When We Were Friends

by Tina Seskis

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said the clerk.

  ‘Oh, yes, thanks,’ said Juliette. He wrote down some details from her passport and she handed him the money, which was crumpled and ancient-looking now; she didn’t know why she hadn’t just kept it in her purse until she’d needed it. The man got up from his chair and walked across the room, to where there was a wooden ladder, and she noticed with a start of sympathy that he limped a little. He climbed slowly, seemingly unable to bend his left leg properly, and Juliette thought he looked well past retirement age, was perhaps even in his seventies, and she worried he might fall. He reached one arm up, looking ever more precarious, and after running his finger along the length of identical-looking volumes he eventually selected one of the giant leather ledgers. As he pulled it down he seemed to only just avoid dropping it, and she was anxious as she watched him one-handedly descend the rickety-looking ladder with this over-sized book that maybe contained her mother (not literally obviously, but it almost felt like that, like she was there in the room with them) tucked awkwardly under his left arm, and as he sat down behind the desk again Juliette found that she seemed to have forgotten to breathe. She felt like she might even take off, literally flutter away with nerves.

  The clerk opened the ledger about two-thirds of the way through, and as he let the pages fall there was a dull thud that vibrated through the table, across to Juliette. He licked his fingers and thumbed backwards a few pages and then stopped, seemingly having found the right one, and then he ran his forefinger down the records, as though his skin itself could read. It was excruciating. Eventually his finger became stationary, and he looked up over his glasses again, into her frightened face.

  ‘Well, you were right the first time,’ he said with a kind smile. ‘I’ve found the record here.’ Juliette’s eyes welled involuntarily.

  ‘I’ll leave you now, to have a look yourself,’ he said. ‘Just come out when you’re ready.’ When he got up he appeared to be limping slightly less than before, and as he passed her he squeezed her shoulder, just for an instant, and she was grateful to him.

  54

  Dagenham

  In a grim little pebble-dashed house in East London, a wheel was spinning frantically. Frank, or was it Dean, was in need of some exercise, and he ran like his life depended on it, getting nowhere of course, as if he were trying to exorcise the miserable reality of his pathetic little existence – and it was only as Terry Kingston watched him that he realised that that was all he, Terry, did too. He was no better off than a caged white rat with mean pink eyes and a long kinked tail, spinning his own metaphorical wheel – trapped between his faintly grubby detective work, his solitary obsession with painting miniature figures of Prussian fusiliers in their exact colours, and his dispiriting marriage to a woman he had nothing in common with. He sighed, but in truth he did feel a little better today. It was Sunday afternoon and the sun was shining and he had heard nothing more from the police, thank God, so maybe it was going to be OK after all. Surely if there had been a body they’d have found it by now? The whole thing had been humiliating certainly, and he was still worried he might be charged with wasting police time – he could tell they thought he was some kind of pervert, so they’d be bound to try to throw something at him – but surely that was better than a woman being dead and him having done nothing about it? Or worse, a woman being dead and him being accused of murdering her. He shuddered.

  Terry Kingston was a surprisingly principled man, and in other circumstances might have led a very different life – he’d just taken a couple of wrong turns here and there, and that’s all you need to screw your life up, isn’t it? And so Terry was insightful enough to realise that despite his situation, his moral compass was still essentially intact, and that comforted him a little, even made him feel slightly superior to those braying women in the park, who despite their veneer of respectability had carried on like fishwives, and all seemed to be having affairs from what he could tell – and who were so hypocritically selfish they’d been prepared to leave a so-called friend for dead.

  The telephone rang downstairs, which was unusual. No-one really called that number any more, people tended to get them on their mobiles these days, and Maria had managed somehow to get their home number delisted, so they no longer got call-centre workers haranguing them about changing their energy supplier or installing conservatory blinds or saving starving people, thank Christ. As the phone rang and rang insistently, Terry knew what it would be about, and he fretted that perhaps something had happened, after all. He couldn’t face talking to the police right now though, and Maria wouldn’t answer, as she was out – at choir as usual, he presumed. But when his mobile went a minute later Terry knew he couldn’t delay for any longer, otherwise he’d have them turning up on the doorstep before he knew it. He sighed.

  ‘Hello, Terry Kingston,’ he said, in his best telephone voice.

  ‘Mr Kingston,’ said the caller. ‘My name is Sergeant Hunter. As you may have seen on the news a body has been found in The Serpentine river in Hyde Park. We’d like you to come in for questioning.’

  Terry said the right things and made the necessary arrangements. As he put down the phone and picked up his paintbrush he felt anxious again, now more than ever, as well as irrationally annoyed at Sergeant Hunter, with his chirpy manner and supercilious air of authority. Surely if he’d been down there fishing a body out of it he should have known that The Serpentine wasn’t a river, it was a sodding lake.

  55

  Somerset House

  Juliette wondered how just some smudgy old ink, written nearly twenty years earlier, could be so critically important to her, how the old-fashioned curl of those letters could potentially reshape the direction of her entire life. There it was. Proof. Yes, she had had a life before adoption, she had been borne by a flesh and blood woman, the stork hadn’t brought her, it had all really actually happened. Her mother had abandoned her. Hammersmith Hospital, Acton, 23rd April 1967, given names Amanda Lily. She was shocked to see she’d had a father too – and my God, what a father: he wasn’t ‘unknown’ like they usually were, like she’d been expecting him to be.

  Juliette sat for ages trying to make sense of what she saw. She was vaguely aware of Renée loitering outside, obviously desperate to come in, but although Juliette felt for her friend she willed her away with her mind and the set of her back, and it seemed to be working for the time being. This was her moment, her moment of truth. Renée would have to wait.

  Potts. The name was familiar but she couldn’t think why. Was she famous or something? Who was Elisabeth Potts? She’d never heard of her, had she? Pots and pans. What did it mean?

  Juliette sat in the quietness of the room for more long, slow minutes, her mind locked in a peculiar state somewhere between racing and blank. Just before she stood up to leave at last, she looked again at the two words that had struck her most, despite all the revelations of the morning. Amanda Lily. And that’s when her tears came. The one thing her mother had given her, apart from life of course, and they’d taken that from her too.

  56

  Wandsworth

  In the end it was Renée who got in her car on Sunday afternoon, an hour after she’d seen the headlines, and drove round to Juliette’s – if she wasn’t ever going to come to the sodding phone she’d just have to visit her in person. When Juliette finally answered the door, she was in tracksuit bottoms, and a tuft of her hair was stuck up in the air as if she’d gelled it like that for a joke, and the bags under her eyes were definitely over the luggage limit, metaphorically speaking. She stared hostilely at Renée, but Renée wasn’t in the mood for histrionics, and instead pushed past her former friend and stomped into the cavernous kitchen to put the kettle on. Juliette came in and slumped into one of the white Eames chairs at the dining table. She put her head in her hands, avoiding eye contact. The atmosphere was poisonous, like methane.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ asked Renée, meaning where’s Stephen?

&nb
sp; ‘At a friend’s house for the afternoon. Stephen’s at work.’

  They were both relieved.

  ‘Has anyone contacted you yet?’ asked Renée.

  ‘No,’ said Juliette.

  ‘What about Stephen? Have you said anything to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have they named her yet?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Juliette, and she looked up at Renée, and for a second it was as if time had turned backwards and none of the stuff with Stephen or with Juliette’s mother had ever happened. They were still simply two best friends gossiping over a cup of tea in their university flat share. When the moment passed – and it was over in an instant – both of them felt hollow, lonely again, devastated for their dead friend, scared for themselves.

  ‘D’you think this room’s bugged?’ asked Renée then, and she sounded panicked.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what with Stephen’s job …’ Renée’s voice fell away, embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ said Juliette, but for some reason she felt nervous too now, and as it was such a lovely day they both moved instinctively, without speaking, through the sliding glass doors that ran the width of the kitchen, as big as the windows in a car showroom, and out into the garden, which their gardener George had worked miracles on this year. The scent of the summer roses hung in the air, sickly almost, and they sat together on the bench under the cherry tree at the end of the garden, unspeaking at first, as they silently mourned their lost friend, their lost friendship.

  ‘D’you think anyone else heard?’ Renée said eventually.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Juliette, speaking into her sweatshirt as she kicked ineffectually at a weed growing through the concrete between the paving stones, hell-bent on living.

  Renée lowered her voice, although no-one else could possibly have heard them.

  ‘Well, Natasha said that we should just leave her, and that if she ended up drowning we’d just say we’d already left, hadn’t heard the splash. That’s pretty incriminating.’

  ‘No, she did not,’ said Juliette.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ insisted Renée. ‘You heard her too. Why are you lying?’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ said Juliette, and maybe she even believed it herself; perhaps she’d been married to Stephen for too long.

  ‘Well, what if someone heard us talking?’ persisted Renée. ‘We can’t say we didn’t hear anything if someone witnessed that we did.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Juliette, but she wasn’t cross exactly, more resolute. ‘Natasha never said we should leave her. She never said anything.’

  Renée was confused – why the hell was Juliette trying to protect Natasha all of a sudden? Finally she got it. Even if someone had overheard them, it had been dark; they wouldn’t have been able to tell who said what. But did that make any difference? The fact that someone had said it damned them all, didn’t it? They had all left her, to die as it turned out. They were all despicable.

  ‘Juliette,’ said Renée, and she was stern now. ‘We have got to work out what we’re going to say to the police. We’ll have to speak to them eventually, we were the last people to see her alive. And we’d all just had a bloody big row. It’s not looking good.’ She stared at the ground, at the edge of the lawn where George had uncharacteristically missed a bit with the strimmer, the few stray blades rising sharp and defiant, glaringly green above the paving stones.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what you want me to do,’ said Juliette. ‘Get Stephen to keep it out of the papers or something? Talk to his mates at Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking ridiculous,’ said Renée. She waited but Juliette said nothing more. ‘Well, I’ll just have to talk to Sissy and the others then, but if it does all come out I’m not going to lie about what anyone said.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ said Juliette, and she pulled at her belligerently sticking up hair, tried to tame it like she was trying to tame her temper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Renée. She hesitated, aware that she should probably leave it there, but this was likely to be her only chance.

  ‘D’you think it was an accident though?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Well, some of the things that were said between us … I mean, some people wouldn’t want any of it to get out …’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk such utter shit,’ said Juliette. ‘If you mean Stephen, he’d have had to push you in, not her, you’re the one who made all the vile accusations. You are such a total drama queen, a complete raving fantasist. You always have been, look at what you were like about tracing my mother, thinking we’d have some beautiful reunion, become like the fucking Waltons.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.

  ‘No, I am not!’ said Renée. ‘It’s not my fault Elisabeth’s like she is. I don’t know why you’ve always blamed me.’ Juliette went quiet, just kept her gaze focused on the ground. Renée tried again.

  ‘Listen, I swear there was someone there the other night, watching us. I could feel it, and then when we were leaving I think I saw someone, crouched behind a tree.’

  ‘So who was it? Stephen?’ said Juliette, sarcastically. Renée said nothing, just looked away, towards the house.

  ‘My God, I don’t believe you,’ said Juliette. She felt almost hysterical. ‘So now you’re saying Stephen just happened to be loitering in a bush in Hyde Park and killed her, as well as, according to you, killing Nigel and –’ She stopped. ‘You’ve got a cheek coming round here, after the things you’ve said about my husband.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was Stephen. I just think there may have been someone else involved.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t make any difference then, does it? If it turned out someone did kill her – my God, I can’t believe I’m even saying this – it doesn’t matter whether we heard anything or not.’ She suppressed a sob. ‘We couldn’t have stopped it.’ There was a long, painful, death-throe silence, before Juliette kicked viciously at the weeds again and said, ‘I think you should go now.’

  Renée knew that was it, there was nothing more to be said. She stood up from the bench and steadily walked the length of the garden, past the raised vegetable beds, the slide, the trampoline, the goalposts – all screened cleverly with bamboo fencing or evergreen hedging – past the gravelled herb garden with the Rodinesque centre-piece, through the half-open sliding doors into the gleamingly chaotic kitchen, across the book-lined Victorian hall, and out the matt-black-painted door into the front garden full of artfully tasteful topiary. It was only when Renée reached the street and the safety of her car that the really ominous feeling left her, and she knew that all she could do now was tell the truth, she’d done her best, and if you’d done no wrong and you told the truth what harm could possibly come to you?

  57

  Balham

  Sissy stopped scraping hopelessly at the wallpaper, which was several layers deep and mostly stuck solid, resistant to home improvement, as she heard the trill of her mobile. Dried-up bits of paper littered the living-room carpet like worn-out confetti. She pulled out the phone from her jeans pocket and, seeing who it was, answered on the sixth ring.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes and heading out to the hallway, which was still grimly dark green, where the children wouldn’t hear. ‘Yes, yes, I know, it’s just so awful, I just can’t believe it … OK, I agree, it’s our only option … Yes, I think we should go in together. If the others want to deny it then that’s up to them … All right, I’ll wait to hear from you then … Yes, I’m OK (sob), I just feel so terrible for her … OK, bye.’

  ‘Who was that, Mummy?’ said Conor, looking up from playing with the cat as she re-entered the lounge, which was looking worse than ever. Sissy hadn’t known why she’d attacked the wallpaper like that, but she’d felt she had to do something, had to keep busy in
stead of sitting around feeling helpless and distraught, scared out of her mind. She kept replaying events from three evenings before, and it was driving her insane. If only I’d trusted my instincts, gone home when I’d wanted to, before everyone started arguing, maybe nothing would have been said, maybe she wouldn’t have run off. If only we’d gone back when we heard the splash. If only she wasn’t dead.

  ‘Who was it on the phone, Mummy?’ Conor repeated, and he sounded fearful now. His little brow was furrowed under his sandy hair, and he reminded her of his father, and the pain was acute. He tickled the cat’s tummy as he stared at her.

  ‘Oh, no-one, darling,’ Sissy replied.

  ‘Was it the hospital? Are you going to die, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh, darling, of course not,’ said Sissy, horrified.

  ‘Well, who is then?’

  ‘No-one darling, no-one’s going to die,’ and as she said it she comforted herself that she wasn’t actually lying, the dying bit had already happened. ‘I just have to go out a bit later, there’s been a little accident.’ And as she said the word accident, she kicked herself, wished she’d chosen a different, less emotive word.

  ‘Will Auntie Siobhan look after us?’ asked Nell, who’d stopped playing on her 3DS and was stood facing her mother, blocking the kitchen door, her stance taut and unbearably adult.

  ‘No, darling,’ said Sissy, suppressing a sob.

  ‘Who will then?’ she persisted.

  ‘I’m not sure yet, darling. Someone nice.’