Page 74 of All the Things We Never Knew

I felt a stab of guilt. That woman was a better mother than I was – keeping her children close to her, looking after them, protecting them from harm. Of course Lulu shouldn’t have gone off on her own – but I should have been there, been with them, being their mother.

By the time I eventually made it back to Damask Square it was mid morning and my guilt hadn’t subsided. It gnawed at me, taking turns with surges of panic at what might have happened to Lulu in my absence. I let myself into the house, calling out that I was home, but there was no answer from the kids; only Augustus came padding up the stairs to meet me.

‘Barney? Lulu?’ I called out anxiously.

‘I’m in the kitchen.’ Barney’s voice drifted up, along with the smell of burned toast.

When I went downstairs, I found him there, surrounded by an empty can of tuna, an open packet of bread and smears of mayonnaise. He gave me a brief recap of the previous night’s events, saying that he didn’t know where Lulu had been then, but she was in her bedroom now.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to her. Barney – I’m sorry.’

I pulled him into my arms and held him tight. His head came almost up to my chin – my big boy, but still a child. A child I should have protected, and hadn’t.

He looked at me in surprise. ‘That’s okay.’

‘I love you, you know.’

‘Love you, Mum,’ he said around a mouthful of tuna melt.

Lulu’s bedroom door was closed. I tapped and then, when there was no reply, opened it. She was lying face down on her bed and she was crying.

All my anger evaporating, I hurried over and sat down next to her.

‘Hi, darling.’

The only response was a fresh outpouring of sobs.

‘What happened last night?’ I asked. ‘You can tell me.’

She cried a bit more and I waited, stroking her hair, feeling sorrow and guilt twisting my insides like a vice. At last she turned over and I took a tissue from next to the bed and wiped her eyes.

‘I went to see Callum,’ she said, almost wearily.

Cold fear gripped me. ‘Right. Who’s Callum?’

‘He’s a boy – a guy. I met him when I was in the park roller-skating with Aisha.’

‘Does he go to your school?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s got a job.’

A job? How old is this Callum? But I didn’t ask that. ‘Go on.’

‘I was with him that other – last time. When you grounded me I couldn’t see him but we texted and… stuff. And we were texting yesterday evening.’

I was appalled. I could guess what form that texting had taken. How dare he do that to my daughter? And what had Lulu been thinking? I’d warned her about things like that – about sending photos from her phone. But I’d left her alone – this was on me.

‘He asked me to go meet him,’ she went on. ‘He was, like, begging. He said he missed me so much. So I went, instead of going to meet Laurel.’

‘And what happened?’

She put her hands over her face and turned away from me. ‘I went to his place. And I – we had sex. Then he brought me home in his car.’

His place? God. My little girl, alone with a man old enough to have a job and a car. Anything could have happened. Anything did happen.

‘And now’ – she burst into a fresh storm of tears – ‘this morning, I went to message him and he’s blocked me on everything. He’s ghosted me, Mum.’

FORTY-THREE