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

From the hotel she and Bobby walked Amanda to the British Airways office to put her name on the ticket, checked her in, and saw her off at the security gates. She must have somehow known that this was the best course of action because she had her passport with her but she barely said a word. As they parted ways, she gave Erin the tightest hug and seemed genuinely emotional to say goodbye to Bobby. It was as if she suddenly realised that this whole trip was a fantasy, that the ardour she’d harboured all this time, the lies she’d been telling herself, were a result of being abused. Erin wasn’t sure how she’d got through to her, there hadn’t seemed to be a road to Damascus realisation but she seemed, in the hotel room, to just give up.

Raf calls again. Only when they got on the train did she turn her phone on. She sent him a text: I found Amanda’s journal. You’re sick. I never want to see you again. I never want Bobby to see you. If you try to find us I will have you arrested.

He hasn’t stopped calling since but she doesn’t want to hear his lies, she can’t bear hearing how she’s got it wrong, how Amanda’s making it up, how they’re all deluded. She looks at Bobby who’s moved on to mutilating a small pot of carrot sticks. At least she has a purpose now, at least her life has a meaning. To make sure that her boy grows up nothing like his father. Her relationship is over. She should be distraught but all she feels is intense relief. Relieved she’s not lost her mind but mainly relief at being free of him. Because she’s spent the last four years just as deluded as Amanda is. She so wanted a saviour, someone that would make sense of how messy her life felt, that she allowed herself to be controlled by a monster. But now the blinkers are off. Bobby cries out as he bites his finger instead of the carrot stick between his four little teeth. He hands it out for her to kiss better so she leans down and smothers his tiny fingers with kisses. It feels extraordinary to mother him like this. It feels natural, perhaps for the first time.

She looks on her phone and sees the icon for the Find My iPhone app. She had no idea what it even did, no idea that you could use it to track your partner, but when she goes into it she sees his phone is there along with hers. She clicks onto his phone. There’s a tiny icon of a phone with a pin stuck onto their road at home. He’s back from London, whatever he was doing there. There are two other phones on the list. ‘iPhone 3’, ‘iPhone 5’. Raf’s old ones probably, Erin’s borrowed one of them in the past when hers was stolen on a bus in Camberwell. She sits forward when she sees that one of them is ‘online’. She clicks on it. The dot seems to be somewhere on the south side of the M25, heading east from Heathrow. She remembers Amanda in the hotel room saying that Raf used the app to watch ‘us’. And Erin had never realised – of course Amanda has a smartphone, she had to have one, the baby monitor they use for Bobby is on a smartphone app. He gave her one of his old ones. Amanda’s not on a plane back to her homeland. She’s in a car heading back towards Erin’s home, back to him.

Erin squeezes her temples. She remembers what Amanda’s journal said he did to the neighbour who threatened to break up their relationship. She wrote that the police had made a mistake but she also thought she hadn’t been abducted. Erin wants to scream ‘fuck’ very loudly, but for the sake of the carriage she manages to restrain herself. She glances out the window and sees the spire of the clock tower of the Museum of Croydon. Her mum’s house is ten minutes away, fifteen, max. She could take Bobby up to her old bedroom, climb into bed and cover herself in the duvet, just for an hour or so. The train comes into the station. She picks Bobby up and he hugs into her. As she’s stepping out into the cold grey of suburbia, she looks into her boy’s eyes, like pools of molten chocolate. His dad’s eyes. Erin’s going to go to her mum’s to drop him off, but she knows she can’t stay.

64

The ground floor looks like it’s been ransacked. The coffee table has been upturned; three empty cans of lager, a bottle of half-drunk vodka stand like sentries on the edge of their dining table guarding a huge bag of crisps popped, spilled and ground into the carpet below. The wire bookshelf has been pulled from the wall and rests on an armchair, its contents mostly on the floor. This is nothing like the man Erin knows, so considered, so neat, so fastidious. But the Raf she knows isn’t a real person at all, so perhaps this is him finally revealing his true atrocious self. Perhaps he has to attach himself to vulnerable, desperate women to bring order to his monstrous mind. But even though he clearly has been here, there’s no sign he’s in the house currently. The Find My iPhone trail has gone cold for both him and Amanda.

She spots the painting of the shrouded figure staring at her and realises that he must have painted it, and that it’s probably of her. Erin’s stomach sinks like she’s dropping in turbulence at the thought of Raf, the grown man, and the poor child Amanda. And he’s a fucking terrible artist, she thinks, looking at the