Girl A(71)

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Fine, then. I spend my time doing things that are a little more worthwhile. Sometimes I go to the library. You don’t get bothered there. And sometimes—’

‘Yes?’

‘Sometimes I ask people for money.’

‘You what?’

He contorted his face into an anxious smile. ‘You don’t happen to have a spare pound, do you? My mother forgot to pack my sandwiches.’ The smile trembled, and cracked into laughter. After a few seconds, when I didn’t join him, he wiped his eyes and lay back down on his bed.

‘I don’t think that school will be much of a concern any more,’ he said. ‘In the parish of Moor Woods Road.’

I didn’t acknowledge it, but Ethan was right about school: I never did go back to Five Fields Academy. The day after Jolly’s arrest, I heard Father moving through the house in the early morning. It was still dark outside, and I was comfortable and warm. I wasn’t even hungry. I closed my eyes and drew up the covers, and when I next woke it was light. The alarm clock was missing from its place on the floor. ‘Did we sleep in?’ Evie asked, emerging testudinate from the duvet.

‘I don’t know.’

Still in bed, I pulled on my school jumper over pyjamas, and braced for the cold. In the kitchen, my parents sat hand in hand, Mother stroking the hair at Father’s temple. There was a collection of clocks on the table in front of them, not just our alarms but the clocks from the hallway and the living room, and the pink plastic watch which Delilah had received for her ninth birthday. Mother and Father shifted as I entered the room, and Father smiled at my choice of dress, the way that you smile at a child’s faux pas. ‘You won’t be needing that,’ he said.

In place of the kitchen clock, he had hung the cross from the Lifehouse. Suspended embarrassingly above the hobs.

‘Why don’t you wake the others?’ Mother said. ‘And we can share the news.’

When we were assembled in the kitchen, Father began to talk. What had happened to Jolly, he said, was an abomination. He had long been suspicious of the authorities’ attitudes to religious groups, peaceful though those groups may be. He had seen the influence of those attitudes in our despondency and our self-consciousness; in our sins and – he looked at me – in our cynicism. He had decided that we should commence a freer, more focused way of living, outside the shackles of public education. He would teach us himself.

Only Gabriel rejoiced at the news. ‘So we don’t have to go to school?’ he asked. When Father nodded, he gasped and clutched his fists to his chest.

Father had ideas about how we would structure our days. Time was an unnecessary distraction, and he would monitor it himself. This was a world without the dictation of the school bell, or going-home time. There were books we had studied which we would need to discard, and which he would collect later that day. It would be up to us to discard the ideas which we had acquired from them.

‘There are some things that you’ll need to forget,’ Father said. ‘But there’s so much for you to learn.’

That morning, Father wrote two letters: one to the headmaster of Five Fields Academy, and the other to the headmistress of the school that Evie, Gabriel and Delilah attended. The letters were polite and perfunctory. Father wished to exercise his right to educate his children at home. He had reviewed the curriculum (‘curricula,’ Ethan mouthed to me, unable to stop himself), and was confident that he and his wife would be able to deliver them. He would welcome visits from the council.

‘Do you know where we are on their to-do list?’ Father asked. Mother gazed up at him, wide-eyed, and shook her head.

‘Below the bottom,’ Father said. ‘Last in line.’

He signed, with a flourish.

During lunch, I excused myself to use the toilet. In our room, I surveyed the small pile of books on the floor, which I had checked out of the school library the week before. I had already read them all; things had happened too quickly for me to return them. I thought of the disappointment of the school librarian, who had praised me for never incurring a fine, and who had once told me that there were days when she much preferred books to human beings. I knelt down and examined the spines. There were fantasy novels, and an R. L. Stine, and something by Judy Blume. I couldn’t hide them all: they would have to go. I took the book of Greek myths and unwrapped it from my jumper, touching the cover and the golden fore edge. It was, I thought, the nicest thing that I had ever owned. I tucked it beneath my mattress, where Father couldn’t find it, and where we could still reach for it at night. In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection for some time. ‘Think,’ I said. I watched my lips pull back over the word. For the first time, I saw myself assembling a rucksack of belongings, and leaving Moor Woods Road in the middle of the night. I could do what Ethan had done, and ask people for money. I could reach Manchester, or even London. I could find Miss Glade, and beg to live with her. I straightened up. It was a ridiculous idea, and besides, I couldn’t leave Evie. I was overreacting. I lifted the skin at the sides of my mouth, and I returned to the kitchen, smiling.

The computer shop opened two doors down from the Lifehouse, just before the church closed. It was called Bit by Bit. ‘Fucking imposters,’ Father said, when he first saw the signage, hurrying us behind him.

Whenever we passed – to the weekend services, or to a prayer session in the evening – the shop was busy. At the till, there was a young woman with a shaved head and a jungle of tattoos. There was a leaflet in the window advertising free computer lessons for the elderly. We had Information Technology classes at school, which mostly involved the boys trying to breach the school’s safeguards to find pornography, but I knew how to send an email and format a document. Father had taught Ethan more than this, but lessons had not been extended to the rest of the family.