Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

  ‘He might have been, I suppose. If he was walking along Stoke Road.’

  Sophie knew that he had been at the party. She knew that Naomi had not seen him. She had made sure of it.

  ‘We could have been next to him at the bar. Met him, even,’ Naomi whispered.

  Sophie felt her heart slash open with love and regret.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But you saw his face, didn’t you? Did you recognise him at all?’

  Sophie would have recognised Jason Parker’s face anywhere.

  ‘No. I’d never seen him before in my life,’ Sophie said, shivering at the thought of his death pallor, of his frightened, narrow eyes and bloody mouth.

  But Naomi’s face was the horror story in front of her now. Bloodless, as though Sophie had pulled her veins out of her flesh. Through Naomi, in one harrowing flash, Sophie felt that night again, felt it more than saw it. What she had done, what they had done, became ghastlier than it had been back then. Through Naomi, she was reliving it. Naomi’s ashen face was a reflection of Sophie’s guilt. All of it. Before now, she had never dared look.

  Chapter Seventeen

  19 July, 1999

  Naomi had looked perfect at the beginning of the evening. Now, her tights were torn and her make-up was rubbed from her face; her cheeks were raw and pink, her hair tangled, like a dirty doll on a rubbish dump.

  I held her hand, steadying her as we walked down the wet steps from the pub to the car park, feeling her nails dig into my palm.

  ‘I’m going to miss you when you’re gone,’ she slurred.

  ‘You’re the one going away, not me,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she giggled. ‘I’m gonna be…’

  Her body was thrown over her legs with the force of her vomit. Chunks of chicken from the party food splattered over my boots. I stroked her back, where the slow, heavy fall of raindrops left dark stains on her denim jacket.

  She spluttered, wiping sick and tears away with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed, stumbling over as she bent to rub my shoes clean. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  Huddled under umbrellas, fellow students poured past us, either laughing at her, drunk themselves, or casting sympathetic glances. A couple of friends asked if we needed a lift or whether we wanted to walk with them through the woods back to campus.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, holding her weight as we continued towards the car, which was parked further down the lane.

  It was dark and wet. Her feet slipped and tripped over themselves; her breath was sour.

  When I opened the passenger door, she did not sit inside. Instead, she opened the back door and stretched out along the seat.

  ‘I need to sleep.’

  I heaved her up to secure her into her belt.

  Her face was close to mine, her eyes stretched wide, ‘I’m not going to miss my flight, am I?’

  ‘No, you’re fine. It’s a couple of days away, don’t worry.’

  Her lids drooped, and I smoothed a wet strand of hair away from her forehead.

  I climbed into the vinyl front seat, relieved to be dry and safe, and smoothed my hand over the old Bakelite steering wheel.

  The winding lane out of the village towards the B-road seemed treacherous as the rain battered my old car. The headlights dazzled the dark countryside, highlighting the dashes of rain on the windscreen, flashing across the hedgerows and woodland. In better weather, I enjoyed these night drives. Nobody else on the roads; obscure music on the radio.

  I increased the pace of the windscreen wipers, whose rubber screamed with age.

  ‘I love this song,’ Naomi piped up from behind me, reaching forward to turn the dial, flopping over the handbrake, groaning and laughing as she clambered back.

  Her knees punched into the back of my seat. In the rear-view mirror, I could see she was dancing, waving her arms about to the beat, singing off-key.

  ‘I LOVE THIS SONG!’ she wailed out of the window, hanging her head out.

  ‘Stop it! Get inside!’ I turned back, and swerved a little into the middle of the road.

  A speeding car came out of nowhere towards us and hurtled past.

  She screamed, elated, and then I heard the quiet moan and the dry retching as she threw up again. The odour was magnified by the car heating, turning my own stomach. I tightened my grip on the wheel, pushing my face close to the windscreen, slowing a little as the wipers slashed the glass, left and right.

  Up ahead, through the thick weather, I noticed someone walking alone under a black umbrella, a straggler from the party, perhaps.

  ‘I feel better now! Why don’t you ghost-drive?’ she hollered into my ear.

  Her hands were on my shoulders, pressing down.

  ‘What’s ghost-driving?’

  ‘Here.’ She reached forward to the wheel, her elbow in my ear, and shut off the lights.

  The darkness enveloped us. The rain was hard on the roof. My heart leapt into my throat. I clicked them back on, clenching my jaw, and reorientated myself, looking for the figure I had seen, anticipating how I would overtake before the bend. The cackling and caterwauling from the back was distracting. I wanted to open the door and roll her out.

  As we got closer to the night-walker, he looked back over his shoulder. Our eyes met. With a jolt, I recognised him. Those eyes. I’d know those eyes anywhere.

  Then I felt Naomi’s hot, clammy fingers covering my face. I couldn’t see. The world was gone. I yelled. Her knees dug harder into my back through the seat and her laugh rose, loud and high, calling out like a banshee. I bit her little finger. She yelped and fell back. As she flopped back, whimpering, I saw the man again, parallel to the car.

  Those eyes. They triggered me. Compelled by a force too strong for pre-planning, too hateful for good sense, I jerked the car to the left and heard the clomp. The noise reverberated through me, through the car’s metal bonnet and into my bones, where that dark instinctive power to hurt that man had come from: spontaneously, unpremeditated. A spiderweb of glass had appeared; a splintered, bloody hash in the top corner of the windscreen, no bigger than a fist. Somehow, my foot pushed the brake to stop the car. In the silence, the radio grew loud, my breathing louder.

  ‘Ouch. What? That hurt,’ she whined from the back.

  ‘Shut UP!’ I yelled, stricken.

  Turning back, I saw her wedged lengthways into the footwell, rubbing her sick-encrusted face, head lolling, eyes closing.

  ‘Stay there,’ I added, grabbing my phone. My hands shivered. I opened the car door.

  Nipped by a gust of cold rain, I walked around the bonnet, sickening for a terrible sight. I resisted the urge to twist away, knowing I had to search for what I couldn’t even contemplate discovering: for the night-walker’s body to be crumpled in front of my car.

  There was nothing. Nobody. The road was slick, polished by rain, and I wondered if I had experienced an apparition of the man with an umbrella. It could have been a deer. Could it? There was a small indentation in the roof, and blood smeared onto the distorted windscreen. The bonnet was undamaged. But then I saw the tangle of an umbrella by the front wheel. My stomach heaved as I picked it up. I lurched back into the car and shoved the evidence under the seat.

  ‘What happened?’ she mumbled.

  ‘We must have hit a deer,’ I replied, pushing down the handbrake, pulling away. The windscreen was unbroken on the driver’s side.

  ‘No!’ she wailed, beginning to cry.

  ‘It’s okay. He didn’t suffer.’

  She sniffled and murmured, ‘No, no, no…’

  I let her whine. Then, I heard light snoring, oblivion. Ignorantly, she slept in her drunken fug.

  How silly she seemed. How I envied her silliness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was not certain how I had arrived home yesterday. The car had ended up in the drive and I had walked inside the house, but I did not have a clear recollection of how I’d made it. Nor did I understand how I m
oved through the day with the girls, figuring out maths homework, playing Monopoly, roasting a chicken, calling my older brothers in Sydney, drying two loads of laundry for sports kits and uniform.

  This morning, after kissing goodbye to Charlie at the train station and dropping the girls at school, as I would on any given Monday, I was on the point of collapse.

  With every blink, whole sections of time seemed to pass me by. If I had told a friend, they would have been making me cups of sugary tea and telling me that I was in shock.

  That was not how this kind of shock would play out. There would be nobody to hold my hand through this.

  I floated through the kitchen, through the hallway, into the sitting room, around the furniture. I wanted to settle; to think, finally.

  The coral and grey interior of my home, coordinated with such care and attention to detail, had lost its calming, comfortable appeal, and I saw these material possessions of mine with a dispassionate separateness, as though they had never belonged to me.

  I sat in the coral armchair that faced the slate hearth, ashy and cold, and opened my laptop.

  Armed with new information, with an actual name, I typed ‘Jason Parker’ and ‘Exeter’ and ‘hit-and-run’ and ‘1999’ into my search engine. Familiar lists of websites and articles rolled down my screen, disappointingly similar to the last time I had searched. There were hundreds of reported cases of hit-and-run accidents, including heartfelt appeals from family members of injured or deceased victims written up on local newspaper websites, pleading for the perpetrators to come forward and confess. As I devoured article after article, I found nothing about historic cases, but I found countless stories of dangerous drivers who had been convicted and imprisoned for their hit-and-run crimes.

  I looked away from the screen and out through our bay windows. Puffs of white cloud moved lazily across the sky, revealing the sun, allowing it to be glorious against its blue backdrop. Silvery bursts shot from the reflective surfaces in the room, from photo frames, from chrome table corners, from the bottles of spirits that sat on the drinks cabinet. Soon, a large cloud eclipsed the sun and the room fell grey. But the bottles still shone. The alcohol inside offered a break, a way to smother the mayhem in my head. I did not move towards the cabinet. I had sought out oblivion in a bottle before. If I resorted to those bottles, I would be lost, lost to Charlie, to Izzy and Diana. To repeat that pattern would be a catastrophe.

  A catastrophe was brewing anyway. My happy family life, as it stood now, had ended.

  I had never previously wanted to go back into the past to change anything, but now I wanted to rip into the space-time continuum and storm headlong into that pub on Stoke Road to take back our errors. Armed with this luxurious hindsight, I would tell Sophie that I did not want a lift in her blue Giulia. Or I could go back further, to earlier in the evening, and decide against that third Jack and Coke. Yes, that would be the place to start.

  In one respect, I should have been grateful to Sophie for giving me twenty years of a good life. I had enjoyed twenty years of freedom. If she had forced me to see that dead body, any semblance of a good life would have ended there and then. Just as it had for Sophie. But Sophie had given me all the facts, and now it was over. It was over because I would have to go to the police.

  The time had come for full disclosure. If I was honest, if I came clean, I could try to make amends for the twenty years that this young man’s family had suffered; a perverse contrast to my own relative lack of suffering. I had to tell the police what we had done: I would be reporting a crime, an accidental death, a terrible tragedy.

  I closed my laptop. I would drive there now, without delay. If I thought about it for too long, I would never do the right thing. The temptation to hold back, to save myself, would be too strong, so I buttoned up my coat and wound my scarf around my neck, slowly, as though this were the last time I would have such a freedom.

  * * *

  The drive to Guildford took twenty-two minutes up the A3. I imagined a karmic force swerving the car off the road, rolling it into the undergrowth, killing me: the ultimate retribution.

  By the time I arrived at the busy police precinct, I was shaking violently, and I was cold and clammy.

  The car park was busy. I drove round and round, just as I had walked round and round my house, trying to find a place to stop, to park, knowing that when I did, I would have to go ahead with my plan. Was it a plan? There had been no planning; it had been instinct, a reaction, and now that I was here, I felt terror. Perhaps this needed more planning. If I planned, I might not have to tell, I might save myself and leave the young man’s mother to die without knowing who had been responsible for her son’s death.

  A parking space opened up. I drove the car into the tight slot and then sat at the wheel, staring at the officers swarming in and out of the grey institutional building, where there was regularity and order and justice, where a confession led to prosecution, where a prosecution led to punishment. Black and white. Good and bad. The contrasting chaos inside me escaped in bursts of irregular, short breaths, until I was light-headed, until I could feel the blood inside my veins bubbling with too much oxygen. My coping mechanisms were breaking down. The right move now would release this tension, heal me.

  I opened the door, swung my legs out, gathered myself. I had to push my body to standing, through this fear. I told myself that I was an honest person, a good person, and I resolved to be the person I had been brought up to be. And here I stood, at the open car door, staring at the police station. I tried to take a step forward. My phone pinged with a text. I slid it out of my pocket. The text was a delivery notice about a case of wine arriving today – irrelevant – but when I saw the screen saver photograph of Izzy and Diana’s faces, as they stood laughing and hugging, I was overwhelmed by regret and I weakened, fatally. There was no way I could walk in.

  Charlie should know first. I would tell him tonight over supper. Together, we could come here on another day, a better day, with a lawyer and more information. I had arrived here in shock, on a whim, without working it through. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t simply walk into a police station and confess to killing a man twenty years ago.

  I secured the seat belt, making sure my body was pinned to the seat, imprisoning it, so that I was not able to make the biggest mistake of my life.

  As I drove off and away from the police station at speed, there was a moment of release and then the dread seeped back. This first escape had been only a temporary stay of execution.

  * * *

  With a superhuman effort, I survived the school run in the afternoon, fooling myself that nothing had changed, acting with a normality that was a million miles away from how I felt inside.

  At home, safe in one sense, I boiled salty water for the girls’ spaghetti while they did their homework.

  I thought back to the playground, to my bright smiles and jolly chat, and it shocked me that I had been capable of such a deceit. Deceit. I couldn’t call it by any other name. I had presented a most hideous lie, a concealment of my identity. While we had the right to hide anxieties and secrets behind a public persona – we could not emote and overshare all the time – this new truth about myself changed who I was. And perhaps those good people around me had a right to know, like an employer had a right to know about a thief’s criminal record, or a mother had a right to know that a paedophile lived on their street. They had a right to know that I had killed someone. My heart stopped every time I revisited this fact. But it wouldn’t sink in. I learnt it afresh each time I thought of it. And the shock never lessened.

  As I reached up to the top shelf for the tomato pasta sauce, that night, twenty years ago, rushed at me, unsteadying me, and I wobbled, almost dropping the jar.

  I slammed the lid onto the pan, too loudly, and the girls both looked up from their workbooks.

  ‘Sorry!’ I trilled.

  I tried to listen to the girls’ chatter behind me, tried to deal with their whining, respond to the
ir random anecdotes, cook them their tea, but I was preoccupied by the past and already weary with it.

  I needed the memories to go away.

  I clock-watched. At exactly 6 p.m., I finally allowed myself to reach into the fridge for a glass of wine.

  The fuzzy feeling layered itself on top of my troubled memories, over my angst about my plan to tell Charlie like a light protective gauze, helping me along with the girls’ bedtime and bath-time routine.

  I could do this. I could tell him. Yes, I could!

  After three glasses of supermarket white wine on an empty stomach, I began to question this crazy idea I’d had of a confession. Was it so urgent? Did I have to tell him tonight? Was it not better to let it sink in first?

  When Charlie arrived home, rumpled and tired, I tried not to slur my words.

  ‘Cottage pie?’

  ‘Great,’ he said, taking a lime from the fruit bowl and the Angostura bitters from the cupboard. Everything was still normal in his world, and I wondered if he noticed that every single molecule of my body was vibrating with change.

  ‘Can I have one of those tonight?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked me.

  Had I asked him if I should jump off a cliff?

  ‘I fancy one tonight, for some reason,’ I said lightly.

  Would now be a good time to tell him?

  ‘Okay,’ he replied slowly, turning away to get another glass out of the cupboard.

  If I do tell him, I’ll wait until we’ve eaten.

  By the time I had boiled the peas, prepared the salad and laid the table, I was sucking down the last few drops of my gin and tonic. I put two wine glasses on the table and brought the cottage pie out of the oven, burning my finger on the edge.

  ‘I saw Alistair on the platform at Waterloo,’ Charlie said, scooping up a huge spoonful of mince.

  ‘Who?’ I poured two glasses of wine and took a few gulps before I placed it back on the table.