by Lesley Kara
Who Did You Tell?
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Also by Lesley Kara
The Rumour
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Who Did You Tell?
Lesley Kara
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TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Lesley Kara 2020
Lesley Kara has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the
appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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9781787631014 (tpb)
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Dedication to come
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Just because you imagine yourself doing something and enjoy the way it makes you feel, doesn’t mean you actually want to do it. It doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. Of course not. Because sometimes the very opposite is true and something you never in a million years could imagine yourself doing is done in the blink of an eye and changes your life for ever.
So if, in my head, I’m grabbing a handful of her braids and slam‑
ming her head into a brick wall till her skull’s smashed in, it doesn’t mean that that’s what I’ll do. It doesn’t make me a bad person just thinking about it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s normal to have the odd violent fantasy about someone you hate so much every muscle in your body contracts when you think of them. I mean, everybody does it sometimes, don’t they? Don’t they?
Seven slams, if you’re interested. That’s how many it takes till her braids run red.
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pa rt on e
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1
I smell him first, or rather the aftershave he used to wear. Joint
by Roccobarocco. A 90s vintage scent – masculine and woody.
A discontinued line.
I spin round, but no one’s there. Only a girl in a puffa jacket
squatting to tie her laces. I almost trip over her. Then I see him,
sprinting towards the sea, the furry flaps of his trapper hat fly-
ing in the breeze like a spaniel’s ears. Simon.
My knees give way. I stare after him, but he’s disappeared
into the night. That’s if he was ever there in the first place.
Maybe it’s all in my head. A hallucination. I’ve had a few of
those in the past.
Whatever it was, I scurry home. A small, frightened creature,
suddenly afraid of the dark. Afraid of him.
Mum pounces on me like a sniffer dog the second I walk
through the door.
‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been worried sick.’ Her fingers dig
into my arms and I have to shake her off.
‘It’s only ten o’clock, Mum. You can’t keep doing this. You’ve
got to trust me.’
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LESLEY K AR A
The snort is out before she has a chance to think better of it.
‘Trust? You’re talking to me about trust?’
She crumples on to the bottom stair with her head in her
hands, and something inside me crumples too. I kneel down
beside her and bury my head in her lap.
‘Sorry.’ My voice is muffled in the folds of her dressing gown
and the years roll away. I’m in my first year of secondary school
and someone has upset me. Mum is telling me to rise above it.
Now, as then, she rubs her hand in a circle between my
shoulders.
‘I just don’t understand why you have to walk when it’s so
late?’ she says, and I want to explain that if I have to come home
and sit in this dreary little cottage night after night without
drinking my head will explode. I want to tell her that I walk to
stay alive, that I have to keep on the move, doing things, going
places, even when I’ve nothing to do and nowhere to go. Espe-
cially then. But all I can do is shed hot, silent tears into her lap.
It’s been five months since I woke up in hospital, Mum standing
at the foot of my bed with ‘That Look’ on her face. A fortnight
since my spell in rehab came to an end. It was she who sug-
gested this arrangement. If she hadn’t, I might have been forced
to ask, wouldn’t have had the luxury of indignation.
‘Move in with you? In Flinstead? You’ve got to be joking.’
Simon and I had laughed about the place on the few occa-
sions it cropped up in conversation. Said the day we ended up
somewhere like Flinstead was the day we gave up on life. It’s got
this reputation as being somewhere you go to die. Like East-
bourne, only smaller and with nothing to do of an evening.
‘What are your other options?’ Mum said. That must have
been the moment she decided to adopt the dispassionate tone
of a counsellor. She’s been using it ever since, when she can
remember. Open questions. No hint of disapproval. I’m not
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WHO DID YOU TELL?
fooled for a second. It’s just another of her strategies. All that
anger and frustration, all that disappointment – it’s still seething beneath the surface, ready to boil up and spit in my face like
hot fat.
It’s gone midnight now. I’m lying in bed, curled on my side,
facing the window. My braids feel tight and itchy and I have a
sudden urge
to unpick them all, but they cost so much to put
in, money I can ill afford, and besides, it’ll take ages. I don’t
have the energy for it.
A sliver of moonlight seeps in through the gap in the cur-
tains. I roll on to my other side and hug my knees against my
chest, finally allowing myself to think of Simon. My mouth
goes dry. There’s a strange whooshing noise in my ears and a
prickling behind my cheekbones. It couldn’t have been him
earlier. It was just my mind playing tricks on me.
We met in a bar. Where else? One of those cavernous London
pubs with panelled wood walls and massive mirrors etched
with the names of beers. Packed to the rafters on a Friday night,
but depressing and sepulchral at four fifteen on a Tuesday after-
noon. Was it a Tuesday? I don’t really remember. Back then, the
days were all pretty much the same. They are now, of course,
only in a different way.
I just walked right up to where he was sitting and told him he
had an interestingly shaped head. That’s what drink does. Did.
Gave me the gall to approach complete strangers, to bypass all
the meaningless chit- chat and get straight to the point. What-
ever point my fucked- up head was currently obsessing over. I
thought I was being witty and flirtatious.
‘No, Astrid. You’re being foul and warped and ugly. Drink
isn’t your friend. It’s your enemy. Your poison. Can’t you see
what it’s doing to you?’ Jane’s words ring in my head. Jane, who
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LESLEY K AR A
was supposed to be my friend. My ally. I’d lost her by then, the
latest in a long line of friends and acquaintances who couldn’t
hack it any more.
Then I met Simon and none of it mattered. We drank cider
till the men- in- suits brigade swaggered in and we slunk off
back to his place. A dingy bedsit on Anglesey Road in Wool-
wich. His sheets were rank, but I didn’t care. He already had a
girlfriend, but I didn’t care about that either. We weren’t just
a couple of drunks hitting it off; we were kindred spirits. Soul-
mates. Two sides of the same coin.
Must have been a bad penny, then, says that little voice in my head. The one that sounds just like Mum.
He can’t have come back. He just can’t.
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2
The next morning I get dressed quickly, determined to put last
night out of my mind. I loop my key chain round my neck and
go downstairs. It’s still early but Mum’s beaten me to it, as usual.
‘There’s a banana needs eating,’ she says. ‘If you want that
with some toast.’
‘Not that black spotty thing that’s been mouldering in the
fruit bowl all week?’
She picks it up and gives it a squeeze. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’
‘You eat it, then. Toast will be fine.’
‘There’s always porridge,’ she says. ‘I could make you some if
you like.’
‘I don’t like porridge, I’ve told you.’
I take the last sachet from the box of green tea and pluck my
favourite mug from the mug- tree. The one that says: I don’t like morning people. Or mornings. Or people. It’s one of the few things I haven’t lost or broken over the years.
Mum sighs. ‘Oh Hilly, it doesn’t have to be like this.’
I rip the sachet too fast and tealeaf dust spills all over the coun-
ter. ‘Mum, I haven’t been called Hilary in over seventeen years.’
She touches my arm. ‘Sorry, darling. Sometimes it just slips
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LESLEY K AR A
out.’ She opens the cupboard above my head and draws out
another box of green tea. ‘Here, I noticed you were running low
so I picked some up.’
With the flat of one hand, I sweep the spilt tea leaves into the
cupped palm of the other. It’s gone everywhere, but I’m glad
of the distraction. It’s something to focus on, something other
than the horrible clogged sensation at the back of my throat.
The one I always get when she does something kind.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
Hilary. It comes from the Latin hilarus, which means ‘cheerful’.
Mum said she and Dad chose it from the Pan Book of Girls’
Names. They opened that treasure trove of possibilities and
stuck a pin on a page to give them the title of my life. I’m assum-
ing, of course, that if the pin had impaled itself on Beryl or
Mildred, they might have tried again. But Mum liked the name Hilary. ‘As a baby, you had a very sunny disposition,’ she once
told me, a wistful look in her eyes.
I’ve since worked out that I was born on a Wednesday, so
what chance did I have? Woe is my default. Anyway, Hilary
sounds like something out of the 50s. Head girl at a posh
boarding school in Surrey. Captain of the hockey team. All-
round jolly good sport. By George, Hillers, you are a good egg!
‘Astrid’ was the perfect antidote to all that, the antithesis of
everything I was running away from. It’s a rebellious, rock- and-
roll kind of name that carries a hint of the stars, a wildness.
There was Astrid Kirchherr, the woman who photographed The
Beatles in Hamburg, and Astrid Proll, an early member of the
Baader– Meinhof gang. Then there’s Astrid Lindgren, author of
the super- strong and thrillingly outrageous Pippi Longstocking
stories. The list goes on. Queens and princesses. Sculptors and
shot- putters. Skiers and porn stars. Troubled fictional protago-
nists. The name means ‘divine strength’.
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WHO DID YOU TELL?
Changing my name changed me. It made me visible. Gave
me the balls to get wrecked with the bad girls on Peckham
Common. To suck Danny Harrison’s cock in a mausoleum in
Nunhead Cemetery. To get my nose pierced and a tattoo of a
flame snaking up my inner thigh. Sunny disposition, my arse.
The tide is way out this morning, beyond the metal markers,
and it’s warm enough to believe that summer’s on its way. I
take my trainers off and walk barefoot on the flat, wet sand,
dangling them by the laces. I’ve counted five small jellyfish,
like transparent fried eggs, before I see the guy in the wetsuit
clambering over the slimy spit of algae- covered rock. The same
guy I’ve seen swimming from here for the last two weeks. The
one who’s nodded at me and said hello a couple of times. It’s
what people do in Flinstead. For someone who’s spent most of
their life in London, it takes a bit of getting used to.
‘There’s a whole ecosystem right here,’ he says, as if we’re in
the middle of a conversation. ‘Sea squirts, limpets, barnacles.
An- en- om- es too.’ His teeth flash white against his tanned face.
‘I have to really concentrate to say that,’ he says.
My laugh peals out before I can rein it in. Too loud. Too
eager. Shut up, Astrid.
He jumps on to the sand. Pale, blond hairs curl at his ankles,
where the legs of his wetsuit end, but they don’t extend to the
tops of his feet, which are smooth and golden brown with
evenly spaced toes.
‘Are you local?’ he says.
I hesitate. ‘Not really – well, kind of. For now, anyway.’
We’re walking towards the sea, squelching through shallow
pools left by the retreating tide. ‘I’m between jobs at the
moment,’ he says.
‘Me too. I’m keeping an eye on my mum.’ A gull screeches
overhead – a harsh, mocking sound. ‘She’s . . . a bit depressed.’
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LESLEY K AR A
Guilt snakes through me. I can hardly tell him the truth.
Someone like him – so healthy, so wholesome – he’d run a mile.
And I don’t want him to. Not yet.
We’ve reached the water’s edge.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘If you fancy a coffee sometime . . .’
‘Yeah, sure.’ It’s just his way of ending the conversation. If he
meant it, he’d suggest a time. A place.
He turns away and strides into the water. I don’t know
whether I’m disappointed or relieved. Relieved, I think. The
last thing I need is the complication of a new relationship.
‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow all right for you?’ he calls over his
shoulder. ‘In the Fisherman’s Shack on Flinstead Road?’
Nervous laughter bubbles up at the back of my throat. I feel
sick. ‘Okay. See you then.’
I watch as he commits his body to the cold and pushes off
into a front crawl. It’s remarkable, the distance he’s already cov-
ered, the relentless rhythm of his strokes. It takes courage to
head straight for the horizon. I nearly drowned once, doing
that. Got caught in a rip current. I screw my eyes shut and clench
my knuckles, trying to block out the memory of my panic, the
sour burn of seawater at the back of my nose and throat.
And that’s when it happens. The unmistakable scent of Simon’s
aftershave in my nostrils. Just like last night. My eyes snap open
but, by the time I’ve registered it, it’s gone, carried away by the
breeze. I twist my head over my shoulder, bracing myself for what
I might see: the old donkey jacket, the faded jeans, the rage in his eyes. But apart from a smattering of early- morning dog- walkers and a jogger with earplugs, there’s no one else about. No one