Keep going, Grace, I whisper to myself, you can do this.
By Alice’s bed, I notice a pool of water, and reaching down I find the jacket she was wearing earlier, soaked through. So she’s been back here, then. But why leave the place in such a mess?
Unless she didn’t do this at all, of course. My eyes fall on her suitcase, half-open, with sandals spilling from the insides. Someone was looking for something in here. The question is, what?
Quickly, my hands fumbling, I take a photo of the room with my phone, somehow wanting proof to show Hannah. For some reason I feel as though the moment I step outside the room, everything will rearrange itself, go back to normal, like some sort of twisted version of Alice in Wonderland. I save the photo, then with one last look around the room, I go back outside.
I look around for Hannah, but then, over by Lion Lodge, my lodge, something catches my eye. There is something in the plunge pool, something big, the shape of it moving slightly in the bright blue of the water. Terror grips my chest.
I am running as fast as I can, my feet skimming over the wet boards, my eyes focused solely on the dark shape in the water. I know what it is.
‘Hannah!’ I call. ‘Hannah!’ I need her to help me. As I run, my left foot collides with something and I trip – my hands coming out automatically, hitting the wooden decking hard but saving my face. Scrambling to get up, my palms throbbing, I see what tripped me up: one of Alice’s shoes is lying abandoned on the decking, the strap torn, the gold fray of it glinting. A half-sob escapes me; I get up, continue to run, though my legs feel like they might give way.
In the water, Alice’s dark hair is inky black. There is a bloom of red drifting into the water around her head, the particles of it separating and rejoining, colliding and disconnecting in dark spirals as the water swirls.
I kneel down, my breath coming in hot, ragged pants. She is face down. Pushing aside my fears, I plunge my hands into the water, grip onto her shoulder, trying to turn her around but she is heavy, so heavy, and I’m not strong enough. My tears are falling fast now, joining the water below, pointless weeping that won’t help anyone and certainly won’t save our friend. Footsteps sound behind me and I can hear Hannah’s horrified scream, and then she is next to me, reaching for Alice’s other arm.
‘It’s not working,’ I say, and I take a deep breath, then jump feet first into the pool. One of us needs to be behind her, to push her upwards. The pool is much deeper than it looks; my feet flail before finding the bottom, and water splashes up my nose and into my eyes, making them sting. The old fears clamber up my throat; the water feels all-encompassing, as though it will drag me down too, claim both of us if I don’t fight to survive.
My arms encircle Alice’s waist, and Hannah grunts as together we heave our friend’s body from the water, both of us wincing at the dull thud of her landing on the decking. There is no sound from her – no coughing, no spluttering. Her feet are bare, the soles dirty.
‘My God,’ Hannah says, and I can’t speak, I am just staring at Alice’s face. She is deathly-white, aside from the make-up that is smeared across her cheeks – black mascara, red lipstick, orange smears of foundation that have run in the pool.
I bend down, put my mouth to hers, my hands on her sodden chest the way they taught us in school, but it’s been years since I learned any kind of first aid and I can’t remember what to do, I can’t remember. My mind is desperately trying to calculate how long it has been since we first heard her scream, how long she has been submerged in the pool, alone. I imagine her lungs filling up like balloons, the terror she must have felt as she gasped for breath, the heavy, insistent pull of the water as it dragged her body under, her eyes, her head. Did she think of Tom? Did she think of us?
Blood is steadily forming in a dark, sticky patch around Alice’s head, like spilt oil, and even as I cry I can hear Hannah’s voice, telling me that we are too late, telling me what I already know, that Alice, our friend, is dead: she is gone. My fingers find her neck, the slick white skin of it, clawing for a pulse. There is nothing.
‘Grace,’ Hannah is saying. ‘Grace.’
I realise I have been holding my own breath, and release it in a moan, clutching Alice’s T-shirt, sodden wet, in between my fingers, thinking of how only an hour ago she was shouting at us both, telling us to fuck off, severing any last ties of our friendship with her cruel tongue and sharp memory. But of course it cannot be severed, can it? Friendships like these can’t be put to bed, no matter what happens. Not really. Not ever.
All of us know that, deep down. Don’t we?
Memories crowd my vision, threatening to overtake me. I picture Tom back in London, oblivious, waiting for her to come home, perhaps enjoying the freedom for now, playing on the Xbox uninterrupted. I think of Alice’s parents, Linda and Dave, at home in their suburban bubble down in Cornwall, maybe out in the garden, carrying on their day with no idea that their daughter is currently lying lifeless in my arms. Her face is so pale, stark against the darkness of the decking. Her jaw is slack, her voice forever stilled. I’ve often wanted Alice to stop talking. I’ve wished she’d be quiet, let someone else speak, I’ve resented the way she talks over me and quietens me, stamps me down as though I am an irritating mosquito. But I didn’t want this.
Did I? Guilt pulls at me, fast and deep.
There’s a hand on my shoulder: Hannah. She tugs at me, urgently.
‘We’re not safe here,’ she says. ‘We have to get help, call for the police.’ Her eyes, usually so calm and placatory, are wide with fright and I can see her deliberately avoiding looking at Alice, her eyes flitting almost anywhere except at our friend’s cold, still features.
I let her pull me up to my feet, and she puts an arm around me, her cold wet skin snaking its way around my waist. My teeth are chattering, my jaw beginning to ache. I know I am at risk of going into shock, force myself to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth.
‘Grace, come on!’ Hannah says, her voice high and desperate.
‘We can’t just leave her here!’ I say, horrified, and Hannah looks at me.
‘What else are we going to do, Grace? I can’t lift her. Neither of us can.’ She sniffs. Droplets of water are running from the ends of her hair, dampening her T-shirt. ‘It’s not like she’ll know, is it?’
I stare at her, shocked by the tone of her voice. It seems at once cold, uncaring, as though a switch has flicked inside her.
‘Hannah,’ I say slowly, ‘this is our friend. I’m not leaving her out here in the middle of Botswana on her own. What if something – gets to her?’
She looks at me, and her eyes look slightly strange. Different.
‘Fine,’ she says, ‘have it your way.’
She lets go of me and turns back to Alice’s body, bends down and grabs one of her sodden arms. Grimacing, she begins pulling Alice away from the plunge pool, but to my horror it looks as though she’s trying to roll her off the decking, down into the river water below. Something isn’t right about this – she’s behaving strangely.
‘Stop it!’ I shout. ‘Stop it!’
Hannah is panting, out of breath; her face is flushed and her eyes are wild. She’s not coping, I realise, she must have gone into shock. She isn’t thinking straight because this isn’t like Hannah, it isn’t like Hannah at all.
‘We can’t have the animals trying to get her, you said!’ Hannah shouts, her voice too loud, spittle forming in the corners of her mouth. She is almost sobbing, her breath coming in short, sharp pants.
‘We need to bring her to safety,’ I say, trying to keep my voice calm and gentle, ignoring the way my heart rate is accelerating as I watch Hannah drag our friend’s body across the decking as though it’s a sack of rubbish. Nausea swirls in my stomach. I take a deep breath, trying to think, changing my mind several times in the space of a few seconds.
‘Come on, Han, let’s go inside now,’ I say. ‘We can come back for Alice. I think you need to sit down for a bit.’
/> I am cold, despite the fact that the air is still warm; my clothes are soaking and I feel chilled, as though the very bones of me are cold and will never be warm again. The darkness feels like it is closing in on us, our horrible tableau – three friends, one dead, and one who seems to be losing her mind. But despite the horror of the situation, I know I have to think clearly – what happened to Alice may not have been an accident. I have to make sure Hannah and I are safe. And I can’t rely on Hannah anymore.
I can only trust myself.
Hannah lets go of Alice’s left arm, and it falls back onto the decking, landing with a sickening thud. I take hold of Hannah, who is crying now, fat tears falling down her cheeks, and begin to guide her back towards her own lodge, murmuring to her the whole while: ‘Ssh, it’s OK, it’s going to be OK.’ It is as though our roles have reversed; I feel odd, but a tiny part of me, the part I’d never admit to, the part I’d never tell anyone about, is relishing the idea of being in control. Hannah is listening to me now. I am no longer being ignored.
Chapter Thirteen
Hannah
Grace shepherds her back to her lodge as though Hannah is a child.
‘Come on, there you go,’ she says as they reach the threshold. Hannah can feel her hand on the small of her back, hot and damp against her shirt. She pushes open the door to the lodge and Hannah stumbles inside. Everything is exactly as it was before – the luxurious bed, the ornate lamps – but somehow it feels different. Tainted. Darker.
She can’t stop picturing Alice’s body – the swirl of her blood, dark red in the water. Did she slip into the pool? Or was she pushed? Hannah imagines hands on the top of her head, forcing her down; Alice pushing up against them, desperately trying to get air. Why would she have gone that close to the plunge pool in the first place, in the middle of a rainstorm? It doesn’t make any sense.
She thinks of Grace’s figure disappearing before her, the flash of her hair as she turned the corner, out of her sight as she ran to keep up. Alice screamed before that, but did Grace have time to get to her before Hannah did? Did she push her, then run back to Hannah? Could she have? Hannah thinks of the look on her face when Alice swore at them – fuck off, Grace. Alice’s little cruelties, stacking up over the years. She wasn’t always nice to Grace. There is no getting around that fact.
‘Why don’t you call Chris?’ Grace tells Hannah rather than asks her, guiding her into the room and over to the bed. Hannah sits down, shakily, not quite trusting her legs to carry her any further. Alice’s eyes stare up at her from her consciousness, dead and unseeing. Guilt claws at her, gripping her by the throat. I know what you did. No. No! What happened two years ago has nothing to do with tonight. It’s unrelated; it must be.
‘Hannah, Hannah!’ Grace has hold of Hannah’s shoulders, is shaking her almost roughly. It’s only then that she realises she has been saying it aloud.
‘No! No!’
‘It’s OK, Hannah, it’s OK,’ Grace is saying, but her eyes are worried and she looks almost frightened. Of her! Ridiculous. But Hannah knows she’s not thinking straight; her thoughts are becoming tangled, the past is confusing itself with the present, and all she can see is her friend’s body, the dark, unholy mass of it.
‘I need you to stay in here for a bit, Hannah,’ Grace is saying, but it’s as if her words are coming through a mist, or a fog – taking too long to reach Hannah. Things feel slurred, as though she is drunk, but Hannah knows it is shock, anxiety, a form of panic. It has happened to her before, once, in those endless, lonely days after she gave birth to Max, where the world tilted and tipped around her and she felt inebriated with exhaustion. She never thought it would happen again. She told herself that it wouldn’t.
‘Where’s your phone, Hannah?’ Grace is asking her, her eyebrows raised. She lifts her hands and to Hannah’s horror, she sees that one of them is stained with red, with Alice’s blood. Vomit rises in her stomach. She can’t do this anymore.
But Grace is pointing at the pocket of Hannah’s shorts, to where her iPhone is nestled, oblivious, and numbly Hannah pulls it out, hands it to her. She is careful not to let Grace see what else is in her pocket; her fingers brush against it, a small spike of reassurance.
‘No,’ Grace says, ‘you keep it. Call Chris, tell him what’s happened. Keep the door shut, stay inside. I’m going to go find help, Hannah, OK, I’m going to go find help but I’ll be back. I promise.’
‘Can’t… lock…’ Hannah says, thinking about how weird it is that they have no keys, that none of these lodges is really secure, that whoever is out there could be coming for her next. If someone got to Alice, there’s nothing to stop them getting to her too.
But Grace isn’t listening to her, she’s leaving, turning her back and closing the door behind her. Hannah sits, sobbing, on the beautiful white bed that is now stained with blood from the smears on her hands.
The door slams, jolted by the wind. After a little while, Hannah stops crying, and picks up her phone. Her thumb hovers over her contacts – Chris’s photograph smiles out at her. In it, he’s holding Max, just a few days old at the point the picture was taken. Max’s face is just a scrunched-up little ball of pink, Hannah can barely make it out at all, but Chris’s smile is wide, it fills the screen. His eyes stare out at her, willing her to call him. To do the right thing.
Instead, she swipes her finger across the screen to call someone else – the one person who listened to her that night, the person who she thinks might be able to help. She lied when she said she didn’t have his number, wanting to see which of the others would offer it up, confirm her suspicions. Hannah tried to call him earlier, and now she tries again. She knows he will help her – he has helped her once before, and promised he would again.
But Nathaniel doesn’t answer the phone.
Grace
It’s so dark as I try to drag the heavy, wet weight of Alice’s body towards my lodge. I know I need to get some rest – we haven’t eaten all day and exhaustion has seeped into my bones, my muscles already straining and my throat dry from the horror and the heat. I do my best to move her gently, but it’s impossible – I’m not strong enough and so I am forced to screw my eyes shut when her head bumps against the slats in the wooden decking, leaving behind it a viscous trail of blood; to think about something else as her T-shirt tears, the sound ripping through me.
My breathing is loud and ragged, and despite the tiredness, my body is on high alert – as though it is waiting for whoever did this to Alice to come for me too. A hand on my shoulder, a blow to my head. An arm closing its way around my neck. I force myself to stop moving for a moment, to take some deep breaths. My throat feels as though it’s closing up, but I know that it’s just panic, the anxiety making itself known as it so often does. I think desperately of my therapist back in London, the one I started seeing after what happened. Her calm, clear voice fills my head and I force myself to listen to it, to focus on staying in control. My clothes are soaked too; water drips off me, forms puddles in my wake.
With Hannah safely in her lodge, there is no sign of anyone else. The darkness is all-encompassing, and I think longingly of home, of London, of the bright green lights of the off-licence on my road, the glare of the car headlights that light up my dingy bedroom window when I am trying to sleep, the golden rectangles of bright pub windows. What I wouldn’t give to see any of that now, to have the feeling of normality wrap itself around me like a comforting cloak. I want my small life back. At least it was safe.
I am holding Alice’s wet sleeve, but as we reach my lodge the material slips slightly, and suddenly, her cold, lifeless hand is in mine. I shudder, and the urge to drop it is strong, but I force myself not to. This is Alice. My friend.
Instead, I look down at her hand, feel the bones of it in mine. How many times have I held this hand? Thousands. Too many to count. I remember us as teenagers, giddy on vodka and youth, hands linked as we walked up the stairs of a shitty, sticky nightclub; as twenty-somethings, me holdi
ng her hand on the duvet as she sobbed about her horrible ex-boyfriend. The three of us, hands linked together at Felicity’s mother’s wake – we’d all known Diane, we’d all gone to support her. Michael, at the front of the church, his arm around Felicity, her body pressed tightly into his side.
I know Alice found me irritating, and that I found her rude. But we shared so much together. That has to count for something. I didn’t confide in her when I should have, though. I didn’t let her in.
Her nails are painted red, but the polish has chipped, and her skin is wrinkled, prune-like from the plunge pool. She wears a silver ring on her forefinger, the metal twisted around her bone. It is icy to the touch. I wonder if Tom gave it to her.
Tom.
I know I will have to make the calls, find help. Hannah seems in no state to do so. But I can’t bear the thought of having to break news like this – life-altering news, news nobody can ever come back from. I’m not cut out for it, I realise, then inwardly chastise myself for being so selfish at a time like this. I’m letting myself get sentimental. Alice found me annoying, at the end, I know she did. An irritant. But still, we loved one another, underneath it all. Didn’t we? We all accepted this invitation, welcomed each other back into our lives.
I feel as though I don’t know anything anymore.
As carefully as I can, I shift Alice’s body over the ridge of my doorway, move her inside so that at least she is in the warm and dry, safe from whatever is out there. For a second, I close my eyes and picture it: the heavy paw of a lion dragging its claws across her chest, the sight of red flesh, dripping blood, spilled organs. A mass of ants crawling over her body, beetles feasting on her eye sockets. No. I can’t let that happen. I’m doing the right thing.
The Wild Girls Page 15