Sophia's Dilemma Read online

  “How do you know?” Dane’s voice sounded flat.

  “Your hair was still wet first thing and you smelled of soap. Is Mr Pearce letting you shower in the changing rooms?”

  She felt Dane’s body shift underneath her. “Yeah. Please don’t say anything. He nips round early and turns the alarms off and then goes home for breakfast while I sort myself out. If the principal finds out, he’ll be in big trouble.”

  “I could talk to Dad. You could...”

  “No. Thanks,” Dane added. “I don’t want your dad to think badly of me. I don’t want him to know.”

  “Fair enough. So where’s the birth certificate?” Sophia asked, trying to change the subject.

  “If it’s still there, it’s in a drawer unit by my bed. I left it in the top drawer with my passport. Can’t believe I left it. I was ready for days this time as well. I’m an idiot.”

  “No you’re not. It was stressful and you were taking care of Maisie and Will. It’s not your fault. Why don’t we...”

  “No!” Dane interrupted her before she could state the obvious. “I can’t get it, Soph. I’m never going back there. He’ll kill me if I set foot on the property. He warned me.” Dane’s fingers strayed to the scar which criss-crossed his eyebrow, feeling the raised skin, still tender to the touch. “I should get you home. I’ve got work tonight.” He kissed Sophia’s soft forehead and breathed in her nearness, knowing it was the only thing keeping him sane.

  “What if I came with you?” she asked. “He couldn’t do anything to you then.”

  Dane breathed out slowly and carefully. She was so innocent and sweet it made his building frustration evaporate. He let out a sad snort.

  “Are you cross with me?” Sophia’s voice sounded small.

  “How can I be cross with you? I know you’re only trying to help, but you have no idea what kind of man my stepdad is, or what he’s capable of.” Dane kissed her gently on the lips again, excited to feel her kissing him back. He pulled away with a teasing smile. “I’ve got work, babe. I need to go. Anyway, the birth certificate doesn’t matter. I’m not going back. I’ll have to live without the scholarship; it’s not worth the effort.”

  Dane started the car engine and tickled Sophia as she climbed off his knee. She squealed and giggled and after a few disjointed hiccoughs, the old car ignition fired obligingly to life. Dane smiled down at his beautiful girlfriend and drank in the sheer enjoyment of being with her. “Soph?” he said, biting his lip. His courage failed him the instant she looked at him with her expressive brown eyes and his declaration of love sank back into his stomach. “Hey, nothing, don’t worry.”

  He thought she had forgotten all about the birth certificate as he held her hand in between changing gear, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Chapter Three

  “I need to pick something up for Dane.” Sophia smiled nervously at the woman at the door of the decrepit house, the following afternoon. It looked derelict, as though nobody lived there, the paint peeling from the wooden window frames and the door barely clinging to its hinges. Sophia had just concluded they must have moved away until with an agonising grind; the buckled front door opened just a crack.

  A wizened face peered out into the bright sunshine, eyes with pupils as large as their irises, blinked rapidly in the light. “Sod off. I’ve nothing for ya. Try the tinny house away down there. We ain’t doin’ weed no more.” A frail, brown arm waved uselessly in no particular direction and the rapid eye movement reached fever pitch. “Go on. Bugger off!” Spittle left through loose lips, spattering the doorframe and making Sophia jump back.

  “But Dane McArdle wants something from here.”

  At the second mention of Dane, his mother’s face changed, filling with a pitiful hope. Her sunken cheeks hoisted themselves northwards to the jutting cheekbones in a valiant effort. She made a serious attempt to focus on her visitor and looked eager, if that was the name of the face expression leaking from bloodshot eyes. “Dane?” she whispered softly. “My Dane?”

  A gash adorned the bridge of the woman’s nose, resembling the damaging trail of a head butt. Sophia looked shifty, remembering the sound of her own forehead hitting Sandra’s big nose that dreadful day when the other girl knifed her. She shivered and banished the memory. The cops agreed it was self-defence. Only Sophia couldn’t accept that. She intended to hurt Sandra. She knew that in the split second the other girl stepped in front of her, oozing menace and jealousy. Sophia forced herself to look at the woman’s cuts and gashes, realising they resulted from more than a single head butt. The shell of a mother was battered black and blue.

  “Dane?” his mother said again and stepped back so Sophia could enter the hallway. The stench of cigarette smoke and urine assailed her nostrils like chemical warfare, making her cough and raise her hand to her mouth. Another smell accompanied it, acrid and drifting.

  Slightly stooped, the woman’s dark hair hung loosely on her shoulders. It was tousled and tatty, more than bedhead - unwashed or brushed for weeks. Her eyes were too closed for Sophia to tell if they were blue like Dane’s or brown like his siblings’, merely slits in her puffy, white face. There was a sense of beauty lost in a wasteful, drug fuelled existence. Now her face and body were equally ravaged. A white tee shirt shrouded a skeletal body, grey and stained. Looking down, Sophia was embarrassed to see the woman wore only a pair of knickers on her lower half. Her legs were scratched and marked as though she had scrambled through thorn bushes recently. The girl averted her eyes self-consciously and tried not to stare at the wreck of a human being.

  “Where’s Dane’s room?” She asked, choking back bile from the stench of the house/

  The woman pointed to a door at the end of the hall. “Dane?” she said again.

  Sophia hurried forwards, feeling like a character out of Jack and the Beanstalk, waiting for the giant to get home and roar, ‘Fee, fie, foe, fum.’ The stink inside the room was awful, a heady mixture of sweat and something else Sophia didn’t recognise. No part of it smelled like Dane’s scent; deodorant and aftershave. No wonder he didn’t want to come back.

  The single bed was rumpled and unmade, the sheets stained and unchanged for weeks. Finding the dresser exactly where Dane described, Sophia put her hand into the top drawer. She dug around in the mess of socks and underwear tangled inside one another. Her fingers contacted something hard like cardboard and she pulled out the black passport with the silver fern on the cover. From inside it, Sophia teased the folded white paper peeking tantalisingly out of its pages. Dane’s birth certificate.

  “Is Dane comin’ home?” The woman’s face peered in the doorway.

  “I don’t know.” Sophia withdrew the precious documents and faced Dane’s mother, slipping them into her blazer pocket in one fluid movement.

  “He dun’t mean it, his dad. Dane makes him angry.” The woman sniffed and wiped her hand across her nose, leaving a streak of blood.

  “Right.” Sophia gritted her teeth and swallowed her acid retort. Dane still bore the physical scars from trying to rescue his tiny brother and sister a few weeks ago, when the man got home from prison and attacked him.

  “I want him home.” The woman’s eyes turned gimlet hard within their puffy walls and Sophia’s heart beat a frantic tattoo in her breast. “Where is he? Where’s my son? I need him.”

  As Sophia attempted to pass her in the doorway, the foul woman leaned across and blocked the girl’s way, resting a yellowed hand on the opposite side of the door frame. Sophia halted, fighting rising panic as the woman’s acidic breath invaded her nostrils. “I need some cash,” she menaced, white spit coursing down her chin with each word.

  Sophia registered her brown iris colour in the dim light of the hallway as the woman’s pupils shrunk perceptibly, the drug high wearing off as she plummeted from heights unknown to any sane person. Sophia swallowed hard, pushing away random gratitude that Dane’s vivid blue eye colour was inherited from his deceased father. Putting her hand inside
the top pocket of her blazer, Sophia pulled out the five dollar note for her bus fare home. Her fingers brushed the hard cover of the passport and she bit her lip, needed to get out. She held it gingerly towards the woman, trying not to touch her fingers as the money was snatched eagerly. Dane’s mother eyed her with disgust. “What’s this?”

  “It’s all I have,” Sophia said, hearing her heartbeat shake her voice, aware suddenly of noises from another part of the house. Somebody else was home. The realisation offered no comfort.

  “It’s not enough, is it?” The woman’s brown eyes were hard and unyielding and she took a menacing step towards Sophia. A door bust open behind the women and Dane’s mother changed in an instant, wincing and cowering in terror. A man’s bearded face poked into the hallway.

  “Where are you, woman?” he spat. “Get in here and watch this. It’s nearly cooked.” He halted when he saw Sophia, his face hardening from irritation to anger. “Who’s this?” he snapped. “What’s she doin’ in my room?”

  Dane’s mother gulped and Sophia was horrified to see a puddle appear on the bare floorboards beneath the woman’s feet, as fear made her urinate without control. It was hideous and the teenager understood with incredible clarity, why Dane put Will and Maisie into care. It broke his heart but they were better off.

  The bearded face poked further around the doorway, bringing with it a mess of dirty dark hair and a body naked from the waist up, covered in a thick black pelt.

  Sophia swallowed and stared at the man. He wasn’t how Dane described him and she fought to control the involuntary tremor that rocked her knees. She imagined some evil satanic creature, capable of wrecking lives just by his presence, sporting cloven feet, horns and a forked tongue. But this was just a man. A very nasty, dirty and smelly man, but human nonetheless. Sophia prayed to the God of heaven for courage and wisdom. And escape. Then the man shouted, his voice washing over her like an acrid fog and he morphed into an object of terror. Sophia almost added to the puddle on the floorboards as the man’s voice rattled her ear drums. “Who are you?”

  A line of spittle flew from his mouth and landed on the woman’s hand. She stared at it blankly as though trying to work out what it was, but she neither moved nor spoke. Sophia shook in every nerve and fibre, but fought to act cool and unruffled as she blagged her way through. “I thought I left something here earlier,” she said quickly, keeping her voice even. “But I didn’t. My mistake.”

  She pushed past the woman in the doorway, stepping over the urine on the floor, which drained slowly down through wide gaps in the boards. So far so good. Sophia proceeded down the hallway with false confidence, stopping as she wrestled with the cracked front door knob.

  Her hands sweated and it slipped in her fingers, spinning back on itself before it fully disengaged the metal lug which kept it clinging to the doorframe. Sophia’s head swivelled as she felt hot breath on the back of her neck, either side of her ponytail. To her horror, another man stood right behind her. She turned slowly, aware of the tiny space he left her before she contacted his body. He was the very epitome of evil, a real and physical presence representative of everything wrong with the world. His eyes were hooded by drooping lids and his mouth set in a sneer. The stepfather. Dane’s mother knew he would be drawn to the noise, the reason for her spontaneous urination. Encountering him, Sophia understood.

  The man’s eyes were piercing and fully switched on. No chemicals blinded him or caused him to be foggy or caught unawares. He was wiry and thin, his whole body giving the appearance of being sharp, like a blade. His grey hair was slicked back into a neat braid and he wasn’t dirty or smelly like the other occupants of the house. He seized Sophia’s ponytail, causing her to yelp in pain, dragging her backwards so her face tipped towards the nicotine stained ceiling. The man turned her bodily in front of him, pushing her towards the filthy bedroom, slipping his left hand around her waist in a way that felt familiar and terrifyingly dangerous. “Shh, steady, steady,” he hissed in her ear and Sophia felt her heart pound under her blouse, fit to burst clean out of her breast. Dane’s warnings ran like cold water down her spine and her breath came in heaves.

  She couldn’t think properly. Sophia tried to jerk her head backwards in the hope of smacking her captor in the face but he was far too wise and world wary for a move like that. He pulled her hair harder and laughed at the challenge, his nails digging deep into the skin of her neck as he changed his grip. “You must be Dane’s latest bitch,” the man said spitefully, shoving her as she tried to resist, digging the soles of her sensible black school shoes harder into the floorboards and finding no resistance. He said Dane’s name as though it tasted unpleasant on his tongue, something eaten that left a cloying taste in his mouth. “Always nice to have Dane’s friends visit,” the man sneered. “How about I take you in the bedroom for a wee chat then? I bet you’d love that.”

  The hairy man watched from the doorway, leering, his lips pulled back from pale, rancid gums. Dane’s mother continued to stand in her little pool of pee, looking at the ground as though wishing she was anywhere else but here. Sophia knew the feeling. Where were those guardian angels the pastor spoke about in church last year? Surely now would be a great time for them to leap into action. The house was eerily silent. The weakness in Sophia’s thigh muscle from the stab wound made resistance more and more difficult as she grew tired and it burned and twinged. Fed up suddenly, Dane’s stepfather punched the girl hard in the back with his fist, tired of her games. “Do as you’re told and I won’t hurt you. If you’re lucky!”

  The abrupt crash of the front door slamming against the wall of the scruffy hallway, took them all by surprise. The tricky handle, which only minutes before evaded Sophia, was no match for the figure silhouetted by the sunshine outside the prison-like house. Turning her head she saw him, like an apparition as her hair was yanked painfully backwards. “Get off!” Dane’s father yelled as the arm moved forcibly round his throat.

  Unable to defend himself and keep hold of the girl, the man let go, throwing Sophia forwards so she landed at the pitiful woman’s feet, narrowly avoiding the quickly disappearing puddle.

  Dane was a great deal taller than when his stepdad used him regularly as a punching bag. The teenager had matured, gaining bulk and muscle in his manual job and taking the middle aged man by surprise. He easily overpowered his stepfather, dragging him down backwards and deliberately dropping him hard onto his back. The boy’s face was a mask of aggression and anger as he straddled the older man and punched him in the face.

  “Go!” Dane shouted in between blows and Sophia pushed herself to her feet, taking advantage of the shock on the hairy man’s face to slide past the two fighting bodies and make her escape. She flew out of the front door gasping, feeling a clutching sensation in her chest as she fought to breathe. At the end of the street, she turned left, running aimlessly, feeling the new skin on her thigh smarting and objecting to the sudden untrained-for-exercise.

  Sophia arrived in the suburb on the bus. Her mother’s car, abandoned as she walked out of their lives just after New Year, gave the girl a new found independence and freedom. But the woman appeared a few nights ago and took it back. Sophia’s father let her take it, keen to get the sickening female out of his house as quickly as possible. His daughter was devastated when she arrived home from youth group with Dane. Sophia’s meltdown was spectacular as Dane pulled off the driveway, his car leaving its familiar streak of oil as a reminder he was there.

  “It’s ok,” Edgar promised, soothing his daughter, brushing loose hair back from her damp, tear streaked face. “Let her take it. I’ll sort something out at the weekend. Wait till daylight when she sees all that blood on the front seats. To be honest, I’m glad to see the back of that damn car and its awful memories. At least she didn’t take you away from me.”

  Sophia instinctively ran for the bus stop, sobbing loudly in terror at the same time as cursing her mother for her selfishness. “You even took the car,” she raged. “
Why do you hate me so much? What did I ever do to you?”

  “Are you ok, love?” asked an elderly lady pushing a pram filled with newspapers. She stopped and stared at Sophia, her face full of concern. Sophia gulped and swallowed, nodding like a maniac.

  “Boyfriend troubles?” the woman asked, lowering her voice and patting Sophia’s shoulder. The girl shook her head.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Are you all right to get home, love?” she asked kindly and Sophia nodded, lying by implication.

  The woman smiled, gave her another firm pat on the arm and continued down the street, placing her newspapers in letter boxes along her route. She glanced back occasionally at Sophia and smiled once as the girl heaved for breath and jogged towards the bus stop.

  A frenzied wail cut the air like a knife, screeching out a warning as the freight train dashed past, shaking the ground underfoot and rattling everything within a half kilometre of the area. Sophia’s thigh pulled tightly from the stab wound as she ran, keeping her hand locked over the precious documents in her pocket. The bus pulled away as she reached the stop, the driver ignoring her raised hand and the young, tear-streaked face. Sophia pulled her arm slowly down to its natural position, realising with dismay the driver had done her a favour. Dane’s mother clutched Sophia’s only money in her thin, scratched fingers.

  With trembling fingers, Sophia pulled her mobile phone from her pocket, desperate to get help for Dane. She ran away like he asked, but couldn’t leave him alone and in danger. She dialled emergency and then cancelled the call before it connected. Dane hated the cops and anyone involved in a justice system which allowed him to suffer in such vile and prolonged ways. Pressing her father’s number, she readied herself to issue the distress call he always hoped she would never have to make. It went straight to voicemail, telling her he was in a meeting. Her heart sank. “Dad, call me back, please. I need help.”