Chapter 23
Abi puts on sunglasses and steps outside with Margot, Lily still in bed.
Abi won’t suggest school to her older daughter today.
It’s a beautiful morning, the kind that makes everything feel new, transformed– apart from, Abi realizes, a godawful smell, ancient like something’s been burning for a long time.
It’s the somnolent smell of an ending, the chemical tang of things that were never meant to burn, burning.
Like the cars the joyriders used to set on fire on the estate.
Margot takes Abi’s hand as they walk, chattering about one of the girls in her class who has a swimming pool at home . A parent Abi hasn’t spoken to before catches her eye as she crosses the road to Abi and Margot’s side of the pavement.
‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ she says, sniffing the air like a rabbit, her tone suggesting that actually what she means is not ‘awful’ but ‘wondrous’.
Abi must look blank because the woman is smiling now, making her green eyes wide, showcasing surprise. She looks to Margot and back up to Abi as she says, ‘You haven’t heard, have you?’
Margot looks at the woman, reaches for Abi’s hand again.
‘What…?’ is all Abi needs to say.
‘Mr Kent– you know, the headmaster who shagged a prostitute? Well, someone burnt down his mum’s house last night!’
‘Oh my God!’
The woman nods.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
The woman shakes her blonde head. ‘Not really, nothing serious. But I have heard rumours’– the woman moves in, closer to Abi– ‘that it was the prostitute who did it. Have you read some of the stuff they’re saying online about her?
’ Then she glances at Margot and starts apologizing for talking about it with ‘small ears around’.
The woman spots a friend soon after, thank God, and pretends she has to cross the road again to get to her.
‘What does “shagged” mean?’ Margot asks next to Abi, watching the woman leave, and Abi squeezes her hand and says, ‘I’ll tell you later,’ and Margot, satisfied, goes back to the more interesting topic of her friend’s pool.
‘They found a frog in it once…’
Behind her sunglasses, Abi manages to avoid eye contact with anyone else at the school gates.
Margot runs into school, pausing like always to give Abi a quick thumbs-up, and as soon as she’s gone, Abi walks away.
Ignoring the clutches of parents standing in small circles, bouncing the news to each other, like Seb and Rosie’s personal life is their favourite new game.
But still, Abi isn’t immune. She too wants to see what she can smell, wants to know if the rumours are even true.
She doesn’t know exactly where Eva lived, but she has a vague idea from when Rosie pointed it out once.
As she walks, it becomes obvious which way to go from the people shaking their heads and walking in the opposite direction.
She overhears one of them, turning worried eyes towards the man next to her: ‘We’ve got a fire alarm, Harry, haven’t we? ’
The road itself is still cordoned off. A policeman, lightly holding on to the plastic tape, answers questions from people standing on the other side. He sounds bored by the questions, but Abi can hear a little thrill, too, like he’s puffed up with responsibility.
‘I can’t tell you any more, no,’ he says to one.
‘Only residents are allowed through,’ to another.
And finally Abi hears, ‘Well, today you’ll have to find another route.’
Abi stays at the far end of the cordon. Eva’s house, once in the middle of the terrace, looks like the stubby, blackened remains of a tooth, rotten down to the gum, in an otherwise healthy mouth.
Abi stares and stares, transfixed by the smell, the smoke, the nothingness.
Abi has never met Eva, but she remembers Rosie talking about her, that day they walked up to the viewing point.
She’s interrupted by a man next to her who, in a loud voice, enunciates, ‘Is this’– he points towards the smouldering wreckage of Eva’s home behind him, before turning back to gaze into the blank round eye of a video camera– ‘a random Halloween prank gone wrong, or is it, as we’re starting to believe, an appalling expression of the anger and resentment that has been building in this usually mild-mannered place?
This is Sam Beresford for BBC News, Sussex.
’ Sam Beresford freezes, holding his sad, benign smile for a moment, before dropping it entirely and anxiously asking the squatting man holding the camera opposite him, ‘How was that?’
Abi closes the door to the flat and calls up the thin stairs, ‘Lil?’
She hears Lily clattering from her bedroom before she appears at the top of the stairs, cradling the laptop they’re supposed to share under her arm and asking, ‘You’ve heard? About Mr Kent’s mum’s place?’
Abi swallows, nods.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Lily sighs. ‘Poor them.’
Abi realizes Lily is the first person she’s met this morning to express any sympathy, any real feeling out loud.
Lily’s long red hair shudders as she thuds down the stairs towards Abi.
Abi opens her arms to her, but Lily doesn’t move in for a hug, so Abi has to be satisfied with putting her hand briefly on her shoulder as Lily moves past her saying, ‘Come into the kitchen with me? I want to ask you something.’
Lily puts the laptop on to the round kitchen table. It wobbles, so Abi bends down to adjust the piece of cardboard she’s rammed under one leg while Lily puts the cereal bowls Abi and Margot used for breakfast into the sink.
Lily sits at the computer and Abi pulls up a chair next to her so she can see the screen as well.
Before Lily opens the laptop, she looks at Abi and says, ‘You’re probably not going to like this but I needed to know, wanted to know more about your… um, old job. So…’
She opens the laptop and there in front of them are a dozen or so thumbnails of women’s faces, tits, crotches, legs wide open like butterfly wings. ‘Sex mad!’ one of them cries. ‘34GG all natural!’ ‘Hungry whore!’
Abi stands up like one of the women has slapped her. She wants to slam the computer shut, shout at Lily for looking at this stuff, send her with a disgusted face and pointed finger to her room.
But, of course, Abi can do none of those, would do none of those things; she just stares at her daughter, who stares back at her, noticing the angry flush Abi feels rising up her face, the sudden tension in her body, the taut way she asks, ‘Why are you looking at that shit, Lil?’
Lily’s cheek twitches. ‘I’m just trying to understand, Mum.’
Abi looks away, up towards the ceiling. She hates this.
Hates the thought of Lily’s green eyes flickering over that pumped, pressed and airbrushed flesh.
These women who, in London, Abi used to think were just like her.
Women doing what they could to improve their lives suddenly seem so desperate to Abi, so vulnerable and one-dimensional, in this little, privileged town. Context really is everything.
Lily keeps her eyes on Abi and waits patiently, until Abi sighs and asks, ‘You were looking for me, weren’t you?’
Lily nods.
Abi looks away, up to the ceiling again, in the vain hope gravity will pull the tears she feels building back into her ducts.
But it doesn’t work so she wipes her hand across her face and reminds herself that no matter how hard this is for her, it’s harder for Lily.
She must get this right. So she looks back, into Lily’s wide-eyed, freckled face and, sitting back down, next to her daughter, says, ‘What do you want to know?’
Abi starts by typing in the password for her old website.
She’d spent an afternoon before they moved down to Waverly removing links to www.theladyemma.com which she paid other websites for, before taking it offline completely.
Without any sadness or regret, she thought that she might not ever see it again.
It feels like years since she took it offline but it must be fewer than ninety days because she still has access.
She watches Lily’s face, her heart frantic; it feels like something trapped inside her as Lily reads to herself the words Abi still knows so well:
‘Hello, I’m Emma. Your open-minded, discreet and passionate companion based in central London…’
The text is set in front of photos of Abi, images of her naked back, her clavicle, her feet lifted in the air, crossed at the ankle, some of her tattoos airbrushed away.
She’d been proud of her website when she made it so many years ago, pleased she’d taken the time to get the wording, the tone exactly right.
Diego helped a bit but she knew he worried about her, so she didn’t ask for him to be too involved.
When Lily’s finished reading, she turns to Abi and asks, ‘So, you were, like, um, high end?’
Abi looks at Lily. She has no idea what words to use, no idea how to tell her daughter that, really, it didn’t feel that different to Abi whether her arse was pressed up against the stale upholstery of an old car or against cold marble in a five-star hotel. The exchange was the same.
‘I suppose so, but really I was just careful to be safe…’ She thinks about how many times Lily, just by existing, saved Abi. Lily needed Abi so Abi had to be careful. She couldn’t ever risk any time in a hospital bed or a police cell because she always had to get home for Lily.
‘I learnt over time the kind of client I wanted to attract…’ Lily is looking at her quietly, frowning in that way she does when she’s concentrating hard.
But there’s no disgust in her face, there’s no longer even any shock.
She does, like she said, just want to understand.
It’s the best response Abi could have hoped for, really.
Abi keeps talking. ‘I learnt a hell of a lot doing that job. I learnt how to market myself, where to advertise, how best to try and dodge time-wasters. I even learnt about boring stuff like bookkeeping and tax. But probably the most important thing I learnt was about boundaries.’