Beneath the Surface (16 page)

I waited for the punchline that never came. It seemed she was serious. I looked at my mother but her head was hung so low, I thought it was about to clunk against the dining table.

‘If
what
behaviour continues?’ I asked.

‘You are a disgrace to this family and your antics will not be tolerated any further. No grandchild of mine will act in this manner. Do you understand that?’

‘Mum?’ I asked my mother, who remained mute and almost unconscious at the table. ‘What do you mean, a boarding school in Scotland?’ Now I was scared. For a long time now I hadn’t felt wanted in our home, but to be sent away to a boarding school – and so far away. I looked at my mother, silently pleading with her to say something, to promise me she wouldn’t send me away, but she said nothing. ‘Do you mean it?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, we do,’ Eleanor replied, standing up to leave the table.

‘Mum?’ I asked again. Why wasn’t she saying anything?

‘That’s all on the subject, Abigail,’ my grandmother told me. ‘It’s your decision how you want to act but I will not have you embarrass me. And I fear that is what you will do.’

Embarrass her. That was what everything boiled down to. Always so concerned with their precious image, how it would affect Charles, how she herself would look. Eleanor let people see what she wanted them to see but if only they knew the person she was behind closed doors. How I longed to show them the Eleanor I knew. Her popularity angered me, but it seemed only I could see how fake and self-centred she was. Eleanor didn’t care for her so-called friends; she cared only for herself.

Charles’s success was also Eleanor’s weak spot. I didn’t realise it then, but I would later, and I would try to use it to my advantage. My grandmother was cloaked in the fear that we would step out of line and damage her precious reputation, and she was willing to do anything to prevent that happening.

You might have thought the threat of boarding school would have worked, but it didn’t. Back at school that January I not only continued seeing my friends, I started hanging out with Jason too. I was angry with Eleanor for thinking she could dictate my life and even more bitter towards my mother for not having the backbone to stand up for me. She was slowly abandoning me, I felt, and so my friends were my only source of comfort.

‘So, d’you wanna go out with me, then?’ Jason asked me one day. Of course I did! I adored him. No one else in the school could strut like he did.

My mother didn’t know. There was no way I would let her into this little secret of mine and have her do everything in her power to make sure I never saw him again.

Jason and I didn’t do much but hang out. In the early evenings I watched him skateboard around the empty park. I waited on the sidelines of football pitches, freezing cold, with no idea of what was happening in the game, and then went back for my tea. But I didn’t push my luck with Kathryn. I started to play the game so she didn’t realise I was still hanging out with Tasha or Cara, or seeing Jason, because the threat of boarding school still hung in the air. She didn’t take much interest by then, though. As long as nothing I did demanded anything of her, I was pretty much left alone.

I was convinced as soon as we got home from Christmas at my grandparents’ house that Peter would leave. In my eyes their marriage was a farce – any fool could see neither of them wanted to be in it. I spent most of that month waiting for the day I found Kathryn in tears because he’d walked out. But he never did; he was still lingering and if anything appeared to be making more of an effort with her, even if it was killing him to do so. Sometimes I caught the expression on his face change when she left the room. The smile he had plastered on for her benefit dropped when he thought I wasn’t watching. I often wondered why he was so angry and miserable when he could have done something about it.

For Peter was everything my daddy wasn’t: Peter was a career man. He would sit at the kitchen table talking into his mobile phone, just because he had one. One leg slung over the other, he would run a hand up and down the creases at the front of his trouser legs, a permanent frown on his face as he barked into the phone, ‘Well, just get rid of him, then. We can easily find another man happy to get his wages.’ Peter was climbing a ladder, but it was obvious Eleanor was holding it for him. He was trying to find his way in politics, using my grandparents to get there. They must have known a weasel like him was using them and I still couldn’t understand what they were getting out of it. My mother, however, seemed oblivious to what was going on. She was too busy painting on her own face, one that said, ‘I am happily married’.

At dinner Peter regaled her with stories about women in the office and how relentless they were in their requests for more money they didn’t deserve. And my mother laughed along with him like a fool. I would stare at her in disgust. I despised her for being too blind to see what a jerk she was married to, or too weak to do anything about it. She was morphing into someone I didn’t recognise: if a person could become their own shadow, she was definitely an example of it.

Occasionally I tried to do something about it. I remember one night, March 20th, because it was the night before my fourteenth birthday. Our relationship had been stretched as far as I thought it could go, each of us pulling one end of a piece of elastic, and I was waiting for it to snap. I was annoyed because Jason had a football match he refused to cancel the following night and so I had nothing to do on my birthday. Meanwhile, Tasha was distancing herself from me, spreading rumours I had dumped my girlfriends for a boy. Her jealousy was infectious and Cara had caught the bug, too.

My mother hadn’t asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday so I didn’t suggest anything, but that night Peter didn’t come home from work at the usual time and she suggested making me a cake.

‘Don’t bother,’ I said, an automatic response for the teenager I had become, although inside all I wanted to do was shout, ‘Yes, please make me a cake! That’s exactly what I want for my birthday.’

She gave me a look of resignation and sighed as she walked out of the room and into the kitchen. I listened hard, hoping to hear signs of baking, but there were none. Eventually I followed her in under the pretence of making myself a drink and found her sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

Nothing.

‘Mum?’

Her skin was so pale I remember it as almost blue, and her eyes were glazed over as if a film had been pulled across them. I continued to watch for any sign of movement, but none came. She was motionless except for the twitch of her hand, clutched around something so tightly her knuckles were white.

‘Mum, is that a bottle of pills in your hand?’ I asked. Still nothing. I grabbed her hand and tried to prise the fingers apart until they eventually fell open, releasing the bottle and sending tiny white tablets scattering across the floor.

‘Jesus! Have you had any of these?’ I shouted.

She snapped out of her trance and stared at the floor, where I was gathering the pills and tipping them back into their bottle.

‘Yes, I’ve had two,’ she replied with clarity. ‘They are paracetamol, Abigail. I have a headache.’ She snatched the bottle out of my grasp and screwed the cap back on, placing them back on the highest shelf of our cupboard.

‘You don’t have to stay with him, you know, Mum,’ I said. ‘If he doesn’t make you happy, we can always leave.’

When she looked at me her face was softer. I swore she was about to tell me what was really going on inside that mixed-up head of hers and agree that yes, we should definitely leave. She opened her mouth to speak and then clamped it shut, turning to look out of the window and after a moment back at me. Her face had changed again; there was none of the softness I had seen only seconds before. Instead the glazed look was back and she eventually spoke in a cool, even tone.

‘Abigail, I love Peter and he loves me. I do not ever want to hear you suggest anything so preposterous again. Do you understand me?’

My heart sank, taking any hope I had with it. Had my mother’s soul been taken away and replaced with mechanical parts? I wouldn’t have been surprised.

‘You’re pathetic,’ I spat at her, angrily. ‘He doesn’t love you. Anyone can see that.’

I can still feel the sting of her hand across my face.

Something woke Hannah at a quarter to five. Her body jolted with sudden alertness and she lay listening for a clue. Then came the slam of a car door and the low rumble of an engine ticking over. She knew it was her mum’s Peugeot before she’d even made it to the window to watch Kathryn drive down the lane, turn the corner and disappear out of sight.

‘Lauren, wake up.’ She shook her sister by the shoulder. ‘Mum’s just driven off somewhere.’

Lauren groaned and stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

‘Lauren,’ Hannah said louder.

‘What’s the matter?’ Lauren hissed.

‘I said, Mum’s just driven off somewhere. Do you know where she’s gone?’

‘What’s the time?’ Lauren asked, rubbing her eyes.

‘It’s not even 5 o’clock,’ Hannah said, grabbing her watch from the bedside table and checking it. ‘That’s my point. Where’s she going at this time of the morning?’

‘Go downstairs and see if she’s left a note,’ Lauren said sleepily, rolling out of bed to look out of the window herself. ‘If not, we’ll try calling her.’

Unable to find a note, Hannah picked up the phone and punched in the numbers for her mum’s mobile. They hadn’t spoken much since she’d threatened to leave the house the week before. Hannah had tried to keep out of her mum’s way, and in turn, Kathryn hadn’t said anything more about Dominic. She didn’t have any intention of leaving, it wouldn’t come to that, but for now she was pleased the threat had appeared to subdue her mum’s constant questioning.

The phone rang out at the other end and clicked into answerphone. After the beep, Hannah left a message: ‘Mum? I just saw you drive off. Where are you?’

Hannah poured two glasses of orange juice and took them up to the bedroom. Neither of them would get any sleep now that Mum had apparently gone AWOL.

‘She didn’t say anything to you, then?’ she asked Lauren, passing her one of the glasses and getting back into bed.

‘Not a thing,’ said Lauren. ‘Where do you think she’s gone?’

Hannah yawned. ‘No idea, nor has she, probably.’

‘I’m worried about her.’ Lauren looked at her sister earnestly. ‘She’s doing strange things again.’

Hannah flicked at the remote control to turn on the television that sat in the corner of the room. ‘There’s nothing decent on.’

‘Of course there isn’t. Most people don’t get up this early.’

‘Most normal people, anyway. What do you mean by strange things?’

‘She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, she looks like her head is constantly somewhere else entirely. Oh, I don’t know, it’s just like she’s not with us half the time. Do you know what I mean?’

Hannah nodded, still gazing at the TV as she flicked through the channels. ‘She went out in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago, too. She doesn’t know I saw her, but I’d gone to the loo and clocked her through the window, coming home about this time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Lauren asked, propping a pillow against the headboard and sitting up.

‘It slipped my mind. Blimey,
The Jeremy Kyle Show
’s on!’ Hannah laughed.

‘Turn it over,’ groaned Lauren, reaching for the remote as Hannah pulled her hand away.

‘Let’s watch the news, then. She might turn up on it.’

‘Why? What are you thinking she’s done?’

‘I’m thinking that if she’s not thinking properly at the moment,’ Hannah said, ‘she could be doing anything right now. Maybe she’s standing in her pyjamas, holding a poor man hostage behind a petrol station counter.’

‘Don’t say that, now I’m going to worry.’

‘I’m only joking,’ Hannah laughed. ‘She’s fine. There’ll be an explanation.’

Lauren sighed. ‘She’s got a lot on her mind, what with Grandma and—’

‘Go on, say it,’ Hannah interrupted. ‘Me and Dom.’

‘She’s worrying about you, that’s all.’

But Hannah didn’t think it was that. For a while her mum’s strange moods had been bubbling under the surface. She was always on edge, snapping at one of them as soon as they tried stepping away from the precious life plan she’d carefully mapped out for them. Increasingly, Hannah had felt her mum knew exactly what she wanted from her and her sister. What bothered her was how far Kathryn would go to make sure she got what she wanted.

Grabbing a packet of face wipes, Hannah pulled one out and rubbed it over her skin. ‘She’s trying to stop me from seeing him.’

‘Well, clearly that’s not working,’ Lauren said. ‘And that’s gross! Look how much make-up’s come off on that. You should take it off before you go to bed.’

‘But Dom’s a good guy. Mum has no right, or reason, to not want me seeing him. Why isn’t she happy I’ve found someone decent?’ Hannah turned to her sister. ‘And why don’t you like him, Lauren? I want you to like my boyfriend.’

‘I don’t
not
like him.’

‘But?’ Hannah asked.

Lauren shrugged. ‘I just don’t like the way it’s causing this atmosphere in the house. I’m treading on eggshells every time I’m at home. You and Mum, tiptoeing around each other, it makes me feel uncomfortable.’

‘And you really think that’s all come about since Dom’s been on the scene? Come on, Lauren, her moods are nothing new.’ Hannah clambered off the bed and peered out of the window but there was still no sign of their mum returning.

Lauren picked up the remote control and carried on flicking through the channels, pausing when she came across Jeremy Kyle again. ‘At least we aren’t as bad as them,’ she said, pointing the remote at the TV.