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

she notices the edge of the painting of the woman in the desert-like landscape at the side of the frame. She zooms in slightly to crop it out and gets a strange sense of déjà vu. This is not the first time she’s edited it out of her Insta-content.

She stamps onto a patch of broken beer bottle as she turns up a path that leads away from the sea and up to the town. She feels certain that she’s manipulated two or three of her photos before to remove the painting. She finds it creepy and assumes others will so she didn’t want it featuring and she remembers editing down video clips for her stories to make sure it wasn’t in the background. So how did Amanda see the painting she remembers from Raf’s dad’s house, the thing that spurred her to visit them, if Erin’s never posted it online? Erin stops in front of a dark tunnel that leads under the road into the bustle of the town. The floor around the entrance is littered with plastic packaging, a scrunched nappy, mulching leaves. Bobby’s arm flinches in his sleep.

She glances up at the cliffs one last time before she heads away from the beach, half expecting to see Amanda’s hair flaming above the brush but there’s still no one there. No one watching her. That she can see. But it could be her, Erin thinks, this, the trolling, started after she arrived. She steps over the litter and braces herself for the smell of urine as she walks into the darkness and the safety of civilisation at the end of the tunnel.

35

19 April 1999

I’ve done something I shouldn’t and I feel so so stupid.

This is the first time I’ve written in here for some time. Donny thinks it’s childish writing a journal and I’m sure he’s right. But today, I’m so low, so alone, that I feel like I could just drink a schooner of bleach.

The first couple of weeks here felt like a honeymoon. We made love every night. When Donny went off to the gallery he’d leave me Post-its with page numbers for poems, he drew studies of me he’d done while I slept in sharpie on the mirror, the Madonna, he loved to draw me like a Renaissance Madonna. It was his joke to me. He’d get groceries sent up every couple of days and I’d always have dinner on the table for him. I felt like a housewife from an old movie. ‘Hi, honey, I’m home,’ he’d say.

I started doing exercise videos in the flat. The library was just across the street so I snuck out and got books about yoga, calisthenics, meditation, recipe books. Jean, our neighbour, showed me a mail-order directory you could order crystals from. I didn’t tell her I didn’t have a bank card in case she clocked how young I was, but I’d still have a good time looking at the pictures, reading up, making lists of the ones I’d buy once I could get a job and have some money of my own.

I got lonely in the days. Someone Donny knew at the gallery knew a guy that worked with Craig and said he was on the rampage looking for me. It proves how obsessed he is with me, so it’s lucky we got out when we did, but Donny didn’t think it was safe for me to be out of the house on my own. The thing is, I endured those boring days because I knew how wonderful it would be when he came home to me. And it was, it really was, he made me feel like a goddess.

But then, after the first month, his mood’s changed, he’s tetchy, cold in a way he never has been before, and he’s started coming back later and later. When I ask him what’s wrong it irritates him. It’s the pressure, he always snaps, the pressure to support us. He never told me at the start but the rent on the flat is astronomical. He says he only got the sea view for me but that it’s ruining us. He says he’s working for Richard in the gallery, spending his evenings trying to network at private views in order to try and get people to buy his work, to get backers for the exhibition. And he says he can’t draw any more, he can’t paint, there’s no time with all the stress of having to make money for us. I offered to get a job but he told me I was being ridiculous. We still make love but it’s different now, fast, not gentle like it was, sometimes it hurts. And I know it’s because he blames me. I wanted to be the perfect muse for him. I can’t believe it’s my fault that he can’t create any more.

I started leaving him Post-its like he used to for me. Quotes I got from books he has about Van Gogh, Picasso. Something to try and get the creative juices flowing. I’d find them crumpled up on the pavement outside our apartment block. I know he doesn’t mean to be so cruel but it hurts so much to see him turn away from me.

In a moment of weakness, I nearly called my mum two days ago, but luckily there wasn’t a cent in the house so I couldn’t use the payphone. I thought I had some coins stashed away in a bag somewhere but Donny must have known I might be tempted. I miss her, that’s the thing. I miss school. I miss sitting next to Lily in maths, I miss the stupid songs she’d make up about Mrs Francis’s comb-over. Everything feels so serious all the time now.

And then last night I did something and I’m not sure he’ll ever forgive me. But I was trying to make him happy. I swear it. I thought it would make him