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‘Hey, what the fuck?’ challenged a boy who was swaying so badly it was a wonder he was still upright.
I spun around, but before I could say a word the boy’s eyes had travelled beyond me to Mitch. I’m not sure if it was his height or breadth that brought about the teenager’s sudden change of attitude, and frankly I didn’t care either way.
‘My bad,’ he mumbled, slinking back into the shadows.
I strode into the house, with Mitch right behind me. It was the smell that hit me first: alcohol and warm sweaty bodies and pungent pockets of weed that hung like clouds in the confined hallway. It was an older property, and even before the spilled drinks and cigarette burns, it must have been pretty rundown and ramshackle.
This was no place for anyone’s sixteen-year-old daughter… especially mine.
We headed straight for the stairs. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I asked a young man who was propping up a wall in the hallway.
‘What? Who the hell are you?’
‘Who she is, doesn’t matter,’ Mitch said, his voice perfectly controlled and almost pleasant. ‘ButIam the guy you really don’t want to piss off. So would you mind answering her question.’
‘There’s two bathrooms. One on each floor,’ said the boy, trying to hold on to a degree of swagger that was fast evaporating. ‘It’s not a public convenience, you know,’ he added as an afterthought. But his words were wasted as we were already halfway up the stairs.
The first door we tried was a bedroom. There was a bed, currently occupied, with a duvet moving in a fairly unmistakable way. I slammed the door shut without bothering to apologise to the couple who probably hadn’t even realised they’d been disturbed. The second door I tried was the bathroom. Thewrongbathroom. It was empty.
‘Next floor,’ said Mitch, leading us towards the flight of stairs.
‘Hope, are you up here?’ I called out before we’d even crested the landing. There were four doors on this storey and all of them were closed. ‘Hope? Can you hear me?’
If I live to be a hundred, I don’t think I will ever feel as grateful as I was to hear her voice calling out in reply. ‘I’m in here.’
I hurried towards the door and pressed down on the handle. It was locked.
‘Hope, open the door, sweetheart.’
There was the sound of a key grating uselessly within the lock. ‘I can’t move it. It’s stuck.’
The frustration of being so close to her and still just out of reach frayed my already tattered control.
‘Step back,’ said Mitch. It was an instruction I’d heard in countless movies, but never before in real life. I looked at the solid bathroom door and then at Mitch, wondering which might shatter first, the frame or his shoulder. ‘Hope, try the key again,’ I urged, leaning my weight against the locked door to help her. The click of the barrel rolling within the mechanism was the best sound ever.
The door swung open, and there stood Hope, looking far more like the six-year-old little girl I had first met than ever before. The make-up that I’m sure she’d applied with great care was now smeared over her cheeks like war paint, and her pale skin was clammy with sweat. Her long dark hair was a tangled mess. She looked like a shipwreck survivor. There was a sour aroma in the air, that got stronger as she fell into my arms.
‘I threw up. Twice,’ she said miserably, before dissolving into sobs against my shoulder.
‘Come on,’ I said, as I rocked her gently in my arms. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
She took my arm, leaning heavily on it as we descended both flights of stairs. We were almost at the door when a voice from the throng of bodies behind us called out Hope’s name. My fingers unconsciously curled into a fist as we turned around to face the boy who I sincerely hoped was about to become my daughter’s ex-boyfriend. I looked down at my hand almost in surprise. Had I been worrying about the wrong parent and their volatile temper? It took quite an effort to force my fingers to relax out of the fist.
‘Hope. Where are you going? The party’s not over yet,’ the boy slurred, slopping some of the contents of the can he was holding all over his feet.
‘I’m going home,’ Hope said quietly.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ the boy continued, taking a step towards us. I made a small noise that sounded practically feral, shocking me almost as much as it did him. And yet even drunk and dishevelled, I could see the boy’s appeal. He was magazine-model good looking, and I wasn’t entirely proud of the fact that I wanted more than anything to punch him squarely on the nose.
‘Well you weren’t looking very hard, were you,’ I said, acid dripping from my words.
Almost as though he hadn’t even seen us before, Hope’s boyfriend turned to look at me and then did a small double take. ‘Who are you? You two look like twins,’ he said, squinting his eyes. ‘Well, kind of.’
This time it was Hope who made a sound of disgust. ‘This is my mother.’
It felt like a good exit line. We turned back to the door and the cool, fresh, night air had just hit my face when I heard another voice say with feeling: ‘Definitely a MILF.’
For a big man, Mitch could move surprisingly quickly. He was a mountain of fury as he stared down at the boy who now looked like he seriously regretted his lewd comment. I laid my hand lightly on Mitch’s arm, shocked at the tension I could feel thrumming within it.
