‘Did your dad do this to you?’ Nancy asked.
Our whole family knew about Conor’s dad, and my parents did not approve of Nana getting involved. They viewed spending what they saw as their inheritance on Conor’s father’s rehab as a waste of time and money. My mother had been waiting for the moment when she would be proved right. Conor looked away and stared at Blacksand Bay down below the cliffs. Nancy tried again, softening the edges of her words.
‘You don’t need to say it out loud if you don’t want to, but I do need to know what happened, Conor. Did your father do this to you? Nod or shake your head.’
Conor stared at her, but he didn’t move his head or even blink.
‘Jump in the back seat,’ she said, and he did as he was told, sliding in beside me. He stank of blood and sweat.
My mother was more than capable of hurting her own children behind closed doors – albeit only with words – but she could not tolerate the thought of any other child coming to harm. The car’s brakes squealed as we pulled up outside Conor’s dad’s cottage, the one Nana had lovingly renovated a couple of years earlier. Sadly, people can be harder to restore than places.
‘Stay there, both of you,’ Nancy ordered.
She got out of the spotlessly clean Mini and tutted at the state of Conor’s dad’s blue Volvo. It was so dirty, I couldn’t read the number plate, even though we were parked right behind it.
‘He’s going to kill someone driving drunk along that cliff road one day,’ she muttered, and I watched, with my face pressed against our car window, as Nancy marched up to Conor’s house. I started whispering under my breath, waiting for my mother to strike like lightning.
One Mississippi . . . Two Mississippi . . . Three Mississippi . . .
I didn’t have long to wait.
‘Open this door,’ Nancy yelled, banging her fist on it. ‘My mother-in-law might have been taken in by you, but I know people like you never change. You are a disgrace of a man. Your son is sitting in my car looking broken, and I thought you might want to say goodbye before I take him back to Seaglass and make sure you never see him or hurt him again.’
Nancy had fallen for Conor by then, just like the rest of the women in the Darker family. We all wanted to protect him. It was instinct. Not something any of us thought to question, or knew how to explain. Like if you found an abandoned puppy: you couldn’t help wanting to protect him and give him a home.
I looked at Conor but he just stared at the floor of the car, his hands forming two little fists in his lap. The cottage door opened, and I could feel my heart beating so fast I thought it might burst right out of my chest. Then a man I didn’t recognize appeared in the doorway.
He looked like Conor’s dad, but at the same time, he didn’t. The man I had seen before was all too often a skinny, smelly, dirty man with torn clothes, a beard and long hair. This man stood tall with his head held high. His hair was neatly cut, his face was cleanly shaved. He’d put on weight, looked as though he’d been working out, and was dressed in clean clothes. I remember that his trousers and shirt seemed to have a ridiculous number of pockets and I wondered what he kept in them all. He folded his tanned arms and smiled. The world seemed topsy-turvy, as my mother – who thought she was the hero of this particular story – appeared to be in the wrong, while the baddie had become a calm, well-mannered, good-looking man.
‘Hello, Mrs Darker,’ he said, before inviting us all inside.
It turned out that Conor’s dad hadn’t started drinking again. Or hitting his son. I watched while he very slowly made some tea. He looked like a man who had never been in a hurry to do anything or get anywhere his whole life. Despite the slow motion, Mr Kennedy had very much got his life back on track, and was working as head gardener at a National Trust property a few miles away. That sounded good to me, but Conor said his dad was always careless with jobs and often lost them. Even before his mother died.
It turned out that Conor had been a little bit careless himself. He was getting into trouble at school, and was in a fight with a boy three years older than him that day. I found out later that the boy had been spreading rumours about Lily and Rose, and Conor was defending them. Lily – who loved Easter because of all the chocolate – had promised to give some of the local boys a peek inside her panties in exchange for an egg. The bigger the egg, the longer they got to look. She was eleven years old. That was just the start of my sister getting a name for herself for all the wrong reasons in Blacksand Bay. My mother, thankfully, never found out the truth.