A Time to Change Read online

  On her way through the loading bay, she glimpsed the girls crowded around the mirror in the staff room, applying lip gloss in a cloud of hairspray and laughing at the mistletoe headbands Mel had bought them all from the pound shop.

  Lou pulled her parka over her gingham tabard and stepped out into the snow that had finally arrived. Tying her scarf tighter around her neck and pulling up her hood, she crossed the yard and walked the short distance to the bus stop. From beneath her damp fringe, she watched the headlights of cars, their tyres churning the newly fallen snow into slush, until the bus pulled up to the kerb.

  With the driver battling against the heavy snow, the bus took twice as long as normal to wind its way across town. Lou rubbed a hole in the condensation and watched the world pass by. The further they travelled from the centre of town, the greyer the buildings grew. Finally, they arrived at the sprawling estate on the outskirts. Each street radiating from the central spine of the main road was the same mix of shabby, grey houses and maisonettes with a narrow stretch of grass halfway down – the greens. Once upon a time, the residents of Hill House Estate had tended their gardens and planted hanging baskets. Children – including Lou, her brothers and Katie – had played tag on the greens. A few of the older residents still planted daffodil bulbs each year, but it was a long time since the greens had been used as anything other than toilets for dogs and a place for the estate kids to congregate and intimidate any passer-by who dared to look at them.

  The airbrakes sighed. Lou zipped up her parka and stepped from the bus. With the cold biting her cheeks, she turned in to the very last street on the farthest edge of the estate. The snow had a strange, calming effect, muffling the roar of traffic coming from the M1 just beyond the houses. It settled on parked cars and filled potholes in the road. Fairy lights shone out from windows, and lights shaped like icicles that had been nailed to porches and fences, blinked and rattled in the wind. In one garden, a huge inflated Homer Simpson dressed as Santa Claus, bobbed and weaved on a rope tethering him to the ground. And, rising above the rooftops, the spire of St Mary’s was just visible, its weathervane creaking as it spun.

  Lou stopped at the gate of the only house not decorated for Christmas and looked up at the dark windows. A shout came from the direction of the green, and a car revved its engine. She fumbled in her pocket, ran up the path, dropped her keys, stooped to pick them up. Her hands shook so violently, it took three attempts to force the key into the lock. Once inside, she slammed the door and leant against the wall. Danger seemed to lurk in every turn on this estate now. She no longer knew how to be in this place where once she had felt so safe, whose alleys and streets she had run and cycled along as a child. She hated it; hated how someone out there had made her feel. Vulnerable, trapped.

  When her pulse settled, she switched on the hall light. Everything looked as it always had; coats draped over the banister and hung on the hooks beside the door; shoes and trainers piled up at the bottom of the stairs; Dean’s rugby boots upturned, each stud encased in a crust of dried mud and twisted grass. But a glance along the hooks revealed that one coat was missing. And a pair of fleece-trimmed boots was absent from the pile of shoes. They were the boots and coat the police had kept as evidence.

  ‘Dean! Are you in?’ Lou called, her voice more desperate than she would have liked. ‘Dean!’ she tried again. ‘Bring your sports kit down, I’ll put it through the wash.’

  A door opened upstairs, and the stairs creaked as Dean lumbered down. ‘How was college?’ Lou asked.

  Dean shrugged and grabbed his coat from the banister without a single glance in her direction.

  ‘Where’s Stephen?’ Lou said.

  ‘Where do you think?’

  The pub. It was always the pub. Even before the events of the last few weeks, Stephen had been as much a fixture of The Hill House Arms as the collection of horse brasses behind the bar.

  ‘What about your tea? I’ll make you something. Sausages?’ It was a pathetic attempt to delay his departure, and she knew it. She wasn’t even sure there was anything in the freezer, except an empty ice cube tray.

  ‘I’ll get something from the kebab van.’

  Fishing her purse from her bag, Lou tried to force a five-pound note on Dean. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

  ‘Do you want to help me put the Christmas tree up tomorrow?’ she said, injecting her voice with as much false cheerfulness as she could muster. ‘I’ll get some mince pies. It’ll be like old times.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  Still without looking at her, Dean opened the door, letting the cold air rush inside. He slammed it behind him. Lou stared at the net curtain quivering on the closed door. He was right. She could promise all the sausages and mince pies in the world, but it would never be like old times again. Lou looked desperately at the phone on the hall table. Please ring, please, please, please ring. Three weeks ago, she would have rolled her eyes at someone phoning to fill her in on what they’d had for lunch or what they had planned for tea. Now, all she wanted was for someone – anyone – to call for a chat. About the weather, their annoying ex, some amazing feat performed by an offspring – the more ordinary and mundane, the better.

  The letterbox rattled, and she stooped to collect the free newspaper from the doormat. Who was she trying to kid? Nobody phoned to chat anymore. Every awkward and stilted conversation was steeped in sympathy, dripping with kindness. If her family and friends knew the truth, they would delete her from their contacts, scratch her name from their address books, and cut off all contact forever.

  Almost on autopilot, Lou unfurled the newspaper and scanned the headlines. She stopped, the newspaper trembling in her hands. Shoved between a report on the recent spate of metal thefts in the area and a story about the Scouts’ Christmas jumble sale, was the headline:

  FUNERAL FOR JOYRIDING TRAGEDY WOMAN

  The funeral was held on Monday last for Mrs Maureen Arnold (50), the much-loved local woman tragically killed in the latest incident of a joyriding epidemic plaguing Hill House Estate.

  The private service, attended by close friends and family, was held at St Mary’s Church. The Rev George Reeves paid tribute to a devoted mother and lifelong resident of the town.

  Sylvia Mather, who witnessed the tragedy said, ‘I remember when this estate was a lovely place to live. Now, it’s just a breeding ground for thugs and criminals. ASBOs don’t work. Everyone with one of them lives here anyway. They don’t care about anybody but themselves. They left that poor woman to die in the gutter without a single thought and with her chip suppers spilled all over the road. They’re animals. Plain and simple. Prison’s too good for them.’

  Police continue to look for witnesses and ask anyone with information to come forward …

  The emptiness of the house echoed around Lou. Next week, the news of Mum’s death would be nothing more than lining paper for litter trays and birdcages across town.

  Lou dropped the newspaper, turned out the light, and ran up the stairs. Passing the door of her own room, she fell into the bed in the room at the front of the house. She crawled beneath the duvet, placed her head on the pillow, and breathed in. There was still just a trace of L’Air du Temps. The tears she had been holding back all day finally came. She wept for the hopelessness of the loss that gnawed her stomach raw. There was nothing she could do to make this better. She couldn’t turn back the hands of time to alter the moment she’d decided to stay at the pub to get drunk, rather than coming home for a soggy pie and an evening of crap telly. If she hadn’t let her mum go to the chippy in her place, then none of this would be happening. Sobbing into the darkness, she repeated her now nightly chant – ‘It’s my fault, it’s all my fault’ – until she slipped into a shallow, restless sleep.

  * * *

  Up on the hill, beyond the spire of St Mary’s and the motorway, behind the walls and tangle of overgrown trees, at the end of the long drive, the heart of Hill House reached out to a little lost girl. In the dar
kness behind the great doors, with rats scratching at the skirting, pigeons huddled on perches in the broken rafters, the ovens and fireplaces cold, the house sighed, feeling the pain of the soul in the near distance. Like her, it was broken, shattered. Where once had been life and joy and happiness was now decay and rot and sadness; a heart ripped out. ‘Come to me’, it would have said, if only it had a voice. ‘I need you, as you need me.’ As a child, that lost girl had shown love to this abandoned place. And now, it was time to open its doors to her. For a hundred years, it had waited. It could wait one more day. To bring her home.

  3

  18 December 2013

  Lou woke to the sound of children laughing and shrieking on the street outside. For a single, perfect moment, everything was right with the world. And then, reality crashed through, like a sledgehammer smashing down a wall with no foundations. Lou peered out from the safety of the duvet and watched dust swirl on the shafts of winter sunlight breaking through the gaping curtains. The dust settled on trinkets crowding almost every inch of the dressing table; the jewellery box Stephen had made in woodwork class, the yoghurt pot Dean had smeared with finger-paints at nursery, and the photo frame Lou had painstakingly decorated with pasta bows at Brownies. It held Mum’s favourite photograph, taken on their one and only family holiday. Was it really possible that those three kids sitting in the saddles of Daisy, Dobbin and Daphne on the glittering sands of the Golden Mile in Blackpool, and smiling for Mum’s old Kodak, were the same people who now shared this house? The same people who just a few days ago had clung to each other on the front pew of St Mary’s, their shared, raw grief binding them together in a way that the fact they were siblings never had. Now, they were strangers again. Numb and facing a future where the glue that had held them together was gone.

  Pulling herself up, Lou sat on the edge of the bed and clutched the duvet around her neck. Her eyes were sore, as though someone had chucked a handful of Blackpool sand into her face. Her head felt thick. If someone had told her she’d woken from a weekend bender, she would have been hard-pressed to contradict them. On the chair in the corner of the room, next to a pile of clean laundry still waiting to be put away, she saw a carrier bag stuffed with tubes of Christmas wrapping paper. No matter how hard it had been on her part-time wages from the Post Office, and without a single penny in maintenance from their feckless father, Mum had always managed to make Christmas special. It would break her heart to see the house the week before Christmas without a turkey in the freezer, a bottle of Baileys in the fridge or a single string of tinsel wrapped around her ornaments on the mantelshelf. Lou picked at the stitching around one of the duvet cover’s buttonholes. If this was all her fault, didn’t that make it her responsibility to reintroduce a semblance of normality to their lives? Or try, at least. She looked down at herself and frowned. Yesterday’s jeans, a creased work tabard, and the funky smell of a day’s work, hardly said normality. Dragging herself up, she headed for the bathroom.

  Standing beneath water a little too hot for comfort for ten minutes had the desired effect and loosened the tangled mess in Lou’s head just enough for her to form a plan. It was her day off, so she’d hit the shops, fill the kitchen cupboards, and have a homemade shepherd’s pie on the table by the time Dean got home from college and Stephen finished work. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. And a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, right?

  Making a mental shopping list, and with her hair still wet from the shower, Lou ran downstairs. But as her foot reached the bottom step, the brakes screeched on her plan. Through the open kitchen door and beneath a fug of cigarette smoke, she saw Stephen and Dean sitting at the table, surrounded by the previous evening’s squashed beer cans and kebab wrappers. Lou cowered behind the banisters. Stephen and Dean never spent any time together. Yet, here was Stephen, his Manchester United dressing gown gaping to reveal his midriff, stirring a mound of sugar into a mug and pushing it across the table to Dean.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said, his voice gruff from a night on the beers.

  Dean gazed into the rusty orange builder’s brew, his eyes vacant. He was barely recognisable as the young man who used to start each day by running down the stairs, gym bag slung over his shoulder, snatching a slice of toast, and kissing Mum goodbye on his way out of the front door.

  ‘I miss her, Ste,’ Dean said, cuffing his already bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Finish your brew.’ Stephen shifted in his chair. ‘I’ll take you to the caff for a fry up. My treat.’

  As though the thought of food was too much to bear, Dean collapsed on to the table and buried his face in his arms. He began to sob. Stephen reached out but pulled his hand away. He stubbed his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Again, he reached out. His hand hovered above his brother until he gave in and patted Dean’s shoulder. ‘She wouldn’t want to see you like this, mate.’

  ‘I kept going on and on about stupid chips,’ Dean sobbed. ‘I should have gone … I could have run out of the way of that car … I could …’ His words disappeared in a cry that made his shoulders shake.

  Guilt churned in Lou’s empty stomach. This pain, this grief, it was all her doing. She couldn’t just watch Dean tear himself to shreds. Abandoning the safety of the staircase, she burst into the kitchen. ‘Dean, it wasn’t you, it was me. It was my fault, I –’

  Stephen leapt from his chair. ‘Drink your tea!’ he barked at Dean. He grabbed Lou’s arm and manhandled her out into the hall. Slamming the door behind them, he dragged her into the living room.

  ‘What the hell are you doing,’ Lou said, pulling her arm free. ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘Breathe another word to Dean, and I’ll do a lot worse.’

  ‘We’re not kids anymore. You can’t bully me and push me around.’

  Stephen tried to push past Lou, but she stepped into his path. There was something unusual about Stephen’s behaviour. He wasn’t shouting and yelling. He could hardly bring himself to look at her. His lips were tight in barely contained anger. No, it was more than anger. It was fury.

  A ball of nervous energy and adrenaline rushed through Lou’s chest. ‘You know, don’t you?’ The words burst out with the relief of steam escaping from a sudden crack in a blocked pipe. ‘You know it’s all my fault.’

  Stephen began to pace up and down the length of the living room.

  ‘You know it should have been me that night, not Mum,’ Lou said. ‘If you know the truth, we have to talk about it. How can we get through this mess if we don’t talk about it?’

  Stephen stopped pacing and faced the wall, leaving Lou to stare at the back of his creased dressing gown.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘say something.’

  Stephen’s response was swift and definite. He slammed the heel of his hand into the chimneybreast. ‘You couldn’t leave it, could you? You had to interfere, like you always do. Shit.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Lou said, pouncing on his reaction. ‘Let me help pay for the funeral. It’s the least –’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ Stephen braced himself against the chimney. ‘I bet you hardly scrape minimum wage at that poxy supermarket.’

  It was against every fibre in Lou’s body to back down from an argument, especially with Stephen – they could pull each other’s strings without even trying. But she should make allowances. Stephen was lashing out, and boy, didn’t he have every right to?

  ‘Well?’ he pressed. ‘What is it? Two hundred quid a week?’

  Don’t take the bait. Don’t take… ‘I … I –’

  ‘Not much to show for three years at your precious university, is it? Waste of fucking time.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with this?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything. Going off there. Thinking you’re better than the rest of us.’

  Don’t Lou, don’t … ‘At least I had ambition.’ The words exploded from her mouth, leaving hear brain staring on in disbelief.

  Stephen retaliated instantly
. ‘And ambition pays the bills, does it?’

  ‘It’s not my fault a checkout assistant doesn’t get paid as much as a plumber. I pay my way as best I can.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, because the fifty quid you bung in the kitty every month goes a long way to paying the rent and the gas and the electric and the council tax and the food and the water.’ He counted off each bill on his fingers with increasing emphasis. ‘And it puts trainers on his feet and clothes on his back.’ He flicked his head towards the kitchen. ‘But don’t you worry, Lou, you stick your brainy head in the sand and leave the rest of us to do what we have to to get by. Because a plumber’s wages really covers all of that, doesn’t it? Along with everything else.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Forget it.’ Stephen started to walk away but suddenly turned back. This time, he glared at Lou. ‘You know your problem, don’t you? You live in Cloud fucking Cuckoo Land. Always have, always will.’

  ‘Who the hell are you to judge me and my life? I’m not the one who ran out on my fiancée the month before our wedding and came crawling back here because I couldn’t face up to the commitment.’

  ‘Like you’d get the chance to run out on anyone. No one in their right-mind would take you on.’ A horrible smirk darkened Stephen’s face. ‘You know, I pity the bloke that ends up lumbered with you. He’ll have to be mad. Or a saint.’

  Lou dug her fingernails into her palms. Why did they have to do this? Why couldn’t they speak to each other like normal human beings and find a way to comfort each other? ‘I’m trying to be nice today. I was going to make dinner and maybe put the Christmas tree up and –’

  ‘Don’t bother. A few fucking baubles aren’t going to bring her back, are they?’