Rosie sucked in her breath and gaped at Mira. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘My lip bled, just here,’ Mira said, dabbing at the left-hand corner of her mouth, as though it was bleeding again after all these years.
‘Ouchy,’ Rosie said, sucking in her breath and staring at Mira’s lip as though she saw blood too.
Mira swooped in with the question she had been waiting to ask. ‘Do you ever bleed when your mummy hits you?’
There was a beat of silence.
‘Yes, I really bleed and it hurts so much and makes me cry. That’s why you can hear me screaming all the time.’ Her face took on a sickly translucence and her blue eyes blinked madly at Mira.
Mira felt like she had swallowed a beautiful butterfly. The information Rosie had delivered fluttered in her stomach, but having wanted it so much she felt sad to have trapped it.
‘I’m so sorry, pet,’ Mira whispered, slumping down, feeling the weight of the child’s words on her shoulders. The bitter sting of her own mother’s slap came to her again.
‘I think I’d better go home now,’ Rosie said, and she stood up and walked out of the house, going the wrong way first, into the living room, and then correcting herself and heading away.
Unable to rally herself out of what felt like a stupor, Mira watched her go.
Then Mira called out to the door, which slammed open against the wall in a gust of wind. ‘Don’t you want that second piece of cake, love?’
It took gargantuan effort to rise from her chair to clear up tea.
After the kitchen was spotless, she shut herself away in the dining room. Her head was swimmy with self-doubt as she mulled over Rosie’s confession. A hotness grew across her left cheek.
She rubbed at it, letting it collapse into the heel of her hand, propping her head up while she absent-mindedly sought out each and every photograph of Craig from the pile. It was like plucking currants out of a bun. She wasn’t completely present in her task; her mind was elsewhere, on Rosie. She was thinking about what the poor child had divulged, about the responsibility that lay on her shoulders.
Having counted fourteen snap shots altogether, she turned them through her fingers, which were sticky. Sticky but cold. The photograph that rested momentarily on top of the pile was of Craig in blue jeans standing just inside the front door of her childhood home. Deidre had taken so many random shots of him back then, like some kind of obsessed super-fan.
Mira had a flash of his lanky figure in that same doorway. She was back inside that house again, staring at him, unable to believe he was there on the doorstep.
With one sweaty hand on the glass, she had held it open for him.
‘Deidre about?’ Craig had asked, tugging at his quiff.
‘She’s at work,’ she had answered pointlessly, knowing he knew this.
He had sauntered in anyway, his broad shoulders curled inwards.
‘I could murder a cup of coffee.’
The clatter of his car keys on the kitchen table. Instant coffee with a splash of milk and two sugars. A cigarette from the glass. Chat about his day. Even chat about Deidre. Important to keep up the pretence.
‘I was just doing my homework.’ The words sounded babyish, and she regretted reminding him of the age gap.
‘Oh yeah?’ He flicked his ash and with his other hand he picked at a spot on his forehead.
‘I’m watching a film. I have to write an essay on TV adaptations. Want to watch it?’
He raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Back in my day, we never watched TV for homework.’
Mira took him through to the living room, where she had drawn the curtains, a pink dusk cast over the room.
The black and white still of Pride and Prejudice was paused on Laurence Olivier’s face, imperious and disdainful, as though he was real and could see through to them. If Mira hadn’t liked him so much in the film, she would have stuck two fingers up at him for judging her.
Craig sat down right next to her on the couch, thigh to thigh, and reached over her for the can of coke she had half-drunk. The intimacy of this gesture made her head spin.
‘Go on, then, let’s watch it.’
She pressed play.
Having thought he would laugh at the way the actors talked or the poor quality of the grainy black-and-white, he sat still and quiet. She stole a look at him. He was rapt, elbows on knees, a wrinkle in his brow.
She was trying to concentrate on taking notes in her file, but his breathing, his smell, the darkened room, the romance of the film, his profile near hers were too distracting.
There was no way she was going to get her notes done with him here, so she lay back into the sofa, contented enough to know that she could watch the film again later when everyone was in bed.
He lay back next to her, wriggling his arm through under her neck, pulling her into the crook of his armpit. It felt like luxury, lying there with him.
In these moments, Craig seemed to give her permission to unpack herself.
She had learnt how to put herself away, how to create a fa?ade that was so far away from who she was inside. She was accustomed to being disagreed with, competed with, shouted at and controlled, knowing that she could survive all these ignominies if she made sure she didn’t react to them. Until Craig, she had begun to doubt the relevance of her voice in life, doubted its value, lost perspective on her basic needs. Craig’s attentions had reawakened her.
‘Deidre’d never watch a weird film like this.’
‘We can turn it off?’
‘Nah, I like it.’
What he didn’t know was that Deidre and their mother were due back early that evening, after a Trade Union meeting about equal pay. With each minute that went by, she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t bring herself to spoil the moment. He would think they had over two hours before they would clatter through the front door. In reality, they only had about half an hour. There was time to tell him, to draw away from his body, to act normal. There was time.
And then his hands reached between her legs and normal was forgotten. Although the desire was there, she wished he would slow down. He unzipped his jeans and shoved them down hurriedly. She tensed up, tried to close her legs. He gently prized them apart, not looking into her face, just down there, focused, shaking with desire.
‘This is my first time,’ she whispered, pushing him away with a lack of conviction. Part of her wanted it to happen, part of her didn’t. She knew they were now stepping over a line. Kissing and touching were one thing, underage sex was another.
‘Have you got any...?’ She was too shy to say the word ‘condom’ out loud.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, kissing her on the mouth briefly before pushing himself inside her.
The stretching and ripping sensations ruined any enjoyment. She recognized this coming-of-age moment, and how different her expectations had been. While he grunted and gyrated on top of her, lost in his own pleasure, she winced with pain, astonished that she was actually losing her virginity. She imagined how she had wanted it to be: candles and kissing for hours in bed with him, without the burden of secrecy, free of Deidre and her mother forever. She let the image go, accepting that her life would never turn out to be quite as lovely as her dreams had been.
Equally, she had never thought that life could turn out to be quite as hellish as her nightmares.
The act had lasted about ten minutes. After which, they had wriggled back into their clothes. The film was back on. She was nestled into him again, thinking that she should have just stayed there all along, worrying about the wetness down there, unsure whether it was from his body or from hers. She was sore, throbbing and stinging. But also glowing from a sense of achievement.
Her mother and sister’s arrival had happened very quickly.
Possibly they had dozed off. There was no time to pull apart. Deidre was standing in front of them, over them, seconds after the lounge door was opened. ‘What the fuck?’ Deidre said, under her breath.