‘Then act like it. Act like you give a shit. This is real. Do you understand that? And if you just sit there and keep quiet, you are part of it. You are responsible.’ Rachel was standing now and, as she spoke, she slammed her mug down on the wooden table. The sharp rap resounded around the kitchen; liquid sloshed over the edge of the mug, soaking her hands. Rachel’s breath wouldn’t settle as she heard the words she was speaking, felt their impact on herself as well as on her daughter. ‘This is serious. This is as serious as it gets, Mia.’
Mia didn’t look away. Rachel could see the alarm in her eyes.
The thud of the fairground’s beat had hit her bones with every step. The impossibly loud blare of dance music had made every other sense blur. He’d taken her hand and led her through the crowd at speed, pushing past shoulders and backpacks and tripping over toddlers in the dark. The mud beneath their feet had been hard and dusty, the grass rubbed away. They hadn’t looked back once. She’d felt nothing but his grip on her wrist, his fingers on her skin. He’d bought candyfloss without queuing and fed it to her, holding the clouds of pink so high she’d had to tilt her head right back to catch it on her tongue. Everything had smelled sweet and her mouth had crackled with sugar. They’d driven to the cusp of another county, so no face in that crowd would light when it saw them.
With her head tilted, she could see the strings of bulbs draped between the stalls, the flags, the letters painted in varying shades of the same colour so they became three-dimensional, so they leapt from their wood. From that angle, the movement of every ride was terrifying. Machines were spinning and diving all at the same time, all in different directions. Limbs were flying outwards, flailing, so near to smashing together. So few seconds from disaster. Mouths were yelping with the glee of it, the horror. Everything reached higher than it should, incredible in the face of gravity. The thud, thud, thud of the bassline held together the clashing melodies coming from every ride. Looming from each hoarding were the faces of celebrities created from spray cans. She couldn’t take it all in. His hand on the back of her neck. His fingers, sticky with pink, in her mouth.
He’d bought tickets for the waltzers, little old-fashioned paper stubs they had to show before they could sit in a carriage. The metal railing pushed against their middles. As the machine jolted to life, Mark leaned over, right into her ear. ‘Scream.’
They spun slowly, gaining momentum with every cycle.
‘Scream now. Like you’re never allowed to. I want you to.’ He had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘Scream as loud as you can.’ They were picking up speed, being hurtled backwards with each loop. She felt the strain on her arms and cheeks, desperate to stay sitting, to stay solid and not be pushed so hard they morphed into the wood and metal behind them. The man who ran the waltzers was suddenly above them, wolfish, giving them the attention he’d usually reserve for groups of girls. Ponytail and earrings. He spun them recklessly, so hard it should have shaken them, should have been hideous. But Mark’s gaze was locked on hers. He couldn’t lean into her, but his eyes did the work his mouth couldn’t. Scream.
So, she screamed. It was a shriek at first, a high wail, wavering and fragile. Then she pushed it deeper. The noise came from her stomach, not her throat. She screamed as loudly and as fully as she could. It was the sort of noise that would make people come running. Mark’s hand gripping hers. The grin of the waltzer man over her head. She was all scream. Mark’s eyes firmly on hers, his fingers laced through her fingers. He was seeing the wild creature he so wanted her to be. She screamed and screamed until tears sat on the tops of her cheeks, until the ride stopped and the man disappeared, and they stumbled together, inner ears scrambled, tripping into the neon dark in any direction at all.
Rachel slid the phone from its jack. Taking Mia’s phone no longer seemed transgressive. It was no longer frantic, but stoical. She kissed her sleeping daughter goodnight, then took the device. It was the one place she could hope to see her, to untangle what she knew. The bricolage of their teenage lives – the pictures, the messages, the timelines of social media sites – was easy to navigate now. She’d already pored over every photograph posted that year, pinching outwards to stretch them bigger, scrutinising every detail, but there was surely more to see.
Rachel knew about the terror teenagers could inflict upon each other; the bullying that a virtual world made permissible. Words that flowed from fingers could be harsher than anything tongues could bear to utter. She knew about the American kids who’d been blithely goaded to suicide. She was braced for it, prepared to read those words – skank, slut, ho, thot – and shudder at how girls could treat each other. She’d tried the words out, felt the shape and taste of them in her mouth, but never found any. With each new site she explored, each month she scrolled backwards, Rachel feared she’d hit the mother lode of horror, but their online universe was odddly sycophantic. They praised each other, bleating superlatives at every selfie – Love you, Queen. You are so unreal. Idk who I fancy more. Tu es séduisante. Ur amaze – and putting themselves down in every group shot. You’re the hottest of them all. What is wrong with my legs? Why does my face always impersonate a fish? No way! I’m nothing on you. They were encouraging, cheerleading each other through every image, every choice – Keira’s new dance leotards, Abby’s Spotify playlist. Rachel knew there were other sites she couldn’t reach. Snapchat had self-destruction built in, gobbling images and words as soon as they’d been glimpsed. There was a slew of messages she could never conjure back, but she could interrogate what she had.
If she looked closely enough, if she analysed their comments like poetry, unpacking their meaning beat by beat, she could see more. She could argue that Lily came off worse. She lacked the nous of the others, the detached irony. She showed the things she loved, not those that would increase her social standing. The others were harsher with her. Their comments were less gushing. #Fail. Awkward. The slights were hidden amongst grinning compliments, but Rachel could imagine the reaction they’d provoke. Lily garnered fewer likes, by fifty or sixty clicks. The judgement now seemed glaring.
It was often near Rachel’s midnight by the time Tim could talk. They’d discovered in the early months of him being away that the phone was not enough. Engaging only one sense was too isolating. So, they relied on Skype. Rachel wanted to linger that night, finding out about his day, how the project was progressing. She wanted to hear his voice, to see his body moving, as if he was there with her, not alone in a hotel room. But the connection was fragile. However the information scrambled itself to travel, it struggled to land. Their faces didn’t remain whole, but fragmented into monstrous, jawless fuzzes. Every second sentence turned robotic. Snowed under. Diary like a barcode. In the first weeks of his six-month secondment, they’d talked for hours, but their nightly catch-ups had become more bulletin than communion.
It wasn’t Tim’s face Rachel could see. It was a digital rendering that looked near enough to fool a stranger. The hair colour was right, the shape of his forehead. But she couldn’t meet his eyes. To look at the screen eyes meant missing his real gaze by inches. They were never able to make full contact. The nearest approximation was to focus on the laptop’s camera, but eyeballing the computer felt hollow, and the stare it created was uncanny. Rachel found it easier to watch her own face move through the conversation from the small box in the corner. The call lasted only twelve minutes.
When Rachel pressed the button to break the connection, the silence in the bedroom buzzed. It felt like her room now, not theirs. It was where she lay without him. The stroke of the sheets against her skin was the nearest she came to physical contact. The weight of the duvet when she could bear it. Her body ached to be manipulated the way it once was, his hands on her flesh, moving her limbs where he wanted, teaching her how best to touch his body. The rasp of male cheeks against her own, the grazes they left behind. The bruises in places no one else could see.
Rachel couldn’t ask. She cou
ldn’t request anything more than the information that flowed her way through the standard channels: school updates, television bulletins, internet news. But she could look. She’d set up Google Alerts for Lily’s name, for Mark’s name, streaming the results as soon as they arose. Nothing of Mark had shown. She needed to see beyond the mainstream articles and newspaper headlines to blogs and comments; she needed to dig into the gossip and conjecture. Someone else must know what she knew. She sat in bed until the early hours, her light off so as not to alert Mia, her face lit to ghoulish green by the phone’s screen, deep into tweets and comments on tweets, mired in Reddit threads. She rummaged through the hashtags she knew were rich seams: #LilyDixon, #whereisLily. She checked their flows, learned the imagined situations they explored. None of them were close to the truth. Screen after screen of speculation scrolled past, and there was no sign of Mark in any of them.
Rachel knew for certain that they were together. The bone-deep thud of recognition hadn’t left her. She knew. And she knew she couldn’t sit on that knowledge. She was part of it. She was culpable. She couldn’t rest. One call, and Mia would be a step closer to having her friend back. She had to make the call. She had to, she had to, she had to. Only a monster would keep it to herself. It had already been too long. It was Thursday morning now, after another night of almost no sleep. She had already lied to the police.
Rachel could feel the phone’s faint pulse ringing down her arm. She breathed in time with it, let her weight slump against the cushions on her bed, dreading the moment a human voice would spring from the receiver. As it clicked and the person on the other end began to speak, she slapped the phone into submission. It was the eighth time she’d tried that morning. Saying those words would shatter everything. She hadn’t even practised how they would flow, just tried to trick herself into blurting it out. She knew what would happen when Mark was caught; what they would say about him, think about him. It would all be her doing.
She could have stopped it. She should have known. She could see Lily’s vulnerability; she’d heard those longing comments about being flattered by an impressive man. She should have listened to her words fully, pushed behind them, unpicked her expressions. She was trained in how to do this. It could have been prevented so easily.
The phone knew the number, so only a tap was needed to call it again. The purrs started up immediately. Rachel tried to focus on nothing but that mechanical trill. She wondered if the rings at the other end came at the same moment or were perfectly syncopated. She wondered if . . . the phone clicked, and a voice greeted her. The words she needed to speak were suddenly too heavy. Someone else must know; someone else would tell. Rachel closed her eyes and swiped the call away.
It had been a corner shop. The type of shop that sold basics – tea, milk, bread – then an extraordinary mix of lurid alcohol and fizzy sweets. She hardly ever went into one. She had assumed he’d popped in to pick up another bottle of the sugary drink he loved. She’d expected him to select a vial of pink or red liquid, pay with cash and then they’d be gone. But he’d walked up behind her, careful not to touch her, not to be seen, and whispered. ‘Take something.’
She had laughed.
‘I’m serious. Take something. Steal something. I want to see you do it.’ He spoke almost without moving his lips, turning his head away from the man at the counter.
‘I’m not going to steal something.’ She mouthed the words back to him, eyebrows high.
‘Do it. Please. I want you to. I want you to do it.’ His eyes were so close to hers that she couldn’t focus. His two eyes merged into one, one enormous eye with lashes that tickled the bridge of her nose. He walked out of the shop. She was left in the middle aisle, alone amongst the dry pasta and jarred sauce. She turned to follow him out, but stopped. There were no CCTV cameras in the corners of the room, just one of those bulbous, fish-eye mirrors. The man at the till was reading a paperback, folded over on itself. He was hardly aware of her, not concerned, not watching. It would be the easiest thing in the world.
She could already feel the blood thrum with more force. It was ridiculous. She couldn’t possibly consider it. She put her jacket on for something to do. The air-conditioning made it viable. She forced herself to inhale slowly, then walked down the aisle in casual curiosity, her head scanning the products. No, no that is not what I’m looking for. She reached the end of the row, blithely turned, and headed down the next. Maybe down here. She bent down to the fabric conditioners, plucked a bottle out and pretended to read the copy on the back. Suitable for delicates. Dermatologically tested. She nodded to herself, and replaced the bottle neatly on the shelf.
The bell above the door dinged as a group of kids stumbled in. They were no older than ten, not yet in secondary school, and no one she recognised. They were miles from home. The man placed his book down, splayed open, bending the spine, and watched as they squabbled over which bottle of fizzy drink they were going to share.
At the far end of the aisle, nearest to the door but blocked from his view, were loose sweets – packets of gummy animals, single servings of chocolate, strawberry laces. She leaned over as if to examine them more closely, picked up a thin, flat bar of toffee and pushed it up her jacket sleeve. Its plastic wrapper was cold against the skin of her wrist. With a glance around the room, as if checking in case she’d forgotten anything, she left the shop, closing the door firmly behind her. As it clicked shut, she ran. She ran like crazy. It felt pure. As her legs pounded and she dodged sluggish pedestrians, she had one straightforward fear. Getting into trouble. Her bag thumped against her side; her hair blew over her face. The fear was overwhelming in its simplicity. She just ran.
She ran around the corner to where she knew he’d be. She pulled the toffee from her sleeve and held it to him like an offering. As he took it from her, eyes wide with delight, she started to laugh, laugh until she bent double, gripping onto him for support. In a small alley between the shops they couldn’t be seen. His arms were around her, his mouth on her hair, her neck. Her veins fizzed with the thrill of it all. The waves of laughter kept coming, uncontrollable and racking. He was proud of her. He lifted her shaking body upright and pushed her backwards against the rough wall, his mouth on her mouth.
Either no one had thought to take the posters down, or they’d feared it might upset some delicate balance. It meant that Lily’s face, in near-perfect profile, loomed out from every noticeboard in the school. Rachel stood in front of the main-entrance board and touched the A3 picture. The paper was glossy. They’d paid substantially more for it. They’d used the camera from the art department, borrowed their complicated lights and a white reflector board to hold under Lily’s chin, just out of the frame. They’d spent hours on eBay, eventually finding a little plastic unicorn that looked like it could be made from glass.
Behind the words – the name of the play, the dates and times it was showing, the school’s address, the ticket prices – Lily’s face was blurred. The unicorn in her hand was in sharp focus. Despite the blur, she glowed. She glowed the golden glow that is entirely made of youth, that is the preserve of those who can’t possibly appreciate it. Rachel knew the only chance of emitting anything like it over thirty was to be exceptionally well loved, or exceptionally well rested.
When the posters had arrived from the printers in a heavy cardboard box, when they’d run an open scissor blade down the tape and her face had jumped out, Lily had been horrified. ‘You can’t! Ms Collins, please. No.’ Her printed face was marginally bigger than life-size. Its colours were marginally brighter. Her words protested, but the set of her lips let Rachel know she was thrilled. Her face was about to be broadcast down every corridor. People who had never spoken to her would know who she was. ‘The unicorn looks lovely, though.’
Rachel could remember the day they’d taken the picture. She’d expected an afternoon of stemming giggles, of trying to capture the one moment when Lily wasn’t in the grip of embarrassed hi
larity, but the girl had been determined. She became grave when the lights were on her. Shot after shot, her face was still, her eyes fixed. She wanted to try out a range of different expressions. She knew the faces the old Hollywood stars made. She had evidently practised them in the mirror, altering the tiniest angle, the slightest muscle to change the geometry of her face. Lily transformed over and over. When they checked the miniature images in the camera’s display, she didn’t settle. She saw ways to make it better, insisted upon trying again, improving it, aiming for perfection.
The toilets were empty. Their location – at the juncture of the canteen and the science block – was out of the way. They were rarely used. A new block in the main building had endless mirrors and light, but Rachel wanted to be alone. She had a free period after lunch, and could hear the corridors fading to quiet. She ran the taps. The hot water was scalding, so she ran the cold until the force of the flow half-filled the sink. She plunged her arms in, scooping handfuls into her armpits, unconcerned if her vest or bra got wet, sluicing the day away.
In the heat, just having a human body was a chore. Just keeping it suitable for public approval was a job, and school was always public. When that teenage stink smacked the air of her classroom, Rachel made certain that her own body emitted almost nothing.
She unclipped the buckle of her sandal and leveraged her right foot into the running water. It was a feat of flexibility gifted from adolescent ballet. She rubbed the grime from between her toes. In the heat, her body was just meat, a lump of flesh always at risk of turning. The constant vigilance was exhausting.
Returning her feet to her shoes, Rachel rested her forehead against the mirror. She didn’t want to catch her own eyes. The guilt of her inaction made her face look unfamiliar. It was the face of a woman too aware of what she had to lose. Rachel couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t felt tired. Her head had felt woozy and untethered for so many days, as if she was always on the brink of a swoon. The ache at her core never stopped nagging.
Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer Page 8