Girl A(87)

We turned onto Moor Woods Road, and Bill dropped gears.

‘Did you know the neighbours?’

‘No. There were horses, though. In that field. We’d stop and talk to them, on our way home from school. They didn’t think much of us.’

‘You’d – what? Feed them?’

‘Feed them? No.’

I laughed. I could see the house coming silently beyond the car windows.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t really an option.’

Bill pulled onto the driveway and cut the engine.

‘Do you want to get out?’ he asked.

The husk of the house against the white sky. Every window was shattered or absent. A few rags of curtain hanging in the upstairs bedrooms. The roof drooped in on itself, like the face of a person after a stroke.

‘Sure.’

It was cooler here. A wind was blowing from the moor, telling of the end of summer. I walked to the side of the house and surveyed the garden. There were waist-high weeds and clusters of rubbish. The grass was tangled with outdated wrappers and strips of material, unidentifiable as clothes. Scorched rings in the earth, where teenagers had lit fires. Bill was at the front door, talking, his voice muddled by the wind. There were a few lank flowers left at the threshold, still shrouded in plastic. I touched them with my shoe. I didn’t read the card.

‘I guess people still leave flowers,’ Bill said. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Is it?’

‘I thought so.’

It had happened at the hospital, too. My room was populated with new toys and second-hand clothes. With white bouquets, as if I was dead. Dr K appointed nurses to sort through the accompanying labels, which could be divided into three categories: acceptable, well-meaning but misguided, insane.

‘Do you think they know what they’re letting themselves in for?’ I asked. ‘The council?’

‘They’ve got the figures.’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘Is it like you imagined?’ Bill said. He knocked briskly on the front door, once, and I had the desire then to frighten him, to say: Don’t you want to see what’s inside?

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Imagine it, I mean.’

He had imagined it, I thought. He had been imagining it for a while.

I crossed back to the car, and held the handle, waiting for him to unlock it.

‘The next time you come here,’ Bill said, ‘the whole thing’ll be gutted.’

‘The next time?’ I said.

In the car, at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, I pointed to a spot beyond the junction.

‘That’s where the woman found me,’ I said. ‘The day we escaped.’

‘Just there?’

‘Thereabouts. Do you know what the driver said, when she was interviewed? She thought that I was a ghoul. Those were her exact words. She thought that I was already dead.’

I prepared my smile. It was the face which I presented at interviews, or at the check-in desk at the airport. When there was something I wanted.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I said.

He glanced across at me, then away.

‘Why did Mother appoint me,’ I said, ‘as executor?’

‘I don’t know the answer to that.’

‘Come on, Bill. All of the things that you’ve done. Helping me. Arranging the meeting. Speaking to the probate lawyer. You must have known her pretty well, to bother doing all of that.’

‘It’s my job. Isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

He sighed, and his cheeks deflated. I liked the advantage of him driving, so that I could scrutinize him as I wished.

‘Fine,’ Bill said. ‘We got on. I wanted to help her. You have no idea how vulnerable she was. The vitriol that woman faced, by virtue of making it out alive. But I don’t imagine you want to hear about that. About the size of the cells, or the abuse, or the mothers in the mess hall—’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘It is my job, by the way. I always thought that I’d work in human rights. Help people that way. Be a barrister. I wasn’t clever enough, I suppose. I went to all of the interviews in London, just after university. No – I wasn’t nearly clever enough.’

There was JP, ascending some great stone staircase, with papers clutched in his fist. Precisely clever enough.

‘This job,’ Bill said, ‘I still get to do that. You help people nobody else thinks are worth helping.’

His hands left sweat prints on the steering wheel.

‘Anyway,’ Bill said. ‘If you ask me, I think that she respected you the most.’

‘Respect,’ I said. ‘Really? That is unexpected. I mean, that really is a surprise.’

I made myself laugh, although it wasn’t funny. More than anything, I wanted to injure him.

‘I think that she tried,’ he said. ‘I actually think that she tried. She mentioned this scholarship. A scholarship you could have applied for when you were at school. She said that she spent weeks talking to your father about it. Nagging away at him – that’s what she called it. She said that she had to be subtle – you always had to be subtle.’

We were past the mill and turning back towards the town.