The next time Chloe glanced across at Jess she was gazing contemplatively at the large tattoo of Shawn Barrett that covered most of her left forearm. Her mum had apparently gone nuts when she’d got it done at the age of fifteen, threatened to report the tattoo parlour, but Jess hadn’t cared.
Now, Jess was biting the inside of her top lip to stop herself smiling and, with her right forefinger, she stroked the smudgy cheek of Shawn’s tattoo.
If Chloe had had to describe her friend’s appearance, she would have said it was ecstatic.
‘Are you on drugs?’ Chloe asked. ‘Did you get some E?’
‘Don’t be daft. Drugs are for losers. Now be quiet, all right?’ And she started to sing, belting out the words like her life depended on it.
Chapter 6
Day 3 – Patrick
Mummy, you put the triangle in there.’
Gill beamed and slotted the triangle through the triangular hole in the apparatus. ‘Here, Bonnie, do the circle.’
Bonnie took the proffered plastic ball, scrutinised it for a moment, then handed it back to her mother, shaking her head so vigorously that her pink cheeks wobbled. ‘Mummy.’
Gill posted the circle, then handed a square one to Patrick. ‘Daddy do the square?’ she asked Bonnie.
Bonnie pointedly turned her back on him, as though he had just made some devastatingly insulting personal comment to her. ‘No. I want Mummy to do it.’
Patrick shrugged, feeling ridiculously slighted. Bonnie seemed more than fine, playing with Gill as if nothing had ever happened – although of course she wouldn’t remember it; how could she, she’d only been five months old, and that was as it should be. It would be terrible if she recoiled at Gill’s touch.
Patrick remembered it, though.
He knew he would never, ever forget it. The sight of Gill’s purple fingermarks on their baby’s neck would accompany him to the grave, her tiny limp body within seconds of eternal lifelessness . . .
As if she could read his thoughts, Gill looked up at him from where she was crouching on the rug next to Bonnie and her toys. She gave him a slow, tentative smile, the neediness of which made Patrick’s teeth clench. This is all so screwed up, he thought. She had recovered; they had the chance for a fresh start. He knew deep down she would never try to hurt Bonnie again, she’d never wanted to in the first place, she’d been in the grip of a devastating bout of postnatal psychosis. As long as they resigned themselves to being a one-child family, there was no reason to be fearful. Bonnie was now a happy, normal two-and-a-half-year-old. Gill was his beloved wife, and they were a family again. He and Bonnie could move back in here with Gill tomorrow – the social worker had already signed Gill off and she could be left alone with Bonnie all day if she wanted now, after a few months of supervised visits.
But the problem was, he wasn’t sure that he felt anything at all for his wife, bar a deep sense of sorrow and pity. How could he go back to sharing his bed, his life, his heart with someone he wasn’t sure he even loved anymore?
Their house was immaculate, far better than it had been in all the months it was rented out on short-term lets. Patrick looked around the room.
‘New picture? It’s nice.’ He gestured towards a large canvas on the wall – abstract artily out-of-focus petals. Privately he thought Gill’s tastes must have changed. The old Gill would have dismissed that as anodyne or too predictable. Perhaps that was a consequence of being incarcerated in a secure mental unit for over a year . . .
Gill actually blushed. ‘I got some new scatter cushions too,’ she said, pointing at the sofa. The cushions were the exact same shade of crimson as the petals in the picture.
‘Yes, I noticed,’ said Patrick, although he hadn’t. ‘Lovely.’
‘The kitchen was really dirty,’ Gill said, helping Bonnie slot jigsaw pieces into place. ‘Those tenants were supposed to have had it professionally cleaned when they left, but they clearly didn’t. We should complain to the letting agent. Who was the agent?’
She hated this, Patrick realised. She hated the fact that he’d had to do all the work involved in the temporary lets of their house, negotiating with the letting agents when she didn’t even know who they were because she’d been locked in a mental unit, having daily therapy while he was approving the inventory, checking references, having to live with his mum and dad, parent Bonnie and work full-time . . . It was as though she felt she could never make it up to him.
Often, Patrick also thought that she never would be able to. ‘Does it matter now?’ he said, more testily than he had intended. ‘We’ve got the house back.’
Gill sat back and held her arms wide for Bonnie to sit in the V-shape made by her outstretched legs. She gazed at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. But we aren’t all living in it, are we?’ Bonnie snuggled into her lap, sucking her thumb, and Patrick regarded the two pairs of identical hazel eyes scrutinising him.
He stood up and walked away, cursing his cowardice.
‘I’m still not ready, Gill,’ he said, without looking at her. When he glanced back from the kitchen, she was hugging Bonnie silently, dropping her lips to Bonnie’s soft brown hair. Patrick felt like a heel. She must know how hard it was for him to live with his mum and dad and have to share a room with Bonnie, and yet he still didn’t want to come home. That must be making her feel terrible, he thought.
He put the kettle on, for something to do, and stood at the kitchen counter listening to the water heat up as Bonnie chatted obliviously to Gill in the next room. She seemed to be telling her about some penguins she knew. Patrick smiled, then the smile dropped away as he realised that every day he prevaricated was another day Bonnie was being deprived of her mother’s continuous and stabilising presence.
It was doing his head in. Why could he not just go for it? Fling himself back into the marriage, for Bonnie’s sake if no-one else’s?
Throwing tea bags into two mugs, he did what he always did when his thoughts reached this impasse: he thought about something else instead.
He remembered the vigil last night. All those big versions of what Bonnie would become all too soon – little girls in almost-adult bodies and scaled-down adult clothes – well, prostitutes’ clothes, in many cases. He grinned briefly, thinking that he sounded just like his mother.
The girls last night had been torn between simmering post-gig euphoria – bordering on hysteria – and the pressure to be hushed and respectful. Patrick suspected that the murder of one of their own was making these girls feel even more excited, blood and hormones at boiling point, than they would at the end of a normal OnTarget gig. At least he and Carmella hadn’t had to sit through the gig themselves. When he’d found out that the vigil was taking place, he’d decided that their attendance at the actual concert wasn’t necessary. The vigil had been an unexpected bonus – a great chance to talk to the girls in his official capacity.
Many of them had got so hot from dancing and screaming inside the stadium that they had stripped down to tiny crop tops and removed the tights that they’d probably sported at the start of the evening in the chill February air. Half-naked, flushed girls holding lit candles was definitely at odds with the funereal atmosphere and Rose’s poor crying parents. He had looked around him at the thirty or forty girls who were all gaping at him as though he’d been beamed down from Mars, trying to spot anyone who seemed particularly uncomfortable or as if they had something to say. But even when he’d exhorted them to come forward, none of them had appeared flustered or anything other than curious, or ghoulishly fascinated by the whole affair.
Surely one of them must know something. Why had Rose gone to that hotel? Had she been dating an older man – the sort of man who would invite her up to a hotel room? He’d asked her mum, but Sally Sharp had been utterly convinced that Rose had no time for boys her own age, let alone older men. Rose had been a young fifteen who had never had a boyfriend and who had only had four, virtual, loves in her unformed and now unfinished life – the members of OnTarget. The girl had apparently slept, eaten, breathed OnTarget. Her whole life revolved around them – trying to get their attention online, buying CDs and downloads, concert tickets and merchandise with whatever birthday or babysitting money she happened to have. Her only friends were other OnTarget fans – Patrick had taken the names of all the ones that Sally Sharp knew of, and obviously he or Carmella would be talking to them as soon as they could – but he wondered if Wendy was right, and this was a simple case of an online predator. So far, the investigations of her online history and phone records had shown nothing interesting, just endless meaningless chit-chat with other fans.