself. The slightest tremor sent the flakes inside her into a churning chaos, and only complete stillness would settle her down again. It was only a matter of time before she let the chaos out.

She felt her body begin to droop as she watched the rain drift back and forth against the dark trees. She’d realised early on that she was beautiful to men. She hated that about herself. She’d tried to change the way she looked by covering herself up with make-up and then tattoos and long fringes and dark clothes and piercings and clunky boots and ugly habits. But that had only made her beautiful to different types of men. Ben broke the stereotype though.

‘I won’t ever lie to you,’ he’d said to her once.

Many other men had said it, too, or something similar, but she’d not believed them. She’d grown used to people saying one thing and doing another. Her foster father was the first one. He’d started it. He said he wouldn’t hurt her. But he hurt her terribly, and when afterwards she’d cried he was angry at her and said it was because she didn’t love him enough.

‘After everything we’ve given you,’ he’d scolded, ‘treating you like one of our own. And this is how you repay me?’

It had confused her because she had loved him then. Probably more than anyone in the world. He’d always had more time for her than his own children and used to give her secret gifts. But behind that love had grown a feeling which she was too young to put a name to. In the shadows it had grown and grown and grown and then one day she realised it was the only feeling she had left for him and she was desperately sad.

She didn’t recognise it as that though. She mistook it for anger and one night when she was nine she had stood in the hallway outside their bedroom, listening to them sleeping through the door. She could hear him snoring and for a long time she’d remained there listening, letting the thing that was burning inside her become a furnace. Then she’d opened the door and tiptoed over to the bed. He was lying on his back, face-up on the pillow. It was a warm night and the white sheet covered him only to the waist. His arms were folded neatly across his chest, and years later when she saw him in his coffin she would recall this night, this moment, and think, if only she had been braver. On the bedside table a picture of them all – she hesitated to call them her family – in a frame beside a half-empty glass of water. She couldn’t see the image well in the dark, but she’d seen it many times before and saw it again clearly in her mind then; the sunlight, the smiling faces, his arm around her waist. There were similar pictures all over the house. Visitors often commented on them.

‘Oh yes,’ her foster father laughed, ‘it’s a picture-perfect life we lead. Isn’t that right, Maddi?’

He was always standing next to her in these photographs. No one noticed that. They say that once you’ve seen something it can’t be unseen. That might be true. But it’s also true that people can refuse to see things they don’t want to. She looked back at him on the bed. His eyes were wide open and he was staring at her. She stopped breathing. He glanced down at the hammer in her hand and then back at her face. For a moment neither of them moved. She felt the weight of it pulling on her arm. He watched her for a long time and then a sardonic sneer spread slowly over his face. How she hated him then. He mouthed something to her which she didn’t understand before turning over complacently and going back to sleep. She dropped the hammer on the carpet and ran back to her room. This was before there was a latch on the door.

She had told no one about this, not even when his worsening illness had finally put a stop to it.

‘I’m dying,’ he told her after the last time. ‘I’m riddled with it. They can’t do a thing. Well? Say something, at least.’

Maybe she would tell Ben. He would come for her in a few hours. He would find her disgusting of course, but perhaps he’d get over it. Maybe she’d tell him everything, in the spirit of full disclosure. A burden shared is a burden halved. Was that it? Her head tipped against the glass. She’d finished smoking. She slipped off the windowsill, slid down the wall and onto the carpet. There was another knock on her door. ‘Go away,’ she shouted, or thought she shouted. From that angle she could see the clouds through the window.

CHAPTER SIX

On Friday evening Beth and Tim would phone their respective parents, Ruby’s grandparents – in name only, they sometimes said. Both sets had moved away. Almost as soon as she had been born one set then the other had upped sticks and scarpered.

‘Out of arm’s reach,’ Beth said bitterly.

‘And harm’s way,’ Tim replied. It was a running joke. Of sorts.

All that remained now were these weekly catch-up calls, a last chore to be completed before the weekend could start in earnest. They would gather on the bed, Tim, Beth and Ruby, they would put the phone on speaker so they could carry on with other things. Sometimes they would make faces at each other while they heard, half-heard, for the umpteenth time, about the state of the tomatoes, the bridge club, the character in the daytime soap they didn’t watch, had never watched. Frequently one, or both, would wander out of the room. Sometimes all three of them would slip away until urgent whispers in the hall sent them hurrying back.

‘Yes,’ they’d say. ‘I’m fine. We’re fine. She’s fine.’

It was never more than that. Their parents these days appeared content simply to talk into the mouthpiece – perhaps that did them a disservice, who knew? They didn’t know them anymore, or, more to the point, their parents no longer knew them – and when it was over they’d sit on the bed and try to ignore the sense of irritation, sadness, of guilt, all of these things.

But why had they sold up and moved so very far away the day Ruby had been born, while she was still in the incubator, yellow with jaundice. It might not have been that exact day, or even that week, but that’s how it felt. Beth, especially, suffered from their absence, and during those first confusing months of motherhood she longed for her own mother, for what she hoped her own mother would be.

‘She never sleeps,’ Beth said once.

‘Spirited,’ her mother said back with a chuckle.

‘But I’m just so exhausted all the time. It can’t be normal.’

‘You spoil her, that’s your problem.’ Beth was then reminded how much easier it was with disposable nappies, how convenient a microwave must be, and two cars, and online shopping.

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ she protested. ‘Doing things quicker doesn’t mean you have more time. It just means you have to do more things.’

Suddenly Beth’s father was booming at her. ‘I worked at the same place for fifty years.’ She could see him in that stiflingly hot room with the curtains that never opened, glaring at the phone as if it were an offensive object, sticking his chin out at it. ‘That was quite enough for me.’

‘It must be nice,’ she said to Tim afterwards, ‘just doodling away the last scraps of your existence without a care in the world.’ They had no idea how fast life had become, how tiring it was, how demanding. And why do the clothes they buy for Ruby never fit? And why are the toys they send always six months behind her development? They should know these things. Other grandparents knew these things.

‘It’s you and me against the world,’ Tim said. But Beth had never wanted it to be like that. She’d dreamed of big families, of long, loud Sunday lunches that gathered the clan. ‘Yes, but they’ve got to live their own lives,’ he argued, but that magnanimity was false too, was just an echo of something that had turned into resentment when he’d seen how their absence had affected his wife, how she viewed their leaving as rejection, even at her age, and how that rejection had manifested as spite directed, for the most part, and because he was the only one left, at him. So, the Friday evening calls. That’s all that remained.

‘They’ve shut themselves in,’ Beth said. ‘The world has shrunk around them. They think they’ve got a quiet life up there. They’re wrong. They’ve just got a small life.’

But this Friday evening was different. When Tim arrived home he found Beth and Ruby standing in the driveway waiting for him. At their feet were three packed bags. He sat in his car blinking at them. He was finding it increasingly difficult these days to follow things clearly. Some events raced past him and left him dizzy, others unfolded in slow motion and distorted, as though they were taking place underwater. His mind had started drifting. It wasn’t always clear if what he saw was real or only vaguely remembered. Suddenly Ruby broke away from her mother and ran to his window. He opened his door and she climbed onto his lap.

‘We’re going away, Daddy.’

He climbed out of the car but didn’t approach Beth, who was still staring at him from the doorstep. Her face was severe. It sharpened her features, aged her. She picked up a bag, it was his, and approached him carefully. When she was a yard away she held it up to him and he took it unthinkingly. Then she turned around and went to collect the other bags.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

She took the keys out of his hand. ‘Get in,’ she said. ‘I’m driving.’

He stood there still. Ruby was standing up in the driver’s seat. It was nearly dark. A cold wind had blown up during the day. There was rain in the air. Beth was in front of him again. Then her arms were around him.

‘You wanted to go camping, didn’t you?’ She leant in closer, so her lips were against his ear. ‘I know you think I’m a horrible person. I’m not though. I’m just sad.’

An hour later they were on the motorway. She was driving fast, away from the roundabout that bottlenecked the traffic, away from the flowers, now dead, in the bin and the answerphone that was at that very moment recording the slightly disgruntled voice of her mother. Night fell, slowly at first and then in a sudden rush. Cars disappeared behind their headlights. The landscape retreated into darkness. In the back Ruby was slumped forward in her seat, head flopping at a ghoulish angle. She tipped sideways, folding like a rag doll around the seat belt.

Tim turned his head on the headrest, saw his own reflection, ghostly and yellow, staring back at him.

‘Are we falling out of love?’ he asked. He was watching himself, searching his expression for signs that would tell him how he felt. His words floated in the trapped air of the car. So much hate for the ones we love. The phrase arrived unbidden in his thoughts and kept repeating. He couldn’t place it. He’d almost forgotten his own question when she answered angrily, almost accusingly.