‘Are you going to tell Dad what happened?’ I asked her as we passed more signs for London and I knew we were getting closer and closer to him. I didn’t think he would hit me, but he would be so, so cross. I was scared of him being cross but I was more scared of seeing him cry. When he cried, which he did sometimes when I was really naughty, it made my stomach feel all funny. It made me want to cry and to hug him. And to be a good girl all the time.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened, Fleur? Then I’ll know what I should tell your father.’ she said.
‘I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t smoking.’
‘Who was, then?’
‘Not me,’ I said. It was her fault, anyway. If she was around then Dad wouldn’t be so sad and cross and expect me to always, always be good. Dad wouldn’t cry if she hadn’t left us.
‘OK.’
‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ I told her.
Not like you.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘It was other people.’
‘OK.’
‘It
was
! Raymond Rheine was talking to me about football and then he kissed me and it was nice and it made my tummy go all funny in a good way not in the bad way it does when Dad gets cross or when he cries. And then everyone said they knew a way outside and Raymond said I should come and so I went because I’m always the boring one and then they were smoking and I was given it and then the teacher was there and everyone ran before I could and I had the cigarette but I didn’t smoke it. I wasn’t smoking.’
‘Kissing boys and smoking, that’s two major things, Fleur, in one night,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t smoking!’ I shouted. It wasn’t fair that I was being sent home when I didn’t do anything. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘Actually, you did,’ she said. She looked at me really quickly so she could keep driving. ‘You shouldn’t have gone with them. That’s me ignoring you kissing a boy which you’re far too young to do, too.’
‘I’m not too young. And no one ever asks me to do anything because I’m so boring. Dad never lets me do anything.’
‘Boring is good, you know? Boring girls generally do better at school and get to have the freedom to be and do whatever they want when they grow up. Wouldn’t you rather live an exciting life then than now?’
‘No!’ I said to her.
‘Yes, stupid question. Fleur, this isn’t good. You know how upset your father is going to be.’
‘I know.’
‘But, more than that, you should want better for yourself. It shouldn’t be a case of your dad being upset that stops you from doing things you know aren’t right, it needs to come from you.’
My tummy was full of butterflies and I felt a bit sick. I didn’t want to see Dad. I didn’t want any of this.
‘Can I come and live with you?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Please, Mummy, can I come and live with you?’
She looked in the rear-view mirror and then indicated and then she pulled over right there on the motorway. There weren’t lots of cars so it was OK. She didn’t turn the car off, she just took off her seatbelt and turned herself around in her seat so she was looking at me.
‘Fleur, I would love for you to live with me, but I don’t think that’s what you really want, is it?’
‘Yes it is,’ I said to her. I didn’t want to leave Dad but I did want to live with her. Sort of.
‘I think you’re scared and worried about seeing your Dad when he finds out you’ve been asked to leave the trip. I don’t blame you, if it was my dad I would be feeling the same thing, but living with me won’t solve the problem. You have to face up to the things you don’t want to do. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but if you think you’re old enough to kiss boys and get into trouble with your friends, you have to take your punishment, like the girl who is old enough to do those things.’ She stroked my face. ‘It won’t be so bad. But, if after you’ve spoken to your dad and you’ve sorted things out with him properly, you still want to come and live with me, you can tell me that and I’ll talk to your dad about it. Does that sound OK?’
I nodded.
I wonder if Noah is the perfect man. This is so different from anything else I’ve been involved with before. He’s kind of laidback, but not
horizontal. You can tell he works hard. The fact he’s absolutely gorgeous doesn’t hurt, either. He glances away from his computer screen and his face creases up with a smile at me. See? Perfect.
Eight years ago
‘You wait here, I’ll go and tell your father what’s happened,’ she said to me. ‘Don’t worry about anything, it’ll all be OK.’
It was early Saturday afternoon so that meant Dad would be watching the football on television and his new friend would be cleaning the house. He always called his girlfriends his friends. I don’t know why, I knew they were his girlfriends and I knew what he did with them. That sex thing. Sometimes I would hear and I would hear Dad telling whoever it was to shush because I was asleep and I would put my pillow on my head because it was too disgusting. Usually on a Saturday I would be tidying my room and writing in my diary and doing my homework.
I slid down in my seat so only the top of my head could be seen in the front passenger seat as she walked up the path to the door. She pushed the doorbell and then took a few steps backwards. It took ages for Dad to answer the door and I slid even lower when I saw the look on his face.
She started talking to him and he started to look at the car and I could tell he was really,
really
angry. The butterflies in my stomach got worse and worse.
He started to come to the car and I said, ‘No!’ and almost threw myself onto the floor. But she stopped him and kept standing in his way, ’cos she was as tall as him, until he stopped trying to come to get me and he stood and talked to her.
He didn’t say anything for ages but he kept looking at me in the car and she kept talking and talking. And then he stopped looking at the car and looked at her and she was still talking. She talked and talked and talked. Then she came over to the car and opened my door and said, ‘Come on, it’s OK, he’s not going to shout at you or stop you going on any more school trips.’
I didn’t believe her so I didn’t move. I really, really wanted to live with her. I didn’t want to go home at all.
She went and got my case from the boot of her car and then she came back and held out her hand. She hadn’t asked me to hold her hand since I was a little, little girl.
‘Trust me, it’s fine,’ she said. She smiled at me and it was like I was five again. When I was five and she used to smile at me, I always smiled back. I felt safe when she smiled at me, I felt like she would always protect me. I felt like I was curled up in her arms and she would never let me go. When she smiled at me like that, right then, she felt like my proper mummy all over again.
I took her hand and got out of the car and she led me to where Dad was standing.
‘Fleur, I’m very disappointed in you,’ Dad said. I knew he was saying that because she was standing there. Usually he’d be shouting at me and telling me what a bad girl I’d been and how he’d made all these sacrifices for me and I was throwing them in his face and trying to hurt him and how I was never to even think about going out again.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I said.
‘I’m going to call the school on Monday and make sure you are given detention for at least a week. I don’t think sending you home early is enough of a punishment. But you mustn’t get mixed up in something like that again.’
‘I won’t, Dad.’ She was still holding my hand, still making me feel safe, still being my mummy.
‘Go to your room and start any homework you have left. I’ll bring you a snack later.’
That was it? That was all he was going to say? I looked at Dad and he didn’t look angry any more. He looked disappointed, I suppose, but not as angry as he had when she first spoke to him.
I looked at her, wondering what she had said to him.
‘OK, Fleury, I’ll say goodbye now.’ She was still smiling at me like she did when I was five. She bent down and, looking right
in my face, she took me in her arms, pulled me close to her. I felt so safe, so wanted and loved. So very loved. She whispered in my ear, ‘I love you, baby girl. Don’t forget that, don’t ever doubt that.’
She stood up and nodded at Dad. ‘Donald,’ she said, like she was talking to someone very important who she didn’t like very much.
‘Mirabelle,’ he replied.
She smiled at me one last time and then went back to her car. She waved at me and Dad and then she drove away.
I thought Dad would shout at me once she was gone, but he didn’t. He told me again to do my homework and he brought me a cheese sandwich a bit later. He didn’t mention it again.
Just before I went to bed that night, as I was pulling across the blue and red flowered curtains at the window, I saw someone standing across the road, looking up at my bedroom window. The outline of the person looked like her, but I couldn’t see properly because it was dark and she wasn’t near a lamppost.
I pulled the curtains across and got into bed, and turned out my lamp and closed my eyes. I tried to go to sleep, but I could feel her out there. I could feel her telling me the story of the Rose Petal Beach, like she did all those years ago. I threw back the covers and ran to the window, opened the curtains then opened the bottom of the window so I could lean out and look across the road properly, see if I could make her out. But she was gone. If it was her. I think it was her because after that day, I didn’t see her again for four years.
Noah still has a frown upon his face as he concentrates on his computer. It feels weird to not have anything to do. I do have stuff to do, but I have no inclination to do it. I keep thinking, ‘What’s the point?’ It’s not like I love college or anything, and it’s not as if there’s any point to anything any more. I mean, take her, Mirabelle: she did what she wanted, she dipped in and out of my
life, but did it make her happy? Did it stop her from being murdered? No. So what’s the point?
I sit back on the bed, staring at the different colours that top my toes. They remind me of the dress she wore that day she came to get me in Wales. It was a long dress, made of strips of the rainbow that clung to her body and ended at her thighs. It showed off her long, slender legs and made her seem even taller than she was. She was a real beauty, my mother. Not many people could have dressed like her and got away with it. The way she hugged me that day was as if she was saying goodbye. It was as if she was showing me all the love she could with a clock hanging over her head. What did she say to Dad that day that made her leave?
Before I think things through properly, I’m picking up my mobile and dialling Dad’s number.
He picks up on the first ring. ‘Fleur. How are you? When are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘The police haven’t allowed me to go into her house yet, so I can’t pack up her stuff and get on with preparing it to go on the market. So I’m going to be here a little longer.’
‘I think you should come home and then go back when you can get into the house.’
‘It could be any day now,’ I say to him. ‘I’ll just hang on and see what happens. Hey, Dad, remember that time I got sent home early from the trip to Wales?’
‘Yes,’ he says, cautiously, because he hasn’t managed to get me to come home.
‘What did she, Mirabelle, Mum, say to you to stop you being so cross?’
His silence reverberates down the line and fills the hotel room. I am silent, holding my breath. Noah has stopped working and is looking at me, waiting, too, it seems, for my father’s reply. ‘I don’t remember, Fleur, it was a long time ago.’
‘Yes you do, Dad, you remember everything,’ I reply. He does. He remembers all sorts of conversations that most people forget.
Noah suddenly hits the save buttons on his laptop, grabs his two mobile phones and his jacket, then waves at me as he departs. Just before he shuts the white door with the emergency exit instructions hanging on the back, he raises his hand to his head in the ‘call me’ gesture.
‘Why are you asking me this?’ Dad says.
‘Because I want to know. I was just remembering that time and I know you spoke to her and I need to know what you talked about.’
His silence returns, descends like a blanket of snow upon us. I’m supposed to say, ‘It doesn’t matter, actually, I’m sure it wasn’t important,’ right now. I often do that when he goes silent, not just about her, Mirabelle, about everything. But this time I’m not going to do that. Because it doesn’t make sense that he wasn’t cross. The first time he trusted me I let him down, and he didn’t hit the roof, he practically let me get away with it.
‘She told me,’ he begins slowly and reluctantly, ‘that you had been sent away from Spurton Hall because you’d been hanging around with kids who were smoking and you were very sorry and very worried about how cross I was going to be.’
‘What else?’ I ask.
‘That was it, mainly.’
‘Please, Dad, what else?’ There was definitely more to it than that.
He sighs. ‘She said you were so scared of my anger that you had asked to live with her. Did you?’ He sounds upset and asks that in the hope that this show of hurt will distract me from questioning him. Which means there’s more.
‘Yes, I was thirteen and scared. What else?’
‘She … she said if I gave you a hard time, she would do everything she could to get you to live with her. It was what she wanted more than anything, but she had told you that you had to sort things out with me even though she would have you living with her in an instant. She’d even bought a big house near the sea so you could come and stay with her as I promised you could sometimes.’
‘You promised her I could stay sometimes? Why didn’t you ever tell me that? Why didn’t you let me go?’
‘I knew that wasn’t what you wanted, Fleur. I knew you didn’t really want to go and stay with her and feel like a burden. She had her life down there and she didn’t really want you to stay, she just said it to make herself feel better.’
It isn’t often my dad lies, he mostly omits things, but this is a lie. No way to style it, he is lying. He is absolutely lying. I know it like I know how to breathe. She did want me to stay with her. She did want me.