Karen stared out of the window at the neatly clipped lawn. Sixteen: it was the worst age to be. Still treated like a child. Still two more years before she could go to university and get out. Still two more years of sidling round each other in a too-small house.
Things could all have been so different, if only Mother had stayed. If only she hadn’t been so selfish. Surely she had known that needing a mother never stopped? That it didn’t fade because you were sixteen, not six? Hadn’t that mattered to her at all?
Karen rubbed at her temples, where a headache was threatening. So she was feeling rudderless and sorry for herself, big deal. Wallowing in it wouldn’t make the day brighter.
She turned to where the kitchen table was set and waiting, as it was every morning: the cutlery neatly aligned, the rose-and-ribbon-patterned bowl paired with its matching cup and saucer.
He tries – you could give him credit for that.
Another thing that never changed: when her conscience pricked about her father, it did it in her mother’s voice. Karen had stopped wondering why long ago; she preferred to focus her efforts on ignoring it.
She was starving though: last night’s lumpy mash and charred sausages hadn’t been one of her best culinary efforts. Ignoring the waiting box of Weetabix, Karen jammed two slices of bread into the toaster. He had left orange juice out as well, the chilled jug and matching glass covered by a cloth. She ignored those too and tipped coffee granules into a mug.
Breakfast made to her liking, she stuck a packet of cigarettes in her jeans’ pocket and went out into the garden.
It was barely ten o’clock and the air was already too warm. Forty days without rain, a dozen with the mercury climbing over thirty degrees; the forecasters unable to promise any change coming. The country was heatwave-obsessed, the spreading drought the only conversation.
Karen blew a series of smoke rings over the lifeless grass. It was so crisp one careless match and it would crackle like a bonfire. That would be something to fill up the day with.
She sat down on a sagging deckchair and imagined a sheet of flame that would leap over fences, devour the dried gardens and swarm into the woods like a flickering army. If she blew really hard, maybe she could summon up a wind, dance the fire down the lane, red and fat and greedy enough to swallow the school – with any luck, the base.
And then he’d move you somewhere else and you’d lose the last cobwebbed trace of her.
Karen stubbed out her cigarette and fed the ends of her toast to a dusty sparrow, trying to ignore the itch in her eyes. ‘Don’t cry. It won’t bring her back.’ That was good advice apparently – it was certainly all she had ever been given – but sometimes the tears punched like a boxer.
She doesn’t deserve them. Karen blinked the garden back into focus. She left. If she was here, I’d be happy.
She hated that voice, the one that was definitely all hers, that crept in more and more often and made her feel like a traitor. It was the same voice that pointed out mothers and daughters shopping together, giggling over coffee cups and standing in cinema queues. That made her want to howl for a hug like a four-year-old.
Karen lit another cigarette, put it out, went into the kitchen for more coffee, came back out empty-handed and didn’t know whether to sit or stand or scream. Inside the house, the hall clock struck ten-thirty. How could the day be creeping by so slowly? How could she bear another one that limped along with only her thoughts to fill it?
Karen dropped back into the deckchair and wandered listlessly through her day. She had a waitressing shift at the Wimpy in the precinct, but that didn’t start until five. She could finish her school reading list. Except all she had left on that was To Kill a Mockingbird, and characters torturing themselves over good and evil and the meaning of morality was hardly the distraction she needed. She could go to the lido and swim her mind blank. Except the heat would have already filled up its pools like human soup and the happy families milling there would make her teeth grind. Normally, she would have called Angela, her closest friend, but she was out of contact for at least another week, waltzed off by her parents for a fortnight at the beach.
‘We would have asked you to come with us, but I wasn’t sure how you felt about the seaside after…’ Mrs Roberts had waved her hand and left the sentence hanging. Mr Roberts had turned purple and far too jolly. In the end, Karen had felt sorry for Angela.
There were other people she could call, but there was no one she was as comfortable with, and certainly no one who would put up with this prickly mood as blithely as Angela.
New school, new faces; new girls who didn’t think she was the odd one. A brand-new start and a big circle of friends. That hadn’t exactly worked out to plan.
Her first day at secondary school five long years ago flew back so vividly, Karen could almost see her eleven-year-old self outlined in the kitchen doorway. Blazer too big, skirt too long. Hoping so hard that things would get better, it hurt.
Army kids. Karen had walked down the lane on that blue September morning picking them out. They were easy to spot. Always in groups, always loud, throwing out their shared impenetrable slang to keep away the unwanted. Even the new year’s intake, with uniforms as oversized as Karen’s, carried a confidence she couldn’t conjure.
As they converged on the school gates, older girls swarmed, sucking up the new members of their tribe. Karen had hovered on the edges of the playground, trying to match names to the few faces she recognised, wishing with every crossed finger they wouldn’t recognise her. She knew no one else from her junior school who had got a place at Aldershot County; she had forgotten, however, that there would be girls from the Aldershot army base. Girls she had encountered on her scattered visits there, who found her secluded life in the village, and her too-shy mother, peculiar. Who sniggered at Karen’s babyish clothes, as if, at eleven, their flared trousers and checked shirts had made them the height of sophistication.
To her relief, none of them spoke to her as the classes were called into line. For the rest of the morning, Karen scurried where she was told, clutching her timetable with its confusion of teachers and rooms, happy to be a very small part of the herd. By lunchtime, she hadn’t got lost, she hadn’t stood out. She had found bodies to tag along with; she had swapped names and shared smiles. The day seemed survivable. Then she went into the playground and the nudges began.
The one who swaggered over, her cronies formed up in a block a pace behind, was square-cut and narrow-eyed and far too certain of her standing. She barrelled across the playground, thumping to a stop toe to toe with Karen, swamping them both in the heavy scent of sugared oranges that most of the girls in the school seemed to be doused in. What was it someone had said the perfume was called? Aqua Manda? Whatever the name, breathed in at such close quarters, the smell made Karen’s eyes sting.
She wrinkled her nose in an unconscious imitation of her mother; her opponent’s eyes narrowed.
‘Why did she do it?’
‘Who? What?’
Karen’s interrogator tapped her finger to her head, much to her pack’s delight. ‘Your mother, stupid. Why did she top herself?’
Mouths dropped; Karen’s new allies shuffled back. No one would meet her eye.
‘Come on, slowcoach: speed up and catch me. It was your mother, wasn’t it? Who killed herself in the summer? Who was found dumped on the beach down by Brighton like a load of wet washing?’