Stay Dead - [8]

7

Sometimes Dolly thought it started when she was ten, just before she considered running away. But no. Actually, when she really thought, it started a year or so before that, with him giving her little gifts.

Whenever she thought about it in later life – and mostly she tried not to – she always thought of the story about the frog put into cold water that was heated until it boiled to death. Had it been put in boiling water to start with, it would have jumped out. But death was slow, insidious; it crept up on the frog and lulled it; and that was how Dolly’s downfall came about, too.

The first time Mum went away to get her ‘treatment’, Dad brought Dolly a box of chocolates.

‘Got to spoil my best girl, haven’t I,’ he said gruffly, shoving the gift into her hands. ‘Don’t tell the other kids, they’ll all be wanting stuff, and that’s just for you, because you’re special.’

Dolly was delighted and flattered. She felt important, because Mum was away and she was in charge of the house, even if she was a lousy cook and an even worse cleaner. She tucked the chocolates away in a recess of the wardrobe in her and Sarah’s room, and ate them whenever the others weren’t around.

Dad loved her, she thought as she ate the chocolates; she was special. She bunked off big school – no one cared, anyway – and spent more time in the house, trying to hold back the tide of mess and failing. But she was appreciated, she was loved. Missing her mum, she liked that.

When Mum came home, looking like one of the zombies in those comics Dick loved so much, Dolly was relegated to second place, and Dad didn’t pay her much attention at all. So Dolly began to look forward to Mum going away, because when she did, there was Dad with gifts for his special girl: a tortoiseshell comb, a music box with a twirling ballerina inside, more chocolates.

And when Mum wasn’t there, when the other kids weren’t around, he cuddled her. She liked that, at first.

‘Come and sit on my lap, Doll,’ he’d say, and she would, to be enfolded in a hug scented with Old Holborn and beer-breath, the unwashed bristly skin of his chin nuzzling into her neck. It was lovely, comforting somehow.

The cuddling became tickling, and play-fighting, and one day down in the sitting room Sam was laughing and Dolly was giggling wildly and they rolled on the grubby carpet, her and her dad, and his hand came to rest on the small barely formed nubbin of her breast. It stayed there, rubbing, and Dolly’s giggles faded in her shock and confusion as she felt her nipple harden.

‘They’re getting bigger,’ he said, and she didn’t know where to look or what to say, she was that embarrassed. It felt nice, the pressure of his hand there. Nice, and somehow very wrong. Shameful. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said, and took her hand and placed it over his trousers. She felt something hard there, and jerked her hand away and sat up.

‘You know the facts of life, don’t you, Doll?’ he asked, sitting there on the floor staring at her. ‘You started your bleeds yet?’

Dolly didn’t know what to say. Was he telling her she was going to bleed from somewhere, like a nosebleed maybe? Was that somehow connected to what men and women did, how they had babies? The thought made her shudder.

Dad put his hand on her shoulder, slid it up to caress her cheek.

‘You know what men and women do together, don’t you, Doll?’

She wanted him to shut up. This was horrible. She thought of the angels in the stained-glass window of the little church, the beauty in them, the goodness. This wasn’t good. This was awful and evil. She knew it somehow, deep in her soul.

‘You know the man puts his thing in the lady?’ he said, and he was whispering now, leaning closer, his breath tickling her ear.

Dolly said nothing. She was frozen there, rigid with disgust and disbelief that her dad was saying these shocking things to her. She wanted to stand up, to run, but she was afraid he’d stop her if she moved. Or touch her again in that bad way.

‘He puts his thing right in her, and it feels good,’ he said, and he was touching her hand, grasping it, bringing it back to that strange hardness at his crotch. Cringing, Dolly tried to pull her hand free, but she couldn’t. ‘You’re my best girl,’ he said, and his voice caught as if he was breathless. ‘There. You see? It’s going to be so good for us.’

So, after Lucy’s birthday tea, Dolly almost ran away. As far as the rec, anyway. But Dad brought her home again, and when she got home there was Mum sitting in her chair at the kitchen table – and Dolly thought that, while Mum was here, she was safe. Dad wouldn’t try to do the man-and-woman thing with her, not while Mum was here.

8

Prospect, Barbados, June 1994

Annie Carter dreamed of him again on the night it all kicked off. Constantine Barolli – the godfather. Him of the all-American tan and the armour-piercing blue eyes, the startling white hair, the sharp suits. It was as if he was there, he was so real. Smiling at her, telling her he loved her.

Once, long ago, Constantine could make anything right. Could make her feel enfolded, protected in the safe cocoon of his love. She turned over in the bed, her eyes opening to blackness, the last insubstantial filaments of the dream floating away into the air around her. Her and Constantine, walking on the beach at Montauk on Long Island, the millionaires’ playground, hand in hand. She could feel his strong grip on hers, could see the sun on his hair, the crinkling of the lines around his eyes… but it was fading, fading… and then it was gone.