Two Wrongs

by Mel McGrath

  If only it were that easy to leave the moment of discovery behind, but the event is tattooed on his brain. The awful humiliation of discovering Ratner and … well, her name hardly matters … in his lab in that … unmistakeable condition and him not having had a clue. Then, after the girl had fled, having to listen to Ratner’s lies. It had never happened before, would never happen again, he loved his wife and kids, blah blah blah. Naturally he’d gone straight to the girl’s records and there it was. The numbers never lie. Incontrovertible evidence that not only had Ratner been fucking the girl, but he’d been paying for her services. Natasha Tillotson was a poor student; Cullen had taught her in a remedial maths group last summer in which she’d had to be reminded of the basic principles of probability. But in every module run by Ratner she’d come out with a good 2:1. Combing through past examination results Cullen had picked up on a pattern of misbehaviour: perfectly unremarkable students – all female – who’d graduated with surprisingly high marks. He’d been head of the department for five years at that point and it had taken the encounter with Ratner for him to wake up to what had been going on under his nose. A terrible failure of oversight. It was his job to spot anomalies and extracurricular activities. But he’d missed Mark Ratner’s affairs, the uplifts in his favourites’ grades, along with clear evidence that this had been going on for years. Why? He knew the answer to that too and it was another failing of his, he realised, a tendency to pay attention to the academic performance of only the really gifted students; boys (and it was, in his estimation, mostly boys) who reminded Cullen of himself.

  He wonders if he should have moved against Ratner the moment he stumbled on him in flagrante delicto in his lab. He’d considered it. A decade ago, five years even, this would hardly have mattered. Faculty affairs with undergraduates were almost a perk of the job. But the landscape has changed post #MeToo. It would all calm down, of course, and revert back to normal eventually, but right now was not the time to be flagrantly flouting the rules. If he’d gone to Maddy back then she would have supported him so long as he had not put her own position in jeopardy. She would still support him now, but he wasn’t convinced that she wouldn’t report the infraction to the Board of Governors, if only to save her own skin if it all came out. The Board might well take a dim view of Cullen’s management of his team and his failure to spot the anomalies in his students’ grades.

  Damn Ratner for putting him in this situation! Why doesn’t he understand how serious it is? It’s been going on so long he probably thinks himself invincible. A third possibility also comes to mind, more alarming than the other two. Maybe Ratner understands all too well the gravity of it and is working it for his own ends. From the moment Cullen got promoted above him Ratner’s resentment has festered like an open sore on an old dog. What if all this is part of an elaborate ploy to take Cullen down? Could Ratner be capable of such a thing? He’d ruin himself in the process but perhaps that would be a price he was prepared to pay in order to extract his revenge?

  That can’t happen. Cullen cannot allow that to happen. Especially not now. Not with Veronica hellbent on starting a family. A voice in his head says, go home, you’re tired and overwrought, even if you do catch Ratner sneaking back from some early morning side hustle, no good will come of confronting him at home. But there’s another voice in his head, reaching up and out from the deep recesses of Cullen’s past. The closer he gets to Ratner’s house the louder it becomes until, turning into Ratner’s road, it has become a raw, red scream.

  Cullen sails past the corner shop and pulls up beside Ratner’s driveway. His hands are shaking on the wheel. I must calm down, he thinks, or I’ll run the risk of making a fool of myself. He turns and checks the house. Ratner’s silver VW in the driveway. A light on in the porch, another in the hallway. All the upstairs curtains closed. He braces himself, takes a few calming breaths but instead of feeling more resolute, he experiences the heat draining out of him. I am so tired, he thinks. Perhaps a nap will help.

  He wakes some time later, blinded and skewered to his seat. He blinks and turns into the light, which, he sees now, is coming from the headlights of the VW as it pulls out of Ratner’s drive. Befuddled with sleep, he checks his watch. He’s only been down for twenty minutes. It dawns on him that Ratner is on the move. In that instant the VW pulls forward and, fearing he’ll be seen, Cullen ducks and at the same time reaches for the ignition key. The VW turns and moves down the street. Cullen follows at a distance, pressing himself into the seat so that his face is in shadow.

  Ten minutes’ drive away, Ratner turns down the steep slope of Marlborough Hill and makes a left onto one of the cul de sacs running parallel to the ridge. From here the only way out is for Ratner to come back the way he came. Cullen pulls the Volvo to the kerb, cuts the lights and the engine and gets out. The silver VW draws up to an ugly block of flats half-way along the street, a cheap piece of 1950s infill built to cover a former bomb crater, he supposes. In Cullen’s experience the only real way to disguise a wound is to pretend it doesn’t exist. That way no one else sees it either. Exposed and poorly dressed wounds make people vulnerable and Cullen doesn’t like to be vulnerable. A light rain is falling now. Cullen ducks behind a hedge and watches. He doesn’t have to wait long before a girl he recognises emerges from the flats and, pulling her coat over her hair, runs on heels to the waiting vehicle. The passenger door opens and the interior light goes. He sees Ratner lean over and fold the girl into an embrace.

  Chapter 16

  Nevis

  The early morning rain has dried up. It is now clear and crisp and the streets smell of traffic fumes and coffee as Nevis makes her way towards the flats in Kingsdown where Tash lives. She’d asked Luke for Tash’s address and he’d texted back immediately. He’d Ubered to a party there once so the address was still in his phone.

  Nevis realises that Satnam has other friends. Obviously. From time to time she has brought them back to the flat for chips or pizza and Nevis would make a stab at joining in with the chit-chat or otherwise slink off to the library or to her room. But she has never got to know any of them well and had always assumed they were casual mates, fellow students whose company Satnam occasionally enjoyed. Nevis herself never felt the need to be friends with anyone but Satnam. Other people are too complicated. Until the night on the bridge she’d assumed that no one knew Satnam better than she did, but she’s now wondering if Satnam has hidden corners that only her other friends have seen into.

  She hikes up Marlborough Hill rehearsing an ideal script of the upcoming conversation in her head. It helps calm her nerves. The truth is she’s a little afraid of Tash Tillotson. At the library she’d got the feeling that she was standing beside a death star or a black hole, something vast and scary that was in the process of collapsing in on itself. And then there was the email or, rather, both emails. What did Tash mean by saying she bet Nevis did know? What did Nevis supposedly know? And why would Tash imagine that someone could be next? Why would anyone be next? The girl was a mystery and mysteries of any kind set Nevis’s teeth on edge.

  Three-quarters of the way up the hill she takes a right and walks along a street of small stone houses to a block of flats. She makes her way through a riot of weeds to the main entranceway and presses the top bell. Moments after ringing it she hears a door swinging open upstairs. Then the hall light comes on and through the panelled glass of the front door a shadowy figure makes its way towards her. The door opens and in front of her stands Tash, smelling of weed and looking slightly flustered, her long brown hair tied in an unruly bun on the top of her head, looking as if she hasn’t slept in days or, conceivably, weeks.

  ‘I thought you were someone else or I wouldn’t have come down,’ Tash says, scanning the street this way and that.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  Hands on hips, eyeroll: ‘If it’s about those emails I was drunk, OK?’ A lip-suck followed by a repentant sigh. ‘I shouldn’t have sent them, sorry.’

  ‘I’m t
rying to understand about Satnam. Why she did what she did.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘Maybe none. But I like to be able to understand things.’

  Tash’s chest heaves but she stands aside for Nevis and leads her into a damp hallway and up the stairs to a small, messy flat with sad walls, undecorated except for a few band posters and a couple of incongruous landscape prints. The kitchen is a few worn cupboards, an old cooker and a cheap, half-sized fridge along one wall of the living room. The air smells of weed and bottled pasta sauce. Three empty cans of cheap lager on the coffee table in the living room suggest that others were here a while ago, but they are alone now. Music is playing on a Bluetooth speaker, something grimy. Not Nevis’s bag.

  Tash gestures to a chair and says, ‘Want a beer? I’m having one.’ Nevis sits and, blinking at the mess before her, says, ‘Coffee, if you have it?’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ Tash says, sounding surprised, like drinking coffee in the late morning is an odd habit. She moves over to the kettle, fills it with water and, taking a bottle of beer from the fridge, pries it open using the counter ledge as a bottle opener then perches herself among the detritus on the sofa.

  ‘My flatmates are still in bed so…’ She tails off, leaving Nevis unsure what to make of the information. ‘How’s Satnam?’ Tash says, peeling at the foil on the beer bottle.

  ‘Probably still in a coma. I think I would have heard if anything had changed.’ As she says this, Nevis wonder if it is true. Surely Narinder didn’t hate her so much that they would keep all news of their daughter from her? But anyway there was evidently a mole at the hospital since it now seems to be general knowledge that Satnam had taken Ritalin.

  Tash has stopped fidgeting and is looking genuinely shocked now. ‘OMG, I didn’t realise. I mean, on social it was just like, she took an overdose of Ritalin but she’ll be OK.’

  Nevis watches her face, wondering how you’re supposed to know whether or not you can trust people. She feels so heavy right now, like a rock.

  Tash says, ‘I don’t know her that well. You realise that, right? We were both in Mark Ratner’s seminar group last year but that’s about it.’

  The coffee tastes bitter and muddy and, above all, of sour milk.

  ‘I didn’t like that last email you sent me. I didn’t like either of them, but I especially didn’t like the last one.’

  Tash’s legs begin to jiggle. She takes a sip of her beer. ‘I already said, I was drunk, OK? I was upset. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Then why are you sending meaningless messages that upset people?’

  ‘Jesus, Nevis, did anyone ever tell you you’re a fucking pain?’

  ‘Yes, at school, all the time.’

  Tash’s nose wrinkles. She sighs and meets Nevis’s eye. Something there Nevis cannot read. Sympathy perhaps? ‘That sounds shit, I’m sorry. Truth is, the thing with Satnam set off bad memories from something that happened back when I was at school. Like, at the end of year nine. In the summer holidays. My sister Alice had just finished her A levels. She was down at the lido every day with her mates. There was a big group of them. Jason, Sam, Fran, a few others, I can’t remember all the names. After the lido closed they used to come round to our house ’cos my mum didn’t care if they drank and smoked. Anyway, one morning the caretaker at the lido went in early to open up and found Jason at the bottom of the pool. He’d tied a gym kettle to his ankle. The next day Sam’s parents find Sam hanging from a tree at the bottom of his garden. Then Fran turns up in a local picnic spot having taken a load of pills. It was just like a hurricane hit or a tsunami or something. Alice broke down. She didn’t go to uni that year, she didn’t do anything for months except watch TV. She’s still a lost girl.’

  ‘That’s awful. Did they ever get to the bottom of it?’

  ‘Suicide contagion.’

  ‘Like an epidemic?’

  ‘I guess. They’ve always happened. Sometimes they call them copycat suicides. It’s young people mostly, you know, after some rock star or celebrity or whatever kills themselves, or sometimes just randomly, like with Alice’s friends. Nobody really knows why.’ Tash puts her beer down on the side table.

  ‘Like a cult?’

  ‘One that no one realises they’re in until it’s too late.’

  ‘But there’s no evidence anyone else is going to try to kill themselves, is there?’

  ‘No, no, I just… I suppose I thought you and Satnam are really close so she might have told you…’ She tails off.

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Nevis sits back in her chair, her hands grinding together in her lap. On the chair beside her, Tash, yawning and fiddling with her hair, says, ‘Look, I really need to get some sleep, so…’

  Determined not to leave until she has what she came for, Nevis brings up on her phone the Valentine’s Day picture of Tash with Satnam and another girl. Tash peers at it for a moment or two, her breath quickening.

  ‘Is this what you thought Satnam might have told me about? It was taken here, wasn’t it?’ Nevis says steadily. The moment she entered the living room she’d spotted the sofa in the picture.

  ‘One of my flatmates had a Valentine’s Day party. So what?’

  ‘That’s Jessica with the two of you, right?’ Tash peers, too obviously wanting to get it right. She knows more than she’s saying, Nevis thinks.

  ‘Yeah. Jessica Easton. She’s in the year above us. I hardly know her either.’ Biting her lip and turning her head away, Tash says, ‘Look, I’m pretty tired, so…’

  ‘The morning after that I found Satnam at the kitchen table, crying.’

  Nevis watches Tash’s expression change. Untucking her legs and rising from her seat, she says, ‘I told you, I hardly knew Satnam. How would I know why she would have been crying?’ There’s a pause. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I just thought…’

  ‘Well don’t,’ Tash snaps. ‘You’re shit at it.’ But she sits back down and taking out a clump of tobacco, dumps it into a paper. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’ Nevis watches her elegant, manicured fingers roll herself a cigarette. ‘You want one? It’s only tobacco.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Sunday night, before she… went to the bridge, she said she was thinking of leaving Avon. Later, at the bridge, she told me she’d had enough.’

  Tash frowns and reaching over the table taps her rollie of ashes. She leans forward, the frown disappearing and the eyes turning inward, as if on the brink of some revelation, then, leaning back, she says, ‘We’ve all felt like that sometimes, haven’t we?’

  ‘Did something happen at that Valentine’s Day party?’

  Tash shrugs and in a flat empty voice says, ‘Like I said, I was pissed.’

  ‘You didn’t say that.’

  ‘Well, I’m saying it now.’ She raises her eyes and sees Tash watching her, flushed and a little flustered. ‘You think Satnam is some kind of mathematical equation and all you have to do is solve her and she’ll wake up, is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Nevis.

  A peal of laughter escapes Tash’s lips. ‘You’re hilarious.’

  She takes the smoke into her lungs and holds it there for a moment before letting it out in rings. ‘You’ve looked at her phone, obviously.’

  ‘I don’t know the passcode.’

  ‘Bummer.’ The rings growing smaller.

  ‘We had a bit of a spat on Sunday evening and I left and went to the library. If I hadn’t gone…’

  Tash tilts her head and narrows her eyes. A frown appears on her otherwise smooth forehead. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I was upset that she was saying she wanted to leave.’

  ‘She probably just meant she was looking forward to graduating.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Perhaps this is all just about me, Nevis thinks, the way I don’t seem to be able to understand people. ‘But she also told me Luke broke up with her… but L
uke said it was the other way around. She cheated on Luke and then dumped him.’

  ‘One of them was lying, obviously. People lie all the time, Nevis.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Tash puts out her cigarette and begins to roll another and Nevis feels very young in her company. ‘Anyway, none of that makes it your fault.’ She catches Nevis’s eye then looks away. Her jaw begins to work up and down on some gum. Silence falls. Nevis opens her mouth to speak but the words don’t arrive in time. Tash rolls her eyes. ‘Whatever you’re about to say, just say it.’

  ‘About that picture, the one at the Valentine’s party.’

  Tash spits the gum into her hand and sticks it under the table.

  ‘If you must know, Jess and I had words. Satnam played peacemaker. That was all. It was about nothing. I can’t even remember what it was about.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention that before?’

  ‘I’ve just said, it was nothing.’

  There comes a ping. Gathering herself, Tash reaches for her phone and reads, her eyes growing bright, a half-smile appearing on her face. She taps a couple of words in return and, turning to Nevis, says, ‘Listen, good to talk and that, but I need to be somewhere.’

  ‘Now?’ Nevis says, unable to hide her surprise.

  ‘Yes, now, as in right away,’ Tash says, hurriedly, rising and bidding Nevis to do the same. Nevis stands and, slipping on her coat, reaches for her backpack.

  It’s still clear and crisp outside now. A pair of Canada geese fly over, cackling, then disappear. At the street corner Nevis feels her legs break into a run and she does not stop until she reaches the entrance to the flat above the chippy. She plugs in the entrance code. The door lock clicks and there is an instant when she thinks she can see the figure of a woman standing in the hallway. Then it’s gone and all that remains is a faint smell of something Nevis recognises but cannot place.

  Inside the flat, she moves over to the sofa, picks up Satnam’s pink throw and wraps herself inside, letting it warm her body. The strong sense that neither Luke nor Tash have been quite straight sits with her. Perhaps she too might learn how to lie. Just as she did to the policewoman at the hospital but better, more complete. The time may come when she needs to. Something is shifting inside her. It began six months ago when she stumbled across a secret held inside the pages of the Children’s Book of Greek Myths which Honor had kept on her bookshelf all those years. Back then the understanding woke in her that all the old stories Honor had told her and that she had told herself would require revisiting and that nothing was as it had once seemed.