The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

‘As long as you don’t forget about us, big shot,’ he says, almost a whisper. They stare at the black, rain-dappled glass for a moment. The halogen buzz of street light fighting through the weather, the pounding sound of thick waterfalls onto the flat roof above the bay window from their overburdened guttering. He reaches his arm round her waist squeezing her into him. ‘Smells amazing, doesn’t it, whatever Amanda’s cooked?’

Bobby seems to take his words as a cue as he lurches towards Erin, forcing her to catch him in the crook of her arm.

‘Wait, his tummy, you’re –’ Raf’s warning comes too late as a scrambled-egg slick of thick vomit spits out of Bobby’s surprised lips and onto the arm of Erin’s gleaming white top. ‘Shit.’ Raf takes Bobby back. ‘God, you have to be so careful with his tummy, don’t you?’ he says. Erin smiles as she tries to pinch the sick up in a tissue without spreading too much onto the cotton. She looks at Bobby’s face staring at her from Raf’s arms. His brow pinched together, molten-brown eyes devoid of sentiment. She smiles inside because Raf seems to be OK with her getting an agent, he seems fine with her taking a job, something that will give her a little respite from the boy staring blankly at her. She glances down at the tissue. There are little nuggets of green in Bobby’s sick, cucumber, courgette perhaps. Amanda managed to get Bobby to eat some greenery. If she has to be away for work, something that Grace seemed to suggest might become a fairly regular occurrence, he’ll be in great hands, she thinks, better hands than hers.

She sits on the bed and takes off her top, her milk-engorged boobs cupped in a bobbled peach maternity bra. Raf gives her a cheeky smile and hands the boy over to her. Bobby latches on, his eyes closed as he goes about his mechanical feeding. She tries to breathe through the pinch of his teeth, the ache of the milk emptying out of her ducts. Raf’s OK with it, she thinks, and, even if it’s just a few hours a week, she’s going to have a life outside of these four walls, a break from this delicate little boy whose arrival has only ever made Erin feel like she’s got everything wrong.

12

23 November 1998

Donny left me an orange Post-it in my locker on Friday afternoon that had the word ‘tomorrow’ and an address on it. There’s some sort of colour code to the notes he leaves me but he’s told me I have to work it out and I haven’t managed to yet. The address lead me about half an hour out of town and finding the exact location took much longer. And when I eventually found it I was amazed to discover that he lived at the old plantation house.

He said he hated the huge house so we walked down to the creek at the end of their estate. He brought pâté and figs. I didn’t like the pâté but didn’t tell him. He can be abrupt sometimes, a bit frosty. But it only makes me want to please him more.

We sat among rocks at the edge of the water. I didn’t know what to say to him and he didn’t speak. Just stared at me, a tempest of thought swirling in his eyes. After some time, quite a long time, of saying nothing, I stopped feeling stupid and managed to join him in the meditative state he seemed to have fallen into as he just looked at me. We were silent for almost an hour. And in that precious time it felt like something shifted even deeper between us.

When he finally opened his mouth, it was to tell me to sing. He’d watched me rehearsing in the school choir, I hadn’t seen him at the back of the room, and he said I had a beautiful voice. I was embarrassed but I wanted to make him happy so I sang ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. He stopped me and told me to sing something beautiful instead. I made it up. He closed his eyes to listen and I felt like I was making him happy. He looked at me and smiled. I stopped holding my body, felt my muscles relax. I uncoiled my hair from its plaits and lowered the ends of it into the creek.

Then he jumped into the water, just like that, and I jumped in after him, both of us fully clothed. He said that we should leave school together. He laughed as he said it as if he was joking. He said he’d watched me with the people in my class, smiling as they mock me, trying to ingratiate myself with them, joining in their inane conversations about TV or music. He said it makes him furious to see me debase myself to fit in with their small-minded world. He’s worried that they’ll drag me, my soul, down to their level unless we get away. I’d never put it into those words but I suppose I’ve always felt the same.

He got out, and while I was coming out of the water and drying myself, he started sketching something in a notebook. I asked to see it. It was a version of one of the primitive women he’d shown me on the postcards from his trip. Spines of rib dominating a stick figure, features exaggerated, monstrous even. I asked him if that was how he saw me and he laughed. The figure was holding something in her arms, a bundle. I asked him what it was in her arms. He told me it was a baby.

13

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