Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  Nine

  This was weird. I felt good. I felt fine. I felt happy. A couple of days after sleeping with Danny I checked myself in the mirror and I looked great. I had been sleeping well. I had been eating well. I hadn't checked my list in days. What had come over me? Maybe it was the weather. It was still dry and sunny, every day, and we were starting to get used to it. I was enjoying the sense of waking up and knowing it was going to be warm. I enjoyed taking the summer weather for granted. I thought that it must be what it would be like to live in a Mediterranean country and not have to worry about clouds on the horizon. There were just a few more days of school left before the holidays, and I was due to have lunch with my exciting new friend Zoey Spiegelman.

  She met me outside the school gates and I took her to a nearby café. I steered her to a dark booth inside at the back, making some excuse about wanting to stay out of the sun. Of course, that wasn't it at all. It was force of habit that made me always choose the least conspicuous table in any cafe. We sat down and looked at the menus, and I was suddenly overcome by awkwardness. I literally did not know how to do this – this friendship thing. I fidgeted with my menu and made some half-hearted remark about the weather.

  Zoey picked up her own menu. 'So, what's good here?'

  It struck me as an absurdly American thing to ask. 'It's a cafe. It's baked potatoes and paninis and sandwiches and stuff. Nothing's particularly good. They don't have a special or anything like that. It's just food.'

  Luckily she laughed. I went across to the fridge to get us some cold drinks, and she said, 'Hey, neat jeans.'

  They were Marks and Spencer Per Una jeans, bootleg with a bit of Lycra for fit; they were the most conservative, ordinary, untrendy jeans it was possible to buy. They were jeans for the woman in her middle youth, I told her.

  Zoey laughed again. 'It's cool that you can wear jeans to work. Teachers never wore jeans when I was at high school.'

  'It's a fine line,' I said. ' Y o u can wear jeans, as long as they're new and smart and dark indigo. But there comes a point when the jeans get older and more faded, and suddenly they're verboten. It's quite a difficult decision. Sometimes when I'm getting dressed in the morning I have to hold my jeans up to the light to check if they're still dark enough to wear. I think they should make a colour chart, just so you can check easily.'

  She was listening to me; looking hard at me with those green eyes. She was smiling at me. 'Tell me more,' she said. 'This is good stuff. I could use this. Great material. Do you mind?'

  'So that's why you want to be friends with me,' I said. 'Because you like my material.'

  Zoey looked serious all of a sudden. 'Do you mean that? D o you really want to know why I want to be friends with you?'

  I nodded.

  'Because you're cool. You're funny. You're different. And also, I like you. This will sound weird, but it's kinda like I've known you for years.'

  I frowned at her. I felt uneasy. I wasn't sure what she meant by that. Part of me felt uncomfortable, in case she really thought that we had met before and she wanted to know where. Part of me suspected it was a line straight from some American self-help book called How to Make Friends. But another part of me was flattered; seduced, even.

  'And also,' she said, changing her tone to one of offhand rudeness, 'frankly, I'm lonely. I lost all my friends in the break-up. He got custody of them all. Here I am, stuck in London, waiting for the divorce to go through, trying to make a living as a stand-up comic, and I'm lonely. I need a friend. Anyone will do. And you were there. Y o u looked desperate. So I took pity on you.'

  'Thanks,' I said, keeping a straight face. 'I appreciate your candour.'

  She smiled at me and that was the awkwardness over. I relaxed. It was lunchtime. It was nearly the end of term. This was what normal people did – they had lunch with friends. We chatted about stuff – safe stuff. We talked about our favourite films. Zoey told me about her life as a comic. She related funny stories about all the grotty clubs she'd played. Every time I spoke she leaned towards me, green eyes wide open, seemingly fascinated by my lame stories about my family and my job, and my weird kid sister, and what it was like being a vicar's daughter. We steered clear of her divorce and my 'secret heartbreak', as she had dubbed it on Friday night. And I made sure I asked her nothing about America. Just in case; on the remote off-chance that, out of all the millions of people in that vast country, she might at some point have met Rivers Carillo.

  An hour passed quickly. We left the cafe, and there was a bunch of girls from Year Ten sitting outside with ice creams. They grinned and nudged each other. I thought they were probably still giggling about that stupid joke I had made the previous week. Zoey and I walked back to the school, said goodbye with a quick cheek kiss outside, and agreed that she would ring me in a couple of days and we'd go shopping or to the cinema together. She waved goodbye and I watched her bounce off down the street. I had had a good time. I was still smiling to myself as I walked upstairs to the staff room, which was empty after the lunchtime rush. I had time for a quick cup of tea before my next lesson. I put the kettle on, stuffed a tea bag in my mug, and went to check my pigeon-hole.

  There were a couple of memos from the head, an overdue essay from the most procrastinating of my pupils and a copy of the English department's newsletter. I picked up the pile of A 4 paper and carried it over to the kitchen area to read as I waited for the kettle to boil. As I shuffled the papers in my hands something fell onto the floor. I knelt down and picked it up. It was a white envelope. A plain white envelope, quite good quality. A standard-size envelope, the sort that took a piece of A4 paper folded in three. There was nothing written on it but it was sealed and there was obviously something inside.

  I made the tea and sat down. I was puzzled and a little apprehensive. I had the envelope in my hand and I ran my finger along the top to open it. I pulled out a single sheet of plain white paper and unfolded it. There was writing on it. Handwriting. Neat, small handwriting with compact capitals, just a couple of sentences in black ballpoint pen. I could hear my heart thumping and my fingers were trembling. As I read it, I felt the blood drain from my cheeks. This is what it said: Remember, I'm watching you. I know everywhere you go.

  There's an expression people use about having your heart in your mouth. And that was what it felt like. It felt like having an actual lump lodged in my mouth, right back towards my throat. The lump tasted metallic. One of my worst nightmares had come true. He had found me. He – someone who knew my secret. I was sitting there in that friendly, untidy staff room at school with that letter in my hand, and I felt like I'd been staring at it for hours.

  'Are you okay, Beth? You look dreadful.'

  It was Lesley, standing there with an armful of files. I hadn't seen her come in. She sank heavily into one of the squeaky vinyl armchairs. 'Seriously, Beth, you look terrible.'

  I folded the letter and stuffed it quickly into my bag. 'I don't think I'm very well.' My voice sounded as if I was being strangled. 'I think I have a migraine coming on. I think I should probably go home.'

  Remember, I'm watching you. I know everywhere you go.

  It had happened. The thing I had been dreading for years. My carefully constructed life had been torn apart.

  Ten

  Rivers Carillo. Back then, before I killed him, when I was in love with him, when I still thought I was in love with him, the 'S' on the end of his first name enchanted and concerned me in equal measure. I was enchanted by the fact that his name was plural. He told me it was just an old family name, but I preferred to believe that he had been named after not one river but all rivers, everywhere: the very concept of river-hood, of river-ness. I was concerned because I wasn't sure how I would introduce myself when we were eventually, inevitably, married. 'I'm Rivers' wife.' 'I'm Rivers's wife.' I tried both, saying them out loud in the privacy of my attic bedroom. In fact, the question was academic because he already had a wife. But I didn't know that then.

  The first time I
saw Rivers Carillo he was sitting at the big wooden kitchen table in Joanna's house in San Francisco. Joanna, my sister's godmother, was with him. It was about ten in the morning and she was still wearing her silk wrap. Her long greying fair hair was caught up in an untidy knot on the back of her neck and her mascara was smudged into the crêpey skin under her blue eyes.

  Her left hand held a roll-up; her right hand was wrapped around one of her chunky earthenware coffee mugs. A stocky dark-haired man stared across the table at her, a slight smile playing on his lips. He had curly hair and vivid dark eyes that were fixed on Joanna. He had broad shoulders and he sat with a kind of hunched, pent-up energy. Such was their absorption in each other that I had to clear my throat to let them know I was in the room.

  When you see two people having breakfast together and one of them is dressed in a bathrobe, chances are that they've just slept together. Sure, I know that now. Then, at eighteen, I didn't read the signs. For one thing, Joanna was way too old for sex: forty-five at least. For another thing, the smile that Rivers Carillo gave me as he turned to look at me was so full of surprised wide-eyed lasciviousness that I knew at once he was interested in me. I looked back at him, with equal interest. He was, I reckoned, about thirty. He had a pugnacious jaw and sexy creases in the corners of his eyes. He was not quite handsome but he was certainly the most attractive man who'd ever paid me any attention.

  He smiled at me. I blushed. Joanna frowned. 'Who's this?' he asked.

  Perhaps that should have been another clue. She didn't introduce us straight away. She stubbed out her cigarette before she answered. 'A young friend of mine from England who's staying here for a while. Lizzie Stephens.'

  'Lizzie,' he repeated. He seemed to savour my name, all the while smiling at me. I felt myself starting to sweat where my too-tight T-shirt rubbed under my arms. I pushed my hair behind my ears and then pulled it back again, afraid he might notice that my ears stuck out. I was wearing a Lycra miniskirt and strappy sandals, big hoop earrings and too much eyeliner. I looked like a cheap tart or a backing singer in a pop video. He looked at Joanna quizzically and then back at me. 'Well, since our hostess isn't going to introduce me, I'll have to do it myself. My name is Rivers Carillo and I'm a poet.'

  He winked at me and that was it. A wink and I was gone. I was under his spell. I was so young. So young and stupid and naive. I was a kid, just a kid. How could I have guessed what I was getting into?

  Lizzie Stephens, the girl I used to be, seemed like another person to me. I struggled to remember what it felt like to be her. She was waiting for her place in the sun, her time in the spotlight, pretty sure it was going to happen any time soon. But already she was a little jaded (a play that didn't go well; a sticky end to a teen romance; the anxiety that she might not turn out to be as bright and brilliant as she'd hoped and dreamed).

  I was pretty. Yes, definitely I was pretty once. I spent time on making myself look prettier. I used mousse to scrunch my hair into wavy tendrils; trained one curl to dangle into an eye, Gloria Estefan or Amy Grant style. I was a little heavier then and my breasts were bigger. I wore Lycra, lots of Lycra, and button-through tops, and I seemed always to be on the verge of bursting out of my clothes. I had great skin that didn't need foundation. My skin glowed. My eyes glowed. People told me that when I smiled, the smile lit up my face.

  Lizzie Stephens was so full of promise. She was beautiful and silly and she thought that life was a banquet laid on especially for her. She was both knowing and naive, and I wished I could reach out into the past, shake her by the shoulders, slap her across the face and tell her – what? Be careful? Keep a close watch on your heart? Don't fall in love too soon? Beware of married men? Don't give yourself away too cheaply? But she'd already been given all those warnings – mother, teachers, books, friends – and she hadn't listened properly to any of them.

  Don't lose yourself. Don't let go. Don't let yourself fall. Perhaps that was what I would have said, if it had been possible. Sometimes that was what I wanted to say to my pupils at school. I wished I could protect them too. I had to watch them growing up too fast. I would see them out at weekends, in their miniskirts and those skimpy tops, and I wanted to warn them. But they wouldn't have listened to me. At eighteen I wouldn't have listened to me. I listened to no one. And as a result I fell. I fell early. And I fell hard.

  Looking back at the awful events of that summer, as I did almost every day, I wondered whether any of it would have happened had it not been for a foul dress, a hot day and a bad review.

  It all started with my sister's wedding in late June. I was eighteen. I had just finished my A levels, I was about to leave school, I was a grown-up at last – and yet there I was dressed in the bridesmaid's dress from hell. Some evil spirit had made my sister choose lilac satin for her bridesmaids, the cheap kind of satin that was so stiff you could have sent the dresses up the aisle by themselves. The dress had puff sleeves that did nothing for my skinny arms, and the bodice was tight across my chest. I'd been a late developer and it seemed that my breasts were still growing. The colour of the fabric meant that every tiny drop of perspiration was instantly visible.

  By the end of the reception I was tired and fed up, and my whole head ached from the smile I'd kept clamped to my face throughout the afternoon. People I barely knew kept coming up to me, pinching my cheek and saying, 'You'll be next.'

  It sounded like a threat.

  I was sitting on a dustbin outside the back of the restaurant smoking a cigarette that I'd cadged off the best man when my sister's godmother found me. She'd arrived in a flurry of suitcases and air kisses the day before, and had spent less than half an hour in our house before heading off for the best hotel in town. Now she perched on the dustbin next to me, brushed the hair from her eyes, took the cigarette from my hand and smoked it herself.

  Joanna was my mother's oldest friend. They'd grown up together and had gone to the same schools, both junior and senior. But while my mother had followed the traditional path of husband and children, Joanna had made a career for herself as a childless bohemian divorcee. She'd gone to art school, and then managed to marry and divorce two rich Americans, leaving her with what was rumoured to be a huge house in San Francisco. None of us had seen her in years but once in a while she'd deign to remember my sister's birthday, sending her expensive presents that were either much too young or too old for her. When she was twelve it was a bottle of Chanel No. 5 that broke in transit, the perfume seeping into the padded envelope. At fifteen it was a Sasha doll. I was eleven at the time, and I desperately hoped my sister would give the doll to me. She didn't.

  'Who chose your dress?' She spoke in a husky drawl that owed a lot to cigarettes and Honor Blackman.

  'Sarah did.'

  Joanna shuddered. 'It's ghastly. Simply ghastly.' She stubbed out the cigarette. 'Do you have another fag stuffed up one of those appalling sleeves?'

  I shook my head. She made an exasperated noise and rummaged in her handbag. She pulled out a tin of tobacco and some rolling papers, and started to roll. I watched her, fascinated. I'd never seen anyone make their own cigarettes before. She saw me watching, rolled another one and handed it to me. I didn't want it, but there was no way that I could politely refuse it. I'd never smoked a rollup. It tasted like mud, or what I imagined mud tasted like, but I managed to inhale without coughing too much.

  'You're an actress, I hear.'

  I grimaced. It was a sensitive subject. I had always acted; always dreamed of becoming an actress. That spring I'd played Juliet in our local am-dram society's annual Shakespeare production. It was my big chance. I had fantasised about being talent-spotted; about landing a role opposite Tom Cruise in a big Hollywood movie as a result. And then the local newspaper reviewer described my performance thus: 'Teenager Lizzie Stephens makes a pretty if somewhat wooden Juliet.'

  It hurt because I knew that it was true. All through rehearsals I'd been pushing back the nagging suspicion that I really wasn't very good. Good enough, perhaps
, with a nice face and a clear voice, and enough intelligence to stress approximately the right word in most of my lines. But I wasn't even the best actress in an amateur performance of Romeo and Juliet. To my family, I raged at the spite of the reviewer. Amongst my friends, I laughed it off. But in truth I was deeply upset – not by the bad review but by the frustration of having a dream shattered at eighteen years old. For most of my life I'd been the actress of the family – it was my role, my 'thing', my special talent. What was I supposed to be good at now? How was I supposed to express myself?

  So when Joanna asked about my acting, it triggered something – because it was a hot day and my face hurt from smiling and my dress was hideous and uncomfortable and I wanted to scream. I took another puff on the disgusting cigarette, kicked my heels against the dustbin that I was sitting on and poured out my heart to her: the dreams, the build-up, the frustration, the self-doubt, the sense that I was about to explode out of my skin unless I could express myself in some way. The way that being an eighteen-year-old girl in a small town could make me want to scream or run through the streets naked or tear off my own skin with my bitten fingernails.

  Joanna didn't respond immediately. She calmly finished smoking her cigarette and then rummaged in her handbag. She pulled out a packet of mints and offered them to me. I accepted one, embarrassed by my outburst. She popped one in her own mouth and sucked it for a while. Then she said, 'And what happens next?'

  'Sarah and Chris will go off and get changed into their going-away clothes and then we all have to stand outside the restaurant and wave them off. I think Chris's mate Andy is tying some tin cans to the car and doing something with shaving foam.'

  She smiled. 'That's not what I meant. What happens next for you?'

  'I'm going to university. London. T o do English.'