The Argument Read online

  The Argument

  A gripping psychological thriller with an incredible twist

  Victoria Jenkins

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  THE ARGUMENT

  Victoria Jenkins

  * * *

  Represented by

  Anne Williams, KHLA

  [email protected]

  0776851889

  * * *

  Dear Diary,

  I will die if I don’t get out of here. My mother is suffocating me. I feel like every time I try to do anything she’s there, stopping me from living, trying to control everything I do. I don’t want to hate her, but sometimes I feel like I do, like hating her comes naturally and is the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes I think she doesn’t realise what she’s doing, then other times I think everything she does is intentional. Sometimes I think she’s enjoying making me feel this way, as though making me feel rubbish makes her feel better about herself and her own pathetic life. One of these days I’m going to just walk out of this house. I am going to disappear to a better life, somewhere she won’t be able to find me. I’ll make myself invisible so that nobody knows where I am, and when I’m gone, it’ll all be her fault.

  2

  One

  * * *

  Hannah

  * * *

  Rosie is asleep upstairs, tucked up safely in her bed. She is a good girl, she always has been; quiet, content; gentle. Not like her sister. Olivia is everything her younger sibling isn’t, wayward and unruly, forever wanting more, always questioning everything. Even in a few years from now, when Rosie reaches fifteen - an age Hannah appreciates many parents find a challenging time – she can’t imagine her acting as Olivia does. She can’t see her behaving in this way, leaving her here in ignorance, wondering where she is and who she is with, worrying whether she’s okay.

  Despite having been told over a week ago that she couldn’t go to the party, Olivia has snuck from the house like a thief and gone anyway. She mentioned it while they were all eating dinner together – a passing comment that neither Hannah nor Michael paid much attention to at the time - and Hannah didn’t think of it again after that, assuming it had been forgotten about. Michael isn’t home tonight, and Hannah doesn’t drive, and she realises her error in not asking Olivia where this party would be, but she hadn’t thought it necessary when they had made their feelings on the subject so clear. Even if she had access to a car, she has no idea where she might start looking for her daughter. Olivia had been told no. Hannah had naively thought that would be enough.

  Is this where it starts, she wonders? She has heard of other parents’ lamentations of the same; she knows that at a certain age, at a certain phase, all teenagers find their feet and start to break away, sometimes gradually, sometimes with one sharp and sudden heave that rips them from their mother and father with a separation that may remain permanent.

  It is happening already, Hannah knows that, and yet she has been lying to herself, denying what has been right in front of her all this time. From now on, will she watch her daughter slip away from her, bit by bit no longer her little girl?

  She goes into the kitchen and gets herself a glass of water, desperate to rid herself of the headache that pinches at her temples and threatens to swell into a migraine. She wonders if it is normal to feel this old at thirty-four, or if it is simply the effect of having had children at a young age. She knows she looks older than she is; she always has done. When she met Michael, she was seventeen, but he had thought her in her twenties. It was something she had always been quietly smug about back then, this looking older than she was, but now that time is really upon her and has started to move quicker in recent years, she wishes the reverse were true. How nice it would be to stop time, she thinks; not just for herself, but for her daughters too. Given the chance, she would have paused it a few years back, before Olivia became the way she now is.

  If Olivia knew the effect her behaviour had on her mother, would she do anything to change it? Hannah wonders. Sadly, she doubts it. She is beginning to think Olivia takes a perverse pleasure in causing her anxiety, and her recent tendency towards defiance suggests this is just the start of it all. Hannah doesn’t like to contemplate how far her older daughter will try to push her, so whenever the thought enters her mind, she tries to chase it away with another. Whatever comes next, Hannah hopes Olivia grows out of this phase quickly.

  The clock fixed to the wall above the microwave tells her it is already gone ten forty-five. Refilling her glass with water, she takes it into the living room and returns her attention to the iPad she has borrowed from Michael’s office along the hallway. She knows the names of some of the girls in Olivia’s school year, though she has never known her daughter to bother much with any of them. She rarely mentions their names, but then Olivia is a loner; she always has been. Hannah has no idea whose party it is; in truth, Olivia may have mentioned the name when she brought the subject up last week, but Hannah doesn’t remember what was said. Despite everything, she believed her little girl was still in there somewhere, caught amid the attitude and the defiance, and she had naively thought she would never defy her wishes in this way.

  She types the name of one of Olivia’s classmates into Google and waits for the results to load. She finds the girl on the second page, an Instagram account that is open for browsing to anyone who might chance upon it. Hannah isn’t particularly good with social media; it has never been something that interests her. Facebook was still in its infancy when Olivia was born, and by the time Hannah gave birth to Rosie everyone seemed to be using it. Up to her eyes in newborn paraphernalia and the debris that comes with an active five-year-old, the last thing she’d had time for was taking a peep at other people’s lives. She has never understood why anyone would want to document the details of their day-to-day existence for people they barely know and rarely see to follow, but apparently, she is in the minority. She is happy with her own life, content with everything she has. Or at least, she was, until just recently.

  She wonders where Olivia is and what she might be getting up to, knowing that if she allows it to, her mind will take her to places she doesn’t wish to go. She has been upstairs into her room; she has riffled through her daughter’s wardrobe to try to work out what she might have been wearing when she left the house this evening. Thankfully, her daughter doesn’t own anything inappropriate for her age. If Olivia was more streetwise, she would understand the dangers the world presents, particularly to a girl as young and as vulnerable as she is, but as she isn’t and she doesn’t, it is Hannah’s job as her mother to protect her. She just wishes that Olivia wouldn’t make that job so difficult sometimes.

  Her eyes widen at the sight that is Casey Cartwright’s Instagram profile picture. Hannah doesn’t understand what Instagram is, how it works or what the point of it is, but from what she sees here it appears to offer a platform for its users to flaunt anything that involves excess. It amazes her that the girl’s parents let her parade herself on the internet as she does. This photograph is available for anyone to see, showing Casey posing on a dancefloor, her rear end jutting to the camera in a dress that is so tight it appears to have been painted on. Her head is turned to the person taking the photograph, her m
outh parted in a consciously provocative and simultaneously gormless gape. She is just fifteen or sixteen years old, and everyone knows that these social media sites are dangerous places. It is easy for a person to pretend to be someone they’re not. The girl is leaving herself open to any kind of trouble, and no one seems to be there for her to stop it from happening.

  Though she knows her own daughter isn’t on Instagram, Hannah types in Olivia’s name, just to be sure. It wouldn’t surprise her to find that she has opened an account somehow, even if only to get at her parents in some way, but she is grateful when she doesn’t find her daughter among the list of other females of the same name. Olivia is showing an ounce of common sense where this is concerned, at least.

  At her side, Hannah’s mobile phone bleeps. It is a message from Michael.

  Sorry I haven’t called. Long day. Off to bed now – early start. Everything ok back home? x

  Michael rarely calls when he’s away with work; Hannah doesn’t expect him to be constantly in touch, not when his workload is so demanding and the trips so stressful for him. Two years ago, he was promoted to Senior Director with the supermarket chain he has worked for since she met him, and the job role has involved extensive travel within the UK. The meetings he attends sound long and tedious, and in the moments when he is in between work she doesn’t blame him for taking some time out for himself. She knows she would do the same if she was ever given the chance.

  She envies her husband, sometimes. Wouldn’t it be nice, she thinks, to spend a night alone in a hotel room, no matter how generic the place, with only the television and the click of the kettle to break the silence? She wouldn’t care about location or star rating, only about the opportunity for a night’s peace. Hannah has only begun to feel this way recently, and she realises that her envy has been instigated purely by their older daughter’s recent rebellious streak. It can be difficult to deal with alone, particularly when the conflict between them affects Rosie, and this is exactly what it has started to feel like, a conflict. A war has broken out between mother and daughter, though no one has explicitly announced its commencement.

  Hannah looks at the message. She knows she should tell Michael what has happened, she thinks, that Olivia isn’t there and has gone to that party, but it would only worry him. He is in Southampton, hours away from their home in Penarth in South Wales; he is too far to be able to do anything useful to help the situation, so what would be the point in spoiling his evening by causing him unnecessary concern? Instead, she sends him a reply that suggests everything is as normal.

  All fine here. Hope you get a good night’s sleep. See you tomorrow x

  Putting a kiss at the end of every text message seems to her a strange thing to do at their age, but Michael has always done it and Hannah has always reciprocated. He has his patterns and his routines, things that cement their days with a sense of familiarity and security – he still kisses her every time he leaves the house, as well as every time he returns home – and Hannah knows she should be grateful for these day-to-day things, for the stability they offer. If there is anything their family needs, stability is it.

  Hannah turns on the television and stares blankly at the muted screen for a while, but it is unable to keep her distracted from the collision of thoughts that has exploded in her brain. She has tried Olivia’s phone countless times. At first it kept ringing through to the answerphone. She left messages she knew would go ignored, each one becoming more frantic in tone. The last few times she has tried the number, the phone has been switched off. What if something happens and she is unable to get hold of Olivia? What if her daughter is alone and hurt somewhere, and no one knows that something has happened to her?

  Stop it, Hannah. She is allowing herself to overthink, letting her brain imagine the worst when she knows that the most likely end to her worry will be the sight of Olivia nonchalantly approaching the house, as though this is just any other evening. She will know that she has done wrong, but she’ll do everything she can to present a couldn’t-care-less attitude designed to irritate Hannah further.

  It is while she is considering this precise scenario that exactly this happens. At twenty past eleven the outside sensor lamp at the front door clicks on, illuminating the driveway in a puddle of soft white light. Olivia emerges from the stone pathway like a ghost, her footsteps crunching across the chippings. Her hair is pulled back messily, piled up on her head, and her face looks paler than usual. Hannah can’t avoid how slight how daughter looks, caught like this in the muted lighting. In recent months she has begun to fade away, refusing food and becoming a shadow of her former self. Hannah worries, though she suspects that it is yet another way in which Olivia is seeking rebellion.

  Olivia doesn’t raise her head to look at the front window, so she doesn’t catch a glimpse of her mother between the curtains, sitting at the window seat looking out for her, but she waits for her at the front door as though she has sensed Hannah’s presence there. She will know that those past few hours will have been consumed with worry, though Hannah suspects that Olivia won’t have given this a second thought.

  Hannah waits to hear the tap tap tap of her daughter’s knuckles on the front door before letting her into the house. Olivia steps past her wordlessly, stumbling to one side, and stoops to take off her shoes. She finds it hard to balance, and when her shoes are off and she is upright again, she refuses to make eye contact.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Hannah doesn’t know why she asks this when she already knows the answer. She realises now that the previous week’s, ‘Can I go to the party?’ had meant ‘I am going to the party’. Rather than reply with the obvious, Olivia offers her a shrug, and even that is given begrudgingly. She is wearing make-up that has smudged beneath her eyes, casting dark shadows beneath them, and it makes her look older than she is, world-weary in a way that suggests it is possible to be defeated at just fifteen.

  ‘I came back, didn’t I?’

  Her words are slurred and when she moves to head towards the stairs, Hannah stops her, reaching for Olivia’s arm. ‘In there,’ she says, gesturing to the living room.

  Olivia sighs loudly, the exhalation enough for her mother to catch the sickly scent of alcohol that lingers on her breath. Has she really been drinking? It seems obvious that she might have been when no doubt everyone her age at the party is likely to have done the same. Hannah feels her frustrations grow.

  She closes the living room door behind them, not wanting to disturb Rosie. ‘What’s going on?’

  Olivia folds her arms across her chest and turns her head to the darkened television, as though staring at a blank screen is preferable to engaging in an exchange with her mother. The framed photograph on the mantelpiece catches Hannah’s eye. It is a picture of the girls, Olivia aged eight and Rosie then just three years old. Olivia is wearing a school uniform, green cardigan top-buttoned over a grey pinafore dress; beside her, Rosie wears a grey dress of her own, unmatching, not yet graduated from nursery and too young to be wearing the same uniform as her sister. Even before she could speak, Rosie expressed a desire to be just like Olivia, following her around the house and mimicking her gestures. She would pull at her red curls, trying to straighten out her hair so that it would look just like Olivia’s. By the age of five, everything had changed, and Rosie had abandoned her adoration of her sister. Perhaps, even then, she was able to see what was becoming of Olivia.

  Hannah wishes she had seen what Rosie might have noticed all those years ago. Back then, perhaps she might have been able to do something about what would follow.

  ‘You went to that party,’ Hannah says, a statement rather than a question.

  Olivia shrugs again, answering her with silence.

  ‘We told you not to go.’

  ‘It was no big deal,’ she says, looking at the floor. ‘It was a house party, that’s all.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what or where it was. The fact is, we told you that you couldn’t go, and you went anyway.’r />
  ‘Why does it matter so much?’ The words are spat in temper and Olivia studies her mother with contempt, holding her mother’s eye with an unspoken challenge.

  ‘If you have to ask,’ Hannah tells her calmly, ‘then you already know.’

  Olivia rolls her eyes. Hannah hates it when she does that. It represents everything she never wanted her daughter to become, petulant and disrespectful, and though Hannah feels sure that so many well-intentioned people might try to reassure her that Olivia’s attitude comes with the territory of a teenager, she doesn’t know how long it is going to be reasonable to use her age as an excuse for her behaviour.

  ‘Why did going matter so much?’ Hannah asks.

  She wants to understand her daughter. She remembers what it is like to be her age; she can appreciate the restlessness and the sense of missing out that seem to so often afflict Olivia. She would never admit it and would hate to hear it, but she and Hannah are more alike than Olivia will let herself believe. The difference between them is that Hannah was given nothing, and Olivia has everything, if only she could just allow herself to realise it. It is the ingratitude that Hannah sometimes finds most difficult to tolerate.

  ‘Everyone else does it.’

  It is Hannah’s turn to roll her eyes as she despairs at her daughter’s childish argument. Olivia notices the look and huffs loudly, clamping her teeth on to her bottom lip as though forcing back something she wants to say.

  ‘And if everyone does drugs,’ Hannah says, ‘is that also something you want to try? Or what about getting pregnant? Sound appealing if everyone else is doing it?’