by Ryan Casey
Ashley kept still. Kept focus on Grace, her white dressing gown barely covering her.
“What are you doing, hun? What are you—”
“I remember,” Grace said. Her eyes were wide. Wide, but faded. They looked through Ashley, like she was drunk and couldn’t quite focus.
“Remember what?” Ashley said. He thought about taking a few steps into the sunlit kitchen, but seeing Grace looking so distant with the knife in her hands, smelling the musty dust that the knife had kicked up…it scared him. Made his heart race. He wasn’t sure what to do other than stand here and wait for her to reply.
Grace looked down at the knife. She looked around at the lines she’d etched into the kitchen floor, the focus returning to her eyes.
“Grace, what is—”
“I remember the last thing I saw,” Grace said, turning back to Ashley and staring him in the eyes this time. “The last thing I saw before I blacked out.”
Ashley gulped. He loosened his shoulders. Smiled as well as he could to try and reassure Grace that he understood her and wasn’t fazed in the slightest. “What did you see, hun? What was it?”
Grace’s bottom lip quivered. Her eyes filled with tears. She tapped the tiled floor with the knife. Scraped it along the lines she’d drawn.
“This,” she said.
TWELVE
“Okay. That…that should just about cover it.”
Mr. Wisdom spread a loose piece of brown carpet over the cream tiles of the kitchen floor. He covered up the lines that Grace had etched. The lines that Grace insisted were the last thing she’d seen before she’d blacked out, descended into the sinkhole.
But what were they? What was she talking about?
Ashley had his arm around Grace’s shoulder. They were sat at the breakfast bar. Mr. Wisdom stood up and winced as he finished laying the makeshift brown carpet over the tiles. Sweat dripped down his red forehead, and even though he was in a suit—as ever—he looked like he’d run a marathon.
“I think it would be wise to have a conversation about what happened here,” Mr. Wisdom said. As he straightened up, sticking his knuckles into the bottom of his back, he looked right at Ashley. Ashley wasn’t sure whether he was simply asking him for a witness testimony or blaming him in some way.
Mrs. Wisdom leaned against the kitchen worktop. She spun a hot cup of tea around in her hands over and over again, tapping her foot on an area where the tiles were still exposed. “Harold, we don’t have to—”
“We do, Marion,” Mr. Wisdom said. He turned his gaze from Ashley to Grace. “Grace, what happened here? You need to be open and upfront with us. Anything that could help.”
Grace shook her head. Ashley could feel the warmth coming off her. He could feel it, but as he held his arm around her, he felt cold. Rigid. He’d seen the look in her eyes as she etched those lines into those tiles. That vacant look.
“I remember the last thing I saw before I blacked out.”
“Your dad’s only—only looking out for you,” Mrs. Wisdom said. She tried to smile, but this was shaky, as she spun the tea around and around like a hot potato.
“I don’t know what happened,” Grace said. Her voice was wobbly. Defensive, either like a kid who had been told off for something they hadn’t done, or a kid that was trying their best to believe they hadn’t done anything. Ashley couldn’t work out which, and yet it was so important. “I…I just remember waking up, coming in here to make breakfast, then Ashley standing there with this—this bad look on his face. I swear that’s all I remember.”
Mr. Wisdom, still a plum shade of red, sighed. Ashley could smell Mr. Wisdom’s over-application of aftershave as he placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. He looked her in the eye. “You should take a lie-down while we talk about the next step.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Ashley asked. It kind of spurted out of his mouth, leaving him with a nasty taste in the back of his throat.
Grace peered at him with her blue eyes. So too did Mr. Wisdom, and Mrs. Wisdom for that matter.
Ashley felt his cheeks burning. He looked to the ground. Took a deep breath. “I just…I just mean with what happened. Finding Grace the way she was…finding you the way you were. I just want to—to make sure you’re safe.”
“Ashley, I’d just be going for a lie-down,” Grace said. Her voice sounded irritable. Tired, as if she hadn’t just had a full night’s sleep. “I can have a lie-down.”
As Ashley stared his girlfriend in her eyes—eyes that were once so familiar—he wasn’t sure whether he believed her. He thought of the scales on her back. The way she’d told him he’d “understand.” And then the etchings on the tiled kitchen floor. What was stopping her from going one step further with that knife and etching patterns into her wrists?
No. This is Grace. She wouldn’t do that. Nothing of the sort.
“Perhaps you’re right, Ashley.”
Ashley didn’t recognise the voice—or rather, the combination of those words and that voice—initially, but as he turned around, he saw Mr. Wisdom was nodding.
Grace turned and glared at her dad. “What do you mean—”
“We need to speak to someone. Seek outside help.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Harold,” Mrs. Wisdom started, laying down her tea on the marble worktop heavily so it rung through the kitchen like an explosion. “She’s stressed. She’s been through hell. She’s bound to—”
“Which is why we should seek professional help. None of us have the slightest clue how to handle situations like this.”
“Situations?” Grace said, anger and frustration in her voice. “I’m a person, Dad. Speak to me like I’m here.”
“Except you shouldn’t be here!” Mr. Wisdom shouted.
The kitchen went silent. Mr. Wisdom’s words seemed to echo around the room, though, circling Ashley’s—everyone’s—heads, refusing to quieten down. Ashley listened to the clock ticking in the background. Felt the warmth of the spring sun creeping through the kitchen window and onto his skin, as he stood completely still. Mr. Wisdom gulped. Took a step away from his daughter, his eyes watery and bloodshot. He adjusted his silver tie. Fiddled with a section of his white shirt that had come untucked.
“We have to pull through this,” Ashley said. The words didn’t sound like his words, though. They sounded and felt alien. But he knew somebody had to break this awful silence, and he figured it might as well be him. “We…All of us. And I mean all of us. We’ve…we’ve been through so much this last year. And then so much this last twenty-four hours. An unimaginable amount of—of pain and…” He looked at Grace’s tearful eyes. “Well, we don’t know what we’ve each been through.
“But what we do need to do is stick together. Be patient. Grace…you’ve been away for so long. We can’t imagine what might have happened. We can’t…we can’t even begin to understand because we—we did our grieving last year. And that’s going to take a long time to fix. But—but we have to be patient with you. We get that. We have to understand.”
Ashley stopped talking, mostly because his throat had tightened to the point of not allowing him to say any more. His pulse raced. He could smell his own greasy sweat on his skin, taste that salty tang that he always got in his mouth whenever he was forced to speak in public. He looked around at Mr. Wisdom, Mrs. Wisdom, and Grace. He looked at them and…Shit. They actually weren’t contesting anything he’d said. They were actually smiling—or in Mr. Wisdom’s case, just staying silent.
“I want to understand,” Ashley said. He looked right at Grace again. Rubbed his hand up and down her fluffy white dressing gown. He remembered the scales he’d felt on her back. Maybe he had just been imagining those. But then did that explain the etching on the floor? Maybe that had a logical explanation too. A result of the stress. “But I’m prepared to wait to understand. We all are.”
>
Grace smiled a shaky smile. She leaned towards Ashley and, with her sweet-smelling breath, whispered in his ear, “You will understand soon. You all will. Promise.”
She kissed him on his stubbly cheek then pulled away, offering another small smile.
You will understand soon. You all will. Promise.
Before Ashley could question these words or even offer anything else to say, the door at the left-hand side of the kitchen rattled open.
Ashley looked over. Fuck. Maybe it was the press. Maybe they’d found a way in. Bastards. Privacy-disrespecting bastards.
Except it wasn’t the press who came through that door. It was Steve, Grace’s brother. Only he was wearing his full black police uniform. And he’d brought along two similarly dressed friends.
“Steve,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “What—what you doing here—”
“We’ve come for that chat,” Steve said. He looked over towards Ashley and Grace. The small, dark-haired female officer with a mole underneath her bottom lip and the chubby bald officer also looked in their directions, something representing a grin on their faces.
“Steven,” Mr. Wisdom started, “the interview isn’t until Friday. It’s only Wednesday. You need to allow your sister some space—”
“I’m not here for a chat with Grace,” Steve said, smiling in his sister’s direction from under his thickening black beard.
Then, his eyes turned to Ashley. Fixed squarely on Ashley.
Ashley’s muscles tightened. His mouth went dry. He felt the eyes of the room on him. The coldness of everyone’s gaze.
“I’m here for a chat with you, Ashley. Except I’d greatly appreciate it if you popped down to the station with us. I think it’s about time we were open and honest about a couple of things, don’t you?”
THIRTEEN
Ashley sat in a grey plastic chair that dug right into his backside. He was in a room at the police station similar to the one he’d been in when he’d reunited with Grace, except this one was only two doors down and there were a few slight differences he noticed—there were silver blinds on both sides of the room, and the table was larger.
But the main difference was that he was sat at a table with two officers opposite him. One of those officers was his brother-in-law (in all but marriage). A black rectangular tape recorder sat on the left of the table.
This time, Ashley was the focus, not Grace.
“Mr. Chester, I’m assuming I don’t have to explain why we’ve brought you in this morning.”
Steve spoke to Ashley like he’d never met him. He looked at him with distance, too, just like he looked at all the other “piece-of-shit” criminals he interviewed. But that was okay. He was allowed that. If he wanted to be spiteful during his sister’s return to reality, that was his choice. He had nothing on Ashley. Nothing.
Ashley cleared his throat. Shrugged. “Not really. I’m guessing it’s something to do with Grace though. Your sister—”
“Right you are,” Steve said. He let out a little laugh. As he did, his stinky, putrid breath clouded across the table. He smelled like he’d been eating ass. Even the officer with the mole beneath her lip beside him cringed, Ashley could’ve sworn.
“Your sister who you haven’t even been back to see,” Ashley said, heating up inside. This piece of shit. His sister was confirmed alive and all he cared about was trying to pin something on somebody.
Steve’s stare narrowed. The momentary smile dropped from his face. “I have my reasons for not visiting. And one of the main reasons is to do with you, Ash…Mr. Chester.” He slapped down a few slightly crumpled pieces of paper filled with text onto the table. Spread them out neatly, making sure they were completely aligned with one another.
“Not one other person besides you witnessed my sister…witnessed Grace Wisdom falling down the third sinkhole on April 20th 2013. Not a single person. What do you say to that?”
Ashley scratched at his arms, which were tingling with a combination of his lack of shower in around two days, as well as the awkwardness of this situation. “I’d say it’s strange that you’ve decided to bring that up today. And I’d say it’s probably pretty likely that most witnesses were worried about running for their lives than playing spot-the-car.”
The female officer beside Steve grinned at this, her brown eyes turning down to the table. Steve’s forehead blushed.
“Why don’t you come and visit her?” Ashley asked. “See her for yourself. Speak to her properly. Instead of trying to—”
“You received a sum in the region of six thousand pounds in the months following Gra…my sister’s disappearance, did you not?”
Ashley tutted. He turned his eyes up to the grey-painted ceiling, peered into the bright white light of the bulb dangling down from above. “Yes. You’re right. As did everybody involved.”
“That just smells a little bit to me, Mr. Chester. You being the only one to see Grace go…receiving that money. And then her turning up nearly a year later completely unharmed. Just doesn’t sit right.”
Ashley couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He actually laughed, it was that ridiculous a hypothesis. “So, what? I set up my girlfriend’s disappearance to get a bit of cash for myself. Or maybe I did it to get a bit of cash for us both. Pretended she was dead for a year, then what? Just let her turn up again? Walk around and expect no questions to be asked?”
Steve shrugged. He curled the corner of one of the pages in front of him. “You tell me.”
A sour taste lingered in Ashley’s mouth. He leaned over the table and stared Steve right in the eyes, his head spinning, his hands tensed. “I will tell you something. And you’d better listen carefully. I love your sister. I loved her, and then I lost her. We all lost her, Steve. And I don’t care what the fuck you say or how the fuck you act, but I know you give a shit that she’s back. I know you can’t understand it either. And maybe that’s why you’ve got me sat here. That’s your way of dealing with your realisation that your sister is back. That she’s—she’s alive, and she has no right to be. But I know what I saw that day last April. And if you’d take a fucking minute out of your day job to speak to your sister, you’d realise too that she’s…”
Ashley was about to say something along the lines of, “that she’s different.” Or that “something had changed” about Grace. Because he had definitely seen change in her. The scales—real or imagined. Obviously imagined, but just so…so not right. And then the etching on the kitchen floor. The last thing she’d seen before the blackout. There was something very irrational about Grace’s return. To even acknowledge that she had returned made Ashley churn up inside whenever he considered it.
But she was back. Something had changed in her, but she was back. And that was the most important thing in his mind.
Steve tried to hold eye contact with Ashley but his face was completely flushed. The curling of the papers in front of him had progressed to full-blown tearing of little edges, rolling them up in his hand. His eyes were heavy and tearful. Ashley could see that desire to understand behind them. That desire to understand in his own way.
“Come to see her when you finish work,” Ashley said, a little more in control of his voice this time. “I know she’d like it. And I don’t give a shit what happened between you two before she…before she went away. It’s a new start now. A new opportunity.”
Steve looked at Ashley again. Sniffed back some tears. The officer beside him raised her forehead and rubbed her hands together, clearly uncomfortable about being placed in such an abnormal situation.
Ashley rose to his feet slowly. His knees were weak as jelly. He looked at Steve, and then at the other officer, and at Steve again. “Can I go?” he asked.
Steve didn’t respond, but the other officer simply nodded her head once. Clearly they hadn’t even had the authority to hold this “interview” in the first place.
Ashley bit his lip. Took a deep breath of the fresh-smellin
g interview room and made for the windowless grey door in the far right corner of the room.
“I’ll find something,” Steve said, as Ashley lowered the handle of the door. “I don’t…I don’t know what yet, but I’ll find something.”
Ashley opened up the door and allowed the chatter of the corridor to surround him. “Good luck,” he said.
In a strange way, Ashley kind of hoped Steve did find a rational explanation for everything.
But he was doubting it more and more by the minute.
FOURTEEN
Ashley decided to take a walk back through town from the police station and towards his flat. It was only a fifteen-minute walk and he needed the fresh air. He could catch a bus from the bus stop opposite his morning regular—the one he’d sat in when Grace had fallen. Grab a few clothes from his flat, perhaps. He wasn’t getting a ride back from Steve, so walking seemed like the most reasonable option.
Besides, there was something he wanted to take a look at.
He took in deep lungfuls of car-fume-reeking air as he made his way towards the memorial roundabout, covered with daffodils, tulips—shit, he didn’t really “do” flowers, but they all looked like pretty enough flowers to him. He stared at the roundabout as he walked down the pavement, still feeling greasy, still so desperate for a shower and to brush his furry teeth. Cars spun around the roundabout, drivers barely looking at it. There were a few cameras across the road, though. Journalists obviously putting together pieces in their own stories about Grace Wisdom’s return. To be expected, really. It was headline news, and it was bizarre news even to Ashley, to say the least.
Ashley looked around at the roundabout. Looked at the rows of shops to the left-hand side. The mechanic’s. The car model shop. He just wanted to see something. Anything. Any kind of clue that might link back to those lines Grace had etched on the kitchen floor. The last thing she’d seen before she blacked out. Ashley wanted to believe there was a rational explanation for those lines. A legitimate final potential thing that had scarred and ingrained itself on her memory, constantly reminding her of her fall.