could watch television with impunity was just after she got home from school and just before her father returned from work, a golden period of two hours where she could sit herself on a beanbag in the front room with a slice of Battenberg cake and with the luxurious prospect of an uninterrupted session of Grange Hill and Blue Peter stretching out in front of her. Her ears were finely tuned into the precise sound of her father’s car engine. When she heard the first growling rumbles of his BMW, she would leap up, switch off the television and sprint upstairs, closing the door to her bedroom and opening her school exercise books so that she would not have to talk to him.
Sometimes, he would knock on her door on his way upstairs.
‘Charlotte?’ He waited until she replied before he pushed the door open, but even then he refused to walk over the thin metallic strip that separated the dark red hallway carpet from the light, beige tones of her bedroom floor. It always felt awkward, his standing there as if on sentry duty, casting his wordless eye over what she was doing.
‘Busy day?’ he asked.
‘Sort of,’ Charlotte said and then couldn’t think of anything else to add. She smiled at him as neutrally as she could. He stood looking at her in silence for a few seconds, loosening his tie with one hand.
‘Good,’ he said. He shifted on his feet, as if he were about to step forward and move closer to her. She saw this and instantly she felt her shoulders jolt backwards, a movement so slight it might not have happened, but he noticed and immediately he turned from her and walked out, making long strides towards the bathroom. After a few minutes, she heard the sound of running water.
She did not know if her family was normal or not. She had few friends to confide in. She was a very lonely child, scared of other children and terrified of new experiences. She had no siblings and was unsure how to relate to people her own age. There was nothing she hated more than her mother saying she must go to a party ‘because so-and-so’s daughter will be there and she’s the same age as you’. Or those horrifying dinners where her parents would sit on one table with the adults and all the children would be expected to gather round a shaky fold-out picnic table with novelty napkins and coloured paper crowns. ‘It’s more fun for them that way, isn’t it?’ the hostess would say, with a facile smile on her face, when actually everyone knew the only reason for their annexation was that the adults couldn’t be bothered to look after them.
It wasn’t ever more fun, thought Charlotte. As a rule, she found that most children regarded her with a naked distrust that soon turned into a virulent mutual loathing. The worst thing was getting stuck with a group of girls who were already, through a series of esoteric family connections, the firmest of friends. They would either gang up on her and whisper about her behind cupped hands, or she would try to be friendly to one of them and immediately be accused by another girl of ‘trying to take her away from me’. She never seemed to wear the right clothes or to have done the right things. Once, when she admitted she had never watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a girl called Kitty with frizzy blonde hair and shiny lips said she was ‘odd’, which had seemed the cruellest possible insult at the time.
Instead, she revelled in isolation. At home, she would spend hours reading in the shed at the back of the garden, sandwiched between old deckchairs and the greasy oiliness of lawnmower spare parts. The shed was her favourite retreat. Sometimes, when things in the house got almost too much to bear, she would come to the shed and imagine that she had run away. She would sit for hours in between two coal sacks wondering if anyone had noticed that she was no longer there and then, when the floor got too hard and the night-time draughts started to seep through the cracks in the wood, she would be forced back inside and neither of her parents would remark on her absence. And it was this – the fact that they had not been worried about her – that used to upset her more than any unhappiness she might have felt in the first place.
‘Get out of the fucking way!’ she screamed as a moped screeched to a halt in front of her. She swerved just in time and saw the familiar outline of the London Bridge Hospital down a road to her left. She indicated, then remembered that the left light wasn’t working and she had yet to get it fixed. Her father had always told her she should do hand signals out of the window if this ever happened, but she was too embarrassed, so she took her chances when she saw a gap in the traffic.
The thought of him made her shiver.
Once inside the hospital car park, where a space was hardly ever available despite the outrageously high charges, she felt the familiar sense of unease settle like a shroud. She hated hospitals: the smell of disinfectant and surgical gloves, the squeaky linoleum, the endless corridors without windows, the collapsed grandmothers shuffling to the loo in their slippers, the enforced cheerfulness of the nurses that made everything seem so much more terrifying.
‘Deep breath,’ she said to herself. ‘You’re not the one who’s ill, after all.’ She picked up her battered handbag, put it over the crook in her arm and walked inside. The automatic glass doors whirred open into the reception area. Along one wall was an ersatz gift shop which sold newspapers (the Daily Express always went first, she had noticed) and sad-looking teddy bears with sickly purple bows tied round their necks. The lift pinged when she pressed the call button and she was soon on the fifth floor. She walked to the end of the hallway, pausing to squeeze a blob of alcohol on her hands from the anti-MRSA dispenser on the wall, and pushed the door on her right, sliding it slowly open.
‘Hello, Mum.’
Her mother was standing by the window, looking outwards to the indistinct greyness of the sky. She turned suddenly when Charlotte walked in. ‘Oh, hello,’ she replied absent-mindedly, as if she had not been expecting her.
‘How is he?’
‘Much the same,’ her mother said, her eyes obscured by the pair of pastel-framed bifocals she wore for reading. ‘The doctor says we should try to talk to him.’
Charlotte looked at the crumpled figure of her father, shrunken and pale against the hospital sheets. She felt unhappiness wash over her. The light in the room seemed to bleach at the edges, draining the room of colour so that everything became shaded in a matt greyness.
It was time to start acting the role that was expected of her. She pushed her shoulders back and smiled too brightly.
At the foot of the bed hung a thin wire basket in which was slotted a cheap blue ring binder containing his hospital notes. Above his head, on an easy-wipe noticeboard, a nurse had written hurriedly in red felt-tip: ‘Charles Redfern. 55 yrs’.
‘Hello, Dad.’
Anne loved her daughter so much it felt like a glass splinter lodged deep in her heart. Yet she found herself incapable of expressing it and this, more than anything else, seemed to drive them apart.
She was unaccountably cross that Charlotte was late. She had promised faithfully to be at the hospital at 6.30 p.m., but it was now 7.15 p.m. In that time, Anne had worked herself up into a state of highly pitched emotion that was a complicated knot of fury, fear and the suspicion that Charlotte simply didn’t care enough about her to turn up. The anger had crept up on Anne so imperceptibly that she had been unable to stop it leaking out in small but significant gestures; a succession of cold stares and raised eyebrows.
She knew that Charlotte picked up on it immediately, that her daughter sensed the tension in the atmosphere as soon as she walked in the room.
‘How was
