The Girls in the Garden Read online

  Pip felt her stomach lurch, a huge surge of molten marshmallows rising through her gut toward her mouth. And then a terrible pang of something else. Something wrong and bad. Almost like excitement. She turned away.

  “Where are you going?” Tyler hissed.

  “Home.”

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that you saw her? Like that she’s a slag?”

  “She’s not a slag!”

  “Er . . .” Tyler directed Pip’s gaze back to the benches.

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” she said. “I don’t even care.”

  Tyler grabbed her shoulder and turned her around to face her. “This,” she snarled, “is disgusting. Someone needs to know about this. They are children,” she said, her fingertips digging into Pip’s bones. “They are fucking children.”

  And then she stormed away from her, her eyes filled with tears, her hands held in small pointed fists at her sides.

  Now it was Pip’s turn to call out: “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she shouted back. “Nowhere!”

  Pip watched her stamping across the lawn toward the side gates, her thin ponytail swinging back and forth with each step. She saw her kick the trunk of a tree as she passed it, then she saw her disappear into the shadows briefly before slamming the side gate shut behind her.

  Pip glanced back at the figures behind her. Someone was passing the cigarette to Dylan, although Pip was beginning to suspect it wasn’t a cigarette. She watched Dylan inhale on it, then offer it to Grace. Grace shook her head and climbed off Dylan’s lap.

  Then Pip saw a circle of light swinging back and forth on the grass.

  “Pip? Is that you?” Her mother’s voice.

  Pip looked at the teenagers on the hill to see if they’d heard. She saw someone stub out the cigarette, heard loud whispers, a quick rearrangement of bodies.

  “What are you doing out here all on your own?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I was with Tyler. She just went inside. Literally.”

  Her mother was by her side now. Pip pulled her to her, absorbing the familiarity of her body and her smell.

  “Where’s Grace?”

  “Somewhere up there, I think.” She pointed up the hill.

  Clare called for her and Grace appeared almost immediately, wide-eyed and smiling. “Hi, Mum! Sorry. I lost track of the time.”

  “I tried calling you both,” she said. “Neither of you answered.”

  “I left my phone in the tent,” said Grace.

  “So did I,” said Pip.

  Clare tutted and touched their hair. “If you’re going to disobey me at least have your phones with you.”

  They collected their phones from the tent and then they walked, the three of them, arms linked, across the park, back to their flat.

  In bed that night, Pip stared at Grace across the bedroom.

  “Don’t you think you’re a bit young?” she began.

  Grace stared at her darkly, as if daring her to say what she thought she might be about to say. “For what?”

  “For what you were doing with Dylan?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything with Dylan.”

  “You were. I saw you.”

  “You mean you were watching?”

  “No. I wasn’t watching. I was with Tyler and she said, ‘Look at this.’ And it was you and Dylan. And then I stopped looking. I’m not a pervert.”

  Grace groaned. “Fucking Tyler,” she hissed under her breath. “What is her fucking problem?”

  “Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? She’s jealous.”

  “Fuck’s sake. What of? It’s not like Dylan is her boyfriend or anything.”

  “No,” said Pip, “but he’s her best friend.”

  “And what have I got to do with that? They can still be best friends. I’m not stopping them.”

  Pip didn’t say what she wanted to say, that how could Tyler be best friends with Dylan when he was with Grace all the time. Instead she opened her book and pretended to read.

  “You won’t tell Mum, will you?” said Grace, her voice soft and scared.

  “Of course I won’t.” Pip had always kept Grace’s secrets, from when they were tiny, always proud to be entrusted with them.

  “Or about the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?”

  “You know, what the others were doing?”

  “The drugs, you mean?” Pip felt weird even saying the word.

  “Yes. And that was nothing to do with me. I don’t do that kind of stuff. I never would. You know,” she said, turning on her side to face Pip, “cannabis can give you paranoid schizophrenia?”

  Pip looked at her questioningly.

  “Seriously, Pip, this is important. Mental illness can be hereditary. Which means that you or I might have it in our DNA already. And if we smoke cannabis, it could bring it out. And we could end up with it.” Her eyes were wide and imploring. “We must never take drugs. Never.”

  “’Kay,” said Pip. “Whatevs.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise, okay?”

  “No, really promise me.”

  Pip rolled her eyes, but deep down she felt touched by her sister’s concern. “I really promise. I promise. Promise. Promise. Promise!”

  She smiled and Grace smiled.

  “My best girl,” said Grace.

  “And mine,” said Pip.

  Pip fell asleep that night with a lightness in her heart that she hadn’t felt for a long time.

  16

  “Look at this, Mrs. H.!”

  Adele turned at the sound of Gordon’s booming voice behind her. She looked down, expecting to see him in his chair, and then had to raise it when she realized that he was standing.

  “Gordon!” she exclaimed. “You’re up!”

  “Yes,” he said. “Whatsername, physio woman, she noticed how much weight I’d lost, told me I should give the crutches a try. I mean, Christ, look at this.” He pulled out the waistband of his old-man jeans to display the looseness. “I’m fading away!”

  But for once he didn’t sound cross about it. He sounded triumphant. And Adele noticed he’d lost some of the disturbing redness to his face, the look he’d had for so long of a boil that was about to pop. It was possible, for the first time in years, to see the handsome man he’d once been.

  “That’s amazing, Gordon,” she said, “so good to see you on your feet again! I mean your, well, your foot.”

  He laughed out loud at her faux pas. “Good to be upright,” he said, “and pain-free. But listen, Mrs. H., bit of a favor to ask you. Are you going to the shops at all today?”

  “I certainly am.”

  “Well, there’s something I need you to get for me.”

  “Right,” she said to Gordon a few hours later, unloading shopping onto the table. “They didn’t have the one you asked for, so I got you this.” She held it toward him.

  “Is it brown?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s brown. Slightly lighter than the one you’re used to. But I think it will suit you better.”

  “As long as it’s brown, I don’t give a shit.”

  “Good,” she said, “right, well, shall we do it now?”

  “No time like the present, Mrs. H.”

  She fetched an old towel from the airing cupboard, sat Gordon on a kitchen chair, and pinned the towel around his shoulders. Then she opened the package of hair dye and read the instructions. It hadn’t been strictly true that they didn’t have his shade of brown in stock. They’d had plenty of choice in the “unnaturally, creepily dark brown for a seventy-year-old man” department. But she’d chosen something lighter, hopefully less alarming.

  The girls were in the park and in their rooms, their lessons over for the day. Leo was still at work. Scout lay under the table at Gordon’s feet. The kitchen radio was tuned in to Radio 6. Adele mixed the ingredients of the hair dy
e together, put on some clear plastic gloves, and then, using a plastic comb, parted Gordon’s silky hair and began squeezing the cream into his snowy-white roots.

  “Does Affie do this for you at home?”

  “Of course she does. Or one of her daughters.”

  “Her daughters? But they’re only young, aren’t they?”

  “They’re eleven.”

  Affie’s first husband had died when she was pregnant with twin girls. They’d been a year old when Gordon had met her through an Anglo-African dating website ten years ago.

  “Gosh,” she said, “and you’ve got them doing your hair!”

  “It’s different there,” he said. “Children aren’t put on bloody pedestals. They’re brought up to take responsibility for their homes, to respect old people. They wouldn’t see it as an imposition to do my hair. They’d see it as part of their role as a member of a family. None of this fucking eye-rolling and tutting that Western children do. You know, those girls of yours, yes, they’re all very polite with their hello-how-are-yous and their offering around the drinks to guests, but they treat you like a fucking slave, Mrs. H. That middle one . . .”

  “Fern.”

  “Yes, yes, Fern. The other day I watched her peel a satsuma and then just leave the peel. Pile it all up in a neat little mound and leave it there. For her slave to dispose of. Christ, if one of Affie’s girls did that she’d beat them black and blue. Or I would.”

  Adele stopped in her tracks, the bottle of dye suspended above Gordon’s head. “What?”

  “Well, not back and blue. But a clip here and there. Of course.”

  “But, Gordon, they’re not even your children. How could you bear to lay a finger . . . ?”

  “They are my children,” he said. “I’ve raised them from babies. I pay for their schooling, their clothing, their food. They call me Papa. Of course they’re my children.”

  “Doesn’t Affie mind?”

  “Mind? No. Why would she mind? She expects me to discipline them. She’d think I was spoiling them if I didn’t. And if there’s one thing you don’t find very often in central Africa, it’s spoiled children. Leo’s mother, my first wife—Christ, she spoiled our boys. Spoiled all three of them. I tried to keep discipline in this house but she wouldn’t let me. If I so much as laid a hand on one of her precious sons she wouldn’t talk to me for days.” He sighed, sadly, as though his troubles were deep and endless.

  “But they’ve all turned out okay, haven’t they? You know, Gordon, with parenting there’s a long game and a short game. The aim of the short game is to make your children bearable to live with. Easy to transport. Well behaved in public places. In other words, to make your own life easier. And, yes, you can achieve that with punishments, with discipline, with a clip here and there. But the aim of the long game is to produce a good human being. And personally, I don’t believe that you need to play the short game in order to win the long game. I genuinely believe you can skip it. That it’s optional.”

  There was a beat of weighty and ominous silence before Gordon spoke.

  “That is utter, utter, utter bullshit. Dear Christ, Mrs. H., it’s in the middle of your so-called short game that the worst things can happen. Your dear, oh-so-innocent children are running wild out there, just like my boys did, and look what happened there.”

  Adele drew a breath. “What happened?”

  “Well, you know, the business with the girl. Phoebe. The one who died.”

  “But that had nothing to do with your sons, with Leo.”

  “Didn’t it?”

  “No! Of course it didn’t!”

  “If you say so.”

  “Of course I say so! Jesus, Gordon. What are you going on about?” She shook her head crossly.

  “I’m talking about kids, Mrs. H. Terrible, dreadful, blasted awful kids. They’ve all got a darkness inside them. They’ve all got the capacity for evil. Give them free range over a piece of territory, like that out there, and you’ve got Lord of the Flies. You cannot afford to take your eye off the ball for a second. Not for even a second. You know, you think you’re keeping your girls all pure and unsullied in this gilded cage of yours. But what you don’t seem to realize is that you can protect children from the world, but you can’t protect children from themselves.”

  Adele’s thoughts raced horribly to the strange passage in Rhea’s memoir: the Howes boys hanging around with no tops on, acting like gangsters and hoodlums with their gold chains and their ghetto blaster. And the girls, the young, young girls, being passed from brother to brother. Until one of them died.

  She shook her head to dislodge the image and slowly she roused herself back to the present. She combed the dye through Gordon’s thick hair, allowing the sharp chemical tang to seep into the membranes inside her nose. Then she covered his head with a clear plastic cap and said, “There you go, Gordon, twenty minutes and you’ll be a vision.”

  Still shaken by Gordon’s words, Adele watched the girls from the terrace later that evening. Ever since Catkin had been young enough to toddle across the park on her own and find her way back home again, Adele had used it as an unpaid babysitter. Her children were safe out there. She could concentrate on other things. Cook a meal. Tidy a room. Make a phone call. And as the years had gone by and her girls had got bigger and made friends, spending hours out there instead of minutes, she’d become more and more dependent on the space it gave her. As far as she was concerned the park was an extension of her home. There were other people out there, but they had her children’s best interests at heart, just as she had their children’s best interests at heart. Phoebe’s death, all those summers before, had been just one of those things. Nothing to do with the community or with the children. Just a wild child come to a sticky end.

  But it was a fragile alchemy too, she realized, and the arrival of the two new girls had disordered things. Dylan and Tyler didn’t seem as close anymore. Catkin was pulling away from the gang. There was a fragility between them all that had never been there before. Was it possible, she thought, that something sinister was going on? That the “playing” that had evolved over the years into “hanging out” had now begun to evolve into something darker?

  Willow was indoors with another friend of hers from the park called Sophie, playing with her chinchilla. Catkin lay in the sun at the top of the hill, her head rested on a rolled-up sweater, reading a book that she was holding above her head. Fern was on the swings, her long legs bent beneath her into acute triangles, listening to music. At the other end of the park were Pip and Grace, sitting under one of the willow trees, cross-legged, talking in that intense way of theirs.

  The scene was as she’d expected it to be: innocent, gentle, an unruffled oasis. She stretched out a hand to pull the dog to her and ran her hands over his powder-puff ears. Then she heard the side gate slam and loud laughter and the whizz and whirr of bicycle wheels. A moment later Tyler and Dylan streaked past Adele’s terrace, engaged in some kind of high-octane race. Tyler stood astride her bike, majestically. Dylan crouched forward, his jaw jutting out determinedly.

  “Hi, you two!” Adele called after them, but they didn’t hear her. She saw them do a full circuit of the park and then come to a breathless halt near Catkin. They stopped there for a while. Catkin put down her book and brought herself up to a sitting position, shielding her eyes from the sun with her forearm while she talked to them. Fern wandered over in that slouchy, nothing-interests-me-in-the-slightest way of hers and they all sat together for a while chatting. Adele watched with interest to see what Grace and Pip would do. She saw them look over and discuss the situation. She saw Pip shake her head. Then Grace shrugged, got to her feet, and wandered toward the group while Pip went home.

  Adele saw Tyler staring as Grace approached, then look her up and down slowly in that awful, forensic way that girls do. Then she saw Dylan take Grace’s hand briefly in his before letting it go. Tyler clocked the gesture, picked up her bike, then turned and strode across the park toward the
gates.

  “Where are you going?” Fern called out.

  “Home,” she replied.

  The four children on the hill stared after her for a while, then turned and looked at Dylan. Dylan shrugged. Then they all went and sat on the benches.

  So, thought Adele, that’s all it was. Grace and Dylan were an item. Tyler was jealous. Pip felt alienated by all the drama. Just normal, teenage shenanigans. Nothing darker than that.

  She pulled Scout onto her lap and held him upside down, like a baby. She stared into his eyes for a moment and he stared back into hers. She felt moved suddenly by the innocence of him, the complete lack of guile. It was the same look she’d seen in the eyes of her children when they were babies, and it was heartbreaking.

  She glanced up at the sound of Leo’s voice. She carried the dog to her back gate, where she peered around the corner. She saw him by the communal entrance to the park. He had a Waitrose carrier bag in each hand and was talking to Tyler. He was leaning down, watching her intently as she talked. Then he put down the carrier bags and encircled her in his arms. She buried her face deep into the space between his pectorals, her hands squeezed together against his chest. He kissed the crown of her head and rubbed his hands down her hair. Then they pulled away from each other and he tipped her face up with a thumb under her chin and wiped a tear from her cheek and she smiled, sadly, and he smiled and then they said a few more words to each other before Tyler reached up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, righted her bike, and disappeared up the alleyway toward the gates.

  Leo collected his shopping bags and greeted Adele with a smile when he saw her waiting for him on their terrace. “Hello, lover.”

  She smiled thinly. Tyler had always had an affectionate relationship with Leo. She’d been one of those children who climbed onto people’s laps without invitation, fiddled with ­people’s hair, insisted on games of peekaboo with strangers, who instinctively sought to beguile and ensnare. And Leo had long been a favored object of her widespread affections.