Scissors, Paper, Stone (26 page)

She still didn’t tell anyone because she wasn’t sure that there was anything to tell. She felt acutely the lack of her own maturity – she was not old enough to know whether this was normal and she did not want to risk admitting her own childishness; she did not want to be made a fool of for her own stupidity. She wanted to deal with things in an adult fashion and not be a crybaby. And, when it came to it, she couldn’t explain what it was she was uneasy about. There had been no momentous physical action, no dramatic crossing of the line that she could look at, objectively, and say to herself, ‘Yes, that was wrong’. She had always been awkward around Charles and imagined that perhaps his subtle physical touches, and her reaction to them, were simply a further extension of that awkwardness. There was the smallest sliver of recognition, deep at the bottom of her, that part of her liked being the focus of his attention, but she rarely admitted this – every time the thought floated to the top of her consciousness, she turned away from it, as if swimming out of a patch of sea cooled by the shadows of rocks.

At school, she tended towards isolation so there were no close friends that she could ask. At home, there were no uncles or male adults of comparable age to whom she could compare Charles’s behaviour. The closest she got was her parents’ neighbour, Giles Treneman, but she only ever saw him when he was red-nosed and drunk at the end of a party when he seemed extremely affectionate and tactile to any woman who crossed his path. So Charles’s strange demonstrations of quasi-paternal intimacy carried on, occurring at random intervals, weeks and months apart and generally when Anne was out of the house.

But the last time it happened, it was different.

He had been driving her to school one morning because there was a bus drivers’ strike and Anne had arranged to do her fortnightly charitable stint in the Red Cross clothes shop in Kew. Charlotte felt uneasy, as she always did when she was alone with her father, but she tried not to think about it over breakfast, chewing slowly on her muesli, swallowing it down even though she felt slightly sick inside. There was a science test today that she was silently dreading.

At the other end of the pine kitchen table, Charles sat with his face entirely obscured by a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. Bits of him emerged from the other side of the newsprint, like shards of a Cubist portrait: the clean half-moons of his fingernails, a lump of shoulder and the top of his head, the golden hair thinning perceptibly. Occasionally, he would clear his throat or grumble over something he was reading. Every few minutes, he would turn the page and fold it back and there would be a loud sound of crackling paper and he would take a sip of tea before resuming his careful examination of the day’s news.

Charlotte glanced nervously at the clock above the Aga. It was already ten past eight. They were going to be late.

‘Daddy?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Shall we get going?’ she asked, trying to sound offhand.

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realised it was the wrong thing to say. He folded up the newspaper and put it to one side, staring at her coldly as he did so.

‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ he said, pouring himself another cup of tea. ‘It’s hardly going to matter if you’re a few minutes late.’

Charlotte chewed her lip. It probably didn’t matter to him very much, but it mattered to her hugely. She hated being late for school because she would be forced to explain to her form teacher, the humourless Mrs Dryburgh, exactly why, and she would have no excuse other than her father not seeming to care.

But there was nothing she could do except sit there in painful anticipation as he finished his breakfast and then listen as he walked upstairs to brush his teeth and go to the loo, all of which seemed to take far longer than it needed to. When he finally emerged, it was 8.20 a.m. By the time they were on their way, it was almost half past. Assembly started at 8.45 sharp. Charlotte started praying that they would make it in time. She fiddled with her watch, circling her finger in an anti-clockwise motion around its plastic face as if she could make the minutes go in reverse.

She was so anxious that she didn’t, at first, notice the change in atmosphere or the fact that Charles had turned the car radio off so that they were now sitting in silence. They had stopped at a red traffic light. She wound a piece of hair round her index finger, stroking the soft ends of it across her upper lip like a paintbrush. Charles turned to look at her.

‘So,’ he said, his voice warm. ‘What are you up to at school today?’

She dropped the strand of hair from her mouth, not wishing to look childish. She wondered whether to tell him about the test and then decided against it – Charles regarded science as a particular forte and tended to launch into incomprehensible mini-lectures about compounds and neutrons at the slightest encouragement. Because he never made any attempt to speak down to her, preferring to express himself in the complex language more suited to an adult audience, Charlotte could never fully understand what he was saying. She would try so hard to follow the gossamer trail of his rapid intellectual conjecture that the effort of it left her feeling simultaneously exhausted and more stupid than she had at the start.

‘We’re doing a project,’ she said finally.

‘What sort of project?’

‘It’s about evacuees in World War II.’ She didn’t elaborate any further.

The light changed from red to flashing amber to green.

‘That sounds interesting,’ and as he spoke, he took his left hand off the steering wheel and reached across to her seat, laying his hand on her upper thigh, the weight of it pushing through the dense grey material of her uniform skirt. He cleared his throat. Charlotte held her breath, as if her complete immobility would stop his hand from moving. She struck a deal with herself in her mind: she could cope with this if his hand didn’t move. She could cope if he just left it there. There was no need to worry as long as his hand stayed exactly where it was.

She became transfixed by it, staring until the flesh started to blur in front of her eyes like a glinting stone swallowed by a tide of muddy water. She recognised the elements of a hand – the marshmallow pinkness, the near-symmetrical dips in between fingers, knuckles like knots – and yet could no longer connect it with her father’s body.

In this way, she detached herself. So although she registered the fact that they had turned right instead of left at the T-junction that led to school, she did not question why and nor did she feel particularly perturbed that this detour would make her even later. For some reason, it had ceased to bother her. It had stopped mattering. All that concerned her was the movement of that hand.

She was dimly aware of the tick-tick-tick sound of the indicator.

Tick-tick-tick.

Tick-tick-tick.

And then they were turning into a residential cul-de-sac that she had never seen before and Charles was parking with his customary precision, deftly manoeuvring into a space. The car stopped and he removed his hand from her thigh to put on the handbrake.

Charlotte breathed out, a softly controlled exhalation designed to draw as little attention to herself as possible, as if she could by sheer force of will convince her father she was not worth noticing.

He parked at the end of a row of cars so that when Charlotte looked out of the windscreen she could see a stretch of pavement bordered by detached red bungalows, each one marked by the plasticine sheen of newly built houses. There was a small shop on the corner with a newspaper rack outside. She noticed that the same newspaper front page she had stared at across the breakfast table was slotted in the top shelf, its pages battered down by the wind, the text shimmering in front of her eyes. She focused on the reassuring familiarity of the smudged newsprint.

Charles undid his seatbelt.

Click. Swish.

Then he twisted his body all the way round in the driver’s seat until he was looking at her directly. Charlotte kept staring out of the windscreen. The rub of his trousers against the seat gave a muffled squeaking sound as he moved.

He put his hand back on her leg, this time at the hem of her skirt and he pushed it, gradually inching it upwards until he reached the edge of her knickers. He leaned over, pushing the other side of the skirt up so that it made a neat horizontal, bunched up just below her midriff. He dropped his eyes and looked at her naked legs, her white underwear, for what seemed like several silent minutes.

He breathed in and out through his nose and there was a slight whistling noise with each heavy lungful. Charlotte started counting.

One.

Two.

Three.

And then, so quickly that she had no time to react, he wound his hand round her neck and pulled her to him, kissing her fiercely on the mouth, the tip of his tongue prising her lips apart.

Something broke.

‘No!’ Charlotte shouted, pushing him away with both her hands.

Charles snapped back, his eyes dilated with shock. His face seemed to lose all its definition, the edges melting like a rubber mask in heat, the pallid skin collapsing in on itself. He bore an expression that Charlotte could not, at first, work out. And then she realised it was terror that she was seeing. He seemed to be frightened.

And just at that point, Charlotte noticed that he was no longer quite looking at her, but sideways, out through the windscreen. She followed his gaze. She looked out. And there, instead of the newspaper and the corner shop and the Lego-brick houses, was her mother.

It seemed so bizarre, so totally surreal, so dream-like that Charlotte shook her head, trying to make the mirage disappear. But when she looked up again, Anne was still there, her hair tied up in the recognisable yellow-striped headscarf that Charlotte had given her for Christmas two years ago.

She was looking straight at them, looking at Charlotte through the glass with an expression of horror on her face, her lips shrivelled into a gasping ‘o’. She was carrying a shopping bag in one hand. By her feet, there was another, wrinkled polythene bag that Anne seemed to have dropped and its contents – old jumpers, hats and shoes – were spilling out on to the street.

Nothing seemed to be making any sense. What was she doing here? What had she seen or not seen?

The thoughts sprung up in Charlotte’s consciousness like pinballs released from a machine, clattering and buzzing through her head, disappearing before she could understand them. And yet amid the confused helter-skelter of her emotions, Charlotte had one, single, coherent thought that pushed through the others: her mother was here. She was safe. Anne knew. There was no need to try any more, no need to pretend or conceal or convince herself it was all right. It was out in the open. There would be no more lying. There would be no more half-guesses or stuttered attempts at normality. She did not have to hide.

But then, in the space of a shallow breath, it changed. The horror that Charlotte had seen on Anne’s face seemed to slide like shale slipping off a mountainside. It was replaced by an inscrutability that made Anne’s eyes film over.

She turned away.

Through the grimy windscreen glass, Charlotte watched as Anne stumbled forwards, catching the heel of a shoe on the pavement kerb, and then, steadying herself, started walking towards the main road, the bag of shopping still in one hand. The clothes still lay on the street, left behind; a trail of unwanted emptiness. The sleeves of a tattered tweed jacket pointed brokenly outwards, the angles unnatural and hollowed-out.

In the car, there was a wordless moment of total suspension. Neither of them moved. Charlotte watched her mother walk all the way to the end of the street, her shoulders hunched against the wind, her steps unnaturally hurried, the shopping bag swinging against her legs. She watched her reach the junction with the main road and then hesitate briefly before turning left and not looking back. Charlotte was so shocked, so confused by everything that had just happened within a few brief moments, that it took her longer than it should have done to open the car door. She fiddled with the handle, her hands fumbling over the lock. Charles, seeing what she was doing, tried to stop her.

‘Charlotte, wait –’

But she was out of the car, out on to the street and she was running, running, running, her school shoes making a slapping sound against the tarmac, her skirt whipping against her legs. Running somewhere, anywhere and nowhere all at once. Running away. Away from here. Away from them. Running away, into the safety of nothing.

Normally she hated running. She dreaded the approach of the annual school sports day because a well-meaning teacher would always force her to take part and Charlotte would dutifully run as fast as she could, knowing before she had reached the finish line that it would never be fast enough and knowing, without looking, that her mother would be attempting to hide her slight disappointment with an upbeat sort of resignation. But that day, she ran and ran and ran and she did not feel the usual suffocating lack of breath or the sharp ache of a stitch. She ran because it felt good to be doing something – anything – that did not require her to think. As she ran, her mind emptied itself; the thoughts pushed out of her skull by the sheer mindlessness of her speed, the force of the wind hitting her cheeks.

She could feel the soles of her feet become numb and the tender flesh on her ankles begin to tingle with rawness. For several minutes, Charlotte did not recognise the landscape and it did not cross her mind that she had no idea where she was going. But then, after a while, her surroundings shifted into focus: there was the wall that circled Kew Gardens, there was the small off-licence where the girl behind the till knew Charles by name, there was the Esso petrol station where two main roads met and there, just a few yards away, was the entrance to Carlton Avenue.