He was at my side before I could even blink. I didn’t know he could move that fast. “Tell Mrs. Greenwood that I’ll give her a ring,” he barked at her secretary, who was cowering behind her computer.
“I have Art,” I reminded him again, because my survival instinct told me it would be safer to inhale noxious paint fumes than go anywhere with my father when he looked like he wanted to hang, draw, and quarter me as a preshow.
“Not bloody likely,” he gritted out, then he must have suspected that I was seriously thinking about doing a runner because he grabbed my upper arm in a circulation-crushing grip that didn’t ease off until he was pushing me into the car.
“I bet you’ve left bruises,” I started to say but was silenced by a skin-stripping look.
“Be quiet,” he said pleasantly. “And do up your seat belt.”
I’d barely clicked it into place before he rammed his foot down on the accelerator. I clutched onto the dashboard with white-knuckled hands. “I guess you’re in a mood with me about something, but slow down, please!”
Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care. “I mean it, Dad! Slow down or I’m going to be sick!”
He huffed but eased off on the accelerator so I could breathe again.
“So what’s all this about?” I tried again. “Not like you to have no respect for the book learning. And I’ve behaved perfectly at school. Well, not perfectly, but I haven’t . . .”
“I thought I told you to shut up. I don’t want to hear another word until we get home.”
Unfortunately, it only took us ten minutes before we were pulling into the driveway and I willed myself to unbuckle my seat belt and get out of the car for my full-on yelling with surround sound for some dreadful crime I didn’t realize I’d committed.
I followed Dad’s stiffened back up the path and scampered through the door before he could yank me through it.
“I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?” I offered brightly . . . but no. Steely grip on my shoulder and I was being frog-marched to the study. Must be really serious, then.
He pushed me down onto one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs that he likes to use for these occasions and loomed over me. I squinted up at him and started taking in all sorts of telling details. Like, the fact that he didn’t get acquainted with his razor this morning and that was the shirt and tie that I’d ironed for him yesterday morning. Bloodshot eyes? Check. The same clothes that he’d worn yesterday? Check. Empty wine bottle on the desk? Check.
“Did you even go to bed last night?” I asked him sullenly, and it was so easy to slip back into my role as Isabel, the worthless wretch of a daughter while he was already assuming his role of the tyrannical Victorian papa.
“I might ask you the same question,” he snapped. “Or I might rephrase it as exactly whose bed did you sleep in last night?”
I gasped at the unfairness of it all. “I told you! I phoned and left a message and said I was staying at Dot’s, so don’t blame me. You probably managed to wipe the message before you’d even listened to it because you do that . . .” I was working myself up into a really righteous indignation because I had told him where I was going. Okay, I wasn’t actually at Dot’s but . . .
“Ah yes, the famous message, which was then followed by approximately fifteen other messages from Dot, who seemed to be unaware that you were tucked up cozily at her house, and those other two ghastly girls that you insist on socializing with, all extremely concerned about your whereabouts.”
Those evil, scheming little bitches. Phoning and leaving incriminating messages on the family answerphone violated every rule of the friend code. But then, I kept forgetting—we weren’t friends.
And if I’d thought last night’s silence was bad, then the loaded menace of here and now when all I could hear was a rushing in my head, was going to make the final cut on the Worst Five Moments of My Life.
“You could have rung me,” I eventually said, peering down at my bag. Really bad idea. Because he stopped standing over me like the Wrath of God and snagged the handles between his thumb and index finger.
“Oh, really. I wonder why I didn’t think of that,” he said with a sneer. “Next time you’re trying to cover your deceitful tracks, I suggest you remember to switch your phone on.”
I had a dim recollection of switching my phone off after Smith had scared the life out of me (and how sorry I was that he hadn’t actually succeeded), but Dad was already finding that out for himself.
“Don’t go through my bag!” I yelped, leaping up as he rummaged inside and hauled out my phone, but it was too late, he was already upending my bag and spilling the contents out onto the desk.
Condoms. Cigarettes. A printout of the infamous blowjob picture. The strip of photos that Smith and I had taken when we went to Eastbourne. A flyer from the Duckie gig. It was all there. Every lie I’d told over the last few weeks spelled out in the debris from my bag.
I was looking and he was looking and muttering under his breath. I started trying to cram everything back, because if it wasn’t actually there, laid out before him, I could keep on pretending, but my hand hadn’t even curled around the cigarettes before he was snatching my shoulders and whirling me around so he could shake me hard enough so I bit my tongue.
“What have you been doing?” he screamed. “All these revolting things in your bag . . . I want some answers right now!”
“Get off me!” I shouted right back, trying to pry his fingers off me. “You don’t go through my personal stuff! I’m sixteen and I can do what I want, and it’s got fuck all to do with you!”
“It’s got everything to do with me. While you’re under my roof, I will . . .”
I got away from him by kicking him in the shin so he let go of me with a strangled yelp and I was free to run for the door and up the stairs before he’d stopped rubbing his leg.
Even with my five-second head start, I’d barely made it to my room before he was in the doorway and preventing all my attempts to slam the door in his face.
“Let go,” he said, all deadly calm and flaring nostrils. “Let go of the door this instant.”
But the calm voice just made the mist even redder. So even though he was a foot taller than me and, like, five stone heavier, I persisted in pushing and shoving at the door and screaming at him. It wasn’t even words, just these angry, high-pitched cries like an animal caught in a trap.
He soon got bored with the tug-of-war and flicked me out of the way with a really insulting ease, before striding into my room, eyes darting wildly around for even more evidence of my misdemeanors. I’m not sure what he was looking for in my wardrobe: my own little vodka distillery, or a crack den. Maybe even a brothel full of barely legal teenagers. But instead he was rifling through clothes rails, snatching up garments, knocking hangers onto the floor, and this was the worst thing of all.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop making a mess, you’re mucking everything up,” I screeched, scooping up armfuls of clothes that were scrunching under his feet.
“How could you?” He said in a choked voice that was so fraught with emotion, I stopped frantically trying to calm the havoc he’d caused in my wardrobe and looked at him helplessly.
He was clutching the black dress I’d taken out of his room, a couple of jumpers, a pair of shoes that I still hadn’t worn because I couldn’t walk in really high heels.
“Her things, you’ve been going through her things, stealing them. How could you?” He sat down heavily on the bed, gazing unseeingly at the stuff I’d borrowed.
“They’re just clothes . . . I didn’t think you’d mind,” I ventured timidly, shocked out of my meltdown by the way he’d gone from furious to broken in five seconds. “Look, I’ll wash them and iron them and I’ll put them back and you’ll never even know . . .”
“I want you to tell me what happened, Isabel,” he said firmly, as if I hadn’t even spoken.
I shut my eyes and breathed out heavily. “I’ve been seeing this guy for a little while and .
. .”
He gave me a look of utter loathing. I’m not being dramatic. It was so venomous and laden with hate that I stumbled backward, bumping my hip bone against the edge of the dressing table. “I couldn’t care less about the sordid details of how you’ve been spending your time. I want to know what happened that day, when she—I want to know what you were doing that made it happen.” His face twisted up and he brushed the back of his hand across his eyes, and when he took it away, his face was damp. “It’s not your secret to keep. She was my wife, she was my everything, and I have a right to know why she isn’t here anymore.”
He was properly crying now and it was awful. And I’m not made of stone, I’m made of flesh and blood and stupid, stupid emotions. There was no way I could make it better or turn back time so she’d still be here. It would have been a fair swap to have her back: on my case 24/7, nagging and bitching and letting me know what a deep disappointment I was, just so I didn’t have to look at him with his head in his hands, shaking with sobs.
I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
He lifted his head and clutched his little handful of memories tighter. “Get out,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you in this house for another second.”
It didn’t take me long to scurry back into the study and retrieve my bag and all the secrets it had spilled out. I grabbed a bunch of clothes from the ironing basket, but then I heard his heavy tread on the floor and there wasn’t time to fold them up neatly, just stuff them in a carrier bag, drop my keys on the hall table, and walk out.
Amazingly, it wasn’t even lunchtime. It should take longer for what’s left of your life to fall to pieces. I switched my phone on and listened to its angry beeping, but there were no calls from the girls, all worried about my sudden disappearance, which proved my theory that they were staging their piss-poor version of a military coup. And I couldn’t bear to listen to the ten messages from Dad, each one of them probably a little more caustic and frantic than the next.
I cleared them all and then tried to call Smith, before I remembered that he always turned his phone off when he had lectures. I left him a plaintive message about needing somewhere to crash for a while, and then walked down to Western Road. Thankfully, I hadn’t even had time to take off my coat before World War Three had kicked off, but it was cold out. Or maybe I was cold inside. I wasn’t sure, but I wished I could stop shaking.
All the loose coins in my bag were probably still lying on the study floor and my ATM card was in my room, but I managed to find a two-pound coin tucked into a side pocket, which was enough for a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea in the Mad Hatter before heading to Topshop, so I could try on outfit after outfit because it was warm and it was something to do until the security guard asked me to leave.
My next destination was the pier, which might well have been the coldest place on earth after the Arctic Circle. I dived into the amusement arcade and surreptitiously poked my hands into the trays under the slot machines to see if anyone had left their winnings.
I scrounged up enough for another cup of tea and eked it out as I watched the seagulls swoop down onto the railings, scanning the wooden slats for discarded chips—and did I mention that during all these slow hours when I tried to kill time, I must have phoned Smith every ten minutes?
It was nearly 4 P.M. and I had no choice but to start heading for Dot’s house so I could throw myself on her not-so-tender mercies. Once I was inside, though, I could swap her toothpaste for foot cream or something, but my evil plans were quashed when my phone started ringing and Smith’s number flashed up.
“Finally!” I said by way of a greeting. “I’ve been calling and calling you.”
“Hey, Isabel. Yeah, I got every single one of your many messages.”
He sounded weird. Or maybe the whole day had been so horribly weird that it had leaked into everything. “I’m not stalking you or anything. I’ve just had a really bad day, like almost the worst day since records began, so do you want to hook up?”
“I’m not at home,” Smith said. “But yeah. We should meet. Do you know that little park with the swings near the marina?”
“By the closed-down kiddies train thing?”
“Yeah. I’m there now. Needed to get some fresh air, y’know?”
“Kinda.” I rolled my eyes at the irony. If I had any more fresh air today, it would fricking kill me. “I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Right, well, see you then.” He hung up abruptly enough that it gave me pause for thought. But not really. All I could think about was how much I wanted to see Smith. Not just because of the shitty day, which I couldn’t tell him about, anyway. Just dying to see him because he was him and he might not love me, but he’d make everything all right just by holding my hand and giving me one of his crooked smiles.
Smith was already waiting for me on the swings, idly stretching his legs out and hanging onto the chains so he could sway gently in the breeze.
“Hey,” I called, as I got closer, but he didn’t say anything so I felt self-conscious and confused about how to put one foot in front of the other.
He fixed me with an unwavering stare. “How old are you?”
I expected the world to tilt off its axis. It felt like it had for a second, before it went right way up again and it was me that was wrong way around. “Eighteen,” I said, like there could ever be any doubt. “C’mon, you know that.”
“Bullshit,” he snapped. “How old are you?”
I decided to fight fire with a flamethrower and a can of gasoline.
“I’m eighteen,” I spat. “Are you, like, deficient or something? Eighteen!”
He placed his feet on the floor and stilled the swing so he could freeze me with a look that NASA could have used if they were ever doing research into killer laser beams. “You’re sixteen.”
“I don’t know what this is all about, but you’re completely wrong because . . .”
His hands bit into my arms, settling on top of bruises that were already starting to blossom, and he yanked me close in a parody of all the embraces we’d had. So close that I could see the tiny flecks of green in his blue eyes; the smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose; the tiny scar just above his top lip that I must have kissed a thousand times. “Stop it,” he whispered in my ear. “Just stop lying.”
Then he pushed me away from him, like he couldn’t bear to touch me, and I stood there, hands pushed into the pockets of my coat and I was on my own again.
“So how do you know what you think you know?” I asked him eventually, still clinging on to the vain hope that I could make him believe my version of the truth. Well, not the truth so much as the random sequence of stories I’d made up.
“Well, sweetheart, you’ve got mutiny in the ranks. I had a very interesting call from one of your friends this afternoon. Wasn’t sure who it was at first because she kept giggling so hard she couldn’t speak,” he said, wrinkling his face as if the memory was deeply disturbing. “How could you?”
I was getting really sick of people asking me that. “How could I what exactly?” I asked.
“She told me that you’ve been stringing me along for weeks, then going back to your mates to discuss all the gory details. I understand it wasn’t quite as good for you as it was for me?”
I covered my burning cheeks with my hands. “Oh, God,” I whimpered, and Smith shot me a flinty look.
“I was prepared to cut you some slack because she also told me about your mum, but then she got on to the fascinating topic of exactly how old you were and all my goodwill suddenly ran out.”
“It’s not true,” I insisted woodenly, because if I kept saying it then maybe he’d believe me. Well, it was worth a shot. “None of it is true.”
“Yeah, she said you’d deny everything. Probably why I found this under my windshield wiper when I came out of my lecture.
I guess the mystery of what you do all day has been solved. Your friends
really don’t seem to like you that much, but I guess I can understand why,” he said bitterly, pulling a crumpled and slightly damp piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to me. I took a minute to smooth down the creases, but I already recognized the school crest at the top. It was my timetable with a handy DOB: 08/08/1989 underneath my name. Damn Mrs. Greenwood’s secretary and her attention to detail.
I was screwed. I kept going from hot to cold and then hot again, and the pinched set of Smith’s features was all I could see. “I never lied about how I felt. About what you mean to me,” I pleaded, but he turned his head away and my words were carried off by the wind.
“Just save it,” Smith said, collapsing back on the swing, like his legs didn’t want to hold him up. “I don’t care about how you feel. I mean, Is, it was fun when you were in one of your rare good moods or all over me like white on rice, but most of the time? You were a grade-A pain in the arse.”