Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020

by Hannah Begbie

  ‘At Jules’ house? I told her she couldn’t go to that until we’d discussed it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you’d … the way it …’

  Becky’s chest tightens. ‘I said no to her.’ Her whole body is tense now. ‘She’s playing us off against each other, Adam, she—’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ he says. ‘When she said there was a sleepover I asked her questions like who’s there, what time are you going. I suppose I assumed she was already going … we were talking about other things at the same time: hash-browns and climbing walls.’ The two of them do go off on tangents. ‘I can’t quite remember how the conversation went but it’s possible she thought we’d already spoken.’

  Becky is a combination of anxious and irritated. ‘Why did you assume anything? Didn’t you think I might have some concerns about her staying at a stranger’s house?’

  ‘It’s not that, the last thing I wanted to do was … I just thought you’d made a call on it already because, well, honestly? It all sounds fine to me.’

  ‘But I’ve never met this guy … Jules, or whatever. What if …’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes, he’s nice. He’s sweet. Totally unthreatening. I’d be more worried about him. He looks malnourished: Maisie could take him down in five seconds flat.’

  There is a silence as Adam watches Becky’s fingers flick over her cuticles in quick and silent clicks then dart to the silk skin on her wrist and back again. He knows what she’s thinking.

  ‘She’s a sensible kid, Becky,’ he says eventually.

  ‘I know that. But I was a sensible kid before that night in the Hampstead house.’

  ‘That was different. You were … no one could have predicted … This is so different. Sober school night, parents down the corridor, the girls sharing a room. It’s not a party, they won’t even be drinking. It’s all good, I honestly think it’s all good.’

  But he sees from her expression that she’s not convinced and so he continues, ‘She’s growing up quickly. If we box her away from what everyone else is doing she’ll do it anyway and then won’t tell us about it.’ Becky bows her head. Knows he’s right. ‘We have to trust her.’ He’s sweet to put it that way when what he means is that Becky is the one that must trust.

  ‘It’s not Maisie I don’t trust. It’s other people.’

  ‘So let’s make Jules wear a monitoring device?’ says Adam brightly, hauling them both back into the present. ‘With the capacity to shock him remotely?’

  ‘You really think he’s OK?’

  ‘He’s passionate about the polar ice caps and Dinosaur Junior. That makes him more than fine. Come on.’ He reaches out for her hand and then lets his arm fall by his side.

  ‘OK, OK, fine.’

  He smiles. ‘I think it’s a good decision. For all of us.’

  By us he means Becky. Good for her to let go, is what he means. Becky feels her stomach unknot with the feeling that Adam is the net under her tight-rope.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘I think the spare room is all made up …’

  ‘That’s OK, I won’t need it,’ says Adam casually, ‘I’ll go to poker if Maisie’s going to be out.’

  Becky turns to face him, her stomach knotting all over again. ‘Where?’

  ‘Pete’s new place in Ladbroke Grove?’

  She wouldn’t dream of travelling to the opposite side of London in the same situation. She’d get on with stuff at home to quell the anxiety that her daughter was staying in a house she had never before visited, as if knowing the colour of the wallpaper would somehow make Maisie safer. Becky would potter about, phone in her back pocket, just in case Maisie needed to speak to her.

  As it is, Becky will be in France and Adam will be in West London. Her jaw tightens. Did he tell Maisie she could go to the sleepover so he’d be free to play poker with his mates? She banishes the thought. It’s not useful. He’s doing her a favour by being on call; what do they call it, in loco parentis?

  ‘But what if something happens?’ she says. ‘And she needs to come home and you’re not here? It’ll take you ages to get to her.’

  Adam turns to her, smiling. ‘Lily’s mum is at the house and Zee can always call me.’

  Part of her is scalded with panic: by that time, it will be too late to save Maisie from whatever has happened. And yet another part of her knows that what he’s saying is entirely reasonable. If only she were able to feel the same reasoning in her bones, just a fraction of his confidence, an iota of his assurance. She wishes she was more like him.

  ‘OK,’ she says quietly. ‘OK then.’

  ‘I’ll fix that shelf in the hall before I go,’ he says, ‘then the shelf gets to have a good night too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, trying a smile. ‘And please, keep your phone on and close to you?’

  ‘Of course I will. And I’ll be here when she comes home from school tomorrow. Come on,’ he winks. ‘This really is fine. Go and have some fun in Cannes.’

  Maisie lopes back into the kitchen holding a box of blueberries in one hand and an over-stuffed rucksack in the other.

  Too late for Becky to change her mind now, she holds onto her daughter tightly and silently prays for her safety.

  ‘Be asleep by midnight,’ she says. ‘You’ve got school. And you can call your dad if there are any problems. Or me. I’ll have my phone with me in Cannes. WhatsApp, text, a call, it will all work …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she says quickly, and turns to face Adam. ‘You guys are the best.’

  She catches the intense concentration and joy in Adam’s eyes as he flips a pancake onto her plate: the pleasure of a job well done for the people he most loves. So she can’t ask him for everything she might want, and he might not do everything exactly like her, but she feels so lucky for what she has. Things might have spiralled into a row without him there, with Maisie not feeling listened to and Becky the baddie, the mother who fails to trust her daughter.

  Adam is her compass. Her confirmation person, her Call in Case of Emergency man. The man her daughter calls Dad. Her best friend. Joint custodian of the great lie at the heart of her life.

  Chapter 7

  Hounslow

  Mid-September 2003 to mid-March 2004

  In the weeks after the party Becky can wake in the mornings and for a few moments feel as if she has come to consciousness in her normal, untouched life. But then she remembers the badness, and it fills her heart and mind to the brim. She overflows with it.

  It becomes a struggle just to get out of bed.

  At first, she gets away with some mornings at home, complaining of a virus and, later, the flu. She insists she doesn’t need anything for it but her parents press paracetamol, tea and damp flannels in her direction. Weekends come and go but her usual trips to the pool are dropped and she can no longer countenance the bright and bouncy happiness of Saturday morning television presenters. She chooses to watch soaps instead, passively allowing their stories and characters to slide past her thoughts and feelings.

  She hides her body in baggy clothes. She avoids the mirror, as if it might talk to her. She just wants to sleep.

  After a fortnight of this her mum declares this period of supposed ill health as having gone on ‘far too long’. Becky is sent to a doctor who diagnoses glandular fever. This buys her another four months of staying in bed, watching television and avoiding food, until her mum begins to mistrust this diagnosis – having come from a generation that does not trust an illness with undefined edges and blurred duration and no brand-name pharmaceutical pill to cure it.

  She insists on tests for Becky: blood and urine.

  Becky goes to the GP surgery to get her results, alone. Just her and the doctor in his airless, disinfectant-scented, steel-and-chipped-Formica office. The words bend her reality. She thinks that she is losing her mind and that she is instead simply sitting in a maths lesson, studying a Venn diagram of symptoms for depression and pregnancy, looking wh
ere the circles bisect. Depression is the blue circle, pregnancy is the red circle, and there she is, all mixed up in the middle, as purple as a bruise.

  Then, she cries a lot.

  Time slips past her. The abortion clinic judges that she is well past twenty-four weeks pregnant. They offer to try to make an exception for her but they need to confer with their lawyers. She never goes back. She can’t talk to anyone.

  In the end, Adam is the first person she tells about what is growing inside her. He hasn’t stopped coming round to her house, asking to see her, even though she always says no. Mary gave up weeks ago.

  Adam holds her in his arms, asking nothing of her, simply being her friend.

  Soon after, like it has been biding its time, waiting to be brought out into the open, the size and shape of Becky’s body betrays her and she becomes the example to be avoided, the beaming red sign for how wrong things can go.

  People give her a wide berth in the school corridor, like she’s got a contagious illness.

  Adam walks her to and from school and holds back her hair when she is sick on her shoes outside the school gates.

  Sometimes he says that if she ever wants to talk, then he is there for her.

  At home she eats very little and then goes straight to bed and watches television. It’s easy at first, when her dad isn’t talking to her and her mum is smoking a lot at the kitchen table. Becky just has to endure the times between when her dad makes tea and leaves the room, if she is in it, and the times he conveniently finishes eating as soon as she arrives at the table.

  But it becomes less easy to shut herself away as her parents’ responses grow more vocal and persistent, like a cancer metastasizing. Her father, in particular, who has spent a lifetime calling pop stars and actresses in short skirts ‘harlots’ and ‘sluts’, becomes consumed with the idea of his daughter having underage sex as a leisure pursuit. He fills with rage and shouts things like: How could you be so irresponsible? Becky finds this response particularly unjust and excruciatingly painful, sinking further into a kind of listless, inward blame – the very worst form of rage. As if it wasn’t enough to watch her belly fill to the brim with her own shame, she has to add her father’s to the mix as well.

  Then come the endless stream of questions – questions that sound more like accusations: Did it happen at home? In our home? How many of them have there been?

  They receive a congratulations card from a neighbour and a helium balloon printed with the words: You’re going to be grandparents! Her father bursts it with the tip of a carving knife.

  She stops going to school.

  She can’t read. She just wants to watch those soaps on television, to be held in the soft bubble of other people’s mistakes, conflict and intrigues.

  Her mum and dad stand in the doorway of her bedroom, faces pinched with anger. They ask her the same questions every day.

  Who did this to you?

  Who is its father?

  Chapter 8

  It had been a post on Scott’s Instagram account that gave her the idea for her film.

  Judging by his Twitter and Facebook, Scott had been in Birmingham for a weekend of clubbing and drinking with a friend of his. The next day he’d visited an art gallery in an attempt, he quipped in his caption, to experience more than the city’s capacity to get you really drunk. LOL Scott. His favourite painting had been one of Medea, made by an artist called Frederick Sandys. He took a snap and posted it on Instagram. Just one more image in a cluster of his weekend shots.

  Becky had been transfixed by it. Wreathed in red coral necklaces, with desperate eyes, and an obsessively incanting mouth, Medea looks away as she makes her poison. To where does she look? The hours ahead of her? To infamy and damnation?

  Becky had lost a whole afternoon to it. Medea. Studying the image, reading the play’s text. Some lines, over and over: Here are the women with ancient anger in their veins.

  She obsessed over why this picture, of all the pictures in the gallery, had spoken to Scott: did he wonder if she, Becky, was still out there, coming for him some day? His own personal Medea, unstoppable in her rage. She had known within minutes that this character was one she needed to advocate for: in her research, she saw more meaning in Medea than she’d found in many years of therapy.

  Her updated version would be a message to Scott that the consequence of what he did would never leave him, and a warning to men that their crimes against women, the injustice of their contempt for women, might be challenged. These men lacked her vision for pain. They could imagine her only as outcast and beaten, once they had no need for her. She was meant to be used, spent, and discarded.

  But Medea would show them what power lies at the heart of rage.

  These were some of the things Becky said to the screenwriter she hired and instructed to see what she saw.

  Medea is Becky’s conduit, her dark avatar, her brutish foot soldier. Her outrage, her violated body, her sorrow, her magnet for the smashed and long-dispersed pieces of her self.

  She must not let Medea down.

  She is doing a good job for her, so far. She has leapt through another flaming hoop, having touched-down, checked-in and changed into an outfit suitable for her first night in Cannes.

  And now, she stands on a stretch of grass in the forecourt of her hotel (five star, Matthew says literally everyone stays there) at the ready, surrounded by palm trees and steak-red beach umbrellas, swimming pool still as a mineral-blue pane of glass, looking out at the Croisette: the stage for the world’s most famous film festival.

  Scott had been here two summers ago, holidaying on a roof-top apartment over-looking the sea. Sweltering, he’d called it. Posted a picture of a charred black and grey steak he’d barbecued on the terrace: I present you minute steak, cooked for ten minutes! Maths fail! Becky had spent ages tying up the visual clues and identifying the exact location of his apartment: distance to the beach, position of the palm trees, amenities – microwave, hairdryer, Wi-Fi, barbecue (charcoal included) – and the final giveaway outside the entrance to his apartments, the yellow and blue neon sign, Croisette corner! So Hollywood-Boulevard! I heart this sign for my kitchen wall! It was easy after that. Google maps for a more specific location. Scrolling the interiors of nearby apartments on a rental website. Bingo she’d said as she matched it all up with the images he’d posted; green snooker ball rug in the living room, shining subway tiles in the kitchen. A call to the rental office to check the exact address. Just checking to see how central the location? Fabulous apartment!

  She’d left it there. For a few days it had been enough but then, as the sludgy feelings sunk back in, she’d returned to the computer and searched Skyscanner for flights, thinking: What if I got on that 6am EasyJet flight? Arrived on the Croisette, waited for someone to let me into the main apartment (lost my key card!), lift to the twelfth floor, bing bong – hello there, he says, answering the door with an espresso cup in one hand – barely finished his sentence before I’m in and driving him through with his own fucking serrated steak knife. Don’t wait around. Back on 3pm flight. Home for an omelette and an early night.

  She feels her heart-rate increase, her skin heat, her eyes prickle. She tells herself she must keep her eyes on the present. She is here for herself and her own dreams now. Not him. What did Adam say? Enjoy yourself! Well OK then.

  And soon she will meet Matthew who flew in on a different airline to her. Having met briefly at City airport, they parted ways at the first-class lounge and she had felt both envy, and then relief at not having to make impressive and professional conversation for the journey.

  For a moment she closes her eyes and allows herself to feel the heat of the sun, a favourite habit since childhood, and a rare thing that has survived to travel with her. She listens to single words break through the loud hum of conversation – yes and gorgeous and absolutely – and the happy music tumbling out of a nearby amp. She allows herself to feel at least a little excitement. She is here to bring life to her baby.
And yet, as she begins to move across the grass, through lines and curves and collections of people absorbed in their tasks – meetings, a phone call, a laughingly funny conversation – she feels so uneasy.

  She doesn’t look out of place – she is wearing nice enough clothes, and like them she is draped and looped with her rainbow lanyards of accreditation – but the world plays like it is on an IMAX screen in front of her. She steps almost spaceman-slow through this seemingly flawless world of self-belief that smells of suntan lotion and perfume and cigarette smoke. It sounds like glasses toasting and the soft hollow thunk of a linen-suited back-pat and the same easy laughter she hears when people come into the office to see Matthew and share the warm facts of their relationship – the work projects, dinner parties, play dates and holidays. These are the people who wave diamond-punctured sunglasses and gold-buckled bags and drinks in the air to flag each other down after a few weeks of not seeing each other.

  For a moment Becky allows herself to imagine what it must feel like to indulge in appetites so freely. Laughing without concern for volume. Writing cheques without concern for bankruptcy. Drinking negronis without concern for conseqence. Then she checks herself. Wipes a sweating palm down the front of her crumpled, aeroplane-upholstery-smelling cotton T-shirt that she now realizes looks cheap even when worn under a blazer. She is not them! She is a woman defined by straight lines, limits and ceilings, not unashamed, unapologetic appetites, for God’s sake.

  She thinks again about Scott. Sixteen years since she last saw him in the flesh.

  She thinks about the nameless woman lying on the floor of Matthew’s house.

  She thinks about Medea, about how she might persuade others to see her as she does, so much more than a villain who murders her own children to punish her husband.

  She should go home while she can – this unproduced woman, who makes packed lunches with economy supermarket bread, whose trainer sole is peeling off, whose house carpets need replacing. She can’t do this. Of course she can’t do this.