After all, I had no other plans.
And maybe, after a day or two, I could start to think again about Aaron – find some way to make clear to him that no matter how upset he was about Peter he didn’t have to send me away. I was there for him, for ever and always.
I loved him.
I would find my way back to him. Somehow.
* * *
Rosie lived in number 137, and when she threw open the door and saw me standing dishevelled and wan on her doorstep (I must have knocked on twenty doors before finding the right one) she squealed and embraced me tightly.
‘We’ve all been so worried about you!’ she said, squeezing my arms. ‘And who’s this?’
Wolf stood behind me, smoking a tiny roll-up and holding his rucksack and the large black case he’d brought from Morningstar.
I’d asked him in the car: ‘Is that Aaron’s video camera?’
‘What do you think?’ The others were gone, and he seemed to have relaxed into a complacent cheerfulness.
‘You stole that.’
‘Not at all.’ His eyes glittered in malicious amusement. ‘I took it in lieu of my wages.’
I could think of nothing to reply.
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ I told Rosie. ‘From … the house.’
When I’d asked Wolf in the car where he would go, he had simply shrugged. Somehow, and with me not quite understanding the mechanics of it, he had followed me out of the car, so that now I’d be asking Rosie to put him up, too.
I could not bear to object. With Wolf gone, even though he had been a peripheral and cynical member, my last link to Aaron and Morningstar would be gone, too.
Rosie nodded. ‘Welcome,’ she said, opening wide the door and letting us both in. ‘Come on in.’
* * *
Rosie’s comfortable little flat was perched jauntily atop a betting shop and next door to a curry house. Delicious smells frequently wafted in through the open window on to the street, though I was too heartsick to eat.
My first surprise was waiting at the kitchen table.
‘Hello, gorgeous!’ It was Piers, ebullient as always, sitting in a Sisters of Mercy T-shirt with a can of bitter in his hand, a pile of books and notes in front of him. His hair had been cut short, shaved in fact.
He leapt up and seized me, swinging me around the room, and in the centre of my misery I felt a little flare of joy at seeing him.
‘Piers! What are you doing here?’
‘I live here. Me and Rosamund – we’re an item now.’ He moved next to Rosie and put his arm shyly around her. ‘I only moved in at the weekend. Strange days, eh?’ His gaze lighted on Wolf. ‘Hiya, mate, I’m Piers.’
‘Wolf,’ replied the same coolly, though he took Piers’s proffered hand and shook it.
‘So what happened?’ asked Piers as we sat down at the table and Rosie put the kettle on, Piers taking his books and dumping them to the side.
‘Is this a visit?’ asked Rosie, and there was something almost nervous about the question. ‘Or have you …’
‘We left,’ said Wolf. ‘Some daft twat was messing about with a gun while he was pissed and shot his own head off, and after that our buzz was kind of harshed.’ He shrugged. ‘It was getting old anyway.’
The other two were silent. I felt I ought to add something, to clarify, as this explanation seemed to have stunned our hosts.
I opened my mouth. ‘I—’
‘So we caught a lift down as far as Cambridge,’ said Wolf, as though I hadn’t spoken. ‘D’you two fancy a spliff?’
* * *
Wolf and I slept in the tiny crowded living room, in the midst of Rosie and Piers’s shared jumble of books. I took the couch and lay there, staring at the glow-in-the-dark plastic solar system that had been glued to the ceiling.
Nearby, Wolf snored gently on the floor, supported by a couple of sofa cushions. It had been a difficult evening. Piers had clearly found Wolf intimidating, but had tried to warm to him. Somehow, though, Wolf had sensed Piers’s unease, and wanted to capitalize on it, talking to him with a kind of patronizing familiarity, only asking if he could smoke or use the loo while he was in the process of getting up or doing these things.
Rosie he barely acknowledged, treating her like one of the Morningstar girls, someone that brought glasses and food and provided colour while the men talked.
Rosie had grown chilly, and seemed unlikely to thaw towards him.
My thoughts were lost in a maze, like the yew maze at Morningstar. Sometimes Aaron was before me, and his eyes were vast and tragic. I had betrayed him. We had failed. We had been too full of negative energy and brought death into the house.
But sometimes my memories of Morningstar scalded me into shame, as though I was being doused from a boiling kettle – he used you, he used you like a thing, and when the going got tough, he threw you away like a rag!
At other times I thought of Detective Inspector Derek Holmes in his darts’ league tie and Hitler moustache, and my heart nearly stopped beating in fright.
* * *
For the first few days, I lived in terror of a knock at Rosie and Piers’s door, of the police wanting to take me in for questioning. After all, what would happen if they wanted statements about Peter’s death and they couldn’t find us? Wouldn’t we look guilty? Perhaps we should go back to Morningstar, point this out to Penelope or Lucy, who could perhaps reason with Aaron.
I mentioned this to Wolf one morning, after Rosie and Piers had gone out.
He shook his head at me. ‘I took care of it. I went to the police station yesterday. I’m not stupid.’
‘I just thought that if we told Penelope or Lucy …’
‘What? What could they do?’
My mouth was dry and I swallowed. ‘They could talk to Aaron.’
His brows beetled together and then a light seemed to come on. ‘Oh, you think those two are still there. At Morningstar.’
‘What do you mean?’
He let out a bitter little laugh. ‘You think he chucked the rest of us out and let them stay? Really?’
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Nina, the minute he got them to do his dirty work for him, he’d have showed them both the door.’ Wolf was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of instant coffee. His constant chain-smoking was starting to get on Rosie’s nerves, I could tell, and there was obvious tension between him and Piers. It was hard to discuss it with them, though, as I never seemed to be alone with Rosie. Wolf was always there.
And now the story of our time at Morningstar had become Wolf’s narrative of it – the careless account of Peter’s accidental death, the tawdry failure of the whole experiment, everyone’s gullibility and stupidity.
Everyone’s except Wolf’s.
‘You think he threw them out as well?’ I asked. I found this nearly impossible to imagine.
A bark of harsh laughter. ‘Petal, I know he did.’ He lifted his mug and slurped. ‘He wouldn’t have thought twice about it. He just needed them to get you lot out first. Divide and conquer.’
‘How do you know that?’
Wolf grinned. ‘You should have heard him talk, the minute you girls and Tristan weren’t in the room.’ His voice dropped a register as he mimicked Aaron’s hoarse murmur. ‘I think it’s not working because the other guys are wrong, man. They’re all so weak and negative, man, I need to get rid of them all and start again, but you’d stay on, right, Wolf? I’d still need a cameraman.’ He rolled his eyes contemptuously. ‘Man.’
I simply stared.
‘I don’t …’
‘Why are you surprised? He was a selfish, narcissistic dick.’
‘Well,’ I said, feeling a sudden rush of protective rage, ‘if he was that terrible, why did you stay with him for so long?’
And then a peculiar thing happened. Something bleak and unguarded flitted across his face. ‘I had my reasons.’
Silence fell, and he was looking at me, his usual aura of defensive cynici
sm gone, and I realized that I absolutely could not listen to what was going to come next. I needed him. I couldn’t do this post-Morningstar world alone, and I could not afford to be boxed into a corner with him that would require a single unambiguous answer.
‘I’m going out,’ I said. ‘I need a walk. I need to think.’
‘I’ll come with you—’
‘No, I’m going on my own. I need to be on my own.’ There was a rising hitch of hysteria in my voice. ‘I’m never on my own!’
‘You’re fucking off back to Morningstar, aren’t you?’ he sneered. At that moment he’d never looked more like his namesake, as if the very hackles on the back of his neck were standing up. I thought he might snarl.
I thought he might bite.
‘No.’ I snatched my coat with quick, trembling fingers. ‘I’ll be back at lunchtime. I just need to get out.’
* * *
‘You’ve got a problem there.’ Rosie rested her hand on her chin, let her pale eyes settle on me.
‘What do you mean?’
I hadn’t gone back to the flat at lunchtime. I’d spent three hours in the canteen in the Institute of Astronomy, drinking endless cups of tea with Rosie, as earnest young men and women in jumpers and jeans with their arms full of notes and books had come and gone.
At first I’d felt horribly guilty. I was taking up Rosie’s hospitality and privacy at home, and now I was hunting her down at the institute.
But I had to talk to somebody.
I’d composed the apology I was going to give Rosie for disturbing her studies, for taking up her flat, for never replying to her letter while at Morningstar, when she saw me, checked that I was alone, and then jumped up and hugged me, as though she’d been here waiting for me all along.
‘Let’s get a cuppa,’ she’d said.
I’d talked for hours, my voice hoarse and buzzy, my eyes pink with tears. I’d talked about Aaron, about Morningstar, about how much I missed him and it, about how I knew I was a fool but I could see no other life.
Rosie had merely nodded and listened, for once without judging.
‘You’ve got a problem in Wolf.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ But I did.
‘You do.’ Rosie offered me a look over the top of her glasses. Her hair, now dyed black, was pulled back tightly on top of her head and tied with a scrap of lace. Her denim jacket bore the badges of bands I’d never heard of – who were Fields of the Nephilim? ‘He thinks you’re together, it’s just that you don’t know it yet. This is why he’s so weird and undermining with Piers, cos he thinks Piers is after you.’ Rosie rolled her eyes and took a sip of her tea. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?’
‘I can’t see past this inquest.’
‘That could be months away. And here’s the thing, Nina – if the police thought you were involved somehow, you’d have heard from them by now.’
‘I don’t …’
‘It was really sad what happened to this Peter, but if you’re not involved, then what is there to worry about?’
‘Oh, I don’t …’
‘See, Piers and I were talking to your tutor. At St Edith’s.’
I froze. ‘You talked to Dr Eddingley about me?’
Rosie sighed. ‘I know it sounds interfering. But I feel terrible about what happened. I knew Aaron Kessler was bad news when we met him, but I didn’t want to seem like the uncool girl, the one who made a scene, and Piers was enchanted with him, and well, I could have handled it all a lot better.’ She sniffed, with a little toss of her head. ‘Basically, I thought about myself first. So.’
‘Rosie, you’re not to blame for my mistakes.’ I was humbled. ‘None of this is your fault.’
She shrugged this away. ‘Well, anyway, we spoke to your tutor.’
I simply stared.
‘And he reckoned that you’d only missed a term, so if you made a submission and explained that you were having, shall we say, emotional problems, they might let you restart the year in October. You haven’t officially been sent down yet.’
I didn’t know what to say. I’d despaired of ever returning to university after the casual way in which I’d left it. I wasn’t prepared for the sudden breathless squeezing of hope within my breast.
‘Rosie, that’s so lovely of you to think of me, but even if they took me back, how would I live till then?’
‘You could get a job. They’re always looking around here. The tourist season will start in a couple of months anyway. You could wait on tables, or pull pints, or sell punt tours in the streets. You could even sign on.’
I considered this for a long moment. ‘But how would that pay for my rent, my grants? I can’t ask my parents for anything. I think Daddy might wring my neck if he ever saw me again.’
‘Firstly, I don’t think that’s true, and secondly, you will always be welcome to stay at the flat, and for as long as you need to.’
Rosie looked away. There was a long second of silence. There had been no doubting that very definite, singular you.
‘And Wolf?’
Rosie raised her shoulders in a shrug. ‘I hate to turn anybody out, but you said it yourself. He’s like this bitter, angry, chain-smoking shadow. He constantly follows you around, speaks for you, tries to control where you go and what you do. He’s got money for tobacco, but he’s never offered us a penny towards his keep—’
‘I haven’t offered you anything,’ I said, mortified.
‘That’s different, Nina. You’re our friend – what we have is yours. But we don’t know anything about this guy, except that he was involved with Aaron Kessler somehow. And to be blunt about it, neither do you.’
I fidgeted at this. Yes, Wolf was annoying to Rosie and Piers, I could see that. But he was the only other person I had access to that understood the Morningstar experience.
To let that go would be like letting Aaron go.
I said as much.
Rosie looked quickly over each shoulder, as if to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, then she leaned forward and whispered, stabbing the table with her finger, ‘Nina, you were a harem girl for that man. You were a slave – someone to be used and lent out when necessary. They locked you in a barn overnight where you nearly froze to death for disobedience.
‘They have got so thoroughly and completely into your head that instead of wanting to call the police, you wait by the phone every day hoping you’ll get called back there. They’re a mind-control cult, Nina.’
‘But … you don’t understand …’
‘No, I don’t understand. I wasn’t there. But I think you have been through a terrible experience and you are vulnerable; so, so vulnerable.’
She grabbed my wrist gently. ‘And listen. This is what this Wolf character sees in you. This is why he doesn’t like us, because we want you to get better, to be free and happy and in charge of yourself again. He wants you to stay this way because then he has a chance of keeping you.’
She let me go.
‘Just make sure you don’t sleep with him.’ She reached over and grabbed my cup. ‘With a fella like that, you’ll never be rid.’ She shook it. ‘Another one for the road, missus?’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tearing up the motorway, the third notebook and contents fresh in my mind, I was nearly killed three times on the journey home from Morningstar. I pulled out in front of lorries and changed lanes on the motorway without looking, angry cars honking at me.
It was very hard to concentrate on anything that wasn’t happening inside my own head.
I’d only had time to read the first dozen or so pages, but I was already running very late – I had to go home and get my dad settled.
I would read the rest tonight, once he was in bed and I was back in my little room upstairs, where there was no danger of him finding this document and asking me questions about it.
I shook my head, trying to dispel the thousand crowding thoughts surrounding me and focus on the road.
&n
bsp; Aaron Kessler couldn’t be my father. That was obscene, ridiculous – Jesus, I’d been actually kind of attracted to him. The memory made me shiver, as though filthy things had fallen down the front of my dress and I needed a long shower and a scrubbing brush to be rid of them.
But another part of me knew there was nothing ridiculous about it. My conception was suspiciously close to the time my mum left the order. My dad must have come later and taken me on as well, without knowing the full story, and together they had resolved never to mention the matter of my parentage to me.
You can see why they might have thought that was for the best.
Or maybe, I thought, with a growing sick feeling, she had passed me off to my dad as his. My mum hated confrontation and was a hardened procrastinator. Knowing her, it was entirely possible she had just neglected to mention Aaron and his role in my conception for over a quarter of a century.
I didn’t know how I felt about all this. I was furious that she hadn’t told me, yet knowing didn’t make me any happier either.
I wasn’t going to worry about it now, though. I was going to Eden Gardens to see Dad and make him the cauliflower curry I had planned. We would have a quiet night in together. I wouldn’t mention visiting the man who might have fathered me, instead I’d take on my mother’s job of making him cups of tea and listening to him grumble about immigrants and the government.
We would get through this.
Dammit, I thought, with an angry shake of my head. I’d forgotten to ask that bastard Aaron about Peter Clay, or Wolf.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would think about all this.
Tomorrow was another day.
* * *
I pulled up at the gates of Eden Gardens, heartsick and exhausted, only to find them closed and padlocked.
A homemade sign on a square piece of plywood read CLOSeD UNTiL FURTHeR NOTiCe. I recognized my dad’s peculiar typography. Normally my mum wrote the signs.
It was only four o’clock in the afternoon.
I got out and unlocked the gates, wondering what all of this meant, and deciding nothing good.
* * *
Everything Is Lies Page 31