‘No one,’ she says. ‘Just Chloe.’
‘What does Chloe want?’
‘I dunno. Probably just wants to talk shit about people.’
She feels him bristling with questions he wants to ask, but her mum is there and Zach is always sweetness and light when her mum is around.
She has to wait twenty minutes for Zach to leave the room before she can check the message. She puts the phone on the sofaand switches it on there so that she can easily tuck it out of sight if Zach comes back.
Yo T from the B. Can u come round after college on Friday? My mum’s out of town for the night. You cld sleep over maybe?
She switches it off, feeling her heart racing beneath her ribs. Scarlett believes Tallulah to be your average eighteen-year-old girl, the type who can come and go at her own pace, the kind with no commitments. And now Tallulah thinks of this other version of herself, the one with no commitments, and she imagines that other Tallulah thinking, Well, I don’t have college the next day, I could go over to Scarlett’s, we could have a few drinks, stay up late, eat cereal with hangovers the next morning in her big glossy kitchen. Suddenly, she wants this other Tallulah’s life more than anything in the world. She turns her head to the door of the living room, checking for Zach, but there’s no sign of him, so she taps the screen of her phone, as quicky as she can:
Maybe. Yeh. I’ll c what I can do.
For the rest of that week, Tallulah builds a story about Chloe. Chloe, she tells her mother, is being bullied by a group of kids from college. Chloe can’t tell her mother what’s happening because Chloe’s mother would just make things worse. Chloe is feeling suicidal. Chloe has been talking about slitting her wrists.
Her mother tells her that she really should tell someone, someone at the college maybe. Tallulah says no, Chloe would definitely not want her to talk to the college, that she doesn’t want anyone to talk to the college.
And then, at about four o’clock on Friday afternoon, Tallulah tells her mother that Chloe has just called and that she is in crisisand that she needs her and that she is going to her house. ‘Can you look after Noah,’ she asks her mum, ‘just until Zach gets back from work? Is that OK?’
Her mother nods fervently. ‘Of course, yes, of course. But please stay in touch. Let me know if you need me to do anything. Call me, please, if it looks like she’s going to do anything stupid.’
She touches Tallulah’s cheek and says, ‘You’re such a kind person, such a good friend. I’m so proud of you.’
Tallulah feels so guilty she almost wants to throw up. She leaves before she betrays herself in any way, leaves without even saying goodbye to Noah. She passes Chloe’s cottage on the way out of the village and stops, just for a moment, just in case someone is watching, just so they could say, Oh yes, I saw Tallulah outside Chloe’s house. In the pockets of her jacket are a spare pair of underwear, a toothbrush and her debit card.
She waits for a minute or two and then carries on cycling. Zach will be on the bus heading back along this road on his way home from work in just over an hour, so she keeps her hood up and sticks to the shadows and the pavements where they veer off the edge of the road between avenues of trees. She turns off the main road with a sigh of relief; then she cycles to the gates of Dark Place and messages Scarlett.
I’m here,she types.I’m outside.
‘You look pretty,’ says Scarlett, wheeling her bike away for her and tucking it out of sight behind the garage.
‘Er, no,’ Tallulah replies. ‘I do not look pretty. I literally came straight here and haven’t even looked in a mirror.’
‘Well, I have two good eyes in my head and they both see pretty.’
Tallulah smiles and follows Scarlett into the house.
Toby greets them in the hallway and joins them in the seating area in the big kitchen extension.
‘How was college?’ asks Scarlett.
‘I didn’t go today. I only go three times a week.’
‘Oh,’ says Scarlett. ‘How come?’
‘Just the way the course works,’ Tallulah replies, not mentioning that she’d worked closely with the course director to construct a timetable that fitted around her other role as a parent.
‘So you study at home the rest of the time?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s cool,’ Scarlett replies. ‘Do you have your own room?’
‘Yeah,’ she says again. Technically it’s not a lie. Technically it is her own room. She just happens to be sharing it with her boyfriend and an eight-month-old baby.
‘What’s your house like?’