The Girl Before You

by Nicola Rayner

  The way the pattern works: it swirls into a single point. A pivotal point. For a moment Kat is back there that night, with Dan standing in front of the door, so that she can’t leave.

  ‘I guess I wanted to fit in,’ Nicky continues calmly, allowing Kat to sit in silence. ‘With those middle-class kids.’

  Maybe she could have done more to stop them. ‘“Rape” is such a big word, isn’t it?’ Kat says at last. ‘I always found it difficult to call it that.’

  Nicky tsks angrily. ‘Why can’t we say it?’ she says. ‘Why do we still want them to like us?’

  ‘It’s not that.’ Kat shakes her head. She thinks of Nicky boasting about the number of people she’d slept with. She thinks of her own bravado, with her fuck-me shoes and Dorothy Parker quotes. ‘Aren’t we partly responsible? Didn’t we want to be free?’

  ‘We wanted to be free, yes. But we didn’t want that. You know we didn’t want that.’ Nicky sighs. ‘And they fucking knew it. They weren’t thinking about us at all.’

  ‘Maybe they just weren’t thinking,’ says Kat. ‘We were all so young. How were they to know that we would carry it with us for all these years?’

  ‘It is like that, isn’t it? You carry it with you.’ Nicky looks past Kat at a couple of girls at the bar. They are nineteen, perhaps, or twenty: coltish bodies, glossy hair falling down their shoulders. Their lives stretching ahead of them. ‘I think it still goes on at universities. There’s a group of feminists in Durham. They look out for each other – we should have done that.’

  The thing is: it was hard to stop looking at yourself as they had – as something worthless. It was hard not to let the shame grow in the dark. Might things have been different for her, without it? Without what they’d done. Now Kat will never know. And George would still be alive when she wasn’t. He would carry on living his life out in the light.

  One of the girls at the bar picks up her phone, smiles at whatever’s on the screen and shows it to her friend.

  Kat says: ‘Do you think there were others?’

  Nicky nods. She is quiet, waiting to see what Kat will say next.

  Kat feels something that is the opposite of letting go. An anchoring in the present. A cause. She feels the certainty of it in her blood. She puts the wine glass to one side and fishes out her water bottle from her gym bag before gulping the cold liquid down her throat, into her belly. That’s better. The sense of purpose gives her a boost. She needs to sober up. She needs to find her notebook.

  She says: ‘Do you want to find them?’

  Alice

  On the way to St Anthony’s, Alice finds herself looking at everything through two pairs of eyes. It’s as if her younger self has slipped into the carriage next to her – and stayed by her side. Her mind drifts back to her last summer in St Anthony’s with George. After the memorial ball she’d gone to stay with his family in their London house. He’d insisted and she loved it when he was like that. ‘I can’t say goodbye to you yet,’ he’d said. ‘Your family don’t need you. Not straight away.’

  As usual, she hadn’t even considered her own family, so she’d more or less moved into the large townhouse in Notting Hill, not far from where they would eventually live together. They would wake to croissants and political discussions over the papers with his parents, sharing long lunches and boozy evenings with their friends in West London bars, where the girls swapped anxious updates on Ruth Walker’s disappearance and the boys drank to forget.

  In one of those late-night drinking places they’d ended up with a bunch of people they didn’t know very well. It had been a funny sort of evening – one of those baking-hot nights in London when the city feels wired, jittery, like a different sort of place. Everyone was pretty plastered and the conversation had turned to Ruth, as usual.

  A guy in the group who’d been quiet all evening – Alice forgets his name, but he was trying to grow a moustache – said, ‘The police have been talking to Dan Vaughan, haven’t they?’

  ‘Not exactly, old boy,’ George said. ‘He just saw her swimming is all.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said the moustached chap. ‘And did you see her swimming, too? I thought you two did everything together.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘The police will be on the phone to you next. But then your dad’s a barrister, isn’t he? I imagine that’ll help.’

  It hadn’t bothered Alice much at the time. The guy had been trying to wind George up – people got so jealous of him – but a day or two later, she woke to find George sitting on the bed with a couple of tickets.

  He tickled her cheek with the paper. ‘Who wants to come with me to Jamaica?’

  She sat up. ‘George, really?’

  ‘My aunt’s a bit lonely out there.’ He grinned like it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘Come with me. We’ll summer in the West Indies.’

  ‘George, no one says the West Indies any more.’

  ‘Come on, Alice. We’ll drink rum on the beach and forget all our problems.’

  While they were out there Dan, on an escapist holiday of his own, had died, taken too much coke on a night out. Was that linked in any way to the police questioning? Or the fact that his job offer at Goldman Sachs had been withdrawn? Whenever they talked about it, which was rare, George insisted it was nothing more than a terrible accident.

  She and Naomi had become quieter on the train as they passed the wide expanse of estuary entering the town, and Alice had felt the tug of the past as the familiar landscape flew by. She hadn’t expected to be so unsettled. With things as they were with George, she had anticipated feeling strange, but she hadn’t bargained for a different feeling, a type of excitement: the flutter in her belly at the smell of the sea, the scream of the gulls.

  She’s been staying in a hotel; she told George that her father had been taken ill, that she would be staying with her family for a week or so to help. She took her mum into her confidence. ‘Don’t call the house,’ she said. Not that George would notice, she thought at the time; he was probably enjoying lots of lovely free time with Christie.

  Her mother, to her credit, was very restrained, didn’t ask too many questions.

  ‘You are all right?’ she checked. ‘You and the baby?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Alice confirmed.

  She always hoped to impress her parents or, more specifically, hoped that George did. She can see now that they never cared about his status in the way she had done herself. She had got everything upside down.

  When they get into town, their first stop is the cottage where Naomi and Ruth used to live.

  ‘This is it,’ Naomi says when they get there. ‘Not so remarkable.’

  But that doesn’t do it justice, really. It’s an unusual place: on its own patch of land away from the others on the street, with a small rectangle of grass between the house and its own steep tumbledown route to the sea. A much larger garden behind it merges, unfenced, with the wooded clifftops.

  ‘The owner bought that neighbouring bit of land recently,’ says Naomi, looking over at the woods. ‘She was having some landscaping done. That’s how they found the skeleton. The police never searched around the cottage at the time – everything was so focused on the beach where her stuff was found.’

  Through the trees, Alice can make out the yellow tape of the police investigation.

  ‘Have you heard any more about that?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’ Naomi follows her gaze. ‘They’re following leads, but now they know it’s not Ruth, they haven’t told us any more.’ She looks up at the house. ‘It looks smarter than it did – and they’ve added the conservatory, too – it was pretty run-down when we rented it.’

  The cottage has new windows and a freshly painted black door.

  ‘Do you want to see inside?’ asks Alice.

  ‘Let’s try,’ Naomi says.

  The woman who answers is in her sixties, with a carefully made-up face and one hand still in a rubber glove, covered in bubbles. She frowns at the pair of them.

 
; ‘We used to live here when we were students,’ Alice begins, though she’s not sure why she’s included herself. ‘Well, my friend did.’

  She looks at Naomi – whom she feels should say something at this juncture – but Naomi is peering past the woman at the house.

  ‘We were wondering if we could have a quick look around?’ Alice pushes. ‘A trip down memory lane.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The woman hesitates. ‘I’m going out in a minute. There’s been a lot of coming and going recently.’ She purses her mouth. ‘People stomping through the garden, walking their muddy boots through my house.’

  ‘What a nuisance,’ Alice agrees, but she doesn’t move. ‘I’m sorry – we should have rung ahead.’ She is not leaving now.

  As the woman assesses them both, Alice finds herself working overtime. They had studied at St Anthony’s, she explains. Pregnancy has made Naomi nostalgic. The cottage looks so light, so spacious. Was the renovation recent? They really won’t take up much of her time.

  She’s mid-flow, when Naomi interrupts: ‘It was my sister.’

  They both look at her.

  ‘Who went missing from here, in 2001,’ says Naomi. ‘You must have heard. We got the call when they found the skeleton.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the woman quietly. ‘That’s a bit different.’ Her manner changes, becomes more conciliatory. ‘We’re new to town – only came here for our retirement a couple of years ago – but we’ve heard, of course. Especially when the gardener dug up …’ She doesn’t finish. ‘Come in.’

  The house is immaculate – all cream carpets and sparkling surfaces – very different from how it used to be, says Naomi as she wanders from room to room. Embarrassingly, she spends the longest time in the master bedroom, which used to be Ruth’s, not looking at the room itself but out to sea.

  ‘Ruth loved this view,’ she says to me. ‘We got ready here for the ball the last time I saw her. It was all red,’ she smiles. ‘She used to collect red pictures and postcards and clippings and pin them to the walls.’

  Although the ground floor of the house has been extended, the upstairs just includes two bedrooms, Ruth’s old bedroom overlooking the sea and Naomi’s old bedroom overlooking the garden, and a small bathroom in between.

  ‘We want to extend up here, too,’ says the owner, almost apologetically, standing on the landing, waiting for Naomi. ‘It’s a bit cramped. And those stairs were a death trap when we moved in. We’ve changed them already.’

  ‘You’ve done a beautiful job,’ says Naomi politely. ‘It’s much nicer than when we lived here.’

  Just before they leave, she asks if she can go upstairs once more. The owner, looking a little restless now, nods. As Alice waits with her in the hallway, she keeps glancing upstairs at Naomi’s tread on the landing.

  ‘I hope you find out one day,’ the woman says as they finally leave the house. ‘What happened to your sister.’

  ‘Did you ever hear of anyone who looked like her in town?’ asks Naomi. ‘Someone who worked in a bar maybe. A redhead.’

  The woman shakes her head. ‘My husband drinks at the King’s Head,’ she says. ‘I could get him to ask there.’

  Alice and Naomi gather their thoughts at Annie’s café, which had always been a favourite with the students. It’s a cosy place, with the same cottage-style decor – patchwork cushions and driftwood mirrors – that it had in their day. Alice orders them peppermint tea and carrot cake, though neither of them feels like eating much.

  ‘Shall we get our list out?’ asks Alice.

  They’ve made a list of all the pubs in St Anthony’s, reasoning that the woman might still work at one of them. They’d also agreed that the town’s pubs would be the best place for gossip. The only trouble was: St Anthony’s was bigger than they remembered and there were lots more pubs than they bargained for.

  They leave Annie’s café and start to work their way through the list, but it proves to be oddly tiring. They’ve decided between themselves not to mention Ruth – just to ask if there was a redhead their sort of age working at each place, or anyone who fitted that description in town.

  The two of them, with their bumps, don’t go unnoticed in the pubs in the middle of the day, however. Often, their entrance is greeted by a hush in the conversation as the handful of locals drinking at the bar look up at them with undisguised interest. Often, too, their questions lead to more questions back – ‘She’s a friend of yours, is she?’ ‘Ooh, what’s she done?’ ‘No, I think I’d remember a redhead if she’s anything like you two’. And so on. Sometimes a name would be mentioned and a Facebook page pulled up and examined, but they were completely wrong – much too old or much too young. It wasn’t going well.

  ‘We could mention Ruth?’ hisses Alice as they leave the King’s Head. ‘It might make them pay more attention.’

  ‘We don’t want more attention,’ Naomi snaps back. ‘We’re getting enough as it is.’

  She is looking pale, thinks Alice. She wonders, for a moment, if they’re overdoing it.

  The road they’re on, steep and cobbled like most in St Anthony’s, winds down to the sea, which looks almost black today. Alice recalls how the colour of it changes: the way you can tell what kind of day it will be from the look of it.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘This is too much, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ Naomi shakes her head. ‘Coming back. It’s hard.’

  She is quiet for a few minutes as they walk down the hill from the top of town.

  ‘I thought I would remember something. I thought something would come to me, some detail. Or that we’d find something important.’

  ‘We will,’ says Alice, determined.

  ‘The door was open,’ Naomi says eventually. ‘The morning after the ball. It wasn’t locked. When I finally got away from Jane, I thought Miss Wick was waiting for me. But she wasn’t there. And neither was Ruth.’ She brushes a hair out of her eyes. ‘I thought Ruth was with Richard then – I didn’t know they’d had another bust-up until he came looking for her the next day. I just went to sleep.’ She looks bereft. ‘Something so terrible had happened and I just went to sleep.’

  Alice takes her arm. ‘Maybe you need some sugar. Shall we stop for a break?’

  ‘Her shoes were on the beach. So neatly,’ says Naomi. ‘It wasn’t like her. Red shoes, like Dorothy.’

  ‘You said,’ Alice murmurs. Whatever her problems at the moment, this trip was always going to be much harder for Naomi. Maybe something to eat would settle her stomach, she thinks as she passes the small general store on the seafront. ‘Shall I get you something?’ She nods towards the shop.

  ‘You get something.’ Naomi shrugs. ‘I’m going to call Carla.’

  When she’d been at university, Alice had been on first-name terms with the woman who’d owned the shop, though she couldn’t remember her name now. Anyway, the layout is completely different and there’s a teenager on the till, who barely looks up from his phone as they enter.

  ‘Where’s the fruit?’ Alice asks.

  He waves a non-committal hand towards the far left corner. The place is bigger than she remembers. At the back, the shop used to stock a strange selection of greetings cards, dusty and unfashionable. Alice had picked one up for Christie’s twenty-first, but Christie hadn’t really appreciated the joke.

  Now, fruit lines the wall on the left, with the cool section for dairy at the back and the booze in the opposite corner. Above the fruit, a large convex mirror reflects the rows of bottles. The selection isn’t great. Alice picks up a blackening banana. The door tinkles as someone enters. Alice hears Naomi’s tread in the next aisle.

  ‘Do you want a banana?’ Alice calls out to Naomi. ‘I thought it might help.’

  There’s a muffled sound in reply.

  It’s not the best-stocked place. There are gaps in the shelves, where goods have run out and not been replaced. The shelving is flimsy, so that through the gaps you can see flashes of the nex
t aisle. Alice can see now that it’s not Naomi.

  She had read once that red hair didn’t go grey in the same way as other colours; that it faded through various shades of copper and strawberry. She remembers this as she glimpses fading red hair in the opposite aisle. In the convex mirror, she can see it from above, piled messily on top of someone’s head.

  ‘I don’t think you mean me,’ says a voice in the other aisle.

  It has a local accent, a Geordie lilt. It sounds friendly.

  Alice walks towards the voice as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. The woman is her age. Red hair, slender. Shockingly familiar. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

  Naomi

  ‘Come home,’ Carla is saying. ‘Just call it a day. I’m worried about you.’

  I have crossed the road opposite the shop and am looking out to sea. It’s almost high tide and there is just the thinnest strip of sand, where seagulls gather in a huddle.

  ‘I thought if I could just stand on that spot where we said goodbye …’ I start to say, but I can’t finish the thought – not even to Carla. That if I returned to that spot, if I stood at the top of the stairs in my old cottage, where I said goodbye to Ruth before she went to the ball … That what? If I said a prayer, made a wish, something would happen; something would change; that she would slip between the world in which she had gone and the world in which she hadn’t, like some sort of magic trick.

  ‘I wish I were there,’ says Carla. ‘I should have come. Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘If I had just paid more attention back then; if I had just kept my eyes open, then there’s a chance it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Naomi, you are not responsible for any of this. That’s just how it feels,’ says Carla. ‘That feeling of guilt is just part of it.’