The Girls in the Garden Read online

  2

  Dear Daddy,

  How are you? When can we see you? I miss you so much. Well, we’ve been here for ten days now. Granny came for lunch on Sunday. She made lots of weird faces. I don’t think she liked it very much. She said that Mum shouldn’t let us out in the park on our own, that there might be murderers and pedophiles hiding in the bushes! She said she’d heard a story about a young girl being found dead in a private park like ours a long time ago. And that everyone would be looking in our back windows all the time. She’s so silly sometimes!

  We went for a walk around the park after she left and me and Grace mucked around on the swings and stuff. There was nobody out there. But then yesterday after school I could hear voices outside. Children’s voices. And I looked out the window and I could see kids running about, some others on bikes.

  Anyway, me and Grace went out, just to look. We stood under the tree outside our house so that nobody could see us and we spied on them. They were kind of our age, I think. Mainly girls. Some of the girls looked a bit strange, wearing ­really weird clothes, patterned things, one had really really long hair, literally down to her bum, another one had shaved off bits and another one had dreadlocks. There was another girl who was much smaller than the others but she acted like she was probably the boss of the gang. She was really pretty with silky blond hair that looked like it had been straightened because it was so shiny. She was wearing normal clothes, jeans and stuff. And then a boy. Mixed-race. Kind of good-looking.

  This is what they look like:

  They weren’t really doing much. The smaller girl was on Rollerblades. The boy was on a bike. The other three girls were just kind of hanging about and then one of them got onto the back bit of the boy’s bike and they were cycling around and I said to Grace, Let’s go to the playground. Let’s go on the swings. Because I really wanted to get closer to them all and see them properly. But she said, I’m going indoors. I hate it out here. It’s cliquey and full of stuck-up kids.

  But I don’t think they are stuck-up really. I think they’re just all different kinds of kids, that’s all. And they probably think the same about us. Stuck-up girls! Hiding under trees! Staring at them!

  So we went inside then because I felt too shy to stay out there on my own. It’s raining today so the park’s empty. Is it raining where you are? Do you have a garden? Are you allowed out of bed? Are you even in a bed? I wish I knew more. I wish I could understand why you’re there and what they’re doing to you and how you’re feeling. I wish we could come and see you. Are you lonely? Do you remember? Do you remember anything? I’ve drawn you a picture of me in case you can’t remember my face anymore.

  And if you can’t remember what Grace looks like, it’s basically the same as me except her lips are fuller and her hair is two shades darker. And she’s got a little freckle by her eye that looks like a teardrop.

  I love you, Daddy. Get well soon.

  xxxxx

  “Okay, girls.” Adele put out her hands to gather up the exercise books handed to her by her children. “Lunchtime.”

  “What are we having?” asked Fern, uncurling herself from her usual position on the blue armchair, scratching at the stubble of her shaved temples.

  “Soup,” said Adele.

  “What sort?” asked Willow, uncrossing her legs and getting to her feet.

  “Chicken noodle.”

  “Can I go to the shops and get myself a sandwich?” asked Catkin, her hands folded into the cuffs of her sweater and held to her mouth, pensively.

  “No.”

  “Please. I can buy it with my own money.” Her blue eyes were wide and beseeching.

  “No. I don’t want you going anywhere. We won’t see you again.”

  “Oh, come on, where the hell am I going to go in the middle of the day?”

  “I have no idea, Catkin. You are an eternal mystery to me. But I’m not letting you go to the shops. And you should be saving your money for things you actually need rather than wasting it on expensive sandwiches.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “Yes. I know. And it’s good for you to learn to budget and prioritize. And while there’s a huge pan of perfectly good soup on the other side of that door, it is crazy for you to waste your money on crappy shop-bought sandwiches full of additives.”

  Catkin rolled her eyes and dropped her baby-animal stance, her arms falling angrily to her sides. “Fine,” she said. “Bring on the fucking soup.”

  Adele and her girls had their lunch in the kitchen, loosely arranged around the big farmhouse table that was one of the few things left behind from her in-laws’ inhabitation.

  It was the same table that Leo and his brothers had sat around as boys and it still bore scars and marks left there forty or more years ago, added to now by Leo’s own children.

  Catkin sat with her long legs stretched out along the bench, her back a C-shaped hump, causing her to turn her head forty-five degrees in order to reach her soup bowl. Fern sat straight-backed as always, rhythmically spooning the soup into her mouth, her body language giving nothing away, her ears taking in every last thing. Willow, meanwhile, kept up a running commentary, her soup getting cold in front of her, a habit she’d had since toddlerhood. In fact, until she was about nine years old Adele had spoon-fed her, slipping the spoon between her lips every time she paused for breath just to get the blessed food into her.

  “What’s for pudding?” she asked now.

  “Pudding?” said Adele. “You haven’t started your soup yet.”

  “Yes, but the thought of pudding will incentivize me to eat my soup.”

  “No, stopping talking for more than thirty seconds is what you need to do. And anyway, there is no pudding.”

  Willow gasped and put her hand dramatically against her heart. “Are you serious?”

  “Well, there’s crumble but you won’t eat crumble, so . . .”

  “Not even any cookies?”

  “Just those oaty ones you don’t like.”

  “I’ll eat an oaty cookie,” she said. “If that’s all there is.”

  “That’s all there is.”

  “Right then.” She picked up her spoon and started shoveling soup into her mouth.

  Fern looked at her in horror.

  “Slow down,” said Adele, “you’re splashing it everywhere.”

  “What can we do after lunch?” asked Willow, wiping soup splashes from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  Adele looked at the time. Then she checked the timetable taped to the front of her folder. “Well, it’s double maths this afternoon, so it might be good for you all to burn off a bit of energy. Why don’t you go out in the park for half an hour?”

  “It’s wet,” said Catkin.

  “No,” said Adele. “It’s damp. If you were at school it would be deemed playground weather.”

  “Yes, but we’re not at school, are we? Precisely because you didn’t like the way mainstream schools herd children around like cattle.”

  Adele sighed. “In which case, do whatever you want. But no TV. And back here at one fifteen please. With your brains switched on.”

  The girls left the table, grabbing oaty cookies and apples on their way. Adele tidied up the soup bowls and wiped the crumbs from the ripped-apart bread rolls into the palm of her hand before dropping them in the bin.

  Adele had been homeschooling her children since Catkin was five. She and Leo had decided to take her out of school halfway through her reception year when she’d come home in tears after being told off for running in the playground. For a while they’d seriously considered moving to the countryside, putting Catkin into one of those wonderful little schools with woods and fields and pigs and goats. But Leo’s revolting father had refused to sell them his half of the flat: “It’s my little bit of London! I couldn’t sleep at night without my little bit of London!”

  They’d been to see Montessori schools, Steiner schools, some of the woollier local private schools, but they hadn’t managed to
make the finances work. So Adele had given up her job as an education coordinator at an arts center—it had barely paid her anything anyway—spent a month familiarizing herself with the foundation stage of the national curriculum, and become her child’s teacher.

  Then had come Fern and then Willow and what had started off as an experiment became a way of life. Not everyone approved. Adele’s sister, Zoe, for one, thought it verged on child abuse. “But they won’t know how to play with other children,” she’d said. “And they won’t know what’s in and what’s out and everyone will think they’re weirdos!”

  “Do you think they’re weirdos?” Adele had asked in reply.

  “No. Of course not. I think they’re lovely. But I’m a middle-­aged woman. I’m not another child!”

  “They’ve got the park,” Adele would counter. “They can do all the peer-to-peer stuff they need to do out there. It’s just like a playground.”

  “Except it’s not. It’s just not. It’s just another weird thing that makes them different from other children. I couldn’t live like that.” She’d said this more than once. “Everyone being able to see in. Never being able to go and sit in your own backyard, on your own, in your bra. Always having to talk to people.”

  It was an acquired taste, Adele supposed. Sometimes she did wish she could take a blanket and a book outside and sit and read undisturbed. Sometimes she did resent other ­people’s children running through her freshly hoovered flat. But the benefits far outweighed the difficulties. And for the girls it was crucial, the lynchpin to their entire existence. Without the park her sister would probably be right, they would be odd and out on a limb. The other children were their connection to the mainstream world. And, of course, as a world heard about only through the anecdotes of friends, school did sometimes become a romanticized concept and each of the girls had on occasion begged her to let them go to school. When she was eleven years old, Fern had even taken to walking up the hill to Dylan’s school to meet him at three thirty just to feel that she was experiencing the first flush of independence like other children her age.

  Yes. Homeschooled children. Communal living. All very alternative. Verging on controversial. But to Adele, entirely and completely normal.

  At one fifteen p.m. she went to the back gate and called the girls in for afternoon school. They came, her brood, her gaggle, with their unkempt hair and their unworldly clothes, their brains filled with everything she’d ever taught them, their stomachs filled with food she’d cooked from scratch. The babies that she’d never had to hand over to the world.

  For half an hour they studied mindfulness. It had appeared on the national curriculum this year. Adele had been delighted. She’d been effectively teaching them mindfulness skills for years; she’d called it meditation although that hadn’t been quite accurate.

  The girls arranged themselves into their usual layout, long legs outstretched in wash-faded leggings and hand-me-down jeans, scrubbed faces in mindful repose, wearing holey old sweaters and unbranded sweatshirts from the charity shops along the Finchley Road—nothing from Primark, nothing from New Look, nothing ethically unsound. The girls understood. They’d watched the documentaries about the sweatshops, seen the news reports about the factory fire in Mumbai that had killed all those people. They knew fashion wasn’t as important as people. They weren’t vain. They weren’t shallow. No smartphones. No Facebook. No Instagram. All too likely to turn them into narcissists. They understood. They sneered at the posturing and posing of their contemporaries, the twelve-year-old girls in mascara puckering into camera lenses, the misguided fools on talent shows. They got it, her girls. They absolutely got it.

  They weren’t weird, Adele thought now, looking at them in turn. They were magnificent.

  3

  Pip stared up at the girl standing in front of her, squinting against the low sun. It was the blond girl, the one who looked like the leader of the park clique. She’d been watching them from a distance and then suddenly got on her bike and cycled toward them with some urgency. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” said Pip.

  “Have you just moved in?” the girl asked in a flat monotone.

  “No,” said Grace. “We moved in last month.”

  “Oh. Right. Haven’t seen you before. Who are you?”

  “I’m Pip.”

  “Pip?”

  She nodded.

  “Is that your real name?”

  Pip blinked.

  “Seriously? You’re called Pip?”

  She felt her cheeks fill with warm blood.

  “It’s her nickname,” said Grace. “Short for Pipsqueak. What we called her when she was a baby.”

  “So, what’s your real name?” The blond girl stared at her impatiently as if this conversation had been going on for long enough even though she’d been the one who’d started it.

  “Lola,” she said.

  “God, that’s a much nicer name. Why don’t you ask to be called that instead?”

  Grace spoke for her again. “The woman next door where we used to live had a really yappy dog called Lola. It put us all off.”

  “But still,” she said, “you don’t live there anymore. You could change it back now.”

  Pip shrugged. She still thought of the yappy dog when she thought of Lola. She still thought of the woman next door and the thing that had happened and, besides, she’d always been Pip. She was Pip.

  The girl stood astride her bike, a big black thing with gears. Her fine blond hair was tucked behind one double-pierced ear; her thin hands gripped the handlebars possessively. She wore denim shorts with pocket bags hanging out and a gray sweatshirt that was as wide as it was long; she had narrow feet in bright white Converse and blunt-cut fingernails.

  “What’s your name, then?” Pip asked her.

  “Tyler.”

  “Tyler like the boy’s name?”

  “Yeah.”

  Pip nodded. She looked like a Tyler.

  “Where do you live?” asked Tyler.

  “That flat there,” said Grace.

  Tyler nodded. “Where do you go to school?”

  “Mount Elizabeth.”

  “Are you twins?” She narrowed her eyes at them.

  “No.”

  “You look like twins. Are you sure you’re not twins?”

  “Positive,” said Grace.

  “I know someone at Mount Elizabeth. She says you’re allowed to smoke. Is that true?”

  “No!”

  “Or maybe she said swear. Are you allowed to swear?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Pip tried to think of something to say. But Tyler had lost interest, and was scouring the park from left to right. She stopped when she saw a boy in the distance; then she pressed her feet to the pedals and propelled the huge bike across the park toward him, her hair blowing out behind her.

  Pip watched for a while. It was the good-looking boy, the tall one with bobbly golden-tipped Afro hair and green eyes. The boy’s gaze fixed onto Tyler. Pip watched him pull off his school tie and absentmindedly roll it into a ball which he tucked into the pocket of his posh school blazer. Tyler said something to him and dismounted from the bike. Then they walked slowly in the opposite direction, toward the square of benches at the furthest end of the park, Tyler wheeling the bike, the boy strolling with his hands in his pockets, the pair of them deep in conversation.

  Pip and Grace looked at one another. Grace shrugged. “What was that all about?”

  “Maybe she was just being friendly?”

  Grace shook her head. “Weird.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Skinny,” said Grace dismissively.

  “I guess.”

  Pip stared into the anemone-shaped head of a clover flower growing by her feet. She pinched it between her thumb and index finger and then brought the honey smell to her nose. A sharp breeze circled the half-moon of the park, feathering the tendrils of weeping willows, biting through the wool of Pip’s sweater. The last slice of set
ting sun fell behind a chimney stack and the temperature dropped.

  “I’m going in,” said Grace.

  “Me too.”

  Pip turned briefly to look at Tyler and the boy again. They were sitting side by side on a bench. The bike lay flat on the grass, its back wheel still turning lazily. Tyler’s legs were pulled up into her body and the boy was laughing at something she’d said. Pip wondered how old he was, where he lived, if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. As she watched, the back gate of one of the flats across the lawn opened and three tall, thin girls emerged. One after the other. It was the strange sisters with the weird hair. They walked in height order, louchely, scuffing at the gravel on the path with old sneakers. The smallest one picked up her pace as she neared Tyler and the boy; the other two trailed behind. And then, virtually telepathically, they arranged themselves into a horseshoe huddle around the bench, a silent choreography. Pip saw Tyler nod in their direction; the boy and the sisters all turned to look at them and then they looked away again.

  “Come on,” said Grace. “I’m cold.”

  Pip followed her big sister back across the lawn and down the graveled path that led to their back gate, and as she did she heard the park whisper in their wake. It talked to itself about the things it knew, the secrets it held close within its pathways and crannies, its bowers and corners. It whispered about the people who lived behind the closed doors and the insular group of children on the bench, and of the days yet to come when the warmth of summer would bring it all back to life.

  Clare watched her girls through the kitchen window. It was the first time they’d gone out into the park without her, just to hang out. She’d seen a young girl come and talk to them. Hard-faced. Pretty. It had looked like something of an interrogation. Not exactly friendly. Then the girl had cycled away and joined up with her little gang at the other end of the park, three slightly alternative-looking girls who looked like sisters and a tall, mixed-race boy in a dark school uniform. She saw her girls now, casting backward glances at the gang on the benches, then heading back indoors. The sun was getting low. She saw Grace hugging herself to keep warm. It was nearly five o’clock. Time to think about tea.