A Twist of Fate (3 page)

Thea felt her chest shudder, that familiar prelude to tears, but knew instinctively that she had to be strong. That this was the only way to make her mama happy. And being happy could fix a
person, right? Thea was certain it could.

She reached inside her pocket, remembering the present she’d made. She’d been carrying it around for weeks now, hoping and praying that Mama would be home, or that at the very least
her father would let her go to the hospital to visit her there.

She’d cut the red silk herself and had embroidered it with careful stitches as Michael’s mom, Mrs Pryor, had taught her. It was covered in fluff now from the inside of her pocket,
but it didn’t matter, she supposed. She pressed the small heart into her mother’s hand.

‘I made it for you, Mama. I knew you’d come home,’ she said.

Alyssa Maddox gripped the heart in her hand and held it to her chest, then closed her eyes. Thea’s father held her shoulders as she started to shake.

‘Getting you was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ Alyssa Maddox whispered, her eyes now glistening with tears. ‘Whatever happens, I want you to know that,
Thea.’

Why was Mama talking like this? Like she’d run out of hope. They’d just have to get her new doctors. Better doctors, who could make her well.

‘Come, Lis,’ Thea’s father said, gently. ‘You mustn’t be out in the cold.’

He tried to turn her back towards the car, but she stood her ground.

‘No. I want to see Thea ride,’ Alyssa Maddox said, with a hint of her old defiance. ‘Just . . . just once,’ she said, her voice turning paper-thin again.

‘OK, watch,’ Thea said, her eyes shining brightly, determined to lift her mother’s spirits again.

She turned and, knowing she had to go fast, she half-climbed, half-vaulted the paddock fence, landing with bent knees, knowing that she had to perform – that this somehow was the most
important thing she would ever do for her mother.

She took off, running, back towards Johnny.

Mrs Douglas was waiting for her in the paddock, holding Thea’s riding hat ready for her. The old woman looked strange, standing in the middle of the mud in her sensible black coat. Why was
she in the way,
again
? But Mrs Douglas wasn’t taking any notice of Thea for once. She was looking behind her towards her parents.

Thea pulled the hat down on her head.

‘I gotta show Mama how well I can jump,’ she called to Johnny.

He nodded, helping her up onto Flight’s saddle, securing her feet into the stirrups.

‘Give me a moment to lower the bar,’ he said.

‘No, I can do it,’ Thea told him sternly, yanking on the reins to force Flight to raise his head from where he’d been cropping the grass.

They circled around and Thea stared at the jump. Then, digging in her heels, she raced Flight right at it. Her heart soared as they sailed over.

She couldn’t have done it better. A broad grin broke across her face.

A second jump was blocking her view of the limousine. As she brought Flight around it, she looked at Johnny for approval, but saw that he too now was staring towards the driveway.

Thea’s smile died then. Her mother hadn’t seen her jump. She’d collapsed and was lying stretched out on the ground. Thea’s father and Anthony were kneeling on the gravel
beside her. Together, they raised Alyssa Maddox up and quickly bundled her into the back of the car.

Thea galloped the horse to the paddock fence, just in time to see the limousine completing its turn and setting off at speed away from her and the house, towards the road that led back into
town.

And that’s when Thea saw it: the red heart she’d made for her mother, lying forgotten on the gravel, abandoned, crumpled and torn.

May 1980

It was lunchtime, and after the long morning shift in the industrial laundry attached to the Bolkav State Orphanage, 183 children barged and jostled their way into the draughty
canteen to take their places on the filthy benches beneath the buzzing strip lights.

All together like this, they were a sorry sight. Ranging from toddlers to teenagers, they had many things in common, including headlice, worms and bedbug bites. Despite laundering clean
bed-linen and uniforms for powerful State officials, they were dressed in ill-fitting and worn beige boiler suits – all of which had an ingrained stench of urine and sweat that was
generations old.

In the lunch queue, holding her dented metal tray, impatiently waiting her turn at the counter for her allocated bowl of cabbage stew, nine-year-old Gerte Neumann, known to her closest friends
as Romy, stood out from the crowd. Even beneath the grubby stains on her face, her violet-blue eyes and high cheekbones set her apart as a thing of beauty, and her happy demeanour and wide smile
made the younger children orbit her like planets around the sun.

But today something far more tangible marked her out as someone special too. She was wearing a sparkly clip in her roughly cropped dark hair – a hard-won treasure in a game of dice. But
she might as well have had a neon sign pointing down at her head, such was the level of provocation the clip was bound to cause.

Any pretty item was rare in the orphanage. The few broken toys, torn books and trinkets that were stolen from the pockets of the uniforms sent into the laundry swiftly became currency used to
curry favour, or purchase food, medicine or cigarettes.

‘Take it off, Romy,’ her best friend, Claudia, whispered in her ear, looking up the queue towards Fox, one of the meanest of the elder boys, who was nearly at the serving hatch,
where the cook was mechanically handing out ladlefuls of stew.

It had been Claudia who’d given Romy her nickname years ago, declaring Gerte too ugly a name for someone so pretty. Now Romy looked to where Claudia was staring and pulled a face.

Everyone was frightened of Fox, especially Claudia. He had a shaven head and his face and scalp were dappled with scar tissue, where his mother had sprayed boiling water on him as a baby so that
she could use him to beg. He was thin, with sharp coppery-brown eyes, and that, along with his reputation of getting away with everything, had earned him his nickname.

‘Stop worrying so much,’ Romy said to her friend. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’ She looked at Fox again and then up to the far end of the canteen.

There, walking in between the rows of chipped wooden benches, Ulrich Hubner, the youngest of the orphanage guards, smacked his cane into his hand and surveyed his charges, muttering to himself
at the din.

Ulrich himself had grown up here. A vicious bully as a child, he’d developed into an even more unpleasant man, and Professor Lemcke, the Orphanage Director, spotting his potential for
instilling fear in others early on, had given him a job the moment he’d turned sixteen.

Ulrich hated and loved this place in equal measure. He loved how easy his job was, particularly considering that his only alternative would be to work back-breaking shifts in the nearby steel
works. But he hated the children here. Not just for what they were – nobodies, who could and did disappear – but also because they reminded him on a daily basis that he had come from
nothing too.

But it wasn’t all bad. Oh no, not now that he’d infiltrated his way into Professor Lemcke’s lucrative side-business. In fact recently a whole new world had opened up. Beneath
his guard’s uniform, Ulrich felt his fat member twitch. Those photographs of those little sluts . . . they’d excited him beyond his wildest dreams.

Just as his mind began spinning off into another deliciously depraved fantasy, an explosion of noise jerked his attention to the queue at the opposite end of the hall. Already the other children
had bunched up into a tight, frantic circle around Fox and Romy, clattering their metal trays as the gleeful cry of ‘Fight’ went up.

‘Give it back,’ Romy hissed, but it was too late. With a sneer, Fox chucked her hair-clip upwards and back over the crowd. A hand shot up and snatched it out of the air. No doubt one
of his stupid friends, Romy thought.

Romy grabbed Fox’s arm, bending his right forefinger back to breaking point.

‘Bitch!’ he shouted, breaking free as he slammed a tray hard against her, sending her flailing backwards into the crowd of screaming children.

Fox was almost twice her height, but he didn’t frighten Romy. She leapt right back at him and swung her fist hard, aiming straight for his nose.

But he was too good a fighter. He ducked and she missed. He seized her, spinning her round by the hair, as the other children continued clattering their spoons on their trays.

Ulrich muscled in, blowing his whistle, violently elbowing the children aside. He snatched up Romy, as if she weighed no more than a doll. He marched her out of the canteen, bellowing at the
screaming children behind him to shut up. Romy made a show of kicking and screaming under his arm, stealthily plucking the packet of cigarettes that Ulrich had recently taken to openly displaying
sticking out of his back pocket, no doubt as a reminder to all the other kids of his recent and rapid social rise. She slipped them into the secret inside pocket that she’d sewn into her
boiler suit.

Professor Lemcke, the Orphanage Director, stared out of his office window towards the billowing steam coming from the laundry’s chimneys, then swivelled in his chair to
face the door, as Ulrich banged it open and deposited the panting, red-faced girl on the patterned linoleum in front of the professor’s large metal desk.

The office was austere. Photographs of government officials dominated one wall, a patch of black mould crept down the other. The orphanage buildings should have been condemned long ago.

Professor Lemcke had a condemned look about him too. He was forty-nine and extremely tall and gaunt, his cheeks sunken beneath his wire-framed glasses.

‘You again,’ he said, as Ulrich left.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Romy protested. ‘Fox started it—’

Professor Lemcke held up his hand.
Yes
, he thought . . .
Neumann
. That was this one’s name. A troublemaker. Popular with the other children too, which was even worse. But she
was an attractive child and in a few short years she would, of course, prove useful to him, so he didn’t want to damage her permanently just yet.

And of course she was an investment of Solya’s. The Professor would be unwise to forget that.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Am I correct in thinking that this is the fifth time in the last two months that you have caused a disturbance in the canteen? If you are not careful, you
won’t be getting any meals at all. Is that what you want? To starve? Is that what you’re going to force me to do?’

Romy stared at the Professor. He had abnormally long arms and legs and, sitting there now, his sharp elbows on his desk as he rested his pointed chin on his thin fingers, Romy thought he looked
like nothing so much as a spider waiting to pounce.

Romy made her eyes well up with tears. ‘Please, sir, it wasn’t my fault, I swear it.’

‘I’m not a cruel man,’ Professor Lemcke said, creaking out of his chair. His knees cracked loudly. His eyes met Romy’s and his tone changed. ‘Haven’t I
treated you as my own? Haven’t I looked after you since you were a baby here?’

Romy tried to hide from her eyes the hatred she felt for this man. He was clever, she knew, even more clever than Fox. She knew how much he liked to inflict pain on the other children,
particularly the boys. But something had always made him hold back with her. Perhaps he really did have a soft spot for her after all.

‘Please don’t punish me,’ Romy said, with a plaintive sob, edging towards his desk.

The stainless-steel letter opener was by his blotter, just where she’d known it would be. She’d been planning this all week, since last week’s visit, when she’d stolen
the book – a novel about fishing – that she was still working her way through with Klaus, the elderly laundry supervisor. Romy was determined to learn how to read. How to read and
escape. To escape and then, somehow, win through to a better life than this.

‘Everyone else thinks my heart is hard, but it’s not, Gerte,’ the Professor was saying. The use of her real name shocked Romy. He never referred to any of the children by their
Christian names. She hadn’t even realized he knew hers. ‘It’s not. I do an impossible job here. You must understand. Now please don’t cry,’ he continued, coming around
the desk.

He put his arms around her and pressed her face tight against his long legs, the way he’d done once before. She could hear him breathing deeply.

‘There, there,’ he told her, not letting go.

This was her moment. This was going exactly to plan.

As he ran his hand through her hair and trailed his fingers down her spine, sending a shuddering tremble through his whole body, Romy reached behind him and grabbed the letter opener, sliding it
up her sleeve.

Footsteps sounded on the other side of the office door. With an agonized sigh, the Professor released her and quickly stepped back.

She looked up at him, her eyes round with obedience. ‘I’ll do an extra shift at the laundry. I’ll do it right now. I’ll be good.’

He was about to answer when there was a knock on the door.

‘Come,’ Lemcke called.

One of the older boys, Drum, barged into the room.

‘Bit young, isn’t she, Prof?’ Drum said, looking between Romy and the Professor, a thin smile playing on his fleshy lips. ‘You should feed these ones up,
Professor,’ he sneered. ‘The faster they grow, the better for us all, eh?’

‘What do you want?’ Professor Lemcke walked back around his desk, his composure ruffled.

‘You know what,’ Drum said. ‘Come on, I’ve already got the basement ready.’

The Professor nodded, opening his desk drawer with a tiny gold key that he took from his inside jacket pocket. Both he and Drum had clearly both forgotten that Romy was even there.

She edged nearer the desk, trying to see what was inside the drawer, already mentally clocking where the Professor kept the key. Somewhere in this office, or in the filing room next door, would
be her birth certificate and perhaps documentation relating to who her parents were. She was determined that one day she would make that information hers.