The Turn of the Key

After I found the necklace I had scoured every inch of the room looking for trapdoors, loft hatches, hidden doors—but there was nothing. The Victorian floorboards ran from side to side in an unbroken line, the walls gave onto nothing except for the roof tiles, and I had moved every stick of furniture, looked at every inch of the ceiling from below. Whatever else I was unsure of, I was absolutely certain that there was no way in or out apart from the flight of stairs leading up from my room.

The moon was still high in the sky, but the clock above the stove had ticked through 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. when I at last heard tires on the gravel of the drive, whispered laughter outside the porch, and the sound of the front door swinging automatically open as someone activated the thumbpad lock. The door closed stealthily as the van drove off, and I heard cautious footsteps, and then a stumble.

My stomach flipped, but I forced myself to stay calm.

“Hello, Rhiannon.” I kept my voice level, and I heard the footsteps on the hallway flags freeze, and then an exclamation of disgust as Rhiannon realized she had been busted.

“Fuck.”

She walked unsteadily through to the kitchen. Her makeup was halfway down her face, and her tights were laddered, and she smelled strongly of some mix of sweet alcohol—there was Drambuie in there, I thought, and Malibu too, along with something else, Red Bull, perhaps?

“You’re drunk,” I said, and she gave a nasty laugh.

“Kettle, black. I can see the wine bottles in the recycling from here.”

I shrugged.

“Fair point, but you know I can’t let you get away with this, Rhiannon. I have to tell your parents. You can’t just walk out like that. You’re fourteen. What if something happened and I didn’t know where you were or who you were with?”

“Okay,” she said, slumping down at the kitchen island and pulling the biscuit tin towards her. “You do that, Rachel. And good luck with the fallout.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

As she picked out a biscuit and pushed the tin away, I took a biscuit too, dunking it calmly in my tea, though my hands were shaking a little beneath my careful control. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to tell your mum. If I lose my job, so be it.”

“If you lose your job?” She snorted derisively. “If? You’re delusional. You’re here under a fake name, probably with fake qualifications, for all I know. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up getting sued.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll take that risk. Now get upstairs and wipe that stuff off your face.”

“Fuck you,” she said, through a mouthful of biscuit, her words accompanied by an explosion of crumbs that spattered across my face, making me recoil, blinking and brushing fragments out of my eyes.

“You little bitch!” My temper, so carefully held, was suddenly fraying fast. “What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Yes, you. All of you, actually. Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to any of you? Do you actually want to be left here alone? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you keep being such a fucking bitch to the staff.”

“What the fuck do you know about it?” she spat, and suddenly she was as angry as me, pushing back her metal stool so that it toppled and fell with a ringing clang onto the concrete floor. “You can fuck off as far as I’m concerned, we don’t want you, we don’t need you.”

There was a biting retort on the tip of my tongue, but somehow, as she stood there, the kitchen spotlights making her tousled, tangled blond hair glow like fire, with her face twisted into a grimace of rage and pain, she looked so like Maddie, so like me, that my heart gave a little skip.

I remembered myself, age fifteen, coming in after curfew, standing in the kitchen with my hands on my hips, shouting at my mum, “I don’t care if you were worried. I never asked you to stay up; I don’t need you looking out for me!”

It was a lie, of course. A total lie.

Because everything I did, every test I aced, every curfew I broke, every time I tidied my room and every time I didn’t—all of it was aimed at one thing. Making my mother notice me. Making her care.

For fourteen years, I had tried so hard to be the perfect daughter, but it was never enough. No matter how neat my handwriting, no matter how high I scored in the spelling test, or how good my art project was, it was never enough. I could spend a whole afternoon coloring a picture for her, and she would notice the one place I had sneezed and jerked my pen across the line.

I could spend my Saturday tidying my room to perfection—and she would grumble that I had left my shoes in the hall.

Whatever I did was wrong. I grew too fast, my clothes were too expensive, my friends were too noisy. I was too chubby, or conversely, I picked at my food. My hair was too messy—too thick, too hard to tame into the neat plaits and ponytails she favored.

And so as I crossed the line from child to teenager, I began to do the opposite. I had tried being perfect—so then I tried being imperfect. I stayed out. I drank. I let my grades slip. I went from total compliance to serial defiance.

It made no difference. No matter what I did, I was not the daughter I should have been. All I was doing now was confirming that fact to both of us.

I had ruined her life. That was always the unspoken message—the thing that hung between us, making me clutch at her even harder as she pulled away. And at last, I couldn’t deal with seeing that truth in her face anymore.