The Woman Next Door(35)
I couldn’t count the number of scraped knees I’d swabbed and bandaged, the number of toddler squabbles that were solved simply by lending a sympathetic, fair ear. And yes, there were cuddles and sometimes the odd illicit lollypop, too; but what kind of world are we living in where comforting an unhappy child is seen as aberrant behaviour? For some of those children, it was the only affection they ever got. But it turned out I had no choice in the matter. I was being asked to retire. So, come the end of the year, I was forced out to pasture.
I tried to fill my time with work in the local charity shop after that, but it wasn’t for me. The other women there weren’t my sort of people.
But I must try not to think about this now. I have to be here for Melissa. And for Tilly. I have a job to do and I must not let them down. I am the strong one in this whole equation.
A gentle rain begins to dot the windscreen. I switch on the wipers, which drag and sweep across the glass with a thumping beat that could become hypnotic. I sit up straighter in the seat, the cushion under my bottom sliding uncomfortably.
My eyes are starting to feel grainy and, despite all my protestations, I’m wondering if I am going to be able to drive the whole way after all. The dashboard clock tells me it is close to eleven o’clock. It is hours until dawn breaks and I am still very concerned about finding this place in the dark. We should stop at a service station and kill some time. I don’t think Melissa is thinking straight. It’s up to me to be the mature, sensible one.
I’m just gathering the courage to broach this suggestion to Melissa when the van starts to judder and shake and smoke begins to pour from the bonnet.
MELISSA
Until the moment they joined the motorway (travelling, Melissa noted, at 55 miles per hour), she told herself there was still time to stop this. None of it was set in stone yet and she could change her mind at any moment. They could still go back. Confess.
She pictured them reversing their earlier work, like a film played backwards at speed. But how would they explain the delay? The fact that the pestle had been cleaned and the floor bleached?
Now they are on the M25, she is suffused with an almost pleasurable feeling of helplessness. After all, they can’t easily turn round here. For now, at least, she must go with the flow.
Bundling her sweatshirt against the window, she lays her head against it and closes her eyes. There’s no possibility that she will sleep – possibly ever again. But her eyes ache and she needs to rest them for a short while.
Soon, the swish and thump of the wipers, the gentle snoring from the dog, and the throb of the engine begin to lull her into an almost hypnotic state. The physical effects of shock combined with last night’s lack of sleep start to drag at her and before long, as she is pitching into a light doze, her mind roams like a fisheye lens around the house at Fernley Close, where her world had collided with Jamie’s for the first time.
***
A small cluttered house on a respectable estate, the hallway was an obstacle course of bags of footballs and plastic cones; Greg was manager of a junior football team. Kathie always grumbled about tripping over it all but there was never any real heat in her words.
They didn’t drink or smoke and they never argued.
Melissa would watch their casual affection and stolen kisses in the kitchen with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Sometimes she would amuse herself by imagining David Attenborough narrating them. ‘And now the male of the species smacks the huge arse of the female, who laughs and tells him he is a “one”.’
They were good, kind people. But Melissa, or Melanie as she was then, was too tightly wound, her heart too sealed away, to let them come near.
Jamie had a long-term foster arrangement at Kathie and Greg’s and he’d believed they would one day adopt him. He confessed that to her one night when they’d crammed into Greg’s shed with a bottle of sweet, sticky sherry Mel had nicked from the back of the drinks cabinet. She’d laughed at him then. Told him he was a deluded fuckwit if he thought Kathie and Greg really wanted him.
Jamie did the puppy dog eyes thing but he no longer threw tantrums.
He understood that Mel wouldn’t spend time with him if he did and was learning to control himself. Really, she was helping him more than anyone in social services ever had.
She had no idea, really, whether they wanted to adopt Jamie. They went overboard in the whole ‘treating you both the same’ thing. They treated her no differently, not in any real sense.
But she felt as though they were able to see the treacly rottenness that lay deep inside her, to see whatever it was that made her difficult to love. You heard about mothers giving their lives for their kids all the time. And yet her own mother wasn’t even able to get out of bed for her. What other conclusion could she draw than that she wasn’t worth the effort?
Kathie and Greg tried to compensate by showing that extra bit of tolerance with Melanie. With Jamie, they acted more like real parents, becoming exasperated, irritated, and finding him comical sometimes. With Melanie it all felt as though it was coming from the ‘Book of Dealing with Difficult Teens’.
This was Jamie’s first and only stint in foster care. His parents had died within a few months of each other; wiped out in a house fire. He had no other family. At least he’d had one before, she thought. He seemed to inspire a soppiness in people. Poor little Jamie. Diddums.
Who cared about her, Melanie Ronson? Exactly no one. And so she’d begun to look for small ways to undermine Jamie in Kathie and Greg’s eyes. She was quite impressed with her own creativity, especially when she took one of his trainers and used it to track dog shit onto the hallway carpet. And because he was naturally forgetful, it was easy to make sure he lost his bus pass twice in one fortnight, or couldn’t find a chemistry textbook the night before a test. All too easy.