by S. E. Lynes
I’m not asking for sympathy, by the way; I’m asking you to understand what I did to that poor girl, that’s all. It was unnerving, all this intuition. I felt like a radio tuned to several different channels at once. But I was trying to take Lisa’s advice and see it as a gift. Human beings need to connect with each other. What else are we in this life for, if not? I was water. I’d always been water, flowing around those I loved and, quite often, those I didn’t. But now I was waiting for fresh drops to swell the depleted puddle I’d become.
For that week, all I did was go to work and come home again. That was enough. By the time I got in at night, I was too exhausted to do more than walk Archie round the close for his wee.
‘Did you see anyone at that time? Anyone you knew?’
I think for a minute. ‘I only saw a couple of neighbours. Mostly I was looking at the lights coming from the windows, the families sitting round the table or watching television together. Mrs Lang from number twenty-four was putting a bag of rubbish into her dustbin. I tell you what, she is a very unhappily married woman indeed. Oh, and I waved to Ingrid, who was closing her curtains.’
‘So you weren’t going any further than your own crescent?’
‘No. Well, I did go as far as the Spar, which is at the end of the estate before you get to the bus stop on the main road, and I suppose I should tell you that I tied Archie up outside, went in and… I nicked a packet of biscuits. Just to see if I could get away with it. Which I did. But the following Saturday was my first really long evening walk. And I swear to God, when I met that young girl, the one in the paper, all I wanted to do was talk to her. Jo. Well, you know her name. But that was the start of things stepping up – I can see that now. That was when I started to feel afraid.’
10
Mark
Transcript of recorded interview with Mark Edwards (excerpt)
Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button
HS: Mr Edwards, can you tell us anything about your wife’s behaviour? Had she changed in any way recently, perhaps around the end of June? Was there anything specific you might have noticed or which might seem relevant in the light of what’s happened?
ME: I suppose she was a bit funny after our Katie’s nineteenth. She had a nosebleed that night and she seemed upset, I suppose. And the next morning she’d gone into herself, further than usual.
HS: Can you tell us anything about the folder containing the crime reports?
ME: (Pause)
HS: For the benefit of the tape, Mr Edwards is clearing his throat.
ME: She’d started with the file the year before. I asked her not to, but she was determined to get enough articles together to take to our MP. She wanted him to take it to Parliament and get something done about all the knife crime. She was very committed to it. I’d hear the printer going sometimes and I’d check the alarm clock and it’d be like five, six, half six in the morning. But it was only after Katie’s do that she started going out in the evenings. Only round our way at first. Took the dog, like. I didn’t think too much about it. But then… then she started going further.
HS: Did you ask her where she was going?
ME: She said she was walking the dog. But our Archie doesn’t need much walking. He’s eight. That’s middle-aged, in dog years. She just seemed to need to get out of the house. She’d be out for hours. And I couldn’t think of a reason to stop her. I mean, I had no idea. So… so I didn’t. Stop her, I mean.
11
Rachel
I met Jo about forty minutes’ walk from our house. It was further than I’d walked in years.
On the Wednesday, I think it was, and this is embarrassing, I’d nicked some chewing gum from the Spar to stop me stuffing my face of an evening. I can’t believe I did that, but I did, and I’ve nicked other stuff since, so maybe that should be added to the charges. But the chewing gum was because I’d put on weight over the last year or so and I suppose I was hoping the evening strolls would pay off eventually, especially as they meant that I was laying off the Hobnobs and the Cadbury’s in front of the telly, and whatever white wine was on offer in the Co-op that week.
‘And you took the dog?’ Blue Eyes uncrosses her legs, recrosses them the other way. She’s wearing a black tunic thing today with a big necklace of coloured glass beads, what Katie would call a statement piece. I’m wearing jogging pants and a T-shirt. I’m not in a prison, which makes sense because there’s no prison overlooking the Shopping City. I’m in a psychiatric unit.
They still lock us up at night, though, which is a relief.
‘Rachel?’ Oops. Earth to Rachel, come in, Rachel. ‘You took your dog with you when you walked?’
‘The dog was my alibi.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Good question. I have a think before I tell her I was trying to pull myself out of the hole I was in, get fit, take my mind off things. But I can see that if I was thinking of the dog that way, I must have known deep down that what I was doing wasn’t strictly speaking a simple leg-stretch.
The girl, Jo, the one in the news, was wandering around in front of the station. I mean, I didn’t know her name then, obviously. She was wearing a too-big tweedy overcoat, skinny jeans and monkey boots and she looked to be about Katie’s age. She looked lost and a bit frazzled so I asked her if she was all right and, as was becoming depressingly familiar, she almost jumped out of her skin. Really, I thought, I should buy a sheet and some chains to rattle just to wring some drops of amusement out of the situation.
‘I’ve lost my satchel,’ she said, fingers bunched at her forehead ‘I thought it was in my rucksack but it’s not. It’s got my purse and my phone in it. I think someone must have taken it while I was asleep. Or I might have left it on the train, I don’t know.’
‘You poor lamb,’ I said, with the lightest touch to her sleeve. ‘Can I help?’
She transferred her fingertips to her teeth, tap tap tap, eyes darting about. ‘Er… oh God, my mum’ll kill me.’
Tobacco had yellowed the knuckles of her fore- and middle fingers. Probably started smoking at school in order to shake off the goody-two-shoes image her parents had drilled into her, and now she couldn’t stop. Her eyes were big, too big, and her collarbone jutted like the handlebars of a bike. She smoked to stay thin and I guessed it was only her alcohol consumption that kept her weight from plummeting to dangerous levels. She drank to cope, to relax. She didn’t tell me any of this. I caught the vapours on her breath. And I don’t know what it was about her particularly, but something drew me to her – her vulnerability, perhaps, and the ever-present loneliness I was beginning to realise was all around me.
‘Have you told the stationmaster?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘There was no one there. I don’t suppose you have a phone I could use, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, love, I’ve left it at home. You can come back to mine if you like and ring from there?’ I rummaged in my bag, found some tissues and offered her one.
She accepted the tissue but took a step back. I’d been too forward. Dammit. She still saw me as harmless, but she didn’t think she should come to my home just like that. And she was right. Stranger danger. I’d have told Katie the same. Usually, the ones with strict parents are lacking in street smarts, but this girl had seen enough television to be wary. I wanted to reassure her, tell her that she wouldn’t end up in a Netflix documentary, but I knew that would sound wrong.
‘I’m here to see a friend,’ she said. ‘I was meant to ring her from the train but I fell asleep and I only woke up at the stop. I nearly ended up in Liverpool, so I suppose in the rush I must’ve left the bag behind.’
‘Do you know where she lives, your mate?’
‘Erm, Festival Way, I think.’
I smiled. ‘I live up that way. It’s quite a walk from here, but I was on my way back. You can walk along with me if you like. Safety in numbers. Or you can walk a little behind me if you’re not sure. I won’t b
e offended. I’d call you a cab but we’ve neither of us got a phone, have we? It’s like my mum used to say: we could’ve had bacon and eggs if we had any bacon, except we haven’t got any eggs.’ I gave a little laugh.
‘Erm…’ She met my eye, still not a hundred per cent. Fred and Rosemary West have a lot to answer for.
‘Or I can give you directions, but they’re a lot to remember.’ Archie sniffed at her crotch. Time of the month most probably, but again, not something to say out loud.
‘Your dog’s cute,’ she said.
‘My daughter’s dog. Not that she ever walks him.’
‘Aw, what’s his name?’ She bent and tickled Archie’s ears.
I thought for a second. ‘Fido.’ I cursed myself. Really, Rachel, is that the best you can do?
But she half laughed. ‘Good name.’
‘Our Polly thought it was hilarious, and it was for about a day.’ Two name changes. The second was better by a country mile. I’d wanted the name Polly, but Mark had preferred Katie.
The girl smiled and stood up. The murderous Wests and other assorted famous predators scuttled away, left her brow clear. Meanwhile I tried to remember the last time Katie had smiled at me the way this young girl was doing, as if I’d said something amusing, as if she liked me.
‘My daughter’s about your age,’ I said. ‘A couple of years younger, but round about.’
The old woman has a daughter, she was thinking, judging by her eyes. She won’t do me any harm. God bless the young. They have such black-and-white ideas about things.
‘We’ll be safe as houses,’ I said. ‘We’ve got our guard dog now, haven’t we?’
‘My name’s Jo,’ she said.
‘Pleased to meet you, Jo.’
She didn’t ask my name, which I was quite used to; I didn’t feel any need to give it. Together we walked up Shaw Street towards Greenway Road. To the left, behind the houses, was the off-licence; to the right, the cemetery and St Michael’s church. It started to spit so I pulled up the hood of my anorak.
‘How do you know your friend if you’re not from here?’ I asked. The young need more questions; they don’t just chat on like older folk do, and they rarely ask anything back.
‘From university,’ she said.
‘So you’re at uni?’
‘Not anymore. But I haven’t really got a proper job and neither has she. We’re both living with our parents at the moment, on zero-hours contracts.’
I nodded. ‘My daughter’s on a zero-hours. Except with her, it’s literally zero; she spends most of her time in bed.’
And then Jo did something. She laughed. And my God, it felt so good to have someone laugh at something I’d said on purpose to be funny and not at something I’d got wrong. It felt so good to have someone hear.
‘I don’t like to be too hard on her,’ I said. ‘The world’s a tough place for you young ones, what with Instagram lifestyles and all that. Our K— Polly can’t go out the door until she’s got her eyebrows on. Honest to God, full make-up when she goes for milk.’ I thought I’d managed a light-hearted mickey-take. I didn’t feel too guilty sending Katie up like that, because Katie’s a pain in the neck.
Jo laughed again. She was thinking I was a nice lady. She was starting to trust me. It’s easy to trust a nondescript middle-aged woman in a cagoule in a way it isn’t to trust a middle-aged man in a dirty mackintosh rooting for something in his pockets, if you know what I mean. As for me, I was finding my sense of humour again. All I’d needed was a little encouragement to get it out of the box and dust it off. A bit of connection.
‘Do you go in for those lifestyle accounts?’ I said. ‘YouTube and Twitface and all that? An influencer, that’s what our Polly wants to be, whatever that is. Do you do that? You know, take a photo of some mushed-up avocado on toast and say hashtag healthy eating hashtag avocado?’
Jo giggled. ‘Sometimes. My friends all do it, so…’
‘Oh, I remember that. When I was younger, if my mates wore wellies on their heads, I’d be up that shed looking for mine before you could say Last of the Summer Wine.’
Jo laughed a lot at that. She shook her head. ‘You’re hilarious.’
She’d never heard of Last of the Summer Wine, couldn’t have done, she was way too young. It was the way I spoke that tickled her, my funny local accent, but I didn’t care. I have quite good delivery. Deadpan is something you earn the right to once you’ve been around the block a few times, another scarce advantage in the shitstorm of the cruel ravages of time.
By the time we reached the end of Norman Road, we were chatting like best friends. It was the first time in years I’d felt confident talking to someone new. I think it was because she was so much younger. And of course, by the way she reacted I could tell she thought I was the bee’s knees. She rattled on and on and on, the way shy people often do once you’ve pressed the right buttons. Wealthy family, judging by the voice, the casual references to holidays in France, the way she said Mummy and Daddy not Mum and Dad, and the village in Hampshire she called home.
We headed down Heath Road to the mini-roundabout, where the town hall stands white and proud in its gardens. We’d been walking for about twenty minutes by then. From the town-hall walls, soft floods bathed the gardens in vanilla light.
‘That’s where I got married,’ I said, pointing to it.
‘Aw,’ she said. ‘Are you still married?’
‘Can’t you tell? Look at the state of me – of course I’m bloody still married.’
Well, she laughed so much I thought she was going to stop breathing or start crying or both. Must be dry as parchment in your house, I wanted to say but didn’t obviously. That would have stopped the connection we were feeling, the connection I’d set out to find. She was hungry, was Jo. I felt the pit of her starvation in my own stomach, the nasty taste of it in my mouth. We were conjoining like those twins you see on the news sometimes; I could feel it.
‘You could feel her hunger?’ Blue Eyes, popping up on me again. Honest to God, I get so lost in what I’m saying, I forget she’s there.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And do you believe that’s possible? To feel someone else’s hunger in your own belly?’
I think for a second. ‘I thought I could feel it, but yes, I might have been over-empathising, what with her being so thin. And all I’d had since my tea was some chewing gum, which I suppose had set my gastric juices off, hadn’t it?’
Mouth twitch. I think that’s a good sign. ‘I think you’re probably right. But you mentioned your magazine quiz telling you that you were highly empathic, and if you’re too empathic, that can be a problem. You’re not differentiating sufficiently between yourself and others. You’re suffering on everyone else’s behalf, which can leave you exhausted, as you’ve described. So it could well be that the young girl’s thinness upset you, as a mother or as an empath, or both. Do you have experience of being hungry? Very hungry, I mean.’
I almost snort. ‘I tell you what, I’ve been on more diets than Gwyneth Paltrow’s had colonic irrigations. I’m always on some diet or other, starving myself, and of course by late afternoon I’m snatching chocolate bars from passing toddlers. So yes.’
She raises her eyebrows and presses her mouth tight, a slight nod: there you go, then – it was your association of the vivid experience of hunger after all. We read so much in the expressions of others, don’t we? Like that, just now, actual words in the simple realignment of a few facial muscles. It can be less, much less – the smallest twitch of the ears, an all-too-hasty nod, and you still understand, you still hear the words that were never said. Jo communicated her hunger to me in the high set of her shoulders, the way she held her arm across her belly, her hand a soft fist. It’s possible I smelled hunger on her breath along with the wine. That halitosis models get from starving themselves, I read about it in… oh, some magazine or other. What a world we live in. And there we were, Jo and I, stopped at the perimeter fence to the town hall.
‘Up there?’ Jo pointed to the trees that hide my special bench. Her sleeve fell back to reveal a criss-cross of thin pink scars. A cutter. Suicidal thoughts sometimes, I bet.
‘I go there when I’m stressed or angry or whatever. When I feel like the world doesn’t understand me.’ World doesn’t understand me? World doesn’t bloody see me, I thought. It has no interest in understanding me what-so-bloody-ever.
She peered into the darkness. She was thinking about how the world didn’t understand her either but that I did. There was a longing in her. You could feel it in the air. She was pining for connection too. She was so lonely inside the walls she’d built around herself. She needed a mother, but not the one she had. She needed a mother like me.