I tried to think of something to say that wasn’t the worst thing. In the end, I couldn’t help myself. ‘You tried to kill yourself?’
I heard a choked laugh before she turned around to face me again, wiping at her eyes with her sleeves. ‘Oh God, did I say that out loud?’ She blinked a few times, then drew in a long breath. ‘My filter just goes to fuck when I freak out.’ She winced suddenly, glancing down at her hand. ‘Ouch. I think I burned myself on the cigarette.’
‘Suze,’ I said quietly.
She looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Last year.’
I wanted to ask why, but even I could see that was a stupid question. ‘Is that why you moved here?’
She made a face. ‘No. But sort of.’
‘OK . . .’ I said slowly, waiting for more.
She let out a resigned sigh and sank back down on to the seafront wall. ‘Things were really bad. At the time. At home, sure, but at school as well. There was some stuff with my friends. It was just too much, there didn’t seem to be . . . much point, I guess. So I took some pills. But it didn’t work, obviously. My dad found me before they could work properly. Sarah came to live with us after, to help try to make things better. But the short version is they didn’t. Get better, I mean. So now I live here.’
‘Sarah came to live with you in Reading?’ I clarified, surprised.
Suzanne nodded. ‘For about three or four months, I think it was.’
‘Did she know before then?’ I asked. ‘That your dad was . . . ?’ I trailed off, not wanting to say it.
Suzanne didn’t say anything. She’d pulled out a fresh cigarette and was rolling it, safe and unlit, between her fingers, her eyes focused on it. After a long pause she nodded again.
‘And she never did anything about it?’ My heart was starting to hurt.
‘It wasn’t up to her,’ Suzanne said. ‘All she could really do was talk to my mum and try and get her to do something. But Mum, she’s not . . .’ She stopped herself, paused, then tried again. ‘She’s not very strong. I mean, emotionally. She couldn’t . . . She couldn’t have taken care of us by herself, without my dad. And she really loves him. So it was never really an option.’
I wondered who had told her all of this, who had made her believe it was true.
‘My mum used to say –’ Suzanne stopped herself abruptly, clamping her mouth shut.
‘Say what?’ I prompted finally.
‘You’ll think she’s awful.’
‘Suze, I already kind of think that.’
A look of distress passed over Suzanne’s face. ‘I shouldn’t have said any of this. I’m not meant to.’
I sat next to her, the cold of the stone seeping through my joggers. ‘Says who?’ I said carefully. ‘There’s only me here, and the only person I care about in any of this is you. And I want to hear it, if you want to talk about it. But if you don’t, that’s fine too.’ I was almost disappointed that it really was only me and her there; I so rarely said the right thing at the right moment that it would have been nice if there had been someone else there to witness it.
‘She used to say I was the strongest one,’ Suzanne said slowly. ‘That I was much stronger than her. That . . . well, that I could take it, basically.’
For a moment I couldn’t speak. ‘Wow. Wow, OK.’
‘See, it sounds bad.’ Suzanne’s voice had quickened. ‘But she meant it in a good way.’
When I’d heard ‘abuse’, that very first time I’d found out the truth about Suzanne’s past, I’d thought of violence as being something simple. Awful, but simple. A violent man and a child who bore the brunt of it. I hadn’t even considered the framework that supported it, allowed it to happen in the first place. The blind eyes turned, the excuses made, the insidious lies whispered into the ear of a child so desperate for love they mistook a gentle tone for truth.
Could I say that to her? Would that make me a good friend or a terrible one?
‘Did you ever tell anyone?’ I asked instead.
‘No, I did everything I could to make sure no one knew.’
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t want them to take me away,’ Suzanne said. She wasn’t looking at me, still rolling the unlit cigarette between her fingers. ‘I know you won’t understand. But they’re my family. I love them. I just wanted them to love me back, that’s all.’ Her voice caught on ‘back’, but she gathered herself. ‘I didn’t want to be taken away. I didn’t want that to be my life. I’d rather die than go into care.’
There were more things I wanted to say. I wanted to ask her why, if she was so against being taken into care, she wasn’t trying harder with Sarah. Didn’t it make more sense to try to be good? I wanted to know more about the family she’d left behind; where her beloved brother was during all of this; whether her old friends knew anything about what had been going on. But before I could voice any of it, she turned to me with a startling, full-bodied grin.