Departure

‘Departure’

Angela took one last, lingering look at the house before loading

the final case into the boot of her car. It was no understatement

to say she had loved the very bricks of that house; had enjoyed

even the most menial tasks; scrubbing the black slate floor of

her kitchen til it shone; bleaching every inch of her expensively

tiled bathroom until it gleamed brighter than her expensively

whitened teeth….of course, He had wanted her to get a cleaner,

stating it was common for her to do such chores, hadn’t He

taken her away from all that? What was it she wanted, to go

back to her single- mother- in- a- council- flat existence,

struggling to keep the electric meter topped up? The scorn in

His voice had lowered her head and flushed her cheeks, but still,

she had never got on with any of the cleaners He had employed

– particularly the blonde European girl with the too-knowing

smile – until He had, eventually, given up and left her to it.

Yes, leaving her home behind was a wrench, and she could feel

tears building in her eyes as she shut the boot and slipped into

the driver’s seat, blinking them away as she smiled in the rear-

view mirror at her son.

“Are we going on holiday Mummy?” Adam asked, pausing

briefly in his demolition of a king-size Snickers.

“Sort of darling”, her voice sounding falsely upbeat, almost

harsh against the bright spring morning and background bird

song. It was the perfect kind of morning to be going on holiday,

she thought ruefully, fastening her seatbelt and starting her car.

The dashboard clock said 10:30; she was in plenty of time to

make her ‘welcome appointment’ as the woman on the phone

had called it, in a cheery, country sort of voice that had made

Angela think of characters from a Josephine Cox novel. She felt

a shiver of apprehension as she pulled out of the driveway,

having no real idea of what to expect at the other end, but

determined to stay cheerful (telling herself it was for Adams

sake, though knowing it was purely to stave off the growing

feeling of anxiety curling in the pit of her stomach) she turned

on the CD player and selected Kylies Greatest Hits. Fittingly, an

album He had hated.

“Turn it up Mummy, turn it up!” Adam yelled excitedly as

Better the Devil You Know blasted its way through the car,

making Angela chuckle, pretending to adjust the volume button

though in truth it was already on maximum. Adam sang his way

lustily through six tunes before falling asleep, his head at an

awkward angle, chocolate smeared around his mouth that even

now at the age of six still had the same cherubic pout he had had

as a baby. He had been a good baby, clockwork with his feeds

and naps and sleeping through the night from ten weeks

onwards. In spite of His opinion that Angela had been falling

apart before He came along and rescued her, in truth she had

been quite happy with Adam in their little flat; close to her

family and friends and with a part-time job in the bakery below.

It had not been His high-flying job or expensive suits and

promises of a better way of life that had seduced her but the way

He had listened to her as if she was someone important,

someone worthwhile; the way He had automatically accepted

Adam and defended her against His mother whose opinion of

unmarried single mothers belonged firmly back in the 50s….and

the way that, even for a long time after she had realised the

truth, her heart would leap when He walked into the room….

Suddenly irritated, Angela turned off the stereo and pulled down

the visor to shield her eyes from the sun, then reached over to

turn on the sat nav, blinking back sudden and unwelcome tears

that felt more angry than sad. How had she ended up here, like

this? She had been the golden girl as a child, the clever one who

was going to go far and make it out of their rough

neighbourhood, her mother had drilled into her, constantly, that

she was the pretty, smart one of the family; that she had chances

her brothers would not. That her mother herself had not. Well

she had got out, hadn’t she, married a rich man and moved to an

affluent area and was driving around in a top-of-the-range two

year old car; her life consisted of a part-time clerical job in her

husband’s cousin’s insurance firm and lunching with her

husband’s friends wives and their horrible children. Only rarely

had she managed to escape His watchful eyes and go back to

visit her own friends and family, though she had hardly seen her

mother lately, there had been too much to hide…because the

change in lifestyle, the socialising with people she had nothing

in common with and the mind-numbingly boring job would

have been bearable had He remained the man she thought she

had fallen in love with.

It was just after half-eleven when she parked outside a fairly

average looking terraced house in an average looking inner-city

street and smiled tentatively at the woman waiting outside for

her. Adam began to stir as the motion of the car stopped,

looking around him with that adorable crinkly-eyed look he had

upon waking.

“Mummy I need a wee” he stated grumpily, seemingly

unconcerned as to his new surroundings. Angela got out of the

car and looked over at the woman and the house. A ‘safe house’

the cheery-voiced contact on the phone had called it and to

Angela it seemed to embody exactly that; normality, safety, a

house much like the one she had grown up in.

The woman, a middle-aged lady with an ill-fitting striped skirt

and a Deirdre Barlow perm came over, smiling kindly at Angela

and extending her hand.

“I’m Sue. Would you like a hand with your cases?” as if she did

this sort of thing every day. But then, Angela reflected, she

probably did. Returning her smile, Angela stretched out her own

slim, perfectly manicured hand, noticing in the bright sunlight

that already, the bruises were fading.