‘Here. This is what you do it with.’
Anna takes the cloth, but she does nothing. The kitchen reeks of chlorine and spilt milk, and she feels sick.
Suddenly Sonia’s face changes. ‘Oh leave it, Anna. I’ll do it. What were you up at this time for, anyway?’ She takes the cloth from Anna, bends down and wipes the floor briskly, getting into all the corners. In a minute the tiles are clean and the cloth disposed of. Sonia, triumphant once more over dirt and disorder, fills the kettle.
‘Cup of tea, Anna?’
Anna nods, hypnotized. Sonia’s turned the water full on, smacking the jet of it into the kettle. Her strict fair hair has come loose, curling damply around her face. Her skin glows with fresh colour.
‘Is it raining?’ asks Anna.
‘Raining! It’s a beautiful day. I don’t know why you want to spend all your time in the barn. You ought to learn to ride.’ She smiles a flushed and secret smile. ‘There’s nothing like it. I’m off all day tomorrow. We’re going up on the hills, and we won’t be back before dark.’
Anna’s astonished. Sonia has never talked to her like this. In fact they rarely talk at all: as if by instinct they avoid each other, one coming into a room as the other one goes out, one moving aside to let the other pass so their bodies never touch. But now look at Sonia, swooping up to take mugs off their hooks, diving like a dancer into the fridge for milk. She is packed, electric with happiness. Anna can feel it coming off her.
‘Did you use the last of the milk?’
‘I’m sorry, Sonia, I didn’t know there wasn’t any more till I’d poured it, I was going to get some more —’
‘We’ll have it with lemon. You like tea with lemon?’
Anna nods.
‘OK. Listen, I’m going to have bacon and eggs. You want some, or are you going back to bed?’
‘Can I have a bacon sandwich?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
Anna leans against the cupboard, watching Sonia. She is so quick and perfect in everything she does. Her hands tap the eggs and the shells fall neady in half, as if she has cut them. She tosses the bacon easily into the frying-pan and it humps up, frizzling. Sonia turns it with a flick of her wrist, then drops in the eggs one by one, each egg swirled round in a glass before it hits the hot pan.
‘Do it like that and you’ll keep the yolk in the middle,’ she tells Anna. The bacon spits, the eggs chuckle in the fat. Anna realizes: Sonia is young.
‘How do you want it, soft or frizzled?’
‘Frizzled.’
Anna gets out the tomato sauce and cuts thick slices of white bread. It feels strange to be moving around the kitchen like this, with Sonia, not minding the touch of her as she brushes past. Here in the kitchen, with the lights still on even though there’s a new day getting stronger outside the window, and the bacon curling and going crisp while the eggs lie bubbling in a veil of white, Sonia’s like someone else. She’s pulled off her riding jacket and tossed it on to the door knob. There are stains of grass and sweat on her white T-shirt, which is rucked around her stomach so Anna can see the flat elastic stretch of Sonia’s skin, and her navel, a deep dint in the brown flesh. Normally Sonia changes her clothes as soon as there’s a spot of dirt on anything she wears, but today she doesn’t seem to care. She’s forgotten about herself. And now she’s dipping her finger straight into the yolk of an egg as it fries. She lifts her finger golden and dripping to her mouth, and sucks it. Anna fetches two plates, two mugs.
Sonia tips bacon on to Anna’s plate, and the rest of the panful on to her own. Anna makes her sandwich as she likes it: a coating of tomato sauce on the white bread, a layer of lettuce, the hot bacon, the sandwich clapped together again. She lifts the sandwich to her mouth. Chewy, sweetish bread, lettuce just wilted by hot fat, bacon crackling between her teeth, the acid sweetness of tomato sauce to cut the taste of fat. Sonia folds her bacon over with her finger and pushes it into her mouth. Neither of them moves to go into the long, polished dining-room. They eat standing up, greedily. Sonia’s swaggering, she doesn’t care. Her mouth is wide and her lips shine with bacon grease. Her teeth tear at the flesh of the bacon and she cuts the yolks out of her eggs and swallows them whole.
‘I should have fried that bread,’ she says. Anna watches her over the thick bacon sandwich, but says nothing. Sonia’s look is sharp now, and direct, lighting hard on Anna. ‘Makes you wonder what we’re doing here,’ she observes.
‘What do you mean, Sonia?’
‘You and me. There must be people like us up and down the country, sitting in kitchens. We weren’t born to each other, we didn’t choose each other. But here we are living together.’
No, thinks Anna, we didn’t choose. My dad chose, if anyone did. But I don’t think anyone did. And here we are.
‘I suppose you could call us a family,’ Sonia goes on. ‘The more you think about it, though, the stranger it is, a family that isn’t blood or choice. Don’t you think it’s strange, Anna?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Anna. Her hand has crept to her left pocket, and she is fingering a piece of folded paper.
‘People say all sorts of things about stepmothers,’ says Sonia. ‘They’ll even say them to your face. Do you think of me as your stepmother, Anna?’
Caught, Anna just stares. But Sonia’s face isn’t hostile. She wants to know.
‘I’ve got a mother,’ says Anna.
‘I know,’ says Sonia, and then she says no more. She will never know how grateful Anna is that she says no more. She thinks of Grace Darling. Boldly, bravely, resolutely. She thinks of the waves thrashing over Grace Darling’s oars as she bent her back and rowed to the rescue of the drowning men. She didn’t ask anyone, she just went. If she hadn’t gone they would have died, on the rocks and in the dark. She touches the piece of paper she tore from Fanny Fairway’s Comprehension book.
Sonia yawns. Her arms go up, her golden forearms, her silky underarms. Her breasts lift as she draws her arms up and behind her head, yawning luxuriously until her eyes water. There is a smell of her in the kitchen: not her perfume, but her flesh. Anna sees that she is beautiful now that she has kicked her cool neatness aside like clothes at bedtime. She is beautiful and her arms are strong from riding. What she wants, she’ll have. She moves boldly, challenging the room even though there is only Anna in it. Anna is almost shy to be with her. She watches, and thinks of what Sonia has said. Not by blood, and not by choice. Why are they together then, her father and Sonia and Anna? What happened to bring them here? Who chose it, and is it Sonia who is unchoosing it now, opening her arms to new things and taking off the old ones like dirty clothes?
‘I galloped on the mare yesterday,’ says Sonia. ‘I didn’t think I would. But you’ve got to go for it.’
‘What was it like?’
But Sonia doesn’t answer. Her mind is inward, turning over what Anna cannot reach. She turns over what she won’t speak of: the spread and stretch of the mare under her, the fleeting wildness beneath its taught paces, the smell, the heat, the harsh slippery sides, the gripping that makes her thighs ache, the smell that comes off on her clothes and her skin. The way the mare shudders all over and spreads her forelegs and puts her head down at the end of the gallop, and when Sonia gets off her legs are trembling too. She walks round to the mare’s head and her hands go up to the mare’s muzzle and the mare tosses her head up sharp as if to shake Sonia off. But she doesn’t really want to shake Sonia off. Her neck arches, her head comes down, nudging Sonia’s jacket sleeve. Her bright, flaring curious eyes are on Sonia’s face. She noses down, feeling her soft wet lips into Sonia’s hand and then she whickers and Sonia feels the spurt of mare’s breath against her fingers.
Sonia picks up a piece of bread which Anna has cut but not eaten. Slowly she begins to wipe it around the inside of the pan, soaking up the savoury fat of the bacon and the golden runnels of broken egg. She sweeps the fat-rich bread right around the pan, brings it to her mouth, bites.
‘All the
same,’ she says, ‘who are we kidding? It’s not really like a family. It’s not real, like —’
She stops. With her bread in her hand she frowns as if she’s going to struggle to say what it’s not like. But the cool harness of daily life is settling on her. She won’t say any more.
‘What are you digging up the money for?’
Anna sits back on her heels. ‘You’re not to tell anyone.’
‘Don’t be stupid. You know I wouldn’t.’
‘I’m going to my mother’s.’
A pang of loss shoots through him. He’s always known it could happen. He’s even practised Anna saying those words in his head. I’m going away. I’m going back to London. But he hasn’t guessed what it would feel like to see her head stooped over the grave of her money, digging it out. She can go anywhere she wants with a thousand pounds. She’ll never need to come back.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she says coldly, as if he’s someone else, not David but a boy she doesn’t know.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Yes it did. You wouldn’t be going off.’
And he knows. He watches her so close he can see the thoughts twisting in her eyes.
‘It was Sonia,’ she says after a while.
‘What’s she done to you?’
‘Nothing. Only she’s right, what am I doing here? What’s my dad doing here? We’re not a family. There’s no reason for us to be together.’
‘What’s she been saying that to you for?’
‘It’s true.’
‘She’s got no call to talk like that to you,’ he says out of a depth he hadn’t known was in him. He burns with anger at the thought that he’s only ten years old, not even eleven yet. Someone can hurt Anna and there’s nothing he can do about it. Even if he told his mum she wouldn’t want to get drawn in. She’d say Sonia might have gone a bit far but there was bound to be more to it than David knew. He could just hear his dad saying that Anna was probably exaggerating. His dad likes that word. He’d tell David to keep out of it. They won’t be here long. They’ll soon be going back to where they came from.
‘You could phone Childline,’ he tells Anna, because he’s seen the stickers in the phone box.
‘Courtney Arkinstall phones Childline all the time. She’s got her own counsellor.’
‘Those Arkinstalls, they’ve got to have everything that’s going.’
‘She says it’s always engaged. She has to try loads of times.’
‘Will you really go back to London?’
‘Yes,’ says Anna. ‘It’s not Sonia’s fault.’ Her hand is back in her pocket, her fingers stroking the sharp fold of the paper. ‘I won’t live with my mother though. I’ll just stay with her. She’s got a pull-out sofa in the sitting-room.’
‘She’ll want you to live with her.’
‘No. She knows I can’t. She’s got an illness, she can’t look after me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She told me, it’s an illness. People think it’s something you choose to do but it isn’t, it’s like having a leg off so you can’t walk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s why she can’t look after me. She’s an alcoholic.’
‘She’s not.’
‘OK then, she’s not.’
‘I didn’t mean I didn’t believe you.’
‘I know.’
They are silent for a while. Anna brushes soil off her palms, then suddenly she smiles at him, a big, sparkly smile that comes from nowhere he knows, and covers more than he can imagine.
‘So I’ve got to sort myself out,’ she says. ‘It’s not my mum’s fault. When I’m grown-up I’ll get a job and pay for her to go to a clinic. My dad thinks she’s got no will-power, but she has.’
Anna has found the edge of the crisp packet with the money in it. She pulls it out and shakes it, showering earth. Inside the packet, the money is as fresh as when they left it.
‘It’s not taken root then,’ says David. ‘Let’s count it again.’ He’d forgotten how new the notes were. He wants to have his hands on the wad of them, one more time. After it’s been buried like that, it doesn’t seem to belong to Anna as much as it did before, when she opened the letter. It could be anybody’s. Anna wants to watch out. Everything’ll get taken off her, unless she holds on tighter than she’s doing. He thinks of Sonia in the Land Rover, with her pale hair scraped back and her sunglasses and her face not looking at anybody or caring about anybody as she drives up to the stables. She looks so perfect. She makes him want to hurt her, driving through the village like that with her head up and looking at no one, as if none of them are real.
Suddenly, without wanting to, he sees Anna’s head bobbing on the other side of the wall, as she walked down the lane that day they threw the grit at her. Her hair hid her face. They peered through chinks between the stones and knew she couldn’t see them. She didn’t know they were waiting for her. They were crouched down, the four of them, Jack Barraclough’s knees digging into him, Billy’s stinky peanut-butter breath in his face. They were hot and excited, shoved in as close as they could to the wall. They could hear her feet coming down the track. And then Johnjo swung his arm back with the handful of gravel in it and let it fly over the wall. They heard her feet stop. Billy laughed out loud, not a real laugh but a laugh for Anna to hear and know they were there. His red mouth opened and there were his teeth with the paste of peanut butter stuck to them, inches from David’s face. Billy flung his handful of stones and then Jack threw his but most of his hit the wall and spattered back at them. Only David still had his handful. They’d got it from the grit heap up at the high road.
‘Go on,’ said Billy, and David threw his, aiming to do what Jack did and hit the wall, but he was a better shot and the stones went over. He didn’t know if it touched her or not. The next minute they were thudding away over the field, Billy and Jack and JohnJo laughing the same loud, loose laughs, as if they were brothers. He nearly wished he could laugh like that too and fall down in a heap by the high road with Billy and JohnJo and Jack. They were telling themselves how they’d made her run for it, how they’d hit her on the bum as she went off running. But he said he had to go home. They looked at him, and Billy said, ‘Go home then.’ He went slowly, to show he wasn’t running. But that was all he did.
‘There’s more than I need here,’ says Anna. ‘We can share it.’
‘No,’ he fires up. ‘I don’t want it. It’s yours.’
She’s silent, fingering the notes. He thinks of his dad, and what his dad would say if he saw David here with Anna and a thousand pounds between them. They are a family. His dad has never hit his mum, or him. Only a smack in the right place when it’s wanted, that’s what his mum always says. Or else his dad says he’ll knock him into the middle of next week, but he never does. They’re not like the Arkinstalls. He’s seen Billy reel out of the door from a crack on the head, and squat down in the space between the coal bunker and the wall, staring at nothing. You’d best not go and talk to Billy then. If he thinks you’ve seen anything he’ll beat you up for it in the playground next day. Sometimes Courtney’ll come out and find her cousin. She doesn’t talk, she just gives him a piece of her chewing-gum, and takes one herself, and they cram in side by side in the gap, chewing their gum for so long it probably doesn’t taste of anything.
‘Don’t be angry, David,’ says Anna.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I’ll come with you, to your mum’s. You shouldn’t go on your own. It’s not safe in London.’
Still she doesn’t say anything. He feels an itchy red in his cheeks. Maybe she thinks he’s after a free holiday in London, stopping with her.
‘It’s all right, I won’t stop. I’ll go with you, then I’ll come back.’
‘Will you?’
‘I’ve said so, haven’t I? But we’ll have to use your money for the tickets, because I’ve o
nly got £6.40.’
‘And we won’t be here when school starts on Thursday.’
‘What’ll Fanny Fairway say?’ he asks derisively.
‘Don’t keep me waiting when I call your name in the register, Anna O’Driscoll. Are you deaf, or daft, or both?’
‘Stupid cow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She ought to retire. She’s way past it, my dad says. She was there when he was at school.’
‘I’ll never see her again,’ says Anna, grasping it. She looks round at a world gone temporary. ‘I’ve got to take the kitten,’ she says.
‘Have you not given it a name yet?’
‘There’s only him left. He knows I’m talking to him. He doesn’t need a name. Will you really come with me?’
‘I’ve said so, haven’t I?’
Twenty-eight
You can’t remember a morning like this since you were a child. On a summer holiday once, in Norfolk. Coming out of the guest-house door in your shorts and cardigan, clutching a big metal bucket and spade. The air was cold on your legs, but everyone said it would be hot later. The smell of the sea. Dad with his hand on the gatepost, looking down the gravel lane to the rise of the sea-wall, breathing in the air. And suddenly you ran, pelting down the lane, bucket clanging against spade, sandals slapping, plaits flying. How fast you used to run. And Johnnie’s still asleep, flat out at the bottom of the world and likely to stay like that until ten o’clock at least. Missing a beautiful morning like this.
They were a funny lot in that guest-house. You smile, remembering how Mrs Lamb always gave Dad two sausages with his bacon, while everyone else only got one. And she’d put the rack of toast bang in front of Dad, then linger behind his chair, breathing heavily, while he ate. Once Mum reached across and helped herself to one of his sausages, just to tease.
A man with a dog slows, catching your smile, taking it to himself. His dog sniffs your legs, and you bend down, recognizing the breed.
‘What’s his name?’