Girl A(61)

A week before school began, with Father in Blackpool, we fanned across the kitchen and searched the cupboards. Gabriel, scouring the drawer where Mother had once kept vegetables, shrieked, and emerged with a handful of pulp, which he dropped onto the kitchen table for inspection.

‘That’s not Mystery Soup,’ Delilah said. ‘That’s disgusting.’

Gabriel waved his hand in her face, and she ducked away, squealing.

It looked like it might once have been a potato. It was the shape of a fist, with soft black patches, and green tufts sprouting from its skin.

‘Bin it,’ I said.

‘You bin it,’ said Delilah, and at that moment, with the five of us clustered around the table, Father opened the kitchen door.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

He was impossibly early. We had been left with instructions to collate passages on determination, in our bedrooms. He took a seat at the table and started to unlace his boots.

‘Who found it?’ he said, and Gabriel, his expression lurching between fear and pride, said: ‘It was me.’

‘And where did you find it?’

‘Nowhere. In the vegetable cupboard.’

‘And what were you doing in the vegetable cupboard?’

‘We were – we were just – checking.’

Now Father stood to remove his shirt, and sat back down in a white vest, tight at the shoulders and gut. His arms dangled behind the chair, and he studied his tableau, not yet satisfied.

‘If you’re so hungry,’ he said, ‘why don’t you eat it?’

Spines and jaws stiffened around the table. Gabriel giggled, and saw that none of us were laughing. The giggle cut with a gasp. He looked from one of us to the next, with wide, imploring eyes. I stared at my feet, and to Delilah, who was looking at her own.

‘I don’t want to,’ Gabriel said.

‘So – you’re not hungry.’

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘Unless you want to starve,’ Father said, ‘you’re going to eat it.’

He sat, waiting.

Gabriel reached out a hand and closed his fist around the pulp. The flesh of it squeezed between his fingers. He lifted it from the table and gave it a long look. Then, with his brows set, and the four of us gaping, he raised it to his mouth.

Father stood from his chair, strode around the table, and clapped Gabriel on the back. The Mystery Soup fell from his hand, and onto the kitchen floor.

‘You didn’t actually think I’d make you eat it,’ Father said. ‘Did you?’

Instead, he took the golden parcel from the table, and carried it from the room.

The night before the new term, I woke to somebody at the bedroom door. For the first bleary seconds, I thought that it was Father. He was on his haunches, arranging something at the threshold. But when he stepped back, into the hallway lights, I saw that it was Ethan.

I hadn’t heard him crying in the night-time since we arrived in Hollowfield. He had shaved his head to the skull, and he was as tall as Father. He no longer seemed to lose his belongings. When he joined Father and Jolly in the kitchen at night, I heard a new, affected guffaw ascend through the floorboards. He had even spoken at the Lifehouse, when only the family was in attendance. He delivered a passionate, sincere sermon on filial duty, and I thought of the boy in Blackpool, five years before, who didn’t believe a thing.

I cracked the bedroom door, to see what he had left. It was a high school uniform. The standard-issue jumper and skirt. It was faded, but clean. It would fit.

I stopped at his bedroom door the next morning. ‘Thank you,’ I said. He was hunched over a pocket mirror, scrutinizing the skin at his neck, and he didn’t look at me.

‘Where did you get it?’ I said.

He did look up, then. He had an expression of curious disdain. I had seen it on so many strangers’ faces, but on Ethan, it had a savagery of its own.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

Five Fields accepted students from Hollowfield and the four villages around it. Three of these were also suffixed with ‘field’; the last, Dodd Bridge, had been outvoted on naming day. The school consisted of a vast concrete playground, surveyed by classrooms on three sides and a wooden hall on the fourth. The hall had been opened by a minor royal, and must once have been a source of pride, but now it was blackened by moor rain, and smelt of PE. On my first day in secondary school, I sat there beside Cara – one of two hundred eleven-year-olds promised the best seven years of my life – and concluded that I shouldn’t have worried about my hair, or shoes with holes in them. This would be an easy place to disappear.

‘Whoa,’ Cara said, as soon as the welcome address was over. She took my hands and held them out at my sides. ‘You got skinny.’

She looked a little frightened, but mostly impressed.

‘And you,’ I said, ‘you got tanned! How was France?’

We compared timetables. We shared three classes, which I hoped was enough to stick together. In the early autumn, that was the case: each break time and lunch hour, we met in the same spot outside the school hall and ate our sandwiches, huddled against the wooden walls. We didn’t have enough to say to entertain the hour allotted to lunch, but Cara brought in books from home: whatever she was reading, and a spare for me.