It Could Have Been Her

Prologue

I liked the girl. She had a nice smile. She was friendly.

I could tell she liked us. She was asking loads of questions about the house, about how long we’d lived here, how old it was, wanted to know if we knew anything about the history of it.

Daddy was very nice to her. He was always like that with new people.

Mummy of course was rude, as she always was with everyone.

My older sister just stared at her as though she’d never seen anyone like her before.

I did the opposite, looking all around her but not at her, because it made me feel weird when I looked at her and I didn’t want her to think I was weird.

“What’s with the…?” She was pointing at my T-shirt.

It was my favorite top; Mummy and Daddy bought it for me for my birthday.

It had a red nose printed on the front and a huge blue mouth and pinned onto the front pocket was a plastic flower with a bulb at the bottom that filled with water and you asked people to smell it and then you squeezed the bulb, which was usually hidden in your pocket, and the flower squirted water in their face.

Except it didn’t have any water in it because I wasn’t expecting a visitor.

I would have filled it if I’d known. But actually, I don’t think I’d have used it anyway because the girl was too pretty and I didn’t want to upset her if she didn’t think it was funny.

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “It’s my clown T-shirt. I collect everything to do with clowns.” I told her about the circus that came to the Heath every summer, how it was my favorite time of the year. Then I showed her how the squeezy trick worked and she smiled and said, “Cool.”

She told us that she was a graduate, just finished her degree in music technology, wanted to be a sound engineer.

Daddy said something about how unusual that was, that it was quite a man’s world, and the girl said that wasn’t going to put her off, and Daddy laughed, and Mummy just sort of sighed as if it was all really boring.

The girl said she could play the guitar and my sister said she was learning and then the girl and my sister had a conversation about that for a while, and I spent that time looking at the girl and feeling things.

There was too much blood in my lap area; I felt hot down there, hot and tingly and like I needed to be touched.

Then the girl looked at her watch. She said she needed to go. She was meant to be meeting some friends in a pub up the road for drinks and she was already so late.

I saw Daddy throw Mummy a look. Even though I was only a kid, I knew what that look meant.

“Are you sure we can’t tempt you to stay a little longer?” Daddy said to the girl. “Annie has a cheesecake in the fridge.”

“What type?” the girl asked, a playful twinkle in her eye.

Daddy looked at Mummy again. Mummy said, “Strawberry.”

The girl smiled. She said, “My friends probably aren’t even expecting me to turn up anyway, to be honest. They call me ‘No-show Claire.’ ”

The girl stayed.