by Deborah Bee
My mum was washing up, Billy had gone to bed and I was watching Gogglebox again, which my mum was shouting is ‘the worst thing on TV, apart from Undateables’, which we’re actually not allowed to watch at all, even though it’s like really funny and if the disabled people didn’t want to be filmed going out on dates together they wouldn’t be in it, would they? My mum says it’s taking advantage of the differently abled. Who knows what the fuck that means? Anyway, the commercials came on, so when my mum came into the sitting room and asked me if I’d heard a crashing noise, I hadn’t. The music was on too loud. So she turned down the sound, and we both stood in the hall and listened, cos my mum said the crashing came from next door, and suddenly the wall shook as their front door banged shut and then it was like totally silent. We watched in the dark through the net curtains in the front room as Adam got into the car and drove off. And my mum wiped her hands on a tea towel and told me to wait right there while she just checked to see if Sarah was OK and to not leave cos Billy was upstairs. So I stood in the hall with my forehead against the wallpaper tracing spirals with my finger, while I heard my mum ringing on Sarah’s doorbell. She rang it three times and then I heard her call Sarah through the letterbox. I heard the squeak of the hinges as she pushed it open. Then she came racing back into our house to get Sarah’s spare key, which was in the pot with the bees on, on the shelf in the kitchen. And, as she raced past me and nearly knocked me over, she shouted, ‘Call an ambulance, Kelly. Do it now – 999. Tell them to be quick. Sarah’s unconscious. She must have fallen down the stairs.’
Or he pushed her. We both knew that. But my mum will never involve the pigs.
Come to think of it, I seem to have spent an awful lot of fucking time in hospitals waiting for Sarah to wake up. That time, it was the hospital in Archway. The view from her room was of a massive roundabout. You could see a queue of traffic coming all the way down the hill for miles. She woke up that same evening, only really out for a couple of hours. She wasn’t in a proper coma. Nothing like this time. She’d cracked her skull. She had black eyes and bruises behind her ears.
It’s eight days now since Sarah was brought in here. The nurses promised she’d be OK after three. Maybe that’s what they say to kids, just to make them feel better. I wish they’d just say the truth. No one ever says what they mean, do they? People just say what they think people want to hear. Don’t they? The nurses don’t say much any more. They just ask me stuff. I think they’re nosey. What do they need to know about Adam for? He was a turd. End of. I’m not gonna tell them stuff about my best friend, am I? I’m not like that.
Sarah is my best friend now. At the time I was mad at Clare for never texting me back. I was mad that she changed her phone number without telling me. It seemed a bit random, don’t you think? I mean it wasn’t MY fault that Wino got to her. I didn’t think it was anyway. No one at school knew what had really happened, and now that I know, I’m not gonna say, am I? I didn’t find out what until Sarah told me later, like two weeks later when the whole situation got an awful lot worse.
She was all bandaged up still in the hospital, and my mum had been there too but she’d gone to phone Anna to make sure that Billy was OK and everything. And before she came back Sarah said, ‘Did you hear about Clare?’ and I said, ‘I dunno, she’s not answering her fucking phone.’ And she goes, ‘Kelly, Clare has died. She committed suicide.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you fucking mad?’ And she’s like, ‘You have to stay calm. It’s not your fault.’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you say that?’ And she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. And I puked. On the floor. I thought she must be just talking crazy from the drugs and stuff. But Clare’s mum had rung my mum who’d told Sarah who’d said not to tell me. That she would tell me herself. Turns out that once Clare had got over the shock of the attack she had waited until her mum was out of the way, run herself a hot bath, cut two deep lines with a razor blade down her forearms and waited while the water turned crimson. All because of Wino. All because of me. She’d told her mum everything. But said she would never tell the police. She was too scared to. But her mum knew.
On the day she got attacked Wino had stolen a Stanley knife from the art block. He got in early through the side door. Turns out he’d waited for her in the bike shed, like first thing in the morning. Clare was locking up her bike. He’d gone up behind her and without saying anything he grabbed hold of her ponytail and sliced it off. Sliced it off. Like still in one piece. Still in the hair band. So she had like no fucking hair. And he’d swung her ponytail round and round and he’d shouted at her about going in people’s lockers and how it couldn’t have been anyone but her and how she wasn’t so clever now she hadn’t got her fucking hair, was she? And then when she didn’t say anything and she was just crying he said, ‘Fuck off, Blondie’, and told her that if he ever saw her again he’d fucking kill her. And Clare hadn’t known what he was talking about. But she didn’t say anything. Didn’t say it wasn’t her.
She’d told this to her mum. But only on the condition that her mum didn’t tell the police cos if she did she’d say her mum made it all up. So her mum never even told the police.
And balls of Clare’s White Platinum hair were all over the corridor outside the art block. Rolling up and down like tumbleweed. And we’d all seen them but none of us had even thought about what they were.
39
Sarah
Day Eight – 9 a.m.
‘Brian, are you going to get me a cup of tea?’
‘I thought they just asked you if you wanted one?’
‘They did. But it was that woman again. The one I can’t stand.’
‘Why, what did she do?’
‘She was rude, Brian. Rude to me. After everything that I’m going through.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Brian, does it matter what she said? What matters is, I want a cup of tea. And a biscuit, if they have them. A custard cream. Or a ginger nut. But not a rich tea. I hate rich tea.’
The door has clicked shut. The paper is rustling. My mother will be reading her horoscope. She swears by it. Won’t set foot out of the door without checking Jonathan Cainer in the Daily Mail.
The door opens again. There is a slice of sound from the corridor beyond, before it closes again. The radio. Marvin Gaye. ‘Sexual Healing’.
‘There you go, June. A nice cup of tea. The pot was fresh.’
‘Where are the biscuits?’
‘They didn’t have any.’
‘Brian! I saw a big box of biscuits on the trolley.’
‘You don’t want to be eating the ones that have been travelling all around the hospital, for heaven’s sake. They will be covered with germs. Covered! I should think you would pick up any number of diseases from eating those. They’ve all been breathed over by sick people.’
My dad is getting old. Ever since he gave up his job he has worried more and more about germs. And dust. He was quite normal when he was working. He had a job in York, at a law firm. Maybe he was a little OCD about his handkerchief being folded correctly or his meal being hot enough, or pasta being on the menu – he thought pasta was a middle-class affectation. But when he retired he began to overstress about little things. He would empty the kettle out completely before use, every time. He would run the tap for five minutes before he refilled it because he only wanted fresh water, not water that had been sitting in a pipe. He would end each day by wiping sterilising fluid over the kitchen surfaces. He boiled the dishcloths every Saturday morning and heat-steamed the kitchen floor on Mondays and Fridays.
‘Brian. I think we should go home.’
‘What do you mean we should go home? We can’t go home. She hasn’t woken up yet.’
Dad! Don’t leave me here.
‘I need to get back to the house. Our lives have just stopped here. One minute I was asleep, next minute we were hurtling down the motorway. It’s like we have just stopped and we can’t get anywhere. I need my routine back. I need to go home and get
back to my routine. I need to sleep. Brian, do you hear me? I need to sleep. It’s over a week since I slept in my own bed.’
Dad! Don’t leave me here.
‘June. Under no circumstances are we going home. You can sleep perfectly well at the Travelodge. The reason the victim support people pay for us to be at the Travelodge is so we can be here for our daughter. She’s the victim, June, who needs support. It’s all in the bloody name.’
Tell her, Dad.
‘I’ve got a lot on next week, Brian. There’s the Ladies’ Breakfast at the tennis club on Wednesday. And Julie Grainger’s wedding is next weekend. There’s Dorothy House on Thursday. I need to get back for that too. We’re down on the rota. I’m sorry, Brian, but we can’t be here all the time. Carol can stay. She’s good in these situations.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, June. Are you saying you think it’s more important to go to your friend’s daughter’s wedding than it is to wait for your own daughter to come out of a bloody coma, because if that is what you are saying you can bloody well go home on your own.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Brian. I’m not going home on my own. You’ll have to drive me. How am I going to get about if you don’t drive me?’
‘Let me get this straight. You think you’re going to go back to life as normal, do you, despite the fact that your daughter is lying here on a life-support machine?’
‘Not as normal, Brian, of course not as normal. But there’s no need for us all to be here, is there? We can’t do anything. We’re just sitting about.’
Dad!
‘And what about your friends? What do you think they will make of the fact that you are happy to leave your daughter on a life-support machine in London while you’re busy baking fruit buns for a bloody coffee morning?’
‘Well . . . we won’t tell them, Brian. What’s the point of telling them? They don’t need to know our business, do they? They don’t need to hear that Sarah has got mixed up with something like this. That our family is mixed up with some kind of gang warfare.’
‘She was mugged, June. She is a victim of a mugging. She isn’t mixed up in any kind of gang warfare.’
‘And our Carol says she was after a divorce.’
‘What? Sarah and Adam were getting divorced? June, what are you talking about now? You know full well what Carol is like. Take no notice. She always dramatises everything. She always winds you up about Sarah. For heaven’s sake, June, your daughter is in a coma.’
‘And if she wakes up, we’ll come back!’
‘What do you mean, if? What do you mean, IF, June?’
That’s it. That’s all they said. They’ve gone. As it has sunk in I realise that I’m not surprised. My mother is not the kindest of women, well, not when it comes to me. She’s more interested in her tennis friends and her horoscope and her old ladies, things that she can get credit for. There’s not much reflected glory from someone like me, quiet, dull, non-achiever, bit of a loser. She wouldn’t understand that her attitude was what turned me that way. Why did I think that? Why do I blame her? I don’t know.
My dad told me then that he loved me. She’d already gone. He said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. He whispered it in my ear. And he left me.
And I don’t know if he’s coming back.
40
Kelly
Day Eight – 4.30 p.m.
The police are here again. My dad, when he was here, he used to actually call them pigs to their faces. Even before they arrested him. I don’t think pigs like the Irish. Who do they like? Themselves. But my mum tells me off if I call them pigs. Actually, my dad used to call them fucking pigs. My mum would wop me one if I said that. She’s crashing around the kitchen with Great Auntie Betty’s best cups and Detective Inspector Twathead is doing his Sherlock impersonation in the front room. He has a laptop. Fuck my life, he looks like a twat.
Mrs Tea and Tampons is here too. She’s also in the front room. She’s on the edge of the sofa looking like she’s about to melt. She has art-teacher earrings on – you know, too big, too loud – and fat crusty sandals that look like they were made with fucking potato peelings or something. I’m not even lying. Sarah would have been pissing herself laughing at them. They didn’t come together, Mrs T&T and Twathead. She had an appointment. Twathead just turned up. She’s sposed to be here to talk through any ‘issues’ we might have concerning Sarah, and to explain what will happen after her next medical assessment. I dunno if she would have told us all that if Sarah’s mum and dad hadn’t just fucked off home yesterday. But since we are on the visiting rota – they have a rota so that there’s always someone there talking to her, and her sister’s fucking crazy, and Sarah’s in a coma, so I think they’re running low on victims to support. But Langlands has crashed the party and urgently needs to ‘interview the friends and acquaintances of Adam’. He also wants to know about Ash. Adam’s brother.
‘But I don’t know any friends or acquaintances of Adam. Or Ash. I didn’t even know he had a brother,’ says my mum. ‘Would you like milk?’ she smiles, hovering with the milk in a jug with like totally vile pink roses all over it. I’m leaning against the wall opposite the open door of the front room, my arms behind my back, in my school uniform again.
‘Kelly, get the biscuits would you, please,’ she says in that posh voice she saves for Father O’Shea.
‘Er, no, thank you, Mrs McCarthy,’ says Langlands. ‘Can we just get on with this?’
‘Is that no to the milk or no to the biscuits or no to both?’ she smiles brightly.
‘Mrs McCarthy!’ says Langlands, getting hot and red. He’s got drips of sweat along the top of his forehead where his hair used to be.
‘Brenda,’ says Mrs Tea and Tampons, ‘the Detective Inspector has got to do this entire road by lunchtime. Can you think of anyone who was friends with Adam, or who knew Adam well, so we can find out if there was anyone who might have had some kind of grudge against him?’
‘Mrs McCarthy,’ says Langlands, looking like he’s swallowing a wasp, ‘I’ll be honest with you.’ (Sarah always said never to trust anyone who said, ‘I’ll be honest with you.’ She said it always meant they were about to tell you a big fat lie.) ‘We’re following up on some excellent leads on this investigation so far. But we need to know more about Adam. We need to speak to the people he was in contact with on the day that he died. And obviously without any kind of statement from Sarah, it’s become necessary to go back over some old ground to try to piece together his last movements. And hers.’
‘She’s not dead, don’t forget, Detective Inspector’, and she closed the door and left me standing in the hall, listening through the wall with the spirally wallpaper.
I don’t know why my mum is lying about the divorce papers. I mean not lying exactly, but sort of not exactly telling the truth either. Langlands keeps saying things like, ‘Did Sarah tell you that she was unhappy in her marriage? Did Sarah tell you that she wanted a divorce? Did you know she was going to mediation with Adam, at all? Did she ever tell you that her husband was violent?’ And my mum just goes, ‘Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge.’ I guess if she had to swear on the Holy Bible, if they actually got a Bible out and made her put her hand on it or whatever it is you’re sposed to do, she might decide that ‘the great vengeance and furious anger of the Lord’ was more of a match than old Twathead.
I mean, anyone can see he’s asking the wrong fucking question. If there’s one thing that he could have got to know about Sarah by now, if he’d sat down and thought about it for a second, it’s that the last thing she is ever gonna do is tell anyone anything she thinks. She’s the most private person I ever met. We only knew about Adam because we heard it with our own ears. And saw the cuts and bruises. I can never even for one second imagine Sarah saying, ‘Oh hi, Brenda. My husband hit me’, or ‘Hi Brenda, guess what? My husband just broke my leg and now I think I must really get a divorce.’ She’s not like that. She never te
lls anyone anything about what she feels. If I ever asked her anything like that, she always said that Adam was a good man. She always said she wasn’t quite sure what she felt. She always said, ‘How does anyone actually decide how they feel about anything?’ It wasn’t easy for her to persuade herself that Adam might kill her one day, if she didn’t get away from him. The hours in mediation, on her own, gave her a new perspective, she said. She started to see that a life without him was possible. And that a life with him would end prematurely – as in, her own life. She said ‘prematurely’, not me. But I know what it means. And I understand what it meant to Sarah.
My mum doesn’t actually know any of that. So not just the wrong questions – it’s really rather fucking funny that Langlands is asking totally the wrong person.