Never Go There Read online

  ‘He’s not here.’ Lois said, watching the young girl stare at the photographs. ‘He left early; university business. Won’t be back for a while. My God, what’s wrong with you? You’re white as a sheet.’ Lois’s eyes stayed on the pictures of James long after Emma’s gaze had fallen away from them. The skin around Lois’s eyes and mouth was tense. Fearful. ‘What is it you want with my son?’

  Emma’s head began to spin.

  She felt for Lois’s arm, tried to cling to the fabric but her fingers felt numb.

  She shouldn’t have come. She should have gone straight to her stepmother, or to Maggie. Shouldn’t have risked Lois finding out about her and James. Emma would lose him, she knew she would, if his mother got in the way. She could sense it in the other woman’s tensed arms, in her voice laced with that odd mixture of protectiveness for her son and aggression towards anyone else.

  Lois would see Emma as an obstacle to her son. A rival.

  Emma asked for Elaine, asked to be taken home, but the pain made words difficult to form.

  ‘You need to talk slower, Emma, I can’t understand you.’ The woman prised Emma’s fingers from her arm and Emma cried out, Lois’s touch like icicles on her flesh. But the woman carried on, one hand feeling the glands on Emma’s neck, the other reaching for her mobile phone, her eyes flickering from Emma to the pictures of James, suspicion rather than sympathy in her actions

  ‘Dammit!’ Lois flung the mobile onto the floor. No reception.

  Emma tried to stand, but her arms and legs wouldn’t hold her. The world turned sideways. She was on her back on the hallway floor, the light bulb above burning her eyes.

  Lois gasped and kneeled by her side. ‘I need your phone.’ Panic made her voice shake. ‘I need to call an ambulance. I need to contact your parents.’

  ‘No!’

  The force of Emma’s cry made her wince, her stomach and torso contracting, but she couldn’t let Lois call her parents, not yet. She couldn’t tell them what she had done, or with whom.

  ‘You need to tell me what the matter is, Emma,’ Lois cajoled, her voice edged with fear. ‘Tell me, so I can help.’

  Tears prickled and she tried to speak again, wanting Elaine, wanting James to take her away, keep her safe, stop the pain that was ripping her in two.

  She parted her lips, her eyes closing against the swirling, shifting images above. She knew Lois wouldn’t want to help her. But who else could she turn to?

  ‘I need James,’ she said, and Lois’s face came closer, her eyes only inches from Emma’s. ‘He’s the father.’

  Lois sprang back. Stared at the girl on the floor, at Emma’s belly, shook her head and her face paled to white. ‘No, you can’t be, he wouldn’t!’

  ‘Don’t tell my dad, please.’

  ‘Your dad?’ Lois raised her hands to her face, hid her mouth. ‘No, you’re right, he can’t know.’

  ‘Please help me,’ Emma said, voice broken. She couldn’t hold it in any more and her hands slid down to cradle her belly. ‘Please.’

  Lois didn’t move. Emma could see the disgust in her face, the disapproval. She wished she had gone to Elaine more than ever, knew that her stepmother would have held her close and stroked her hair, promised her that everything would be all right.

  Lois managed to shake the horror from her face, moved forward urgently. ‘You mustn’t tell Arthur that James is the father. Understand?’ She grabbed Emma’s shoulder, tried to make her agree but Emma couldn’t talk any more.

  Head foggy, she was aware of footsteps, Lois running to the building next door: Maggie’s pub.

  Painstaking moments of silence followed, the pain kicking her, grinding her.

  ‘She’s through here,’ she heard Lois say at last, and Emma cried out in relief when it was Maggie who appeared, dear Maggie, holding Emma up in her strong arms, carrying Emma through the door.

  ‘Ambulance will take too long, forty minutes they said, at least,’ Lois said to Maggie, guiding them out of the house. ‘They told me you should drive her on in.’

  ‘What about Arthur and Elaine?’ Maggie asked, her eyes never leaving her goddaughter’s face.

  ‘I tried but there was no answer.’ Emma knew that Lois’s mobile phone lay on the floor, discarded. Lois met her eye for an instant, then looked away. She was lying: for whatever reason, she wanted to keep this from Arthur as much as Emma did. ‘You can ring them again from the hospital.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we try again? We could drive past their house—’

  ‘For God’s sake, look at her! There’s no time!’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ The panic in Maggie’s voice made Emma ache, but she had no strength left to tell her herself.

  ‘She’s pregnant, Maggie,’ Lois spat. ‘The stupid girl’s gotten herself pregnant.’

  Seven years ago

  Maggie

  Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Maggie’s arms ached with the weight of the girl, the strain making her stomach tighten. She was still wearing her pinstripe pyjamas, hadn’t even gotten around to brushing her teeth before Lois had banged on her door.

  ‘She’s only fourteen, how the hell can she have got pregnant?’ At the sound of Maggie’s voice Emma opened her eyes, closed them again, lying limp and heavy in her godmother’s arms.

  It was the horror of the situation that was making Maggie feel queasy, the reality, that her goddaughter had been violated in this way, nauseating. Nothing to do with the gin she’d been drinking last night, or the restless, drunken sleep that followed.

  ‘Same way you did, Maggie,’ Lois said, her eyes on the teenage girl. ‘Same way I did.’ She opened the back door of the car, swept away the crisp packets and stale-smelling cardigan that littered the rear seat.

  Maggie bent forwards and lay Emma down, the heat from the sun-baked car hitting her as soon as she ducked her head inside it. She wound down the rear window, then opened the front passenger door to let Lois inside.

  But the other woman had turned away, was making her way back to her house.

  ‘Lois!’ Maggie called, then looked around, side to side down the street, to make sure there was no one around. She didn’t want to cause a scene, didn’t want anyone to know about Emma’s situation. ‘Get in, we need to go!’ The last few words hissed through her gritted teeth.

  Lois didn’t turn back.

  ‘Lois!’ Maggie called again, louder, Emma mewing on the back seat, her eyelids flickering but not opening.

  ‘Go then,’ Lois said, turning back with a cold, hard stare. ‘I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘You’re not coming?’ Maggie looked at the girl lying prostrate on the seat, a slick of sweat glistening on her forehead, her skin worryingly pale.

  ‘That’s why I came for you,’ Lois said. ‘You’re her godmother, you deal with it.’

  ‘She’s a child, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant!’ Maggie cried. ‘Pregnant, Lois! You of all people should want to make sure she’s OK.’

  ‘Me of all people?’ Lois repeated the words with venom, teeth bared, face hard. Her gaze flickered to the car. ‘She’s got nothing to do with me,’ she hissed.

  A flash of understanding hit Maggie, almost winded her into shocked silence. Why Emma had run to Lois’s house, why Lois was so frighteningly hostile. So frightened. ‘It’s James!’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’ Lois spat the words, the tendons in her neck pulled taut. ‘Nothing.’

  But the reaction, the fear in her eyes, told Maggie she was right. ‘He’s the father.’

  The whimpering from the car reminded Maggie there wasn’t time to argue or ask more.

  ‘Is he here?’ Maggie asked. Lois shook her head, folded her arms.

  ‘He’s gone to London.’

  ‘You need to contact him, get him to come home.’ Maggie pleaded with Lois this time. ‘If James is the father he’ll need to know.’

  ‘He’s not!’ Lois cried. ‘He wouldn’t! She’s—’ And a sob escaped, stifled only when
Lois pressed her hands to her mouth.

  ‘She’s only fourteen.’ Maggie finished the sentence for her, pointing to the girl who needed their help. ‘Just a year younger than you were—’

  ‘Don’t you dare compare me to her!’ There was an edge to Lois’s tone, a remnant of the angry, sarcastic teenager she once was, or turned into once she was married to Jim Lunglow at just sixteen, pregnant with his baby. Maggie remembered the shouting she would often hear from next door, the arguments between Jim and Lois in the first few years of their marriage, the years that were meant to be blissfully happy, not spent engrossed in rows whilst their baby son cried upstairs.

  It had raised a few eyebrows, Jim Lunglow, then forty at least, marrying a girl still in her teens. Those eyebrows turned to frowns when it was revealed that Lois was already pregnant, the wedding deemed shotgun, the young woman labelled as cheap, easy, a slut who was getting what she deserved for sleeping with a much older man.

  Some said she got pregnant on purpose, to trap Jim into marriage, to give herself an easy life.

  Some said she’d slept with other men, though nobody ever said who.

  No one, Maggie recalled, blamed Jim.

  This was the man who had raised James, this had been James’s role model.

  And now James had skulked into his father’s depraved footsteps.

  ‘If she’s lucky, she’ll lose the baby,’ Lois spat. ‘At least that way, she won’t end up like me.’ There was some dark thing in her expression as she caught Maggie’s eye, then she turned on her heel and went angrily through her front door, slamming it fast behind her.

  Maggie wanted to follow, to make Lois look at Emma, wanted Lois to come with her to hospital and explain to the doctors exactly what had happened. But the need to get Emma to safety, get her seen, overrode everything else. She dropped heavily to the driver’s seat and turned the key, Emma groaning as the car came to life.

  As she drove out of the village she tried to push Lois from her thoughts, the hostility in her voice, the anger. She tried to think about Emma, about getting her to hospital as quickly, and safely, as she could.

  The car bounded along the track, the fields either side bright green, purple heather growing along the banks, the white dot of sheep far off to the left.

  Maggie looked over her shoulder at Emma’s young face, her eyes closed and lips parted.

  Was Lois thinking of her own past? Was that why she was hostile when faced with a child in the same state Lois had been in herself? Although Lois had been one year older when James was conceived.

  James.

  He was nineteen, five years older than Emma, a grown man. He wouldn’t have gone near her, would he? He wouldn’t be so low as to do that?

  But another image played inside her head. That of James, nineteen, a fully-grown man, taking little Emma’s hand and leading her into the darkness.

  Maggie stroked Emma’s hand, feeling the tube that pierced the skin, the coarse white tape that held the tube in place. The girl had been out of surgery for just half an hour, was yet to wake up.

  The room was light, the day still early and the sun outside bright and hot. The drip beside Emma’s bed clicked and beeped, the monitor attached to her chest beeping in sync with her heart, a constant, rhythmic bleep-bleep that should have been reassuring, but wasn’t.

  The sound reminded Maggie of waking up in a room just like this one, ten years before. The monitor was the first thing she had heard upon waking, registering the noise even before her eyes had opened, focusing on its sound as the doctors told her that she had survived the crash but her husband was brain dead, that she would have decisions to make, papers to sign. It was the sound she had listened to, the bleep becoming a constant drawl, as she held Tom’s hand whilst they switched off the machines that breathed for him, as his heart stopped beating and he left her for good.

  On Emma’s bedside table were several empty plastic cups, the water going someway to relieve Maggie’s aching head, but a slight pain remained at the back of her skull, a throbbing sense of dread. It wasn’t the gin from the night before (she hadn’t drunk that much, just a little over half a bottle, hadn’t even been sick for goodness sake.) Nor was it caused by these memories, the sounds of the hospital, the smell of boiled food and harsh bleach, forcing Tom’s death to the forefront of her mind like a barbed hook she couldn’t pull out.

  No. It was the phone call she’d made an hour or so ago, the phone call to Emma’s parents.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me straight away?’ Arthur’s voice had been a growl, the receiver obviously close to his mouth, making his words sound muffled and wet. She could hear his footsteps as he paced the hardwood floor of his hallway, his heels sounding out a slap on the wood.

  ‘I couldn’t get through before,’ Maggie had lied, not telling him she hadn’t even tried, had viewed making the phone call in the way one might approach holding an unpinned grenade. She had hoped Elaine would answer, that Arthur would be out at the farm. She had put off making the call until she really couldn’t put it off any longer, the staff asking her, once again, when Emma’s parents would arrive. ‘She’s in surgery,’ Maggie had told him, avoiding explanations. ‘If you drive down now you’ll probably be here in time for her to wake up.’

  She had hoped the revelation would spark his sympathy, dissolve his anger. It hadn’t.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong with her,’ he barked down the phone. ‘Why the hell’s Emma in surgery? What happened?’

  She swallowed once, twice, the impossible words, ‘Your daughter’s pregnant,’ drying out her mouth. She couldn’t tell him.

  ‘The doctors will explain everything when you’re here,’ she had said instead, her mobile phone slipping against her clammy cheek.

  ‘Maggie,’ he spoke her name quietly, a threat in his voice, ‘tell me what’s wrong with my daughter.’

  She couldn’t, wouldn’t, be that messenger.

  ‘I have to go,’ she had said instead, ending the call and turning off her phone.

  Now she looked at Emma lying motionless on the bed, the drip embedded in her thin arm, the heart monitor beep-beeping beside her. Had Maggie done the right thing, calling the girl’s parents? Was there something else she could have done instead?

  But on the bed, Emma looked so very childlike that Maggie knew there hadn’t been another option. Of course there hadn’t. And, despite Maggie’s opinion of Arthur, he had a right to know that Emma was in hospital. Besides, her low opinion of his character was based only on the way he had treated Maggie herself. The rest of the community loved him, applauded him, had him to thank for countless jobs in his farms, dairy, warehouse, and cheap rent in the houses he owned. Perhaps she was wrong, had misjudged him. Perhaps he would be kind, understanding, calm.

  But Maggie knew she was fooling herself. She had experienced his cruelty first hand, ten years ago.

  ‘Sign the fucking papers.’

  Maggie had been half cut on the gin Arthur himself had bought her, head lolling on the table of her empty pub as he pushed the papers towards her. Tom had been dead less than a month. Arthur’s sympathy for her loss had disappeared as soon as she said no to his offer. ‘What the hell do you want with that land, Maggie? Wouldn’t it be easier to sell it?’

  ‘It’s my land. My boy’s land. I’ll keep it for Lee,’ Maggie slurred. She had drunk too much.

  But she had said no. Even when drunk, she stood her ground.

  And then Edward Burrows, Arthur’s right-hand man, came to see her, stopping by for a pint a week later, a week that Maggie had spent in the pub all alone, not a single customer gracing the bar, the till empty save for the float. ‘It’ll get worse,’ Edward had warned her. ‘I doubt anyone will come drinking in here, not with Arthur angry with you the way he is.’ And it had got worse. Not a soul entered the pub for a month, the business nearly down on its knees. By the time Maggie gave in and sold the land to Arthur, save for one small field, she was broke. All the money from the sale had gone into sa
ving the pub. But, at the time, she felt she had little choice.

  ‘Maggie?’ The name came out as a croak, the sound drawing Maggie back from her reverie.

  She jumped, pressed the call button on the bed, held Emma’s hand properly at last.

  ‘You’re awake.’

  The girl had her eyes half open, blinking lazily. ‘What happened?’ she asked, her lips dry, their edges cracked.

  Maggie reached for a cup from the table. She held it to her goddaughter’s lips and helped the girl drink.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Emma said when the cup was removed, her lips trembling. ‘Aren’t I, Maggie?’ Her right hand, free from needles or drips, rested lightly on her belly, pulling away again as soon as she felt the bulk of gauze and bandages beneath her gown.

  Maggie lifted the hand, held it in her own. ‘The pregnancy was ectopic, Emma,’ she said gently. ‘The foetus was growing in one of your fallopian tubes; they had to remove it.’

  ‘But the baby?’ Emma asked, her voice high pitched and childishly hopeful. ‘It’s going to be OK?’

  ‘Sweetheart, they couldn’t save it.’

  Emma’s face crumpled, tears filling her wide, blue eyes. ‘Oh,’ she said, opened her mouth and closed it again.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Maggie squeezed Emma’s hand, but the girl withdrew her fingers to wipe the tears from her eyes.

  Maggie took a deep breath. ‘Emma,’ she began, wondering how long she had before Arthur arrived, ‘was James the father?’

  Emma’s eyes widened, the last of the weak colour draining from her face. ‘Don’t tell Daddy,’ she whispered, grabbing Maggie’s hand and squeezing this time. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll understand—’ Maggie tried, but she knew it was useless, could tell from the desperate look on Emma’s face that the girl was petrified of her father’s reaction. ‘He’s your father, love, and you’re only fourteen. Of course he has to be told.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to know about James, does he?’