Her dad is always telling her that he will ‘be there for her, no matter what’, and yet whenever she actually needs something, like for him to turn up and watch her swim in a gala, or stand up to Brian, or, say, pick her up in the pouring rain after she’s had an encounter with some creepy man, the call goes straight to voicemail.
Her cheeks burn and she ignores them.
Now that she’s reached the bottom of the steps of the pedestrian exit, she starts to consider her situation more calmly. She is in a warren of residential streets near the river, outside a closed beauty shop.
Katie pauses under the awning, wondering whether to try again or simply abandon the whole venture, when she hears steps: someone is walking along Abbey Road, with heavy boots and a brisk, rolling gait, a person hidden by the intervening wall.
She thrusts the phone back in her pocket and waits for whoever it is to pass by her, but the steps just stop – there is no sign of anyone when she finally abandons the shelter of the beauty shop’s porch and returns to the street, and she guesses that they must have turned into one of the houses nearby.
Well, whoever they were, they aren’t there now, and she needs to get a move on. She has a plan.
Just beneath Elizabeth Way and along the riverbank there is a footbridge – just a few minutes’ walk from here. She can re-cross the river there and make her way along the well-known streets back home. No car can follow her over it, and anything would be better than waiting here.
Young as she is, Katie knows that the suggestion of decamping to her dad’s house when there’s a crisis is like throwing a match on to the petrol of her mum’s insecurity. That’s why it was a great plan when Katie was furious and wanted to hurt her mother, but not so good when, as now, she’s exhausted, a little scared and soaked to the bone.
If she can sneak up to her room before they see the backpack she can just say she went out for a walk to clear her head. There would still be a bloody awful row, but not as bad as it could be.
She heaves her wet rucksack over her shoulder; everything in it must be damp. What a stupid night this has been, she thinks. That bloody Brian, he lives to wind me up – and sets off under the overpass, the river gurgling and pattering placidly on her right, the huge concrete pillars on her left. Above her head, cars roar.
The well-lit tracery of the footbridge is visible just ahead and she smiles slightly to herself. She will go home and get dry and, once they’ve stopped shouting at her, she’ll get into bed and stream some rubbish TV to her laptop. In fact, her mother might even decide not to continue their fight, but instead take pity on her bedraggled state and make her a mug of hot chocolate and some toast to enjoy in front of the telly – it’s been known to happen before. Katie knows that their rows make her mum feel horribly guilty, but she never understands why.
This fantasy pleases her as she trudges along the rails on the side of the river, so it takes her a second or two to work out that someone is walking up behind her – someone in heavy boots walking quickly, too quickly.
She jerks around, but not fast enough, and there is the shocking intimacy of arms – strong, knotty arms – snaking around her waist, her neck, forcing her head back, a big rough hand covering her mouth.
‘Ah, Katie,’ he whispers, and his breath is hot against her chilled cheek as she tries to scream, to struggle. ‘I think we got off on the wrong foot there.’
1
I’ve always had this thing about magpies. They’re meant to be unlucky if you see one on its own, but they always give me this sudden burst of optimism whenever I catch sight of one perched on grass or rusted railings, in its tuxedo of feathers and cocking its head at all comers. I admire self-possession in the animal kingdom.
One of them was watching me from the chestnut branches as I left my own portion of the animal kingdom, namely St Hilda’s Academy, where self-possession isn’t as highly a sought virtue as self-restraint. I was in the school car park under its leafy canopy of trees, loading my bulky bag into my little red Audi A3 convertible. I was highly strung and restless, or at least more so than usual, casting my glance at the bag containing all of the day’s collected essays, which were threatening to spill out of the top.
So much for my weekend.
I got into the car alongside the offending bag and shut the door.
On the dashboard lay a copy of the Cambridge Examiner, which I hadn’t had time to read yet. I thumbed idly through it. PUBLIC ENQUIRY ENDS IN SEMI-RIOT shared the front page with RESIDENTS PROTEST ONE WAY SCHEME. Within were the little boxes of print naming the damned souls caught trying to pilfer tinned veg and pairs of tights from the local supermarket, or breathlessly describing acts of low-impact, mundane vandalism, alongside a photo of a gloomy pensioner shaking his head at youth’s folly and the world’s wickedness.
There was nothing in there about Katie Browne. There had been nothing for a week.
I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this.
Somewhere between the letters complaining about the failure of parents to control their children in restaurants, and the feature on Cambridge fifty years ago (it appeared to be the same seething, overheated one-horse town as now – the horse in question was posed in the photo on Magdalene Bridge sporting a floral collar and looking glum and disappointed with its lot), was ‘Dear Amy’, the column I write. In it I presume to advise the lovelorn and wits-ended.
I met the Examiner’s editor through his fifteen-year-old son Conor. Conor was in my English class, but having trouble concentrating on my lessons – on everyone’s lessons, to be honest. He was acting up and distracting the others, and starting to display an uncharacteristic but growing anger. The editor, Iain, was constantly being summoned to speak to the Head of Year about this, with his new wife in tow; a pale brunette with a triangular face who was about ten years his junior. Whenever I ran into her she clearly, judging from her expression, thought she might have bitten off more than she could chew in terms of the whole blended family thing, and the received wisdom, even amongst the kids, was that this was the root of Conor’s defiant truculence.
But for some reason, I had a funny feeling about Conor.
After a disastrous double lesson during which he threw a pen at me and kicked over his chair (in the genteel atmosphere of St Hilda’s, this latter act was received like the burning of the Reichstag – the kids were literally paralysed with shock), I finally tackled him in my tiny office – not about his new stepmother, but about his best friend Sammy, who sat beside him and had giggled surreptitiously throughout his antics.
And after some prodding it all came out, like uncorked champagne – he had feelings for Sammy, feelings he couldn’t explain, not ever, and he didn’t know what to do, and I must understand, no one could know. Sammy would never speak to him again. He would be destroyed.
I could have wept at his confusion and panic.
‘I’ll never tell a soul,’ I said. ‘But if you aren’t going to talk to Sammy about your feelings…’
‘Never.’
‘… and I can see why you wouldn’t, you’re going to have to come up with some way of living through this. You can’t get yourself expelled just because of unresolved sexual tension.’
He regarded me mournfully, rubbing his hands through his untidy red hair, a caricature of worry, while I sorted him out with some counselling switchboards outside of school.
‘Ring them. They understand how you feel. You’re still very young and these things are confusing, but the more you talk, the less scary it will all become. In the meantime, I’ll thank you to attend to your lessons and we’ll overlook the thrown pen for now. And we’ll say nothing to your parents. Understood?’