The incident with Mad Alec unsettles me. Today in the local paper there’s news of another attack, where a girl not much older than me was half-strangled. It happened in Hove, but still, that’s not so far. Who knows where Alec wanders?
I go to school and don’t see Banks at all. One night, I go with Chloe to Raven’s house where they stick false nails on me and dye my hair. It’s not anything too wild or permanent, just something that promises to bring out more ‘coppery lights’. After this we go to another girl’s house and it seems that I’m getting on with Raven better than Chloe is. We find ourselves sharing jokes the others don’t find funny – laughing so hard it makes my sides and my jaw ache. When I get home I’m smiling, and Mum looks like she just won the lottery. I don’t even mind her seeing I’m happy and I don’t feel guilty about it either. She makes big mugs of hot chocolate and we sit and drink them while some awful home shopping channel plays across the TV screen.
By the time Dad comes home, Mum is curled up asleep on the sofa and I’m almost as tired. It’s been fun. When I’m in bed, the nervous thing that’s always there, pulling at my tendons and squeezing my muscles, isn’t. I poke around for a minute looking for it, then leave it alone and sleep.
Finally, I hear from Joe. He’s ringing from outside somewhere and sounds a bit odd. He keeps breaking off as if someone’s distracting him. He asks me to meet and we end up in town just hanging around and talking.
‘I’m not living at home right now,’ he tells me. ‘But I’m okay.’
I remember what Raven said about bruises and search his face. There aren’t any but he does look tired. I want so much to ask him about it, but then I see his smile in the streetlights and don’t do it. When someone is happy, it’s best not to spoil it.
‘What do you want, Joe?’ I ask him and he pauses for a long moment before answering. ‘I want to be myself!’ he says at last. ‘And I’m doing something about it. You should too. You want your parents to listen to you and explain why they let you get hurt but you never outright ask them. You’ve got some secret you’re hiding away but you don’t tell anyone. I won’t be like that.’
‘You have secrets too, Joe, that you don’t tell me.’
‘Turn and turn about,’ he says. ‘When I know yours, you’ll know mine. But by then, mine will be sorted.’
I’m glad he’s so sure. I’m glad his week is going well. Mine isn’t. Only two days after meeting Joe, I come home from school and know at once that something is very wrong.
Dad appears at the top of the stairs and signals to me. Then, in the voice he uses when he’s being Father, not Dad, he says, ‘Corinne? There you are. Would you come up for a moment, please?’
In the first floor sitting room Mum is standing at the window looking down into the street, and there are two policemen standing awkwardly in the centre of the room. One of them has a face like a party mask, with big tufty eyebrows and cheeks as red as tomatoes. The other is younger, with gelled hair. He’s taken his hat off and is smiling at me. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Corinne? I wonder if we might ask you a couple of questions. Don’t worry. You haven’t done anything wrong.’
I wonder if I have the right to refuse, or if anything I say will be taken down in evidence, and my brain whirls round trying to think what I might be guilty of.
‘Sit down if you like,’ the policeman continues. ‘It’s just a question or two. We need to clear something up.’
My heart sinks. We’ve all of us been here before. The police used to come round fairly regularly when Sam was at his worst. Once when he’d been drunk and taken a swing at a traffic cop, once when he’d been found wandering about shouting at people, and of course, there was the night they found him in his rooms and couldn’t wake him.
I sit on the long sofa, as far away from the policeman as I can, so he sits on the other end, like he was proposing to me in an old Jane Austen novel.
‘I wonder, Corinne,’ he says, ‘whether you know a man called Stuart Banks?’
It goes terribly quiet. Mum turns from the window to face me. Dad leans in to whisper something to the other policeman.
‘I…’ I begin, ‘I know a man called Banks – a bit. But I don’t know if he’s called Stuart. I don’t know him well. Is he dead?’
Everyone looks at me as if I’ve said something stupid, and the policeman shakes his head. ‘No. No,’ he says. ‘Everything’s fine. It’s just that we stopped Mr Banks today outside a porn shop. He had a ring in his possession that he claims that you gave him.’
Now I’m confused. Why would the police stop Banks outside a porn shop? And when did I ever give him a ring? The policeman has taken a little box from his pocket, which he opens, and then – unbelievably – there on his palm is Mum’s ruby ring. The one her mother left her. I gaze at it and my mouth opens. I don’t know what to say. Mum has come over and is leaning over the sofa back. Her fingernails are painted bright red and she digs them into the leather of the sofa, ominously. The policeman is looking at me, his eyes wide and round, a tiny encouraging smile on his lips. And then something clicks into place.
I remember when I was waiting for Banks to come down the day he had the bath, and what a long time he was. I remember the little hollow in the bedding in my parent’s room, and I get a mental picture of the ruby ring, where it always is, in the little glass trinket box next to Mum’s bedside lamp. My face goes bright red. I can feel the blood beating in my cheeks, and there is a rushing sound in my ears. What do I say? That I brought him in here that day – a stranger, a drunken tramp – because that’s how they’ll see it.
‘What did he say?’ I ask.
The policeman flips open a notebook and reads from it.
‘Mr Banks claims that you were talking to him – a little while ago – he couldn’t remember. That you were wearing the ring, and that you took it off at one point because it was…’ he looks closer at the writing, ‘…too tight on your finger. He claims that you then went off home, and he noticed the ring on the bench afterwards. Mr Banks claims he was keeping it safe until he saw you again. I wonder if you can tell us if this is true?’
Before I can say anything, Mum bursts in. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Of course Corinne doesn’t know this man – he’s obviously stolen it. That’s what he was doing at the pawnbrokers, trying to sell it.’
I have it now. Not porn – pawn – a pawnbroker, where people without much money take things and get what they can for them, and when they have some cash they buy them back again – or not. The policeman is looking at me, so is Mum. So is Dad.
‘I see,’ I say. ‘Right.’
Banks stole Mum’s ring, and he tried to sell it. Now he’s trying to get out of trouble by lying, and making me lie too. If I choose to that is. My eyes start to prickle. ‘I think I did,’ I find myself saying. ‘I’m sorry Mum. I did wear it. I just wanted to wear Gran’s ring. I’m so sorry. I did lose it, and I’ve been so worried ever since.’
I’m crying now. I’m so angry with Banks. I hate him.
The policeman is talking to Dad, and Mum is hissing away in a high, angry voice that I only hear half of: ‘…A tramp of some kind! What is she doing talking to someone like that? It’s really too much. You need to have a serious talk with her, Mark. And perhaps you police should be doing more to catch this person who’s going round attacking people. Perhaps you should be concentrating on important things…’
‘Karen!’ Dad says. ‘Stay with Corinne while I see the officers out.’
He takes the policemen downstairs. I hear their voices getting quieter as they go down. Mum sits next to me on the sofa – close but not touching – the ring in her hand. I can see her knees pressed together and the tips of her red nails turning the ring over in her palm with tiny, tiny clicking sounds. Then she polishes it on the sleeve of her cardigan, rubbing at it like she might catch something from Banks’ hands – his dirty, thieving hands. Mum sighs. The house is silent around us, and the sound seems to go on for ever, settling into the empty spaces like a skein of silk spooling out unnoticed and unchecked.