Things I Want My Daughters to Know (43 page)

“I said I thought she might be.”

“She can’t be allowed to do that. Then you really have lost control.”

He was sitting in an armchair contemplating his control, or lack thereof, when Hannah appeared. Her entrance had been heralded by forty-five minutes of toing and froing from the bathroom to bedroom, and back, and by the buzz of the hair dryer, followed by, blissfully, the Red Hot Chili Peppers being turned off. Every sodding song sounded the same, and they all made him want to put cushions over his head. Or polythene.

He swung around in the chair as she came down the stairs, trying not to look too much like a Bond villain. And then trying not to look too shocked. Your child’s phases of development never seemed to happen gradually—they were always, somehow, shocking. Long hair. Second front teeth—the ones that are always a little too big for their mouth.

The ability to stand on two feet. And now, breasts and hips. It seemed to him that Hannah had gone skipping upstairs to bed five minutes ago, in a floral-sprigged nightdress and pigtails, and come down now transformed into a white Beyoncé. All curvy. It was utterly disconcerting. Hannah was wearing long skinny jeans that buttoned at least four inches below her navel, and a tight stripy top four inches above. The midsection, a very slight layer of flesh on top of obviously strong muscle, drew your eye immediately. Until you noticed the eyeliner, applied in the Bardot method (if Bardot had been drinking meths and no longer had a very steady hand). The effect might have been comic, if it hadn’t been so scary.

Barbara might have tried to send her straight back upstairs to wash her eyes. Might have suggested a thermal vest to bridge the gap. Might have threatened to lock the front door and send the ride away. He’d seen her do it with Amanda. He didn’t know what to say.

Hannah’s eyes—what little he could read of their expression—challenged him.

“Am I allowed to know where you’re going?”

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The other night, they’d fallen out about something insignificant.

Hannah had told him she was old enough to move out and live on her own. Over sixteen—“practically seventeen.” Which meant driving a heavy goods vehicle was out, but almost everything else was acceptable, apparently. He’d managed to bite back any comment about what she might live on, and he’d won that little argument, whatever it was; he couldn’t remember—there seemed to be so many of them these days—

but the “old enough” argument felt like it was getting harder to win.

Still, he hadn’t meant to start so aggressively.

“Out.”

He sighed. “Hannah—don’t be so bloody rude. I asked a perfectly civilized question. I deserve a proper answer.”

“Sorry. Yeah. You do.” Flashes of the daughter he recognized. “I’m going out with Alice and Phoebe.”

He knew both the girls. They were nice girls. They didn’t, so far as he knew, wear eyeliner that looked like it had been applied with a wax crayon.

“Really?”

“Really! If you don’t believe me, you can call either of their mothers and ask them.” He hated the defensive, aggressive tone. And his own anger. This wasn’t how he wanted to talk with his little girl.

If she was calling his bluff, she was doing it well.

“And where are you going?”

“I’m taxi-ing it to Phoebe’s, we’re all meeting up there, then there’s a sixth-form party, down her road, so no one’s driving. And I’ll get dropped back—probably by Alice’s dad.”

“By when?”

“By one?”

“Those two are allowed to stay out until then, are they?”

She looked at him as though he had suggested something absurd.

“Doh. Of course.”

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Mark wasn’t happy about it, but before he had the chance to say anything else, the taxi driver pulled up in the drive, honked impatiently, and Hannah was gone, giving him a quick peck on the cheek and responding to his request that she take a coat with a giggle (not a coat).

He thought about calling Phoebe’s mum for about a nanosecond. He didn’t know these people—not well. He didn’t want them to know he didn’t trust his own daughter. Even if it was true.

Christ, life moved fast. At Christmas she’d been helping him bake and picking out a tree. Now she didn’t seem to want to be with him at all.

Hannah sat back in the taxi and tried to calm herself down. Her heart was beating so fast. He hadn’t called her bluff, thank God. Her mates knew exactly what was happening—they’d spent the previous afternoon working on this evening’s ensemble together. But their parents would be more than mystified by a call from Mark. The only part of what she had just told her dad that was actually true was the bit about the party. There was a party. But she wasn’t going with her girlfriends, and it wasn’t just down the road from Phoebe’s house, and she wasn’t going to be dropped off by Alice’s dad. She told herself, and almost believed it, that she was protecting him, that it was for his own good—what he didn’t know couldn’t worry him. She knew what she was doing; it wasn’t like she was taking risks. He should trust her more. She didn’t like being asked questions all the time. If he trusted her, she wouldn’t have to lie.

She was going with Nathan. It was his friends having the party. He’d told her they’d be a bit older, and cool. She’d decoded his explanation, hence the crisis wardrobe talks with Alice and Phoebe, and the eyeliner.

She wanted to look older, to look right. Tonight was important. This was the first time she was properly meeting his friends, and she didn’t want to be perceived as a silly schoolgirl.

He’d asked her to stay with him all night. His parents were away for the weekend, he said. They didn’t have to have sex, he said. He’d said that straightaway, knowing it would be the first thing she thought of. He just 320 e l i z a b e t h

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wanted to be with her, to hold her all night, to wake up with her. It did sound wonderful. He’d said she could say she was with one of her mates.

She wasn’t ready for that, in all sorts of ways. That was too big a lie.

The consequences of being caught out frightened her. Mark would be furious, and his rage, while seldom seen, and almost never before directed at her, was pretty scary. She’d be lucky to get let out on her own again before her eighteenth. And worse, he’d be really, really upset. She didn’t want to do that to him. And then there was Nathan. He was still saying all the right things, about waiting until she was ready, and not wanting to pressure her, but he was doing things that made her think otherwise. His erection, strange and hard beneath his jeans, was omni-present when they were alone together, and his hands were getting more insistent, moving frustratedly beneath clothing she wasn’t ready to remove. Things were getting hot and heavy—which thrilled and discomfited her—and she wasn’t sure either of them actually believed it would be possible to sleep all night together in a bed without something

“significant” happening.

She’d said she couldn’t. Made up some story about having to go somewhere with her dad early on Sunday morning. More lies. Sometimes she didn’t recognize herself, and it had nothing to do with the eyeliner. He’d seemed pissed off. All the more important that the party was a success . . .

When Lisa finally let herself in as quietly as she could, it was after one in the morning, and she expected the whole house to be asleep. Mark, sitting statue still in the armchair, scared her to death.

“What the hell are you doing, sitting there in the dark? You made me jump!”

“Sorry. Waiting for Hannah.”

“She isn’t home yet?”

“She said she’d be back by one. She promised.”

Lisa flicked on the light switch in the foyer and looked at her watch.

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“It’s twenty-five past. That’s only a few minutes. Has she ever done this before?”

“No, she hasn’t. But I’m still going to kill her. I only agreed to one o’clock under duress. In fact, I didn’t even completely agree to one.”

Lisa peered at him, half amused. He hadn’t even asked her where she’d been all evening. “You look knackered. You go up. She’ll be back in a minute. I’ll wait for her. I want a cup of tea, anyway.”

“And miss the chance for another showdown. Are you kidding? This one’s been brewing for hours. Jen would be proud of some of the lines I’ve been rehearsing in my head. Stick the kettle on—make two mugs.”

Hannah

She might have looked eighteen, but Hannah felt distinctly thirteen. She felt like she was still Nickelodeon and that this was a very MTV crowd.

The kid whose house it was—his parents were away, too. Nathan said they’d given their permission for the party, but Hannah suddenly doubted it. She’d been to loads of parties where people were drinking. She’d drunk her fair share of the bizarre cocktail that was teenage contra-band—everything from cider to campari, and once, memorably (but for all the wrong reasons), anisette. But she’d never been somewhere where there were drugs. People were smoking joints here. And passing them to her. The first time she’d said no, thanks, and raised her plastic glass of nasty wine in unsolicited explanation. The second time, she’d watched Nathan watch her say no, and she didn’t like the look he gave her, so the third time she nodded and took the shortest drag possible, letting the herbal smoke seep from the side of her mouth before it got past her teeth and resisting the urge to splutter. She’d tried smoking, but hated the taste and the sensation of dirty smokiness in her throat and lungs.

This tasted the same, with a sweet, flowery sort of add-on. She waited to feel dizzy or strange, but nothing happened. She supposed she hadn’t inhaled much.

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not dancing—that is, the blokes—were moving their heads back and forth to its insistent rhythm. The girls looked much older to Hannah.

Their eyes were closed, their arms above their heads. They looked sort of dreamy. A couple of hours ago, it had seemed thrilling. Now it was disconcerting. The joint kept coming back around. She kept puffing on it, hoping it would be okay.

The atmosphere had deepened somehow. The party had grown more volatile and unpredictable, the dancing more trancelike, the air foggier.

People were coupling up, sloping off. Hannah didn’t know what she was doing, not really. She didn’t belong here. She felt a bit sick. When she looked at her watch, and was able to focus, she was almost relieved to see it was 12:30 a.m. Nathan had promised he’d have her home in time.

Drop her off on the corner.

Nathan had been drinking and smoking. She’d seen him. He wasn’t falling down drunk or anything; he was still coherent. She couldn’t see him at the moment. He must be in another room. She wasn’t sure which one.

Pushing her way through two huge guys in the door frame, she went through the kitchen. He wasn’t there. It was still too noisy to hear, so she moved farther away, into the small utility room at the back of the house. She wondered, briefly, as she passed, about the family who lived here, who must have gone leaving the white Formica surfaces clear and clean. Now there were empty bottles and piles of ash and spilled bags of crisps everywhere. It was a complete mess. Her head was starting to throb in time with the music, and it was a relief to be in the cool silence of this tiny room, which smelled only of legal things, like fabric softener and furniture polish.

She dialed the number of a taxi firm. The guy who answered told her he didn’t have any cabs for an hour. Busiest time, he said. She should have booked. She tried another one, where the woman said the same thing. Her drivers were all out on jobs, and there were more booked.

When Hannah expressed dismay, the woman sounded suddenly mater-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 323

nal. “Are you somewhere safe, love?” she asked. It shocked Hannah to realize that she didn’t actually know where she was. She knew roughly, but she couldn’t have given a house number. What an idiot. “I’ll try and switch a few fellas around, get someone there in forty minutes or so.”

Hannah looked at her watch: 12:45. She was already late. She began to panic. Bloody hell . . . She thanked the woman and said she was fine and that she’d try someone else. But she couldn’t remember any more taxi numbers.

She knew she should ring Dad. She knew he’d still be half awake, waiting to hear her. But she’d have to admit that she was lying. And it was a big lie. She didn’t want him to be mad at her, and she didn’t want him to be disappointed in her. Leaning against the chest freezer, she realized she was disappointed with herself. She knew better than this, didn’t she? She didn’t know anymore.

Things were faster and slower when she came back out into the party. The dancing was more frenetic, but her own movements felt like she was wading through treacle. Her hands looked like they were someone else’s, taking the joint and raising it to her lips. She didn’t want to do it. But she was doing it, anyway. And Nathan, when she found him in the front room, loved it. And that was good, right? He laughed and pulled her toward him possessively by the belt loops on her jeans, knocking their pelvic bones together through the denim. “I’ve got to go home, Nathan.”

“Stop worrying, babe. We’ll go soon. I said I’d take you, didn’t I?”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Don’t be sick in here, for Christ’s sake.” Someone—was it Nathan?—was pushing her toward the front door. The fresh air that had been so welcome in the kitchen a minute (an hour? a week? a lifetime?) ago hit her like a train and made her so dizzy she tried to sit down on the front step. Someone wouldn’t let her, and now she knew it wasn’t Nathan, because Nathan was swaying in front of her. She vaguely understood that she was being ejected.

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She wanted to, needed to lean on Nathan, but she couldn’t, otherwise she knew they’d both fall down. She kept thinking about an infant Bambi, learning to stand up, in the film. That was how her legs felt. It made her giggle, but she didn’t sound like herself to herself. When they got to his mum’s car, he pushed her hard against the door and kissed her hungrily. He tasted of smoke and beer. She was horribly, lucidly afraid, for a moment, that his tongue was going to make her vomit. And there was the erection, poking at her.