Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  The blood still pounding in my ears, and with a feeling sweeping through me that may be disappointment or relief – I honestly can’t tell – I put the lamp down, just as Amy emerges from the kitchen, rushing towards my little girl and sweeping her up in her arms.

  29.

  Amy

  I hold her for a long moment. Feel the soft flesh in my arms, the smell of her, all pinky-clean and sweet from her bath – I burrow my nose into the crook of her short little neck and inhale.

  ‘Hey there, little one. I missed you,’ I croon.

  She’s trapped inside the towel so she can’t wrap her arms around me and return the embrace, but that’s okay. I draw back and beam at her, at the serious look on her sensible little face.

  ‘Give her to me.’

  I look around. Cara is there, with her arms out for the child. Her face is kind of stretched-looking, and I don’t like her tone. I keep a hold of Mabel and walk into her bedroom, swinging from side to side, singing a little tune to her.

  ‘Mummy,’ she says again, sharply this time.

  I break off my lullaby to whisper and hush. The door closes firmly behind all three of us.

  ‘What’s wrong with Olivia?’ the little girl asks.

  I say, ‘There, there. She’s just sleeping, that’s all.’

  ‘Give her to me now,’ Cara says again.

  This time I relinquish the child. My arms are tired from holding her, and that tiredness seems to communicate itself to my other limbs, my back, the creaking stretch of my shoulders. This room is softly lit, the bed made up in cloudy-white sheets, and I feel a yearning for it now – the need to lie down and drift away.

  ‘Why is Olivia asleep on the floor?’ Mabel asks, snapping me from my thoughts.

  Cara murmurs something to her that I don’t catch, and then she carries the child to the bed and sits down, holding Mabel on her lap and rubbing her with the towel. She’s whispering something to her that I can’t hear, and the sight of them there together – a loving mother tending to her sweet child – it redoubles my desire for her, making it luminous.

  I come and sit by them, so Cara and I are shoulder to shoulder, and when I reach out and tenderly touch Mabel’s hair, Cara lifts the little girl from her lap, holding her away from me, and puts her on the bed.

  ‘Into pjs,’ she softly commands.

  Mabel sits solemn-faced, her two eyes like pebbles watching me as she raises her arms and allows her mother to slip her nightie down over her.

  ‘Why are you back here?’ the child asks.

  Her voice is low and serious and it makes me pause. But then I laugh, and lean forward on the bed, grasping her little ankles, and say, ‘Because I missed you, sweet pea! I missed my Maybelline!’

  Cara’s back is to me, and I see it stiffen. There’s a gap between her T-shirt and the waistband of her jeans. I let go of one of Mabel’s legs, and my hand trails across, tentatively strokes the pale band of exposed skin.

  ‘I missed your mommy too,’ I say softly.

  Cara gets up quickly.

  ‘Stop it!’ she hisses, shooting me a fierce look that leaves me stunned.

  She’s holding up the duvet and shooing Mabel under the covers.

  ‘Don’t worry, my love,’ she says. ‘Amy is going now.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Injury in my voice. Why is she saying that? Lying to her own child?

  ‘Yes. You are.’

  She is tucking in the blankets now, something urgent and cross in her exertions, almost pushing me off the bed as she rounds the corner to tuck in the blanket there.

  ‘Why would you say that? I came back here for you. So that the three of us could be together.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she snaps, still fussing around the bed, picking up toys and putting away books.

  ‘I’m not ridiculous. You’re the one who’s lying.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘It’s alright, sweetheart.’ She brushes hair from the little girl’s forehead and kisses her tenderly. Again, she murmurs something that I can’t hear and the girl nods her head.

  A chill comes over me, suspicion hovering like a bad smell.

  ‘What are you saying to her?’ I ask, but she ignores me, keeps on whispering, and the suspicion stirs up into anger. ‘What are you saying?’

  Without looking back, her gaze trained on the little girl, she tells me, ‘We’re sharing our secrets with each other. Telling each other the truth.’

  And the little girl smiles at her, but there’s something closed and conspiratorial about it that I don’t like. A smile that pushes me out, seals them off from me. Mabel has spilled the beans – told Cara what I did, my various disciplinary methods. I can sense it. It sends me past the point of nervous excitement into a kind of blunt unease. The room which had felt so welcoming just a few minutes ago now seems to thrum with an energy that I don’t understand. The bedside lamp casts shadows that can’t be trusted. And reflected in the mirror, I see Connie’s face, pale and gory. Her lips draw back into a smile. One of her front teeth is missing, blood in her mouth.

  Don’t you know when you’re not wanted? she says, shaking her head and laughing at me, threads of blood strung between her teeth.

  The whispering goes on and on, indiscernible and echoey in the chambers of my head. Everything in this room is clean and laundered. It makes me feel soiled and dirty. Filthy. Like the grime on my skin is so deeply ingrained I won’t ever get clean.

  I look down at my fingernails, see the blackened crescents, the stained and ragged cuticles. My hands are trembling. I’m so tired. So goddamned tired. And Connie won’t shut up laughing. All I want is some peace.

  I back out of the room. Leave them to their whispering.

  ‘Don’t be too long, okay?’ I say.

  But they don’t even look my way, like I’m nothing to them, and I can’t be sure I even said the words out loud.

  I pull the door closed, lean my forehead against it for a moment. There’s a pain in my chest, a sudden feeling of loss that is somehow tied up with memories of my own mother. It’s the tenderness between them that’s done it. Right now, in this place, the cold coming back into my bones, exhausted and unsure, I need something to hang on to. Some fleeting memory of warmth and belonging, some scrap of hope from loving words spoken. But inside is a blank, a vacuum, filling up now with this awful black pain.

  Tears come and I shake them away, swallow them down.

  ‘Stupid bitch,’ I say, a little sob of self-pity surfacing, and I slap my face quickly. No more of this blubbing. I need to focus. To remember my goal.

  I turn around and look at the empty hall. My eyes strain under the too-bright lights, trying to gauge what they are seeing. The blank floor – the space where the girl had been. In my mind’s eye, there’s a fixed memory of her curled around the leg of the table. But now I’m staring at the table and there’s nothing there. It’s almost as if I imagined it. Only the dark smear of blood on the floorboards betrays her recent presence.

  The slump I’ve fallen into fades quickly, replaced by an urgency powered by my fast-beating heart. Bloodstains on the floor – sticky smears of it like drag-marks along the hall and past the kitchen – lead me on. The door to Jeff’s study lies open.

  She hasn’t gotten far. But somehow, she has managed to crawl here, a bloody handprint on the white paint of the door where she pushed it open. Another bloody fingerprint on the switch of the computer which is fired up now. She’s kneeling on the floor in front of the desk, half-slumped against the chair, one hand resting there, while the other manoeuvres the mouse. From where I’m standing I can see that she is barely able to keep her head up. She’s just clicking on Skype when I come up behind her, a leather-bound periodical the weapon I choose.

  The surprised look on her face, the ‘o’ of her mouth as I smash her head with the book, hear the snap of her neck flying back, and then she is slithering down the chair, on to the floor, like some rapidly wilting flower, the cursor on the screen poi
sed and waiting, and Connie is shrieking with laughter behind me.

  30.

  Cara

  ‘Is she dead?’

  At the sound of my voice, Amy turns around. I’m standing in the doorway, rigid with shock and fear. I can hardly believe how calm my voice sounds when inside I feel liquid, molten. My head heavy with it all.

  There is a look in her eye – a fleeting expression of wild disbelief, at what she has done, at what she is capable of – it lasts but a second or two and then it’s washed away by that pitying smile she gives me, like I’m a child who’s just lost her mother, who needs comfort and sympathy and love. Endless enveloping, smothering love.

  ‘It had to be done,’ she says softly, kindly. ‘You know that. There was no other way.’

  She casts a quick glance back at Olivia, unmoving on the floor, blood pooling around her head, matting her hair. It’s a glance that’s almost tender.

  A gasp comes from me, like I’ve been holding it in until now. She turns to me with a quizzical expression, as if she cannot fathom why I’m so upset.

  ‘You didn’t even like her,’ she remarks, almost bemused by my distress.

  ‘She was innocent.’

  ‘Oh, please!’

  I have to hold it together. I cannot fall apart, not now. Not with Mabel waiting in her bedroom. Above all else, I must get her out of here safely. I realize that I am holding on to the door frame, leaning against it for support. I try to quell the shaking in my legs, try to will some strength back into my body. But I feel strangely weighted, like my limbs are filling up with water.

  ‘Amy, whatever you think has happened between us – this love affair you keep alluding to – it doesn’t exist. It’s only in your mind.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she chides, but she’s still smiling, her head turned coquettishly to one side. She doesn’t believe me.

  ‘I was grateful for your help at the time, but then … You got so clingy, and manipulative. You took advantage of me …’

  She’s shaking her head, laughing lightly, as if I’ve made some self-effacing joke.

  ‘Remember what you said to me? On the night we met?’ she asks brightly, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘You told me that you couldn’t be sure you had met the love of your life yet.’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘You said that you didn’t love your husband –’

  ‘I never –’

  ‘You did, Cara,’ she says, gently and firmly, and I have the sense again that she is talking to me like I’m a child, and it suits her to infantilize me like this. Make me helpless. Make me dependent. I’m shaking my head from side to side, but I feel the effort of it, like it’s difficult to even hold my head up.

  She goes on, ‘You told me that when that terrorist came towards you and you thought you were going to die, it wasn’t Jeff’s face that flashed in front of your eyes. It was Finn’s.’

  I close my eyes, as if that will erase the regret, the terrible folly of openly confessing such a thing. That night, I had been so grateful for her help. I thought she was rescuing me. What I hadn’t banked on was the possibility that she could be every bit as dangerous as the killers on the street. My lids are so heavy, it’s a struggle to open my eyes, to focus on what she’s telling me now.

  ‘You said you had been questioning your marriage anyway, that it had never really felt right, always overshadowed by the dead wife. You told me that the only thing holding your marriage together was your daughter, the irony of that being you couldn’t be sure she was actually his.’

  What does any of this matter any more? Finn is dead. And now Olivia. I can hardly bring myself to look at her body lying there on the floor. I catch a glimpse into the future, a moment when I will have to break the news to Jeff about the loss of his precious girl. It’s almost too much to bear. And I think about how we stood here together, in this very room, by this old desk, only this morning, the current of animosity that zipped between us. What was it all for? What on earth had been achieved?

  That’s when I remember the phone call.

  The scrap of paper. The number dialled. Someone had answered but no words were spoken, and struck by an impulse I couldn’t explain, I had uttered her name.

  ‘A sign,’ she had told me. I had given her a sign.

  ‘It was you,’ I say, my tone tinged with amazement. ‘I thought it was Finn, but all along it was you.’

  The look she gives me is quizzical, and it suddenly infuriates me.

  ‘Your Closest Friend,’ I say, my voice dripping with scorn. ‘What a joke.’

  She grimaces – a disavowal there.

  ‘Not the name I would have chosen,’ she remarks blithely. ‘And I think it’s laughable that he thought so highly of himself as to pick that name for his little alter-ego.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, it was him, at first. Those pathetic little messages.’ She laughs, a horrible mocking burst of it.

  I shake my head, baffled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  My confusion registers with her, and she explains.

  ‘I caught him here one day, sniffing around for you. He was a mess,’ she says, before continuing. ‘Poured his heart out to me. Told me all about the little game he had going, posing as some kind of secret admirer. Pathetic. So I took the phone from him. It was for the best.’

  ‘And the spyware on my laptop? The bug in my handbag?’

  ‘Necessary measures,’ she says primly.

  I think of that naked picture. The audio file of Finn and me together.

  ‘All that time, you were spying on me. Listening to my most private conversations.’

  ‘I had to know so that I could protect you!’ She laughs again but it is shrill, a manic jag in it.

  ‘You sent those images to my workplace. That audio-clip of me and Finn. How was that protecting me?’

  ‘I was saving you from yourself,’ she declares.

  Her conviction sets new alarm bells ringing in my head.

  ‘You were so in thrall to him, you couldn’t see how dangerous he was. I had to drive a wedge between the two of you – something so bad you would never be able to forgive him. I knew that if you thought those things were done by Your Closest Friend – if you believed he was behind it – then it would kill off any last feelings you had for him. You would be free!’

  ‘My God, Amy. What did you do?’

  Her eyes are lit up, but her mouth is twitching like it can’t settle on an expression.

  ‘I had to stop him, don’t you see?’ she says, her voice brittle and loud. ‘He was dangerous. Who knows what he might have done?’

  ‘The night that he died – you were there?’

  ‘Of course! You know that,’ she says.

  The quizzical look is back on her face and it sends a shiver of horror through me. There is a lack of remorse, a kind of perverse pride in her crime.

  ‘It was you. You were seen going into his house. You had sex with him.’

  ‘Oh!’ She bursts out laughing, then claps a hand over her mouth to suppress it.

  Laughter in this room, with Olivia not yet cold, is obscene, a perversion.

  ‘Oh, Cara. Oh, my love. No – it wasn’t like that. I had to, you see? Even after all that whiskey, and the sleeping pills, it was the only way I could be sure he would sleep. It wasn’t … I wasn’t being unfaithful to you. It was a necessary act. He had to be asleep for me to … You know.’

  She can’t bring herself to say it, wrinkling her nose in distaste, skipping around the subject, unable to land.

  ‘For you to kill him.’

  She seems to flinch at the word. Then recovers herself.

  ‘It had to be done,’ she says again, her tone flat and calm, no nerves, no conscience.

  ‘Why?’ I whisper, straining hard to keep my emotions in check, part of me back there in that bedroom, his blood vessels open and spilt on to the bed, the floor, the life gone from him.

  ‘Because he was a pest. He was never going to leave
us alone, Cara. And, like all pests, he had to be exterminated.’

  There it is. The audible squeak of pure craziness.

  ‘And Connie?’ I ask, pushed by that same instinct. ‘Did you kill her too?’

  Something closes down in her face at the mention of the name, a fidgety inward recalculation.

  ‘It wasn’t the same,’ she says. ‘That was … personal. But this,’ she moves on, brightly animated again, lit up by the gleam of madness inside, ‘this was for you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘All of it. I’ve only ever done it for you. To bring us closer together.’

  ‘Your Closest Friend,’ I say, and I cannot keep the sourness from my voice, the heavy disdain.

  She mops a hand over her brow, as if to wipe the sudden display of emotion away. She shakes her head, trying to come back to herself. Then she looks at me, and there is pain and love and wistfulness in that gaze.

  ‘I love you, Cara. From the first night we met. It felt fated, that we should have been thrown together like that. Something beautiful coming out of all that terror.’

  She is moving towards me now, and I back away, towards the bookshelves, that waterlogged feeling in my limbs and in my head. She is almost upon me, and I can feel the ridge of the shelf cutting across my shoulder blades, my hands behind me touching the dust of the books, when I remember the wine. The sediment. The way she had urged me to drink. My thoughts are swampy and heavy – they press down on the panic that rises now I realize that she has drugged me, just as she drugged Finn.

  ‘All of it will be forgotten,’ she whispers, ‘all the bad things that happened so that we could be together. You’ll see.’

  She’s so close to me now, I can feel the heat of her breath on my face, a sour taste of fear coming into my mouth. She lifts a hand, tentatively touches my face. I’m holding myself still, pushing back so the shelf is cutting a line into my back. I feel the chill of her fingertips passing over my cheek, my chin, my mouth. The salty, acrid smell of her hands. The cool dryness of her touch as it lingers in the hollows under my eyes, everything inside me straining away from her.