The Alibi Girl

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘All done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to give me your contact details in case any of the families want to get in touch with you and thank you?’

  ‘Uh, no, I don’t think so,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, okay.’ He lingers in the hallway. ‘Well if you find The Duchess give me a bell.’ He fumbles in his jacket pocket for a business card and hands it over to me.

  ‘Sean Lowland, RSPCA Inspector,’ I read. And there’s a number.

  ‘That’s my mobile so I can come and get her when she turns up.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,’ he says.

  Something about his eyes. Something in them beckons me to tell the truth. And so I do. ‘My name is Ellis. Ellis Clementine Kemp.’

  His face lights up. ‘Wow, what a great name.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I blush.

  ‘Okay, I better go now. Thanks again for looking after the cats so well. I hope The Duchess turns up soon.’

  ‘Me too.’ The blush deepens, red hot. I hope he can’t see it. ‘Thank you.’

  He blushes too for that matter. I’m expecting it to be awkward and it is for a short moment but then we’re both smiling. He hands me a couple of leaflets. One says ‘Thanks for being a Friend to Pets’ and has a detachable sticker on it of a dog giving a thumbs up. Another is all about Adopting a Pet.

  ‘You should think about adopting The Duchess properly, if nobody claims her. I’ve recently adopted a dog myself, actually.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yes, a Jack Russell called Arthur. He’s a proper scamp. Comes out in the van with me sometimes. He’s not with me today though. He’s having his you-know-whats off, poor little man.’

  ‘Ahh.’

  ‘No, it’s good for him. It’ll calm him down a bit and keep him healthy for as long as possible. I’m going to take him to socialisation classes when he’s better. Well, best be off. Thanks again, Ellis.’

  I like hearing my name in his mouth. And I realise then that I don’t want him to go. Because when he goes, I’ll have to take Step 2 on the checklist:

  Prepare your method of suicide.

  I don’t want to do it now. I want to talk to Sean. I want to know more about him.

  But he’s down the steps before I can say anything else. He turns to me when he’s back at the van and says, ‘I’ll be in the Smuggler’s tonight on Cook Street, if you fancy a drink? Around seven-ish?’

  ‘Okay,’ I call back.

  What does that mean? Does he want me to meet him? Even after knowing that I’m a weird woman who steals cats and pretends she has a new-born baby? He’s gone before I can say anything else. How could a guy like Sean possibly be interested in a girl like me?

  If he does want me, it won’t last long. Relationships are based on trust and I’ll have to tell him about all the lies I’ve told and then he’ll run for the hills. Or he’ll kiss me like Kaden did and he’ll find out what a terrible kisser I am and then he’ll back away from me, giving me the same look. Or he’ll use the same excuse: It’s unprofessional. You’re a client. When what he really means is You’re a pathetic, lying freak and you disgust me. I deserve to be on my own.

  The stupid thing about the suicide website is that it gives you all these warnings about hurting yourself. Talk to somebody first. Get it out of your head. Before you take the final step, have a final meal. And during your final meal, you can make your preparations: the How, the Why and the Where.

  But I don’t know anybody. And I’m not hungry.

  I think about Sean and how it could be. But I am sick of thinking of how things could be. Unicorns don’t exist. And neither does me and him together. Me and anyone. Grow up. There’s nothing else to do. It’s all too hard.

  And so to the How – I have a choice of gunshot (no gun), hanging (no rope, and I can’t find my dressing gown cord), a plastic bag over my head (too sweaty), drugs (might be sick, and I hate being sick), carbon monoxide poisoning (no car), jumping off a high building (The Lalique’s only four floors high and if I’m going to do it, I want to be sure I’m not going to wake up in some hospital afterwards), jumping under a train (no, poor driver) and drowning.

  I look out at the churning sea. Well, I have plenty of water, that’s for sure.

  How do you drown yourself? I go to Google again.

  There’s two ways, apparently. You can drink yourself to death or you can load your pockets with heavy stones and throw yourself in an ‘expanse of water’. I could do it in my bath. Some people fall asleep in the bath. But I’m not tired. I could take sleeping tablets. Haven’t got any though. I’ll go out and get some.

  It’s early evening in town and the streets are full of loud people, ogres and trolls shouting and staring at me as I make my way through the streets, trying to go unnoticed. I pass the Smuggler’s Arms on Cook Street around 7.15 p.m. and I look in the window to see Sean sitting at a small round table by the fire, looking at a paper. I want to go in and sit with him. He invited me. He wanted me to come. Or was he just being nice? He was just being nice. I shouldn’t disturb him.

  And so I go home. By the time I get back to the flat, I am ready. I go into the bathroom and run myself a hot bath, using the last of the bath foam and a bath bomb I bought ages ago at Mr Zhang’s shop. ‘Moon and Stars’ it’s called. I was saving it for a special occasion. I place it under the running tap and it immediately spews a rich royal blue into the water and all these tiny gold stars flood out and float up to the surface. I reach into the pharmacy bag and pull out the boxes of sleeping pills. Then the Morrison’s bag, and two more boxes. Then the Tesco Metro bag, for the last two boxes. I didn’t know they won’t let you buy more than two boxes at a time in any shop.

  I call Scants. He doesn’t pick up but I don’t expect him to. I leave a message. ‘No bullshit and to the point,’ just how he likes things. I’m fuzzy enough to want this now. I hang the wedding dress on the bedroom door, smoothing out the feather skirt so I can admire it. It is the most beautiful dress in the world. I walk into the bathroom and disrobe, leaving my clothes where they land. I set my phone to Spotify, to the playlist of all the songs we used to listen to as kids: Alanis Morrissette, Madonna, Kylie – I place it on the stand on the window sill.

  I sink down beneath the warm water, allowing it to cover every part of me but my head. It warms me through, thaws my fingertips and toes. The little gold stars float and bob around me, over me, wrapping around me until I whisk off inside my head to another place. Home. The pub. Me and Foy making up a dance routine in the beer garden. Auntie Chelle clapping and whistling when we’re finished.

  I have my treasure bag, one of my mum’s old handbags that I found in Dad’s wardrobe. It’s full of the stuff I can’t be without: a bottle of pearlescent Tinkerbell nail varnish, a syringe from my Fisher Price medical kit, my fake diamond princess necklace, a tree decoration, shells, crayons, penny chews, obsolete coinage and a tiny Jeep I got from a Kinder egg. Me and Foy are in our dress-up bride’s dresses. We’ve absconded from our double wedding to the evil princes and we’re on the run.

  ‘Oh shitake mushrooms!’ I say. ‘Look at the time! We need to go to the shopping mall before it shuts and get the Jurassic Chum.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  We scamper down the ladder and race across the lawn to our bikes – if we don’t go now then the Mall will shut and all the animals will go hungry. The Mall, or skittle alley as it is widely known, is still open when we get there, thanks to our Lamborghini Countach and Ferrari Testarossa, so we sprint straight to Feathers and Fins, the pet shop, to get what we need: polar bear steaks, bamboo for the pandas, seed for the dodos, tins of Jurassic Chum and bananas for the gorillas.

  We didn’t play The Castle Game all the time. We also played The Den Game. The 20 Children Game. The Treehouse Game. The Marshmallow Factory Game (same as The Den Game except we work in a marshmallow factory) and The Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Game where we pretended we were tiny. But The Cas
tle Game is what I remember.

  We park up the supercars and scamper back up the ladder to our castle and get the sketch books out. We’re building extensions – having the blue whale enclosure made bigger and we’re adding a racing track so we can race the velociraptors.

  The castle is warm and stinks of fresh paint. We’ve put two flower pots in the window – a pansy and a crocus bulb that’ll come up in spring. The knights are all practising their jousting and taekwondo in the arena – both Thursday and Sunday Knight are top of the leader board. The sound of Foy’s felt tip pen colouring in blue soothes my worried mind. She doesn’t look out the window as much as I do, but I feel like I have to drink every second of this place up before it’s over again for another holiday. The sweeping grassland. The unicorns prancing and flicking their rainbow tails and manes. My lions sunning themselves beneath the oak tree. The T-Rex gobbling his Jurassic Chum inside his pen. If I’m quiet, I can hear the magic cows with the strawberry milk tearing and chomping the grass. Foy smooths over the feather skirt of her dress. I smooth over mine. We are the fairest in all the land.

  I hold my breath and sink underneath the water. It closes over my head. I open my eyes, see the blur of the dingy light-bulb on the ceiling. If I can calm myself. If I can float away like the stars and lose myself in sleep. But I’m running out of air. My body wants to stay down but my brain is screaming at me to slide up, come up, get up, breathe, fill your lungs, breathe. So I don’t move and I breathe in.

  I’m bolt upright and coughing my lungs out – the only witness to my attempt, if you can call it that, is the patch of mould in the corner. I want to try again, but I also don’t. It’s too shallow anyway. And I’m too aware of my own need to survive. I need to disengage. Perhaps I’ll take one pack of the pills for now. See if that does anything. Let me try again. Relax. Relax. I pop them out of their packets, one at a time, and line them up along the bath.

  I feel myself slip slowly beneath the water until my cold face is warm again. And I stay there. I’m safe. No one can hurt me. Not the strange man outside, or whoever killed Tessa Sharpe. The stars collect above my face. The water stills.

  But as I open my eyes, a shadow passes over me…

  24 Hours Later

  La Galerie de Lorraine de Courcy, Dijon, France

  16

  Foy

  Saturday, 2nd November (morning)

  Modern art makes me angry. All that unmade bed and upended urinal crap. My brother Paddy loves it and every chance he gets he drives into Dijon to this overpriced, pretentious gallery to look at the new installations. Today, I’m on full meltdown alert and he suggested I go with him to ‘get me out of the house’.

  ‘It’ll do you good, sis.’

  ‘Why on earth would I want to go there? You know I hate modern art.’

  ‘It’s not about the art. It’s about getting you out of your own head for a few hours. Come on, it’s free.’

  I knew it wouldn’t help. Nothing seems to. But a break from brick dust and piss-useless builders and rotten wood and over-expensive paint was on the cards and so I went. And as expected, I hated it. I knew from the second I was met by the snooty anorexic on the desk who handed me a map. The place stank like a crematorium.

  The first room was four walls of pictures of red. Nothing else on them. Same colour red. Just red.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I say. ‘Why is that even worth doing?’

  ‘It provokes a reaction, doesn’t it?’ Paddy laughs. ‘Anger. Maybe that’s it.’

  ‘I’m already angry,’ I spit. He sits there looking at it for ages, from all angles, taking it all in. In the next room, five chairs. One has a giant white egg on it.

  ‘Why is that art?’ I say. ‘An egg on a chair?’

  He wheels round to face me. ‘Doesn’t that say something to you? The pristine white egg and the battered old chair with one of its rungs missing?’

  ‘It says to me someone’s put an egg on a chair.’

  ‘It’s not put on the chair though, is it? It’s hanging above the chair. See the wire?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘So what does that say to you?’

  ‘Someone has hung an egg over a chair.’

  He rolls his eyes and wheels on into the adjoining room. A couple of old men smile down at him in that patronising way people do when they see a wheelchair user. I stare them both out and Paddy grabs my arm and drags me away. We pass an assortment of impossibly thin people in strange angular clothing, walking achingly slowly, pointing things out to their pointy-nosed companions in stunned silence.

  I want to shout IT’S ALL FUCKING CRAP. GET A LIFE. But I don’t. Because I wouldn’t. And because of Paddy. He likes it here. I’m here for him.

  But there’s this anxious gnawing in my chest I can’t ignore. It taints everything.

  His face lights up as we stand before the next piece. ‘How about this one then?’

  ‘Jars hanging from a tree,’ I say, arms folded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Empty jars hanging from a tree.’

  ‘Look at the tree trunk.’

  ‘Empty jars hanging from a tree which has a glass trunk but wooden branches. Well excuse me if I don’t roll over and shit Mars bars.’

  He sighs. ‘Do you want to go to the gift shop while I finish up in here?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous, Paddy. Doesn’t it anger you? You spent years at fine art college only for this bollocks to get its own gallery?’

  ‘I think it’s amazing.’

  ‘A vacuum cleaner stuck to the wall? A deflated balloon? A squirt of paint and an empty skip? That’s amazing?’

  ‘Yes. You’re not looking at it all properly. You’re not unpicking it.’

  ‘Oh I think I am. It’s crap. I’m sorry, I know this is your thing but…’ I stop beside a stick leaning against a wall. ‘This is art?’

  He laughs and wheels over to me. ‘It’s the representation of a life in crisis.’

  ‘No, it’s a stick leant against a wall.’

  The next exhibit is a sheet of blue silk going back and forth on the floor, pulled by a tiny train on a track. ‘What is that saying?’

  ‘What does it say to you?’

  ‘The sea. Pulled along by a tiny train.’

  ‘Well there you go.’

  ‘What do you mean, there you go? Why? And what about this?’ I stand next to a large glass box and inside it is a huge pile of clothes and in the middle of the heap is a marble statue, poking out, only its arse visible.

  ‘Reminds me of you in TK Maxx.’

  He bites down on a smile but I see it before he swallows it. ‘It’s a work of art consumed by modern accessories.’

  ‘Next.’

  ‘You just need things explained to you.’

  ‘No I need to see some proper art. By someone who can fucking draw, maybe?’

  ‘Think of it like a puzzle. You have to put the pieces together. Doesn’t any of this speak to you at all?’

  In the next space, mutant butterflies, large papier-mâché clouds raining condoms and a collage of rancid fruit covered in maggots.

  ‘Stunning. That really takes some thought and talent, doesn’t it?’

  It’s when we come upon the last exhibit that my ire bubbles and brews in my guts. All four walls are adorned with the tiniest pictures, no larger than postcards, and which you can only see when you get right up close. The artist is there, with a scraggy plaited beard and more holes in his ears than actual skin. He’s talking with his hands and gesturing to the pieces to two stick women in multi-coloured twat tights.

  The pictures, the artist explains, were drawn by his dog. A spaniel called Desiree.

  ‘Did he say his fucking spaniel drew these?’

  It’s at this point that I walk out, heading towards the café.

  ‘Wondered how long it would take,’ I hear him chuckle behind.

  Even the café is poncey, the chairs all look like balloon animals but made from steel and the walls look like
there’s been a food fight recently. I order two pain escargots and coffees, that’s all fucking cold by the time I pay. I find a crumby table by a window at the back of the room and wait. I feel like crying.

  Outside in the pristine garden, a metal sculpture catches the light and momentarily blinds me. Irritated, I get up to move but then I look at the sculpture – it’s a head, being pressed into the ground by a giant hand. And the expression on the face is all gnarled and distorted. Rage, being kept down. I get that. I am that.

  A poem reels in my mind, one Mum used to read me sometimes before bed: ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod’ by Eugene Field.

  ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night sailed off in a wooden shoe, Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. “Where are you going, and what do you wish?” The old moon asked the three. “We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea…’

  I repeat it until I see Paddy again.

  I watch him wheel in, momentarily stopping to chat to an elderly woman who bends down next to him like he’s a little boy who’s banged his knee. She keeps him for a good five minutes. I try my deep breathing exercises the quack taught me. When he eventually arrives at our table, I’m already on the defensive.

  ‘What was that about?’

  ‘She asked if I was in Helmand with her son. That’s how he lost his legs.’

  ‘Nosy cow.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, will you calm down?’

  ‘I can’t help it. Patronising old bag.’

  ‘She was making conversation, that’s all. I met her in the gallery and we were chatting about one of the installations.’

  ‘Which one, the bale of hay? The broken cheese grater? The pants full of piss stains? She was patronising you, I heard.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t.’ He sips his coffee, eyeballing me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘It’s a bad day, that’s all. We all have them. I am entitled.’

  ‘I know,’ he replies, calmly. ‘But you’re having more than most at the moment.’