Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

Daddy took it from her. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘And my mother.’

‘Ha!’ laughed Ruby. ‘You were a cowboy then too!’ She peered up underneath the photo in his hand. ‘It says Johnny and me on the back.’ He turned it over and touched the writing with his fingers.

‘Your mummy was sooooo pretty,’ said Ruby.

‘Not like Nanna.’

‘Yeah, she was,’ said Daddy, and winked. ‘That’s why I’m so good-looking!’

Ruby giggled, then sighed. ‘I wish I had a cowboy outfit.’

Daddy ignored the hint. Everybody ignored her hints. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered giving hints. She’d been hinting about a pony for years.

Daddy was still looking at the picture, so Ruby sidled up alongside him so she could look at it too.

‘Was your daddy taking the photo?’

‘I can’t remember.’ Daddy put the photo in his pocket and looked around him. ‘There’s nothing here.’

They put almost everything back exactly where they’d found it, then they ate the pie cold, and straight out of the dish, because Daddy said it was nicer that way.

Later, while Daddy watched TV, Ruby took her diary out of her pony backpack. She opened it on the first blue-lined page, which was always so encouraging.

She wrote: MONDAY.

It didn’t look quite the way she’d wanted it to – the D was a bit like a P and she had to go over it twice – but so far, so good.

She gazed at the window and chewed the top of her pen. Then she bent over the book again and underlined ‘Monday.’

It was wonky. She should have done it with a ruler.

She chewed the pen some more, until the little plug came out of the end of it, then she sucked on that so it stuck to the tip of her tongue like a big blue pimple. If she waggled it about, she could see it at the bottom of the slope of her own cheek.

Then she underlined ‘Monday’ again.

Then she went and got a glass of milk to help her think.

Finally she wrote:

MONDAY.No horses in the paddick. Drew maps for school.

TUESDAY.Maggie fell off the swing on the cliffs and it bled in her sock.

WEDNESDAY.Played in the woods. Found a good stick for a gun.

THURSDAY.No horses in the paddick again.

FRIDAY.My Mummy got new shoes and my Daddy said they are to high then Daddy went to cowboy club and I tied his holdster on his leg.

SATURDAY.Me and Daddy cleaned the house.

Ruby put down her pen and sighed deeply at the nice blank page she’d ruined with her boring life.

‘CALL YOUR MOTHER.’

The woman sat in the woods. Cross-legged on her hands and a bed of red-brown pine needles, soft and prickly under her naked thighs.

She squinted up at the man.

‘What?’

He waggled the phone at her again. ‘Call your mother.’

He didn’t know it, but her name was Katie Squire. She was twenty-six and she’d been walking the South-West coastal path alone for twenty-four days without experiencing anything worse than a blister between Fowey and Kingsands. Completely preventable; she’d forgotten to wear two pairs of socks.

She was wearing them now though – two pairs of red hiking socks, and nothing else.

She stared at the hand holding her phone. Apart from his lips and eyes, it was the only part of the man Katie could see, and the fingernails were bitten and dirty around the cuticles. The thought of those fingers touching her skin made her feel hot and shivery.

‘Call your mother.’

‘No,’ she told him. She hadn’t called her mother for months; she wasn’t going to start now with this.

Whatever this was.

She was shocked by how calm she was. It was too bizarre to take seriously, she supposed. She’d been walking through an unexpectedly lovely tunnel of trees, with the sea sighing softly somewhere to her left. The only warning she’d had was a loud rustling in the undergrowth – and the time between that and this (whatever this was, she thought again) was an iron grip on her arm and a surreal blur of stumbling and shaking and standing on one leg, trying to unlace her walking boots, while her skin raced with goosebumps and her teeth chattered like a joke skull.

But now she was calm.

Numb, possibly.

He’d said he had a gun but she didn’t see one, and it was too late now.

Above them, it was raining, but here on the forest floor it was dry. Only the sound of the drops on the canopy overhead gave the rain away. Katie had been to a spa once and they had played the sound of raindrops while she’d had a massage. This was a bit like that – apart from there was no massage.

And she was naked in the woods with a pervert.

Apart from that.

The man fiddled with her phone and then held it up. She heard the fake shutter noise and blinked in the flash, then he turned the phone so that she could see her own stark image – as pale as a frightened ghost on the bed of terracotta needles.

‘I’ll send that to your mother. Then she can see.’

Katie said nothing.

He looked at the photo and his teeth grinned through the hole in the black wool. ‘For a young maid you’ve got right floppy old tits.’

It wasn’t true but it stung. This, of all things , brought tears to her eyes. Katie fought them. She wasn’t a crier. She hadn’t cried when he’d forced her to walk off the path. She hadn’t cried when he’d forced her to strip. And what did she care what this weirdo thought of her breasts?

But she did care. It made no sense, but she did .

And then the wrongness of that caring made her angry. She shook her straight dark hair out of her eyes defiantly and glared up at him. ‘How would you know? I bet you never even touched a breast. Is that why you force women to strip off in the woods? To get your jollies?’

‘Shut up.’

‘You shut up.’ Katie had three brothers, so ‘Shut up’ was home turf to her, and she drew strength from a row that suddenly seemed very familiar, despite her nakedness and his balaclava.

‘I want my clothes back. I’m freezing.’

‘I want you to call your mother.’

‘Why?’ she said suspiciously. ‘Do you know her?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes, I know her.’

‘Bollocks,’ she decided. ‘You don’t know my mother. And anyway, she wouldn’t want to talk to anyone who’d do such a pathetic, cowardly thing.’

It was true, Katie realized with a surge of emotion. Her mother might be an interfering old cow, but she had principles. Why hadn’t she called her in months? There was no real reason. And suddenly Katie was impatient to speak to her. To hear the gossip. To tell her she loved her.

But she wasn’t doing it in front of this bastard.

She glared at her attacker. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘either hurry up and rape me or bloody well let me go.’

He made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a cry.

‘Filthy! ’ he said. ‘Filthy little whore.’

‘You’re filthy,’ she spat back. ‘Making a total stranger take her clothes off. Taking pictures of it. That’s filthy. That’s sick.’

He angrily pressed the phone against her face, squashing her nose, pushing her off balance. ‘Call your fucking mother.’

Katie slapped the phone away, sending it spinning off a tree.

‘Call yours , arsehole!’

He swung at her so hard that when he missed, he almost fell.

Katie got up and ran, and he went after her.

This time he didn’t stop after a few strides. Instead, her running ignited some deep chase instinct in him. Like a hound after a hare, he wanted to catch her. Wanted to bring her down.