The Story of Us

by Dani Atkins

  But now that Jack had opened the door to the memory, all I could see when I closed my eyes was Amy gripping my hand on the cold tarmac of the road, as though I was a priest absolving her during her final moments, and the relief on her face when I had told her everything was all right.

  I tried to tell myself there was no hidden intrigue or mystery to her words. Amy was just as likely to be apologising because she’d ruined a pair of shoes she’d borrowed… or something equally mundane. Really? That was what was on her mind in her dying moments? Some damaged designer sandals? I shook my head angrily at the voice of doubt, which for some reason was speaking in my head in a soft American accent. Damn him. Why the hell hadn’t he just kept his stupid questions to himself?

  There was only one other person who had known Amy as well as I had; one other person who might just be able to tell me what I needed to know.

  ‘Caroline McAdam.’ Her voice was clear and professional, with a sing-song intonation.

  ‘Hi, Caro, it’s me.’

  Her tone softened and warmed, and the smile that I knew she was making was as clear as if I was standing in front of her. ‘Hey, sweetie. How are you doing?’

  Good question, and not one I really knew how to answer right then. ‘I’m fine,’ I replied, because that was what she was expecting to hear. ‘I was just wondering… are you free for a quick cup of coffee?’

  There was a slight pause, and I could visualise her, sitting at her window-side desk in the estate agency, glancing at her watch and maybe even biting her lip the way she always did when considering something unexpected.

  ‘Yeah, I guess I can pop out if it’s only for a quick one.’

  I got to the coffee shop first, ordered us two cappuccinos, and found a small table by the window. I saw her walking towards the café through the glass and waved, smiling at the wide beam she sent back in return.

  She carefully undid the lid of her frothy drink, and I let her take a sip before I launched into the reason I had dragged her out of the office in the middle of the morning. We didn’t have much time.

  ‘Caroline, I have something I need to ask you.’

  She looked up and delicately licked away the small milky trail on her top lip.

  ‘That sounds serious,’ she observed.

  ‘I… I don’t know. It might be.’

  A small furrow appeared between her brows. ‘So, what’s up?’

  ‘Caroline, how much do you remember about the night that Amy died?’

  I watched her face spasm, and I hated myself for having to do this to her, but there was no one else I could ask.

  ‘I take it you don’t mean about the hen party?’

  I shook my head sadly. ‘The accident,’ I confirmed quietly.

  She shook her head, as her eyes shifted away from me, staring out of the window. ‘Not much,’ she admitted. ‘It’s all a blur after we left the party. I remember Amy feeling sick, I remember the deer in front of us and then… it’s all kind of greyed-out until I was sitting in the back of the ambulance.’

  I’d known her memories of the night were sketchy, but I had no idea there was so much she was missing. ‘So you don’t remember finding Amy by the road?’

  Caroline looked back at me in shock. ‘I found her? I thought that Jack did?’

  Her words had an almost visceral effect on me. I reached across the table and took hold of her hand. ‘You were the one who got to her first, hon.’

  Caroline looked stricken at the revelation. ‘I did? It’s all just gone. I can’t remember it at all.’

  I knew then that it was almost pointless asking my next question, but I asked it anyway. ‘So you don’t remember what she said, while we were waiting for the ambulance?’

  Caroline’s eyes widened into huge blue marbles in shock. ‘What do you mean? How was she talking? She was unconscious.’

  I shook my head sadly. ‘No, she wasn’t. She was awake… well, kind of… God, Caroline, it was awful to see her like that and not be able to do anything to help her.’

  Caroline’s eyes had filled with tears, and I hated myself for giving her an image that I knew was going to keep her awake at nights, just like it did to me. ‘Caro, the reason I’m bringing this up is that I’ve remembered something Amy said, something really strange, and I wondered if you knew what she meant.’

  Caroline shook her head, still grappling with the awful image of our friend being conscious after having been hurled through the windscreen of her car. ‘What did she say?’ she asked, her voice a hoarse broken whisper.

  ‘Well, at first I thought she was just sort of babbling… but now, I’m not so sure. There was something really important she was trying to say to me; it was something about her being glad that I had forgiven her and that I was a good friend.’

  Caroline looked directly at me, her eyes two bright blue sparkling jewels. ‘You were a good friend,’ she affirmed.

  I shook my head. ‘No. It was more than that. It was like she was thanking me for being so understanding. Have you got any idea at all what she was talking about?’

  Caroline reached for her drink, her hand shaking so much that the froth swayed from side to side within the plastic container. ‘No. I haven’t got a clue.’ She drank deeply from her coffee, as though to burn the taste of the lie from her mouth.

  ‘Caroline,’ I said probingly, ‘are you certain you don’t know? You can’t think of anything Amy could have said or done that was worrying her?’ The question sounded ridiculous on my lips.

  Caroline’s cheeks flushed slightly, yet another curious sign, but she didn’t waver. ‘No, of course not. Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. Are you sure you didn’t imagine the whole conversation? You had just hurt your head, after all.’

  That made me mad, and I really hadn’t wanted to get angry with her. ‘I didn’t, because it wasn’t just me who heard her, Jack did too.’

  That silenced her. She looked down and began to fiddle with the coffee container again. ‘I really don’t know what she meant.’ She looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears, and I knew my own questions had been pushed aside by a much more overwhelming realisation. ‘I can’t believe she was still conscious…’

  I had a horrible afternoon. And now I had a new portion of guilt to add to my fast-growing mountain; I had hurt Caroline and thrust the night of the accident right back into the forefront of her mind. I was definitely to blame for the despondent set of her shoulders and her decidedly weary stride as she walked back to work after hugging me goodbye on the pavement.

  I almost asked Richard about Amy’s curious comment when he called me that night, but he was in a rush and was phoning from the hospital after a student had been stretchered off the slopes with an ankle injury, so the timing was all wrong. I guessed it could wait until he got back. My sleep that night, perhaps not surprisingly, was disturbed with nightmares, senseless jumbling scenes which all featured Amy desperately trying to tell me something that I couldn’t understand. But the one that ripped me from sleep with a torn and strangled cry was a true gothic horror tale. We were in the church and somehow – in that weird way of dreams – it was the day of my wedding as well as being Amy’s funeral. The altar was decked in wreaths, and as the organ began to play the opening strains of the wedding march, I noticed with horror that Richard, who was waiting expectantly at the head of the aisle, was standing beside a shining black coffin. The church doors were flung open and a white-gowned figure began to walk to my waiting fiancé, and no one but I seemed to notice that the coffin was still positioned precisely where the bride should stand. The approaching figure was a soft focus blur of white lace, and it was only when she finally held out her hand and took Richard’s that I saw beneath the gauzy veil that I wasn’t the one about to join him in marriage, it was Amy. I opened my mouth to scream, to shout that there had been some dreadful mistake, but no one could hear me, despite the fact I was yelling so loudly my voice was becoming hoarse. But the wood was solid and the padding thick; the coffin I
was lying within held my dream-self imprisoned as tightly as though I was already buried many feet beneath the newly wedded couple.

  I awoke drenched in sweat, panting in thick throaty gasps. It was the worst nightmare I could ever remember having. And even when I’d had a drink of water and lay back down on to the damp pillows, the images refused to disappear. I’d never been much of a one for believing that dreams mean anything, and I certainly didn’t think they were prophecies, but this one had been so vivid, so intense.

  I didn’t put it together slowly, one small piece at a time. Instead it came to me in one complete and horrible picture. There was a moment when I knew no turmoil and then I blinked and suddenly there it was. For one minute I thought I was going to be sick, actually physically sick. I swallowed several times and could taste something revolting in the back of my throat. I had to be wrong. There had to be some other explanation. I’d just woken from a nightmare, it was four o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t thinking clearly. That had to be what was going on here. Anything else was simply unthinkable.

  But sometimes the unthinkable, however horrible it is, just happens to be true. All the clues had been there all along, but I had just refused to see them. It had taken Jack’s question to light the fuse, and then the trailing spark had snaked its way inexorably to a huge keg of dynamite which, if I was right, was about to blow my world apart.

  I saw it all now, in a horrible collage of images and memories: Amy holding my hand on the side of the road after the accident, whispering her apology with her final breath; Richard’s work number hidden among Amy’s belongings, and the way he’d been so grief-stricken at the funeral and distraught in the following weeks.

  But on the other hand there was Richard. My Richard, who I’d known and trusted my entire life. The man who on Christmas Day had told me that there could never be another woman in the world for him but me, and who then, in front of both sets of our parents, had got down on one knee and produced a small velvet ring box and asked me to marry him. Of all the memories I wished I could ignore, that was the one that kept coming back and slamming into me like a bulldozer.

  I had no appetite for food the following morning, but sat at the kitchen table, topping up my caffeine levels, just in case I needed further assistance in climbing the walls, which I was already scaling quite well. As dawn was breaking I had finally resolved to hold off doing or saying anything until Richard returned the following day. This was one conversation that definitely needed to be held face to face and certainly not over some dodgy mobile connection.

  Across the table, my mother sat carefully shaking out a crackling golden waterfall of cornflakes into a bowl. She liked to feel she was still independent enough to make her own breakfast, which I suppose you could say she did, if pouring out cereal qualified. Her head was bent low, as she tackled the task with all the painstaking concentration of a five-year-old. In the morning light I noticed a fine network of grey threads among the auburn strands and made a mental note to make her a hairdresser’s appointment when I got to work. That was the kind of thing my father would never think of organising, the kind of weight I was meant to be lifting from his shoulders.

  A wave of loss came up from nowhere and side-swiped me with its intensity. Where had she gone, my real mum, not this dressing-gown clad woman sitting in her kitchen, who looked just like her. Because I really needed her now, wherever she was. I needed her wisdom and good advice, and most of all I really needed her to tell me what the hell I was supposed to do next.

  She looked up from her task and smiled at me, and just for a moment I thought she was back. But then she spoke. ‘Do you happen to know where they keep the milk these days?’

  I shook my head sadly. She asked the same question every morning. I got slowly to my feet, feeling and moving more like someone fifty years older. ‘I’m not sure, Mum, let me check in the fridge for you.’

  To say that I wasn’t functioning at maximum efficiency at work that day would be an understatement. I gave the wrong change to three different customers, and only two of them pointed it out; I ordered a hundred copies of a new title instead of ten; and then spectacularly managed to spill a cup of coffee over a box of new deliveries. Frankly, by the end of the day I was lucky I still had a job. Thankfully, Monique was understanding, and despite swearing at me, in French, which was a true indicator of how annoyed she was, she wisely and considerately left me alone. However, an hour before closing time she came up to me with a solemn request. ‘Emma, will you do me a huge favour and piss off home now,’ she said pleasantly, ‘while I still have a business left.’

  I couldn’t really blame her, I thought, as I gathered my bag and car keys and headed for the rear exit. I saw him immediately, a second or two before he noticed me. He was leaning casually against the side of my car, idly looking around at the dingy and deserted loading bays behind the high street shops. The door clicked behind me, and his head turned in my direction. I stood motionless at the top of the two shallow steps and briefly considered turning back and begging Monique to let me stay for the last hour.

  As I approached my car he levered himself from its side, and before saying anything he held up both hands. ‘Now, before you start on me, let me say that I do appreciate this isn’t exactly “staying as far away from you as possible”, as you requested.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ My tone gave nothing away. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m waiting for you to get off work.’

  ‘I don’t finish for another hour.’

  He gave a small shrug as though this didn’t really matter, and leaned back against my car again. ‘Okay, I can wait.’

  I shook my head in exasperated disbelief. ‘How long have you been waiting here, anyway?’

  He glanced down at his watch. ‘Not long. An hour or so, maybe.’ I looked around at the insalubrious surroundings behind the shops, with scattered rubbish and broken wooden pallets stacked high beside overflowing and smelly refuse bins. It wasn’t a pleasant place to have spent part of his afternoon.

  ‘Go home, Jack,’ I said wearily, pushing past him and opening my car door.

  He must have picked up something from my tone, because any trace of banter left his face. ‘I came to apologise. I was way out of line the other night. You had every right to be mad at me. You’ve had more than enough to cope with recently, and the last thing I want to do is cause you any further distress. My behaviour was totally unacceptable, and I can’t excuse what happened. You were just so sad, and I was holding you, and comforting you, and then…’ His voice trailed away.

  In light of everything else that was going on in my life, Jack’s behaviour and the attempted kiss had slid right down the scale of things that were worrying me. But he still didn’t deserve to be completely let off the hook. ‘So kissing other women is your go-to reaction when they need cheering up, is it?’ My tone was scathing. ‘You must have one hell of an understanding wife.’

  His brow furrowed. ‘I don’t have a wife.’

  More lies. I seemed to be surrounded by them suddenly. ‘To Sheridan, my friend, my lover, my inspiration and my wife. For ever, Jack.’ I blushed slightly as I said the words, not realising I had memorised them until I heard them tumbling out of my mouth.

  ‘Bitter Revenge,’ said Jack with a sigh of understanding.

  ‘It was on the dedication page.’

  He nodded. ‘You must have an early edition. It’s not in the later reprints.’

  I was quiet for a long moment.

  ‘I was married, once, a long time ago. It didn’t work out.’ He gave a laugh that sounded more than a little bitter. ‘But none of that excuses my behaviour, I know that. I might be a free agent, but I should have been respectful of the fact that you’re not.’

  ‘Yeah well,’ I said, getting into the driver’s seat. ‘The jury might still be out on that one.’

  I leaned out of the vehicle to grab the handle and slam the car door shut, but Jack’s reactions were faster than mine. With l
ightning speed he placed one hand on the frame and grabbed hold of the edge of the door. Even so, he only managed to prevent it from shutting on his hand by a split second.

  ‘That is a really excellent way of losing your fingers,’ I said, angry that the close shave had made my heart trip and race in panic. He crouched down beside the open door.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said, even little children know better than to put their hands in the way of a slamming car door.’

  There was a sharp intensity in his eyes and more than a hint of impatience in his reply. ‘Not about the fricking door. What did you mean just now about the jury being out?’

  I swung my legs out of the car, forcing him to straighten up and step back as I got out of the vehicle. ‘Just that I might have been accusing the wrong man of cheating.’

  I’m not sure what reaction I was expecting from him. He was the first person who I had even voiced the suspicion to out loud, so maybe everyone was going to stare back at me in the way that made me feel as though I was a defendant on the stand, and he was the prosecutor.

  ‘Are you sure? Because Richard didn’t exactly seem the type.’

  ‘He’s a man, isn’t he?’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Ouch,’ murmured Jack. ‘Not all men cheat, Emma. Some of us can be trusted.’

  I sighed, and tried to remove the bitter edge to my words. ‘Well, right now I don’t know anything, for sure,’ I admitted.

  ‘So you’ve not spoken to him about it? You have no substantial evidence?’

  This man had been watching way too many courtroom dramas.