Her sticky fingers wormed into Claire’s loose fist. ‘We can be friends again, like before. Can’t we? I mean—’
‘What about the pills?’
‘What pills?’ She moved to face Claire and sat in front of her on the rug.
‘You know what pills.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Marianne’s sleeping pills.’
‘They’re Marianne’s, not mine.’
‘They were in your room?’
‘What?’ The girl looked confused, mouth open, brow low.
‘They were in your room. In the guinea pig.’
The girl laughed. ‘Pills in a guinea pig?’
‘And in the doll’s knickers.’
‘Knickers!’ the girl snorted.
‘Lorna—’
‘I just picked up the guinea pig and there’s no pills there. What are you talking about?’ Still confused, wanting to help. ‘I don’t get it?’
‘Why I’ve been so tired.’
‘Well, you hurt your ankle, didn’t you? And Auntie May says you’ve been ill—’
‘Lorna—’
‘I don’t know. I mean, she says you drink too much, and take pills. And you do, don’t you?’
‘I threw away the pills I found. I put them down the toilet.’
Lorna stayed still, looking quizzical. ‘Good?’ she said eventually.
‘Lorna, can you be honest with me?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Mum? Really, I don’t. I’m always honest with you. Is this about dancing school? Look, that’s Marianne’s idea more than mine. I mean, I don’t care about going to London really. I’d be really happy staying here with you. Happier even. But she wants to go, and, well, I don’t want to hurt her feelings.’ Claire said nothing. The girl kept babbling. ‘I mean, you invited her here, and I’m just being friendly. I thought you didn’t want me any more, anyway. I mean you’ve been sleeping all the time, and we haven’t been friends, and I thought you wanted to get rid of me.’ She peered at Claire’s blank face trying to gauge the effect of her words. ‘I mean, you bring me here, and there’s nothing to do, and nothing to play with, and then you get ill and I have to spend all my time with her. It’s not my fault. You act as if it’s all my fault. I didn’t ask to be brought here.’ Lorna’s face had flushed pink, and the corners of her mouth turned down, as if she was about to cry.
‘You did ask to be brought here,’ Claire said neutrally.
‘I didn’t!’
‘You did. And now, here we are.’
‘Here we are.’ The girl jumped up, and stalked back to the stairs. Her face pulled into a sneer. ‘It’s your fault. All of this.’
‘Who started the fire, Lorna?’ Claire murmured.
‘Fuck you,’ Lorna hissed back.
33
Claire found more pills that night, tucked behind the boiler in the airing cupboard. And more twisted into a scrap of toilet roll behind the neglected spice rack. She meandered around the house for the next few hours, looking for more pills. The house smelled of sugary dirt. She found a pair of knickers and a banana skin under the sofa, along with an eye shadow sampler, the colours smeared together, and a training bra stuffed with toilet paper. Everything in the kitchen was teetering on the point of falling, as if time had stood still, just before the final earthquake struck. Famous Five books flopped on the table, next to an overdue library copy of a Katie Price autobiography. In the bathroom, a smear of toothpaste stuck one sock to another, and the toilet bowl was rimmed with dry spots of shit. The whole place was disastrously, deliberately dirty. How had she, Claire, let it get this way? And she felt, suddenly, coldly, that it was all an expression of Lorna herself. This chaos, this menacing disorder, that ekes its way into your neat little life, like rot eroding a tooth from the inside. And now that you’ve moved from pawn to opponent, you should be fearful, Claire. Oh yes you should!
In her own, tidy, room, she considered the pills she found in the airing cupboard. Little comforting dots, all of them, with their friendly score down the centre like a winking eye. Nearly a full bottle. Their rattle, loud in the quiet house, was friendly too. Simple. Simple to let it all go, lie back and sleep for ever. No need to think because thinking was hard. No way out of this lunacy Lorna had concocted. No need to confront her again; no need to accept defeat. No need to grope, painfully, towards the source of Claire’s own errors, understand where she’d gone wrong, how she could have predicted something this terrible, how she’d trapped herself. She lined the pills up, cheerful soldiers, on the scarred bedside table and pushed them this way and that way with her fingers, arranging them into patterns – starbursts, houses, letters. An L and an M and a J. Marianne’s sudden snoring from next door startled her, and she cleared up the pills with shaking fingers, snapped the lid back on and shoved the bottle in her cardigan pocket. No more of that, Claire. No more of that.
* * *
The next morning, Claire woke to find that the door to the cottage stood open and the wind had torn the pictures, lists and self-help mantras from the fridge door into a loose pile on the floor. In amongst them was a note that must have been on the table:
Gone to the beach L NEEDS ICE CREAM! Recording something, so don’t turn off box. M