Chapter 5
Ms Naylor entered the all too familiar office with as much gusto as she could summon. Everything looked as usual, the wide, glass table in the centre of the room; the abstract paintings on the walls; the frighteningly tidy desk with the neatly aligned pens at which Hanssen was now sat behind. Places like these brought back unwanted memories. Not just of nearly getting sacked (which even Jac had to agree happened on a worryingly regular basis), but of before her days as a doctor. To be more precise, her time in care. She'd been carted around from pillar to post and when things didn't work out…ended up in an office identical to the one she was now sat in. Six years she'd spent as an orphan, but it had felt more like sixty. Jac shuddered at the memory.
"Get lost Jacky" Heloise drawled in her French accent. She deliberately elongated the word "Jacky" because she knew it would set her off.
"That's not my fucking name." Jac replied, through gritted teeth; surprisingly calm for the situation she had found herself in.
However, this was just the calm before the storm. Underneath, she was seething with irrational hatred for the girl, three years her senior, for undermining the respect it had taken her over half a year to gain. She was thirteen now and this meant she was to be treated like an adult. The care home catered for 10-16 year olds so, when she had arrived, last September she had been at the bottom of the pecking order. Most of the kids she found herself living with were veterans in their field. They had grown up with no-one to look out for them, no hope of a better life. They had to look out for themselves.
Jac turned away from the spiteful teenager and plonked herself down angrily on the alarmingly red sofa at the far end of the office.
"I'm not leaving until I find out why you were looking through my file" Jac demanded "We're not even supposed to have them"
"That's never stopped anyone else" Heloise scoffed and kicked the forbidden folder with her toe. It was now abandoned on the floor, between them both.
The room fell silent as neither really knew what to do next.
"You had no right" Jac muttered - almost to herself.
She bent down to retrieve the red, dog-eared folder. The one that had passed through a million social worker's hands. Her entire life was in that folder, or at least what people thought was her life. Most of it wasn't even about her. It was about her 'incompetent mother' or 'abusive step father' as they'd put it. Even the document that supposedly defined her as an individual was a fraud.
She knew this because, yes, she'd seen it once or twice. Mainly out of curiosity; she wanted to know which secrets were still safe.
"So what did you find out then?" She asked the girl, almost defeated by the effort it had taken to pick it up.
"Oh nothing much" the girl replied "nothing I haven't seen before at least"
A pang of emotion hit Jac like a slap in the face. She couldn't quite work out what it was: Hurt at being betrayed? Embarrassment by the invasion of her privacy? No... it was...disappointment. She was disappointed because she wasn't special. 'Nothing much' - that was how the girl described her.
Nothing much.
Yeah, that pretty much summed her up.
That was probably why her mother had left, without warning one day and never come back. She wasn't even worth staying for. The tears that threatened to break the surface of her already rather icy exterior were nothing compared to the pain she felt. The terror of that morning when she had woken up and frantically searched the house for something - anything - worthy of a clue as to her mothers whereabouts. There was nothing. The panic that had gripped her very being during that morning had never quite faded. She seemed to live in a constant state of trepidation and anxiety which she had learnt to mask with snide comments and bitchy remarks.
However, the false persona she paraded around during the day couldn't last forever. At night, the scared little girl would materialize and the monsters would return to haunt her.