‘No! Let’s just go back to mine. You need to sober up.’
She shrugs her shoulders and huffs off towards my house. She falls over the stile getting into the field and I have to try and pull her up off the ground where she’s rolling around, laughing like an idiot. I’m getting really cross. I’m thinking about how I could accidentally kick her in the face, but I eventually get her up and get her to my house, make her drink a pint of water and then put her into a sleeping bag on the floor of my room where she immediately falls asleep.
I think about staying up but then Mum will get home and she’ll know something is wrong if I’m not with Molly and just go on and on and on, so I get changed and lie down on my bed instead. I run through some breathing exercises to try and get rid of how furious I am about this whole horrible evening, until finally I fall asleep.
I don’t know how long I’ve been dreaming for but I wake up with a jerk. Molly is kneeling up beside me, staring at me. The edges of her face in the dim light make it look like one of those ancient Greek statues, all smooth curves and blind eyes.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I whisper.
‘Did he kiss you?’ she says, her breath hot and sour-sweet.
‘Who? Tristan? No, I pushed him off before he could.’
‘No, I meant Newboy. I saw you with him in the garden, I saw you talking. Did he kiss you? Did you have your first kiss?’
‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I say, but I remember the way he touched me and uneasiness runs right through me, making me shiver.
‘Are you scared?’
‘Of what? Being kissed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I can fix that,’ and before I know what’s happening she brushes my hair away from my face, fingers slipping through, and kisses me hard on my mouth. For a second I think I feel her tongue against my lip, a dart of warm satin, but then she sits back before I can push her away.
‘Now you’ve had your first kiss,’ she says, giggling, and then she lies back down, falls asleep again.
I don’t understand what is wrong with her. What the hell was that about? The firm belief I had in Molly, who I thought she was, is starting to erode and break away into sharp pieces in my mind. I feel unsure, like I’m losing control. I don’t like to lose control. It brings back bad memories. I can’t let what happened before in London with her happen again here with Molly. I won’t. I’ve worked too hard.
I run my hand over my stomach and I can feel rough, sore grazes on it from where Tristan must have scratched me trying to grab me. I hate him, I absolutely hate him. How dare he do that to me? It’s bad enough when he tries to hang around with us, spotty, always foul-mouthed. He makes me sick. I end up lying awake for a long time, watching the pale light shine through the window silver onto Molly’s hair.
It looks like she’s burning.
London
‘Is she asleep?’ Rachel had crept into a quiet house to find her mother in the kitchen, washing up.
‘Yes, she went up at seven, love. School is tiring her out.’
‘I’m sorry I missed bedtime again, this campaign is insane.’
‘Aren’t they all?’
Rachel decided not to answer the rhetorical question, which had been accompanied by a stern look. She knew her mother was unhappy with the hours she had been putting in since her promotion, but she loved her new job, and she had to prove she had been the right choice.
‘How did she get on? Was she okay today?’
‘Seemed to be. She’s a quiet little thing at the best of times, she didn’t say much.’
‘I’ll pop up and tuck her in and get changed.’
‘Okay, love. Dinner’s nearly done. I got some of those nice sausages from the butchers.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
Rachel hung her handbag on the end of the banister as she went up the stairs, pulling her hair out of its tight clip as she did. It felt dry and frizzy from the irons she tortured it with every morning, but it looked much smarter straight. She hadn’t been that wild-curled art student for a long time. Pushing into her small bedroom, she cast a reproachful eye at the single bed she’d had growing up and was inhabiting again. Her little nest egg could not turn into a deposit for their own place soon enough, useful and comforting as it had been to live with her mum after everything.
She quickly took off her suit and hung it up, smoothing the sleeves and picking lint off the pencil skirt. Stripping her restrictive shirt and tights off with a sigh of relief, she swapped them for loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt. She left the confines of her room and quietly popped her head around the door to the even smaller box room, where Vivian lay sleeping.
The little girl was curled up like a bean in the middle of the bed, the covers puddled beneath her feet. Rachel padded into the room and slid her hands beneath her daughter, gently pulling her up to the pillow, tugging the covers up to cover her. She smiled, and kissed her gently on her silky head, stroked her cheek. Such a good girl. As she left she smiled again at the sight of Vivian’s little uniform neatly folded on the tiny dresser ready for the morning. It didn’t seem possible that five years had passed since she had come back, since Vivian had been born.
At the doorway she looked back again, feeling the tug of guilt that she was missing so much time with her, that she only ever seemed to see her asleep or to wake her up with a brief hug as she left
