Oh my God. The young man Catherine was with, the day Alice and I followed her from Nando’s. The young man in board shorts. He was wearing a navy baseball cap the wrong way round. It must have been Ross. I clamp my hand over my mouth and think of the way Catherine’s head disappeared in the car, my dawning realization of what was going on in there. Alice and me giggling so much we almost choked on our sweets.

My eyes tremble and blur. I can’t stay here a minute longer. I need to leave. I reach out a hand to grab the doorframe, but it looms at a strange angle and I miss it completely. My ears pound. The room suddenly looks all jagged and angular, like a cubist painting. Something strange is happening. Something strange and, at the same time, frighteningly, sickeningly familiar.

PART THREE

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

—George Eliot

For months after it happened, I was terrified that someone would find out it was me who ran into Sue Molyneux, who almost made her lose the baby. Lose Lizzie. Catherine said that if I got caught I’d be convicted for attempted murder and sent to a children’s prison.

I later discovered that this wasn’t true. For a start, I was only nine when it happened, and nobody under ten can be charged with a crime. What’s more, there’s no such thing as attempted murder of an unborn child. In the eyes of the law, an unborn child is not a person. So even if I’d been ten, the most I’d have been charged with is Actual Bodily Harm, that’s if they could even prove it was intentional. And how could they? Catherine had burnt the only piece of evidence that existed—that childish declaration she’d made me sign in her bedroom, which seemed so meaningful and portentous at the time.

When I found this out and told Catherine, she went scarily still and I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. She told me it didn’t make a jot of difference. There were other punishments I would receive. I’d be put under a Child Safety Order and Aunt Jessie would disown me. She said I’d probably be taken into care and the police would always be monitoring me for the rest of my life.

Especially when they found out about the “other things” I’d done.

That was the threat she always hung over me. Telling her parents and Aunt Jessie that I’d touched her private parts. Even though she’d told me to do it. Even though she’d shown me exactly what to do and liked it just as much as I did.