by Lucy Lawrie
I sat for some moments, aware of the sound of his breathing, which was rather fast. The faint, sour warmth of it against my cheek.
‘Blackmail,’ I said quietly.
‘No.’ He winced, and ran a hand over the top of his head. ‘God, no, it’s not blackmail. We’d be giving her a chance to make recompense. I mean, it was bad enough that he ruined one of her hands with his drink driving. Then she goes and smashes up her other one?’
I shook my head, feeling sick again.
‘And it might help you, Janey. Put all this to rest.’
A few months back?
When, exactly, had he worked it out? When he saw the first ‘Janey and Hattie’ drawing? Had he twigged as soon as he’d heard our names connected? When I’d said Miss Fortune’s name, after drawing the forest scene?
And of course. I’d panicked and gasped and rambled about how I thought I’d drawn myself holding a hammer. I’d given it all to him on a plate. All my secrets, without even realising. It was moments after that he’d drawn me into his arms. Held me that first time. Let all my hurt ebb into his arms.
I could feel it coming back to me now. Heavy, cold as lead. Pulling me under.
‘You guessed.’ It came out in a small, broken voice, as though I was pleading with him to say it wasn’t true. ‘You must have guessed I’d witnessed it, or at least knew something about it. That’s why you befriended me. That’s why you spoke to that lawyer.’
‘What? No!’ He slid an arm round me. ‘I sensed that – perhaps – you knew something about it. Through Hattie, maybe. I wasn’t planning to involve you. It just got me thinking, that’s all. She was deteriorating so fast. She’d got so much worse over the summer. I’d started looking into care homes and found out how much they cost.’
Money. Money was somewhere at the root of all this.
Steve.
I remembered that first email from him, the pixels in his name dancing before my eyes. The sound of his voice, moving from gentleness to teasing to hard and back again. His eyes, feverish as he touched me, every time. Everything that made up ‘Steve’ flipped over like a deck of cards. The possible shapes of him, shifting so fast, a hundred different combinations that could have meant anything. Or nothing. I couldn’t hold on to the meaning.
His arm felt heavy now, like a snake across my shoulders. I unwound it and stood up.
‘Home.’ I could hardly get the word out. My voice didn’t even sound like mine. ‘I need to get home.’
42
Janey
If Hattie was surprised to see me on her doorstep at 3 a.m., half blown over in the storm and the rain, she didn’t show it. She took my coat off, peeling it from each arm as though I was a child. She led me down the stairs to the kitchen, fetching a towel to put round my shoulders. It smelt of lemon soap.
‘It’s finished. It’s all finished. He’s gone.’
He was never there.
I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. The truth – the hot, corrosive truth – it was all going to come spewing out. I put a hand over my mouth.
‘What’s happened? Janey? Is it Steve?’
‘Your mother. She tied Miss Fortune up and smashed her fingers with a hammer. I saw it happen. I saw it all happen through the kitchen window.’
Hattie frowned, but it was a frown of puzzlement. Not shock, or disbelief.
‘You knew?’ I said. ‘You knew all along?’
She sighed, and closed her eyes briefly.
‘I knew something had happened, that night, though I didn’t know exactly what. The last day of term, right? That’s what you’re talking about?’
‘Tell me.’
She sat with her head in her hands for a moment, a mirror image of Renee at the kitchen table on that night. Then she got up, left the room.
She came back a few minutes later with her diary, the one I’d read, the one that had been sitting in the Woolworths bag in my box room for all those years.
She laid it on the table and opened the back cover, peeling the black leatherette covering away from the cardboard underneath. The flap came away easily, with a little splitting sound.
‘Pritt Stick,’ she said. ‘It’s lasted pretty well.’
Frowning, she eased two fingers into the space between the leatherette and the cardboard, and pulled out one folded sheet of paper. She gave a little laugh, as though in disbelief that the tiny rows of pencilled words were still there.
Thursday, December 14th
I’m alone in the house.
Mum’s left me alone. One minute she was downstairs heating up a disgusting mushroom quiche for dinner, and then she was gone. I wouldn’t even have known, apart from the slamming of the front door.
I wish I could rewind the last few hours. I’ve set off some kind of terrible trouble.
This afternoon, I went down to find her. She was packing things from the kitchen cupboards into boxes, and I held out my music case and said, ‘What should I do with this?’
‘Just box it up with the other things from your room, darling.’
I said I couldn’t, because some of the music was Miss Fortune’s own.
And I pulled it out and put it on the table. Fun for Ten Fingers, the finger-strengthening book.
Mum picked it up, flicked through it, and the letter fell out. Just like it did when I first opened it, when I got home after my second lesson. It’s been in there all along, the horrible thing.
The Letter.
17th October 1973
Dear Esme,
I am returning Blue Bear’s Dance, the piece you wrote for James’ third birthday, which I cannot pass on to him for obvious reasons. You will be pleased to know that he is happy and settled. He calls Renee ‘Mummy’ now, and will have no lasting memory of your time here. I am sure you will understand why I must ask you not to contact us again. Please also stay out of the vicinity of Little Goslings Nursery. If you do not heed my wishes in this regard, I shall be referring this matter to my lawyers.
Regards
Emil
Mum shoved it back into the music case, like it didn’t matter, but her hands were shaking.
I asked her again if I could go to the carol service and she looked right through me as though I wasn’t even there.
And now she’s gone out. I’m in the house alone.
11 p.m.
I saw her come in – I was watching from the top landing, waiting for her, with her navy-blue silk dressing gown wrapped round me for the cold.
But she was dressed in my school uniform, which made me feel odd inside, like I’d gone over a bump on a fast road. And she was carrying my schoolbag.
Her hands, when she reached up to pull my hat off her head, were a reddish colour. I think that’s right. I keep trying to remember. My head hurts too much to be totally sure. But I think that’s right.
She’s gone into the bathroom now. She’s been running the water for the longest time. The pipes are making an awful racket, from all the hot water she’s using. I can hear them through the wall. That’s what it must be, that horrible, splitting, thudding sound. The pipes.
‘Oh Hattie . . .’ I folded the page up and put it back inside the cover of the diary. ‘Poor Hattie. That was the TL from your diaries, then: The Letter. You should’ve told me.’
‘I was frightened of it. Too frightened to talk about it. I didn’t understand what it meant, not fully, but I knew it was probably enough to blow our family apart.’
I spoke in the gentlest of voices. ‘So why did you show it to your mum?’
She sighed. ‘I’ve asked myself that so many times. I think I was just tired, tired of holding all that power. I knew it was powerful because the inklings had started the day she gave it to me: the odd piano playing upstairs. Then the music case thumping around in the cupboard, as though the letter wanted to be let out. I thought maybe the inklings would stop if I, you know, handed it over.’
‘But they only got worse?’
‘Yes. Everything in my head seemed
to get darker. I thought Mum, I thought she’d . . .’
‘Oh God. You thought she’d killed her.’
‘Well, she couldn’t leave Edinburgh fast enough, afterwards. We weren’t supposed to be leaving until after the weekend, but she bundled me into the car the very next day.’
‘I don’t understand about your diary. How did it end up back at school, in that box on my desk?’
‘When I came out of the shower the next morning, Mum had been in my room, “packing up” the last of my things. I’d hidden my diary inside my history folder and that was gone, along with my other school stuff. She caught me going through the load of bin bags piled up in the hallway, and blew up at me, saying there was no way we were taking all my junk down south.
‘I said there were important things in there that I had to send back to the school or I’d get in trouble: textbooks and stuff, and my script for the school play, marked up with my part, which I needed to hand on to Alice Simpson. But Mum said we were “done with that fucking school now”.
‘I was too shocked to reply – I’d never heard her swear like that before. And in front of Mrs Patel, too, but she just raised her eyebrows and pressed her mouth into a thin line, as though Mum was an unruly teenager. She marched me down to the kitchen and fed me breakfast, and said not to worry, she’d sort it. She was supposed to be taking all the rubbish to the dump, but she must have rescued my school stuff after we’d gone.’
‘And sent it on to me, at the school, because—’
‘If anyone would know what to do with it, it would be you.’
A sob caught in my throat. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t stop your mum. I’m so sorry.’
She took my face between her two hands, making me look into her eyes. ‘Janey, I didn’t stop her either. Nothing could have stopped her. Nothing. Especially not a frightened little girl.’
‘I could have phoned the police. Steve thinks . . .’
She shook her head. ‘Steve? What’s he got to do with all this, anyway?’
I stared down at the floor. It was so embarrassing to say it, that this was what it had come down to, the great, shining love that had been written all over my face. ‘He knew everything. He’s involved with Miss Fortune; he’s basically like a son to her. He knew about you and me, and our lessons, about James, and the baby. He guessed I knew about the attack. He knew it all, all along. From the first day he saw me.’
I felt the thud of hurt about to fall again, as brutal as Renee’s hammer. But Hattie reached across the table again and took both of my hands in hers.
‘I’m here,’ she said, simply. ‘I’m here.’
43
Janey
The next few days were grim. Two versions of myself were fighting against each other. If I didn’t want to hear from Steve, why did I still check my phone every five minutes? I erased all his texts with iron resolve, but couldn’t – quite – erase his number.
I saw Hattie every day. She kept finding excuses to drop round: with a new kind of limeflower tea she’d found in Waitrose, or to borrow my calligraphy pen to write Christmas cards. She insisted that Pip and I go round to help put up her Christmas tree in the enormous drawing room. In those hours spent with her I would forget to check my phone, and even found myself laughing at the sight of her straining to perch Pip’s Darth Vader figure on the top of the tree; he’d hidden Renee’s antique gilded angel up his jumper.
In the end, Steve phoned at six o’clock on the Tuesday, just as I was trying to give Pip his dinner. Had he done it on purpose, hoping for a short, perfunctory conversation?
‘Janey,’ he said. My body loosened at the sound of his voice: my chest, my shoulders, deep down in my stomach, the places I’d been holding the hurt. And there was nothing, nothing but longing for him. Formed by his mouth, resonating through his jaw and the very bones of him, even my name sounded different: charged, somehow.
‘What do you want?’ I said, breaking up Pip’s fish fingers with the side of his fork.
Pip shrieked. ‘My! My do-it!’
My hand was shaking as I handed the little fork to him. He dropped it.
‘Fok! Fok!’
I bent to pick it up, whacking my head on the edge of the table as I straightened up.
‘How’re things?’ said Steve. His voice was odd, as though his jaw was tight. He could have been shivering.
‘Are you cold?’
‘Yeah. It’s freezing. I’m just walking into Sainsbury’s. Need to get some things for dinner. Red peppers. Mustard.’ He paused. ‘You okay?’
I hated the fact that he hadn’t sat down somewhere – somewhere indoors – to phone me. I hated the fact that he was planning dinner without me, and I hated the assumption that I would be the one who wasn’t okay.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not okay. Not in the slightest.’
If he had broken down at this point, wailed down the phone, begged me to come back, I’d have given in in a second.
‘Thanks,’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, someone just gave me a two-for-one voucher.’
‘What for?’
‘Diet Coke multipacks.’
‘You don’t drink Diet Coke. You’re worried about aspartame.’
‘No. Yes.’
Pip raised curious eyebrows at me. His eyes looked impossibly wide, luminous. I stroked a smudge of ketchup away from his chin. He smiled, revealing his sharp little milk teeth, white rows against perfect pink gums.
‘You sound down,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk?’
‘Yes, I am down. Something to do with you using me for your compensation scheme.’
He said nothing.
‘Yes,’ I went on. ‘It must have been such a bore to listen to all my little confessions. Even harder to bring yourself to touch me. To kiss me . . . to sleep with me.’
The hurt had nowhere to go. It was swelling higher and higher in my chest. I snatched a breath. ‘For the life of me I don’t know how you did it. All for the sake of money.’
Help me. Stop all this. Say you loved me.
‘God, Janey. Is that really what you think of me?’
Silence.
Finally, he sighed. ‘What a mess. What a bloody mess.’
Why wasn’t there a ‘sorry’? Where were the forthright, all-too-convincing denials I’d been half hoping for, half dreading?
‘Yup.’
Steve. Steve, please.
‘We should probably talk it all over.’ There was a weariness in his voice that edged – ever so slightly – into distaste.
I shuddered. There’d been far too much talking over with this man. Too much cut-open honesty. I wasn’t about to bleed more of myself out in front of him.
‘No thanks. I think we’re done. Goodbye, Steve.’
*
‘All girls together!’ cried Jody, punching the air.
I jerked back, nearly knocking over my caramel latte. I wished to God that I’d never mentioned my break-up with Steve, that I hadn’t started crying in the middle of the Diddle-diddle-doo song this morning. Or that I’d at least had the presence of mind to invent a dead aunt or other excuse.
‘Men are obsolete,’ she added. ‘Or at least they will be, in a few years’ time when they’ve improved the technology.’
‘Except Richard and Cameron, of course.’ Molly pulled Cameron higher onto her lap, as though Jody might suggest beginning the cull there and then. ‘And Tom and Dave,’ she added, ever the dutiful wife.
‘A few of the best specimens will be retained, of course,’ twinkled Jody.
Cleodie stretched her legs out, arching back against her chair, her sturdy, unshaved calves emerging under the hem of her skirt. ‘But men are nice though, aren’t they? To have around?’
‘Exactly!’ said Jody. ‘When. They’re. Around.’ She jabbed the table with each word. ‘Not when they blubber off with someone else and leave you.’
‘Blubber off?’ For a moment I pictured whales, fornicatin
g and faithless, before I remembered that Jody had a whole lexicon of approximated swear words, for use when Vichard was in earshot.
‘Well he has, hasn’t he?’
‘No. I finished it, actually.’ I let out a shaky sigh. I held out a hopeful spoon of yoghurt for Pip, who batted it out of my hand with a contemptuous look. We’d been making progress, though. He’d eaten a tiny cube of pear last week, a triumphant dessert after his jam sandwich.
Jody shook her head impatiently, indicating that I was getting bogged down in mere technicalities.
‘What did he do?’ asked Molly, passing me another grey, environmentally friendly tissue. ‘Did he have commitment issues? Was he seeing someone else?’
‘No. He was just . . . I think he was using me. Being manipulative.’ I shrugged, trying to signal that there was nothing more to be discussed.
‘Manipulative, ooh,’ said Jody, sucking latte foam off a teaspoon.
‘What did he do?’ asked Cleodie and Molly in unison.
‘Oh, he just wasn’t the person I thought he was. I found some things out about him that were a little, er, worrying, to tell you the truth.’
‘A nutter, then,’ said Cleodie, with a gleeful eyebrow twitch. ‘So was it him who was doing those screwy things in your flat?’
‘Screwy things?’
‘The weird things appearing in your cupboards and so on. Was that him, then?’
‘Not unless he can walk through walls, no.’
Cleodie sprang upright. ‘Have you ever left him alone with your keys, or your handbag?’
An image came into my mind, like a bubble popping to the surface: Steve catching me off guard with his embrace after the second art session, me scurrying off to the bathroom to clean the mascara off my face, leaving my handbag by my chair.
‘No. Oh God, no I don’t think so. If I ever did I was only gone for a minute.’
‘He could have swapped your keys over. It’s a classic conman trick.’ She made a sweeping movement with her hand, as though to silence any dissent. ‘I’ve been researching it for a bit in my novel. He’d most likely have gone for the back door key. The Back Door Switch. Was the key to your side door on your key ring? You know, the door from your flat into the tenement stair?’