The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

email, thinks of the day a week she’s agreed to be at the Phibe offices for the next couple of months. She thinks of the chain of London hotels Grace said have expressed an interest in her hosting a monthly influencer’s dinner. She thinks of Fearne Cotton’s podcast, the four other less esteemed ones she’s been invited to be on in the two and a half weeks since Grace’s been her agent. She can’t bring Bobby and she can’t turn it down. They need the money, she needs the money, some of her own. If she can’t honour all these commitments, if she can’t keep raising her profile, keeping herself in position as Grace’s future superstar, she might not get anything. Erin needs Amanda to stay around for a while longer, just until she can start to be a bit more picky, make enough to show Raf that he can start turning work down. But what Amanda said about her in the cafe, the topless cuddling with her baby, the way she gripped Erin’s arm when she caught her snooping in the studio. She had seemed so lovely, Erin thought she might have a friend, a confidante, but now she just can’t shake the feeling that she might not be able to trust this woman.

‘Food’s done, guys.’ Amanda’s call comes up to them, muffled by the carpet on the stairs. ‘I’m hitting a class with the girls. Don’t wait for me to eat.’

‘Have fun,’ Raf calls back, not shouting but loud enough to be heard in their small house.

‘We have to find out what her plans are,’ Erin says. ‘For her sake as much as anything else.’ Raf nods, puts a hand on her bare knee and squeezes it. ‘You’re right. It’s not fair to make her part of the family then ask her to leave. We need to find out what her intentions are.’

‘Yeh,’ he says, scratching at the hair on the back of his neck. ‘Otherwise she might be with us forever.’ He makes a funny face, something to lighten the mood that says God forbid, before getting up and going into the bathroom.

Erin looks down at Bobby, his eyelids are drooping closed and then popping open again to suckle some more food every few moments. She experiments with holding Bobby closer into her, pushes the pillow up to support him. He reaches his free arm around her waist, tickling the skin under her vest top. A pulse of warmth runs up her back. The front door clicks shut as Amanda leaves for the evening.

27

6 February 1999

We’re here! We made it! We have a flat together like a real husband and wife! AND AND AND

WE MADE LOVE.

We got a taxi from Palmerston bus station in the middle of the night and arrived at our apartment by the Darwin Marina. And there, that first morning, before we’d even unpacked our bags, he took me in his arms, carried me to the bed and made love to me. It was like he’d unleashed all of the emotion that had been brewing within me. I wept and wept and wept and he held me in his arms. It was almost too wonderful. He was quiet afterwards, but when I asked if it was OK, he smiled at me and said I was perfect. Then he got up, got his pencils and began to sketch me just as I was, lying naked, there on the bed.

Before, back home, he always said he was scared, scared of piercing the energetic bond between us, even after our marriage ceremony at Nourlangie. He said that desire could do strange things to spiritual bonds like ours and he was scared it might irreversibly alter what we had. But as he drew me, he seemed so much happier than I’d ever known him to be, so much more relaxed. He looked up from his pad at one point and said, ‘Now we can really be. Be how the universe wants us to be, just us, together forever.’

And that was when I knew I’d made the right decision. In the night-time cab ride I’d been scared. Leaving my mum, leaving school, being a fugitive from the only life I’d ever known. It wasn’t until the car got to the outskirts of Darwin that the profundity of what we’d done, what I’d done, really hit me. And I can admit, to this blank page, that I had doubts.

But now I don’t. We wrote a note for Mum to tell her not to follow us, to be happy for us, and to try and move on with her life without me. Donny said that one day, when I’m older, when they’ve had some time to get perspective, they’ll see that I had to get away. It came to me like an epiphany that Craig’s feelings towards me aren’t healthy, his trips to my room, talking to me about sex with boys, it’s not appropriate. Donny didn’t like the way he looked at me. He said he saw hatred in his eyes, and something else. He’d hit my mum before. How long before he hit me, or something much, much worse?

The apartment is tiny, dirty, and a little damp. Donny’s been out most of the time, at Richard’s gallery, but I’ve been cleaning and doing as much decorating as I know how to do on my own and, even though we only moved in three days ago, it’s starting to fall into place. I’ve cleared the balcony and I want to plant a herb garden there. I told the woman next door I like crystals and she’s given us this beautiful smoky quartz, and I cleaned its energy and polished it up. I was going to make it the centrepiece on our coffee table, but then I thought Donny might want to know where I got it from, so now it’s under the sofa.

I want to make our home