The Silence

by Daisy Pearce

  A sharp intake of breath. Frankie is looking at me across the table.

  ‘Please don’t hang up,’ I continue. ‘I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.’

  ‘Where are you calling from, Stella?’

  ‘Cornwall. A cottage near Tyrlaze. It’s called Chy an Mor.’

  This time I thought she’d gone. The silence goes on and on.

  ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m here. This had better not be a joke.’

  ‘It’s not, I promise. I’m just trying to understand.’

  ‘Ellie was my best friend. Before it all happened I was closer to her than anyone in my whole life.’

  ‘Before what happened?’

  ‘Before she died, stupid.’

  I’d been expecting it, but even so I sit back in my chair, stunned.

  ‘You know what? She was dead when she reached the cottage, that’s what I think. She was dead when she met Marco fucking Nilsen.’

  I look at Frankie, who is watching me carefully. He raises an eyebrow. Are you all right? I nod.

  Claudia is still talking. ‘He didn’t want her. That’s what gets me. He could’ve just left her alone because it was never her he wanted.’

  I can hear in her voice that she is about to cry.

  I say, ‘Please can we meet? I want to hear more about this.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Stella, it was a very bad time for all of us.’ She hangs up.

  I clatter the phone to the table and put my head in my hands, groaning.

  Frankie stays quiet. Finally, I look at him. ‘What you said, the other night—’

  ‘I was rude and I was drunk and I am sorry.’

  I wave him away.

  ‘Marco lied to me.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I showed him the photo of the woman – the one, you know, where she’s all beaten up. Marco said he didn’t know her; said he’d never seen her before. But he had.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t recognise her? She was in a bad way.’

  ‘No. No. I don’t believe that. I managed to get hold of a photo of the two of them together. He knows her. He’s just not telling me why.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask him about it?’

  ‘Because I’m frightened.’

  He smiles unhappily, his hands dangling between his legs as he leans forward. ‘What do your friends make of him, of Marco?’

  I shake my head. Whenever I think of my friends, of Martha and James and Carmel and all the ones left behind in my old life, a hard little lump rises in my throat. Most of all it is Carmel I think of with a sorrow as sharp as grief. Carmel stretching on the pitted and scarred velvet sofa, asking me how my day was. Interested. We could start talking at eight, and a bottle of wine or two later it was two in the morning, and we still weren’t done. I can remember Carmel returning home one sunny Saturday morning and taking off her long coat to reveal nothing but a gold G-string. When she saw me raise my eyebrows, she had snarled, ‘That idiot told me he didn’t want me to leave so he hid my clothes. Ha! As if that was going to stop me.’

  And even though it had been nearing the end of our friendship, we had laughed and laughed, and the flat had been sunlit and beautiful. That was before, just before, I think. Before she had turned cold and jealous and unhappy.

  Chapter 27

  That night sees a hard, driving rain attack the cottage like artillery fire. I drowse in the big rose-patterned armchair and my dreams are all the same; the clifftop, a moon as waxy and round as cheese, a woman, skin marbled white. Her smile exposes rotted stumps of teeth.

  The woman whispers, her words snagged in the rising wind, ‘Pay attention, Stella. Pay attention.’

  I snatch for her just as she jumps into the abyss without a backward glance, hair fluttering out behind her like the tails of a kite.

  An electronic chirping wakes me. I reach for my phone, still half dreaming.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. Wind on the line. A fizz of static.

  ‘Hello?’ I say again, sitting slowly upright. I am afraid. I can hear them breathing.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I tell the silence. I am about to hang up when I realise I can hear, very distantly, a song. My theme song.

  ‘There’s Bonnie and there’s Eddie and there’s Mum and Mikey too,

  Daddy, Lucy, Frisky, we’ll never forget you!’

  Someone is watching the show. I shiver. I can hear breathing now, as though they are standing too close to the mouthpiece. Slow, laboured breathing. The song ends, and I hear the programme start, my voice as clear as a bell.

  ‘Aw, Frisky, I wish I had some friends to play with!’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I say as I hang up.

  I sit mute for a few moments before releasing a long, shuddering breath. Through the doorway into the kitchen I can see the back door standing open. Outside the rain has stopped and the sky cleared, revealing an arch of stars in the vault of the sky. At the back of my mind something is stirring. An awareness, flexing its muscles. I both welcome and fear it, knowing that it means a change is coming. Something seismic. I have made a decision.

  I call Frankie early the next morning. I have no one else.

  ‘I’m going to see her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The hairdresser. Claudia. I’ve made an appointment. See if she’ll talk to me.’

  ‘Stella, I—’

  ‘Don’t try to talk me out of it.’

  ‘I was going to ask if you wanted a lift.’

  We drive to Falmouth later that morning. The rain has stopped but the sky is still dull and heavy. We park in the town and walk to the hairdresser’s in a shrill wind which whips at the hem of my dress. By the time we get there I am flushed and nervous, fingers raw with cold. Frankie points to a coffee shop a little further up the road.

  ‘I’ll be in there. Call me if you need me.’

  Inside, the hairdresser’s is warm, a comforting smell of shampoo and soap, strong artificial perfumes. At the front desk a young woman, no older than nineteen with poker-straight hair down to her waist, looks at me expectantly. I ask for Claudia. She checks the book in front of her and points to a couch.

  ‘She’ll be with you in a minute,’ she tells me. Pink lips the colour of bubblegum. I envy her lineless face, the knowing arrogance. I flick through a magazine I can barely see. Nerves have made me shaky. I need a drink. I don’t hear Claudia saying my name because I haven’t given my real one. I don’t look up when she asks ‘Maria?’ and only realise she is there when she puts a hand on my arm.

  ‘Maria? You awake, love? Do you want to come with me? We’ll get you washed.’

  I stand and face her. She is smaller than me by at least a foot, with a rounded face and large, heavy breasts. She is holding a towel out to me but when I turn to face her it falls from her hands and folds to the floor. It’s the same look Jim Kennecker gave me that first day. Her eyes, claggy with thick, dark make-up, widen. It is the expression I imagine you’d have if a family member pulled a gun on you.

  ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ she hisses.

  ‘No – I – I’m sorry, Claudia, I didn’t know what else to do.’

  She flashes me a look of real anger. I see her hands ball into fists. I wonder if she will hit me.

  ‘We spoke on the phone.’

  ‘I told you already I don’t want to see you.’

  ‘Please. Just five minutes, that’s all. I need to know – is this her, is this Ellie?’

  I pull the photo from my pocket, hold it out to her. She looks at it stiffly, a muscle twitching in her eye.

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ Claudia asks me, and her fierceness has softened a little. Just a little. ‘Don’t you see the resemblance?’

  I nod. I had, of course. It was difficult to tell under all the bruising in the photo but it was there all right. Even her posture was familiar to me, that coquettish way of looking up from beneath her lashes even though it was clear her nose was broken. My stomach
rolled sickly.

  ‘This isn’t how I remember her,’ Claudia tells me. ‘She used to be so beautiful before.’

  ‘Listen, Claudia. I’m sorry to have misled you, and I know this is painful. But I’ve paid for an hour of your time, and I don’t need a haircut.’

  ‘You do.’ She nods at my hair, unsmiling. I don’t think she means to be so blunt but who knows?

  ‘Okay, yes. But today I just want to speak to you about Ellie.’ I lick my lips. ‘Marco too.’

  ‘That prick.’

  The anger again. Corrosive.

  ‘Come on,’ Claudia says finally. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes.’

  We walk across the road to a café in silence. Claudia orders us both drinks without checking what I want.

  ‘You’re paying, right?’ is all she says as we find seats. Her handbag, her nails, her lips, everything about her is glossy and dark. She looks at me expectantly over the table.

  ‘So you want to hear about Marco, do you?’

  I nod.

  ‘I can’t look at you. You’re so like her. At the end, I mean. When he’d finished with her.’

  ‘How was she before?’

  ‘Happy,’ Claudia says immediately. ‘You ever seen the way a room can change just by someone being in it? Like, how happiness is catching? That’s her. Everywhere she went. At school everyone loved her, even the teachers. She was just one of those people, you know?’

  I nod.

  ‘And then she met Marco. Probably when he was down here in that house of his. She’d just set up her own business, and he offered some investment.’

  Our drinks arrive. She pulls the sugar bowl towards her and starts to lift the sachets, shaking them with pinched fingers.

  ‘She came to me because she wanted hair extensions. Right the way down to her waist, like yours. That was the first time I thought that maybe something was going on. She’d always looked so beautiful with short hair – Ellie always said it was easy to look after, one less thing for her to worry about. Marco paid for them – the extensions, I mean. And she never outright said it was his idea. It was just a feeling I got. Then she started to lose weight. I think they had moved in together at this point. Last time I saw her she was frantic. Called me up out of the blue and told me she’d lost her keys. Couldn’t remember when she’d last had them or where. I drove over there and . . .’

  Claudia swallows. She looks desperately uncomfortable. ‘I wish we could still smoke in these places. Anyway, when I got there I couldn’t believe what she looked like. She didn’t look like Ellie at all. She looked like a little doll. Like she should have been under glass. And all those bruises. Her face was so swollen she could hardly speak. She’d been locked out of the house for three hours. Five minutes after I get there, guess who arrives?’

  I guess. Claudia nods.

  ‘Course. Marco. Prince Charming. He had her keys. Said they must have fallen out of her bag into his car. She cried when he handed them back to her. Told him he’d saved her life. They were only keys, but she thought he was God Almighty.’

  ‘Did you talk to him? To Marco?’

  Claudia shrugs. ‘I tried. Asked him about the injuries she had. He said she’d fallen in the night. Sleepwalking.’

  I shiver then. Just a little. Claudia doesn’t notice.

  ‘I wasn’t being dramatic on the phone, you know. I really do think he killed her, whatever the papers say.’

  ‘Do you know Penelope Dalton? Penny, maybe. She lives in Tyrlaze.’

  She nods. ‘That’s Ellie’s mother. Surprised to hear she’s still alive, to be honest. She had a problem, you know?’

  She makes a motion with her hand, tipping a drink into her mouth.

  ‘She gave me your number. Any idea why?’

  I hold out the piece of paper.

  Claudia scans it. ‘This is Ellie’s writing. I don’t know why Penelope had it. Ellie changed her number about a week before she jumped. I couldn’t get hold of her anymore, just a recorded message saying that number no longer existed. She called me once, about three days before she died, but I was too busy to talk to her.’

  Claudia pulls a napkin out of the dispenser and blows her nose. I think of my new phone at the cottage, the one with only three numbers in it, the ones Marco had put in there. He said it was because I’d lost my phone, but I don’t remember losing it. So I’d taken his phone and copied Mr Kennecker’s number down, hadn’t I? Hidden the piece of paper in my bra where he wouldn’t find it. Had Ellie done the same with her friends and family? Tucked this little note somewhere to keep it safe, in case of an emergency? But then why did Penelope Dalton give it to me?

  ‘I have to go.’ She’s standing, pushing her hair from her face with her fingers. ‘I can’t say it’s been a pleasure to meet you, but I hope you got the answers you were looking for.’

  ‘You know we’re engaged, don’t you? Me and Marco.’

  She gives me a look of such abject pity I want to shrivel up. ‘I bet you are. You’re just his type.’

  I ask Frankie for one more favour. We are sitting in the garden on the sun-warmed stone bench.

  ‘Upstairs there are two bottles of pills in the drawer beside my bed. I want you to take them away, and not give them back to me no matter how much I ask you, no matter how upset I get. You think you can do that?’

  ‘Sure, I’ve done much worse.’

  ‘Will you destroy them?’

  ‘Yup.’

  I lean closer to him. Over our heads the gulls circle like vultures.

  Marco fires Alice. The first I hear about it is when I receive a call from her while I am sitting on the sofa, watching TV. I almost don’t answer. I’ve had three calls in the last twenty-four hours, each one almost silent except for the wet rattle of breathing and, just audible in the background, the playing of old Marigold! tapes.

  ‘Stella, it’s Alice.’

  I’m puzzled. ‘Is everything okay? Is Marco okay? Are you at the office?’

  She surprises me by laughing. ‘Didn’t Marco tell you? I got fired yesterday.’

  ‘No. No, he didn’t mention it.’

  ‘It’s no drama, Stella. Just time for me to move on.’

  ‘But – but why?’

  ‘He found out that I sent you those photos for your “collage”.’

  I want to think I’m imagining the inverted commas around the word ‘collage’. She sounds bitter and angry. I feel immediately guilty.

  ‘Oh no. Oh, Alice. I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him I pressured y—’

  ‘I don’t want that job back. I don’t want to work for Marco Nilsen anymore. Do you know how he found out? He’d had keystroke software installed on my computer. You know what that is?’

  I tell her I do not.

  ‘It’s a way to monitor what I’m typing. It records everything. It’s spying, in layman’s terms. I’m not even sure it’s legal. You know, it’s funny, looking through all those old photos of his. It felt like trespassing, in a way. I felt bad doing it. I don’t now.’

  I have a feeling I’m not going to like what comes next but I can’t stop listening, can’t end the call. A part of you always wants to know the worst. It’s the darkest part of you, where the abyss deepens to a pitch-black.

  ‘When I checked his hard drive I found a site he’d been visiting. Willowvale. You know what that is, Stella?’

  ‘Well, Willowvale is the name of the village in the show—’

  ‘Yup. You been on that site, Stella?’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘It’s weird. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s for some of the more . . . fanatical enthusiasts of Marigold!, I guess. There’s photos, of course. Mainly of you as Katie Marigold. Looks like they were taken on set – they’re what I suppose you’d call “candid”. You look like one of those kids at the American beauty pageants. All hair and make-up and big frilly dresses. He was infatuated with your hair.’

  That expression you hear, ‘my blood ran cold’.
I understand it in that instant. I am chilled with a slow and creeping horror.

  ‘You want to look it up. That’s what I think. Oh, and Stella?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If he knows that you asked for those photos, you’re going to need a better cover story.’

  Chapter 28

  As soon as I hang up I type ‘Willowvale’ into my browser. I click on the first result. It’s a chatroom, fairly innocuous-looking except there are pictures of the Marigold! family as the header across the top of the page. It’s all very twee, and I’m loath to go further, but Alice had sounded so insistent that I click on a thread headed ‘Joey Fraser AKA Eddie interview The Times 03/04’. There are a few commentators on this but it is brief and runs out fairly quickly. I scroll to the next heading, ‘UR favourite Marigold! MOMENTS1’, which is considerably longer and populated with users with names such as ‘Bill501’ and ‘FriskyTheDog’ and ‘HoneyPot64’. I don’t read the posts, just scroll quickly through. I’ve no desire to reminisce over my past. I hadn’t liked it all that much at the time. In fact, I’m about to close the screen when I see something which pulls me up short. It’s a user called ‘Uncle’. A line of text and no more: I think you’ll find that the catapult only featured in series one. They removed it for the remaining episodes as it was considered too dangerous.

  He’s right, I think faintly. There was an episode in which Eddie Marigold had fired rocks from a catapult, but it had been deemed too violent to be shown at teatime. It’s not something widely known, I don’t think, at least not to people who weren’t involved with the show. I click on the name Uncle and immediately see the vast quantity of posts that user has made. Photos, some of them years old, of me in make-up, still with gaps in my teeth. Photos of me signing autographs aged ten. Here’s me in my ‘Here Comes Katie Marigold’ dress with the ruffled sleeves. And my hair. So many photos of my long, wavy golden hair. It leads to a memory then, of my mother, brushing my hair in front of the mirror. She had called it my ‘asset’. I hadn’t known what she’d meant. Later I would overhear her and my father arguing about money, the money he’d gambled away. We were going to lose the house. My mother had had some loony idea of cutting off locks of my hair and selling them to fans.