Jake just looked at me, his head cocked slightly to one side. Finally he said, ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because he’s very sick. He needs a transplant, but you know it takes for ever to get donor organs, and there’s no guarantee – we can’t wait that long. The other chance is a living donor, when you give a bit of your liver. You know, our livers can grow back. It’s pretty clever really. But, you see, it has to be a match. A relative. I can’t. And Cassie . . .’
Her name at least got a reaction from him. He turned away slightly, folding his arms. They were smooth, unmarked. I imagined them covered in prison tattoos. I knew he loved Cassie, even if he hated me, and Mike even more. ‘She can’t,’ I said, my nose filling up again with the unfairness of it, with the sound Cassie made sobbing. ‘She tried but she’s not a match.’
I had been hoping that by now Jake would have understood my meaning and jumped in. But he just sat there, his eyes as flat as a shark’s. I decided to just say it, all in a rush. ‘The thing is, Jake, you might be a match. I realise this is all a shock and you’re very angry and betrayed, and you lashed out, but I’m sure you didn’t mean to really hurt him, and if he does – if the worst happens, you could be in here for a long time. If you do this thing – if you help him – it would help you too. With sentencing. You know.’ I couldn’t believe I was saying these words, so cold and clear, and yet there was a certain relief in it too. To finally say what I really meant. To say, give me a piece of you, cut yourself open, bleed, and atone for what you did and maybe I’ll help you get out of here. ‘So. Think about it. You’ll have questions, I know. We can . . . a doctor can call you, or come to see you and explain. But it has to be soon.’
I didn’t know if visiting time was over, or what the protocol was at all, but I knew I couldn’t spend another second in this room, so I stood up, scraping the chair over the floor. ‘Just think about it.’
He stared at me, unmoving. But he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t laughed in my face, at the idea that he would give a part of his liver to the man he’d tried to murder. To his father. A father who’d abandoned him, who’d possibly raped his mother. It was small comfort, but I had to take what I could get. But I couldn’t leave without one final thing. Without pleading my case one last time. ‘I want you to know that I . . . I had no idea. That Mike was. That your mum. I really had no idea.’
He stared at me for a long time. His eyes were so blue. Just like those of my own kids. Karen had once hinted his father was foreign, Scandinavian maybe, someone she’d met on a night out and never seen again, but I could see now his eyes were Mike’s, clearly Mike’s. I’d been blind all these years when the truth was sitting right in front of me. ‘Then you’re a fucking idiot, Ali,’ he said, clearly. He’d never called me Ali before, not like this. And before I could go he stood up and walked away, towards the bowels of the prison.
I sat in my car outside the prison, tears running down my face. Maybe it was the shame of asking him to do what I couldn’t bear for Cassie. Slice into his smooth unmarked skin. Offer up bits of himself to a father that didn’t deserve it. How had Mike never suspected? He must have. He’d turned his back, as I had.
I wiped my tears, ashamed of breaking down, and remembered to turn my phone on again from where it had lain in the prison locker. Immediately the ding of alerts. Missed calls, messages. I was so tempted, for a moment, to ignore it. The human nervous system can only handle so many shocks and disasters, before we become numb to danger. I was beginning to feel that way. As I considered putting it away, it began to ring again. The house. I answered, and heard my mother’s voice on the end.
‘Alison?’ High and wavering. I knew that tone. She was scared. I was already putting the car in gear as she told me what had happened.
1996
‘We should get back,’ Bill said. ‘We’ll miss breakfast otherwise.’
I was longing for that – the decadence of Buck’s Fizz before noon, the burnt-out sexy exhaustion of it all – but at the same time I didn’t want to break whatever this was between us. We’d walked around the university parks for hours, crossing bridges, me lifting my skirt over puddles, watching the river and the early-morning rowers go by, coxes shouting. It felt like a film about Oxford, about being young and glamorous and privileged. I had my usual stab of jealousy at the over-educated kids being propelled around by punctilious parents. What could I have been if I’d had that kind of upbringing? Someone who knew Latin, for a start. Then I had what I recognised as a more mature thought than I was used to. It didn’t matter that my childhood had been ordinary, even embarrassing. I was here now, in a silk dress, with a man in a tuxedo, and we’d stayed up all night talking about books, and music, and life. I felt huge and hollowed-out with the talk we’d had. The kind that changes your life. It was tomorrow now and I wasn’t going to be the same. I didn’t have to be the Ali I’d been born and brought up as – I could be anything.
Bill and I were walking back now, my skirts swishing round me. He’d given me his jacket, because he was the kind of boy who’d do that, and I thought we must make quite a sight, traipsing down the street on a weekday morning, his hands in the pockets of his oversize trousers, my hands lost in the sleeves of the jacket. I kept turning to look at him. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing. I’m just seeing you.’
‘Seeing me.’
‘Yeah.’ And I was. The way his hair fell over his forehead. The braces, so cool and understated. The way his sleeves turned up over his slim dark wrists, the loveliness of the bones there. His eyes screwed up against the blood-red morning sun. The way he held back at road crossings, waited for me to be ready to go over. Mike always dashed ahead and it drove me mad. It seemed natural to slip my hand into his and keep it there. Neither of us spoke. I could almost feel him turning it over in his head – to say the wrong thing now would shatter it all.
‘I’ve always seen you,’ he said finally.
‘I know.’
I didn’t look at him, just straight ahead. It was forming in my mind. When we reached college, we’d have our first kiss. The one we should have had three years ago. The one that would erase Mike, and start everything properly. I’d go travelling with Bill, and it would be so simple, falling into step beside him as I did now. I wouldn’t have to choose, or decide, or ask Mike if I could move in with him in Clapham and look for a job. It would be as easy as choosing one crossing instead of another on a path.
So this was how we were, Bill and I – hand in hand, his fingers stroking the inside of my wrist, me in his jacket – as we approached college. Immediately I could see something was wrong. There were too many people gathered outside on the pavement, spilling out of the lodge and on to the road even, girls wearing jackets as I was or hugging bare arms to themselves, and there was a hubbub of voices, but in the wrong key for the fuzzy-headed joy we should be hearing. And parked by the railings was the yellow and green of an ambulance. I think it was then that I dropped Bill’s hand.
‘What’s going on?’
He said nothing. He was good like that. When there’s nothing to say, and you don’t know the answer, just keep quiet. I saw Karen, her face streaked in tears, which was so unlike her I felt panic gnaw at my stomach. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Someone’s been hurt.’ Her voice was dull and flat. ‘Something happened. We don’t know. They said to come out here.’
Rumours were flying. James Collins, pale as his shirt, said: ‘They found something in the Fellows’ Garden. Someone.’
‘Who?’ No one answered, but I asked again. ‘Who?’ Mentally I was scanning the crowd. Where was Mike? And I hated that my first thought was of him, but it was, with a sick inevitability. I stood on my tiptoes and scanned for him, a strange sort of passion erupting in me when I saw him and Callum in a tight knot by the railings, whispering to each other. ‘Mike!’ My voice was loud and I knew Bill had turned to look but I couldn’t stop, I went on barrelling through the crowd. ‘Mike! What’s happening?’
Mike’s eyes were wide, and I realised he was scared. That was something I’d never seen before. Usually it was me vibrating with anxiety, knowing how few minutes I’d be allowed of his attention, doing my best with them like someone on a variety TV show, just waiting to be shouted off stage. ‘Ali,’ he hissed. ‘You have to help. Shit, this is a disaster.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘They know I talked to her and now she’s . . . shit. You see how it’ll look.’ He said this last to Callum, who nodded silently. Sneaking a look at Jodi. Then Mike moved close to me, so I could feel his panicked breath on my neck, and he started talking very fast. How he’d been with her, just chatting, she’d been really pissed and they’d never talked much and she was sad, so he just cheered her up. That was all, honest, he got her some drinks and they chatted and then she wanted some quiet, she wasn’t feeling well, so he walked her to a bench in the garden, and then, swear to God, he left her there. Didn’t he, Cal? Yes, he left her there and maybe he should have put her to bed or something but she seemed OK, just a bit pissed, and he thought she wanted some time alone and no one was meant to be able to get in there, were they, the whole ball was meant to be private, those security staff must have fucked off early and he hoped the police were going to look at them not the students.
My head swivelled back and forwards, but all the same I was aware of another feeling building in me. Power. I had power here. ‘Who are you talking about?’
It was Jodi who answered, arms still folded, in a tight bitchy voice. ‘Martha. Martha Rasby. Mike was with her.’
‘We were just having fun,’ Mike pleaded to me. ‘I looked for you, after. You were off . . . I couldn’t find you.’ He was talking like he even owed me an apology, and that was something new, to have any rights at all. I thought of how I’d seen him on the lawn, getting gin, how he’d rejected me. Already he was rewriting the truth.
I looked round at them all. ‘But I don’t understand. What’s even happened? Why does it matter?’
‘Because, for fuck’s sake . . .’ Mike drew in his breath, as if frightened by his own burst of temper.
Again, it was Jodi who could say it, while Mike and Callum stared at the ground, and I realised they were both white and shaking. ‘They’re saying she’s been found dead,’ Jodi said. ‘In the Fellows’ Garden. Martha.’
‘Oh my God.’ Finally, I grasped it. ‘And you were with her.’
‘No! I mean, yes, but before. I left. I left, didn’t I, Cal? I swear it. You saw me, after.’
Jodi said: ‘I was with Cal. But I didn’t see you, Mike.’
Callum cleared his throat. ‘You see the problem, Al. Mikey-boy was seen talking to her and if she’s been . . . hurt . . .’
‘And I was looking for you,’ said Mike. ‘I looked all over. Cal said you were with Bill.’
Bill. Where was Bill? I looked in the crowd but couldn’t see him. Karen was there, staring into the lodge, her face strained and terrified. ‘I was, yes,’ I said, not bothering to apologise. Another new thing. I still wasn’t quite taking it in, the connection between the boys’ pale faces and the ambulance and Martha. I’d seen her only hours before, beautiful and laughing.
Again, Jodi. Dry and practical. ‘You need to say you were with Mike,’ she said. ‘All night.’
‘Why?’ I was bewildered.
Jodi looked at me like I was stupid. ‘Because, this is everything, Ali. This is the future. Don’t you get that? It’s our lives.’
‘But . . . I was with Bill. Everyone saw us come back.’
Mike spoke urgently. ‘Say you were here until an hour back. That’s when . . . someone first called the police then. Say I was with you and then you and Bill just went for a walk. OK?’
‘But . . . I don’t understand. Couldn’t someone else say you were with them? Where were you?’
Mike hesitated, just a second. ‘Looking for you, like I said. Moving all round the place. You see the problem.’ You see the problem. That seemed to be a phrase they had agreed on, he and Callum. My head spun slowly, taking in the way the balance had shifted beneath my feet. And where was Bill?
‘But . . . she can’t really be hurt, can she?’ Stupid, but when these things happen our brain wants to reject it and does its best to.
At that point there was a commotion, and someone cried out – Karen, I think. I don’t know why. She didn’t know Martha all that well, none of us did. She was first-tier, we were second. Even in such a small college there were strata, rules, cliques. I followed Karen’s gaze, all the way through the lodge, through the gate to the Fellows’ Garden, which had just swung open. There were two male paramedics there, one young with a beard, one older with grey hair. A woman paramedic knelt beside them. They were working on something. A huddled heap. As they moved, from a distance, I saw something in my line of vision – a small white hand, which was already beginning to smudge with bruises. A woman’s hand. A woman who was clearly dead. A flash of white silk, stained with dirt. And nothing was ever the same again.
Chapter Thirty-One
Here’s what my life had become. My husband was in the intensive care ward of the hospital, clinging to life. And my daughter was in the psychiatric ward of the same building, having had her stomach pumped after my mother found her slumped in her bedroom, a packet of tranquillisers scattered beside her. The same ones my mother had been taking for most of my childhood. The ones that made it easier to turn a blind eye to what our home had become. There would be time for that later, to blame myself for leaving her with my kids, for not seeing anything sinister in the fact Cassie wouldn’t leave the house or get dressed or shower. That she’d stopped even going online, so toxic had her life become. And it had poisoned her.
They told me she’d be alright. That she hadn’t taken enough to do permanent liver damage – the irony of it, as if trying to destroy the organ she couldn’t give to her father – that once she stopped throwing up black-coloured bile and grew a little stronger she could go home. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? She’d tried to kill herself.
I’d always prided myself on my kids. Sure, Cassie wasn’t as academically gifted as Mike might have wished, but she was pretty and popular and seemed happy. I was just now finding out what my mother had always said – pride was a sin. And the punishment was to learn how wrong I’d been about all the things I took pride in. My marriage, my long friendships, my house. That still stood, but tracked through with blood and dirt and now Cassie’s vomit on the stairs where they’d carried her out. My mother had scrubbed it by the time I got back home on the Saturday morning, having spent the night in the hospital yet again, the dirty feel of unbrushed teeth becoming normal to me. She’d given me a darting, fearful look, one I recognised from my childhood, after my father had hit her, or me. Shame. I didn’t say anything, just gathered what pyjamas I could find of Cassie’s and threw them in a bag. Most of them skimpy and unsuitable for hospital. I’d buy her more, it would give me a thing to do while I waited for her to wake up.
As I packed in Cassie’s room, noticing that she’d taken down all the pictures of her and Aaron, the ghosts of BluTack on the paint, my mother came up behind me, the drag and tread of her feet so familiar it set my teeth on edge.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said stiffly.
‘You left pills out where she could find them? You’re still on that crap?’
‘I – I haven’t taken them in years, Alison. It’s an old pack. I just thought – just in case it was hard. Being here.’ She sucked in breath. ‘She – she seemed alright. Quiet, but she would be.’
‘There must have been something that wasn’t
normal.’ I didn’t look at her. A vast and unformed pool of rage was swirling in my stomach. For this. Not just for this. For everything all at once.
‘I don’t know what’s normal for her,’ she said quietly, without accusation, and I found myself weeping hysterically, a noise coming out of my mouth like the scream of ambulance sirens.
I was on Cassie’s bed, or beside it, kind of kneeling. ‘I can’t do this. It’s too much. I can’t. I can’t bear it!’
I felt her hesitate, then her cool hand – she always had such poor circulation – touched mine and I felt the cotton of the handkerchief she always carried up her sleeve. ‘It’s always hard to see your child suffer.’
So many things I could have said then. But you let him. He hit me. You went out of the room and you let him. Instead I took the hankie she offered, wiped my red face. ‘Thank you for being here. I know it isn’t easy.’
She hadn’t expected that. Her own face crumpled in on itself. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been thinking and thinking if there were any signs I missed. That she was going to do . . . That. I – I’m just glad Benjamin didn’t find her.’
I shook my head, wondering how I’d find the strength to stand up. Looking up at my mother from the absurd vantage point of the floor. ‘You can’t really stop someone. If they want to.’
‘I think she was just in pain. Something happened with her boyfriend, was that it?’
‘Something.’ I couldn’t explain about the picture. For a moment, I saw myself strangling Aaron. Snapping his rugby-player’s neck. ‘She hasn’t told me everything.’ I was sure of it now. Something else had happened that night, the night everything unravelled in my hand like a cheap jumper. Cassie sneaking round the side of the house in her pyjamas. The blankness in her eyes when I asked what happened.
My mother took my arm and helped me up, like an old woman who’d fallen. ‘It’s terrible,’ she said, firmly. ‘With Michael, and now this. It’s alright if you need help, Alison. Anyone would.’
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