Wishful Thinking (38 page)

I retrieved the cat, and put him back in her lap, and daubed her eyes with the tissue. I was a bit surprised to find my hand didn't shake. When she started stroking again, she grew calmer.

‘What happened next?' I said.

She went on stroking. Then she looked up at me, her expression oddly flat. When she spoke, her voice was different. Sharper. ‘I said . . . I'd like some ice cream.'

A faint warmth flowed through me. ‘And?'

‘He got some. Two spoons. He said we'd share it. He said he didn't know why Mummy didn't like me to eat ice cream. If I did what I was told, he'd see I got lots. He – he got his thingy out. While I was eating the ice cream. He said . . . he'd show me something, and he got his thingy out. It was disgusting. It looked – wrong . . .'

‘How – wrong?' I asked involuntarily.

‘Not floppy like it's supposed to be. Sticking up. Anyway,' she added, ‘you're not meant to touch your rude bits when you have food. It's unhygienic.'

‘Very,' I said. ‘So did you—?'

‘I did a sicky.' There was a note of defiance in her voice. ‘I did a really good one. All over him – all over his thingy.'

‘Well done,' I said. I was crying. ‘Bloody well done.' I hugged her, taking care not to dislodge Mandy, feeling a little of the tension ooze out of her. ‘Was he very angry?'

‘He was scary – he said he'd punish me, make me sorry, really sorry. I thought he was going to hit me, but he had to go and wash first, and change his trousers, and I locked the bedroom door so he couldn't come in. Then he stood outside and said how wicked I was, and he would tell Mummy, and she would be very angry. When she came back he told her he'd been nice to me . . . I'd done a sicky when he'd been nice to me . . . and she believed him . . . she
believed
him . . .'

‘Did you try to tell her what he'd done?'

‘No. I thought she'd be angry – about my helping the twins to watch porno stuff. Ivor said she would – he said she'd believe him – and she did. She kept on believing him—'

Meredith was tearful again – I could imagine her sense of betrayal – and I reassured her, telling her it would be all right now, I'd talk to Lin, and she'd be believed, not Ivor. I don't know if she was completely convinced, though I told her ‘
I promise
', which is always sacred to children. I didn't want to think of Lin's reaction when I pulled the rug out from under her world . . .

‘How did you manage to run away?' I asked Meredith.

‘I had to open the bedroom door, when Mummy came home, and Ivor took the key, and this morning he locked me in, and Mummy didn't stop him, and he said in a horrid quiet voice that he would deal with me later. So I climbed out of the window and down into the garden. There's a drainpipe – it's a bit slippy, so I fell some of the way, but I made it, and then I could get out the back. I remembered where you lived, so when I found a taxi I told him to come here. I didn't know where else to go.'

‘You did quite right,' I said. ‘You've been really brave and clever, and I'm so proud of you . . . so proud . . .' I hugged her again. ‘Your mummy will be too, when she knows everything.'

‘You won't tell her about the porn pictures?'

‘Don't worry: it'll all be fine now. I'm going to call Georgie, and tell her about it. That's okay, isn't it? She never liked Ivor very much.'

‘I thought she didn't,' Meredith said, with a trace of satisfaction.

I gave her another biscuit which I suspected would go the way of the first, and put on a video. Then I phoned Georgie.

Horror and fury at Meredith's story possessed me so utterly I'd completely forgotten the drama of the previous night – or that Georgie and I were still on questionable terms – or the fact that she must be suffering from the mother of all hangovers. She answered the phone in a voice that seemed to have sawdust in it: I could hear the fur on her tongue. I paid no attention.

‘Something's happened,' I said. ‘Get round here. It's urgent.'

‘I feel like shit,' she said stonily. ‘And I don't know if I want to see you.'

Memory clocked on, but I ignored it. ‘Meredith's here. She ran away. Thank God, she remembered my address. She turned up in a cab about an hour ago.'

‘Have you called Lin?' Georgie sounded baffled.

‘No.'

‘She'll be frantic. Why did Meredith—?'

‘Ivor.'

There was a silence which lasted some time. I could hear Georgie thinking, kicking her numbed brain into gear. ‘What did he do?'

‘You were right about him,' I murmured, obliquely. In front of Meredith, I wanted to keep the conversation innocuous. ‘You were right all along.'

This time, the silence was much shorter, punctuated by an intake of breath. ‘Is she okay?'

‘I think so. She will be. She's a bloody star,' I added, getting weepy again.

‘I'm coming.' The sawdust had trickled away; her tone was brisk. ‘Just give me time to wash and dress: I'll be as quick as I can. Wait for me?'

‘Yeah.'

I sat down with Meredith in front of
Shrek
, but very little of the film registered on me. Lin must be worrying, I knew, but that was tough. I had no intention of calling her; Georgie and I would go round there. (I couldn't possibly confront Lin alone.) It occurred to me that we couldn't take Meredith with us so we'd need a babysitter. I called a neighbour, giving her few details but stressing the urgency of the situation. Meredith wasn't too happy at the prospect of being left with a stranger, but as it was a woman, and they were to remain in my flat, she accepted it. ‘We have to deal with Ivor,' I told her. ‘We'll fix it so you never have to see him again.' I wasn't sure how – I had no plan of action – but it didn't matter. We'd fix it. I knew I ought to call the police, but not yet, not till we'd spoken to Lin. They would have to be involved, sooner rather than later – presumably Meredith would need to make a statement to some specially trained, sympathetic officer (didn't they video children nowadays, so they wouldn't have to appear in court?) – but all that was for the future. The first thing was to tell Lin, and get Ivor out of her house, out of her life.

We'd finished
Shrek
and moved on to Indiana Jones before Georgie arrived. Meredith had begun to be hungry at last; I gave her some tabouleh from M&S which I had in the fridge and some chocolate which I found at the back of the vegetable drawer, left over from pre-diet days. She greeted Georgie with something that was almost a smile and turned her attention back to the film.

I took Georgie into the kitchen to fill her in. She didn't look good: the fading tan gave her a sallow pallor and the disorder of her hair seemed less artistic than usual. But the tag-end of her hangover had evidently been consigned to history: her manner was sharp and alert, like a flick-knife with the blade ready to spring. She didn't say anything about last night; nor did I. She just listened.

‘We have to go see Lin,' she said when I'd finished.

‘Yes.'

‘Oh God . . .'

I knew she'd started thinking, as I had, not of what Ivor had done (or tried to do) to Meredith, but of what he'd done to Lin. Lin with her romantic ideals and loving heart – Lin standing there in Waitrose with fairy dust in her eyes – Lin saying she'd found her Mr Right, her soulmate, her one and only love. Lin who thought wishes really did come true.

If he fried in hell for all eternity, it wouldn't be too long. (Not that I believe in hell, or capital punishment, or any of those things, but there are times when primitive emotion takes over.)

‘What do we do?' I asked.

‘Go round there.' Restlessly, Georgie opened and closed the kitchen drawers, a purely nervous action, like biting your nails. Or not. I saw her take out a fruit knife with a four-inch serrated blade and thrust it into her waistband, where it was in imminent danger of puncturing her stomach.

‘What's that for?'

‘I thought it was for cutting up fruit,' she murmured, with an echo of her old self. ‘It's just a precaution.'

I didn't like it, but I didn't say any more. We left Meredith with my neighbour, and went out.

I hadn't thought about it, but I should have realised that Georgie was on the edge. The disintegration of her relationship with Cal, the paralysing discovery of her own depth of feeling, the realisation that she too could plumb the abyss of drunken humiliation – these things had pushed her beyond the limits of normal human reactions. Most of us have a sense of proportion, an internal equilibrium that keeps us rooted in the real world; but Georgie's equilibrium had gone with the raggle-taggle-gipsies-oh, leaving her off-balance, off-message, no longer safe to be around. But I was too absorbed with the problem of Lin and Ivor to notice. I remember very vividly the terrible shrinking sensation in my stomach when we arrived outside her house. They say the seat of emotion is in the heart, but it isn't. The heart may quail or leap occasionally, in response to powerful stimuli, but it's the stomach that bears the brunt of the punches. Fear, panic, revolt, anticipation – that's where it gets you. Right in the gut. We stood on Lin's doorstep and rang the bell, and my stomach ran the gamut of every emotion in the book. Lin opened the door. She looked too anxious to be surprised to see us.

She said: ‘What?' and ‘Come in', in an abstracted way, glancing over her shoulder to where Ivor appeared from the living room.

‘Meredith's run away,' he said, looking grave. The hypocrite. ‘Lin wants to call the police, but I don't think . . .'

‘I'll bet you don't,' said Georgie.

Lin didn't seem to register her tone, but Ivor did; I saw it in his eyes. For an instant, it was like looking into the eyes of a calculating machine – or it would be, if machines
had
eyes. I could see his brain doing sums.

‘I feel awful,' Lin was saying, on the edge of tears. ‘We told her off – we locked her in her room – what else could we do? She'd behaved so badly . . . You have to have discipline. Ivor's right about that: he
knows
kids. I suppose I've been lax; I've let her get away with things for so long. She must've climbed out the window . . . I can't think where she could've gone. I've called some of her friends, but she isn't there . . .'

I said: ‘It's all right, Lin. She came to me. It's all right.'

‘Oh God. Oh Cookie – !' She hurled herself on my chest, hugging me, passionate with relief.

Lax
, mouthed Georgie. She was looking at Ivor the way a snake looks at a bird – but Ivor wasn't a bird.

He joined Lin in expressing his gratitude and thanks, though we hadn't done anything. ‘Where is she?' Lin demanded. ‘Why haven't you brought her back? Is she okay?'

‘I left her with a neighbour,' I said. ‘She's fine. We wanted a word with you first.' Like Georgie, I was looking at Ivor.

His expression was a masterpiece: rueful, regretful, compassionate, a little sad. If there was an award for Most Appropriate Expression Under Very Awkward Circumstances, he'd have won hands down. But I knew him now; I could
feel
the well-oiled confidence underneath, the vein of smugness. ‘She threatened to tell people I'd been abusing her,' he said on a sigh. ‘You must realise it's nonsense, but . . . well, you know what she is. I'm afraid she's a lot too clever with that computer of hers. I didn't want to tell you, darling –' this to Lin ‘– but she's been accessing porn sites. She
says
it's for the twins. But . . . I caught her looking at child porn last night.'

Lin stared at him, her colour draining. He took her hand, looking kind, so kind, sorrow and sympathy coming out all over his face like a rash. In that moment, I could have killed him.

But I wasn't the one with the knife.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘she did mention what you tried to do. Funny how convincing she was. I think Lin should get her film career off the ground right now. With that sort of talent, she'd be an Oscar winner from scratch.'

‘Meredith's a very good liar,' he said gravely. He was good at gravitas. ‘The trouble is, she's always got away with it. You wouldn't believe how savvy kids are nowadays. They know it all, poor things. Colleagues of mine have to deal with this sort of accusation all the time.'

A little of Lin's colour returned. She said: ‘Ivor would never . . .'

‘She wasn't lying.' My voice was one
I'd
never heard myself use before. ‘She
did
get pornography for the twins: they've hit puberty with all its urges, and it was a way of augmenting her pocket money. But it was Ivor who accessed the child porn. That wouldn't interest Sandy and Demmy: they like tits. And it certainly wouldn't interest Meredith: she's still young enough to think sex is yukky. She may think it for a long time now.'

‘It's not true,' Lin whispered.

‘What was the first thing you told him, when you met in the chatroom?' I must've sounded hard – implacable. I had to. ‘You wanted to get the worst over with, didn't you? So you explained you were a single parent with twin boys and a girl. A
difficult
girl. He must have thought Christmas had come early.'

‘No . . .' Lin's whisper had shrunk till it was almost inaudible.

Ivor had begun to protest, with just enough weariness in his tone to give it conviction. Georgie, untypically, wasn't saying anything. She'd moved round, so she was standing beside and a little behind him. Her left hand went under her D&G T-shirt and reappeared with the knife. Then her right grabbed his arm, and the blade whipped round – and stopped.