Crushed

by Kate Hamer

  40

  Phoebe

  Will I ever sleep again?

  I’m alone in the house finally and every tiny thing that can be done has been done and checked and rechecked over and over again, but still I cannot sleep. Imps pinch at my eyelids, urging me to check once more. Demons cluster in the corners and shout every time I’m dropping off. Hooves rattle across the floorboards of my bedroom. My sorcery has turned upside down and back to front in a way that is now against me. Even though her dress is not here, its blue ghost walks the house and haunts me. I long even for the crowded sleep I used to have.

  I lie with eyes wide open, looking at the ceiling.

  *

  When we returned last night I opened the front door on a house I’d hoped never to return to. I heard the phone ringing as I crossed the threshold and, even though I ran, nearly tripping, to the kitchen, when I placed my hand on the receiver I felt only the last dying ghostly ring vibrating through my hand. When I picked it up there was the buzz of a dead line.

  ‘Who was it?’ Grace asked and I said I didn’t know, even though I feared I did.

  We toured the house. At first it was with the lights off because somehow we couldn’t bear the glare on us. We saw our way by the remains of the endless summer twilight falling through the windows. In this blueness I kept glimpsing the other two’s eyes as big and round as saucers and I wondered if mine looked the same. I’m sure they did. I saw how that world was smashed and how now the fact of that wasn’t sublime at all. I despaired of ever being able to reconstruct it. All those shards of glass; if I was given a millennium could I ever piece them together? What about cleaning the blood out of my dress? Getting rid of his clothes somewhere where no one could ever find them? It was as impossible as spinning flax into gold. It was all so much work I wanted to lie right down on the spot and never get up. Although even then I knew I would not be able to sleep, because I grasped that, even though sleep had now become something I craved perhaps more than anything, it would elude me until the end of my days.

  Nevertheless, a start had to be made. I fetched some newspaper from the kitchen and began to pick up glass in the study. I saw now that it was not only the precious objects inside that were spoiled and smashed but the glass door on the cabinet was broken on one side too. A great jagged hole gaped. Grace crunched over glass, swearing and weeping. Getting back to the house seemed to collapse her. She weaved around, shouting. The drugs had intensified in her system so that she barely seemed to know where she was. Orla was no more use. My lovely Orla. She looked like a stranger, like someone who didn’t matter to me any more. She kept looking at us both in turn and asking, ‘What shall we do? What shall we do?’

  ‘Clear this glass up,’ I said.

  She knotted her hands together like writhing snakes. ‘But that won’t bring him back,’ she said.

  Then like an avalanche, like an invasion, there was an echoing down the hallway, a flooding of sound, a cacophony of bells. The other two froze.

  ‘It’s the phone again,’ breathed Orla.

  I dropped the glass so it smashed on top of the rest and I ran to the kitchen. This time I made it.

  ‘Hello.’ I wondered how my voice sounded.

  There was a silence on the other end so of course I knew who it was straight away.

  ‘Mum?’ I whispered, and yes, I’ll admit, even then, even now, there was longing in my voice.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Her own voice, ice cold, dripped down the back of my neck.

  ‘Umm. I didn’t make it to the phone in time. I—’

  ‘Phoebe. I have been ringing all evening.’

  I held the receiver tight to my ear. ‘What for?’ I managed, finally.

  ‘To check on you, of course. I told you specifically and categorically you were not to leave the house so I want to know exactly what’s going on and where you’ve been.’

  ‘Mum.’ Never had my longing for her felt greater.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum, please.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Phoebe. You’re not making any sense.’ That’s when I detected it, the slipping slur in her voice. It made me realise not everything was on her side. It was a tiny unpicking at the seam.

  ‘Mum. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I am. Why would you say that?’ There it was again. She’s drunk. She’s drunk! I realised.

  ‘It’s just that your voice sounds all strange and slurry. Are you ill or something?’

  There was silence for a moment. Her slurring didn’t actually sound that bad but I could tell she didn’t want to test it out again. She needed a moment to collect herself.

  ‘I’m absolutely fine …’

  ‘You really don’t sound it, Mum. You sound really funny. Where’s Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a break in her voice and that’s when I realised it. She was drunk and she’d had a row with Dad and she’d wandered off, and that’s why she was ringing all night to take it out on me. She was on some cobbled Edinburgh street in the midnight blue dress with my ghost tears sprayed across it in an invisible corsage, and she was standing with her phone clamped to her ear, desperate and fuming. ‘You still haven’t told me where you’ve been.’

  ‘We were upstairs and we turned the CD player right up and we were dancing so I didn’t hear. Sorry, Mum. D’you think you ought to go and find Dad?’

  Pause. ‘I suppose so. I hope you didn’t disturb the neighbours with your music. Is it turned down now?’

  This house is like a castle. I don’t know who the neighbours are, except for on one side I’ve seen a man scurrying to his car occasionally. They wouldn’t hear even a faint echo of any music we play.

  I needed to get rid of her now. I had too much to do. ‘Yes, Mum. It’s switched off now. You go and find Dad. He’s probably worrying about you.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll do that.’ Her voice drifted off, like she’d taken the phone away from her head, and then the line went dead.

  Back in the study Orla had her arm around Grace, who was crouched next to all the broken glass with her hands on her head. Drools of spit were running out of her mouth and dry sobs racking over her body. They hadn’t done a thing while I’d been gone. The newspaper lay exactly where I’d left it. I could see I’d have to get rid of them too and do everything myself.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ll need to shower before you get into bed. My mother will go crazy if she finds mud on the sheets.’

  I showered them and tucked them up in the guest room. Grace fell asleep almost immediately but Orla lay there with her eyes wide open, looking petrified.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ I warned her. ‘I need you to stay exactly where you are.’ I couldn’t take her blundering around, having to look after her. She looked in such a panic I wouldn’t have put it past her to wander outside wrapped in nothing but a sheet and stand screaming about what we’d done in the middle of the street. As a precaution I took the key from inside the door and locked them both inside. I slipped the key into my pocket and went to work.

  It was strange. It was as if all my years of checking the hairs on my diary, the crumbs, the total and one hundred per cent attention to detail in the forensic rubbing-out of myself was all training for this one night.

  After the glass was all in the bin I turned my attention to his clothes. Oh, I felt so sad looking at them. They didn’t even seem like clothes any more they were so stiff with blood, misshapen and deformed. In the pockets I found his wallet, his keys and the mobile phone I recognised as being ‘ours’. When we were arguing he told me he’d only brought it with him so he could throw it in the river in front of me as a demonstration that this silly little charade of a relationship must end. I frowned down at the screen. It was a hurtful gesture, but one he never did get to perform before he got stabbed. I think the phone was in his hand when it happened. Grace – cleverly – must have put it back in his pocket. I pick through his wallet. A twenty pound note and a five. A debit car
d in joint names with his wife – Mr L and Mrs K Jonasson. A receipt for toothpaste and shampoo from Boots. Some blue and yellow slips of paper with numbers printed on them like the ones used in raffles. It seemed respectful to put everything back where it was. I felt tears forming in my eyes. It was so dreadful that a whole life could end with just this dirty mound of stuff: the shoes that he was probably proud of because they were nice leather oxblood brogues, compensating for the cheapness of the jacket; the black underpants boasting Pierre Cardin on the waistband that were probably chosen for him; the shirt with the jaunty stripes of pink and orange, distinctive colours that I’m sure I’d seen in a ‘buy one, get one half price’ deal in the window of a shop in town. The whole lot spoke so much of striving and staying relevant alongside making do, it nearly broke my heart. And that’s before you even began to think about all the blood and mess. You’ll feel better when it’s out of sight, I told myself, and carried it all into the garden.

  Outside, the night was still warm. I had no idea what time it was. I checked up at our neighbours’ windows but they were all in darkness. It made me shudder, though, the idea that someone could be watching behind them in the darkness. I hunched up as close to the garden wall as I could as I made my way down towards the shed with the bundle in my arms. Even though Mum and Dad aren’t exactly keen gardeners I was sure there must be something in there – a spade or fork or something. Burning the clothes out here could have all those eyes turning towards the back windows, pressing their faces up against the glass. I might as well put out an announcement on a loud speaker. They would have to be buried. I stumbled around the shed, starting to panic, but eventually my heart soared when I found a long-handled spade behind the other tools.

  I’d brought the phone that he’d given me to bury with everything else. I chose the spot near the ivy where I used to hide the phone. I began to dig, the only sounds the chopping into the soil and my own breath. I found it difficult to know how deep to make it or even how deep I’d got because of the darkness, but eventually I judged it big enough and shoved everything in the bottom and covered it all back up with soil, which took an age.

  I was closing the back door behind me, thinking about what else had to be done, when a wave of the most crippling panic fell right through me. It was so bad this time it felt like radiation – not the wonderful kind I felt in the Roman Baths, but a poisonous sort – and I was a mere object for it to get through and it was going to kill me.

  What if, and I could hardly bear to think about it, what if not everything went into that hole?

  What if I’d dropped something on my way? Or if something fell out of his wallet and was fluttering around in the breeze in the garden right now? What if a button had fallen off his jacket and was lying on the garden path like an accusing eye? Or it could be one of his green socks or even his underpants that slipped away from me.

  I went back out into the night, nearly crying with fear and exhaustion. I took a torch with me this time, despite the neighbours, and looked all over, searching over the lawn and the tatty borders and down at the bottom around the shed, but even when I couldn’t find anything I couldn’t rest, so convinced was I that there was some piece of incriminating material somewhere. It was like the day I thought I’d written all those terrible things in my diary for her to read, only this was a thousand times worse.

  I had no choice, I decided. I’d have to dig it all up again. God knows what time it was, but that’s what I did. I really was crying by the time I got to the bottom, I was so tired. Before reburying it I laid everything out, piece by piece on the ground, to convince myself each thing was really there – the socks neatly side by side and the shoes. I went through his wallet, placing each item on the ground – the notes, the raffle tickets, the loose change, the debit card and receipt. Stand up and look at it all, I told myself, commit it to memory like you would with that game when you have to remember objects on the tray after they’ve been covered up with a cloth. So that’s what I did, the torch flickering over the horrible bloodied stuff. Then I dropped everything in the hole and shovelled earth back over it.

  But as I was walking away the what-ifs started again. I looked all around the filled-in hole to see if I’d accidentally left anything out, and part of me knew it was nuts but the bigger part of me was panicking and panicking and wishing I’d made a drawing of everything on the ground with labels and then ticked it off piece by piece as I lowered it into the earth. It took a huge effort of will to break away – stronger than anything I thought I was capable of – but I did it in the end by promising myself I could do this again soon, when everyone was out one day, and it would be easier in the daylight. Nobody but me ever came out here anyway, except Dad once in a blue moon to cut the grass after it reached over a foot long, but he’d only just done it and the grass is really short so that won’t be for ages. Besides, I had to get inside as there was still so much to be done in there. I had to put the knife through the dishwasher, although after I had, I thought of how Lucas’s corpuscles had been spread in a fine mist over the entire inside of the dishwasher, and the idea of having to eat off plates and with cutlery that had been in there nearly made me puke and I wished I’d done it in the sink. I ran the dishwasher again and again, empty, to try and make it clean again. I had to wash my white dress because surely she would notice if I got rid of it, and that took an age. I washed it first in the sink with bubbles up to my elbows and then in the washing machine with the special brightening powder she uses on Dad’s white shirts and it actually came up really well. I spent over half an hour examining every seam, every inch of fabric before I put it on the line to twirl away through the night. I was beyond exhaustion by this point and dawn was beginning to creep in through the windows. I practically crawled into the shower and scrubbed and scrubbed until my skin hurt.

  It was fully light before I allowed myself to rest. I lay on top of my unslept-in bed and ran everything through my mind over and over. I’m going to have to be so fucking careful; the care I’ve had to take up till this point is nothing compared to how I’ll have to be from now on. I let myself rest a little before going to unlock Orla and Grace. I’d already decided what to do with them.

  When Orla came screaming out of the bushes with the knife in her hand, Lucas and I were too shocked to move. How she knew it was in my pocket I don’t know. Even after she’d plunged the knife into his neck the expression on his face was one of complete surprise. An awful choking sound came out of his mouth. Then Grace, stumbling after, reached up and pulled the knife out and that was when the blood really started pumping. She was trying to save him, although I don’t think she did him any favours by doing that. That’s when he really started dying, I think. On the way back I realised that Grace really thought she’d done it, that she was the one who’d stabbed him. She’d got the image of the knife in her hand all covered in blood stuck in her head. I need to keep her thinking that. There’s no way Orla could take it, the idea that she’d murdered someone, but Grace just might. She’s the toughest by far out of the three of us. She’s the only one who has the slight possibility of surviving that.

  I think about beforehand, by the riverbank when we were arguing. ‘What, you think I’d leave my wife to go off with a child like you,’ he practically screamed at me. When I think of that, how horrible and hurtful he was, there’s a moment when I’m actually glad he’s dead. He lifted up his hand as if he was going to hit me and that’s when Orla came raging out of the trees. But … somehow I don’t think he was going to hit me. I think he put his hand up to push me out of the way so he could get past; that’s what I thought at the time anyway. It’s immaterial now, all of it. I just have to make sure that Grace goes on thinking she did it and Orla stays believing she didn’t. It will be impossible otherwise.

  *

  My body feels as cold and stiff as marble as I lie and wait for Mum and Dad to get back. The other two have left. They were in their own clothes again, like last night. I started to protest about them takin
g my mac, but I couldn’t be bothered to argue in the end and I can’t go through what I had to do last night again. They’ll have to deal with it themselves.

  Did I actually sleep for a few minutes? I’m not sure. The angles of the light tell me it must be afternoon by the time I hear their car pulling up outside and the front door opening. I listen to them moving around downstairs and wait, strangely indifferent. Finally I hear her calling up.

  ‘Phoebe, you’d better come downstairs.’

  As I make my way down I have a sensation. It’s like I’m floating, but not in the horrible sick way I did in the Spinney. This time I’m still in my body and it’s almost … pleasant. I muse on the strangeness of this so much I almost forget to be afraid and think about what I’ve got coming to me. For a moment I wonder if perhaps that’s because it won’t be as bad as I imagine, but I soon have to change my mind about that when I see her face.

  The rage is already there.

  It’s not even at the early stage. It’s full-blown. It’s naked. I put my arms up as if to defend myself.

  ‘Don’t you even move,’ she screams. ‘Don’t you even cover your shitty little face.’

  I lower my hands and dare to look.

  The screaming continues. ‘You absolute little shit. I knew you couldn’t be trusted – look at this.’

  I look her straight in the face. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed the rage completely because normally I’m flailing away from it or cowering or covering my face and I only catch it in little glimpses. Now I stand and fully take in the white around the mouth and the way the lips are stretched right back and how her face is practically elongated from the power of it. I almost feel sorry for her then, because I know how much she can’t help it and how it must hurt her to have something going through her that turns her face almost unrecognisable.

  I don’t slump or cry and I can’t seem to take my eyes off her. It’s like the rage is bouncing right off me.