His Secret Family by Ali Mercer

Author:Ali Mercer [Mercer, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: urn:ean:9781838881030
Publisher: Bookouture

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My sense of moral superiority did not last much longer. It didn’t feel like a decision to do something bad, though. It felt like a fait accompli.

I went to bed at the same time as Ellie – later than usual for her, early for me. Then I couldn’t sleep. I was plagued by a general sense of dread about everything. There were the exams, the visit to Mark’s three-bedroom new-build house, the schools I might go to. The wedding, with nobody we knew there to wish us well. Mark’s mother, who was going to be supervising us even though I was perfectly capable of looking after Ellie myself, and often had.

And then I’d be starting over. No more Molly, no more Jasmine, no more Brian looking fit from a distance. No more Toby.

No more of our flat. No more of nice old Peter Carman, the downstairs neighbour, tending his roses and inviting Mum down for sherry and opera. No more of the nurses upstairs, coming home at odd times after night shifts or nights out.

No more London.

OK, so we weren’t in London proper but we were close enough for a bit of its dirty glamour to rub off. I didn’t know much about the countryside apart from that there was plenty of empty space, there was nothing to do and people were nosy. Our neighbours were easy to get away from: all we had to do was make a short journey by bus or train to lose ourselves in crowds of people all minding their own business, none of whom knew or cared who we were. In the countryside it would be different. People might be curious about us. We’d probably have to make the effort to be nice to them.

London let us be. The countryside would kill us slowly and watch us die.

It wasn’t right. It was all happening too fast and I had no say in any of it. If Mum was so desperate to reunite with my father and have another baby, couldn’t she at least have had the decency to wait till I’d left home?

I tried to like the idea of a little baby arriving in our lives, but it really didn’t come naturally. Shauna Perritt from the year above had got pregnant before GCSEs and had to leave the school; I’d seen her since a couple of times, walking round pushing a pram looking like she didn’t know what had hit her. I’d peered into the pram and said polite things like you were meant to do, but all I was thinking was, There is no way I am ever, ever letting that happen to me.

The longer I lay in bed thinking about all of this, the less likely it seemed that I would ever get off to sleep. And there was Ellie right next to me, the supposedly neurotic and anxious one, sleeping like a… sleeping like a baby. Like babies didn’t, usually. I remembered that much from when Ellie was little. Once Mum had given birth, we were in for a whole lot of screaming and crying.

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