Spider Page 5

  Beth, with her arm firmly through her mum’s, kept on walking and didn’t slow down until they’d rounded a corner, away from the view of Spider’s increasingly distant figure.

  ‘Well, do we have any savings?’ Alison asked again as they slowed.

  Beth rubbed her forehead. Her palm stung where she’d hit him, and her shoulder ached from the rebound. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Mum, leave it! It was stupid of you to approach him like that. Stupid!’ She rounded on her. She knew she was redirecting her anger at seeing Spider again onto her mother.

  Alison’s mouth trembled. ‘I didn’t think… Where is she? Where’s Lara?’

  Beth pulled her mum into her arms. ‘Ssh, it’s okay. I’m sorry for shouting.’

  ‘How much will the Jelvia want for finding Lara?’ Alison asked. ‘Maybe we can sell your car?’

  Beth stepped away from her mum, rubbing the back of her neck. ‘They aren’t interested in finding her, Mum. They already have her, remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course. You’re so clever, Bethy.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Lara was the clever one,’ Beth said absently. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying her best to hang onto her positivity. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

  Beth peered around the corner to make sure Spider had gone. He was nowhere to be seen. She linked arms with Alison as they continued the walk to the carpark. With her other hand, Beth took out her phone and scrolled down.

  The new entry was under “Y” for YASH.

  As she stared at it, her phone pinged.

  She opened the text, feeling her mouth rapidly drying.

  My price is your control. Instructions to follow.

  EIGHT

  Alison didn’t say much about the encounter with Yash on the journey home. She chattered about her trip to the hairdresser’s and the shops they’d visited instead, so Beth was surprised when the first thing Alison wanted to talk to Steven about was the Jelvia.

  Beth knew she couldn’t stop her and was ready for Steven’s reaction. She didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘Why did you approach him? Are you stupid?’ he yelled. He swayed slightly, telling Beth he was drunk. Sometimes it was hard to recognise at first glance because he’d become so good at hiding it.

  ‘I asked him about Lara,’ Alison said, defending herself. ‘Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?’

  ‘Of course not! Beth,’ he said, turning to Beth and flinging out an arm, ‘I thought you were meant to be looking after your mother!’

  ‘I was!’ Beth flared back. ‘We went into a shop to hide!’

  ‘Clearly, your mother didn’t follow you! You’re lucky he didn’t kill her—or you! You’re stupid—both of you!’ he added, glaring from Beth to Alison. Then his eyes fell on Alison’s stricken face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Oh, love, don’t look at me like that.’ He raked his hair. ‘It’s just that the Jelvias took one of my girls, I couldn’t stand it if they took another.’

  ‘In the morning, when you’re sober, I’ll tell you what the Jelvia said,’ Beth said. She took her mum by the hand and pulled her away from Steven.

  ‘I’m sober!’ he bellowed after them, as they headed upstairs.

  Beth ignored him and ran a bath for her mum. Alison had bought some nice-smelling bath salts, and she wanted to use them. She’d already poured half a bottle into the running water before Beth could stop her.

  Alison was perfectly capable of bathing herself, but Beth felt the need to escape her dad for a moment. After they went upstairs, Beth knew, he’d spend a few moments thumping walls, cursing and yelling at the world because of their encounter with a Jelvia. As if on cue, a crash came from downstairs, followed by a yell of anger.

  Beth waited until it was quiet and then went downstairs as Alison sang to herself in the bath. Beth opened the door to their lounge area, half-hoping her dad was in the yard or inside their small shed where he thought he was drinking in secret. Instead, he was staring out of the window at the neighbour’s old car parked in front of the home next door. Two of the front wheels were replaced with bricks.

  ‘I think we should move,’ he said without turning around. ‘London’s the main area for Jelvias. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘The council houses us where they like, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘We should live up north. Scotland.’

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘You could get a better job. You’re worth more than that shithole the Dog and Gun pay you, and as for cleaning… you’re worth much more than that pay, too.’

  ‘You think?’

  He turned around and crossed the short space between them. He took her hands in his and, looking up into his face, Beth noticed that his eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘I know it!’ he said earnestly. ‘We’ll rent privately. We don’t need the council to home us! We’ll rent a cottage in Scotland, and you can get a job that’s worthy of my daughter—we could run a guesthouse!’ He broke from her, rubbing his hands together in enthusiasm.

  Beth moved through the archway towards the kitchen and flicked on the kettle.

  Steven followed her, saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that before? Why should we put up with government handouts and a shithole for a house, and why should you have to work in a backstreet boozer?’

  ‘Because, Dad,’ she said, ‘I have no choice. I flunked school barely able to read, and you failed to pay the mortgage on our family home, which lost us our house. Tea?’ she asked, holding up the packet of teabags.

  Steven stared at her. ‘You always have to bring that up, don’t you?’

  ‘What, me not being able to read or write, or you losing our house?’

  ‘You can read and write.’

  ‘As good as any nine-year-old, maybe.’

  They eyeballed one another for a few minutes as the kettle boiled behind them. Steven was the first to look away.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart,’ he said. Then he sighed, his positivity as short-lived as his anger, and slunk away, leaving Beth in their small kitchen overlooking the equally small backyard. She watched as Steven, tottering slightly, headed towards the little shed. He opened the door and disappeared inside.

  Beth visualised him taking his bottle of vodka from where it was hidden inside a watering can—or in the neck of an old vacuum cleaner, or under the broken floorboard. She knew all his hiding places.

  She thought back to better times, when they hadn’t lived on a council estate, surviving on handouts from the social security, and even food banks on the odd occasion. Alison obviously couldn’t continue her high-flying career after the accident, and Steven had to give up his job to care for her. When Beth became older, he’d taken various positions, but he’d been laid off from his last one eight months ago and hadn’t found a job since.

  Beth took a cup of tea upstairs to her mum, who was dressing in the bedroom. She was pulling on her dressing gown over her pyjamas.

  ‘Mum, it isn’t bedtime yet,’ Beth said with a smile.

  Alison took the offered cup of tea. ‘I know, but it’ll save time later.’

  Beth laughed, then looked at Alison’s ‘memory box’, as she called it, laying on the bed. Alison had collected many of these boxes over the years, though they’d become not so much ‘memory boxes’ as ‘hoarding boxes’.

  The containers were old cereal, shoe, or other small boxes that Alison had filled with her ‘memories’. These items could be stones she found in the garden, pictures she’d drawn, old chipped cups or plates, a pretty wallpaper cutting she’d taken a fancy to when they were out shopping once, seashells, empty shampoo bottles, perfume bottles, an old toothbrush—all packed lovingly in boxes that neither Steven nor Beth could bear to throw away.

  Beth pointed to a pair of hairdressers’ scissors. ‘Mum, did you take those from the hairdresser’s today?’

  Alison didn’t even look remotely guilty. ‘Yes,’ she said and sipped her tea.

  Beth
laughed and sat on the bed next to her mum. Had her life been normal, she’d have been able to come home, share with her dad that she knew someone who might help them (that someone being Macy Shaw), that Alison had remembered that Graham and Beth had liked McDonald’s as children, and that Alison even now recognised that Steven drank too much.

  Her life wasn’t normal, but there was still much to celebrate. Her mum was coming back, bit by bit. Beth leaned over and kissed Alison on the temple as she continued to rifle through her memory box.

  ‘Drink your tea while it’s hot,’ she reminded Alison and left her to go into her own room, the same bedroom she used to share with Lara. Lara’s bed was neat and tidy as if waiting for her to mess it up.

  ‘I’m going to find you, little sis,’ Beth muttered.

  Guilt tugged at her consciousness, though, because the day Lara had gone missing, they’d had a huge argument. They never usually argued, but that day would be etched on Beth’s mind forever.

  A month before, Lara had applied, on Beth’s behalf but without her consent, for a managerial position at a new hotel on the other side of town. ‘Beth’ had been invited for an interview, which she turned down once she realised what Lara had done, and Lara had sulked about it.

  Fed up with Lara’s sulk, Beth tried to reason with her by admitting that she’d missed so much school to look after their mum that her reading level would probably be that of a child. She was embarrassed. Lara was heartbroken on her behalf and vowed to help Beth, and Beth should have left her desire for a ‘heart-to-heart’ there.

  Instead, the conversation moved to Harry. Lara had believed that their split was a mutual decision. But Beth admitted to Lara that she’d lied to Harry and told him she’d slept with another man so Harry would leave her because she needed to concentrate on the family.

  As soon as she’d told Lara, she knew she’d made a mistake in telling her. Lara had been incensed. In fact, Beth had never seen her so angry. Beth had been shocked because Lara had only been twelve when they split up. But apparently, Lara had desperately tried to get them back together, even going to such lengths as to phone Harry and beg him to come back.

  ‘All this time I was so sorry for you,’ Lara yelled, ‘but you dumped Harry, telling him lies, because of Mum and Dad! You’ve let them become your world. You’ve lost it, Bethy, lost it!’ Her voice was loud in Beth’s head, and for a moment, Beth wondered if she was in the room with her. She looked over her shoulder, but the room was empty.

  Her gaze fell on her handbag, which she’d tossed aside earlier. She sat down and drew the bag towards her and pulled out the postcards.

  ‘Fuck,’ Beth said, and buried her head in her hands, letting the cards scatter around her lap. She didn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. She lifted her head, and stared dry-eyed at Lara’s bed. Lara’s teddy, from when she was a child, sat on her pillow. Beth wished she could undo the argument. Maybe if they hadn’t argued, Lara wouldn’t have stormed out, and she wouldn’t have been kidnapped by Jelvias.

  It was their first-ever serious argument, and the last conversation they’d had before Lara went missing. Whenever Beth thought back on it now, the pain left her breathless. She only wanted to remember the positive but the argument was on a loop in her head, and it played over and over.

  ‘Harry was your get out of jail card! Fuck, Beth, d’you want to stay here forever, and with him?’

  ‘Him’ was Steven. Lara never put up with any of Steven’s “woe-is-me shite”, as she called it and often rebuked Beth for putting up with it. Lara was a social butterfly, but she worked hard to pass her GCSEs and to gain a two-year apprenticeship in health and social care. She had been in her second year when she went missing. ‘Dad will never change. Get out while you can,’ she’d said.

  ‘And what about Mum? And you—you need me just as much.’

  ‘I do not! Beth, I’m not a child anymore. Christ, are you saying that if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t be? Do you know how that makes me feel? Fuck sake, Beth, live your own life, not Mum or Dad’s—or mine!’

  That had stung—as though all of Beth’s care had been flung back in her face. As sisters, they’d been close, with Beth perhaps taking on the motherly role a bit more than most sisters would have.

  Beth gathered up the postcards and picked out Macy’s. The rest she threw in her wastepaper basket. She re-read the card and then picked up her mobile to search the internet for Seagull Estate. She paused over the screen, thinking of Spider—or Yash, as she now knew his name—and his so-called offer to bring Lara back if she accepted his proposal. She couldn’t agree with it. Yash had said Jelvias didn’t kidnap, but he was lying. They had Lara, and now Beth felt she was being blackmailed for her return.

  ‘My price is your control.’ She didn’t re-read the text. She didn’t need to; it was imprinted in her mind. She didn’t understand it entirely but knew it would be sexual. ‘My price is your control’—maybe that was bondage. The thought of being bound and gagged for a Jelvia’s gratification filled her with horror.

  It was now more imperative than ever to find Macy and ask for her help. Beth looked up Hayle in Cornwall. It would take Beth nearly a day to travel there, and Macy might not even be there. There was no date on the postcard. She didn’t even think if her old car was up to travelling all that way.

  ‘Beth! What’s for dinner?’ Alison shouted from downstairs.

  ‘Coming, Mum,’ Beth called back. She shoved the postcard back in her handbag and left her bedroom.

  ‘How about sausage and mash?’ Beth asked as she walked down the stairs. Alison was waiting at the bottom for her.

  Alison looked relieved. ‘Lovely. I’ll peel the spuds.’

  They walked past Steven on the settee—spread-eagled, belly out, and snoring vodka-fumed breath into the air of the living room.

  ‘You’ll never leave me like Lara and Graham, will you, love?’ Alison said.

  ‘No, Mum,’ she replied dutifully.

  NINE

  Beth felt jittery all through dinner. She pushed her food around her plate, not hungry. She put it down to the confrontation with Yash finally catching up with her, but there was no one to notice. Steven was still asleep on the settee, and Alison was Alison—innocently oblivious.

  They cleared up together, keeping Steven’s dinner in the oven to keep warm until he woke up enough to eat it, then Beth settled her mum in front of the TV to watch her favourite channel. Beth sat with her, absently watching the show as Alison laughed at the TV. Beside her, Steven lay on the settee, smelling of alcohol fumes from the whisky he’d later deny drinking.

  Beth felt an itch on her face and brushed a hand over her eyes. She looked at the back of her hand in surprise—she was crying! Steven grunted beside her and pulled himself up into a sitting position. He looked across at Beth and Alison as if surprised to see them there.

  ‘Your dinner’s in the oven,’ Beth said. She rubbed the wetness off her hand onto her jeans and hurriedly wiped her eyes.

  Steven stood up, wobbling on the balls of his feet. ‘Thanks, love,’ he said and then did a doubletake of Beth. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course, why wouldn’t it be?’

  Steven stared at her for a moment. ‘You know, I’ll grab my dinner in a few minutes. I’m going to have a quick shower.’

  Beth shrugged. ‘Do what you like. You always do.’

  Steven frowned at her but carried on towards the stairs.

  Beth listened to him walking up the stairs. She heard him open the bathroom door, the creak of the bath as he stepped into it, and then the bang, bang of the old pipes as he turned on the shower.

  ‘Steven never has a shower on a Wednesday evening,’ Alison said.

  ‘He wants to sober up. He saw me upset and now wants to put my world right—or the world he thinks is right for me,’ Beth replied. But Alison had gone back to her show.

  Beth pushed herself up off the saggy settee and went into the kitchen where she put the kettle on. She asked her m
um if she wanted a drink, but Alison was glued to the TV and could barely bother to look up to reply ‘No, thank you, dear’.

  Part of Beth wanted her father to shoulder some of the load she was carrying, but the other part of her knew he wouldn’t be able to cope with it. She wanted her old dad back, the one who used to make everything right again—but maybe he’d always been a creation of her childish imagination. Alison had been the strong one—the disciplinarian, the cook, the nurse, the bookkeeper. Steven had been the one to take them to the park, to swing them on his shoulders, to play games, and to enjoy fun times.

  She was stirring sugar into his coffee when he came into the kitchen. The ends of his hair were wet.

  ‘Do you want me to get your dinner out?’ she asked, passing him the coffee.

  ‘I’ll have it later.’ He took the coffee from her. ‘What is it, Beth? I caught you crying, and that’s not like you.’

  Beth glanced through the archway towards her mum, watching the TV in the lounge. Their home was tiny and walls were thin, but hopefully Alison was too preoccupied to pay attention to what Beth needed to say.

  As Steven lifted the coffee to his mouth, Beth noticed his hand was shaking. He was scared. Scared that he’d caught her, the strong one, having a meltdown.

  She couldn’t do it. Telling him about Yash would finish him.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to your AA group?’ Steven had been going to Alcoholics Anonymous for two years, but six months ago decided to stop.

  ‘I don’t need it anymore,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Dad, look at you. You’re a mess, and you need it more now than ever. There’s no shame in admitting you’ve fallen off the wagon.’

  He put his coffee down and stepped towards her, gathering her against him. At first, Beth allowed herself to lean into him, to let herself be that child and him a father. But eventually, she righted herself and pulled away.

  Steven took her hands in his as his eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ve failed you so much. Failed all my children.’