The Woman Next Door(64)

She has worked her whole life to scrub that look from her own skin. It offends her now that this person is here, bringing a tsunami of remorse in her wake.

‘Aw, she’s so cute!’ says Tilly as the little girl toddles back into the kitchen. ‘How old is she?’

‘Five,’ says Kerry like the word is a hard, unsavoury pip. ‘But it’s like she’s younger.’ All her sentences have this rat-a-tat quality. She is nervous and attempting to cloak it with aggression.

Amber becomes shy then and presses herself against her mother’s side, turning her face away. She’s holding a pale yellow muslin cloth of the kind Melissa remembers from Tilly’s baby days. It’s wrapped around her hand and as she sneaks her thumb into her mouth, she gently rubs her cheek with the cloth.

‘Mind out, Amber,’ says Kerry grumpily as she reaches for coffee, and then, as though she has been waiting for the right moment, she blurts, ‘So are you 100 per cent sure that he didn’t say owt about where he was going?’

Melissa pours milk into her coffee and shakes her head, keeping her focus on the cup. ‘No, not at all,’ she says.

Finally, she forces herself to look up and meet Kerry’s eye.

She braces herself against the harshly appraising look and she feels heat creep, treacherously, across her cheeks. Flustered, she lifts her cup and takes a sip of the coffee, which is far too hot and burns her mouth. She wants very much to cry.

‘I dunno,’ says Kerry gnomically and sits back, lifting her own cup to her lips. She takes a long drink and then continues. ‘It’s just that he told me he was coming here.’

‘Oh?’ says Melissa, too distracted to notice the bitterness in this statement. ‘Well, Kerry,’ she says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you. He did come here and I let him sleep in the spare room because we were having a party that night.’ God, she thinks, why am I giving all this detail? She doesn’t need to hear that.

A sudden image of Jamie’s muscular back and taut, rounded buttocks as he got up in the middle of the night floods her mind and she forces more unwanted coffee down.

‘We talked about the past a little bit and then in the morning he got up and left. And that’s really all I know about it.’

The young woman opposite blinks and, to Melissa’s total horror, swipes at a tear that brims over her eyelids.

‘It’s just, Amber’s really missing him, and I don’t know what to tell her.’

Tilly’s head swivels to her mother. She is shocked and not a little entertained by all of this. Amber is wriggling and Melissa gives her daughter a meaningful look, cocking her head slightly towards the door.

‘Hey Amber, shall we go and find something to watch on telly?’ says Tilly. The little girl unpeels herself and smiles angelically.

‘I like Peppa Pig,’ she says in her flat voice.

Tilly, who had always longed for a younger sister, holds out her hand and Amber takes it easily. They leave the room as both women watch.

‘Look, Kerry,’ says Melissa in a low voice. ‘I’m really sorry that you can’t find Jamie but it’s really nothing to do with me. I was very surprised that he turned up here and …’

‘Were you now?’ says Kerry in a hard, accusing tone, swiping angrily at her face.

‘Well, yes, of course,’ says Melissa, confused. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? I hadn’t seen him in years.’

‘Yeah but you were dead close as kids, weren’t you? That’s what he told me, anyway. He reckoned you and him had some kind of special bond.’

She emphasizes the last two words and Melissa sees, with a clarity that punches her in the stomach, that this young woman loathes her. Jamie has clearly exaggerated a past that Melissa wanted wiped out of existence, burnishing it with gold.

She swallows, sure that her heartbeat is echoing and booming around the room now. ‘I think he has exaggerated things a little bit,’ she says, her mouth suddenly dry. ‘We were in care together for a relatively short time. I’ve honestly barely thought about him since.’

Kerry looks up, stung, and Melissa sees that she is only making this worse. She doesn’t want Jamie to have been close to Melissa. But for Jamie to have no value in Melissa’s life hurts her pride in some complicated way too.

‘What I mean is,’ she says more gently. ‘We knew each other briefly at a very difficult time in my life. Can you understand that I don’t really want to revisit that period of my childhood?’

Kerry barks a short, harsh laugh and looks around at Melissa’s kitchen. Melissa knows exactly what she is thinking. Stuck up cow with her four-by-four in the drive and her kitchen that’s bigger than my whole flat. Probably. Something in her hardens. She was once a Kerry. And she’s worked for this. She’s Melissa now and she’s buggered if she’s going to sit here and feel guilty. About that, anyway. Her stomach contracts.

Tilly comes back into the room chatting to Amber, who is holding her hand and looking up at her with open interest. Melissa feels herself free-falling. Oh God, that little girl had a daddy. And that daddy is now bloated and dead in a river in Dorset.

Kerry is getting to her feet.

‘C’mon, Amb,’ she says. ‘Time for us to go.’

Amber makes a moaning sound. ‘Mummy we stay. Tilly going to show me her room.’