Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [20]
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Sounds a bit flippant.’
She shrugged. ‘Not flippant – rational. I just don’t see why people do it. When you look around yourself at the world – see how overcrowded it is – and then you see people having to go through what the Woods are going through, I mean, why do it?’
‘But you don’t not have children because you’re afraid of losing them. That’s crazy.’
Zoë stared at him, a little pulse beating at the back of her head, irrationally annoyed by that comment. He’d made it sound pitying. As if not wanting children meant she was ill, or defective. ‘Crazy or not, you won’t ever catch me with a football up my sweater.’
Ben gave her a long, puzzled look. A car went by on the street outside and a cloud covered the moon. After a while he stood. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I think I’ll go to bed now. Got a big day tomorrow.’
She raised her chin, surprised by his tone. His hand on her shoulder was friendly, but it wasn’t the touch of a lover. ‘OK,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I won’t disturb you when I come up.’
He left the room and she sat for a long time, gazing at the place on the stairs his feet had disappeared, wondering what on earth she’d said. Wondering if the natural evolution of her life was always going to be the same – always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Sally had always been the baby of the family. Dolly Daydream. Wide blue eyes and blonde ringlets. Everyone’s favourite – and completely lost now that the family was gone and there was no one left to look after her. Once, she’d been close to her parents, but with the divorce something had changed. Maybe it was embarrassment, shame, a deep sense that she’d let them down somehow, but she’d found herself making excuses not to visit them in Spain, and slowly, over the months, their contact had dwindled to a phone call a week – sometimes Millie would answer and speak to them and Sally wouldn’t even know about it until later. As for Zoë … well, Zoë was never going to come into the equation. She was something high up in the police now, and wouldn’t want anything to do with Sally – the spoiled, idiot doll, propped up in the corner with her vacant grin, always looking in the wrong direction and missing what was important in life.
Missing things like Melissa, happening right under her nose.
Big, tanned, leggy Melissa, with her fat frizz of blonde hair, her tennis player’s shoulders and loud Australian accent. She’d crept into their lives through those fatal gaps in Sally’s attention and, before anyone could draw breath, she was the next Mrs Julian Cassidy, starting a whole new chapter of Cassidys. According to Millie, the baby, Adelayde, had taken over the house at Sion Road with her playpens and bouncy chairs in every doorway. Melissa had dug up the lawn and replaced it with gravel-filled beds, huge desert plants and walkways for Adelayde. Sally didn’t mind, though. She had decided there was only one way to approach the divorce – amiably. To accept it and welcome it as a new start. She didn’t miss Sion Road. The house seemed, in her memory, to be murky and distant, always cloaked in cloud or orange electric light. And anyway, she told herself, Peppercorn Cottage was beautiful, with its views and clear, natural light that just fell out of the sky and landed flat on the house and garden.
Peppercorn was hers. The terms of the divorce were that Julian would pay Millie’s school fees until she was eighteen and buy the cottage for her and Sally to live in. The solicitor said Sally could have got more, but she didn’t like the thought of clawing for things. It just seemed wrong. Julian had set up a special kind of mortgage on Peppercorn. Called an offset, he explained, it meant she could borrow against the house should she need to. Sally didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of it, but she did grasp that Peppercorn was acting as a kind of a cushion for her. She and Millie had moved out of Sion Road one November weekend, carrying their suitcases