The Other Child Read Free Page B

snaked upwards along terraces. They were densely planted with bushes and trees and a multitude of little paths cut through them. The shortest way through it was up the steep steps that led directly to the Esplanade, the wide road on whose western side the hotels stood, one beside the next. This was Amy’s way home, and the dark steps were the tricky stretch. As soon as she reached the Esplanade, she would feel better. Then she had to go a good little bit further up the road and just after the Highlander Hotel she would turn into Albion Road. An aunt of hers owned a narrow terraced house here and had given Amy a place to stay while she studied. The aunt was old and lonely and happy to have company, and Amy’s parents weren’t well off and found the offer of a free place to live very welcome. Furthermore, from there she could easily walk to the campus. She was glad that some things had turned out better than she might have expected. Where she came from, a working-class estate in Leeds, no one would have believed that Amy would make it to university. But she was intelligent and hard working, and for all her extreme shyness and her fearfulness, she was determined. She had passed all her exams with good marks until now.
    She was in the middle of the bridge when she stopped and looked back. Not that she had heard something, but every time she got about this far she had the almost automatic reaction, before she plunged on into the creepily empty Esplanade Gardens, to check if everything was all right – without being exactly clear what she meant by all right .
    A man was walking down St Nicholas Cliff. Tall, slim, taking quick steps. She could not see what sort of clothes he was wearing. Only a few more yards and he would have reached the bridge, towards which he was obviously heading.
    There was no one else to see, near or far.
    With one hand Amy held on tight to her bag of books, with the other hand to her front door key, which she had dug out of her bag at Mrs Gardner’s house. She had got into the habit of holding it at the ready on her way home. Of course that was all part of her fearfulness. Her aunt forgot to turn the outside light on every night. Amy hated standing there rummaging around in her bag for the key, as blind as a mole. There were ten-foot-high lilac bushes to the right and left, and her aunt – with the typically unreasonable stubbornness of old age – refused to have them pruned. Amy wanted to get into the house as fast as possible. To be in a safe place.
    Safe from what?
    She was too easily frightened. She knew that. It just wasn’t normal to see ghosts everywhere, burglars, murderers and perverts behind every corner. She guessed it had to do with her upbringing – as the sheltered, mollycoddled only child of her straightforward parents. Don’t do this, don’t do that, this could happen, that could happen … She had heard things like that all her life. She had not been allowed to do a lot of what her classmates did, because her mother was afraid that something could go wrong. Amy had not rebelled against the bans; she had soon shared her mother’s fears and was glad to have a reason she could give her schoolfriends:
    I’m not allowed …
    The long and the short of it was that she did not have many friends now.
    She turned round once more. The stranger had reached the bridge. Amy walked on. She walked a little faster than before. It was not only fear of the man that made her hurry. It was also the fear of her own thoughts.
    Loneliness.
    The other students at Scarborough Campus, an offshoot of the University of Hull, lived in halls of residence for their first year of study, then they formed little groups to rent out the inexpensive houses that belonged to the university. Amy had always tried to convince herself that it was natural and sensible for her to creep under her aunt’s wing, because no rent was naturally better than low rent, and she would