Birthright

By Charles Lambert

• A sharp, gripping literary thriller with a lean towards the uncanny and unsettling.
• Charles Lambert was shortlisted for the Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ writing in 2019 for his novel Prodigal, which also looks at the relationship between siblings.
• Charles Lambert is a British writer living in Rome, where the book is set.
• A focus on unlikeable female characters and dark themes in the vein of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal or Annabel Lyon’s Consent.
• Charles Lambert has a literary fan club that includes Jenny Offill, author of Weather, Edward Carey, author of Little and Owen King.
• Lambert’s novel The Bone Flower will be published in late 2022. This menacing Gothic masterpiece will delight his established fanbase and place him with readers of dark, literary fiction.
• Birthright will be a perfect pitch for crime and thriller outlets as well as literary fiction reviews and paperback slots. 
• Will be supported by a strong media campaign and a focus on the flourishing ‘literary crime’ fanbase. 
• An ideal title for book club picks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gallic Books
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913547455

Charles Lambert

Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, the United Kingdom, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, he now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples.

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

She is washing the feel of the evening’s cooking from her hands when Aldo calls her into the living room. She wipes her hands on a tea towel, picks up her tray and joins him on the sofa.

He is pointing at the screen. ‘Isn’t it remarkable?’ he says. She looks across and sees a photograph of a girl with a fringe almost covering her eyes and the kind of blue-and-white-striped sweater she thinks of as Breton. The photograph has that deckled edge that photographs used to have and is set at an angle, which accentuates its vintage air.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Her fingers grip the tray. For a second she thinks she might faint.

Aldo pours her a glass of wine. ‘Come on, Liz, don’t tell me you can’t see the likeness.’

She lays the tray carefully down on the coffee table next to his, picks up the glass.

‘Likeness?’ she says.

‘It’s the spitting image of you when you were that age.’

She sips her wine. ‘How would you know what I looked like?’ she says, her tone level, under control. ‘You didn’t know me when I was that age.’

‘Well, practically,’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t see it. You could be twins.’

The photograph disappears and a blonde woman begins to speak, but Liz can’t concentrate. She needs to breathe normally, her heart is racing. She closes her eyes for a second, then takes another sip of wine. Aldo continues to stare at the screen, shaking his head in disbelief.

Moments later, the presenter is replaced by an old woman, frail in an armchair too large for her, a cloud of permed white hair around a sunken face. Liz hears the woman speak a few words of affected English, the English her generation uses on the telephone, until her voice is masked by the confident, strident enunciation of a younger woman saying in Italian that she would never understand, that it was all so long ago, that she would rather be left in peace but she couldn’t bear not to know, the words so contrary to what the old woman is trying to say, everything lost, or almost lost. Liz hates it when they do this, this layer of Italian distorting the still just audible English, so that all she can hear is the gap between the two, into which meaning tumbles.

‘What is this programme anyway?’ she says, because something, sooner or later, has to be said.

‘It’s about people who go missing. You’ve seen it a hundred times.’

‘And hated it every time,’ says Liz, with a shudder. ‘It’s so intrusive.’

‘Look at that poor old dear,’ says Aldo. ‘She’s crying.’

‘I don’t want to look at an old woman crying,’ says Liz. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ She stands up, crosses the room to the door leading out to the garden.

‘I need some fresh air,’ she says.

*

Late afternoon the following day, she walks out onto the terrace with a bottle of white wine and a glass, and finds the programme on her iPad. She’s been putting it off all day, but Aldo is due home in an hour and she needs to be alone. She sits down, sips the wine slowly until the glass is empty, refills it, then sighs and streams the programme from the beginning.

The journalist, young, blonde, with a tailored jacket and an air of concerned authority, is in a studio, with banks of people on phones behind her. The action alternates between urgent searches for people who have just gone missing, with photographs and details of where they were last seen and what they were wearing, most of them in their teens or terminally confused, and more leisurely trawls into cold cases of the past. The programme has the air of being a public service, cutting to anxious parents, or deserted husbands, or weeping siblings. Policemen chip in with details of where the missing person was last seen in a language no normal person would ever use. Neighbours say the missing person was always cordial, that no one would ever have expected him or her to disappear like that, from one day to the next. They all seemed so happy is the constant refrain. But Liz isn’t convinced. Who wouldn’t want to escape from that frigid sitting room, with its flimsy Empire-style chairs and faded artificial flowers and Padre Pio on the wall? Who wouldn’t empty the family coffers into her handbag and make a run for it? What right do these people have to set the hounds of hell on her trail?

And then there she is. The girl. Liz wonders how many other photos have survived, small and curling, their colours subtly changed by time. She will have kept them all, Liz supposes, in a biscuit tin the way people used to do. I remember that sweater, she thinks. I never liked it.

A fact sheet appears alongside the photo. Name. Age. Height. When and where last seen. The clothes the girl was wearing when she disappeared. Liz lifts her eyes from the tablet and looks down the garden to the line of distant hills, blue-grey in the afternoon light, the setting sun lending them depth. I don’t need this, she says, out loud, to no one. I don’t need this.

And then she’s back, the woman from last night, hunched and faded, lost in her armchair, her fuzz of hair around her skull of a face, twisting a tiny handkerchief in her hands, one of those embroidered handkerchiefs women used to tuck up their cardigan sleeves. So old now, so old she seems to be on the point of death. But of course she’s old, it all happened so many years ago, the woman would have been middle-aged even then. The eyes chastising as ever, although larger now in that chaos of wrinkled skin and bone; the voice, despite being barely perceptible beneath the interpreter’s jaunty Italian, with that slight metallic edge to it that she must have acquired as a kind of self-defence.

Liz listens more carefully this time, teasing the English out, as the woman talks about the girl, how much she was loved, how badly she was missed. It’s a mercy her father wasn’t there to mourn the loss of her, the woman says. He would never have got over it. He lived for his little girl, worshipped the ground she walked on. Liz picks up her glass, puts it down again, the wine untouched. How could she just have disappeared like that, from one day to the next, and in a foreign country, the woman says, our lovely daughter, in a country she loved so much, when she had her entire future in front of her. The woman’s voice breaks at this point, she dabs at her eyes with the handkerchief in a way that strikes Liz as coquettish. Because none of this is true, she thinks, furious. It wasn’t like that at all. She was all I had, the woman says, and Liz shakes her head. No, no, no. All of it lies, she says to the empty garden.

The next case is a fifteen-year-old boy, last seen on the outskirts of Milan three days before. His mother is too distraught to talk, but his father is in the studio. He’s a good boy, he says. It isn’t like him to make us worry. The photo shows a sullen adolescent, with a hoodie and ripped jeans, standing alone in front of a graffiti-covered wall. Everyone calls him Mikki, the fact sheet says, but his father uses his full name, Michele. When the man sighs, Liz hears an edge of irritation, a hint of anger. We can’t imagine why he should want to run away from home, the father says, turning to the camera. At least get in touch, Michele, the man says, and there it is again, that note of barely contained rage. Your mother and I want you back. Let’s start over, he says.

Liz sips her wine, snaps shut the iPad cover.

‘Run for your life,’ she says.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Fiona first came across proof of the other girl’s existence when she was sixteen. She was searching in her mother’s dressing table for a bracelet she wanted to borrow when she spotted a loop on a small velvet cushion in the top drawer. Curious, she lifted the cushion and there she was. The other girl. But she didn’t know that then. She thought she’d found a photograph of herself.

It was a newspaper cutting, a girl in clothes she didn’t remember wearing, a woman she didn’t recognise, and above the photograph the headline ‘Pot-induced madness, a modern mother’s shameless antics’. And she thought, I don’t remember this. But the woman wasn’t her mother. And her mother wasn’t modern. And, well, pot. She couldn’t see her mother smoking pot. Her mother wouldn’t let people smoke normal cigarettes in the house, she’d make them stand on the patio while she fussed around inside, pretending not to mind that they preferred their filthy vice to her company.

She wasn’t sure what to do. The cutting had been hidden, so there had to be something wrong about it. But it had been worth keeping, and running the risk of its being discovered. She remembered being told by someone – Ludovico maybe, because this was the sort of clever-clever comment he would make – that the things people hide are the things they most want to be found. Maybe her mother had wanted her to find this. She sat on the bed and looked at herself, she lost all track of time, trying to understand what she’d discovered. She stared at herself in the photo and wondered if she’d been drugged and kidnapped, and that was how she’d ended up in the paper, but she didn’t look as if she’d been kidnapped, although she might have been drugged, and you don’t take a kidnapped child to what looked like a rock festival. She had a big smile on her face and daisies in her hair. She looked like a hippie and so did the woman with her, the woman the paper said was her mother, and she supposed that’s why the paper – the Sunday Express, it had the name at the bottom edge, and part of the date – had thought she was using pot. She looked maybe nine or ten in the photograph, but she was hopeless with ages. Later, when she knew, she told her earlier self sternly that she had to stop thinking ‘I’ when she thought about the photograph because it wasn’t her at all. It was someone else. Someone she didn’t know.

It was the summer after her father died, and they were in England, and it was too hot to bear without a swimming pool or the sea. Before his death, they spent the summers in Italy, with Ludovico and his family in their villa in Liguria. It was modern and not very nice, and there were mosquitoes, but it was only a few minutes from the sea and the two families had met up there every August for as long as she could remember, long sunbaked summers, with everyone except Ludovico speaking Italian all around her so that she’d found herself learning it without even trying. They made fun of her when she answered them back in their own language, all those skinny boys and girls, tanned so dark they looked like Turks, the girls in tiny costumes she wished her mother would let her wear, constantly rubbing oils into their skins, the boys playing football along the edge of the beach until someone’s mother told them to stop. She was almost as dark as they were by the end of the summer, and then it was the girls at school who made fun of her, but that was envy, because their parents hadn’t taken them anywhere decent. And the food, fruit that tasted of fruit, the first time she’d eaten real fish with a head and tail on it, the glass of cold white wine she’d be given as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a thirteen-year-old girl to drink wine with her dinner. And Ludo always there to defend her when she needed to be defended, to peel her prickly pear with a tiny penknife he carried around with him so she didn’t get the hair-like prickles in her fingers, to hold her by the waist as she learnt to swim, like a friend and then like a brother and then, one summer, more than a brother. But that hadn’t lasted long, those moments – no more than three or four – when no one knew where they’d gone, when they’d sneaked away from the others to hide inside a beach cabin, giggling at first and then kissing, with Ludo’s hands on her hard new breasts. And then Ludo’s father had spoken to him, and her mother had spoken to her, and then the summer was over, and the summer after that a boy she’d never seen before that year had promised he would love her for ever if she let him put his penis inside her, and so she had, glad that she’d got that over with. She couldn’t remember where Ludo had been, but she remembered wishing it had been him. Perhaps he’d had another girl that summer. He’d have been at university by then, maybe already in the States. She’d see him talking to their fathers sometimes, like an equal, about money and politics, because that was all their fathers cared about, and mostly it was money. Money was what bound them together, her family and Ludovico’s. It was all about money in the end, but money was men’s business; the women of the house had no part in it. His mother was always in the kitchen, shouting at the Filipino woman who looked after the villa with her husband. Her mother would be reading a book in the shade somewhere, her white-gloved hands holding the book up close to her face because she didn’t want to be seen in glasses, until the book fell to her lap and she slept, her mouth half open, and Fiona would find her when she came back up from the beach and take the book out of her hands and close it. And then Ludo would see her and walk across to talk to her and she’d tell him what she’d been doing that day, but not a word about the boy. Not that. Not a word about what the boy had done.

That summer, though, when she found the cutting, she was at home in England and nothing she owned was cool enough or light enough and she had no one to talk to. She hadn’t understood why they shouldn’t go to Italy, even if Daddy had died. She lay on the lawn, on a beach towel in a new bikini until she glistened with sweat. She missed Ludo, and the sea. She wondered if the other boy would be there, and what she might have done if he had been. It was her mother’s decision, she’d told Fiona that it was time to free themselves of Ludo’s family while they could. They didn’t need to maintain a friendship with one of her father’s employees, she’d said, her lip curling at the word friendship, as though it were something infinitely compromised. She said she didn’t trust him, he would stab them in the back as soon as look at them now that Daddy was gone. Fair-weather friends, she said when Fiona insisted, quite the worst kind of people. Which was her way of saying foreigners. Fiona wondered if a letter addressed to the villa would reach Ludovico, but never wrote. She didn’t know what to say, other than that her father was dead and she was unhappy, and he would already know that. Besides, she thought, if Ludo cared he would write to her.

What made it worse was that all her friends had gone somewhere nice for the summer and she hadn’t been invited because her father was dead and no one knew what to say or do. She was stuck in the house with Mummy, who just kept bursting into tears, and closing curtains to keep the heat out. She mooched from room to room, lay around in the garden pretending to read a magazine, her transistor radio beside her head until she couldn’t take another note of Abba and Kiki Dee, and stomped back into the house to snap at her mother and her mother’s awful friends when they asked her how she was. She began to keep a diary. ‘I do love her in my way,’ she wrote, ‘and I suppose she loves me in her way, although I don’t know what that is, and I never have. She’s always shown me off to other people as though she’s got nothing else to be proud of but her daughter. Maybe she hasn’t. She hasn’t done anything at all with her life, really. She hasn’t lived. She’s been pampered from start to finish, or at least from the day she hooked Daddy, and so have I, I suppose. I’m spoilt. And I wish I wasn’t. It’s not my fault. I wish I was someone else.’ And then she padlocked the diary with the key provided, and put it away in a drawer. Because Fiona had secrets as well.

She took the cutting into town the next day and found a shop that made photocopies. The youth in the shop, a year or two older than she was, looked at the photograph and then at her. ‘You were really pretty,’ he said, then added, with a hopeful grin, ‘And you still are.’ She didn’t answer. At home, she put the original cutting back where she had found it. The copy she slipped into her diary, snapped shut the tiny padlock and put it away again. She tried not to think about it any more, but the girl with her crown of daisies kept coming back into her mind. Is it me? she thought, and if it isn’t me, who is it? And if it is me, why can’t I remember?

A few days before she was due back at school, she asked her mother if she’d ever been taken to a rock concert. Her mother was reading a novel and didn’t answer. Fiona coughed, then asked again, her tone more insistent. Her mother looked up from her book.

‘A rock concert? Who on earth do you think would take you to a rock concert?’

Fiona shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if you don’t know,’ her mother said, returning to her book, and Fiona couldn’t think what else to say.

The following day, during breakfast, her mother asked Fiona if she’d been rooting around in her drawers. Fiona giggled.

‘Don’t be vulgar,’ her mother snapped.

‘Well,’ said Fiona, ‘you should choose your words more carefully.’

Her mother sighed. ‘You’ve been touching things in my dressing table, haven’t you?’

Fiona shook her head.

‘All right,’ said her mother, detaching a sliver of grapefruit from its skin. ‘But be sure your lies will find you out.’

‘I’ll be sure if you will,’ said Fiona.

‘What do you mean by that?’

Fiona shrugged again, her default reaction this summer. ‘Nothing.’

‘I’ll be glad when you’re back at school, young lady.’

‘So will I,’ said Fiona. She buttered a piece of toast, then threw it down on her plate with a gesture of disgust. ‘I’ve had a hateful summer.’

‘It hasn’t been that much fun for me either,’ her mother said. ‘Having you moping around the house all day. I told you I would have been happy to have a friend of yours staying. You must have some friends who’d love to visit, surely. We have such a pretty village.’

‘We could have been in Italy. We could have had a swim. I’m boiling.’

Her mother put down her spoon with an irritated gesture. ‘I don’t intend to have this conversation again.’

‘And what you want is all that counts, I suppose.’

‘As long as you’re in my house, yes.’

‘Well, I wish I wasn’t.’

‘You’ve made that perfectly clear,’ her mother said. ‘And now perhaps you’d like to answer my question.’

Fiona stood up, pushing her chair back as petulantly as she could manage. ‘What question?’

‘Good heavens, Fiona. Do you never listen?’ Her mother rarely raised her voice, which explained the shrillness.

Fiona smiled. She’d managed to infuriate her. ‘I’ve already told you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got better things to do than root around in your smelly old drawers.’

‘And now you’re just showing off.’

‘Showing off?’ Fiona laughed. ‘I’m sixteen, for God’s sake, not five.’

Her mother threw her napkin onto the table.

‘Get out of my sight, before I do something I’ll regret.’

‘Like having me in the first place, I suppose,’ said Fiona, under her breath. She walked towards the door.

‘Wait a minute.’

Fiona turned to see her mother staring at her, the colour drained from her skin. In this mood her face grew tight and hard. ‘What did you say?’

‘You’ve never wanted me. Not the way Daddy did.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘I think you’d better go to your room.’

Fiona ignored this, and left the house, slamming the door behind her. She stood on the step, beneath what her mother always called, absurdly, the Doric portico, and stared down the drive towards the road that would take her into the world, where she knew no one and had no one, and cared for no one. ‘I miss you, Daddy,’ she said, listening to herself as she spoke, hearing the tremor in her voice, ‘I miss you so much,’ and then, turning back to face the door, louder now, hoping that she would be heard, she said, ‘And I hate you. I hate you with all my heart. You’re not my mother. I wish you were dead.’

CHAPTER THREE

Fiona tucked the photocopied cutting into her diary and, back at school, put it out of her mind. She was in the sixth form, in a bedroom with only one other girl. Jennifer had been thrown out of her previous school after a prefect caught her smoking a cigar in a potting shed with – in her words – the yummiest of the school’s gardeners; arriving at Fiona’s school, she trailed an aura of glamour.

The two girls became inseparable. Fiona had never been popular and Jennifer’s reputation provided another sort of isolation. They studied together or pretended to, sitting side by side in the school library until another girl complained that their constant whispering and giggling distracted her and they were made to sit at separate tables, after which they began to take their textbooks into the patch of unkempt lawn behind the tennis courts, where one of them would make daisy chains while the other read pages of R. H. Tawney in a bored monotone. They ate side by side in hall, they spent their free time in each other’s company, leaving the grounds of the school whenever the chance arose to do so, without explaining why. Life is too short for obedience and explanation, Jennifer liked to say, and Fiona was thrilled. They had pet names for each other – Fifi and Jojo, like performing seals – and vowed they would never use them in front of any other girl, a vow they kept until the end. One night, they kissed with their tongues poking into each other’s mouths, but decided they preferred the real thing. Boys.

There was a dearth of boys. They tried to make up for their absence by talking about what they had done, and what they would do if they had the chance. What Fiona had done behind the pedalò was adjusted to suit her audience, the boy who had fucked her reclothed in the lovelier and more adult flesh of Ludovico. She added a touch of passion and several repeat performances, and was thrilled when she saw Jennifer’s face, its flush of eagerness, the bareness of its jealousy. The other girl leant forward, voice lowered, determined not to be outdone. Her gardener, she said, had touched both breasts and had wanted to go all the way, and she had said no, because she’d expected to get a second chance, and she would have done if that bitch of a prefect hadn’t reported her, and she would have said yes, which she would have said the first time if she had only known. He looked like David Essex, she told Fiona, repeating the name in a breathless way. The gardeners in Fiona’s school – all of them, at the very least, in their thirties – were hopeless, she said. The nearest place with fanciable boys was the nearby town, the dead-and-barely-alive hole the school was attached to, a resting place for pensioners before they were called to their eternal home.

There were two types of boys in town, the ones from the equivalent school to theirs, who were brothers and cousins or knew brothers and cousins, and couldn’t be trusted. And then there were the local boys, who couldn’t be trusted either, although for more exciting reasons. They would gather outside Woolworth’s and half sneer, half whistle as the girls walked past, then follow them in and stare while the girls lounged around the pick ’n’ mix counter. Sometimes, a bolder boy would offer a girl a cigarette, which would always be refused, although there were ways of refusing, some of which were barely refusal at all. Outside, they separated, like oil and vinegar, the girls heading off to the school, the boys regrouping for the next skirmish. Occasionally, a girl would hang around to talk to one of the boys, then walk down the street a little way, until they could turn into the lane behind the bins. When asked what had happened, she would shrug and say, oh nothing, but no one believed her. She was envied and condemned, in ratios determined by her popularity and whether the boy was considered worth it. Spots were a no-no, as was greasy hair. Tall was good, blue eyes were better than brown, clean teeth were a definite plus. Jennifer disappeared one afternoon for almost twenty minutes with a boy she’d singled out the week before, older and more soberly dressed than most. When she came back, she had a love bite just high enough to be seen with her collar turned down, and chapped red lips. I touched his thing, she whispered to Fiona that night, when they were both in bed and the lights were off. Fiona lay in the dark and wondered about Ludo, and his thing, and what her breasts must have felt like when he touched them, and if he would touch them again if he had the chance. And she hated her mother all over again.

‘You need to meet my brother,’ Jennifer said.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are. I’m stuck with my mother and that’s it. She’s my entire bloody family now that Daddy’s dead. It’s like some awful nightmare.’

‘Not all families are perfect,’ said Jennifer consolingly. ‘Mine isn’t either.’

‘At least you’ve got someone to talk to.’

‘Patrick? My brother? I don’t talk to Patrick.’

Fiona flicked ash from her cigarette. They were crouched on their haunches behind the far wall of the kitchen garden, shivering, their blazers buttoned up, scarves knotted around their necks. Their bare knees, almost touching, looked vast and blue. It was late November and they shouldn’t have been outside the main building, but they wouldn’t be missed. They never were, unless a prefect or one of the more spiteful teachers had decided to make their life even more unliveable than it already was.

‘I think he’d like you,’ said Jennifer, appraising Fiona in a swift, unnerving way. ‘I’m sure he would. You’re just his type. You know, pretty.’ She took a long slow drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke out in a perfect circle, her own breath cloudlike in the cold. ‘You know what I’m going to do?’ she said, as the circle broke into ragged scraps. ‘I’m going to fix you two up.’

Fiona was too surprised to answer.

‘He’ll be home for Christmas. Come and stay with me for a few days and bingo, he’s yours.’

‘What if I’m not interested?’

Jennifer grinned. ‘Oh, you’ll be interested. He’s gorgeous. I had a friend at my old school who was totally in love with him. And she’d only seen a photograph. He’s even better in real life. He’s got this dishy hair.’ She mimed a fringe with her free hand, then swept it back. ‘Mummy says he’ll break every girl’s heart when he goes up next year. He’s got a scholarship to Balliol to read economics. He wants to be a banker, or something.’

‘Mothers always say stuff like that,’ said Fiona.

‘Is that what your mother says about you?’

Fiona shrugged. ‘Normal mothers. My mother doesn’t count.’

‘So she won’t mind if you come for Christmas?’

‘What she minds doesn’t matter.’ Fiona straightened up, her hand on Jennifer’s shoulder to steady herself, grinding her cigarette butt into the frost-hard earth with determination, as though it was her mother’s face. ‘Not now Daddy’s dead. It’s what I want that counts.’

‘So you’ll ask her?’

Fiona shrugged again, her heart beating. ‘Yes,’ she said. She could have cried, she was so excited and so angry. ‘If you’re sure.’

Her mother would have none of it.

‘Don’t be silly. Christmas is a time for the family,’ she said.

‘What family?’ said Fiona. She was in a telephone kiosk in the town. She had a pile of coins ready to be inserted, and one glove off so that she wouldn’t drop any.

‘I’m not prepared to listen to this nonsense.’

‘I haven’t had a family since Daddy died.’

‘What a hurtful thing to say.’

‘It’s true. You know it’s true.’

‘I don’t know anything of the sort.’

‘You don’t want me.’

‘Of course I want you. You’re my daughter.’

‘I don’t belong to you.’

‘Actually, young lady, you do. Until you’re eighteen.’

‘I hate you. I wish I’d never been born.’

‘And I wish I—’

‘What? What do you wish?’

There was a long pause. Fiona imagined her mother, struck to the floor by grief, and felt a thrill of power.

‘You wish I’d never been born, don’t you?’

Her mother sighed. ‘Oh Fiona, can’t we just talk about this calmly?’

‘What do you wish?’

‘I wish you’d be reasonable, that’s what I wish. Honestly. You’re so like your father sometimes.’

‘Is that why you hate me? Because you hated him too?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Fiona,’ she said, her tone exasperated. ‘Will you just calm down for a moment and listen to me? Of course I didn’t hate your father. And I don’t hate you. How can you say such a thing? I love you. You’re my only daughter and I love you.’ She said these last words slowly, with great care, as if afraid she might be misunderstood.

‘So you expect me to spend the whole Christmas holiday cooped up in that house with you?’

‘That house, as you put it, is your home, Fiona.’

‘Well, I don’t want it. You can bloody well keep it.’

‘You will not use that kind of language with me, young lady. I don’t care how angry you are, I will not put up with it.’

Fiona pushed another 10p into the slot.

‘You don’t have any choice,’ she said. ‘Not if I come back for Christmas. You’ll have to listen to it for three whole weeks.’ She put the phone down. She hit the box with the heel of her hand, said ‘Fuck, fuck,’ then headed back to school.

Jennifer found her sitting cross-legged on her bed, scribbling in her diary, muttering to herself as she wrote. She didn’t interrupt her scribbling or look up until Jennifer asked her what she was writing about. ‘My fucking mother,’ she said. ‘She says I’ve got to spend Christmas with her.’

‘I thought what she wanted didn’t matter,’ said Jennifer.

‘Don’t you start.’ She threw her pencil across the room, followed by the diary. It hit the wall, and a folded sheet of paper fell out. Jennifer picked it up,

‘What’s this?’ she said, unfolding it before Fiona could stop her.