The Tall Man Read online

  She opened her eyes and looked up at the building. When she’d left sixteen years ago, it hadn’t existed – it and its car park had been another yellowing field. Now the town had crept out, in ways she was still noticing, whole estates of identical bright-bricked houses springing up in places she only realised had been untouched once she had passed them. Had she really expected to come back and find things unchanged? She wasn’t sure now.

  She still thought most days of the night she had arrived on their doorstep.

  It had been late, later than she’d intended, and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved to see a light on in the living room. She had brought nothing with her – this had seemed important. She’d seen the house before, of course, though she hadn’t admitted as much to Miles. She’d had to check, had to be sure. She’d needed to know that it was just the two of them living in that house, that it was only Sadie who would be returning to it, no unwelcome guests accompanying her. She’d thought that it was finally time, that it was finally safe for her to go back to them – but she’d learned the hard way that it was important to be sure. The shadows had an unfortunate habit of returning to her.

  Walking up the short drive, she’d taken in the car, the peeling, sun-faded unicorn sticker in the passenger window. A folder lay in the footwell on that side, curling handwriting she did not recognise on its label: D&T coursework  She remembered the way she had stood outside the front door, listening. The Sadie she had been wanted to keep on walking, to creep around the side of the house and look in through the windows – to see for herself, from a safe distance. Instead she had rung the bell.

  Now, the automatic doors to the leisure centre jerked open, light flooding the pavement. Another car pulled into the car park, full beams cutting through the dark, and she couldn’t help shrinking away, turning back towards the trees. Old friends were harder to leave behind than she’d expected.

  The group of kids who’d spilled out of the doors slowly separated enough for her to make out Amber among them, arm linked through Mica’s. Sadie was pleased with herself for remembering Mica’s name. And there was Alisdair, too – Amber’s other best friend. They had been a gang of three since Amber was at playgroup and it was important that Sadie remembered that.

  She often wondered what they must think of her; the returned mother, the crazy woman back from the wilderness. She wondered what they knew, though she wasn’t all that sure exactly what Amber knew, either. She had tried to ask Miles in those early days, wanting to understand how much he had explained to her about why her mother had gone – and, really, how much did Miles even understand? She had listened as he recounted his memories of that week in their tiny flat after Amber had been born, and at first she’d felt sorry for him. It must have been terrifying, especially for Miles, who’d been full of the positivity that only someone who’d lived an entirely happy and shadow-free life could maintain. She’d felt guilty at first, seeing how she had taken that from him. But as he talked on, she’d felt that familiar darkness rise up in her, her patience evaporating.

  ‘I had to leave,’ she’d found herself saying. ‘I did it to protect her.’ And he had been quiet after that.

  The group were still lingering outside the leisure centre, drifting slowly closer to the car so that Sadie could make out Amber more clearly. She had added details to her face that weren’t there when she left the house: a dark lipstick, almost purple; a sharper contour to each cheek. She had also removed the shorts she’d been wearing, the tight black T-shirt just long enough to perhaps pass for a dress. If you weren’t really looking.

  Beside her was a tall girl Sadie didn’t recognise. Dark-haired, head down as she talked eagerly to Amber, her arms folded across her front. Lilac jeans and a pretty, diaphanous white T-shirt; the kind of girly outfit Sadie knew Amber wouldn’t be seen dead in. She watched the girl watching Amber as she spoke; Amber occasionally glancing at her or nodding to show she was listening, here and there leaning towards her with a giggle, a tilt of her head. Uninterested but not unkind. With a shy wave goodbye, the girl broke away from the group and climbed into the passenger side of the other car, headlights still full beam and blinding as it swung out of the car park and away.

  Sadie watched her daughter’s attention move idly back and forth between the boys trying to hold it. She posed for selfies with them, leaning back into someone’s chest, laughing at another’s joke. But there was a flatness about her as she did, and Sadie decided that Amber was not interested in any of them.

  She decided, too, that her daughter was very aware that she was watching.

  The boys grew bored and loped off in the direction of town, until it was only Amber and her friends left. Mica and Alisdair and a boy Sadie did not recognise. He walked behind as they came towards the car and she couldn’t get a grip on his features as the four of them passed in and out of the pools of streetlight. When they were close, Sadie’s eyes met Amber’s and it wasn’t until the car doors clicked open that she realised the pack had separated; that they had surrounded her.

  ‘Hey, Mrs Banner,’ Alisdair said, sliding into the passenger seat.

  Amber was the last to climb into the car. Behind her, the trees had begun their writhing again.

  As they drove away from the leisure centre, Sadie could feel her daughter’s eyes on her in the rear-view mirror. She reached up and pretended to adjust it. Pretended not to hear the slithering whispers from the back seat, the explosion of laughter like crows bursting from a tree.

  ‘Thanks very much for giving us a lift.’ Alisdair, comfortable beside her – one long leg crossed over the other, an elbow resting proprietorially against the door.

  ‘Oh.’ She found her hands running across the worn leather of the steering wheel, searching for the words as if they were imprinted there. ‘No, not at all, that’s fine.’ When, after a while, the silence felt like cardboard in her mouth, she remembered to ask, ‘Did you have a good time?’

  Alisdair turned and smiled; a tight-lipped sort of conspiratorial smile, gone in a second so that she thought she might have imagined it. ‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, a polite, talking-to-a-parent voice returned. ‘It was really fun. Thank you for buying our tickets.’

  Sadie hadn’t bought them. Sadie had a pitiful amount in her savings account, scraped together in ways she didn’t like to think about now, and Miles seemed to find every attempt she made to contribute physically offensive, turning away at the earliest opportunity. She didn’t want Alisdair (or Amber) to know that. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

  She watched the headlights slicing through the street ahead of them, the beams picking out the edges of cars and hedges before abandoning them to the dark again. She could hear the whispers in the back seat again; Mica, Amber and the boy whose name she didn’t know or hadn’t remembered. They prickled over her skin and she flushed, embarrassed. She felt like a kid, like she had been presented to Justine and Marie all over again and was trying her very hardest to say the right thing, to be what they were looking for. Like then, she didn’t know what to talk about or how to talk to them; if she was supposed to talk at all. Did Mica’s mother talk to them when she occasionally brought them home from school? Did Alisdair’s dad linger in the living room when the three of them were there, watching films at his house; did he stand and chat and ask them things? Or were those parents seen but not heard, slipping easily from place to place as they cared for their children in as unimposing a way as possible? She didn’t know. She didn’t know how to fit in. She never had.

  ‘Mum,’ Amber said, the vowel drawn out and bored-sounding; the final ‘m’ tugged up by a laugh, quickly extinguished. ‘You missed the turning.’

  Her palms felt damp against the wheel now. ‘Sorry,’ she said, making an untidy three- and then five-point turn. She drove slowly, the beams hiding more than they showed, the shadows shifting and unwieldy. She wished she was at home. She couldn’t remember which house was Mica’s and the road was narrow, cars parked on either side.

 
‘This is me,’ Mica said, as if sensing her discomfort. ‘Thanks, Mrs B.’ She kissed Amber on the cheek and then stretched forward to Alisdair in a wave of expensive perfume and the sweet chalky smell of make-up, her nails blood-burgundy as they gripped the seat.

  ‘Actually, I can walk from here too,’ Alisdair said, and Sadie tried to argue but the sounds she formed were feathery and fleeting, a hand lifted weakly in protest. ‘Don’t worry, I can cut through the back there,’ he said, the car door open and those long legs in their skinny jeans unfolding out.

  When they were gone, the whispers in the back became softer, the giggles sharper. The boy had been sitting in the middle and he didn’t slide into Mica’s vacated spot. As Sadie turned the car back on to the main road, Amber bumped towards him with a laugh, her bare knees slipping sideways; her head tilted towards his.

  Sadie wanted to stop the car. She wanted to get out and feel the night air bite into her skin, the early warmth of the day evaporated.

  She didn’t want to think about the woods, about Justine’s torn shorts or the clack-clack-clack of the charms Helen had threaded on to the spokes of her bike wheels. She didn’t want to think about the Tall Man.

  He can make you special, too, if you ask him.

  ‘Mum.’ Amber sounded embarrassed, no longer laughing. Sadie looked at the road and had no idea where they were.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, weakly. ‘Did you say something?’

  ‘You missed the turning again.’ Amber’s voice was flat now. ‘Ages ago.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ She slowed, pulling the car into a dusty lay-by and swinging it into a slow U-turn. The road was empty and the darkness liquid. She avoided her daughter’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Amber slid away from the boy in the back seat and stared out of the window.

  He spoke as she drew closer to the first turning in the road, the spidery hawthorn trees with their first white flowers catching the headlights like stars. ‘It’s the one after this,’ he said, and his voice was surprisingly deep and languorous. ‘By that streetlight there – see?’

  ‘OK.’ She tried to keep her voice easy, normal. She could feel Amber simmering behind her. She turned on to the dirt track, her headlights dipping as the car jolted, and followed it through the rape fields, the lights of the town to her left.

  The farmhouse was low and flat-roofed, one light on at the front. Outbuildings crouched in the shadows and a single swing sat crookedly in the parched grass, its frame rusted and peeling.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ the boy said, opening the door (making his escape), but before he could get out, Amber reached out and grabbed a fistful of his T-shirt. She pulled him towards her and kissed him; not a long kiss, but a hard, unflinching one, and as she released him, her eyes slid sideward to meet Sadie’s in the mirror.

  When they were back on the road, Sadie said, ‘You’re drunk.’

  Amber simply shrugged, alone in the empty back seat. Neither of them had thought to suggest she climb into the front.

  Sadie tried again; tentative, on unfamiliar ground. ‘You’re too young to be drinking, Amber.’

  Just a laugh this time; a small, bitter sound. Her daughter’s face turned away from her.

  Sadie relented. They drove on.

  ‘Urgh.’

  Amber rolled on to her back and pulled the duvet over her face. The sun was streaming through the window; she had forgotten to close the blind before she fell asleep. She lifted her head, glancing down at her body under the cool white canopy of the duvet. She had also forgotten to change out of her clothes. Or – she turned and glanced at the pillow; the ghost of her face smeared there – take off her make-up.

  She lay back down and did a quick assessment. Mouth thick and a little furry; a faint taste of whisky lingering. She felt otherwise pretty OK, considering. She was fairly sure hangovers were a myth. Just another thing that existed only in her mother’s head.

  Eyes closed, she tried to go back to sleep. But now she was thinking about last night, running it over in her head. She’d had fun. Everyone had had fun. Hadn’t they?

  Mica and Alisdair had spent a lot of time together. They always seemed to spend a lot of time together lately. Plus there had been that throwaway comment from Alisdair about some gig the two of them had been to – Amber didn’t remember receiving an invitation to that.

  She knew exactly why it was happening. Since Sadie had come back, her two best friends had changed around her. It was like they expected something from her – like they were waiting for her to talk to them about how she was feeling about it all. Amber had no intention of doing that. That stuff was private, it was hers. If Mica and Alisdair thought she was going to start opening up about how sad it was to be abandoned as a baby, about how weird it was to suddenly call someone who was basically a total stranger ‘Mum’, they obviously didn’t know Amber at all. And Amber couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps the reason they had changed was that they were too weirded out by the whole thing (and who could blame them?) or – worse – that they felt sorry for her. She couldn’t bear that.

  On the other hand, Alisdair had stolen the whisky from his dad’s drinks cabinet for them. And Mica did buy her the black crop top she’d been eyeing up online for weeks.

  She fished around under the pillows and found her phone. She’d dropped it at a party a month ago and the screen was spiderwebbed with cracks, the photo of herself and Mica she kept as her background splintered from the centre. She unlocked it; a missed call from Alisdair a couple of hours ago, when he would have been on his way to his early shift at the bakery in town. She relaxed a bit more. Still number one.

  She had a text too, from Jake – that was kind of a surprise, after how totally weird Sadie had been the whole car ride home. Sweet dreams followed by a blowing-kiss emoji. She rolled her eyes. So predictable. Delete.

  There was a knock at her door and she flopped the duvet back off her face. ‘Yeah?’

  Miles poked his head in. ‘Morning, baby girl. Can I interest you in some bacon?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ she said, and when he closed the door she got up and stripped out of her clothes. She pulled on clean pyjamas from the drawer, rubbed a baby wipe over her face and pulled her hair into a neater ponytail. She checked her reflection in the mirror above her dressing table. Much better. She knew Miles didn’t like to think about her growing up. She often wondered if it was because she looked so much like Sadie. If he’d begun to think she might leave him too.

  Downstairs, Miles had opened both of the kitchen windows and the sharp green smell of cut grass threaded through the greasy steam rising from the frying pan. A lawnmower buzzed somewhere down the street. Amber pulled out a chair and watched him as he finished the bacon, dressed in his old, threadbare robe with the splashes of bleach down one side. His hair wet and slicked back from the shower. He whistled along to an old song she sort of recognised on the radio.

  ‘Madam.’ He handed her the finished sandwich, made exactly the way she liked it: slabs of white bread hacked thick from the loaf, ketchup spilling out of the edges.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy.’

  He pulled out the chair opposite and started in on his own (brown roll, brown sauce), the paper open beside him. Its pages drifted up in the breeze every so often; fluttered back down each time it retreated.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ The word unfamiliar in her mouth, which was strange. It wasn’t as if they had never talked about her. Yet now she was here, an actual person instead of a vague sort of nebulous concept, it felt wrong. Now that she was here and it was supposed to be normal – unlike in the first few days, when Miles had acted as if there were a unicorn sitting on the sofa and that any sudden movement or sound might scare it away – it felt odder than ever.

  ‘She’s not feeling great.’ He looked at her and winked. ‘She’s only got herself to blame though.’

  Amber glanced at the counter; a new empty wine bottle in a row of
empty wine bottles, waiting for her dad to take them out with the rest of the recycling. There were always bottles there now and they always made her think of the nursery rhyme, sent it circling through her head. Ten green bottles hanging on the wall. It was usually in her mum’s voice even though she knew she couldn’t possibly actually remember Sadie singing it to her. And if one bottle should accidentally fall.

  Miles glanced up. ‘Oh, speak of the devil. Ears burning, honey?’

  Amber looked at Sadie and then back at her sandwich. She wondered if Sadie was angry with her about last night – which seemed kind of hypocritical, with the row of bottles standing sentry on the side. The wind picked up; the paper’s pages skittering up and over, the window sucked open with a shriek. Sadie went over to it and tugged it shut, followed by the other for good measure. The sudden silence felt loaded but then most of them did, in this house now, and so Amber carried on eating.

  The fridge screamed next, its door tugged open by Sadie, who leaned against it for support as she studied the shelves. Miles met Amber’s eye over the table and smiled. As if the two of them were the parents, the ones who knew better, and Sadie their teenage child. As if it wasn’t completely obvious that it was Miles and Sadie now, that it always had been, and that it was Amber who was surplus to requirements. She dropped her sandwich back on to the plate and pulled the paper towards her, ignoring him.

  Sadie, giving up on the fridge, poured herself a cup of coffee from the cafetière on the counter and sat down at the end of the table, leaving two seats between herself and the others. She wrapped her hands around the mug as if for warmth and looked tentatively at both of them before looking away.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ Miles said, beaming at them both. ‘Saturday morning breakfast with my girls. What a treat.’

  Amber was annoyed with him and his optimism wore on her sometimes but it was also irresistible in its invincibility. She remembered making him cry once when she was a kid, the memory one of her most vivid. A stupid thing – Amber tired after a day playing at a friend’s, Miles insisting that it was time for bed. I wish my mum was here, she had shouted and the words had hit him like a slap – she had actually seen the impact, his jaw dropping from the hurt. He’d turned away before she could see him cry, but she had heard the tears there, she remembered the sound of them clearly. Go to bed, Amber, he had said, and she had done as she was told. She had done what he had told her ever since, because the image had stuck with her, the starkness of seeing Miles’s brave face, glass half-full persona slip the most frightening thing she could imagine. Miles was all she had and five-year-old Amber had been determined that she would not be the one to break him ever again.