Ruth exhales. ‘Me too. I want that too. Please. Can we just spend some time? I’ll ask the boys to go away.’
The shadows are lengthening across the grass as Kat and Ruth meander their way back to college through the park. Luke and Richard have taken a different route, via a curry house and on to the college bar.
The clusters of students are thinning out in the park – packing up picnics or pulling on jumpers. The drunkest lie starfished on the grass looking up at the sky.
‘Do you ever feel nostalgia for the present?’ Ruth asks as she and Kat cross over Park Bridge back into town.
Kat shakes her head. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Do you ever feel a sort of longing for things that haven’t passed yet?’ Ruth stops to pick up a red carnation that a finalist has left on the wall of the bridge. ‘Sometimes I feel that everything to come … that none of it will be as good as this.’
Kat smiles sadly. ‘That’s because you’re in love.’
‘Maybe.’ Ruth stops to look upriver at the cathedral. ‘Yes, but it’s not just that – we’re young and we don’t have any responsibilities. We don’t need to work right now. Or make money. Or pay a mortgage. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want. It’ll never be as good as this.’
Kat looks at the flower in Ruth’s hand; the edges of its petals are beginning to brown. ‘But this is shit,’ she says. ‘Everyone’s terrified of failing. Of the future. Why do you think we need to get so bloody drunk the whole time?’
Ruth leans over the wall of the bridge. ‘I’m not scared,’ she shouts into the roar of the water.
Kat comes to stand next to her, elbow to elbow.
‘Don’t bridges always make you feel strange?’ Ruth laughs.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s a sort of excitement,’ Ruth says. ‘They unbalance me. I start to wonder how it might feel to climb up on the wall. To throw something precious over the side.’
There’s an intimacy to standing so close, facing in the same direction like this. Like driving or walking side by side, it’s as if you could say anything to each other because you don’t have to look at each other’s faces. Kat thinks for a moment she might say it. She might say, ‘Something bad happened to me last year.’ Maybe that’s how she’ll start …
‘Why don’t you throw your notes in?’ says Ruth.
‘What?’ The moment passes.
‘Your revision notes – why don’t you throw them in?’
Kat blinks. ‘Really? What if I need to resit?’
‘Then you’ll make new notes. Go on – it’ll be liberating.’
Kat looks down at the clutch of papers in her hand, scrawled and scribbled with words. She imagines the feeling of it – throwing away not just the rotten exam, but all of it: the unsaid words and the silence of the exam room and the please-turn-over-your-paper and the pressure of this place and the poison between them. And what George and Dan did to her: their hands on her body. The photographs that exist out there somewhere. The pain of it all. The humiliation. What if she could throw that away? She smiles at the prospect.
‘You like throwing stuff from high places, don’t you, Ruth Walker?’
‘Have you got your eye on anyone?’ Ruth asks her later. They have drunk the first bottle of champagne Kat’s dad had sent and were well into the second. Ruth lies on the floor of Kat’s room, smoking.
They’ve spent a pleasant couple of hours talking and laughing at Kat’s conquests as they used to. It is almost like the old days. Almost.
Kat is standing, looking at the mirror above her sink, pinning up her hair and rearranging it again. ‘No.’ Spitting the grips out, she continues looking at the mirror rather than at Ruth. ‘I still can’t imagine liking anyone else as much as I liked Richard.’
Ruth catches her eye in the reflection and Kat looks away. ‘But I’m sure I will,’ she adds.
‘Kat,’ Ruth says. ‘I’m really sorry. I know I hurt you. A lot.’
She stops what she’s doing for a moment – her hair half up, half down. ‘I’d like to say I wouldn’t have done that to you.’ Kat shakes her head. ‘But I would have done.’
‘I feel like a thief,’ says Ruth quietly. ‘I keep thinking bad things will happen.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’ Kat laughs sharply, reaches out for her mug of champagne; she thinks of Dan’s hand over her mouth, of not being able to breathe. ‘Bad things have already happened. Bad things happen all the time.’
By four, tired from dancing around the room, Kat has put on something mellower. She wanted to get stoned but they don’t have anything to smoke. All night she has thought she will tell Ruth. But she doesn’t know how to start the story. After this cigarette, she keeps thinking. After the next one. And now she is lying on her bed chain-smoking and occasionally singing along to the records Ruth is playing. Finally, finally, she begins to doze off. It feels as if she hasn’t slept in weeks.
She feels Ruth take the still-burning cigarette from her, is aware of her turning off Kat’s bedside light and creeping for the door. As it creaks open, Kat whispers into the darkness, just to try it: ‘Something happened.’ If Ruth doesn’t hear, it won’t matter.
Ruth pauses at the door. There is a silence and Kat can’t tell if she heard or not.
‘Kat, did you say something?’ she whispers.
Kat pauses. It sounds a bit pathetic the second time round. ‘Something happened,’ she says again. ‘With Dan and George.’
Ruth comes back into the room, closes the door quietly.
Kat lights a candle next to her bed. The flicker casts Ruth’s face in light and shade, so that Kat can’t read her expression. She finds she doesn’t know how to proceed, so says, almost conversationally, ‘George is strong, isn’t he? He looks podgy in his clothes but …’ She finds she doesn’t know how to finish. His chest pressing down on her, Dan watching. ‘It wasn’t rape,’ she says quickly. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. It wasn’t that.’
‘What wasn’t?’ Ruth hesitates, infuriatingly slow. ‘I don’t understand: did George and Dan rape you?’
‘After it happened,’ Kat continues, ignoring the question, ‘everything changed. I felt different. People – men – in college, they looked at me differently, as if they knew.’
How terrible she’d looked the next morning, almost grey, and she had to wear long sleeves to hide how bruised she had been, the marks scrawled up her arms. Ruth hadn’t noticed a thing. Too busy falling into bed with Richard at the time. A flare of fury flashes through her and then it’s gone, almost as quickly as it arrived.
‘It’s my fault, really, because I put it all out there. So it’s not surprising …’
Ruth climbs onto Kat’s bed with her.
Kat can’t look at her face. ‘It just feels as if things can never be the same. I can’t go back to how I was.’ She reaches out for the ashtray by her bed. ‘I got the impression they’d done it before,’ she says. ‘With other girls. It’s like a game. They take pictures.’ She glances up at Ruth. ‘Did Dan ever have a go with you?’ She picks up her lighter and cigarettes. ‘He’s strong too, not weighty like George. Sort of sinewy.’
‘No.’ Ruth shakes her head. ‘Though there are times I don’t remember. Black-outs.’ She looks confused.
‘The thing is,’ Kat says, ‘I would have done it anyway – with Dan – so I don’t understand why …’ Another sentence she can’t finish.
Ruth is silent. Kat wishes she would say something.
‘I just didn’t know how to make them … They said I could have made it stop.’
Ruth won’t stop looking at her. She says quietly. ‘Of course they did.’ The room is slowing down around them. ‘We need to do something,’ Ruth says. She clenches a ball of Kat’s duvet tightly in her fist.
Kat looks at her wearily. Sometimes she feels so much older than Ruth. It feels like years, not months, between them.
‘There’s nothing we can do.’ She lights the cigarette. ‘I
t’s done.’ She inhales, though it’s the last thing her throat needs after the amount she’s smoked today. ‘I don’t think it was actually rape,’ she concludes, though she’s unsure as she hears the words come out.
Ruth looks sad. ‘You keep saying that,’ she says.
Alice
When Naomi opens the door she looks older than Alice remembers, of course she does, but not so very different. Even with her hair scraped off her face and not a scrap of make-up, she still has cheekbones most women would kill for and a natural kind of beauty that Alice, with her manicures and bob, would never attain. Naomi is wearing a sort of smock, with smears of paint down the front, a pencil in her hair.
‘Naomi?’ Alice says. ‘I emailed you at work, remember?’ Her words are coming out too quickly, betraying her nerves. ‘To say I might be dropping by? We were at St Anthony’s together?’ Why is she making everything sound like a question?
Naomi smiles warily. ‘Yes, I remember. Alice.’ She says the name as if trying it out for the first time. ‘You did law, didn’t you? You married …’ She lets the words tail off, pulls the pencil out of her hair, winds the bun up tightly and pushes it back in.
‘Yes,’ says Alice. ‘I need to talk to you about something, like I said.’
‘O-kay,’ Naomi elongates the vowels in a mock solemn tone and pulls the door open for Alice.
It is a sweet little place, smaller than Alice and George’s home: stripped wooden floorboards, with threadbare rugs thrown over them, and plant pots gathering dust on the windowsills. In a shaft of sunlight that pools on the sofa, a Jack Russell lies sunbathing, stretched out, sphinx-like.
‘Sit down.’ Naomi gestures at a spot on the sofa. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
Alice perches and offers a hand to the dog, who licks it and promptly rolls on his back.
She calls through to Naomi. ‘Have you got decaf?’
‘Yes,’ Naomi replies. ‘I was going to make some for myself, so I’ll just make a pot.’
Alice halfheartedly strokes the dog’s belly. ‘Nice place,’ she calls through once again. ‘You live here with your boyfriend?’
‘Girlfriend,’ Naomi calls back. Her head pops out from the kitchen and she says by way of explanation: ‘Carla.’
‘Oh,’ says Alice and finds herself smiling rather rigidly back. She hadn’t known Naomi was gay. ‘You been together long?’
‘Forever. Since just after uni.’ The head disappears again and Alice is left sitting in the unfamiliar room.
There aren’t an enormous number of photographs: a few of Naomi with another dark-haired woman – Carla, she imagines – another of a couple on their wedding day. A small woman with large dark eyes standing next to a handsome man with auburn hair, who looks confidently out at the camera, into the future. Confetti has settled on their hair. Who would wear brown on their wedding day? Alice wonders.
‘The Seventies, eh?’ Naomi comes through carrying a tray with a cafetière, two mugs and a couple of flapjacks. ‘I don’t know what my mum was thinking. Her bridesmaids were in orange … I hope the milk’s all right,’ she says, peering into the jug. ‘Carla likes to buy organic and it’s a bit lumpy.’
As Naomi stands up over the coffee table, fussing over pouring and stirring, Alice glances at her bump. ‘How far on are you?’
Naomi smiles shyly. ‘Twenty-two weeks. How about you?’
‘Eighteen,’ says Alice.
‘Do you know what you’re having?’ says Naomi.
‘A girl,’ grins Alice. The thought still makes her beam. ‘What about you?’
‘We’re waiting to find out,’ says Naomi. ‘But I have a feeling it’s a boy.’
As they compare hospital experiences and morning sickness, Alice has a growing sense of unease. Maybe it was a bad call to come here in person. Glancing up, she sees a photograph she’d missed before on the bookcase of two little girls – one dark-haired, one red – sitting next to each other on the low branch of a tree. She swallows hard. She’ll have her coffee first. Then she’ll make her case.
Their talk turns to work and Alice finds herself turning out certain phrases, such as, ‘Well, it’s a type of law that actually means something.’ Not that that’s always true, of course. Sometimes her work feels emotionally satisfying, but she’s not always the hero. Sometimes, she’ll be working for the lousy husband, or wife. The wrongdoer. As George might say, it’s all about how you tell a story. As George might say, you go where the money is.
He had taken his damaged desk pretty well when he came back from filming in Glastonbury. That was one thing you could say about George: he didn’t sweat the small stuff. Alice didn’t know whether or not he’d noticed the scratch where she’d tried to pick the lock. She hadn’t asked. In fact, Alice wondered if he’d spoken to Christie, if they might have had some kind of powwow about her. George is being gentler, more attentive than usual. He keeps asking how she’s feeling and suggesting spa breaks. It’s all most unlike him. In truth, it makes her feel even guiltier about being at Naomi’s, but she has promised herself that this will be her last stand, her last attempt to find out more about Ruth. If nothing comes of it, she will leave it be. She will return to her husband and she will have her baby. She won’t look back.
She needs to gather herself. It’s important that Naomi thinks she’s rational, logical, normal. But then she catches Naomi looking at her and smiling, and she finds she has to ask her to repeat her question.
‘So, tell me: what’s the secret situation that brought you here?’ She is smiling, but she looks wary.
Alice thinks of bottling it, of making some nonsense up and getting out of here. She plays for time. ‘I don’t know how to say this.’
‘OK.’ Naomi looks curious.
‘I think …’ The heat rushes to her face as she realises she’s going to say it. ‘I think I saw your sister.’
Naomi’s face changes from being open and friendly to something quite different. There is a long silence.
‘Oh,’ she says eventually.
‘I know.’ Alice doesn’t know what else to say. ‘I know,’ she says again.
Naomi looks at her for a long time. She has beautiful eyes, Alice notices, almost too large for her face – like a cartoon character. Her grandmother had been Spanish; she remembers, suddenly, chatting to Naomi about it in a crowded college bar.
The silence is interminable. The dog jumps off the sofa, sits at Naomi’s feet and whimpers for attention. She lowers a distracted hand to him and doesn’t take her eyes off Alice.
‘You’re not the first,’ she says eventually. ‘She’s been spotted before.’
‘Spotted?’
She waves her hand. ‘In Thailand. London. Once in Leeds. We got excited about that one. Someone called the house another time, pretending to be her. Actually said, “Hello, it’s me, Ruth.” Can you believe that? That people would do such a thing?’
Alice can hear the house breathe around them, the whir of the washing machine from the kitchen. She sees herself for a moment, as if floating above the scene, and it’s not a flattering view: here she is, obsessed with a dead stranger. Visiting the home of a bereaved relative, for what? Her own preening purpose. And yet this is it: her only shot.
She takes a deep breath. ‘Look, I know how this sounds. I know it sounds crazy and I know, well, I don’t know actually, but I can only begin to imagine what it must be like for you to have lost your sister. I just … she was unusual-looking, wasn’t she? With that hair. It didn’t seem the kind of mistake one could make, with hair like that.’
Naomi exhales. ‘The hair,’ she says sadly. She looks at the photograph on the bookcase. ‘People went wild for it, you know.’ She gives Alice a look. ‘Some of them got obsessed. It’s worse when missing people are beautiful. Well, worse and better. They want to print their photographs in the papers, of course, but then that also attracts the weirdos.’
‘No, it’s not just the hair,’ Alice says quickly. ‘The girl – the woman – I
saw looked exactly like Ruth did. Exactly. And she was a very striking girl – someone I remember quite clearly from college … I always admired her, how she looked. I saw her – this girl – on a train coming down from Edinburgh. And I knew … knew about your sister, knew that she had …’
There’s another silence. How can she explain it?
‘She ran away,’ Alice adds quickly. ‘That’s the thing: she disappeared after I spotted her. Why would she run if she had nothing to hide?’
Naomi looks tired. ‘There are all kinds of reasons,’ she says more kindly. ‘Maybe you frightened her.’
Alice thinks of George. This is what he has said all the way along. She fishes her card – crisp, white, embossed – from her handbag and puts it down on the coffee table before getting up to leave.
‘I’d better go,’ she says, her face hot with shame. ‘But if you ever want anything, just to talk. Or anything. Here are my details.’
Naomi picks up the card and asks as she looks at it, ‘Did you do it?’
‘What?’ Alice blinks.
‘Did you send me Nunny?’
‘What do you mean? What’s Nunny?’
‘My sister’s rabbit – toy rabbit – someone sent him to me in the post. Was it you?’
‘God, no.’ Alice blinks. ‘That’s a pretty weird thing to happen.’
‘It is,’ agrees Naomi, getting to her feet.
‘I didn’t know her that well at college,’ adds Alice. ‘I didn’t even know she had a favourite toy. Someone sent us something, though,’ she says, remembering. ‘A postcard saying, “St Anthony, St Anthony, give what I’ve lost back to me”.’
All the colour drains from Naomi’s face. ‘What did you say?’ she asks quietly.
‘St Anthony, St Anthony, give what I’ve lost back to me,’ says Alice again.
Naomi looks at her. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘It was on the postcard, like I said,’ Alice explains. ‘A postcard to George.’
At the mention of George’s name, Naomi frowns. Whatever opened, briefly, is closed again.
The Girl Before You Page 19