‘Don’t you dare compare me to him. Don’t you dare!’
‘Get out!’ I reach for the pillow and launch it across the room. It hits him weakly on the hand and drops to the floor. ‘Get out and leave me alone. I want to go home.’
Mike crosses the room, his hands clenched into fists, jaw tight, nostrils flaring. I scoot as far back on the bed as I can and wrap my arms around my body. But he doesn’t touch me and he doesn’t say a word. Instead he stops at the end of the bed and glowers at me until I break eye contact, then he marches straight back out of the room and turns the lock.
I stare at the door, too shocked to react, but the numbness doesn’t last long and I howl with frustration and despair, then burst into tears. I cry, curled up on the bed, until the world beyond the window turns black and I pass out with exhaustion. It’s still dark when I wake but the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glows red with the time. 1.13 a.m. I pull the thin duvet up to my chin and roll over. As I do, I catch sight of a figure sitting in the armchair on the other side of the room. It’s Mike. And he’s watching me.
I’ve been living in Dad’s house for over a week now but, despite hours spent hoovering, cleaning and scrubbing, the smell still hits me the second I open the front door and step into the porch. Dampness, mustiness and cold. It’s the scent of neglect.
I glance at my watch as I step into the kitchen. Twenty to six. Mike said he would be here a little after six thirty.
I trail from the kitchen to the living room and sit down on the sofa. Dad’s chair, in all its horrible tweedy green worn glory, is closer to the TV, but I haven’t sat in it once since I got here. I’m trying to work up the nerve to throw it away.
Dad’s friend Bill was the one who found him. He realised something was wrong, he told me on the phone, when the local pub landlord told him that Dad hadn’t been in in over a week. He went to check on him after closing time. The curtains weren’t drawn, the lights were on and the TV was blaring away in the corner of the room. Bill said he could tell by the way Dad was slumped in his chair that he was dead. A heart attack, the coroner said.
It wasn’t hard to pick Bill out from the mourners at Dad’s cremation. Other than me, the only other people in the room were the celebrant, the funeral director and three elderly men. Unsure what to do after the ceremony ended, I stood by the door and shook hands with the scant group of mourners as they left. Bill gripped my hand in both of his.
‘I know your dad was a grumpy old bugger,’ he said, his voice rough and rasping, ‘but he was proud of you. He told me a few times that he had a daughter living the high life and earning herself a small fortune in London.’
I smiled and thanked Bill for his good wishes. I didn’t mention that Dad and I hadn’t spoken in over ten years – other than a brief and awkward phone call when I rang him five years ago to tell him that Mum had died of cancer – and that he had no idea what I was doing or how much I was earning in London (certainly not a small fortune). I did cry though, when I got back to my car. Proud was not a word in Dad’s vocabulary when it came to me. Disgrace – yes. Embarrassment – that too. While Mum rushed up to me and wrapped me in her arms after I was brought back from France, Dad could barely look at me. When he did it was to ask whether I had been harmed. Harmed. He meant, had I had sex with Mike? I could tell by the way his eyes swept the length of my body then focussed on a spot on the floor near my feet. Afterwards, Mum and I went back to our flat. We stayed there, locked together on the sofa with the TV on loud while the phone rang off the hook and journalists tapped at the kitchen window and thumped on the front door. One night I heard an argument between Mum and Dad on the phone. She was trying to keep her voice down but I heard her snap, ‘I can’t believe you’d suggest that, Steve. This is your daughter we’re talking about and she’s fourteen years old.’ Dad thought I’d brought it all on myself. He wasn’t the only one who thought that. I did too.
Mum tried to convince me to testify against Mike. She said she knew that I loved him but what he had done was wrong and he had to be stopped from doing it to anyone else. I started to cry then, not because of what she’d said but because she’d got me so wrong. What I felt towards Mike wasn’t love. It was a strange limbo emotion – a longing for the love I thought we’d had, wrapped up in guilt, regret and fear. When Mum, and the police, finally accepted that I wouldn’t testify against Mike, she decided that we should move to London before the trial started. Mum said it was for the best.
I turn on the TV, watch a couple of seconds of a game show, then change the channel. I watch a couple of seconds of a period drama, then press a button on the remote. I change the channel once more, then turn it off. I look at my watch again.
6.08 p.m.
Not enough time to go for a run.
Mike will be here in less than forty-five minutes.
After Chloe told me to fuck off this morning, I was so frustrated I drove to the nearest phone box, rang Mike’s work and asked to speak to him. If the police weren’t going to prosecute, and Chloe and her family refused to listen to me, the only option I had left was to confront him directly. Ringing from the phone box was a deliberate decision. It meant Mike wouldn’t have my number or any way of contacting me. He’d be shocked to hear from me, wrong-footed, and I’d be the one in control. I’d call, tell him who I was and say that I needed to speak to him in a public place (a park maybe or St Anne’s Well on the Malvern Hills). I’d tell him how he’d ruined my life. How I’d end a relationship as soon as a boyfriend told me they loved me because I associated love with control. How I’d freak out if anyone so much as brushed my neck with their fingers. How promiscuous I’d been because my self-worth was in the toilet. How I’d only have sex if I was the one who initiated it and it took place in my home. I’d tell him all of these things, and more, and then I’d scream in his face that it was his fault. That he’d made me like this. That I’d spent eighteen years denying how much of a fuck-up I was, but I wasn’t going to do it anymore. And especially not when he was about to screw up another innocent girl’s life as much as he’d screwed up mine.
I was shaking – with anger and fear – as I tapped the number out on the buttons and waited for the call to connect. My voice wavered as I asked to speak to Mike Hughes. The receptionist had to ask me to repeat myself. When she said he wasn’t in – he was already on the delivery run – I slumped against the glass side of the phone booth.
‘You could try his mobile,’ she said.
It took me three attempts to call his number. Twice I slammed the phone down before the call connected.
‘Mike Hughes speaking.’
I pressed myself up against the glass as though pinned by his voice.
‘Hello?’
Tears burned beneath my closed eyelids.
‘Hello, is there anyone there?’
My courage had vanished. I could barely breathe.
‘Are you after a delivery or a collection? Hello? I’m going to put the phone down now.’
‘Do you know who this is?’ Panic forced the words out of my mouth.
‘No? Should I?’
A pause. A silence that stretched eighteen years. I didn’t have any control. The moment I told Mike who I was he’d have a choice. He could tell me to fuck off. He could refuse to meet me and put the phone down. The only way to help myself, and save Chloe, was to take away that choice and put him in a situation where he had to listen.
‘My name is Milly Dawson. I’d like to arrange a collection please.’
‘What is it and where are you?’
‘An armchair. It needs to go to the dump. I live in Acton Green.’
‘That’s a way out so it’ll be pricey. Forty quid.’
‘That’s fine.