Wonder Women (24 page)

‘Why, David? Why am I more responsible for her than you are? Why don't you move in here? Or Miranda?'

He looked at her like she was crazy. ‘Because I have a home. A proper home, not a room in some squat somewhere. And a job, and a family. And Miranda has a home and a family too. You're the one who's spent the last decade roaming around footloose and fancy free. It's time to take some responsibility.'

Holly said nothing. She just got up from the table and walked out. As she opened the front door, she heard David say, ‘… running away. Like she always does.' She could hear Miranda's placatory murmur, although not what she said. She got into her mum's car, and without thinking drove around the North Circular to East Finchley. When she'd signed the lease, Bob had given her keys, so she opened the door and started to carry stuff up the stairs to the flat. The car had been absolutely rammed to the roof, but once she'd lugged all the boxes up the stairs, they made a sorry, small pile in the middle of the living room. The flat-pack furniture
was all still in its boxes, and even when she laid all the kitchen stuff out on one counter, it looked pathetically inadequate. She wandered back into the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor, looking out of the window at the branches of a big tree that was illuminated by the street light. Curtains. Fuck. Curtains. She didn't have any curtains. She was thirty years old, about to become an orphan and she didn't even have curtains. She wished she could go and buy a lot of alcohol and get very drunk, but she didn't have a bottle opener or any ice, and anyway, she couldn't drink because she had to get her mum's car back.

When Bob tapped hesitantly on the door and came in, she was sitting with her head in her hands. She was too tired and sad even to cry. She could see Bob's olive green trouser leg and carpet slipper beside her, but she didn't have the strength to raise her head. She heard the clink of glass against glass, and Bob held a bottle of beer in her line of vision. ‘I know you have to drive, but you can have one,' he said.

‘Thanks.'

‘Had some bad news?'

‘Yes.'

‘Need a bit of time to think things over?'

‘Yeah … I—I don't know if I'll be able to take this place after all, Bob …'

‘Well, that's a pain in the arse. I don't want to have to go down WHSmith's to get a new lease form and fill it in and all.' He paused, and then said diffidently, ‘Look. Take a week or so. Sort yourself out. I haven't got around to banking your cheque yet, and I can hang on to it for a bit.'

‘You're a nice man, Bob.'

‘Now, don't you go spreading that around. I have a reputation to protect, you know.' He clinked his beer bottle against hers, and she heard him shuffle out and close the door behind him.

Things between Mel and Serena seemed, temporarily, to have reached a peaceful place. Since they had returned from Christmas in Devon, Serena had been keeping better hours, hadn't skipped school once, as far as Mel could tell, and was generally more civil, even friendly. Mel hated to admit it, but it seemed Bruce's gift of the laptop had turned things around. A bit of freedom and access to her own computer had made Serena very happy. Not that Mel had had much choice in the matter, as the first time she knew about the computer was when Bruce gave it to Serena on Christmas morning.

And, to be fair, so far so good on the whole computer thing. They had set limits on the hours Serena could access the Internet: a two-hour window each weekday evening and longer at weekends. Her IT-whizz friend Hamish had assured her he had limited the websites Serena could access and he had given Mel the web address for the monitoring website so she could look at Serena's Internet history, but so far, she hadn't done this. Firstly, because while things were this good, it seemed unnecessary, and secondly because now that she
had the laptop, Serena seemed happy to come home and spend time in her room, rather than being out roaming the streets. As her hours on the Internet were limited, she must be using her computer for other things – Mel could often hear music playing, so she reckoned that was a major part of it. She hadn't been at all sure about the whole thing when Bruce first gave Serena the laptop, but he seemed, on balance, to have been right. Having a laptop in her room meant Serena could type assignments for school instead of handwriting them, for one thing. And as her handwriting was as bad as Mel's, that could only be a positive.

One Thursday morning, Mel was at home. She wasn't due at work till midday, so she was using the morning to give the flat a quick once-over. She put through a few loads of laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, cleaned the bathroom and set about giving the flat a thorough hoover before she left for work. Serena was off to stay with her dad that weekend, a rare occurrence, and Mel would be working long hours at the shop while she was away, so she wanted to get all the housework out of the way.

She wasn't planning to clean Serena's room. She hadn't done that since Serena had turned thirteen and started yelling at her every time she came through the door. She nagged periodically and got Serena to pick up all her dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket in the bathroom, or kept on at her until she brought dirty plates and cups out to be washed, but by and large, she left her to it. If it wasn't actively unhygienic, it seemed best to leave her to have her own space. But today, Serena was out, and her door was slightly ajar. Mel could see the fluff and dirt on
the carpet on the other side of the doorway. She had the hoover out. She might as well run it over Serena's carpet. It wasn't as if she was going to do a major clean.

She pushed the door open and went in. The room wasn't terribly untidy: there was a pile of clothes on the end of the bed (which wasn't made), but at least there were no dirty dishes or food containers, and the floor was relatively clear. The waste-paper basket was full, but she could empty that – she had a big black bin liner with her to empty all the bins in the flat. She pulled the waste-paper basket out from under Serena's desk and tipped it into the bag. The bin was very full and a few bits spilled out on to the carpet. She bent to pick them up. There were a few soiled cotton buds, a tissue and a distinctive piece of red and white cardboard. Mel was streetwise enough to recognise a piece of card torn from a Rizla cigarette paper package. She also knew that a fragment of a Rizla packet meant that (a) you'd had a whole packet of cigarette papers at some point, and (b) when rolling a cigarette, or possibly a joint, you knew enough about what you were doing to use a piece of the package rolled into a cylinder as a makeshift filter. She sat heavily on Serena's desk chair.

So at best, Serena was smoking roll-up cigarettes. Quite possibly, she was smoking marijuana. Mel couldn't stop herself. She took the bin liner and tipped its contents on to the floor. It made an almighty mess, but she sat picking through each piece of rubbish to see what else she could find. There was nothing else terribly incriminating: lots of crumpled pages of half-done schoolwork and an enormous amount of junk-food packaging. There were also a few beer bottle tops,
but in the greater scheme of things, she wasn't terribly worried about that. But Rizlas? Rizlas were not good.

Mel finished picking up all the rubbish and set about hoovering the carpet. In order to clean under the desk, she pulled the chair right out, and in doing so, jogged the computer mouse that Serena had attached to her laptop. The computer hummed and lit up. She must have left it on and let it go into sleep mode, rather than switching it off completely. Damn! Well, as long as she didn't touch anything, hopefully it would put itself back to sleep before Serena came home from school. Serena's desktop wallpaper was a picture of some awful grime group that she loved. They were all standing in front of a graffiti-covered wall and making gun shapes with their fingers and pointing at the camera. Yawn, thought Mel. How unoriginal. Unlike her room, Serena kept her computer desktop very tidy. There were a few progam icons neatly lined up along the left-hand edge, but that was all. Mel's own computer desktop was covered in random programs, copies of pictures and documents she'd opened or downloaded. Hamish was always on at her to file or delete things so she didn't lose them or clutter up her hard drive, but she couldn't be bothered. She knew where things were, more or less. It seemed Serena was a lot more disciplined.

Mel should have walked away, but a tiny voice said to her that if there was a Rizla packet at the bottom of Serena's bin, what else was her daughter hiding? She didn't know the first thing about looking for things on a computer, so she clicked on the ‘Start' button and looked at the menu that came up. There was an option for ‘Recent Items', and
she chose that. There were fifteen or so items listed. There were about ten Word files that were clearly school course-work. Then there were three video files. Mel clicked to open one and saw it was a pirate copy of a film. She sat through the title sequence to see what it was, and it was
Hannibal
. She checked the other two video files:
American Psycho
and
28 Days Later
. All 18s, all films she would have prevented Serena from watching had she known. But how did Serena get them? Had someone lent her a DVD that she'd copied on to her computer? That seemed unlikely … Mel didn't even know if it was possible. But if not, where had she got them? From illegal file-sharing websites? But how was she accessing them when Hamish had set all the parental controls?

The last two files in the ‘Recent Items' list were photos, and Mel had a feeling before she opened them that she would wish she hadn't. She was right. In the first picture, Serena was in a bathroom, not theirs, one at someone else's house. She was standing at right angles to the bathroom mirror, wearing just a bra and pants, and the angle of the picture told Mel she had taken it herself with her mobile phone. Like Mel, she was small and compact. Unlike Mel, she had quite big breasts, and they were spilling out of the bra, a sexy black lace one that Mel had certainly not bought for her. Why would Serena take a picture like that? Why was it on her computer? Did it mean she had posted it somewhere? Or sent it to someone? If so, whom?

But the second picture, which showed Serena lying on her back on her own bed, was even more worrying. Not so much because of what she was wearing – a T-shirt and very short
shorts, but what horrified Mel was firstly the look of naked, adult sex on Serena's soft, teenage face, and secondly the camera angle. The picture had been taken from over by the window, looking down on the girl lying on the bed. That meant that Serena couldn't have taken it herself. Someone had been in this room, and had taken an intimate picture of Mel's teenage daughter. The kind of picture you took of a lover.

She felt sick. Sick, angry, powerless and very, very alone. She didn't know how to handle this. Serena was only fifteen, and she clearly had a secret life that was much more adult than Mel had imagined. It seemed to involve both sex and drugs. What was Mel to do? She knew from experience that confronting Serena would end badly. There would be screaming, and then there would be a wall of silence. And if she admitted she had seen the pictures or the contents of Serena's bin, she would be forced to explain that she had been in the room and had used the opportunity to look at Serena's private things. She knew that the betrayal of trust would slam doors closed and that Serena would never forgive her and never tell her anything again. She was walking on eggshells with her as it was. Was the Rizla packet Serena's, or had someone else left it there? Who had taken the picture of her on the bed? Who had seen the picture of her in her underwear? Who had helped her to get around the controls on her computer? It seemed there was one, or more than one, mysterious figure in Serena's life, convincing her to get involved in things she shouldn't. It would help to know who they were, and what exactly she was dealing with, before she started asking Serena questions.

Mel looked at her watch. She was already late for work. She closed the last picture on the computer and put the mouse back exactly where she had found it. She pushed the desk chair back in, grabbed the bin bag and the hoover and left Serena's room.

That evening, when she came back from work, Serena was in the living room, slumped on the sofa, watching an Australian soap opera. Mel looked at the back of her head. This girl, this child, had come from her body. She had thought she knew her better than anyone in the world, that they were partners for life. But it seemed Serena was a stranger. If Serena had secrets, she would have to have secrets too. If she was going to watch over her daughter and protect her, she would have to learn to be sneaky. She called on all her acting experience, took a deep breath and said, ‘Hi,' in the most breezy, indifferent voice she could manage. In response, Serena muttered darkly, something Mel didn't quite catch. ‘What was that?' she said, because that was what she would say if today was a normal day, a day the same as any other.

‘Why did you go in my room?' Serena said. She didn't seem angry, just petulant.

‘I was cleaning and your door was open so I thought I'd give it a quick hoover and empty the bin.' And before Serena could say anything else, Mel said, ‘I got pizzas for dinner. Hope that's okay.'

She went into the kitchen and started putting things away. She was shaking, but she thought her performance had been convincing. Serena had a day off school the next day, Friday, as there was some sort of staff training. Bruce would be coming over to collect her in the morning to spend a long
weekend with him. She would take the laptop with her, that was a certainty. But Mel had already decided to try to meet up with Hamish, who, she hoped, would shed some light on how Serena had bypassed the parental controls. It was a first step, a small one, but it was something, and she had to do something. She had to.

Bruce arrived the next morning. He was half an hour late, which was no big surprise; he was always late. It was just particularly infuriating that morning, because it meant Mel had to leave for work as soon as he arrived. She had been hoping to invite him in for a cup of coffee, so they could have a talk about Serena. But she'd been late for work the day before, and lenient though Jo was, she wouldn't take kindly to Mel opening the shop late. All she had time for was a quick, ‘You're late. We need to chat at some point. I have to go.' She kissed him quickly on the cheek, grabbed her bag and ran out of the door. ‘Bye, Serena, have fun!' she yelled, as she headed for the stairs. At any other time, she would have gone in and said a proper goodbye, maybe given a few instructions about homework over the weekend, and she would definitely have kissed Serena goodbye. But she just couldn't bring herself to go near her daughter. If she did, she would either weep, or slap her, or hold on to her with all her might and never let her go.