Jenny cleaned her teeth in the bathroom, bobbing in a happy dance with her reflection to put more effort into the process. The chocolate cake had caught in the crevices of her molars and she was worried about getting cavities. So far she’d made it to fourteen without a filling and she wanted to keep up her good record. At least her complexion had cleared up from the latest outbreak in time for the party.
‘I won’t be late. The concert should be over by eleven,’ her mum called from by the front door where she was putting on her shoes.
Jenny spat out the toothpaste and splashed it away with a blast of the tap. ‘OK! I hope it goes well!’
‘Your dad said he’d ring so if the phone goes it’ll probably be him.’
‘OK!’
‘I know it’s your birthday but if you do have any homework …’
‘I know, I know.’ Jenny came out of the bathroom and leant over to give her mum a goodbye kiss. ‘I’ll get to it, I promise, Mum. Thanks for the cake.’
Her mum looked up at her and smiled. ‘My pleasure, darling. It was fun, wasn’t it? They’re a nice bunch. We’ll go somewhere at the weekend, prolong the festivities.’
‘That would be great. See you later.’
‘I hope not.’ Her mum slipped into her jacket. ‘You should be asleep by then. You’ve got my number if anything happens?’
‘Of course I have. Go on: you’ll miss your lift.’
Her mum waved and headed out the door. Almost as it banged closed, the phone rang. Jenny hurried to the phone in the lounge to catch it before it clicked to the answerphone.
‘Hello?’
‘Jenny! It’s your dad here.’
‘Hi, Dad. Where are you?’
‘Toronto.’
‘As in Toronto, Canada? What are you doing over there?’ Jenny twisted the springy cord around her finger.
‘Interviewing for a job tomorrow. African studies at the university.’
That was the first she’d heard that he wanted to leave Nigeria. ‘Oh, er, great. Good luck.’
‘I didn’t call about that. A little bird told me it was my girl’s special day.’
Her mum had probably had to remind him. ‘That’s right.’
‘I can’t believe you’re a teenager already.’
‘I’m fourteen, Dad.’
‘That’s what I meant. I’ve sent your mum some money for you to spend as she couldn’t think of something for me to buy for you in Lagos. She suggested you’d like some sheet music. I thought that safest.’
Jenny’s spirits developed a slow puncture. ‘Great.’
‘I put a card in the mail today too. Sorry that it will arrive a little late but I think you will like it. I picked it out myself.’
When normally he didn’t? ‘I’ll let you know when it comes.’
‘So, tell me, how did you celebrate?’
She started on an account of her birthday party with the music students singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the style of Beethoven, how witty it had been. There had been a whole crowd of them, most were older than her but who had got to know her through their lessons and at music camp last summer. She had a bit of a crush on one boy in Year 9 who was about to take his grade eight theory. Harry had bought her a card, a corny cartoon one of a kitten like she was ten or something, but it still had pride of place in the front room.
Her dad’s replies to her chatter were ‘hmm’ and ‘ah-ha’. Was that the sound of typing in the background. ‘Dad, are you doing your emails?’
‘Oh, er, something urgent has just come in about arrangements for tomorrow. I had to reply immediately.’
She pressed her head back against the sofa cushions, feeling a little sad and lonely now. ‘Are you going to fly through London on your return?’
‘I’m sorry, Jenny, but I’m going via Paris. I have a colleague I need to see.’
‘Right. OK.’ Disappointment bloomed. ‘I’d better go and do my homework.’
‘On your birthday! What a good girl you are! How are you fixed for the summer? Do you want to come and spend a couple of weeks with Marissa and your brothers?’
‘Will you be there?’ She’d gone last year and found she was an unpaid nanny to her father’s new family with him barely in evidence.
‘Oh, in and out as usual. It depends if I get the new job. If that comes through, then I will be arranging our move. I’m a busy man, Jenny. I cannot drop everything, you know that.’
Why couldn’t he? ‘I’ll talk to Mum.’ And find a way of refusing. ‘You’re always welcome here, Mum says.’
‘What, Harlow?’ Her father chuckled.
‘We could go on holiday in England together. Or I could meet you in Paris? I’m fourteen now. I can do the journey on my own on the Eurostar.’ She could just imagine having him to herself as they walked through the Louvre or drank citron pressé at a café in the Champs Elysees. Her language text book was full of such little transactions, buying drinks and tickets. She could try them out. French was one of her dad’s languages.
‘Fourteen! How did that happen?’ And so he passed over the bait, not taking up her suggestion. ‘Let me know about the summer when you know your availability. Marissa loved having you last year.’
Of course she did. His wife spent most of the time meeting her friends for coffee in Lagos’ most upmarket air-conditioned malls while Jenny played hot, sweaty garden cricket with the boys. There was nothing wrong with Marissa, apart from the fact that she saw a sibling relationship as cheap labour. As eldest of five, Marissa had probably been on the other end of that treatment herself.
‘OK, Dad. Good luck tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, Jenny. Love you!’
‘Love you too.’
Did he? Did he love her? The evidence seemed to be very slight on that front. If her mother hadn’t kept badgering him to keep up at least this minimal contact, he would probably have dropped her altogether, like he had Nikki ten years ago.
She went into the kitchen and helped herself to another slice of the cake in the fridge. It would probably give her new spots but she didn’t care.
‘It’s my birthday and I’ll cry if I want to,’ she sang, bending the lyrics of one of her mum’s favourite tunes from the Eighties. ‘You would cry too if it happened to you.’ Putting the plate down, she grabbed a wooden spoon. Homework could wait. She was going to have a kitchen karaoke. She couldn’t be bothered to get out the PlayStation and use one of the games Mum had bought her to encourage her vocal skills. A spoon and the radio would do. A few Justin Timberlake tracks and a Beyoncé later, she was feeling much better. She gave up at 50 Cent, not knowing the words well enough to keep in time and that annoyed her as she liked to be perfect when singing. The others had sounded good though. She might offer to sing something at her school spring concert. They expected her to play the violin, of course, but it would be fun to surprise them with something contemporary. Maybe a Britney track? ‘I’m Not A Girl Not Yet A Woman’? Would that suit her voice? She could wear a really cool outfit and shock everyone so they all had to reassess their assumptions about her. The boys might notice and then …
She kissed the kitten card and carried on humming tunes while she completed her homework. Nothing too heavy, just ten Maths problems and some French vocabulary for a test tomorrow. That done, she could practice her violin pieces for her lesson with Mum on Thursday. They’d taken to making it official as otherwise they both just put it off, Mum for paying students, Jenny because … well, it was Mum, wasn’t it? She loved the Telemann she was learning at the moment. It was a duet, which was so much fun as you wound in and out of the melody with someone else. It made her feel like she was full of bubbles. She and Mum would have a lovely time together when they did that later in the week. Mum had been teaching it to lots of her students too because it was on the exam syllabus so the apartment was continually resounding with the happy tune.
With a sigh of contentment, bad feelings generated by her father’s call played away, Jenny put her beloved violin back in its case. Mum had really pushed out the boat to buy this one for her thirteenth birthday a year ago, forgone getting a car so she could afford the loan. Best birthday present ever! It was a huge step up from Jenny’s previous instrument that had been a cheap new one made in China. Mum hadn’t wanted to fork out on a special violin until Jenny had settled on her choice of instrument. But the violin was the one for her. She was her mother’s daughter.
Brushing her teeth again, Jenny got ready for bed, choosing clean shorts and a T-shirt from her chest of drawers in honour of her birthday. She put the old ones in the laundry basket. Coming out of the bathroom, a noise from her mum’s room caught her attention. She peered inside and saw that the net curtain had knocked a box of tissues to the floor as it billowed in the breeze. Picking the box up, she put it back on the sill and reached up to close the window. Jenny ran through her mental tick list. She’d remembered to leave the chain off the door so her mum could get back in, and checked the door was locked as Mum had instructed her to do when she was on her own. They lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats so it felt a safe place once the entrance was fastened. Any intruder would have to be Spider-Man to get in.
With a smile, she got into bed and reached for the bedside light.
It was the hand that woke her. A hot hand stroking her cheek.
‘Mum?’ She turned towards it, expecting to see that her mother had come in to say goodnight, but then sensed something else entirely. Alarm rocketed. A stranger was lying on the duvet next to her. He smelt of men’s deodorant and cigarettes. She opened her mouth to scream but the palm smashed over her lips and his weight slid over her.
‘Sssh, sssh. No need for that. Don’t make a sound. You want this, I can tell. Be a good girl. It’s just you and me, nothing to fear.’
It was pitch dark. She couldn’t see anything in this dark cave in which they were enclosed. The blackout lining she’d asked for in her curtains to keep out the streetlights was working too well. She thrashed and screamed in her throat against his grip.
‘So beautiful,’ he whispered. ‘Your voice singing to me – so lovely. I love listening to you. Sssh.’ His hands went to her throat, squeezing. ‘You have to keep quiet now. Let me do this.’ He shoved the duvet aside.
The horrible unexpectedness of it all stunned her. It had to be a nightmare but she knew it wasn’t. Thoughts whirling super-fast looking for a way out, her brain divided into the part that analysed the situation for the exits, while the other just screamed in horror.
As he adjusted his flies, his hand let up momentarily.
‘Mu—’ She didn’t get any further.
‘No! Don’t spoil it! Shut up, you little black bitch!’ He grew angrier at her continued resistance. There was a sweet taint to his breath as he panted in her face. The next few minutes were horrific. She almost didn’t care what else was going on, the violation secondary to the compression on her throat; the caring would come later if she survived. Her body focused on living through this. No air made it past his grip. Her consciousness faded in and out. She clawed at the back of his hands, but he was wearing gloves. She couldn’t break skin. She couldn’t …
The doctors said later she must’ve blacked out when he pressed down so hard that he damaged her larynx. Impossible to say if he had been intending to kill her or this was just the way he liked it.
Her mother’s return prevented her death. Her assailant must’ve heard the door, and, it was assumed, hidden elsewhere in the flat. Her mother sensed something was wrong even as she crossed the threshold because she could see down the single corridor that ran from the front to the back of the flat. She immediately noticed that Jenny’s bedroom door was wide open. Thankfully, she came straight in and found Jenny half-dragged from the bed. Nikki was too distressed to check she was safe from attack herself; her only thought was to summon an ambulance. That short interval gave Jenny’s assailant a chance to slip away.
No search of the apartment was made until the police came looking for forensic evidence. They’d found Jenny’s cake out of the fridge and worked out that her attacker had been in the flat some time while Jenny got ready for bed. She had inadvertently locked him in with her. The other possibility was that the window she’d closed in her mother’s room had been big enough for a man to climb through if they had a head for heights and didn’t mind scrambling up the balconies. Whichever way he’d entered, he’d acted as if he owned the place. He helped himself to the birthday cake, a neat slice put on a plate, then left by the washing up bowl when finished. Then in a mercurial mood change, he’d dropped the rest of the cake on the floor and stamped on it. The impressions of his trainers had been clear in the chocolate frosting and added to the file, as well as the DNA traces they’d found. They asked Jenny, when they were finally able to interview her, if she’d heard anything, but of course she hadn’t. She’d been humming along to Britney, doing her homework in her bedroom.
That all came later. At the time they were searching the flat and coming up with these theories, Jenny was in hospital with tracheostomy, hooked up to numerous machines to breathe for her. She’d been rescued from brain damage only by the quick actions of her mother and the paramedics who had come in response.
They had saved her life, her brain, but not her voice.
It didn’t matter. She never wanted to sing again.
If she did, Jenny believed, he might come back.