No one talks much in the hot, messy lounge of Connor’s flat; mostly they play computer games or watch TV and smoke weed. I don’t know what I’m doing here or why I’ve come, not really, or even what I’m expecting to happen. I just want to make sure Edie’s OK, because she hadn’t seemed it, at the quarry – she hadn’t seemed OK at all.
When Connor comes in and calls Edie’s name she jumps up eagerly and goes to him, smiling in relief as he pulls her down on to his lap. When my eyes eventually drift up to his face I flinch as I meet his hard green stare. Slowly, his eyes still fastened on me, his hand moves upwards until it disappears beneath Edie’s short skirt. I quickly look away, staring out of the window while my cheeks burn.
Outside, the sun blazes in the cloudless sky, belting down upon the motorway, and I wonder about them, all those people in all those cars as they leave Fremton far behind, on their way to someplace else, someplace better. I glance back to the room, to this ragged band of strangers suspended up here with me in this hot, stuffy flat, and I try to make sense of how I came to be here, how it came to be that I should end up here too.
‘Heather,’ Connor says, breaking me from my thoughts. ‘Get me a beer from the fridge.’
I don’t reply.
He raises his voice, just a fraction. ‘Are you fucking deaf?’
I glance at Edie but she ignores me and a long, uncomfortable moment passes before I reluctantly get to my feet. Self-consciously I pick my way through the bodies littering the floor, gingerly stepping over legs and ashtrays and empty cans until I reach the door. In the kitchen where hot sunlight pours in through smeared glass and the floor feels tacky beneath my feet, I bend down to a tiny fridge. A sour, stale smell hits my nostrils as I open it and quickly pull a can free. And when I straighten up again, Connor is standing behind me.
‘You all right there, Heather?’
Wordlessly I hand him the beer and he takes it from me, popping open its ring pull and taking a long swig, not moving from his position, nor dropping his eyes from mine. Suddenly he takes a step towards me and I hurriedly back away until I feel the knock of the sink’s hard edge against my spine. He sniggers, and placing his beer can on the table comes closer still and, leaning forward, his hands grip the sink so I’m trapped between his arms. His face is inches from mine and I can smell the beer and cigarettes on his breath as he murmurs, ‘What you doing here, Heather?’
My mouth is very dry. ‘Come to see Edie,’ I whisper.
‘Yeah?’
I nod.
‘You fancy a bit of that, do you?’ He smiles. ‘That it? That why you were chatting shit about me? Want her for yourself?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Let me go. I want to go home.’
‘I don’t like people telling lies about me,’ he goes on, his face moving a fraction closer. ‘You listening?’
I feel my scalp creep and still he doesn’t move or drop his gaze. I see something so dark and disturbing, so devoid of warmth in his eyes that fresh fear pulses through me. It’s like looking at the green oily surface of the quarry, its secret deathtraps looming suddenly into view. And as we stare at each other my expression must alter, showing him what I have understood, that I’ve seen through to his lonely rotten core, because in that instant the hatred in his eyes deepens, sharpening its claws and baring its teeth. My lungs empty of air.
‘Connor?’
I cry out with relief to see Edie appear in the doorway behind him. She looks from one to the other of us and as Connor straightens up I quickly move away from him. ‘Edie, come home with me,’ I say desperately before Connor can speak.
She shakes her head but doesn’t answer. I see her hesitation and for a moment a faint hope climbs inside me. ‘Please, Edie,’ I beg, ‘I’m scared he’s going to hurt you. I’m so worried for you, you’ve changed so much, you look so awful …’
‘You better shut your mouth,’ Connor warns.
‘You could find someone else,’ I blurt, ignoring him. ‘Someone nicer—’
‘That right, is it?’ he interrupts. ‘Not good enough for stuck-up little cunts like you? That it?’
Edie still hasn’t spoken and I have to swallow hard to clear the lump in my throat when I see the desperation in her eyes. I turn back to Connor’s hateful face, and say, quietly, ‘Yes.’
He makes a lunge and I just have time to hear Edie shout, ‘Get out of here, Heather, get out,’ and see her step between us before I make it out of the kitchen and out of the flat, slamming the door behind me. I hurtle down six flights of stairs until I reach the bottom and I don’t stop running until I’ve left the estate behind.
I stay away from the flat after that, brooding on the plan I had begun to form and spending my time hanging around at the end of Edie’s street, hoping to catch a glimpse of her and reassure myself that she’s OK. But it’s not until a few weeks later, at the beginning of August, that I see her again. I’m sitting in the town square, eating a Greggs sausage roll and wondering if it’s too early to go and hang around outside her house when I spot her walking past on the furthest side. I get to my feet and watch as she approaches the payphone outside the police station. As she digs out her purse I make a large loop round and duck behind the phones’ shelter, and there I wait, straining my ears to listen.
‘Connor?’ she says, her voice muffled, ‘It’s me.’
I hold my breath as she falls silent, listening to him speak. Then, ‘No, Connor, please baby. No … no, I don’t want to … I don’t want to.’ She begins to cry and I ball my hands into fists. ‘That’s not true,’ she says. ‘Listen to me … I … but I do! I do love you. I love you so much! You’re all I have, Connor, why don’t you believe me? I’d do anything for you.’ She falls silent again, and then, eventually, reluctantly, says, ‘OK. Yes … OK, I will. I promise.’ She hangs up the phone, and I watch as she slowly makes her way back across the square.
I’m on study leave from school, and I sit with my father in the kitchen as he tips baked beans on to some burnt toast and passes me my plate before retrieving a hardback book from his jacket pocket and opening it to read. Within seconds he’s absorbed and I watch him silently for a while. Since Mum left, a kind of peace has settled between the two of us. I leave him to his work and he in turn takes no notice of what I do, accepting without question that it’s my schoolwork I’m preoccupied with while I’m alone up in my room. And although this is a relief after living with Mum’s constant, critical scrutiny, it also leaves me with an unsettling sense of freefall, as though I’m about to step off a very high cliff and there’ll be no one to catch me when I land.
Suddenly Dad looks up from his book, catching me staring, and I watch as he mentally fumbles around for something to say. After a long pause he murmurs, ‘It might be a good idea to go over your UCAS forms this evening, Heather. You shouldn’t leave it too late.’
I manage to nod and, satisfied, he returns to his book. As my beans go cold I let myself imagine saying, ‘Actually, Dad, there’s no point in applying for uni, because I haven’t a hope of getting the grades I need anyway.’ So far I’d managed to fob my teachers off with tales of illness and ‘trouble at home’. But there was a sense of things unravelling, of the lies I’d told spinning out of my control. My parents and I have talked about my plans to study medicine since I was eleven. They’ve been putting money into my uni fund for years. And I had always studied as hard as I possibly could, desperate not to disappoint them, even paying my birthday and Christmas money into the post office account myself. Still I allow the fantasy to run in my head, how easily I could blow the world wide open with a single stroke; tell Dad about the awful grades I’ve been getting, how I’ve ruined everything, force him to see me – really, actually see me – for once. But of course I don’t. Instead I go back to thinking about Edie and the last time I saw her.
After the phone call in the square, there’d been no sign of her for a week. Anxiety had nagged at me every day. What had Connor wanted Edie to do? A dull foreboding had grown inside me and I’d stepped up my surveillance of her house, spending longer and longer at the end of her street, waiting for her. And then a few days ago, when the afternoon had begun to stretch into evening and I was about to give up and go home, I’d seen her approach and watched as she’d let herself in.
Quickly I’d followed her, slipping through her side gate into the tiny scrappy garden. Hearing raised voices I’d crept up to the kitchen window and peered in. Edie’s mum had her back to me but her voice was loud and clear. ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ I heard her say. ‘I phoned the school and they said you haven’t been in today, or to any of your classes this week!’
Edie was staring at her feet and she’d looked so thin and tired that my heart had hurt. Her mum must have seen it too, for her voice had softened. ‘Edie, I’m worried about you. There’s something wrong, I know there is. Please talk to me.’
To my surprise, Edie sank into a chair and put her head in her hands. Her mother and I both watched as her shoulders began to heave. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she’d said when she could finally speak. ‘I just … it’s all just so …’
Silently I’d urged her, Tell her, Edie, please, tell her.
‘What’s the matter, Edie?’ her mum had said, going to her and putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on, love, it can’t be that bad, can it?’
Edie had looked up, an expression in her eyes as though she were pushing a lorry up a hill. I’d held my breath as she’d opened her mouth to speak.
‘Is it a lad? Is that it?’ her mum had gone on. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
And silently Edie nodded.
‘I knew it,’ her mother said triumphantly. ‘I bloody knew it! That’s why you haven’t been going to school! Oh God, Edie, don’t be a bloody fool, don’t let a lad screw your life up the way I did! You want to be like me? Pregnant at seventeen? Your life over? Don’t make the same stupid mistakes I made!’
And just like that, the shutters in Edie’s eyes had come slamming down. ‘That’s all I am to you, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘A stupid bloody mistake! Well fine, maybe I’ll do what Dad did and leave too.’
She’d stormed from the room, her mum following awkwardly on her crutches saying desperately, ‘Edie, I didn’t mean it like that, you know I didn’t!’ But Edie had run from the house, leaving her mum and me to stare after her in the silence.
It’s this I’m thinking about when Dad stands up to clear our plates away. I haven’t touched my own lunch, but he makes no comment as he scrapes the cold mess into the bin. As I’m about to mutter something about homework and leave, the doorbell rings. We look at each other uncertainly for a moment or two before I go to answer it. When I open the door, there, standing on the front step, is Edie.