by Rebecca Reid
Max pointed through the hall, through the kitchen and living room into the garden. ‘Oh, Rav’s already home. We’ve been waiting for you.’
‘What the fuck is going on?’
Max went through to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and seemed to be perusing the contents. ‘Do you want a glass of rosé or a glass of white? It’s too hot for red, and I know you hate champagne.’
‘I don’t want a drink.’
‘Oh, I think you do.’
Chloe’s hands were by her sides and yet, for some reason, her index fingers were twitching. She stretched them, trying to make it stop. ‘It’s my kitchen, Max. I’ll get my own wine.’
‘Fine. Come and join us outside when you’re ready.’
Chloe watched the wine glass flood with pink liquid and took a steadying breath. Max was only here because he was trying to call her bluff. Rav was only home early because Max had summoned him. This would be a work meeting. In a moment, when she went outside, she would find that Max and Rav were talking about some boring building project and Max had just been trying to scare her. She took another deep breath and willed her feet to move. The longer she stayed in here, the longer she didn’t go into the garden, the stranger this seemed.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said brightly, kissing Rav on the lips. ‘Welcome home.’
‘How was the inset day?’
‘It was great, actually. Everything’s in order, I think. Or at least as much as it ever is.’
‘Max popped by to chat to us about something. I was thinking we’d give him supper.’
‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to work.’ Chloe tried to keep her voice even. ‘We’ve hardly got anything in the fridge.’
‘That’s no problem,’ smiled Rav. ‘I’ll pop to the shops and grab a few bits. You two will be all right here for a bit, won’t you?’
Chloe forced lightness into her tone. ‘Yes, of course.’
Rav patted himself for his keys and his wallet, whistling as he closed the front door. The local supermarket was only at the top of their road. It would take him fifteen minutes at most to get back. Could she get rid of Max in that time?
‘So what happens on an inset day?’ asked Max jovially. ‘I’ve always heard people talking about them but I’ve never really understood what one was.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Jesus, you’re not very nice after a day at the coalface. I think I’ll insist that Verity gives up work when we get married if she’s anything like you. Don’t want to come home to a row every night.’
‘Does this mean you’ve decided?’
‘Decided what?’
‘If you think Verity is sticking around, I assume you’re going to tell Zadie’s parents what you did.’
Max laughed. ‘No, no, I don’t think I’m going to do that.’
‘So what, then? You want me to tell everyone what happened? You want to lose your job and your friends and everything else you have?’
‘No, that’s not it either. I’d very much like to keep those things.’
Max was talking infuriatingly slowly. Every time she asked him a question, hushed in case one of the neighbours might overhear, he would lean back and stretch. Take a long drink from his glass.
‘I gave you twenty-four hours to decide and it’s almost up. If you don’t tell them by tomorrow, I’m going ahead.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
Chloe tried to adopt an expression of amused indifference, but Max was so calm. So confident. She couldn’t manage it.
‘What are you playing at?’ she asked. Her voice came out higher than she wanted it to.
‘I’m not going to tell the Listers anything. And you’re not going to make any accusations. You’re not going to talk to Verity, until you see her at our wedding, at which point you’re going to limit yourself to “Congratulations” and “You look beautiful.”’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because you no longer have any evidence that we slept together.’
Chloe ran inside for her bag, heart pounding as she scrabbled in it for her phone. Nothing. She took it back to the garden, brandishing it at Max. ‘How did you get my phone?’
‘I didn’t. Rav did. I imagine he’s resetting it right now, just as soon as he wipes any back-ups from your laptop.’
Chloe tried to form words but couldn’t. She stumbled backwards and let the garden wall take her weight.
Rav was the most honest person she knew, the most trusting. He knew all her passwords and pin codes yet never showed even the slightest hint of wanting to use them. He trusted her entirely. She trusted him. Always had. What could Max have over him? Surely this couldn’t be about Rav wanting to be his friend? He couldn’t want to be Max’s friend more than he wanted to be her husband? ‘I can still tell people. Even without the pictures, even without the video.’
‘You could,’ said Max, recrossing one leg over the other. ‘But I have the video you made. Which I think you’ll remember showed some rather enthusiastic consent. You probably should have been clearer on the plan before you filmed us.’
‘That film doesn’t prove I consented. It shows you hitting me.’
‘It does. And your brand-new search history on your laptop is full of all sorts of dirty goodies, nasty little video clips of women begging for things like that. And Rav threw in some extra search terms, too, which make it look like you’ve been obsessed with me.’
She turned at the squeak of the patio door opening. Rav stepped out into the garden, a resigned look on his face.
‘It’s done,’ he said quietly.
She looked at Rav, searching his face for something that would help her understand, but he was staring at the ground.
‘Why would you do that?’ she asked, because there were so many questions and it was almost impossible to know which one to ask first. ‘You want to work for him that badly?’
‘No,’ said Rav, finally making eye contact. He pulled up a chair, sharing Max’s painful slowness. ‘It’s not about that.’
‘Then what? Why the fuck would you do something like this to me? He beat the living shit out of his girlfriend and left her on the floor, bleeding. Why are you protecting him, Rav? Why?’
‘It wasn’t Max,’ he said.
Chloe’s gaze flicked between Max and Rav, back and forth. ‘What?’ she said, breathing heavily.
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Max. There was no pleasure in his voice. ‘I told you back then. I told you when you came to dinner, when you came over the other day. It wasn’t me.’
‘Then who was it?’ asked Chloe.
‘It was me,’ said Rav quietly. ‘I did it.’
28
Then
‘Take me to your room,’ said Zadie, her voice heavy. ‘There’s a torch in my drawer.’
‘What? Why?’
She started to get up, wobbling slightly. ‘Please. Come on.’
It took them a long time to make it up the stairs, Chloe holding the torch in one hand and helping Zadie with the other. When they got there, Zadie sat tentatively down on the bed. All the blinds were open and the sun was starting to come up. She stared at Zadie’s ruined face in the blue light. ‘Zadie, what happened? Was it Max?’
He had been so angry with Zadie at dinner; Chloe had seen it hidden behind his pseudo-calm expression. But surely Max wasn’t like that? Surely Max wasn’t the sort of man who would hurt his girlfriend because she was loud and annoying at dinner? Chloe thought back over the previous months, trying to work out whether she had ever had a sense of Max being violent towards Zadie, or towards anyone else. There wasn’t a single moment. She had often wondered why Max and Zadie were together, when they seemed to wind each other up and want such different things. But she had never, not for a second, worried that Max might mistreat Zadie. If she had speculated that one of them might be violent, it would have been Zadie, not Max. But there was no question that someone had hurt her.
Zadie m
oved her head. Was she nodding? Or shaking? ‘I just want to go to sleep,’ she said.
Chloe helped her to take off the white dress, unhooking each button as if she were doing the rosary. When the dress fell to the floor it revealed that her ribs were stained blue and purple. Chloe couldn’t help asking again, ‘What happened?’
‘He was so angry,’ she breathed as she pulled the covers tight around her shoulders, like a little girl who was afraid of the dark.
‘Zadie, I’m calling the police. He can’t get away with this.’ Chloe started searching for her phone and was surprised when she felt Zadie’s vice-like grip on her arm.
‘No,’ she said forcefully, her eyes welling up. ‘Please.’
It was the first time Chloe had seen her cry. She nodded, feeling helpless. She waited until Zadie’s breathing was perfectly even, knowing after so many nights sharing a bed that Zadie was easily woken initially. Then she slid in next to her, careful not to move or even touch her at all, and fell asleep.
29
Now
Chloe’s head spun, and then she was throwing up into a plant pot by the back door. A pretty blue-and-green one they had bought at a farmers’ market and planned to plant with lavender. The two men watched her, and when she had finished vomiting she sank down on to the step which led from the living room to the garden. Rav got up. Keeping a metre or so away from her, he passed her a glass. She drank the wine thirstily, hoping that the alcohol would numb her, even a little.
‘She said your name,’ she said, looking at Max. ‘She said your name, that night.’
Max shrugged. ‘Maybe she wanted to talk to me. She was drunk. She’d had a huge shock. Not sure that was really enough to condemn me on, Coco.’
‘She was wearing the ring. You have the ring that she was wearing.’
‘She left it for me at the house. She knew it was a family ring. Presumably she thought that my parents would be in touch to get it back from her if she didn’t.’
‘You always seemed so … guilty.’
He smiled, a sad sort of half-smile. ‘I felt guilty about that night. But not because I hurt Zadie. Because I kissed you. Because I liked kissing you. She told me I could do whatever I wanted that night, as long as I didn’t touch you. But I couldn’t resist.’
She tensed at the idea of Rav hearing this, knowing that she and Max had kissed when they were together. Then she laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, at her own stupid reaction. Rav had done something a hundred million times worse.
‘Why?’ she asked him now. ‘Why would you do that to her?’
‘We had a fight.’
‘What could you possibly have had to fight about? You barely even knew her.’
‘I was in love with her.’
The world swam for a few moments.
It was too much.
The ‘psycho’ Zadie was seeing at university, the one Louella had told her about in the conversation that had made her so completely and utterly sure about Max – it hadn’t been Max. It had been Rav.
He had hurt Zadie. He had hit her hard enough that she bled. Left bruises all over her perfect skin. Which meant that he had the capacity to do something she could never, ever have imagined him doing.
Rav had been in love with Zadie. Of the people who had known them both, she had thought he had chosen her, liked her best. But he had in fact liked Zadie better. Loved her. And moreover, she had spent the last fifteen years talking to him about Zadie, about where she was, about what had happened to her, while he held this piece of the jigsaw out of her reach.
‘Did you and she ever …’ She trailed off, praying that the answer was going to be no, that he would say they’d never had any contact, that nothing had ever happened between them.
Rav sat down. His skin was grey. ‘Yes.’
She closed her eyes. ‘When? How many times?’
‘We were sleeping together for six months. I wanted her to tell Max. I wanted her to end it with him so that we could be together. I told her that night that unless she came clean with Max and called it quits with him, we were over. She said no. She laughed at me, said she couldn’t believe I would ever think she’d choose me over Max. And I saw red. I lost it. I hit her.’
‘Six months.’
‘Yes.’
‘All the time that you and I were getting together.’
‘Yes.’
‘When did it start?’
‘The party where we met. I met her there, too.’
A wave of nausea passed through her. ‘She told me that I shouldn’t see you. That you didn’t seem that interested in me.’
‘She was jealous. She didn’t like that I liked you. But she was with Max and, I don’t know, I guess I wanted you both. Chloe, I’m so sorry. This was a long time ago, I was very young, and very fucking stupid. And then that night, during that awful fucking game, she told me that we were over. She was wearing Max’s ring. She said all this stuff, she baited me …’
Chloe looked up, trying to focus on Max. ‘You knew?’
Max nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘You knew the whole time?’
‘I knew she was sleeping with someone else. I suspected it was Rav. And then the party happened. He came to me that night, told me what had happened.’
‘And you covered for him?’
‘You always forget, you didn’t know her for very long. You had no idea what she was like. She could get into your head. She could make you absolutely fucking crazy. I’m not saying she deserved what she got. He shouldn’t have done it. He knows he shouldn’t have done it. But would you really have wanted Rav to go down for that? How would it have looked? Angry brown kid beats up a beautiful white girl with millionaire parents? They’d have thrown away the key.’
Chloe drank from her wine glass again. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t try and act like this is normal. Like what he did was okay.’
‘It wasn’t okay,’ said Rav gently. ‘I know that. I’ve regretted it every day since and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’
‘It’s your fault she died!’ Chloe shouted, for a moment forgetting to keep her voice down for the neighbours, forgetting to pretend that she was calm, that she was in control of the situation. Zadie would have known that she and Rav had stayed together all those years. That they got married. Had she thought that Chloe knew? That she didn’t care?
‘That’s not true,’ said Max, who did at least have the good grace to drop the smirk he’d been wearing earlier. ‘Everything I said to you – about her being ill, unstable – it was all still true.’
‘She wasn’t like that.’
‘Don’t you care that she was sleeping with him? She knew about you two, and she didn’t stop,’ Max went on.
‘Stop it.’ Chloe shook her head. ‘Stop it.’
‘She listened to you talking about him. She watched you check your phone to see whether he had sent you a message. And then she went back to his room and fucked him. You don’t care about that at all? That doesn’t matter to you?’
She looked at Max. At Rav. Back to Max. She could smell the vomit from the flowerpot behind her. The light was glinting off Max’s glass of wine. A plane whined overhead. What did she do now? Where did she go? How was it possible for a life that she had lived for so long, so easily, to be smashed up, broken, annihilated like this, in a matter of minutes?
Max got to his feet. ‘I think I’ll be off. Rav, I’ll see you next week.’
She watched him go inside, pull an expensive jacket over his pale blue shirt and close the door behind him. He would presumably get a car back to south-west London. Sit in the garden with a glass of wine. Talk to Verity about work. Keep moving, keep living, keep everything just exactly the same as it had always been. Chloe dropped her head into her hands, looking at the dusty patio between her fingers.
‘What now?’ Rav asked, eventually.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know.’
30
Then
When she woke the next morning the first thing Chloe thought of was Zadie. Sometimes she needed a moment to remember where she was, what was happening, why she was worrying. But today, it came back before she’d even opened her eyes. She turned to the side of the bed, but Zadie was gone. Trying to breathe calmly, she got up, pulled on a pair of jeans and a jumper and went down to the second floor. She knocked on Max’s bedroom door and it swung open. Zadie’s make-up was strewn over the bedside table. Her robe was slung over a chair. Max was lying in bed, snoring gently. She closed the door and went down to the breakfast room. A couple of last night’s waitresses were back, setting up breakfast. ‘Have you seen a girl down here? Tall, blonde hair, pretty?’
One of them shook her head. ‘You’re the first down. Did you want a cup of tea, or a coffee?’ Chloe shook her head, unconcerned about being rude. She went back upstairs and shook Max awake.
‘Max, where’s Zadie?’
He opened his eyes blearily and gestured towards a glass of water on his bedside table. She didn’t pass it to him.
‘Zadie. Where is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When did you last see her?’
He ran his hands through his hair then stretched his arms wide open. ‘I don’t know. Last night. Before the game? During the game? I don’t really remember much.’ He grinned. ‘Did you have fun?’
‘I found Zadie lying on the floor last night. Covered in bruises. Her lip was bleeding.’
Max looked confused. ‘In here? Had she fallen over?’
‘No, she hadn’t fallen over, someone had beaten the living shit out of her.’
‘I don’t think that’s possible, Chloe.’
He never called her Chloe. Always Coco.
‘I know what I saw. She was in here, she was bleeding, she’d been beaten up. She slept in my room. I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t let me. When I woke up she was gone.’