‘Why don’t we drive down to the coast tomorrow?’ he says, suppressing a yawn. ‘I could do with some fresh air.’
I tilt my head, thinking about it, and then shrug. ‘Yeah, why not. The kids will be happy. I’ll call Mum in the morning and let her know.’
He looks down at me as he hangs his coat over the banister. ‘Why don’t you see if Robert and Amber want to come too?’
I pause. ‘We could,’ I say carefully. ‘But let me try Jenny and Simon first. I want to get to know them better.
He gives me an appraising look and I smile up at him blandly, as if it’s nothing. He doesn’t know that I’ve begun to question my reliance on my closest friend. I love Amber to bits, but sometimes I feel owned by her, as if I have to ask permission to do anything and include her in absolutely everything.
‘They’ll still be clearing up,’ he said. ‘They won’t want to come.’
But he’s reckoned without Jenny, who, by the time I call at eight, has already been up for two hours and is only too happy to round up her family and jump in the car and escape.
June 1992
To avoid going home Katya went to the library after school and did her homework there. It was maths so it didn’t take long. She wondered whether Luke was worried about her and decided she didn’t care if he was. She didn’t think he would tell because that would make Sally curious about why she was avoiding him. She wandered round the children’s section, taking out books, flicking through them and rejecting them. Sally said her reading was coming on, but not compared to Gabriella, who was on quite grown-up books now. She found something with pictures and tried to ignore her hunger. She was hungry all the time these days, and thought she must be growing at last. She read a few pages and then rested her head on her arms and dozed off, waking with the side of the book imprinted on her cheek.
She wandered out into the early evening and walked all the way down to McDonald’s, where she knew she would be left alone, and managed to kill an hour learning her spellings. Friend, lorry, cinema, lioness, parsley, exercise, castle, tablet. It upset her that her spellings were different from the ones Gabriella got given. She had words like excellent, accommodation, alienate and catastrophe. Katya didn’t like to be made to feel inferior, particularly to Gabriella, who never passed up an opportunity to show off at her expense.
Luke and Maggie were approaching on the other side of the road. Spotting them, she hastily repacked her rucksack. What were those two doing together? Luke must have phoned Maggie and told her some story; pretending to be a good foster parent, worried sick about Katya. Maggie was gesturing, her arm bumping Luke’s, and he had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slightly rounded as he leant in to catch what she was saying. Katya pretended to be surprised when Maggie rapped on the glass. Maggie and Luke exchanged a few words, and Luke shrugged and pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. She left him outside and slid into the seat beside Katya.
‘So, are you going to tell me what’s up?’
Katya glanced out of the window in time to see Luke release an unhurried plume of smoke. ‘I didn’t feel like going home.’
‘You can’t go scaring people like this. Luke and I have been at our wits’ end. If we hadn’t found you in a few minutes we would have had to call Sally.’
‘I don’t like him.’
‘But he’s such a nice man. He cares about you; they both do. You can’t repay their kindness by disappearing. It’s not fair on them.’
Katya shrank from describing how he made her feel. ‘They quarrel,’ she said at last. ‘It’s my fault. Now he’s not got a job I’m just a nuisance. I want to live somewhere else.’
Maggie took hold of her hands. Her brown eyes seemed to change colour, to darken. ‘What kind of quarrels?’
‘Stupid ones. I hate it there. I don’t …’
She made a face. She couldn’t tell Maggie what was happening, about the touching. Luke had warned her about the consequences. He would say she was just like her mother. But he also said he loved her and she thought she might love him when she didn’t hate his guts. He treated her like an adult, telling her things about him and Sally that she really shouldn’t know, congratulating her on being so mature even though she was only a kid. She was so confused that when she started to think of him at night, the only way to stop was to jab herself with a compass. She ran her fingers over the constellation of little scabs on the back of her hand, over and over, knowing their position by heart.
Luke leant over her to shut the front door. She tried to make herself small. She had looked at the clock in Maggie’s car before she got out, so she knew it was gone twenty past seven. Only one hour and forty minutes until Sally got in. Too long for her peace of mind.
‘You’re not scared of me, are you?’
‘No,’ she mumbled.
He cupped her face in his hands, the pads of his thumbs against her lips. They smelled of cigarettes. She held her breath.
‘Because you know I’ve got your best interests at heart, don’t you?’
She nodded as she imagined sinking her teeth into his flesh, his roar of surprise and anger. She desperately needed a wee. Luke let her go and she darted for the bathroom, hearing him laugh as she slammed the door. Ten minutes later she found him spooning baked beans out of a saucepan on to a slice of buttered toast. She ate slowly, making the meal last as long as possible even though she wanted to wolf it down.
‘I’m not going to tell Sal what you did today, so don’t you go telling her I was smoking,’ Luke said. ‘There’s a good girl.’
Later she sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands underneath her bottom, watching Coronation Street, a programme she had become addicted to ever since Sally started her on it. She was used to the oppression of Luke’s presence in the house when he had nothing to amuse him, used to being expected to entertain him, but she hoped he would at least allow her to watch the episode till the end.
‘Why did you stay out?’ He had snuck up behind her and was leaning on the back of the sofa.
She shifted so that she couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath. Lately he’d begun to smell like some of the men who had visited Linda.
She stared at the television set. ‘I don’t know.’
He massaged her shoulders and she tensed, holding her breath as his fingers kneaded and pummelled her muscles, getting right in deep between her bones. From his angle above her he couldn’t see that her face was all scrunched up, that she was mouthing, ‘Stop it,’ under her breath.
‘Feeling better now, Princess? Sally loves that when she’s stressed.’
He moved into the kitchen area and Katya pulled her feet up, contorting herself into a tight ball. She chewed the hem of her dress where it stretched over her knees.
15
Sunday, 21 February 2010