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

when he’s asleep like this and his skin looks so perfect he looks like a little demi-god, it’s easy to say how much I love him. I find him hard. So, so hard. I spit with fury when I look at other people’s babies that never cry. Because he cries. All the time. And my body tenses up, which I’m sure makes him cry even harder. But, he is my pride and he is my joy. He is. So you can all think what you like about me. You can do what you want to me. But I know what he means to me.

‘Holy shit.’ Raf’s at the door of Bobby’s bedroom. He’s dressed even though it’s five thirty in the morning. He beckons Erin out of the room, shocked by the state she’s in but not wanting to wake the baby. Erin smiles, puts her hand out for him to come and join her in staring at the sleeping baby but he shakes his head and his eyes tell her that he wants to know what the hell’s happened to her. She’s still in her outfit from the club, coat dirtied. She doesn’t know if, in the low light, he can make out the blood matted into her hair, or the shredded patches of her tights. She tried to go to A&E after she fell but it was overstuffed with frightening drunks so she came straight home.

‘What the hell happened?’ Raf asks, as she closes the door of Bobby’s room. He ushers her over to the kitchen table, gets her to sit down. She has a banging headache though feels strangely at peace. Perhaps she’s concussed.

‘I got an Uber from London. Please don’t be angry. I’ll give you the money when I get paid. You won’t have to pay for it.’

‘What happened?’ Raf goes to put the kettle on, gets a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer and brings it over to her. He doesn’t know where to put it until Erin hauls her ankle up on a kitchen chair, takes it from him and winces as she places the peas on it. ‘Did someone do this to you?’

‘I tripped.’ He looks at her, dubious. ‘I decided to get the last train back, I didn’t want to be away from Bobby for another night. I was sprinting for a taxi to get to the station and I tripped and fell onto a bin.’ Raf sits down opposite and puts her hands in his. She realises her fingers are shaking. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She looks at him starkly, one eyelid slightly closing from the swelling on the top of her forehead. ‘What I did to you was unacceptable and you don’t deserve it and I hope you can forgive me.’ Raf looks down at the floor, he starts breathing through his nose. Erin knows he doesn’t have to forgive her, maybe Anna Mai’s reaction was right and he should leave her. But his face when he saw her hurt, the compassion, the desire to protect, she needs him, it could be that’s all she’s ever really needed. She looks at her hands in his. Rather than the adulation of an audience, the likes of tens of thousands of anonymous followers, perhaps she just needs the love, the care and protection of this one man. ‘I don’t want you to leave us.’

Raf looks up and he’s got a big grin on his face, he shakes his head. He goes to hug her, attentive to the fact she’s hurt. He’s happy.

‘Of course I forgive you. You’ve put yourself under so much pressure,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘I’m doing everything I can, I’m putting everything I can into helping you cope, but it’s got too much. Hasn’t it?’ She nods. He looks at her with warmth in his eyes for the first time in what seems like weeks and it feels so wonderful to have him back on her side. He is on her side, she knows that, he always has been. It’s been her that’s pushed him away.

‘We should clean that up,’ he says, eyeing the gash on her head.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks. Hair mostly.’ He encircles her cheek in his hand and she could almost lean into it and fall asleep. Raf gets up to search the kitchen cupboard where they keep medicine.

A light comes on outside. The security light of the studio at the end of the garden. Erin turns to see Amanda slinking in through the garden gate and towards her room. It’s not even six yet. Their guest glances into the kitchen before heading into her lodgings. She doesn’t turn the studio light on. Erin thinks back to that dark road in Hackney. Maybe she fell because she was drunk. Maybe she imagined there was someone there watching her. Maybe she imagined the shuffle of running feet that made her sprint into the pitch-black until she fell hard and hit her head. But if she imagined it all, then where’s Amanda been in the middle of the night?

48

18 May 1999

We’ve moved to the suburbs and everything is better. Donny and I are clearly not made for city life. We don’t need the noise and all the people, we only need space and each other.

He’s been so amazing. I thought he’d be angry to have to move out but he’s been so kind, so loving, just like he was back at school. It was my fault we had to move so quickly. He’d told me he didn’t want me talking to any of the neighbours. He told me, again and again, that sooner or later Jean upstairs would start asking questions about where my parents were. But she always seemed so ditzy to me, I thought she had Alzheimer’s and that he was just being too cautious. Well, one day she came looking for me in the day, Donny was home