The Girls (31 page)

Grace had forced it into the too-tight confines of her bag and rushed from the flat before anyone could ask where she was going, what she was holding so close to her inside that bag.

‘Tyler says to put it in her fridge,’ Dylan had whispered into her ear when she joined up with him again in the garden. ‘She says her mum’s out.’

They head out now, through the garden gates, on to the summer-dry pavement. Dylan holds her hand. Just like that. Just like people do. She feels amazing walking down the street with him. She still remembers the first time she saw him, at the top of the hill, waiting for Tyler. She remembers the way he pulled off his school tie and rolled it up, put it in the pocket of his blazer. Stood and waited. So tall and so assured. She’d thought then he must be fifteen, sixteen at least. She’d thought Tyler must be his girlfriend. And when she’d found out he wasn’t even a year older than her, that he and Tyler were just good friends, it had been like something amazing being handed down to her from the universe.

They stop at the entrance to Tyler’s mansion block on the corner. She feels Dylan’s fingers running up and down the backs of her thighs. ‘Best shorts ever,’ he whispers.

She shivers at his touch. She wants to touch him back but she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know where. Then he throws her a smile that is so beautiful and so bad that when he looks away she raises her eyes to heaven as if she might find its source up there.

Inside Tyler’s flat all the glory of them fades away. Tyler is playing happy and glad but Grace knows that she is neither. They are set again at the sharp points of their awful triangle. When Tyler’s back is turned to take the champagne to the kitchen, Dylan’s fingertips find the backs of her thighs again, tracing an exquisite undulation across her skin that seems to join up dots in her body she’d had no notion existed. She feels like one of those actors in a CGI suit, as if there are blobs of light all over her.

‘Aw,’ says Tyler, coming out of the kitchen, catching the glittering comet tail of their longing, ‘you two. You are just adorable. You should get married and have babies.’

‘Yeah yeah,’ says Dylan.

They stay for too long. Outside are the sounds of children and summer. In here it is dark and hot and they are only here because they have all somehow decided that it is more grown-up to be indoors in a flat with no adults than to be outside at a boring babyish old
garden party
. Grace wishes they would leave, and is relieved when her mum calls just after four to tell her off for disappearing. ‘We’d better go,’ she says to Dylan.

Dylan gets to his feet, says, ‘Can I use your bathroom?’

Tyler nods. Dylan leaves. Then they are alone.

‘So,’ says Tyler, her voice flat. ‘Are you having a lovely birthday?’

Grace nods.

‘My thirteenth birthday was shit. Everyone forgot. Except Dylan. He bought me roses. Pink ones.’ She looks at Grace as if to say
beat that
. ‘You know’ – she brings her face closer to Grace’s – ‘you know that he’s the best person in the whole world, don’t you? And you know that you totally don’t deserve him.’

And for some reason, because it is her birthday and because Dylan’s touch has brought her somehow to life and because Tyler appears somehow smaller and less significant in the overcast surroundings of her mother’s slightly shabby little flat with its empty rooms and plain woodchip walls and because she is so sick of Tyler always being there, always with that face with its peaks of disapproval and dips of envy, Grace finds herself saying, ‘No, actually, I think you’ll find
you’re
the one who doesn’t deserve him. If you were a real friend you’d be glad for him, instead of walking around the whole time with that
look
on your face.’

The look appears, right on cue. ‘Christ, you’re a bitch,’ Tyler says. ‘I honestly don’t know what he sees in you.’

‘And I don’t know why he’d be friends with a loser like you. You’re like a leech, just sucking off him. Sucking the goodness out of him. Because there’s none inside you. Because you’re all hollow inside and without him you’re just
nothing
.’ Grace inhales, sharply.

And then, in the smallest, deathliest voice, from lips twisted and contorted against tears, Tyler says, ‘I hate you.’

Dylan reappears.

‘Take her away, will you, Dylan? I don’t want to look at her.’ Tyler turns and stares from the window, out across the trees and the tops of gazebos and marquees, her fist held hard at her mouth, her body rigid with fury.

Dylan tries to say something but Tyler raises her arm in the air and repeats, ‘Take her away. Now.’

They catch the lift down, even though it’s only two floors. Dylan pulls across the shiny brass concertina doors; then he turns. He’s about to say something. Something about Tyler. But Grace does not want to talk about Tyler. She wants to do something to erase Tyler from Dylan’s thoughts forever. As the lift straddles floors one and two, Grace does something she saw on a TV show once. She presses the emergency-stop button. The lift bounces gently in its cradle, making a mournful humming noise.

She takes Dylan’s hands and she leads his fingers up and down the backs of her legs until she gets that feeling back. That feeling from before, that she was all and she was real and she was ready. Dylan drops his face into her shoulder, his breath against her skin warm and surprised. Her hands find the button on his jeans. He makes a noise into her hair. She knows that it is a noise he has only made alone before. That she will be the first person to make him feel this way. She feels empowered, unassailable, thirteen. She sinks, slowly, as she’s seen them do on screens, to her knees and does the thing that they do on the screens and she has no idea if she’s doing it right or doing it wrong and the smell is odd and sweet like stale drawers and candyfloss and Dylan’s hands press into her hair, and then it happens and he says,
I love you, Grace. Oh God, I love you
. And he looks shocked and awed and she feels strange and euphoric. She reaches back up his body to his face and his mouth and his hair, to the familiar parts of him, and he holds her face in his hands and his eyes burn with gratitude and adoration and amazement, and she knows. She knows that she has won.

Her eyes look up through the lift shaft. And there is Tyler, pale eyes on hers. She presses the down button and Tyler disappears from view.

Thirty-two

Adele waited, heart racing, for the sound of her husband coming to bed. She was so awake, so alive, so wired into the dark, dizzy, fast-pulsing core of everything that she felt as if she might never sleep again. Finally, just gone eleven thirty, he appeared. He had lost some of his sparkle, some of his lustre. He looked tired and overwhelmed.

The words that had been swirling inside Adele’s head all day didn’t take long to find their way to her tongue. ‘We need to talk,’ she said, patting his side of the bed.

‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘we’ll go to the station, we’ll look at the CCTV footage. You’ll see what happened. She was upset. I don’t know why. And she hugged me. I did not initiate it. And nothing else happened. I prom—’

‘I don’t mean about Grace. I mean other things. Come to bed.’

‘Yes,’ he said, robotically removing his clothes.

She stared into the middle distance as he did so. She couldn’t bear to watch him naked and vulnerable. Her perfect husband.

He slid in beside her. She heard him exhale slowly. Then rub his hands down his face. There was a denseness to his movements, where usually there was light and energy.

‘I spoke to Tyler earlier,’ she began. ‘I took her out for her tea. She hadn’t had lunch because Cece hadn’t topped up her lunch card.’ She sighed, still sad at the thought of it. ‘Anyway. We had a very revealing conversation, Leo.’ She paused for a beat before continuing. ‘Did you know that when Tyler was four years old she saw you kissing Cece in the Rose Garden?’

She turned to watch his reaction.

For a moment he said nothing, his mouth left open. Then his head dropped and he rubbed his eyes and he said, ‘I remember that.’

Adele’s already marching heart picked up pace.

‘So it happened?’

‘Well, yes, but not in that way. Not in a “kissing in the Rose Garden” way. It was more’ – he scratched his scalp – ‘she kissed me.’

Adele stared at him.

‘She was upset. She was cross with me. For some reason. Dragged me in there. Told me everything that had gone wrong in her life was my fault. Told me she was still in love with me. Told me she’d thrown away everything for me. Told me she’d …’ He looked at her then, and she saw something so dark and dreadful in his eyes that it almost burned her.

‘What?’

The look faded. ‘Nothing. Just that she’d only ever wanted me. And she’d made loads of bad choices because she couldn’t have me. And all those bad choices were my fault. And her having a baby when she wasn’t ready to have a baby was my fault. And how Tyler should have been mine. And if Tyler was mine she’d be a better mother. And how she—’ He stopped. A half-smile of regret passed across his face. ‘How she hated you and resented my children. Oh, God …’

‘And then you kissed?’

‘She started to cry. I put my arms round her to comfort her.’

‘After she’d just told you she hated me?’

‘I just … Del. You know what I’m like. Women crying. It’s my weak spot. And she was crying and in pain so I held her and then she kissed me and it was so full of fury and pain. It was … like being sucked into a black hole. Or into the pits of hell. And I had my eyes wide open the whole time. And I saw Tyler, I saw that little girl standing there, watching. And I pulled away and Cece turned and saw her there too and then she …’ He moaned gently, pulling at the skin of his face. ‘She kissed me again. Knowing …’

‘That her daughter was watching?’

‘That her daughter was watching.’

‘She wanted her to see.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tyler thought you were her dad for ten years, Leo.’

‘I know.’

‘You know!’

‘Yes. It was obvious. Wasn’t it?’

Adele thought back again through the years: the little pixie girl always in the middle of everything. Always where Leo was. Always where his children were. It was obvious. Yes. But she’d never really noticed.

‘But she’s not, Leo. Is she?’

She had to ask it.

‘What? My daughter?’

Adele nodded.

Leo turned fully now, finally seeming as though he was hers again. ‘No. God, Del. No.’

She nodded, believing him. ‘She told me, earlier, she met him. Her real dad.’

‘The woman-beater?’

‘You knew?’

‘Yes. Cece told me. Years ago. Made me promise never to tell a living soul.’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘I didn’t.’

Adele looked at him curiously. ‘What was it?’ she said. ‘Between you and Cece. All these years? All these secrets?’

Leo shrugged. ‘Just a garden thing. Just history. Just …’ He paused. ‘… the stains of childhood.’

‘Leo,’ she said, quietly. ‘What happened to Phoebe?’

Grace held the mirror up to her face. Turned her head this way and that way. Grimaced.

‘It’s not too bad,’ said Clare. ‘They reckon it’ll set straight. You were lucky.’

Grace nodded miserably, and then put down the mirror.

She claimed not to know how she’d broken her nose. She claimed to remember nothing. But Pip knew; she knew without a doubt that her sister was lying. She knew that it was only a matter of time before Grace ‘remembered’. But there was something, something else underlying the happiness of Grace’s awakening. Something her mother knew, that her father knew. Something they weren’t telling Pip. Conversations that stopped when she entered the room. Concerned looks. Snatches of words spoken as whispers into each other’s ears. Pip was beginning to believe that there something more than a broken nose and a drug overdose in the story of what had happened to Grace on Saturday night. Something to do with the yanked-up top and pulled-down shorts. Something to do with the special nurse who’d seen Grace yesterday. Something to do with sex.

She pulled at her father’s arm. He looked down at her. ‘I want to talk to Grace, on my own.’

Clare nodded at Chris, and they left the room. And then it was just the two of them. The Irish twins. It was awkward at first. As though they were new to each other. Pip sat in the plastic chair, still warm from her mother’s body. She stared for a while at her sister. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.

‘In a coma.’

‘No,’ said Pip. ‘I mean: where’ve you been all these weeks?’

Grace frowned at her.

‘You’ve been in another world.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just, since we moved on to the garden, since we met the others, it’s like you’ve been taken over.’

Grace shrugged. ‘It’s not just the garden though, is it? It’s everything. New school. New house. New mum.
Dad
.’

‘He’s back now.’

‘Yeah. I’d noticed.’

‘Are you happy?’

Grace shrugged again. ‘Not really. Kind of. Whatever. You know, until the next time.’

‘He’s on different medication. Maybe he won’t get ill again.’

‘Yeah. And maybe he will.’ Grace put her hand to her face, to her nose, stroking the tender contours with her fingers as she’d done almost obsessively since she’d woken up last night. Then she moved her hand to her hair and grimaced. ‘Fucking hell, I need to sort my hair out.’

‘You’ll be home soon. You can wash it then.’

‘I don’t want to go home.’ She plucked at the white sheets of her bed.

Pip looked at her questioningly.

‘I don’t ever want to go back to that place.’

‘Was it …?’ she began, cautiously. ‘Grace? Was it Leo?’

Her sister’s face broke up into a splintered mask of disbelief. ‘What?’

‘Was it Leo? Who hurt you?’

‘Oh my God. What? Seriously? What are you asking me?’

‘Leo! He’s weird. I’ve seen him, with Tyler, acting weird.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said again. ‘Are you crazy? Leo’s, like, the best person in that garden. He would never—’

‘So who did? Who did?’ Pip said, words tumbling now. ‘The others. They said they were in the playground when you got hurt. But they weren’t. And Max says he heard stuff, voices and stuff. And then he saw you. On the ground. And heard people running away. And your clothes, Grace, they were all pulled up. I had to cover you, because you were showing. You know.
Showing
.’