‘Distracted by what, though?’ He was daring her. He wanted her to attack Madeline so he could defend her, so he could hear himself defend her.
His mother looked at her husband, exasperated, but he refused to meet her gaze, brushed a sleeve across the table instead, searching for crumbs, trying to sweep away the debris left behind from dinner. She resolved to go on alone.
‘I forget you’re still just a child. So, did Madeline enjoy it?’
Ha! I win. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very much.’
‘Really? It doesn’t seem like her kind of thing.’
‘And what do you suppose her kind of thing is?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say.’
‘You’re doing a good job of still saying it though.’
‘Well, when we met her I was a little surprised, let’s just say that. And that’s another thing, why did it take so long for you to introduce us? It’s almost like you were embarrassed of us. Or were you embarrassed of her?’
Her husband got up abruptly. He stood there at the table a moment, looking down at his hands clasping the back of his chair, then walked to the counter, filled the kettle and turned it on. She watched him, they both did. They were waiting for him to say something profound. When it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything at all she tried to resume.
‘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.
