by Lisa Jewell
When he’s gone, Tallulah’s mum looks at her and says, “Well, someone’s in a good mood.”
“Yes,” she replies. “He is a bit.”
“Nice to see him so happy. He’s seemed a bit, you know, preoccupied lately. With the flat.”
Tallulah nods but doesn’t reply.
“So, tonight, any particular reason for it?”
“No,” she replies airily. “No. I just think he was getting bogged down in saving up and wanted a break from it all.”
“Well, you both deserve it,” says her mum. “The two of you are incredible. So hard-working and selfless. It’s about time you put yourselves first for a bit and went out and had some fun.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right getting Noah down? He’s been a nightmare lately.”
“I’ll be fine,” her mum reassures her. “If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll just stay up late. It’s the first time I’ve babysat for ages; I don’t care how challenging it is. I just want you to have a wonderful, relaxing, possibly exciting”—she throws Tallulah a mischievous look—“night out. I don’t want you to think about Noah or me or anything that isn’t fun-related. OK?”
Tallulah wonders about her mother’s use of the words “possibly exciting” and the strange look she’d thrown her. Does her mother know? she wonders. Has Zach told her? Or, God, heaven forbid, maybe even asked her permission? The thought freaks her out.
But she smiles and says, “OK. I promise not to think about my mother or my child.”
“Good girl.” Her mother throws her another indulgent smile. “Good girl. And if you’ve got a hangover tomorrow, just stay in bed. I’ll do the morning for you too, OK?”
Tallulah nods, then places Noah back in his high chair and holds out her arms toward her mother and says, “Hug?”
Her mother smiles and says, “Oh, yes please.” And they hug there, in the kitchen, the midsummer sun shining on them from the garden, Zach singing in the shower overhead, Noah chewing thoughtfully on the corner of a book and watching them curiously, almost sagely, as if he knows that this is a night that will shape his destiny. At the very thought of it, Tallulah feels a tear roll down her cheek. She wipes it away quickly so that her mother doesn’t notice.
50
SEPTEMBER 2018
It’s four o’clock. Kim left Maypole House two hours ago to collect Noah from nursery and now Sophie pulls on a cardigan, grabs her phone, and heads out into the grounds. Classes are over for the day and the paths swarm with teenagers. She imagines these same paths swarming with Scarlett’s cohort. She pictures tall, lean Scarlett as Liam described her back then, with her hair a natural dark brown, a minidress, opaque tights, and clumpy boots, followed by her adoring coterie.
And then she pictures Scarlett on a boat, her bleached hair burning blonder in the sun, sitting with her dog, posting abstract photos sporadically, possibly strategically, for a handful of people to see, so that they know that she is still alive. But what of Tallulah? What of Zach? And what, she wonders, of Jacinta Croft’s husband?
Her thoughts spiral as she walks. A few students smile and say hello. She returns their greetings blankly; she has no idea who they are, but they know that she is Mr. Gray’s girlfriend, and no doubt, by now, they know she is a published author too. She has an ephemeral, slightly elevated status here that she finds somewhat unsettling.
She sits on a bench in the cloisters and she googles “Cherryjack” on her phone. It brings up dozens of hits for a cherry-flavored rum from the Virgin Islands. It also brings up at least half a dozen social media accounts for other users calling themselves Cherryjack. She clicks the Google filter to “Images” and scrolls through them. She finds endless photos of rum and rum-based cocktails and boys called Jack Cherry but nothing that looks anything like Scarlett Jacques.
She glances up as she feels someone approach. It’s Liam. She smiles and says, “Just the man.”
“Am I?” he says.
“Yes. I wondered, if you’re not busy, could we have a chat?”
“Of course,” he says, “sure. Here? Or…?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I mean, you could come up to my room. I was on my way there. I have cold beers.”
She nods and smiles. “Sure,” she says. “That would be great.”
Liam’s room is nothing like Kerryanne’s. It’s a rectangular box with a bed on one side, a sofa on the other, sliding doors directly onto a small balcony, and a tiny kitchen tucked away inside an alcove.
“Snug,” she says, running her eyes instinctively across his bookshelf as she walks past it.
“Yes,” he says, pulling off his jacket and hanging it from a knob by the front door. “Small, but big enough. You know. Here.” He moves some paperwork from the arm of the sofa and invites Sophie to take a seat.
The room is neat and fragrant, filled with the clutter of his life, but in a way that seems very organized.
“So,” he says, going to his fridge. “How’s your day been?”
“Kind of weird,” she replies. “I’ve spent most of it with Kim Knox. You know, Tallulah’s mum. We’ve been trying to find Scarlett Jacques online.”
He takes two beers from the fridge and passes her one. She glances again around Liam’s room. He has some interesting art on his walls, the most overpowering of which is a large canvas portrait. She narrows her eyes to make sense of it and sees that it is a rather jumbled painting of what appears to be a young woman sitting on a throne with a dog by her side, and then the pieces fall into place and she points at the painting and says, “Is that…?”
“Yes. It’s Scarlett. A self-portrait. She gave it to me.”
“Is it OK if I have a look?”
“Of course,” he says. “Be my guest.”
She rests her beer on the coffee table and walks toward the painting. As she gets closer, more and more detail reveals itself. Both Scarlett and the dog are wearing crowns. Scarlett looks slightly imperious, her hands spread out upon her open knees, each finger sporting a huge golden ring, picked out in shiny metallic paint. There are various things on tables in the background, including a throbbing heart on a platter and a cake slice dripping with blood.
“Bloody hell,” she says. “This is, erm… odd?”
“Yeah. It is.” He shrugs.
“What does it all mean? The heart, for example. What do you think that represents?”
“She never really explained any of it to me, to be honest. She just turned up with it one day and asked if I wanted it and I said yeah, because I knew it would look really cool in here, and also because, you know, it was nice just to have a bit of her…” He trails off slightly.
“You know,” she begins carefully, “I saw Jacinta Croft the other day and we were chatting about Scarlett and she told me how heartbroken you were after you split up.”
He nods, just once, and then takes a swig of beer. “I guess I was,” he says. “In a way. I mean, a girl like Scarlett doesn’t come along very often, especially not for a guy like me. She made things feel kind of exciting. She made me feel like maybe I was special. Special because she chose me. You know. But…” He sighs and rallies: “… it is what it is. I’m over it now.”
“Anyone else on the scene?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “No. Not really. I mean, I’m on dating sites, so it’s not as if I’m not actively looking, but I’m also not that bothered either. You know?”
“So, you and Lexie…?”
He looks up at her smartly. He seems confused. “Lexie Mulligan? God. No. I mean, we’re friends and everything. But no. Not in that way. You know, I’m pretty sure she’s not even straight. She had a big crush on Scarlett for a while. But anyway. No. Not Lexie. Not anyone. Just me.”
“You know the other night? When the police were here after they found the second ‘Dig Here’ sign?”
He nods.
“Had Lexie been up here that night?”
“Here? You mean, in my room?”
&
nbsp; “Yes. In your room.”
“No. Definitely not. I actually don’t think Lexie’s ever been in my room.”
“Can I go out on your balcony?”
“Sure,” he says. “It’s not locked.”
She slides the door open and goes to the edge of the balcony. She peers over and out toward the flower bed and she steps onto her tiptoes and leans out even farther and she realizes that even at this angle and at this height, she cannot see the spot where the “Dig Here” sign had been posted. She turns around and looks overhead, but there are no balconies above. Lexie had definitely been lying about seeing the “Dig Here” sign from her apartment. Or from anywhere, for that matter. She knew about it not because she’d seen it but because either she or her mother had put it there.
Sophie walks back toward the sofa, but as she does so, her eye is caught by another painting on Liam’s wall; it’s a smaller canvas than Scarlett’s self-portrait, but painted using the same strokes and the same jolting, in-your-face color palette. It’s a stone spiral staircase, with the steps painted in garish rainbow shades all blending and bleeding into one another almost like melted wax. A pole of bright golden light beams down from a circular window at the top of the tower that the steps are housed in and pierces the stone floor at the bottom, creating a plume of purply-gray smoke and sparks of glitter. Just to the side of the hole is another knife, again smeared with what looks like blood.
“What the hell is this one?”
Liam shrugs. “It’s another one of Scarlett’s. She painted it during her breakdown. She said she needed me to take care of it for her. For posterity.”
“But what’s it of?”
“I don’t really know. I mean, I know what it looks like—there’s a staircase in her house, in the really old part of the building. It goes up to a kind of turret with a tiny room at the top with little slit eyes for arrows. They never used the little room. It was too small to put any furniture in.”
Sophie stares at the painting, hard, trying to divine some more meaning from it. “Did she ever say anything about the room?”
She stands closer and peers at the detail. There’s a kind of rectangle of light around the bottom step. It bleeds through a small gap. The blood from the knife trickles toward this gap and then disappears. As she stares at the knife, she notices that it’s not actually a knife at all, that it has a bent end with a U-shape cut into it. It’s not a knife, it’s a lever. She feels her heart stop beating for a split second, and then start again, twice as fast.
“Would you mind,” she says, “if I take a picture of this?”
“Sure,” he says casually. “Do you think it’s a clue of some kind?”
She nods. “Yes,” she says, her cool tone belying the electric instincts setting all her nerves on edge. “I think it might be.”
51
JUNE 2017
The bright sun strobes through the willow hanks as Zach and Tallulah cross the common toward the pub. Zach takes her hand as they walk and keeps up a running commentary. He tells her about a guy at work who just got a rescue dog that can’t bark and another guy at work whose kid was arrested last week for vandalism and he tells her about the possibility of a caravan in the New Forest that he might be able to borrow for a week off a friend of one of his sisters—they could go there for their summer holiday, maybe, and Tallulah nods and smiles and makes all the right noises because she has nothing to lose now by being nice to him. By the end of this evening they will never hold hands again, he will never chat to her like this again; by the end of tonight there will be a solid wall between them that will be, she knows, because it is how Zach works, absolutely unbreachable. So for now, while the sun shines and there is wine to be drunk and no more exams and a night out, why not be nice, why not pretend that everything is fine?
The garden at the front of the pub is packed. The Swan & Ducks is a destination pub, not just a local. People come from all the surrounding villages and hamlets, especially on a sunny Friday night in June.
It’s quieter inside the pub. The barman points out their table to them and Tallulah catches her breath. There’s a bottle of champagne chilling on the table in a chrome bucket, and two champagne flutes.
“Ta-da,” says Zach, leading her to the table.
She goes to pull out her chair but Zach intervenes and says, “No, allow me,” before pulling the chair out for her and then tucking her in on it.
Tallulah smiles and says, “Wow, thank you. This is amazing.”
“The least you deserve,” Zach replies, pulling out his own chair and seating himself.
Tallulah glances up at him. His face is soft, wreathed in smiles. He looks like the sweet lost boy who started secondary school halfway through and she feels her resolve start to diminish.
“We both deserve it,” she says. “It’s been quite a year.”
His smile falters then and he says, “Yes. It really has been.” He turns to grapple with the champagne bottle. “Right,” he says, “please don’t let me fuck this up.” He eases the cork from the bottle and Tallulah brings her flute close to the bottle neck, just in case, but the cork leaves smoothly with a gentle pop and Zach pours her a glass and then himself and then he says, raising his glass to hers, “To us. Zach and Tallulah. And to Noah, the best little man in the world. Cheers.”
Tallulah touches her glass against Zach’s and is grateful when he doesn’t hold her gaze or expect her to reciprocate his sentiments in any way and instead turns his attention to the paper menu in front of him. “Right,” he says. “Literally order anything. Price is no object. Whatever you want.”
She glances at the menu and sees a whole sea bass served with broccolini and pilau rice for thirty-five pounds. She gulps and says, “Well, I won’t be having the sea bass.”
“Have the sea bass,” says Zach. “Seriously, have whatever you want.”
“I don’t even like sea bass.”
He rolls his eyes at her affectionately and she sees his hand go to the pocket of his trousers as he’s done a few times since they left the house and she knows that that’s where the ring is and her mouth feels dry and she thinks: Why is she doing this? Why has she let it get this far? She is going to humiliate him and crush him and all of this, this golden midsummer night of champagne toasts and chivalry, will curdle into something unbearable and cruel. But no, she reminds herself, no, tonight is not real. Tonight is a mirage. She reminds herself of the night she slept over at Scarlett’s, the barrage of increasingly abusive messages and videos, the way he pressed his face so close to Noah’s, using him to get to her, to scare her, to bend her to his will. She thinks of the feel of his finger under her chin, poking hard and deep into the softness there, forcing her to look him in the eye. She thinks of how he wants her to give up her college course, give up her friends, stay at home, save money, be a good mother. She thinks of how he has manipulated his way into still living in her home, still sharing her bed, and she thinks of how she let him and she thinks no, no, this can’t be a kind split, this can’t be ambiguous, this can’t leave any room for anything but animosity and pain. Because Zach is a controller and she has to show him that she cannot and will not be controlled and that all the champagne and big, soft eyes and compliments and expensive fish in the world is not going to change that.
She pulls in her breath to calm herself, and looks down at the menu.
As she does so, she hears a commotion at the door, the sounds of hooting laughter and loud chatter. She glances up and sees first Mimi, then Roo, then Jayden, then Rocky, with Scarlett and Liam bringing up the rear. Zach looks up and she sees displeasure register on his face. He hates the posh kids from the school across the common. He groans. “That’s the end of the peace and quiet.”
They head toward the bar, and Tallulah can feel Scarlett’s eyes burning upon her, but she keeps her gaze fixed on the menu. The words swim before her, meaninglessly. Cannellini. Jus. Anchovy. Rigatoni. Chorizo. She doesn’t know what any of it means. She just knows that Scarle
tt is at the bar and Scarlett is looking at her. She feels her phone vibrate and glances at the message.
Has it happened yet?
No, she replies.
I’m here if you need me.
K.
“Who’s that?”
“Just Mum,” she replies. “Wants to know which pajamas to put Noah in.”
Zach smiles. Then he says, “Fancy sharing a seafood platter with me?”
“Oh,” she says distractedly. “Maybe. What’s it got on it?”
“King prawns. Smoked salmon. Clams. Potted shrimps. And caviar.”
She glances at the price. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he says. “I told you. We’re fine dining tonight.”
“OK, then.” She nods. “I mean, it’s up to you. I don’t really like caviar…”
Zach laughs and says, “Don’t worry. I’ll eat your caviar.”
She smiles and takes a large sip from her champagne glass. Scarlett and her mates are still at the bar putting in a long and very complicated order and asking for cash back and being generally loud and irritating. She glances up and catches Scarlett’s eye very briefly. She can feel her face flush pink and she quickly looks away and says, “Shall we order some fries?”
“Hell yes,” says Zach. “Triple-cooked chips. French fries. Or truffle chips. Shall we just have one of each?”
“Yes,” she says, not really knowing what she’s saying yes to. She has no idea what a truffle chip is.
“Excellent.” He smiles and folds his arms.
Tallulah can hear Scarlett from here. “Have you got any rum from Barbados?” she asks. “It’s called Mount Gay?”
“ ’Fraid not. We’ve got Bacardi. Kraken…”