Go on, try me if you like. Fucking bring it on.
I pelt a stone hard across the pavement.
Christian Earhart is not my father.
He is not my goddamn father.
45
YOU
I WAKE TO DISCOVER FALLING SNOW.
Swan Lake is wrapped in a huge white duvet, falling flakes gather on the window ledges and hang heavy on tree branches. The ice on the lake is like a magical land, hidden. I stay inside, where it’s so quiet my breath echoes. The other girls and Max are out on the hill, sliding on plastic bags and metal trays down below.
Watching them through the window as they catch snowflakes on their tongues and scoop balls of snow to pelt at each other, I realise how old I feel, much older than twenty.
Daisy and Max are spread-eagled on their back in the snow, moving their arms and legs vigorously, laughing. When Max jumps and sees me at the window he waves, pointing to the shape he’s left behind.
A snow angel.
With Daisy’s pale, almost-blue skin, her wide eyes, a pink knitted hat with a white pom-pom covering her head, a few curls escaping, she looks like nothing less.
When Daisy and Max finally come inside, Daisy’s teeth are chattering and her lips are navy. I hold her hands in mine. Rather than giving her my heat, I can feel my arms turning icy.
‘I think you should see Rebecca,’ I say, when her skin hasn’t regained any colour after twenty minutes.
‘I’m fine,’ she says.
But she isn’t.
46
YOU
DAISY DIED IN THE NIGHT.
Rebecca woke me with a gentle shake.
‘How?’ I ask, sitting up in bed.
‘Heart failure,’ she says, sitting heavily on the edge of my bed. ‘The staff on duty the other day should never have let her go out in the snow.’
And then she stares at the window, at the water dripping from the melting icicles along the gutter, her hands clasped in her lap.
The news seeps into my soul like poison. Snow angel, little Daisy, has starved herself to death. I let her down. I knew she lied about getting her period, I knew she was dying. And I kept quiet.
‘Where’s Max?’ I say.
‘Social services have taken him.’
I didn’t get to hug Max.
Rebecca leaves.
I think about Elizabeth, and how I’ve abandoned her too. Not allowing her to visit, refusing any contact. Reading all of her letters, treasuring them, but never once replying.
I mourn, but I don’t let the OCD win. I don’t hurt myself with checks. I don’t have a panic attack.
Dig deep, and find the grit in you.
I pick up the Black Magic Box and take out the Wedding Day DVD.
The dark side of the world is in my hands.
On the night of my seventeenth birthday, my father gave me his special camera. My sister got angry at him. She ran out and went into the shed. I followed. Inside the dark room, she told me everything. She showed me the reason why I was always forbidden to enter the shed.
The locked chest. The DVDs.
Something I’ve seen before when I was a little girl, I think, but remembered to forget.
That night — before my father caught us in the shed, before my sister was violently knocked over and cracked her skull against the concrete ground, before my father locked me up in Swan Lake to keep me quiet — I managed to steal some of his films and hide them in my seahorse bag.
Up and until now, I haven’t had the courage to watch my sister’s movie. For some reason, Daisy’s death and my guilt for keeping silent, and my determination to not fall into my old OCD patterns, spurs me on to face the past.
I slip out the Wedding Day DVD from the container and slide it into my laptop drive. I gulp in breaths in the stale air, and hug my knees to my chin as the screen flickers into life.
My sister’s wedding to Archer.
Elizabeth is sat on a bed wearing her white wedding dress. She has her hair pinned up in a chignon, like a bride. She looks nervous as one too. This film is old. She looks younger, maybe only seventeen. But her eyes are the same, scarred . . . scared.
As the camera pans back I see she’s in Archer’s studio at Pleasurepark. They’ve put a bottle of Buck’s Fizz on the table, and pink flowers, trying to make it look like a hotel room. But I can see the plastic table is still stained, the sheets on the bed aren’t hotel fresh, and the flowers are plastic.
Elizabeth looks up at the screen, and says hesitantly, ‘I was waiting for this night. I’m a virgin.’
‘That’s okay, I’ll be gentle.’
It’s Archer’s voice. Playful, coming from somewhere off-camera. Whoever is filming doesn’t care about him, and zooms in to focus only on Elizabeth. In the reflection of the window I can see three other men.
One is hidden behind the camera, the other two are just leaning against the wall, watching.
The picture is filled with Archer’s naked back, as he squats on the edge of the bed and reaches behind Elizabeth to unzip the dress.
She looks directly at the camera, a tight smile. ‘I’m so happy right now. Can’t wait for everything that’s coming, the honeymoon, moving to our flat.’
Archer has released her breasts. He’s not responding to anything she says. Elizabeth has her own script. A script of her own fantasy.
My sister’s dream wedding was a fake. Her engagement to Archer was a fake. It was all a sick fantasy in his under-age pornographic movie.
‘Let’s take this dress off.’
She sits straighter,
