The Woman Next Door(63)

I am running out of things to do when Bertie suddenly presses his nose to the gap in the fence and begins furiously wagging his tail.

The small, pale arm of a child worms through the gap and roughly taps the top of Bertie’s head with a chubby flattened hand. As I get closer I hear a hoarse giggle. Bertie rolls onto his back for a tummy tickle.

Tentatively, I crouch down next to my dog and look through the hole in the fence.

‘Hello,’ I say gently. I can see a half slice of the little girl’s face. She stares back at me with the one blue eye I can see.

‘We didn’t get properly introduced before, did we?’ I say. ‘This is Bertie and I am Hester. What’s your name, sweetie?’

‘Amber Mae Piper.’ Her voice is monotone and a little loud. Then she says, ‘I live at Flat 302, Burnside Estate, N9 2HJ.’ She busies herself with patting Bertie again. I can see he is starting to tire of her rather heavy-handed affection but I’m very anxious that she shouldn’t leave.

I am just trying to form another question when, unbidden, little Amber suddenly says: ‘We are looking for my daddy.’ She has that flat intonation I’ve heard before in people with this syndrome but it’s her words that have caused my legs to wobble beneath me.

‘Your … daddy?’ I say weakly. Then, because I can’t stop myself, ‘What’s your daddy’s name?’

She doesn’t reply but yanks a clump of grass from her side and tries to feed Bertie with it. Bored now, he has taken to licking his front paw with great concentration.

‘Amber?’

The harsh voice blasting from Melissa’s kitchen almost makes me fall backwards onto the grass. Amber’s mouth turns down at the corners.

‘Would you like to come and see Bertie again some time?’ I say.

A beautiful smile lights up her face and she nods. And then, as though it was the obvious follow-up, ‘My Daddy is Jamie Liam Cox.’

She gets to her feet and bustles away; a small washerwoman with chores to attend to.

‘Bye bye,’ I whisper. ‘Bye bye, Amber.’

Back in the kitchen I slump into a chair and stare into space.

I haven’t experienced much in the way of guilt about what we did. I know that’s wrong of me, but there it is.

But everything has changed now. I never knew that young man was a father; rapist or not. What we did has had an effect on that little angel’s life. I slump forward miserably, my head on the kitchen table. I begin to bang it repeatedly onto the plastic tablecloth, whimpering, ‘No. No. No.’

My head hurts and my stomach turns over. I run to the sink and bring up the remains of my breakfast cereal.

I reach for a knife from my wooden block near the cooker and fling it at the far wall. It bounces off and lands with a defeated thud on the lino. I take another and throw it at the kitchen door, using all my strength and yelping a little.

It hasn’t helped. So next I take a plant pot containing a small cactus from the windowsill and throw that at the same spot. Then the china chickens that belonged to Mum and then my wedding crockery. Then the china shepherdess.

Smash, smash, smash …

Finally, I sink into a chair and rest my head on my arms.

Everything is becoming muddled in my mind again. I have to remember that Jamie wasn’t an innocent man. Didn’t he try to force himself on Melissa? I wish I hadn’t cared about that. I wish I had never stepped in and helped her as I did. It has brought me nothing but ingratitude and heartache.

Bertie gives a small cry. Looking around at my devastated kitchen it occurs to me that all I have is a small dog and a lot of unwanted memories. I thought I had a friend, but I was wrong.

I have nothing to lose anymore.





MELISSA


Spooning coffee into the cafetière, Melissa’s hands shake so hard that dark grounds scatter over the stonework surface. She tries to scoop the mess into her palm but the kitchen surface is damp and the coffee streaks, reminding her of Jamie’s bright blood smearing her floor tiles.

Her breath has become lodged in her chest and she has to force herself to suck it in and blow it out again. Oh God, she thinks, please help me through this.

The act of making coffee, heating milk and putting it into a jug, and then carrying all this over to the kitchen table feels like an overwhelming, momentous thing. How can she look this woman, Kerry, in the face?

If only Tilly hadn’t been here, she could have denied ever having had Jamie visit them. Damn Tilly, she thinks and for a sickening, confusing second she hates her daughter.

Instead, she had pretended to look puzzled and said that, yes, Jamie had visited, but no, she had no idea where he was now.

She wanted to scream – ‘Get out! Get out of my house!’ – at the woman and her sweet little girl but Tilly was offering coffee and now Melissa is making the coffee and wishing the process took ten times as long as it does so she can think what to do.

When she comes to the table, too soon, to lay down cups, pot, and milk she can feel the young woman’s eyes fixed hard upon her.

‘Lemme see what Amber’s up to,’ she says in some sort of northern accent and moves to the kitchen door where she shouts the little girl’s name.

Melissa and Tilly both wince, as though it were choreographed, and briefly meet eyes. Melissa keeps her expression blank and then watches Kerry as she stands there in her Primark clothes. She has olive, sallow skin and light-brown eyes and could be quite pretty, were it not for that tired patina of poverty and stress Melissa recognizes so well.