Amber screams.
She’s green and weak by the time they trundle into the station. Every limb turned to jelly. Her companions are laughing, savouring the endorphins, shouting brilliant-amazing-fuck-let’sgo-again at each other. And all she feels is sick and feeble. If anyone were to tell her that she had to go round once more, she would die, there on the spot, she knows it.
She wonders once again what Jade is doing. She had a deadline to meet, she knows that, but it’s approaching dusk now, so she must have filed, if she managed it. Is she thinking about me? Or has she just forgotten? Written it off as one of those things, and gone back to her ordered life? Her hands are shaking. Gradually, her hearing lets in more than the sound of the blood pumping in her ears, and she registers the opening strains of ‘Could It Be Magic’. It must be half-eight already.
If I sit down and have a coffee, she thinks, maybe I can find someone I know to chat to; reassure myself with the familiar. At least I won’t feel like this, trying to stay upright on legs that don’t want to hold me.
The crowd has cleared from the platform now, and she’s the only person left. She feels her way along the wall until she finds the stairs and staggers down, gripping tightly on to the rail.
Her route to the café takes her past the shooting arcade, the ghost train, the kids’ merry-go-round – still occupied, despite the hour – and the dodgems. She half expects to see Vic there, then remembers that he and Dave have swapped on to the waltzer tonight, for a change. Instead she runs into Suzanne Oddie, frowning as best she can through her botox as she peers around in search of someone. Standing a pace behind her are three police constables and another whose uniform places him higher up the food chain.
‘Ah!’ says Suzanne, spotting Amber. ‘You’ll know.’
Amber recognises the senior policeman. He was the one who came with her and Jackie – accompanied them, she thinks in police-speak, and smiles for the first time today – down to the station the night she found Hannah Hardy. He smiles and greets her by name. Suzanne looks surprised, then suspicious, then ploughs on.
‘Ms Gordon knows everyone,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘I’d noticed.’
‘Is there anyone in particular you were looking for?’ asks Amber.
‘Yes,’ says Suzanne. ‘Victor Cantrell. He’s meant to work on the dodgems. Would you recognise him?’
Amber feels once more as though she is falling.
3.30 p.m.
Jade crawls through the hole in the hedge and lands up in a patch of stinging nettles. Swears loudly, because she knows that Chloe will find a way to roll in them, however much she tries to beat them out of the way. She’s beginning to really, really hate this kid. She’s a walking damage magnet. And every time she falls over, that squealing wail starts up: a noise as annoying and invasive as a police siren, reverberating in her skull like a dentist’s drill. And now it’s going to be stinging nettles.
‘I told you we should’ve gone along the road,’ she snarls.
‘No you didn’t,’ snaps Bel. ‘It was you that said it was quicker this way. I asked if there was a footpath!’
It’s the dog days of summer and the ground is hard. All three of them are bruised and scratched from falls and climbs and brambles, and now Jade’s hands and knees are coming up in a white, leaky rash where she’s crawled on the nettles. Her mouth is parched; she can feel the dryness creeping down her throat, feels like her eyelids are lined with sandpaper. Her temper is rising to match Bel’s. Their brains boil with heat and resentment.
‘Come on,’ she snaps back. ‘Mind. There’s nettles.’
Bel pushes Chloe forward. They’ve learned, over the last hour, that she has to go in the middle everywhere. She’s too young and stupid to lead the way, and if they both go first she hangs back until someone has to crawl or climb or push their way back to get her. I’m never having children, Bel thinks. Not if there’s a chance they’ll turn out like this one. She looks at the purple face – the cheeks streaked, the chin a spongy mass of tears – and feels a surge of contempt. The kid reminds her of Miranda – spoiled, useless, favoured Miranda – and the contempt turns to rage. They always blame me. Every time anything goes wrong, they blame me. It’s not fair.
‘Don’t be so bloody pathetic,’ she says. ‘Go on.’
Chloe lost a shoe somewhere back in the mud at Proctor’s Pond, and her white socks are filthy. She squats and looks at the hole in the hedge, and starts to whimper again. Then she gets down on hands and knees and begins, slowly, to crawl. God, thinks Bel, she’s got a bum the size of an elephant. How can someone that small have such a big bum?
Experimentally, she gives the bum a shove with her foot. Chloe pops through the hole like a champagne cork; lands flat out, face down, in the nettle bed. There’s silence for a moment, as she takes in her situation, then the howling starts up. ‘Waaah. Waaaaaaaah. Wah-ooooooow!’
Jade puts her hands over her ears. I can’t stand this, she thinks. How come nobody ever puts a gag on her?
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’
Chloe’s face, hands and thighs are covered in welts. She stares down at her palms and starts to scream. They must be able to hear this all the way over at Banbury. Jade feels her eardrums begin to rattle. Grabs the child by the arm and hauls her upright. ‘Shut up,’ she shrieks, ‘or I’ll give you something to cry about!’
Jade’s the youngest in her family. Has spent many happy hours in the charge of resentful elder siblings, has never had to take charge of a younger one. She does what Tamara and Steph and Gary have all done to her many times to deal with tantrums: she whacks her across the cheek.
Chloe shuts up, double quick.
‘I’ll put a bloody gag on you if you start that again,’ Jade threatens. She doesn’t really understand why she’s in such a temper. Doesn’t know about dehydration and overheating and blood sugar; just knows that Chloe is a burden she never asked for and doesn’t want. ‘We’ll find some dock leaves,’ she tells her. ‘They’ll sort it out.’
‘I want to go home!’ wails Chloe. ‘I want my mum!’
Bel crawls through the hole and stands up. This afternoon seems to be going on for ever.
Chapter Twenty-three
Kirsty learned years ago that work is the great solace. In fact it was Chris, her counsellor at Exmouth, who introduced her to the concept. For a year she had felt as though her head was full of wasps: repetitive thoughts blocking everything else out. They found out quickly that she was barely literate, that what time she had spent at school had been wasted by the expectations of her teachers. At eleven, she had never learned to concentrate. Now, whenever she tried, pictures of Chloe would burst into her head: pictures of her mum, her brothers, the crowd outside the crown court; and she would be angry, tearful, hopeless.
Then one day she’d spent a whole hour with Chris, reading slowly through, of all the mad unteacherly choices, a chapter of James Herbert’s The Rats. For an hour, someone else’s peril was at the forefront of her mind. She wanted to read on and find out what would happen next. So, through graphic descriptions of people being chewed alive, she learned the solace of reading, and from that she slowly learned the solace of learning, and then of writing, and then of asking questions and hearing answers and making something of those answers. And one day she discovered that she had become a success story – the child who was rescued. And she’s never forgotten.