Page 39

CHAPTER 39

OLIVIA – D AY F OUR

We’re locked back in the bedroom again. Chloe’s doing some colouring on the bed. Amelie is just lying beside her with her eyes shut. Both girls are trying to be brave but they’re hungry and thirsty. I’m worried about Amelie in particular. She’s missing her family more and more. I’m nervous about how much she overheard earlier. And she’s obviously so much more aware than Chloe of just how bad our situation is.

My father’s gone out again. No idea where or why. He’s locked the front door and taken the shotgun. He says he won’t be long and I heard the car pull away. He warned me it was my job to make sure the girls behave.

Nothing silly . There will be consequences if you get silly.

I feel I’m letting the girls down so badly because I just can’t decide what to do. A part of me feels I should try to break down the door and get them far away from here right now. But the gun has changed everything. What if he turns up the very moment I’m trying to break out, making a hell of a noise? Gun in his hand. It will whip him into a complete fury.

I think again of what happened in the cellar at home, that one time I made the mistake of challenging him.

I just don’t know which is more dangerous. Triggering his unpredictable anger or playing along with this gruesome charade a bit longer. Keeping him as calm as possible? We need to get out of here, away from that gun, but I need to know he’ll be away from the caravan long enough for us to break down both doors.

It’s agony trying to make these decisions; to cover up my own fears for the girls’ sake. I haven’t explained about the fast to them yet. They’re frightened enough already. They’ve complained of being hungry, but I’ve just told them there aren’t any shops in the countryside so we’ve got to make the juice and the biscuits last all day. Split them fairly. Of course I haven’t had anything myself. I just pretended to sip on the apple juice as we passed the carton between us. I gave the girls one biscuit each and the last of the raisins but it’s not enough. And it leaves just one biscuit to split between them later.

I turn my head to take in Chloe’s concentration. She loves colouring and it’s a Disney book featuring her favourite films. She has distinctive green eyes, my daughter, which always remind me of her father. I wonder when she will ask me about him again. I fobbed her off the last time it came up.

He had to go away, darling.

Will he ever come back?

I was only fifteen when I met Chloe’s father. A naive and silly teenager prone to crushes on singers and actors. I’m not streetwise, I know that. And in my teens, it was worse; I was so unused to freedom. Unused to boys. I had a best friend back then called Julia but my father told me I was to stay away from her. He said she was a bad influence. Wild. Which is precisely why I both loved and envied her too.

Julia was everything I was not. Savvy and confident. Outgoing and funny. She was allowed make-up and had her ears pierced and had all these plans. She didn’t get on with her father but for entirely different reasons. He drank. Got loud and argumentative. She used to talk about running away to London to get a job in a bar and start to live for real. She hated school.

I was the opposite. Little miss goody two-shoes. The swot who did well at everything. High grades and a father with ridiculously high expectations. Doing well at school kept my father calmer. Back then he was taking tablets though I never knew what they were for. His moods were still up and down but not quite so bad. He had these weird punishments if my grades dipped. Made me take cold baths in my pyjamas, using the kitchen timer. Five minutes for a B grade. You could have got an A . Fifteen minutes for a C. I quickly learned to put in the hours; to make sure the school reports were good. It made my life so much easier.

And then it was Julia’s sixteenth birthday and her mother was buying her a record player for her bedroom. Julia was into all things retro and had started a vinyl collection. There was a record shop in town and I decided to save my pocket money and buy her a record as her birthday present.

So that’s where I met him.

His name was Daniel and he looked to me like a musician. Hair to his shoulders. Designer stubble. Tight jeans and a white shirt. Oh, and those eyes. Piercing green eyes.

I was so naive, I blurted this out almost immediately – You have really unusual eyes – which made him laugh at me. Looking back, he must have thought I was flirting but I really wasn’t. Because I went to an all-girls school and I had no idea how to even talk to boys. My father just wouldn’t let me go to pubs or clubs or anything. It never occurred to me that someone like Daniel would be interested in me.

He said his father was French but his mother was Irish. They lived on the outskirts of Paris. The green eyes were from the Irish genes. He said his mother had traced their family tree. Had it all typed up on the computer, going back generations.

I asked him a lot about Paris. I loved learning French at school and was blown away that he was bilingual. The idea of being able to speak two languages fluently thrilled me. He asked me for my name in French and I answered in French. The whole thing gave me butterflies. I gabbled in English about wanting to travel myself. Learn new languages. See the world. I told him about Julia and the birthday present and he helped me pick out the most fabulous record. Bright red vinyl. Beautiful. Her favourite band.

He asked if I would be calling into the shop again and that he’d really like it if I would. I felt hot. And strange. And also conflicted because I just knew deep down that my father would be absolutely horrified to think of me chatting like this to a boy who was a few years older than me. You don’t know what boys and men can be like .

But I didn’t care. I loved how it made me feel, standing in that shop with Daniel smiling at me with his lovely green eyes. So I said I would be back the next week. And I lied. When he asked how old I was, I said I was sixteen. Just a bit older than my friend ...

‘I’m hungry. When are we having proper breakfast?’ Chloe puts the colouring pencils down and pouts. ‘I want to play. Or watch a film. Or go outside or something.’

‘I know it’s hard, honey, but we’ll just stay here for now.’

‘But when’s Grandad getting back? When are we going to eat ?’

‘Soon, sweetpea. Soon.’

Amelie rolls on to her side and I can see that she’s crying again. It hits me suddenly that I need to stop with all this dithering. It’s not fair what I need to ask of these girls; they’re too young. But the truth is I need to start preparing them for what I need to do. I need to explain, as gently as I can, that my father’s ‘illness’ is becoming a serious problem. Which means the time for playing along has passed. I need to get us away from him.

And so I need them to be brave.