The Back Road

8

Grabbing a silk dressing gown from the bed, Leo thrust her arms into the sleeves. What on earth was wrong with Ellie? It wasn’t like her to be so tetchy. It felt like a bad omen for the evening ahead, and Leo couldn’t help thinking that in some way it was her fault. She had been so sure of her welcome here, but maybe it had been wrong to act on impulse.

Plugging the straighteners in to warm up, she walked over to the open window and leant her elbows on the sill. The view calmed her; it hadn’t changed in all these years. The flat green fields stretched for miles behind the house but she could just glimpse the dark hills in the distance. Her bedroom hadn’t had a window - it was more of a cupboard really - so whenever she had been able to sneak in here she had always stood gazing at the scenery, thinking about other places, other times, and other lives.

Without warning, her mind was assaulted with a memory so vivid that she gasped. She recalled standing in this very position gazing out of the window, and she remembered the day clearly. She must have been about fourteen, and she’d been sent home from school because of agonising stomach pains. She hadn’t wanted anybody to know because there would be no sympathy, so she had sneaked into the house unobserved. She’d never said that she had started her periods, and her stepmother hadn’t bothered to ask. Leo had to take everything she needed from Ellie, or sometimes Ellie would hand over some of her pocket money. Leo didn’t get pocket money, of course.

She remembered that she had sneaked upstairs and come into Ellie’s room to raid her top drawer. It had been a day much like today, and the window had been open. Nobody knew she was there. She had no idea why her father was home that day, but he was unenthusiastically hoeing the flowerbed below the window - probably the last time the garden was touched until Ellie and Max had taken it over. She had moved back, afraid to be seen, but the voices still invaded the room, and their bitterness and hatred seemed to be tainting every surface they touched.

The first voice was her stepmother’s.

‘You can’t hide from me out here. I haven’t finished with you yet. I’ve always known you lack moral fibre, but I thought you’d finally learned your lesson. I suppose that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it?’

‘Shut up Denise. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Hah! You’d like to believe that wouldn’t you? But I know you. And I know what you’re up to when you’re not here. I didn’t know about your brat, but do you think I didn’t know about her mother? Your whore?’

‘She wasn’t a whore. She was my wife. And she’s dead - more’s the pity. She at least made me smile.’

‘I’m your wife. Me. Maybe I should tell the police, have you done for bigamy. As it is, I can’t show my face in the f*cking village. Since SHE came, your little bastard, everybody’s talking.’

‘Your language is a disgrace, Denise. And Sandra was more of a wife to me than you will ever be. If you wonder why I have to look elsewhere, take a good look at yourself.’

‘Looking’s one thing. Touching’s another. I don’t care about those sad cows that find you irresistible. But what about those that don’t, eh? What about the clever ones who are not taken in by your slimy charms? What do you do to them? As if I didn’t know. But you don’t like it when they say no, do you? And they’re getting progressively younger, aren’t they?’

‘I’ll say it again - you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re making things up. And for Christ’s sake, woman, keep your voice down.’

‘Or what? I’ve told you - I know you. I’m not stupid. The latest one’s gone now, poor little bitch, but I know what you did. So who’s next, hmm?’

‘Just get out of my sight.’

‘Oh no. This time I’m not backing down. I want you gone. Do you hear me? Gone. You were lucky this time. But you’re not going to shame me again.’

Shaking herself back into the present, Leo pushed herself away from the window. She didn’t want to remember any more. It was years ago - maybe she hadn’t recalled it correctly. The venom in her stepmother’s voice was accurate, as was the contempt in her father’s. But the conversation? She couldn’t be sure, but it had seemed so clear as the words leapt into her head. She remembered the pain of listening to them discussing her mother, but the rest hadn’t meant so much at the time. It was just like every other row. But if her memory was accurate, what did it mean?

Leo had known from the day she arrived in Little Melham that her stepmother despised her, and she had stopped caring about that long ago. But her own mother had been special. So much fun. Hearing her described like this brought back the pain she’d been burying for years. She had been sure that her father had loved her mother, because she made him laugh and he had looked happy when they were together. She’d never seen that expression on his face again after her mother had died. But then she had avoided looking at him after the day he brought her here. He had never comforted her as she cried. Only Ellie had tried - and Leo had shunned her sister’s affection.

She bent down to her holdall, pulled out her laptop and searched for a file marked ‘father’. Whether those words had actually been spoken or not, she was going to add them to her notes. Ellie’s mother had never told them the truth about their father’s disappearance, Leo was positive of that. And Ellie had never been able to accept that he was dead, and still lived in hope that one day soon he would walk back through the front door. Why else would she have chosen to live in a house that brought back so many bleak memories?

For her sister’s sake, Leo needed to find out where their father had gone, and more to the point, why he’d never come back.