Free Never Mind Miss Fox by Olivia Glazebrook

rather come to the cottage with us?” he said. “I haven’t seen you all week.”
    Eliza said nothing. Because you’ve been working every night until bedtime, she was thinking.
    Every evening she had expected her father to come to her room, but he had not. She had heard him treading the floorboards in the kitchen above her head until she had either put on her headphones or fallen asleep. Now he was here, not to tell her he was sorry but to forbid her from doing what she most wanted. She knew that when he said, “Wouldn’t you rather?” it meant, “I want you to change your mind.”
    She frowned at the duvet. He was being unfair, she knew he was, but nonetheless he had brought guilt into the room with him and it was snouting and curling a place for itself on the bed. She pushed it away, cross and determined: if her father were going to shove, she would have to shove him back.
    â€œWe will come, on Saturday. Like Mum said we could. Please, Dad,” she appealed. “Eliot’s my friend.”
    â€œShe’s not your friend, she’s your teacher.” This came in a different voice. “We pay her to teach you the piano. A friend would be a little girl your own age who liked spending time with you.”
    â€œEliot does.” Eliza was on the edge of tears—this was worse than the playground.
    â€œEliza love,” Martha came in, “have you done your teeth?” She looked at them both, and stayed at the door. “What’s going on?”
    â€œDad’s being horrible.”
    Later Eliza heard Martha shout, “What is your fucking problem?” all in one breath.
    The front door slammed. Eliza wondered who had gone out and her heart fluttered in her chest. She hoped it was her father and when she heard his shoes clop down the front steps to the road she was relieved.
    Mum came into the room and said, “I said you can go and you can. I’ll deal with Dad. But don’t mention it to him again, OK?”
    Eliza swallowed. In a mouse’s voice she said, “OK.”
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    The end of the week arrived. Clive sat in his office and brooded. He fingered crisps from a packet on the desk and into his mouth where he let each one rest on his tongue like a communion wafer. When the caustic sting of flavoring began to burn, he crunched and swallowed.
    He liked this sensation—it was absorbing and short-lived. He liked to think of such things as crisps, a headache, or the weather. He liked to wonder if it would rain, and whether he would be caught out when it did. He liked the thoughts which bobbed at the surface, but not the shapes that lurked on the ocean floor.
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    Carcasses on the seabed rotted in the end—he and Eliza had once watched a program about a dead whale. “Gross…” Eliza had said, her eyes like saucers and her face lit blue by the screen. “And amazing.”
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    Clive tried to remember the peace of a life before Eliot. Eliza had, that morning, avoided talking to him again. “How long are you going to keep this up?” he had asked her. She had continued to eat her Shreddies, wearing her earphones and staring straight ahead. The silence was as clear a sound as if she had told him to get stuffed.
    Clive had said to Martha, “Eliza wears those things all the time.”
    â€œYes,” Martha had replied.
    â€œShe can’t hear a word I say.”
    â€œNo.”
    She had said nothing else, and Clive had left to catch the Tube.
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    With a blink Clive turned his thoughts instead to the weather.
    â€œGot your brolly?” the man in the corner shop had asked, cheerfully handing Clive his change. “It’s going to piss down all afternoon, apparently.”
    Rain was a nuisance. Martha and Eliza—driving straight from the school gates—would be halfway to the cottage by now, but Clive had to cross London to get to the station and he risked a soaking. He