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

makes his huge powder puff of hair shake from side to side. She can’t risk Raf seeing him again. She definitely doesn’t want to see him again. She doesn’t understand it all yet, but Amanda, the studio, the paintings, she knows that everything about their relationship is a lie. Bobby can’t have anything to do with someone who could do what he’s done.

‘We should get you to departures,’ Amanda says from the bedroom, her tone eerily flat. Erin needs to deal with her. What Amanda’s done today, the elaborate treasure hunt leading her to look for the jar spell, the fucking jar spell! She needs to get Amanda somewhere safe, then Erin can assess what the hell she’s going to do with the rest of her life.

‘This is what’s going to happen.’ Erin turns back into the door frame of the bathroom. This is all acting now. The wide stance, deepening the tone of her voice, the firm, commanding words. This is Henry V ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’ stuff. ‘We’re going to go to the British Airways desk, put your name on this ticket, and you’re going to go home. My old agent, Grace, her company has an office in Sydney, they’ll find someone for you to talk to. You’ve been a victim of abuse, you’ve been groomed, and you’ve not been able to move on from it. Raf will know that you told me about his past.’ Erin pauses, expects Amanda to come up with some objection, but she just stares ahead of her, fiddling with her pendant again. ‘Do you understand that, Amanda? He’ll think it’s your fault that I left him, that I took his boy away from him. If he’s so obsessed with being a great dad, that’s going to make him very angry. You won’t be safe.’ Erin can’t quite believe it but Amanda starts nodding.

‘What will you do?’ she asks.

‘Go to my mum, I guess.’ Erin hasn’t thought about it all, she hasn’t spoken to her in months, but she can’t think of another option.

‘He’ll find you.’

‘I’m going to tell the police about the bank account,’ Erin says, biting the inside of her lip, making it all up on the spot. ‘Tell them I found out he was pretending to be me. That’s illegal. I’ll say I’m in a coercive relationship. I’ll show them the journal, show them what he did to you when you were a child and they’ll be able to protect me.’ Amanda turns her head to Erin. She’s smiling.

‘Us abandoning him like this,’ she says, eyes filling, ‘it’s much worse punishment than anything the police can do to him.’

‘You might not be able to understand it yet, Amanda, you might not ever believe it, but he deserves every punishment we can mete out against him.’

‘Let’s go then,’ Amanda says, closing her eyes briefly. Then she whips a key card out of her pocket and opens the door onto the yellow light of the hallway.

63

‘Erin?’ Her mum’s shock scratches curtly through Erin’s iPhone speaker.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘You’ve deigned to call me.’

‘Are you at home?’

‘It’s not a great time to be honest, I’ve got to go into town for –’

‘I’m coming over.’

‘Um –’ The crowded airport swirls around Erin and Bobby as if they’re in the eye of the storm and she can barely hear her mum with the noise. She half expects her to say she has some pastoral stuff at the charity she volunteers for that she just can’t put off. She hates to be surprised. Bobby grabs a clump of skin. He looks exhausted, panda patches under his eyes. Erin’s mum clears her throat. ‘Has something happened?’ she asks, concern beginning to melt her frostiness.

‘Yes.’ Erin’s chest shudders up at the thought. ‘Yes, something has happened.’ The admission breaks Erin’s banks, she sucks short breaths in, the point of hyperventilation, yelping almost. Eyes in the crowd become fixed on her though no one does a thing. She locks eyes with Bobby who’s staring at his mother somewhere between upset and amused and it stills Erin momentarily, gives her the time to rein her emotion in.

‘I’ll be here,’ her mum says. ‘I’ve got stuff for a fish pie.’ Erin bursts into laughter, tears streaming down her face. Soon they’ll be there. Soon they’ll be safe.

Bobby looks tiny sitting on the big train seat next to her. He napped for a while on her chest and he’s now dismantling one of those spirals of compressed fruit and sticking bits of it on his face. As the scenery outside starts to adjust from towers of council flats to the flatter rows of suburban terraces, towards Croydon, her mum, sanctuary, everything starts to settle in her mind.

She thought she was losing her grip on reality; that she’d forgotten about a bank account she set up. She glances at her phone on the table between her and Bobby. He almost made her believe that her addiction to it had made her so delusional that she was imagining jars with dolls planted under sofa beds. She never truly believed that she was going mad, but Raf seemed so frustrated with her, so quick to dismiss the things she was saying were going on, that she accepted it. Got into bed, pulled the cover over her head and just accepted it. Looking back on their time together, she can see that the pattern was always the same. He’d suggest she make a life change, not hanging out with certain friends, giving up acting, moving out of London, having a baby, and at first she’d rail against the idea but somehow she always acceded to it. And it would always be because he was ‘worried’ about her, worried about her mental health. He used her neurosis about her career, her anxieties about her friends making more money than her, her sense of wasted potential, her antenatal depression even, as a tool to