Right, warning, this chapter contains some disturbing references to something very horrible happening.
Sorry. Happy cuteness will be returning soon! Jessie xx
Hertfordshire (cont.)
Sandra glanced between the four Stricklands. Rufus looked like he was on the edge of saying something; Mia looked as if she wanted the chair to suddenly drop through the floor and take her and Bella with it; Bella was staring curiously at her mum, probably wondering why her socks were suddenly so interesting; Rob meanwhile looked as if he wanted to ask a hell of a lot of questions all in one go and was finding it hard to find where to start.
"They don't know, do they? Mia?" Rufus broke the stalemate.
"Is there somewhere we could go that's I don't know, a bit more private maybe?" Sandra interrupted quickly as she watched the two she knew better struggle to contain conflicting emotions.
"What don't we know?" Robert's voice was low, dangerous if you didn't know him, woundful if you did. Sandra could feel the hurt and confusion even though she didn't understand it.
"Nothing," Mia lied hopefully looking into her father's eyes. "Or, maybe not nothing…" she trailed off.
"What do you mean nothing?" Rufus exploded quietly, mindful that even if the walls didn't have ears, there were still other people in the room. "Digger Thomas…"
"You knew these people, who were they? They were sixth-formers, how did you know them?" he asked suddenly, quickly. The pace of his voice, still quiet, betrayed his need to know the truth of why his daughter had become so abruptly unresponsive. "Mia," Robert spoke her name, willing her to look at him, to tell him. If he was honest with himself, he knew what he was about to hear, and he knew he didn't want to hear it. But he needed to hear it. She hadn't told him exactly why she'd left school, thinking back he hadn't asked. He'd assumed, naively, that she'd been kicked out for getting pregnant. He'd believed her, when she'd admitted it had been at a party. He'd let himself believe that she'd been drunk, stupid. But his daughter wasn't stupid. She knew that he wanted to marry Sandra. She wasn't stupid.
"Digger Thomas," Rufus rapidly answered one of his father's harried questions. "He was the one who got thrown out. He was driving. He was the one who…"
"Rufs," Mia begged with a strangled whisper.
"Mia," he looked hopelessly between his sister and his dad.
"There was a gang of us," she spoke so suddenly and so quietly that the others had to strain to hear her. "Darren, me, Helena Mathers, Chris Cunningham, Lewis Tanner, Rainey Thomas, Tommy Harrison, Daniel Richards and Digger Thomas."
She reeled off the list, each name coming freely to her mind as she recalled those people she had called her friends until a time so recent yet a lifetime ago. Most of them, she hadn't thought about in the last year, apart from Daniel Richards and Darren Holmes, the only two who had meant more than someone to lark about with. Digger Thomas was a boy she never wanted to think about again. The venom in her tone as she spoke his name scared her. She never wanted to talk about him again. She had never wanted her dad to find out this. She couldn't look up.
"Some of them were sixth-formers, the rest were my age. We used to hang out. In the Common Rooms, in town," she sniffed as she paused, lost in her narrative. "I don't know where to start."
She looked up and sought the one pair of eyes she needed to find; the one person who at that moment she needed to give her the power to explain everything that she should have explained six months previously but couldn't bring herself to. Blue eyes softened kindly as they met her gaze, Sandra offered a kindly smile as she sat forward in her seat and motioned to take Bella.
"It's ok," Sandra said softly, gathering Bella into her arms and nodding at Mia, once the baby was settled on her lap she placed a hand on Robert's knee; his face was set in a grim expression. "Take your time. Start wherever you need to. We're not going anywhere."
Mia returned Sandra's nod and took a breath. "There was a party," she looked at her dad. "But I wasn't drunk. Me and Daniel, we'd gotten to know each other. We liked each other. But Digger Thomas couldn't have that. He was the top dog. If he didn't have a girlfriend, Daniel couldn't have one. The girls teased him, whenever Daniel and me kissed, he'd be looking at us. It didn't seem to bother him that Helena and Tommy were seeing each other; and Rainey was his sister. He teased Daniel a lot, I think he though Daniel was the geek, the one who shouldn't get a girlfriend. They had a massive fight that night. He shouldn't have been driving anyway, he'd been drinking so much. But he insisted on it and insisted that Daniel get a lift with him."
"So that's why you got thrown out?" Robert couldn't stand to hear anymore. He didn't want to hear anymore. The entire time Mia had been speaking, the dragon of guilt and fear that he thought had been tamed had been waking and rearing inside him with all the vigour of his youth and anger. So much anger. Untamed, un-harnessed, unleashed. At the one person he didn't feel any anger towards at all. "Because you were in his, this Digger Thomas' gang? I thought it was because you got pregnant?"
"No," she whispered, biting back the tears. She didn't know whether they were tears of fear of what was going to come or sadness at reliving what had been. She didn't want her father to be angry. He'd been her tower of strength for the last six months; she didn't want to ruin that. She didn't want to hurt him.
Sandra kept a steady beat playing on Bella's knee with her fingertips to distract the child from the pitched distress between the others. She threw a glance toward Rufus who was watching the exchange intently; he appeared torn between butting and running away. She found looking at the other two hard; Mia was on the verge of tears, something that Sandra had never witnessed before. Robert's demeanour burned a fury that she had never seen before either. The conclusion of this conversation pushed at the boundaries of civilised common room dialogue. There was no way of easing the pain or coercing a speedy u-turn. The truth would spill like oil on the ocean of their lives, indelible, inconceivable, unavoidable.
"I didn't get thrown out because I was pregnant," Mia sniffed as the tears began to roll unbidden down her cheeks. "I got thrown out because I accused Digger Thomas of raping me."
Robert was barely aware of Sandra's hand on his knee. He wouldn't have noticed if the room had turned to jelly and all its occupants to marshmallow people. His heart was cold now, veins and arteries had turned to ice and every blood cell made of jagged glass cut as it passed through his body of stone. The dragon raged. But he couldn't speak.
"I didn't know about the crash," she brushed angrily at her cheeks as they became damp. "Darren got me a taxi. I didn't know. The matron asked me where I'd been, when I got back. I started crying and told her what had happened. How he'd been drunk, teasing me about Daniel, pushed me into the toilets, how he'd … That Digger Thomas had … I didn't know then. She took me in the morning to the hospital. That's when I found out about Bella. She was already there," she looked up at her father's tortured face. "She was already there."
Sandra watched as Rob's tightened jaw trembled slightly.
"When we got back to the school, we found out about the crash. It was all so sad, and so messy… and then when it came about what Digger had done to me, it was all so horrible. I just got told over and over again not to speak ill of the dead…"
"Never mind what he'd done to you," Rufus couldn't stay silent any longer. "Why didn't you tell them?"
Mia shook her head and brushed yet more tears from her cheeks.
Robert closed his eyes.
Sandra gently applied a light pressure to where her hand rested still on his knee. "It's ok," she whispered. "Mia, Robert. It's ok."
"Na…prip…ma, ma, ma!" Bella squirmed uncomfortably in her Nana's lap. Her family was unhappy, she didn't like it.
"Here," Mia whispered. "I'll take her."
Robert barely looked up as his granddaughter was passed over his lap. "You knew?" he growled at Rufus.
"Yeah," the boy replied quietly. "We weren't exactly on speaking terms, Dad. Mum didn't want us speaking to you. And after Mia had to leave school, she made sure I wasn't to tell you anything."
"What did she do, threaten to take your x-box away?" Rob snarled. "I'm your dad, didn't I have the right to know?"
"Dad, please?" Mia pleaded.
"Does she know we're here today?" Robert asked. He couldn't focus. It was like one of those days when his to-do list normally scribbled on a post-it mutated onto the back of an envelope. When the phone wouldn't stop ringing, e-mails piled up and the red-wire intray on his desk formed a tidal wave and threatened to take over his desk. Only instead of cases, colleagues, commissioners and shopping lists; today was a nightmarish hall of mirrors where every place he looked to was a shattered image of happiness that he didn't have the strength to deal with.
"Yeah," Rufus admitted. "She's not happy about it."
With a massive effort Rob managed not to tell his son exactly what he thought of his ex-wife's privileges to happiness ought to be. "Shall we go out somewhere for lunch?" he asked instead.
Sandra felt that it might take something stronger than turpentine to remove the look of shock that was surely plastered all over her face as Robert looked calmly around each member of his family seeking a response to what might in other circumstances be a perfectly reasonable question.
"I'll, I'll need to be signed out," Rufus said.
"Ok, great, let's go get that sorted," Robert stood up. "Meet you girls by the car? Good."
Rufus led his father to the admin offices of the school where he could get signed out. Sandra looked at Mia. It was her seventeenth birthday next month. Not for the first time she marvelled at how strong the child was. She bit her lip, trying to summon the words that would be right. There weren't any though.
"I'm sorry," was all she could say.
"No," Mia shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's my fault."
"It isn't," Sandra said firmly. "None of this is your fault."
Mia bent down to pick up the carry cot and put it on the table in front of her, she positioned her five-month old daughter in the seat and strapped her in. "Is that what you have to say?" she asked without malice. "When women come to you and tell you they were raped. Is that what you have to say? It's ok, it's not your fault. Does it make any difference? Do you think it helps them to hear it? Because I'm not sure it does. Sure enough, some women might feel like the whole disgusting dirty business was their fault. Like they've been punished for being bad people, or for something that they've done. It's not their fault because it was a bad man that did it to them. The truth is, there are people that do bad things. And that bad things happen to good people as well as bad. Digger Thomas raped me. Digger Thomas died. He took the boy I loved with him. But Bella and me, we're here. And we should have told Dad right from the start. We should have gone to him right from the start. Do you know why we didn't? Because I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to hear him say that it wasn't my fault. I couldn't cope with him being the policeman. I needed him to be my dad."
"He is," Sandra choked as she picked up Bella's bag and rolled the car keys over in her hand.
Mia stood up. "Come on. There's a fantastic chocolate shop in town; your mum would love their biscuits."
By the time they reached the car, Robert and Rufus were deep in discussion about football once more. Sandra smiled, it reminded her of the time Brian had found out about his Mark's 'second team' How can you have a second team? He had fumed about that for days. Even by the end of lunch and three different topics of conversation about holidays, America and blushing through Rob's explanation of what UCOS did; Sandra still couldn't see Rob buying Rufus the new Man U shirt for his birthday. Mia led them to the shop that Sandra had to admit was definitely what heaven looked like if heaven was made of chocolate. They spent far too much on chocolate; though Sandra did reason that if she accidently let slip about the place and didn't provide samples for the boys, she'd be in more trouble than it was worth. Mia picked a packet of seemingly normal chocolate-covered biscuits, assuring Sandra that they were in fact the best and that her mother would love them. Sandra opted to bow to the girl's judgement; she had a feeling that they could be the worst biscuits in the world but if told that Mia had chosen them and not Sandra, Grace would find them delicious. Grace Pullman had taken a shine to Robert's family, that was for sure, Sandra allowed her mind to meander as Robert bade goodbye to Rufus back at the school. Mia was settling Bella back into the car and Sandra was checking her phone. She could just make them out in the mirror of the sunshade. Two tall, slim figures of familial similarity in the background, talking.
"I'm sorry you had to go through so much without me," Robert said seriously having failed once more to highlight the virtues of Tottenham Hotspurs. He'd spent the afternoon conscious of every syllable uttered by anyone else or expelled from his own lips. He could barely dare to touch at what he'd learnt that day. "You know, you can always ring me, anytime, anything. I'm your dad."
Rufus nodded.
"Are you happy here?" Rob asked. He had always allowed himself to believe that his ex-wife had been looking after his children. Today's revelations showed him that he had been a fool to think that. He knew that he needed to help Mia, but he had to be sure that Rufus was ok too.
Rufus shrugged. "It's not for long. Look, I didn't want to tell you but Mum's moving to the States."
Robert sighed, he laid a hand on his son's shoulder. Sometimes he wondered… so many things. He bit back his now tired anger. "I think I need to ring your mother."
Rufus sighed. "Yeah, probably. Anyway, it was good to see you. And to meet Sandra. She's alright."
"Yeah," Robert couldn't help his smile as he remembered their reason for coming. Even after having the stability of his world destroyed, he still had to face the fact that he needed his son's approval. "Listen, there's something I want to ask you, about Sandra. I know you've only met her this one time, but she means a lot to me."
"Dad," Rufus interrupted. "You don't have to ask my permission."
Robert studied his son for a moment. In many ways, Rufus took after his mother far more than Mia did. The lad's blaze way of handling things for instance; but both of them knew him better than she ever had. He loved them both. He wanted to help them both. He wanted the best for them.
"But thanks," Rufus shrugged. "Now get, before this gets soppy, right?"
"I'll see you soon," Rob promised hugging his son tightly. However his family had become so torn, he was determined to fix it. Somehow. Even though he felt like he'd been on a tumultuous rollercoaster of time stopping and starting since they had arrived in Hertfordshire; the half-hour drive home promised to be the longest half an hour of the day.