by cass green
‘In here,’ came a thin voice and I walked into a long room with two large bay windows, which must have looked over the street outside.
Anya was sitting with her arms bundled around her knees, dressed in faded yellow pyjamas with ducks printed on them. They looked a little too small for her, as though they were from her childhood or teenage years.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. She was thin and pale-looking, her eyes large. I could see sweet wrappers on the floor by the sofa and an empty box of Celebrations lay on the arm of the chair.
Finally, I broke the silence.
‘What the hell is going on, Anya?’
She started to cry.
‘I’m so sorry, Ell,’ she said as tears poured down her cheeks and a snot bubble burst in her nose. Her next words were so shocking, I couldn’t immediately process them and felt as though I had misheard her.
‘What?’
‘I killed him,’ she repeated. ‘I killed him.’
When she comes back, Daddy has put on some music and ‘Move It, Move It’ is playing. Almost all of the girls are dancing and even Dylan has been dragged to his feet. He is throwing his arms around wildly and looking a bit silly.
Mummy catches her eye and smiles with a question in her eyes: Where did you go, pumpkin? But she just moves over to the crisp bowl, where she plunges in her hand and chooses a really big one from near the bottom. Then she lets out a whooping cry and starts to dance along to the music.
It takes a little while for people to notice what is happening. Dylan, being a bit overweight, doesn’t dance for long and quickly resumes his seat next to the crisps, where he carries on stuffing them down in handfuls.
At first, he just coughs and looks a bit uncomfortable in his seat, moving forwards and then scratching at his chest and neck, which have gone pink. His eyes go wide. Adults race over to him and he starts flapping his hands and making a breathing sound like there is something stuck in his throat. She watches in horrified fascination as her mum shouts, ‘Someone call 999!’ and runs into the kitchen, before quickly returning with a small plastic device in her hand. She had seen Dylan’s mother hand this over earlier but hadn’t seen where it had been kept.
Lottie grabs it out of her hand and her mum starts to object but Lottie is too busy jabbing the thing straight into her brother’s trousered leg in one quick movement. Within about ten seconds he begins to cry. Lottie is crying even harder. She clings to Dylan until the ambulance arrives.
Later, her mother will come into the kitchen and find the jar of peanut butter. It is a new jar, which came with the delivery the day before. The foil inner lid has been peeled back to reveal a shape that looks like three small fingers have been pushed into the smooth surface.
ELLIOTT
Anya drew her feet in their oversized fluffy socks closer to her body and snaked thin arms around her middle. I felt a strange distance from her. Normally, her looking this vulnerable would make me want to hold her.
But then, maybe I had never seen her like this before.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, and then, moronically, ‘Why haven’t you been to work?’ As if that was the most important thing right now. Maybe it was because the words she had uttered were too big to process.
Anya rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand, in a quick, hard movement, as though trying to erase her own face.
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
‘I heard you.’
I sank onto a low red sofa that was scuffed and saggy with use. Did I recognize it? I wasn’t sure. It looked like the one that used to be in Anya’s old bedroom. The question of why I never knew this flat existed felt like the least pressing one right now.
‘Who did you kill?’ I said softly, looking into her eyes, which were dry and oddly vacant, as though she had been completely emptied out.
She gave a heavy sigh.
‘I think I’d better start at the beginning,’ she said.
She began to speak. As the light faded outside the window, I understood how little I really knew her.
His name was Michael Copeland and he was the brother of another man, Liam, who she had gone out with for a time at Cambridge. She said, ‘It was mainly a physical relationship. I’m sorry. I know that’s not the sort of thing you really want to hear, but there it is. It was about getting off our heads and then, well … you get the picture.’
I did. In high definition.
She said it fizzled out after a while and that Liam ‘wasn’t the important person in this story’. He buggered off somewhere and there was a rumour he got on the wrong side of someone in his shady circle. Anya said, with an attempt at humour, ‘We’ve both watched enough Scandi crime, haven’t we, to fill in the blanks?’
Anyway, it was his brother – a real slimeball, according to Anya – who then became obsessed with her. He did really creepy things like turning up to her college with gifts, which went from being stuff like chocolate and perfume to more sinister dead roses. Her mum and dad got a restraining order in the end but the stress became too much, making her leave Cambridge and take a year out before going to Durham.
In truth, much as it was hurting me to think of Anya going through all this, an insistent voice in my mind kept whispering, ‘But why am I only learning this now?’
Finally, as she was telling me about some of the letters he used to write to her, I blurted out, ‘I think you need to tell me what you mean by “I killed him”.’
She stopped speaking then and wrung her hands in her lap. It was a strange gesture I had never seen her make before. I knew my wife’s stress habits as well as I knew my own: the way she would bite on the side of her little finger or twist her hair at the root. This hand-wringing thing looked oddly mannered, but I dismissed the ungracious thought as quickly as it came to me.
‘I’m getting to it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let me tell you in my own way, okay?’
‘Okay! But get to the point!’
‘This is hard, Ell!’
I raised my palms in supplication. ‘I said, okay!’
So Michael Copeland had turned up again.
First, she saw him lurking outside her work and had to hide inside until he went away. Then he came into the office and asked for her by name. She went out into the street to talk to him, even though, she said, ‘It made me feel physically sick.’
‘What did he want, though?’ I asked.
She made an impatient gesture, throwing her hands into the air. ‘He wanted to fuck with me! To intimidate me, Elliott!’ Her voice cracked, and I felt myself drawing back, aware suddenly that I was making her feel worse. But it felt so hard to understand the point of this kind of obsessive behaviour.
Breathing heavily, Anya continued.
‘I threatened him with the police and he left. But then he somehow got hold of my mobile number. It was the day of the festival …’
Understanding seemed to flood through me now. That explained her weird behaviour that day. It hadn’t all been my fault.
‘Anyway, I was trying not to think about it,’ she said. ‘I was up there on your shoulders, feeling like Queen of the World and attempting to record the Foo Fighters, when a message appeared on my screen. It said “I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE ANASTASIA”, all in capitals.’
Anya gave a quick, bright laugh and wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry about being sick on your shoes. I liked those shoes.’
‘Fuck the shoes,’ I said, emotion rising inside me, hot and damp. I almost wanted to cry, but I was angry too. ‘I just can’t understand why you didn’t tell me any of this at the time.’
Anya gazed back at me, her eyes brimming with tears now. Outside someone was shouting in a foreign language and a car alarm was going on off on a different street. It felt surprising, that life was going on out there, as normal.
‘Okay,’ she said, blowing out air and lifting up her hair, before twisting it and tying it up with the band around her wrist. ‘I won’t be able to apologize enough and so I’m not even going to try. Thi
s is the really hard bit. I know this is going to make you think you haven’t been the big protector, or some other patriarchal bullshit. But honestly, I didn’t especially want you to know that I cracked up at uni. I didn’t want you to change your opinion of me, to see me as someone else.’
‘Anya, I can’t believe—’
‘Please, Ell!’ she shouted, making me flinch. ‘Let me get this out! Just, please, listen.’
I sat back in the seat, raising my palms again.
‘So, obviously it was Copeland,’ she continued. ‘I told Mum and Dad straight away and they advised me to change my number. I’m sorry … I didn’t really lose my phone but it seemed easier to say that. Mum and Dad thought that was the best thing …’
Mum and Dad. Of course, she went straight to them. I was only her husband, after all.
‘The person who knocked you off your bike,’ she said in a rush, ‘could have been your Psycho Dad character from school, the one who made the phone calls and threw that brick through the window. But I had a strong feeling that was Copeland. Mum and Dad were all up in arms about getting another injunction against him, but I felt deep down that this wasn’t really going to stop him. I got angry then. Really angry. So, I did a stupid thing, Ell.’
Cold hands seemed to snake around my neck, then. Now we were getting to the part that changed everything.
‘When I was at Mum and Dad’s the other night,’ she said, ‘I contacted him from the old number. I thought if I could just meet him face to face when I was prepared for it, I could make him understand that he was hurting me and that I would never be with him in the way he wanted.’
I was on my feet again, almost without realizing it.
‘For fuck’s sake! How could you have been so stupid!’
Anya looked down, cheeks red. Her hands started to twist together again in her lap.
‘I know,’ she said, voice trembling. ‘I know how it sounds. And it was stupid. Believe me, Mum and Dad have given me hell over it. But it is what it is.’
Anya swore and leaned back against the sofa for a moment, closing her eyes.
‘So?’ I said, forcing myself not to grab her by the shoulders and yell into her face. ‘What happened when you met him?’
She sat up and threaded her hands around her knees again, making herself even smaller on the sofa.
‘I arranged to meet him in the car park at Petrel Point.’
‘Shit!’ I couldn’t stop myself from shouting. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’
She started to sob now and spoke indistinctly through her tears. ‘It’s always such a popular spot. It felt like being out in such a wide-open space would be safer than meeting him anywhere else.’
Breathing as heavily as if I had just been running, I said, ‘I’m sorry. Tell me the rest. I won’t interrupt.’
The words all came out in a rush.
‘… when his car pulled up and he got out, looking even more creepy and unkempt than I remembered him, I knew straight away that I had made a mistake. His eyes were all glassy and he had really wet lips that he kept licking. He couldn’t seem to look at me directly and I thought maybe he was drunk, or high on something. I gave it to him straight: told him that he had almost broken me once before with his unwanted attention. I was so determined to stay strong, but I became emotional, remembering what a terrible time it had been before, and begged him to leave me alone.
‘And that was when he lunged at me. He managed to get his arms around me for a split second, but it was long enough to feel his wet lips against my neck and to smell his rank body. All the other cars in the car park had gone and I was alone with him. I thought, This is it. He’s going to rape me then kill me. I managed to shove him away and I ran down to the coastal path, the one you and I have walked so many times in happier circumstances. You know how we are always saying that they should put a fence along that one section of it that goes close to the cliff edge?’
Anya slipped off the sofa and sat on her knees in front of me. She took my hands in hers and looked into my eyes as she stuttered out the rest of this terrible story. I squeezed her hands, unable to speak for the moment.
‘He chased after me and I could hear him gaining,’ she said, ‘despite the fact that he was older and more unfit. I don’t know, you hear about people getting superhuman strength or speed in times of high emotion, don’t you?’
A long, ragged breath in and out.
‘And maybe that’s what saved me,’ she said and gave a strangled laugh that turned into a sob. ‘He caught hold of my wrist,’ she continued. ‘I turned and shoved him with both hands, harder than I could have believed possible. And then …’ she swallowed, a kind of wonder on her face. ‘Then he wasn’t there any more.’
‘Shit,’ I said on a drawn-out breath, before leaning back against the chair and releasing her hands.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to look over the edge of the cliff at first,’ she said in a rush. ‘Every corny scene where a murderer comes back for another go at the victim played itself out in my head. But I knew I had to look, so after a few moments I took a small step and forced myself to walk to the edge of the cliff, where the spongy dune starts to turn into rock. I couldn’t see him from there. I didn’t know what to do. I was hyperventilating, Elliott. It was like I was never going to be able to breathe air again for a minute and I honestly thought I might die from panic and shock. But after a few moments the rational part of my brain took over and I forced myself to walk back to the car.’
I sat there for a few moments in stunned silence. None of this felt real.
‘Wait,’ I said then, ‘was this the night you came in soaked from the storm?’
She gave a small nod, her expression wary.
I remembered the way she was that evening; hyped-up and sizzling with some sort of strange energy. A horrible thought flashed into my mind that I pushed away, ashamed for even thinking it. It was just stress, that was all. None of us knew how we might react in times of such intense drama. You hear about people getting the giggles at funerals. So what if she had seemed oddly … excited, that night? Who knew how I would have reacted in those circumstances?
Then I just felt sick. The easy way she had lied to me, about there being nowhere to park. It felt as though those words had fallen so easily from her lips.
‘Say something,’ she said.
‘I hate that you went through that,’ I said, my voice strangled. ‘But why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you go to the police? It was self-defence for fuck’s sake!’
Anya threaded her fingers through her hair and tugged at her scalp as she got to her feet.
‘I don’t know!’ she said and began pacing the room. ‘I mean, I was the one who arranged to meet him. Mobile phone records will show he had contact with me, even if his phone is never found. They may even come out as it is. What’s to stop a clever prosecution barrister from claiming that I, a local, lured someone who didn’t know the area to this dangerous spot and then got rid of him?’
Then, shocking me, ‘I think it would probably make for a very nice tabloid story and I don’t think either of us want that kind of scrutiny, do we? I know what a disaster it would be if the press found out about your dad, especially because of the job you have now.’
This felt like a low blow. I looked away and stared at the window. It was dark outside but light glowed from the streetlamp outside the house.
She continued in a low voice. ‘When we saw the local paper piece asking whether anyone knew him, I almost died from the shock that he was still alive. Mum pretended to be a journalist and called for updates, so we found out, just a few days ago, that he had died.’
‘Murder, then,’ I murmured, and she shot me a defiant look.
‘As I am being totally honest with you,’ she said, ‘I was relieved to hear this. I’m sorry if that makes you think badly of me. But you don’t know what it is like to feel what I felt, that this man was going to rape and kill me.’
There was a long s
ilence before Anya spoke again.
‘I love you, Ell. Please never forget that. I did what I thought was right, but I made mistakes. I don’t think I deserve to go to prison for them though, do you?’
ELLIOTT
My head had started to ache at some point in the last ten minutes. Maybe it was the stuffiness of that room. I only noticed now that the windows were tightly shut, despite the mildness of the day. Maybe it was shock at what I had just heard.
Anya was sitting again now, leaning forwards, so her head was on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs. She was rocking a little bit.
I couldn’t seem to work through everything I was feeling.
My skin prickled with goose pimples and the flat suddenly felt very cold. I pictured Anya running from that man, in blind terror for her life, and squeezed my hands into fists, before jumping up and pacing the room. The toe of my trainer caught the edge of the Chinese rug and I tripped, almost flying face first into the mantelpiece. Adrenaline sparked up my spine and I was breathing heavily as I steadied myself.
‘Are you alright?’ she said. ‘That rug’s a death trap. I’m always telling Mum and Dad it needs to go.’
I turned to look at her, incredulous at her easy tone. There were probably all sorts of quirks to this, the secret Ryland family flat. Maybe some rattly pipes, or a tap that didn’t quite turn off. I wouldn’t know, would I?
‘So you’ve been here? Hiding away from work? From me?’
Her cheeks darkened as she looked up at me and I could see annoyance there.
I knew I was focusing on all the wrong things here. But I couldn’t seem to get my derailed emotions onto the correct track.
‘I’m sorry, I have to think,’ I said as a hot feeling of fury washed over me, stealing my breath in a way that was a bit frightening. I felt like I was having some sort of anxiety attack. I just couldn’t believe that all this had happened, and Anya had chosen not to share one single bit of it with me, her husband. I had to get out.