Good Girl, Bad Girl(49)
I know you’ve been asked these questions dozens of times before, but I’m hoping with the clarity of hindsight, you might have remembered something else.
I don’t have a phone number (it’s a long story), but I’m including my address and a pager number. I don’t need to know where you are or what you’re doing or why you’re staying away (unless you want to talk about those things).
Contact me. Please. I guarantee complete discretion.
Yours sincerely,
Cyrus Haven
25
* * *
ANGEL FACE
* * *
“When are you leaving?” asks Davina, nudging my shoulder.
“Friday.”
“You excited?”
I don’t know what I am.
We’re setting up the tables for breakfast in the morning—one of my chores—putting out bowls and spoons and boxes of cereal, refilling sauce bottles and checking the salt and pepper shakers.
The dining room smells of chip fat, boiled cauliflower, and, for some inexplicable reason, carpet shampoo, even though the floor is tiled.
“Why him?” asks Davina.
“Who?”
“Dr. Haven. You ran away from all those other foster families, but this guy pops up and you say yes.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“He understands,” I say, which sounds lame. I don’t know the reason. Maybe I’ve grown up. Maybe I’m sick of this place. Maybe I’ll run the first chance I get.
“We’re going to miss you,” says Davina.
“Liar.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“People are allowed to tell lies, especially when they’re trying to be polite.”
I can see her point, but why change the habit of a lifetime?
I don’t mind doing kitchen duty. Whenever I get anxious, I get these bouts of OCD—although Guthrie calls them CDO, which is “just like OCD except in alphabetical order.” My compulsion is to clean and put things in order. I once broke into the pantry—not to steal food, but to check the use-by dates and arrange all the tins with their labels facing outwards. Nobody caught me. I did it again a few weeks later. I broke in, but the pantry was still so neat that I messed it up. I figured I could fix it the next night, but they caught me on the way out. Sod’s law.
Davina doesn’t mind my obsessions. She has a little boy at home. Oscar. He’s four. She talks about him a lot and has pictures on her phone. His dad looks after him when she’s working. I don’t think they’re rotten poor, but they don’t have much money. I keep telling Davina she should get her teeth straightened, but she says she can’t afford to look like a supermodel. That’s her idea of a joke.
Her partner is called Snowdon and he sometimes does odd jobs around Langford Hall because he’s good with his hands, particularly fixing motors, which is how he makes his living—doing up cars and flogging them. Every time they hire him, he makes sure the job lasts four hours, so he gets a full-day rate.
Terry Boland liked motors. He used to drive a limousine—one of those posh white ones that are stretched out. In the beginning he let me ride up front with him, but later when he had his shitty old Ford Escort I had to hide in the boot when we traveled.
He’d make me curl up in a long zip-up bag, which he slung over his shoulder and carried to the car. I was allowed to undo the zipper when the boot lid was closed. I lay curled up above the spare tire, smelling the diesel fumes and oil and hearing the sound of the road only inches from my face.
Terry sometimes took me out of an evening, but it was always in the bag. We’d drive for miles and stop at one of those motorway service centers with a McDonald’s or a KFC. He’d park in the darkest corner and let me out of the boot.
“Remember our story,” he’d say. “You’re my daughter. We’re driving to Liverpool to see your grandparents. Your name is Sarah. I’m Peter.”
“What’s our last name?”
“Jones.”
“Where do I go to school?”
“It doesn’t matter. Stay close to me. Don’t make eye contact with anyone. Don’t start a conversation.”
I nodded and took deep breaths, enjoying the fresh air. I remember looking up one night, but I couldn’t see the stars. I thought they might have all fallen and other people had made wishes, but Terry told me that you don’t see stars when you live in London because of all the other lights.
He held my hand as we walked into the brightly lit food hall, passing racks of glossy magazines, most of which had Kate Middleton on the cover. She’d married William by then and people were on “baby watch.” Terry let me watch the wedding on TV because there “was nothing else on.” When Kate said, “I do,” I wanted the camera to zoom up close on her face, so I’d know if she was lying or thinking, “What am I doing?”
Normally, I ordered a cheeseburger because I ate meat back then, and I liked the way the fat coated my tongue. I also had french fries and a chocolate shake. One night I threw up on the way home, which made Terry angry because he had to wash the mats and the bag. It wasn’t my fault. It was the fumes.