To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

“Yes,” declared Sarah. “For hours, Veronica. All night. While you went off to steal Eliza. Come on, you must remember.”

  Comically, Veronica placed her finger on her face in an exaggerated thinking posture, eyes blinking ever more heavily, sleep flitting back and forth across her brow. But then suddenly, the memory came to her. The arrival of it was almost visible and Sarah shook her head in amazement that it had truly not been present before, that she really had forgotten. “I did,” said Veronica. “Shit, I did.”

  “It’s fine,” breezed Sarah, lifting Veronica’s glass to her mouth and encouraging another sip. Veronica took one, studying Sarah through blurred eyes. “Of course you left me with a debilitating claustrophobia, and that’s why Eliza had to drive to get me. That’s why she’s dead. But I’m fine. Almost.”

  “What?” mumbled Veronica.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?” Veronica was sinking fast now. Clearly confused, she was trying so hard to make sense of things, but her body wouldn’t cooperate, just as Sarah had so many times found that her own body wouldn’t cooperate. Sarah watched as slowly, Veronica gave way to it and allowed herself to lean back more fully into the sofa. The folds of the cushions wrapped themselves around her. Her eyes closed and stayed closed. She dropped her glass and it spilled onto her. “Whoops,” she half giggled, half cried.

  “Let’s get you dry,” soothed Sarah.

  Leaning forwards, she helped Veronica remove her top.

  “I wonder if in another twenty years, you’ll remember what you’ve done to Amelia,” mused Sarah, spitefully.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Sarah lifted her phone. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you have done to Amelia? What you’ve put in that ridiculous report? And why?”

  Veronica was way past explanation now. But the moment had arrived anyway, and Veronica was powerless to resist it. She slumped, eyes half closed, mouth half smiling, body half dressed. Wearing only her bra and a skirt, a wine glass in her lap, she was the perfect picture of irresponsibility. Sarah didn’t even need words. She didn’t need confession. How easy it had turned out to be. One snap was all it would take. One snap, and a share on social media, or a message to a few parents. Not the ending of a career, not total decimation, but the finale of the façade, the end of perfection. Just a small act to balance the scales of justice. One snap was all it would take.

  But into the silence, Veronica suddenly spoke. “I was so jealous,” she muttered. “You had everything I wanted.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You still do,” Veronica muttered again. “Have everything.”

  “What?” Sarah kept the phone poised, ready.

  Veronica’s eyes were firmly shut now, but she lifted her hand clumsily, flapping it around for her dropped glass. “Elderflower,” she slurred. “It’s always elderflower.”

  “What?”

  Sarah wasn’t sure she had heard properly and wanted Veronica to finish her sentence, but it was too late, Veronica was gone, finally overwhelmed by the sedatives. Elderflower? What was she talking about? Sarah lifted Veronica’s wet top and smelt it. There was a hint of perfume, but the liquid was definitely not wine. No wonder she hadn’t got drunk sooner. Immediately, Sarah felt fooled and indignant – manipulated by Veronica again. But it took only another moment for the truth to penetrate. Glancing to the almost finished sushi, she realised that all evening Veronica had stuck to the vegetable options, avoiding raw fish as well as alcohol. Either Veronica was pregnant, or trying to be. Yet this didn’t make sense to Sarah. It wouldn’t compute. Everything came easily to Veronica. It always had.

  Hesitating, thoughts spiralled.

  Sarah lowered her phone.

  So Veronica’s life wasn’t as perfect as it appeared. She wanted a baby and didn’t have one. If she was jealous, then that was a reasonable, understandable explanation. Sarah felt sympathy begin to rise. But wait, was she really jealous? Had she actually been so when they were young? What would she have been jealous of? Probably, it was rubbish, all of it, just another Veronica drama, another way for her to manipulate, to pull at the heartstrings, to commandeer. Besides, no matter what her own jealousy, it was no excuse for sabotaging Amelia, a child.

  Sarah lifted her phone again. Leverage was there for the taking. Power.

  Veronica was sleeping soundly now. Oblivious and vulnerable.

  Feet next to faces in a small single bed.

  Just one snap.

  Three weeks of giggling into the night.

  One snap.

  Three weeks of living like sisters, in the gap of her own.

  One snap, and at last the woman would know consequences, she would know how it felt to not be in control.

  Where had Veronica’s parents been for three whole weeks of the summer?

  Sarah paused. Phone in hand, she paused. And into the pause flooded her own parents, and Eliza, and David, and herself, and the solidity of that circle. Even a member down. Even beset with attacks of panic. Even in the constant flux of unreliable friendships and unjust battles and law that wasn’t always Right.

  The pause stretched on. For what seemed like many minutes, Sarah stood unmoving, collecting the memories and pieces of thought around her. Collecting them. Weighing them. Sorting them. Unpicking the strands.

  If only Eliza had been there to help her as she used to, to be her mirror, to help her know.

  Longing breath collected in Sarah’s lungs. Desperate, engulfing longing. For her no-more sister. Eliza.

  Eliza.

  Sarah looked at her phone.

  10.10pm.

  Something akin to either shame or conspiracy powered Sarah through the next minutes. She couldn’t believe what she had done. She pushed her phone hurriedly back into her bag, as though once there she could deny its purpose, and picking up Veronica’s top, it was not possible to manoeuvre her arms and head back into it, but she draped it across her chest. Collecting the last remains of sushi, she crossed the room to the kitchen and disposed of it neatly in the bin. She noticed the elderflower on the counter and returned the bottle to the fridge, fighting a quiet but terrifying thought in the back of her mind – what if Veronica was already pregnant, what would the sedatives do to the baby? Sarah shook her head. If Veronica really was jealous, then it was from absence of child, not presence. Everything was fine. Closing the fridge, she wiped spilled drops from the kitchen counter. She corked the wine. She found the remote to the sound system and turned off the soft jazz they’d had playing through the ceiling speakers. Veronica had mentioned that George would be home by 11pm. That was soon. He’d find Veronica and put her to bed. He’d assume she’d been drinking. When Veronica woke, she’d assume their glasses had somehow been mixed up. The colour was the same, the smell not so different. It was feasible. Sarah would see her at school sometime, and either say nothing, or something. Everything was fine.

  Taking one last look at the sleeping woman, exquisite despite her ungainly coma, Sarah considered, just for a moment, how beautiful she had always found Veronica. She didn’t know why she thought about this, and uncharacteristically, she didn’t want to unpack it. Likewise, she didn’t know if she truly believed Veronica’s supposed jealousies, or if she would ever attempt to discover the reasons for them, or care. In that moment, all she knew, with a certainty that felt like epiphany, was that despite the compelling, wild freedom of Veronica and others like her, Sarah had never been, and wasn’t, and didn’t actually, in fact, want to be a meanderer.

  Veronica slept, and Sarah stood there wondering why it had taken so many years to come to this realisation. Maybe it was the maturity of motherhood, or that oft-touted confidence one was supposed to achieve in one’s thirties. Maybe it was ‘closure’. Maybe it was seeing Veronica’s own struggles. Whatever it was, Sarah was glad she had realised it, glad she had, in the end, remained true to herself. Everything she had so far done was still un-doable, the sedatives would wear off, she hadn’t taken a photo, there
was no real damage, no real consequence. And if Veronica continued to sabotage Amelia’s prospects, Sarah could fight that, she would fight that, she would protect her child. She was the strong one after all.

  She let the peacefulness of this new comprehension wash over her. Then steadily, she turned. Quietly, she made her way towards the front door. Serenely, she opened it.

  But almost at once, the door to the neighbours’ house flew open next to her, shattering the calm, and a man staggered out onto the street. The same man she had seen the day before, hooded in the rain. Wildly, he glanced up and down the road, veering into the way of cars. “Simone!” he yelled. “Simone! Simone!”

  Though nothing to do with her, Sarah felt herself tense at this man’s madness. He was blocking her path, but she couldn’t go back inside, it was nearly eleven and George would be home soon. Besides, she told herself, look: a little way up the road was a woman walking alone; in the other direction a boy, no more than ten. It was perfectly safe. Trouble was behind her only. One last time, Sarah channelled the woman slumped against cushions, gave the man a withering, Veronica-empowered stare, and then left, quickly, decisively, without further collection, letting the front door bang shut.

  Veronica

  Sirens fought through her grogginess. Then hospital lights and the sound of George at her side.

  There were four separate calls, Veronica was told afterwards, as though this would somehow mitigate the fact that they, the police, had still arrived too late. They were understaffed, they’d protested to a vehement George standing soldier in her hospital room, his guard sturdier than theirs, or so he needed to prove. But even when he finally let them through, she couldn’t tell them what they wanted to know: how she had come to be so comatose, what he had done. They wanted it first-hand, from her, but it was clear that both of the officers in the room had concluded their truth already – the man tiptoeing around it, the woman’s face full of pity. They’d been told in fact four separate times from four individuals who had seen it: Terry entering her house through an open door.

  The samples scraped later from her body confirmed his semen. His urine too. Only the scratch to her leg had come after, they thought, in the scuffle when the roofer from the downstairs flat next door had charged in and pulled Terry away.

  She had recollections: Terry’s face looming over her; a rank smell; hot liquid on her skin; rough grunts. But she wasn’t sure if these were real visions, or imagined, or spliced together with teenage rememberings and the sounds she’d heard through walls. Her body didn’t hurt, but it felt tired, used up. They said it was the roofer who had saved her. Another witness had confirmed this, a woman, a neighbour. But when she closed her eyes she was sure she could see Dominic – the boy she’d wanted to help, the helpless one – creeping up behind Terry, lifting a steel saucepan to his head. Terry had been standing over her then, she was sure of it – over her, but not on top of her, not actually inside her. And before the roofer she was sure there had been somebody else, too, a woman, a blur of orange and red, smelling of something sweet, pulling Dominic away, lifting him up, allowing him to crumple small into her arms. After that, her ears had filled with soothing melody, church music, or lullaby, and somehow it had swept them all away. She said this once or twice, to the police, to George – the boy, the woman, Terry being by her but not in her. But it didn’t make sense, it didn’t fit, and in the end she let these visions slacken and slide past her with the rest. In some ways it was reassuring to think of the unthinkable as simply a blurred and distant part of patchwork.

  George would not stop apologising. For being late. For being naïve. For not fixing the door. But how had she got like that, he asked, on elderflower? He wanted to call Sarah, but Veronica found that she didn’t want Sarah to know. Besides, it was possible, she suggested, that she had simply picked up the wrong glass and not noticed the taste of wine. It was possible. She told herself this too, tried to convince herself of it, but every time she thought of Sarah, something grew just slightly inside her – a sensation of either empathy, or anger, or perhaps both, suppressed for now, for now.

  Meanwhile, she held herself together. Humiliation and shame nipped at her heels, but she filled out the necessary forms, and succumbed to the necessary tests, and spoke up. And spoke up. She did not cry. With tears, it seemed to her, the last drops of her power would seep away, and she would not allow Terry, or anybody else, to take this too. So she held herself together, just as her parents would have proscribed, just as her colleagues would have expected. Only George knew different. With George, she held herself together by allowing herself to fall apart, a patchwork unravelling, piecemeal, one square at a time. George collected the cotton gratefully, this something he could do, and he took her lead as much as he was able. It was still difficult for him, trapped not only by his family but the bonds of masculinity – be a man, be a man, how damaging those three words – but he bared as much as he could, allowing her to know how angry and devastated and helpless he felt too. Their weaknesses holding them up.

  It was with unhidden, tightly entwined hands that they waited for the results of the tests for STDs, preparing themselves for the worst. But in the end, it was the other results that destabilised them: George’s tests, for which they were unprepared. These fell casually through the letterbox a few days later and were followed by a much less casual visit to the clinic. He wasn’t infertile, Dr Shirazi explained when called upon to do so, not completely, natural conception was still possible even. But it might not be as easy as they’d hoped.

  Veronica felt sick about that.

  She felt sick and a little dizzy.

  Even when she lay down to sleep, the nausea remained with her.

  A few weeks later, she didn’t even need to take a test to know that of course she was pregnant.

  Veronica

  George knelt before her, his arms wrapped around her waist. He should already have left for work, but was there in his shirtsleeves, on the floor, bent low.

  I’ll have you begging! I’ll have you on your knees and broken!

  The pregnancy test was in his hands. He couldn’t stop looking at it. Veronica cupped her own hands around the slightly greying blonde of his head.

  “Not broken,” she said. “We’re not broken.”

  “What?” George looked up at her. He wouldn’t stand, or couldn’t. “Veronica, it’s fucking his.”

  There was a trembling to his voice that Veronica had never heard before, unrecognisable from the boy who’d shot bloodied down a rugby pitch, or the man who’d swept into Kenya, or stood just weeks earlier towering over Terry. Veronica was unrecognisable too. She felt her mood swinging violently and bitterness creeping beneath her skin, like all the hands that had ever touched her uninvited. But she fought hard against it. She followed up with all the police inquiries, channelling her rage into action, resisting the temptation to plaster it beneath blankets of muting patchwork. For all their combined pain, George at least was still here, still talking, still talking to her. Veronica found herself musing that this is what it must have felt like to grow up being Sarah.

  “It might be yours, George. I think it is yours. Don’t you? We never even have to find out anyway, if you don’t want to. We’re going to be okay.” She said this to her husband with more confidence than she felt, removing one hand from his head and placing it onto her stomach where despite ambiguous paternity, there once again was a poppy-seed-sized hope. “We are. Going to be okay. All of us. Somehow.”

  George shook his head, unconvinced, but he rested his lips on top of her hand and kissed it. Veronica leant down and kissed him. And finally, George stood.

  They were in the living room, the afternoon glow of summer sun illuminating the smooth wood of the floor. Behind them was the carefully chosen coffee table, and the shelf lined with favourite books they’d once imagined lying entangled on the sofa and reading. Outside the window, somebody glided by on a bicycle. In the distance was the melodious tinkle of an ice cream van. A few
minutes later, there was a gentle clipping of passing feet. And then, a soft closing of a nearby door.

  A door. Latched and locked. Or not?

  Though wrapped still in George’s arms, this last sound disturbed Veronica and for a few surreal moments she felt a return of that distinct, unsettling sensation of being watched. It wasn’t possible, however, not now. Terry was long gone, refused by three different brothers, apparently, to either pay his bail or have him in their homes. He couldn’t come near her from where he was. He couldn’t be back. To prove her own silliness, Veronica looked over George’s shoulder towards the street, ready for the pretty houses, knitted in such tidy union, to prove her nervousness wrong.

  And that was when she saw him – the boy, Dominic.

  Dragging a bundle of black bags into a waiting car, he stopped, and looked at her through the window. Again there came that flash in her mind, that vision of him wielding steel, helping her, fixing things. But the memory flickered before her in the sun, and now, he brandished nothing. Instead, without instrument, he nodded. His beady eyes were as unnerving and unreadable as ever, but she imagined an attempt at his conveying something with that nod: apology, thanks, conspiracy, absolution?

  With him was a woman she hadn’t seen before – much older, black, carrying a laughing Jasmine, something about her intangibly fortifying. Even from the other side of glass, Veronica felt a little fortified. She nodded back to Dominic. But next to him, catching the gesture, appeared Simone.

  Simone.

  Of course she was there too. Standing face on. Motionless. Looking inside as Veronica looked out.

  For a fleeting second, the eyes of the two women locked. Saying nothing, saying everything. Melded that way together. Until abruptly, as though moved by some thought or some new paradigm of life, or simply no longer desirous of looking in, Simone nodded at Veronica, as her son had done, and then turned away from the window, back towards him, back towards her family, and climbed into the car, and was gone.