CHAPTER THREE
‘Hello?’ I shouted as I pushed open the front door and pulled the key from the lock. ‘Can someone give me a hand with the shopping, please?’
There was no answer, but that wasn’t a guarantee the house was empty. The mention of shopping bags wasn’t the best way to lure two children and a husband out of hiding to help, unless the bags came from H&M or Zara, or a sports shop.
I made three trips before they were all placed neatly across the wooden kitchen worktops. Each bag was below the wall cupboard or above the drawer where its contents were to be placed.
Bieber the cat, an ugly grey and white thing with a deep coat of soft fur and a hiss like a coiled cobra, belonged to my younger daughter Alice. He lay stretched by the bifold doors, basking in the sun’s warming rays streaming through the glass. He turned his head to see who was disturbing his slumber and made some guttural rasp when he recognised me. I rasped back. I was the one who fed him and emptied his litter tray, but that wasn’t enough to earn his respect and still he detested me.
When I was sure I was alone, I flicked the radio on. A DJ introduced an unfamiliar song, so I switched to a channel playing only music from the 1980s – the era of my childhood. Several callers to End of the Line had told me that my voice was like one of those late-night broadcasters on commercial stations who only ever play ballads. Apparently it was ‘soothing’.
George Michael was admitting to kissing a fool before Madonna began urging me to dance for inspiration. Most of the time I didn’t listen closely to the songs; background noise in an empty house was enough to stop me from visiting dark spaces in my head that it did me little good returning to.
With tins and packets placed inside the cupboards – the labels facing forward, and arranged in accordance of light colours to dark – I took a bag of frozen chicken breasts and stuffed them into a crammed fridge to defrost for tomorrow night. I unboxed a Victoria sponge, stuck my knife into a jar of jam and smeared some around the sides, then put a little more icing sugar on the top left-hand side than the right to make it look less perfect. I held up and examined a pair of jeans belonging to Zoe, one of my younger colleagues, who’d asked me to replace a broken zip. ‘No problem,’ I’d told her. ‘Give me a couple of days.’
To the End of the Line team I was a superwoman, a devoted mum-of-three who could turn her hand to any task, from repairing a jacket pocket to reupholstering a chair. But I knew little about baking or sewing – that’s what supermarkets and tailors were for. And no one I worked with needed to know that I outsourced my pastries and repairs.
A yawn caught me by surprise – it was only approaching four o’clock but it felt like much later in the day. The kids would have been let out of school by now, and Tony finished work in a couple of hours. So I poured myself a large glass of red wine while I had the opportunity, and sank into the armchair next to the bifold doors overlooking the patio and garden. I gazed out across the lawn, beyond the beds of brightly coloured lupins and peonies, towards the wooden fence and the flat, grassy playing fields.
When the first of the children arrived two years into our marriage, Tony often reminded me to make the most of my ‘me’ time where and when I could get it. Now they were older, I had too much ‘me’ time to fill, especially in this house, the one he’d made us move to. I’d been more than content in our last home, but Tony was insistent that once we made it onto the property ladder, we must keep climbing.
I inhaled the floral scent coming from a jasmine reed diffuser and glanced around the open-plan room. We’d knocked the kitchen, living and dining rooms into one large living space. I’d overseen the landscaping of the garden, the internal remodelling, the replastering and redecorating, and I knew every inch of the place like the back of my hand. Everything was just how Tony had envisaged it. Yet it felt alien to me.
‘We’ll only need to stay here a couple of years,’ he’d explained. ‘Once all the work is done and we can make a tidy profit, we can move on.’
But we hadn’t moved on. It had been three years and I was still sitting in the same living area.
I finished my wine and gave a sly smile as I stepped on the cat’s tail, causing him to spit and run. Upstairs, the bathroom door and the kids’ bedroom doors were shut, so I made sure they were ajar. They knew there were no closed doors in my house.
I peered into Alice’s room first. Her walls were still adorned with pink, sparkly paper and covered in posters of pop stars and TV personalities, like most nine-year-olds’ rooms were. But she was growing up fast and I was already feeling the apron strings tugging as she began to pull away. It wouldn’t be long before her thoughts became polluted with boys, make-up, and clothes that were tight in all the wrong places.
Effie’s bedroom showed the difference in their ages. Pictures of YouTube and Instagram stars I didn’t know the names of were affixed around a mirror and taped to her door in collages. She’d printed out photos of her friends, too, all of them featuring small gangs of overly made-up girls sucking their cheeks in so tightly they must’ve met in the centre of their mouths and pouting. Tummies were also held in, to make them look even skinnier than fourteen-year-old girls already are.
Effie’s confidence had grown and she was aware she was beginning to catch the eyes of boys her own age, along with men who had no business looking at young girls. Once upon a time, they used to look at me like that. Now it was as if I didn’t exist. I couldn’t help but hate her a little for it. She was like a vampire, sucking the beauty and vibrancy from me and keeping it for herself.
She was also keeping secrets from me, so I had to learn about my daughter’s private life by other means instead. I sat on her bed, switched on my mobile phone and clicked on the Facebook app. She still hadn’t changed her login password so I checked her inbox. Most of the messages were from her friends. Occasionally boys’ names appeared but the subjects were innocuous, with the exception of one.