Before I Wake

by C. L. Taylor

  “But after Keisha went off to find Danny, Mike offered to buy us some drinks. We thought he was on the pull, dirty old git, so figured we’d get the most expensive cocktails we could out of him before we did a runner. I had a…” She dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand. “Doesn’t matter what we had, but while we were drinking them, Mike started telling us how he was new to Brighton. He said he’d moved here from London to make a fresh start after splitting up with his boyfriend and losing his niece Martha to cancer. He said he really loved her, said she was like a daughter to him, and that Charlotte reminded him of her. I thought that was a bit creepy, but Charlotte thought it was sweet.”

  That’s my daughter, always thinking the best of people.

  “So.” Ella licks her lips then pops another cigarette into her mouth. “Once we’d finished the cocktails, I gave Charlotte a look like ‘let’s get out of here,’ but she ignored me and kept on talking to Mike. He bought us some more drinks and they kept talking—about his niece and his job as a photographer, which Charlotte thought was way cool—for ages. I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night chatting to his Royal Gayness.” She shoots me a look. “Sorry, but he wasn’t bothered about talking to me, just her. Anyway, I only managed to drag her away when ‘Love It When You Lie’ came on and we went for a dance.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  She shakes her head. “Not that night, no. But he was there the next time we went. Keisha wasn’t there that time, and he just strolled up and said hello.”

  “So Charlotte and Mike became friends?”

  “Yeah.” She shrugs. “That’s part of the reason why we fell out, the fact that she was getting all these new friends and hanging around premiership footballers in Grey’s, and I felt like I wasn’t good enough for her anymore, like she was really up herself. I called her on it, but she said she was just living her life and that it was cool to have a gay friend and that Mike was funny and gave her good advice on clothes and stuff.”

  “Clothes?” A sick feeling rises from my stomach as I imagine my daughter in a changing room, parading around half naked in front of a man she barely knows. “What do you mean, he gave her advice on clothes?”

  “He took her shopping.” Ella pulls a face. “I know, I was totally jealous. I’m not even going to lie. He must have spent hundreds of pounds on her and got her all designer stuff—the proper labels and everything, not reject stuff from TJ Maxx. It wasn’t just clothes either—he got her sunglasses, CDs, DVDs, loads of shit. Said it made him happy, like he was still buying stuff for Martha.”

  Ella’s face is animated as she continues to describe, in minute detail, everything Mike bought for my daughter. I recognize some of the descriptions—I saw them in Charlotte’s room and bought her explanation that they were fakes from a market stall or a car trunk or love tokens from Liam—but others I’ve never seen. The story is plausible enough, a recently bereaved single gay man in a city where he knows no one spots the doppelgänger of his dead niece and showers her with presents in return for her company, and yet, why do I feel like the temperature just dropped twenty degrees?

  “What does Mike look like, Ella?”

  She shrugs. “Old.”

  “How old? As old as me?”

  Ella screws up her eyes and scrutinizes me. “Probably, yeah.”

  “What else?”

  “He was just a bloke, an old bloke with gray in his hair, like any old bloke you see in the street.”

  “Think…please, it’s important. How tall was he? Was he fat or thin? What kind of clothes did he wear? Did he wear any jewelry? What were his shoes like? Did he have a mustache, beard, glasses?”

  “Like I said.” She twists in her seat and gazes across the park at a bunch of teenagers swinging back and forward on the children’s swings. “He just looked normal, apart from being really tall.” She looks back at me. “He was probably about the same height as my dad.”

  So he was about six-foot-four. “What else?”

  “He always looked smart—dark trousers and a shirt, that sort of thing. I never saw him in jeans. I don’t remember what shoes he wore.” She glances back at the teenagers. “He had a watch, I think.”

  “And his build?”

  She sighs. “Medium. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t thin. And he didn’t wear glasses or have a mustache or beard,” she adds before I can ask. “Oh yeah…” She puts her feet up on the bench and hugs her knees. “His eyes were a really odd color, kind of grayish, and he had quite a big nose and a strange accent. Birmingham? Liverpool? I’m rubbish with accents, but he definitely wasn’t from around here. That okay?” She looks back at me, but I can’t meet her gaze. I can’t tear my eyes away from the teenagers at the other end of the park. She’s just described James, twenty years after I last set eyes on him.

  “Sue?” Out of my peripheral vision, I can see Ella unclasping her legs. “You okay? You look weird.”

  I was wrong about the school teacher Jamie Evans, but I’m not wrong about this. I can feel it in my bones, the marrow-deep certainty that, somewhere in Brighton and Hove, my ex-boyfriend is watching and laughing, proud of his newest role—bereaved gay man—delighted that he managed to wheedle his way into my daughter’s life right under my nose.

  “Did he ever touch her?” I snap around to look at Ella. “Did he hurt Charlotte in any way?”

  “Why would he? I just told you, he bought her loads of stuff. He treated her like a princess.”

  “What was he blackmailing her about?”

  “Blackmailing her?” She shakes her head. “Charlotte never said anything about that. Mike acted like he worshipped the ground she walked on—little miss ‘my dead niece.’”

  “Have you got his number? Or his address?”

  “No. Liam will though.”

  “Liam?”

  “Yeah.” She looks at the surprised expression on my face and laughs. “Charlotte wasn’t going to have sex on her own in Mike’s flat, was she?”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Eight

  “Sue?” I can hear the concern in Brian’s voice. “Where on earth are you? You’ve been gone for hours.”

  “I’m sorry.” I turn off the engine. All the curtains are open in Liam’s house, but there’s no movement beyond any of the windows. “I got caught up at the funeral home.”

  “Really?” The change in the tone of his voice is immediate. “Is that why they rang up to offer their condolences and ask when we’d like to come in?”

  “I…” My brain scrabbles for a way out. “I haven’t been there yet.”

  “Well obviously.”

  “I went for a walk along the beach instead. To clear my head.”

  “For three hours?”

  “Yes, three hours.” There’s something about his tone that irritates me. “My mother just died, for God’s sake, Brian! Is there a time limit on grief? Was there a motion passed in Parliament that you didn’t tell me about?”

  It’s unfair, but lashing out is easier than lying, even when it’s not deserved. And I’m so close to finding out what happened to Charlotte.

  Brian says nothing for a very long time, and I’m just about to take the phone from my ear to check whether he’s ended the call when—

  “Tell me where you are and I’ll come and collect you.”

  He may as well have offered me the other cheek.

  “There’s no need. Really. I brought the car.”

  “Then I’ll join you. We’ll get a coffee. Have a talk.”

  There’s a cough to my left and I remember that I’m not alone. Ella is tapping away at her phone like her life depends on it, but I can tell by the hunch of her shoulders and the fact that her body’s angled away from me that she finds this whole situation hideously awkward. And who can blame her? I asked her to come along to convince Liam to tell me the truth, not to bear wit
ness to my marital problems.

  “I don’t want any company, Brian,” I say and then I realize that’s exactly why he’s checking up on me. He’s not trying to control me; he’s worried. My mother has just died, he thinks I’m suffering from depressive anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder, and I’m insisting he leave me alone. He probably thinks I’m about to do a Sylvia Plath and walk into the sea.

  “I’m sorry.” I soften my voice. “I know you’re just trying to look after me, but this is something I need to get through on my own and—”

  “But—”

  “Not forever, just today. I just need to get through today on my own. I’ll be back by this evening. Please, Brian. Please trust me.”

  “Of course I trust you, Sue. I just don’t want you to—”

  “I’m not going to do anything silly,” I say, even though I know there’s every chance I might do the opposite, depending on what Liam has to say. But I don’t feel silly. I feel like I’m regaining control of my life, twenty years too late. “Please, Brian, I need to do this.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I understand. Just…please don’t stay out too late. Don’t make me worry unnecessarily.”

  My heart twists in my chest. He is a good man. Despite everything, he’s a good man and I’m lucky to have him in my life.

  “I love you, Brian.”

  Ella squirms in her seat, but I don’t care.

  “I love you too, Sue. Take care of yourself, okay, and I’ll see you later.”

  I end the call, but I don’t immediately turn to Ella. Instead I stare out of the windshield, at the thin blue line of sea on the horizon, and I say a small prayer. Not to God, the universe, or anyone in particular, but I ask for strength, courage, and protection for my family. I ask for a twenty-year nightmare to be over.

  “Can I put the radio on,” Ella asks, reaching toward the CD player, “if you’re just going to sit there and be weird? I can’t stand it when it’s quiet.”

  I smile. “No need. We’re going to go and see Liam now, and I hope you’ll do the talking.”

  ***

  If Liam’s older sister was surprised to see his girlfriend’s mum and ex-best friend standing on the doorstep, she didn’t let on. Instead she pointed in the direction of Lewes Road and told us that he and Last Fight, his band, were rehearsing. She didn’t know what time they’d finish, but suggested we wait in the Gladstone, the pub around the corner, where they always headed afterward.

  “You didn’t have to get me a Diet Coke,” Ella grumbles as we take a seat at one of the wooden tables in the back of the pub. “I’ve got an ID, you know.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Should you be telling me that?”

  She grins and it strikes me how different she is from the first time we talked after Charlotte’s accident. The brittleness, the anger, the hurt—all gone. She’s like a little girl again, like the darling playmate Charlotte would bring home to decorate my freshly baked cakes with colored icing and sprinkles.

  “There he is!” She points across the room.

  Liam, surrounded by dark-haired, similarly dressed young men, saunters across the pub, a guitar bag slung over his shoulder. He does a double take when he spots us.

  “Liam!” I raise a hand and wave him over.

  He nods then turns to his band mates, says something I can’t make out, and splits off from the pack.

  “Mrs. Jackson.” He looks at Ella and frowns questioningly. “Ella.”

  “She knows.” She leans back in her chair and widens her eyes. “About you and Charlotte having sex at Mike’s house.”

  “What?” He pales visibly.

  “But she’s not angry,” she adds quickly, pulling out the chair beside her. “She wants to know more about Mike. She thinks you might know something that could help Charlotte wake up.”

  Liam glances at his band mates, laughing and drinking, crowded around a table on the other side of the room.

  “Please.” I force a smile. “I’m not angry. I promise. I just need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Okay.” He reaches a tentative hand toward the chair next to me. “I can’t stay long. We’ve got band stuff to talk about.”

  “It was Charlotte’s idea,” he says before I have a chance to draw breath. “She was the one who pushed for us to have sex. I wanted to wait until she was sixteen and legal.”

  I don’t believe that for one second, but what Oli told us about the hotel room suggests that Charlotte was as keen as Liam, if not more.

  “Was she the one who suggested that you have sex in Mike’s house?”

  “No.” He eyes our drinks. “Well, not straightaway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me that she’d met this rich old gay bloke in Breeze who thought she looked like his dead niece and wanted to buy her stuff. I thought it was creepy.” He rubs a hand over his stubble. “But then Charlotte said Mike could probably get me stuff too, and my guitar was knackered, so…” He tails off.

  “He bought you a new guitar?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes dart to the guitar case propped up on the wall beside him. I’m no musician, but even I know that Les Paul guitars aren’t cheap. “I told her not to ask him to get me one, but she thought it would be funny. If he had the cash, he should be able to spend it however he wanted, she said, and besides…” He picks up a bar mat, pulls off the paper advertisement, and rolls it into a ball. “Buying us, buying her stuff seemed to make him happy, so why not?”

  A shiver runs down my back at the thought of my daughter being so Machiavellian. I thought I’d brought her up better than that. I’m not sure how much more I want to hear.

  “So how did the two of you end up having sex at his house?”

  “Mike suggested it when Charlotte got drunk one night. She’d been shooting off, telling him how crap it is being a teenager these days, because if you want to lose your virginity, you have to do it on the school fields or in someone’s car. That’s when he suggested we use his flat.” He lowers his eyes. “He said he was going away for the weekend to see some mates in London and that he’d put clean sheets on his bed and food in the fridge and we could treat the flat like it was ours for two days.”

  I can see why two teenagers would have jumped at that offer.

  “So you took him up on the offer?”

  He doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” He pushes back his chair, rests a hand on his guitar case. “Can I go now?”

  “Mike didn’t turn up while you were there? Nothing bad happened? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, his cheeks coloring slightly. “It was cool.”

  He’s halfway out of his seat and I realize I’m about to lose him. How long did I expect my daughter’s ex-boyfriend to talk to me about sex for? Even Ella, across the table from me, is staring at the cocktail menu like it’s the most fascinating thing she’s ever read.

  “Then why would Mike blackmail Charlotte?”

  “What?” He looks down at me, his forehead creased.

  “Keisha told me Mike was blackmailing Charlotte about something. Do you know what?”

  “No.” He shakes his head, his expression incredulous. “She never said anything about…” He looks at Ella. “Did you know about this?”

  She raises her eyes from the menu. “Nope.”

  “She didn’t give you any clue?” I look from one to the other. “Nothing at all?”

  Two blank expressions meet my question.

  “So if I were to tell you that she wrote keeping this secret is killing me in her diary, you wouldn’t know what she was talking about?”

  They look shocked but shake their heads.

  I stand up too. “Liam? One more thing before you go back to your band.”

  He shrugs.
“Sure. What?”

  “Show me where Mike lives.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Nine

  Liam and I are alone in the car. Ella received a phone call from her mum while we were leaving the pub, asking where the hell her cigs were, so I dropped her home. I wasn’t just returning her home because her mum was suspicious. I wanted her safe, and now that we’re outside number 117 Highgate Road, I need to make sure Liam is too.

  “This is definitely the house?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” He nods at me from the passenger seat. “I’d know it anywhere.”

  “Thank you, Liam.” I look in the rearview mirror and flick the indicator. “I’ll take you back to the Gladstone now.”

  “Nah.” He shakes his head. “I’m staying here. If you’re going to confront that mincing fucker, I’m coming too. I’ll punch his fucking lights out.”

  That’s a lot of bravado for a seventeen-year-old, but it doesn’t raise a smile. Liam has no idea how much danger he’d be in if he so much as looked at James the wrong way.

  “No, you won’t.” I pull out into the road, ignoring his protestations. “We don’t want two people in the hospital.”

  Liam laughs, flattered I’d think him capable of hospitalizing a grown man. I don’t bother to correct him.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later and I’m back outside the flat. It looks innocuous enough—marine blue front door, brass knocker, bay windows with curtains ever so slightly open—but I’m having a hard time opening the car door. My brain is urging me on, telling me to get out, knock on the door, and confront the man who’s been terrorizing my nightmares for the last twenty years, but my body is holding fast, refusing to move. I look down at my right hand, at the diamond band Brian bought me during a “makeup” holiday in Rhodes after the affair. I refused to wear it—his guilt gift—for a long, long time, and then suddenly it was our fifteen-year anniversary and the affair was a distant memory and the ring felt like a symbol of positivity, of a fresh start, so I started wearing it. I try and will the hand to move from the steering wheel to the door handle.