‘Don’t worry, she is a boring bitch,’ says Dan. ‘And now we have two bottles of champagne between the three of us.’
‘Three is the magic number,’ says George.
Kat thinks of fairy tales – three sisters, three bears, three wishes. She thinks of what her wish would be and then swallows the thought away. Anyone making wishes in fairy tales is always fucked anyway – just like anyone using someone to block out the pain of someone else, says a voice in her head, but she pushes that away, too.
They take turns going to the loo to do lines, forging different alliances – sometimes it’s George and Dan, sometimes George and Kat. When she has her turn with Dan, she says, ‘Do you want to do the blow off my neck?’ She lifts her hair up, lets it fall down her shoulder, exposing her pale skin to him.
‘Better not waste it,’ he laughs and turns to cut the lines on the cistern.
‘Want me to blow anything?’ She stands behind him, puts a hand on his hip as he leans over, feeling powerful for a moment. She lets her hand wander over his crotch, feels the twitch of his dick beneath it, interested.
He stops what he’s doing.
‘You’re a naughty girl, aren’t you?’
‘You like that?’
He spins around suddenly, pushing her against the cubicle wall. Her head knocks against it and a few strands of her hair get caught under his hands, pulling at her scalp sharply. And he’s kissing her neck and throat roughly, with his stubble scraping against her skin. Kat moans but it’s too rough, too quick. He pushes down the front of her dress and the material gives sharply.
‘Whoa,’ she says. ‘Careful with my mum’s Chanel.’
He stops for a moment – the polite Etonian returns. ‘Oh dear, yes, I seem to have completely forgotten my manners.’
Kat is relieved to be back on familiar territory. ‘Handsome and ruthless, that’s how I like my men,’ she says, adapting Dorothy Parker for the occasion.
‘Shall we do those lines?’ Dan asks, leaving Kat to adjust herself.
‘Good idea.’ She runs a hand over her cheek, down her neck, where her skin feels hot and prickly. ‘And, Dan,’ she adds, ‘I wasn’t saying no, you know?’
He chuckles. ‘Oh, I do know that.’
‘Did you kids have fun?’ laughs George. ‘You were gone ages – I was getting rather jealous.’
‘A lady doesn’t kiss and tell,’ says Kat, helping herself to a fresh glass of champagne.
‘So, I’ll be hearing about it in full detail later,’ says George, catching Dan’s eye instead of Kat’s, shutting her out of the joke.
Time keeps changing, expanding and contracting again, so that some moments seem to last for days and others vanish completely. Kat can’t remember leaving the club, but they’re walking through the streets, the three of them, with George and Dan’s arms around her. Kat is trying to work out how she can get George to leave them alone, but it’s late now, or early, and her limbs aren’t quite doing what she wants them to – more than once a heel gives way and she feels her legs buckle beneath her, and the boys lift her up, saying ‘oop-la’ like well-meaning uncles.
As they reach college, Dan takes her by the hand and leads her to his room. ‘My place?’ he calls back to George without waiting for an answer.
Kat notices how strange she feels, how light-headed. ‘I might go back to mine,’ she says, hoping Dan will take the hint and come with her, want to be alone with her without George. The buzz, the excitement of earlier, has faded; she wants to curl up in bed with someone and be held.
‘No, no,’ he grabs her arm. ‘I need you to come back to mine, so I can ravish you.’
‘And I need to watch,’ George laughs.
Kat wishes he would go.
In Dan’s room, Kat collapses into an old armchair as Dan pours her a glass of port. She takes a few sips and puts the glass on the floor. It makes her feel sleepy. The boys are in the corner of the room, murmuring between themselves, as she drifts off.
She wakes quite suddenly, with the pair of them looking down at her on the chair. Her mouth is gummed up with the sweetness of the port and she has the beginnings of a terrible hangover.
‘Are we going to do this?’ Dan says softly.
Kat blinks, rubs her eyes. ‘Do what?’
‘Ravish you.’ George is holding something in his hand, a white silk scarf.
Kat sits up. ‘What, both of you?’
Dan laughs nastily. ‘What did you think was going to happen?’
‘Both?’ Kat says again. She is desperately thirsty and the port has made her feel rather peculiar, nauseous, heavy-limbed. She looks for her shoes.
‘We thought it would be fun.’ George twists the scarf in his hands. ‘We thought you’d be the sort of girl who was up for it.’
Kat snags on this thought. She says: ‘I don’t want to.’
‘Come on, Kat, you’ve been flirting with us both all night. Getting off with us both.’
‘Not George,’ she says, trying to stand. ‘I didn’t get off with George.’
‘You don’t remember?’ George laughs. ‘Look, it’s been a good night. Let’s make it even better.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Kat says again. She notices her heart has started to pound. She is trying to put her shoes on but her hands are shaking. Maybe she doesn’t need them. ‘Can’t we talk about it first?’ Her voice sounds high, shrill.
Dan has moved over to the door. He turns the key in the lock, puts the chain on. He picks up a camera from the bookshelf and starts fiddling with it.
‘No more talking,’ George says lazily as he comes over to where she’s sitting. ‘It’s too late for talking.’ He crouches down and takes her shoes off, almost tenderly. ‘We can’t force you,’ he says, climbing on to her, kissing her neck roughly. ‘You can stop it if you want.’
The phrase strikes Kat as something a lawyer might say. The weight of George presses down on her; the smell of him is hot and wet; he puts his hand up her dress; she says, please. She doesn’t know if she says it in her head or out loud. She wants to explain that she is a person: not just a girl, but a person – who has parents, a mother – but she doesn’t know how to, she doesn’t have enough time.
‘Do you mind if I go first?’ George says over his shoulder to Dan.
‘Nah, I’ll watch for now.’ Dan is still by the door, like a sentinel. ‘There’s no rush. We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘We’re not making you do this,’ says George. And then, ‘You’ll like it, you’ll see.’
Kat closes her eyes. She read somewhere it didn’t hurt so much if you try to relax. It’s strange, she thinks, that George is so heavy: she had always thought he was plump when, in fact, it was pure muscle.
Naomi
I sometimes get the sense that the same things happen over and over again: that everything is a variation of something that has happened before; that things go missing all the time and there is no way of knowing where they go. Not things. People.
We got into a routine, Miss Wick and I. She’d lend me the keys to her flat, and I’d go there and wait for her. The first time, I was pretty jumpy. I had to try all the keys on the keyring to open the front door of the building – a huge Regency house in a sleepy street not far from school. An older woman whom I passed in the hallway seemed to clock me as I entered the building. I wondered for a moment if she might be a teacher. Miss Wick and I always had to be vigilant.
I had to go through the same palaver with the keys again when I got to Miss Wick’s flat. When I finally turned the unfamiliar lock, the heavy door swung shut loudly behind me. I leaned against it for a moment and got used to being there: the cool darkness of the hallway, the tick of a clock coming from the next room, the faint smell of eucalyptus. A strange thought occurred to me: that I could bolt, leave before Miss Wick arrived, and say, when she next saw me, that it had all been a huge mistake – a misunderstanding. I didn’t, of course. I never really had a choice when it came to Miss Wick.
In the living room, a couple of the sash windows were open and the net curtains twitched in the breeze. Miss Wick had told me to help myself to a drink from the tray in the corner. I picked up a bottle of red wine that had been opened. Malbec, of course. I examined the other bottles – tried to decipher their meaning. Did Miss Wick drink vermouth or was it something she’d inherited with the flat? Or drank with another girlfriend? I thought back to our first meeting: Miss Wick had been waiting for a blind date. Had anything ever happened with that woman? I glared at the bottle in my hands, when someone wrapped their arms around my waist, said, in a familiar voice, ‘You should have some if you want.’
‘You made me jump.’ My heart was racing. She never seemed to give me any warning. There was never any time to prepare myself, to protect myself. My skin was covered with a light sheen of sweat already. Maybe I did need a drink. ‘Are you going to have something?’ My words tripped each other up. ‘I mean, I wasn’t – I don’t know – but if you’re going to have something?’
Miss Wick smiled. ‘I don’t want a drink right now.’ She took my hand and led me towards the bedroom. ‘There’s something else I want to do first.’
Afterwards, it was quiet. Words swam in and out of my head in shoals, but none of them felt right. My body was different: tingling and trembling. I thought: so this is what all the fuss is about. It took a while for the horses’ hooves in my chest to still.
Miss Wick, Joaquina, didn’t look perturbed. I never got used to calling her by her first name. She hunted around for her cigarette papers gloriously naked, wandering past the open windows.
‘Your surname doesn’t sound Argentinian,’ I said at last.
‘It’s not.’ She blew out a plume of smoke, came to join me on the bed, perching on the end with the ashtray in her lap. ‘I made it up.’
Her proximity made me want to touch her again. She reached out and trailed a finger along my arm, making me smile.
‘I mean, it’s my real name,’ she continued. ‘I changed it. It’s just not my family name.’
I didn’t know what to say. Why would someone change their name?
‘You don’t have to tell me about it,’ I said too quickly. ‘I mean, I’ve read a bit about Argentina. Terrible things. And you barely know me. So …’ I stopped to draw breath.
‘Dear Naomi.’ Miss Wick ground out her cigarette and put the ashtray on the floor. ‘I am getting to know some parts of you very well.’ She pulled the sheet back and looked at me. ‘How long have I got you for?’
Alice
April 2016
Since the arrival of the postcard from St Anthony’s, Alice has convinced herself there are more of them. She’s increasingly bothered by the locks in the house, by the drawers and boxes she can’t access. They have gained a significance, a power they never had in the past, and she has put aside today to look into them. On the pretext of baby shopping, she has booked the day off. Mrs T isn’t in and George is filming in Glastonbury, so she has the run of the place to herself.
George’s reaction to the postcard had been completely enraging. ‘It’s just a nutter,’ he’d laughed over breakfast the day after it arrived. ‘You should be used to them by now.’ He tore off a piece of croissant and popped it in his mouth.
‘A nutter from St Anthony’s?’ Alice said. ‘That’s a very specific kind of nutter. Possibly one we know.’
‘Darling, no one we know has been to St Anthony’s for years. And any idiot with access to Wikipedia can see I studied there.’ He rubbed her arm. ‘Please don’t let it upset you. Honestly, it’s nothing. If you saw half the mail I got back in the day …’
‘What sort of things?’ Alice stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea.
‘All sorts of nastiness.’
‘That’s too vague,’ Alice said. ‘I want specifics.’
‘Death threats,’ said George steadily. ‘Some even said they’d harm you.’
Alice swallowed. ‘I can imagine the sort of thing.’ She took a sip of her drink. ‘You never said anything.’
‘I wanted to protect you,’ George said, reaching over the kitchen table to touch her hand. ‘I wanted you to feel safe.’
Alice looked past him into the garden, where a magpie hopped across the lawn. ‘But maybe I wasn’t,’ she said.
It’s never bothered her quite so much before. She has her own secrets, after all: a carved wooden box under the bed – ironically, a gift from George on their fifth wedding anniversary. It contains several of her old journals – she’s kept them as long as she can remember – and a batch of love letters from an ex-boyfriend who got in touch before she married George to say that he still loved her, that he thought she was making a mistake.
But George has stacks and stacks of locked boxes in the spare room – most of which, she imagines, are papers relating to his work. They never held any interest for her in her life before, but more recently she’s started to wonder what else might be in them: other postcards, perhaps. Letters from all of those nutters, or other things – maybe a memento of Ruth, a photo of them together, a lock of red hair. No, she stops herself, that’s ridiculous.
The drawers that bug her most are the ones in his study. It is there, she has convinced herself, that George keeps his darkest secrets. There that she is most likely to find what she is looking for.
She starts by hunting for the keys. She checks in the key cupboard in the kitchen, though they are not there, of course; she looks everywhere in the study, in all the little pots and vases on the shelves, which would make the perfect hiding place for a tiny key or two. Then she checks the drawer in the table in the hallway and all the drawers in George’s bedside table, all the trinket pots in their bedroom and all his pockets.
She goes back downstairs and takes a closer look at the locks on the desk. She thinks for a moment of calling a locksmith. Perhaps she could persuade someone that her husband had locked something vital – car keys, an inhaler – in one of the drawers. She imagines for a moment how that conversation might go, the amused tone of the man – it was bound to be a man – at the other end of the phone, possibly going along with the charade or, worse, saying politely but firmly, ‘I’m sorry, madam, but that goes against our policy.’
No, the better way round would be to break in herself and ask an expert to fix it, if needs be. That way no one else would be culpable. She goes to the kitchen to get out George’s toolkit from under the sink. Coming back upstairs from the kitchen, she catches herself in the hallway mirror briefly. She hasn’t showered yet today, or done her hair, and she sees herself for a moment in her pyjamas, with her dressing gown open, her bump visible, her hair on end and a toolkit in her hand about to break into her husband’s desk. It doesn’t look good.
She perches for a moment on a chair in the hall. She could stop: she could put the toolkit back, she could go out for the day, for lunch or a film or some genuine baby shopping. But it’s the thought of the child inside her that makes her get up again. A friend of hers had re-evaluated her life before she got married, looked at her past and taken stock, cleared out her wardrobe, written to exes, built a bonfire, released the ghosts. Alice had never done that, but she needs to do it now and if George won’t tell her, she’ll work it out for herself. She needs to know what he’s hiding.
Alice tries to remember how they did it at school, when they would play at unpicking locks. A friend of hers could open other girls’ desks with a couple of paperclips, although Alice never quite got the knack of it.
In George’s study, she closes the shutters at the front of the house and puts on the lights. She fishes out her phone from her dressing gown pocket and Googles ‘How to pick a desk lock’. YouTube has more tutorials on the subject than she could ever have imagined and she takes her time watching several, making notes as she goes, until she finds one exactly like George’s desk, which she watches twice. It’s more interesting than she’s expecting: the pins in the lock need to be pushed to the exact position where they catch – and then you can
rotate the whole cylinder, one vlogger explains.
She needs what her YouTube teachers call a rake and a tensioner – two paperclips would do it, with one curled into a little hook. The tensioner applies pressure in the direction the lock is supposed to go, while the rake scrapes along the pins to move them to the right position.
Alice takes a couple of paperclips from a pot on the desk and has a go. Maybe she won’t need the toolkit after all. It proves frustrating work, though, much harder than it looks on the videos. After half an hour, she retreats to the kitchen for a break before returning with a cup of tea and renewed vigour. She thinks she might need a stronger tensioner and she picks a fine screwdriver from the toolkit to do the job. It slips into the lock OK and she applies pressure in the way she thinks the lock will go, but she miscalculates so that, instead, the screwdriver slips out of the lock and heads south, forming a deep scratch in the dark wood.
Fuck. Alice leaps up in frustration, knocking her tea all over George’s desk. Just as she does, the doorbell rings.
She stands for a moment in the room, hoping that whoever it is will go away. ‘Alice!’ She hears Christie’s voice. ‘It’s me.’ There’s a rapping at the window.
Alice curses quietly and puts the screwdriver down. She shuts the door of the study and goes to the front door, her heart pounding.
Outside, in the bright sunshine, Christie is standing, perfectly coiffured, lipstick on, ready, Alice realises with dread, for some sort of outing.
‘Now, a little bird told me you were going baby shopping today,’ Christie says cheerfully, diplomatically ignoring Alice’s dishevelled appearance. ‘And I couldn’t have you doing that without buying at least one special present for my future goddaughter.’
Alice blinks. ‘Christie, I don’t know …’
Christie holds up a manicured hand. ‘I insist, Al. I won’t take no for an answer. I know all the places to go. Now, why don’t you go and shower,’ she says, glancing at Alice’s hair. ‘I’ll just make myself a coffee and do The Telegraph crossword.’
The Girl Before You Page 16