I will never forget my sixteenth birthday, for several reasons, none of them sweet. Life settled into a sort of pattern after Grandma died and Sam came home. He found work in a factory near Mansfield, a bus ride away, and with the odd double shift, we managed to budget for the occasional take-away pizza. I spent my days at school and my evenings and weekends either doing homework, housework or washing pots in the local pub kitchen. I relished being the woman of the house, sorting our money and cooking dinner for Sam every night without anybody telling me what to do or how to do it. I had no friends, no social life and no plans for my future, but in many ways, those were the most contented days of my life. I lived for Sam – put all I had into making him happy, believing if I loved him enough, took care of him, was a good enough sister, it would keep his demons at bay. Maybe he was only that way before because of Grandma. It was different now, wasn’t it?
Then my sixteenth birthday arrived. It was November, and a thick layer of frost lined the outside of the window when I woke that morning. Sam had an early shift, so I got ready for school in an empty house, pausing to grab a couple of pounds out of the money pot to treat myself to a hot dinner. The pot was empty. Momentarily startled, my mind flashed back to Sam stumblingin through the front door while Grandma wept about her stolen pension. And the safe she bought to keep her valuables in, until she found the back forced off and her jewellery gone.
Then I remembered about my birthday. Of course! Sam had taken the money to buy a present. I was sixteen. That needed a special present. I hugged myself inside as I put the lid back on the pot, wondering what he could possibly have bought with all that money.
Later that day, I found out. He had bought me a foul-mouthed, violent, out-of-control brother.
My sixteenth birthday also happened to be ten years to the day since Kane had killed our mother. Something in Sam snapped. I was no longer a child. He had done his duty and seen me through to adulthood. The bomb of rage and pain and guilt and grief exploded, blasting away the delicate shoots of the life I had been nurturing for us, my dreams, my security and the last lingering wisp of my innocence.
My old brother disappeared, rapidly consumed by his addiction and anguish. He lost his job a few weeks later. Not long after that, he began selling off Grandma’s remaining possessions. I bought a money belt, wearing it under my clothes twenty-four hours a day to protect my paltry earnings. He broke down the bathroom door while I showered and took it. I started working longer shifts – cramming in homework during breaks and before school. I often had to choose between heating or electricity, food or sanitary towels. Sam vanished for days at a time. I could never relax, never switch off, never take a break. But I ploughed on, determined to finish the last few months of school and keep some hope of a future that didn’t include all the knives and forks being sold at the local car boot sale.
And then Snake slithered in.
Snake was a parasite. Sam let him stay because he sold drugs from the back door, paid rent in the form of heroin, and Samwas too weak, too lost and too scared to make him leave. He got his name from a tattoo of a python that started on his ankle and coiled itself around his leg, up past his groin, and in a loop around his torso before slinking up his neck to end in an open mouth enveloping his bottom jaw and one side of his skull as if the snake was in the process of swallowing his head. I wished a real python would swallow his head.
I bought two solid bolts for my bedroom door, and for the bathroom. For three weeks, I stayed away as much as possible: at school, at the pub where I worked, in the local library, the café, on the streets, anywhere but at the place I had called home. I still feel ill when I think about it. The stench of vomit and sweat and filth, the wizened, grey bodies passed out on the living-room floor, the fights and the moaning and the girls, some younger than me, who came round trading their dignity for a fix. The night after night after night when I lay awake with the fear and the misery pounding in my head in time to the banging on the door and the creak of broken bedsprings.
I cried to my brother, wept and cursed and threw empty bottles. Swore I would call the police if he didn’t do something. The men disappeared, and most of the girls. Snake stayed, his eyes glittering hard when we crossed paths in the kitchen, or on the stairs. But then he started talking to me, asking how my schoolwork was going, when my exams started, what I planned to do afterwards. I would answer in shaky monosyllables, darting out of the room to the sound of his rasping laughter. In the new-found quiet, I felt no less afraid.
I felt watched.
Iwasbeing watched.
By an evil snake.
6
The third Saturday in September, Hester arranged an outing for the choir. The heat of summer had begun to fade, replaced with the faint whisper of autumn carried along on crisp air, and I dressed in dark-grey tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved top for our outdoor adventure day. This was no fun trip, but a necessary requirement, according to our choir director, to get us ‘working together in time, rather than bumbling along like a herd of blind sheep who happen to randomly knock into each other but have no idea what any of the others are doing’. She insisted on settling for nothing less than us being able to read our fellow choir members’ minds.
Fair enough. We would give it a go.
Having said that, if anyone managed to read the depths of my mind that lurked beneath how petrified I felt about the challenge ahead, I would have to resign from the choir forthwith. I stuffed my waterproof jacket into my old rucksack and waited for Marilyn to pick me up. As she wasn’t, strictly speaking, a member of the choir, Marilyn was going to watch from the sidelines and supervise refreshments.
Having parked in Brooksby, we boarded the church minibus with the other choir members. Dylan had agreed to be our driver. I sat near the back, away from him, still cringing about Perry’s behaviour at the chapel. It took an hour to reach our destination, the landscape changing dramatically from the rolling fields and forests of Nottinghamshire to the Peak District’s craggy moorland.
Eventually, the road narrowed to a winding trail that ended up as a rough car park surrounded by nothing but coarse grass and enormous rocks. In front of us rose a cliff face, which I reckoned stood slightly lower than Mount Everest. There were a few brightly coloured spots dotted along the cliff, which I suspected were climbers, and a couple of other cars parked up. That was it.
We scrambled out of the van into a brisk wind that whipped the hair out of my ponytail, stealing my whimper away before the others could catch it. Two tanned, athletic, hardy-looking men jogged over carrying ropes and metal things that I assumed were going to prevent us from falling off the cliff face and splattering into smithereens.
‘You the choir?’
Hester, wearing a black, belted trench coat and brogues, nodded briskly. ‘We are. We are here to learn trust, courage and each other’s secrets. Working as a team is not good enough. I want these women as one organism. Can you do that?’
The tallest man, with a thick, blond beard and very broken-looking nose, grinned at her. ‘I’ll give it a flaming good go, ma’am, so long as they’re game.’
He moved his gaze to us, eyes crinkling in the breeze. None of us looked game. The others appeared exactly how I felt: like clueless wimps. That is, except for Janice and Millie, our older choir members who had kitted themselves out in full-on outdoorgear – skin-tight Lycra leggings and tops, climbing shoes and fingerless gloves. ‘There was an outdoor special at the market!’
They looked like jelly babies left out in the sun too long, one of them propped up on two walking sticks and wearing a bobble hat.
One of the other altos, Polly, appeared tranquil too. She took a folding chair out of the van and created a small nest including a book, a newspaper, an MP3 player, a bag of knitting, a flask of hot chocolate, and a jumbo packet of cheese puffs. Polly was fourteen weeks pregnant, and therefore excused from climbing, but not the trip. She would be keeping Marilyn company and cheering us on in between naps. I didn’t know much about Polly, but behind her polite smile and immaculate outfits I suspected she carried as many burdens as the rest of us. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and breathed in a long, slow lungful of wide-open sky. A secretive smile played at the corner of her mouth and within seconds, she fell asleep.
What is going on in someone’s life when they are so desperate for sleep, they can find it buffeted about on a folding chair on the edge of a mountain?
We got through the safety bit, the initial instructions, and were told to choose a partner to hold the other end of the rope for us while we climbed the smallest rock face. Smallest being relative, of course.
‘Stick to your groups!’ Hester ordered, as she marched up and down behind the instructors. ‘No inter-subsection partnering!’
That made things a little simpler – or more difficult. I shuffled over to my fellow altos. Apart from Polly, now faintly snoring in her chair, there was Rosa – a fifty-something woman from Bulgaria, Melody – exactly the kind of woman I would trust to hold the rope that might potentially save me from serious injury, and Kim. Kim, who had so far spent the whole tripSnapchatting her boyfriend Scotty, had chosen to wear a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a crop top. If I happened to look up while holding her rope, I would get to see a lot more than I had paid for.
