by C. J. Cooke
She had brought me a basket of bread and cheese and grapes. I looked like I’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, my face swollen from crying, still in last week’s clothes, tissues all over the place. She looked at me and the state of my room with unveiled pity. ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘The loss of someone you loved is a wound you will carry for the rest of your life. But it will become bearable.’
I nodded and pretended I agreed but I knew she had no idea what this felt like. How could she? No one has ever loved another person the way I loved him. Crazy, obsessive love. I loved him more than I loved myself.
I told Madame Proulx I would come back to dance school and she was reassured enough to leave with a smile on her face. She said she would be back next week to check in on me and made me promise that I would eat and sleep. I have no intention of going back to dance school, nor do I intend to eat or sleep.
I put on my clothes, then write a note for Medbh that I’m not coming back and not to worry about me. I tell her she can have my red corduroy jacket for letting me stay and taking care of me. It always looked better on her anyway.
It’s two in the morning, pitch black with snow on the ground. The ice pinches at my toes and cheeks as I walk down the street. It’s a good feeling, a relief to be numbed, to have my thoughts pulled towards physical pain. I walk to the train station and walk towards the tracks. Then I lie down, pull out the Polaroid of me and Luke on our half-year anniversary, and wait.
The stars overhead gleam and twinkle. I remember singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ to Jeannie when she was a baby. She’s ten, now. I haven’t seen her since Easter. She’s settled with the Carney family and they much preferred her over me. I was the stroppy teenager, Jeannie the cute eight-year-old who still enjoyed teddies and cuddles. I couldn’t wait to leave that place.
I think of them telling Jeannie and me that our mother had died. I didn’t blink. I might have said, ‘Good,’ though I didn’t mean it. I wanted to be defiant, to show that Mum had no hold over me, not even in death. Jeannie burst into tears. She cried for days, kept asking where Mum had gone. She hadn’t seen our mother for two years before that and even then Mum was distant and distracted. She only saw us for an hour a week, and with a social worker lurking in the background. Still, Jeannie was always so eager to see her, to please her.
I think I can hear a train coming. I squeeze my eyes shut and pray it’ll be quick.
Jeannie was unsettled after Mum’s death. She kept crying for me to come and pick her up but I couldn’t bring her all the way to London. I’m a student. I couldn’t possibly care for a child and go to dance school. And she’d been happy at the Carneys before.
I think of her hearing the news that her sister has died. I’m all she has, now. How will this affect her?
A horn sounds. I sit upright and see a white dot of light in the distance. I’m so cold I can hardly feel my arms and legs, but somehow I manage to shuffle to the side of the tracks right as a train thunders through the station, the suck of the wheels incredibly strong, almost pulling me under. The Polaroid of me and Luke is ripped from my hands and shredded by the force of the train. I curl into a tight ball and hold on to a piece of iron jutting up from the ground to stop myself from being dragged under.
When it passes, I know I can’t do this. I can’t do it to Jeannie.
So I go home, and when Ronnie questions me about the note I tell her I’m moving out. I’ll get a job closer to Grimsby and visit Jeanne. I’ll give Luke a second funeral in my heart.
Somehow I have to forget him in order to survive.
43
Reuben
6th September 2017
Malfoy: I think your whale looks amazing. The breach is super-realistic. Just need to work on the waves. Did you check out that free stock footage website?
Roo: ☺☺☺ I’m glad you like the whale! I was worried that you’d think it was rubbish. Your pirate ship was WICKED.
Malfoy: I *love* it. I can send you a YouTube link to some tutorials for shape tweening. Waves are hard to get right :/
Roo: Thanx
Malfoy: I need you to send me the footage I asked for in exchange for the YouTube link.
Roo: What footage?
Malfoy: Did u forget?
Roo: No. Maybe.
Malfoy: You didn’t record the police interviewing your mother?
Roo: Oh yeah I did ☺
Malfoy: Phew.
Roo: It’s audio only tho is that a problem
Malfoy: No. Send it now.
Roo: Is this the dangerous thing u were going to tell me bout?
Malfoy: What?
Roo: The police interview. They asked about my dad a lot.
Malfoy: That depends.
Roo: On what?
Malfoy: Well, I haven’t listened to the interview yet so I don’t know what they asked your mum.
Roo: For me to send this u hav to tell me your real name.
Malfoy: hahaha
Roo: what’s so funny?
Malfoy: this is iPix, nobody uses real names. Only avatars.
Roo: Yeah but this is different. I have to be able to trust u so tell me ur real name so I know u aren’t a bad person
Malfoy: I promise you I’m not a bad person.
Roo: so tell me ur name then
Malfoy: David.
Roo: David who?
Malfoy: David Reynolds.
Roo: I don’t beleive u
Malfoy: That is my name.
Roo: Y do u keep asking me to record my family??
Malfoy: For your protection.
44
Helen
7th September 2017
I toss and turn all night, wracked with grief and guilt. I can hear Reuben grinding his teeth in the room next to mine. I go into his bedroom and slip his mouth guard between his teeth, ending the awful crunch of molar on molar. Then I go into Saskia’s bedroom and lie down on her rug, breathing in the smell of her, dissolving quickly into tears.
The narrative that the police have constructed is that sometime during our family holiday, Michael contacted someone in Belize and said, Here’s eleven thousand pounds. Make it look like an accident.
I tell myself that there is simply no way Michael is capable of such a thing.
A voice in my head whispers, But what if he knew you burned down the bookshop? I feel a deep terror creep upon me. What would he do if he found out? It was a thought that never crossed my mind at the time, but then I never expected the fire to grow so big. I feel stupid, utterly consumed with self-hatred. Michael built that shop from nothing and took immense pride in how successful it became. And when the public library closed down, our shop became even more vital and popular. Before, Michael had worked long hours to pay the bills. Now, he was working seventy or eighty hours a week to keep kids interested in books and to support local community groups.
And I destroyed it all.
What if that’s what he discovered in the hospital? What if that’s the reason he left? Michael’s anger is the dangerous kind. Whereas mine is quick to show and just as fast to burn out, Michael’s temper simmers for a long while, then erupts. A volcanic fury.
I can’t sleep now, and it’s not guilt that sends me down the stairs and peering out the windows, expecting to see a shadow outside.
It’s fear.
I open the front door and step outside, looking over the street. No one is around. Smoke wafts gently from several chimneys in the distance, the smell of turf clinging to the cool, damp air. I’m barefoot, but I step out into the garden and walk out on to the street. I can feel it, now. The eyes that follow.
We both know kids didn’t start that fire. He said that right before the accident, when we were lying in the hammock at the beach hut. I remember the bitter tone of his voice. I remember the way he looked at me when he staggered out of the blaze. He’d gone rushing in to try to put out the flames but quickly realised the blaze was already too big, bursting out of the windows and consuming the shop floor.
<
br /> At the time I raced inside to help him. He had an armful of books that he was trying to salvage and was filmed in soot. My lungs screamed for air. When we reached the cool air outside we fell to the ground, gasping and choking. I rolled over and saw him on all fours, looking across at me.
That look. I tried to dismiss it at the time. It was a look that spoke volumes. What have you done?
There is nowhere I can go. Even here at Jeannie’s AirBnB, he’ll find me. With a deep, gut-churning shudder, I turn back inside, lock the door behind me, and climb into bed with the letters spread over the sheets. Michael read these. What must he have thought? How furious must he be with me?
For a long time I consider that showing these to the police is my only option. I can show them, tell them Michael is innocent. And yet they will only ask questions. Who was Luke Aucoin? Why did the writer call you a murderer?
I can never tell them the whole story. It was the reason we chose silence in the first place. To protect our family. We risk losing Reuben and Saskia.
‘Helen?’
Jeannie appears in the doorway of the bedroom with a tray of coffee and buttered toast. I’m still surrounded by the letters, spread over the sheets. I make to tidy them away quickly but she sees.
‘What are these?’ she says, picking one up.
‘They were sent to us over a number of years,’ I say hesitantly. ‘I got them from the bookshop the other day. I think they have something to do with Michael’s disappearance.’
She flicks through them, absorbing the content, her eyes widening when she sees the word ‘murderer’.
‘Who’s Michael King?’ she asks.
‘Michael,’ I say, my voice trembling. ‘His name was once Michael King.’
‘Michael King? When did he become Michael Pengilly, then?’
‘About twenty-two years ago. He changed it to his mother’s surname.’
‘Why?’
I begin to cry. She takes my hand, looks over the letters a second time.
‘Helen, what is going on? Why has someone sent you these?’
I tell her. In great blustering sobs I tell her about the trek twenty-two years ago. About Luke and Theo, meeting Michael for the first time. About the fall.
‘Luke was unconscious,’ I say, shivering with waves of shock as I recall it. ‘He was hanging on the end of the rope. We were calling to him … the rope was about to break any second.’
We never talked about what had happened. We never wanted to face up to it.
And yet, it had lived with us every day of our lives. It was with us in the room when Reuben was born, a shadow that reminded me that all of this – my marriage, my newborn son, my life – could have, and perhaps should have, ended that day on the mountain. Every moment of happiness was a debt.
Jeannie sits down on the bed and says nothing while I tell her everything, confessing it. Again and again she refers to the letter, looking over the envelopes, absorbing the awful truths I’m divulging.
‘You were only nine,’ I say. ‘Michael and I never told anyone a word of this. We were so young at the time.’
‘Did you speak to the police?’
I shake my head, tears spilling down my cheeks. ‘We never told anyone. It was so horrific … We both just disappeared.’
‘But … how did you and Michael end up getting together?’
I tell her about bumping into each other on the train platform. How it was both awkward and like a homecoming, because we were the only two people on the planet who knew the dimensions of grief at Luke’s death. Our knowledge of what the other was going through, of that terrible guilt, was a powerful intimacy. It was Michael who brought me peace, who taught me to love again.
‘Michael and I, we never spoke about it,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t murder. But we never spoke to Luke’s parents and told them the truth so heaven knows what conclusions they drew from that …’
‘You said Luke had a brother,’ she says, shuffling through the letters. ‘He was there, wasn’t he? When the fall happened?’
I nod. ‘He was destroyed by it.’
She nods, visibly struggling to keep apace. ‘But … if Luke’s brother was there, wouldn’t he have told everyone that it was an accident?’
‘I thought he would have,’ I whisper. ‘But time distorts everything, doesn’t it? Maybe he started to think differently about it. Maybe he started to think that Michael and I planned it or something.’
My throat tightens painfully as though a fist is squeezing my windpipe. I’ve seen Theo many times over the years. On the tube, in the supermarket, on TV. At our wedding in Gretna Green – Michael in a charity-shop suit and me in a tulip-print dress off Tesco’s sale rack – I broke into a cold sweat when I saw Theo brooding in the cloisters. I was so shaken that I stopped the ceremony halfway through and wandered off to have a look. Michael gave a nervous laugh, made a joke about me getting cold feet while the registrar cleared his throat. It wasn’t Theo at all, of course – just a floral arrangement on a long black stand. And then at Reuben’s baby group, one of the dads got a bit freaked out when I kept staring. He was Theo’s double.
‘Do you think he’s the one sending threats?’ Jeannie asks. ‘This Theo.’
‘I don’t know. His name doesn’t appear anywhere. I found this.’ I show her the envelope signed ‘Chris Holloway’.
‘Does that name mean anything to you?’
I shake my head and draw my knees up to my chest. ‘He’s been sending letters every year to one of our old addresses. And then this year, he found us here.’
‘The twenty-fifth of June … why does that ring a bell?’ she says, looking over the postmarks. ‘Was that when the fire happened?’
I nod. Her eyes widen.
‘Then why didn’t you show these to the police?’ she says, exasperated. ‘Helen, this is crazy. You have proof that someone was watching you, that someone was making serious threats. And that the date of the fire coincided with these. The police want to charge Michael with bloody murder-suicide! Why didn’t you show them these?’
I can’t answer her. She looks at me as if I am insane.
‘What are you not telling me?’ she says.
Right then a bleeping sound cuts through the room, the repetitive chime of a digital alarm or mobile phone. She looks around. ‘Is that your phone ringing?’
I pat the pocket of my nightgown. My mobile phone is there, still as a stone.
The bleeping continues. We lift cushions and books to find the source, peer beneath the duvet and mattress. Just then, Reuben comes in. He’s wearing his Star Wars pyjamas and holds his iPad in front of him.
‘Are you OK, Roo?’ Jeannie asks.
‘Sssh!’ He waves his hand at her. She jerks back in her seat, silenced. He keeps his gaze on the screen and shuffles towards the spot on the bed where Jeannie is sitting, then plunges his hand beneath her. Jeannie gets up with a shout. Reuben draws up the object making the sound: Saskia’s teddy, Jack-Jack.
‘Ha!’ he says, tapping the screen of his iPad. Immediately the bleeping stops.
Jeannie and I look on in bewilderment as he makes to head back upstairs with the teddy clutched tight to his chest. He looks over at me sheepishly. ‘I like to sleep with Jack-Jack,’ he says. Then, so quiet I can barely hear: ‘So I can be close to Saskia.’
I scramble out of bed and approach him, my eyes fixed on the screen of his iPad. ‘What was that noise just before? Why was Jack-Jack bleeping like that?’
‘Look,’ he says, tapping the screen. ‘It’s cool. You can track him anywhere. If you lose him you can bring up a map and it tells you where he is. Well, not exactly. It didn’t tell me he was down the side of the bed but that’s why there’s a noise on it, so you find his exact location.’
I turn to Jeannie. She bought Jack-Jack for Saskia, and I know it’s upsetting for her to see it. She reaches out for the teddy and as Reuben passes him to her I notice something different about it.
A round baby-pink tag on his bloo
dstained collar, about the size of a ten-pence piece and twice as thick.
‘It was a good idea to put that tag on him,’ Reuben says then, glancing up at me. ‘Pity he wasn’t wearing that when we were in Cancún. We wouldn’t have had to spend hours and hours looking for him.’
‘This tag?’ Jeannie says, finding it with finger and thumb. ‘It’s a name tag, isn’t it? Funny name for a teddy, though. I thought she named him Jack-Jack?’
I step closer and finger the tag.
‘I never put this on him,’ I say. Jeannie raises it up, and I see the lettering on the tag. TRKLite.
‘How did you know it makes a sound?’ I ask Reuben, and he tells me that the tag can track Jack-Jack anywhere in the world. He says he was able to bring up the digital map locating Jack-Jack as we left Belize and followed his journey all the way back to the UK on the Medevac plane. The more he explains the more bewildered I feel, and when he sees me growing upset he starts to click his fingers and stumble over his words. Jeannie intervenes, widening her smile and coaxing him to sit down on the bed.
‘Reuben, darling,’ she says impatiently. ‘Explain it to us again? You can connect to the tag on Jack-Jack’s collar with your iPad …’
He nods, then brings up the website for TRKLite and shows it to us.
‘It’s a crap website,’ he says, disgusted. ‘I could have done it much better.’
Flashing on the screen, an image of small round tags in various colours, and a banner that says, ‘TRKLite! The new Bluetooth tracking device! Only £39.99!’ A video featuring a smiley blonde woman explains it to us: you can attach it to keys or luggage and keep track of it anywhere in the world, just as Reuben said. All you have to do is download the app to a mobile device, et voilà, a little red dot blinks on a digital map, locating your belongings.