‘Come here, Rach, love. Drink some of this. Come on now.’ A glass of water was pressed into her grip, and warm hands wrapped around hers to lift it to her mouth. It was cool. If she kept her eyes closed, and it was just her and the water, she’d be okay. Then the glass was gone. She was pushed forward, and her arms were removed from her sequined shrug.
‘You’re better with this off now, darling, you must be over-heating.’ Marianne’s voice near her ear.
Rachel had enjoyed how she’d looked as she left the house. The sequins looked dressy enough for the occasion, but still edgy over her jeans, her faded T-shirt. Without it, she looked too casual next to these women in their satin tops. All she could smell was perfume; three different perfumes mingling together to form a floral fug.
Someone else leaned over, pressed the back of their hand against her forehead to see if she was burning up.
‘I’m fine. Really, I’m absolutely fine, just got a bit dizzy. It’s the heat.’
Their flesh was still pushed against hers. ‘You poor thing. It really is too much for any of us to cope with.’
‘I said to Jase, this is too much for us all; too much for the kids and too much for us.’ Tina’s voice was still wobbling.
‘And you’re right at the coalface, having to be in school every day.’
‘I don’t know how you do it, darling.’
Now Rachel was cooler, now she was sitting down, the arms around her felt genuinely comforting. It was days until arms would be around her again.
‘And having known him, having worked with him, it must be awful.’
‘I can’t imagine how you must feel.’
Rachel swallowed. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
If they knew. If they knew that she’d failed to speak, that she’d abdicated her responsibility to Lily, to their daughters, their faces would hagger and harden. Over a decade of friendship would vanish in a heartbeat.
‘Sweetheart, you just rest.’
‘We’ll look after you.’
They’d kissed in the freezing water, their blue lips locked onto each other. Their goose-fleshed bodies had tangled together, half desire, half necessity. The current felt stronger, more urgent, and she’d felt herself being tugged from him, the river urging her to come downstream, always downstream. It wouldn’t be discouraged. She clung to Mark: he was taller; his feet had a better grounding in the silt; he’d be able to keep her safe. They were too far from the shallows where they’d paddled in, but he could get her to the far bank without panicking, without swallowing too much of the grimy water. They could climb out and walk from there. It would be fine. It would be over. But the river kept on tugging and when Mark released his grip, she felt herself being torn away, out of his arms, out of her depth, at the mercy of the current. A shot of pure panic coursed through her.
She called to him. ‘Please, I want to get out.’
He looked over to her. The cold was growing unbearable; it was weighing on her limbs, pressing on her lungs. She couldn’t fake it any longer. The fear was urgent.
‘Help, please, help me get out. I don’t like it.’ She was treading water as fast as she could, too scared to put her feet down in case she realised how far from the bottom they were. ‘Please, I want to go back to the car.’
He stared right at her and smiled. She held her arms out to him, expecting him to catch them, to pull her towards him, to guide her to the edge with a firm grip. He didn’t move.
They were dropped home in Marianne’s people carrier. Rachel clambered out of the back seat, stood in her porchway, and waved them goodbye. She watched the seven-seater amble around the corner, but she didn’t enter the house. She didn’t go in to where Mia waited for her, watching television, or maybe lying in bed, bathed in her phone’s glow until sleep took over. Instead, she bent down, unlaced her silver leather trainers and left them on the front step. It was finally dark, properly dark, not just the tail of endless dusk.
Rachel padded barefoot across her own garden to the lawn of the house next door. The grass felt luxurious between her toes. The gardens of the cul-de-sac were patchworked, sometimes separated by painted fences or neat hedges, sometimes flowing into each other, guarded by invisible borders. The grass in all of them was rich with nutrients, fed like a pet every weekend, mowed in contrasting stripes. Rachel walked across the garden of number six and cleared the hedge to number eight in one leap. It was as oppressively warm as in the daytime. She wished the sky would cloud over and rain so the dust would wash away.
It was after eleven, and downstairs lights were beginning to be flicked off; the lower halves of houses were being put to bed, and the upstairs were stuttering to life. Rachel knew all the people in all the houses: their names, their occupations, how many children they’d managed to have. She knew where they went on holiday, and when they got their houses valued. She’d seen inside so many of those rooms, seen the furniture and the wallpaper they’d chosen, how they’d transformed their kitchens and exactly how much it had cost. In the light of nothing but streetlamps, the red-brick exteriors were indistinguishable from each other. Without numbers, it would be impossible to recognise one as your own. Hundreds of neat boxes, all the same, each connected to pure, perfect broadband, so no one ever need be bored for a second ever again. She knew that in those upstairs there would be cursory kisses, and nighties despite the heat. Rachel found herself suppressing the desire to scream. She wanted to shout, just one great bark of sound that would wake the place up, just to see what would happen.
Rachel walked out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main road. Grit from the warm asphalt prickled her bare feet in a way that wasn’t quite painful. At that time of night, there was hardly any traffic. Rachel stepped off the pavement and walked along the middle of the road. She kept her feet carefully within the boundaries of the central white lines, like a gymnast on a balance beam, taking step after step towards nothing clear. Pools of light gathered underneath each streetlamp she passed, fading to near-darkness at the furthest points between them. She walked that way for minutes, down the straight road – passing cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac – before a car’s lights were suddenly on her, appearing without warning, abruptly close and sharp and real. Rachel leapt – two steps, three – to the kerb. She turned her face away, into the bushes that grew along the pavement. Her heart jittered. She held her breath until the car had driven by, until it was out of sight, out of earshot, and she could be sure the driver hadn’t recognised her barefoot and alone in the night. A few more steps and she’d be there.
His mouth had been curled into a grin, but his words were flat. He’d grabbed both of her arms, securing her to him, so the river’s current didn’t tug her away. She didn’t feel any safer.
‘Don’t be so fucking boring, Rachel.’
When she didn’t respond, when she didn’t throw her arms into the air and whoop with glee, or match his smile and laugh it off, when she froze in position and stared at him, the grin dropped.
‘What are you doing?’
She couldn’t read his face. The cold was gnawing, and her heart wouldn’t calm. The dark was treacherous and, in that black river, the look on his face when he turned to her had seemed like nothing but disappointment.
‘I thought I knew you.’ His grip didn’t lessen.
She knew she was supposed to be special, magical, not like any other woman of his age. She was supposed to have stayed wild. His expression was blurred. Ripples on the surface were lit by faraway streetlamps, but everything else fuzzed. They’d been wet for less than ten minutes, but it felt crushing. Everything was a shade of blue, as if every other colour had drained from the world. His face was so close she could feel his breath. She couldn’t speak.
‘I thought I knew what you were like.’
She wasn’t supposed to see the danger. He moved them a few feet, dextrous in the water, able to shift it at his will. Nothing so f
leeting as a wave could knock him off balance. His hands were on her arms, her neck, holding her face. They gave no warmth. He was looking right at her. His eyes reflected the moon, the streetlamps. His pupils flickered, back and forth, up and down, as if he was trying to locate her within her own head.
‘Rachel. I thought we wanted the same things.’ The drama in his voice neared despair.
Her face was between his hands, closed in his grip. In that dark, he looked betrayed. She’d reneged on a promise she hadn’t realised she’d made. She was supposed to have behaved a certain way, made him feel a certain way. Their limbs were tangling in the water, grappling with each other to stay afloat. They were only metres from the bank, from the parked car, only minutes from her house, but it felt like wilderness, utterly remote from anywhere safe. She needed him to get her out. She tried to smile, tried to acquiesce to him, but there was more in his voice than disappointment.
‘Why are you being like this?’ He stood still. His hands too hard on her side, anchoring her in the freezing water.
She was always going to fail him. Forty years of existing made it inevitable. She couldn’t erase them. He wanted real youth, not some middle-aged mimic. Not someone who had calcified into conformity. He wanted the real thing, and was furious with her for being false. He knew the risk of the real. He must have hoped he’d never have to seek it, hoped that Rachel would be enough. But she was terrified; she was pulling away; she was challenging him. It was more than disappointment.
‘You’re boring me, Rachel.’ It had been a threat.
Mark’s flat. That’s where the road had led. It was no more than twenty minutes from her house, but she’d never walked there before. She’d only been inside a handful of times, but knew what sat behind the dark of that window. It was a one-bedroom flat in a converted industrial building that had kept the exposed brick, the wrought-iron window frames of its previous life. It was as urban as it was possible to be in that town. He wasn’t in there. He hadn’t been in there for well over a week, but other people had. There would be police footprints and fingerprints on everything. Everything he had gathered and collected in his forty-one years would have been ransacked to prove what a terrible person he was. They’d have been looking for the worst. They would have found almost nothing of Rachel. Her prints, her DNA, fibres from her jacket and shoes would be present, but nothing bigger, nothing visible to the naked eye.
Rachel reached down and, in the small patch of garden underneath Mark’s window, found a pebble. It was smooth and perfect, nearly round, the sort of pretty thing a child might squirrel away. It felt cool in the soft of her palm. Rachel drew her hand back and threw the stone. In the fraction of time before it hit the window, a spasm of panic ripped through her as she realised that the window could shatter, and if it did the hours that followed would be excruciating; the conversations, the explanations. All because of a stone no bigger than an acorn. She could practically hear the smash, the clatter. But the window didn’t break; the pebble just rebounded onto the shrubbery beneath.
The stone lay pointless and Rachel felt it as an anti-climax. Despite the fear, she wanted to cause destruction, something that proved she’d been there. Something that proved she could have an impact. The stone she’d thrown now sat at the feet of a cerise rhododendron bush; lurid and flimsy. Rachel grabbed a handful of the bright petals and pulled them. Everything that had simmered in her, pulsed under the surface for so many hours, so many days, began to shift. Whole clusters came away easily, and she threw them into the dark air. They fell like confetti over her head. She ripped off more and more, flinging them behind her, carpeting the ground with pink. She tore at the shrub until it was naked of flowers, until only its thick leaves remained. She tugged at those. They came away, but it took far more effort. She opened her mouth as if to scream but didn’t allow herself the noise. She mouthed obscenities into the air. You fucking bastard. You fucking creep. Nothing but ghosts of words to articulate her rage. You bastard. The words, even if screamed, would seem pathetic in the face of her fury. Her hands were red, sore with the strain; she had to push her feet against the shrub’s trunk to gain enough traction. It wasn’t enough. She wanted the whole bush to suffer. Kneeling in the dry mud, Rachel used her hands as shovels to dig into the soil, scooping clods of earth away, smashing her fingers against the meaty, fibrous roots, trying to get around them, beneath them, so she could leverage the whole beast. Memories of him flashed through her. The sweet hit of candyfloss in a far-flung fairground. The smooth wrapper of a stolen slab of toffee. The varnished wood of his desk. She gripped the branches and tugged with all her might, grunting with the effort, the frustration. The cold fear in that river. She yanked until her nails split and her fingers stubbed and her arms screamed. She was doing herself damage. But it was futile. The bush was anchored firmly, and all her raving hardly dented it. She flopped, filthy with soil, smeared with sap, to the ground, fully aware that if anyone saw her, if any resident of a ground-floor flat just happened to look out to investigate the noise, she’d seem nothing but a deranged middle-aged woman.
5
Rachel had kept a picture of Debbie Harry in the pocket of her coat for nearly five months. It only left when she transferred it to her handbag on days it was too warm for a jacket. White lines slashed through the image from where it had been folded and refolded. It had become floppy and curled from the damp of her grip. It was of Debbie Harry in the seventies, wearing almost nothing but a tight slogan T-shirt and a studded belt, her fingers stretched out towards the camera.
He’d handed it to her in the corridor. She looks like you. Pupils had bumped into them. Rachel had palmed the picture and kept on walking. There was something in the rise of Debbie Harry’s chin, something in the slant of her eyes, that did recall Rachel’s face. They did have the same lemon-blonde hair. Rachel’s had once been messily natural, but now cost £120 and nearly two hours every eight weeks. Her vainest thoughts would have taken her to the comparison, but she’d never have voiced it. When she later protested, he was emphatic. She looks like what I see when I look at you.
There were so few mementos, so few fragments she’d managed to store from Mark. He sent almost no messages to her phone. He rarely dialled her number. He liked everything to be transient. He wrote notes that couldn’t be traced back to his pen; he’d never given her a single gift. But he’d cut this picture from a magazine. She’d hoarded it like treasure.
Rachel had barely spoken to Mia since Wednesday. The house felt empty, even with them both in it. It seemed to goad her, flaunting its spare rooms, space for the children she didn’t have, the husband who was so far away. The third bedroom had been reconfigured to form a study that none of them used.
Rachel paused in Mia’s room before she came home, breathing it in. She needed to see inside Mia’s physical world. Written in two-foot characters over Mia’s bed were the three letters of her name, created by fabric stretched over thick cardboard and stapled into place. They’d made it together when she was twelve, taking a trip to Liberty to select the fabric, splashing out on dense prints. Rachel had been grateful for the brevity of the word. It hadn’t been her first choice. Tim had pulled her back from more bohemian impulses, tracking away from Persephone and Foxglove to something good and solid. They’d found common ground in pop culture. In their mid-twenties, they’d both deemed Tarantino’s Mia Wallace suitable inspiration. Rachel had encouraged her daughter to seek out the root of her name, but she’d never seemed the slightest bit intrigued.
Mia’s desk was right-angled, every object on it placed carefully. Her homework diary, a copper Anglepoise lamp, a stapler, a ruler, three packs of chewing gum, a Moscow Mule cup full of black biros, a potted succulent. She was taking the first year of her GCSEs very seriously. She had always been a disciplined child. It made Rachel smile. Her daughter could seem so far away, and the moments when their characters aligned were joyful; the moments when Mia seemed to be made of fragments of
Rachel, collected up and recast. She was proud of it. Proud and scared. Part of her willed Mia to shrug that trait off like an unwanted hand-me-down, the trait that left nothing unplanned, that nagged at the edges of everything. The trait that made so little good enough, that drove her to want control over things that should be left wild.
On the shelf above Mia’s desk, there was a framed photograph. Her parents’ wedding day. Rachel froze. It hadn’t been there before. It was a photograph Mia couldn’t possibly decipher. She couldn’t know how significant it was to prop that framed 8'' x 12'' print against those books now. She couldn’t know. Rachel steeled herself to look at it. It had been taken only months before the end of the century, when everything was Ray-Bans and grins. The day had been determinedly laid-back: sausages in rolls, bridesmaids in wellies, loose hair, mud and flowers, a live band. Tim was so tall and gentle, his arms around Rachel’s waist, over the place where Mia would start to grow only weeks later. Rachel remembered dark lipstick, tumblers of bourbon and a dress that showed her clavicle. She never knew if the memories would have faded without those photographs. It sometimes felt as if she only recalled the moments when a camera had flashed. The minutes and hours between them had blurred. It was those stills that had stopped her hand, silenced her voice. Despite her concern for Lily, it was those pictures that meant she could do nothing to save her.
The heavy silver frame didn’t suit the picture, totally misread its dishevelled charm. But Mia had curated it. She’d found the picture, bought the frame and placed it there deliberately.
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