“I saw her hide something at Jem’s place.” Jem’s place, now, but with two bikes and photos as mementos of a time he can’t remember, because he wasn’t even there. Does it feel like his place to him? “She put a piece of paper in her pocket.” He raises his eyebrows; he knows there’s more. “It was still in the pocket of her dress when I went to the bathroom.” I close my eyes for a moment, remembering those frantic few seconds, looking round the bathroom and the bedroom until I finally spotted the dress she’d been wearing, hung up in the closet. If it was me, it would have been on the floor somewhere, but Bron has always been tidy. The closet should have been the first place I looked.
“And?”
“I’ve got no idea what it means. It just had three numbers on it; I wrote them down.” I pull up the hem of my dress, and he blinks in surprise to see digits scrawled in Bron’s eyeliner pen across my upper thigh, like a crudely drawn tattoo. “It was the only thing I could find to write with, and the only thing I could think to write on.”
“Impressively resourceful,” he says appreciatively, humor lurking around the corners of his mouth. He takes out his phone. “I think we need a more permanent record, though. For personal use only, I promise.”
“Careful how you angle that thing,” I warn him with mock severity, and his mouth twitches again while he takes the photo, then checks the result.
“What do you think?” he says. “Phone numbers? The first two both start with seven; they could be London numbers without the 020 prefix.”
“Could be, though the last one can’t; it’s only six digits. Dial one of them.” So he does, twitching up my hemline to see the number he’s copying, and prefixing with +44 20. He puts the mobile on speaker, and it starts to ring out, once, twice, three times . . . After seven or eight rings an answerphone kicks in: Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Extension 6622 is not available. Please leave a message after the tone. He shrugs and tries the other eight-digit number. There’s a single beep. “Call failed,” he says. He tries again, with exactly the same result.
“Well, that wasn’t exactly conclusive.” I flop back on the bed again. “But perhaps they’re invoice numbers?”
“Or payee references, or staff identification numbers. Can I borrow your toothbrush?”
I nod because I can’t not, under the circumstances, though my stomach tightens: it’s yet another step down a path I’ve never tread before, nor taken an active role in choosing now. I hear him begin to brush in the bathroom. My eyes are starting to close. A minute passes, or ten, or many more, before he spits, and says, “Or a supplier reference. Could be almost anything.”
I open my eyes again. “They obviously meant enough to her to write them down. And to not tell us, which is weird. She’s been acting weird this whole trip.”
Adam snaps off the bathroom light. “It’s not a normal trip, though, is it?” I can hear him moving around, presumably undressing, before I feel his weight settle onto the other side of the bed. I wonder if he’s wearing underwear. I should take off my own clothes, or at least my dress—my ruined, misshapen dress. Even if I could get the blood out of it and mend the strap, I could never wear it again; the very thought makes me feel nauseous. That sudden disgust at the dress, at what it signifies now, gives me the strength to shimmy it up over my head and toss it onto the floor, then slide under the covers. No, this is not a normal trip. Not in any way, shape or form.
I lie on my back, somehow too exhausted to drift off. Adam is on his side in the dark, facing toward me, one arm extended to gently link his fingers through mine. His thumb rubs over my wrist, back and forth, then stills. He’s breathing rhythmically, but I don’t think he’s asleep yet, either. Then he says, half muffled into the pillow: “There’s one thing I’ve been wondering: why didn’t you come?”
“Come where?”
He releases my hand and rolls over onto his back—mere inches away, but no longer touching. “The last swim trip. Why didn’t you come?”
I gaze at the darkened ceiling. “I was going to. My flight was booked and everything.” Not everything, in truth. I never actually requested the time off work. “But in the end I was just too busy. I was going to come out a month later instead.” He makes a noise, some kind of strangled puff of air. “You don’t believe me?”
“I’m sure you were very busy. I’m equally sure you could have made it work if you’d wanted to.”
I could say, You don’t understand. I could say, You have no idea what my life is like. I could say those, and other things, but I don’t. Because, of course, he’s right. “It wasn’t because of you.”
He laughs a little, a soft sound in the darkness, but he sounds weary rather than amused when he speaks. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t kidding myself that it was.” I don’t know what to say to that. I never know what to say to things like that; there’s a language that everyone else is fluent in, but somehow I missed the lesson. Perhaps parents teach it; parents who aren’t numbing their disappointment at life with alcohol and interminable, unwinnable fights, that is. But without any kind of Rosetta stone, all I can do is recognize there’s a foreign tongue being spoken. Finally he speaks again. “It was about Lissa, then.”
“Yes.” I’m almost bewildered that he feels the need to ask that question. Of course it was about Lissa. It’s always been about Lissa. But now there’s no Lissa . . . My head aches and aches.
“What were you afraid of?”
“I wasn’t—” But I can’t finish the denial: I was afraid. “She’d been saying stuff for a while. On the phone and in emails. She was starting to sound . . . She was starting to worry that Jem . . .”
“That Jem was having an affair?”
“I—” I finally turn my head to look at him. His head is turned toward me; I can just make out the outline of it. There’s a faint gleam where his eyes should be. I count two breaths, then two more. He’s waiting patiently, but I can tell he won’t let me off the hook. My throat is almost too tight for any words to escape. “Yes.”
“And that scared you.” Like mine, his words are a whisper.
I nod, turning back to look toward the ceiling once again. Yes, it scared me. It scared me so much that I became an ostrich rather than risk seeing anything that might confirm my suspicions. I told myself I was doing the right thing in delaying, that it would be clearer if I visited by myself, but really, I was just scared. I thought I was better than that. I should have been better than that.
“Because of what she might do?”
“No. Well, yes, but . . .” I can’t say it, but I’m somehow helpless, unable to dissemble, either. I’m starting to feel mildly dizzy, as if the bed is spinning, but I can’t see anything in the darkness.
“But what?”
“There are responsibilities. That we have.” Every word speeds up the spin. It’s beginning to feel like riding dodgems when drunk.
“Responsibilities?” I can tell he’s frowning; he doesn’t get it. I close my eyes briefly. I don’t want to imagine the look on his face when he finally understands.
“If I saw, if I thought—if I knew she was going to . . .” I can’t utter the words.
“If you knew she would . . . then what?” He’s genuinely baffled. It’s unlike Adam to be lagging behind. “You’d report her?” I can’t help it; I laugh softly. It must be the tension, or the feeling that everything is careening out of control. But even though I’m ahead of him, he’s catching up. “No, of course you wouldn’t report her. No. You’d—you’d stop her.” There’s a sudden urgency in his voice, though he doesn’t raise the volume. He sits up abruptly and reaches out a hand to snap on the bedside light beside him. I protest a little at the sudden brightness, but he ignores me. “How would you stop her, Georgie? What were you planning to do?” I finally glance at him, just as the penny drops and the dodgems crash. Hard. “Oh my God,” he says slowly, visibly stunned.
I look away quickly. “You were going to kill her. You were going to kill your best friend.”
I open my mouth, but before I can say something—what? what can I say?—he jumps in. “Don’t lie to me, Georgie,” he says roughly. “Whatever you say now, don’t lie to me.”
“I wasn’t going to lie.” It’s true. I am many things, and I have been many things, but a liar has never been among them.
“I’m right, then?” He’s still stunned.
“Well.” You were going to kill your best friend. It sounds so ridiculous, hearing him say it out loud, as if airing it exposes it for the nonsense it must be. Who, after all, thinks about killing their best friend? It must be a temporary piece of insanity, the sort of thing that hides in the dark corners of a mind; it surely can’t withstand the open air. But this—well, this is more resilient than that. More real. I risk a glance at him. He’s recovering his usual control. Only his eyebrows rise slightly to urge me on. “I’d been giving it some thought. In case it came to that. I was planning to come out a month later, just me. I thought maybe if it was just me visiting I’d get more time with her, and I might get a better sense . . .” I trail off. That’s what I’d been telling myself. I’ll never know now whether I would have choked on that visit, too, or whether fear for Jem’s safety would have forced me onto the plane.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” I can hear his breathing, short and fast, then he spits out, as if a challenge: “All right then, how were you going to do it?”
“That’s the thing. It’s remarkably difficult to come up with the perfect solution.” I can’t bring myself to say murder. Kill, maybe. Not murder.
“You don’t say.”
“You don’t think I would have done it.” I sound accusing. I could laugh at myself for that, except that we’re talking about killing Lissa here. Specifically, me killing Lissa. Me feeling forced to kill Lissa. Only now she’s already dead.
He waggles his head side to side as if weighing it. “No, I actually think you might have.” Then he shakes himself suddenly, as if saying that aloud has delivered an impact that he’s still reeling from. “Jesus Christ. You’re like a child; you have no idea. You are literally the most fucked-up person I know—”
“Thanks,” I say acidly, stung.
“—and even so, I didn’t twig you were thinking this. So tell me, how were you going to do it? What were you considering? Poison? Assault and battery? Was drowning on the menu?”
“Yes,” I fling back, grateful for the opportunity to be angry in return. “All of the above. And strangulation, electrocution, hit-and-run—”
“Is that part of why you wanted to come out alone? So you could quietly murder Lissa without your friends inconveniently getting in the way?” His delivery is rapid-fire, each word hitting the target unerringly.
“Yes, if I had to.” I’m almost shouting.
“For fuck’s sake, Georgie. Murder? Really? You don’t even like Jem much.”
“You think it would have stopped with Jem?” There are responsibilities that we have. Whether we’d choose them for ourselves or not.
He makes a sideways jerk with his chin—a grudging acknowledgment—before shaking his head, almost his entire body, like a dog might. “You couldn’t just settle for warning him?”
The abject disgust in his tone is excruciating; the sear of it fans my anger. “You know he wouldn’t have believed me. He’d have gone straight to Lissa—”
“So you’d rather kill her than tell on her?”
“I—” I stop. Yes. Killing her would have been less of a betrayal. He releases a sharp huff of frustration, and then we’re both silent for a breath; for two, for three. My anger begins to slip away, mingled with the air of each exhalation. “That should have been why I didn’t come with the rest of you,” I admit at last. “Logistically, everything would have been easier on a solo trip—not least of all, finding out where her head was at.” I think again of her email: It’s as if history is trying to repeat itself. Which part of history? If only I had been here to ask her directly. “But really, I didn’t come because I just wasn’t ready to face it.”
“And that extra month would have made all the difference?” I shrug; there’s no way to counter his biting sarcasm. “You do know you would have destroyed yourself, too, right? Even if you’d managed to bring yourself to do it, and somehow get away with it? You’d have been writing your own death sentence, too. You don’t carry that around inside you afterward and be just fine.”
Something cracks inside me, and things that I’ve been stamping down, keeping far from the light, push up against the sudden weakness, forcing their way through the sliver of a gap and spilling out of my mouth in a strangled gasp. “Fine.” I lie utterly still on the bed. There are tears on my motionless face, running straight down from the corners of my closed eyes to the bedsheets as if a current running to earth, but I will win the battle. In a minute or two. In a minute or two, the crack will be patched. “I’ve never been just fine. I’ve never expected to be just fine. The only person that made me forget that was Lissa.” And Maddy.
Adam is quiet beside me. I’m almost certain that he will reach out a hand to touch me, and if he does, I will shake him off angrily. I wait with my eyes closed, the tears already slowing, the crack repairs underway. But the touch never comes. Instead he says quietly, “If you thought Jem was in so much danger, you must think she killed Graeme.”
His logic is impeccable. I try out possible answers in my head. But it’s a black-and-white question, and all my answers sound like what they are: equivocations. Shades of gray. The moment stretches and stretches, and every second I don’t reply is another answer in itself, that’s neither one thing nor another. And now I can’t speak, because I’m listening to Lissa sobbing down the phone line, four years ago:
He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. I can’t say sorry, I can’t fix things; he’s dead. If I’d jacked in my job to give the IVF a better chance of working, we wouldn’t have been fighting so much—
No, honey, no—
It’s all my fault—
No, honey. It’s not your fault. It was an accident, just an awful, tragic accident—
All my fault—
Lissa, it was an accident. A beat. Wasn’t it?
But she didn’t answer then, and she’s not here to answer now. Beside me, Adam breathes out a long sigh. Of disappointment, presumably. This must be why I don’t do the relationship thing: I can barely manage my own expectations; I can’t possibly live up to someone else’s. I should say something. I know I should say something; but I don’t have the right words, and anything less than that would be meaningless. He sighs again, and moves as if to switch off the light, but stops suddenly. “Did Lissa suspect?” he asks. “Could she have known what you were thinking of doing?”
“I don’t see how.” But the idea settles uneasily around me, coating my skin and sinking slowly through; it won’t be dislodged. A betrayal of that magnitude—would that have been enough to topple her fragile balance and send her into the waters at Kanu Cove?
He reaches out to the lamp switch again. “Get some sleep,” he says evenly as the room goes black again, and I know from his tone that I’ve fallen badly short in his eyes, and it’s not because I’ve been mulling over how to kill my best friend. And then I fall asleep, because I’m too physically exhausted not to, though at first my dreams are too panicked and frantic to allow me to sink into a proper oblivion. But then a dark creature arrives to flow like liquid through the fragments, winding in and out of the corners of my mind, cool and silent and other. It coils itself around me, it coils itself inside me, and drags me down implacably into the darkness that lies below. In the very last moments before unconsciousness claims me, I look out through eyes that I somehow know are both mine and the serpent’s, and see Lissa’s face looming out of the darkness, locked in a soundless, horrified scream.
EL
EVEN
BRONWYN
I wake the next morning in a tangle of sheets wrapped round my whole body, even my head, and have to fight my way out, sleep befuddled, with the boat and the propeller and that sickly cold touch of the thing in the water in my mind . . . It’s a shock to come out blinking into a quiet bedroom, sunlight streaming in through the open curtains. Deliberately left open, I remember, lurching upright to peer out at the pool area. But there’s nobody there. And then I remember that there never was: that was my subterfuge.
I’m not good at this lying stuff.
A glance at the clock shows it’s midmorning, already later than I would have expected. I take myself into the shower for a pep talk, the warm water streaming over my upturned face, washing away the last remnants of whatever murky dreams still hover. Right: no more defeatist attitude. Looking at things objectively, I must actually be very good at lying. After all, nobody suspected anything when Graeme and I were slipping in through doorways that each other’s spouse had just walked out of. The benefit of being wysiwyg, presumably: nobody believed I was capable of anything more. Even Graeme was impressed by my attention to detail. Maybe if he’d had kids himself, he would have taken pains to be more careful. I had had to be careful enough for the both of us. Afterward, when there wasn’t an us, I had to be careful enough for Rob; for Kitty and Jack.
How to Kill Your Best Friend Page 14