Looking for JJ (7 page)

“The studio’s only ten minutes away. I won’t be more than a couple of hours.”

Jennifer thought of Simone then and felt a rumble of worry.

“Will I have to go to Simone’s?” she said.

Her mum stopped and looked at her for a moment.

“No, love. Not today.”

Jennifer pursed her lips. Did that she mean she had to go to Gran’s?

“I want you to be a really big girl today and stay on your own. That’s all right, isn’t it?”

Jennifer was surprised.

“On my own?” she said. “By myself?”

“Like a really big girl. I’m going to leave you in the front room with a video on. I’ve got some drink and biscuits and when I go out the front door I’ll start the film and I bet you that I’ll be back even before it’s over.”

“I’m allowed to watch a video on my own?”

“Just for today. Just this once because it’s very important.”

Her mum tidied up the living room, pulling the big armchair in front of the television. She put a glass of squash and a bowl of crisps on the coffee table. Beside it were a couple of tiny chocolate bars.

“You’re not to answer the front door to anybody. Nobody at all. Do you understand?”

Jennifer nodded, feeling very serious.

“Nor the telephone. Just let it ring. The answerphone will pick it up. And. . .” Her mum looked around, hesitating. “Don’t touch anything. Things that you shouldn’t. . .”

Her sentence hung in mid-air and then she looked at her watch.

“I’ll have to run. You’ll be all right, won’t you. Look, it’s two o’clock. I’ll be a couple of hours, probably. Back at five at the latest. . . You can watch the video. Then the telly. You’ll be fine.”

And then she left. She didn’t return until eight o’clock. Jennifer was on her own for five hours. The flat got dark but she and Macy sat tightly together on the settee, the light from the television making the room look blue.

After that it was easy. Her mum left her on her own for a few hours, a whole morning or afternoon, a day that seemed to stretch out for ever. Just now and then at first. Then once every week, a couple of times every week, then every afternoon after school.

Jennifer got used to being alone. What choice did she have?

Alice was lying back on the pillow, the photograph loosely in her fingers. From somewhere else in the flat she could smell meat cooking and hear the sizzle of the frying pan. Rosie was making something. There was the clink of cutlery and the sound of cupboard doors opening and closing. She even thought she could hear some low music playing, and Rosie’s voice humming along.

She sat up. She wanted to be there, in the kitchen, with Rosie. She left the photograph on the duvet and walked out of her room, along the hallway, her throat dry, her eyelids heavy. The kitchen was warm and the air full of the smell of onions. Alice let herself sink into it. When the music stopped Rosie must have sensed Alice there, because she turned round and looked at her with some concern. Alice took the two steps she needed and sank into Rosie’s arms, her head pushing into her soft breasts, her arms clinging tightly.

The counsellors had never really understood. In those early days her mum hadn’t actually
abused
her. She’d simply deserted her, cast her off.
Abandoned
her.

 

 

 

The good news came in a phone call from Jill Newton.

Alice was helping Frankie to pack the last of his books and clothes into cardboard boxes. They were lined up in the hallway of the flat, waiting for his dad to turn up for the journey back to Brighton.

The other students had already left for home so the place was almost empty. Alice could hear the echoes of her footsteps as she walked in and out of various rooms, picking up bits and pieces of Frankie’s stuff. All that was left were the basic pieces of furniture: beds and wardrobes, a settee and coffee table, kitchen table and chairs. Several things in the kitchen had to be counted in order to make sure that the students got their deposits back. Alice stood at the cupboards and checked the kitchenware. There was eight of everything, cutlery and crockery. She counted the sauce-pans and the oven dishes and ticked them off the list.

Frankie was in the bedroom putting some papers into a bin bag.

“All done?” she said.

“Um,” he murmured.

Frankie’s mood was not good. She had arrived later than she’d said and he had immediately wanted to know where she’d been, what she’d been doing. When she told him she’d been helping to stocktake at work he’d looked at her with disbelief. Because he had hated any job he had ever had, he expected her to hate hers. She didn’t, though. She liked working in the café. It was all so ordinary. Serving people, making drinks, cutting slices of cake or using the silver tongs to pick up the syrupy Danish buns. It didn’t bother her if the manager asked her to stay on for a short while, to help out with other things. But Frankie had been waiting, and demanded to know where she had been. His questions had an undertone, as though he thought she hadn’t been at work at all.

“How long till your dad gets here?” she said, trying to ignore his mood.

She walked up behind him and put her arms around his broad back. She could feel the tension in his muscles, so she hugged tightly, rubbing her face on the back of his T-shirt. He was so warm, so solid. She loved the feel of him, the fact that he was big and could shake her off in a second if he wanted.

“About an hour,” he said, his voice softening as he turned towards her, his arms folding across her back, half lifting her off the ground. She tilted her face up to look at him and felt her eyes blur as he leaned down to kiss her. Her eyes closed and her lips opened as she waited for his mouth to touch hers.

The ring tone of her mobile sounded. She pulled back, the sound startling her. She still wasn’t used to having a mobile, let alone receiving calls. Frankie let her go, his face on the edge of a pout.

“Who’s that?” she said needlessly.

She walked back out into the hallway where she’d left her bag and rummaged through it until she produced the mobile. On the screen was the name
Jill
. From back in the bedroom she could hear the plastic sacks being dragged across the floor and dumped by the door.

“Hello?” she said, uncertainly.

“Alice,” Jill said. “How are you?”

“Fine. Is anything wrong?”

That was her first thought. She stood in the hallway, the mobile clamped to her ear, and imagined the worst. She had been found. Her secret was out. It gave her a cold, clammy feeling, even though it was a hot day and stuffy in the flat. Frankie came out of the bedroom and gave her a long-suffering look. He made his hand into the shape of a mobile and held it at his ear.
Who is it?
he mouthed at her.

But she was listening to Jill and couldn’t focus on what he was asking.

“Good news, Alice,” Jill was saying.

Good news
. This was a phrase that Alice hadn’t heard much.

“We’ve managed a clever decoy trick with the press. I don’t suppose you remember Michael Forrester, a support worker at Monksgrove? Probably not as you hardly had anything to do with him. Anyway, Patricia Coffey had information that he’d been meeting with a reporter. Obviously her first thought was to dismiss him but after a chat with me we decided to try something. We produced some fake documents that indicated that Jennifer Jones had been placed abroad, in Holland, with an English family.”

Holland?

Frankie had come up behind her. He was standing close enough to listen. She turned and put her hand up to fend him off.
I won’t be a minute
, she mouthed, trying to catch what Jill was saying.

“Sorry, Jill, I missed that,” she said.

Frankie gave a dramatic sigh and turned his back walking out of the room. The door closed slowly, as if in slow motion, behind him.

“The idea is that Jennifer has been placed with an English family in Holland for three years. She will go to university there and live a quiet and private life. Afterwards she may stay in Holland or choose to come back to live in Britain. Patricia Coffey has phrased the whole thing to look as though it was part of an international agreement.
The European Resettlement of Offenders Strategy
. It’s very convincing.”

She walked to the room door, holding the mobile at her ear. Frankie had gone back in the bedroom. She could hear drawers being opened and closed.
Holland, for three years.
It certainly had a ring of truth to it.

“So these papers were left around when Forrester was in the office. Patricia engineered some kind of emergency and left him on his own.”

Jill Newton’s voice was buoyant.

“Guess who rang a couple of days later? A national newspaper! They wanted confirmation that Jennifer Jones was living in Holland with an English family. Patricia denied it of course, but we expect them to publish in the next couple of days.”

“Publish?” Alice said, her heart sinking. “It’s all going to be in the papers again?”

Her voice had dropped to a whisper and she walked to the corner of the room, as far away from Frankie as she could get.

“This is good news, Alice. This is the end. Once the papers accept that you’re out of the country they will stop hounding you. This detective will go away. You’ll be able to relax and live a normal life. When you start university in September no one on earth will know that you’re anyone other than Alice Tully. Believe me, this is the best possible news.”

After several more optimistic statements Jill rang off. Alice was perplexed. It was all going to be in the newspapers. Every detail would be dragged up again. She could just imagine the headlines.
Berwick Waters Murder. Jennifer Jones Escapes Justice!
Jill Newton was sure it would be the end. Once the press thought that JJ was out of the country they’d stop looking. They’d forget about it.

Alice plonked down on to the arm of a chair.
Forget.
It was such a simple word; as if part of the brain could just wipe itself clean, delete information so that it was no longer there. The silly small things of life forgotten; a birthday card, a book to take back to the library, a tube of toothpaste from the supermarket. But the big things of life. They were ingrained. They lived in the fibres of the brain, in the tissue and the blood. They would always be there, curled up, sleeping in the unconscious, until something prodded at them. Memories that flickered into life and filled her head with pictures. A trip out for three children that would live with Alice for the rest of her life. A hole dug in the ground, the skeletal face of the feral cat, the splashing of water, the sight of blood, like a shocking red rose blooming from a child’s head. How could she expect the press to forget when she never ever would? She sat there for a few moments gripping her mobile phone. Beneath her feet the carpet was threadbare. In places it was thin enough to see through.

She found Frankie lying across the bare mattress on the bed that he used to use. Alice could see the tension in his face. He hadn’t always been like this. At the beginning he had made her laugh all the time.

“What’s wrong?” she said, sitting beside him.

He turned away from her, pushing his face into the mattress.

“You’re seeing someone else,” he said, his words muffled by the mattress.

“What? Of course I’m not!” she said, wearily.

They’d had conversations like this before. Frankie quizzing her about who she was with and where she’d been on the evenings and days when she wasn’t with him. He didn’t understand that she liked time on her own, or was happy to just stay in with Rosie. Sometimes she had to lie, like when she was meeting Jill Newton. He didn’t trust her and she didn’t know what she could do about it.

She lay down beside him and put her arm around his waist and began to kiss his shoulders.

“I’m not seeing anyone else,” she said, between kisses. “It’s just you and me.”

She felt him turning and waited until he was face to face with her.

“I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she said, her voice husky.

He was staring hard at her, his eyes dark, shifting slightly from side to side, as if he was scanning her for any sign of lies.

“I’m sorry,” he said, after a minute, his big arms pulling her closely to him. “I just want you all for myself. I can’t help it.”

She felt his mouth on her neck, his lips pushing hard into her skin, as though he might bruise it. She put her hands up, cupping his face, pulling him towards her and then lifted her head so that he would kiss her.

Poor Frankie. It wasn’t possible to have people, to own them, as though they were possessions. Alice knew that. It was something that JJ had learned the hard way. A long time before.

 

When the modelling work finished and her mum locked herself in her bedroom for days and weeks, Jennifer had to live with her gran. She slept in the sewing room, on a small camp bed in the corner. There wasn’t much room with her gran’s giant sewing machine and the various plastic stacking boxes that were full of her equipment; materials, patterns and threads.

“Don’t you touch any of those, Jenny,” her gran said. “That’s my job, see, it’s what I get paid for.”

Jennifer knew this already. Her gran made clothes for children’s shops. She’d seen the piles of trousers and tops, the skirts and tiny pairs of jeans that her gran sewed up. She’d even been given some of them to wear from time to time.

During the day, she had to move out of the tiny room so that her gran could work. That meant she had to sit on the sofa in the living room changing Macy’s clothes, watching the television set that seemed to be on all day long whether her gran was in the room or not. Nelson had an armchair to himself and from time to time she caught him looking at her in a bad-tempered way. She tried to ignore him and spent her time chatting to Macy.

After a week her gran told her that she’d have to stay for a while. They’d have to try and find her a new school because the old one was too far away.

“When’s Mummy coming?” she said.

“I don’t know, Jenny. I wish I knew,” her gran said, taking a cigarette out of a pack and lighting it up.

There were lots of phone calls, mostly late at night. Jennifer heard her gran talking, her voice low and urgent, her words sharp and ugly. Once, she got out of bed and walked into the hallway. Her gran’s back was facing her, her shoulders hunched. Even though Jennifer couldn’t see her face she could tell that she was angry. The top of one of her arms wobbled as if she was pointing her finger at someone and her legs were stiff, like a sentry on guard duty. Jennifer imagined her face all screwed up, her lips pursed up into a little bunch.

“She is not my responsibility. She’s been here too long already. You can’t just dump her when it’s not convenient. . . I don’t bloody well care what sort of a job. . . I’ll have to contact social services. . . I can’t have a kid living with me. I’m warning you. You keep this up much longer and she won’t be here when you come back. . .”

A growling sound startled Jennifer. Her gran turned round to see what it was and saw Jennifer there. Nelson was standing at the door of the living room, baring his teeth.

“I’ve got to go,” her gran snapped and replaced the handset. “Jenny, you should be in bed,” she said, walking along the hallway, lifting her foot to shoo the dog back into the living room.