The Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

really don’t think you’d want to see the house, Pip. I think it’s too early.’
    ‘But … why ?’ Pip was crying now. ‘I want to, Mum! I want to see the house. Please!’
    Clare exhaled deeply and took Pip into her arms. She felt her shuddering and shivering inside her embrace. For days and days on end they could act like everything was normal, like they were on a lovely little adventure together. And then the reality of their situation would crash through the façade and they’d emerge like a straggle of pile-up survivors crawling from the wreckage. ‘Fine,’ she whispered into Pip’s hot ear. ‘Fine. We’ll go after school tomorrow.’
    ‘I’m not going!’ said Grace. ‘I never want to see that place again. I never even want to think about it.’
    Clare dropped her face on to the crown of Pip’s head. She kissed her hard, breathed her in. What was worse? Denial or fascination? She didn’t know.
    ‘Do you promise?’ said Pip, looking up at Clare through wet eyelashes.
    ‘Yes. I promise. We’ll go straight from school. But, Pip, be prepared for a nasty shock.’
    Pip nodded her head against Clare’s chest, tightened her arms around her waist, whispered thank you .
    The house was still shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. It looked monstrous between the immaculate houses on either side. The insurers still hadn’t settled and, given the circumstances, it was possible they never would. It was possible in fact that their beautiful house might sit shamefully like this forever.
    Pip’s hold on her hand tightened. ‘It looks scary,’ she said.
    ‘It is scary,’ said Grace.
    She’d come, in the end. At breakfast time she’d said, ‘It would be weird if you two had seen it and I hadn’t. I don’t want to. But I think I have to.’
    ‘Do you remember …?’ Pip began. But she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Because they all remembered – painfully, clearly. The late autumn night when the three of them had walked home from dinner at a local restaurant and found their house ablaze, their father standing on the pavement in his scuba-diving suit, waving his arms towards the flames, shouting out profanities and nonsense, his eyes wild with madness.
    Clare pushed open the metal gate and the girls followed her up the path towards what used to be the front hallway. She pulled back the plastic sheeting and swallowed hard. There it was, her home. A charred, buckled, disfigured nightmare.
    Luckily they’d had a joint account, she and Chris. Luckily everything Chris earned as an independent documentary maker was paid straight into their bank account and was easily accessible. But it wasn’t infinite. It would run out one day. And then what? Clare had no skills. No work experience. She could get a job at the school like some of the other mums, but that wouldn’t cover rent in central London. That wouldn’t keep the three of them fed and clothed. So she eked it out. Pound by pound. And hoped that at some point before it ran out Chris would be well enough to work again.
    The girls pushed open the front door. The ceilings were propped up here and there by long scaffolding poles. Clare could barely remember what they’d lost now. She saw blackened lumps of furniture that meant nothing to her any more.
    ‘I hate this, Mum,’ said Grace. ‘Can we go now?’
    ‘No,’ said Pip, ‘not yet. I want to see it. Properly.’ She walked ahead purposefully, looking this way and that as though evaluating the situation, as though preparing a report.
    Grace turned sharply towards Clare when Pip was out of earshot and said, ‘Why did you marry someone who was mad, Mum?’
    Clare swallowed. Neither of her girls had ever used the ‘M’ word before to talk about their father. She’d told them it was politically incorrect. That their father was mentally ill. She resisted the urge to reprimand Grace for the transgression and said, ‘I didn’t know he was.’
    ‘Yeah you