by Lucy Foley
I nodded, though I wasn’t even really sure of the question. The question, really, was immaterial. Because I would have found it absolutely impossible not to agree with her.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I really need a drink. No more beer for me; I want something stronger. Do you want a drink?’
I nodded, still numb with blissful surprise. We had another Academic interview in the morning, but that seemed completely meaningless now.
She bought us two Jim Beam and Cokes, which at the time seemed the most sophisticated thing I had ever experienced: the sly, sticky warmth of the bourbon beneath all the sweetness of the soda. She drank hers with a straw, and somehow made it look cool. I kept waiting for her to really see me, or rather the lack of me, the thing that was missing; the void inside. She’d be appalled, she’d be disgusted – she’d realise her mistake and go off with any of the other bright young things who were so much more her type. But it never happened. What I hadn’t come to appreciate then was that Miranda is – was – someone who spends so much time negotiating the various disparate parts of herself that she doesn’t have very much time to properly see anyone else. To notice any discrepancy, or lack. And that has always suited me just fine. In addition to this, Miranda likes a project. She doesn’t like to go for the expected thing. She has eclectic taste, is a collector in her own way. Before anything else we had that much in common.
It didn’t seem to matter to her what I said – or indeed what I didn’t say, as I sat there, dazzled. She was happy to have a mirror, a sounding board.
Already she made all the others, the ones before, the causes of so much heartache and shame, seem like paper cut-outs of people. Here, finally, was something to emulate. Here was a proper project, worthy of all my resources and attention. Or, as other people, normal people, might have put it: here was someone who could be my friend.
We went dancing in a club she’d learned about from a third year who was meant to be supervising us, but spent most of the evening trying to chat her up. As soon as we got in there, she shook him off with an ‘as if’ roll of her eyes, and grabbed my hand. We danced on a little retro multicoloured dance floor, sticky with spilled drinks. For once I wasn’t aware of my fatness, or my weirdness, or – briefly, joyously – the absence inside, because I was borrowing from her light: I was like the moon to her sun, and it was meant to be.
I didn’t believe I would see her again when I got accepted to Oxford. It would be too perfect, and I wasn’t used to the things I wanted happening. Besides, for all her brilliance, I wasn’t sure that she would have been bright enough – in the Oxford sense – to have got in. But there she was, at registration. My Best Friend To Be. My inspiration, my living mood board. The fount from which I might draw in the hopes of constructing a personality of my own.
I stood in line and waited for her to notice me. The moment would come, of course, I just had to be patient. It was impossible that she wouldn’t notice me, we’d had that electric connection. Best friends at first sight. I imagined precisely how it would happen. She’d slouch along the row of freshers, all so raw and shufflingly awkward, already looking like she’d been there for years, like she owned the place. Her hair a gleaming sheet of gold, her leather bag of books pre-battered, her silk scarf trailing almost to the ground. Dazzling. And then she’d stop and do a double take when she saw me. ‘It’s you! Thank God, I haven’t met anyone else I’ve wanted to chat to. Fancy going for a coffee?’
And all the others in the queue who had seen only a fat, bespectacled shell of a person would suddenly see something else – someone who was worthy of the attention of this Goddess. I waited for that moment as a priest might await the visitation of the divine presence, tingling with anticipation. She was turning, she was coming towards me – a lazy catch of the silk scarf, a toss of it over her right shoulder. And still I waited, almost trembling now. For a moment I was so overwhelmed I actually shut my eyes, one long blink. And when I opened them she was gone. I turned, in disbelief. She had walked past me. Straight by, without even stopping, let alone saying hello.
I saw that she was turning to talk to the girl behind her: dark-haired, too thin, dowdy. Her clothes almost conspicuously unfashionable – as unstylish as Miranda’s were chic. And I understood: she already had a project, a hopeless case. This girl, whoever she was, had usurped me.
Still I had hope. I waited for her to notice me. I went to the Junior Common Room and sat at the same table and watched her at the bar, drinking her Jim Beam and Coke. I’d sit close enough that I could hear all the things she talked about. I heard once that she hated the food in the canteen – but couldn’t cook herself, so supposed she was stuck with it. So that was when I learned to cook, of course. I’d spend hours in the kitchen on her hallway, making elaborate meals as good as any you could find in Oxford’s restaurant scene. I’d wait for her to come past and loiter outside the door and say something like, ‘Oh my God, that smells incredible.’ Then I’d offer her some of it – because of course it was all for her – and we’d sit down and eat it together and we’d become the best of friends. And I could once again borrow a little of her light.
But it never happened; she never noticed me. The few times she did pass, she was too busy texting on her phone, or chatting with her awful friend, or later, chatting with her equally awful boyfriend. They deserve each other, Katie and Julien. They never deserved her.
I think of the sad, lonely girl who used to sit six seats behind her in lectures – who remembered the first day she walked into the lecture hall. As with the others, I couldn’t decide what I wanted more: to be her, or simply to be close to her. But I could see immediately that neither would be possible. Her friends were nothing like me. None of them were as pretty as she was, but they had the same gloss of cool – even awkward, lank-haired Katie, absorbing some of her allure. They would reject me, as a foreign body.
I had made no impact on her life at all, I began to realise. While she had defined the last few months for me, ever since that interview. So I began to follow her, everywhere. She would – did – call it ‘stalking’. I just thought of it as close observation. And when that didn’t satisfy, I began to take things. Sometimes items that I suspected were of sentimental value. Other times things that I knew had high significance – such as the essay she had plagiarised, or the earrings she had stolen. I wore those earrings for a week, the little painted parrots. With them hanging from my ears I felt a little more her, a little less myself, as though they contained some essence of her power, her personality. I actually smiled at baristas in coffee shops, and handed an essay in a day late, and sat in the sun beside the Isis to tan my legs. I waited for her to notice, to challenge me about them. She never did. There was a moment, in the street, when I saw her catch sight of them and stop short. Her mouth formed a small ‘o’ of surprise. Then she shook her head, as though reprimanding herself about something, and carried on her way, and I knew that she had only seen the earrings. She had not even seen me.
That’s when I realised that I could force her to pay attention. I could send the items back. I could let her know that it wasn’t just her imagination, or that she hadn’t suddenly become even more clumsy, more forgetful. Some things though, the most special things, I did not send back. They were my talismans, like the holy relics of a religion. When I carried them about with me, I felt transformed. I became her guardian angel.
She was so careless. Perhaps it was just that she had so many nice things, they didn’t mean that much to her. A cashmere cardigan casually discarded on the edge of the dance floor, or a hairband poking out of the top of the bag she left on a café table while she went to the loo, or a heeled sandal after she’d taken them off at a ball and was too drunk to remember where she left them. I was her Princess Charming. I’d return each item with a carefully thought-out note. I imagined the little frisson she would get, knowing that she had a secret admirer out there. It would be better than not having lost the thing in the first place.
I began to dr
ess more and more like she did. I went on a diet, I had my hair straightened and dyed. Sometimes, if I caught a fleeting glimpse of myself in a shop window, it was almost like she was there instead of me. I got a Second, rather than the First my tutors had predicted. But I didn’t mind. I’d got top marks in studying, and becoming, her.
I followed her to London. I knew where they liked to drink, she and her friends, where they went out. The ironically divey bar on the high street, and then to the even more divey club on Clapham High Street, Inferno’s. And that was where, while I was sipping my lemonade at the bar, Mark approached me.
Of course I knew who he was. At first I was petrified, I thought he’d come to challenge me, ask why I was there. Then he said, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and a whole new world of possibility opened up to me. I suddenly realised that he didn’t see me as weirdo Emmeline Padgett. He saw me as a desirable woman he’d met in a club, wearing her Miranda-esque leather skirt and silk shirt. So when he asked me my name, I said, ‘Emma.’ My favourite Austen heroine, of whom Miranda had always reminded me a little.
Something magical happened. As Emma, I became someone new. It was acting, the same beautiful dislocation from myself that I had known on stage in a school production, when I briefly managed to become a different person entirely. Emma could be capable and cool, sexy, clever, but not too much so, not the kind of clever that scared people. She would be a social creature, she would be someone without layers, without darkness. She would be everything that I was not.
And I would be legitimately close to her. Would be called, even, a friend.
That bloody photograph. I’ve thought about it before, many times. Of course I knew it was there, I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Miranda’s Facebook account. But it wasn’t my photograph, I didn’t even know the person taking it – so there was nothing I could do about it. I could have reached out, asked him to take it down, but Miranda knew him, so that might only have drawn attention to it … It might have been worse than leaving it up. I wasn’t tagged in it or anything – of course, no one would have known my name. And I looked so different. You’d have to have looked very hard, and known exactly what it was you were looking for. Why would anyone study a photograph from fourteen years ago, and some thousand photos back? I thought I had been safe. I had been safe.
‘It is you,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been good at faces.’ She shakes her head, as though she’s trying to clear it. ‘It all makes sense. But wow, you have changed. You’ve lost weight. You’ve dyed your hair. But it is definitely you.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘you’ve got it wrong. It can’t have been me. I was at Bath.’ I’ve always prided myself on my game face and my acting abilities, but suddenly everything I say sounds false, sounds like the lie it is. I shouldn’t have said that, I realise. I should have just said I didn’t know what she was talking about. In denying her accusations I have confirmed that she is right.
I make one more attempt to save myself. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘perhaps I came up to visit a couple of weekends. I had friends at Oxford, of course.’
But it is all too late. I can hear it in the background like a Greek chorus: lie, lie, lie.
It doesn’t seem to matter, anyway. It’s like she hasn’t even heard me. She is saying, ‘I can see it all now. The stalker stopped almost around the time you and Mark got together. I thought it was him for a bit – I thought so again recently. He’s always had a bit of a thing for me, but then I’m sure you know that. Now, I understand.’ She pauses, then says, ‘You know I used to feel sorry for you? I thought Mark was just using you, for your passing resemblance to me. Katie pointed it out – I would never have noticed it myself. But it was the other way around, wasn’t it?’
‘I just want to be your friend.’ I know how it sounds – I can hear it. Desperate … pathetic. But there’s no point in lying. She knows it all now. It might as well all come out.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
‘What did she look like?’ I ask. ‘You’re sure it was a woman?’
Iain screws up his eyes. He has gone very pale. I hope it’s just the pain, not the loss of blood – but I suspect it is the latter. I’ve seen too many people die in an ambulance from wounds not much worse.
‘Iain, what did she look like?’
‘Just a woman,’ he says. ‘Just two women.’
‘You must have seen more than that,’ I say. ‘What colour was her hair? The killer?’
‘Don’t know,’ he says, and gives another groan. ‘… I suppose it was light coloured. Maybe blonde. Not sure. Difficult to see properly. But definitely not dark.’ He seems certain of this. The other two female guests – Samira and Katie – have unmistakably dark hair. He might not know the exact shade of the woman’s hair, but neither of theirs could be described as ‘light’.
And then something else occurs to me. ‘Iain, are you telling the truth when you say you didn’t take the rifle?’
‘Why would I lie?’ he groans. ‘You know everything else now. Why would I lie about that?’
He has a point. But I don’t want it to be true. Because, if it is, she has the rifle. And in coming up here, we’ve made a horrible mistake.
One day earlier
New Year’s Day 2019
MIRANDA
I shove my way out of the cabin. I can hear the clatter of Emma’s feet on the steps behind me. ‘Miranda,’ she says, ‘please – please listen. I never meant any of it to upset you.’
I don’t answer. I can’t look at her, or speak to her. I have no idea where I’m headed. Not to my own cabin, not to the Lodge. Instead I realise that I’m running in the direction of the path that stretches around the side of the loch. I have the dim idea of getting to the train station, waiting for a train. What time did Heather say they leave? Six a.m. That can’t be too far from now. I’m aware that I’m still drunk, drunker than I thought, and that there are probably a number of problems with this plan, but my brain is too fuzzy to think of them. I’ll work them out when I get there. For now, I just have to get away.
I plunge into the trees. It’s darker here, but the gleam of the moon penetrates the branches, flickering over me like a strobe light. It’s a long way to the station, says a little sober voice, from somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain. I push it away. I could run like this for ever. Nothing hurts when you’re drunk.
The only obstacle – I see it looming in front of me – is the bridge over the waterfall. I’ll have to be careful there.
And then, suddenly, there’s a black figure on the path just ahead. A man. He looks like something that has just uncut itself from the fabric of the night. He has a hood pulled up, like death personified. Inside I can just make out the white gleam of his eyes. Then he is scrambling away from me, up the side of the slope above the path into the trees, disappearing into a little building that is almost hidden there.
I teeter for a second, on the edge of the bridge. Is he going to rush out and attack me? He didn’t like being seen, I know that much. I suddenly feel much more sober than before. It’s the fear that has done it.
‘Manda.’
I turn. Oh Christ. Emma is just rounding the bend in the path. My hesitation has given her time to catch up with me.
‘Manda,’ she says, breathlessly, walking towards me. ‘I just wanted to be your friend. Is that such a terrible thing?’
EMMA
‘You were never really my friend,’ she says now. ‘Friends don’t do that to each other.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘And you were only my friend before because of your connection to Mark. I would never have chosen you as a friend. I’ve always thought you’re a bit dull, to be honest. I always thought you lacked depth. And I always thought you were trying too hard. It all makes sense now.’
There is a terrible pain beneath my ribcage, as if she has reached into the cavity with her bare hands and is squeezing, crushing. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say.
‘No?’ she says. ‘No – I do.’ She is actually smiling. Her face is beautiful and cruel. ‘I prefer this version of you. Much more interesting. Even if you are a fucking weirdo.’
That stings. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘What?’ Her manner is playground bully now. ‘A fucking weirdo?’
Memories are surfacing from some dark, long-buried place, a classroom, the most popular girl in a year who looks – yes, I can see it now, rather like Miranda. I hadn’t realised it before. The two faces: the remembered one and the one in front of me, seem to converge upon one another. Back then I gave that girl a shove, a hard shove in the middle of her chest, and she toppled back into the sandpit.
‘God,’ Miranda says, ‘we call ourselves the inner circle. The best friends – the ones who remained while all the other ones fell away. But those other people were the sensible ones. They saw that the only thing holding us together was some tenuous history. Well, I’m going to get on the train, and start a new life – one in which I don’t have to see any of you lot again. Especially not you.’
‘Don’t say that, Manda.’
‘Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that. Can you get off the bridge please? I don’t think it’s meant for two people at the same time.’
I don’t move. ‘You can’t mean that, Manda. All I have ever wanted is to be close to you, to be part of your life.’
She puts out her hands, as if to fend off my words. ‘Just leave me alone, you fucking psychopath.’
That word. It’s the action of a moment. I put out my own hands, and grab her neck. She’s taller than me, stronger, probably – from all that boxercise and Pilates. But I have the element of surprise. I’ve got there first.