LITMIR.BIZ

       10

      Vicky went next door to number four where the Dents lived—in a house half the size of number two, built in the fifties on a plot where stables for number two used to stand. She walked to school most mornings with Ruth—partly out of convenience but primarily because out of all her group, it was Ruth she liked best. Ruth had been the first friend she made in Burwood as an unwilling urban transplant who spent most of her time shut in her room dazed with loneliness and the amount of time she spent on Facebook.

      The friendship had been engineered, in the beginning, by their mothers—Sylvia, in order to offload, and Rachel out of generosity—and in many respects it mirrored the burgeoning friendship between Sylvia and Rachel themselves, who became inseparable when Rachel started to emulate Sylvia. After bringing the Hendersons back from the brink, meeting somebody who wanted to be her was the best thing that could have happened to Sylvia.

      It was the same for her daughter, Vicky.

      Despite inauspicious beginnings—Vicky initially mistook Ruth’s choking shyness for aloofness—Ruth was soon buying Vicky wholesale.

      Vicky had been to a pathologically competitive girls’ school in London that regularly provided the worlds of business, banking and government with leaders. It was intimated to the girls that reproduction was for the weak and stupid and that using your womb as nature intended was a less suitable fall-back position in life than having a breakdown and doing VSOS in Central Africa. Vicky had been on track for 12 GCSEs—including Ancient Greek and Chinese—and total mental and emotional collapse.

      Ruth’s early feelings for Vicky, clouded as Vicky was in the aura of the city she’d been forced to leave behind, were ones of reverence, and Ruth’s reverence healed Vicky in a way nothing else could have done. The more Ruth wanted to be Vicky, the more Vicky loved her. Ruth understood that, for Vicky, living in Burwood was like living with a permanently infected wound. Despite having spent the past nine years of her life happy in this small commuter town nestled in the valley of affluence between the North and South Downs, she now learnt to actively despise it—and the people in it—for Vicky’s sake.

      Just as when Vicky fell in love with Mr Sutton, Ruth was expected to do the same in order to keep her company.

      While Vicky was often cruel to Ruth—nobody else was allowed to be.

      During the cruel phases, Ruth maintained a sobbing silence and simply waited for Vicky to come back round.

      Saskia was nowhere near as devoted as Ruth, but she was swayed by the Aura of London surrounding Vicky. A complicated home life and an inherent and distracting talent for painting prevented Saskia from becoming worshipful, but Vicky liked her because she was beautiful.

      She liked Grace the least.

      Grace had so many part-time jobs—including raising a younger sister their mother was never home to raise herself—that she was rarely able to commit to the social life of the group, and this bored Vicky. Any latent chance of real intimacy had now been buried under Grace’s appointment as Head Girl.

      This morning the Dent family—apart from Ruth—were already out on the drive.

      Nathan Dent, Ruth’s stepfather, was trying to get something off his shoe and Rachel Dent was trying to get into the car because she was volunteering at the hospital that morning. The Audi estate was emitting the mellow, warning ping it had been programmed to make when the driver’s door was left open too long.

      ‘My shoe,’ Nathan said over the voice of the Sat Nav, Giselle, who was trying to initiate conversation.

      He stared down at the toe of his right shoe. What he had taken for a mark was in fact a cut in the leather. Between yesterday evening and this morning, something had either wilfully or unwittingly lacerated the leather across the toe of his shoe. The shoe was now irrevocably damaged…flawed…imperfect. Imperfection brought on nausea and panic, which led to bouts of unaccountable rage—like the one he experienced briefly now, standing on his drive on a Friday morning.

      ‘It’s ruined.’

      Rachel looked down at the shoe he’d pushed through the gravel and fog towards her for inspection.

      ‘Where?’

      ‘There. Completely ruined.’

      ‘Is not so bad. Can’t you get repair?’ She’d dropped her pronouns and forgotten her tenses like she used to do when she first learnt English; something she only ever did when she got anxious.

      ‘It is not so bad. Can’t you get it repair-ed. Look, I know you don’t care.’ He paused, but Rachel didn’t respond to this. ‘But the shoe’s beyond repair and—for me anyway—that’s frustrating. I walk home in a perfect pair of shoes and by the next morning—mysteriously—they’re completely ruined.’ He paused again. ‘And that’s frustrating.’

      Rachel continued to remain silent. She wasn’t being obtuse, she just had no idea what she was meant to say—how to respond without aggravating him further, which she was bound to do. With an effort, she leant suddenly forward, aiming clumsily for his cheek, and missing as Nathan turned to meet her kiss. Her lips bounced uncomfortably off the side edge of his chin and she mumbled ‘sorry’—aware that it was last night she was apologising for…for having fallen asleep when he wanted to make love to her.

      Nathan calmed down as soon as her misjudged lips touched his face. The shoe was forgotten. ‘Okay, well—I’d better be off,’ he said, sounding almost cheerful now, and even managing a small smile.

      Rachel watched him walk down the drive in his beige CIA Mac, nodding at Vicky Henderson who was backed up against the red brick wall that separated number two Park Avenue from number four. He got to the gate post, which was fast becoming obscured in bamboo, stepped in a puddle, cursed, shook his foot, then crossed the road, narrowly avoiding the bus going into town that nobody ever used because everybody in Burwood owned a car. Even the elderly shunned using their bus passes in favour of battery operated mobility aids.

      By the time Nathan got to the junction with Hurst Road, he was wearing the tight smile he wore most of the time for his dealings with the world: a quietly overbearing, sarcastic smile that the majority of people were unwilling to probe behind.

      Nathan Dent was the product of an over-hygienic childhood; the recipient of a slow, trickling paternal and maternal love, so you couldn’t blame him really—for his smile. You couldn’t blame him for the other legacies either—the propensity to dress like he sold audiovisual equipment in Currys, and the habit of scrubbing at his hands and nails with a toothbrush when they got dirty. His childhood had left him with a bitter taste in his mouth and a capacity for measuring himself out—both professionally and personally—in careful, dispassionate doses. Marrying Rachel, in fact, was the most ambitious thing he had ever done in his life. It was also, importantly, the only time he’d ever not been in control of himself. He turned down Hurst Road and across the park to the offices of Pinnacle Insurance where he sat in a booth and protected the world against itself.

      ‘You okay?’ Vicky asked Rachel, embarrassed. She had to say something—she’d been standing there the whole time and was still backed up against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with brick and bamboo.

      Rachel smiled at her—confused by the question.

      ‘You?’

      Vicky nodded.

      ‘You don’t look it.’

      ‘A bit fluey—that’s all.’

      ‘What’s your temperature?’

      ‘My temperature?’

      ‘You

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