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

matter-of-fact calm, standing a few feet behind him. There’s a ripple along Raf’s shoulders but he doesn’t move. It’s just started to spit but there’s no wind so she knows he’s heard her. He walks down towards the harbour arm.

45

‘Her stepdad. Craig. She never told anyone but he, he was, when she was really little, threatening her. When he was drunk. She told me she thought he was going to do something to her, make her do something to him.’

‘Shit,’ Erin says. They’re huddled over in a shelter down on the promenade. The beach is deserted, the concrete walkway in front of them littered with shattered slabs of chalk fallen from the cliffs above them. ‘Didn’t her mum know?’

‘Her family set-up was pretty fucked.’

‘Wasn’t her mum a doctor?’

‘What and that’d make her a saint? Look at my dad. But no, she was a nurse, Janey. Dad took a shine to her at the Tropical Medical centre he got a job at after we moved from Melbourne. I don’t know if anything happened between them. Knowing him, probably. Things between her and Craig were pretty rough, they drank a lot, had parties at their house. Pretty sure he hit her.’ Raf pauses, clears his throat. The implication that just a couple of days ago he was the one on the end of a spousal assault hangs between them like the smell of burning plastic. ‘Anyway, I, er, I ended up babysitting Amanda once or twice when they had a party. She’d come over to Dad’s, we’d hang out in the garden. She was smart, bit mad, but quite funny. I felt sorry for her.’

‘How old were you?’

He looks at her, back at his hands. He’s picking at the cuticle of his index finger. ‘Ah, eighteen, nineteen maybe when we arrived there.’

Erin clenches her jaw, bites her upper lip. She wants to press him for more detail, to ask him exactly what date it was they moved. Since finding the passport she realises how vague Raf’s always been about his and Amanda’s friendship. Those first few days she was with them, Erin was so caught up in the excitement of all the things taking off in her own life, she didn’t take the time to interrogate what sort of friendship leads someone to drop in from across the other side of the world. He didn’t have many friends, she’d always loved how content, how dedicated to her he always seemed. So who was this friend of her fiancé?

‘She started spending time at our house,’ he says. ‘Amanda said she thought Craig was scared of me, he was short, a real bogun scumbag. I don’t know. She was a little kid. She saw me as her protector I think. Then I moved from Dad’s place to live in Darwin. She wanted to come and see me but I told her it wasn’t allowed, then Craig got wind of it, thought I was trying to get her to run away from home, there was some other boy, from school I think, so Craig accused me of covering for the mystery boyfriend as well. Anyway he started throwing threats around so I told him I’d tell social services what he’d been saying to her unless he left me and her alone. That ended it, I thought. Thought I’d done my bit. He was a piece of shit that guy.’

‘She was what, twelve?’

‘You went through her bag to find her passport?’ He looks at her for the first time since she came into the gallery. She stands up and walks away from him. She needs to stay calm. They’d told her they were family friends, allowed her to think they were two relatively isolated teenagers thrown together by their parents’ work. She’d pictured them being fifteen maybe, she thought they would have skulked together at neighbourhood barbecues while the grown-ups talked about health policy or lack of research funding. She’s not thought there could be something this complex, scared young princesses, fairy-tale wicked stepdads and Raf the accidental knight in shining armour.

‘Amanda’s lying about how she found us. Your dad’s painting’s never been on my Instagram. That’s why I was looking in her stuff. And –’ she has to swallow hard, swallow down the desire to start shouting, to start losing it – ‘I’m pretty glad I did. Because she is lying to us, maybe about everything, and now I hear you’ve got some weird past where you what, saved her from her abuser? The idea she’s come for a winter jaunt to the Kent coast seems a little far-fetched all of a sudden.’

Raf’s looking at the ground. Strands of sodden seaweed clog the walkway and he kicks at a jumble of it.

‘I told her to say about the picture.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Craig went to prison. Three years after I left. I didn’t know any of this until she got here. One of her teachers flagged that they didn’t think she was safe and the police got involved,’ Raf licks his lips, struggling to get the words out. ‘Craig had been messing with Amanda. It had been happening when I was still there as well. He tried to tell her they were in love. She’s, she’s fucked up about it. Janey tried to cover for the bastard, but they locked him up for it.’

‘God.’

‘Yeh, he was released a couple of months ago. That’s why she’s here.’ Erin massages her wrist, only just noticing that the rain’s got heavier so she ducks into the weeks-old weed smell of the shelter.

‘How did she find us then?’

‘She wrote to Lydia’s daughter Anya. That was true. That’s how she got our address. Lydia had worked in the hospital with Dad and Janey for a while before she moved back to England so Amanda knew her surname. Found her on Facebook I think.’

‘Why didn’t Anya give us a heads-up that she was coming?’

‘She didn’t know. Amanda just said she wanted