Given my new status, perhaps it was to be expected that I dreamed about my parents.
While I hadn’t always been the pathetic loser of the past few months, I had spent most of my childhood feeling pitifully ordinary. Which, in my family, kept me in a solid last place. Mum and Dad would always believe they were exceptional parents. My brother, Cameron, was conclusive evidence that they’d achieved their goal of raising a Good Person. One dedicated to leaving the world in a better state than if he’d never existed. My choice to pursue what they considered far less noble goals meant I failed, not them.
Of course, the fame and fortune that accompanied Cameron’s self-help empire was purely a happy by-product, rather than the reason for his viral TED talk, ‘Why You Keep Making Stupid Choices and How to Stop.’
Mum was a barrister when I was young. The year I started secondary school she retired from the law, becoming a women’s rights activist. Dad spent twenty-three years as a local politician in Sheffield, the South Yorkshire city where we’d lived, his crowning glory being a revolutionary scheme that drastically reduced ex-prisoner reoffending rates.
So, fulfilling the left-wing, liberal stereotype, we ate a lot of home-grown, organic vegetables in our house. Mostly cooked by me, because everyone else was far too busy fighting for social justice alongside election campaigns, protest marches and general world-saving.
Efforts to redress the imbalance of our privilege included second-hand clothes, recycled everything, no car, and a tiny television. I had to wait until sixteen for my first phone, and computers were for educational purposes only. I was expected to spend my very limited spare time on edifying pursuits such as reading, playing the piano and tending our raised beds.
I was mostly okay about all that – I was genuinely proud of my parents and knew their work was important and brilliant. I just wished they could think I was important, or a tiny bit brilliant, sometimes. I’d longed for a weekend slouching about doing nothing much, not hunched in the corner of a refuge pretending to do homework while Mum doled out advice, helped traumatised women fill in vital forms or handed them tissues while they cried.
Of course, I never had the audacity to cry, having been given everything I could possibly want in life.
Everything, that was, apart from being allowed to worry about my own problems, like the shame of being forced to give Daniella Button a book about the suffragette movement at her twelfth birthday party.
I spent two bearable years at the perfectly decent secondary school a couple of miles from our shabby town house. However, after a standoff with the head teacher about what they considered institutional sexism in the home-economics curriculum, my parents smugly enrolled me in a failing inner-city comprehensive. This was mainly to prove some point I never quite understood, but also included the expectation that I would waltz in there like a teen white-saviour and enlighten all my peers in the playground, or at the very least share my home-made oat bars.
Instead, I met Shay and Kieran. Who, the truth was, saved me.
4
BECKETT
Beckett didn’t think of himself as a nosy person. One of the reasons he’d probably have not been the best doctor was his lack of curiosity. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, more the courtesy of not wanting to impose on other people the same discomfort he felt when pressed to share personal details.
And yes, he understood that this reluctance to open up and partake in the healthy exchange of information that friendships thrive on only increased his isolation. His resulting shame at having no social life or much life at all to speak of perpetuated the problem indefinitely.
Yet. In the hours since he’d first stood on Mary’s doorstep, he couldn’t stop wondering about her. Once she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, he’d finished the chapter of the book he was reading and then made to leave. However, something had compelled him back into her kitchen first. When fetching her duvet from upstairs, he’d not been able to help noticing that the bedroom was stark. There was a small pile of clothes on a wooden chair in one corner, a clutch of toiletries on a chest of drawers, but no photographs, artwork or ornaments. He’d never been in a woman’s house that didn’t have a candle or a throw.
There was nothing to suggest this place was a home. He suspected Mary had not been here very long, but also that she’d no intention to stay. In which case, why was she holed up in a remote cottage that was, to be blunt, a dump?
The kitchen cupboards had made his stomach clench. He’d found pasta, a box of crackers, teabags and a few tins. The fridge wasn’t much better – some soggy salad leaves, half a packet of cheese and enough milk for maybe one cup of tea. The freezer held a couple of ready meals and some peas.
After quickly washing up, wiping down the surfaces and sweeping the floor, he’d headed home, relieved to see that the snow was already melting, but the thought of Mary sitting alone, eating one of those grim excuses for a pasta bake, wouldn’t stop bothering him.
Everything about her situation pointed to her having run for her life. The only thing that made him hesitate in concluding that Mary had fled domestic violence was that while she seemed sad, even depressed, she didn’t appear watchful or scared. She might be hiding, but he didn’t think it was from anything dangerous.
He’d snatched three hours’ sleep before his alarm went off. Gramps was still sleeping, which confirmed that he’d been unsettled by the change in routine the night before, and Beckett was downing some much-needed caffeine when Tanya shuffled into the kitchen with a face like concrete.
‘Coffee?’ he asked. A pathetic peace offering, but she looked as though she might need it before he said any more.
She banged a travel mug onto the worktop. ‘To go.’
‘Thank you for being here.’ Beckett ran a hand through his hair, about two years overdue a cut. He forced himself to find the words to explain. ‘A woman was literally giving birth on the back seat, and, with the road being closed, I had to stop at the nearest building I could see…’
‘I stayed for him, not you.’ Tanya leant against the table, arms folded. It was a decent-sized kitchen, but Beckett felt as though there wasn’t enough room as he filled her mug from the jug of freshly ground filter coffee.
‘Yeah. I know. We’re very grateful to have you…’
‘You don’t have me, Beckett. I meant what I said last night. I’m done with being treated like this. We have boundaries for a reason, and I won’t keep letting you disrespect them, and me.’
‘I understand. It’s not okay, and I’m sorry. I’ll pay you overtime for being here all night, and can finish early today to make up for it. It won’t happen again.’
He handed Tanya the travel mug, and she shoved it into her giant shoulder bag, clearly not appeased.
‘No. It won’t happen again because I’m resigning. I told you, I’m done.’
