The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  And all this is absolutely, perfectly normal.

  27

  Bo

  7.15 p.m., Saturday 13 August, London Bridge

  Bo isn’t big on having women round to his place. The exceptions to the rule being Anna and Casspot, obviously, but otherwise, no thanks.

  The female smell lingers over everything. He prefers to see them in hotels, or, if pushed, on their own turf. Which, generally, means having to interact with them in parts of London much less salubrious than London Bridge. It’s mad how far people live from the centre of London these days. All the travelling and the hotel bills. Seventy, eighty quid. Another thirty or so for the Uber. It’s an expensive habit, but he sees it partly as field research. He’d charge it to his business account but that would make it all rather too public.

  He’s home now, though, in the apartment (OK so it’s a flat but no one calls multi-million-pound homes with direct views over the water ‘flats’ these days), getting himself ready for the much anticipated night out. Sooner or later his phone will ping with a text to say that Anna is outside. The only woman who knows his secret. She’ll nag him about it as usual and he’ll issue all the necessary reassurances and then she’ll stop and they will both look forward to a good night out.

  It’s irritating that tonight didn’t go to plan, but he’s had things go wrong before. Interruptions. Women suddenly changing their minds. (God, why are women so flighty and unreliable?) It’s hardly a big deal, but it’s vexing and not ideal given that she’s already had a drink. A small one, but still. In an hour from now she’ll be feeling distinctly off-key.

  He doesn’t wish her ill, but really, to back out like that when they’d already started. And for what? A shitty work call from a shitty employer about a shitty job delivering pizzas.

  It’s really Anna’s fault, this habit of his. No guilt. God, how beautiful and vulnerable she looked after the accident. Her face, her delicately boned shoulders, the bird-like clavicle, the parts of her body left untouched by the lorry’s wheels seemed jewel-like and evanescent. What was it about seeing her prone and unconscious which had so aroused him? Even now, he still finds it difficult to think about. Her vulnerability, perhaps, her complete lack of power. As she hovered somewhere between life and death, everything about her seemed miraculous. How powerful that had been! Even now he only has to think about her lying alone and unconscious in that great, faceless London mausoleum of the ill, to become almost painfully aroused. Sitting beside her then, he knew that something inside him, some wholeness, some kernel of normality, had shattered into a thousand pieces. For the weeks she remained unconscious, Anna was his Sleeping Beauty and he her Beast. Not that he would ever have said anything so corny to her. Or to anyone. Life was now a before and after. Before he had always thought of himself as a perfectly normal bloke. Afterwards he sensed something breaking away. The fuel that powered his decency. Now there were only fragments of that old Bo left. He had become a dark distortion of himself, a black hole, drifting in Anna’s orbit without ever being able to land.

  Even now he’s never really spoken about that time, afraid that if he did, it would puncture the intensity of this memory. If anything, his response to the mental image of Anna’s helplessness has only grown stronger and more powerfully arousing over the years. The memory is no respecter of banality or the mundane. He can be brushing his teeth or microwaving a ready-meal and a tiny fragment of the whole – the way the sweat collected in her jugular notch for example – only has to flash for an instant across his mind for him to grow wretched with desire.

  And yet, the real Anna is no longer of any erotic interest to him whatsoever. Hasn’t been since Ralphie’s birth, obviously, but also for quite a long time before that. The last time they had sex (and yes, he’s done the maths but prefers not to think about it) it was more or less a mercy shag. They are so much better off as friends.

  Speaking of . . .

  The expected text from Anna pings. He checks himself briefly in the mirror, puts on his light cashmere hoodie and heads out of the apartment. The cab (it’s a Prius, it’s always a Prius) is parked up on the opposite kerb side, with its indicator lights flashing. As he crosses the road Anna spots him and gives a little wave. If it were Cassie in the vehicle she would lean across and push open the door for him, then budge up obligingly to make room but Anna isn’t Cassie. Anna just sits and waits. A model of composure. He gets in and says hi, but knows better than to bounce all over her like some overgrown puppy. She waits until he’s settled himself then leans in and kisses him once very lightly on the lips.

  ‘How was your date?’ she enquires.

  ‘She didn’t show so I just got a pizza instead.’ He makes sure she’s not looking at him when he responds. She’s not as good at detecting his lies as she thinks she is, but why take the risk.

  ‘Ah, poor Bo-Bo.’ She pats his knee. He rewards her condescension with a stern look, which she meets with one of her enigmatic smiles. He’s not sure she believes him, but so long as she stays off his case, it doesn’t really matter.

  ‘Good that I came early, then. Nice to have a chance to catch up before the others arrive. I hardly ever get you on your own these days, darling.’ He checks the rear-view mirror. They are crossing London Bridge now, and to his relief the driver is occupied with the flow of traffic. Nothing incriminating has been said, or will be, but you can never be too careful. The pizza delivery girl will almost certainly have had to cry off her shift but she’ll have no idea why she isn’t feeling great. The likelihood is she’s already back in her shitty flat way out somewhere in zone zillion, sleeping it off. In a few hours she’ll wake and hardly remember a thing. No harm done. Not the way he does it. Not with the amount of research he’s done. In any case, so long as she doesn’t tell anyone she’s feeling odd or do anything drastic like go to A&E, she won’t connect this encounter to anything. Tomorrow she’ll wake up and remember nothing. It’s a 99 per cent probability he’s in the clear.

  ‘You look great by the way,’ he says.

  ‘None too shabby yourself, Mr Bojangles.’ He smiles to himself, pleased that she still thinks him worth flirting with. If it hadn’t been for the accident, could he have settled down with her? He’s asked himself this question a thousand times and always comes up with the same answer. No, because it would have been too much. All that feeling. He would have ended up hating her. Aside from desire, hatred is the only feeling he can really pin down. Every other emotion is ungraspable, like a little dog running up and down inside a tunnel. He desires and, less often, he hates. Sometimes he wonders if desire is just the flip side of hatred. When he’s not feeling one or the other he’s almost a robot. It has occurred to him more than once that there might be something about him that isn’t quite normal.

  ‘You’ll be nice to Cassie tonight, won’t you?’ Anna says. They are driving along Lower Thames Street now, the Tower of London tremendous and yellow in the floodlights. Ahead is the supermoon, massive and awesome.

  ‘Of course. I’m always nice to Cassie. And Dex.’ Another reason he could never have been with Anna. Her patrolling. She’s always doing it, whether over their friends or over his dates. Sometimes he wishes she’d just leave him the fuck alone. But he can never tell her that. Not since the terrible time she arrived unannounced and let herself into the apartment with the keys he’d forgotten he’d given her after a wobble with Isaac and discovered his habit. Bundling a semi-conscious woman into a cab with Anna going mental. It’s why he uses hotels almost exclusively these days. It’s a safety issue.

  It’s why he’s already regretting the pizza delivery girl.

  28

  Cassie

  Evening, Saturday 1 October, Isle of Portland

  ‘Happy birthday, my darling Bo,’ Anna says, scooping the flute from the table. We raise our glasses to our lips. The wine is a cold wave, more like sea water than champagne. A mountain of seafood awaits and there is more wine. And I am feeling a great deal better.

  ‘To fift
een bloody great years of friendship,’ Bo says.

  ‘To the four of us,’ Anna says, smiling at me as she says it.

  Nothing is said about the police or the festival or the missing money or the assault in the graveyard or the drowned woman. Here, tonight, for the next few hours while the wine is flowing we are at one with our memories and our stories, and in the fun palace of our friendship there is only room for laughing, drinking and making promises to each other that we may or may not keep, while in the middle of the table a pyramid of empty shells and broken claws grows up around us until it blocks our view of everything but here and now. Tomorrow the shells and broken claws will be picked clean of their flesh by gulls working through the rubbish and left for the tides to crush into grains of sand. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, right here, right now, is all the love I know.

  Though perhaps, just maybe, not forever.

  By eleven I am at Will’s front door in Fortuneswell. I am not drunk, only, perhaps, a little worse for wear. He greets me in a lopsided manner, one hand white from the effort of holding back an enthusiastic yellow dog.

  ‘This is Baxter,’ he says with a smile. ‘Do you mind dogs? He’s not mine, I’m just looking after him.’

  ‘I love dogs.’ Dex and I would talk about getting a dog, though, of course, we never did. He waits for me to move into the hallway then closes the front door and lets go of the dog, which shimmies and sniffs at my feet.

  ‘My old boy died a couple of months ago. I really miss him. Having a pet says something about a person, don’t you think?’

  We move into the living room where Will has set a fire. He shows me to a worn sofa, and offers me a glass of whisky then disappears for a moment and reappears with a tray in the shape of an ammonite onto which he’s stuck two glasses, a bottle of Bell’s, and a tumbler of ice.

  The cottage is like the best fossil beach you never quite found. There are fossil cushions on the sofa and fossil wallpaper and a fossil rug on the floor. The real things are lined up on shelves, where most people keep books, ranged along the window ledges and hanging in box frames on the wall.

  ‘Apologies for all the fossil-themed knick-knacks,’ he says, taking a seat on the sofa beside me. ‘Presents from Mum when she didn’t know what else to get me.’

  Will picks ice from the tumbler and adds it to our glasses. ‘I’m glad you came. I thought maybe you wouldn’t show up.’

  ‘Because of the fall?’

  He pauses, his whisky glass like a talisman in his hand. ‘Not really that so much. Though how are you feeling?’

  ‘Much better, actually. Almost human.’

  Will smiles and raises his glass. ‘Here’s to being almost human.’

  The whisky unfurls in my gut. It’s good. Full of substance in a way that prosecco can never be. I put my glass back down on the coffee table.

  ‘I really meant, because of what I said about your friends,’ Will goes on. The dog comes up and pushes his snout against my hand.

  ‘We must seem a bit odd to you.’

  ‘Not really. Just a bit close, maybe.’

  ‘And that’s a bad thing how?’

  ‘It’s not, necessarily. But is there any real space for anyone else, I wonder?’

  ‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m glad.’

  I lean towards him and take a kiss. His lips are wet and his breath saturated with the whisky. He smells, as he did the first time I saw him, of sandalwood. Reaching out he very gently pulls me to him. The palm of his hand is warm and surprisingly hard around my cheek.

  ‘You know what first made me want to kiss you? The way you took my hand. You didn’t shake it, you just squeezed.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I thought, once you’d met Anna . . .’

  ‘Anna’s the sort of woman men think they should like but we rarely do, not really. I think she knows that but she doesn’t seem able to do anything about it. Do you remember after I’d dropped you at the top of the hill? I felt your eyes on me as I drove off.’

  ‘I’m good at staring.’

  He pulls away and taking my hands in his, says, ‘I didn’t mean that, obviously. I meant more that there’s something steady about you. Something absolutely rock solid.’

  ‘Ha! That’s funny. I am the least steady person I know. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m still in a shared flat working at a job I don’t particularly like and living from hand to mouth.’

  ‘It’s what makes you different from your friends.’

  I can feel myself pull away, keen, all of a sudden, to be back at Fossil Cottage playing some silly drinking game and sharing a spliff with the Group.

  ‘Oh, so we’re back to them. It’s obvious you don’t like them, but I have no idea why you’re being so negative. It’s rude and I really don’t appreciate it.’ A tide of feeling has risen up in me. My throat is suddenly tight and there’s a hollowing in my belly. What the feeling is though, exactly, I’m not sure, but I’m struck by a sudden impulse to cry. Tonight was a chance to redeem the night of the festival, to forget about Marika and the money and the police. To do one simple but almost impossible thing: to turn back time and make it right. We so nearly made it. How close we were.

  He’s risen from the sofa now and put another log on the fire. Turning back to me but not sitting down, he says, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s not a question of liking or disliking them. There’s something about them I just don’t trust. And I don’t think you should either.’

  I feel my limbs tightening before a spring. Two hours ago, my mind had already leaped forward into a future with Will, with all five of us together, a future in which I was no longer the junior partner in the Group, the hanger on, the urchin. A future in which I’d proved myself by bringing another member into the Group. A future in which I was finally worthy. But now all that’s gone. Will has robbed me of that. ‘Thank you for your extremely frank opinion, which, by the way, I didn’t ask for, but they are my friends and of course I trust them. Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know but I think you do.’

  There is a moment to go back then, an opportunity to rewind, to walk out of the door and return to Fossil Cottage and to pretend that none of this is real. That what I saw in the churchyard and what I did in the toilet trailer at Wapping Festival, that none of that ever happened. That everything is perfectly normal.

  The choice is quite clear now. I tell him everything and betray the Group or I leave.

  Rising to my feet, I hear myself say, ‘I’m sorry but this is really not going to work out.’ Even as I say the words, I realise that they sound far too final, but it’s too late to go back. You can never go back. I should know that by now.

  I watch his shoulders sink, a knot appear on his forehead. The mouth which only moments ago I was kissing tightens into a thin line. Sensing a change in the energy of the room, the yellow dog comes over and digs its nose into his hand. Will takes his eyes from mine and turns himself to the dog. I am to understand that he will not try to stop me or beg me to return.

  Outside, the moon has risen and shrunk, like something left in the oven just long enough to become unappetising. There are lights on in the cottages around and the scent of wood smoke. I set off down the road towards the high street, interrupted, briefly, by the entreaties of a cat.

  Were we always like this, the four of us, too tight for comfort, the bonds between us secured with unsayable secrets? Did we always seem such a mess, so unlikeable, so sinister? Was there never a more innocent time, a time when were really were young and sweet and full of promise and not simply pretending to be all of those things?

  There was, there was. It is so bright in my mind that my eyes are dazzled by it.

  At this table is all the love I have.

  But is that enough? I have reached the Spar now, its gaudy window strung with early Christmas chocolates and a local druggie slumped in its doorway. God, this place. Perhaps I should have gone home. Why didn’t I? Anna and Dex wanted me to
. Were they afraid of what I might do here? Were they afraid of what I might say? It is wild here, much wilder than Tottenham, which is itself pretty wild. But here it is sad and wild and beautiful. The peregrines are roosting in the cliffs now. Above them, on the island’s high ground, the prisons give off a sickly light. Within the walls of the prisons, life is regimented but it’s all pretend, a thin barrier pitifully unequipped to push back the chaos. There are moths in the light of the street lamp and bats in the air. There are feral goats resting on West Weare. The crows are in their rookeries. On Chesil Beach the sea pounds the shingles. Halfway up the hill Fossil Cottage listens.

  The druggie says, ‘Spare any change?’

  From my pocket I pull out a tenner and two pound coins.

  ‘That’s all I’ve got so there’s no point in following me.’

  He takes the money, gets up and toddles off up the hill to find his fix.

  A single lamp illuminates the yew tree in the churchyard and from somewhere nearby an owl hoots.

  What did you do?

  You know the answer to this question. I have explained it to you over and over, Marika.

  We did nothing because there was nothing to be done.

  Because you are not my call, Marika.

  Because caring is too dangerous.

  I did nothing because – please understand this – at that table is all the love I have.

  But it’s too late for any of that. Something is buried inside me. It lies under layers, unseen but implacably there. I will never be rid of it now. Whatever I do it will never go away. But sooner or later it will make itself known. It will come out of the rock, it will rise to the surface, it will tumble onto the beach, it will be washed in by the tide. And then we’ll see. Then we’ll hold it in our hands. We will turn it over and see that it is not made from fool’s gold after all. We will see that it is real.

  At the churchyard I turn and make my way back to Will’s house.