Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer

by Hazel Barkworth

  ‘Settle back, now. I’ll be here. Don’t worry.’ The Police Liaison Officer had gone out with Gary, to give Debbie a few hours of quiet in the early evening. Rachel had agreed to stay with her, to keep her company and to monitor the now-tapped phone.

  Debbie looked shattered. Not just tired, but broken, as if the whole she’d once formed had splintered. Debbie had never been the sort to glide through life. She walked as if the air was viscous, her left arm always pumping heavily. Rachel had spent so many cumulative hours with Debbie – dinners with the other mums, book group meetings, doorstep conversations around the details of netball fixtures, jumble sales, dates of inset days – but they’d never become close. Debbie favoured the trinkets that were designed to beguile five-year-old girls: circlets of plastic around her wrists, tinsel clips in her hair. Rachel would mentally make her over as they chatted, staining her lips ruby instead of pastel, chopping in a fringe, warming her bleached ends to rich honey. The last few days had blanched her even paler. Rachel didn’t want to improve her now, just hold her. She couldn’t bring herself to imagine the other woman’s pain, to consider if it was worse to know that Lily had chosen to go, if it hurt more that she’d acted on her own volition.

  ‘You’ll wake me, Rach, if anything happens, if you hear anything.’ Her voice was a scratch.

  Rachel held Debbie’s shoulder as she curled her legs up onto the sofa, resting her head on the cushion. ‘Of course. Just relax. I’m here, I promise.’ She could have kissed Debbie’s forehead.

  Rachel sat in an armchair and waited. The room was dim. The curtains might not have opened again since they’d closed on Sunday night. It was a fug that was deepened by the knowledge of the blaring sun outside. A slice of light crept in through a gap in the material and lit a vivid triangle. That shard of brightness picked out the dust motes in the air so they twinkled and danced. Just when Rachel thought she’d dropped off, Debbie’s eyes flashed open, her hands jerking out, splayed and tensed, as if she was braced for a fall, as if her dream-self had been pushed to a plunging death. In time, she calmed again. Rachel sat for minutes and minutes, until Debbie’s breath thickened, rhythmic and heavy, until the whole room seemed to sigh.

  Rachel flicked on the light in Lily’s bedroom. The click resounded, and she paused, but Debbie made no noise downstairs. Rachel needed to see the room for herself. She’d been in there a handful of times, once or twice in recent years: to collect Mia, to admire a dress. It looked odd now. Every object had been moved, photographed, toyed with. It felt violated. There was a blank in the centre of Lily’s desk where her laptop must have sat. It was being dismantled somewhere now, raided for clues. Everything had been ransacked for Lily’s safety.

  Rachel stood in the middle of the room. She let her eyes scan, let them rest on every object for a second. Lily’s copy of The Glass Menagerie lay on the bedside table. The police must have scoured every inch of carpet, every scratch on the paint, but Rachel was sure she could decode it further. She’d spent over fifteen years watching teenagers. She could read their glances, detect their brags and their shifts. The police would have taken fingerprints and inventories, but they didn’t know what to look for.

  The room was heart-breaking. Its walls were the shade of purple that must have thrilled Lily six or seven years ago, and every corner was filled with the whispers of her childhood. Mia had already dispatched every potentially embarrassing item to bin bags and charity shops, but Lily was more sentimental. Amongst the hairspray and high heels were all the things she hadn’t cast away; books that surely hadn’t been opened for a decade, a lamp shaped like a bunny.

  ‘They moved everything.’

  Rachel’s hands flew to her chest as Debbie’s voice cut the air. She must have floated up the stairs, appeared from out of the dust. Rachel wanted to apologise, explain why she was there, but there was no reprimand in Debbie’s voice.

  ‘I couldn’t even come in here for the first day. I just couldn’t handle it.’ Debbie went over to the window and ran her fingers over each of the milky blue and green gobbets of sea glass that glowed on the sill. ‘She collected these at West Wittering. She was seven. She thought they looked like treasure.’

  Cuddled up on her bed, sitting on a pile of cushions, were three stuffed bears. Debbie plucked the biggest one from the middle and cradled its rump on her arm like it was an infant. ‘She loves this bear.’

  Rachel didn’t know what to do except smile. ‘He’s lovely.’

  ‘She used to tuck him up into bed when she was little.’ The fur had rubbed smooth on his body, but his face still looked fresh. Debbie pressed her nose against the soft fuzz between his ears. Rachel could see his plastic eyes stare plaintively as Debbie spoke. ‘He must miss her.’

  Debbie began to wander around the room, picking things up to examine them more closely. A pink feather boa that hung from the curtain tie. A series of black-and-white postcards showing the golden age of Hollywood. A music box that tinkled a tune when it was knocked. Lily had inherited her mother’s penchant for the glittered and fluffy, but it looked sweeter here. It was the taste of the little girl she once was, that she hadn’t quite let go of. Mia and Lily could cover their faces in make-up, mimicking the women they might one day be, but this was the room Lily lived in once the door closed. Rachel had to squeeze her eyes tight. The girls were still so young.

  Rachel kept her eyes shut for a moment, to silence her mind, to block out Debbie’s movements, her words. She stood entirely still, but alert as a spiritualist waiting for a message to eke its way through; waiting for the glitch in energy that meant she could divine the truth. Her eyes opened, and her gaze lingered on a poster, printed on A4 and Blu-tacked onto the wall. A wash of pastels, with words in a sketched font.

  ‘She made this. On the computer. She’s ever so good with things like that.’

  Don’t waste sunsets with people who will be gone by sunrise. What could those words possibly mean if you were fifteen? Layered over the poster was a thin strip of photographs. They had not been caught by a digital device and held there, but were solid. They had been taken in a machine as big as a car and spat out to be kept for ever. They looked as if they came from another time. This generation were different. They didn’t hoard endless scraps of paper, letters and notes and lists; nothing bled from a pen any more. Their precious memories were all locked inside their phones. They took more pictures of themselves than of their friends, and didn’t keep them close, but displayed them to the whole world. But here was a tangible image. Five faces had squeezed together to fit into the frame. Lily, Mia, Ella, Keira, Abby. Four photographs lined up on top of each other. Mia was wearing a new top. The pictures were only weeks old.

  Debbie pressed hot against Rachel’s arm. ‘They look pretty, don’t they?’

  They smiled in one, laughed in the next, gurned in the final two, pushing their fingers into their ears, their tongues into their cheeks to distort their faces.

  ‘Mia’s got your features, hasn’t she? You must like that. Lily’s got her dad’s.’

  Rachel held the pictures. She didn’t look at Mia’s face, but Lily’s. Something had altered. The change was minute, but its impact was unambiguous. Rachel would watch the sixth-form girls as they sat in their semi-circle of desks, breathlessly parsing Plath. They were so round and bright in Year 12. Then, around the beginning of Year 13, the softness would judder. It was tiny: some delicate alteration in physiognomy, a weight loss of only an ounce, a faint line beginning to form. Lily’s face in the pictures still looked plump. It still curved lavishly from chin to cheek as she smiled, but something near her eyes had sharpened. It would be easier to discern in person, but printed on paper, it was clear enough. There was that sudden definition around the edges. Lily looked knowing. Rachel swallowed hard, dropping the strip of images onto the desk. Lily was fifteen. It was too young. Did Debbie know? It must be someone they hadn’t thought of, some drama club stud, some unk
nown older boy who’d lured her away. Someone had preyed on that pretty girl.

  She’d never sat in an empty cinema before. On that Tuesday afternoon everyone else was busy, and the rows and rows of seats were unoccupied. It was deafeningly dark, as dark as she’d ever experienced. So dark the air seemed liquid. So dark they could lift off their chairs and turn slow somersaults.

  He’d bought tickets based on timings, not content. They had no idea what was showing. They didn’t even look at the screen. In that flickering dark, wrapped in the warm smell of popcorn, they could be alone. Just her face and his. From a crinkled pink-and-white bag, he brought treats to her lips, each invisible to her eyes, unknowable until they were in her mouth. Spongy banana-flavoured sugar, jellied gems, discs of grainy chocolate. And the salt of his fingers with each one. It was the first time she’d ever felt like she was a body, not a person in a body. She wasn’t trapped; she was whole. In that cavernous space, with the meaningless noise and light of the unwatched film, she was present. She was in her muscles and her sinews. She was her blood and her bones and her marrow. She was every inch herself as he touched her.

  It was a piece of notepaper. That thing she hadn’t known she was looking for. It wasn’t a ripped-out page of foolscap A4, but special notepaper with a turquoise border and filigree patterns painted into each corner. It was covered in neat, curling cursive. It looked like a poem at first, with its jagged right edge, but as she stepped closer to the pinboard, Rachel recognised the words. She is a changeless angel.

  Debbie moved towards her to see what she was staring at. Each letter had been formed with elaborate attention. This version was not the first. It must have taken Lily hours to get it this perfect. She must have thrown away page after page because one word sloped too much, was too small or towered above the others. Every word on this page was immaculate. This had been painstaking. She is a changeless angel. It had been important to her.

  Rachel snatched the paper from the corkboard. She knew those words. Debbie yelped as the corner ripped with the force of her tug. Lily could have copied and pasted the words into an app; a swift Google search would have laid them out before her. She could have made some cute meme with a bleached-out image of a meadow of flowers, a starlit sky, a beach.

  She is a changeless angel

  She’s a city it’s a pity

  That I’m like me.

  Lily could have imposed the words over her own face. But she hadn’t.

  ‘What is it? Is it a poem?’ Debbie leaned in to look, her breath warm on Rachel’s neck. Printing it would be too easy. This had taken time. Lily had wanted it to take time. She’d dedicated hours to it, and she’d savoured them. She’d wanted to feel the shape of every word in her hands. And these weren’t words she’d known before. They couldn’t have been. They’d been entirely new to her.

  The words would have meant nothing until he played the song to her. She must have sung it over and over as she wrote it out. She’d have memorised every breath. She is a changeless angel, she’s a city, it’s a pity that I’m like me. This page wasn’t a meme to be shared. This was private. This was between the two of them.

  Debbie pulled the paper out of Rachel’s hands. ‘Does it mean something? Rach, do you know it?’

  Rachel felt her gut thud. She knew the song. It was ‘Spaceball Ricochet’ by T. Rex. It was an album track from The Slider, never released as a single. It was written nearly thirty years before Lily was born. Rachel held herself solid, although her blood had deserted her. Only one person she knew loved that song. He’d played it in his car the single time he’d driven her home. He’d clicked to make it repeat three times when he’d realised Rachel knew the words. She locked her knees to stop them from buckling. Mark had played the song to Lily. It was their song. They were together.

  3

  The next morning, Wednesday, hit twenty-eight degrees, and for once it felt like a blessing. The flush in Rachel’s cheeks, the prickles of sweat on her eyelids and upper lip were made sense of. Everyone looked tired, puckered under their eyes where the heat had fought sleep. The weather had become a ritual, a punishment they were all growing used to. In the early days, the school field had been crowded every lunchtime, nearby parks littered with exposed flesh, but people now began to take refuge in the shade. Rachel was in no fit state to teach.

  They were rarely asked to invigilate these days, but when the call had gone out, Rachel gladly accepted. Physical presence was all she could muster. Invigilation was ideal. Rachel sat, inert, as that huge room slowly filled up with tension, like water into an empty pool. Two hundred students filed in. The gymnasium was entirely reimagined for exams: drained of joy, with desks in regimented rows on the coloured lines that usually marked out play. Invigilation involved witnessing the moment of horror descend. That day, the screech of chairs, the growing rumble of fear, grated on Rachel. She watched as the room turned on those teenagers. She watched for the dawning of it on their faces.

  The tension faded after five minutes, and the remaining hours became so dull it was almost meditation. All she had to do was sit there and make sure nothing happened. There were rumours of other supervisors playing invigilation games – racing to give out every piece of spare paper, playing chicken as they walked down aisles towards each other, concocting elaborate Battleships tournaments by pausing next to certain pupils. Rachel just stared.

  His hair was cut short. It had been shaved all around the sides, inches above his ears, with a badger streak of longer, thicker hair on top. Half the boys in his year boasted the same style, mimicked from bands or television presenters. The school had previously upheld rules about hair cropped below a certain grade, but the sheer number of semi-shorn heads made it futile to police. It made them look uniformly ugly. The empty space where their hairline should be served to flatten their features, making their noses look boxed, and their cheekbones broad and dumb. You could see their scalps glisten beneath the speckles. The other fashions Rachel had watched flit through the school – tight jeans, pierced eyebrows – had made the boys look vainly over-styled, but this made them look like brutes.

  As Aaron bit down on his wad of forbidden gum, Rachel could see the mechanics of his skull in action. Through some fate of alphabet, he was seated directly in front of her, his desk only a single step – maybe two – from her own. She’d never seen him this close up before. It seemed as if hundreds of tiny bones were flexing and unflexing under his skin, gripping together like cogs to make his jaw hinge. The exam was three hours long.

  He looked down at his paper, so the full dome of his skull faced her. If she didn’t blink, didn’t deviate her gaze, could she penetrate the skin of his scalp, pierce the bone, and reach the tender coil of his brain? Could she read what he bred there? His hair was a length that was strokable. The sensation on her hand would be satisfying. The bristles would seem to move beneath her. Rachel wanted to drag her palm from the thick of his forehead, right across his scalp to the scruff of his neck. Had Mia done the same? Had her daughter run her hands along those prickles? Had she felt the coarse scrub of it under those purple-painted fingers?

  Aaron wasn’t the kind of boy Rachel would ever have gone for. He was too mainstream. Too conformist. Underneath that expensive haircut, that designer hoodie, there was no spark of real rebellion. It would never have been his head her hand had longed to touch. She’d have craved softer, lanker locks. It seemed odd that her poised daughter was drawn in by this lumpen ox, but Rachel knew why. It was the lumpen ox’s moment. These were the months – fifteen months, eighteen months, thirty if he was lucky – when he would shine. When he could glow in the dark. When a raise of his eyebrow could change history. She’d never seen him this close up, but she’d seen him swagger down corridors, King of Year 11. His feet were encased in the most covetable nylon; his heart thumped red beneath his untucked school shirt. Rachel had glimpsed him on the football pitch. He barely broke sweat. The ball knew who he was; it
knew to bend to his will, just like the cabal of boys who constantly shadowed him. He was sixteen and he knew everything. Rachel could see how that could be irresistible.

  He was holding his pen badly, one crabbed fist around the biro. Rachel had never taught him, but she could see from feet away that his writing was a scrawl. There was nothing of sensitivity in those brutish hands. His fingers were like miniatures of his head. Had those fingers groped at Mia? Had those grubby-nailed stubs probed at her daughter’s bra, at the pants she sorted in the washing basket? Had three sets of fingers toyed with those pink scraps of fabric – Mia’s when she slipped them on, Aaron’s when he tugged them off, and her own when she worked to make them clean again?

  He stretched. Every ten minutes or so, he’d thump his pen down and pull one arm straight across his chest, using the other to wrench it tight. He’d reach both hands into the air, grasping for the ceiling. Those muscles must feel bulky. When his arms raised, Rachel could taste the sting of his aftershave and, underneath, something undeniably male. He was sixteen, but his body was grown. He was physically a man, even if not legally.

  As he lowered his arms, he saw Rachel looking. Their eyes met. Rachel didn’t allow her face to react. Aaron stared back, hands resting on his desk, his spine straight against the wooden chair. Rachel was suddenly aware of the dryness of her own mouth, the fabric of her skirt, the scoop of her neckline. Aaron didn’t look away. His gaze was steady. Intentional. It flashed in Rachel like rage. These children were nothing of the sort. They knew exactly what they were doing. They held all the power, and they were fully aware of it. Rachel locked onto his stare and refused to flicker. She wished she could assert her authority. She wished she could report him, punish him for his flagrant insubordination. She wished she could upend the table she sat at, drag him out of the gym by his shirt collar and into the playground, where she’d knock the arrogance from him.