Silas immediately lets go of Veronica’s arm. His face, a moment before full of solid rage, collapses like a building dynamited in slow motion.

  ‘She seemed a nice woman. Terrible mess, though. I wonder how she got that way?’

  Silas stares at her, but does not speak.

  ‘I think we’d better go inside,’ says Veronica, picking up her shopping bags.

  Inside, China registers the tension between Veronica and Silas when Silas simply heads upstairs without a word after China asks him if he wants a cup of tea. Veronica’s face, she notices, is dark and angry.

  ‘I wish everyone could just be happy,’ says China, pausing and fishing for teabags at the back of the larder.

  Kardashian pads across the room, settles herself on the sofa and closes her eyes.

  ‘You want to know what happiness looks like?’ says Veronica. ‘Happiness looks like that.’

  She points to Kardashian who appears, once more, to be insensible.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Silas sits on the bed in their bedroom, the door closed. He is holding one of the six scatter cushions as if for protection. Downstairs, China is preparing supper, cheerfully assisted by Mason.

  ‘Who was that woman?’ says Veronica, carefully inspecting Silas’s face for signs of deceit. ‘I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t really express to you how off-the-scale angry I am with you at this moment. Don’t make it worse. I’ll ask you again. And don’t forget, I already know the answer. This time tell the truth. Who was that woman?’

  Silas puts his face in the cushion then takes it out again.

  ‘She looked like someone I used to know.’

  ‘You seemed awfully keen to get away from her.’

  ‘She seemed a bit loopy.’

  ‘I don’t know. When I got speaking to her she seemed pretty sane. In a bad way, I suppose, but sane.’

  Silas looks up at Veronica. As usual, his eyes are sliding away from hers, not even catching her gaze for a moment. His face is naked now. It is, she suddenly realizes, a small boy’s face hidden behind the mask of a grown-up. His eyes are red-rimmed.

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘These are the crucial details, I think. She told me that she thinks she was married once. To – let me remember this correctly. Oh yes. To you. You had a child together. After the child was born, she suffered severe postnatal depression. After that happened, you abandoned her. You got a court order to keep her away from her own child. After you disappeared, she went back on to drugs. “Back on to” because she was into drugs before she had the child. In fact, you both were into drugs. In fact, you got her into drugs in the first place.’

  ‘That’s not… ’

  Veronica holds up a hand to stop him.

  ‘Not your turn yet. She came from a terrible background, a broken home. She was abused as a child. She was self-medicating with alcohol and you introduced her to heroin. She became a junkie. So did you. You recovered but she didn’t, even after she got pregnant. At that point, you became a heroic father, returning from the brink, and she became a fallen woman. She ended up broken, on the streets, anonymous, a nobody.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Silas, pointlessly zipping and unzipping the cushion cover.

  Veronica looms above the slumping figure in front of her.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say? That poor bloody woman. How she must have suffered.’

  Silas picks up another cushion and starts picking at the snake motif that is embroidered onto it.

  ‘It was much more complicated than it sounds.’

  ‘How much more complicated?’

  For the first time, Silas’s voice contains a note of defiance.

  ‘She was abusive. Dangerous. Out of control. I couldn’t risk her being around Mason.’

  ‘How long did you help her try to recover after she suffered post-natal depression?’

  Silas slowly shakes his head.

  ‘The doctors said… that it was likely to be chronic. That she was too damaged.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Veronica… ’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I thought it was best that we make a clean break. And so did the courts,’ he adds, defiant once more. But still his eyes slide. A silence falls. Eventually Veronica leans forward and puts her mouth near to Silas’s ear.

  ‘Do you know why I have put up with you all these years, Silas?’

  ‘Put up with me? That’s harsh.’

  His voice is meek again.

  ‘I’ll tell you. Because for all your faults – and there are many, many of them. Your meanness. Your cruelty to China. Your inability to create boundaries for Mason. Your pomposity and self-righteousness. Shall I continue?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish. The fact that you are shit in bed. Your fucking vegetarian lasagne. And the way you try to be the victim in everything you do. But all the same I chose to be with you. Do you know why?’

  ‘I expect you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Because despite everything else, I thought you were honest.’

  She allows the word to float in the air for a few seconds before continuing.

  ‘My marriage died because it was full of lies. I decided never to let that happen to me again. Never. I believed in you. I believed you.’

  ‘I am honest, Veronica. It was just… ’

  ‘Just this one little thing? That you’d been married before? That Mason had a mother? That the mother was living on the streets? That you had abandoned her to her fate? Is that what the word “just” represents? That’s making it do an awful lot of work.’

  Silas tries to take Veronica’s hand but she pulls it away violently.

  ‘I made a mistake. But I still think it was best for Mason.’

  ‘I don’t care. The point is, you didn’t tell me about it.’

  Now, lost for anything further to say, she picks up an empty Habitat vase sitting on the bedstand and throws it against the wall. Amazingly, it doesn’t shatter but bounces back and sits limply on the floor as if stunned.

  ‘You didn’t tell me anything, Silas. After I trusted you.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Silas flatly. ‘Guilty. So. What do we do now? How do we fix this?’

  ‘Always the practical one, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with being practical, is there? We could see a therapist perhaps,’ he says hopefully. He stands and picks up the vase and replaces it on the bedstand, adjusts it so it lies in the centre of the space.

  ‘You don’t get it do you? You lied to me.’

  ‘I never said anything.’

  ‘You can lie just as much by not saying anything.’

  Instead of returning to sit on the bed, Silas goes to sit at the workstation. He glances at Veronica’s still-open email with its subject line, ‘Forgiveness’, but it does not register, and he idly closes the laptop so that Veronica doesn’t think he is snooping. For the first time when he looks back at Veronica, he allows his eyes to meet hers for an instant before they glide away once again, mercury on glass.

  ‘Listen, Veronica. Mason has become very attached to you. I wanted you to be a mother figure for him and you have been. I think he has learned to love you.’

  ‘Why are you bringing this up now?’

  ‘I’m just trying to make you see the implication if you… if you… ’

  ‘Leave you?’

  Silas nods.

  ‘So now you’re trying emotional blackmail. You must be scared.’

  Silas suddenly looks as if he is about to weep. His expression contorts into slightly forced wretchedness.

  ‘I am.’

  Veronica regards him coolly, as if looking at a complete stranger.

  ‘You’d better get used to it. You might benefit from getting to know what it feels like to be scared. How some people are scared every day of their lives. What it makes them do.’

  They go downstairs to the kitchen without saying another word. Mason and China have disappeared. After a while, Silas goes to the fridge searching for a snack. But when he closes the door, he is holding one of China’s bottles of Budvar. He hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since Veronica has known him.

  He reaches for the bottle opener.

  ‘You touch a drop of that stuff and I’m out the door,’ says Veronica.

  ‘It’s for you,’ says Silas, prising off the cap.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’ says Veronica.

  ‘About what?’ says Silas, handing her the bottle.

  ‘About her.’

  For the first time, Silas looks Veronica directly in the eye and holds her gaze.

  ‘I’m going to go and find her again tomorrow. And I’m going to try and help her.’

  ‘Correct answer,’ says Veronica, her voice steely.

  She feels the beer, cold and startling, in her throat.

  * * *

  Later that same evening, Sarah Hilyard waits for the coach near the Brighton seafront, in the shabby mess that is Pool Valley Coach Station. She is clean, and her clothes are tidy – a pair of jeans she has bought in Primark and a simple white blouse from a charity shop. Her backpack is still stuffed, but the contents are clean and in some semblance of order.

  She knows she cannot stay here on the coast. The past is too heavy a burden and she isn’t ready to confront it. Silas was right to drive away from her. She knows that the woman will come looking for her – perhaps with Silas. Perhaps with Mason, too.

  She can’t face it.

  She climbs on. The driver smiles at her and she smiles back. She hasn’t smiled like that – so casually, so reflexively – for a long time. She takes her seat and puts her knapsack on the rack above her head. Inside, there is a full supply of medication she has been taking every day. And every day, she feels clearer. She has no plans, but she also feels the weight of no unexploded bombs inside her either. The urge to self-destruct has been fading. What will happen in London is unknown, but it is at least a known unknown. Brighton is her past. You can’t go back, she decides firmly.

  She thinks once more of Mason, sitting in the back of the car by the traffic lights, as the coach pulls away. He has grown so handsome and strong. The women sitting with him seemed like good women. The woman who came and talked to her was a good woman too. Sarah was sure of it.

  Mason was in good hands.

  The coach heads out of the Brighton Road towards the M25, which is the part of this journey she has always liked most. She loves the ring road, the sense that she is just going round and round, and round and round, a life of circling without the pain of leaving or arriving.

  But she is getting somewhere all the same, she now feels convinced of it.

  August 2020: Brighton

  Frankie and China are spread on beach towels on the hard pebbles of Brighton beach. It is a perfectly still day – there is barely a ripple in the waters of the English Channel. The temperature is touching 30 degrees centigrade. Frankie sits up and begins to rub himself over with factor-20 sun lotion. All around them there are seething crowds, but they have carved out territory for themselves with a strategically placed windbreaker. Previously, they spent an hour on the Palace Pier, eating doughnuts and chips and crashing bumper cars into one another. China has changed her mind about the Palace Pier – now it seems an affirmation of life, brash and cheerful, while the West Pier seems to her just a mess of untidy black bones.

  ‘I’m getting burned here,’ says Frankie. China doesn’t reply. She turns over onto her back to top up the tan she has been developing over the summer.

  ‘You be careful too, China. We’ve been out here for hours. You could get sunstroke.’

  He looks at her bare back where the tree tattoo is pebbled with droplets of perspiration. China is oblivious. She is listening to Kanye on her AirPods, which Frankie has not noticed are thrust into her ears, and looking at the Vice website on her phone. She has a large bottle of water which she periodically pulls on. Frankie leans over closer.

  ‘China! Can you hear me?’

  She takes an AirPod out of one ear. Her skin gleams with youth in the sun.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I said, you should be careful not to get sunstroke. Or you might set your tree on fire.’

  China nods and tries to twist round to see the small of her back.

  ‘Yeh, you’re right.’

  Frankie examines the tattoo. He squints carefully at what he had previously thought was black ink.

  ‘Is that tree blue…?’

  ‘In a certain light, I suppose,’ she says.

  Frankie cranes closer. The tattoo ink is definitely dark blue, he notes, with a rush of excitement. Not black, as he had previously thought. A Blue Tree.

  China checks her retro digital watch. Her phone pings with a text. She reads it and gives a short laugh.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Silas asking if I want a lift to my friend’s house later. He’s suddenly got a lot nicer for some reason. Weird. Shall we go for a swim?’

  ‘It’s cold in there. I only signed up for sunbathing,’ says Frankie, cracking open a can of beer that he has stored in a cooler pack. ‘How’s everything at home? How you getting along with Mason?”

  China squeezes the last of her sun lotion onto her collarbone.

  ‘He’s turning into a pretty good kid. We have a laugh, actually.’

  ‘You always said he was a nightmare.’

  China drops the empty lotion bottle into her bag and rubs the remaining lotion into her hands.

  ‘He was hurting. When you hurt, you turn into a nightmare. So then you can make sure other people hurt as much as you do.’

  Frankie takes a swig of the beer and gives a gentle burp.

  ‘Pardon me. And how’s your Mum getting on with wossisname?’

  ‘Up and down.’

  China tells him the story of their shopping trip – Veronica lighting a cigarette in the car, infuriating Silas to the point of apoplexy.

  Frankie considers this, sucking down the last of his beer.

  ‘That is strange. What did Silas do?’

  China stretches out, arching her back. A daisy-decorated football comes over from the nearby family group where the mother is playing with her infant daughter, who has kicked the ball in their direction. China gently rolls it back and the girl smiles and waves. China waves back.

  ‘He went fucking mental. And then – and this is the strange thing – a bit later he quietened right down. Hasn’t quite been the same arrogant, condescending prick since. It’s as if he was on probation or something. I don’t know. Come on, Dad, let’s have a swim.’

  ‘I told you. It’s cold in there,’ says Frankie, performing a mock shiver.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby. Mum goes in the middle of winter.’

  ‘Mum goes in the middle of winter,’ repeats Frankie in a mocking baby voice.

  China frowns, then gets up and slides her possessions under the towel. In the distance she can see low white clouds gathering.

  ‘By the way, Dad, thanks for offering to pay my tuition fees for uni.’

  ‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’

  ‘You’re going to need that money now you don’t have a job. Student loans are cheap. Anyway, it’s time I struck out on my own. I’ve got to make my own way.’

  ‘I’ll still give you something. Maybe help with the rent.’

  China shrugs and turns towards the sea.

  ‘Come on, then. Before the sun goes.’

  Frankie follows her gaze to the ocean. The low clouds seem to be drifting towards them at speed. He decides to rise to the challenge.

  ‘You are the most important person in the world to me, China,’ he says, getting to his feet.

  ‘You’re definitely one of the most important people in the world to me. Along with my mum, my friends and Kardashian.’

  ‘And Nodge,’ says Frankie.

  China suddenly looks earnest.

  ‘No. Not Nodge. I mean, obviously I like him more than you.’

  ‘Of course. What’s not to like? So how come I have risen above him in the charts?’

  China flicks a gobbet of sun cream that is still on her finger in the direction of Frankie and it lands on his stomach.

  ‘Because he’s not my dad. And you are.’

  Frankie grins, rubs in the sun cream and leaps to his feet.

  ‘I’ll show you what a baby I am.’

  Without waiting for China, he runs to the water’s edge, China chasing him. He is about to throw himself in, but, feeling the sudden cold on his ankles, slams to a stop and begins to pick his way, very slowly, through the pebbles, as the water rises to the level of his knees. Then China is next to him, hurling herself in recklessly. She surfaces from the trough of an incoming wave.

  ‘Fraidy cat.’

  Frankie feels embarrassed, but he hates cold-water swimming – he always has. He inches a little further forward. Now the water comes up to his thighs. China emerges from the ocean in front of him, glistening with water. She flicks a handful at Frankie’s chest.

  ‘Old man!’

  ‘Don’t!’ yells Frankie. ‘I mean it! I need to do this in my own time.’

  He immerses himself to his waist, all the time shivering and sharply drawing breath, while China dives and bobs around him. The crowd in the sea is almost as thick as the crowd on the beach, but about fifty feet further out, the crowd line breaks, and the sea is almost empty apart from a few dotted swimmers and surfboarders.

  Frankie finally works up the courage to take the plunge and thrusts his whole body under. The water, despite the heat of the day, feels shocking. His breathing increases and he breaks into a fast crawl away from the beach in order to get his metabolism working.

  Before he knows it, he has broken the crowd line and his skin has adjusted to the cold. He feels elated – refreshed by the water and bolstered by his own courage. He can see China twenty feet behind him moving towards him in long, slow strokes. The water is so calm, he kicks backwards to see if he can simply float on his back. But he finds himself tensing up, scared of sinking and choking on salty water. China, from nowhere, surfaces in front of him.