by Lisa Jewell
I was very lonely by now. I tried to rekindle my friendship (or what semblance there had ever been of a friendship) with Phin, but he was still so angry with me for betraying him the night he pushed me into the river. And yes, I know I should have been angry with him for pushing me into the river in the first place, but we’d taken drugs, and I was annoying, I could see that I was annoying, and in a way I’d deserved to be pushed into the river and my fury afterwards was more to do with hurt pride and feelings than any sense that he’d put me in mortal danger. And also, I was in love with him and when you’re in love, you’ll forgive almost anything. It’s a trait that I’ve carried with me into adult life, unfortunately. I always fall in love with people who hate me.
I came upon Clemency in the kitchen one afternoon shortly after the announcement of my sister’s pregnancy.
‘Did you know?’ I said.
She flushed a little as obviously we’d barely spoken over the years and now we were talking about her best friend having sex with her father.
She said, ‘No. I had no idea.’
‘But you’re so close. How could you not have known?’
She shrugged. ‘I just thought they were exercising.’
‘What do you think about it?’
‘I think it’s disgusting.’
I nodded, vehemently, as if to say we are on the same page, good.
‘Has your father ever done anything like this before?’
‘You mean …?’
‘The babies. Has he ever got people pregnant before?’
‘Oh,’ she said softly. ‘No. Only my mum.’
I told her to come to my room and she looked scared for a minute, which hurt my feelings, but then I thought it was good. It was good to be scary if I was going to overthrow David and get us all out of this house.
In my room I pulled my mattress away from the wall and pulled out the objects I’d found in David and Birdie’s room. I spread them across the floor and let her look at them. I told her where I’d found them.
‘But how did you get in there?’ she asked.
‘I can’t tell you,’ I said.
I saw confusion sluice through her as she looked at the objects. ‘Your pencil case?’
‘Yes. My pencil case. And there was so much other stuff.’ I told her about the silky underwear and the whiskey and the piles of cash. And as I told her I saw that I was breaking her. It was like the day I’d told Phin about seeing his dad kissing Birdie. I’d forgotten that I was talking to a child about her father, that there was a deep seam of shared genetic material, memories, connection there and that I was ripping it all apart with my words.
‘He’s been lying to us all along!’ she said, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘I thought we were doing all of this for the poor people! I don’t understand. I don’t understand!’
I looked her firmly in the eye. ‘It’s simple,’ I said. ‘Your father’s taken everything of value from my parents and now he wants their house. Legally this house is held in trust for me and my sister until we’re twenty-five. But look.’ I showed her the will I’d pulled out of the box. It had a codicil added in David’s handwriting. The house, he’d stated in cod legal language, was in the event of the deaths of my parents now to pass directly to David Sebastian Thomsen and his descendants. This codicil had been witnessed and countersigned by my mother and Birdie. It wouldn’t stand a chance in hell of making it through a court of law but its intent was clear.
‘And he’s having a baby to secure his stake in the house.’
Clemency didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, ‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, rubbing my chin as though there might be a wise man’s beard there, but of course there was nothing of the sort. I didn’t grow a beard until I was in my twenties and even then it was pretty unimpressive. ‘But we are going to do something.’
She looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘OK.’
‘But’, I said firmly, ‘you have to promise me that this is our secret.’ I gestured at the objects I’d purloined from David and Birdie’s room. ‘Do not tell your brother. Do not tell my sister. Do not tell anyone. OK?’
She nodded. ‘I promise.’ She was silent for a minute and then she looked up at me and said, ‘He’s done this before.’
‘What?’
She dropped her gaze to her lap. ‘He tried to get his grandmother to sign her house over to him. When she was senile. My uncle found out and kicked us out. That’s when we moved to France.’ She looked up at me. ‘Do you think we should tell the police?’ she said. ‘Tell them what he’s been doing?’
‘No,’ I said instantly. ‘No. Because, really, he hasn’t broken the law, has he? What we need is a plan. We need to get out of here. Will you help me?’
She nodded.
‘Will you do whatever it takes?’
She nodded again.
It was a fork in the road, really. Looking back on it there were so many other ways to have got through the trauma of it all, but with all the people I loved most in the world facing away from me I chose the worst possible option.
54
Libby and Miller leave Sally’s office ten minutes later.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks her as they emerge into the sweltering heat.
She manages a smile but then realises that she is about to cry and can do nothing to stop it.
‘Oh God,’ says Miller. ‘Oh dear. Come on, come on.’ He guides her towards a quiet courtyard and to a bench under a tree. He feels his pockets. ‘No tissues, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I have tissues.’
She pulls a packet of travel tissues from her bag and Miller smiles.
‘You are so exactly the sort of person who would carry a packet of travel-sized tissues around.’
She stares at him. ‘What does that even mean?’
‘It means … It just means …’ His features soften. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘It just means you’re very organised. That’s all.’
She nods. This much she knows. ‘I have to be,’ she says.
‘And why is that?’ he asks.
She shrugs. It’s not in her nature to talk about personal things. But given what they’ve been through in the last two days she feels the boundaries that define her usual conversational preferences have been blown apart.
She says, ‘My mum. My adoptive mum. She was a bit – well, is a bit chaotic. Lovely, lovely, lovely. But it was my dad who kept her on track. And he died when I was eight and after that … I was always late for everything. I never had the right stuff for school. I didn’t used to show her the slips for trips and things because there was no point. She booked a holiday in the middle of my GCSEs. Emigrated to Spain when I was eighteen years old.’ She shrugs. ‘So I just had to be the grown-up. You know.’
‘The keeper of the tissues?’
She laughs. ‘Yes. The keeper of the tissues. I remember this one time I fell over in the playground and cut my elbow and my mum was just sort of flapping about looking for something in her handbag to clean it up with and this other mum came over with a handbag exactly the same size as my mum’s and she opened it and pulled out an antiseptic wipe and a packet of plasters. And I just thought: Wow, I want to be the person with the magic handbag. You know.’
He smiles at her. ‘You’re doing really well,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
She laughs nervously. ‘I’m trying,’ she says. ‘Trying to do the best I can.’
For a moment they sit in silence. Their knees touch briefly and then spring apart again.
Then Libby says, ‘Well, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it?’
Miller throws her a devious look. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘not entirely a waste of time. The girl. Lola? She’s Sally’s granddaughter.’
Libby gasps. ‘How do you know?’
‘Because I saw a photo on Sally’s desk of Sally with a younger woman holding a newborn. And then I saw another photo on her wall o
f Sally with a young girl with blond hair. And then I saw a child’s drawing framed on the wall that said “I Love You Grandma”.’ He shrugs. ‘I put it all together and hey presto.’ Then he leans towards Libby and shows her something on the screen of his phone.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘It’s a letter addressed to Lola. It was poking out of her handbag under her desk. I performed the classic kneeling-to-tie-my-shoelace manoeuvre. Click.’
Libby looks at him in awe. ‘But what made you even think …?’
‘Libby. I’m an investigative journalist. This is what I do. And if my theory is correct, Lola must be Clemency’s daughter. Which means that Clemency must live locally. And therefore, this address’ – he points at his screen – ‘is also Clemency’s address. I think we might just have found the second missing teenager.’
A woman comes to the door of the smart bungalow. A well-behaved golden retriever stands at her side and wags his tail lazily at them. The woman is slightly overweight; she has a thick middle and long legs, a heavy-looking bosom. Her hair is very dark and cut into a bob and she wears gold hoop earrings, blue jeans and a pale pink sleeveless linen top.
‘Yes?’
‘Oh,’ says Miller. ‘Hello. Clemency?’
The woman nods.
‘My name is Miller Roe. This is Libby Jones. We’ve just been talking to your mum. In town. She mentioned you lived close by and …’
She looks at Libby and does a double take. ‘You look … I feel like I should know you.’
Libby bows her head and lets Miller do the honours.
‘This is Serenity,’ he says.
Clemency’s hands go to the doorframe and grip it, momentarily. Her head rolls back slightly and for a moment Libby thinks she is about to faint. But then she rallies, puts her hands out to Libby and says, ‘Of course! Of course! You’re twenty-five! Of course. I should have thought – I should have known. I should have guessed you’d come. Oh my goodness. Come in. Please. Come in.’
The bungalow is beautiful inside: hardwood floors and abstract paintings, vases full of flowers, sunlight shining through stained-glass windows.
The dog sits at Libby’s feet as Clemency gets them glasses of water and Libby strokes the crown of his head. He’s panting in the muggy air and his breath smells bad but she doesn’t mind.
Clemency returns and sits opposite them. ‘Wow,’ she says, staring at Libby. ‘Look at you! So pretty! So … real.’
Libby laughs nervously.
Clemency says, ‘You were just a baby when I left. I had no photos of you. No idea where you went or who adopted you or what sort of life you ended up having. And I could not picture you. I just could not. All I could see was a baby. A baby who looked like a doll. Not quite real. Never quite real. And oh …’ Her eyes fill with tears then and she says, in a cracked voice, ‘I am so, so sorry. Are you …? Have you been …? Has everything been OK for you?’
Libby nods. She thinks of her mother, with the man she calls her toyboy (although he’s only six years younger than her), stretched out on the tiny terrace of her one bed apartment in Dénia (no room for Libby to stay when she comes to visit) in a hot pink kaftan, explaining over Skype that she’d been too busy to book flights to come and see Libby for her birthday and that by the time she’d looked online all the cheap ones had gone. She thinks of the day they buried her father, her hand in her mother’s, looking up into the sky, wondering if he’d got there safely or not, worrying about how she was going to get to school now as her mother couldn’t drive.
‘It’s been fine,’ she says. ‘I was adopted by lovely people. I’ve been very lucky.
Clemency’s face brightens. ‘So, where do you live now?’
‘St Albans,’ she replies.
‘Oh! That’s nice. And – are you married? Any children?’
‘No. Just me. Single. Live alone. No kids. No pets. I sell designer kitchens for a living. I’m very … Well, there’s not really a lot to say about me. At least, there wasn’t until …’
‘Yes,’ says Clemency. ‘Yes. I should imagine it’s all been a bit of a shock to the system.’
‘Putting it mildly.’
‘And how much do you know?’ she asks circumspectly. ‘About the house. About all of it.’
‘Well,’ Libby begins, ‘it’s all a bit complicated. First of all there was what my parents had always told me, which was that my birth parents had been killed in a car crash when I was ten months old. Then there was what I read in Miller’s article, which was that my parents were members of a cult and there’d been some kind of suicide pact and I’d been looked after by gypsies. And then, well, two nights ago Miller and I were at the house, in Cheyne Walk, and this guy appeared. Quite late at night. He told us …’ She pauses. ‘He told us he was called Phin.’
Clemency’s eyes open wide and she gasps. ‘Phin?’ she says.
Libby nods uncertainly.
Clemency’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Are you sure?’ she says. ‘Are you sure it was Phin?’
‘Well, he told us that was his name. He said you were his sister. That he hadn’t seen you or your mother for years.’
She shakes her head. ‘But he was so ill when I left him in the house. So ill. And we looked everywhere for him, me and my mum. Everywhere. For years and years. We went to every hospital in London. Wandered round parks looking at rough sleepers. Kept waiting and waiting for him to suddenly appear on our doorstep. And he never did and eventually … well, we assumed that he must have died. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he come back? Why wouldn’t he come to find us? I mean, he would have, wouldn’t he?’ She pauses. ‘Are you absolutely sure it was Phin?’ she asks yet again. ‘Tell me what he looked like.’
Libby describes the horn-rimmed glasses, the blond hair, the long eyelashes, the full mouth.
Clemency nods.
And then Libby tells her about the luxury apartment, the Persian cats. She repeats the joke about the cat called Dick, and Clemency shakes her head.
‘No,’ she says. ‘This doesn’t sound like Phin at all. It really doesn’t.’ She pauses for a moment, her eyes roaming around the room as she thinks. ‘You know what I think?’ she says eventually. ‘I think it might be Henry.’
‘Henry?’
‘Yes. He was in love with Phin. Totally unrequited. Obsessive almost. He would just stare and stare at him. He dressed like him. Copied his hairstyles. He even tried to kill him once. Pushed him in the river. Held him under. Luckily Phin was stronger than Henry. Bigger. He managed to fight him off. Henry killed Birdie’s cat, you know?’
‘What?’
‘He poisoned her. Cut off her tail. Threw the rest of her body into the river. So the signs were there all along. It’s a terrible thing to say about a child, it really is, but in my opinion Henry had a streak of pure evil.’
55
CHELSEA, 1993
I did not kill Birdie’s cat. Of course I didn’t. But yes, she did die because of me.
I was working on something with the belladonna, another sleeping draught, something a little stronger than the draught I’d given David and Birdie to get into their room. Something to bring about a slightly less temporary stupefaction. I tested it on the cat figuring if it didn’t harm the cat then it was probably safe on humans. Sadly it did harm the cat. A lesson learned. I made the next draught much, much weaker.
As for the cat’s tail, well, it sounds harsh when put like that: cut off her tail. I took it. It was beautiful, so soft and full of remarkable colours. I had nothing then, remember, nothing soft, it had all been taken. She didn’t need it any more. So yes, I took the cat’s tail. And – fake news – I did not throw the cat in the Thames. How could I have? I wasn’t able to leave the house. The cat, in fact, remains to this day interred in my herb garden.
As for it being me who had pushed Phin into the Thames rather than the other way around: well, that is categorically not true. What might be true is that Phin pushed me in during a struggle that had ensued after I at
tempted to push him in. Yes. That might have been the case. He told me I was staring at him. I said, ‘I am staring at you because you are beautiful.’
He said, ‘You’re being weird. Why do you always have to be so weird?’
I said, ‘Don’t you know, Phin? Don’t you know that I love you?’
(Remember, please, before you judge me too harshly, that I had taken LSD. I was not of sound mind.)
‘Stop it,’ he said. He was embarrassed.
‘Please, Phin,’ I implored. ‘Please. I’ve loved you since the minute I saw you …’ And then I tried to kiss him. My lips brushed his and for a minute I thought he was going to kiss me back. I can still remember the shock of it, the softness of his lips, the tiny puff of breath that passed from his mouth into mine.
I put my hand to his cheek and then he broke away from me and looked at me with such undisguised disgust that it felt like a sword passing through my heart.
He pushed me and I nearly fell backwards. So I pushed him and he pushed me and I pushed him and he pushed me and in I went, and I know it wasn’t deliberate. Which is why it was so much worse that I’d allowed his father to think that he’d pushed me in on purpose, that I let him be locked in his room for all those days and never told anyone that it was an accident. He never told anyone it was an accident either, because to have done so would have been to tell them that I’d kissed him. And, well, clearly there was no worse confession to make than that.
56
CHELSEA, 1993
One summer’s night, towards the middle of June, I heard my sister begin to moo.
There was no other word for it.