Beth no longer felt like running. She stalked back through the woods, shoulders hunched and brow furrowed as she mentally worked through the list again and again. When she crossed the threshold to her home, she was no closer to finding a link between the names, and the weight of the list in her pocket now felt unbearably heavy.
The house was empty. Josh, reliable as the tide, had already left for work while she was on her run. After discarding the note on the kitchen table, Beth dragged her weary legs upstairs, keen to shower off the feeling of unease that coated her skin like a thick oil.
Two
‘Ruby, do you know why you’re here?’
She lifted her head to peer at the bespectacled woman on the nearby armchair but said nothing. The fibres of the sofa she was perched on were chafing against her bare legs. She wished she’d pulled on jeans rather than her pink shorts. But it was warm for April and today they might let her go outside, might let her feel the sun on her skin. Yet here she was again, in the office that smelt like old books and stale coffee. A large window showed the green grounds, glowing and lustrous in the early-morning light.
Tired of being taunted by the view, Ruby lowered her head again.
‘I felt like we made real progress during our last session.’ The woman regarded her notes and then lowered her glasses with a plump hand, letting them hang around her neck on the ornate chain she always wore. ‘Maybe we could continue from where we left off?’ It sounded like there was genuine hope in her voice.
Ruby grunted and leant forward to pick at a scab on her knee. ‘I want to go home.’ The words were mumbled, almost incoherent. Yet the woman in the armchair was attuned to her juvenile dialect.
‘You know that’s not an option.’
‘But I want to go home.’ Her words were a plea. Abandoning her scab, Ruby folded her arms against her chest, which had begun to swell. She wanted to see her friends, to feel the sun warm the back of her legs as she ran through a field. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be in school like everyone else.
‘Ruby, there is no going home. You understand that, don’t you?’ There was a gentleness to the woman’s words which Ruby wasn’t accustomed to hearing.
‘I do but …’ She squeezed tight against her chest, against the unfairness of it all. ‘I still want to go home.’
‘I understand that, truly.’ The woman leant forward. She had kind eyes and a treble chin. Every day she wore the same uniform of a long flowing skirt and an ill-fitting blouse that strained against her ample bosom. And she always smelt of coffee and lavender. Her curves made her seem kind, like her body was built to give cuddles. Not like Ruby’s mother, who was made of sticks, every slim bone in her body piercing and sharp. When she embraced her daughter, it felt like being pressed into a bag of needles. But already Ruby was starting to forget what it was like to be in her mother’s arms. How much time had passed since Linda Renton had held her – really held her?
‘Let’s talk about that day, about what happened,’ the woman prompted, a smile of hopeful eagerness pulling on her thin lips.
Ruby swallowed. Talking about that day was like turning the screw in a broken hinge: pointless. It never did anything, never improved her circumstances.
‘No,’ she told the woman sternly. ‘I’m done talking about it.’
‘Okay,’ came the breezy reply. There was no resistance, no hand surging forward to strike her across the face. At home, any resistance always earned her a smarting cheek. Perhaps this place wasn’t that bad after all … ‘Then let’s talk about something else. About your family. Can we talk about that?’
A shadow passed over Ruby’s young features as her hazel eyes gazed up sadly at the woman. ‘I’d really rather not.’
‘Well, we have to talk about something. It’s important that we make the most of our time here.’
‘Can we talk about something nice?’
‘Sure, Ruby. Like what?’
‘Like …’ Ruby looked up and allowed her gaze to fix upon the window and the sunlit vista beyond. ‘Like the weather. It’s so sunny today. Perhaps later I can––’
‘We can talk about the weather all you want.’ The woman was writing while she talked, scribbling notes in her thick A4 leather-bound pad. ‘But eventually we have to talk about things that are not so nice.’
‘I know. I mean, eventually, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So not today.’ Ruby continued to gaze wistfully out of the window, hoping that today could be a good day, that today she could at least pretend she was free.
‘Okay, Ruby,’ the woman conceded with a soft smile, ‘not today. But another day. And know that there will be other days, lots of them.’
Three
Hair still damp, Beth trudged back downstairs, skin flushed from the heat of the shower. Stepping into the kitchen, her eyes immediately locked on to the slip of paper on the table, left there in haste as she’d headed for the shower, needing to feel the pressure of hot water against her back. It looked innocuous in the morning sunlight.
‘Weird.’ Tentatively, Beth approached the note, drumming the blunt ends of her nails against the table as she moved round it.
Five names. Alien to her. Strangers. Except for the third name, which was her own.
Dragging a chair out, Beth sat down heavily and grabbed the note.
‘Joanne Rowles.’ She read the first name aloud, hoping that it might bring forth some distant memory from the recesses of her mind. It didn’t.
Carefully, she folded the paper along its crease and then opened it again, running her fingertips against its surface. Its material wasn’t flimsy, it was the kind of thick, sturdy paper she used to feed into the printer back at school. And the writing on it. So ornate, so carefully executed. It chilled Beth to imagine someone bent over a different table, pen in hand, taking the time to write out her name so artistically, so elaborately. The list was not scrawled in haste.
‘But why?’ Beth stared at it hard and bit her lip. What was the point of the list? What connected her to the other names?
The brightness outside drew her attention, reminding her of the litany of chores she had to do that morning, of her shift at the cinema that commenced at six. She didn’t have time to idle over the list. But still the names lodged themselves in her mind, prickly as a thorn.
After pinning a freshly washed load of clothes onto the rotary line in the small back garden and cleaning away what remained of last night’s dinner, Beth once again found herself drifting towards the kitchen table and the folded slip of paper upon it.
‘Why am I on there?’ she asked aloud, knowing no answer would present itself. ‘Could it be another Beth Belmont?’ she wondered. In the woods? Her woods? Where she ran each morning? Her fingers twitched with the impulse to go into the lounge and fire up her laptop. A quick Google search might shed some more light on matters.
Beth’s bare feet took her out of the kitchen, across the grey tiled floor towards the lounge at the back of the small terrace. The computer was in her sights when she heard gravel crunching beneath the weight of thick tyres. Turning, she saw through the kitchen window that Josh’s van had just pulled into the driveway. Her chest constricted as her gaze flew back towards the list.