by Lucy Carver
‘You stole it,’ Jack confirmed.
‘Did you get a chance to read it?’ I asked.
‘Parts of it.’
‘Does she come across as – you know, depressed?’
‘Enough to throw herself in the lake?’ Paige shook her head. ‘No, like we said – she’s up and down, the way she always was. And she doesn’t mention being pregnant either, unless these little marks above the date mean something.’ Sliding the page-a-day diary away from Jack, Paige opened it at random and pointed to small shapes that Lily had drawn. They reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphs – part geometric, part pictorial. One was a square with four legs, one a stick-man, along with other twiddles, triangles and swirls.
‘Could they be Lily’s version of writing in code?’ Jack wondered.
‘But why would she?’ I wondered. ‘I mean, who did she think was going to read her private diary?’
‘Paige?’ Jack’s question in answer to my question came quick as a flash, but Paige didn’t even blush.
‘I’m not sorry I took it before Adam could get his mitts on it,’ she insisted as she turned the page and stabbed at an entry with her finger. ‘There’s stuff here that Lily would never have wanted her family to read.’
Saturday, April 5th. Big fight with the tyrant.
Followed by a clever Lily-style caricature of Robert Earle, instantly recognizable. Bald head and scrawny neck, deep-set eyes with dark circles like a meerkat.
Will not, repeat WILL NOT play his game.
Paige flicked to a later entry.
Monday, July 4th. Called Mum to ask how she was. Tyrant came in and grabbed phone from her. HATE HIM!!! Met J after school. LOVE HIM!!!
Then a row of tiny hearts in red felt tip, linked by capital letters spelling out Jayden’s name.
Am thinking of getting tattoo around ankle, with J’s name linking chain of hearts, as above.
‘Good job she didn’t,’ Paige commented. ‘You can get chucked out of St Jude’s for less than that. They don’t regard getting a tattoo as part of expressing your individuality.’
I took the diary and flicked through until the start of September. ‘You were right about her not going to stay with her cousin,’ I found out. ‘It says here she was with Jayden in Upper Chartsey.
September 5th. House was all ours, I read. J’s mum and kid bro staying in caravan in N Wales. J and I lived on chips, pizza and LURVE!!!
More hearts followed and a rectangle with legs – maybe a bed? And at the top of the entry I noticed new hieroglyphs – a circle with a dot followed by a question mark, a smiley face which didn’t need a super intellect to interpret and the stick man walking what looked like a stick dog.
‘Wasn’t your aunt a famous spy or something?’ Paige mentioned. ‘Come on, Alyssa, didn’t you inherit the family code-breaking gene?’
‘Great-great-aunt,’ I told her. Then, ‘Give me chance.’
‘So what else do we learn?’ Snatching the diary back and knocking it against her cup of coffee (‘Oops!’), Paige studied more entries. ‘We know she loved Jayden and stayed with him while his mum was away – sorry, Jack.’
‘No, Lily was doing her own thing. We’d moved on.’ He looked steadily at me as he said this, as if saying, Now do you believe me?
I do. I believe you!
‘We also know that within a couple of weeks of being loved-up in Upper Chartsey, Jayden had dumped her and Lily’s life sucked,’ Paige reminded us. ‘And listen to this.’
‘Wednesday October 3rd,’ she read. ‘A came here after big fight with the T on the phone. Won’t take any more meds, just in case. Didn’t explain why. Hate him. Don’t want to end up like M. Took it out on work in progress. A and P tried to stop me. Swear I’ll never paint again.’
‘Remember that?’ Paige asked me excitedly. ‘Come on, you’re Memory Girl. Give us an action replay.’
Wednesday, October 3rd. A date is enough to plunge me once again into total recall:
I was sitting on my bed when Lily stormed in and started flinging things around the room. She wasn’t crying but she kept on grunting as though someone was using her as a punch bag.
‘I’m sixteen. They can’t tell me what to do.’ Tearing clothes out of her drawer and throwing them on the floor, she seemed to be looking for something she couldn’t find. ‘Has anyone seen my phone?’
‘It’s on your bed,’ Paige told her.
‘Not that phone – my secret phone!’
‘Sorry, I don’t know anything about it, and that’s probably because it’s a secret.’ Paige pointed out the Catch 22. Lily ignored her.
Instead she turned on me. ‘Alyssa, have you seen it?’
‘Is it the one in the black case?’
‘No, that’s my normal phone. I mean the red one without a case.’ There was a heap of T-shirts and sweaters on the floor, which Lily was burrowing into. ‘Jesus, I hate all this!’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, getting up to help her look. ‘What do you hate?’
By this time Lily was crying and she’d left off looking for her phone and throwing things and picked up the palette knife instead. ‘Everything.’
Paige and I tried to stop her from wrecking her canvas. Lily held the knife like a dagger and slashed into the abstract painting. It was very Gerhard Richter – controlled chaos, bright red circle and sweep of yellow across the diagonal, with paint laid on in thick layers, which were scraped back in some places to show areas of black underneath.
‘What do you mean – everything?’ I grabbed her wrist, but she broke free and made more slashes with the knife.
‘What do you know, Alyssa? You’ve only just got here. What could you possibly know?’
Paige was stronger than me and she stepped in briskly to take the knife from Lily. ‘Breathe,’ she told her. ‘Calm down and we’ll help you find your phone.’
‘They won’t even let me speak to him and anyway he’s not answering my texts,’ Lily sobbed. ‘I wish I’d never told my mother. Or him, or anybody!’
She collapsed forward and we could hardly tell what she was saying, too focused on stopping her from turning the knife on herself to really listen or to ask who ‘he’ was.
Only now I got what I hadn’t got at the time. When Lily stabbed the canvas and it seemed to me she was trying to kill part of herself – that was the baby, the secret that she’d dared to share with her mother.
‘You see this circle with the dot?’ I said to Jack and Paige as we studied the stolen diary. ‘I reckon that’s a symbol for the baby. And I think the stick man with the dog is Jayden.’
Jack rocked back on his chair while Paige flicked through the book.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That must be right.’
You’re thinking, What if Jayden doesn’t have a dog, Alyssa? What if it turns out you’re crap at breaking secret codes, despite your great-great-aunt Caroline?
‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ Jack decided after two cups of coffee in the Squinting Cat. ‘I don’t want to. I’d rather stay and help you two work this out, but I have study group in fifteen.’
We do this on Saturdays at St Jude’s – it’s a non-uniform day, but not a non-work day. We still get together for informal study groups that are meant to help with a big project in say science or French. Yeah, I agree – it sucks not to have the whole weekend free.
‘See you later, Alyssa.’ Jack stood up then leaned over and kissed me on the lips. Our first PDA – nothing major, but still a big step forward for both of us. And the brush of his lips against mine was a totally pleasurable sensation that I longed to repeat.
‘Me too – I have to go.’ Paige pretended not to notice, but she gave me a secret wink as she stood up. ‘Are you coming, Alyssa?’
‘No, I’ll stay. Leave the diary with me.’
‘You’re sure?’
I nodded and told them I wanted to be certain that the automaton was clear of the school premises before I ventured back. ‘I’ll see you both later.’
‘Hey, isn’t that your bike?’ Susie the waitress asked from behind her counter.
I looked up in time to see two kids aged about ten hop on to the St Jude’s bike, which I’d left propped against a lamp post. The one with the shaven head straddled the cross bar and began to pedal while the other with dark hair flopping down over his forehead perched on the saddle and stuck his legs straight out. As they wobbled out of sight I saw that they were followed by a brown-and-white dog.
Yeah, that was my bike. I thanked Susie, shoved Lily’s diary into my pocket and was up out of my chair and on the pavement in five seconds flat.
Notice the dog.
The thieving little bastards didn’t get far along the pavement – only to the Bridge Inn – before riding tandem on a one-person bike became too much for them and they both fell off. The dog barked, the kids hooted as they picked themselves up then kicked my bike while it was down.
I sprinted towards them. The dog, who was between me and my transport home, heard me and turned to bare its teeth.
‘Go get her, Bolt!’ the kid with the jailbird haircut cried, stamping hard on the front wheel.
‘Kill, boy, kill!’ the other one croaked.
For a second it looked like the dog would. It snarled like only a broad-chested, bow-legged Staffie can. So I stopped in my tracks.
Partly because of the dog, but also partly because Jayden had just stepped out of the alleyway down the side of the pub.
He didn’t say anything, just shoved the kids to one side and picked the bike up from the ground.
Stubble Head swore like an underage trooper while Floppy Hair slunk off without a word.
‘Look at that!’ I protested, pointing to the bike’s buckled front wheel. ‘It’s wrecked. How do I get back home?’
Now Jayden did speak, not to answer my question but to swear back at the kid and thrust the mangled bike towards him. ‘Take this into JD’s – get it fixed.’
‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ the kid retaliated.
‘You are.’
‘Who’s going to make me?’
Would you have dared to stand up to Jayden this way? No – me neither. Anyway, Lily’s ex was fired up enough to take the kid by the scruff of the neck, haul him off his feet and throw him and the bike in the direction of the car-repair place down the street.
While this was going on, Bolt the dog kept up a chorus of low growls.
‘Sit,’ Jayden snarled, and Bolt at least had the sense to do as he was told.
‘So – same question,’ I said as kid and bike got on their way. ‘How do I get back to school?’
‘Bus.’ Squeezing one-syllable answers out of Jayden was like getting blood from the proverbial stone.
I was still mad, so I pointed after the retreating kid. ‘Who is that, anyway?’
‘Brad.’
‘You know him?’
‘I should do – he’s my kid brother.’ Jayden launched off in the opposite direction with Bolt close behind. Stick man and stick dog.
Running after him, I took a huge risk. ‘You heard what happened to Lily?’
He halted, nodded then walked on with shoulders hunched, wearing a deep scowl.
‘The funeral’s Wednesday.’
He shook his head.
‘Yeah, it is. I talked to Lily’s brother, Adam.’
‘It’s not happening, not any more,’ he insisted.
I overtook him and stood in his way. ‘Why, what do you know that we don’t?’
‘No body, no funeral.’
‘But there is – obviously there is!’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the word ‘body’.
Jayden’s hooded eyes were almost closed under that overhanging brow. ‘Talk to Alex.’
‘Alex who?’ I looked frantically up and down the street, in time to see young Brad and the bike disappearing into JD Repairs.
‘Driffield. You know him.’
‘What’s he got to do with anything?’ I asked the question realizing that I wouldn’t get an answer.
Bolt kept pace with Jayden as he turned off the high street down Meredith Lane – a road leading to a small housing estate built in the 1950s for council workers. The back end of a Staffie isn’t attractive – thin, pointy tail curving up to reveal tight white anus and squat haunches. Is that too graphic for you? Anyway, they walk like bodybuilders on steroids.
Silence from Jayden and never a backwards glance.
What the –? What, dear Reader, was that all about? Jayden’s kid brother destroys my bike. Jayden appears out of nowhere and reins him in. He tells me there isn’t going to be a funeral. Hold the eulogy.
Driffield? Alyssa the Memory Girl gets to work. JD – John Driffield is the name of the guy who runs the car-repair garage. His name is in small letters under the main sign. Alex must be his son.
‘Jayden!’ I cried as man and dog turned into the garden of a house with an overflowing wheelie bin at the gate.
The door banged and then silence. And now I was on a mission – straight back down the high street to JD Repairs where I saw my broken bike propped up inside the wide entrance. A bald man in overalls stood chest-deep in a service pit under an ancient Volvo. Radio 2 played loudly. There was a small office at the back of the workshop.
‘Hi!’ I called above Take That circa 1995.
The guy in overalls pointed me towards the office, where I found Brad sulking with Alex Driffield.
Brad’s vocabulary of anatomically-based swear words was impressive for a ten-year-old. I won’t sully the page.
‘Eff off,’ Alex told him as he swiped at the kid’s head with the back of his hand. ‘Sorry about that – the kid was out of order,’ he told me.
Brad effed off and I shrugged, coming straight to the point. ‘Jayden says you know something about Lily’s funeral.’
Alex logged info into a computer as he talked. ‘Yeah, it got held up.’
‘How? Why?’
‘No body, no funeral.’
‘That’s what Jayden told me. But how come?’
‘From what I heard, the police aren’t ready to release it.’ This was right up Alex’s street. What with his fascination for TV crime series, he relished being in possession of confidential police information.
‘Who said?’
‘A kid in school – Micky Cooke. His dad works at the morgue in Ainslee.’ Slowly Alex revealed the precious, scavenged facts, savouring the moment.
My heart hammered at my ribs. ‘And?’
‘The pathologist handed over his report. He found something they weren’t expecting.’
‘For God’s sake, Alex!’
‘Chill. I don’t expect it’ll be anything too – y’know – gory.’
I bit my lip and steadied myself against the desk.
‘Maybe nothing at all. They’re not sure yet.’
Still I waited. The DJ segued from Take That into One Direction’s latest number one.
‘Micky’s dad says it’s just enough to make the cops think twice. Yes, Lily did drown, yes, she was pregnant and, no, there was no sign of a struggle . . .’
‘But?’
‘Like I said, they’re holding on to the body for the pathologist to put in a second report.’ Know-it-all Alex wouldn’t let go of his big
moment.
‘Alex, for God’s sake, this is real – not some poxy TV series!’
‘You’re right – sorry.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re getting some kind of weird thrill.’ I was really angry and didn’t care if he knew it.
He shrugged. ‘So now what?’
‘So now you find out from Micky Cooke exactly what the pathologist found.’
‘Just like that?’ Alex made it clear he was done with me by turning his back and bringing up the messages inbox on his iPhone.
‘Yes, just like that!’ I yelled. ‘You can’t go around spreading rumours without any proof.’
‘Watch me,’ he muttered.
chapter five
Paige wasn’t around – she was probably still at study group – when I got back to school, so I sat alone in our room, staring out of the window at the darkening scene.
Nothing had changed. There was a smooth lawn and a lake and beyond that an oak wood stripped of its leaves. Rooks rose from their untidy nests and circled in the dying light.
But everything shifted in the lengthening shadows – from sedate to sinister, sane to crazy, suicide to possible murder.
This could be a suspicious death! I said to myself as I put my finger on what had felt so wrong from the very start. Maybe Lily didn’t kill herself.
I had nothing concrete to go on – only a funeral delay and a request for a second, in-depth pathologist’s report – but the thought insinuated its way into my brain and I started to shake. Murder, not suicide. Unlawful killing.
But what about the email containing the desperate last thoughts of a gifted but unstable girl with an unwanted pregnancy and a boyfriend who’d dumped her the minute she’d told him about the baby?
Nothing too gory. I thought if I repeated Alex’s phrase often enough it might make my racing heart slow down. Nothing too – y’know – gory!
But the lake and the woods still made me shudder. I almost saw Lily out there, or her pale ghost, standing at the water’s edge, staring up at my window, begging for help.
I turned away but then it felt as if she was in the room, sitting cross-legged on her bed, breathing, beseeching.
‘Lily, you have to help me. I don’t know what to do!’ I said.