Stolen Girl (7 page)

The timing was strange because despite Donna suddenly leaving school, for the first time in years, my life had become more settled. I no longer lived in constant fear because now I had my own gang and I felt as if, for once, I truly belonged. But just as I’d begun to feel more content at school, so my home life took a turn for the worse.

T
he atmosphere at home was now so awful that I’d dawdle all the way home from school. Mum and Dad were arguing more and more, and the house was always full of shouting. Accusations were thrown like poison arrows across the kitchen table. I didn’t know what was going on and part of me didn’t want to because, whatever it was, I knew it was something bad. I’d never ever seen them argue like this before.

It’s hard being a child when your parents fall out of love with one another. Part of the situation makes you believe that somewhere, amongst all the rows and petty misgivings, they love you just that little bit less. I hated the shouting and every time they argued I wanted to stand on my chair and scream until they stopped. Deep down I knew it wouldn’t make any difference; even if I did scream, I wondered if they’d even notice. In the end, I decided not to get caught up in it all. I reckoned the more I dragged my feet on the way home, the less I’d have to listen to.

One day, when I pushed open the front door, I realised there were no raised voices. Instead, the house was silent. In fact, it was so quiet the silence was deafening.

I sniffed at the air. There was no smell of cooking either. Instead the house smelled of dust, as though it was dead.

‘Mum?’ I called, but there was no reply.

I heard someone shush their voice. The noise was slight, barely a whisper but I followed it all the way to the kitchen. The door was closed, which was unusual. It was always open, but not tonight.

She must be in there,
I told myself.
Maybe she was hiding? Maybe she was behind the door, waiting to pounce out and shout ‘boo!’…

I burst in through the kitchen door with a huge grin on my face; this had to be a wind-up. But when I opened it, Mum wasn’t there, only Dad. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and he looked exhausted. My eyes shifted to someone else standing beside him. A tall, slim dark-haired man I’d never seen before. It was odd because neither man was speaking; Dad stared straight ahead whilst the strange man looked anxiously over at me. A forced silence hung in the air but it felt like it was packed with explosives, as though something might go off at any moment. I looked at Dad and then at the man but no one said a word. I knew I’d interrupted an important conversation, one I wasn’t privy to. Then it dawned on me: they’d shut up the moment I’d come through the front door, that’s what the ‘Shush!’ had been. Dad had a secret he didn’t want me to know, but who was the man? I was only twelve, but I was old enough to sense the atmosphere between them. Something wasn’t right.

My father’s face looked tired and drawn as if he’d not slept a wink. The strange man seemed jittery and nervous as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he should say hello.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I demanded.

Both Dad and the strange man flinched at the mention of her name. I didn’t know the man and I was sure that Mum wouldn’t know him either, so why was he looking at me like that?

Dad’s eyes were sad and somehow he suddenly looked older.

‘She’s at Diane’s,’ he said, pointing his hand in the direction of our neighbour’s house.

Diane was the same age as Mum and lived a few doors away from us at the bottom of the road. They were good friends and were always popping into each other’s houses for a cup of tea. It wasn’t odd that Mum was there but it was strange that she wasn’t here making tea and getting ready to leave for work. I closed the front door and ran to Diane’s house to find out what was going on.

My heart beat fast as everything raced through my mind. I thought about the cold cooker, no tea, the strange man standing in our kitchen…Who was he? Dad hadn’t even introduced him, yet usually that’s the first thing he would’ve done because that’s how my dad is – friendly and polite. Nothing made much sense.

Grabbing the gate to Diane’s front garden, I pulled it up high on its hinges so it would open. The gate had been like that for as long as I could remember. Diane had nagged her husband Chris to fix it time and time again but he was always busy with something else – fixing his car mostly, she complained.

I walked around the side of the house towards the back door. Diane had known me since I was a baby; she would have been shocked if I’d have knocked at the front. Clenching my fist, I tapped lightly on the glass. I didn’t even wait for an answer – it wasn’t how you did things around there. Diane’s door was always open to us.

‘Mum?’ I called out before the door had even fully opened.

I stumbled into Diane’s kitchen to find them both sitting at the table. Diane looked a little startled when she saw me – as surprised as the strange man had been. A pot of tea sat sadly in the middle of the kitchen table. There were two mugs in front of them. They were full to the brim with strong builder’s tea but they looked untouched, stagnant and stone cold. I guessed just by looking at them that Mum must have been there for ages.

As soon as she saw me, Diane became anxious. Her eyes darted nervously between me and Mum, who still had her back to me. Something was up. I noticed Diane wringing her hands in her lap, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to say. The atmosphere in the kitchen was the same as it had been at home.

‘Mum,’ I said again, my voice a little weaker. ‘There’s a strange man in our house, talking to Dad.’

Mum didn’t respond or turn around but remained seated. She was slim and I could see the outline of her spine – her shoulders hunched over down towards the table as though she’d given up. Even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was upset about something.

‘Is everything alright?’ I asked, even though I really didn’t want to know the answer.

Diane subconsciously twisted her wedding ring nervously around her finger as Mum turned to face me. Her eyes looked red, as if she’d been crying all afternoon. As she moved, I spotted something behind her – a bunch of screwed-up tissues. They were scattered all over the table. A sob caught in the back of my throat. Something was wrong and whatever it was, it was serious because Mum never cried. Never. Yet here she was,
crying in Diane’s kitchen. I tried not to let my fear show; whatever it was, I wanted her to think I was grown up enough to handle it. But I needed to know what was going on and who the strange man was.

Mum’s voice cracked with emotion as she spoke.

‘Everything’s fine, Katie – just go back home, will you? I’ll be there soon.’

But I didn’t want to go back home – I wanted to be with Mum. I wanted to know why she was crying in Diane’s house and who the strange man was making Dad look so sad back home. But Mum refused to tell me any more.

‘Katie, go home. Please,’ she said, her eyes as tired as my father’s.

I felt stuck. I didn’t want to go back to the house with the strange man in it; I didn’t want to leave Mum crying and upset. I didn’t know what to do for the best. Diane came over. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders and tried her best to reassure me.

‘Don’t worry, Katie – your mum’s just a little bit upset. Be a good girl now and go home. Don’t worry, I’ll look after her here – she’ll be fine here with me.’

With that she opened up the back door and guided me out through it. I felt a slight push in the small of my back as the door closed abruptly behind me. It was a rude thing to do but as I stood alone on Diane’s driveway, I knew something bad had happened and guessed it was to do with the strange man.

Tugging at my school socks, I hoisted them back up and ran out through the gate to our house. I’d confront them both, I decided. I’d make Dad tell me who the strange man was. But by the time I arrived, the man had gone.

‘Who was he?’ I asked.

Dad shifted uneasily in his seat. He was still sitting at the kitchen table. Like Mum, he was hunched over as if he was hugging the table – as though he’d had the stuffing knocked clean out of him.

‘No one, Katie. He was no one,’ Dad insisted. He pulled himself up and dragged his feet over to the kitchen door, walking like an old man. As he did so, he turned to face me.

‘Fix yourself a snack for tea, Katie. Mum will be back soon.’

But I knew he was lying. I could tell Mum wasn’t coming home soon; her tears had given her away. I wasn’t hungry either – I felt sick. I wanted to be there in Diane’s kitchen, where the grown-ups were talking. I wanted to know why my mum was red-eyed from crying and why the strange man had come to our house and left Dad looking so devastated. But they wouldn’t tell me.

Life carried on as before but strangely without the constant arguments. Instead, Mum and Dad moved around the house as though they were robots. They said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but I noticed something else: Dad didn’t put his arms around Mum’s waist the way he used to. There were no more smiles or jollities. He’d stopped slapping her on the bum when she washed up at the kitchen sink, too. It was as though something had shifted overnight.

We survived like this for the next month or so. My parents still went for the odd night out but they never went together anymore. Mum would go out with friends to the pub or she’d pop in to see them on the way home from work, but she never went out with Dad. When she was at home, she always looked so distracted. Before, she’d notice everything but not anymore. Now it was as if she was just going through the motions of family life, playing her ‘role’ of mother and wife but her heart
wasn’t in it, it was obvious. Whenever she cooked it was as if she was standing in our kitchen but her mind was a thousand miles away.

One day as I approached home on my way back from school, I could hear shouting. I was startled when I spotted Mum and Dad standing in the front of their bedroom window – it was wide open and they were screaming at one another. Dad’s voice was so loud it carried down the street – everyone could hear him. I cringed when I noticed a few of our neighbours had already come outside to get a better look.

Mum and Dad were struggling with something. Mum was trying to pull something out of Dad’s hands but I couldn’t make out what it was. She was pleading with him as if she was pleading for her life.

‘Don’t, Steve. Please…’ she begged. Her voice was pitiful.

Something flashed as it fell out of the open window. I held my breath. For a moment, I thought one of them had slipped and fallen but then it landed with a flutter and I realised it was a bundle of clothes – Mum’s clothes. I gasped. Mum’s best dresses were tangled together in a mess; one even looked as if it’d been torn at the side. More followed. Soon dresses, shirts, trousers, even her underwear was billowing around on the front lawn.

Oh my God,
I thought,
Dad has gone mad!

A few of the local kids pulled up on their bikes to get a better look. They started pointing and laughing at something and then I saw it – a pair of mum’s knickers caught in a bush underneath the front window.

Thud!

More stuff fell to the ground: make-up, a hairdryer, even a few of Mum’s ornaments, which she kept on the bedside table.
Then I noticed Dad hanging out of the bedroom window, throwing Mum’s stuff out as wide into the air as he could. His eyes were wild with fury.

‘Please, Steve…the neighbours!’ Mum screamed.

My heart lurched. I wanted to die right there and then. More front doors opened and now people were standing in their gardens watching the show – the one featuring Dad having some kind of meltdown. I was terrified. I’d never seen him this angry before. Normally when he lost his temper Mum would calm him down, but not now – he wasn’t listening. Then it struck me: maybe he’d listen to me?

I ran in through the front door and bounded up the stairs, two at a time, until I reached the landing. Dad was still manically pulling things off hangers inside the wardrobe. The wooden drawers had already been yanked opened and cleaned out. He’d emptied each and every one of them.

‘Not that – please! Steve, please, think of the kids…’ Mum pleaded.

‘I don’t care,’ Dad was shouting. ‘You’ve made your bed and now you’ll have to lie in it.’

‘Dad!’ I screamed from the bedroom doorway. ‘Please stop!’

The sound of my voice made my father freeze to the spot. He turned to look at me, his eyes wild with anger. But it wasn’t aimed at me, this was about Mum – this was something she’d done.

‘It’s not me, Katie, it’s your mother. Ask her, go on, ask her what she’s been doing!’ Dad shouted, pointing over at Mum. His voice was hoarse, bitter and angry – something he never was. He spat the words out as if they were venom in his mouth. It frightened me because I’d never heard him sound like this before.

Tears brimmed in my eyes; they were tearing each other apart. Whatever it was, it was something really bad.

‘Mum?’ I asked, hoping for an explanation, but she wouldn’t look at me. Dad saw and threw her stuff on the floor.

‘I’ll tell her, shall I?’ he hissed. ‘Tell her what you’ve been up to?’

What was he talking about? My heart quickened with fear.

‘It’s your mother, Katie,’ Dad screamed. ‘She’s got a boyfriend!’

My mouth fell open, it couldn’t be true. Boyfriend? But Mum was married to Dad. I looked at her, but her head was down and her eyes refused to meet mine. Then I waited. I waited for her to deny it, to say that Dad had got it wrong but instead there was a horrible silence.

‘Mum?’ I whimpered. But she wouldn’t look at me, never mind answer. In the end Dad broke the silence.

‘She won’t tell you, Katie. See, you and Andrew think she’s so perfect, but she isn’t. All this time she’s been carrying on with some fella,’ said Dad, spitting out the words.

‘Who?’ I demanded; now hot and angry tears were flowing down my cheeks. ‘Who is it?’

‘Remember the man in the kitchen?’ Dad sneered, grabbing the last of Mum’s clothes off the floor. He bunched them up in his hands. ‘Well, she’s been seeing him. Yes, that’s right – your wonderful mother has been sleeping with someone else.’

I shook my head in disbelief and begged Mum to tell me he was wrong, that he was lying. But she didn’t. The look on her face gave her away; Dad’s anger gave her away. My father never lied, but it seemed that my mother had. She’d lied to him and us. I thought back to Mum, the day I found her crying in Diane’s kitchen – now everything made sense.