‘So does he know?’ she asks. ‘Your husband? About you?’
‘Jim?’ Kirsty feels the prickle of hair on her arms at the thought. ‘God, no. Not a thing. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know how…’
Amber’s tone turns harsh, interrogatory. ‘So what do you tell him? What’s your cover story?’
‘I… bad parents. Care system. Don’t want to go back there. You know.’
‘And he accepts it?’
‘He… At first I think he used to have a fantasy that he could bring about some sort of miracle reunion, you know? But he gave up a long time ago. I think he just accepts it now. Just thinks of it as being what makes me me. That I don’t want to go back there and I don’t want to be reminded.’
‘I’ll bet you don’t,’ says Amber.
Kirsty gulps. This isn’t going well, she knows. Though she’d had few expectations that it would. ‘What about your… Vic? Does he know?’
‘He doesn’t ask,’ says Amber. ‘I guess maybe that’s why I’m with him. He never asks. Not about anything, really. He’s the most uncurious person I’ve ever met.’
Incurious, says Kirsty’s mental editor. She slaps him down. But God, that sounds so – empty.
Amber sees the thought cross her face. ‘Oh, don’t feel sorry for me,’ she snaps. ‘I don’t need your pity. It’s how I like it, trust me.’
Kirsty feels herself blush, looks down. The waitress returns with her coffee. ‘I put some chocolate on top,’ she tells her. ‘I hope that’s OK.’
‘Thanks,’ says Kirsty, who’s more of a cinnamon girl.
She stirs the drink, peeps at Amber. ‘I’m sorry, Amber.’
A frown: suspicious, defensive. ‘Sorry? What about?’
‘No,’ says Kirsty hastily. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t. I was trying to apologise if I’d offended you. And because I… I didn’t know about Blackdown Hills. I didn’t know that had happened to you.’
‘Yeah? And if you’d known, what would you have done about it? Come galloping to the rescue?’
‘You know I… Oh, God. I just didn’t know, that’s all. And I’m sorry.’
The defensive look is still on Amber’s face. I’m handling this so badly, thinks Kirsty. Jim would do it so much better. He’d know how to talk to her. I wish I could ask him.
Amber is shaking her head repetitively. ‘Yeah, well. I’m not the tragedy you seem to think I am, Jade. As it goes. It may not be Farnham, but I’m doing OK. For your information, we’ve bought our house, too. I’m not a charity case. I don’t need your pity, thanks all the same.’
Kirsty is ashamed, wrong-footed; squirms at the tone. She’s angry with me? I didn’t do it. I didn’t send her to Blackdown. ‘Yes! Sorry. God, I’m doing this all wrong. I know I am. I didn’t mean to…’ She dries up. Stirs her coffee again, miserably, while Amber studies the flock wallpaper from behind her stupid sunglasses. Kirsty catches sight of a figure in the window: Rat Man, from before. He’s leaning his arm along the glass to shade his eyes, and peering in. Funny little man. Something of a pest around here, I’ll bet. She turns her gaze back.
‘You know what I think?’ ask Amber.
Kirsty doesn’t really want to know. But she owes it to her. ‘No,’ she says.
‘I think you got Exmouth and therapy and education because you were the kid who got led astray,’ she says. Challenges her to contradict the statement. ‘In the end, that was what it was.’
‘Amber, I had to work for it!’ she protests. ‘They didn’t just hand me university on a plate. I did it on my own.’
Amber’s eyes narrow as she interrupts. ‘Yeah, but we all know why you got the chance to do that, don’t we?’
‘Why?’ asks Kirsty, miserably.
Amber fiddles with her teaspoon and glares at her. ‘Because I was evil, and you were misguided. It was what they said in the papers, after all. There’s nothing like a cut-glass accent on a kid to make her an evil bitch, is there?’
The words come out in a rush, the flow stopping suddenly, as though she’s run out of breath.
‘Oh God, Bel,’ says Kirsty. She doesn’t want to believe it. A kid’s a kid. Surely that’s true, isn’t it? ‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sure it was just a lottery thing. It has to have been.’
Amber looks away again, her face inscrutable behind her dark glasses. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says. ‘Don’t think you can just come in here and get my forgiveness. It’s not absolution time, Jade. Just so you know. I don’t think it’s OK that you got helped and I got punished. Whatever the rest of the world thinks. I was no more responsible for what we did than you were. And now I know, a bit of me’s going to hate you till the day I die.’
Chapter Twenty-two
Amber stands no chance of snatching sleep before her shift begins, so she comes in to work early. She feels restless, uncertain, and wants to be among people, because people are the best way to stop you thinking. Amber never comes to Funnland as a visitor, and finds herself suddenly keen to experience the pump-pump-pump of music, the hyped-up laughter of strangers, the breathless whirl of light and movement, without thinking about the junction boxes and the pistons, the pulleys and the cranes and the smoke and mirrors that bring it all to life.
She comes in through the back gate. Jason Murphy is off, she notices; a thin, solemn black man she doesn’t recognise watches her as she swipes her card and opens her locker. She nods at him and receives a neutral nod – neither friendly nor unfriendly, nor curious nor bored – in return. She dumps her bag, but keeps her jacket on, emptying her keys and cash into the buttoned breast pocket.
She can hear the strains of ‘We Are Family’ coming from the waltzer, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ from the Terror Zone, ‘Echo Beach’ from the Splash Zone; her ear has become so attuned to the repetitive assault to the senses that she can hear each song individually, knows that each will be followed by ‘I Feel for You’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’. Somewhere out there, she knows that Vic and his mate Dave are doing their Sister Sledge dance together, their little bit of showbiz, all manly shoulder-leaning and jazz hands; a little bit of theatre that makes the punters laugh and feel like they’ve witnessed a moment of joyous improvisation. Improvisation that, if they hung around the same spot long enough, they would get to see at eleven minutes past the hour, every hour. In seventeen minutes’ time the students at the roller coaster queue will ‘spontaneously’ become Take That, patting their chests and pointing to their crotches with choreographed abandon.
Automatically, she runs her eye over the punch cards in the rack. Funnland still has a punch-card system, as well as the swipe-keys, so that Suzanne Oddie can tell if any of the staff have been sneaking in for a bit of fun without paying. Few cards have been punched yet: just the early-evening skeleton crew who circle the compound, emptying bins and picking up litter with long-handled tongs. Amber had to fight long and hard to get the tongs: before she did it, the cleaning was an onerous cycle of stoop and stand, stoop and stand, absenteeism through back strain a serious problem. She notices that Jackie has punched in already; wonders why her laziest colleague is suddenly keen. Starts worrying, again, about what she’s going to do about the budget.
Shit, she thinks. I’m not going to get a minute’s peace. If I’m not thinking about what happened this afternoon, I’m going to be worrying about that. I don’t see how I’m going to do it. Could I cut back everyone’s hours, so no one has to go? Christ. And then it would be unfair on everyone.
She realises that she’s been standing here for a full minute, staring at her locker door as though in a fugue, and that the security guard is staring at her, this time with curiosity in his gaze. Pull yourself, together, Amber. Come on.