She tried to open her eyes fully and murmured something; her fringe was stuck to the sweat on her forehead.
‘Jesus…’ I rolled my eyes.
The two of them were watching me, waiting for me to remove their problem.
‘Look, I’ll take her home,’ I said. ‘Can she walk at all?’
‘Um… not really.’
‘OK.’ I stood back with my hands on my hips, and gestured at Steph. ‘Can you put her shoe back on? I’m gonna carry her to the car.’
Steph did as she was told. The other lady helped Clare sit up and I took one of her arms around my neck. At her height I thought she’d weigh more, but when I lifted her it didn’t take much strain. She opened her eyes for a moment, struggled to focus and then shut them again, her head resting against my chest.
There was a sequinned bag hanging from her neck and Steph tucked it away. ‘Is she going to be OK?’
‘I think she’s only drunk,’ I said.
‘Um, my coat…’ Steph took a step forwards.
I glared at her. ‘I’ve no doubt she’ll make sure you get it back. You were fucking stupid, giving her pills when she’s like this.’
They looked at each other. They would probably go back into the club, I realized. They didn’t care, not really.
I left them and took Clare back past the club and across the road to my car. I supported her against the side of the vehicle to open the back door.
‘Clare, can you… fucking wake up a bit?’
When I threatened to lower her to the ground she responded, and managed to get inside the car. She pulled the coat tighter around herself, kicked her shoes on to the floor and curled up across the back seats. Even with the scars, it was so out of character for her to seem this vulnerable.
I watched her for a moment, and took off my jacket to put across her legs.
The air was bitter, full of dim music and other people laughing.
By the time I had hurried around the car and got into the driver’s seat I was already shivering. I went to start the engine and looked in the overhead mirror. She was asleep, a hand up by her face and her lips parted.
Anything could have happened, I thought, glancing back at the club.
There was an indistinct noise behind me and I turned back. ‘You all right? Clare?’
She was still asleep.
‘You’re all right,’ I said as I started the car.
The jolt of the car coming to a halt outside the house woke her up. I got out, wincing against the cold, and when I opened the rear door she was trying to sit up.
‘Where…?’
‘You’re at home.’
The coat fell off her; she was wearing a short black dress. ‘… You?’
‘You got your friends to call me, remember?’
She tried to form an expression of disbelief but didn’t manage it. I held out a hand but she ignored it, choosing to struggle by herself instead. She eased herself to the edge of the seat, put her bare feet down on the road and realized she didn’t have her shoes.
‘Um… there.’ I pointed at the footwell and the high heels. ‘You sure you can walk in those?’
‘I’m… fine.’ She reached down, managed to reach one of the shoes, and came back up looking disoriented. ‘I don’t… feel very…’
I took a step back as she retched and vomited a stream of stale alcohol on to the road. She started to apologize but threw up again, her shoulders trembling and her shoulder blades showing through the criss-cross straps across her back.
I was glad she had waited until we had got home.
Clare had brought her feet back up off the road, holding her forehead in both hands.
‘You OK?’ I said.
She sniffed and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, but didn’t look at me. ‘Sorry… I don’t… do this.’
‘Come on…’
‘I can do it,’ she said, leaning down to get the other shoe.
‘No. You really can’t.’
She ignored me.
‘And can you decide soon? Because it’s really fucking cold,’ I added. My eyelids were growing heavy.
For a while she sat on the edge of the seat looking down, trying to work out how much effort it would take to put on the shoes and walk to the house by herself. She sniffed again, brushed her fringe out of her eyes and held out an arm.
‘OK.’
I picked her up again and felt her tense.
‘Sorry,’ she said as I kicked the door shut. ‘How embarrassing…’
‘You’re fine, I’ve seen worse.’
I avoided her eyes as I carried her up to the front door, the hand holding her shoes draped around my shoulder.
‘There’s a key… somewhere…’
She fumbled with her bag and I put her down, carefully, so that she could unlock the door. She still couldn’t support herself and I held her up with one arm as we stepped inside. Her skin seemed yellowed in the harsh light.
‘I’m OK, you can… just go.’
‘Don’t be stupid, you can’t stand up.’
‘I’m… not stupid.’
‘Look, go to bed and I’ll get you some water.’
She wavered at the stairs.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I said, picking her up again.
‘I don’t… I meant when I said I don’t… do this. At least not for a while.’ She dropped one of the shoes as I took her upstairs but I ignored it. ‘Used to do it all the time… I was the… life and party.’
It was the first time I had noticed the lines around her eyes.
I nudged open the bedroom door and set her down. ‘Stay here, I’ll get some water.’
Clare sat on the edge of the bed, holding the one shoe in her lap; the soles of her feet were blackened by the pavement and road. A few tears had worked their way out and smudged her eyeliner. Without looking at me she brushed her hair off her face and fixed it up in a tight bun again.
‘Hey, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘You look fine.’
She didn’t answer.
I went downstairs and picked up the other shoe on the way. While I was in the kitchen I rested it on the side, running some water from the tap and filling a glass. The black suede was tarnished and scraped away by the tarmac.
It was nearing one in the morning.
While I was here I could find her laptop, I thought, but that was for later. I didn’t have to do that now.
I picked up the water and the shoe and went back upstairs. In Pat’s absence, the house was quieter than I had ever heard it. As I passed Emma’s room I thought of going in for another search, but that could wait until later too.
Clare was sat where I had left her, looking at the high heel in her lap as if it was her life’s shoebox.
I tried to picture what would be in hers.
‘Thanks.’ She took the water with a shaking hand and popped a breath mint from the bedside table. ‘I’m… God, I’m so sorry. It’s so… disgusting.’
I put the other shoe down by the wardrobe with the mirrored doors. ‘It doesn’t matter, really.’
‘I thought going out… would… do something,’ she said, between gulps of water.
I stood for a second, but then sat down next to her. She wasn’t looking at me anyway.
‘Sleep it off. You’ll feel… well, you’ll probably feel shit in the morning.’
‘It’s true, you know,’ she said. ‘My friends… They didn’t say I was the life and soul… they said I was… I was the party. Nic, I… when Emma…’
‘What?’
‘Nothing… Nothing important.’
She put the glass of water on the floor and leant her head against my shoulder, wiping the tears off her cheeks. It seemed to calm her down.
‘It’s weird, that you seem nice,’ she said.
I laughed.
‘No, I’m serious… I’d like to know what made you hate people so much.’
‘Well, I’d like to know what made you hate yourself so much.’
�
�Hm, well… You first.’
With a coy smile, she took her head off my shoulder and curled up at the end of the bed. Her eyes were closed, but she seemed to be listening.
I didn’t even know where to begin.
She prodded me with her toe. ‘Go on.’
I pushed her foot away with a smile, realizing that I would have to share in order to get any worthwhile information out of her.
‘I killed someone, this kid, when I was seventeen. It was an accident; they had the knife.’ I met her eyes to judge her level of shock, but they were still closed. I wasn’t sure whether she had fallen asleep but I carried on regardless. ‘I spent a while in juvie, then transferred to an adult prison for a year, then got out as I was apparently no longer a threat to society. My parents… well, my dad never forgave me for it. I think he’s always thought it was my fault.’
She sat up against the headboard, sniffing. ‘That’s terrible.’
‘It’s just one of those things, it was an… accident. I mean, I thought I was only punching him to get him off me, I didn’t realize…’ I frowned, unable to comprehend why she looked so distressed. ‘Come on, it’s not like I was a medical student or someone who was gonna change the world in some way. Sadder things have happened.’
‘No, I just… I guess I never thought about… how you would get into what you do, you know.’ She fiddled with the straps of her dress, observing where they had left red welts against her skin. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Your turn.’
I knew she wasn’t going to tell me anything in return, but it was worth a try.
She smiled at me, rubbed some smudged eyeliner from underneath her eye and shifted forwards. Her vision didn’t look entirely focused; she wouldn’t even be close to sober until tomorrow evening.
Despite all this, when she went to kiss me, I let her.
That was all I had wanted, really, I realized. Maybe it was all she had wanted too, as she dropped the pretence of a heart-to-heart and came closer to press her body against mine. She tasted like mint and faintly of spirit. Nothing about her was soft, not as I remembered from the mortuary. She was made up of sharp edges and corners.
She kissed me harder, sighed against my lips, and hooked her legs around my waist. Following her lead, I ran my hand up her leg towards the hem of her dress. All I could think about was touching her, every inch of her, possessing all of that strength and that madness and making her need me as much as I needed her. But she pushed me away. Not far, but far enough away to tell me my place.
‘No,’ she said, biting my lip.
The images that had been playing through my head were dashed. I was so hard, aching at the prospect of holding her and fucking her and doing something that made sense to me.
But this wasn’t about me, I realized. It was about her; it was always about her.
Her fingers curled around my wrists and I let her force me on to my back, grinding her hips against me, and her eyes locked on to mine as if she was daring me to challenge her.
Every move she made sent spasms through my veins.
‘Clare…’ I breathed, one of my hands entwined in her hair.
She was kissing my neck, her hair falling loose and brushing against my forearms. ‘No.’
‘Why—’
‘No.’
She pulled away a few inches with her eyes half shut, and I could feel her exhales on my skin. A faint gloss of sweat had reappeared on her forehead and the hand that wasn’t pinning my wrist to the bed was between her legs.
I fought for breath. ‘Fuck…’
She sat up, letting me go, and smiled at me in a way that mocked my desperation to be in control. Without taking her eyes off me she loosened the straps on her shoulders and let the dress fall to her waist.
I pulled myself up and she was still touching herself, the back of her knuckles grazing my erection as if I was nothing more than her toy. I’d let her do anything, because she felt so good, so fucking good, but, like everyone else, I realized that the most I could hope for were the scraps she chose to throw down from her table.
Her skin was hot underneath my hands, her breasts firm under my tongue. I could hardly see her clearly any more.
She groaned and pulled my lips back to hers, running her tongue along my teeth as she rocked against her own hand. The pressure was unbearable. In my mind I forced her down beneath me and made her tell me everything, made her say my name as though it meant something to her.
Instead, she took my hand off her thigh and guided it between her legs and past her underwear.
‘Mmm…’ She shut her eyes tight as she directed me, bucking her hips against every thrust.
It was the biggest kick, how wet she was, how she started gasping at the sensation of my fingertips working around her clit. Suddenly she had taken my wrist again, her features clenched, arched against me as if she might just die if I wasn’t inside her. She let out the smallest cry as the rest of her body jerked against me, her lips parted, and then she opened her eyes.
They were flecked with green.
A bead of sweat ran down the side of my face.
‘Don’t go,’ she said.
I brushed my thumb along her cheek, the flushed skin and the sheen of perspiration. I didn’t get it. I didn’t fucking get what she wanted the world to give her.
‘Please, don’t go,’ she said, clinging to me as if she meant it.
Like a keytar, I thought. Obviously, I was going to stay.
23
There was a note on the bedside table when I woke up, in a feminine italic handwriting.
‘Gone to work early. Sweat it out! Thanks xxx’
In a way, I was glad. I couldn’t imagine that either of us would have wanted an awkward morning conversation. After she had begged me not go she had undressed and fallen asleep next to me. It had taken hours for me to relax enough to follow suit, confused and tired and agonizingly turned on.
In a perverse way, I decided, it was some kind of progress.
Getting out of bed, I dressed quickly and went downstairs. When I switched on my phone I had a voicemail from Brinks and a voicemail from Mackie. I decided to blank Brinks for a while, leaving him to be the one holding out for a reply for once. Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for his whining. Mackie could wait a bit too.
She’d left the laptop on the kitchen work surface.
I took a moment to listen for any sound outside, over the beating of my heart, and opened it. After a few seconds the desktop had loaded, and I did a search for video files.
‘Fucking yes,’ I said under my breath.
There was a list of videos, some of which had names like ‘Emma’s birthday 2005’ and ‘Maldives 2002’. Some, however, had nothing but generic webcam titles; things like ‘Clare Dyer – Webcam video – 16:45 20/09/10’. Despite my curiosity I knew I couldn’t afford to watch anything now. I went on to the internet and uploaded everything to a storage site under my login, glanced at the clock on the wall and shut the laptop without leaving any trace of it having been used.
Exhilarated by the success, I dropped my bag and sprinted back upstairs into Emma’s room. This may be my only chance, I thought. Don’t fuck it up.
I hadn’t noticed when I’d woken up that the landing still smelt dimly of alcohol.
Looking around the room, I tried to work out what sort of person Emma was, what would make a girl develop a chronic addiction to disappointing her parents. What would have turned her into the sort of person who kept letting her father back into the house to spite her mother?
All I could remember of her face was Pat’s glare.
I searched through the drawers of her dressing table, where I had found her diary, and found payslips from a restaurant, bank statements, letters from college, a pile of photos that looked as though they had missed out on being stuck around the edges of her mirror.
I looked up at my reflection for a moment, at the grey shadows under my eyes, and lost myself to the recollection of the night before. I cou
ldn’t shake it from the forefront of my mind. Was that going to be it? All I was allowed of her?
It bothered me, how much it was hampering my ability to think straight.
I gathered up all the papers and photographs, anything that looked as if it could be relevant, and took them downstairs. When I had put them in my bag I went into the living room and pulled down the shoeboxes on the top shelf. I left the photos of Emma that Clare had been looking through, but I took the rest. It wasn’t as if they were going to be missed, and even if they were it didn’t matter. The worst consequence I could foresee would be her disapproval.
There was still a footprint in the centre of the door on Shooters Hill. I was smoking furiously, fighting back the creeping anxiety that had been festering in my stomach since the moment I had woken up.
It took a while for someone to answer, but I recognized the girl who did. She was a platinum blonde, thinner than Harriet and with even less warmth in her face, dressed in a see-through mesh shirt and jeans.
It was the girl I’d last seen slumped against a headboard with a needle in her arm.
Like I give a fuck.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘Is anyone else in?’ I asked. ‘I was here before looking for Kyle.’
There was a flicker of recognition, but it didn’t seem to concern her. ‘He’s not here, hasn’t been here for a while… just said I could stay until his rent ran out.’
‘So you live here?’
‘Looks like. Who are you?’
‘My name’s Nic, I’m a private investigator.’ I dropped the cigarette and crushed it under my shoe. ‘I wanted to talk to you about a boy called Joe O’Donoghue. Meds, you might have known him as.’
‘I know… I knew Meds.’ She smiled. ‘Took all sorts but the good stuff.’
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘Whatever. Don’t think I’ll be able to tell you much.’
She let me in and slouched down on to a threadbare chair in the living room. It looked bigger without the people lying all over the floor, but it stank of stale food from half-empty take-out boxes. An inch of dust coated all the surfaces and a vase of dead flowers stood in the corner.
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