Groping around with her hands she found her knickers, one of the stockings and her other shoe. Her underclothes were so soaked that she didn’t bother putting them on, but she put her shoe on and stood up, shakily. As soon as she tried to walk, her heels clagged in the sand, so she stooped with a whimper at the pain in her head and took them off again, turning to walk away from the sound of the sea. It was just growing light, the early east-coast dawn, so that she could make out the outlines of things, the top of the beach, the pier stretching away behind her. She stood and got her bearings for a moment. A lone gull cried overhead. She would walk back along the beach.

Shivering and feeling ill, she scuffed her way along the sand, carrying her shoes, her knickers stuffed into one, the stocking in the other. Things gradually became clearer as the sun came up, casting a pale morning light that knifed into her eyes, making her screw them up. Only one person was about, a man with a dog, coming back up from the sea, who avoided looking directly at Molly, then disappeared up to the promenade.

How must I look? she thought, washed with shame. She felt sticky between her legs, her clothes were soaked and dishevelled and her hair was full of sand. After a while she realized she was near the place where there were public toilets. She needed to go, and also maybe she could have a bit of clean-up before going back to the Laurels? She’d have to sneak in without them hearing.

Climbing up off the beach, she stepped inside the even colder atmosphere of the toilets. It was quite dark inside and, as she stepped towards the basins, someone loomed towards her, a tall, dark figure that she recognized with a horrible shock. The big-boned face, hair pulled messily to the side, the slouching walk, the drunken, sullen expression . . .

‘Mom!’ she gasped. What the hell was Iris doing here, lurking in a public convenience, waiting to jump on her, give her one of her beatings?

Heart thumping with shock, she moved closer to the mirror, reached out and, with a small intake of breath, touched its cold surface.

‘Oh! Oh God!’

Her reflection stared back at her in horror. The darkness had stolen the blonde colouring from her hair so that it looked darker, like Iris’s. And the puffy drunkard’s face: her mother’s face looking back at her, full of disgust at what she saw.

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t go on like this.’

Molly leaned queasily against the basin in front of the mirror, put her hands over her face and began to sob from the depths of herself.

VI

EM

Thirty-Six

‘Come on, Nanna, open the door!’

Robbie rapped his knuckles impatiently on the door of number eighteen.

‘Get back under here,’ Em said, leaning over him with the umbrella. ‘You’ll get soaked else.’