The runner shrugged. ‘Barry thought it’d be a laugh to put her with Devon,’ he said. ‘Good TV, you know?’
‘Fuck. Dev’s totally buggered,’ Gary mumbled. ‘I can’t watch this.’
‘Car-crash telly,’ the runner said. ‘Got to love it.’
By now, petrified of what Shirley would say next, equally terrified of the dog’s dinner she was cooking up, Devon was in such a state she could barely focus on the pan in front of her. The aubergine seemed to be scorching without cooking through; she lifted the spoon and tasted a bit. It was absolutely foul.
‘Mmm!’ she exclaimed, smiling at the closest camera. ‘Delicious!’
‘Five minutes left!’ Barry announced. ‘Time to finish your dishes, teams!’
‘Shirley, dump your sauce in here,’ Devon said swiftly, practically grabbing the pan of tomato sauce from her reluctant teammate. ‘I’ll cook it all down. And why don’t you fry up a couple of eggs? You can fry eggs, can’t you?’
‘Of course I can fry eggs!’ Shirley said, offended. ‘What do I look like?’
Devon bit her lip, hard, to avoid telling Shirley exactly what she did look like, as Shirley, humphing loudly, pulled out a frying pan and poured some oil into it.
The tomato sauce, mixed in with the aubergine, looked awful; the watery tomatoes – Shirley had barely cooked them down – were studded with tiny greyish dots of aubergine, which floated in the sauce, blackened and charred. Devon stirred it frantically, hoping that the more it cooked, the tastier, at least, the tomatoes would get. Beside her, Shirley was dourly frying a couple of eggs in oil that was smoking so hard now that Devon started to cough; Shirley seemed utterly immune to it.
‘Two minutes!’ Barry positively yodelled, his voice brimming with glee. ‘Red team, how’s it coming? I’ve gotta tell you, the blue team are cooking up a storm over there!’
He took in the grim little scene at the hobs: Devon and Shirley working away, not exchanging a word. Across in the blue kitchen, Devon could hear Stan and Jim chatting and laughing together as they cooked in unison.
‘We’re doing great, Barry!’ Devon said, beaming at him. ‘Delicious brunch eggs coming right up!’
‘Shirley?’ Barry asked, swivelling to Devon’s teammate. ‘Having fun?’
‘Not really,’ Shirley said. ‘I might as well be working in a caff.’ She sniffed again. ‘Frying eggs! It’s not exactly gourmet cooking, is it?’
Devon ladled the sauce out onto a waiting plate and nipped over to the fridge, where she’d seen a bunch of parsley. Pulling it out, picking off some leaves, she arranged them on the side of the plate; that was one skill Devon did possess, making a plate look pretty. She’d done it so often for her own shows that she was fully confident; her heart racing, she grabbed a small red chilli from the fridge too and set it among the parsley, shaping them to look as if the chilli were a flower and the parsley its leaves. The audience, who could see everything she was doing on a huge monitor, oohed and aahed its appreciation.
I might be in with a chance! Devon thought, adrenaline spiking through her. At least it’ll look good – and that’s almost all that counts on TV . . .
And then she saw Shirley’s eggs.
Shirley was sliding a spatula under them, holding it out towards Devon. The eggs were a crucial ingredient, one of the two that had to be used; no matter how awful they looked, Devon couldn’t avoid them. Miserably, wanting desperately to cry, Devon picked up her pretty plate and carried it over so that Shirley could dump the eggs on top. They had been fried to within an inch of their lives, their edges frilled, brown and curling, the whites hard and rubbery. Delicate, lattice-like fried eggs, their yolks golden, their whites soft, might just have worked, sitting elegantly on the sauce, and concealing most of it; but Shirley’s eggs were exactly like the ones you would get in the caff she’d just mentioned disparagingly. All they needed was a red rubber tomato, filled with ketchup, sitting next to them.
Devon managed to arrange them so they didn’t block the view of her chilli flower, but that was all she could do to redeem the situation. She stared at the plate in horror as a buzzer beeped loudly and repeatedly, and Barry sang out, ‘Cooks . . . put your spoons down, now!’
It was a catchphrase and the audience chorused along with him. Devon stepped back from the counter, wiping her hands on her apron, plastering a happy smile to her face. Then she glanced over at the blue team’s counter and her smile froze.
Because Stan and Jim’s creation looked absolutely amazing. How they’d done it in the time, she didn’t know; somehow, they’d cooked and stuffed an aubergine, a poached egg resting invitingly in each hollow. The dark purple skin of the aubergine glistened deliciously, a rich sauce puddling at the base; a golden cheese gratin on top, beneath the eggs, was the perfect finishing touch. It looked totally professional.
While mine looks like something two drunken students made at four in the morning, then chucked in the bin because they thought they’d puke if they had to force it down. Devon averted her eyes from her own plate, unable to look at it any more.
Over in the blue kitchen, Barry was talking to Stan and Jim about their Imam Bayildi, mmm-ing and ooh-ing as he tasted it: ‘Pan-roasted . . . flash-grilled . . . reduction of aubergine and onion in a creamy sauce . . . pecorino and feta gratin to reflect the Middle Eastern theme . . .’ Stan was chanting happily over the top.
‘Deee-licious!’ Barry said happily. ‘Tastes as good as it looks! And now, let’s see what the red team have cooked up . . .’
The next minute went by in a blur. Devon just kept smiling. It was all she had left, and if she stopped, she knew she’d burst into tears instead.
She smiled as Barry looked at the plate, and commented that at least the flower looked pretty. She smiled as Shirley said that no, she didn’t want to try the food they’d just made, because it looked like a mess and she didn’t fancy it. She smiled as Barry gamely cut into the egg, splattering sauce over the plate and her chilli flower, and made a big production of chewing through it, raising his eyebrows as he did so to indicate how tough it was. She smiled as Barry coughed, mentioned that maybe the chilli powder hadn’t been cooked enough, and that the aubergine tasted raw. She smiled as Barry thanked her and Shirley, went back to his podium, and asked the audience to hold up red or blue cards to vote on who had won today’s cook-off. She even managed to keep smiling when a wall of blue promptly rose in front of their eyes, and Barry exclaimed that it was the first time ever – ‘a 1-2-3 Cook record!’ – that not a single person had voted for one of the teams.
Devon smiled as she hugged Shirley as the credits rolled, as she shook Stan and Jim’s hands, as she stood behind the red counter waving goodbye to the viewers. And then she walked off the set like a zombie.
Gary, bless him, was waiting for her, his train case and overnight bag already stacked next to the suitcase she’d brought up from London the night before.
‘Here’s your coat and bag,’ he said, his face grim. ‘I’ve got them to book us a cab – it’s outside, waiting. Let’s get you out of here. We’ll get to the station and hop on the first train for London, OK? I’ve got an emergency hip flask in my case – you can have a nice old nip of voddy on the train.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘And then you should probably hole up for a few days. Or take a little break somewhere. Get away from it all.’
Go somewhere they don’t have the internet. Or TV. Or newspapers, he added to himself silently, as he shepherded the dazed and broken Devon out of the studio, everyone falling aside to let them go. Nobody could meet their eyes.
‘Wow,’ the runner mumbled, nipping out the back to smoke his roll-up. ‘That’s a first. I’ve never seen someone totally fuck over their career on live TV before.’
1993
Bill’s corpse hit the ground with a thump. His head thudded down last, drawing a whimper from Deeley.
‘Ssh!’ Maxie hissed furiously.
But the whimper had been as instinctive as an animal’s wh
ine of distress: Deeley couldn’t control it. Maxie glanced at her. Even in the faint moonlight, she could see how upset her little sister was. It was a reasonably warm late spring night, but Deeley was shaking as if it were twenty degrees below freezing.
Carrying Bill’s body outside had been awful for all of them. Maxie and Devon had taken one of his ankles each, and started to pull him across the floor of the lounge, but the way his head bumped across the carpet tiles, lolling at a dreadful angle because of his broken neck, had been too much for Deeley, who had started crying. Maxie had curtly instructed Deeley to go outside and wait for them, but she couldn’t blame Deeley for her distress. The only way she could get through this was by telling herself this was the worst thing she’d ever have to do in her entire life, and that wasn’t helping much. She’d had to pinch Devon hard to stop her bursting into tears too, and now Devon was as white as a sheet and clamping her lips together in an effort not to break down.
By the time Devon had helped drag Bill through the lounge, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the garden, she was in pieces. Even if she looked only at what was directly in front of her – Bill’s ankles, in the socks and John Lewis slippers they’d bought him for Christmas – she could still hear the back of his skull knocking against the lino of the kitchen floor, whacking into the wooden riser on the threshold of the open back door, thudding down onto the stone patio outside, a relentless punctuation.
Maybe his head wouldn’t have hit so loudly if they’d been stronger, if they’d been able to pull Bill more smoothly along the floor. But they weren’t very strong and Bill was a solid, heavy man. So they had hauled him along in a series of jerks, a big heave, a stop to catch their breath, another heave. And every time they stopped, that sound came. Bill’s skull, banging to a stop.
Right on the bald patch at the back of his head, Devon thought, choking back her tears. He hated that bald patch, he was so careful to brush his hair around it to cover it over as much as possible. And now they were wearing it away even more . . .
Devon glanced over at Deeley, whose face was so wet with tears by now that the moonlight made it gleam like glass. She rubbed her eyes roughly with the arm of her school sweater.
‘Right,’ Maxie whispered, darting a look back at the houses on either side of them; no lights were on, no one seemed to be awake. They’d waited till three in the morning, and the entire street was dark. Just a few sputtering streetlights on the road, very faint in the distance. If there hadn’t been a reasonably full moon, the girls wouldn’t have been able to do what Maxie had so carefully planned.
‘In there,’ Maxie said, nodding towards the big hole by the crumbling garden wall.
There were sycamore trees all along the gardens behind Thompson Road. Bill had hated them because they sent out so many seeds every year, which did their best to pollinate on his lawn; he spent hours during the spring and summer months picking out the little seeds, each with twin wings of green leaves that enabled them to glide on the wind. He’d taught the girls to look for them and how to pinch them out of the ground where they were trying to take root. And he’d chased the council, wanting them to uproot the sycamore in the back garden of his house, because it was gradually beginning to tear up the low stone wall that ran along the boundary of the garden.
They hadn’t answered his letters. Eventually, Bill had given it up as a lost cause. But Maxie had taken notice of everything: the tree roots, digging a hole at the base of the wall; the stone, beginning to crumble away, exposing the foundations of the wall. Leaving a space big enough to hide the body of a man.
‘We need to roll him in there,’ Maxie said grimly, nodding towards the tree. She knelt down on the grass and slid her hands under Bill’s torso, getting ready to heave.
But Deeley and Devon were still standing there; they hadn’t moved.
‘Come on!’ Maxie hissed angrily. ‘It’s too late to stop now! We can’t leave him out here in the open!’
Devon obediently dropped to her knees beside Maxie. So did Deeley; but when she reached out to touch Bill, she started crying all over again.
‘Deeley, go and sit on the step if you’re not going to help,’ Maxie said impatiently, still under her breath.
Crying silently, tears flooding down her face once more, Deeley obeyed, as Maxie and Devon heaved Bill’s body up and over, onto his face, towards the hole. They shuffled forward on their knees, slid their hands under him again and heaved once more, Bill turning on his back again, beginning to slide down into the hole.
‘You take his feet,’ Maxie whispered, knowing that Devon wouldn’t be able to handle moving Bill’s head, lolling grotesquely on its broken neck. Maxie shuffled round to his shoulders, clambering over the loose stones, getting herself at an angle where she could haul and drag his upper body deeply into the hole under the wall. She could smell his hair, the Head and Shoulders shampoo he used, and faint traces of the Mitchum deodorant he’d put on that morning.
She’d have to get rid of all his personal stuff, she realized. His deodorant, his shampoo, his toothbrush, his passport; stuff he’d have taken with him if he’d left. And she’d have to do that herself. Neither Devon or Deeley would be up to the task of going through Bill’s things.
Maxie suddenly felt so weary that she could have lain down on the grass and gone to sleep right then and there.
But she couldn’t. There was so much more to do tonight before she could finally crawl into bed.
She looked over to see what Devon had managed with the other end of the body, and was relieved at how well Devon had done: she’d pulled and hauled one leg after the other, stacking them on top of each other to squash Bill underneath the wall as much as possible. Maxie wriggled round to join Devon, braced herself, and, both hands firmly against Bill’s torso, gave him a last, massive shove that sent him right into the hole, as deep as possible, landing on the soil below with a heavy thud.
It was a very final sound. From the kitchen step, Deeley gave a tiny, choking gasp, which Maxie ignored. Instead, she picked up a clod of earth, and Devon followed suit. They piled up the earth till it looked exactly as Maxie had planned, as if the wall had crumbled outwards, hiding the sycamore roots, loose stones dotted over the top. It took another half an hour, but by the time they’d finished, Bill was thoroughly buried. Even looking at it in the dark, Maxie knew that her plan had been successful. No one would ever suspect that a body was lodged in there, under the wall, wedged between the roots.
The sycamore would grow and spread out, covering Bill’s body more and more. The wall would crumble further, onto the corpse, driving it deeper into the soil below. The only way he would ever be found was if the council tore up the entire garden, ripped out the wall, uprooted a huge tree, and found the bones lying underneath.
Maxie stood up, rubbing her hands together to wipe as much dirt off them as she could. Even by the faint moonlight, she could see how filthy her nails were, and she couldn’t help wincing; she tried so hard to keep her hands clean at all times, nicely painted. To show that though her mum was a drug addict, and currently banged up, she, Maxie, was better than that, was going to make something of herself.
‘Come on,’ she said softly, holding out her hand to Devon, who took it and clung on so hard Maxie winced. They walked over to Deeley, who was curled up in a ball on the step, rocking back and forth. She looked up at her sisters with a tear-wet face, her eyes huge and dark.
‘It’s all over, Deels,’ Maxie said. ‘He’s gone now. We’ll never see him again.’
‘What if they come round? The council?’ Deeley whispered, so quietly they had to bend down to hear her. ‘Like Bill wanted? What if they come round to dig up the tree?’
‘They never even got back to Bill, not once,’ Maxie said reassuringly. ‘They’ve got tons of other stuff that’s much more important than some old tree in some crappy back garden, believe me. No one’ll ever dig that up. We’re completely safe.’
‘I hope so,’ Devon mumbled, her fingers
digging even deeper into Maxie’s hand.
‘And even if they did – which they won’t,’ Maxie added quickly, feeling Devon stiffen beside her, ‘they’d never suspect us. Not in a million years. Three nice sisters like us. We’re never in trouble, we do well at school, we’re nice to our teachers. Look.’
She pulled Deeley up with her free hand and guided them all back into the house, through the kitchen, into the living room; to the mirror on the far wall, over the sofa. They stared at their images in the mirror. Seventeen-year-old Maxie in the centre, the tallest, the most dominant, her jaw set with resolve. Thirteen-year-old Devon, softly beautiful, even despite the terrible events that they had just gone through. And Deeley, the smallest and most vulnerable at just nine, her plaits coming loose, her round childish features smudged and damp with tears, her eyes swollen from crying. All of them still in their school uniform sweaters, Maxie and Devon with their sleeves pushed up to their elbows, to avoid getting them dirty, because they only had one each.
‘Look at us,’ Maxie said, her voice full of reassurance. ‘We’re good girls. Good sisters. No one’s ever going to think we’d do something like . . .’ She hesitated, choosing her words. No one’s ever going to think we’d do anything wrong. We just need to stick to our story, and we’ll be fine. We’re going to say that Bill went away on a trip and didn’t come back, and after a week or so, we’re going to go and live with Aunt Sandra. Because we can’t stay on here with Bill missing. OK? People will think something weird happened to Bill, but they won’t ever imagine that we might have had something to do with it.’
She reached her arms round her sisters, drawing them even closer.
‘We’re good sisters,’ she repeated to their faces in the mirror. ‘We just need to stick together, and we’ll be fine. OK?’
‘Yes, Maxie,’ Devon and Deeley chorused, hugging Maxie tightly. Maxie nodded.
‘We look after each other,’ she said, her voice utterly serious. ‘We’re good sisters.’
Bad Sisters Page 23