Hold My Hand (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Carol’s hands are shaking. She realises this as she grips the banister to support her watery legs. The timer switch, which allows only the athletic to get way from floor to floor while still in light, goes off, plunges them both into darkness. She thumps a fist against the wall where she knows the knob to be and now she is looking down into his eyes, his pupils big and dark from the change in the light and the fact that he has obviously been drinking. Of course he has. He never does this when he’s sober. He's too smart. Knows the meaning of ‘exclusion zone’. Knows how far he can push it. Before he gets onto the lager.

Yet again she is struck, as everybody is, by what a handsome creature he is. You’d never think, she ponders, that such a sensitive face could mask such a brutish interior. No-one ever does. That was one of the problems. God knows, if I’d been Bridget, I’d’ve fallen for it myself. He could sell burgers to Hindus, that one. That bone structure, those innocent blue eyes, the strong-but-gentle mouth: everyone reads the outer package, whatever they say. The good-looking have an easier ride through life than the rest of us, however rotten their core, because people just assume goodness in them.

He's like a turd in Christmas wrapping, she thinks. That poor girl, black and blue under her clothes and everyone telling her what a lucky girl she was. She keeps the heel of her hand on the light switch, a talisman against him.

Kieran’s pupils contract. There's a faint sheen of exertion on his forehead; kicking doors in is harder than they make it look on the TV. “Fuck off, Carol,” he says.

“You know I can’t do that, Kieran,” she replies. “But you’d better, if you’ve got any sense. You know you’re not meant to be here.”

“I just want to see my kid,” he says.

No you don’t, she thinks. You want to kick eight bells out of her mother.

“Not now,” she says, “and not without a social worker. You know the rules. It’s the middle of the night.”

Kieran gives her a look. White light courses through her veins. My God, he is evil, she thinks. I’d almost managed to forget.

“You’d better go, now,” she repeats. “They’ll be here any minute.”

Please, she prays, please let him believe me. He doesn’t know I’ve run out of minutes. That I couldn’t call if I wanted to. If I sound confident enough, he will believe me.

He does. Begins to retreat. Disappears from her field of vision as he starts to descend the stairs.

She thinks, decides. She would rather see him go than keep her hand on the light switch. I’ll be able to see his shadow in the streetlight better than I will him, once he’s down at the bottom, she thinks: be able to tell that he’s actually left rather than dodged back inside to hide until I’ve gone down there and got her to open up. She crosses the landing and leans out over the banister.

He walks slowly, looking upward. Their eyes meet again. Carol forces her features into a deliberately neutral expression. Don’t let him see what you think of him, she thinks. Don't give him excuses.

He drops his head, continues on his way.

The light goes out. She hears him pause. Which do I do? Do I go back and switch it on, cover the sound of his movements with my own, not know where he is? Or do I stay here, trust my hearing, believe that if he doesn't break into a run he must be going down?

There’s a light coming from under downstairs’s door. She can see the shadows of a pair of feet pressed up against it. God, I hate them, she thinks. Bet
they
haven't called the plod, even though they could. Just waiting to make sure no damage is done to their property, then they'll go to bed and complain at work all day tomorrow about their noisy neighbours. One of us could get killed up here, and all they’d do would be to get mouthy about the blood spoiling the paintwork on their ceiling.

She hears his footsteps: deliberate, careful. He wouldn’t be so careful if he were coming up. I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s feeling his way. Not in a hurry.

Relief floods her as the sound of his shoes changes. He’s on a hard surface now: on the Victorian tiles on the ground floor. She’s never liked them much: they’re cold, too ornate for the use the building's been turned to. She loves them now.

Inside the front door, Kieran pauses. She can hear him thinking.

“Go on,” she calls. “I’m still here.”

She is surprised to hear how steady her voice sounds. That look on his face a minute ago – drunk, yes, but suffused with the Neanderthal rage she'd managed to forget over the months since she last saw him – gave her a bigger fright than the initial sound of his foot smashing against the door.

“A hundred metres,” she calls, forcing herself to sound confident, sure of herself; gripping the stair-rail hard with both hands to try to steady her body and keep the tremble from her voice, “You need to be at least a hundred metres away by the time they get here. You know that.”

The latch clicks below, and his large shadow is cast across the old tiled floor. “Doesn’t matter,” he says, and his voice, though quiet, echoes up the stairs. “I can come back. You can’t be here all the time.”

The door swings to. Carol waits, holds her breath, on the step, listens for signs that he might still be inside.

Nothing. No shifting, no rustles.

He could be like a cat, she thinks. He could be able to keep so still that even tiny prey animals are lulled into a false sense of security, come out because they think the coast is clear.

She steps back across the landing, turns the light on again. Cranes out over the banister in an effort to see into the shadows below the stairs.

The hall is empty.

She thinks.

Chapter Nine

She always feels nervous coming home, even when she's only been away a few minutes. All it would take would be a few minutes: he could be in and out and no-one any the wiser without her there. It’s no way to live, this single life, she thinks. I’m going to be one of those old ladies whose body has mummified by the time anyone notices I’m missing.

I’m getting too old for this, thinks Carol as she mounts the front steps. It’s all very well, but I'm nearly forty-five, a middle-aged lady, and middle-aged ladies weren’t meant to be up all night, even in crises. She feels washed out, grainy. Yas was clingy at the school gates, the way she always is when Kieran’s been round. I need a nap. A nap and a bath and several cups of coffee.

The house is silent, the front door double-locked. She pauses in the hall, listens. Nothing. Just the hum of traffic on Streatham High Road. She climbs the stairs. Taps on Bridget’s front door and finds that it swings back off the latch.

“Hello?” she calls. Peers inside, with trepidation. All looks normal. No signs of struggle, no bloodstains.

“Bridge? Hello?”

“In here.”

She follows the voice to the kitchen. Bridget sits on the lino, coffee mug cooling beside her, a letter lying loosely in her lap. Tears stream down her face.

“Oh, Honey,” says Carol. Gets down on her knees and wraps her arms round her head.

“Well, it’s a good thing, really,” says Bridget.

“What is?”

“This.”

She hands her the letter. It bears the address of a large Central London lawyer, but it’s from the Building Society, as Bridget had suspected last night. She reads it, slowly, takes in its stiff and formal language, lays it down.

“A month? That’s all they’re giving you?”

Bridget sighs. Shrugs. “They've given me more than a year. You can’t expect them to hang on forever. They’re not a charity.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got a kid.”

Bridget shakes her head. Drops it forward and allows the tears to flow.

“It’s time we went, anyway,” she says eventually. “It can’t go on like this. He’ll just be back. He’ll be on our backs forever. You know that.”

“You’re knackered,” says Carol.

“I’m right, too” says Bridget. “Oh, God, but I’m so tired, as well.”

Carol sits down, rests her back against the kitchen cabinet. Takes Bridget’s hand in hers and squeezes it.

“Did she get to school all right?”

Carol nods. “Of course. I’ll go and get her later.”

“I’m sorry,” says Bridget. “I’m really sorry, Carol. This is so unfair on you.”

“Oh, Honey,” says Carol. “Look. We’ll work something out. We will. It’ll all be all right, you'll see.”

“Oh, come
on
. How’s it going to be all right?
How
?”

“I don’t know,” says Carol. “We’ll…”

She stops, because she can’t think how. Can’t see beyond this morning, to be honest. It’s always darkest before dawn, she reminds herself. It’s always when you give up hope that something turns up.

“I’m tired,” says Bridget. “Tired of all of it. Tired of struggling, tired of trying to put a brave face on, tired of telling Yasmin it’ll be okay. Tired of walking down the street looking over my shoulder in case he comes out of nowhere. Tired of having to choose between shoes for my daughter and food for myself. Tired of waiting to be repossessed. Carol, I really can’t do this any more.”

“Oh, don’t. Oh, Honey, don’t.”

“Maybe I should just…”

Carol waits. Bridget doesn’t continue.

“Babe,” she says eventually, “you know you’re going to carry on. It’s what we do, isn’t it? What alternative is there?”

Another tear slides down Bridget's cheek. She feels all cried out, salted inside like a kipper. Finds it hard to believe that she has any tears left.

“You never know,” says Carol. “That bloke might ring.”

“Oh,
please.
”

She bundles the letter into a ball, throws it at the wall.

“As if,” she says. “Jesus what a waste of time that was. And petrol. He's not going to call. Why would he call? My luck never changes. Never. It never has. It’ll just go on and on like this, spiralling downwards, forever. You know it, Carol, and I know it, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. I might as well…”

In the bedroom, in the interior of her handbag, the phone starts to ring.

Chapter Ten

Eight hundred pounds. I’ve got eight hundred pounds in my pocket. That’s more money than I’ve had at one time in… how long? Feels like forever. God, I used to take that much down to New Covent Garden in cash every other day, back in the old days. Before Yasmin, we used to think a hundred quid was a reasonable amount to spend on an ordinary night out, and now it feels like a fortune.

Yes, she thinks, but it’s not a lot to show for a lifetime, is it? Two hundred of it is Carol’s and two-fifty is the flight fund, scraped together out of Child Benefit against emergencies. And fifty for my engagement ring.

She glances down at her newly naked finger. Selling the ring was as much a gesture to the end of her relationship as a financial necessity, the fact that the diamonds turned out to be cubic zirconium almost perfect in its irony. After all these years, she has finally let go of the last vestiges of Kieran, and received a final proof of his duplicity, of the value he put on her. When he gave the ring to her, top of the Eiffel Tower, champagne weekend, jacuzzi suite and all the luxuries, she felt like a princess. Now – she’s ashamed of what that hotel room cost. She could have squeezed two more months out of the mortgage for the price of that weekend.

Three hundred and fifty: everything that’s not, or not in, this crumbling car – furniture, kitchen appliances, all those decorative fripperies that dripped away the thousands over the years, when we weren’t saving, when I thought that incomes only ever went up when you were in your twenties – was worth three hundred pounds, and that only because the house clearance man took pity on my crestfallen face when he offered me two-fifty. Christ: he wouldn't even take the telly. Said it was so old even a burglar would have left it.

Yasmin stirs in the back. Tranquillised with chips and hot chocolate, she has slept since the services two hours back, almost buried among bedclothes and cushions. If we crashed, thinks Bridget, checking the wing mirror because the rear-view is blocked with boxes of pans and books, shoes and toys, crockery and chemicals, all bundled together with the haphazardness of haste, she’d undoubtedly survive. Though whether she’d be found in the wreckage before she suffocated is anybody’s guess.

One thing Bridget has already discovered: there is no good radio west of Reading. By Yeovil, apart from a couple of piratey drum’n’bass outfits, the world has become a cosy one of two-mile ringroad tailbacks and Christmas fairs. It’s as though London didn’t exist, she thinks, apart from the odd suspicious comment about edicts from Westminster. It might as well be on another planet, or at least another country: as relevant to these people as Rome or New York. By Exeter, on her third feature on decorative chutney-making, she concedes defeat, fiddles with the buttons until she finds Radio 2.  They’re playing Duran Duran:
Girls on Film
. The final tune at her first school disco, when they put the lights back up after the slow dances. Back then. In another life. When she thought the future held nothing but adventure.

Bridget smiles for the first time today, beyond the false rictus of reassurance she’s carried about for her daughter's sake, sings along – with the chorus, anyway – as she turns on the headlights. As always in house moves, they got on the road later than she had intended, boxes and bags so much heavier to carry and harder to stow, even with Carol’s help, than she had anticipated, and it’s already almost four o’clock. It’ll be pitch black by the time we get there, she thinks. I’ll have to leave most of the stuff in the car until morning, just bring up the bedclothes and the cooking things. We’re going to the country. We can leave a car full of valuables, such as they are, overnight, and still expect them to be there in the morning.

My God, I'm tired, she thinks. I must be getting old. And then she laughs out loud because she has realised that she’s just tuned a car radio to Radio 2 for the first time in her life. You may not be old yet, she tells herself, but you’ve sure as sherbet passed one of the milestones of middle age.

“What’s so funny?”

She glances in the rear-view. Yasmin is sitting up, craning like a meerkat. She’s strapped onto the booster seat, her legs sticking out in front of her, too short to bend fully at the knees, her dark hair crushed down on one side of her head from sleep. Bridget feels one of those hourly surges of love. My baby. Not a baby any more, but not big enough to kick the back of the seat, either.

“Nothing, baby,” she says. “Just something I heard on the radio. Are you thirsty?”

Yasmin considers the question, stretches to see the gloomy road. “Yes,” she says, absently, imperiously. “When did it get dark? It must be awfully late.”

“It’s winter, darling. It gets dark early in winter.”

Children are so odd. The things they notice and the things they don’t. Six winters Yasmin’s gone through now, and she’s only just discovered about the darkness thing. “Why?”

Good God, thinks Bridget, I don’t actually know the answer to that. Is it because the course of our orbit is different at different times of year? Or does the earth tilt on its axis? Or is it something to do with the Wobble they go on about on the science programmes?

“It’s just one of those things,” she settles for the it-just-is route. “It’s why it gets colder in winter, you see. There’s less sun.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why is there less sun?”

“Because it’s winter–”she begins. Realises that she’s painting herself into a corner, changes tack. “We need the winter so all the plants can have a rest. It’s like you needing to go to sleep.”

“But plants don’t need to go to sleep,” says Yasmin the logician. “It’s people who need to go to sleep.”

“Mmm,” says Bridget noncommittally.

“And cats. Cats sleep. A lot. Sometimes you can’t wake them up.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Can we have a cat?”

“We’ll see,” she says. A phrase she hears passing her lips thirty, forty times a day.

“I shall call him Fluffy,” says Yasmin with finality.

Please don’t, thinks Bridget. It’s tough enough being a child’s cat without being called Fluffy.

“Are we nearly there yet?”

“Another couple of hours, I’m afraid.” Bridget fishes a mini-carton of Five Alive from the door pocket, unwraps the straw with her teeth and passes it back.

“Another couple of
hours
?”

“Yes. I told you it was a long way.”

“Practically,” says Yasmin, in that strange, suddenly grown-up way she has, “America.”

Not far off, thinks Bridget. After all, it only takes seven hours to fly to Florida.

“Mummy, I’m bored.”

Oh God. Don’t let her start. We’ve got such a long way. “Do you want to play a game? How about I Spy?”

“Ok. I spy with my little eye something beginning with H.”

“Um…” Bridget casts about her. “Headrest?”

“No.”

“Hair?”

“No.”

“Um…”

A car passes on the other side of the road. “I get it! Headlights!”

“Yup,” says Yasmin. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with H.”

“Headlights,” says Bridget.

“Yup. I spy with my little eye something beginning with H.”

“Okay. I get it. Drink your drink.”

A rattly slurp from the back seat. “How much longer?”

“One hour and fifty-nine minutes.”

“I’m
booored.
”

“Look!” cries Bridget. “A camel!”

“Where?” She sits up again, boredom forgotten.

“Oop, missed it.”

“What’s a camel doing here?”

“They get everywhere, camels.” Especially when small children need distracting. They’re very useful for that. And elephants.

“Well, how come
I
never see one?”

“You’re just not quick enough, that’s all. I’m sure we’ll see another one. I should think there’ll be quite a few along this road. We’ll be going through Camelford, after all.”

“Tchuh,” says Yasmin. “Sometimes I think you’re just making them up, Mum.”

Oh, damn. I knew it was too good to last.

“We need to think,” she says, “what colour to paint your bedroom. It’s cool, isn’t it, having a bedroom of your own at last?”

“S’pose so,” says Yasmin. Bridget feels a touch of disappointment. She’d expected more enthusiasm, but she guesses that it’s hard for a child Yasmin’s age to get too excited about something she’s never had. Except a kitten. Perhaps she should think about the kitten. It’s a tricky one. Even harder to move on if it doesn’t work out, if you’ve got a pet to leave behind.

“You’ve got a spare bed as well,” she says cheerfully. “You can have your friends to stay.”

Yasmin picks up her monkey from the seat beside her, starts pulling at its ears. “All my friends are in London.”

“You’ll make new friends,” she promises.

“How?”

“Well, you’ll be going to a new school – ”

“I don’t
want
to go to a new school…”

She can hear her daughter’s voice well up. Oh, no, please, she thinks. I can’t do any more tears today. I’ve just handed the keys to my home in to the building society. I’ve just become homeless. I’ve left everything familiar and run away to a place full of strangers…

And she carries on, like mothers do: forces her voice light and finds a joke the way she always has. My daughter won’t grow up knowing about unhappiness. She won't grow up thinking the world is a threatening, dangerous place. I won’t let her. I won’t let Kieran poison her future.

“How about lime green,” she asks, “with purple spots?”

“Eeeuugh!”

Yasmin is good at distraction. Storms turn to sunshine rapidly in her world. She giggles. “No!”

“Well how about orange with electric blue stripes?”

“Noo!”

“Um…”

“Pink,” declares Yasmin. “I like pink.”

Of course you do. You’re six years old.

“With stars on the ceiling. Those stars that light up in the dark.”

“Okay. I’m sure we can find some of those.”

“And a special cushion for Fluffy. Because he’ll need his own bed, won’t he?”

“Um…” she endeavours to find a creative way of being noncommittal, fails, leaves it.

“And I want one of those lights.”

“Which lights, dwarfy?”

“The ones that go round and round. With the pictures. So I get stars and fairies on my walls.”

Jesus. Stars and fairies? What have they been teaching her at that school?

“Fluffy’s black and white,” says Yasmin. “With a pink nose. I love him
sooo
much.”

They fall silent. Think their thoughts as they pass the sign for Okehampton. Maybe she’ll forget about the cat thing in a while. Once she’s at school, and she’s got friends, once she sees lambs gambolling in the fields and… I don’t know… maybe she can start an earthworm farm or something… or maybe… as long as she doesn’t start wanting a pony…

Yasmin shifts again, struggles against her seatbelt. “Are we nearly there yet?”