Hush (22 page)

It was dark where Lily was.

She’d lost track of how much time had passed. At first she’d been concentrating on keeping as quiet as possible – they’d told her she had to stay quiet, otherwise they’d come back and shut her up for good. They were bluffing, of course. But that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of hurting her.

After a while the noises outside had faded, and she’d deduced that most of the people in the building had gone home. She’d tried banging on the door and calling out a few times, thinking that maybe there would be cleaners around. But there had been no answering noise. No squeak of rubber shoes on plastic floors. Everyone was gone.

Just her, for miles.

The darkness was absolute. She held a hand out in front of her face, experimentally. Nothing. Not even shadow superimposed on shadow. All she could see were odd white flashes if she closed her eyes, and then of course she wasn’t really
seeing
, because her eyes were shut.

At least if she couldn’t see then neither could anything else.

She pushed herself further into the corner she’d chosen as her area of refuge, and pulled her knees up to her chest. She knew there was nothing
in here,
at least. She’d seen it when they pushed her in, for a start. And also she’d had a quick grope around, once she’d had a minute to get her bearings. She was in a cupboard of shelves, in the space between the
floor and the lowest shelf. If she sat up straight her head rested against wood. There wasn’t enough space for anything to be in there with her – if she stretched out her legs she could touch the opposite wall.

It was just a cupboard.

It probably wasn’t even locked, but, because the shelves went right up to the door, and the door handle was higher than the bottom shelf, she couldn’t get to it to let herself out. Badly designed, really.

The silence was scaring her. She could sense the emptiness of the whole building, settling around her. Three floors above, at least one below. Corridors stretching out in every direction. Sleeping classrooms. Curtainless windows, looking at nothingness, both inside and out.

The figments of her imagination, unfurling to fill the empty space.

She had been in the maths department when they’d found her. She often stayed behind for a few minutes after class – Ms Beecham liked to recommend exercises for her to do at home. She already referred to Lily as her ‘star pupil’, though not in front of other people.

The department had been quiet when Lily left the classroom, so they hadn’t had difficulty cornering her. One girl in front, hand clamped over Lily’s mouth. One girl behind, arm around her waist, pinning her hands to her side. Pulling her by the hair with the other hand. Lily, too disoriented to even try to scream, had weakly followed.

They’d pushed her into the cupboard, kicking her to make sure she didn’t try to escape. By chance they’d got her face; she could still feel the ache in her jaw. Invisible bruises blooming in the dark.

Then they had slammed the door shut and left her.

She wondered if she’d still be here in the morning. She was hungry, and she needed the toilet. She didn’t know how
much longer she could sit here, expecting someone to turn up any second. It was clear there was no one nearby. She would have been able to hear them.

It got harder to breathe the more she thought about it. The closeness of the space. If she stretched out her hands and feet she could touch all four walls without difficulty. Sitting up straight only reminded her that there was no room overhead.

There was an agitation in her limbs. As if her bones were itching. Her muscles made cramping protests. She wriggled, raising her feet higher on the wall, until she could almost stretch her legs out properly. But it wasn’t enough. She could still touch the walls. It was as though the darkness
was
the walls. Or as though the two had combined to become one solid, suffocating blanket.

She wanted out.

Reluctantly, humiliatingly, she succumbed to the fact that no one was coming to find her. Felt the damp warmth spread beneath her, and wondered where on earth Connie was.

‘Tell us again.’

‘Mama, there’s nothing else to tell. I think we should look for her. Or call the police.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Marcus stood up, uncurling himself in a movement which appeared to take all his energy. ‘Tell your mother again what happened.’

‘Dad, I’m not going to sit here all night waiting for the police to show up.’

‘You’re not going out there again by yourself.’

‘Well, bloody hurry up and come with me, then.’

‘Connie –’

‘Marcus, she’s right.’ Anna’s voice was quiet, but strong. ‘Lily could be seriously hurt. Those girls knocked Connie
unconscious; God knows what state Lily’s in. I want to go and find her.’

Across the table, Connie’s eyes met her mother’s. For the first time in years, she felt something pass between them. The realisation that she was indeed her mother’s daughter.

‘We should call the police too, though. It can’t hurt to have more people looking.’

‘Quick, then.’

Marcus left the room. Anna stood up, walked to the sink. Opened the cupboard underneath and pulled out a clean cloth. She ran it under the tap, wrung it out until it no longer dripped. Then crossed the room to crouch down next to her daughter and gently wipe the blood from her face, as if she were a six-year-old. ‘How long has this been going on?’ she asked, the steel in her voice in sharp contrast to the gentleness of her movements.

‘Forever.’ Connie winced, and tried not to flinch away from her mother’s touch. ‘You must have known.’

‘It may have escaped your notice, but I’ve not been the most attendant of mothers.’

‘Even you couldn’t have paid that little attention. We’re still your children.’

Anna said nothing for a moment. She pushed Connie’s hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears, stroked her cheek. But Connie turned her head away.

‘I didn’t stop loving you.’ Anna’s voice was sad, but not pleading.

‘Right. So you – what, just couldn’t summon the energy to look after us?’

‘Something like that, yes. You might understand one day.’

‘I fucking hope I never do.’ Connie stood up so fast her chair fell over, but she made no move to pick it up. She was shaking, though whether from rage or exhaustion she wasn’t really sure.

‘You’re being childish.’

‘Yes. I’m still a child, in fact. You haven’t been absent for
that
long. Yet.’

‘You’re fifteen.’

‘Oh, you kept count?’

‘Don’t make this out to be my fault –’

‘You were all about the apologies a minute ago. Now nothing’s your fault again? You’re a fucking joke.’

‘You’ve got a mouth like a sewer.’

‘And whose
fucking
fault do you think that is?’ Connie couldn’t remember ever having been so angry. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes, her lip trembled, her jaw ached from clenching it so tightly. White-knuckled, with half-moon cuts on her palms.

And her father in the doorway, his disappointment dousing the room like cold water.

‘Is this really the time?’ he asked, his voice quiet but carrying like a stage whisper.

Connie looked from one of them to the other, and walked out of the kitchen. Stormed out of the house, slamming the front door so hard that she heard one of the tiny glass panes fall from its frame and splinter on the concrete below. She didn’t turn around.

Connie had assumed that things would be simpler, with Lily living further away. In some ways they were: she didn’t feel a constant obligation to pick up the phone and check how her sister was getting on. She wasn’t arranging clandestine meetings with Richard to sort things out. Although her concern for Lily was a constant prickling in the back of her mind, it was no longer her responsibility. There was nothing she could do, and she just had to accept that.

But, if she wasn’t focused on Lily, then there was nothing to focus on but herself.

Life, it seemed, operated around her, virtually without her input. She’d never noticed it before. She was a good mother, of course: she participated, she picked the boys up from school, she played with them, she helped with their homework. She arranged activities and cooked nutritious dinners. But it was as if she just slotted into a prearranged set-up, without really having to think about it, all the important decisions having been made earlier, at a point when she had been in some way useful.

She couldn’t put her finger on what it was that made her feel this way. Nathan earned all the money, yes, but he always had. He paid the bills; he kept their lives running, essentially. The logistics of their life went on behind her back, out of sight, and that made her feel in some way childlike. But it had to be more than that. More than just a lack of control over her financial situation.

Perhaps it was the fact that he got the boys up in the morning. That, if she chose – and these days, it seemed, she often did – she could lie in bed all day and no one would notice, as long as a certain amount of washing was done and food for dinner had been purchased. The fact that dust was gathering like clouds before a storm and she hadn’t hoovered for six weeks and the plants hadn’t been watered seemed immaterial to the running of the household.

Connie, in fact, seemed immaterial to the running of the household.

The only times she felt as though she truly mattered were weekends. When there wasn’t a set schedule; when she could do something with the boys that wasn’t just picking them up from school or dropping them off at whatever activity they were supposed to attend that night. The rest of the time she merely existed, floating from room to room, trying to find some place for herself in a life which seemed to regard her as largely useless.

She didn’t know whether it was the sudden removal of responsibility for her mother, or for Lily, or whether it was the distance between her and Nathan – the feeling that he was operating in a space that was separate from hers. It could even just be that the boys were growing up. But, whatever it was, she couldn’t continue like this forever, barely existing.

She needed a purpose.

She was wandering half-aimlessly through Sainsbury’s – she knew that she needed to buy something for dinner, but not what she wanted or which aisle she might find it in – when her mobile began to ring. The number was unknown, but that didn’t mean much – most of her phone calls came from school, or Nathan’s work, or random businesses trying to sell her things; the numbers were almost always blocked.

‘Hello?’

‘Yes, hello. Is that Constance Emmett?’

‘Not for a few years,’ she laughed, ‘but yes, that was me. Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name’s Lewis and I work at Farnworth Manor Hospital. We have your sister here with us?’

Connie felt her blood turn to ice, at the same moment that she wondered why on earth he was posing the sentence as a question. ‘Lily?’

‘Yes. We have two contacts here, you and a, er, Richard Hargrove?’

‘That’s right, yes. What’s happened to her?’

‘Well, we’ve been trying to contact Mr Hargrove, but we can’t seem to get through to him –’

‘I’ll contact Richard,’ Connie said, firmly, her voice considerably calmer than her hands, which had begun to tremble. ‘What’s wrong with Lily?’

‘First of all, she’s in a stable condition, so please don’t panic. We’re not too sure what happened. It seems she’s had a fall and hit her head. If you could come to the hospital –’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ Connie hung up the phone on the middle of his sentence, picked up her bag, and abandoned her trolley in the middle of the aisle, causing an old woman to shoot her a dirty look. Connie, momentarily forgetting that she was now a mother in her thirties who wore sensible shoes and obeyed
No Smoking
signs, took great pleasure in giving her the finger as she marched past.

Connie followed the signs for the ICU, and emerged from the lift into a wide corridor lined with individual rooms. The nurses’ station was at the end of the corridor, and bustling with activity. One of the nurses led her to Lily’s room, where an almost unrecognisable shape lay, swathed in blankets and
bandages, hooked up to machines which Connie couldn’t identify. A doctor, in his thirties with a pale smattering of ginger hair, came by a short while later.

‘She had a nasty fall,’ he explained, ‘but actually she’s been extremely lucky. She’s sprained her wrist, so we’ve bandaged it up for the time being, and there’s some bruising, but we’ve given her a CT scan and there doesn’t seem to be any damage from hitting her head. We’ve not yet seen any signs of her waking up, but that’s nothing to worry about at this stage.’

‘And what if she doesn’t wake up?’ Connie asked, her eyes not leaving the unconscious figure in the bed.

‘That’s extremely unlikely,’ the doctor said, smiling his most reassuring smile – which Connie found more patronising than reassuring – and moving on to his next patient.

A welter of bruises darkened Lily’s forehead and left cheekbone. Her left wrist was swathed in bandages and the visible part of her hand was swollen and unrecognisable. Wires connected her to machines that monitored her heart rate and brainwaves, and, whatever the doctor said, this seemed much more serious than any time she had collapsed before. She’d never been unconscious for more than five minutes.

‘Hey, Lils,’ Connie murmured, lowering herself into the chair next to her sister, and pushing her fingers inside the curled fist of Lily’s right hand. ‘What are you sleeping for, huh?’ She squeezed her hand, hopefully, but there was no corresponding pressure.

She wondered where Richard was. Whether she should call him again. She’d left two messages on his answerphone on the way here and it seemed pointless to leave a third, but she couldn’t imagine where he could be that would prevent him from picking up his voicemail. Especially now, so soon after Lily’s last collapse. Wasn’t he on permanent standby? Weren’t they all? She wondered fleetingly if he was ignoring
his phone because he’d gone somewhere he shouldn’t have. Was Richard capable of cheating? It seemed unlikely. As far as Connie knew – and she thought she knew better than anyone else – Richard’s entire life revolved around Lily.

But, if that was the case, then where was he now?

Connie chewed on her lip, debating what to do. Her instinct was to find Richard and bring him here to her sister. But then there was the chance that Lily would wake up and find neither of them here. That would be unacceptable.

After a moment’s thought, Connie rang Nathan and asked him to pick the boys up from school. Then she settled more comfortably into the chair, to wait for her sister to wake up.

It was Richard’s third shift at work, and he was getting used to the rhythms of the place. Rosa seemed to expect very little of him, and so he was generally free to chat to the regulars, do the crossword, ease himself into village life. Rosa kept him entertained with stories of her daughter’s misdemeanours while he picked apart cryptic clues absent-mindedly, his mind tripping over hidden meanings as she talked.

He’d left his phone at home, something he hadn’t realised until he was halfway to work, and although a vague worry was nagging at him – what if something happened and he couldn’t be reached? – there was also a part of him that was enjoying the relative freedom.

Ed had been in earlier, to see Tim and Rosa and to check how Richard was getting on. ‘I suppose I could stop for one,’ he’d said with an easy smile, when Richard had waved a pint glass at him. ‘Mine’s an Abbot, thanks.’

‘So I thought I’d have seen you around before this?’ Richard had said, hoping he didn’t sound accusatory.

‘Yes, sorry about that. I meant to come in and have a word, talk you up, you know. But it’s been a hectic couple of
weeks. Haven’t known whether I’m coming or going, really. How are you getting on here? Settling in okay?’

‘Yeah, actually. It’s been good. I’ve been making friends.’

‘With Rosa, right?’ Ed had laughed easily. ‘She’s the only friend anyone needs in this place. Keeps the whole village going, if you ask me. And how’s that girlfriend of yours getting on?’

‘Oh, you know.’ Richard had shrugged, smiled halfheartedly. ‘She’s doing okay, I think. Spends most of her time at home.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yeah. Well, when I’m not there. She’s doing a lot of work, I think.’

Ed’s smile was sympathetic, though Richard hadn’t been trying to invite sympathy. ‘Is she there now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And where’s that sister of hers? Does she come to visit?’

‘Not yet, but I’m sure she’ll turn up soon enough.’

Richard was grateful when Rosa came over to talk to them, deflecting the conversation away from his personal life, and Ed had left shortly afterwards. Richard had been scanning the headlines of the paper ever since. He was fascinated by local newspapers, by the things they considered to be news.
Man Feeds Pet Chicken to Dogs. Locals Outraged by Trolley Debacle.

At four o’clock the pub closed for a couple of hours – another wonder of village life: the fact that the pubs shut in the middle of the afternoon so everyone could go home and rest up for the evening – and Richard wandered home, pausing to pluck a sprig of holly from someone’s bush. Lily loved holly bushes, especially when it was close to Christmas. She would tie bunches above all their picture frames, attaching tiny red beads if there were no genuine berries.

The house was quiet when he walked through the door,
but that was nothing unusual. It took him several moments to realise that something wasn’t right, and a minute more to work out what it was. It was something in the air that felt wrong, like a scent of something unfamiliar.

It was when he walked into the kitchen and realised that the patio doors were open that he began to worry. Lily hadn’t been out the back of the house since they’d moved in there. She’d barely even spent any time in the kitchen unless he was there, as far as he could tell. She’d set up camp in the living room.

He stepped outside, into the rapidly darkening evening, squinting into the trees in the vain hope of seeing something moving. Other than trees stirred by the breeze, there was no sign of movement whatsoever.

‘Lily?’ he called, his voice pointlessly quiet, subdued by the shadows and the feeling of wrongness. And then, louder, realising he was being ridiculous, ‘Lils?’

No response. He felt his insides tighten, as if his stomach was attempting to migrate into his lungs.

He stepped back inside, pulling the door shut behind him, though he didn’t lock it, in case she was outside and beyond his earshot. He ran up the stairs, darting into all the rooms, trying to tell himself he was being ridiculous. She’d obviously just gone for a walk. She’d been shut in the house for days; it was perfectly reasonable for her to want to go out. Maybe she’d gone round the corner to buy a pint of milk.

But then, why had the patio doors been open?

The upstairs of the house was deserted. He made his way back into the kitchen. Spotted his phone lying on the kitchen counter, and felt a jolt of terror as he noted the missed calls. Six from Connie. A couple from an unknown number.

Heart thumping uncomfortably in his throat, he listened to Connie’s voicemail.

Then grabbed his car keys and headed for the door.