Edith slept badly and woke restless, filled with dread. And just for a moment, as the thin trickle of daylight slunk between the bedroom curtains, she imagined that she could wish it all away and start again. Yesterday. The last seventeen years.
She clamped her eyes tight shut, but the more she clutched at the tattered remnants of her fantasy the more it disintegrated and the wretched cold facts crashed over her.
She hadn’t been able to clear her mind of the way the dog slumped as the round hit it, the jitters of its dying body. Sleep had been a long time coming and fitful when it had. And it did no good to remind herself of the brutal savagery of the attack on the lambs. Knowing she’d done the right thing did not make it easier to bear.
Edith had been shooting rabbits, rats, and squirrels unlucky enough to have the wrong colour coat, since she was barely into her teens. She’d never realised that something bigger would cause her to lie awake sweating at the awful memory of what she’d done.
Oh, last night she’d summoned up a sullen bravado to face her father’s spluttering rage and her mother’s weary disappointment. But up here, alone in the dark, that brittle façade had cracked and splintered.
On the far wall surrounding the window, the posters of her silver screen idols stared down at her, mocking. Edith had longed to join them, had aped their sultry pouts and sophisticated poses. Until a few weeks ago she’d believed she finally had a chance of actually becoming one of those beautiful, elegant, desirable women.
She’d foolishly believed the attentions of the local boys proved she was finally turning from an ugly duckling into a swan. Because they wanted her all right; in field gateways and bus shelters, in the backseat of cars, they’d expressed their lust.
Including Danny Robertshaw, who’d been her secret crush at school. The older boy who’d been so surrounded by his groupies he’d never given her a second look. Until a local band was gigging in one of the pubs in the market square in Kendal. He’d bought her a Red Bull and vodka, even though she was under age, and she’d gone down on him in one of the ginnels leading down towards the river. Hadn’t known until after, as he was zipping up his jeans, that he’d just been seeing if the rumours about her were true.
Edith had never realised that by giving any of them what they wanted, she was taking it away from herself.
Stupid, ugly little Edith. Didn’t she prove yesterday that she can’t do anything right?
Edith screwed her eyes shut again, gripped the edge of the lumpy quilt until her hands pulsed. But still, the sneering voices wouldn’t abate until, with a low moan, she twisted to face the wall. If that bloody dog hadn’t done what it did, maybe she would have been saved all this now. It would all be over. But deep down she couldn’t escape the craven sense of relief that she hadn’t had to do it, after all.
“Edith! You are out of bed aren’t you, lovey?” Her mother’s voice, reedy and anxious, floated up the stairs. “You haven’t forgotten Mr Hogg needs you to go in today, have you? Your breakfast’s nearly ready.”
Slowly, Edith rolled over onto her back and stared up at the sagging woodchip on the ceiling. So, she’s going pretend it never happened. No change there, then.
Her mother’s biggest reaction to the events of the day before came when she discovered Edith had broken one of her precious china ballerinas from the mantelpiece in the front parlour. It was the room saved for best and never used except when the vicar came round.
Her mother had bought the ballerinas, a matched pair, out of one of her magazines—the boring ones with the knitting patterns. Sent off the money week by week and twittered with anticipation waiting for the first of them to arrive. Edith had always hated those figurines, with their flawless white skin and their swanlike poise. Twin models of perfection that taunted her every clumsy attempt at grace.
Her mother cried a little over the broken pieces, mutely shaking her head when Edith’s father had offered to see what he could salvage with superglue and a dab of putty. Instead, she’d swept up the shards, wrapped them lovingly in newspaper and laid them to rest in the dustbin. What, in the heat of the moment, had seemed to Edith like an act of final defiance, suddenly took on the tawdry hue of small-minded pettiness. She found herself awash with renewed self-loathing.
Her mother called again from downstairs, sharper now, a long-refined trigger for Edith to drag herself listlessly out of bed and into her clothes. As she descended the creaky staircase she could hear her mother bustling around in the kitchen, clattering pans. The smell of fried bacon hit Edith’s stomach like a fist. She pushed open the back sitting-room door to see a dripping plate waiting for her on the gateleg table by the window.
“Don’t look like that, lovey, you need a decent meal before you do all that cleaning,” her mother said from the kitchen doorway. She eyed her daughter critically. “Honestly, Edith, you’d blow away in a strong wind.” She disappeared again, carrying on the one-sided conversation over her shoulder as she went. “I’m rushing myself this morning. One of the girls is off sick and I’ve said I’ll cover.”
Edith knew better than to argue. She slouched into a chair and made a show of cutting up what was on her plate. Her mother sat down opposite, letting out a sigh as she got off her feet. She was forty-two and moved ten years older. A heavy woman whose once passable looks and figure had buckled under the weight of hard work and worry and too many nights of cheap ready meals in front of the telly.
She was already wearing the tabard for her shift in the canteen at the truck stop down by the motorway junction. Despite spending all day doling out greasy food, she attacked her fried breakfast with gusto, her eyes fixed on a magazine laid open on the table in front of her, shovelling it in. Edith’s movements faltered.
Maybe I’m adopted.
Her mother sensed her lack of enthusiasm and glanced up. Edith put a small forkful in her mouth, chewed mechanically, then put her knife down and reached for her milk.
Her mother had never questioned why Edith always drank milk at mealtimes, and she dismissed it as a harmless quirk that her daughter insisted on a mug, not a glass. The opaque liquid in its equally opaque container was the perfect place to spit unwanted food. Edith made herself leave half of what was on her plate, and poured half of what she appeared to eat down the drain afterwards.
When she’d hastily disposed of the leftovers and dumped her dirty crockery in the sink, she gathered her cagoule and open-face helmet, and made for the back door. The little Honda step-through scooter was parked under a tarpaulin by the back gate, with a chain wrapped through the rear wheel, even though all the local kids knew better than to try and steal anything from Jim Airey’s family. Not because he was talented as a detective, but because he was mean. He’d indiscriminately make all their lives a misery by way of retribution.
“Edith.”
Edith hadn’t heard her mother follow her out and jerked in surprise to see her, still in her slippers, standing by the gate.
“Look, I know your dad went on at you a bit yesterday, but it’s for your own good, lovey,” her mother said haltingly. “What you did…well, I know you thought you were doing the right thing, but other folk won’t see it that way if they find out it was you. And Mrs Inglis is already against you after…well, after last Christmas. People like us can’t afford to make enemies out of people like her. She’s important.”
And we’re not. I’m not. Edith didn’t say it, just stared at her with a thousand cutting words pouring from her brain to her lips and dying there unspoken.
“I know.”
Someone had let their dog lift a leg against the back wheel of the scooter. Deliberate, most like. Edith unlocked the chain doing her best not to touch it, half expecting that her mother would retreat back inside the house. To her surprise, when she straightened, the woman was still watching her from the safety of the step, hands clutched as though trying to work up the courage to say more. Their eyes met with total incomprehension for each other.
“You’ve got to find yourself a purpose, lovey,” her mother said then, all in a rush. “You don’t know how lucky you are, living out in the countryside, not like some of them inner-city tower blocks with junkies on every landing and the lifts never working. But you’re throwing it all away if you don’t make something of yourself.” She stopped, took a breath. “You’ve got a good brain in there—all your teachers said so—but if you don’t use it you’ll never get anywhere.”
She paused, as if hoping to see some instant effect from this badly-delivered little speech. When there was none, she floundered on. “You’re never going to be famous, Edith, and you can wish for it all you want but it isn’t going to happen. Things like that don’t happen for people like us, lovey. You might as well wish for the moon.”
She broke off, bit her lip as the fire went out of her. “Did you think I wanted to be scrubbing tables all my life? Always thought it was temporary. Until something better came along. Well, here I am, Edith, still scrubbing tables and mopping floors at my age. And that’s all I see in store for you, unless you pull your socks up and do something.”
For a long, disconnected moment, mother and daughter stood facing each other across a gulf too wide to ever be bridged.
Edith swallowed. “I gotta go,” she said, forestalling whatever response her mother might have made to that by jamming on her helmet and hitting the starter. The two-stroke engine smoked into life with a ringing clatter. But when Edith glanced back there was something sad in her mother’s eyes, in the hunch of her shoulders. She knows…
By the time the scooter had struggled up the steep hill to the main road, Edith could barely see for tears.
Throwing it all away… You’ll never get anywhere… All I see in store for you… You’re never going to be famous… It isn’t going to happen… Not for people like us…
Not for people like us…
The litany hammered round and round in her head to the rhythm of the tyres on the road and the beat of the motor, until she wanted to scream out loud.
She bent low over the handlebars and the scooter swooped down the next hill, gathering the momentum she needed to get her up the long climb on the other side. Only the buzz of precarious speed seemed finally to drive her mother’s words out of her head.
“I’ll show them,” she muttered under her breath. “I’ll show them what I can do and then they’ll be sorry. They’ll all be sorry.”