“My wife made me give up,” Vincent said. “I don’t know what it is about it that I miss. Do you mind if I ask you a question? It’s not related. Your mum used to be mixed up with Joe Hind.”
I nodded.
“Do you know where he is?”
“In hell, I hope.”
“We found his car a few years ago burned out in a wood, but no sign of Joe for some time now. Wanted on a number of charges. A couple of them related to young women like yourself. Know anything about that? You all right?” Vincent put a hand out to steady me but too late. I fell against him.
“Is he dead?”
“You’re all right. You’re all right. There you go.” Vincent glanced over at the family, but they were not looking at us. “No one knows where Hind went, and there were plenty of people interested.”
My knees seemed trustworthy again and I let go of his arm.
“What’s going to happen now?” My voice was small and childish.
“Go home. Have a cup of tea,” Vincent said. He turned to go and then stopped. “No idea why she was wearing your coat, I suppose?”
“We always borrowed each other’s clothes,” I said.
“Look after yourself, Andrea,” he called after me.
* * *
The inquest would take months and return an open verdict. I didn’t go to the final hearing. I didn’t see Zack or Priss or Rob again. Nor David. I thought he might show up but I was wrong again. The only one I saw was Alice. It was a few days after Christmas. She was sitting in her car in the car park behind Waitrose. The snow had all melted and lay in slushy pools full of floating, bloated fag ends.
Alice rolled down the window. We exchanged a few blunt words. I walked closer to the car but she rolled the window back up before I got there. I wished Marcus was there, the low voice and restraining hand. But Marcus was staying at his mum’s.
She started the engine and I went and stood in front of the car. It was a neat little Volkswagen, all shiny and red, a gift no doubt. I felt like a shark circling a diving bell. There are times when anger makes you feel superhuman, capable of tearing metal. Alice revved the engine.
“Go on then,” I mouthed.
Bless her, I could see she really wanted to. She had more than a touch of crazy. When I stepped aside, she drove off riding the clutch. A shitty driver in a car someone bought her. I wished her ill and then I stopped wishing her ill and started crying.
* * *
Marcus didn’t come and he didn’t phone. I had left a message with his mum, but something in her voice stopped me calling back. In the run-up to the funeral, I went to see Peter, calling on him at his parents’ house as of old. We sat on the stone wall that enclosed the graveyard.
“Are they going to put her here?”
“I think so.”
Grief was making ghouls of us. Peter’s face was the color of a dead tooth. I was wearing the clothes I had slept in, the same clothes I had been wearing the day before.
“Have you seen Marcus?”
“Once,” he said.
“How is he?”
“He’s angry. He’s not thinking straight.”
“Should I go and see him?”
“I’d leave it a bit.”
I nodded. There was something I wanted to ask him.
“Pete, at the manor that summer, were you and David … I mean were you fucking him?”
Peter got to his feet.
“No, Andy. Don’t worry. You got there first.”
I stayed sitting on the wall, the cold sinking into me, staring him in the eye.
“She was wearing my coat.”
Peter gave me what I can only call a strange look.
“What would you have done if I’d said yes, Andy?” Then he walked quickly away before I could answer.
The millennium dawned. I slept through it. Back at work, I didn’t see Marcus either. He was on-site, I was told, and he stayed there. But he came to the funeral. Peter was back at Oxford by then. He took the train down for the day, and during the service we stood, the three of us, in a line. I could feel Peter trembling on one side, Marcus as hard as wood on the other.
Songs from the old lady choir, all in tears, a eulogy from Em’s younger sister, Faye, Peter’s dad leading us out into the graveyard, the bit with the dirt. The startling stab of rage—that I was expected to say goodbye to her, now, with all these people watching, that I was expected to say goodbye to her forever, and then another stab, this time with Em herself. Em, you prick, you total prick. What were you thinking? Look what you’ve done to me! And you’re going to do it forever!
Afterward there were sandwiches in the back of The Green Knight. People from school sliding looks over. They were there. Say they don’t know anything. That she was just wandering about out there on her own and fell over.
Em’s mum came over and hugged all three of us.
“You’ll come by the house, won’t you?”
I promised that I would. Knew I wouldn’t.
“She’d made you all Christmas presents. She’d done tapes for you.”
When we left, she came and hugged me again, crying, her round face wet and wobbling. “I think she was out there hiding them again, so you could have another go at that game. That would be like her, wouldn’t it? Doing something nice for you all. What will we do without her, Andy? What will we do without our Em?”
I got in the van, into the back next to Peter, and Marcus drove us to the station at Great Bedwyn in silence.
As Peter slipped away, up the steps and onto the platform, I could see his eagerness to be off and I envied him. Back in Oxford no one had heard of Em, and its libraries and lecture halls and greens would be untainted by her and by the grief of those who had loved her, and at times he would, I imagined, be able to forget any of it had ever happened.
* * *
The darkness was coming in as we drove back in the rain, down the Roman road, through the ancient forest. I was in the passenger seat. At the lights in town, I stole a glance at Marcus and could see a tear flexing from the surface of his eyeball, until the light changed from red to green and he blinked and it broke. He didn’t take me home, he drove on, taking the Swindon road to Chiseldon and then up to Barbury Castle.
The car park was empty. It would close in another hour if the caretaker could drag himself away from his cottage to padlock the gate. The windscreen misted up, obscuring the view of the winter wheat, the dun hedgerows, the bulk of the aerodrome and beside it the gray cracked tarmac of the runway from where Mrs. East’s pilots had taken off on their wartime bombing missions. Beyond the mist, raindrops fell and ran together to create ripples of descending water. When the joint was rolled, I plucked it from his fingers and got out, briefly feeling the wet slap of the wind before I slid open the side door and got into the back. After a minute, I heard him open his door and get out on the driver’s side. He was gone minutes and when he finally came in, his hair and face were wet with rain.
Marcus gave me a smile that was just a movement of the lips. I sparked up and we smoked, passing the joint to and fro, but that wasn’t what we were there for. The rain fell on the roof and the radio, tuned as always to Radio One, played deeply inappropriate songs—Ricky Martin was “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Britney Spears was “Born to Make You Happy.”
When the spliff was halfway down, I pinched it out and, without meeting his eye, I crawled over to where he was sat, back against the wall panel, legs stretched out. I’d bought a black dress for the occasion and now I knelt in it before him, my knees either side of his thighs, his face at the height of my breasts. I stayed like that for a moment or two and then leaned in to press against him. His hands came up around me and I pushed against him and kissed him hard, and felt a quiver of triumph as he reacted, as his mouth opened and his grip tightened and I pulled back only long enough to pull my dress over my head.
All the sorrows and hurts were outside and couldn’t get in for now. I felt them circling, pressing against the windows,
but they could not reach me. In the past, I had struggled to want to fuck Marcus often enough or at appropriate times. It took drink or a spliff, a fight, another woman eyeing him. But I wanted him now, even though I knew it was the end. It was like burning the house you live in, when there is a storm raging outside in the middle of winter. Don’t say you haven’t wanted to, never had the inkling, the almost-knowledge that everything you love and hold dear is holding you back. Back from what? I was going to find out.
He got there. I felt him go, but there was still time, a little time. I held the dead weight of him, counting the seconds. A sudden and terrible comprehension of everything I was losing. My mouth was an inch from his ear. I wanted to say something, use words to hold him hostage. I knew the secret name he had given his bike when he was eleven. I’d seen his face, green with leaf light as we lay beneath the willow trees. But I wanted to keep those things safe too, sealed off from the present, so I said nothing.
Marcus had a few words for me.
“It’s over. I don’t want to see you.”
I said I was sorry about David. I managed that.
“I used to be jealous of him, of what you had between you. God, I wished you’d fucked off with him all those years ago, instead of hanging round to poison everything. I don’t want to worry about you or look after you anymore. I’m sick of it.”
“I’m sick of you looking after me too.” Like all the gratitude I had to feel, all the guilt for not getting better, had gone bad. Resentment, that between us he always got to be the noble one, the knight, and what that made me. For a glorious second, it felt that I was slipping my chains and riding off on the back of the dragon, but then it lurched back to feeling like I was in a film, that all that was keeping me from falling forever was Marcus’s hand gripping mine, and his grip was slipping, and then I had that odd dreamlike sensation, like in the second before you wake up, when you are finally falling and it’s such a relief.
“Well, hope you enjoyed the fuck, Marc. Are you glad you got it in before you told me you don’t want to fucking see me anymore, your last-minute sightseeing?”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Em—”
“Don’t fucking say anything about Em.” Shouting in my face, spit flying. I got my dress on and opened the van door.
“It’s not like it’s ever any good with you anyway.” And this was unfair and untrue. Or it was only true sometimes, and when it was, it was not Marcus’s fault.
He did look at me then, ugly with hate, like I was a criminal, a robber who had stolen something precious from him and sent him a video of myself shitting all over it before destroying it forever.
Marcus blinked. When he opened his mouth, his voice came out hoarse. “And every day you get more and more like your mum.”
He drove us back. I got out, floated down the path toward the house, like one of those cyclists who get back on their bikes after an accident, not realizing yet the bones they’ve broken. Inside, I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. I wanted to call Em. I wanted Em to come and hug me, and make me tea and tell me it would all be all right. I would want the same thing a thousand times. I want it now.
There was a knock a couple of minutes later. When I didn’t open up, Marcus pushed the letterbox open with his fingers and peered through to confirm I was there. Then he told me to find a new job, to do it quick, and not make him get his uncle to sack me.
CHAPTER 14
GENTLEMEN’S CLUB
After my night at the bar, the inevitable episode. I woke curled around my laptop, next to the tail end of a ketchup sandwich and the burned-out telephone box. It went downhill from there. Episodes could begin innocuously enough. I would get the idea that I deserved a duvet day as reward for my long hours and professionalism, a bit of telly in bed with a bowl of ice cream, but they always ended the same way: binge-watching series or films while binge-eating whatever was in the house, first addressing the fridge and cupboards, eventually the freezer.
One screen was never enough, so I’d have the tablet open as well, usually the browser on the phone too, my eyes flickering from the show, to the news, to the shopping or social media site. Every half hour or so, I’d shuttle back to the kitchen to fetch something else to eat, occasionally ordering in or even venturing out to the corner shop. Only once I was a few hours deep in an episode, I couldn’t stand to be looked at, wasn’t able to even meet my own eyes in the mirror, so I tended to make do with what I had in the house, mashing up butter with icing sugar and spreading it on bread, or making my own cookie dough and eating it with my fingers from a bowl, the kind of food that I had resorted to when I lived with my mother and there were no other options.
The rules regarding what I watched during an episode were strict. Art of any kind was forbidden, as were old movies, musicals, documentaries, love stories, and anything that gave significant screen time to children or animals. No, I watched action movies, watched them for the explosions, the moments when the whole screen was a consuming, raging fire, and for the fight scenes, in which bad men were eventually overcome with maximum force. The fights were like beautiful dances, rising toward climax, the body count swelling as Vin, or The Rock, Jason or Bruce, snapped and stabbed and choked, punching and ripping and slamming and gouging bad men toward unconsciousness or death, their faces flushed and contorted with the effort of it. The violence always justified. A wife murdered. A child held hostage. But the women and children merely ciphers, excuses for the violence unleashed. All the while on the second screen, I’d be clicking through the news, where there was neither climax nor heroes, only rolling horror leavened by celebrity thighs and sponsored lifestyle features about juicing.
Sometimes, the episodes rolled over from one day into the next, could gobble up a whole weekend, during which I’d become more and more agitated, feeling the presence of the mirrors in the house, even while I lay cocooned in bed with the curtains closed. I would want to stop, but at the crucial moment, I would either click or not click so the next episode or film would begin; I’d rarely remember falling asleep but, waking up next to the laptop’s greedy eye, I knew if I so much as tapped a key, there would be another fourteen, sixteen hours of explosions and murders ahead while I ferried something or other to my mouth, waiting for it to end, implicated by all of it—the violence, the news, the shopping—moving further and further beyond rational thought, brain scrambled, as though computing that by staying there, via my avatar on the screen, I could defeat the bad men, overcome the terrible threat from the safety of my sticky crumb-infested bed, out of sight, tunneled into the sheets like an animal.
There was no pleasure in it, only a bone-deep, inarticulate panic, matched by the unwillingness or inability to end the whole episode because it would have meant, once the devices were all turned off, once the flat was quiet around me, that I would have been alone with my own thoughts.
* * *
The day after my meeting with Mr. Hutchinson, as my hero, armed with a hunting knife, stabbed and slashed and slit his way toward the enemy lair, sending up fountains of blood, the news featured a line of men kneeling in the desert awaiting execution; a herd of refugees with their saucer-eyed children, knee-deep in mud, corralled at a border by armed men in black; and a special report on the links between London-based financiers and Russian kleptocrats revealed by the leaked papers. I was mechanically eating cereal with peanut butter. A girl had gone missing. Her picture was everywhere, her face young and painfully open and now marked for death—she was missing, feared something-ed. By tea time she would be found something-ed. The hero of the film, no matter how hard he fought, was unable to save the girl with her shining eyes and plait done up with a pink bobble.
Rob was an unlikely savior, but he brought the episode to an end, quite swiftly around four o’clock. It was Rob Calcraft I had messaged at the bar. Rob from the manor; Rob who was once the kind of boy who would smirk when he was being told off, who would have been unable to stop no matter how much worse it made matt
ers.
I’d invited him to connect with me and then written, I need to talk to you. I’d never bothered uploading a profile pic so I’d added, It’s Andy, remember? From Marlborough.
The message I got back the next day went, Oh I remember! Phone number?
I hesitated, but only a little, then sent the digits across. Then nothing. I went back to my hero, who was fighting a bad man in the cockpit of a plane, eventually biting him on the face before strangling him with a parachute cord and throwing him out the back, the phone cradled in my lap. On another screen I searched for news of the man who’d come off the roof three nights before. His name was Ward Collier. He’d worked in the city and was engaged to be married before he’d jumped or fallen from the top of the multistory car park. The family was mystified.
After a short interval, long enough to suggest someone enjoying the tension but unable to really wait, my phone rang and I jumped like a bomb had gone off.
Rob, sounding much the same, insisted we meet at his club. It was one of the old ones, one of the last to finally admit women. He seemed surprised that I knew where it was but quickly recovered. Before he rang off, he asked me if he would recognize me.
“I think you’ll know me, Rob.”
“Will I? Will I indeed?”
His parting line contained the same mix of malice and bonhomie I remembered:
“I could always ask Alice to join us. Make it a proper reunion. Maybe I’ll do that.” And he hung up before I had a chance to say anything.
* * *
“What can I do for you, Andy?” The club, a pornographic spread of establishment clichés, was fairly empty. All the members off in their constituencies, or enduring family time, or visiting country houses. There were lots of oil paintings of prime ministers, viceroys, and generals through the ages in huge gilt frames, oak paneling, the works. How was it all still here? All still standing?
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