Girl A(50)

On my final day at Jasper Street, I embraced Amy and Jessica and Caroline. ‘We’ll miss you so much,’ they said, and scrubbed at dry eyes. (I provided them with an excellent anecdote for future therapy – a tale of guilt, naivety, and horror – and when each new source close to the family stepped forward, years later, I would wonder if it was one of them.) Miss Glade produced a cake for the class to share – iced with an open book and Good Luck, Lex! – and when I cut into it, each of the layers was a different colour. I thought of Miss Glade in the kitchen of a small, warm house, wearing oven gloves and pyjamas, and I allowed myself a moment to reside there, with the smell of baking and a lifetime of Friday lunches. I hadn’t quite forgiven her for the surprise visit to my house, but after the cake, I decided that I should try.

At the end of the day, she helped me to empty my desk into a plastic bag. I took all of the exercise books that I could carry, and slung my satchel over my shoulder. ‘One more thing,’ she said, at the classroom door, and handed me a present wrapped in newspaper.

‘Should I open it now?’ I asked, and she laughed.

‘Lex, you open it whenever you want.’

I picked at the Sellotape and folded back the paper. Inside, there was a new, hardback book of illustrated Greek myths.

‘Those are your favourites,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they?’

I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, and opened the book in the middle. There was a picture of the Underworld, and Charon ferrying Persephone down the Styx. She gazed back at the reader from the dark watercolours.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I made as much space in the bag as I could, and eased the book inside.

Miss Glade nodded, then reached down and hugged me, quickly and hard. When she let go, she looked surprised, as though she hadn’t intended to do that.

‘You look after yourself,’ she said. ‘OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Off you go. Your mother will be waiting.’

I set off down the school corridor, past the bright displays and the class photographs; past handwritten narratives of field trips and families and What I Did On My Summer Holidays. At the end, just before the door to the playground, I turned around. Miss Glade was still standing by the classroom door, her arms embracing her own body, watching me. I waved, and she waved back.

Hollowfield was stuck at the base of three tors, and hardly a town. The plughole of the moors. The welcome sign provided that it had a twin town, Lienz, in Austria, which I wondered about each time we drove past. How had the arrangement come about? Had anybody from Lienz actually visited us, to understand what they were welcoming to the family?

We moved house on a Saturday, in a van owned by one of Jolly’s acquaintances. Mother was unwell, so Father, Ethan and I carried our belongings to the car. ‘Do a last check,’ Father said, before he would allow us inside, and Ethan and I walked from one vacant room to another, talking little. We had left only our rubbish, and dirt. The landlord recouped the cleaning fees five years later, when he sold photographs of the end of our tenancy to the press. The sad, stained spaces. As with most empty rooms at low resolution, it was easy to imagine that something terrible had happened in them.

We drove to Hollowfield through the gloaming. Clouds sagged over the hills. We passed the old factories, with their spindly chimneys and every other window kicked in. There was a functional high street with a second-hand bookshop, and a cafe just closing. Grey men stood at the door of the pub, their collars turned up.

‘Is our house close?’ Evie asked.

‘Five minutes,’ Father said. ‘Maybe ten.’

He pointed out the site where he would build the new church. It was a dilapidated clothes shop with mannequins still sprawled in the window, but the footfall would be good, and he could always resurrect the dolls as statues – as part of his performance. We were driving out of the town, now, and we turned over the river, past a rotted water mill and a garage, and onto Moor Woods Road. The first few properties were cottages, neatly kept and gathered together, but as the road climbed, the houses dispersed and mutated. There was a dark barn, and a bungalow with a guard of rusted machinery. Evie opened the window of the van, counting down the numbers. ‘The next one!’ she shouted.

Number 11 was set back from the road. It had a grubby beige front and a garage, and a garden at the back. It was – as they would later say – a very ordinary house.

Father had purchased the house on Moor Woods Road from an old member of Jolly’s congregation. She could no longer manage the garden, or make it up the stairs without a break in the middle. Jolly had led negotiations. It was a house for a family, he said, and she had been happy for us to have it.

Her furniture still occupied the house. Under covers, chairs and tables and beds took strange, monstrous shapes. We tailed Father from room to room, guessing before he unveiled them. A boat, a body. A walrus. Before our first dinner at Moor Woods Road, Father arranged one of the furniture sheets over his head, and staggered into the kitchen, wailing. He said grace with a broad smile and his hand on Mother’s thigh, and the sheet still hanging from his shoulders.

After dinner, Evie and I unpacked. In the moving boxes, our belongings had melded with everybody else’s. There was a series of stern, ill-fitting outfits which we had both suffered, and we took it in turns to model them for one another. We traded T-shirts with Gabriel and Delilah, hurling them across the hallway. I had wrapped the book of Greek myths inside a jumper, partly to keep it away from Father – there were stories of the pagan gods, which was basically blasphemy – and partly to keep it away from Delilah, who would find some way to destroy it, or to make it hers. Once the house was quiet, I slipped the bundle to Ethan’s room.