I stare at the girl in the picture. It’s funny, all the times William has spoken with me about the past it’s always my stories he ends up unspooling, my past. All the loose ends and burned bridges, what he describes as my ‘murky history’. He gets a kick out of it. I touch a finger to the photograph. Edie Hudson.
‘Was she his girlfriend?’
‘I don’t think it was ever that serious. This one’ – he points to the girl in the middle with a scowl on her face and her middle finger pointed up to the camera – ‘that’s Charlie. I gave her a Valentine once when I was ten years old and she broke my heart. And that one, on the end, looking like she doesn’t really belong there, that’s Nancy Renard. I still see her around occasionally. She was nice. I don’t know why she hung around with that lot of bitches.’
I take the photo back from him and he brings me my tea. ‘Where was this? Round here?’
‘Yup. At the church in town. St Mary de Castro, at the top of Eastleigh Avenue. Back then we called it “St Scary de Castro” because of the caretaker there. He used to poison the rats and rabbits that lived in the graveyard and the whole place was just littered with the corpses of slowly decomposing animals.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Yeah. It reeked in the summer.’
‘So why did you hang out there?’
‘It was where the youth club was, in the hall that we used to go to on Fridays, back in the days before we could get served alcohol and go and drink in parks like normal teenagers. Of course, Dad was involved in the church too – he wanted a protection order put into place for the old trees that grew there. He said some of them were centuries old. He and the caretaker used to cross swords about it all the time. Us kids, we didn’t give a shit about a few old trees or the bad smell or the dead animals. I mean, look at us there’ – he taps the photograph of the black-clad teens – ‘all doom and gloom. William loved that stuff. He’d take me along to the youth club with him but we always used to sneak off into the churchyard and play dare and spin the bottle. Dad would be out the front with his placards and his petitions and me and Will would be round the back trying to get off with the girls.’
‘Oh, those kind of dares?’
He winks at me. ‘Yeah. Kissing mostly. Sometimes we’d dare each other to go into the old Prevett family tomb and touch the wall. I didn’t like doing that. It smelled really bad in there, and it was always cold. This girl here, with the ponytail?’ He points to a girl in the photo to the other side of William. Her dark hair is piled high on her head and her skin is coffee-coloured, in striking contrast to William’s unhealthy pallor. ‘Her name was Moya. She would do the craziest dares. It got so we were just thinking of the stupidest stuff – dangerous stuff – just to see if there was anything she’d say no to.’
‘And was there?’
‘Nope. One time we dared her to go into the caretaker’s cottage and bring something out, a souvenir or something. We watched her over the wall as she climbed in through the back window and came out again with a gas mask. Horrible thing, it was. From the war. I don’t know why the caretaker had it in there – he was always an oddball – but I know that none of us wanted to touch it. We stopped playing dares after that.’
We’re silent for a moment and then he slides the photo to one side, putting his hand over mine. His skin is soft and slightly damp.
‘Is everything all right, Frances? With you two?’
I think of Kim, her back arched in see-through knickers just so she can afford the rent on her Tufnell Park flat, her expensive handbag and her scuffed ankle boots, the way her hair darkens where her roots need doing. I think of William setting up a separate bank account, hiding money from me, hiding the photos of her squeezing her tits together and lifting her leg a little so you can see the creases inside. It’s just photos, she told me. It’s not real life.
‘Yeah,’ I tell Alex. ‘It’s fine.’
The next few mornings I am up early, watching a bright dawn mist curl into the valley, slithering between the trees like a living thing. The dewy hedgerows glitter in the sunlight, all nodding meadowsweet, campion and snarls of bramble. I walk into town one morning, with a shopping list in my back pocket and the weight of my dreams upon me. Since we’ve arrived at Thorn House my sleep has been fitful, dreams stuttering like a blown engine. I’ve been waking up with a jerk and a gasp, eyes snapping open, one hand reaching as if to grasp something – or to ward it away. The dreams are always of Mimi and me sitting in front of the French windows, her thin body propped up by her pillows. It’s a sunny day, and we’re watching the birds. The old box of photos is on her lap but when she opens it the pictures inside aren’t old family portraits. They’re of me, in the past. I try to snatch them back but I can’t seem to move my hands and William’s mother’s saying, Is this you, dear, you don’t look well, and there I am aged nineteen with a nosebleed and pupils dilated to wide black saucers from the ketamine, the MDMA. There’s me in the years before I met her son, slumped in the corner of a squat party in Ilford, calling my parents crying because I couldn’t make my rent, cleaning my neighbour’s car while he sits inside and watches me and jerks off his stubby penis and when he pays me it’s five pounds short so I don’t eat that night. I’m trying to take the photos away but she has seen them all, and the bruise is spreading over her face, black threads working their way over the bridge of her nose, even into the whites of her eyes, down her neck and shoulders like the diseased roots of a plant. There’s me trying to kiss Gary Webster at the bus stop aged fifteen and he recoils and calls me a stupid bitch, there’s me thrown out of a pub for selling wraps of speed, there’s me, there’s me, there’s me. Don’t look, I tell her, don’t look at them, and when she finally turns her head towards me she says, No wonder he wants to leave you, Frances.
I walk the long way to town, past the river, which gleams like polished brass in the sun. I arrive at the chemist’s just after nine o’clock and hand over Mimi’s prescriptions to the woman behind the counter. She looks up at me, smiling. ‘Will you be waiting for these?’
‘Sure.’
She turns away from me and I find myself looking at the display of baby products: soft blankets and dummies and smooth wooden rattles. I pick up a brightly coloured octopus designed to rustle and squeak under tiny, seeking hands. I press it to my chest and hold it there, eyes closed. I think of the box room back in our Swindon home, the way it seems to hold the mellow afternoon light like spun honey. The day we moved in I sat in there on the bare floor and William came in and saw me, and he smiled.
‘I’ve never seen you so quiet,’ he said, crouching beside me. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Where the cot could go. And the toy box. It would be so beautiful in here.’
He kissed me, slow and hard, with his hand cupping the back of my skull. But he didn’t say anything. I suppose, even then, I should have known. He didn’t want this.
The bell over the door rings and a woman walks into the pharmacy. She has shoulder-length hair that falls in amber waves, thick and bouncy. Everything about her is long and almost perfectly straight: her figure, her nose, her long, lean legs. She walks right past me as if I’m not there, trailing a cloud of floral perfume so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.