‘Lynsey!’ I shout. ‘They’ve gone. They’ve driven off. Come out and come home, you wee daftie. They’re away.’
I start to dog-paddle as the ground falls from under my feet. My thrashing makes her dip and bob and a wash of water passes right over her face. She doesn’t splutter.
‘Lynsey?’ I shout again, my throat blocking with fear. She wouldn’t be floating like that, would she, if she was— Then she blinks.
With one last surge I’m by her side, my shoulders up round my ears and my neck cramping from the chill. My hands are going from stinging red to that numb yellow-white but when I touch her fingers she’s even colder than me. I grab both her hands and kick my legs harder to keep me afloat.
‘I’ll tow you in,’ I say, and turn towards the shore.
‘Pull me by my feet,’ Lynsey says, her voice almost lost in the shivering. So I put her little feet under my armpits, warming them with the last of my body heat, and strike out for the beach, with her streaming along behind me.
When I’m back in my depth, I stand and go to grab her by her middle.
‘No, Carmen,’ she says. ‘Hold me by my feet.’
I don’t get it but it can’t do any harm, so I tow her, floating, all the way to the edge, and through the seaweed and sticks, until her back scrapes on the pebbles.
The ash of their fire is only metres away and I remember, with a jolt of guilt that’s got relief behind it, that I’ve left five of Mum’s good towels behind that wedge of rock.
‘Here,’ I say, coming back to Lynsey, putting the biggest one round her shoulders and up over her head like a shawl. ‘Wriggle up out of the water and I’ll cover your legs too.’
‘Mum’ll have a flaky,’ Lynsey says.
‘Mum can take it,’ I tell her. ‘What were you doing in there?’
‘Rinsing through.’ It’s one of Mum’s sayings. Washing is what you do to jeans and jumpers and Dad’s shirts in the washing-machine. Rinsing through is something we do in the bathroom sink to tights and knickers and hand-wash-only underwired bras. Like there’s some different kind of dirt that comes out of the three of us.
Lynsey makes a loud HUH! noise, like the start of a cough, then stops, with her breath held. I brace myself for another howked-up lump, thinking she must be down to tiny pebbles now.
‘If you swallow water,’ she says, ‘it goes right through and comes out.’ I don’t say anything. I’m busy tucking the rest of the towels around me, trying to work out if my feet would be warmer dug into the gritty sand, or bundled in the damp fabric, or left out to dry in the half-hearted sun. ‘So why can’t it work the other way? If water goes up you, why can’t it come out the top?’
‘Is that why I was dragging you by your feet?’ I says. ‘To get the seawater…’
‘Up,’ she says. ‘I swallowed tons and sicked it out last night. And I know it can get in and dribble out again, but why can’t it go through? Why can’t it rinse right through?’
‘Have you even started biology yet?’ I say. I can’t remember when we did what in science in the first year.
She shakes her head. All I see is the hood of towelling shift a bit. ‘Chemistry,’ she says. ‘Corrosion.’
‘Well, if you keep jumping in the sea I wouldn’t be surprised if you rust too.’ I’m trying to make her laugh.
‘What – my fillings?’
‘Oh, Lynsey.’
‘But it’s wet inside my mouth all the time. Is it the salt?’
‘I’m kidding,’ I say. ‘But you know you’re not allowed to swim on your own.’
‘I wasn’t swimming. I was floating. Rinsing. Don’t tell Mum. She’ll kill me.’
I haul her to her feet, wrap the bottom towel round her like a kilt and add another one. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘I’m freezing.’
‘Can you sing the song again? And can you hold another stone, Carmen? Or are you full? I can still feel it in my tummy. I didn’t wash it away.’
I let the sigh out of myself silently, my mouth wide, as if I’m making smoke-rings. Then I shake one hand free of the towel I’ve swirled round myself and cup it under her mouth.
* * *
Mum’s watching out the back window. The kitchen’s the only room in the house where the net’s scalloped up in a ruffle in the middle, so she can see what’s going on in the garden. It must have started when we were wee and playing out, but now we come and go to school through the garden gate and she can clock us as soon as the latch rises. She’s usually got the kettle on for a Cup a Soup or the tap running cold for diluting juice before we’re in and dumped our schoolbags.
This morning, I can see her wide-open eyes and her mouth moving. She disappears from the clear bit in the scalloped net and the back door goes flying open.
I start first, before she has a chance.
‘Mum, I’m so sorry!’ I say. ‘I forgot to gather up the towels and bring them home last night so we went down to get them. And the tide was up and a couple of them were floating.’
It works. She stops dead in her slippers on the slabs, the scolding forgotten. ‘What?’ she says. ‘They left them lying on the beach? They didn’t even take them up to the house and run them through the washer?’
Lynsey, standing at my side, gives such an extravagant shudder that she knocks me off-balance and I have to take a step to steady myself.
‘Here, girls, get in and have a hot shower,’ Mum says. ‘I’m going to go round there and give that woman a piece of my mind.’
I know they’ve gone but I shouldn’t know, so I deliver it as best I can. ‘Mu-um! Don’t show us up. What if they come back next holidays? Don’t go round there and act as if we’ve been clyping.’
‘I’ll give you “clyping”,’ she says, back inside, kicking off her slippers behind the kitchen door and jamming her feet into her trainers.
We’re sitting in front of the cartoons when she comes back. Lynsey’s bundled in the duvet off her bed, sipping a cup of the baby tea she likes, with too much milk and a wave of the teabag, three sugars only half stirred so there’s syrup at the bottom.
Mum plumps down in her armchair and clicks her fingers at me to mute the telly.
‘They’ve cleared out,’ she says. ‘And you would not believe the mess they’ve left behind them. There’s actual sick on the floor in the wee study upstairs. The carpet’ll have to come up. And there’s more of it in the downstairs toilet – not the toilet pan, I’m saying, but floor, walls, everywhere. I nearly boaked myself, walking in there. There’s food stinking to high heaven all over the kitchen, bluebottles laying eggs. The pool room smells like a brewery. There’s dirty clothes everywhere.’
Lynsey makes a small mewing noise and I feel her stiffen. ‘Carmen,’ she breathes. Surely that woman Anna won’t have left the knickers with the name tag where she found them.
‘If they think I’m doing their washing and ironing and forwarding parcels with my own money,’ Mum says, ‘they’ve got another think coming. They’ve not left me a penny of a tip.’
‘So are you going to leave it like it is?’ I say.
Mum sniffs hard. ‘I couldn’t leave that lying the way it is if you paid me in gold bars,’ she says. ‘No, I’m just here to get my camera and take pictures of it all before I start in.’ She laughs. ‘They’ll not see a pound of their deposit,’ she adds, practically purring with delight.
‘I’ll come and help, if you like,’ I say. ‘Poor you. You weren’t expecting this.’
She gives me a shrewd look. She can sniff out crawling like a dog at the airport.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I want to see if he took his birthday present we got him. He didn’t even open it, did he, Lynsey?’ It’s the only thing I can think of and, ordinarily, I wouldn’t rely on Lynsey to back up a fib, but she’s so out of it today she just nods. ‘If it’s still there, I’m taking it back and give it to someone else another time.’
My mum treats me to a smile, then turns her gaze to her other child. We’re right in her good books this m
orning, saving her towels and being so much better than those hoity-toities after all. ‘You coming along, Lyns?’ she asks.
I can see Lynsey’s bottom lip trembling and I feel a sudden flash of heat where her leg’s up against mine. ‘I don’t want to smell sick and off food,’ she says. Her voice is a tiny peep.
My mum sniffs again. ‘All right for some!’ she says. ‘None of us want to, Miss. I didn’t want to have both of you down with a bug when your dad was away golfing that time. I didn’t want two years of nappies from you both and a bin strike in the middle of the summer.’
I feel Lynsey relax. Mum’s on a greatest-hits tour now. We know what’s coming.
‘I didn’t want to find that bleeping hamster dead in a cornflakes box!’
‘Sorry,’ says Lynsey. I wait for Mum to wonder why, for the first time ever, Lynsey hadn’t taken a case of hysterics, getting reminded of Hamlet that way.
‘Will we go now?’ I ask. ‘It’s not going to get any better for drying in.’
Lynsey hands me her empty cup and burrows deeper into the duvet. I click the sound back up and leave her there.
* * *
How can the house look so different in one day? The grass is still smooth and close, the windows still clean. Yet as I walk into the hall I think of bad breath and blocked drains and crumbs of sleep in the corners of eyes. I pause at the door to the downstairs toilet and feel tears, gritty and grudged, start to prick.
‘Don’t go in there, Carmen,’ Mum says. ‘I don’t want you seeing the likes of that.’ She looks away.
The likes of what? I think. A bit of sick that’s probably mine and some towels on the floor?
Anyway, Mum loves filth, no matter what she claims. Her happiest day ever was when she got her first carpet shampooer and could marvel at the grime of her own house. She even likes clearing sink traps, gets narky if someone else does it and spoils her fun.
So I’m surprised that I get the kitchen, once she’s taken about fifty pictures, with her mouth pursed up like a cat’s bum. I stand in the breakfast-room bit, with my hands on the edge of the tablecloth for three big breaths, before I pluck up the courage to lift the hem and look under. There’s nothing there. I stand up again.
The cake’s probably fine, but I tip it into a bin bag anyway. I scrape in all the gluey salads, even worse now with that strange, thick dressing curdled into little balls of white and pools of grease. The long strips of fish and the piles of little black dots and the clumps that look like someone’s coughed them up? They all smell so bad now – so strong and sharp – I wonder if it was joke and maybe none of it was food after all.
I tie the bin bag shut and take it out to the little yard by the wood store, hefting it up and over the rim of the big bucket with a grunt of effort, catching one last whiff.
Back inside, I run warm water into a shallow bowl and put it in the microwave to steam off the dried-in splatters. Mum would squirt Jif lemon in too but I check a couple of cupboards and can’t find any. Then I remember the limes.
Along in the pool room, someone has started the clear-up but abandoned it after minutes. The bottles are all in a box on the floor, but the dregs have seeped through the cardboard so now the carpet’s soaked and stinking, as well as the green felt on the table-top. The ice-bucket’s still there, though. In it, floating in the melt-water, are two half limes and a wad of spat-out chewing gum. I turn away.
My mum’s standing in the doorway. ‘This all happened after you left?’ she says.
‘Mu-um!’ It won’t do to use the spell too often in case it loses its magic, but one more will be okay. ‘I was looking after Lynsey! Even if I did drink, I wouldn’t drink with my wee sister here!’
Mum looks down. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course you wouldn’t. I’m glad you went swimming if this was the alternative, I’m telling you.’
* * *
We ‘go swimming’ most days, and most nights too, the rest of that Indian summer. I wake up to the sound of the bedroom-door latch and listen for sounds in the bathroom. If I hear, instead, the quiet turn of the kitchen-door handle, I drive myself out of bed and follow her. Her bright hair picks up dawn, dusk and moonlight, and her little pipe-cleaner legs flash pale against the wet sand, flash brown against the dry sand.
‘Why don’t you wait for me?’ I say, treading water beside her as she floats in her star-shape. ‘Wake me and talk to me. Maybe talking’s all you need.’
‘This is what I need,’ she says. ‘It’s working. I really think the saltwater’s working. If I can keep coughing up the black stones – you don’t mind, eh, no, Carmen? – and if I can keep rinsing through with all this saltwater, I’ll be fine.’
‘Rinsing right through?’ I say.
She smiles up at the sky, her eyes crinkled against the sun’s glare. ‘Did you know that when you breathe, the oxygen doesn’t just go in and out of your lungs? It gets into your blood! And did you know that when you do a hm-hm, it’s not only food that’s in it? It’s got all the bad things from all over your body! I was wrong, Carmen. It’s all connected. There’s nowhere blocked off in the middle that you can’t get to.’
Then she starts to rumble deep in her throat, and I kick my legs faster and lift my cupped hands.
The last morning, I don’t decide not to go. I haven’t planned not to go. But I’m feeling like shit and I know I’ll feel worse when I’m up. My bed’s warm and the air’s cold. My pillow’s soft and dry and there’s drizzle blurring the view of the garden, misting the net curtain where the window’s open at the top.
I hear our bedroom door. I hear the kitchen door. I grasp the edge of my duvet to throw it back and then I … close my eyes. I even dream about her. It’s not drizzle and daylight in my dream. It’s inky black night and stars like ice-chips and a cold sliver of a moon. And yet the water’s warm and she floats curled up instead of spread out, the waves pushing her beyond the headland, past the cradling arms of the bay, out into the deeper darkness of the endless sea.
Chapter 19
‘Because this is so obviously about the kid that drowned,’ Buck said. ‘Right? I mean, right?’ We had drifted through to the library, all of us sick of the dining room after hours corralled there. Now we were down to seven, there was no need to go and spread out in the drawing room. The Leslies sat on the couch. Rosalie and Kim held hands on the long, low footstool, and Ramsay and Paul had the armchairs. I was on the slipper-chair by the fire. Rosalie brought the framed photo and set it on the mantelpiece.
‘How many times?’ I said. ‘No kid drowned. Honestly. Look, Home From Home has only just bought this house and they wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole if there’d been that kind of history.’
It didn’t help. ‘We were here, Donna,’ Ramsay said.
‘Did any of you mention it to Sergeant Wilson?’ I asked.
‘I feel sick speaking about it just to us,’ Peach said. ‘But we have to. We have to talk about all of it.’
‘Or,’ said Rosalie, ‘we don’t. We pack up and leave.’
‘Again,’ said Ramsay.
‘How the hell are we supposed to leave when we’ve got no car keys?’ said Paul.
‘And in my case no car,’ Kim said.
‘Oh, he’ll have given our keys back,’ said Ramsay. ‘No question of that. They’ll be here somewhere.’
‘Kim, how about if I give you a lift home tomorrow and you just … clean out your bank accounts, change the locks and call it a blessing?’ Rosalie said. ‘Do we have to go poking around working out what he meant? Who cares?’
‘You know me,’ said Ramsay. ‘I’m a technical engineer. I want to take it apart and see how he did it. Because this is the worst prank Sasha’s ever pulled – that goes without saying – but it’s kind of his best one too.’
‘I know,’ said Buck. ‘If it wasn’t for the doping, I’d take my hat off. It’s a pretty good wind-up.’ He put his hands up in surrender at the looks on the others’ faces. ‘If it wasn’t for the doping.’
/> ‘Tell the truth, Buck,’ said Paul. ‘Are you in on this?’
‘I swear on my children’s lives,’ Buck said.
‘Because someone must be.’ Paul frowned. ‘Someone else must be. There’s no way he did it all.’
‘With Jennifer, remember,’ said Ramsay. I shot a look at Peach and Rosalie. Jennifer’s face had turned pale and shiny when she’d realized where she was. She couldn’t have faked that. I cleared my throat. But Ramsay went on, ‘Jennifer’s not the sidekick you’d expect, though. No offence, Buck, but if it was you I wouldn’t have been fooled for a minute.’
‘None taken,’ Buck said. ‘And that explains why Jen stormed off. She had to be off-stage taking care of things. Right?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Kim said. ‘Sasha was pretty wired all weekend. Maybe he was panicking because Jennifer bolted.’
‘That sounds about right,’ I said. ‘She came back, you see, late on Friday night. And she saw me in the garden with him.’ I gave a short laugh. ‘I went out because he said he was going to go for a swim and I thought he needed a minder. Unfortunately, Jennifer came up the drive exactly when he’d decided to come in for a drunken snog and she sort of saw it – saw something anyway – and went kind of ballistic. Drove off again.’
‘Sasha made a move on you?’ Kim said. ‘Well, that says it all. Happy anniversary to me!’
‘I’ve been thinking about the dope,’ Ramsay said. ‘Sasha’s worst freak-out was at tea and then at drinks last night, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t eat the canapés.’
‘How could Sasha get dope into canapés that Donna made?’ Buck said.
‘I promise you—’ I began.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Paul. ‘How can you all be so gullible? How could Sasha have done any of it? How could he and Jennifer have done it? A plan that depended on there being a lobster creel on the beach, for a start. A plan that needed Kim to be wakened up when Jen and Sasha were in place? There’s got to be someone else. Not Buck. I believe that. But someone.’
Go to My Grave Page 22