Twist Of Fate

Thirty One

CHLOE 

The back garden looked exactly the same. My fairy path was still there, grass creeping over the edges of the flagstones and growing between the cracks. The crabapple tree stood still, frozen in time, although somehow smaller than I remember. Isn't that always the way when you see something from your past years later? It always seems smaller now than it did at the time. Is it because you have grown up, so your sense of proportion is different, perhaps? Or is it because everything from your childhood is magnified, because you live life in the moment, so therefore every experience seems larger than life and bigger than it really is? 

The wall between us and next door can't be much higher than my waist now, and I had forgotten there was also a plastic mesh fence attached to the lower brickwork, where I used to peer through and laugh with my friend Hayley. How much life has changed since those days. How much did I used to take my life for granted, with all my childish innocence, never dreaming there would be a day in the not too distant future where I would be all alone in this house, this garden, for the very last time, accompanied by my social worker, packing my clothes into a suitcase to be taken to a childrens home in South London.

"Just a temporary measure," the woman at social services had assured me, "until we find you a foster home back in Broadstairs. There is nothing at the moment but you'd be surprised how quickly something turns up when people hear about your circumstances."

I'd believed her, of course. I'd been convinced I would have a new home by the end of the week. But the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years. I slipped further down the list because I wasn't causing any trouble at the children's home, and although my grades slipped drastically from what they had been I wasn't classed as an urgent case - there were simply far more children with a greater need for a stable home than me. 

Harry's footsteps shuffle on the pavement behind me as I lead him silently back along the road we have just come, over the little roundabout and along the main street of the village of St Peters, Broadstairs. There are so many things flashing through my mind as I walk along:

The chippy where once or twice a month I would come with my dad on a Friday night after he got home from work, and we would buy three battered haddocks and a large portion of chips, drenched in salt and vinegar, and take them home to my mum who would have the plates warming in the oven. We wouldn't bother to put the food directly on the plates though, we would just open up the paper and put the plates underneath so the grease wouldn't soak through, and eat it with a little wooden chip fork.

The hairdresser where I convinced my mum to take me, aged about nine, and have all my hair chopped off into a bob. I hated it immediately of course, and cried all the way home. I prayed that night it would grow just long enough for me to tie it back into a ponytail, but of course it didn't and for the next year or so I grew it out until it had returned to its previous length.

The little supermarket where my mum would sometimes do the weekly shop when she couldn't be bothered to travel across town to the larger one on the retail park. She moaned every time, about the prices of the groceries at the little one, but a few weeks later she would be back there again in a hurry after work, and moan about it again all evening.

The recreation ground, where I used to come some afternoons after school when I was little with my mum. The play area had changed drastically - I barely recognise the place, with its soft rubber safety mats, its woodbark footing beneath a single rubber tyre swing, and its new sensory area that used to be the monkey bars in my day.

The road beyond the rec, leading in the direction of the beach, where I know that through the trees old caves are visible, closed off now to the public and housed on private property, and known for being used by smugglers hundreds of years ago to bring contraband ashore.