The Wicked Girls

Chapter Forty-one

Martin is woken by the sound of an argument. Forgets, in his discomfort – he’s been sleeping sitting up in the van’s cramped driving seat for hours – where he is for a moment until the sight of the neat suburban road, neat suburban cars parked in neat suburban driveways, restores his sense of place. He raises the peak of his cap and cranes round, to see Kirsty Lindsay standing beside the little Renault, bag over her shoulder and keys in her hand, deep in disagreement with her husband. Gingerly, not wanting to make them aware of his presence, he cracks open the window and listens.

‘I don’t believe this,’ says Jim. He’s not put anything on his feet, and clutches his dressing gown over the boxer shorts he’s worn to sleep in since Soph hit the toddling stage.

She opens the car door, throwing her overnight bag on the back seat. She’s no idea whether she’ll need it, but the habit is so ingrained after years of news-driven changes of plan that she is barely able to go to the supermarket without loading it for luck. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I have to.’

‘No you don’t,’ he says. ‘You don’t. They know you’re on holiday. Why did you even answer the phone?’

She takes the lazy option and throws the blame back in his lap. ‘You told me to answer the phone. And anyway, you always answer the phone.’

‘Well, that’s different,’ he begins. ‘My mum-’

He catches the look on her face and stops. In the course of a marriage, you learn that there are subjects it is unwise to broach. Kirsty’s untethered status is one of them. She feels keenly the habit that people from loving backgrounds have of assuming that those from bad ones have no emotional attachment to them. He remembers the ferocity of her reaction the first time he pulled the ‘It’s all right for you’ line, and knows it’s a potential deal breaker. He gulps back the words when he hears her sharp intake of breath.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘That’s OK,’ she says eventually. He wonders if she’ll use his carelessness as a weapon. Feels he’ll probably deserve it if she does. ‘I’m sorry that I don’t have a mother of my own to worry about,’ she adds, ‘but funnily enough, I do worry about yours.’

The ball’s back in his court. ‘So much so that you’re bailing on going to see her tomorrow,’ he says. ‘She’s been looking forward to this for ages. You know that.’

‘And I told you. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can. I’ve just got one job, Jim. I don’t have set hours and holidays and a pension. All I’ve got is my willingness to adapt. It’s really, really tough out there at the moment. People are giving up all over the shop, you know that. We need the money. I can’t turn stuff down.’

Christ, I’m even convincing myself, she thinks. ‘You’ve not got a job in the bag yet,’ she adds sharply, and sees him recoil as though she’s slapped him. God, oh God, she thinks. All that work, all that care I’ve taken not to mention the elephant in the room, not to undermine his confidence, not to make him feel unmanned in unemployment, and I’ve blown it all apart with one simple sentence. It’ll take us months to get over this. Months. And he’ll never know I did it to protect him.

He’s silent for a moment. Then: ‘I can’t do much more of this,’ he says.

Kirsty slams the car door and rounds on him. ‘More of what, Jim? More of what? You don’t seem too upset when people tell you they’ve been reading my stuff in the papers. You don’t mind showing off your insider knowledge at dinner parties, do you?’

A light goes on in a window next door. ‘Shh!’ hisses Jim. ‘Keep your voice down!’

She’s been inflaming the argument as a means of leaving without telling him too much. Persists. Jim can’t bear the neighbours knowing their business. He’d sooner bleed to death in the kitchen than make a spectacle of himself by going outside with a knife in his guts.

‘What?’ she replies aggressively.

‘The neighbours,’ he says.

‘Well go inside, then!’

He knows it’s hopeless. She’s not going to be talked out of anything. He still can’t believe she’s taken a phone call at two in the morning and simply got dressed and headed for the car, but he’s known her long enough that he can tell when there’s no point arguing. He knows, too, that she’s not telling him the whole story. Has known it over and over again through the course of their relationship, the way her eyes glaze and her jaw sets when certain subjects come up. She’s a fucking oyster, he thinks. And she can be such a bitch when she wants to head a subject off. And I’m so soft that I just let it pass because I don’t want to distress her, even though everyone knows that sometimes you have to lance a wound to let it heal. I’ve got to change. Once I’ve found a job and the balance is restored, I’ve got to toughen up, or we’ll be skating round stuff in our eighties. I love her so much, but sometimes I think we’ve only got half a relationship.

He shakes his head. Turns back to the house. ‘OK. Well, there’s no point arguing. Just so you know. I’m not happy. I’m pissed off, actually. You promised you’d be here, and I’m not happy.’

She almost relents. Remembers Amber’s threat and finds herself torn in half. ‘Jim,’ she says.

‘Whatever,’ he says.

‘Come on. Don’t let’s…’

‘I’ll see you in Hereford, eventually. Keep me posted. If that’s not too much trouble.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Kirsty. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sure,’ he says, before he closes the door. ‘Sure you are.’

Kirsty waits in the drive until the hall light goes off. If I carry on lying like this, she thinks, we’re going to be in trouble soon. He’s not stupid. Tolerant, but not stupid. I see him, sometimes, wondering, when he looks at me. It’s only because he’s such a gentle soul, because he doesn’t want to push me, that we’ve survived this far. I’m so lucky I found him. I can’t think of another man who’d leave me alone like this.

She gets into the car, pulls out the phone. It takes a few rings for Amber to answer, and when she does, it’s in a low voice, as though she’s afraid of being overheard.

‘It’s me,’ Kirsty says. ‘I’m on my way.’

She hears Amber inhale heavily, hears tears in her voice when she answers. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

‘Are you safe?’

‘Sort of… I think so. I’m on the pier. At the end.’

Kirsty sees her in her mind’s eye, huddled on the benches in the bullring of faded Edwardian amusements beyond the train terminus, her face periodically lit by the orange warning light on top of the shabby helter-skelter. Maybe I should call someone, she thinks, do her a favour by betraying her. But no: there’s no way she can call anonymously, not in a world where phone calls are routinely traced. And just because it would be the better thing to do doesn’t mean that Amber will see it that way and keep quiet about her.

‘It’s going to be an hour and a half. Will you be OK?’

‘I hope so,’ says Amber. ‘No one ever comes here at night. The gates are locked. I used my Funnland ID card to break through the lock on the staff entrance. It’s only a Yale.’

‘OK,’ says Kirsty. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

She hangs up and turns the key in the ignition. She has no idea what she’s going to do once she gets to Whitmouth. Hopes she’ll drown her rage and resentment long enough to formulate a plan on the long drive over. Otherwise, God knows, the chances are that Jim’s wish that she’d open up more might come appallingly true.

Martin watches the Renault back out of the drive and start down the road. He puts his seat upright and starts his engine, but leaves the lights off as he pulls out of his parking space, to avoid alerting her to his presence. Waits till she’s turned the first corner before he pulls out and flicks on his beams. The roads are empty enough at this time of night that he will have little trouble finding her again, and he figures that the most powerful weapon he will have when they reach their destination is the element of surprise.

4.15 p.m.

The gate is locked and an electric fence runs through the hedge. The farmer’s keeping sheep on the field this year, and everyone knows that sheep are a bugger to keep in. The gate, meanwhile, is rickety: half off its hinges, all splinters and creosote, the crossbars too close together to allow even their undersized bodies to slide between.

‘Right, well,’ says Jade, ‘we’ll have to climb over.’

She eyes Chloe appraisingly. The kid seems to have gone wobbly in the last fifteen minutes, as though her legs are losing the ability to hold her up. Has fallen down every hundred yards, and takes longer, each time, to get up.

‘You should take that thing off,’ she says, tweaking at the strings on the anorak. ‘You must be boiling.’

Chloe is sluggish, unresponsive. She seems to have lost the will even to cry. Even when she caught her shin on the barbed wire two fields back, she let out little more than a dull moan of pain. Only another four fields till we reach the river, thinks Jade. A good thing. I don’t know what to do with her. I think she’s getting ill.

She has severe doubts that they will find Debbie at their destination, but they’ve come this far and the shrieking, splashing party that takes place on the Evenlode every afternoon of the summer is the nearest source of help she can think of. She and Bel unzip the anorak, peel the passive child out of it. Her thin white arms are covered in bruises, her skinny-rib top stained with sweat. For the first time they see that her hair is a bright, golden blond, curls plastered to her scalp like astrakhan. She staggers slightly; her eyes seem to have gone blank. She snatches the jacket from Jade and clutches it to her chest like a teddy bear.

‘Come on,’ says Jade, in a tone more gentle than she’s used all afternoon. ‘See over there?’

She points to a line in the grass that emerges from the woods to their right and slashes across the heat-scorched meadow. ‘See it? That’s the stream. When we get there, we can have a paddle and a drink. Cool you off a bit. And then we just have to go along it till we get to the river.’

Chloe looks ahead without interest. ‘Come on,’ says Jade again. She puts a foot on the bottom rung of the gate, grabs the top to show how it’s done.

‘I’m not sure…’ says Bel.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Jade. ‘I’ve been climbing gates since I was three.’

She’s not sure how much truth there is in this statement, but she knows she’s been doing it for years, and anyway, it’s not as if climbing gates is a highly rated skill. Besides, there’s no other way through she can think of, short of breaking it down. She scales the gate like a ladder, swings her leg over as though she were mounting a horse. Sits astride it, looks down at the others. ‘Easy-peasy,’ she says. Swings her other leg over and drops to the ground. Chloe stares, her mouth half open.

‘Go on,’ prompts Jade. ‘Give her a hand.’

Bel shuffles the kid forward. Her feet seem to be made of concrete. They drag and catch on the ground as though they’re too heavy for her legs. Bel gets to her knees and lifts one of Chloe’s feet on to the bottom bar. Tries to clamp the child’s hands on three bars up, but Chloe refuses to let go of the anorak. After several goes, Bel unpeels a single arm and hooks it through the rungs. ‘See?’ she says. ‘It’s like a ladder.’

Chloe just stands there. Presses her face into the anorak and inhales, deeply, for comfort. Stares at Jade like she’s visiting the zoo.

Eventually Bel puts her hands under Chloe’s bum and heaves. Unwillingly, the leg on the bar straightens up. The other just hangs in the air. The kid wobbles. Looks scared. Says nothing. She’s been silent since they waded through the dock leaves on the edge of the Hundred-Acre.

‘It’s OK. Go on. Put the other one on the next bar. You can do it.’

Bel stands up and leans her body against Chloe’s, takes the weight against herself. Wow, she thinks again. I thought she was heavy before, but now she feels like a bag of sand. She unpeels Chloe’s anorak hand and puts it on the top of the gate. It’s a weak grip, for the child is pressing her elbow into her side so as not to lose the sacred garment. ‘There you go,’ says Bel. ‘Almost there.’

It takes for ever to manoeuvre Chloe to the top. But eventually her crotch is on a level with the bar and she’s wibble-wobbling at the hips. ‘Lift your leg up,’ says Jade. ‘Go on. Just swing it over.’

Chloe looks down, as though she’s noticed the ground for the first time, then she bends at the waist and lies the length of her body along the top bar. The anorak slips between her torso and the gate; a sheer, slippery base to take her weight.

‘Come on,’ says Jade. Chloe stares at her, frozen. Grips her perch with chunky thighs.

‘Oh, come on, Chloe!’

Bel has a rush of rage. Doesn’t know where it comes from, just knows that she wants this afternoon over. She’s sick of being patient, sick of the way her day’s turned out, sick of thistles and cowpats and nobbles of hardened earth that get into shoes, and can’t bear the sight of the kid any more. She wants her off the gate. She jumps forward and shoves, with all the strength she has left.

Chloe slithers round the bar and pitches forward, head-first, through the air.

It seems like a very long time until she lands.