Rachel asked Felicity not to tell Alex and Jenna about her dad, so when they came back they’d swum in the freezing pool and talked about nothing in particular. It started raining, and they couldn’t get warm, so as soon as they’d done a few frenzied lengths they ran back into the house and wrapped themselves in big towels. They sat in the sitting room, wearing jeans and big jumpers, with their hair in towel turbans and mugs of hot chocolate in their hands, and half watched a video of Crocodile Dundee. Felicity kept meaning to go and bake her brownies, but Rachel’s revelations had shaken her, and she wanted to be next to her all the time, to make sure she was OK. Alex produced a pile of blankets from the airing cupboard, and they snuggled up.
The film was funny, but she didn’t really watch it. Her head was full of Rachel. She had so many questions for her.
How long had her dad been violent? Did he hit her mother too? Why didn’t her mum protect her? It was overflowing, and all she could do was grab Rachel’s hand and squeeze.
‘Rach is staying here tonight,’ she said when she couldn’t stay quiet any longer.
‘Me too,’ said Jenna.
‘Great,’ said Alex, but he was mainly talking to Jenna. When Felicity got up to go to the loo, Rachel followed her out of the room.
‘I’m scared,’ she said, her words falling over each other. She took Felicity’s sleeve and led her into the kitchen and outside. ‘About staying here. My dad’s going to be looking for me. He’ll be panicking that I’m telling people. Showing them what he did to my face. He’s going to want to drag me home. I don’t want to bring him into your lovely home, Lissy. You don’t understand what he’s like.’
‘No way. You stay here. We’ll look after you. We’ll call the police if we have to. Can I tell Alex?’
Rachel blew out so her hair flew up in front of her face.
‘I guess you have to. Just the outline, in case Dad turns up. Not the police, though. No way. Promise?’
‘We’ll tell Alex and Jenna, and we’ll all be alert. If he comes, you can hide upstairs, and we’ll say we haven’t seen you.’ She thought about the attic. ‘There’s a bedroom up there with a bolt on the inside.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘If he found me here, he’d go berserk. I need to go much further afield. Seriously, he’d push me over that cliff if he caught me up here. Drown me in your pool. Bury me in your garden. I’m bringing shame upon the family.’
They stood outside, in the courtyard.
‘I’ll need to go thousands of miles away,’ said Rachel. ‘India. Thailand. Maybe Peru or something.’ She paused. ‘So you know Andy Teague?’
Felicity nodded. ‘I didn’t know his surname, but yes. Bad idea, Rach.’
It turned out that Rachel had met Andy Teague when he approached her at the bus stop (clearly his best hunting ground), and they were making fanciful plans to run away to Thailand together.
‘I’m not sure if he means it,’ said Rachel, ‘but I hope he does.’ She looked at Felicity’s face. ‘It’s not like that! It’s not a romantic thing. It’s just a getting-away-from-here thing.’
‘But, Rach!’ Felicity felt helpless. ‘He’s a creep! You can’t run away with him.’
Rachel started to say something, but stopped herself. ‘Anyway,’ she said instead, ‘we’d better go back to the film.’
When Crocodile Dundee finished, Felicity put a mix tape on, and Jenna and Alex got up and started dancing. It was adorable. They were dancing to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, holding each other’s hands and mirroring each other’s steps, laughing. They looked good together: Alex so tall and serious, Jenna tiny and doll-like, but tough as anything. Felicity hoped they would get together, then hoped they wouldn’t, because Alex was going to university so they’d have to break up, and it would be awkward for her, stuck in the middle.
She was distracting herself from Rachel. Rachel, and her parents, and the fact that Rachel’s life was in such a state that Andy Teague felt like a saviour. Felicity knew that she couldn’t let Rachel leave with him, but she didn’t know how to stop her.
‘Thanks for letting me hide out,’ said Rachel, shifting up closer to her. ‘You’re so lucky living up here. And your parents just leave you to it.’
‘I wish yours were …’ Felicity didn’t know how to end the sentence.
‘I don’t think mine have ever liked me,’ said Rachel. ‘I mean, you know my dad.’ Felicity nodded at that. ‘He wanted boys, but since we were girls he wanted perfect little girls in matching pinafores. Doing the flowers for church. Making cups of tea for the people who come to the house. The vicar’s daughters. Probably one of us would marry well, and the other would stay a spinster to look after him and Mum in their old age. He thinks I’m an “abomination”.’
Felicity gasped, and Rachel nodded. ‘That’s actually what he said. My hair. My clothes. The fact that I refuse to go to church. I told him I was an atheist. I wish I could just knuckle down and live his way like Lucy does. But I can’t.’ She sighed and rubbed her bruised forehead.
Felicity thought about Lucy, Rachel’s angelic little sister.
‘Does Lucy take the heat off you at all?’
‘Poor Luce. The golden girl. Not as much as you’d think. He’s always playing us off against each other, and I feel bad for her having to keep it up. I mean, I’m seventeen! Surely old enough to get the fuck out of here. I feel bad leaving her, though.’ She was breathing fast now. ‘Anyway, tell me about you. Distract me. Are you going to leave Cornwall when you’ve finished your course?’
Felicity apologized mentally to her dad for ever having considered him annoying. He was so gentle, so devoted, and both her parents had always let their children be whoever they wanted. She realized, again, how lucky she and Alex were.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose that in a few years I’ll be qualified to cook for a living, and I guess then I can go wherever I want. Maybe I’ll go and live in Italy or something.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Doesn’t your mum stop him?’
Rachel’s voice was almost a whisper. ‘She does it too.’ She spoke louder. ‘I can totally see you being the chef in a little taverna in Umbria or something. A restaurant in Paris. A private boat. You’re going to have the world at your feet.’
Felicity wondered whether Rachel might be right. Clattery Parisian restaurants were far too scary, but a little taverna? A boat? Maybe.
Felicity had forgotten how much she liked Rachel. She couldn’t let her go home, and she couldn’t let her leave with Andy.
‘Can I tell my grandma?’ she said. ‘Please?’
She felt her eyes filling with tears. Grandma would know what to do. Grandma already hated the vicar. She had called him a ‘patriarchal arsehole – a patriarsehole’.
Rachel was wavering. ‘Not until I’ve gone.’
‘Please? She’s brilliant.’
The other two were swaying now, Jenna’s head resting on Alex’s chest. The music was the song from Dirty Dancing.
Rachel was blinking fast. ‘I’ll think about it, OK? Can we talk about something else? Do you want children one day? If you could plan your own family, who would you have in it?’
The colours in Felicity’s head cleared, in spite of everything. A picture appeared. A figure, surrounded by orange.
‘A little girl,’ she said at once. ‘She’d be everything I’m not. Good at reading, and not afraid to talk to people. She’d have an easy life, and she’d always be happy.’
‘What’s her name?’
Felicity thought again about the orange colour around this imaginary daughter.
‘Clementine.’ She smiled at the vision of the perfect little girl in her head. In real life, she would never be able to manage a relationship with a boy well enough to get to the point of having a baby, but it was soothing to imagine it. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t want children. But, if I had to, I’d have a boy and a girl, and they’d be able to be whoever they wanted, and my parents would never get to meet them, not even once. They wouldn’t even know they existed.’
Jenna and Alex left the room. Rachel took the remote control and put the TV back on. They sat and watched whatever was on.