The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  ‘A dolphin? Just no.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Anna lies down on the massage table, rearranges her hair and sinks her face into the doughnut. I wait just long enough to see how it’s done before clambering onto the adjacent table.

  A moment later the curtain moves and the two masseuses we saw earlier waiting at the pamper area entrance reappear, exchange brief greetings and busy themselves mixing oil. The taller one of them, a lean woman with cornbraids, comes over and waits for me to put my head in the doughnut before arranging my arms flat on the table. The feeling of her hands, sweeping across the broad width of my back, are those of the best lover you never had and the oil smells clean and comforting. Tomorrow I’ll be just another millennial struggling to make ends meet in a city that, with its gig economy, insane work hours and outrageous rents, is doing its very best to drive me away. Plus I’ll be sporting a cracking hangover. But let’s not think of that right now. Let’s live for the moment just a little. Let’s live for tonight. Because tonight is the night I am a birthday queen sitting in a VIP tent at a cool festival with my besties while someone who is probably paid even less than me massages my shoulders and pedies my feet.

  The massaging stops and for an instant it feels like some small part of me just withered away with it.

  ‘Is that tattoo new? I shouldn’t really . . .’

  Anna says, lifting her head from the doughnut and directing herself to the masseuse, says, ‘Pretty please, it’s her birthday,’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘We’ll tip like you won’t believe.’

  The masseuse smiles and shrugs. ‘Well, OK. Happy birthday. I guess I can work around it.’ Pouring a little more oil on her palms, she begins to push at my flesh anew.

  Silence falls for a while as the masseuse turns to my lower back, pressing her fists into the muscle either side of the spine and sending warm waves up into my shoulders. Beside me, Anna has begun making appreciative little grunting sounds. I’m conscious of thoughts slipping from my mind and falling onto the floor like cut hair.

  ‘God, isn’t this glorious! I hardly ever do this sort of thing these days. Never have children, darling, they eat you alive. So expensive too. We’re practically penniless.’

  The thoughts instantly pick themselves up and fly back into my head. It’s not a good feeling. I don’t know how I’m going to make the rent this month and I’m already late with last month’s payment.

  ‘Oh God, let’s not talk about money.’ The masseuse stops momentarily. When she restarts there’s a different energy to the movement.

  ‘But, darling, you just paid to have a tattoo so . . .’

  ‘Were you listening when I was telling the story in the pub? The guy did it for free. He had a kink.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Silence falls again followed by the resumption of small grunting sounds from the other table, then silence once more.

  ‘Just a thought, why don’t you ask Bo to lend you a couple of grand? Or Dex. Ask Dex.’

  ‘No! Anyway, you know how Gav is about money.’

  The masseuse tries valiantly to stop me fidgeting. In the space of five minutes I have become the nightmare client; tense and broke.

  ‘Well, ask Bo then. You know how brilliant he was with me.’

  ‘True, but I’m just useless with money. You were run over by a lorry. You nearly died. You had to take a year off.’

  It happened when Anna was cycling to work. A lorry turning left, the usual thing. The attending emergency doctor said that, though she was horribly bruised and with a fractured pelvis, a broken arm and several broken ribs, Anna was lucky to have escaped with her life. Bo, Dex and I took eight-hour shifts at her hospital cubicle. When Chris and Tricia, Anna’s parents, finally flew in from Nice, where they’d taken early retirement, they spent most of their time shopping saying that Anna, who was by then in a medically induced coma, wouldn’t notice, made a huge fuss about the ropey coffee in the hospital cafeteria and left two days later. Bo was a champion. This was a couple of years before he hit pay dirt with his dating app. The money Bo gave Anna for her recuperation was the stash he’d saved in order to quit the tech job he hated and sign up to study for a PhD in palaontology, which, naturally, then never happened.

  ‘Poor you, though, you had to deal with Chris and Tricia. I have that sweetheart Dr Bukhari to thank for putting me in a coma so I didn’t have to.’ She pauses to fire instructions at the masseuse (Ooh, yes, just there where the knot is. Lovely) before going on, ‘Anyway, having money doesn’t make you any happier.’

  Outside, a group of festival goers passes by laughing loudly.

  ‘I’d be happy to give it my best shot.’

  She turns over and waits for the masseuse to rearrange her towels.

  ‘Sometimes all you really want is the one thing you can’t have. Or the one person.’

  The lean woman with the cornrows stops massaging and asks me to turn over.

  ‘But you’ve got Ralphie.’

  ‘Yes, darling Ralphie. I adore him, you know I do. And I love his dad, in my own way.’

  ‘Isaac?’

  ‘Of course Isaac.’

  There’s a pause. I wonder if this might be the time to speak about Ralphie, and what I know. It’s just us, for once, and the mood is light.

  ‘Anna? Are you ever going to—’ Her eyes sideswipe. Waving off the masseuse she sits up and clutches at the towel. Then in a voice laced with warning, she says, ‘Don’t, Cassie, just don’t. And don’t you dare ever say anything to you know who. Not ever. I wish you hadn’t guessed but you did so we can’t do anything about that now. If you did tell I wouldn’t be friends with you any more, you know that, don’t you? And nor would you know who.’ Swinging her legs over the table she reaches for her clothes and using the towel as a screen, slips them on.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap, especially not on your birthday. Of all four of us, only Bo really got a decent set of parents. Ironic, really, you’d think that would make him keener to be a parent himself.’

  A phone pings. Peering at the console table she reaches out and peers at her device. Her face, sunny for an instant, suddenly darkens.

  ‘Oh bum. Ralphie’s woken up and Isaac doesn’t seem able to comfort him. I’m so sorry, darling, I’ll have to go,’ says Anna, regretfully. ‘But listen, I can jump in an Uber, settle Ralphie, and whiz back. I could be by your side again come midnight. You’ll hardly notice I’ve gone.’ She bends over and lands a kiss on my head. ‘You look absolutely gorgeous, by the way. Why don’t you find some nice bloke to swipe right? There must be loads here. You won’t even miss me.’ She squeezes my hand. Her eyes are dark mirrors and in the dim light of the VIP tent she looks invincible. ‘Don’t ever be a mother, darling.’

  24

  Cassie

  Afternoon, Saturday 1 October, Isle of Portland

  Dex and I have been at the cottage for over an hour now. In the cab on the way over there had been a discussion, begun by Dex and more painful than cracked ribs, because it seems increasingly unfixable.

  ‘You know, Cass, we’d all understand if you just wanted to go home,’ Dex says. It hadn’t occurred to me to go home. Now, it seems, the idea has been discussed behind my back.

  ‘Why would I go home? In any case, my home is here with you three.’

  Dex takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘You just seem a bit out of step with the rest of us right now.’

  ‘Is that what you and Anna were talking about last night when I brought out the hot chocolate?’ When Anna pressed a warning foot onto yours.

  ‘No, I mean, I don’t remember. But no.’ Dex knits his brow and goes on, ‘All I’m saying is, first there was that thing in the sea, and now the horse thing. You seem to be having a really shit time. I just wonder if you wouldn’t be better off in London?’

  The cab pulls into the little drive and crunches onto the gravel.

  ‘Just think about it, OK?’ Dex says, helping me ou
t of the cab.

  Anna is waiting for us at the front door. ‘Well, that was all very alarming, wasn’t it?’ She has laid a duvet on the sofa in the living room in preparation for my return and fetching a cup of tea and a fistful of ibuprofen wonders if I shouldn’t go to the hospital for a check-up.

  ‘I’m OK, just a bit bruised.’

  I watch Dex disappear upstairs with his cup of tea.

  Sitting down beside me and gently moving my hair from my face, Anna says, ‘They were terribly cut up about it at the stables, as well they might be, given that they promised your horse was bullet-proof. You could sue them, you know.’

  ‘Hello, it’s me, remember? When was the last time I got myself together to do anything? In any case, it sounds odd but I’m really having trouble remembering what happened.’

  Already the events seem like a thick stew through which only small parts of the whole are visible.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.’ Anna is running her hand through my hair now. ‘I do love you, Cassie, darling, and it’s because I love you that I’m wondering, maybe, since you had that horrible accident, it might be better for you to be at home in London right now? I’m worried that you might feel worse here, away from everything familiar.’

  ‘You’re familiar. So is Dex and Bo.’

  ‘Well, OK then.’ She picks up the cup of tea and takes a delicate sip. A penetrating silence descends on Fossil Cottage. ‘That’s why we’re still friends, really, isn’t it? Because we always agree on the big things.’

  It has been nearly two hours since Jason and I parted company and Anna has yet to ask me a single question about how it happened. And, to make matters odder still, the more I try to remember the day’s events, the hazier they seem.

  25

  Dex

  Evening, Saturday 13 August, Wapping

  The pizza arrives a little earlier than Dex had been expecting and the ring on the doorbell catches him newly showered but still naked.

  He throws on his bathrobe and trips down the stairs, remembers on his way that he double-locked (paranoid that Gav would return and catch him) the front door and as he goes by the console table in the hallway yanks on the drawer where the key habitually lives.

  A small, dark woman is at the door with the order. Dex thinks he recognises her. On Bo’s recommendation he and Gav have started ordering from the Great Big Pizza Company so she’s probably delivered here before. He’s usually focused on the pizza, he thinks, with a twinge. London is so anonymous. How many people do you pass every day without taking much notice? He takes the pizzas and asks her to wait on the doorstep so he can find her a tip. She looks like she could use one. He figures undernourished or maybe a bit druggy. Turning his back he moves into the living room, deposits the pizzas on the table and goes over to the cabinet where Gav keeps a bowl of coins, turning the tiny key and scooping up a handful. These he dumps in the pocket of his bathrobe, then reties the bathrobe where the belt has come loose.

  When he goes back into the hallway, the woman is still waiting on the stoop. Fabien, as his Grindr date has styled himself, is now standing at the top of the stairs, though still wet from the shower and covered only in a small towel.

  ‘Do you have, like, a fresh towel?’

  They’ve had their fun and in the post-coital phase, Fabien is failing to grow on him. Particularly now he’s dripping all over Gav’s silk Nain rug.

  ‘I told you, in the big grey armoire,’ he says, holding a staying hand up to the pizza deliverer.

  ‘Arm? What does that even mean?’

  Mate, thinks Dex, your name is Fabien, you’re French. Armoire is French.

  ‘The cupboard, in the bathroom, where towels are usually kept.’

  ‘I think I might have tried there already,’ Fabien says.

  Christ on a bike. Have I literally fucked this man’s brains out? Dex thinks.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ Dex says to the pizza woman.

  Yomping up the stairs two at a time, Dex clatters towards the main bathroom and points to the large cupboard, which seems to satisfy Fabien, then turns and makes his more measured way back down the stairs and is surprised to see the woman still standing there, patiently waiting. She must be desperate, he thinks, handing her two twos and a one, a very overgenerous tip, but to include having to wait while he dealt with the cockwomble upstairs. She smiles and he smiles and harmony is restored. He swings the heavy front door shut and relocks, then is about to remove the key and put it back in the console when it strikes him not to bother. Fabien, or whatever his actual name is, will be leaving in the near future.

  Truth be told, Dex would really rather his date leave now. The frisson is having company in his and Gav’s bedroom when Gav has expressly forbidden it. Bloody good word, frisson. Anyway, now that’s done, leaving Dex with a sense of business completed and, beneath that, a vague sense of unease, guilt probably. Still, it would be astonishingly rude to kick the man out without so much as a drink and a bite.

  He calls, ‘Pizza!’, takes himself back into the living room, switches on the TV loudly enough for Fabien to be able to hear upstairs, lies back on the modular sofa and opens the box marked American Hot. A few minutes later Fabien appears, dressed, primped, smelling of Gav’s aftershave and no doubt ready for his next Grindr appointment.

  ‘I think I’ll just go. Do you mind?’

  Does Dex mind? His mind is dancing an Irish jig.

  ‘Mate, do whatever you need to do,’ he says to his soon to be ex-friend in as measured a voice he can muster. He looks at the boxes sitting on the table in front of him, picks up Fabien’s. ‘Want this to go?’

  Fabien looks at the box and is embarrassed.

  ‘No, please, I insist,’ Dex says, standing and thrusting the box in Fabien’s hands and thereby saving himself the trouble of finding a place to dispose of the box before Gav sees it.

  Having shown Fabien and his pizza out, Dex shuts the front door, and stands with his back to it for a moment, feeling a mixture of relief and pleasure and guilt, but mostly relief. He moves into the living room and folds a slice of American Hot into his mouth. What a shame, he thinks, that there’s no Grindr only for interesting people, or, at least, guaranteed not-bores. You’d think Bo would be able to come up with an algorithm for that. Give Bo some ones and zeroes and he can come up with anything.

  He’s looking forward to meeting up with the Group now. Why is it, he wonders, that he’s never been able to make any other really long-lasting friendships? What does that say about him and about the Group? Maybe it’s because they’ve all been through so much together: growing pains, minor university triumphs, finals and that awful low period when they basically graduated into the midst of the world financial collapse, then his break-up with Cassie, wedding to Gav, Anna’s accident then the birth of Ralphie. Looking back on it now, the months and years they spent together seem so full of incident and feeling. They were living at a kind of emotional intensity he’d never experienced before and hasn’t with anyone else since. Even with Gav. Particularly with Gav and most definitely recently. Dex’s other half has been grumpy and out of sorts lately. And all that weight loss. Dex wonders whether his hubbie is trying to reclaim his youth. Whatever, it isn’t working. No, for all the pain and tensions, the break-ups and the betrayals, he never feels so alive as when he is in the company of those three. They are the colour in what can often seem a world painted in fashionable but no more desirable drabs. Their voices are his favourite music. God, he thinks, interrupting his own reverie, I’m beginning to sound like some nutter in a cult. Don’t want that, do we, Dexter mate.

  He finishes his pizza, gets dressed and at the appointed time takes off down to the river and makes his way along the Thames Path. A sentiment flies into his head fully formed. I bloody love London on a summer’s evening when the air is balmy with the fug of garden flowers and petrol fumes and there are people lying out in the parks and strolling along the river path. There is no way I could love it more. Being
able to be here, in the magic of a dimming twilight, with the lights of the city blinking on, walking towards the people who I love and who love me, and with the prospect of hours of music and laughter and dancing stretching ahead, this is what joy is. That’s even a little bit poetic, he thinks.

  He reaches the Prospect of Whitby in high spirits and makes his way through the pub to the Group’s usual table at the back in the bay window with a direct view of the river. Cassie and Anna are already seated and chatting animatedly. A warm scent of briny mud and detritus floats up from the murky water. His eyes float over the familiar plaque explaining that from this pub drunk men were rowed out to the middle of the river, robbed, tossed overboard and left to drown. Every time they come here, which is often, Dex says that’s what he’ll do to Bo, one of these days, and Bo always says, do it, man, because you look across the water, that’s my river-view flat right there and I’m a strong swimmer. But no one’s really going to throw anyone in the water. Obviously.

  Cassie spots him making his way through the crowd and waves. Dex comes over and slides onto the bench. Two pint glasses of beer and a large wine glass still half full of white wine sit on the table alongside a bag of crisps and a small tray of salted nuts.

  ‘Where’s Bo?’

  Cassie gestures towards the gents’.

  ‘Can I get anyone a drink?’

  He’s waiting at the bar when Bo approaches, alerted by the women, and helps him carry the round back to the table.

  ‘Happy birthday, Cass,’ he says, putting another beer in front of Cassie and beside it, the present he’s bought her.

  She opens the box and takes out the ammonite pin, backs away as if unnerved then, letting out a hollow, uncertain laugh, presents her right arm to him, where there is what looks like a new ink etched into the delicate skin of the wrist. A blue ammonite.

  ‘Wow, how weird is that? I didn’t even know you were into ammonites. I must have just picked it up somehow.’