Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

With a shiver of fear, Dinah realised that the tight seals she had kept on the past were straining and threatening to give way. At home in England she had been able to contain herself with familiarity and routine. But in Franklin she was out of her place and adrift, and her awareness of this intensified with time rather than diminished.

Then Milly had come, and her age and her fury and fragility had all touched a rawness and longing in Dinah that was frightening, and always increasing, and now threatened to overwhelm her.

Dinah grew cold and stiff with sitting. She stood up and walked the length of the room and back, and the dog raised its head to look irritably at her. It was two, nearly three hours since Milly had run out of the house. The night was bitter, and she had been wearing only the usual layers of ragged woollens. Where had she gone? Was she outside in the darkness, wandering by herself, or was she in some dangerous warm place, shut in and at even greater risk?

She was only fourteen. A child, a little girl. Her responsibility, entrusted to her.

Dinah ran to the front door and jerked it open. Cold air met her, and the scent of woodsmoke, and the sight of the cosy curtained windows of her neighbours’ houses. The wind carried the irregular hum of distant traffic.

She closed the door again, pressing the night away behind it. Denied images rose up before her eyes, making her roll her head in an effort to dispel them. None of her old methods of deflection would work any longer, because Milly had unlocked the sealed place.

Dinah ranged through the rooms of the house, looking for somewhere to hide and collect herself, but there was nowhere. The tidy defences of possessions and pictures and an ordered life looked irrelevant now. Guilt emerged from its lair as tangible as another human being until she thought that she could hear its breathing, smell the rankness of its sweat.

She could stay in the house no longer, she would have to get away from this foetid personification. She snatched a coat from its peg and pulled it on. She called to Ape and he came bounding eagerly towards her. The sight of him gave her an idea and she ran up the stairs to Milly’s room. At first it looked bare of her minimal possessions, but then she saw a frayed and shapeless garment discarded on a chair. Dinah bore it downstairs, and gave it to Ape to sniff.

‘Find her,’ she ordered. ‘Seek, there’s the boy.’

When she opened the door for him he set off up Kendrick, tail waving like a plume. Dinah ran behind him.

The dog thought it was a good game. He ran in a diagonal line across Pleasant, and plunged into the dark area between two houses. Dead leaves crackled under Dinah’s feet as she followed him. There were garage doors with basketball hoops, fences and paved yards and silent porches. Ape ran her until she was gasping for breath and then circled back to twist between her legs, panting and slobbering. She could have kicked him for his amiable stupidity. Milly was nowhere in these quiet streets, why should she be? The peaceful suburban darkness only emphasised her fears. But still she walked on, with the dog now scuffling at her side. She threaded up and down the neighbouring streets, peering at each house as her shadow reached ahead of her and then fell back again between the blue-white auras of the street lamps.

Dinah knew that she could walk all night and not have a hope of discovering where Milly might be.

A need to return home as urgent as the one that had driven her out took hold of her. She swung round and began to walk, faster and faster until she was running, into Kendrick and across the grass to the steps of her house. The door was still on the latch, as she had left it. She knew as soon as she stumbled inside that Milly had not returned.

It was after midnight.

Dinah picked up the phone and dialled the Parkeses’ home number. The answering machine picked up, Ed’s confident voice. If Milly was there she wouldn’t answer. Dinah quickly hung up.

Whom to call? The Parkeses were staying at the Bel Air Hotel, Ed had told her that twice and Sandra once. Not yet. She couldn’t call them yet.

The police? What to say, that a difficult teenager had banged out of the house to sulk for a few hours?

Matthew?

No, not Matt. Not Matt, most of all.

Dinah went into the kitchen and slowly, deliberately made herself a cup of tea. As an afterthought she tipped a measure of Scotch into it. She stood by the uncurtained window and stared out into the darkness of the yard as she drank the peaty tea. She began to see faces other than her own mirrored in the black glass.

At one a.m. she called Nancy Pinkham. Nancy answered the phone after two rings but her voice was thick and bewildered with sleep.

‘I know I’ve woken you up,’ Dinah said.

‘I’ll be right over,’ Nancy answered, when she had explained.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in Dinah’s kitchen in her blue terry robe. She drank the whisky that Dinah poured for her and rubbed her smeared eyes.

‘Listen, don’t you worry. Not yet, anyhow. I’m certain the kid will be back when she’s ready, when she thinks she’s done enough mischief. Don’t you think?’

Dinah nodded, Nancy’s prosaic common sense like a buoy to catch at in a riptide.

‘Yes, I guess so. But I’m so scared something’s happened to her, that it’s my fault …’

‘Sure you are. Who wouldn’t be, with any imagination? But it isn’t your fault, okay? The kid’s a monster, how can you be responsible for that?’

‘She isn’t, it’s not that …’

Nancy took her arm and the whisky bottle and drew them into the den.

‘We’ll just make ourselves comfortable here and wait for madam to get back.’ She looked shrewdly at Dinah as they both sat down. ‘I’m more worried about you than her.’

They drank some whisky. Nancy punched the television remote and found an old Clint Eastwood movie that had only just begun. They watched it to the end and then dozed a little in the grey light from the screen.

Dinah woke up with a shudder. The television light had been replaced by the beginnings of daylight, and Nancy was standing over her.

‘She’s back. Coming down the road, large as life.’

Dinah jumped up. Through the window, she saw Milly swinging up the path to the porch steps. She looked no more dishevelled than usual.

‘Where’ve you been? Do you know we’ve sat up all night, you thoughtless little tramp?’

It was Nancy who began shouting as soon as the door opened. Dinah had never seen her so angry. ‘How d’you think Dinah felt? If you were mine, I can tell you, I’d cane your ass.’

Milly walked straight past her into the kitchen.

‘Shit. I’ll leave you to it,’ Nancy muttered. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do?’

‘Nothing. Thanks, Nancy. You’re a good friend.’

‘Do the same for me sometime. Although, Jesus, if Laura and Brooke turn out like her …’

Milly scowled in the kitchen when Dinah came wearily in.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Go on where?’

‘Say your piece, like mother tightarse out there.’

The softness of relief was wrapping itself around Dinah. The kitchen, and its everyday instruments looked sweet and wholesome in the strengthening light.’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything. Only that I’m pleased you’ve come back.’

Milly suddenly smiled, the merry, upward-slanting smile that transformed her face. Her shoulders dropped and her head lifted. ‘Well, great. Yeah. Thanks.’

Dinah wanted to hug her, but remembered in time that Milly didn’t like to be touched. She asked her instead if she was hungry.

‘Starving.’

‘There are some English muffins.’

‘Why are they called English? They aren’t English , are they, they’re bloody American.’