Charlotte had curled up like a fist on her bed, holding her swollen stomach and staring at the pack of cheap pads her mum had given her the day before when the sticky brown blood appeared in her pants. She wearing one now, a bulky betrayal. The curse. She didn’t want it. She doesn’t like it. She’s still only eleven. She wants her changing body to go back to how it used to look, flat and hard like a boy. Like it was before Daniel came along. When things were better.
Ma has never taken her away for a weekend. She’s never taken her anywhere. And now she’s gone and left her with Tony for two whole days, maybe three, and as her head swirls with drugs and booze and feels heavy and thick on her shoulders, that worries her. It frightens her. Charlotte Nevill, the fearless girl. The troublemaker. The bully. The little bitch.
‘It’s Mummy’s fault,’ Katie says, staring ahead, hard. ‘Everything is always her fault. I wish she was dead.’
‘I wish Daniel had never been born.’
‘We can’t let them do this to us,’ Katie says. She sits up and swivels round so she’s facing Charlotte, cross-legged, before taking hold of her hands again. They’re soft and small and neatly manicured. Charlotte’s, much bigger, with bitten-down nails and torn skin scabbing at the edges, look clumsy. Manly. She doesn’t mind manly. Today she loves her hands.
‘No, we can’t,’ Charlotte shakes her head. ‘We won’t. Let’s run away. Let’s do it.’
‘Yes!’ Katie says. ‘We’ll be free. Together forever.’
Charlotte grins and stands, spinning around like Katie does sometimes when she has too much energy for sitting still. ‘Bonnie and Clyde, Clyde and Bonnie,’ she says and suddenly she’s giggling loud and from her sore gut.
‘Just like them,’ Katie says. ‘In love and on the run.’
‘You’ll be on the run,’ Charlotte says, her head swimming as she stops, part drunk, part high, part exhausted. ‘But no one will come after me. They won’t care. They’ll all be glad to be rid of me. They can have their perfect family if I fuck off. Live in this shite estate, all happy without me.’
Katie pulls her back down, shaking her head. ‘No, we’ll be on the run.’
Charlotte waits for the world to settle. The half pill she took is kicking in hard. Maybe different from the others, she didn’t look at the packet. She likes it, whatever it is. It makes her feel warm and floaty and sleepy. Like there’s a blur between her and the rest of the world. Only she and Katie exist, like in one of their games. ‘What are you on about?’ She leans forward and smiles. ‘Your eyes are perfect blue. Like the sky.’
‘Concentrate, Charlotte! I’m being serious. This is important.’ Katie shakes her shoulders and she tries to focus. She does focus.
‘I’m listening, all right?’
‘Good.’ Katie is intense. ‘Why should they get to be a perfect family? Why should they be happy when they’ve made you so unhappy? Why should I have to worry about Mummy ruining my life forever? She’ll never let me go. Even if I run, she’ll find me.’
‘She should have died falling down those stairs,’ Charlotte murmurs. She hates Katie’s ma almost as much as she hates her half-brother. She hates anything that makes Katie unhappy.
‘Yes,’ Katie says. ‘She should have.’ She pauses. ‘And she still could.’
A moment of stillness sits between them.
‘And children have accidents too,’ Katie continues, quietly focused. Slowly, slowly Charlotte grasps what her best friend is saying.
‘There was the kiddie who electrocuted himself in Cairn Street,’ Charlotte says. ‘He nearly died. They reckon he did for a couple of minutes.’
‘Exactly.’
The enormity of what Katie is suggesting is surreal, and yet Charlotte finds herself laughing. It’s not a pleasant sound, but angry and bitter and filled with a hard joy. She imagines Ma in tears. Tony broken. No perfect boy and no dumb girl to send to the chippie.
‘We’ll kill them and run,’ she says, breathless with the fantasy of it.
‘On the same day!’ Katie shines with excitement. ‘I’ll start stealing from my mother’s purse. She never knows what she’s got in there. And take some jewellery too. We could go to Scotland maybe.’
‘Spain,’ Charlotte says. ‘Somewhere hot. Jean went to Spain once. She said all the buildings were white and that everyone was always happy because they sleep in the afternoons.’
Katie laughs, a sweet tinkle not like Charlotte’s raucous uncouth noise. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘If it has to be Spain then we’ll get a boat. We’ll go to my dead grandfather’s house first. It’s full of valuable things we could sell and they won’t look for us there, not at first, not in all the shock. I’ll get a key copied. And you don’t need a proper passport to get to Europe. Just one of those cardboard ones from the post office.’
Charlotte hasn’t got any sort of passport but who cares, Katie will take care of all that. In her head, they’re on a boat, a big ferry, and shrieking together into the salty wind until they’re laughing with tears running down their faces.
‘When?’ she asks. Everything seems better already. Even the rain is slowing down.
‘Soon,’ Katie says. ‘Let me get enough money first.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to nick much.’ She hates her poverty. It’s like grime under her fingernails she can’t dig out.
‘Don’t be silly.’ Katie takes Charlotte’s face in her hands. ‘You only have to bring you.’
‘I love you, Katie Batten,’ Charlotte says. ‘My Bonnie.’
‘I love you too, Charlotte Nevill. My Clyde. My partner in crime.’ She smiles, still holding Charlotte’s cheeks. ‘We’re definitely doing this, aren’t we? Deal? No more playing?’
Charlotte nods. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ Katie whispers in agreement, before leaning in to kiss her.
56
NOW
MARILYN
It’s dark by the time we get back to town and I can’t risk taking her to Simon’s hotel, so I check into a Travelodge near the centre of town, paying for two nights with cash on the off chance the police are watching my banking. Paranoia is catching. I also give Lisa a hundred and fifty pounds to keep on her at all times. She doesn’t want to take it but I insist.
We make strong coffee and sit on the bed, Lisa cross-legged, the knife she’s stolen from the youth hostel safely out of her coat and on the desk. With her strange blue hair and khaki clothes, she looks so much younger, barely in her late twenties, but this disguise also reminds me she’s a woman who’s had to survive. She’s told me about her life before, about her plan with Katie. But the rest? Prison. Fear. Hiding. Who knows what she’s faced during those times? But that life has given her skills which are ingrained, I think. And they could save Ava. I haven’t told her Ava might be pregnant. There’s only so much she can cope with.
‘Poor Jon,’ she says, as the TV plays the news again. ‘He wasn’t such a terrible person. He was just weak. He would never have taken Ava. And anyway, I knew it wasn’t him. He didn’t know about Peter Rabbit.’
‘Peter Rabbit?’ I ask.
‘Daniel’s favourite toy. He got it for his second birthday. His last birthday. Someone left one almost exactly like it outside the house. Jon couldn’t have done that.’
Jon Roper’s face comes up on the screen again, alongside one of Lisa – my Lisa – and the shock of seeing her there still jolts me.
‘He gave us all the money he made from when he sold the stories to the papers about us. Exposing me. His mother had made sure most of it went in the bank so he wouldn’t drink it away, and when he sobered up, I guess he felt guilty. It wasn’t a fortune but it was enough for a deposit on the house and I could finally put some roots down for Ava and me. I could never hurt him, just as he would never hurt his little Crystal. It’s Katie. I knew from the start it was Katie. It was always games and make-believe with her.’ She swallows some coffee and stares into its rich murky brown. ‘Until the deal.’