by Kate Hamer
‘Come on, you can’t sit there all day, looking like the end of the world is about to come.’
She drags me outside but I flop down on the cold stone seat in the vestibule underneath all the notices for Mother’s Union meetings and choir practice.
‘I can’t go on like this,’ I moan. ‘I’ve been thinking, I could run away, start a new life. I don’t know, go abroad, anything. This is unbearable.’
‘Shut up now. You haven’t heard my plan. Running away would be the worst thing to do because it will draw attention to us, and then it will just be me and Grace, and quite frankly I don’t trust she has our best interests at heart.’
Her eyes have gone all hard and starey.
‘Come on,’ she says, pulling me up by one arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We take the winding path between the graves towards the gate.
‘Do you remember us talking about all being buried side by side when we’re dead?’
‘What?’ I turn to face her. Rain glosses her face. ‘Are you thinking we should all kill ourselves?’ The idea goes through me like a jolt, but I have to admit there’s an edge of relief too. For a moment it almost feels like a plan.
‘No, we haven’t come to that yet.’ She stops and looks at the sky. ‘Look, it was Grace, wasn’t it, really? If we let everyone know that, and that we hardly had anything to do with it at all, everything could be all right.’ She holds onto the iron gate with the flaking blue paint and creaks it back and forth on its hinges.
‘For God’s sake, we can’t do that.’
‘Why not? It was her, wasn’t it?’
‘Think about her mother, Phoebe. Who would look after her mother if anything happened to Grace? Besides …’
‘Besides what?’
I bite my lip. ‘I keep thinking. It could have been any of us really, couldn’t it? I keep remembering seeing you in the kitchen, holding that knife up to the light. They could say it was all premeditated. That makes it so much worse, I expect. Sometimes, I even think the knife was in my hand. No, no, no, Phoebe. There’s got to be something else.’
But she’s out of the gate, banging it closed so I’m shut into the graveyard.
‘I’ll be stuck with them forever,’ she yells over the gate. ‘Is that what you want?’
For the first time I notice she’s gone against the ‘no black’ rule. Her slender form is sheathed in some thick woollen black tunic and she wears tight black leggings underneath. Cheap knobs of faux pearls hang off her lobes.
I put my hand on the gate and it’s wet and freezing. Crisps of rusted paint stick to my palm.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I say. ‘Stuck with who? Phoebe, I know I’ve got to get a grip but I can’t. Every time I think of you holding up that knife—’
‘It was you.’
‘What?’
‘It was you all along and I was protecting you and now you say we have to look after Grace.’
‘Phoebe, don’t lie.’
‘I’m not. I’m not. It’s all your fault and now because of it I’m going to be stuck with them forever.’
Her black form, dense as a crow, peels away from me and starts running down the hill as a wash of blue spreads over the sky and the raindrops on the gate shiver and start to dry up.
45
Grace
Listen, bitch.
You know the time has come when you are going to have to fight like a fucking soldier in hand-to-hand combat. Like you have a baby and someone is holding a fucking knife to its delicate little throat. Like everything and everyone you love is about to be blown to pieces. That’s how hard.
I used to think I was tough. Looking back, I see I was deluded. I was just a stupid soft bitch.
At the funeral I saw Phoebe and Orla bending their heads together, so close they were touching from the shoulder to the hip, their hair tangling into the other’s. Phoebe glanced up and the look only lasted a second but I could see it all written as plain as day. They intend to turn me in. Three’s become two and they are going to stick together and save themselves. Phoebe turned away to hide her face but it was too late. I took off without even saying goodbye and ran all the way home. I went and stood on the balcony and smoked and smoked to help me think.
Now I picture myself gradually putting on armour piece by piece. It’s like the armour I saw in town one day, on men dressed up as Roman soldiers for some tourist thing. The sun that glinted off the metal pierced right into the back of my eyes. The red feathers waving on top of the helmets were the colour of newly spilt rich blood.
What I would really like to do is cover this old tower block with armour like that, the pieces overlapping so there are no soft vulnerable spots. What a sight that would be when the sun hit. It would strike such fear and awe in the hearts of anyone who saw it, glittering and sparking against all the old crumbling stone, that no one would dare to approach and we would be kept safe inside. It would be the emperor of buildings here instead of some poor relation.
That’s impossible of course, but I do something similar with my mind. My mind is like a wall and I check it nightly as I lie awake, looking for weak spaces or parts that need mending, looking to see where a new plate of armour might be needed. The thing is with those two, they don’t know about fighting like a demon. They’ve never had anything else to look after except their own miserable arses and that gives me an advantage, a strength, that they don’t even know about.
At school the teachers think I don’t pay attention. They know all about what’s happening at home, but I suspect some teachers also think I’m simply thick and that I have excuses made for me that aren’t warranted. Actually, what I really am is tired. The constant wash of information is too much. I have nowhere to put it. I’m all full up. Occasionally my ears do prick up, though, because I might not be the most studious pupil in the world but I have an inbuilt radar for something that might prove useful.
One such moment was when Mr Jonasson talked about
Macbeth. Phoebe was always drivelling on about it, about the three witches and how that was like us and how you could predict the future and all her stupid little rituals and childish spell making. But the bit that really made me sit up had nothing magical in it at all. It was both simpler and more complicated than that. It was how the three witches managed to put a thought into Macbeth’s head and that thought became a picture and the picture became a plan and the plan became an action. It made me realise the power we hold: that by making something concrete for someone, painting a picture of it and holding it up and saying, ‘Look, look at this,’ it can plant a seed that wasn’t there before. But also, these same things can destroy us: if we allow ourselves to become prey to thoughts, weak and sick with them, it can finish us.
I’ve been checking on Orla because I could see this happening to her. She hides her weight loss under chunky jumpers but I can see it all right. I’ve made a point of keeping a close eye on her, wandering down to her house as the sun sets – the nights are growing cooler and darker – and saying hello or watching from a distance as she leaves the house with a violin tucked under her arm, being ushered to her mother’s car. I’ve tried to see from her body language what the state of her mind is.
Things have become more urgent, though.
Since I saw her bend towards Phoebe’s words at the funeral yesterday I know that keeping an eye out is not enough.
Tonight I wait, sitting on the wall opposite her house until she sees me and comes out. Her head is down and her feet shuffle in their worn ballet pumps. She sits down next to me.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘How are you?’
She casts me a look that’s almost contemptuous. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she says. ‘Don’t think I don’t.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You’re checking up on me. You think I’m the weakest link.’
The truth of what she says shocks through me. Obviously, I haven’t been subtle.
‘Think of that,’ she carries on
, ‘the weakest link before Phoebe. That’s sinking pretty low. I think about finishing it all sometimes, you know.’
‘Really? God, Orla.’
‘Yes, really.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Cutting my wrists. Jumping under a train. What difference does it make?’
‘Come for a walk,’ I say. Something about her is making the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end. She looks thinner than ever. Her eyes have lost any gloss at all and are like scratched marbles. She’s reaching the end of her endurance. It makes me sick with anxiety.
She shrugs. ‘All right then.’
We start walking. Sunday night in Bath and the streets are nearly empty. The day trippers and the shoppers have gone home and people have yet to turn out on the streets for dinners or the theatre or trips to bars. There’s a chill to the air too that adds to the melancholy of empty windows. We pass the undertaker’s with the huge sculpted head above its doorway and Orla looks up at it and shivers.
‘If only I could go somewhere, I’d feel all right,’ she says, quickening her step.
‘Go where?’
‘Anywhere.’
We pass through the square; the Roman Baths are dark and hushed behind the wall. The statues of Roman rulers gaze down at the Great Bath. They weren’t actually built in Roman times, though, these statues, not part of the old site like the baths are; I learned that years ago. They were put up by the Victorians to try and make it look more authentic. Orla looks up at the Abbey, which looms impassively against the sky that has just the very first tinges of dusk and the promise of turning that deep and particular shade of blue that is nightfall when the sky is clear.
‘I can’t bear it any more.’ She rubs at her mouth.
I lean in closer. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I just can’t bear living like this. If I don’t go away I’m going to go mad. It’s true what I told you, that I think about killing myself all the time. Either that or walking into a police station.’
My heart starts pounding. ‘Let’s buy some cider.’
‘What, now?’
‘Why not?’
I think of Mum watching television at home. I’ll just have to try and forget about her for the moment, block my mind.
I buy a huge bottle of the cheapest strongest cider at the mini-market and we cart it to the Abbey square and take turns swigging straight from the bottle. Her voice turns slurry almost straight away as if she’s been longing to get drunk.
‘What are we going to do, Grace? I’m at the end of my tether, I really am. Phoebe wanted us to turn you in.’
So, my instincts were correct, but still the news jangles through my nerve endings.
I try to stay calm. ‘Let’s go to the station and get on a train. Anywhere, the first one that comes along.’
She looks at me. ‘Sometimes I think it was me. I saw Phoebe at the house, wrapping up a knife and putting it in her pocket. When I think about it I seem to remember pulling it out of her coat and running with it. It’s hard to know what’s real.’
‘Come on, let’s go now.’
She looks uncertain. ‘Really? I haven’t got any money.’
I dig around in the back pocket of my jeans and wave my wallet at her. ‘I have. Come on.’
There’s about twenty quid in there but I don’t tell her that. I’m having to improvise.
We walk down the wide pavements to the train station. The houses at this end of town haven’t all been cleaned. It’s something about this kind of honey-coloured stone that the city of Bath is built with that when it’s clean and sunlit it looks golden, but it also sucks in pollution, takes it readily into its pores like a smoker to their lungs so it gets black and sooty. These crouched Georgian buildings in this part of town haven’t yet been in the city cleaning programme and they are nearly completely black, decades, centuries of coal smoke and car fumes clogging up their façades. At the station we buy the cheapest ticket possible for the next stop from here on the London train. ‘We can hide in the loos when the ticket inspector comes round,’ I tell her. ‘Then we’ll go as far as we want. We’ll go all the way to London.’
We sit on a bench, waiting for the train and talking. Around us the darkness encroaches. Bath is such a tiny place really. We’re surrounded by fields, by quarries and woods. The countryside is so close; it creeps into the edges of the city. I hear an owl hoot nearby. I catch a musty leaf smell carried on the breeze. Orla is lit by moonlight, her thin arms blue with it, and it makes me realise, we must have been sitting for hours, the two of us, talking.
I heard an old wives’ tale once that stayed with me as if it was information that would be needed at a later date. If there’s a pot of frogs in boiling water and one tries to escape and crawl out, the others will not allow it to; they will pull it back down to die alongside the rest of them. That’s what we are now: we are three frogs in the cauldron.
‘Listen …’ I say, and she turns her head.
‘What?’ she asks, her eyes dull, her arms crossed across her chest. She asks the question as if she needs me to tell her something, anything that would be a last-ditch attempt to save her.
‘No, I mean listen. There’s a train coming.’ It’s far away, on the breeze. I stand and walk to the edge of the platform and she follows behind.
‘It’s coming,’ I say. ‘It’s coming.’
Beside me I feel the flurry of her. She is all at once alive, electric. Something passes through her, an energy, a thought. I see it out of the corner of my eye. It blurs her edges as if she’s moving, but then I realise it’s because she is moving, kicking up her legs, her hair and arms swinging as she lifts off the platform and onto the tracks where she stands in a petrified second in the moonlight before the train hits her.
*
Afterwards, after they’ve taken her body and they’ve talked to me, I go back home and find Mum asleep in the chair. I shake her awake by her shoulder and lift her up in my arms and carry her to bed. I take in a plastic cup of water and help her brush her teeth, then I peel back the covers and help her climb in. Only then do I allow myself to ask, What was that? What just happened?
Don’t be a stupid soft bitch, I tell myself. You know exactly what happened. Don’t for one fucking second forget that or try and tell yourself otherwise. You understand completely.
46
Phoebe
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I’m to see pussy-cat face again. The news has sent me reeling. The worst of it is that it’s just at the point when I started to feel better, when I sensed I’d begun to tie everything up like a Christmas pudding bandaged neatly in snowy white cotton, ready to be lowered into the pot to steam. When I started to feel it might be possible to contain it all.
Now, every night until the appointment is dread. Guts writhe. Horror seeps through my brain. I am sick with it all.
On the Sunday beforehand we have a roast and the sight of the knife sticking into the beef, squelching in the blood and sinew and then rising up, red and dripping, sends me running from the table. I hang over the toilet and dry-heave. The rest of the day is spent in bed, curled and miserable, with pain tightening around my head in a cap.
Mum comes into my room. ‘Don’t think you won’t have to go,’ she says to my hunched body under the sheets. ‘That appointment is happening if I have to march you up the stairs myself.’
And that is what happens. She drives me to pussy-cat face’s office, which, like our school, is in a building that used to be a house. There are boarded-up fireplaces in every room. Everything is covered in a pristine layer of thick white paint and carpets the colour of pale wood cover the floors, giving it all a neutral, medical air that is supposed to be calming. There is a receptionist at a heavy wooden desk in the first room on the ground floor. She speaks in a low voice as if not to disturb all the discussions being held above her head, the great mass of confusions and longings and fears that are being released up there from hour upon hour of ap
pointments. It’s surprising there’s not a cloud, as black as a swarm of stormy bees, above the roof.
We have to wait, sitting side by side on the leather sofa in front of the receptionist, who has to pretend that our four eyes are not watching everything she does and our four ears not listening to what she says on the phone.
As we wait the old feeling comes back, but worse, the sense that pussy-cat face is actually able to see right through me. That she is my hunter and I am her little mouse and she will pursue me until I am half dead with exhaustion, until my tiny heart is about to expire from going like the clappers so long, until I know for certain it’s better to give up than to go on with the chase. Then I will have to roll over and lie on the dusty floorboards surrounded by my own little droppings and admit defeat. I’ll have to let her chew me up alive.
I look at the clock above the receptionist’s head and imagine it an hour on and me looking at it then and what will have happened in between. Who knows? Who knows? I can rub at my mouth or tap the back of my hand or dash at my eyes with my fingers or any of the hundred little tricks that I use to keep myself on track, but I never know whether they’ll work or not.
I hear her tread upon the stair.
She puts her head around the door. She has a striped blouse that I haven’t seen before but otherwise she looks just the same; if anything, the curve of her top lip and her slanting eyes are more catlike than ever.
‘Phoebe, how lovely to see you. It’s been, how long …?’
Is she seriously expecting me to answer in here with these two looking on?
‘Well, anyway, come on up. You know the way.’ The last bit is said playfully, lightheartedly, as if we are old friends and we’re going to her bedroom to try on some fucking shoes or something. Mum waits on the sofa, reading an interior design magazine.