Two Wrongs

by Mel McGrath

  ‘Tell Satnam I will be there in fifteen minutes.’ Nevis thinks, my voice sounds weirdly distant, as if it belongs to someone else. She grabs her phone to summon an Uber and throws on clothes. A different person from moments ago. A crisis will do that. In seconds she’s rushing down the stairs and into the street, one eye on her screen to follow the progress of the taxi, willing the driver to go faster. Farok in the black Prius, come on. Three minutes, two, one. The longest one hundred and eighty seconds in history. There’s a moment, maybe a second or two, when she loses heart and thinks, how can I do this? But how can she not? Satnam is her best friend, her only friend. Nevis owes her this.

  The Prius has barely come to a stop at the side of the pavement before she’s throwing open the door and hurling her body inside. Farok whips his head round, meets the expression on her face with a look of alarm.

  ‘Nevis, Clifton Bridge?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not what you think. Or it is what you think, but it’s not me, it’s my friend.’

  Farok hesitates for a second as if trying to decide whether this ride is way above his pay grade. He turns back to the dashboard and glances at her in the rear-view mirror and – miracle – a look of resolution is on his face. He’s decided this one is worth doing.

  ‘OK,’ he says, ‘We’ll go very fast.’

  As they speed up the hill towards Clifton she calls Satnam’s number again, but the device goes to voicemail. What if it’s too late? Oh God, please no. This is like solving an equation, Nevis tells herself, perhaps the most complicated, challenging equation you have ever been asked to solve. There will be a point where you can take one of several different pathways. Only one of these pathways will lead to the correct solution. You have to think it through. You have to get it right.

  But how? She does not have all the parameters. This isn’t the Satnam that she knows. This is not the friend who sits on her bed and watches crap telly or the friend who called out the wanker who thought it was funny to spray-paint ‘Mentalist’ on Nevis’s daypack. This isn’t the friend who dreams of becoming a medical researcher, the girl who is determined to marry for love whatever her parents might think. It’s not the girl who jogs even when it’s raining and is always happy to share her chips. But perhaps the Satnam on the bridge is the same Satnam who says she’s going to the library but never seems to be there, the friend who has lost weight recently but says she hasn’t, the one who cries in her bedroom and once – recently – threatened to leave Avon University. Perhaps this Satnam has secrets.

  People are complicated. Satnam is complicated. If only people were as simple as mathematics.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Nevis says, to no one in particular. The person she would normally ask in a situation like this is Satnam. Because Satnam has everyday, ordinary, practical smarts. Nevis has maths smarts as well as knowing a great deal about river birds. But Nevis has no people smarts. I am useless, she thinks.

  Farok doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know either. Of course he doesn’t. He has no idea. In any case, he’s doing what he can, which is driving really very fast across the northern edges of the city towards Clifton. Farok is looking at Nevis in the rear-view mirror. He also seems terribly concerned.

  I can’t speak, Nevis thinks, the words have gone. There is just wire wool in my throat where sentences should be. Who can I text to help me?

  She pulls out her phone. There are so few numbers in her contacts. There is Honor of course but they haven’t really spoken in months, not since Nevis found the letter.

  Chapter 2

  Honor

  Honor is asleep when the call comes from Nevis. At first she doesn’t realise what has woken her and thinks it must have been Zoe, who is sitting at the bottom of her bed, doing what she has always done since she died, staring into the middle distance. Is it morning or is Zoe playing one of her tricks? Perched on her elbows now, Honor scouts the darkened room. The slice of window left visible after she shrank the curtain in the wash is still night-black. She listens out for birds but hears only the usual distant hiss of London traffic making its way along the A12 at Bow and the murmur of the boat on the water. Her brain, which feels as thick as toothpaste, is demanding more sleep. It’s tempting to ignore Zoe. Over the nearly two decades since Zoe’s death it has become Honor’s principal survival technique to pretend there’s no trouble in life so pressing you can’t turn your back on it and hope it will go away. Then again, Honor also knows that Zoe will not go away until she’s said what she’s come to say, which is tricky, given that she never speaks.

  ‘What’s up?’

  No reply.

  Her phone buzzes and throws out its tinny blue light. So this is why she woke after all. There are only two people who ever text after work hours: her daughter Nevis and her neighbour Bill and it’s too late to be Bill.

  Honor reaches over to the bedside table where the phone is sitting on its charger and reads Need speak now. The breath catches in her throat. Her pulse thrums. Nevis was always scrappy about keeping in touch. She’s never been one for the long, intimate conversations that Honor knows other mothers have with their daughters. In the last few months they’ve barely communicated at all. Something Honor did or said. Nevis won’t say what. It’s gone midnight. There’s a hammering at the front of her brain. Her chest pops and splutters. All the old, long-buried anxiety comes rushing back as though the dam that had kept it back all these years has just burst its banks. She can feel it rising in her legs. She presses callback, the pad of her finger sliding on the screen, leaving a tiny slick of sweat. Holds her breath while the call connects and when Nevis doesn’t pick up, feels a terrible sinking. She cuts the line and bashes out a text.

  I’m here. Call me.

  She waits a few seconds and when there’s no response, tries again. The cold damp inside the narrowboat hits her. The Kingfisher is always chilly on the canal, even in summer, but March cold is particularly penetrating. On another night she might throw on her poncho but there are more pressing things. A moment or two later she tries Nevis for a third time and gets no response. She takes a breath, checks the sender and re-reads the text in case she has got it wrong.

  Need speak now.

  Honor thinks about calling the police but what will she say? A nervous tic starts up behind her eyes, like the ignition on the gas burner. Again she calls and again, nothing.

  She’s up now and in the saloon, plucking her puffa jacket from the hook beside the steps to the deck. There’s a sudden tiny shock of fur as Caterine the Great, disturbed from her usual routine, weaves herself around Honor’s legs. Any other time the cat would be a comfort but tonight she steps round the animal and clambers up the steps onto a deck already slippery with rime. Frosty cobwebs sit on the glass windows, reminding Honor, unexpectedly, of a day, a few years ago, passing a happy hour or two on a school science project with Nevis to make ice from supercooled water, the seed a grain of rice thrown into the water bottle, the instant transition of water to ice, the cracking as it shattered. There is a bright moon and over the marshes a pink London sky. From somewhere far away comes the tinkly laughter of people partying on the water. A distant siren blares.

  She runs up Sugar House Lane towards the van. Beside the old warehouses, newly converted into ‘luxury apartments’, a fox crosses her path, its breath pluming the night air. The driver’s side door of the orange 1999 Ford Connect – which Nevis christened Gerry – gives with a ‘thunk’ and a musky blast. A pool of stagnant water sits in the passenger side footwell, the result of some leakage whose source she has never been able to locate. Moss grows on the interior seals. She hopes the cold won’t prevent the engine starting. The key hasn’t been turned in weeks. Time was she needed a vehicle to haul boat supplies – timber, marine varnish, engine and pump parts – from the chandlers in Essex, but these days everything’s available online for delivery and most of her work is now fixing and repairing other boats on the canal. Gerry remains hers out of sentiment and to haul Nevis’s things to and
from university at the beginning and end of each academic year, though now Nevis is no longer living on campus that’s probably not so necessary either. Day trips to visit her daughter are easier by train. An hour and forty-five minutes and not too expensive if you book early enough, though this year she hasn’t made any of those. Hasn’t been invited. Nothing has been the same since the week before Nevis started back at Avon University in September. Nevis did not come home at Christmas. They have barely spoken in months.

  Need speak now.

  The key turns and the van, which she bought second-hand only months after Nevis’s birth, chugs into life. You beauty! Honor pats the dashboard as a thank you, puts the gearstick into first and pulls out of the parking space into the street.

  Chapter 3

  Nevis

  Nevis is feeling queasy, though she knows it’s only nerves. They are in Clifton now, the tyres of the Prius tocking wildly across granite setts. True to his word, Farok is driving like a man whose wife is about to give birth in the back. Or a man trying to prevent a death. She checks the time remaining on Google Maps and notices the missed calls and messages from Honor. She will have to call or text later. For now, it is more important to prepare herself for whatever she is about to face. Why has Satnam asked for her? Has she kept something from her? What can be so bad that she has never mentioned it to Nevis? Weren’t they supposed to be best friends? What can she be wanting to say that Nevis doesn’t already know? Why did Nevis never think to press her about the weight loss? Why didn’t she probe when Satnam talked about leaving uni? Why did she allow herself to be soothed by Satnam when she said her tears were PMT? She sees now that these things might have been cries for help. Why didn’t she see it then?

  I’m stupid, she thinks. I’m a bad friend.

  At last the Clifton Suspension Bridge looms up ahead, dimly lit by a thin moon. The lights are customarily switched off at midnight and it is now gone half past. The journey has taken one minute fifteen seconds less than the prediction on Google Maps, but it’s been the longest journey of Nevis’s life.

  And there is still further to go.

  Directly ahead on either side of the slipway onto the bridge stand the two toll houses, each illuminated by a night light, and beyond them the looming mass of the first tower dimly lit by the moon. No one is visible. Where are the toll house attendants? She’d read somewhere that after midnight, when the lights on the bridge switch off, body heat cameras are able to detect anyone climbing the suicide barrier. Perhaps the attendants have picked up Satnam’s image and are on the bridge with her now. Perhaps they have called the police? A shocking thought bubbles to the surface. What if she is too late?

  The thought stops her in her tracks. Wouldn’t she be able to tell if something terrible had already happened? Wouldn’t there be a sign? They say you can sense the presence of the dead if you put your mind and your body to it. Nevis has experienced this herself: sometimes, in the quiet of the night, she has sensed her birth mother, Zoe, as if she were waving to her from behind a closed door.

  Stop thinking, Nevis, you are wasting time! Just move. Shouting a thanks to Farok, she feels her limbs breaking into a run, the soles of her feet thudding onto the pavement, propelling her past the toll buildings towards the tower and, reaching it, into the cool darkness beneath and then out again onto the span of the bridge. There, just beyond the first tower with her back to Nevis, she sees a figure standing in the moonlight. Too tall to be Satnam. The woman is unaware of her presence and there is no one else to be seen. Could this be Sondra? Does Sondra even exist? Her belly pulses, stomach churns. What if this whole thing is some kind of sick joke, or a scam? She’d been scammed before, more than once. Satnam says it’s because she’s not very worldly for which Nevis reads, not very good at reading people. To Nevis human hearts and minds are like jewels sitting in a locked box for which she has no key. She knows they’re there. If she picks up the box and shakes it, she can hear shuffling and the sound of soft cries and laughter whose origins she will never understand.

  She shouts: ‘Hello?’

  The figure on the bridge wheels about and shouts back.

  ‘Are you Nevis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The woman beckons her with frantic hands. Nevis takes a step forward then two and in a few moments she has caught up to her.

  ‘Look,’ Sondra says, pointing a few metres ahead, to where Satnam stands, spectral in the moonlight, on the edge of the bridge where the fence meets the suspension rail, facing the abyss and unprotected by the fence. There’s a gap in the barrier here. At any moment Satnam could squeeze through it and step out into the air.

  Never in her life has Nevis seen anyone more lonely.

  ‘Just talk to her,’ Sondra whispers, but how? She thinks, I’m no good at talking, there’s a wire loose. Some connection between mouth and mind is broken in me. The fear is choking. The terror of getting it wrong, of saying the one thing that sends Satnam over the edge. She can feel the ribs rattling in her chest.

  ‘Speak! Tell her you love her,’ says Sondra. And so she does, faltering at first and then finding her voice all of a sudden, crying, ‘Satnam it’s me!’

  It’s as if a great wave has rushed to the shore and caught her unawares. How did I not see this coming?

  Satnam’s face whips round. In the moonlight Nevis can just make out the faint gleam of her teeth. Is she speaking? What is she saying? The wind is taking away her words. Once more Nevis calls her friend’s name then gathering herself she advances a step.

  ‘Stay back!’

  ‘Whatever the trouble is, we can fix this, Satnam.’ She thinks, you called me. You want me here. Please, let me come closer. Let me come to you.

  Her friend is shaking her head now.

  ‘Please, Sat, it’s going to be OK. I promise.’

  The girl is sobbing and speaking. As the wind dies most of what reaches Nevis is incoherent, a slurred stream of words not meaning much. The odd sentence makes its way to her. You don’t understand. I’ve had enough. I can’t live with myself any more.

  Nevis takes a step forward. Her heart is a drum roll, pulse drilling her brain. She thinks, why did you ask for me? Was it to ease your soul or to be a witness to your death? She stops, dizzy with fear, clutches her head and in that instant something soft arcs across her field of vision. A shout. ‘Oh God, no!’

  She turns to see an owl banking over the gorge.

  An owl means wisdom.

  An owl means endurance.

  An owl means new beginnings.

  The owl is a sign.

  ‘Satnam!’ No answer. Nevis is close enough now to see her friend’s face, dazed and expressionless, the head unsupported and wobbly, shaking on legs that don’t seem to belong to her, hair pasted by the rain against her cheeks, speaking without making sense. She feels herself surge forwards calling, saying no! and please! and finally, I love you!

  Satnam lifts her right foot. Nevis can no longer look, feels the breeze against her cheek as she turns away. The world goes to black and one by one the tracings of the retinal veins appear like red comets. The wind whips up again and sings through the wires of the barrier. Nevis braces herself. Behind her Sondra cries out.

  Chapter 4

  Honor

  Honor is heading west out of London. At this time of night the traffic is light and flowing freely over the Westway and on through the outer suburbs towards the M4 and she’s thinking about how quickly the years have flown by since she first decided to quit the Welsh Marches and begin life afresh with Nevis on the canal in the eastern fringes of the capital. Was that the best decision? It seemed important, no, vital, then to leave everything behind, to be able to say goodbye to the painful memories and the dreams of revenge. Zoe’s death still felt so raw then. She would never break free, she knew, not while the man who was responsible for Zoe’s death was out in the world. Every patch of woodland reminded her of their foraging days, every passing caravan spoke of their life together, every bridge brought
back agonising memories of her best friend’s death. Zoe haunted her every waking hour and came to her in her sleep. The only thing that thrived inside her during those first months was hatred. Here she was, at nineteen, with her best friend dead and Zoe’s baby to raise and no idea whether she had the strength to survive any of it. She’d lived like a zombie, warming Nevis’s bottles and changing her nappies on autopilot. Becoming the best mother she could be had taken second place to her all-consuming grief and the naked, desperate desire for revenge. And then she woke up one day and realised that love, a simple mother’s love for her daughter, had crept up on her and grown so fierce and hot that it burned out all the bad.

  Nevis, you saved my life. Why have I never told you that?

  The van tocks across the concrete panels of the road.

  Need speak now.

  Has Honor ever known Nevis need to speak before? She doesn’t think so. Nevis doesn’t like talking. She can go whole days and barely say a word. Even as a young child speaking came hard to her and as she grew older she opened her mouth less and less. Honor got the impression that she had secrets and liked to keep them. A legacy of her birth mother. By the time Nevis reached adolescence she barely spoke unless there was some information to impart. With Nevis it was more than the casual teenaged sullenness for by then she had discovered her own true language. Mathematics. For Nevis the turns of algebra and rhythmic shapes of geometry were more eloquent than spoken language ever could be. And so for her to need to speak now, in the middle of the night, to Honor who she hasn’t properly spoken to in months, something very important and very urgent must have happened. But what?

  Pulling the van into a layby just before the junction onto the M4 at Chiswick, Honor speed dials Nevis’s number, gets her voicemail, leaves a message just to say she is on her way and about to get on the motorway. She won’t be able to call for a while – nothing as sophisticated as a handsfree set – but Nevis should call or text her if she needs to and Honor will pull onto the hard shoulder and call her back.