The journey isn’t a long one but there are delays on the tube and by the time she gets to Camden it’s well past eleven. She has visions of Sadie cast out on the street, lying in a gutter. But when she gets to the pub it’s clear that this isn’t the sort of place that abides too much by last orders. It’s a total dive, full of bruised-looking men who are barely even talking to their companions, just downing their drinks in vicious silence. She pushes her way past them, spotting her sister as soon as she turns the corner. She’s sitting on her own at the back of the bar, dressed in a tight scarlet T-shirt with matching lip gloss, mascara smudging the corners of her eyes. Rachel sees a young man hanging around, running an appraising eye over Sadie, but her sister looks up lazily and stares at him with such contempt that he hastily backs off, his expression wary, sliding off her like wheels off black ice.
Rachel steps forward. “Not a good night, then?”
Sadie looks up with a start, her eyes dazed and unfriendly. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me to come.” It isn’t true, actually, Rachel realizes, but it might as well be. “So here I am.”
A beat of silence as Sadie takes this in, and then, inexplicably, she’s laughing uncontrollably, almost bent double over the table, her eyes streaming. Her breath is coming in gulps, and as Rachel watches her she’s no longer sure if this is laughter at all, or something closer to grief.
She sits down and reaches out across the table, pulling her sister’s hands into hers. They hardly ever touch, and the contact feels strange, skin burning on skin. “Tell me what’s happened,” she says quietly, “and don’t even think about lying to me.”
Sadie looks surprised, almost offended. “I wouldn’t,” she says, and silently Rachel acknowledges that this is fair enough, because to the best of her knowledge lying isn’t something her sister does a lot of, except perhaps by omission. She’s never been concerned with covering up her behavior.
“Go on then,” Rachel prompts. She can see that this isn’t just a drunken panic. There’s something specific, stirring between them, waiting to erupt.
Sadie draws in a long, slow breath and shrugs. “I’m pregnant,” she says, “and he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
At the same time as she registers the shock and dismay, Rachel is also conscious of a creeping little thought that it is a wonder this hasn’t happened before. Because of course this is what happens to girls like Sadie, girls who don’t give a shit about anything and who put their animal instincts above anything else. But it hasn’t happened, not until now. And actually, her sister isn’t stupid. She’s cynical about men, wary of being trapped. So even as she draws in breath and asks, “Who?” she already has a nasty feeling that she knows. There’s only one person who Sadie would have dropped her guard like this for. “Not Kas,” she says flatly in the wake of her sister’s silence, and Sadie winces and looks down, acknowledging it.
“Don’t be angry,” she mumbles.
“It’s not you I’m angry with,” Rachel says automatically, finding that it’s true. Right now, looking at Sadie’s tearstained face and the lost, glazed look in her eyes, she can’t feel anything but pity. An image of Kas swims into her head; the hard, muscular bulk of him, the way that everything about him seems designed to intimidate. She can’t imagine wanting this man anywhere near her.
“I don’t want you to be angry with him either!” Sadie fires back. “You don’t understand—he can’t do anything about it, his hands are tied. He’s married to that bitch, Melanie, and he can’t leave her, because he isn’t like that. He doesn’t just—shirk his responsibilities!” It’s like she’s reading from a script.
Rachel is silent for a moment, dropping her head into her hands and massaging her temples, gently pushing her fingers into her skin. “Sadie, listen to yourself,” she says eventually. “What you’re saying is ridiculous. You’re talking like this is a man with incredibly strong morals, but that clearly isn’t the case. If it was, you wouldn’t be in this position, would you, because—”
“You don’t understand,” Sadie says again, her voice rising. She stands up, reaching a hand out to steady herself against the table. “It’s not him. It’s her. I’m going to find her right now, I’m going to tell her everything.”
Rachel jumps up. “Don’t be insane,” she says. “Why would you do that? He isn’t going to thank you for it, you know. It’s not going to change anything.”
“Yes, it will,” Sadie argues. “It will, because then I’m taking it out of his hands, aren’t I? He can’t do it himself, but I can do it for him. I know where he lives. I’m going to his house right now, I’m going to find her.” Abruptly she pushes the table away from her, strides through the bar.
There’s a split second when Rachel thinks that she might abandon her. A weariness comes over her, settles like a cloud. These mercurial spikes of anger that Sadie has are powerful, and she knows her well enough to realize that if she’s fueled by this energy then there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to talk her out of it. But then she thinks about the reality of this situation. Her sister is stumbling out drunk, looking for a fight with a woman she knows nothing about, a woman who’s married to a potentially dangerous man. There isn’t a choice here. Just like she’s always done, she’s going to try her best to minimize the damage.
“Fucking hell,” she hisses under her breath, and she makes her heavy limbs hurry after Sadie, out of the bar.
Her sister has moved fast, and Rachel can see her swerving down a side street a hundred yards or so ahead, walking surprisingly steadily and with intense purpose. She makes herself walk faster to catch her up, reaching out a hand to grab her arm. “Please, Sadie, stop,” she pants. “This is such a bad idea. She won’t even be there anyway, she’ll be with him at the club, won’t she?”
Sadie stops for an instant; a spasm of doubt crosses her face. But then she shakes her head firmly, pressing on. “She won’t,” she says confidently. “She hardly ever goes.”
“Please,” Rachel says again, wrenching at Sadie’s arm so that she has to turn to face her. To her own surprise, Rachel feels tears springing to her eyes, and she has to fight past a lump in her throat. “Just come home, come home with me. You can put this behind you, Sadie. We can talk properly tomorrow, work out what’s best to do about the baby. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world. It could be a turning point! At last! You can move on, honestly.”
Sadie pauses. She’s looking at Rachel thoughtfully, as if she’s genuinely considering what she’s saying; these words sinking in slowly and absorbing themselves through her brain. Rachel stares back at her, willing her to agree. Perhaps, she thinks, Sadie just needs one more push, something to get her over the line. “Just leave Melanie alone,” she says calmly. “She knows nothing about any of this. It isn’t her fault.” And even as that last sentence leaves her lips she realizes it was the wrong thing to say, and that if she had just kept quiet, everything might have been different.
SADIE
JANUARY 12, 2000
She storms on through the streets, covering ground fast. She knows where she’s going. Kas lives on Fraser Street—she’s never been there, but she’s seen the address on letters at the club and she’s walked past it many times, wondering if she might catch him there. It’s not far now. She isn’t so drunk that she’s incapable. In fact, she’s just drunk enough to be able to channel all this fury and conviction without inhibition, to get the job done.
It’s right what she told Rachel, she thinks; Melanie won’t be at the club. She doesn’t want to support Kas. Not the kind of wife he needs. It wasn’t Melanie he turned to when he needed help, was it? It wasn’t her who he trusted with the stuff that really mattered. She wishes she could tell Rachel this, but it’s a can of worms she can’t open. She just lets it add fuel to her own fire, strengthening her conviction. Of course Rachel doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have the full pictur
e, and you can’t make a judgment based on fragments.
As she marches on she thinks it all over again, playing her favorite game of reshuffling and reshaping, sliding the pieces into place. The way Kas touched her this afternoon when he first said hello, the way he pulled her against him and spoke into her ear, his lips hot against her skin. He still wants her. And the word he used when he talked about Melanie. I have my duty. Not love, she thinks, not love, duty. A duty is barely a choice. It’s a responsibility. A burden. It’s this definition she likes the best, the one that feels like it’s starting to drain the poison away from her heart. He has this burden, and it isn’t his fault.
She rounds the next corner and she sees the little plaque looming at the side of the road: Fraser Street. This is the place. She peers down the darkened alley at the houses cluttered together like dominos. There’s something about the lines of dark, gaping windows with their ragged curtains, the jagged piles of bricks unevenly skirting the entrances that worries her. It isn’t the glamorous penthouse she imagined. Now that she’s here, it’s harder to imagine walking up to one of these unfriendly doors and knocking on it to be let in. But then she hears the footsteps, clicking lightly up the other side of the street. Sees the shadow of a figure, dark and indistinct at first, then revealed in a sudden brief burst of light beneath a streetlamp; long legs in sheer tights, black high-heeled boots beneath a shiny, raspberry-colored rain jacket.
She finds herself shrinking back instinctively, out of the light, pulling Rachel with her. “That’s her,” she whispers. “Look. She’s going out somewhere.”
“Leave it,” Rachel whispers back, but there’s a hopeless lack of conviction in her tone.
She shakes her head silently, and then she turns and moves quietly, following Melanie back through the darkened streets. And Rachel is trapped in this silence now, too, not wanting to attract attention to their presence, and with no choice but to follow after her sister.
She’s going to the Overground station. Sadie realizes it as soon as she takes a turn off from the high street and strikes out up the Camden Road, although she can’t imagine where Melanie would be traveling to at this time, almost midnight, and on her own. Perhaps she’s going to meet another man. Sadie likes this idea—likes the thought of Kas’s wife being an unfaithful bitch, no matter how unlikely it seems that she’d need to look elsewhere. It’s a good ten minutes’ walk to the station, but it seems that it’s done in seconds, with nothing existing except this moment, the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of being unseen. A couple of times Melanie hesitates, half-turns her head, then walks on, drawing the cheap-looking jacket closely around her, her long dark hair cascading down the back in a tangled fountain. She quickens her steps a little as she reaches the entrance to the station, slipping over the threshold as if she’s crossed a finish line.
Sadie reaches the entrance seconds later, and as she peers through the gateway she sees that the ticket hall is deserted and dark, the expanse of platform ahead completely empty but for Melanie’s tall, thin shape patrolling back and forth uneasily. She’s checking her phone, then tucking it back into her pocket, and Sadie knows that in a few seconds she’ll raise her head and look in her direction. She can feel Rachel’s hand on her arm, silently tugging her back, but she shakes it off and steps forward onto the platform, the wind whipping down the long tunnel and chilling her right through—and as she does so she realizes that she hasn’t planned this at all and that she has no idea what to say.
Melanie must sense her presence now, because she looks around sharply, and there’s a split-second where she struggles to place the woman she sees in front of her, then a dawning realization that hardens her expression. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she snaps, and strides toward Sadie.
She doesn’t answer for a few seconds, struggling to process what is happening. She has expected Melanie to be caught off guard, not to react so instantly and so aggressively. And her voice is different from how she imagined, with none of Kas’s subtle exoticism; a voice straight out of the East End, all hard edges and swallowed consonants. Sadie gathers herself, taking a moment to breathe in, feeling the cold air rush through her lungs. “I’ve come to tell you something about your husband,” she says.
Melanie tosses her hair back over her shoulders, folding her arms in front of her. She’s half smiling, a lazily amused smirk that makes Sadie want to hit her. “There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.” The words are edged with steel, even if her expression is light.
Sadie looks at her steadily, and she realizes that this woman is older than she thought. There are tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead, a faint road map that will only strengthen with time. “I don’t think you know this,” she says. For some reason, now that the time is here, the words won’t come. Or rather there are too many of them, all jostling for prominence, forming a cauldron of cacophony inside her head. He’s cheating on you. I’ve slept with him. I’m carrying his child and he’s staying with you out of duty, nothing else. She doesn’t know where the right place to start is, where will hurt the most—and she realizes, too, that there is no reason why Melanie should believe her.
The older woman is looking straight back, cat’s eyes slanted, her expression bored. “I don’t play guessing games with little girls,” she says. “Especially ones like you. You think you’re special, but you’re not. You’re nothing to him. You can’t think you’re the first slag he’s had some fun with?”
She is very close now, and Sadie can smell her breath, sweet like peppermint, as she speaks her words slowly and clearly. “He used you,” she says, “like so many others, and now he’s thrown you away.”
Later, when she looks back, Sadie will find it impossible to unpick exactly what goes through her head when she hears these words, or why they hit their target so keenly. All that remains in her memory is the fury, the strength of it and the brute instinct it unleashes. Her hands rising up, her fingers curled like claws as she lunges at the woman’s face. The savage gladness she takes in the way Melanie’s heels twist on the platform, her thin legs crumpling like paper. And then in the next split second she finds that she’s defending as well as attacking, raising her arm against a returning blow, pushing back against the force that is coming at her. The gathering sound in her ears of wheels rushing against tracks, the blaze of headlights igniting from nowhere out of the dark. An instant of panic that she sees reflected in the face of the woman just inches away from her own, because suddenly she realizes that they’re close to the edge, very close. So close that anything could happen.
PART THREE
ALEX
SEPTEMBER 2017
We sit in silence for a while, my wife and I, side by side on the rocks. She’s very close to me, but she’s never seemed so far away. I find myself staring at her profile, picked out in silhouette against the darkening sky, and it feels as if I’m looking at a stranger. She’s thinking about the sister in the photograph, I think. Sadie. There’s all this knowledge, all this history, packed away inside her head, and I know nothing about it. Nothing at all.
“You and your sister weren’t close, then?” I ask. I deliberately keep my tone casual. I have the feeling that at any moment she might snap this conversation shut.
She breathes in and out slowly, her gaze straying upward as if she’s remembering. “We used to be,” she says. “When we were young. We spent all our time playing together. Once we even wrote our initials in blood on a tree trunk because we’d read somewhere that if you did that then nothing would ever break you apart. We pricked our fingers with a needle to do it and I cried, but not because it hurt me. Because I saw it hurt her.” She gives a little grimace, at once sad and dismissive. “I grew out of that, though. If I’d cried my eyes out every time she did something to hurt herself I’d have never stopped, by the end.”
“So what changed?” I ask.
She shoots me a
quick glance, her dark eyes meeting mine for an instant before she looks back out at the rolling expanse of the sea ahead of us. “I suppose you could say we grew apart,” she says. “We liked different things.” Her tone is dryly understated, as if she’s making an in-joke, forgetting that I can’t understand. “We lived together, when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two. It wasn’t what I would have chosen, but, well. It was complicated. I thought it would be OK. But it wasn’t. I can’t even tell you, Alex,” she continues, turning to me again, fixing the force of her gaze on me so that I feel almost suffocated by this intensity. “It got to the point where I would lie in bed and I could hardly breathe, literally could hardly breathe, because I knew that she was in the next room and I couldn’t bear it anymore, the way she poisoned everything.” She stops and takes a breath, looks down. Picking up a small polished rock from the scattered pile beneath us, she takes aim and throws it fast and precisely into the sea. It skims over the surface for an instant, sending salt spray up into the air, before sinking and vanishing.
“And the man in the photo?” I prompted, because I can see now that all this is connected, even if I don’t yet understand how.
Her expression shifts with something that could be displeasure or fear. “He ran a nightclub. He was—involved with my sister. I’m not even sure how deeply. Not very, I suspect, from his perspective. But she was besotted with him, obsessed with him. She was very young, and he was so . . .” She hesitates.
“Good looking,” I say, glancing down at the sloping, aristocratic angles of the man’s face in the photograph I’m still holding. “Don’t worry, I won’t cut your head off for noticing.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Natalie says, a little sharply. “But there was something—compelling about him, I suppose. Not in a good way.” For a moment she half smiles, but it drops from her face instantly. “She would have done anything at all to be with him, I think. It didn’t matter what he was like or how he treated her or anyone else—whatever Kas did, it was all right with Sadie. But he was married, of course, and he used that as an excuse, when in reality he probably never would have committed to her in any case.”
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