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  Julie tipped her head to one side. ‘Well, you had that little incident yesterday when your anger got out of control in the kitchen. How do you feel about that now?’

  ‘Don’t feel anything,’ he mumbled, tucking his chin under the collar of his tracksuit jacket.

  ‘Come on, you must feel something, even if it’s just that you’re too tired to talk. Is that it, hm? Can’t be bothered today?’ Julie smiled, leaning one pudgy arm on her thick knee. She was a fat woman, almost as round as she was tall, but she was by far the kindest woman I’d ever met in my life.

  ‘Basically,’ he said, rubbing his face with the palms of his hands.

  I understood. Some days were like that. I’d found that now, surrounded by more brick houses instead of the crashing waves and Peter’s cliff, the days just rolled into each other, over and over. Here, there was no fear; no damp, dark houses; no black ocean sweeping me away with Peter. No David, no dad; no creaking coffin lid.

  Even my hair had grown, leaving just the split tips an orangey-yellow. The bleach had almost faded away completely, like the life I used to know.

  I adjusted to the immediate, refreshed sense of wellbeing pretty quickly when I arrived here.

  It was the absence of fear, now, that frightened me; the absence of him.

  Michael had been addicted to sniffing aerosols during his time at school, and he once confessed in our group sessions that he’d thought of disappearing just to get a taste of his old life back. It wasn’t just the high that was addictive; it was the sense of belonging that he missed. I empathised.

  We forged our own lives out of the scraps we were given; built our own crooked houses. Our necks and backs bent to fit, becoming accustomed to the painful moulds we were forced to shape ourselves to.

  But when we finally found the straight house, just like this house, we were just left plain crooked. The surroundings no longer fitted us.

  After the group session, Julie brought out a tray cake and they all sang happy birthday. I sat there, numbly, mesmerised by the glowing candles: eighteen of them. I was a grown woman now.

  Julie didn’t condescend me by insisting I made a wish, but inside, I was definitely wishing. I wished for Peter back, in my dark room at night, putting me through hell; anything, but leave me here all alone. Posses me if he had to; in fact, I’d relish it, just to feel alive, to be controlled, to be one with him. But I kept that to myself, and when I blew out the candles, she withdrew the cake from the table.

  ‘Now,’ said Julie, giving me an eager smile. ‘I want you to close your eyes for your present.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, blushing. ‘I didn’t know we did presents. You don’t have to, honestly.’ I did as I was told and closed them tight.

  While she waddled into the hall to fetch it, I felt the others around me like members of a séance, watching to see what became of me, or what spirit I’d bring leaping from the otherworld first. I thought of all the things that had been burned away in the fire — my magazines, my few clothes, my music. All gone.

  But when Julie placed the present across my lap I knew instantly what it was, and I was still sore for the loss of the original. I opened my eyes and tore off the birthday wrapping paper to reveal the splendid instrument with its glossy finish: a brand new acoustic guitar.

  My mouth hung open, while the others ooh’d and aah’d. I looked at Julie’s warm round face. ‘How did you know I was learning to play?’

  She folded her podgy arms and smiled. ‘Melanie sent an email about some of the things you’d lost in the fire.’ Her expression looked tense, then, as if she’d stepped out of turn. A lot had been lost in that fire, or nearly lost, including my own life. Let alone dad’s; dad who, in death, had escaped any and all consequences for the abuse he put me through.

  ‘She thought it might be nice if we gave you something that you might have been missing. Oh! And that’s not all.’

  She waddled out of the room again and produced a plastic bag, which she plonked on my lap. ‘I bought these this morning. I didn’t have time to wrap them, but Melanie said you liked his music, so I thought—’

  Her voice faded like a record turned down low. I peeled the plastic back to find, glossy and new as the guitar on my knees, a book of songs by Jimi Hendrix. I flicked to the back and found they had the basic chords for Bold as Love and Foxey Lady and, as a bonus, it even included his cover of my favourite song.

  I blinked away tears. ‘Only pros can play this kind of music,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no chance of learning this.’

  Julie laughed. ‘Of course you have, in time. There’s a beginner’s book in the bag as well, not that you’ve seen it for dribbling over that one. You could learn a few chords and give it a go. You might be a fast learner.’

  A few tears dropped onto the book’s shiny surface, but I wiped them away. ‘Not that fast,’ I said. ‘Maybe for a while I’ll just look at the pictures.’

  Now that I was eighteen and for all intents and purposes “recovering”, I didn’t need protecting from the press anymore. The press had been hounding me since the fire, when it emerged that Dennis had been publicly cleared and given a huge sum of money as compensation. My social workers had shielded me well, but now that I was an adult, things could be different.

  I could make my own decisions, at least. I scheduled my first interview with Best, then Red, then all the major papers. After that I was given a slot to make a five minute appearance on This Morning, all to share my story.

  At the ITV studio I went through hair and makeup, and Julie and I got transfers from the house in a posh cab. We had promo-shoots: me leaning on my stick because my knee still played up from time to time, and Julie with her arm encircling my shoulders, the supportive surrogate mother. Later, when I looked at those pictures, I really wished I could love Julie like a mother. I just couldn’t.

  I didn’t feel much at all now that there was less and less to be afraid of. I smiled awkwardly in the pictures, and found myself trying to cower behind my stick as though my body was even smaller, slimmer, hardly there at all. When I’d watched people like me on This Morning before, I’d never considered how they felt before the programme, when they had the silence to really think about what they were about to do.

  While a woman prepped me about the questions and another powdered my face, I wondered if the victims I’d watched with envy and awe had experienced bitter regret, or disappointment, when they sat in that studio hot seat.

  When my slot came, I wasn’t shrouded in darkness, and I didn’t have my voice disguised. Julie sat with me on the sofa, and we were accompanied by a TV doctor who gave all the facts and figures about victims of abuse — including feelings of confusion and fabrications of the truth.

  Just like in my trial four years ago, I kept my head down and let them talk. The doctor’s facts were my fiction, and they were more comforting than the truth. I realised that it didn’t matter how old I’d grown; to the world I was a child, shrinking from the camera, keeping it all inside. I’d imagined so much more of myself before, and yet, nothing.

  I came away from the interview shaking, and in the taxi home we had to stop so I could vomit into a Tesco’s bag Julie had been carrying our bottles of water in. Then we came back to the house and I slept and slept.

  The next day, I delivered three phone interviews with various presses. My replies to the questions were all I’m moving forward or I’ve had so much support or I never thought in a million years and all the usual clichés. It was easy. I’d read all the magazines; I knew those responses by heart.

  For about two months I was a household name. Instead of basking in the glory I’d always envied other victims in the media, I shut myself away. At first the phone was always ringing. Pretty soon the last interview was published, and the magazines were read and thrown away.

  None of it felt right. When my favourite magazines published the last articles, I never bought them, let alone read them, and I didn’t watch myself back on This Morning.

  It wa
sn’t me in those interviews, or on the couch on TV. I felt that it was my spirit representative; my form taking shape, before disappearing in a puff of smoke.

  I made tens of thousands from doing the rounds of papers. My exclusive interview with The Daily Mail made me a further fifty grand due to the detailed questions I answered about dad, Dennis and David. None of it mattered; after all, they were dead. Once I’d finished answering a question, it vanished from memory.

  I couldn’t even think how to spend the money. The one thing I wanted couldn’t be bought, only dug up out of the earth.

  After a while, when it all quietened down and I was left with my own thoughts, I thought it would be easier to just crawl into the earth with him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mid-October I was moved into my own flat, because Julie decided that I had progressed well enough to move out on my own and continue therapy from there. Before leaving, Julie spent time with me explaining bills, shopping budgets, and how to manage my own money. Seeing as I had some considerable wealth in the bank, though I was still unemployable, she wanted to see that I spent my money wisely.

  ‘I don’t even know what to do with it,’ I said, sitting on my single bed in the empty room on Camberwell road. Julie was sorting me out with a double duvet and pillow cases, plus some basic kitchen equipment, and was arranging it all into boxes.

  ‘Well, it might be a good idea to save it for your future. You could use it for a deposit on a house for when you get married, or you could buy yourself a car once you’ve learned to drive.’

  Grown-up things; things most girls do after university, when they’ve landed their first job and gained a steady boyfriend, maybe a fiancé. Cosmo girls. None of those options stirred anything within me, because it was the unattainable. That was somebody else’s life she was describing.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, staring out the window at the bland garden with its sulking plants in terracotta pots. There was a white sky and a slight breeze, enough to tease the limbs of the washing line side to side, its metal stem creaking in the mud.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, sitting down beside me. ‘They might not be things you’re thinking about now; you’re only young. But they will be one day. Believe me, there’ll be a time when you need a lump of cash, especially if you want to have kids.’

  ‘No, no. I’m never having children. I’d rather die.’

  She gave me a soft smile. ‘Give yourself time. Anyway, it’s a lot of money you’ve made, and if you ask me, you deserve it. For the first time in your life you’re your own woman, aren’t you, eh?’

  I tucked my lank, thin hair behind my ears. Yes, I thought, I am my own woman. But she had never grown to exist as her own entity; only as the parasite upon others.

  Now she was skin, bone, and little else. She didn’t even have the luxury of being a ghost. I said none of this to her, of course; some thoughts were still my own, even if they were all I had in the world. Instead I let her pat my hand, and smile her fond smile, while I repeated my name in my head before I faded before her eyes: Ellen Woodley, Ellen Woodley, Ellen Woodley.

  The first night alone was the worst.

  I had a spacious bedroom —no bay window, no view of the harbour— and a ceiling fan to stare up at. My guitar was a solitary as a statue in the corner of the room, but my book of songs, well thumbed and dog-eared, rested on the pillow beside me. I closed my eyes and thought of Peter, not as he had been to me this past year, or even for the last three years, but golden, fresh and living as he once was.

  With all of my heart, I willed him to come back to me. I clenched my fists and awaited the cold shudder I’d craved since he’d last visited me, all that time ago.

  Hours passed and it never came. Only the regretful pulsing in my loin remained, while I dreamed of our first and last embrace on the best and worst night of my entire life, blissful in that bedroom.

  I turned over and stuffed my face in the pillow. I screamed until my throat pained and my lungs gave out. I felt so old now; aged and frail. It seemed so long ago.

  The next morning, I took the tube to Piccadilly Circus and walked the streets for hours, popping into various shops, looking at DVDs, and CDs, and people-watching. I needed to do something to keep myself sane.

  I passed the cafés with girls outside in green scarves, smoking roll-ups like they do in Paris. It was a grey, damp day like every day in Britain; Sunday weather. My jeans were wet to the knee, and as the wind bit through my clothes it ached, swelling up, making me limp.

  When it got dark I stopped at a Starbucks, something I’d never actually done alone before. It was all steamy-windowed, like a brothel just for girls in green scarves. I gazed at the menu, breathing in the rich coffee smells.

  I could afford the whole menu fifty times over. No, hundreds of times, and then some. I could buy anything I wanted. I settled for three cold, creamy frappuccinos, because I couldn’t choose which one was best.

  I drank one after the other, sucking the straw until my teeth and tongue were numbed, and the shakes were reduced to lumps of ice rattling around inside the plastic. I left and walked the streets some more, letting the crowds take me, storming between them like a mini hurricane.

  Amongst the crowds I felt a little buzz inside me; I could be anyone, and no one, whowever I pleased. I was Carrie from Sex and the City, I thought: I was Esther from The Bell Jar. I was Ellen Woodley. I had articles in all the magazines. I was nobody. I was a shadow. I wasn’t even there.

  The buzz faded. In my core remained a hollow where the wind howled right through me.

  I stopped at a kiosk and looked at the magazine covers for my face, the way they did in the films. There were a few thumbnails of other girls, telling their stories about how their fathers had abused them, and how they were too scared to move on, and couldn’t ever have normal sex. My face wasn’t on them. There was nothing more to say about me.

  As I turned to walk away, a sight in the window of a shop made me stop and gasp.

  Peter, I nearly uttered. In the window was a poster of Jimi Hendrix, and surrounding it were guitars and WHA pedals and all kinds of musical gear hung up on a big rack. The shop was called Zeppelin. It began to rain, so I went inside and hovered in the doorway. It wasn’t just a music shop — it had everything. It was a musician’s dream store.

  The floor was laminated and the place was well lit, with the store stretching back further than I could see. All around me, with elegant price tags, were sleek red chairs and black stools and prints of every rock musician in the world. There were chic lamps and brightly coloured racks for even more instruments; tambourines and mandolins and even a giant, metal triangle that glinted in the light. There were glass cases of nick-nacks: guitar picks and gloves and rows of junk jewellery.

  All along the back wall were hundreds and hundreds of electric guitars, all bright and glistening like candy gobstoppers.

  There were even record players that converted to MP3, and rows upon rows of second-hand records and old CDs on sale. At the back was a sound-proof box for trying out the instruments, with a long black leather settee.

  The store attendant, a youngish guy with a long fringe and holes in his lobes, meandered the various odds and ends on sale, giving me a slight nod.

  I fingered the rows of records with their torn sleeves, breathing in the odours of damp cardboard. They sold music books, too; new ones, second hand ones, all kinds. The sight of it all in one place was all too much, like I’d entered Aladdin’s cave.

  Suddenly, I felt like crying, and crying hard. I placed both hands down atop the records, closed my eyes, bowed my head and sucked in a long, deep breath. I knew whose place this was. For a few moments I just wanted to escape there, to a world where Peter didn’t die and all our hopes came true. I cleared my mind and let my thoughts drift away.

  Peter and I have escaped to London. We’re living with four others, all artists and filmmakers and dancers in a warehouse flat, top floor. He was busking in Piccadilly Circu
s when he was approached by a head-hunter and offered a record deal with an insane monetary advance.

  We’re kissing in the rain and walking down the street, getting soaking wet; we can’t wait to tell everyone back home that Peter is going to be the next Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘Wait, wait, stop,’ says Peter, pulling me back by the hand. His hair is tamed by the damp; wet curls get in his eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ I say, fizzing inside. We’re on our way to a trendy bar to celebrate, just him and me, and I can’t wait. He’s promised me a designer wardrobe with the first instalment of his advance, and he’s going to buy himself a pair of Ray Bans. No, five pairs, all different colours.

  ‘Look at this,’ he says, pointing to a shop called Zeppelin. Inside is a whole range of sleek furniture, hundreds of shiny new guitars, and in the window is a giant poster of Jimi Hendrix. ‘We need to go to this shop, Ellen. This is our shop. Just look at it!’

  ‘But we don’t have any room,’ I say. ‘Our room’s too tiny.’

  Peter laughs. ‘I’ve already put down a deposit on our penthouse apartment. I was going to surprise you.’

  ‘Oh Peter!’ I squeal, and he picks me up and spins me in his arms, and we run inside like the kids from Willy Wonker’s Chocolate Factory. He summons the shop keeper and buys everything; six new guitars, chairs, stools, tables, racks for all his new instruments, a swanky studio system to record all his own music.

  There’s a glass cabinet with vintage Ray Bans inside on little stands. He buys the lot, his eyes glistening, gripping my hand so tight. He tries them all on, and he looks like a movie star in every one of them. Then he buys more, rushing from one end of the store to the other, oohing and aahing at all the posh gear.

  It’s all so much better than his little box room at home; it’s all so, so Peter. He pays for everything by card, and organises the delivery like he’s been doing this for years, like a real pro. I’m so excited I could burst. He’s doing it, really doing it, and I’m right there with him.