The Girl Before You

by Nicola Rayner

  ‘He and Ruth must have buried her,’ says Alice softly.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Paula. ‘It was his idea. Just like it was his idea for Dan to make up some story about how he’d seen Ruth swimming and for Ruth’s stuff to be left on the beach. Magicians call it misdirection.’ She takes a gulp of wine, begins to roll another cigarette. ‘There aren’t many things you can choose,’ she says. ‘We all think we’re free, but we’re not. I see students come to St Anthony’s year after year. They act like they own the place, strutting around Cathedral Square, getting in the way on their bicycles. They’re everywhere – in the pubs, rowing on the river, lazing around in the park. And then they move on.

  ‘It’s like their lives are carved out for them: private school, posh university, job in London, husband, babies.’ She glances at our bumps. ‘Nice house. Pearls. The same kitchens. When I worked in the kitchen shop in Morpeth, the mums used to come and look at everything, like they were thinking about it really hard, and then they’d pick precisely the same kitchens, down to the same sink – those heavy ceramic ones that look as if they belong in a farmhouse. They think they’re free, like they’re making their own decisions, but they aren’t at all. Any more than me.’ She looks down at the rolled cigarette in her hand. ‘I can understand how it might be tempting – to start all over again, to slip through the system, to run away from it all.’

  ‘From me,’ I say quietly. ‘She ran from me.’

  And I remember how when we were children and she had broken my arm by accident, she had run off into the fields and spent the night in our treehouse, worrying our mother sick. To look at what you have done, that can be the hardest thing. But Paula is right: if we don’t forgive ourselves, how do we keep on living?

  ‘She must have been terrified,’ says Alice.

  ‘It’s true,’ says Paula. ‘After all that booze, all that weed, and then hurting someone like that.’

  ‘No,’ says Alice. ‘I mean of facing Naomi.’ She turns to me. ‘Of telling you what she’d done. How do you begin? How do you start explaining something like that? And George wouldn’t have supported her.’ She frowns. ‘He might have helped her to get away, but it wasn’t in his interest for her to come back, to come clean. Even if she had, it’s likely he would have got away with it somehow. Slippery little fuck. And what would the future have held for Ruth? Prison? Estrangement from her loved ones. Lost years. Trying to build her life again from the beginning.’

  We are quiet for a moment. I think of Ruth on a train or a bus. Maybe a boat. Her hair dyed, cropped short, perhaps. An old bag at her feet stuffed with George’s cash. Nunny on her lap watching the landscape fly by with his marbled eyes. We never even noticed he was missing.

  ‘That night,’ says Paula eventually, fiddling with her cigarette again. ‘It was the worst thing that I ever did – that I was ever involved with. But this – telling you – letting it out is the best thing. And no one will know how hard it is – how hard it is to keep a secret like that, but also how hard it is to let it out.’ She sighs. ‘That’s your story. You’ll want me to tell the police again, won’t you?’

  Alice looks at me.

  I’m feeling calm, strangely clear-headed. I nod at her.

  ‘Shall I call them?’ says Paula.

  Alice gets up. ‘I’ll do it.’

  While she is gone, I say one last time to Paula: ‘But Ruth hated George. Loathed him.’ I can’t get past that, that she would have colluded with him, that she would have done what he suggested.

  ‘She made a deal with the devil.’ Paula picks up the cigarette and lights it, ignoring the tutting barmaid as she approaches. The smoke curls up to the ceiling. ‘And maybe she didn’t want to live in a world where people like him were in control.’

  She – the runaway Ruth of my imagination – would have got somewhere eventually. A sprawling metropolis, or a dusty town. As my mother and I sat bolt upright, sleepless, by the phone in the days after her disappearance, she would have pushed the door open to an unfamiliar hotel room or hostel dorm or dingy flat. Did she pick up the phone, wherever she was? Did my number come into her head? Did she think of dialling it?

  Kat

  ‘Don’t hang up,’ Kat says quickly, quietly. She can hear Richard breathing, the chatter of the newsroom behind him. ‘I just wanted to say: there was nothing going on between Dan and Ruth. I let you think there might be.’

  ‘I know that now.’ Richard’s voice would sound calm, measured, to someone who didn’t know him well, but Kat, who has also had difficult interviewees, knows it’s an acting trick. She imagines him standing up – another trick – to sound more assertive, in control.

  ‘Ruth was trying to get him to confess.’ She speaks quickly, still aware she could lose him. ‘She’d become obsessed.’

  ‘Confess to what?’

  ‘Date rape,’ she says. She perches on the edge of the sofa and looks down at her bony feet, the Rouge Noir varnish on her toes, so trendy in the Nineties, is back in fashion. ‘That’s what they call it now – you didn’t hear the term so much back then.’

  ‘I heard rumours …’ Richard pauses. ‘Can I ring you back from somewhere quieter?’

  As Kat waits for him to call, she turns her mobile over in her hands, remembering what she did to Ruth. It’s going to be difficult to tell Richard, but she doesn’t have anything to lose now. She thinks back to that night, watching Ruth in the marquee, singing along to Richard’s songs at the memorial ball. She didn’t see Kat as she’d sidled up to Ruth, pressing her cold champagne flute against the other girl’s bare shoulder so that she spun around in surprise. Ruth’s face, on seeing Kat, had been uncertain. She’d smiled in a worried way, as if working it out: friend or foe?

  ‘You’re back,’ Kat said.

  Ruth struck a pose as if to say: here I am. Up close, Ruth smelled of coconut hair oil, as usual, and fresh sweat.

  ‘How was Wales?’

  ‘Awful,’ Ruth scowled. ‘As you can imagine. I left messages for you. Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘So you’re back together?’ Kat ignored the question.

  Ruth nodded, glanced towards the stage. ‘Well, we’ve still got a lot to talk about, but yeah.’

  ‘How was the make-up sex?’ Kat asked. ‘Pretty hot, I imagine.’

  Ruth frowned, looks back to the stage. ‘Shut up, Kat.’

  ‘Was it?’ Kat persisted, feeling a lump in her throat.

  In that moment, she had remembered her own night with Richard, the way she’d woken early the next day with her heart brimming. She pictured, for a moment, a pair of scissors in her hand, severing all ties with Ruth, like cutting through a ribbon at an opening ceremony.

  ‘Was it really good?’ she asked again. She was committed to her course. ‘I imagine it is really, really good with someone you love that much. Especially when he’s as hot as Richard.’

  Ruth took a step away from her as if she were a tramp at a railway station. Which suited Kat perfectly: she hadn’t wanted to be too close for the last bit – certainly not within swinging distance. She drained the dregs of champagne from her glass. On stage, Richard was in the middle of dedicating a song to his ‘beautiful girlfriend’. Kat leaned in to stage-whisper: ‘I don’t have to imagine any more. I had a go myself while you were away.’

  The ring of the mobile in her hand makes her jump. Kat blinks and steels herself. ‘There are two things I’ve got to tell you,’ she begins.

  ‘OK.’ He sighs. ‘I have something to tell you, too.’

  ‘Brace yourself. It’s bad.’ Kat stands up. Richard’s not the only one who knows the tricks. She walks to the window.

  ‘I’m braced.’ She can hear him smiling.

  Kat swallows. Outside, her cat is sitting on the patio, looking up at her purposefully.

  ‘It’s really bad. You might never forgive me.’ She can feel the emotion in her throat. ‘I have always loved you.’ She has said the words casually, lightly to him before. But not like this. ‘I have alwa
ys loved you in a way I haven’t loved anybody else in the world.’ This isn’t what she meant to say. It’s all coming out wrong. ‘And now I don’t have time.’ She can feel the tears start. ‘None of it has gone how it should.’

  ‘Kat,’ he says softly.

  ‘I lied,’ she says. ‘There aren’t two things to tell you. There are three things. Countless things. I love you. I’m dying. And …’ This is the hardest one. The real kicker. ‘I told Ruth.’

  ‘Kat,’ Richard says again. ‘What do you mean you’re dying?’

  She is crying fully now. Horrible snotty sobs. Thank God he can’t see her.

  ‘Just cancer,’ she says. Which sounds ridiculous.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he says quietly.

  ‘I told Ruth,’ she says again. ‘That we had been together. The night she went.’

  Richard is quiet for a very long time. ‘I know,’ he says at last. ‘She left me a note.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Just that I was a bastard and I wasn’t to try to get her back.’

  Kat wipes her face and begins to laugh. ‘Well, you haven’t obeyed that order.’

  ‘I gave it to the police. Not that it swayed them. I think they were convinced she had drowned once the dress turned up.’

  ‘But it wasn’t in your book.’ Which Kat had admittedly only skim-read. Too much love, too much Ruth.

  ‘It didn’t make me look good,’ he says sheepishly. ‘But it convinced me she was out there. Out there, but not with me: to punish me.’

  Kat moves to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. ‘That would be a hell of a long game just to make a point.’ She is weak with relief. All this time. Thinking that Richard would hate her. And he knew. All along. They had been locked in the secret together. ‘Weren’t you mad with me?’

  ‘Yes, I was. That’s why I couldn’t talk to you for months. But look, it was true. I did it. I slept with you. You told the truth.’

  ‘What did you have to tell me?’

  Richard is quiet again.

  Kat stands by the kettle, waiting.

  ‘I had a weird experience with George,’ he says at last. ‘At a party, in our first year. He offered me a girl he’d just shagged.’

  ‘Offered you?’

  ‘I’d passed out on his floor. She was completely out of it, too. When I woke up, he’d just finished having sex with her. He said: “Do you want a go?” Something like that.’

  ‘Something like that?’ Kat repeats. She catches her face, drained of colour, reflected in her oven. A thought bubbles. He could have warned you. He could have said something. ‘Did Ruth know?’

  ‘No,’ Richard sighs. ‘I didn’t want her to think …’

  ‘You didn’t want her to think you’d been part of it?’ Kat finishes.

  ‘Yes.’

  Kat sighs. She says eventually: ‘Something similar happened to me. With two of them. Him and Dan. I wasn’t prepared.’

  The shame had grown in the dark, but now just saying the words out loud, bringing the matter into the light, made it shrink slightly.

  ‘Oh,’ Richard says quietly.

  ‘Ruth never told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I asked her not to.’

  ‘Well, she could keep a secret.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Kat. ‘She could.’ She goes to her desk, picks up the pad where she’s started making notes. ‘I thought there might be a story here for The National. About what they did to me. To lots of girls.’

  Richard is so quiet that Kat wonders if he’s still there.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he says at last.

  Naomi

  May 2016

  On the long train journey back to London, I remember how, when our father died, Ruth knew before I did. Our mother picked her up from secondary school, told her first. As for me, my grandmother drove me home from primary school, strangely silent in the car, braking too suddenly, giving elliptical answers to my questions. Ruth couldn’t be there when I was told. She couldn’t bear it; she’d gone off to the Llewelyns’ stable, to bury her face in her pony’s mane, no doubt. She needn’t have worried – I didn’t scream like she did but was sick, quietly, efficiently. Would it have been easier with my sister in the room? Perhaps.

  A coward. I never thought of her as that. I always believed she was so fearless, that I was the timid one. But then there are different kinds of bravery.

  They buried Miss Wick like a dog. So swiftly, so unceremoniously. What does it take to do such a thing? How do you live with yourself afterwards?

  We’d found a bathroom in college, a secret place to go, hidden away from Jane. We’d locked the door and she’d made me come on the bathroom floor as the music thrummed below. It was a humid night and that little square room at the top of the building trapped the heat. Afterwards, we opened the skylight and lay out on the cool tiles watching the gulls circling above us, made plans for the following year when she would be in town permanently. We watched as they let 350 silver helium balloons into the air, one for each year of college, how they drifted away towards the sea. We stood side by side on a rickety old chair, watching them becoming smaller and smaller until they were just freckles on the face of the sky.

  And that was where Jane found us – she was screeching and screaming, and Miss Wick said, ‘Go and talk to her; do this properly.’ I told her where we kept the key to the cottage, where she and I had snatched some stolen hours together before, and said I’d meet her back there. We didn’t know how unhinged Jane was, didn’t guess how she would lock me in her room and waste those precious remaining hours of the night – where, if I had been home, everything might have been different.

  Alternately berating and trying to seduce me, she told me how inscrutable I was, how unreadable – trying to get into my head, not knowing that the people who did weren’t the ones who stayed and wept but the ones who left without a trace in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until she’d fallen asleep that I was able to prise the key from her hand and let myself out, slipping back through the streets to an empty cottage.

  Bent all wrong, she said. Miss Wick coming up the stairs, not knowing what was going on, maybe even wanting to help Ruth. And then being hit like that: falling. Like landing after a jump or coming off a horse – so important to soften with the fall, not to brace against it. But Miss Wick, Joaquina, didn’t ride, so she wouldn’t have known that.

  While we were waiting for the police – while Paula was smoking and the barmaid was flapping, and the pub had gone strangely quiet around us – Paula said: ‘I found out later how furious Ruth was with those boys. She’d been on to them, you see.’ She said urgently, to Alice, ignoring my face perhaps, knowing she didn’t have much time left with us: ‘Ruth had told George that she was going to reveal everything to you – about what they’d been up to. I think he wanted to take some nasty photos with me in her bedroom to make it look like it was her. To keep her quiet.’

  It was as if she didn’t notice how silent Alice and I had become. The police arrived then. There was a shift in the pub, a crackle as they entered, but I didn’t care. I said to Paula as she got up: ‘What do you mean: you found out later? Who told you that? Not George?’

  I put my hand on her arm; I wanted to stop her going. ‘The postcards, Nunny: they came from St Anthony’s. You’ve been in touch with her, Paula, haven’t you? Haven’t you? Paula?’ I started to shout. ‘Paula? Where is Ruth?’

  She didn’t say a thing. Her face changed, but it wasn’t smug, like she was enjoying the secret, it was more as if she had made some sort of promise.

  Alice and I had to speak to the police, too. I gave them Miss Wick’s name, for what it was worth: her new name for a new country. I didn’t know any of her relations or friends or even where she was living at that time. No one had seemed to miss her or, if they did, to place her in St Anthony’s that night. And even I – who loved her hands and her hair and her mouth – even I thought she’d just disappeared again, the way she did. As if she
were some sort of phantom, not a living, breathing being, whose neck had been broken, whose body had been buried a matter of feet from where I lived.

  Ruth, on the other hand, had been missed and longed for. She had been spotted on trains and in crowds. She had been imagined many times by people who knew her – and even Alice, who didn’t: a pale face reflected in dark glass, the swish of red hair disappearing around the corner.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it? On the train,’ Alice says at one point on the journey home.

  ‘Maybe it was,’ I agree. ‘Maybe you were right all along.’

  She looks pleased for a moment. ‘Poor thing,’ she half-smiles. ‘She was so startled. Maybe I gave her as big a fright as she gave me.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I look out of the train window and think of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, the way it all begins on a train. With her love of mysteries, would Ruth have remembered that? With her love of drama, might she have staged the whole thing? I wonder if she might have read about Alice’s high-profile clients, about the family law conference in Edinburgh, and followed Alice to the station.

  It’s far-fetched. But not impossible.

  I don’t share these wilder theories with Alice now. I keep them to myself.

  ‘We’re going through the same sort of thing, aren’t we?’ I say instead when she goes quiet. ‘We’re both looking at someone we loved with fresh eyes.’

  She looks out of the window at the countryside beyond. Rows of windmills, bone white against the sky.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says eventually, ‘I always knew, deep down, what those boys were like. I just didn’t want to look at it.’

  How could Ruth do it? Live another life? Another life without me in it.

  Just as we’re coming into London, I drift off into a fevered sleep. In my dream I’m back at the hotel, in the kitchen, but the police are there with their yellow jackets and their walkie-talkies, asking us about what happened to the man who went missing from the cliffs all those years ago.