The Shadow Year (31 page)

He shakes his head. ‘She could help out a little more round the place, don’t you think?’

Kat nods dumbly.

‘She’s odd, isn’t she, your sister?’ He says it with a thin smile.

‘Yes,’ says Kat. She is torn. A small part of her feels as though she should defend Freya, but deep down she is pleased to hear the displeasure in Simon’s voice. Kat has noticed Freya’s growing absence, of course she has, but frankly she doesn’t care where her sister goes. She’s just grateful to have her out from under Simon’s feet, grateful not to see her moping about the house, or sneaking outside to the pit toilet, green-faced with nausea. They haven’t talked properly since Christmas Day – just polite exchanges about the logistics of the jobs to be done around the cottage – but the new year has come and gone and Kat is
still
waiting for Freya to announce her departure. If she doesn’t go soon the others might start to get suspicious.

‘Well, see what you can do with Carla, will you?’ Simon continues. ‘I don’t know,’ he rolls his eyes, ‘all these over-wrought women about the place . . . this is supposed to be a bit of fun.’ He glances up at her. ‘Maybe we should all just pack up and go our separate ways?’ He shakes his head and returns to the stick in his hand and Kat, feeling the panic lurch in her guts, nods and leaves the room.

She finds Carla at the kitchen sink, muttering over a pan of water. She spins at the sound of Kat’s footsteps. ‘Who does he think he is?’ she asks. ‘Who made him lord and master of us all? I don’t remember taking a vote.’

‘I know.’ Kat shifts uncomfortably beside the table, wondering how to placate her. ‘But you know what it’s like, we all fall into our roles, don’t we? Simon’s a natural leader. We certainly thanked him for it at the beginning, didn’t we, when things were easier?’

Carla slams the pan against the sink, sending water sloshing to the floor. ‘It’s not even as if it’s about the money, is it? It’s about Simon wielding his power.’

Kat shakes her head. ‘Let’s trust him. Things will be better again before long. Ben will get well and it will be spring soon. I think we should trust him.’

Carla turns to face her. ‘Which role do you fall into then?’ she asks, eyeing Kat carefully.

‘Pardon?’

‘Which role are you playing? Kingmaker?’

‘Don’t be like that. I’m just trying to help.’

Carla sighs. ‘Sorry. I’m just sick of it all. This place. The cold. The lack of food. It’s all too hard. If Ben wasn’t so ill I’d be tempted to throw in the towel right now and go home.’

‘I know,’ says Kat gently, ‘but we’re doing the hard yards now. It will get easier again. Remember how it was last summer? Swimming in the lake . . . picking blackberries . . . drinking beer . . . all of us hanging out, having fun?’

Carla slumps back against the sink.

‘Let’s try another steam inhalation,’ Kat suggests gently. ‘If he’s not any better in twenty-four hours we’ll take it up with Simon again. Or we’ll just take the money and do it anyway. OK?’

Kat really hopes it won’t come to that and is relieved when Carla nods, pulls herself up again and moves to place the pan of water on the range. Morale is slipping so low she knows the last thing any of them need is a full-blown argument; it could be enough to fracture the group once and for all. ‘You’ll see,’ she says, in a voice more reassuring than she feels, ‘everything’s going to be fine.’

Carla nods once more and they don’t speak of it again, but later that night, while the rest of them sleep, Kat creeps out of bed and down the stairs, heading into the kitchen and to the shelf where she knows Simon keeps the money. She reaches into the old tin canister and pulls out a wad of notes. In the light of a thin crescent moon she counts them out at the table, relieved to see that there is over one hundred and fifty pounds left; more than enough to help Ben . . . more than enough to see them through the winter. She sits back on the bench and looks at the money spread across the table. Simon wants her to play the peacemaker, to smooth things over? Well, maybe they will all have to make a little sacrifice, for the sake of the group. She sits there for a while, mulling over the options, and by the time she returns to bed, her footsteps feel a little lighter upon the floorboards.

Kat wakes Freya early, before any of the others have stirred. ‘Freya,’ she says, shaking her gently, ‘Freya, wake up.’

Freya mumbles incoherently and rolls away beneath the covers.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘budge up, it’s cold.’

Reluctantly, Freya shifts across to make room for Kat. ‘What are you doing?’ she mumbles. ‘What time is it?’

‘Still early.’

‘God, your feet are freezing.’ She scoots up closer to the wall, her back still turned to Kat.

‘Shush,’ says Kat, ‘don’t wake the others.’

Dawn hovers on the horizon. Its pale light filters through the thin rose-covered curtains and stretches in a triangle across the ceiling. ‘Do you remember how we used to do this?’ Freya murmurs from under the covers. ‘You hated that top bunk.’

Kat can’t help smiling. It’s been years since they lay like this in the same bed but somehow it feels familiar, two warm bodies lying on a skinny mattress, the slow rise and fall of their breathing. ‘I didn’t hate it,’ she says. ‘I just said that so that you wouldn’t feel so bad about being afraid. I always climbed back up the ladder as soon as you were asleep.’

‘Oh.’

Silence settles over them both as they remember.

‘It was hard, wasn’t it, those first months, with Margaret and Peter . . . in their home,’ says Freya quietly.

‘Yes.’ There is no need for either of them to say anything else. Freya has put her finger on it with those two simple words:
their home
. A neat little terrace with double-glazed windows and a trimmed square of grass out the back; it couldn’t have been further from the chaos of the life they’d been removed from. They’d been well cared for by the Brownings; warm baths and healthy packed lunches, fruit in the bowl and freshly pressed school uniforms. Their shoes had always fitted and not once did either Margaret or Peter raise a hand to them or steal their pocket money for booze and cigarettes. Suddenly all the things that marked the dysfunction and chaos of life with their own parents – the mornings when their mum hadn’t been able to get out of bed or had lain on the sofa in her own vomit, or the evenings her dad had walked out, disappearing for days on end – had vanished, to be replaced by a cooler, cleaner, more sterile kind of parenting.

The Brownings were a wholesome couple, big on self-improvement and philanthropy.
Charity begins at home
was an expression they used a lot, yet it always made Kat squirm because it had seemed to prove that rather than being taken on by a desire to create a family, they saw the sisters as projects, two disadvantaged girls they could offer up to the world as symbols of their own benevolence. She’d heard Margaret talking about them at their late-night dinner parties, Kat seated at the top of the stairs in a freshly starched nightie, as she’d talked about social responsibility in that bleeding hearts voice of hers. She’d heard Margaret’s self-congratulatory tone and known then that they were little more than symbols, a way for the Brownings to measure their worth against the rest of society.

But for all their flaws, they were responsible and steady and they were kind to the girls. Sure, Margaret would have rather ironed a basket-load of washing than had a conversation with Kat about the boys she liked or the confusing things happening to her body through puberty; and the day Kat had summoned the courage to tell Peter about the mean girls bullying her at school Peter had just crouched down on one knee so that their faces were level and told her:
Don’t come to me with a problem, my girl, come to me with a solution
. It was one of his favourite sayings. Kat understood; he wanted them to be independent, to learn to stand up for themselves, but what he didn’t get was that they were already independent, that they’d had to be on the days their parents couldn’t rouse themselves from bed or the nights when they didn’t come home at all. If they’d sat an exam to test them on some accepted code of parenting, the Brownings would have passed with a steady B-, but she supposed it was better than the resounding ‘fail’ her biological parents would have received.

In the end it was inevitable that Kat had played the mother figure to her younger sister and to a certain extent she’d enjoyed it. She’d been happy to be the one Freya ran to when she grazed a knee or got her first period; it was fun to be the one taken into her confidence about first crushes, the one Freya had wanted to celebrate her exam results with . . . enjoy her first legal drink with. Back then, she would have done anything to protect or help her little sister. So what’s changed, Kat wonders? Why does she find herself lying there on the mattress in the still-warm indentation of her sister’s body, feeling so full of rage and resentment?

Simon.

It all boils down to Simon. Kat has finally opened her heart to someone, finally trusted herself to fall in love and Freya has swooped in and stolen him away. She could have put up with many things from Freya, but sleeping with Simon is the worst thing she could have done. Freya could have had anyone. Why did it have to be him?

Her sister is still lying with her back to her, but she can tell from the rhythm of her breathing and the slight tension in her body that she is properly awake now. She swallows and realises she’s going to have to speak. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks at last, breaking the silence. ‘You can’t ignore it, you know. It’s not going to just go away.’

Freya sighs and rolls onto her back. ‘I wish it would.’

Kat sees the single tear sliding down her sister’s pale face. It drops onto the pillow between them, hitting the fabric with a faint thud. ‘That night. It was early October . . . you’re over three months along.’ Kat has worked it all out in her head.

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Freya asks, turning to her at last.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘What
can
I do?’

‘You could leave. Get an abortion. Get rid of . . . it.’ Neither of them wants to use the word
baby
.

It makes sense in Kat’s head, but Freya just gives a bitter laugh. ‘Yeah? And where would I go?’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve got no money. No home. I can’t go back to college in this state and it’s not as if I can return to Margaret and Peter either. Imagine.’

Kat does imagine; she sees the shame blooming on Margaret’s cheeks and Peter’s cold, hard stare.
Don’t come to me with a problem, come with a solution
. Freya is right. There is no way she can go there.

‘And I know
you
don’t want me here.’

Kat remains silent.

‘Face it,’ says Freya, ‘I’m out of options.’

‘What if I could get you the money . . . you know, so you could go somewhere nice, a private clinic . . . just enough to pay for the procedure and to help you get back on your feet again afterwards? Enough for transport, a few weeks’ food and rent?’

‘And where would you get that kind of money from?’

Kat swallows. ‘The tin.’

Freya goes quiet for a moment. ‘But that money belongs to everyone. What would you guys live off? We’re barely scraping by as it is. What would the others say?’ She hesitates. ‘What would Simon say?’

Kat shrugs. ‘We’d manage. We’d have to. Besides, by the time anyone has noticed, you’d be long gone. I’d take the blame.’

Freya studies her for a moment. ‘You’d do that for me?’

No, she wants to answer. I wouldn’t do it for you, not this time. She’d be doing it for her and Simon; to return things to the way they were just a few short months ago, before Freya ever arrived at the cottage. ‘Yes,’ she says, convinced at last about what she’s offering, ‘I’d do it . . . on one condition though: if you promise me you’ll go . . . and never come back. If you promise me you’ll leave Simon alone.’

Freya’s gaze snaps back to Kat’s. There is a fire in her eyes but her words, when they come, are like ice. ‘Me leave
him
alone?’

Kat nods.

‘You think
I
seduced
him
?’ In the pale morning light, Kat sees her sister’s eyes blaze. ‘You think I stole him from you?’

Kat swallows. ‘I understand. Believe me, I understand better than most. He’s a charismatic guy. I saw the effect he had on girls at university when he turned his spotlight on them. Honestly, I don’t blame you for getting swept up in that.’

‘You don’t
blame
me?’ Freya is wide-eyed with incredulity and shock. She shakes her head. ‘Kat, I didn’t seduce him.’ She swallows and looks up to the empty space above their heads. ‘He
raped
me.’

Kat stares into Freya’s perfect blue eyes. She waits for them to crinkle with amusement, for that smile to creep across her pretty china doll face.
Got you!
But Freya’s eyes stay fixed and still, staring at the ceiling. ‘Come off it,’ she begins, ‘I really don’t think—’

‘Don’t!’ says Freya. ‘Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Don’t take
his
side.’

‘Freya, I’m not taking sides. I just think you’re wide of the mark here. That night was crazy. We were all off our heads. But saying Simon
raped
you? Come on. We’d all seen the way you’d been flirting and flitting around him.’

‘What? I was being friendly. Trying to make your friends like me. To accept me. I was no different with Simon than I was with Ben . . . or Mac.’

‘So you were flirting with them all? Throwing yourself at them like some cheap tart? Simon . . . Mac . . . Ben too, eh? When Carla wasn’t around?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Freya looks genuinely confused.

‘Don’t play the innocent. You knew what you were doing . . . flicking your long blond hair, fluttering your big blue eyes. You just couldn’t help yourself. You knew how I felt about Simon and yet you still went ahead and slept with him.’ Kat is struggling to keep her voice to an angry whisper. ‘You took him from me.’

‘I took him from you? Oh yes,’ Freya gives a bitter laugh, ‘I lay down, passed out on the floor, off my head with mushrooms and spliffs and beer and just
stole
him away.’ She hisses the words at her. ‘Kat, I’m sorry to burst your bubble but none of this is about you. This is about Simon. About his power trip. He’s loving lording it over everyone here. Don’t you see that?’