If I Never Met You(82)

A voice inside her said: You don’t have to stay here, you know. So she walked away.





33


Laurie found her way back to where Jamie stood, on legs that felt like the bones in them had dissolved.

‘We have to go,’ Laurie said. ‘Now.’

‘OK,’ Jamie said. ‘You’re very pale, are you OK?’

‘If we go, I will be,’ Laurie said.

‘Understood.’

Unfortunately, leaving involved collecting their coats, which attracted the attention of Laurie’s new stepmother.

‘You’re not leaving?!’ Nicola shrieked.

Laurie didn’t know what to do, as she had momentarily lost the power of normal speech.

‘Going to get some fresh air, then we’ll come back up,’ Jamie said, swiftly. ‘Too cold to go without coats. Laurie’s had a lot very fast.’ He gestured a tipping glass motion at Nicola, as Laurie stood mute.

‘Oh right!’ Nicola said, squinting her eyes in sympathy. ‘Do a tactical barf, darling, then have a Smint. See you both in a bit.’

‘Thank you,’ Laurie said in a small voice to Jamie, as they otherwise descended in silence in the lift.

At ground level, Laurie calmed somewhat. She’d felt trapped up there, as though her skin was two sizes too small.

‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on, or do you just want to go home?’ Jamie said.

Laurie breathed out.

‘Yes, but not here.’ She took Jamie by the hand to lead him to somewhere on the street they wouldn’t be jostled by the Friday night crowds, and Jamie squeezed her hand back reassuringly. She felt relief from him somehow, despite the unnatural interruption, and wasn’t sure why.

Once they were in St Peter’s Square, she turned to face him, tucking her hands deep into her pockets and hunching her shoulders against the chill. She was suddenly very cold.

‘There was a man, at the bar,’ she said. ‘One of my dad’s friends. He brought a memory back.’ Laurie shook her head. ‘Until ten minutes ago, if you’d said, did I repress any memories from my childhood I’d say “Haha, I wish.” But I had. I’m kind of … stupefied, to be honest. It’s like I knew it was there, but I’d never looked at it. Like having something in your loft storage.’

She wasn’t just cold, she realised she was shaking. Actual physical shaking, like she’d been plunged into sub-zero temperature water.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Jamie said, and Laurie nodded, then shook her head again: I can, I will be OK.

She breathed and steadied herself. ‘I want to. Ummm. When I was about eight, I went to visit my dad for the weekend. One of the few times he did turn up. He took me to his old flat,’ Laurie paused. ‘His mates came round. They got wankered. My dad disappeared off somewhere, “to see a man about a dog”. He does that a lot. He left Pete and another guy to watch me. I knew I wasn’t safe, I knew …’

Laurie steadied herself so she could continue. Jamie put his hand on her shoulder. That was the worst of it: before she knew, she knew.

‘Pete said … oh God. I haven’t told anyone this, or thought about it, for so long.’

‘Not even Dan?’

‘No. Not that I was consciously keeping it from him. I was keeping it from myself.’

Jamie nodded.

‘That guy Pete said to me: “Come sit on my lap and show me what colour knickers you’re wearing.”’

Jamie’s face changed. ‘What the … To an eight-year-old?’

Laurie nodded.

‘Fuuuu—’

‘I don’t know if he was joking, trying to frighten me. What would’ve happened. I said I needed the loo, and I went and let myself out of the flat. This would be about eleven at night. I walked through the city until I found Piccadilly station …’

‘On your own? Aged eight?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must’ve been petrified.’

‘I was. I think it was fireworks night, you know. Explains why I hate fireworks. And drunken people who didn’t mean any harm were shouting “Where are you going?!” and trying to talk to this little kid wandering through the streets, and I was hyperventilating.’

Laurie was as still as a statue as she recounted this. Jamie looked stricken.

‘… I made it to Piccadilly, I asked them to sell me a ticket to go home to my mum. Of course, they flagged me as a lost child. The transport police turned up, they found a number for my mum and called her. I had to spend a night in a room at the station until she could get the first train in the morning to pick me up.’

‘Oh, Laurie.’

‘She was furious with me, Jamie.’ Laurie welled up now, ‘She thought I’d wandered off. I mean, she was more furious with my dad, but he made up some story about how he only went to the corner shop for five minutes and I had no reason for what I’d done.’

‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

Laurie wiped away tears. ‘She’d have never let me see my dad again. I might’ve been eight, but that much I knew. He wasn’t coming back from having left me with a paedophile, was he?’

Jamie blew his cheeks out. If nothing else, Laurie had succeeded in taking the shine off the largesse and larging it upstairs. This was the unattractive reality, the dysfunction. Her dad didn’t care about her, or care for her, at all. That was why she hung back from him, she didn’t want the contagion of the pretence. She didn’t want to be suckered in by the money and the connections and then hate herself for it. She didn’t want to become him. She had to hold on to the truth.