Complicit

by Unknown

  It was afternoon when I finally got into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I wrapped a cotton scarf around my neck – I wasn’t going out but I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. On my way to the kitchen to make myself something to eat, I saw that a folded piece of lined paper had been pushed through the door. I picked it up and opened it. ‘Bonnie,’ it read, in hasty, lopsided handwriting, scrawled with a blunt pencil. ‘There are some things I would like to tell you that I should have told you before. Please let me see you. Please. Sorry. So very very sorry. H’

  I crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the bin. Then I retrieved it and straightened it out, staring at the words until they blurred.

  The phone rang, startling me. I pushed Hayden’s note into my pocket as if somebody was watching me. It was Guy.

  ‘Are you all right? You sound as if you’ve got a cold. Are you losing your voice?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘I was just calling to say I’ll be a little late for the rehearsal.’

  ‘Rehearsal.’

  ‘I’ve been caught up. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  ‘I don’t think I can make it today, Guy.’

  ‘It’s at your flat. In half an hour.’

  Of course it was. I looked around me in despair. It was as if burglars had broken in and turned a building site into a bombsite, with me at the centre of the explosion.

  ‘It’s all a bit of a mess,’ I rasped.

  ‘No one minds that,’ Guy said heartily. He lived in an immaculate house, everything in its proper place. I think he liked other people’s chaos. I stooped down and picked up a piece of the broken cup. ‘But you’ll be there to let me in.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  As soon as I put the phone down I started clearing up the kitchen, mopping the milk with a cloth I kept having to squeeze into the sink, and gathering up all the broken china. It’s amazing how far china travels when it’s smashed. My feet were bleeding now as well as my leg. But then I suddenly grasped that I was concentrating on the wrong task: the mess of the flat didn’t matter, the mess of myself did. No one could see me like this.

  I hurried into the bedroom. The shorts would do, but not the T-shirt. I had to find something high-necked. I pulled clothes out of boxes until I found a Victorian blouse that I must have got in a vintage shop years ago. I couldn’t remember ever having worn it before – it wasn’t really my style. I pulled it on carefully, wincing as it brushed against my neck, then stood back from the mirror to examine myself. I looked like a girl who’d been through her mother’s dressing-up box. More to the point, the bruise showed above the collar. It seemed to be spreading higher and higher.

  I went into the bathroom and opened my sponge bag, where I kept what small amount of makeup I owned. There was some old foundation cream in there and I unbuttoned the shirt to smear it liberally over my neck and up to my jaw. It was darker than I’d expected. I must have bought it when I was tanned, except I was never tanned. I had a milky skin against which the bruise flared vividly. I rubbed in more. Now the bruise was almost obscured, but my neck was a browny orange that ended abruptly at my jaw line, like a tidemark. Above it, my face was whiter than ever. I rubbed some of the cream into it and smoothed it in, making sure it went into my hairline. Then I looked at myself carefully.

  My neck and face were almost the same colour, which was an odd kind of bronze. I rummaged in the sponge bag, but there was nothing very useful in it, so I went back into the bedroom and found the box of toiletries I’d been going to throw away. There was a stick of very pale makeup that I vaguely recalled had been used in a school production of Grease. I used that to whiten the bronze. Now my face looked thickly tan-coloured and slightly streaky; if I ran a nail along my skin, a thick line of paler skin emerged. I completed the effect by covering the whole lot in Grease face powder. I put on some mascara, because my eyes seemed small and sunken in my matt, pasted face.

  To complete the effect, I dabbed gloss on my lips and sprayed some perfume an aunt had once given me down my cleavage, onto my bloody feet and into the air of the room. There. I buttoned up the shirt and wrapped the scarf round my neck.

  I had about five minutes. I put a plaster on my leg, laid newspaper over the kitchen floor to soak up the last of the milk and protect people from the broken china, swept anything that was on the table into an empty box that I pushed against the wall, then took Hayden’s note and put it in my underwear drawer. I was picking up damp towels when the doorbell rang. It was Joakim.

  ‘Hello, Bonnie,’ he said, and blushed. ‘You look very pretty today. Have you caught the sun?’

  After

  ‘Hello, Bonnie.’

  When Joakim appeared at my door, carrying a guitar case, smiling, it felt as though he had stumbled on me in a car crash, surrounded by crushed metal, broken glass, covered with blood, and he simply hadn’t noticed. I let him in and wondered if I had forgotten about a rehearsal. Then I thought he might have come to tell me in person that he had to drop out of the performance. What a relief that would have been. Then we really couldn’t have continued.

  But he wasn’t pulling out. He told me he thought we needed another song, something people could dance to, but he wanted to try it out on me before he sprang it on the others. He had the sheet music with him and I had barely closed my door before he had got the guitar out and was strumming the chords for me. At any other time I would have been caught up with his enthusiasm. I got out my own guitar and played along with him but it was like watching someone on television being enthusiastic. I hardly felt I was in the same room.

  What I was trying to tell myself was: It’s over. Or, at least, it’s as over as it ever will be. Finally it made sense. Neal had put himself at terrible risk for me and so, in her own peculiar way, had Sonia. In fact, she had done it a second time, when she had come back to the scene to save me from my hopeless self. There was more. The question I hadn’t been able to get out of my head ever since I’d realized the truth was whether I should be grateful to Sonia on a whole different level. Had she done what I would have done if I’d had the courage? Had she done what I secretly wanted to do, even if I was unable to admit it to myself? After all, I had let Hayden hit me and apologize and hit me again and still I hadn’t left him. What would I have said if I had been told about someone who had behaved as I had? I would probably have described her as weak and pathetic. If it was a friend of mine, would I have had the guts to do something about it, to help her, the way Sonia had helped me?

  With the other part of my brain, the automatic part, I played along with Joakim, nodding with him, seeing how the music would work for the group. But I couldn’t give myself up to it. There were the old reasons for that. The image of Hayden dead on the floor, which never left me. The process of wrapping him up and lugging him out, like something to dump on a skip. The thought of him there in the dark, cold, deep water. I would never lose that, I knew. But even so, it was over, and I finally knew the truth, and yet it was still nagging at me, spluttering and fizzing inside my head.

  It was so easy to picture. When Sonia had told him to lay off me, Hayden would have been startled at first but then he would have become angry, and the guilt he felt, the recognition that he was in the wrong, would have made him angrier still. He would have started shouting, become incoherent and, as words failed him, he would have lashed out. He’d show Sonia – he’d show the self-righteous bitch what drove men to be violent. Except Sonia wasn’t like the others. She wouldn’t put up with it. She would fight back. Hayden was a coward. His violence was directed against people who wouldn’t fight back. There was no doubt in my mind that, in the way Hayden lived his life, he had invited something like this. It was just a question of when he ran into someone like Sonia, rather than someone like me. Hayden and Sonia, an immovable object and an irresistible force.

  Joakim was smiling as he watched me play and realized I was accepting his idea, that we really would be playing this funny old bluegrass tune he had down
loaded from somewhere or other. I had trouble with one fiddly chord change and he laughed.

  ‘Are you still deferring your university entry?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean, now Hayden’s dead and no longer an evil influence on me?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m still deferring. All my life I’ve done things just because my parents thought it was the right thing to do. This isn’t anything to do with Hayden any longer, it’s about what’s right for me.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll never forget him, you know.’

  ‘That’s good too,’ I said. ‘He rated you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  Joakim hurriedly got his stuff together. I think he had tears in his eyes.

  ‘So you think it’ll work?’ he asked, snapping his guitar case shut.

  ‘It sounds good,’ I said. ‘As long as we can write an easy enough part for Amos, we should be all right.’

  ‘It’ll be weird doing it without Hayden,’ he said. ‘You’re probably sick of me going on about that.’

  ‘I’m not going to say it’s what Hayden would have wanted, because that’s the sort of rubbish people say about the dead, but it’s probably the right thing to do. We signed up for this. We need to do it.’

  The moment I shut the door I felt as if a little explosion had gone off in my head, as if a gremlin had got into my stupid, non-functioning brain and done my thinking for me while my mind had been dealing with Joakim. Sonia and Hayden. Hayden and Sonia. It wasn’t any kind of answer or even an idea. But there was something there – something that had been worrying away at me. I tried to think hard. I tried to force myself to remember. What would an intelligent person do in my situation?

  First, where was the beer mat? If you’re looking for a beer mat, the best place to start is in a pile of beer mats and there it was, the beer mat on which Nat had written his number. I dialled it.

  Nat didn’t seem especially pleased to hear from me. ‘It’s been a bloody nightmare,’ he said. ‘There’s this detective, this woman, she doesn’t like me. They’ve talked to me about three times. The same questions. I’ve only got the same answers.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I said. ‘You’re innocent.’

  ‘How do you know I’m innocent?’

  That was a good question. Too good a question.

  ‘You just wouldn’t do something like that,’ I said feebly. ‘You’re not the type.’

  ‘That’s not much help.’

  ‘Actually, I need help from you,’ I said.

  ‘From me?’

  ‘I went to a party with Hayden, just a few days before he died. You were there. Do you remember?’

  ‘Kind of. I wasn’t completely at my best.’

  ‘There were old friends of Hayden’s. One was called Miriam. Dark hair, big eyes – she was smoking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Do you know who she is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were at the party.’

  ‘So were about two hundred other people.’

  ‘Could you find out for me?’

  There was a sort of groan. ‘Sure, I’ll ask around. If I hear anything, I’ll call you some time.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is really, really, really urgent. What I’d like you to do is phone anyone you know and ask them who this Miriam was. Then you can ring me, or they can ring me. I’ll give you my number. Do it now. I’m going to sit by my phone and I want you to ring me back within ten minutes. If you don’t, I’ll keep annoying you.’

  The groan resumed. ‘Yeah, yeah, OK, I’ll do my best.’

  I didn’t just sit by the phone. I changed into something smarter, some striped trousers and a pale blue shirt. Serious-looking. I found a jacket and put my purse, a pair of sunglasses and my keys into the pockets. Just as I was wondering if I needed anything else, the phone rang. The voice asked for me by name.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My name’s Ross. You don’t know me. Nat said you want to find out about Miriam Sylvester.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s great. Thanks for calling.’

  ‘So what do you want to know about her?’

  ‘I don’t want to know anything. I just want to talk to her.’

  ‘All right. You got a pen?’

  It was that easy.

  On the train I stared out of the window the whole way to Sheffield. I’d handed over a fistful of notes for my return ticket. I wondered if I was being stupid. Should I have done this over the phone? No. It had to be face to face if it was going to be done at all. The last time I’d been on a train out of London it had been with Hayden, an impulsive journey to the seaside just to show we could do it if we wanted to, go anywhere without anyone knowing. Every field, every piece of green had been like a secret message of escape, a sign that we didn’t need London, that we were not trapped by our duties and responsibilities. This time it felt different. The countryside was just something to be got through. It was probably at its best in the late-summer sun, but what was the point of it? What did people do there? I saw people playing cricket, tractors, church after empty church. I started to nod off and worried that I might sleep through Sheffield and wake up somewhere far to the north. So I drank a cup of horrible black coffee to keep me conscious.

  I got into a taxi at the station and read out the address that the man I had never met had given me over the phone. ‘Is it far?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said the driver.

  As he drove, I looked out of the window. Another place I’d never been before, and because of that the shops and the people seemed just a little bit foreign, a little bit interesting. I knew that if I stayed a day or two the novelty would go and it would look the same as everywhere else. But I wasn’t going to stay a day or two. He turned off a shopping street into an area of old red-brick terraced houses on a hill. Some had been gentrified and others hadn’t. Number thirty-two, the address I’d been given, was definitely one of the houses that had been. I got out and, once again, paid more than I’d expected. I knocked at the door. God, wouldn’t it be stupid if nobody was at home? But the door opened.

  ‘Miriam Sylvester?’ I said, although I had immediately recognized the woman I’d talked to on the stairs at the party. Now she was just wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and her face, then exotic with kohl and lipstick, was bare of makeup.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, slightly puzzled. ‘You must be the woman who rang earlier?’

  ‘Yes, I talked to your, erm, er…’

  ‘Partner, Frank, yes,’ she said.

  Her partner. And I remembered her flirting with Hayden on the stairs. Because that was what women seemed to do around Hayden, like bees around honey.

  ‘We met at a party,’ I said. She looked blank. ‘You’d heard about me. As far as I remember, you’d heard something about me and my banjo.’ She looked less blank but a little more puzzled. This wasn’t starting well. Was it possible I’d wasted my time? ‘I was there with Hayden Booth.’

  ‘Hayden,’ she said, and her expression changed to one of intense engagement. ‘Oh, God, Hayden. I read about it in the papers. It’s the most terrible thing. At first I couldn’t believe it was the same person. Yes, come in, please.’

  I’d worried that she might be so freaked out by the thought that I’d come all the way from London to see her that she might not want to talk to me. But it quickly turned out that that was exactly the advantage. I was her first-hand source for the whole Hayden story. She invited me in, sat me down in her kitchen, offered me lunch and, when I turned that down, made me mug after mug of coffee. Being questioned in detail by a virtual stranger about Hayden’s death and the police investigation was pretty much the thing in the world that I least wanted, but I thought it prudent to go along with it. So I sat there for more than an hour and answered her questions and listened to her talking about how shocked she was. I calculated that the more I responded to her the more she would have to resp
ond to me.

  And so, after she had asked every possible question she could think of, after she had talked about the death of someone else she knew, after she had cried a bit and I had comforted her, after all that, I took a deep breath and asked her the question I had travelled right across England to ask.

  Before

  Amos and Sonia arrived shortly after Joakim. Amos was wearing a pair of flowery shorts and a clashing T-shirt and looked slightly ridiculous and very happy – happy in a way I remembered from the past. He kissed me on both cheeks, heartily, and I thought: He’s completely over me at last.

  He was holding Sonia’s hand when I opened the door to them and he didn’t let go of it as they entered the flat, so that they had to wind their way through the mess into the kitchen. Sonia was wearing a sleeveless white shift that made her dark hair and eyes seem even darker; her skin was creamy and clean. She glowed with a health that made me feel like a creature who’d been found under a stone, squirming in the sudden unwelcome light. She kissed me too, then held me by my shoulders and said in a quiet voice, so Joakim and Amos wouldn’t overhear, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Me?’ I feigned surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You look a bit…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tired, maybe.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You haven’t been under a sun-lamp, have you?’

  ‘Am I the kind of person who would go under a sun-lamp?’ I gave a high, hysterical squeal that was meant to be a laugh. ‘Coffee? Joakim, Amos? I’m making a pot. Or would you prefer something cool?’

  ‘Your flat’s amazing,’ said Joakim, enthusiastically, staring round it.

  I saw it for a moment through his eyes. It wasn’t just a mess, it was almost surreal. ‘You mean a complete tip.’

  ‘My dad would never let me live like this.’

  ‘Quite right too.’

  ‘It’s like a statement.’

  ‘Bonnie taking her stand against the bourgeois world,’ said Amos. He winked at me. I tried to smile but my face felt stiff and swollen.