by C. L. Taylor
I push the duvet away from me and swing my legs out of bed. There’s one thing left to try.
Mike doesn’t look at my face as I walk into the barn. He looks at my empty hands.
‘I’m thirsty,’ he says as I settle into my normal spot against the barn wall, directly opposite the cage. ‘I finished the other bottle last night and I haven’t had a drink all day.’
‘Good.’
‘Lou.’ He wipes a hand over his lips. They look pale and dry, even from this distance. ‘Come on. I said I was sorry.’
I shrug.
‘Come on, Lou.’ He forces a smile. ‘At least get the hose out again. I’ll catch some of it in my mouth.’
‘You’re not getting any water.’
His smile slips. ‘What?’
‘I’m not here to give you water. I’m here to tell you that I’m going to break into your house.’
His eyes widen. ‘What the fuck?’
‘I need that other phone. You may as well tell me where it is or I’ll trash your house looking for it.’
He laughs, gripping his stomach as he throws back his head. ‘You’re fucking kidding me! You’re going to break into my house? And then trash it? Seriously! You’re fucking unhinged, Louise. Have you heard yourself? And to think I thought my ex was a psycho.’
‘Don’t laugh at me, Mike.’
‘Why? What are you gonna do? Stab me? Sorry, Lou. Been there and got the scar to prove it, thanks to Dee. She said wanted to talk to me about the terms of the divorce and put a steak knife through my leg instead.’
He rubs his hand up and down his left thigh.
‘You told me you got that scar from a lorry accident.’
He smirks. ‘So I told a fib. I thought it might make you feel sorry for me.’
‘You’re scum.’
‘Whatever. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re both psychos. I had to take a restraining order out on Dee. She got Community bloody Service for what she did, and I got a permanent limp. Where’s the justice in that?’
I don’t believe him. He never made out that his wife was violent. Boring, yes. He told me she was more interested in her garden than him and at bedtime she’d rather do a crossword puzzle than have sex. Their marriage had been over for years, he said.
‘I wasted ten years of my life on that woman. I should have listened to my mates when they said she was a bunny-boiler. Jesus. Wendy Harrison, what a bloody mistake.’
‘Say that again.’
‘Say what again?’
‘The name of your ex-wife.’
‘Wendy Harrison. Hughes after she married me.’
‘But you told me she was called …’
All the hairs on my arms go up as all the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.
Dee. Wendy. Wen-Dee.
Chapter 24
Chloe
Thursday 3rd May 2007
Jamie’s laughter carries across the pool, over a frantic father–son table tennis match and across to the sun loungers. Chloe plucks at her dress. It’s too tight across the bust and sweat is pooling between her breasts. Still, at least Jamie’s firing his water pistol at their dad now, rather than her. She glances at her mum, lying on the sun lounger beside her. She’s wearing oversized sunglasses and a black swimsuit with a sarong swathed around her hips. She hasn’t looked up from her book once in the last hour.
Chloe has never really understood her mother – with her constant migraines, lack of interest in Chloe’s life and her permanently exhausted expression – but she does now. She’s dead inside too. There’s no point talking to her about what’s been going on in her life. Even if she could find the words, what could her mum do? At best she’d tell Chloe that everyone has crushes and she should find a nice boy her own age to go out with. At worst she’d tell her dad and the police about Mike. What does her mum know about love anyway? She might have loved her dad once but there isn’t any evidence of that now. They never kiss or touch each other. They barely speak other than about the kids. Chloe can’t even remember the last time they smiled at each other. Their relationship couldn’t be more different to her relationship with Mike. Correction. The relationship she used to have with Mike. Even her dad had commented on the fact he hadn’t dropped round the house for a while.
Chloe shifts on her sun lounger and sits up. She plucks at the thin material of her dress, clinging to her thighs. The second she lets go, it sticks to her skin again. She’s so hot and uncomfortable she feels sick. In another world she’d rip off her dress and jump in the pool with her knees tucked up to her chin and feel the sweet relief of the water washing over her. But it’s not another world. It’s this world, where she’s fat and lumpy and she’d rather die than let anyone see her in a swimsuit.
‘I’m going to get a Coke,’ she says. ‘Do you want anything?’
Her mum shakes her head.
‘All right. I’ll be back in a bit.’
Chloe hangs back when she reaches the poolside bar. Three teenaged girls are propping it up, sipping cold drinks through straws and gazing around the complex. They look so confident and relaxed, even the short girl with the thick thighs. They’re the sort of girls she’d like to be in another life. And the type of girls who’d whisper about her in this one.
She turns to go.
‘Hey, you.’
She keeps walking.
‘Girl in the blue dress with the bob!’
Chloe stops walking. If she ignores them they’ll only say something the next time she runs into them. Better to get it over and done with now.
She turns slowly and points at her chest. ‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you,’ says the short girl with the thick thighs. ‘Come over here.’
She sighs. What does it even matter? There’s nothing they can say about her that she hasn’t thought herself. They won’t beat her up, not with so many other people close by. They’ll probably just tell her what a fat bitch she is.
‘Hi.’ She surveys them through dead eyes as she draws closer. The short one in the middle is definitely the ring leader. The girl on the left has thick black hair, eyebrows that look as though they’ve been drawn on with marker pen and a sickly pink gloss lipstick. The girl on the right is as skinny as they come but with massive boobs.
‘I’m Katie,’ says the short one. She gestures to her right. ‘This is Leticia. And that’s Charlie. Are you on holiday here too?’
No, Chloe thinks. I’m a Spanish waitress. Of course I’m on holiday here.
‘Yeah, with my family,’ she says.
‘You don’t have an older brother, do you? Like, well tall, totally fit. Brown hair, good abs?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, my brother’s seven.’
Katie bursts out laughing. ‘That’s a bit young, even for me.’
‘How old are you?’ Chloe asks.
‘Sixteen. So’s Charlie. Leticia’s fifteen. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’ To her surprise Chloe finds herself warming to the small girl with the big smile and the chunky thighs. There’s a light in her eyes and a warmth to her laugh that makes Chloe feel slightly less dead inside. ‘Are you all on holiday together?’
‘I wish,’ says Leticia, flicking her dark hair behind her shoulders. ‘Nah, we got talking what …’ she looks at the others ‘… a couple of days ago? Now we’re besties.’
They all laugh, even Chloe.
‘Do you wanna come to karaoke later?’ Katie asks. ‘Charlie does a mean Beyoncé.’
The blonde nudges her. ‘Shut up!’
‘Seriously, it’ll be fun. And you can help us stalk the worldy I saw yesterday.’
Chloe shrugs. ‘I can’t sing.’
‘Neither can I, but I can drink. See you there then, yeah? We’ll grab a table and save you a seat, ’bout eight o’clock?’
‘Okay.’ A shy half-smile appears on Chloe’s face. ‘That would be cool.’
She orders a Coke, says goodbye to the girls and walks back to her sun lounger feeling half a
stone lighter.
‘Have some.’ Katie nudges Chloe’s arm and gestures at the vodka bottle she’s holding under the table.
‘Can’t. My dad’s over there.’
‘What is he – Superman?’
‘What?’
‘Unless he can see through Leticia how’s he going to see what you’re doing?’
Chloe shrugs. If her dad catches her drinking he’ll kill her. He only agreed to let her sit with the girls when her mum made a rare intervention.
‘She’s thirteen,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t want to sit with us. And she’s made some new friends, Alan.’
Her dad had eyed Chloe suspiciously. ‘Just because we’re on holiday doesn’t mean you’re not still grounded. You can sit with those girls, but you’re not to leave my sight.’
And she hasn’t. For the last half an hour she’s been sitting in a booth around a table with Katie, Leticia and Charlie in the large characterless room the reps call ‘the theatre’. Charlie is already pissed. She’s fallen off her seat twice and she squeezes her boobs and honks with laughter every time Leticia says patatas bravas.
‘Here,’ Katie snatches her glass of Coke from her hands and empties at least three or four shots of vodka into it. She gives it back to her. ‘Drink it. You’re on holiday.’
Chloe raises the glass to her lips. The vodka is rank – cheap and strong. Just the smell makes her gag, but she parts her lips and swallows a large mouthful. It hits her throat first, then her stomach. A couple of seconds later it hits her brain and she sits back in her chair and smiles.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ Katie says. ‘So what are you going to sing? I’m going to do “Chandelier”. Best song ever. Are you into Sia?’
For the next fifteen minutes as the four girls laugh and joke and tease each other, Chloe forgets all about school, getting fired from the garden centre and the weird woman who gave her a diary – which she left at home, wrapped in its bag in the bottom of her wardrobe. She even forgets about Mike. Then four boys approach their table.
‘You all right, girls?’ says the one with brown hair and an England top.
His eyes scan all four of them and rest on Leticia. She flicks her hair back and stares up at him from under two pairs of false eyelashes.
‘We’d be better if you bought us a drink.’
The boy laughs. ‘And there was me thinking you’d already brought your own.’
He looks pointedly at Katie who smirks.
‘Get your own drinks.’
‘We have!’ He gestures at the pint in his hand. ‘Budge up then, girls. Make room for a big one!’
Out of the corner of her eye Chloe sees her dad stand up. He stares straight at her and cricks his index finger. Her heart sinks. She’s having one of the best nights of her life and her dad’s going to ruin it. He’s going to humiliate her in front of her new friends. She moves to stand up but, as she does, her mum does something out of character. She reaches out a hand and yanks at her husband’s wrist. She says something, looks across at Chloe and then pulls on his wrist again. To Chloe’s surprise and delight he sits back down.
‘He’s gone to the loo with Ed,’ Katie hisses. ‘Go after him.’
‘No way!’ Chloe’s lost track of the number of vodkas Katie has tipped into her glass, but she doesn’t care. She’s having the best time. The three girls are the loveliest friends she’s ever had and, though she can hardly bring herself to believe it, Sam, who’s been sitting next to her for most of the night, was chatting to her non-stop until he left to go for a fag.
‘I am not going in the men’s loos,’ she says.
Katie rolls her eyes. ‘I didn’t say you should go in there. Just, you know, hang around outside. Look casual. Then when he comes out you can snog him without your dad seeing.’
‘But …’ doubt gnaws at Chloe’s drunken confidence. ‘I don’t even know if he fancies me.’
‘Of course he fancies you! He wouldn’t talk to you if he didn’t fancy you, would he?’
Chloe glances across the table. Leticia is sitting on Callum – England top’s – knee. There’s a lot of tongue and slurping going on. Beside her, Charlie is also getting her face sucked off by Ashley.
‘Anyway,’ Katie says. ‘Ed told me that Sam fancies you. So there.’ She inches her way across the bench, her skirt riding further and further up her thighs as she moves. When she reaches the end, she grabs Chloe’s hand. ‘Go get him!’
It takes all Chloe’s concentration to walk across the room without bumping into someone, falling over, or throwing up. Now she’s upright she feels three times drunker than she did sitting down but at least her parents have gone. At some point in the evening her mum came over to the table and asked to talk to her. Chloe shuffled off the bench, cheeks burning, certain her mum was going to bollock her for drinking. But that wasn’t why she’d come over. It was to tell her that they were going back to the apartment to put Jamie to bed.
‘Your dad wanted you to come back too,’ her mum said, ‘but I told him to give you a break. I,’ she jabbed herself in the chest with a stubby fingernail, ‘told him that. So don’t let me down, Chlo.’ She put her hands on Chloe’s shoulders and peered down into her face through bloodshot eyes. Chloe wasn’t the only one who’d been drinking. ‘I told him to let you have a night out. You won’t let me down. Will you? We both know what your dad can be like.’
Chloe hadn’t just agreed to behave herself, she’d sworn on Jamie’s life that she’d be back by midnight and she wouldn’t do anything to upset her dad. But her dad isn’t in her thoughts now as she leaves ‘the theatre’ and sways down the corridor that leads to the toilets. She’s made friends. She’s drunk. And a boy her own age fancies her. She’s normal. For the first time in her life she feels normal and if she weren’t so pissed she’d jump up in the air and click the heels of her shoes together like some kind of twat in a romantic comedy movie.
It’s the cigarette smoke that makes her pause as she passes an open fire exit, then the low rumble of voices. One of them sounds like Sam. She grins to herself and prepares to throw herself through the door and shout boo! She can be as funny as Leticia and as spontaneous as Katie. She’s good fun too. She’s—
‘Man, you really lucked out tonight.’
She takes a half step back and presses a steadying palm to the wall. That’s Ed’s voice.
‘I know, man. Four birds and I get the fat one.’
Chloe widens her eyes, but her eyelids feel impossibly heavy and her vision is starting to swim. Sam’s met a fat girl? What fat girl? He’s been sitting next to her all night.
‘Sorry, mate. We owe you. You got the short straw this time.’
Sam sighs. ‘I wouldn’t mind if she wasn’t so fucking boring. She has literally no personality. I’d get more banter talking to a lilo.’
‘You could still poke your dick in a lilo.’
Ed cackles with laughter. The sound goes right through Chloe, making her shiver, but she’s still in denial. She’s convinced she’s mishearing things. She has to be. Katie told her that Sam fancied her.
‘Mate,’ Sam says. ‘I wouldn’t touch Chloe with yours. She’s rank. She’s like a fucking blancmange. Have you seen the size of her? She looks like she ate the fucking lilo!’
It takes all the energy Chloe has to push herself off the wall but rage drives her forward, through the open fire exit on wobbly legs and into the courtyard. The cool night air hits her full in the face and she sucks it deep into her lungs.
‘You,’ she says, pointing at Sam, leaning against the wall with a cigarette between his fingers. ‘You are a fucking arsehole.’
Then she pukes all over her shoes.
Chapter 25
Wendy
Wendy Harrison can’t remember the last time she felt so full of adrenaline. Her wedding day possibly, maybe the time she was arrested for stabbing Mike, but certainly not for a while. But she can feel it now, the buzz of excitement that’s making her skin tingle and her heart beat faster.<
br />
Ben Feltham has replied to her message and he’s online now!
She pulls her chair a little closer to the kitchen table and takes a sip of her gin and tonic. She’s not normally a big drinker but the reply from Ben – which made her phone ping five minutes ago – is cause for celebration. Not that his reply – Why? – gave much away, but it’s enough. He’s curious and now she can reel him in.
She looks at the screen:
Saskia Kennedy: How much do you know about Lou Wandsworth?
Ben Feltham: Why?
Wendy taps the glass against her teeth. The plan was to tell Ben everything she knows – she’s fairly certain Lou won’t have told him all about her past – and then watch the online fallout. Only, Ben and Lou have been very quiet on social media recently and she’s got a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing would be a huge anticlimax. Ben and Lou could have had the most terrible break-up and she’d never know. Leaving the flowers on Lou’s doorstep had given her the most wonderful thrill, but she wasn’t there to see her reaction. She needs to get closer. But how? She could try and befriend Lou. Maybe take her out to lunch or accidentally bump into her at the weekend. She could play on the other woman’s sympathy. Maybe pretend to be desperately ill. You’d have to be a hard-hearted bitch to turn down a dying woman’s requests.
That wouldn’t work. Lou Wandsworth is a hard-hearted bitch. She had to be to steal Wendy’s husband away from her when she needed him most. It had made Wendy’s blood boil, seeing how the press had painted Lou as an innocent victim. She wasn’t ‘just a child’, she was a fourteen-year-old seductress who knew exactly what she was doing. She’d used her smooth skin and her soft body to lure Mike away. Then, on the day Wendy turned up at the IVF clinic, supposedly to support Mike as he produced a sample, Lou Wandsworth stole him away to France instead. She didn’t just steal Wendy’s husband that day. She took her hopes and dreams too.
Wendy takes another sip of her gin, then slams it back down on the coaster. For years it was the girl she hated most. The girl who would appear in her dreams laughing and pointing and humiliating her. Later, Mike appeared in the dreams too. Sometimes with the girl, sometimes alone, but always mocking her.