‘Oh.’
‘You’ll have to tell the doc you shagged some spotty fifteen-year-old git though or I’ll be locked up.’
Her ankle throbbed. She thought about pain. She was brave about pain. The pain of childbirth was considered unbearable by even the most hardy of women. She’d cope.
‘You okay?’ he had asked as he crafted his quiff with gelled palms.
‘Yup.’
She turned away from him and took her hairbrush from the drawer.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. She counted in her head, brushing from the widow’s peak at the front and continuing right down to the ends. Seven, eight, nine, ten.
Craig said something else to her, she thought, but she hadn’t heard him. Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. Her arm had begun to ache at forty. Craig stamped out of the room. Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one. She counted in time to his heavy footsteps, which shook the floor under her feet. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two. Her hair was silky smooth. One hundred. Her mind was calm again.
Dropping the photograph, Mira ran her fingers through her cropped grey hair: wiry and stiff and requiring no brushing, but just as thick as it had been back then. What would she look like with it long now? She had spent her adult life with it short. Thirty-four years ago, she had asked the hairdresser to cut it off. It had been an angry, almost violent self-destruction – a symbolic act – and she wondered whether she should be bothered by the fact that her haircut, all of her adult life, had been a visible representation of that one bad moment in her history. She thought of growing it out. Her image and others’ view of her would be radically altered if she wore long hair again. It was an amusing thought, to open up that side of herself again after so many years of hiding her. It was out of the question, obviously. But amusing all the same.
Cutting into her playful thoughts of swishing her thick hair around her shoulders, came Craig’s vile words again. ‘The NHS’ll do it for free, you know.’ He hadn’t even been able to say the word ‘abortion’.
She went upstairs to find a hairbrush. The only one she could find was in Barry’s shoe rack. One, two, three. She brushed from the widow’s peak and down through her imaginary tresses. Ten, eleven, twelve. Once she got to one hundred, she was calmed all over again, just as she had been at fifteen years old standing in Craig’s bedroom.
* * *
When Mira arrived at school, little Olivia in Year Two pointed at her and cried, ‘You’re all dirty, Mrs Entwistle!’ Streaks of black shoe polish were smeared down the front of her T-shirt, over her breasts and right down to the top edge of her skirt, like black shadows of her former self.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Hello Vics?’
‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Sorry, reception’s bad.’ I shouted, ‘I’m on the platform.’
‘Gem!’ Vics cried. ‘What are you doing on a platform at this time? Are you skiving?’
I laughed, and then wanted to cry. All morning at work I had been distracted and unable to concentrate, preoccupied by Rosie. Repeatedly, I had played back Rosie’s strange mood change when I had asked her about Beth. What with the unsettling events of the week, I couldn’t help worrying that it was connected.
‘Sort of. I wanted to pick Rosie up from school today.’
‘You’re venturing into the vipers’ nest of New Hall Prep playground?’
‘I’m feeling a bit out of the loop.’
‘You’re a braver woman than I.’
‘I know. I must be coming down with something,’ I laughed, weakly.
‘Fancy coming round for a cuppa afterwards?’
‘Yes please,’ I sighed, comforted by that thought. ‘I’d love that.’
‘It’s been too long. We’re three doors down and I haven’t seen you in three weeks. How does that even happen?’
‘Sorry.’
‘We got Peter very drunk the other week.’
I almost said sorry again, and then realised I wasn’t to blame for that at least.
‘That’s okay. He probably needed the release.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes, fine.’ I stared at my reflection in the carriage window, which distorted me, wiggling my edges and narrowing my head as though it were in a vice.
‘You don’t sound fine.’ I imagined Vics’ tanned forehead form two deep wrinkles in between her eyebrows, and thought with fondness about how, when she was about to listen to something of importance, she would flick the two sides of her brittle blonde bob in a deft movement behind each ear.
‘I’ll fill you in later. Are you sure it’s all right to have Rosie again?’
‘Again?’
‘Yesterday afternoon?’
‘I didn’t have Rosie yesterday.’
My throat constricted. ‘What?’
‘Beth goes riding on Thursdays, remember?’
‘But Rosie told Harriet she’d gone round to see Beth yesterday afternoon after school.’
‘Nope. Impossible I’m afraid.’
‘So where did Rosie go then?’
Vics’ silver bracelets jangled. ‘I’m sure there’s some logical explanation. Maybe Harriet got it wrong?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure,’ I replied, knowing Harriet never got things wrong.
Aside from an aberration from Harriet, I couldn’t think of any logical explanation for why Rosie would lie. There had never been a hole in her schedule that I couldn’t account for, that I couldn’t fill with the life I had planned for her. I had a pressing, nauseating desire to get home to her to find out exactly where she had been; but my stomach churned at the thought of what I would uncover.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The police response team, consisting of the one officer, PC Raynor, had arrived at Woodlands Primary after lunch, later than expected. Even so, Mira had not had time to clean her blouse or change into something borrowed.
While the officer was speaking to her in that hot little side room next to Patricia’s office, she worried that the strange black stripes of shoe polish would give the wrong impression entirely and deem her quite the most unreliable witness they had ever spoken to. She cursed her memories! Those photographs were poison on her brain.
‘What will happen to Gemma Bradley?’ Mira asked, after she and the officer had been through the details of Rosie’s confession.
‘In the light of your information, I think we would need to speak to Rosie first.’ The young police officer’s stomach was popping out of his uniform at the front and his youthful, cheerful cheeks, redder with every minute in the room, belied the purpose of his visit.
‘Rosie will say what I’ve said.’
He pulled up his trousers from his belt. ‘We’ll keep you informed.’
‘What is likely to happen to her?’
PC Raynor stood square on two feet, as though about to recite a poem. ‘The Child Protection Officers will speak to Mum and then speak to Rosie at school and decide what action to take, based on whether they consider Mum’s actions to be lawful chastisement, where no further action will be taken.’
‘No further action. I see. So, it’s okay to bloody your ten-year-old’s lip, is it?’ Mira asked, vexed.
He looked at Mira – a brief glance down at her smeared blouse – scratched his cheek and calmly replied. ‘But, at a guess, based on the information you’ve provided, and depending on what the little girl says when they speak to her, they might well deem it assault.’
Mira pressed her fingers into her lips. ‘Could Gemma be arrested for that?’
‘Yes. That is a possible outcome.’ PC Raynor cleared his throat.
The shock of it. The thought of it. Mira had expected that the Social Services would get involved, at the most. She had not expected this.
‘So I did the right thing, then,’ Mira said quickly, before PC Raynor could spot the doubt shooting through her expression.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ PC Raynor said, nodding officiously and holding the door open for Mira.