Page 34 of Cross Her Heart

Ava’s run away. The thought hits me as I turn back to the office to face the pack’s curious, hungry looks. My worry ties itself in knots. Little Ava out there somewhere in the world, angry and alone. I hope she’s not alone. I hope one of her friends knows where she is and will crack under police pressure. She’s sixteen, I tell myself. She’s not stupid. She’ll be somewhere safe. The thought is hollow. The world is full of bright but angry sixteen-year-olds who run off and end up on the streets or worse. Dragged out of rivers. Never heard of again. Ava’s stubborn and she always has been. She wouldn’t go back, however bad it got.

Maybe shehasgone to get an abortion. Maybe she’ll turn up afterwards. I never thought Ava getting knocked up would be a comfort, but now it’s like an emotional anchor. She’s gone to get an abortion somewhere. The police will find her.

I go straight to the kitchen to make a coffee – the one Emily left on my desk now too cold for my taste – and it’s Stacey who joins me like a skittish cat, and asks what they wanted. She at least has the decency to look a little embarrassed and I wonder who pushed her in here, Julia or Toby or a combination of the two.

Fuck you, Lisa, I think for the millionth time since she ceased to exist.Fuck you very much for all this.

34

AFTER

2003

There are no fairy tales, no happily ever afters, no matter how many cheap Disney videos she plays in the afternoons to keep her daughter settled while she cleans and tidies and tries to make their lives look normal and under control. Not for her at any rate. She was stupid to ever think there could be.

She aches as she gathers up the empty beer cans and cheap vodka bottles and throws them away. What is the point, she wonders. There will only be more to throw away later. Later. She can’t face any morelater.

Upstairs, in her cot, Crystal starts crying. Crystal. She hates their daughter’s name. One of their many, many big arguments was about that name.Avawas what she’d wanted to call her. A name which spoke of elegance and charm and better things. Crystal sounds cheap for trying so hard not to. Crystal is breakable. Crystals can be smashed into a thousand pieces. The thought of any harm coming to her baby terrifies her. It fills her every waking thought, humming in her blood. Someone taking some terrible crazy revenge. She should never have told Jon who she really is. She should probably have never got involved with him, never have dared to think she could have a love that survived her past, but without him she wouldn’t have her daughter so she can’t wish for that.

Little Crystal is two now. Her turning three can’t come quickly enough. To be three would mean she was past Daniel’s age. Maybe her dreams of him will then fade. Maybe this sense of terrible dread will go. She doesn’t believe it. The dreams and the dread will be with her forever, and they’re so much worse since Crystal was born. At first she thought the dreams were Daniel’s ghost wanting to punish her more from beyond the grave, but in her heart she knows that’s not true. Daniel was a good boy. And he was only two and a half.

She goes upstairs and cradles Crystal to her thin chest, soothing her. The little girl’s clothes need washing, as do most of her nappies, and the whole of their small house smells vaguely of shit and warm milk, but Jon hasn’t left her any money again and she’s out of washing powder. This cannot go on. She needs to call Joanne. She has to.Shemay deserve this awful life with a man who drinks too much and calls her a killer and says she revolts him whenever she tries to appease him, but her Crystal,her Ava, doesn’t. If they stay here, who knows how it will end? What he’ll do?

Last night was a wake-up call and she needs to act. To finally show some spine. Every time she closes her eyes she sees it: the bottle smashing against the wall to the right above her head. Little Crystal, sitting on the floor, shocked into stopping crying at her parents’ fight for a moment, covered in broken glass and alcohol.

It killed his anger in its tracks. He loves their daughter, she knows that, but she knows violence and what he did was enough to chill her to the bone. To make her realise how he blames her for everything through his alcoholic haze. She’s grown up a lot in the past three years, the long years since the perfect night when she told him her secret. She’s learned a lot about people. She knows he loves her, but she knows he hates himself for it. He can’t look at her most of the time and when they have sex she can feel his disgust. It’s worse since Crystal came along. Her sweet innocence is a constant reminder of whatCharlottedid.

You’re a monster.That’s what he said last night.How can I love a monster?His words are worse than blows, but the blows can’t be far off. She’s had to gauge these things before. It’s all building to some awful conclusion, and she’s terrified he’ll take it out on Crystal, however much he says he loves her, because she knows how easy it is for things to go horribly wrong.

She holds the pudgy little girl too tightly, until she starts to cry. She doesn’t scream or wail, but lets out a gentle sob as if she can pick up on her mother’s anguish. She can, of course, and maybe she’s afraid to cry loudly now, even when Daddy’s out of the house.

Jon won’t be back for hours. He’s not at work, he’s at the pub or the bookie’s or round a mate’s house. He only works a few hours a week now and that won’t go on forever. His drinking is too out of control to hold down a job. She used to be able to see the man she fell in love with still inside him, but not any more. Not now it’s all turned to shit. Worse than shit. This awful loathing that emanates from him.

She has to call Joanne. This is the end of the line. Failure has to be faced. Maybe it will be fine, maybe she’ll be able to stay who she is now and move to a little flat in the same town – maybe even her old flat. She won’t be able to work until Crystal goes to school, but it could maybe be almost like before she met him. She’d have routines like when she was happy.

It won’t be that way, of course. Joanne’s already unhappy about the situation. She thinks it’s ‘precarious’. Jon’s ‘highly unpredictable right now’. And she’s right. He should have taken the counselling he was offered when they came clean about him knowing. But he didn’t. He said he was fine. He loved her. That was before the pressures of fatherhood and the pressure of carrying her secret every single day for years and years.

This is the other thing she’s learned over these years. The secret is her own. It’s her burden and sharing it doesn’t lighten the load, it simply doubles it. She can’t stay here if she leaves Jon, that’s just wishful thinking. Joanne, and the police, and all those people who make her decisions won’t let her. Jon’s threatened often enough that if she takes Crystal away, he’ll ruin everything. Tell everyone. Finish her. When he’s sober, he says he’s sorry, but how often is he sober? You can’t trust a drunk, she knows that too.

Crystal is crying and she has to do what’s best for her. She burns with shame when she finally calls the probation officer, but Joanne is nothing but professional and suddenly it’s all out of her hands. Plans are put in motion. It would seem they were readier for this than she is. All that’s left for her to do is leave him a letter. She tries to write how she feels, and also to be cold with him. He needs that. He needs to start again as much as she does. Her hand shakes as she writes. She doesn’t love him any more. This is true. She’s afraid of him. This is also true. She writes one final line before folding the paper and leaving it on the kitchen table.

Don’t come after me. Don’t try and find me. Don’t try and find us.

Calm now, she was always calm when someone else took control, she gathers what she needs and the pieces of her legacy life – passport, NHS certificate, everything that made this ghost of a person real. They’re useless now, a skin that will soon be shed, but Joanne will want them back, and even if she doesn’t, Jon shouldn’t have them.

She takes a moment to stand in the house, the flimsy walls of her playing card castle, and then she’s ready when the car comes. She doesn’t cry, she never does, but her heart empties as she closes the door.

Goodbye, Jon,she whispers.I’m sorry.She doesn’t look back as they leave. She’s so tired of looking back. Instead she holds her tearful daughter tight and points at buses out of the window. ‘Don’t cry, Ava,’ she says, sucking in the smell of her child. ‘Don’t cry.’

35

NOW

MARILYN

I’m on autopilot, watching my movements from the inside, in awe of my body’s ability to get all the shit I need doing done. Despite the awful pain – this time a rib or two are definitely cracked – I get up, get dressed and head into work. On my way I stop at the bank on the high street and wait outside until they open. I’m the first customer through the door and I hear myself speak. ‘I’d like to empty these accounts, please.’ I smile, confident. There is barely five hundred pounds in one, but there is a thousand in another. Money I’ve been squirrelling away as an emergency fund, never thinking I’d actually use it. An illusion that I may one day be brave enough to break away.

When I first found out about Richard’s debts I’d considered telling him about it, but my thousand wouldn’t touch the sides of the well of his poor financial judgement, and once his gratitude had faded he’d want to know why I’d been hiding money from him. And what would I say then?Because when I vowed to love you until death do us part, you beating my ribs into my spleen isn’t what I had in mind …

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