Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  5

  Alice

  I didn’t know where I was. I’d been to rock bottom before, lots of times. I knew what it was like – the jaggedness; that feeling of weight too hard to push against; the hopelessness of finding my way up through the murk.

  This was somewhere new, though. This was far beneath rock bottom, and it was dark and frightening. It felt like a place few others had ever been to, and there was no one who could guide me out.

  There was nothing here. Nothing but pain.

  My head was too small. It was too small to hold this. All other thoughts departed. Confusion and Bo were everywhere.

  I didn’t know who Bo was anymore. And I didn’t know who I was, either. Because, if I was sane and normal, and if those memories of Bo saying she loved me, would move heaven and earth just to touch me, would die for me – if those memories were real, then Bo was wicked and cruel and evil. But if they were not real, if I had imagined it all, then I was mad.

  Thinking about it, puzzling it over, trying to find an explanation I could settle on was exhausting.

  I crawled into bed and thought, I would rather be mad.

  The scent of lilies hurt. I wanted them to disappear. They wore me out. I was meant to admire their beauty, their scent, keep them alive. I could hardly look at them, or touch them. They were not Bo. They did not soothe.

  I turned away from them. I didn’t want the responsibility of flowers. I didn’t care whether they lived or died.

  6

  Bo

  I needed a project. A new book to work on. Sales of my most recent novel were slow and places at festivals becoming more scarce. My agent wanted to meet me to discuss our next steps, to make sure my plan was to construct a hit, something original and shocking that could compete with the brilliant young things coming up behind me, hogging all the space at Edinburgh, Hay, Oxford…

  Low sales. They’d never happened to me before. Everything I’d ever written had flown off the shelves. I was famous everywhere. Americans loved me, Australians loved me, even the Japanese paid me to sign books in their huge, sterile shopping malls. I’d always thought I hated fame, but now I was finding I hated this more. Low sales were the start. In five years’ time, I’d be forgotten. This was it. I was on my way out, aged forty.

  I laid everything on the bed that I was taking with me to London for the meeting with my agent. I’d booked a hotel room in Bloomsbury for two nights. There was no way I could stay in my mother’s wagon. The claustrophobia was suffocating.

  I pulled my overnight bag down from the top of the wardrobe, where it lived for most of the year. Last time I’d packed it, I was going to Northumberland, where I would meet Alice. I sighed at the sight of the bag. It was a remnant from when life was simple, the life I thought I’d have back by now: neat, calm, domestic, beautiful in its easiness, nothing but writing, walking and caring for my girls.

  That was the one thing I knew I was good at. I was good at looking after my daughters. Feeding them, protecting them, nurturing them … Yes, I had done all that, and I’d done it well. They were as cared for as any children were whose mothers loved them with all that raw urgency I’d read about in the baby-advice guides. Motherhood was something I took seriously. I wasn’t going to hand on misery and produce cold young women. Lola and Maggie would be sane, confident, happy. They were my proof. They were all I needed. I was good at mothering. I was good at everything motherhood demanded: devotion, self-sacrifice, patience. No one who was this good at caring for people could ever be evil.

  The girls were in their bedroom.

  I went in and smiled at them. ‘I’m going now,’ I said.

  They each came up and hugged me and told me they’d miss me. Maggie gave me a picture she’d drawn of rabbits. I slipped it into my handbag.

  I kissed them both. ‘Be good,’ I said.

  ‘Will you bring us a present?’

  ‘I’ll bring you a book.’

  Maggie wrinkled her nose. ‘Boring.’

  I kissed her again and left. I hated leaving them.

  Downstairs, I said goodbye to Gus. He barely looked up.

  ‘I’ll be back late on Friday,’ I said. ‘I’m calling in at my mother’s on the way.’

  ‘Your mother’s?’

  I shrugged. ‘Duty.’

  ‘Enjoy it.’

  I left, got in the car and drove down through Windermere and out onto the M6. It was five hours to London. I turned on Radio 4 and wondered if anyone would be talking about me. They often were, but all the way through Woman’s Hour and two programmes devoted to contemporary literature, I was not mentioned once. Other, newer writers were spoken about, the prize-winners of tomorrow, rather than of me, the washed-up winner of yesterday.

  Stop it, I told myself. Just stop. It’s a blip in sales. It doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.

  But it was. I believed in instinct, and mine was strong; I knew with absolute, deep-soul certainty that my career as a writer was coming to an end.

  I cried all the way to the M4.

  ‘Oh, Bo. There is so much love for you here.’

  We were drinking wine while waiting for our meal. Vanessa, my agent, spoke sweetly, but I knew she didn’t mean a word of what she said. There was no love for me. There was an understanding that I’d brought the agency significant amounts of money for fifteen years and now I was dwindling and something needed to be done about it.

  She went on: ‘We want to help you plan something new, so we know we’re on to a winner before you even start. Now, have you got any ideas you can bring to the table?’

  I hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been such a stressful time recently. I’ve had an incident with a stalker. I don’t know if you know about that?’

  Vanessa shook her head and frowned, concerned, ‘I haven’t heard anything at all about it. It sounds awful.’

  ‘It was. I taught on this writing course – it was a few months ago now, back in May – and there was a young woman there called Alice Dark. I tell you her name because I think she’ll become known before long. She was lovely, or so I thought. To cut a long story short, she started sending me love letters – emails, in fact. I told her to stop, but she wouldn’t, and then she suddenly moved to live near me and made death threats against my husband – real death threats – and she tried to blackmail me too. She wouldn’t leave me alone.’

  Vanessa leaned forwards, nodding in sympathy. ‘Bo,’ she said. ‘You have a story right here. I’m sure you can do something with this. Turn this into a brilliant novel. A thriller.’

  ‘I have had that thought myself,’ I admitted.

  ‘There’s a lot in here. A lot that’s relevant. You know that museum of women’s history? There’s all that stuff there about Jack the Ripper … I don’t know … You’ll be able to do it better than I can, but surely you can say something meaningful about sexual predators today. Something feminist. Something … Oh, I don’t know. Of course, you can’t be homophobic about it. You can’t be accused of saying, “Oh, women have always been so vulnerable and now all these bloody lesbians have the freedom to come out and get married, we’re even more vulnerable…”’

  ‘No, I definitely don’t want to be accused of that.’

  ‘But have a think about it. Plan it out and send me your ideas. I have absolute faith in you. I know you can do something magical with this, you’ll be able to invest it with an emotional reality that will resonate with all your critics. I really think this could be great.’

  I sipped my wine. Perhaps she was right.

  7

  Alice

  Despair turned to rage, and rage turned back to despair, and then rage and despair joined forces against me until I thought they might kill me.

  I got out of bed and paced my flat in fury. Bo had wrecked me. Deliberately and carefully, she’d hurled a grenade at my being and shattered it; and now I was barely able to catch myself up. I’d left half my mind trailing behind me. Nothing made sense. If I saw Bo now, what would I do?
Would I weep and fall against her and beg her to make everything right again, or would I take that face in my hands and slap and slap and slap?

  I wanted to undo time, meet Bo all over again and look out for the clues this time, find the hints in what she said, in the way she behaved, in her demeanour; I wanted to pin down a moment of nastiness amidst the gentle, angelic care, turn it over and over in my mind and say, ‘This was it, the sign all along that Bo was never the person she seemed.’ I sat on the floor, surrounded by six novels – six hundred thousand words, all written by Bo – looking for her in the pages. I wanted to find the depths of her psyche, the nastiness, the hell.

  But there was nothing. Nothing there at all.

  Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you for doing this to me, for putting me here, in this place where I am out of my mind.

  I thought of all the ways I could get Bo back. I could phone her husband and tell him my story, because surely, after all these years of living with her, he had some idea of the woman who lurked beneath the surface? All I’d need to do was give him the other side of the tale, and hope he could see the truth in it. Or I could write an anonymous letter to her publisher and tell them. But what would they care, really? Besides, Bo would have already covered that base, already slandered me to every professional she could think of.

  Or I could do what I’d already thought of, and write a book about it. A thriller. Make a story of what had happened and send it out to the world, so that Bo’s shame could peer down at her from every bookshelf in the country. I’d neglected my writing recently. My head was so full of Bo, I hadn’t had any energy to put into my project about the Victorian criminal underworld. But now Bo had handed me a story on a plate, just like that.

  8

  Bo

  I drove to Woodstock the next morning, playing things over in my mind. Yes, I could construct a shocking, brilliant novel about a famous person with a troubled young stalker – a young woman confused about her sexuality and her mother. Thoughts of Alice’s work had niggled at me recently. I worried that I’d inadvertently given her all the material she needed to grow up, move on from her mother and write something with real ambition and depth. The perfect revenge novel. I needed to make sure I did it first. I had all the advantages: fame, an agent, a fan base. It would take Alice years to fight her way out of obscurity.

  I drove into the village just outside Woodstock and parked beneath the beech trees by the church. It was the closest I could get to my mother’s caravan, and even then, there was a mile-long walk to the site. Still, it was pleasant enough. The weather was insanely mild for November, even for the south. Wild roses swung in the long grasses by the river and the sun beat with springtime warmth. The news put it down to El Nino, but Gus insisted it was climate change, the unsettling beginnings of worldwide catastrophe.

  After half a mile or so, the wide riverside route narrowed into a path that stretched through the beech woods. A breeze stirred the year’s fallen leaves at my feet, their brush against the earth crisper and drier than the gentle whisper of those still left in the trees. I walked on until I reached a rotting bridge over a drying stream and then into the clearing where my mother’s caravan stood beside two ramshackle wood cabins. Everything was weather-beaten and old, but the setting was beautiful. At the edge of the clearing, near a cluster of silver birch trees, a fox laid down, opened its mouth and yawned. I wished I’d brought my camera.

  My mother had been here more than two years. It was the longest she’d stayed anywhere.

  I went to the steps of her caravan and rapped on the door. As I waited, I adjusted my hair. I looked good, I knew that. My jeans were expensive, my turquoise top cashmere, my coat long. I could swish in this outfit, effortlessly, and say without words, I have left you behind. It was a more powerful vengeance than merely cutting her out. No, I would keep on putting myself in front of my mother, saying, ‘Look what I have become. Look how clever I am, how talented, how rich; and then look what you are. And know that I will never help you, however hungry you might be, however cold, however hard you beg, you will not get a penny from me.’

  It gave me a feeling of deep satisfaction.

  The door to the caravan opened and my mother stood there. She was skinny, I thought, undernourished. Her face showed signs of age and burden.

  We didn’t hug or kiss hello. My mother stepped back and opened the door wider. That was as much of a welcome as I knew I would get.

  Inside was only one room. Two benches and a small table were the only furniture.

  My mother offered me a can of beer from several that floated in a bucket of water on the floor. I shook my head.

  ‘Got nothing else,’ my mother said.

  ‘That’s fine. I won’t stay long. Can I sit down?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I took a seat.

  My mother sat opposite me and cracked open a can for herself. ‘What brings you to this neck of the woods?’

  ‘I was in town, meeting my agent about my next novel.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. And what is it this time? Some load of intellectual crap no one can make head nor tail of, like the last one?’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d read the last one.’

  ‘I didn’t. Couldn’t make it past the first fifty pages. No one wants to read that stuff, Bo – brothers and sisters writing poetry, walking up mountains and falling in love with each other. It’s horrible. Write romance, for God’s sake. Something people want to read at bedtime.’

  ‘I’m going to write a thriller about my stalker.’

  ‘That poor young man?’

  ‘No. A woman this time.’

  ‘What? A new one?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Why do all these people stalk you?’

  ‘Because I’m famous.’

  ‘You’re only a writer. It’s not like a pop star or a Hollywood actress.’

  ‘It is for them.’

  ‘They want your money?’

  ‘They want me to love them.’

  ‘Fools.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s another reason I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Yeah. You said. The baby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s been years since I heard from them.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Fifteen, twenty years, maybe.’

  I felt my heart droop. ‘Can you remember their names?’

  ‘Yeah. The mother called herself Rosa Ferris and the dad was Will.’

  ‘So I could look them up?’

  ‘You could, but I don’t know why you’d want to drag through all that now. The girl’s dead, Bo, don’t you remember?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, I told you. I told you at the time. She was ill by the time they took her. She hadn’t been fed since she was born. You remember how you didn’t feed her? They did their best, but the poor scrap was malnourished and too weak to take the bottle. They didn’t take her to the doctors soon enough – they were afraid the social would take her off them – so she was on her way out before she even got seen to.’

  There it was again. A fist in the stomach, in the chest, in the heart. Fists everywhere. For a while, I could hardly breathe.

  After a long moment, I said, ‘You didn’t tell me. I would have remembered.’

  My mother dismissed my accusation with a wave of her hand. ‘Oh, maybe I didn’t. It was years ago, Bo. It was a kid. It died. You’ve got your own kids now. What does it matter what happened to that one?’

  I took some deep breaths, got myself calm again. I stood up. ‘You’re right, mum. Thanks. Thanks for telling me again. I must have just forgotten. It’s no big deal, as you say. I didn’t want the child. It was hardly mine at all. I wasn’t even … Well, you know. If I’d had any say in it, it would never have been conceived.’

  ‘Don’t bring all that up now. We were skint. We needed money. It was an easy way to bring some in. You’d have ended up homeless without it.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘Plenty
of girls sell themselves for a bit of extra cash here and there.’

  ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘I’d have done it myself, if I’d been pretty enough. Still would. I’m poor, Bo, you have no idea. If I thought I could make even a tenner opening my legs for a man, I’d do it now.’

  Without warning, I spun around and slapped my mother across the face.

  Then I left.

  9

  Alice

  ‘She’s a bitch.’

  At the other end of the line, Anna spoke matter-of-factly. I supposed she was used to seeing the bad in people. It came with twelve years in the police force. People were scum. They were arseholes. Trying to find their shreds of goodness was the way to madness. If Bo was behaving like a bitch, then she was a bitch.

  ‘Don’t make excuses for her,’ she said. ‘We see that all the time. Battered woman syndrome. You’re strong enough to let that go. It sounds to me as if she’s on the narc spectrum.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Narcissist. Psychopath. People without conscience. They prey on the vulnerable, charm them and then fuck them up and leave them, but they’re generally lovely to everyone else, so no one believes the victim and the victim goes mad.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘So the best thing you can do with this woman is get her out of your life.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What did you want to do? Please don’t tell me you want to get back with her.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Revenge?’