Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  I did want more, but also I didn't. My body told me I wanted more. I wanted to go on kissing him, to feel his tongue in my mouth, to feel him bite down on my bottom lip. I wanted to thrust myself at him, to have him fondle my breasts and more. But, at the same time, I didn't want it. I was still a virgin. Not only that, I was a vicar's daughter, a nicely brought up vicar's daughter. My virginity was the one thing I thought I should keep, at least for now; at least until I was sure that he loved me.

  Rivers stood up, still with the wineglass in his hand. He unfastened the little French doors that led out onto a tiny, rickety balcony, walked out there and took in the view. 'Shit,' I heard him say.

  'What is it?'

  'Joanna's back early. Go downstairs, grab her and keep her talking while I make my escape.'

  He kissed me quickly again as I left my bedroom to go downstairs. And once again, there was the wink.

  I knew barely anything about Rivers Carillo at this point. I knew he was thirty-eight and a poet. I knew, because he told me, that during term-time he taught literature at some university in Indiana. But every summer he came out to what he called his 'spiritual home', San Francisco, to 'reconnect with his muse'.

  Yeah, I know. I should have realised then that he was a shallow, pretentious fraud. But I was a naive eighteen-year-old with a thing for older, artistic men. I was a naive eighteen-year-old who took people at face value. And so I thought he was talented, artistic, deep and passionate – the kind of man I had always been destined to fall in love with. I was a stupid, stupid girl.

  Thirteen

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

  One sheet of paper and nine words. That's all it was. Nine words – but it felt like the whole world had changed. I'd been living on a fault line for seventeen years and finally the earthquake had struck. All those years of fear, wondering what might happen, if anyone would find out, if I'd really got away with it. All those years of fear, and there it was: a white envelope, a sheet of white paper, nine words, neatly handwritten in black ballpoint pen. A standard sheet of white laser-print paper, no watermark, no smudges. A single sheet of paper, thin and deadly, like an arrow breaching my defences.

  I got back to my flat on that Friday afternoon and I locked and bolted the door, as usual. I leaned against the front door, standing in the hallway of my flat, and out of nowhere I started laughing. Suddenly the note seemed hideously funny. I remembered the man at Leicester Forest East, running after me to give me my carrier bag and calling me 'duck', and how scared I'd been then. That was nothing compared to this. I was laughing because — well, I'd been afraid for so long, and now it was finally here. It, the judgement, the avenger — whatever it was. Whoever it was. It had finally caught up with me. It was almost a relief. And then, in the way that hysterical laughter tends to, it turned into sobs, and I found myself sinking down, still leaning against the front door, until I was sitting on the prickly doormat. And on that sweltering day in London, another day when the temperatures were soaring close to thirty degrees Celsius, I sat there feeling colder than I had ever done in my life.

  Eventually I got out my list. What else could I do? I got out my list, and I dug out the manila file from the place where it was hidden on the bookshelf and I reread everything I'd written, every piece of information I'd gathered together. I was trying to control my fear through information, or simply by doing something, anything. I checked the internet. I searched Rivers Carillo's name on it for what felt like the millionth time. There was nothing new, nothing added, from all the other times I'd searched. I didn't know what I was looking for, anyway. Maybe a police report. The kind of thing you'd get in a T V police procedural. Something to say the case had been reopened because new evidence had been found – a 'cold case', they'd call it. Or more far-fetched: a close relative of his who'd had amnesia for seventeen years had suddenly remembered the identity of the girl that Rivers had been seeing the summer that he'd died. Or a report that the body they found wasn't Rivers Carillo at all. But there was nothing. Nothing had changed.

  Everything had changed.

  Why now? I kept asking myself. Why now, after all these years? As I paced around my flat I caught sight of my green jacket hanging on the back of my door and I realised that something had changed – I had changed. I'd decided to stop being afraid; I'd decided to start being happy. Had this person – the letter-writer, the stalker, the avenger – had they seen me with Zoey, laughing and joking and acting like a normal, happy person having lunch with a friend? Had they followed me to the Black Keys gig, waited outside and watched me leave arm in arm with Danny? Had they seen me go into Danny's flat? Had they waited outside until I'd emerged the following morning looking happy? Was that the trigger?

  And that made everything even worse, because that meant someone had been watching me for years, watching my fear, feeding off it; waiting for their moment to strike – the moment when I'd dropped my guard, the moment when I'd stopped being afraid. And that someone was probably close at hand right now.

  Assess the threat level. That sentence came into my head from nowhere. Maybe it was something I'd heard on TV, from a survival programme, or from some American miniseries about disaster threatening the Earth. What was the threat level? More to the point, what was the threat? What was I being threatened with? I was being watched. Somebody knew exactly what I was doing and who I spent my time with. Someone was out there. I'd probably seen them at some point – in the street, on the Tube, hanging around outside school. They knew where I worked; no doubt they also knew where I lived. They probably knew everything about me. But what did the note mean, and what were they threatening to do to me? To carry on watching, that much was certain. But what else? Were they going to expose what I had done? If so, to whom? Was I in physical danger? What should I do? Should I leave? Should I run away and hide?

  Someone was watching me and I didn't know who. And I didn't know what they planned to do to me. The questions went round and round, round and round, swirling around inside my head. There were no answers. I had no idea what to do. I'd come to a decision, an explanation, a plan of action, and then it would float away again. There was no one I could tell. How could I, without revealing what I had done all those years ago?

  Impatient, frustrated and afraid, I turned off my computer. I looked at the note once more, flattened it out, then folded it up again, put it back into the envelope and slipped the envelope into the file. I put the file back where it belonged, hidden between the atlas and the D I Y book, weighed down and hidden where no one would find it. I looked at my white walls, at the sparsely furnished rooms, at the small pile of books, the few CDs on the shelves. I looked at what my life had come to, what my life amounted to. I couldn't think of anything else to do. I turned off my phone. I turned the television on, loud. I cooked some pasta and tried to eat it. I watched something on television – I don't know what, maybe it was a sitcom, maybe the news. I ran a bath and lay in it until my skin wrinkled, drinking red wine, as if a hot bath and enough alcohol could somehow persuade me that everything was normal. And, in the end, I made myself go to bed. I curled up in a foetal position, my duvet tightly wrapped around me, and I tried to go to sleep. What else could I possibly do?

  Fourteen

  There he was again, out of the corner of my eye: Rivers Carillo. I knew it was stupid. He was dead; I killed him. Whoever was stalking me was not Rivers Carillo. How could it be? But still, there he was, the next day, haunting me at another motorway service station; haunting me yet again when I was trying to run away. There he was, serving behind the hot-food counter at Pease Pottage Services, just south of Crawley. He was wearing a white hat and overall, and he was serving all day breakfasts to frazzled-looking families. From time to time he looked across at me and seemed to grin. I looked away. I moved my seat so that I was sitting at a different angle, so it was difficult to make even the slightest eye contact. I was hiding under the baseball cap I usually wore only on bad hair days, and I pulled the rim
further down over my face. I was trying hard to keep myself together, to act as normally as possible. I took a long gulp of Diet Coke and filled in another clue in the Times crossword with a shaking hand. The crossword was calming me slightly, letting me focus on working out anagrams and other word puzzles, putting letters into blank squares, feeling a sense of control. It was what I needed.

  After a while I made myself look back towards the hot-food counter and – of course – it wasn't Rivers Carillo at all. It was just a kid, a young guy, not much more than twenty, with a cheery face and a frizz of curly dark hair poking out of his hygienic hat. And it occurred to me that all the time I'd been bothering about him, that spectre of Rivers Carillo, someone else had probably been watching me, someone I wouldn't recognise. I looked around me cautiously, as discreetly as possible, feeling as if every hair on my body was standing on end. Just the normal Saturday crowds. Nobody looked suspicious. Everyone looked suspicious.

  I was running away. I didn't want to be in London. I couldn't stay in my flat. I'd woken just after seven, the sun already streaming through the gaps in the blinds, the flat already stuffy and airless. I had a headache and my throat was dry. I'd stumbled into the bathroom and splashed water onto my face. I could see in the mirror that the skin around my eyes looked puffy and bruised. I went back to bed, tossed and turned, and eventually fell asleep again, waking frequently in the midst of horrific dreams.

  I'd tried to stay in bed. I thought maybe I could stay asleep all day, all weekend; hiding under my duvet, escaping the fear that way, killing time, killing the empty days. But by mid-morning I was wide awake. I felt hot and sweaty, and I couldn't find a cool place on the pillow. I got up again and walked around the flat, counting to myself. Then I stood in front of my bookshelf for a while, my arms tightly folded so that I wouldn't be tempted to fish out the letter from the file and read it again. I opened the big window as wide as it would go, and I stuck my head out and breathed in the sticky London air. There were roofs and windows as far as I could see, each hiding people that I didn't know: hundreds and thousands of them, people and people and people, and one of them wished me harm. In the street below my window someone was kicking a beer can along the street. The sky was white with the threat of humidity and extreme heat. I knew that I had to get away.

  So there I was, on the run. I was looking for some air, and a chance to escape for a while. I wanted to lock the door on that sheet of white paper with those nine words on it: to put some miles under my belt; to get away, to hide. And so I was on my way to a place that I guessed would always be a refuge, however old I got. I was going to spend the weekend with my parents. I even had a half formed idea – a glimmer of a plan – that I might tell them what had happened: tell them everything, and let them sort it out. That's what parents are supposed to do, isn't it? But I knew I would never do it. I knew I would lose my nerve at the last minute.

  My parents lived in one of those small Sussex seaside resorts that aren't Brighton, a town full of bed-and-breakfasts and down-at-heel cafes. We'd moved there when I was thirteen, and my parents must have liked it because they stayed. There was a grim concrete shopping centre built in the 1960s that the local council was planning to knock down when they could decide what to build instead. The latest idea was a new leisure centre-cum-civic theatre. The main shopping precinct seemed mainly to specialise in shops selling sports shoes, greetings cards and Chinese medicines. There were at least four charity shops, filling spaces where big-name high-street stores used to be. The beach was mostly shingle, the pier was falling down, and the town's only glories were a few streets of faded Victorian villas, one terrace of attractively restored Georgian houses and the brightly coloured municipal flower beds, always filled with pelargoniums and impatiens in various eye-searing colours. My mother had taught me the Latin names for plants; she was a keen gardener. But I knew that another name for impatiens was Busy Lizzie, because that's what my father used to call me: Busy Lizzie, or sometimes Dizzy Lizzie or Whizzy Lizzie or Fizzy Lizzie. Variants on a theme: I was the child who soaked up attention, who was never still, who was always dancing and acting, and acting up. I threw tantrums if I was ignored for more than five minutes. I was difficult, a pain, a little madam, a show-off. It was no wonder that my parents were so pleasantly surprised when I returned home from my summer in San Francisco as a newly quiet, restrained woman called Beth.

  Did I blame my parents for never noticing that something was wrong – badly wrong – with me? I don't think so. Not really. They had so many other things to think about. My dad was a vicar – I suppose he still was; you never stop being a vicar, do you? He still filled in sometimes, covering for other vicars who went on holiday or had nervous breakdowns or affairs with parishioners, taking services at a variety of local churches. Back when I was a teenager, we'd lived in one of those Victorian houses in the old part of town, a huge rambling vicarage with seven bedrooms that had now been sold off and converted into flats. Both my parents took their pastoral roles seriously and kept an open house. You never knew who might be staying under our roof: homeless drug addicts, pregnant teenagers thrown out by their parents, African theology students with archaic Biblical names like Zachariah and Simeon.

  There was a lot of love in our home, but the love was swirling and unfocused. It was up to each individual child to grab as much love from my parents as we could, as they passed by on their way from one good work to the next. It was very easy to hide from, if you didn't want to deal with parental love. And then, when I was older, there was a whole thing with my younger sister Jem: hospital appointments and big medical decisions and operations, and suddenly she was the focus of family life as the rest of us left home. All this might explain why I was such a show-off as a child and yet I'd been able to fly under the radar ever since.

  I was, ironically, the child who gave my parents the least worry. My older sister Sarah was divorced and bringing up teenage kids on her own, up there in what my parents considered to be the grim North. Jem – the youngest child, the baby, the one who had been ill as a child – was permanently infantilised by the family and my mother didn't seem to realise that she was now a grown woman. Jem was seven years younger than me. She was involved with websites or videos or graphic design, and from time to time I would bump into her in Soho or in Camden, and we'd make half-hearted promises to each other to have lunch. She had a lot of piercings and tattoos and variably coloured hair, she wore strange footwear and T-shirts with Japanese logos on them, and none of us really knew her at all.

  And then there was me: the killer who lived in a state of permanent fear. Or to describe me the way the world saw me: there was Beth, the sensible one, the schoolteacher with a nice little flat in London who visited her parents dutifully every couple of months. My mother did occasionally worry that I was lonely; I think she thought that I might be a lesbian and she wished that I would come out and tell her, because she would have been really supportive. In fact, she probably would have been thrilled. But, mostly, my parents didn't worry much about me. They thought I had my life all sorted out. What would they have said if I had told them?

  My parents wished they could still live in a house like the vicarage. They would have liked a sprawling house to fit their image, their dream, of the sprawling extended family. But instead they had a little bungalow on the outskirts of town, with a neat garden that I had to remember to admire every time I visited. It was probably not their fault that our family split apart like curdled milk. Except maybe, because we shared that vicarage with every needy person in the parish, because there was no privacy and no separate family time, Sarah and Jem and I had all built walls around us and between us in our different ways. Mine was the least definable but definitely the most impenetrable.

  It was very hot, even there on the coast, the kind of heat that hits you like an insult as you get out of an air conditioned car. But at least there was a whisper of a breeze off the sea. I parked my car on the street that sloped gently down from the Downs and towards the
sea, and I breathed in the fresh air. My mother was in the front garden, planting or uprooting something in one of her tubs. She was kneeling, her hands – ungloved – deep in the soil. She saw me, smiled, and stood with difficulty. I noticed that she was starting to get old. She hugged me, careful not to touch me with her dirty hands, and asked me if I liked what she'd done to the garden. I gave her a cautiously general response about how pretty it was looking despite the lack of rain. Then she said, 'You look tired,' and before I could answer she added, 'But never mind, you've got that lovely long holiday ahead of you.'

  Inside, the porch was full of supermarket carrier bags stuffed with jumble, presumably on its way to a church fete. My mother put the kettle on and I went through the airless, shabby bungalow and out to the conservatory, where my father was doing the same crossword that I'd been attempting to complete earlier. His new reading glasses made his eyes look enormous as he looked up at me. 'Busy Lizzie,' he said tenderly, ruefully, his dry lips brushing my cheek. He'd taken to calling me that again; I didn't know why. I slumped down into one of the cane chairs and looked around me, at all the familiar ornaments and at the tatty carpet, and the furniture that had seen better days.

  For half a moment I considered confessing. I should tell my father what I did, all those years ago. 'Dad, I have something to tell you.' That's how I would have begun. My father would have looked up, vaguely. 'Dad, I killed someone.'

  What would he have said? Would he have dealt with the shock? Would he have asked me to tell him everything, all the details? Would he have taken it in his stride, as a vicar should, and offer me forgiveness and absolution in exchange for repentance and penitence? Not that I believed in all that. I had killed any vestigial faith that I might have had on the day that I killed Rivers Carillo. I grew up in a house surrounded by people of deep Christian faith. It was always there for the taking, and somehow I'd taken it for granted. But I had never bothered to develop my own faith. Any belief that I had was probably always destined to die very quickly, like the seeds in the parable that were sown on rocky soil. Forgiveness seemed like a cop-out. I didn't believe that anything could be that easy. And yet I still yearned to confess.