‘Peter,’ I raise my voice. ‘I’m here to talk to you about Patty. Patricia. My mum.’
‘I don’t know any Patricias. What is it I’m supposed to know?’
I lean closer, smelling his boiled-sweet breath, and say in a low voice: ‘What happened? I want to know what you did to me.’
‘Did to you?’ he shouts. ‘Whatever are you talking about?’
I sit up straight. ‘When I was a girl.’
‘I don’t understand.’
I jump up and the chair falls back. Peter yelps. My arms are stiff and straight at my sides. ‘You don’t have to understand, I just want you to remember.’
‘Remember what? I think you’ve got the wrong person, young lady.’
He sits more upright in the bed, trying to pull the bed sheets off, and the sticks of his legs edge towards the floor. I throw the covers back across him and hold him by his shoulders, pushing
him down on to the mattress. Peter scrabbles at my arms with ribbed yellow nails, but I press harder, feeling the loose twigs of his bones inside the sack of skin. Tears spring up in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry for whatever it is,’ he says. ‘Believe me, I’m truly sorry.’
I lean in close and spit my words in his face. ‘You can’t be sorry unless you remember.’ He struggles as I press down, then with his teeth bared he stills under my weight. His
breathing speeds up, lungs hungry for air, and tears roll down his cheeks. Me on top, him underneath, the reversal of how it had been all those years before, and the memories tumble out. All of the
times. Each and every event rushes at me as a fresh incision.
‘Please forgive me, for whatever it is you say I’ve done.’ He wheezes and his face turns from grey to white. ‘I’m just an old man.’
Under Peter’s head is a stack of pillows. I could put one over his face and hold it there; he’s weak and it wouldn’t take long. Who would know? I have already disappeared.
‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘please go. Please leave me alone.’
‘That’s what you should have done to me.’
Under my pressure his shoulders bend into the mattress, and his fragile bones remind me of Seamus’s limp body as I dragged him through the woods. From the bed there’s the popping
sound of a ligament. Peter screams. My hands spring from his shoulders, and I grab one of my fists with the other and restrain the pair against my chest. The old man’s cheeks are wet and he
rests shaking hands over his face.
I slump back in the chair at his side, watching Peter until his hands slide off. He looks at me and his body shudders, then he sputters and retches, grabbing a tissue from his bedside table. He
spits. Damp green leaks through the thin paper. As I lift up my hands to run them through my hair, Peter screeches with the sound of a little girl and fumbles to the other side of the bed, almost
falling off. He grabs the sheets to haul himself back. Again he sobs and I chuck him the box of tissues. He blows his nose several times, focusing on the bedding in front of him, before he flits a
look at me. I catch his eye. He turns his face back to the bed.
‘What do I need to do to make you go away?’ he says in a quiet voice.
‘Tell the truth.’
He wipes his eyes and sighs. ‘It was . . . you know. All those notes. What did you expect?’
‘Notes? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The letters in my jacket, the ones I used to find in the mornings after I’d stayed with your mother. You were persistent, I’ll give you that. I thought you wanted me to . . .
Well, Patty told me to sort it out.’
Another piece of the story breaks off and slides into place. My father’s writing pad on the desk in my childhood bedroom. The letters I wrote to my dad were pages long, telling him all
about what I’d been doing, asking when I could see him again. I used his old fountain pens, thinking they made my writing more grown-up. When Dad wrote back I was so excited, but over time
the replies became shorter, replaced by the occasional postcard, until Mum told me he’d moved abroad.
Absent fathers, letters unanswered. ‘Pa, when are you coming home?’ Was it the same for Seamus; easier to hide his mistakes and pretend he didn’t have a family? Let the women
do their growing up in front of the children.
It’s a sin for the woman to leave, but damn the wife who tries to contain her man. Like my own dad who bounced between lovers and wives, siring children along the way, his offspring passed
over like puppies for the pet shop. When the forwarding addresses for Mr Sharp changed to ‘Return to Sender’, he got the freedom he’d always desired.
So in the absence of my dad, the letters to my guardian angel became prolific. I’d sit in my room at my nanna’s old desk, creasing the pages of the writing pad with my fingernails
painted red and tearing the paper into tiny pieces to make it last. I’d fold these notes over and over then hide them around the house: behind picture frames, wedged into gaps in the skirting
board, tucked into shoes and jacket pockets. If they’d disappeared by the next day, I knew the angel had found them.
In front of me on the desk where I wrote was my school photo. I’d been tall for my age, stretched, but not all the pieces of me had grown in sync: my teeth were too big for my head, my
hands and feet huge on the end of skinny limbs. Small breasts and a child’s narrow hips. Pieces of a woman tacked on to a girl. Where was the mother to guide me until I was ready?
The pot plant I’ve brought is on Peter’s bedside table: chrysanthemums, cheap and colourful, the same kind he used to buy for Mum. I always hated them, and I know Mum did too, but
she was afraid to tell him in case he stopped buying her flowers altogether. The yellow petals are as bright as if they’ve been injected with dye, and they suck the colour from everything
around them, turning the universe of the room insipid and grey. In the heated room their perfume is a chemical vapour.
I pick a small flower, one recently opened from a bud, and roll the stem in my fingers. The petals bruise along opaque lines the second they are bent. I put the flower in my pocket next to the
little bones I found outside Seamus’s caravan, then stand and stare at Peter. He sours into the bed. When he goes to speak I press my hand hard on his wet mouth, remembering the adult
currency he traded with a child’s infatuation. I think of him one day soon reverting to his base elements, as my mother has already done: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen – the molecules
separating and no longer able to do harm.
Let him fester, and rot, and disappear.
A layer of soft hair covers my face and body. It’s grown quite slowly over the last year but mostly it’s on my forearms. Luckily it’s quite fair, not like the
hair on my head. I like to pinch some of the strands together and roll the hairs between my fingers so they pull a bit. My skin looks like it belongs to a newborn calf, but I don’t feel very
pure. More of a beast.
Around my chest, I strap myself up with lengths from a torn sheet, then a tight vest over which I wear a baggy top. I’ve tested the look in the mirror and I’m flat like a plank.
Girls at school chant a rhyme when I pass them in the corridor, ‘She’s so boring, she’s got no tits, she never puts out, and she never gets her kicks’. The boys tease me
too, they call me spaghetti. None of them have asked me to go out with them; none of them would want to if they knew. Only Mike gives me lifts home on his bike. He French kisses me with a pointy
tongue when he drops me off. Mrs Simpson over the road watches through her net curtains. I think Mike’s my boyfriend, but Melanie Blacksmith’s going out with his brother, and she says
that Mike’s not interested in girls who are frigid.
For supper Mum’s cooked what’s left in the fridge: a mishmash of cheese on toast, some cabbage and half a pie. We sit opposite each other and I eat slowly, worrying about how long I
can leave the food in my stomach before it gets absorbed. Now that Uncle Peter’s stopped coming round, there’s nothing to break up the evening, and the meal seems to take ages.
‘How was your day then, darling?’ Mum says in a squeaky voice, pecking her food with a fork. The cutlery clangs on the china. She won’t finish the meal, but she’ll expect
me to finish mine.
‘Fine.’
‘Did you get your homework in on time?’ Her words are all shaky. ‘I expect to see great things from you at the next parents’ evening.’ That’ll be the first
one she’s ever made it to then.
Mum dabs her mouth on an ironed napkin and her lipstick prints satsuma shapes on the cloth. Earlier today before I went to school, she opened the front curtains, placed herself by the window and
wrestled the rusty ironing board open. When I came home, everything from the laundry basket had been ironed, even the dress I wore for my twelfth birthday which no longer fits me. She’s hung
it in my wardrobe anyway.
We finish the meal in silence. I scrape my knife and fork together and put them to the left of my plate. Mum lights a cigarette and inhales a big lungful of smoke. She looks out of the window
and flicks cylinders of ash into an ashtray. Normally she uses her plate.
‘You know, you mustn’t talk about this,’ she says with a sniff.
I stare at my plate.
‘There’s just no need.’ She pulls on her cigarette – it’s nearly finished, in record time – and she stubs out the butt and looks at me. ‘It’ll
only cause a load of problems. They’ll ask lots of questions, of me as well as you. No good will come from airing your problems. Mistakes are best hidden.’
Her eyes scorch into me. She fiddles with the packet of cigarettes then lights another. I wish I could smoke and take big breaths like that.
‘Well,’ she says, her voice all high-pitched, ‘we’ll have to make sure we concentrate on your studies now, shan’t we? Get you into that university you’re
always talking about.’ Her words start to quiver. ‘Get all this sex stuff out of your head.’
The gravy from the pie has made brown rainbows on my plate. I think about the food in my stomach, mixed up into a thick sauce like in a giant food processor. No one would eat if they had a TV of
their insides, they’d take space pills instead.
Mum’s crying now. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ She wipes her eyes with her dirty napkin and a bit of lipstick smears on her cheek. ‘Is it too much to ask, for me
to have something for myself? The one good thing that’s happened to me in all these years, and you had to come along and ruin it. After all I’ve done for you, after all I’ve given
up.’ She stands and paces the floor. ‘Did you think we could share him? Was that your idea?’ Mum looks at me but carries on walking and puffing on her cigarette. She holds the
butt in the V of her fingers and jabs it at me while she talks. ‘If you were a grown-up I’d call you a little bitch. But you’re only skin and bones, a stupid little girl. I
don’t know what you think you’ve got to offer that I haven’t.’
Raindrops of mascara trickle down her cheeks. She wipes the black on to her hand. At the kitchen window she stops and looks out, turning her back on me. Big yellow roses burst round the window
frame. Their leaves are dry and the outer petals are starting to crisp. They’d last out a few more weeks if someone bothered to water them.
I stand to leave the room but my legs won’t move. I run my fingernail up and down the edge of the table, making a small dent in the wood where the Formica has come away and gritty bits of
old food are stuck. I wish I had a time machine to take me back to one of those other meals, before all of this started.
‘You could be in so much trouble, young lady.’ Mum sniffs back her tears, takes another drag and stubs out the cigarette, but she doesn’t turn from the window. She fills the
sink with water and washing-up liquid, and clanks the plates and cutlery into the volcano of bubbles.
‘I love him.’ I say the words under my breath.
Mum swivels on the balls of her feet to face me, her face damp and red. Soap suds are on her hands and up her wrists.
‘What did you say?’
‘He said he loved me.’
‘Love!’ she shouts. ‘What would you know about love? You’re only fourteen.’ Her head juts forward from her shoulders and she waves her hands in the air. White
clumps of bubbles fly around the room; some land on my face. She screams and I’m glad the windows are shut, even though the room is hot and smells foodie. ‘Look at yourself, Rachel.
What do you see? I see a silly little girl flaunting herself in front of a grown man.’
‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t have let him . . . I thought . . . I thought that’s what I was meant to do.’
‘Liar.’ Her voice is getting louder. ‘You’re a liar!’ I stare at the floor and mumble. Tears drop on to the lino.
‘I only wanted—’
Mum flies at me and holds me by the shoulders, digging her fingernails into my skin. Her lips are shrivelled round her clenched teeth and her bottom jaw sticks out. She shakes me and my head
bobbles back and forth on my neck until my brain goes fizzy. ‘Wanted what?’ she screams.
‘A hug.’
‘Liar. I bet you loved every minute of it. Don’t tell me this wasn’t your plan all along. You’re jealous.’
My legs go weak and she pushes me away. ‘Dear God!’ She wipes her head with her forearm, leaving a line of suds on her hair. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do
without your father’s support. It’s bad enough what you did, but why the hell did you have to tell him? You and your stupid letters. Did you think it would bring him back? Did you?
Well, it won’t. Your plan’s backfired. He’s disgusted with you. We’re on our own now, Rachel, totally alone, thanks to you.’
I sink into my chair. I can’t get enough air in my lungs.
‘Now it’s all down on paper; if anyone else finds out, you’ll end up in prison. Peter is a policeman, he could lock you up and throw away the key. You’d be stuck in there
with all those rapists and murderers, all those bad people like you.’ I start to cry out loud. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘that’s what you deserve. I rue the day I ever gave
birth to you, you little demon. You’re a thief and a liar.’
She grabs my hair. I scream and grapple at her hands as she pulls me out of the room, but she keeps on yanking and hauls me up the stairs, and I’m scared my hair’s going to come out
in a big lump. I stumble halfway up the staircase and she lets go and holds my arm instead, pulling me on to the landing and then into my bedroom, where she launches me towards my bed. I flop down
and she slams the door behind her as she leaves the room.