The Girl Before You

by Nicola Rayner

  And Alice finds herself stepping out of Christie’s way, letting her friend into the house, when it’s the very last thing she wants.

  She herds Christie down to the kitchen, keen for her to get as far away as possible from the study. She grabs a tea towel and says: ‘You know where everything is,’ waving vaguely at the kettle.

  Alice scurries back to the study, her mouth dry, her heart pounding, but she’s too late, the tea has drenched George’s desk, including the photo collage, which has toppled over into the sea of hot liquid and been completely ruined, with a tidemark spreading through the pictures. Dashing up to the airing cupboard to get more towels, Alice does her best at wiping down the desk and the carpet around it, but it’s very unlikely it will recover. She blinks away tears, goes to get the dehumidifier from the hall cupboard.

  At the sound of her hauling the bloody thing across the hallway, Christie pops up from the kitchen. ‘What’s going on? I thought you were getting ready.’

  ‘I was.’ Alice stops for a moment. She swallows. On top of everything else, she is going to weep. ‘I had an accident.’ Her voice cracks a little. ‘In George’s study.’

  ‘Well, let me clear that up while you get ready.’

  ‘No,’ Alice says with such fierceness it makes Christie recoil. ‘It’s my mess. I should clear it up.’ She starts to cry in earnest.

  ‘Darling,’ says Christie. ‘What’s this really about?’

  ‘George,’ Alice says between sobs and she tells her friend about the postcard.

  Christie, as always, knows what to do. She puts on the dehumidifier, opens the windows, calls an antiques expert about how to treat the drenched wood and packs the photo collage so she can remake another (‘I’m sure we have them all on our computer.’) And, then, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, she calls George to ask him where the keys are.

  ‘We’ve had an accident,’ she tells him smoothly. ‘A spillage on your desk. No, she’s not feeling very well. We need to limit the damage. Ha ha, yes, “bossy Christie”, as usual. Where are the keys to the drawers? We need to check nothing’s leaked through. OK, thanks.’

  She puts the phone down. ‘It’s here,’ she says brightly, emptying out the paperclips from the pot on the desk and pulling out a small silver key from the tangled mass. It’s the same one for all of them.’

  Alice smiles weakly. The way Christie handled George! She feels light-headed and strange – half grateful, half furious.

  She takes the key from her friend and opens the top drawer. There’s some personalised writing paper she’d bought George for their first wedding anniversary, a pack of stamps, an unused appointments diary. In the next two drawers there’s more of the same – an accounts book, an old school yearbook, an unframed team photo, a white-tie scarf and an old camera she hadn’t seen for years. She can’t rifle through with quite the relish she would on her own, but, as far as she can see, there’s nothing here of interest, only sentimental bits and bobs from school and university – no postcards, no mystery letters, and nothing to do with Ruth Walker.

  Naomi

  Afterwards, with Miss Wick, I always felt braver. Maybe because I felt empty, emptied of everything, including my nerves. On our last afternoon together, I asked her with my head on her chest, my cheek sticky with cooling sweat, ‘When did you first know you were gay?’

  ‘I’ve always known. What about you?’

  I looked at her then – her strong eyebrows, the line of her jaw – until it became too much. ‘The first time I saw you.’

  A different sort of person might have looked pleased at this, but Miss Wick just said: ‘Yes, I think it can be like that.’

  I rolled onto my back. It was getting late, the lampshade casting a longer shadow across the ceiling. ‘Have you ever done something like this before?’

  She got up to roll a cigarette. ‘You know I haven’t.’

  I said to the ceiling, ‘I wish I could stay.’

  ‘You must eat before you go,’ said Miss Wick. ‘I’ll heat up that risotto.’

  ‘No.’ I began to get up. Better not to prolong the goodbye. I’ve always hated Sunday nights. ‘I should go.’ I knew soon I would be walking along the street in the velvety darkness of the evening, thinking about her, and it wouldn’t be so bad.

  ‘Naomi, you must.’ Miss Wick marched to the kitchen and started clattering around with pans.

  When I went to say goodbye, Miss Wick was standing over the oven stirring the risotto with one hand and reading Lorca’s Poet in New York with the other. ‘It’s almost ready,’ she said.

  My words came out in a rush. ‘I love you.’

  She put down the book, still holding the wooden spoon. She kissed me. ‘You need to eat.’

  I shook my head. ‘I need to go.’

  We both acted as if I hadn’t said the words at all.

  Back at the hotel, my mum was out and the smell of spaghetti bolognese lingered in the corridors. It was stuffy. Some of the guests propped open their doors to let the air in and chords of music drifted up from the bar. As soon as I got back to my room, I missed Miss Wick. I nipped down to the hall to call her. I imagined the burr of Miss Wick’s phone from where it sat in the corner by the drinks table. You could hear it wherever you were in the flat. I started to count the rings: ten, twelve, but she didn’t pick up.

  I tried to study for an hour or two before bed, but the words wouldn’t sink in. At eleven, I crept back to the phone. I let the phone ring for longer this time – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen rings. In the end, I put the receiver down for a moment and tried again. I imagined Miss Wick suddenly returning, fiddling with the keys in the door, coming through to the living room after doing some late-night shopping with a bottle of red wine or perhaps just carrying her liquorice cigarette papers. I glanced down the corridor; my mum still wasn’t back. I tried the number again, waited for it to connect, but the sound that greeted me was the long, ugly tone of a phone that had been taken off the hook.

  Kat

  November 2000

  Kat’s moods have got darker in the months since it happened – she struggles with being on her own, so that on weekends in the autumn term it wasn’t unusual to wake, as she does today, unsure of where she is for a few seconds. Not in her room in college, that much is certain.

  She runs through the usual mental checklist. Today her head was OK-ish, manageable – there was usually a headache of some sort and some level of dehydration. Sometimes, too, like today, her lips would feel bruised; her legs would ache, and she’d wonder if she’d have the strength to get out of bed and walk away. She’d look over at the snoring bloke next to her and feel like crying before the day had really begun.

  She pieces together the evening before: the union bar, pints of cider and a crowd from the engineering faculty. He’d been among them, this guy – shaggy haircut, tattoos, leather jacket. There’d been a drinking game and lots of shots of something blue. When they’d got up to dance, they used it as an excuse to touch, pushing up against each other on the busy floor. Later, she’d given him a hand job as they waited for the bus to come. Nice.

  Occasionally, Kat is pleasantly surprised by her choice from the night before, though that seems to happen less and less these days. Her standards have slipped. She’s always known on first meeting a man – instinctively, within a matter of seconds – yes or no. It was that clear: like the needle of a compass.

  These days she’s lost touch with that gut instinct. She makes allowances: sure, his eyes might slide over her breasts within minutes of meeting her, or he might be making a play for two or three other girls in the bar at the same time, but the more she drank, the less that mattered and the more urgent it would feel for her to go home with someone, for her not to go back to her room alone.

  Hopefully, just for a bit, in the middle of the excitement, she would lose herself. She would feel like someone else. It didn’t always work. Sometimes she would float out of her body, as she had for a moment last night, and see
herself as she was – not Dorothy Parker or Mae West but a sad, drunk girl giving a hand job at a bus stop to a guy she didn’t even like.

  She squints around the room, careful not to move too much; she doesn’t want him to wake up. It seems a bit grubby in the light of morning. The floor is strewn with clothes, there’s a Metallica poster on the wall and the smell of something rotten coming from the bin. She assesses the situation: her dress scrunched up on the floor, her coat flung across his chair, where they’d done it as soon as they came in. Her handbag is over there too – she’ll grab it on the way out.

  She gets up quickly and quietly, smoothing down her dress as she puts it on and throwing the fake fur coat over her shoulders. You just had to brazen out the Walk of Shame, which was easy enough when you could feel the booze still pumping in your veins. What was his name? Joshua? Jacob? Something biblical. He stirs, turning his head away from her. Maybe he was faking sleep. She’s done that before herself. No matter. She’s out of here.

  Outside, it’s a dazzling November morning – frosty and crisp. The clean air sends her into a paroxysm of coughing. The street is quiet as Kat’s heels click along. She wishes she had her sunglasses. It’s too far to walk, or at least too far in these shoes.

  Waiting for the bus, Kat smokes her last cigarette. She thought she’d run out last night but there’s a bashed one at the bottom of her handbag. One for luck. The tobacco has squashed together, making for a stronger hit. She coughs again but can feel her body – her neurons, endorphins – perking up with the fizz of nicotine.

  The bus is crammed. A thin film of perspiration prickles the back of her neck – it is too bright, too hot through the glass. There’s the sting of last night’s alcohol in her sweat. She would take her coat off, but then she’s practically wearing a negligee underneath. She catches a man, a short, stocky man in his fifties, gazing at her. He stares at her, really stares, and says something in a low, guttural voice to his companion, an older man, who turns towards her and nods approvingly. And whereas before she might have been pleased, flattered, by such attention, these days her reactions take her by surprise.

  Her chest tightens. A thought hits her: if they should try to touch her, she will kill them. The rage is sudden and unquenchable. And though Kat knows, in truth, that it isn’t aimed at these men but at someone else entirely, the reaction makes her shake. She reaches out to push the red button, so she can get off at the next stop.

  In the high street, she stops to pick up some cigarettes, a Diet Coke and a large bottle of water. On a whim, she grabs the Sundays – a broadsheet and something tacky. She’ll go and see Ruth and read the weekend gossip with her. She doesn’t want to be on her own this morning. She can never sleep the morning after. Sober and alone, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Her thoughts have become too much for her, too much even to sit with. And though Ruth has snatched Richard from under her nose and though it hurts so much that Kat can’t even look at them when they’re together, Ruth is the nearest thing she has to a friend. So Kat is hoping that if she pretends really hard that it’s all OK, somehow it will be, but it isn’t, really. It isn’t OK at all.

  Afterwards, after they had done what they had done to her, she had started to cry, but the tears didn’t have any fight to them, they just seeped out. They started to get dressed quickly then, guiltily, and George just said, ‘You could have stopped us.’ As if it had all been down to her.

  ‘You’ve done this before?’ she asked Dan before she left, sitting up to take a cigarette off him.

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘You know. Together.’

  He shrugged, pulled a cigarette out for himself. ‘The girls are always up for it.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘They never say no, so …’ He lit his cigarette.

  ‘What are you going to do with the photographs?’ she asked. ‘Please can I have them?’ Not that she ever wanted to see them – just to destroy them, to erase them off the face of the earth.

  ‘No,’ Dan grinned. He liked her begging. ‘They’re for our private collection.’

  She’s only spoken about it once, to a guy – the first after them. She met him at a party over the summer holidays. They snuck out to a caravan in the garden where they talked and kissed. He was so gentle, so sweet: didn’t try anything more. Lying on her back, she said into the darkness, just to find out what it would sound like: ‘I was raped, I think. There were two of them. And they hurt me a bit – but, more, they humiliated me and now I can’t see myself the same way I did before.’ He stroked her hair and talked to her about a friend to whom something similar had happened. But in the morning she woke up in the caravan alone, with the heat of their breath condensed on the windows.

  The summer break had helped, though. The time away from Ruth and Richard had given her some breathing space. She hadn’t told Ruth about George and Dan. There had been times when she was pissed when she nearly had, but she couldn’t quite go through with it. She couldn’t bear to, really, because she knew it would change the way Ruth would look at her and she wouldn’t be able to change it back. It didn’t help that Ruth was so happy. That she was blooming in her relationship with Richard.

  They’d returned, after the summer holidays, as one of those quasi-married college couples, so that the new intake of freshers would never have guessed that Ruth might once have been the sort of person to shag George Bell in a pub loo or on a pool table – or to have slashed his clothes and hurled them from his balcony for that matter. It was as if this sane, sanitised version of Ruth had always existed, brushing her teeth, washing her face, and curling up each night next to Richard in his college room and spending weekends in the cottage she rented on Top Cliff with her sister, Naomi.

  That was another change. Now Naomi had started at St Anthony’s, Ruth was never alone. When Kat goes to see Ruth, Naomi’s often – too often – there. Maybe sitting on the bed chatting, or curled up on the beanbag just reading. And though they are kind, polite, though they are careful to explain every story, Kat still has the feeling of being just what she is: a guest at somebody else’s house.

  She hesitates for a moment before turning up the drive to the cottage. Kat doesn’t feel like sharing Ruth at the moment. They were so different, Naomi and Ruth – Ruth was like quicksilver and Naomi, so calm, so still, like a millpond. Maybe she should leave it, try for some sleep, after all, but the thought of her lonely room – its slightly disapproving air as she returns, not for the first time, to the debris of her preparations from the night before – is enough to steel her on.

  The front door to the cottage is unlocked, as usual. Ruth never locks doors – that’s what growing up in the middle of nowhere does for you. Kat clunks up the stairs to Ruth’s room in her heels. She’s looking forward to telling Ruth about the guy – Josh or Jacob or whatever his name is. Giggling about it with her. But she can hear laughter billowing from Ruth’s room before she reaches it and it’s too late to turn back.

  They are still at it when the door opens. Ruth is bent double, clutching her belly; Naomi is standing in the middle of the room rocking with laughter. They are both covered in mud.

  ‘Kat!’ Ruth exclaims in between chuckles. ‘We’ve been gardening.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kat smiles dryly. ‘Why don’t you pay someone to do that?’

  They had so much space here, the pair of them – the garden behind the house. An incredible sea view from this bedroom. It’s a shame the place is so run-down.

  Naomi smiles. ‘That wouldn’t be half as fun.’

  Kat thinks for a moment that she might cry. Ruth and Naomi look so healthy: well-slept, clear-skinned. Kat is suddenly aware of her panda eyes, her shagged-out hair – not to mention her tiny dress and fake fur. What was that phrase her mother used to say? All fur coat and no knickers. Well, fuck her mother. And fuck them.

  Ruth smiles. ‘You’ve got the papers,’ she says evenly. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ Kat says. ‘I need to
shower really. I probably stink.’

  Neither of them correct her. She is tired to her bones. Maybe she’ll have a nip of something when she gets back to her room in college – that might take the edge off the morning-after paranoia. And maybe a sleeping tablet, too. A lovely sleeping tablet.

  ‘You two look very wholesome,’ she adds pointedly. ‘Rosy-cheeked.’

  ‘We had a chilled one last night,’ says Naomi. ‘Just some supper at Annie’s café and we watched a couple of films here.’

  ‘How rock ’n’ roll,’ Kat says crisply.

  She just wants to talk to Ruth on her own, why can’t Naomi get that? She lets the bedroom door slam behind her on her way out.

  Ruth is saying something to Naomi as Kat makes her way downstairs – something apologetic. Ever since taking Richard from under Kat’s nose, Ruth has been so pathetically grateful that Kat is still talking to her that she’ll do almost anything. In her fury, Kat takes the last step too fast and one of her heels gives way. She is airbound, falling forwards, arms outstretched. The sudden pain of her bare legs against the stone slabs makes her gasp.

  ‘Kat.’ Ruth is there. She picks up Kat’s coat, which has come off her shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ She’s grazed her knees like a child in the playground. She tries to scramble up without Ruth’s help. The heel has broken clean off her right shoe. ‘Just a bit of a shock.’ She dusts down her dress. ‘Those stairs are a fucking liability, by the way.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Ruth keeps her hand on Kat’s arm. ‘You seem a bit …’ She pauses. ‘I don’t know – a bit snappish.’

  ‘I’m tired.’ Her knees are stinging. She’d better go and clean them. ‘Hungover. I wanted you to myself … to go over all the sordid details from last night.’

  ‘I thought so.’ Ruth hugs Kat. ‘God, you smell like a brewery,’ she laughs.