The Flavours of Love (44 page)

I’ve been holding her little black and silver box of secrets in my hand since they took her down to surgery. Before I had to call the ambulance, it felt like I was getting through and that she was about to tell me who was really responsible for this. She confirmed there was another man involved and he was still on the scene, probably still manipulating her. All she had to do was give me his name.

All I have to do is unlock this phone and I’ll have all the information I require.

I’m desperate to find out the truth, to arm myself with the information that I thought she was about to give me. The second I look, though, I will have crossed a line. I will have actively invaded her privacy and that goes against everything I believe in. My parents had no sense of boundaries, I was never allowed privacy because I
wasn’t an autonomous being as far as they were concerned so they had a right to know everything, all the time. Even when my mother came to stay in my flat in the years before I moved in with Joel she would open my post, sometimes go through my belongings because I was still her child in her mind and I required no privacy. I’ve tried too hard to go the other way, and it’s ended up here – with Phoebe hospitalised because I allowed her too many secrets that I convinced myself was privacy. There’s a fine line between privacy and secrecy – Phoebe has crossed the line. I have to cross it too as her parent, but it stirs up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings inside.

I feel like I am reverting to type, I’m being my mother.

Phoebe knows I check the history on her computer, the rules being if it looks like anything has been deleted or that she’s been using private browsing, she loses her computer indefinitely. I can check her phone whenever I want, too, and if it looks like anything has been deleted or the calls and texts don’t match up to the bills then she loses her phone. I have never checked her phone. I check the computer because, I convinced myself, all the danger was on that nebulous thing called ‘the internet’. It wasn’t other people she knows and cares for in real life. It wasn’t the real-life friends she hung out with on social media. It was chatrooms and perverts and porn – strangers, not the people who had her phone number, who were friends in the physical world. When you hung out on social media with the people you hung out with in the real world, your mother could relax. She’d tell herself not to fret that you’re bunking off school, that you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be which leads to your father being there too, and meeting up with the person who was going to take him away for ever.

It was all of it, of course. I should have been involved, should have known what she got up to via her phone – I should have checked.

The main reason I didn’t check her phone was because I wanted to believe she’d earned back the trust she’d lost because Joel would have wanted me to try to trust her again, he would have convinced me that she’d made a mistake and was genuinely, heartbrokenly sorry and wouldn’t do anything like this again.

Over and over goes the phone in my hand. Over and over, spin, spin, spin.

I’m scared to check in case it is Fynn. Or it is Lewis. Or it is any man I know. If he’s familiar to me, I’m worried I’ll lose the plot and go after him and all the anger I feel at the loss of Joel, the devastation of my life, the powerlessness created by the letter writer will be unleashed upon this man. He’d deserve it, but Phoebe and Zane don’t. They don’t deserve to lose another parent, probably to prison this time. The rational me understands and believes that, but the me who would want to hurt the man who has done this to my daughter might not be as reasonable.

If I don’t check, though, I can’t go to the police about the stalker because having that sitting there, a ticking bomb for any reporter to unearth and detonate at some later date, is too big a risk to take with Phoebe.

Through the strip of window embedded in the wall opposite where I sit, I spy the panorama of Brighton: the buildings slotted together like irregular, multicoloured building blocks, and the mysterious misty seascape beyond the buildings. From this angle I can’t see the beach, from this height I can’t see the people. They’re both there, they both exist even though I am looking right at them and I can’t see them. The answer to what I do next is probably the same: staring me right in the face and I can’t see for looking.

What would Joel do?
I ask myself.

What would Joel do?
I ask the Universe, God, Whoever is out there.
What would Joel do?
I ask Joel.

The answer diffuses through me – my skin, my lungs, my heart – like an expensive, delicate perfume until it arrives in my mind.

I am not Joel.

It doesn’t matter what Joel would do because I am not him. I am me. And I need to do what I would do.

Slowly I type the password, the key to the secrecy box, into the waiting space. I almost hear the latches being drawn back, the handle being turned and the door being thrown open to Phoebe’s secret life.

It takes seconds to find him. It takes minutes to work out who he is. It takes twenty minutes to read through their message chain. And it takes a microsecond to know that, like the Mount Vesuvius eruption that levelled the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, my explosion is going to level everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity.

My hand shakes as I place the phone on her bedside table. It’s set back onto the last message to Curtis it was on so she won’t know what I read, what I discovered until I confront the bastard and I tell her that I looked.

‘Mum?’ she croaks. She tries to move but doesn’t manage anything beyond a slight shift of her torso – her body probably feels like it is weighted down by boulders, her throat will be arid and tight. She doesn’t open her eyes, probably too much effort at the moment. I clasp my hand around hers.

‘I’m here, lovely girl, I’m here.’ I smile at my daughter who can’t see me but can hear me.

Not being able to touch Joel at the morgue was something that underlined my loss in so many ways in the following days and weeks and months. Since I first clung onto his hand on the flight to Lisbon, I loved to touch him, I loved to be touched by him. Being restrained, ordered not to connect with him physically, added a cruel dimension to losing him. The policeman’s grip on my forearm, a stern restraint from interfering with ‘evidence’, underlined how totally he had been snatched from me – reminded me that my connection to him in the physical world was gone. I promised myself then I would touch the people I loved as much as possible in case I was ever denied that again.

I lean over the bed, stroke my daughter’s face and press my lips to her cool cheek. She usually protests at my touches, doesn’t understand that I need to do this in case I’m not allowed to do it again. Right now, her entire being seems to relax when I make contact with her.

‘I’m right here, beautiful girl. I’m right here.’

‘You need to stay here until I come back,’ I tell Aunty Betty.

She hasn’t had time to change from today’s visit to the post office, which she’s done alone. For the past three days I’ve accompanied her there, which is why Phoebe and I were up and out early, so I could be back in time to take her, but she’s sneaked off to do it alone. I don’t have time or the spare amount of annoyance to bring it up with her now. I do, though, need her to understand how important it is that Phoebe isn’t left alone. I don’t want her waking up alone, to be confused why I’m not there.

‘I don’t understand where you’re going,’ Aunty Betty replies.

‘I have something urgent I need to do. It can’t wait. But I want you to promise me that you won’t leave her. Play the old woman card and I’m sure one of the nurses will get you anything you need. The loo’s right there. Don’t talk to anyone who isn’t a doctor or a nurse and who can’t prove they should be in here. If they can’t prove they should be in here, kick up the biggest fuss you can.’

‘Child, you want me to check if someone can prove they should be in here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would some—’ Aunty Betty stops talking and her usually animated face draws still, wary. She’s a smart woman, she understands what I mean. ‘The letters?’

I nod.

‘You’re going to sort that out now?’

‘No, this is something else entirely.’

She jerks her head questioningly towards a fast-asleep Phoebe.

I nod, gravely.

‘I won’t leave her side.’

‘Don’t tell her where I’ve gone, I’ll do that myself later. If she wakes up and asks for me, call me. If you can’t get hold of me, call either Brighton or Hove police station because that’s where it’s likely I’ll be.’

For a moment, when our eyes meet, I have a flash of Joel staring at me, and the way her mouth is set reminds me of how his mouth would contort itself right before he would ask me not to do something.

‘You do what you’ve got to do,’ Aunty Betty says.

If she’d asked me not to do it, I would have thought twice. I would have tried to find another way. But I have to do this. He deserves to experience this now, while I am this angry. If I’ve had time to calm down, to be reasonable, to decide to talk it out, I’ll let him get away with it. And he’ll do it again. He’s probably done it before.

‘Thanks,’ I state.

A kiss and a hug for Phoebe. I turn from her, a mountain in my throat from how fragile she is, how close I came to losing her. I bend to hug Aunty Betty, the moment awkward and unnatural. I keep doing it though, despite her whole body stiffening in my arms, I’m going to keep my promise to myself – I’m going to touch the people I love before it’s too late.

*

From my house I retrieve the items that I need right now.

I stuff them into my black soft-leather bag, grateful once again that I’m not one of those people who can carry her life around in a bag no bigger than a cigarette packet. Before I leave, I’m seized with a sudden need to run from room to room, to check that there’s nothing else I need. I pause in the living room, stare at the picture of Joel with the children on the mantelpiece.

I’m sure he’d tell me not to do this. I’m sure he’d tell me to find another way. It would work if he was here, he’d do it his way and the consequences wouldn’t be as extreme. In my chest my heart is beating in staccato again, my breath is shallow and ragged.

The words of his texts replay themselves in my mind and the rage descends all over again. He doesn’t get away with this, this man who has groomed my daughter, he doesn’t walk away from this unscathed.

*

I’m probably a bit too shaky to drive, but I do it anyway because I need to do this now. Waiting on more taxis, trying to avoid making chit-chat with the driver will only delay this and will only make me doubt myself again. I need to do this while the Sun is still up, while it’s early enough in the day for me to possibly get away with it, while the blood is still bubbling and fizzing in my veins.

*

He does a half-day today. Gives him time at home for other pursuits, so I’m as sure as I can be that he’ll be there when my finger presses hard against the doorbell.

My heart sounds in my ears, drowning out the gushing of my adrenalin-laden blood. Inside my head is a loud place right now.

He answers the door and his first instinct is to grin. To flash his flawless smile, and to open his perfect mouth and say, ‘Saffron! This is an unexpected pleasure.’

I can see why she likes him. If you are fourteen, I’d imagine you’d form an attachment to someone who treats you like an adult, who plies you regularly and consistently with confidence boosters and compliments the way a party rapist would ply you with booze. I can see why you’d think that this was what you wanted when you feel responsible for your father’s death, your mother is distracted by grief, your brother is too little to understand and you think you
know and trust this man. He is an attractive man if you are fourteen and scared and looking for love and understanding wherever you can get it.

‘My daughter is in a hospital bed right now, because of you.’

‘Phoebe?’ he asks, confused. ‘Is she all right?’

‘No, but she will be. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure she is. And if that means going to the police about you sending her sexually explicit material and seducing her, then that’s what I’ll do.’

‘Wait, I never—’

‘Don’t even bother lying about it. I saw the text messages.’

‘No, no, it wasn’t like that. It was a silly thing. I saw her on her way home one night after school so I gave her a lift. It was all perfectly innocent.’

‘“I get hard just thinking about your lips.” That’s innocent, is it?’

‘Saffy, out of context, that can be taken—’

‘She’s fourteen!’

‘She doesn’t act fourteen,’ he says. ‘Girls mature much faster and they know what they want—’

‘
Fourteen!
Even if she was sixteen you’d be a pervert but
fourteen?
’

‘No, Saffy, it’s not like that. It was only a bit of fun,’ he protests.

‘Fun? Really?’

I reach into my bag. My fingers close around the handle of what I retrieved from my kitchen and pull it free from my bag. ‘I’ll show you fun,’ I say, brandishing my blue and white iron, the white and grey striped cable wrapped around its base. It’s heavy and solid – exactly what I need for this.

‘Darling, what’s taking so long?’ Imogen appears behind her husband in the gash of the open doorway. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says coldly. ‘What do you want? And what are you doing with an iron?’

‘I’m showing your pervert husband what fun is,’ I say. Along their posh, well-to-do road in this posh, well-to-do area of Brighton, the cars seem to have all come from the same template of car ownership: a colour palette of navy blue, silver or black; a sleek design, a
sunroof, an expensive manufacturer badge at the front, matching extravagant model type on the back. Ray’s car stands out though – sleek, pricey and lavish like the others, but it is an eyesore metallic bronze that makes it easily identifiable to the woman with the iron.