Miranda

I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone being hit before – not in real life, and for a moment – just a split second, I was curious – listening to the noise it made. It wasn’t a slap he gave her – more of a cuff – but a very big one – and it sounded quite loud – a dull kind of clap.

She didn’t do anything when he hit her. Just stood there and let it happen. She would’ve had time to put her hands up to protect her face – or at least try to, but she didn’t. The expression on her face didn’t change either – it stayed the same – the blank, doll-like stare that she always had, even as her head moved sideways with the force. She almost didn’t look like a real person.

Then I felt sick, and scared, because it was Miranda’s father and he really hit her hard – so hard that she fell onto the ground and I had no idea that people I knew would do that kind of thing.

She curled herself up into a little ball just by the hedge once she’d hit the ground, and since she’d managed to do that I knew she couldn’t be dead; I thought she might just be hoping she could stay there until he went away. I wished I could do the same, but he seemed to have forgotten about me, and I didn’t want to do anything to change that, so I stayed where I was, half crouching behind his car, swaying slightly, holding my breath at the awfulness of it all. The fear had sobered me up a little, but not very much, because we’d had quite a lot to drink, as well as the tuinals.

He didn’t stay long after that. He stood there for a minute, looking at her, and then he called her a stupid bitch, and turned smartly, like he was a soldier on parade, and went back into the house, slamming the front door behind him. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.

I didn’t know him well – I hardly knew my father either. They all seemed to be more or less interchangeable - large distant figures of authority to be avoided whenever possible. They were people you only went to if you needed money, or permission for something, and even then you were there for as little time as you could manage, because the longer you stayed within their sight, the more likelihood there would be of another round of dreary hectoring about the way you looked, or were acting, or something you’d done, or your carelessness – there was always something to criticise.

All I knew was that he was at the foreign office, and that he’d been a prisoner of war, and had been one of the people who’d built the bridge over the river Kwai, like in the film. He was very tall, with a red face, and bushy eyebrows set in a permanent frown.

I walked over to Miranda and crouched down next to her.

“Miranda?”

I didn’t touch her. I felt awkward, as if I was intruding somehow on a part of her life that should be private;

“I’m sorry….. ”

I knew it’d all been my fault – it’d been me who’d fixed up the lift from the Roundhouse. I’d been scared of the man who hadn’t left us alone the whole evening, going on and on about being in his film, and did we wear schoolgirl socks. It hadn’t been such a big deal at first – we’d laughed it off, but later on, when I was wrecked, and I hadn’t been able to find Miranda for a while, it had started to worry me, because he’d kept pulling me towards the door, saying he knew a great party nearby, and I’d got in a bit of a panic about it.

That was when I’d finally found her in the loos; she was almost asleep, and I’d had to help her up, and then Leather Paul had lent us enough for a taxi. She couldn’t have walked to the tube – not like that. I thought she might have been able to pretend to be ok once we got back to her house, so that they wouldn’t have noticed. I was quite good at that myself – even after the time I’d nearly died. I hadn’t expected her to fall over as she’d got out of the car, and I hadn’t counted on her father coming out, and it would never have occurred to me that he'd hit her. I felt dreadful about that.

Even though it was the middle of the night, it was summer, so it wasn’t cold. It was getting uncomfortable crouching down for so long, so I sat cross-legged on the gravel and tried to think what we could do next.