The Girls in the Garden Page 12

  “Looks sore,” said Adele.

  “It’s fine. It’s healing.”

  Adele nodded but kept her gaze on Tyler. She didn’t look quite right. Despite being something of a tomboy, she’d always been strangely meticulous about her appearance—couldn’t bear to have a rip in her jeans or a tangle in her hair. Adele had put this down to the influence of her mother, who, despite—in her opinion—being a high-functioning alcoholic and heavy recreational drug user, always looked immaculate. But Tyler looked slightly dog-eared today: her hair needed a wash; her Converse were gray with a frayed hole on one side. Her skin looked dry. And then there were those scratches on her arms.

  There was a slam as Leo arrived at the front door. The dog scrambled to his feet, Willow darted to the hallway, everyone turned expectantly to look toward the door, and then he walked in and the whole atmosphere lifted. Tyler’s face lit up as it always did when she saw Leo. She’d adopted Leo as her surrogate father from a young age and because she didn’t have to live with him, she still saw him with a golden, childish lack of objectivity.

  Within moments of his arrival all the children were out in the park loudly collaborating to get the tent up. Max wandered across and joined in. Smaller children, curious and wide-eyed, stood and watched from the sidelines. Neighbors came over to chat. Catkin wheeled Gordon out and he sat, his half-empty wineglass clutched in his fist, passing a running commentary on the foolhardiness of all involved. It was a day short of the equinox, and the sun sat high in the evening sky. It would not grow dark for hours. Leo brought out chilled wine in a thermal sleeve and a stack of plastic cups, offering it around to all the adults. Up above, Rhea sat on her balcony, her rabbit on her lap, a glass of wine in her own hand, large sunglasses obscuring her small-featured face, the sun glinting off her golden chains and oversized earrings. She held her glass aloft to Adele’s and called something down that Adele couldn’t hear above the din of conversation. Adele raised her glass up to Rhea and smiled and felt that swell of joy she always felt at this time of the year when the park came back to life. She hadn’t eaten since midday and the icy wine hit her senses like an intravenous shot of pleasure. If, quite against all of Adele’s naturally held beliefs, it turned out that there was an afterlife, she strongly suspected that in heaven it would always be a Friday night. Any Friday night would do, even a gray wet one at the fag-end of January, but this Friday night in particular, with the prospect of another three hours of daylight, a low nighttime temperature of sixty-four degrees, the weekend lying ahead of them, her children engaged and happy with their friends, and the early softening effects of a good white wine, this Friday night would be a good one to live over and over again, in perpetuity.

  Adele cupped her eyes against the sun as two figures approached. She’d thought at first that it was children. Then realized it was Pip and Clare, who was looking very girlish in a summer dress, her short hair held off her face with a thin black band. She held up a welcoming hand. “Hi!” she said. “Pip! Clare!”

  “Hi,” Clare said.

  Adele tipped her glass toward the tent. “What do you think of our monster tent?”

  Clare appraised it. “Very nice,” she said.

  Leo got to his feet as she approached. “Clare,” he said, “hi. Can I interest you in a glass of wine?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Just a small one.”

  “There you go.” He handed her a cup. “Cheers.”

  Pip slid into the tent to join the other kids while Clare sat down on the grass next to Adele and sipped her wine. “Can never get used to how different it looks from over here,” she said, surveying the sweep of park.

  “I know,” said Leo. “That’s the magic of the park, the way it was laid out to give so many different aspects. Your side was designed to feel like a country hamlet, you know, all the little paths and nooks and crannies. Whereas this side was meant to be sweeping and grandiose.”

  “Looking down on the little people?” Clare suggested drily.

  “Well, yes, I suppose. Like the old estates with the big house at the crown and the workers somewhere at the bottom. Except of course this is central London and we’re all equal now.” He laughed.

  They all turned to look at the tent, which was currently bulging with outlined parts of children’s bodies, shrieks of mirth, and overexcitement emanating from within. “So nice to see them all actually playing,” said Adele. “Instead of just sitting about.”

  “I know,” said Clare. “I miss the playing.”

  “Such a funny age, isn’t it?” said Adele. “Thirteen?”

  “Bittersweet,” said Leo.

  “Animals,” Gordon growled from the terrace. “Animals when they’re born, animals when they’re grown. That’s all there is to it. And you lot, you modern parents, you sit and you talk and you talk and you talk, like you can make any difference to any of it.” He snapped his left hand open and shut. “Well, you can’t. Keep them clean. Keep them fed. Tell them what the rules are. Give them a good hard nip if they break the rules. Let them know who’s boss. Then, when they’re not animals anymore, let them go. That’s all there is to it. I fear for this generation of children, I really do. Can’t take a fucking crap without Mummy and Daddy standing over them and analyzing it all. Making fucking notes.” He mimed scribbling into a notepad and snarled.

  Adele and Leo groaned.

  “Gordon, for Christ’s sake,” said Adele. “Every generation does things differently. And it’s all about getting the balance right. I personally think all these kids are amazing. They’re confident and focused and sociable.”

  “Call that middle one of yours confident, Mrs. H.? Really? What sort of thirteen-year-old still needs a comfort blanket?”

  “It’s not a comfort blanket, Gordon, it’s a sensory thing. She just likes the feel of it.”

  “Bullshit. It’s a comfort blanket. Poor child probably can’t get over the fact that she’s not a baby anymore. Wants to crawl back up your front passage and into the womb.”

  Adele, Clare, and Leo all exchanged outraged looks. Then they shook their heads and laughed. It got to a certain point with Gordon when there was no suitable response. When you just needed to shake your head and change the subject.

  As the sky glowered and the sun slid behind the terrace beyond, Leo lit a match and set his campfire alight. The children emerged from the tent, tousled and eager. Adele passed around the special toasting marshmallows she’d found in a local deli: big, fat ones, the size of muffins, speared onto extra-long wooden stakes. Clare finished her wine and said she was going in. “I want you in when it’s dark, girls,” she said to Grace and Pip. “I mean it. I don’t care what everyone else is doing. Ten o’clock and no later.” Adele watched her walking back across the lawn, tiny and unsteady on her feet. She’d only had two cups of wine but seemed slightly unstitched. The campfire crackled red and amber, sending tiny sparkles of gold into the gray night sky. The children were peaceful and contemplative, their faces patterned with coppery shadows.

  Adele let her soul fill up with it all and poured herself another glass of wine.

  15

  Clare sat in her own backyard. It was ten o’clock and the sun had finally gone down, leaving behind a sky that was a curious, reddish shade of black. But the park was still bustling and alive, filled with the echoing whoop and holler of children roaming freely, the sounds of wineglasses and raised voices.

  The flat seemed eerily quiet without the girls in it. Every moment or two Clare would stretch her neck just a little, looking out through the trees for the shadowy outlines of her girls, silently hoping for one of them to appear at the back gate moaning about something or maybe even crying a bit, at which juncture Clare would be able to stride across the park bristling with annoyance, call the other one in, lock the back door on all three of them, and go peacefully to bed.

  Her thoughts returned to her drinks earlier with Leo and Adele. She’d only stayed an hour. Just long enough for two glasses of wine. She was a feeble
drinker; more than a glass or two and her eyes would cross, her legs turn to jelly, people would have to help her home or tuck her into a spare bed. More than three or four drinks and in all likelihood she would throw up. Possibly endearing as a young girl, but now, in her early thirties, with two children the same height as her, horribly unseemly.

  A breeze blew across from the trees and ruffled the pages of that morning’s edition of Metro on the chair next to her. She’d picked it up at the tube station earlier even though she wasn’t getting on a tube. She liked the commuter papers. They were written for people who inhabited a different world to hers. She’d never been a commuter. She’d been a student. Then she’d been a wife. Then she’d been a mother. All before she was twenty-one. And she liked to live vicariously in this world of stolen glances across carriages and texted quick-fire observations, of delayed trains from Orpington and people looking after fainting strangers on the underground. It made her feel like a part of it all. It made her feel normal.

  There was no response from Grace’s phone so she called Pip’s. No response from there either. She sighed and went inside to fetch a torch.

  The air was still so warm, even with the light breeze that had begun to pick up. As she reached the brow of the hill she looked up and saw the old woman still sitting on her balcony. The sweeping curve of the stucco terrace on the other side was patterned with rectangular cutouts, each a different shade of gold, each framing a different life, a different set of secrets and problems. It reminded Clare of one of those old-fashioned nativity calendars, with a beautiful vignette behind each door instead of a chocolate.

  Leo sat out on his terrace, his laptop open on the table in front of him, a bottle of beer at his elbow, the dog by his feet. He smiled as she approached. “Hello, again,” he said. She could see the lines in his handsome face in the harsh up-light from his screen. His heavy eyebrows threw dark shadows up onto his brow and he looked vaguely ghoulish.

  “Hi,” she said. “Just looking for the girls. Have you seen them?”

  He cupped his hand around his ear. “I can certainly hear them,” he said. “But I can’t say I’ve seen any of them for a while.”

  “Oh,” said Clare, her heart rate picking up. It was bright here in the light of the big houses, but in other corners of the park it was dark. She turned and looked over her shoulder. “Do you think . . . ?”

  “They’re fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about them. They’re all together.” Then he turned and looked over his shoulder, through the doors behind him. He beckoned her over. He patted the other side of the bench he was sitting on. She sat next to him, conscious of the warmth emanating from him, his square-tipped fingers wrapped around the beer bottle, his bare feet close to hers beneath the table. She breathed in the smell of him and briefly allowed herself a moment’s imagining of another world, a parallel world, where she had met a man like Leo, married a man like Leo, had her children with a man like Leo. A world where she woke up next to this fragrant, sane man every day. Where she got to keep him and her daughters got to keep him and every day was blissful in its simplicity and predictability. Did Adele have any idea how lucky she was? she wondered.

  “Look,” he said, checking over his shoulder again that there was no one standing behind them, and then angling the screen of his laptop toward her. “Roxy Hancock. Thirteen Basildon Gardens, E11. And there’s her mobile phone number.”

  Clare widened her eyes at him. “How did you—?”

  “Easy,” he said. “I told you. Found her name on IMDb, Googled her name with the Walthamstow postcode. It came up on a movie freelancers’ site. Took less than a minute.”

  “Right,” she said, staring at the information on the screen. “God.”

  Leo leaned back and stretched himself out. His T-shirt rode up slightly, revealing a strip of soft, hairy stomach. Clare pulled her gaze from it.

  “So, now you know where he’s living.”

  “Yes, I do, thank you. But, God, I’m not sure I . . .”

  “You could call her?” he said, leaning forward again, closing the gap between his T-shirt and the waistband of his shorts. “Send her a text? Whatever. It’s up to you. But I think it’s important, you know. Just in case. Here.” He passed her a piece of paper. “I wrote it all down for you. Keep it somewhere safe. And now”—he turned his attention back to the screen—“I am going to delete my search history. Because in a house full of people like this you really don’t know who might stumble across things they shouldn’t.”

  He did this and then turned to smile at her. “There you go. All safe and hidden away.”

  She wanted to touch him in some way. Place the palm of her hand against his cheek. Squeeze his knee. Kiss his hand. She wanted, in some way, to claim him. Instead she said, “Thank you. That’s really kind of you.” And he smiled at her in that soft-eyed, attentive way of his and said, “You are very welcome.”

  The park felt terrifyingly alive. Bushes rustled and crackled. Things darted across the lawns. Shadows grew and shrank and grew again.

  Pip jumped.

  “It’s just cats,” Tyler said. “You know they’re nocturnal, right?”

  They were sitting on the grass on the brow of the hill, hiding in the shadows of a full-grown chestnut tree. It was just the two of them. Pip wasn’t sure why. It had been a really strange evening. She hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place and then Willow had come to the back door and basically bullied her into coming to the campfire. And then it had been fun for a while; they’d mucked about in the tent and toasted giant marshmallows and her mum had been there for a while too and Pip had been having a really nice time. And then, when the campfire had burned itself down and her mum had gone home, things had changed. The older ones had disappeared into the shadows by the benches and she and Willow had hung out in the playground. Then a few minutes later Tyler had joined them.

  That had been okay for a while too. It was still light then and Willow had been there and Tyler had been happy playing along with their slightly weird, hyper game where they were pretending to be orphans who’d run away to the circus (this was Willow’s game, of course. Willow was totally mad and, like Pip, a big fan of Jacqueline Wilson). And then Willow had gone inside and Tyler had said, “Let’s go and sit over there.” And that was about an hour ago and they were still sitting here.

  Every now and then Tyler would jump to her feet and peer around the chestnut tree at the other kids on the benches at the top.

  “What are they doing?” asked Pip.

  “Not a lot,” she replied. “Just sort of hanging out.”

  “Shall we go and sit with them?”

  “No. Let’s stay here.”

  Pip’s shoulders dropped. She felt manipulated and uncomfortable.

  “Have you got a boyfriend?” Tyler asked, suddenly and unexpectedly.

  “What? No! Of course not. I’m only twelve. Have you?”

  Tyler grimaced. “No fucking way,” she said. “Boys my age are all losers.”

  “Apart from Dylan?”

  “Yeah. Well. I used to think that. Now I’m not so sure.” She picked at the skin around her fingernails and threw a fleeting glance in the direction of the others. Then she turned abruptly to look at Pip. “Has Grace said anything?” she asked. “About her and Dylan?”

  “No. Not really. I did ask her about that photo on Instagram. The one you showed me. And she said there were other people in the room. Like, some friend of Dylan’s from school or something.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Well, that’s what she said.”

  “Dylan never invites friends home. He’s too embarrassed. You know his mum’s, like, virtually a hoarder and their flat is really tiny and dirty and his mum’s really weird and unfriendly. No,” she said conclusively, “they were on their own up there. And your sister is a liar.”

  The accusation rankled. Pip felt she should be able to tell Tyler that she was wrong. That Grace would never lie to her. But she didn’t believe that
to be the case anymore.

  “Well, even if she was lying about that, what does it matter?” she countered. “She’s twelve years old. He’s thirteen. It’s not like they’d be having sex or anything.”

  Tyler looked at her pityingly. “Shit,” she said, “really? Do you really believe that?”

  “What time is it?” Pip asked, desperate now to get away from Tyler, to go home to her mother. She’d left her phone in the tent and she was too scared to go and get it in the dark on her own.

  Tyler pulled out her own phone, looked at it, and said, “Five past ten.”

  “Shit,” said Pip, “I need to go. I told my mum I’d be home at ten.”

  “Five minutes isn’t going to make any difference,” Tyler snapped. Then she put a finger to her lips and shushed her. “Listen,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “It’s gone really quiet up there. Come on.”

  “What?” She scrambled to her feet after Tyler. “Where are we going?”

  Tyler shushed her again. “Just come.”

  They tiptoed together through the darkness toward the benches at the top of the hill.

  “Stop!” Tyler put a hand against Pip’s chest, her gaze straight ahead of them, like a hunter with their prey in view. “Get down!”

  Pip dropped to her knees. They were a few feet from the benches. “Look!” Tyler said, turning to Pip, her eyes burning with triumph and hurt. “Just look!”

  It was darker here; no light from the houses reached this part of the park and it took Pip’s eyes a second or two to work out what she was seeing. And then she knew. Lying side by side on the grass, staring into the starless sky, were Fern and Catkin. They were passing a lit cigarette between them, a tiny nub of glowing gold that shone hot red every time one of them inhaled. And there, on the bench, a kind of two-headed animal which, as Pip’s eyes made sense of things, slowly revealed itself to be her sister astride Dylan, her legs wrapped fully around his torso, her face planted entirely on his, his hands in her hair, their twinned bodies rolling together like a dance.