The Silence

by Daisy Pearce

  When I come round, one of the windows has been opened and the air is clearer, less pungent. I apologise as Beverley hands me a glass of water. I sip it, hands shaking. ‘You complete me.’ Oh, I have heard that before all right, always delivered softly into my ear as we lay, hands entwining each other, on his bed or on the couch. ‘You complete me,’ he would whisper, and I would feel a heat somewhere behind my ribs, a slow-burning furnace. ‘You complete me.’ My mouth tasting of red wine and semen. ‘You complete me.’ Singed hair and burning flesh. ‘You complete me’, as he stripped me of my friends one by one.

  My phone is ringing again. I can’t face it. I can’t face anything. Tremors beneath the surface of my skin. Something inside is beginning to split wide open, and there will be pain that comes with it.

  ‘I have to go, Beverley.’

  Beverley nods and waves a hand in the air. ‘I shan’t get up. It’s too much effort and my bones are weak. You seem a lovely girl, Stella. I know it must be hard work to live in the shadow of a work of fiction. You mind and pay attention.’

  Chapter 30

  Outside the light is bright and clear, the day magnified as though through a lens. In the dappled shade of the trees I smell wood smoke and earth, the effluvious dank smell of ditch water and wet leaves. Everything about me seems to have an extraordinary clarity but inside my thoughts buzz and collide like flies shaken in a jar. I am walking too fast, head down, thin stem of my neck drooping. Soon the sky will darken; funeral clothes for the dying day. I pull my phone from my pocket and call Frankie.

  ‘I need to get into the loft,’ I say breathlessly.

  Frankie hesitates and I wonder if he is regretting getting involved in this.

  ‘The loft.’ I’m breathless, sweating. ‘The loft has a lock on it, a big one. I need to get in there. I need to see what he’s hiding. Can you come over? Reckon you can break it?’

  ‘Well – sure, I suppose so. I mean, there won’t be any finesse to it, it won’t be my finest piece of work – but I reckon I can smash it open with something heavy unless it’s one of those industrial ones.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Can you come now? Right now?’

  ‘Yeah, course. You okay?’

  ‘I just need to know – I need to see it for myself. Who he is.’

  ‘Okay. I hear you.’ A pause. ‘You know what? You’re incredibly brave.’

  I stop, panting. I have never thought of myself as brave before. I am struck by it. I am brave. I am a brave woman. But inside something is moving, some new knowledge as lethal as a blood clot.

  Chapter 31

  When I get back to the cottage there is someone sitting on my front porch. Long legs drawn up to their chest, head resting on their knees. A dark globe of hair. An Erinys. A Fury.

  ‘Carmel,’ I say.

  She stands awkwardly in the kitchen, her coat folded in her arms. She won’t have a cup of tea, and she can’t stay long, she tells me. When she looks at me, right at me, my eyes slide away from her gaze. I feel almost delirious. I haven’t forgotten what I did to her, you see. At the end. I’d believed Marco when he’d told me that she wasn’t going to press charges, that I’d never see her again. I want to reach out and touch her.

  ‘You look well,’ I tell her. She looks better than that. Vital. Even with no make-up on and her hair growing out from her buzz cut in weird kinks. She is wearing a white shirt, neatly pressed. The sleeves are rolled up to her forearms. There are still marks there, in the places that my teeth had broken the skin. Marco had said she’d probably be scarred for life. He’d laughed when he’d told me that, and said it was about time. ‘Bitch got her comeuppance,’ he’d said with that same wide smile.

  Carmel lifts her chin, her jaw set. Her eyes are flat and cool and dark and I miss her so much I am aching as if with fever.

  ‘I found your bag.’

  ‘I know. Alice had it sent here.’

  ‘No. Not that one. Your handbag.’

  I blink.

  She tilts her head slightly. ‘It had your phone in it, your keys, bank cards. Everything.’

  ‘It was stolen. I was drunk. Marco sa—’

  ‘Ask me where I found it.’

  I don’t want to. Suddenly I want her to go, to leave before she does some real damage. I turn away from her and pour myself a glass of water from the tap with slightly shaking hands. When I lift the glass to the light it is tinted brown like nicotine. There are bits floating in there, black flecks.

  ‘It was in the meter cupboard in the hall. It had been shoved right to the back, behind the pipework.’

  I shrug. So?

  ‘It wasn’t stolen. It was hidden from you. Did Marco give you a new phone?’

  I don’t answer that, so she comes around the table and stands in front of me, arms folded.

  ‘Do you remember what happened, Stella?’

  I force myself to look at her. Her face is stone, granite. She does not smile but something softens, I think, in her eyes.

  ‘You lost your parents’ wedding rings. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you thought I’d taken them. Sold them. Because I was flat broke. Or because I was pissed off that you’d given my birthday party a swerve. Or because I was jealous of you and Marco.’

  I’d said those things, all of them. I’d been looking for a fight, muggy-headed and restless. It was just a couple of days after her birthday party and her boxes were stacked in the hall, waiting for the shipping company to spirit them away. I’d gone to my room and upended my jewellery box onto the bed. My parents’ rings hadn’t been there. I’d grown hysterical, started pulling my room apart. I’d overturned my mattress and dismantled my bookshelf. Then I’d turned to the boxes in the hallway, the ones Carmel had carefully packed and labelled. Pulled out the contents blindly, scattering them on the floor; her clothes, her make-up, the bottle of her favourite perfume which smashed and filled the room with a dark and mossy fragrance. When she’d come home I’d been wild-eyed, shrieking. She hadn’t been able to calm me down. I’d called her a thief and worse than that I’d called her a shit friend, a parasite. I’d asked her how much she’d got for selling the story about my overdose.

  ‘I bit you.’

  ‘You did. You did. All up my arm. My cheek. I had to have seventeen stitches. When I was triaged they thought I’d been attacked by a dog. They gave me a tetanus shot.’

  Of course, I remember. I called Marco. ‘Help me,’ I said, ‘help me.’ I’d been scrubbing blood out of the carpet, almost hysterical.

  ‘We’ll fix this, Stella,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry. The best thing you ever did was jettison that bitch.’

  ‘Why are you here, Carmel?’

  ‘How much weight have you lost? Christ, there’s nothing to you. Sit down.’ And then more gently, ‘Sit down, Stella.’

  I let her lead me to a chair. Carmel moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards.

  ‘Haven’t you got any alcohol here? Vodka or something? You must have something stashed away. I thought you were meant to be an alcoholic.’

  I laugh, and she brightens a little. She goes to her bag and pulls out a half-bottle of brandy. Pours us a glass each, healthy measures. She clinks her glass against mine.

  ‘You’re no more an alcoholic than I am the Pope. Have a proper drink. I know I’ve given you a hell of a shock, and you’re about to have another, I’m afraid.’

  I love the smell of alcohol, the hit at the back of the throat, the warmth blooming in your chest. I drink it in three quick swallows, and it is delicious. She pours me another, slightly smaller.

  ‘Do you want to do this now?’ she asks me, taking her iPad from her bag. I meet her eyes for the first time since I saw her outside.

  ‘I don’t know. Do I?’

  She thinks for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she says.

  The small screen fills with a grainy black-and-white image. It is a yard, seen from slightly overhead. A car is parked there, the back end of it just visible in
the left-hand corner. It is Sadie, I know, and then the image falls into place the way an optical illusion does. It is outside our old Lewisham flat, mine and Carmel’s. There is no date or time stamp, but I don’t need one. It was the morning we left for Cornwall. Here I come into the frame, head bent, carrying my suitcase. The sun had only just begun to rise to a watery grey dawn, and my breath is visible. Here is Tonto, the neighbour’s cat, coiling round my knees, tail curved. I watch myself bend and run a hand along its spine. There’s me walking to the car and putting my case in the boot, going back through the open doorway. Moments later Marco comes out. He crosses to the car quickly, removes my case and goes back inside. It is just a moment. The entire footage is less than a minute long.

  I watch it all again from beginning to end.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘The guys upstairs – their names are Drew and Ben, by the way – the cyclists. You remember they told us there had been a lot of break-ins last summer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We had been on the balcony, Carmel and I. Drinking wine from tumblers. The air had been dusky and smoky and just right.

  ‘Those bikes of theirs are expensive. They had CCTV fitted from their bedroom window. I remembered them doing it.’

  She takes my hand and presses it gently between her own. ‘On the day Alice came to collect your luggage I was at the flat packing up the last of my things. I must have looked a state because I’d been crying and I was still all stitched up. Alice was very kind. Very polite. Not pushy. But she knew. She said, “Has she gone with him?”

  ‘“Yes,” I told her. “Looks like she forgot her luggage.”

  ‘“No,” Alice said, “I doubt that she did.”

  ‘And that was all. After she’d left I started to wonder what she meant by that. She worked for Marco, after all; she knew him better than all of us. Even you.’

  There are tears standing in my eyes, shivering there. If I move they will fall, so I stay completely still and let Carmel finish.

  ‘After I found the CCTV, I called Alice up at work. She told me you’d been looking for photos of Marco, and, I’ll never forget it, Stella, she said, “Perhaps she is not in the dark anymore.”’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Carmel.’ The tears come. Thick, syrupy. I feel them drop heavily into my lap. It is as though something has fractured, some internal fault line finally shaken apart by wave after wave of shock. ‘I didn’t listen.’

  ‘You didn’t know. How could you? He’s a monster. Him and that quack doctor. They get off on it. Power. Control. They are very selective with their targets. They like vulnerable women.’

  I wipe my nose with my sleeve.

  Carmel squeezes my hand. ‘Let me tell you what Alice told me. When Marco and Doctor Wilson were at university in the eighties, two women died on their campus within a year of each other. Suicide, according to the post-mortems. One of them overdosed on Quaaludes, of all things. The other hanged herself in the basement. Both women had been involved with Marco, at least one of them romantically. Funny, huh? Funny how tragedy seems to follow him around.’

  ‘There’s someone else too. Ellie. An old girlfriend. She died.’

  Carmel’s eyes widen.

  ‘Here, at the house. Jumped off a cliff into the sea. She’d been taking the pills too.’

  There is something unravelling within me, like a thread drawn rapidly from a spool. The more I talk the faster it comes loose. And what will happen when it does? What then?

  ‘Just after your dad died I had a job offer in New York. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t take it. I was so worried about you; you couldn’t be left alone. I didn’t mind the sleepwalking, or the crying, or the melancholy. I expected that, I think. I didn’t even mind that you were stealing my Valium because I could see how upset you were, how raw. But after the overdose something changed. It was Marco, the way he looked at me when I was leaning over you on the sofa, trying to wake you. He looked so angry, like he might hit me. He wanted to be the one to find you, Stella, to save you. Then you would be indebted to him. Bound to him.’

  ‘I didn’t take an overdose.’

  ‘I know that now. He’d put something in your drinks. He was doing it to you for months.’

  I remember the night of her party. How I’d woken disorientated and naked and sad. It had ruptured things between us, Carmel and me. Not irreversibly, that was still a little way off. But the damage was deep.

  ‘I’m going to take you home now, Stella,’ Carmel says softly, squeezing my forearms with her long fingers. ‘You can come with me to Paris and live in the cupboard under the sink.’

  I laugh. She grins at me.

  ‘You know I’ve met someone?’

  ‘No! Who? What’s his name?’

  ‘Her name is Zita and she’s been showing me all the most beautiful parts of Paris. You’re going to love it there, Stella.’

  ‘You look happy.’

  ‘I am.’

  We look at each other in that moment with something akin to wonder, as if we can’t really believe we’re sitting opposite one another, as if it’s been years rather than weeks.

  ‘You didn’t sell the stories? The photos?’

  She shakes her head slowly. ‘Never. And I’m betting the same person who did also hid your bag and took your parents’ wedding rings. All the better to turn the screw, am I right?’

  I nod miserably and look down at my ring finger. I’m still wearing his ring, the one he said had belonged to his grandmother. I slide it over my knuckle and place it on the tabletop. It comes from Penang, he’d said. That’s in Malaysia. I know where Penang is, dickhead.

  ‘Now I want you to listen to me. Get your things. You need to get away from here. It’s poi—’

  The knock at the door is loud enough to startle us. We exchange glances, wary, frightened, and then I remember. Frankie. I am filled with a mixture of thrill and treachery, my heart rising into my throat, blood hot and restless. Once we have broken the lock we cannot go back. I will have to go up into that dark, airless space and reveal what he has been hiding from me. All this time.

  ‘It’s Frankie,’ I tell Carmel. ‘He’s going to help me get into the room upstairs.’

  ‘You know the tale of Bluebeard’s wife, Stella?’ Carmel is asking me as I am hurrying towards the door. I don’t answer and later I will wish I had. It will be the last thing she ever says to me.

  Chapter 32

  Just before I open the door I turn and look over my shoulder. I cannot shake the feeling that something is creeping up on me. I unlatch the front door. ‘What took you so long?’ But it is not Frankie.

  ‘Hello, Stella.’

  Marco. He stares at me flatly. His knuckles are bloodied and raw-looking, his nose a bright-red pulp. A bib of blood stains his shirt. I can’t speak. I feel like my throat is plugged with cotton.

  ‘Say something.’ He spits on the ground; it is foamy and red.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Smashed the car. Can I get a drink?’

  ‘Christ, Marco. You’re hurt.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He pulls down his lip. ‘Lost a tooth, see? Maybe I could put it under my pillow, see what I get.’

  I shiver with revulsion. Something has spoiled, curdled inside him. He even smells sour as he pushes past me, into the hallway. Outside, the mist is thickening, reducing everything to shadow.

  ‘We need to get you an ambulance. You’re hurt.’

  ‘You should see the other guy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should see the other guy.’

  I run into the garden and down the path. Up ahead I can hear the tick of cooling metal, the hiss of escaping steam. One ghostly light winking on and off in the gloom. A hazard light.

  ‘Frankie!’

  There, on the lane. A shape, dark lines growing clearer as I run towards it. I can see Sadie, skewed across the stony track at an angle, slammed into one of the hawthorn trees which line the road. There is steam com
ing from beneath the crumpled bonnet, a spider-web crack in the glass of the windscreen running from one corner to the other. The ding, ding, ding of the seatbelt alarm. I listen for a moment, and I hear something else. A faint groan, almost spirited away in the fog. I press my face up to the glass but there is no one in the car. The seatbelt alarm is chiming quietly, and there is blood pooled on the passenger seat. Chunks of safety glass stud it like glittering diamonds. Then I see him, lying in the road a little further away. He has crawled there on his hands and knees. Now he is lying face up to the sky, the mist crawling all over him, in the places where the blood has seeped through his clothes.

  ‘Frankie!’ I shout, unable to stop myself. ‘Frankie!’

  His head lolls, his eyes rolled up to the whites. For a moment he is horribly still. Then his chest jerks and I hear him cough weakly, and with considerable pain.

  ‘Frankie.’ I kneel beside him, wanting to touch him, not wanting to move him, resting my hands against his face. He is cold.

  ‘Frankie, let me call an ambulance. I’m going to call someone for you so hold tight, okay?’

  I don’t think I am crying, but when I try to speak again a lump fills my throat like soft dough. His hand lifts and drops onto his chest, on top of mine. It squeezes, just once. I lower my head to him, next to his cheek where the stubble grows thickest, the curls of his hair meeting his neck. I breathe him in, crying and choking and unable to move. I tell him I’m sorry, I tell him I will get help. He opens his eyes and gives me a pained smile.

  ‘Get out of here. Run.’

  ‘Frankie—’

  ‘Run, Stella, please run. I so want you to live.’

  I find his lips – they are so cold – and plant a kiss there, soft and warm and tender. I am acutely aware of his taste, the firmness of his mouth, the way his hand lifts a little to stroke my hair. My eyes are bright with unshed tears.