Undertow (14 page)

But as we walk back down towards the town, Mum’s enthusiasm infects me.

“Look,” she says. “A whole new world.”

And she is right. It is a whole new world. The sunlight shimmers on the water, ricochets off slate roofs. The town is transformed, the way London is when the snow falls and muffles the dirt and noise in a blanket of clean white.

Mum links her arm through mine, Finn racing ahead. And I ignore the eyes on us. Ignore the stares and the “What the hell?”s. And instead I wrap myself in my family, like a force field, protection against the enemy. And I soak up the sun.

Mum’s good mood lasts until six. She takes us digging for sandworms, then for ice cream from the Fudge Factory, the woman behind the counter laughing, saying it’s the first sale she’s had in months. Takes us all the way back up the hill with promises of pizza for tea and staying up late. But then we open the door, see the answerphone blinking its red eye at us. As if to say, “I know something you don’t know.” And everything turns to black.

There are two messages. The first is Danny. About swimming. I’m to meet him at two because he’s on an early and the pool will be empty then. And so my stomach is already alive by the time the second message kicks in. Mum’s hanging round me, Finn under her arm singing “Billie and Danny up a tree, K. I. S. S. I. N. G.”

“Ssshh,” I say. “I can’t hear.” Thinking maybe Cass has finally got round to ringing. Or it’s work. Or Danny again. Changing the time. Cancelling. Letting me off, and my butterflies out.

But it’s a man’s voice. Deeper than Danny. Older. His voice rich with breeding, money. A sugar-daddy voice, Cass would say. And this sugar daddy has a name.

“Henrietta… Het… It’s Jonty.”

He pauses, wondering what to say next, I guess. Leaving a gap big enough for Finn to fit in, “Who’s Jonty?”

The name jolts my memory. I can see it spelled out in Eleanor’s looped italics underneath a photo of two boys with a carrot-nosed snowman.
Will and Jonty, Christmas 1977
. It’s someone from back then. Someone Mum knew.

I turn to her, looking for the same recognition. But whoever he is, whatever he is to her, she doesn’t want to remember, and, instead of nostalgia, anger floods her eyes.

I reach for the answerphone, trying to cover it before she can hit
DELETE
. Instead she pushes it to the floor and tries to stamp on it with her pink Havaianas. All the time she’s swearing to herself, at me, at him.

“For Christ’s sake, Billie. This is why I told you to turn it off.”

“Who is he?”

“Nobody. God.”

Then I realize. Or I think I do. It makes sense. It’s so obvious. “He’s my dad,” I blurt out.

Mum looks up at me, her face pale, her cheeks flushed with effort, or embarrassment. And I think, This is it; she’s going to tell me.

But instead she shakes her head. “No, Billie, he’s not. He’s nobody. A nobody.” And then she raises her leg and brings it hard down on the answerphone again. “Nobody,” she repeats. “Nobody.”

“Mum, stop,” Finn pleads.

But she doesn’t. She stamps on and on. Which would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. And then, finally, I hear a crack. And Mum stops and steadies herself against the wall, her breath coming fast and hard.

Finn is crying. But Mum can’t hear him. All she can hear is the voice inside her head. And the voice tells her to walk away. To shut herself off. And she does. So it’s me who crouches on the hallway floor, holds Finn, hauls him up and then lies him down on the sofa, scans through the channels to find cartoons, makes him pizza for tea.

And that’s how we sit for three hours. Our faces sticky with cheese, our eyes glazed with
Transformers
. Just me and Finn. At nine, Mum still hasn’t come down, so it’s me who tells him he has to go to bed, makes him clean his teeth, reads him four pages of Harry Potter before I realize his eyes are shut and he is lost in another world, fighting his own dragons. And demons.

Mum’s door is still closed. And I should go to bed. But I’m too wired. I know I won’t sleep. Not like this. So instead I get my paper and pencils, and I draw.

I draw Finn and Luka. Draw Mum, in her sundress, in her own March summer. I draw Danny. His soft smile, his lean chest, his long fingers. I draw until my blood stops singing, till my eyes ache and my hands are stiff. Then I let sleep take me away too.

HET

HET LOATHES
Christmas. The enforced jollity. The baubles and tinsel and wrapping paper, promising the earth but delivering disappointment in the shape of another hat and scarf and thin, insipid gravy
.

But worse is Boxing Day. Every year her parents insist on having half of Seaton around for cocktails. Or rather, her father does. Het can see the weariness in her mother’s red-rimmed eyes; weariness she chases away with Optrex and sherry
.

This year Het is dressed in some absurd taffeta thing her mother has bought from Dingles in Plymouth. The boned emerald silk squashes Het’s breasts and digs into her back, leaving weals on the faded tan of her skin. She can feel the lace underskirt rubbing against her bare legs. At least she won the battle of the American Tan tights
.

“You look a delight, dear.” Carol Lister kisses her on both cheeks while blowing out a thin seam of Pall Mall smoke
.

I look like a Christmas Fairy, thinks Het. But she doesn’t say so. She smiles thinly and murmurs her thanks
.

Carol arches an overplucked eyebrow, giving her the strange air of an emaciated drag queen. “Jonty’s here, you know,” she whispers conspiratorially
.

“Oh,” says Het. “Well, I’ll be sure to look out for him.”

“You do that.” Carol draws slowly on her cigarette
.

But Het forgets to. Instead he finds her
.

Het takes a Twiglet from a crystal bowl on the dining table and sucks off the salty coating and with it a memory of Christmases past. She wishes she were seven not seventeen. Wishes she were small enough to see the world through a sea of pantyhosed and navy-serged legs, small enough to drink sugary Ribena instead of the sour claret her father has pushed into her hand, small enough to slip under the table still. Away from the smoke and the sound and the silent hating, hidden by a curtain of white linen in her own small world
.

But is she so big? She doesn’t feel it. Feels like she’s playing dress-up. Her feet sliding around in her mother’s court shoes, a dress she would never have chosen, will never wear again. She looks around. No one is watching. The doctors and dentists, the great and the good of the county, are absorbed in themselves and soused in festive spirit. So, quickly, quietly, Het drops the Twiglet on the floor, crouches as if to retrieve it, then slides neatly along the carpet to the safety of the table
.

She sits cross-legged on the sage green, the white tablecloth trailing around her, cocooning her. Too tall now to lie on her tummy, her ear against the floor, listening to the thud of footsteps and hum of conversation. Instead she hears the clunk of glasses above her. The pop of a champagne cork and the ripple of a cheer at the extravagance of it, the indulgence. Hears the murmur of small talk, of golf and gardening. Then a change in tone, and her father’s restrained anger, his “Why is that man Shaw here?” Her mother’s gritted-teeth reply, that it would look worse if he had not been invited
.

She hears all of it, from the safety of her hiding place. Smells it too. A distant haze of Nina Ricci and sweat and cigars. And something else. Aftershave and money. But close, overpoweringly close. It is the smell of an intruder
.

“Still playing hide-and-seek, Hetty?”

She feels her stomach leap. “Jonty.”

She doesn’t look at him. His breath is hot and whiskey-sour on her neck. His lips so close she can feel the vibration against her when he speaks
.

“God, you’re gorgeous.”

Then his lips are on her neck, his tongue warm and wet, leaving slug-trails of saliva on her skin. Like a Labrador, Het thinks. She pushes him off
.

“Stop it.”

“What’s the matter? Scared Daddy might see? He’d be over the bloody moon if he knew it was me.”

“No. It’s… I just… I don’t want to.”

“Frigid little cow,” he hisses
.

Maybe I am, Het thinks. Maybe that’s why she feels like this. Empty. Dead
.

It’s not the first time he’s kissed her. That was aged thirteen, in a game of sardines that she had begged to be excused from. But Eleanor insisted and so Jonty squeezed into her mother’s wardrobe, amongst the silk and the jacquard and the fox-fur coats. Het made a wish that this were Narnia and she could disappear into the snow behind and run away. But there was no lion, no witch, just hard oak against her spine
.

“Want to play blue murder?” he whispered in the dark
.

“What’s that?” she asked
.

“This,” he said. And then she felt him. His fat lips on her mouth. His body pressing against hers
.

But Het felt nothing. Not then. Not when he pulled her behind a bush during a game of French cricket. Or in the cinema, when he pushed his hand up her skirt, his fingers gripping her bare thigh, possessing her, trapping her in a place where she couldn’t scream
.

Each time Het lets him. Hoping this will be the moment the earth moves, that life lives up to its Judy Blume promise
.

But it never does
.

“Come on,” he says. “Old times’ sake.”

“Not here.”

“Upstairs then.”

And she lets him. Lets him lead her up to her bedroom. Lets him kiss her
.

Not because she wants him. But because she wants to feel something, anything
.

But ten minutes later, when he’s bored of her unresponsive arms, when he’s back downstairs braying with Will and her father about some rugby match, when she’s lying on her bed, wiping the wet from her neck, she still feels nothing. And she wonders then if she ever will
.

BILLIE

“TAKE FINN
with you.”

Mum slams a cup of coffee down on the counter, its contents slopping over the Formica and dripping a steady brown trickle onto the floor.

“What?” I say. I’m standing at the door, swimming kit in my hand. I’m late already and now she lays this on me.

She’s been like it all morning. Finn set her off. Asking for Luka. Asking when his daddy was coming. And she starts banging around in the kitchen, looking for something, some plate that she has to have and none of the others will do. Then she decides she wants butterscotch Angel Delight for lunch and sends Finn down to the corner shop, shouting at me when he comes back with crisps and a packet of Chewits instead. Like it’s my fault.

She’s letting it buzz round her like an angry bee. That phone call. Luka. She can’t think straight. The banging, the busy stuff is to block it out. I know that now. But it doesn’t work.

“You heard me. Take Finn swimming.”

“Yes.” Finn punches the air.

And part of me wants to say yes. Because of the way she is. The way she might be going. But then I think of Danny. Of his hand on mine. And I can’t. I just can’t.

“No,” I say.

“Why? What are you planning on doing?” Mum brushes a pool of coffee onto the floor with her hand.

“Nothing,” I say quickly.

“Then take him. I want some peace.”

So when I show up at the pool I have an eight-year-old in tow, swinging his goggles like a lasso.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to Danny. “It’s just that Mum’s…” What? Having one of her moments? One of her days, weeks, months? I can’t tell him that. “She’s busy in the kitchen and she can’t watch Finn and do that at the same time and I…”

“Hey, hey. Slow down,” he says. Then turns. “I’m Danny,” he says, holding out a hand.

“Finn,” says Finn, shaking it.

“Come on.” I tug at Finn’s jacket. “We should change.” I’ve done it before, taken him into girls’ toilets and stuff. It’s fine. But Danny steps in.

“No, Billie. He can come with me.”

“Cool,” says Finn, nonchalant. Though I can see he’s anything but.

“Er. Well, I’ll see you in the pool, then,” I say.

“You will,” Danny says, and grins.

“You have to kick harder,” Finn tells me.

“I know,” I protest.

“It’s easy, look.” He dives underwater, arcing round me like a seal, then bursting through the surface, laughing. And me? I’m just trying to keep my head above the water.

“Ignore him,” Danny says. “He’ll soon get bored.”

And he does. Bored of the big sister who can barely get three strokes without swallowing then coughing up half a pint of chlorine. Bored of Danny, who’s too busy helping her to race him.

So Finn huffs off to the deep end to dive, leaving Danny and me floundering in a metre of water.

“Your neck’s too stiff,” he says.

“I know that,” I snap. “How else am I meant to breathe though? I don’t want to drown.”

“Hey,” he says, his voice Luka’s, when he’s trying to calm Mum, make her see reason. “You won’t drown.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I won’t let you,” he replies. “You have to trust me, Billie.”

“I do.” I relent. “It’s just, with Finn—”

“I know. But he’s gone now.”

I look down to the deep end. See Finn standing on the edge, fingers pointed, face pure concentration. He leaps, a perfect curve, the water barely moving as he plunges beneath the surface. He’s a natural. And I am out of my depth.

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” Danny says.

“I’m not scared,” I lie.

“OK. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to hold my hands. And we’re going to go underwater. We’re not going to swim. We’re just going to float. And it doesn’t matter if it gets in your eyes or in your mouth. It’s water, Billie. Just water.”