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

as much as she pretends, but better, and now she’s abandoned him and undone all that progress. Amanda has gone to the kitchen and arrives over at the mantelpiece clutching a bag of frozen edamame beans. Raf tries to put the bag on the baby’s head but it riles him so Raf hands it back. Erin watches as he murmurs his thanks as if he were a surgeon in a hundred-year-old war and Amanda his Florence Nightingale. She turns and sees Erin staring at her.

‘You must want to catch up, find out how the little one’s been coping.’ She weaves her neck in the air, halfway between a dance and a stretch. ‘The first time you leave a baby can be incredibly unsettling.’ Erin fingers the spires of the crystal on the table. Amanda swishes the door into the garden open. She’s about to walk out into the darkness when she turns round, her angular face breaking into a beatific smile.

‘I can’t wait to get to know you all properly,’ she says, eyes dropping towards Bobby’s head then up to Raf. ‘It’s been too long.’ She sweeps out of the room, sliding the door shut behind her and walks towards the studio in the garden, the lanterns on the pathway lighting up one by one as she passes them.

4

14 October 1998

I talked to him today. I found him in the art department. He told me to call him Donny.

He started at school about six weeks ago and has smiled at me in the hall four times since. Each one more nourished with meaning than the last. On Monday, we saw each other in the corridor that runs parallel with where the principal’s office is, and he didn’t smile. He didn’t blink. His face did nothing. I know now it was an invitation.

He told me about a trip he’d gone on with his dad to Kakudu Park to see the Nourlangie cave paintings. He talked about the Lightning Man and his wife and how inspiring he’d found it. He showed me a sketch he’d done while he was there. A huge figure of a woman and a smaller man figure, their skeletons visible, with a crowd of smaller figures below them. He said he found it incredible that these primal people still celebrated the union of two souls over the unconnected rabble below them. The woman the goddess, the man her protector, her devotee.

Then the bell rang and the spell was broken, but I believe something commenced today. I could feel something vibrating between us. Something small. Something precious. An energy that felt almost divine.

5

‘She got our address from Lydia’s daughter Anya,’ Raf says from their en suite bathroom. Erin’s perched on the end of their bed, stress fluttering in her chest as she scrolls through the seemingly never-ending list of notifications. A mum asking for advice of which mindfulness app to use, another asking where she gets her fake plants from, a few trolls, a few people telling her how beautiful they think she is. What’s become, since she got into Instagram less than a year ago, the usual. ‘She said she called her to ask last week and Anya just gave it up to her,’ he says as he squeezes through the narrow bathroom doorway, drying his face on a towel. Erin hums to herself, pleased. Carly Reagan (113k followers) has liked the selfie she took on the train that she posted when she got back on Wi-Fi seconds before she saw them all through the front window.

Raf knocks into the chest of drawers and a tube of something clatters off it. Erin glances up to see him making his way towards her, craning his neck under the sheer eaves of the room. Raf’s six foot three so the attic room feels tiny when he’s stood up in it. When they moved down to the seaside from Croydon, Erin imagined they’d be able to afford a roomy three-bed but, with her not having a salary and Raf’s earnings as a graphic designer, decent enough to live on but not consistent enough for the tastes of mortgage providers, this converted bungalow was the most they could extend to. Two bedrooms, theirs in the attic and Bobby’s just off the open-plan ground floor.

Raf sits down next to her and puts his hands over hers, over her phone.

‘Please can I look at these?’ she says.

‘You’ve had the whole train journey.’

‘Had to leave our sim cards at home for this stupid “detox” and the train Wi-Fi wasn’t working.’ She slides her hands out of his. A comment on her post from one of her regular communicators, Florri-Bourne, grabs her attention – You CANNOT be hungover. You look incred. She has to put her tongue on the roof of her mouth to stop herself smiling. Raf, wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts, coils his sinewy arms over each other in his lap, eyes down, radiating his being ignored, so Erin slides her phone face down onto the bed’s coverlet.

‘Amanda seems nice.’

‘Yeh,’ he says, his tone a shrug almost.

‘You don’t seem very excited to see her.’

Raf puts his hands behind him and spreads them backwards onto the bed.

‘I don’t know. She was my dad’s friends’ daughter. We got on pretty well but we didn’t even know each other for that long. After I left Oz, I didn’t give her much thought to be honest. She was a lonely kid, didn’t get on with her stepdad. I probably should have stayed in touch, a letter or something. But, you know, halfway across the world, trying to get over the fallout of the stuff with Dad. It’s just one of those things.’ Raf doesn’t talk much about his life back home and Erin’s had to come to accept it. His father was a serial philanderer and it ground his mum