I won’t lay this at your door. I’ve been looking after her for the last six years; if there’s any fault to be found it’s probably mine.’ He gazed round the filthy room and shrugged. ‘I always encouraged her to bring her friends back here – I thought it was better to know where she was and who she was with – but they use the place like a doss house. I suppose I should employ a cleaner as Abbey refuses to clear up, but money is tight at the moment.’
‘Abbey and her friends did this?’ I looked round at the chaos with fresh eyes. ‘Don’t you supervise her at all?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s not a child any more. When she bothers to get out of bed in the mornings she goes to college and I suppose I’ve let her do her own thing. No one supervised me when I was that age. Anyway I have to work to keep this roof over our heads.’
I put a hand to my head. Of course, Abbey’s birthday was at the end of October. She’d still been ten and a half in the April when I’d left for the jump, which made her sixteen, almost seventeen now.
I ran a hand over my face. ‘Oh, Calum.’
‘Don’t you dare judge me, not after running out on us like that.’ I could hear the anger rising in his voice again.
‘I’m not judging you. It sounds as if you’ve done your best.’ We subsided into silence once more but at least he wasn’t throwing me out into the street. ‘Look, I only came to tell you I’m back before you found out from the police or the newspapers or something.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s the truth. And I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you, Calum. And the parachute jump itself wasn’t that dangerous anyway, I survived it, didn’t I?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Look, I think I’d better go.’ I got to my feet. ‘Could I use your phone to call my mum? She or Dad could come and collect me.’
He reached out unexpectedly and caught my hand. ‘Do you really not know about your parents?’
My heart pounded as I looked at him. I suddenly remembered Kevin’s comment at Matt’s house earlier. ‘What about them?’
‘There’s no easy way to say this. Your father died four years ago; two years after you went missing.’
I stared at him as the words sunk in. Then I gave a strangled cry and put my face in my hands. ‘No!’ Dad couldn’t be dead, I thought; how could that be? He’d always been so full of life, such a constant part of my existence. I thought of the dashing rather handsome middle aged man who had been the centre of my universe when I’d been growing up.
‘At the beginning he and your mother flatly refused to believe you were dead.’ Calum was continuing as if the bottom hadn’t just dropped out of my world. ‘After the police enquiry went cold they spent all their waking hours putting up posters and leaflets, asking people if they’d seen you. Your father’s heart gave out suddenly one day while he was out for the umpteenth time questioning people who lived in out-lying areas near the airfield. They took him to the hospital but he was pronounced dead on arrival. Your mother thought he didn’t put up much of a fight, because he was ready to die … to go to you.’ It was an accusation. ‘I think even he gave up on you at the very end.’
The tears I’d been holding back flowed freely down my face now and were dripping off the end of my chin. ‘I must go to Mum.’
Calum lowered his eyes and looked away, his face taut.
‘What?’ I cried in alarm as I saw the discomfort in his face. ‘What else has happened?’
‘Your mother never really recovered after losing you. When your father died, it was too much for her and she retreated into a world of her own. She’s suffering from clinical depression and is in a nursing home for the mentally ill, Kaela. Your parents’ house was sold to pay for it.’
I registered his use of my nickname, the name my family and close friends used.
I looked up at him with my tear-stained face and realised he was observing me with some sympathy now, the earlier hostility gone, or at least tucked away out of sight.
‘Where is this home? Can you give me the address?’
‘You don’t have to go straight away, Kaela. Maybe you should sit a while to get over the shock.’
‘I thought you wanted me gone.’ I was angry now, my head reeling from his revelations.
He pressed his fingertips to his forehead and shook his head. ‘I never wanted you gone, Kaela. There was a time I’d have given anything to have you back, to feel your body against mine again. I just can’t get my head round the fact that you’ve been out there, alive and well all this time; that your parents were right all along.’
‘I didn’t leave any of you on purpose.’ I was furiously sniffing back the tears. ‘I cared about you, Calum. I adored you from the first moment I met you.’ I lowered my voice an octave. ‘Do you remember you were wearing that strange quilted waistcoat under your jacket like Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary? I still feel like that about you. As far as I’m concerned I climbed out of your bed only yesterday morning. I don’t know where the last six years have gone.’ I sighed wretchedly. ‘And I’m having trouble assimilating everything you’ve told me.’ I gazed miserably into space feeling almost totally numb.
He lowered his hands and stared at me again as if trying to decide whether I might be telling the truth. I returned his look as calmly as possible, though the tears were still running down my face.
‘If you truly believe that, then as I said earlier, you need to see someone, Kaela. And the police should be informed that you are alive and well.’
I found I could barely think, but made a supreme effort to pull myself together. ‘Matt and Kevin have given me two hours before they call the police. I insisted on seeing you first.’
He bristled again at the mention of Matt’s name, but then seemed to give in.
‘And I haven’t been very hospitable. I think I’m still in shock. Do you still want to see Abbey before you go?’
Tearing my thoughts away from the plight of my parents I tried to stay focused. ‘What will Abbey make of me being back?’
‘At the moment she’s not in any state to say anything. She’s still sleeping off the effects of last night.’
‘And when she wakes up?’
‘She’ll probably hate you,’ he said with the beginnings of a sympathetic smile. ‘She seems to hate everyone at the moment, but deep down she really misses you. I think she thought you’d left because of her behaviour towards you.’
‘Have you taken her to see anyone, to get professional help?’
Calum looked at me blankly and I assumed he hadn’t. That poor child, I thought. First losing her real mother and then being left to think I’d abandoned her because of something she’d done.
At that moment the door to the sitting room opened and a strange apparition appeared in the doorway. The creature was dressed in a long, black, jagged hemmed skirt, which ended above the ankles, revealing what looked like army issue boots. Her top half was barely covered by a skimpy black and purple top. Her hair, part of which was piled high on her head in a messy fifties bee-hive, was dyed jet black with purple streaks. But it wasn’t so much the hair or the deathly make-up and eyebrow and nose piercings that made me stare, but the terrible self-inflicted scars and tattoos which were etched into both her arms.
‘Abbey?’
Her eyes rested on mine beneath their thick kohl liner and widened in shock. Her already chalk white face blanched even further, and clutching one hand to her mouth and the other to her stomach, she turned and threw up all over the carpet.