‘Oh God, I’m so drunk,’ he said, as if that made everything all right. I could see his head swivelling around like a meerkat’s as he tried to spot Karen in the crowd. ‘I need to take a piss,’ he added before staggering off.
When I turned around I caught Karen’s eye, and by the hurt that flickered on her face I knew that she had seen everything.
The next morning the two of us travelled to Bangkok alone.
I’d pleaded ignorance of course. Said it was all him. That he was a sleaze, just like Dylan. She was so angry she never even said goodbye to him and we left before he got up. I admired her for that. She was stronger than she first appeared, although I noticed that she packed the Buddha he’d given her.
Maybe I should have realised how much she loved him. I can see that now, in hindsight. I can see that I made a terrible mistake in what I did. But I was young and hot-headed. Resentful. I’d wanted to punish her for being the one that Harry had chosen.
How was I to know that she would end up punishing me?
27
Things had changed between us. On the train back to Bangkok I sensed her taking sneaky peeks at me from behind her book – some soppy rom-com – as though trying to figure me out. But she had my measure, surely? She knew what she was letting herself in for when she first heard me hurling the c-word at those guys; when she agreed to swap seats; when she got a tattoo to show me she wasn’t a coward. She’d wanted to impress me, to please me. She must have known I liked Harry too, but she hadn’t wanted me to have him. Oh no, she could be selfish when it suited her.
It was the end of August by now, and rain drummed on the roof of the train. We didn’t speak much as we sat opposite each other, so different to how it had been three months previously; no excitable laughter or getting-to-know-each-other chatter, no drinking cans of lager or banter. Karen read her book with a sullen look on her face and I stared out of the window, following the raindrops with my eyes as they snaked down the glass. When it was time for bed, we made up our bunks wordlessly. Karen climbed to the top and I didn’t see or hear from her again until the morning.
I would miss Harry too, I wanted to tell her. But it was for the best; if I couldn’t have him then she couldn’t either. I lay there in the dark, the occasional light flashing past and the low hum of conversation from the other passengers keeping me awake.
By the time we reached Bangkok she had begun to bore me with her sulky silences. I started to think I was going to have to cut her loose. I didn’t sense her admiration any more, just her disapproval. It reminded me too much of Sean.
We trudged around the city for most of the day, visiting the Grand Palace and the Reclining Buddha, even though we’d both seen them before. We were aimless, really, engrossed in our own little worlds, missing Harry and the others but not wanting to admit it to each other. The sky was overcast by the afternoon, the weather humid. We took a boat down the river to see the houses built on stilts. I was amazed as the fish jumped up, mouths gaping open for the food the guide threw them, before disappearing back into the murky water. Karen sat staring into the distance, her eyes full of sadness, ignoring everything around her.
Karen answered my questions in a monotone as we stepped off the boat, pretending to be engrossed in the architecture. I wanted to tell her to get over it, that he was just a guy, but I acted like there was nothing wrong between us as I studied my guide book. ‘This hostel sounds cheap,’ I said as we veered down a dusty residential side road in a less salubrious part of town. ‘If they’ve got space, shall we stay here tonight, and then we can travel north tomorrow?’
She lifted her shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. ‘Sure.’ She glanced up at the building. It was narrow and set back between two shopfronts, with large glass windows and a bonsai tree wilting by the entrance.
She shadowed me through the hallway and stood, examining the mosaic-tiled flooring while I enquired about rooms.
‘We are not busy tonight,’ said an attractive Thai woman with a beaming smile. She had glossy dark hair swept up in a bun and coral lipstick that didn’t look quite right on her face. She led us up two floors and down a corridor to a narrow room with two sets of bunk beds. A fly buzzed at the open window between the bunks. There was no air conditioning. The room felt muggy and the walls seemed to tilt inwards. I said we’d take it.
Karen collapsed onto one of the lower bunks. She had dark rings around her eyes and her face was pale. She curled up on top of the sheets, still fully clothed, her knees tucked up into her chest.
I told her I was popping out to the 7-Eleven on the corner, promising to be right back. When I returned, armed with bags of crisps and cans of fizzy drinks, she was sitting up, staring into the distance, hugging her knees, a look I couldn’t quite read on her face. I offered her a can and she took it without a word; it hissed and bubbled as she opened it.
I went to the loo. When I came back she was fast asleep, her eyes fluttering behind her lids, the Coke can by the side of the bed, opened yet untouched. I picked it up and drank it, not wanting it to go to waste, and settled down on the bottom of the bunk opposite. On the window sill between our beds sat her Buddha. On impulse, I picked it up and shoved it into my backpack. She had to stop looking at him, mooning over Harry. I was doing her a favour.
I must have fallen asleep too, because when I opened my eyes I was sprawled out on the bed, still fully dressed. I’d been sleeping heavily and felt groggy, wondering what had woken me. It was so dark it was as if my eyes were still closed and there was a funny smell in the air, thick and cloying. I could hear shrieks coming from the corridor and the pounding of feet.
I sat bolt upright, hitting my head on the bunk above and blinking as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. My whole body felt lethargic. Somebody was hammering on the bedroom door as though trying to break it in. What was going on? Then the door burst open, smoke filling the room, curling around the bed posts, thick and black, stinging my eyes and making me cough. A fireman was standing in the doorway. He shouted to me in Thai. I tried to get up but my legs felt heavy and gave way so that I fell to the floor. ‘Karen!’ I called. ‘Karen! Get up!’ The smoke was so dense that I couldn’t tell if she was out of bed or still asleep. I tried to get to my knees, the smoke jamming the back of my throat, threatening to choke me. I couldn’t breathe, I was losing the edges of my vision. Suddenly I felt hands grab me and scoop me up, somebody speaking. A man’s voice. Calm. I realised it was the fireman; he was carrying me down the corridor. My lungs were working overtime as I tried to inhale but there was no air, just the acrid smoke, like a thick duvet rammed down my throat. I was suffocating. And then we were heading towards an opening, a rectangle of black sky just visible through the smoke, and finally I was taking deep, desperate breaths of fresh air.
The fireman clattered down a metal stairwell with me slung over his shoulder. A group of teenagers were standing on the ground, gawping in fascinated horror as he dropped me to the pavement. I crumpled onto the hot tarmac and stared as the fire ate away at the top floor of the hostel like some ravenous beast.
Karen. Karen was in there.
‘My friend!’ I pointed in the direction of the hostel. He ran back inside just as one of the windows exploded with a popping sound, glass splintering and raining down on us. There was a cry. The group cowered, covering their heads with their hands while I looked on in dismay. A policeman yelled at us in Thai, then in English: ‘Stand back!’
It was utter chaos after that. More fire engines turned up, lurid yellow, screaming to a halt outside the hostel, and I was ushered into an ambulance, dazed and still coughing. As the fire worsened, I could only watch, wrapped in a scratchy blanket the colour of horse dung, shivering despite the heat. After a while I was taken to a hospital, where I was checked for smoke inhalation. When the doctor asked for my name I lied. I didn’t want to reveal my real name in case it made the newspapers. I could just imagine the headline: ‘British backpacker survives hostel fire in Thailand’ – and then Sean would
know where I was. I had no documents on me, no details – they would have gone up in smoke along with everything else.
I could hardly sleep that night. My chest felt heavy, as though the smoke was still in my lungs. I thought of Karen. Had she managed to escape?
The next morning, I was discharged. I had to fill out forms, which I did in a fake name. I went back to the hostel. It was unrecognisable, the top floor completely burnt out, blackened, and seeming to shimmer in the heat, the lower floors covered in ash. Officials were picking their way through the wreckage. My belongings had been destroyed. When I asked if an English girl had been found, a harassed-looking policeman with a notebook shook his head sadly. He took down my details, saying they might want to interview me for the investigation. But I never heard any more from them.
Over the next few days, I rang around all the hospitals to find out if she had been taken in, or was having treatment, but each one said the same thing: no Karen Fisher had been admitted.
Eight died in the fire that night, three members of staff and five backpackers. There were seven survivors and two missing. Luckily the hostel had been relatively empty, otherwise there would have been a lot more casualties. There was no mention of my name. Or Karen’s. Most things had been obliterated in the fire, no records survived, just bodies found, blackened and burnt.
I was lost in the days and weeks that followed, numb, going through the motions as I contacted the British Embassy, applied for a new passport in my maiden name of Elizabeth Davies – a way of escaping Sean permanently. I’m not too proud to admit that I missed Karen; I missed her companionship, somebody to have a laugh with, even her crap jokes.
It’s funny how life can change direction so suddenly, as though everything is being engineered by a higher being. My dad was a vicar, and both he and my mum spent their time trying to instil Christ into me, so that even now I can’t quite shake the belief that there might be something in it, even though I’d rebelled against it as a teenager, running away from home at fifteen and living in a squat with a group of like-minded people until I met Sean.
I’d told Karen my parents were dead, but the truth was my mum left. She’d left my dad and she’d left me. I haven’t clapped eyes on her since I was twelve. She would spend ages sitting on the edge of my bed in the evenings, before she ran out on us, spouting words from the Bible at me, telling me that I needed to cleanse myself of sin. I often wondered if she’d done the same, after she fucked off with the man from our local church. Or maybe those rules didn’t apply to her. My dad blamed me, saying I was difficult, a spoilt, only child. I wasn’t ‘quite right’, he said, because I didn’t conform to the way he lived his life as a pillar of the community, in our quaint chocolate-box village. After Mum left he was always getting called in to school because I’d played truant or got caught smoking behind the bike sheds. When I was seen kissing Theo Masters in the boys’ loos my dad had been furious, branding me a ‘slut, like your mother!’ We rowed and I’d stormed out. I never saw him again.
As a kid, I imagined God like a puppet master, hovering above us all, pulling our strings, deciding which way our lives would go as though on a whim.
Marrying Sean so young had been an escape. He was desirable because he was older, suave, well-off, with his own flat. He had his own construction company. I’d been impressed by him, but I’d jumped from one disaster to another.
When Karen had said I was a tough cookie she hadn’t known the half of it.
28
I’d only been back in the country a couple of days – the first time in nearly ten years – when I saw her photo. I was flicking through a copy of the Mail on Sunday that had been left behind in a café, some greasy spoon in Huddersfield. It was a few weeks out of date, middle of March 2017, but I began reading it anyway. It was the name in the caption I recognised. Because it was my name: Elizabeth Elliot. What a coincidence, I thought as I sipped my coffee and re-read the story of a teacher who had saved the life of a pupil in a fire. A teacher with the same name as me. Not that I was a teacher – I never did take up my place at the teacher-training college. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I’d stayed on in Thailand for a few years instead. Then I travelled around the world, working in bars and restaurants, always moving on after a few years. Then I met a Spanish man, Matteo, fell in love, and we were happy living in Barcelona, until everything went tragically wrong three months ago.
I’d only returned to England because my dad had died, and only to see if the bastard had left me anything. I was his only child, his next of kin, and I needed money since I’d run from Matteo.
It didn’t dawn on me at first. It wasn’t until I took a closer look at her picture, noticing those large hazel eyes and the smudge on her right arm in her sleeveless blouse; her matching tattoo, almost blurred if you weren’t looking for it. Her hair was different, darker now and cropped, with a sweeping fringe. The same style as mine had once been, as it was in my old passport photo.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Karen Fisher? How could it be her when she’d died in the fire? I peered more closely at her face, at the dimples as she smiled down at the children at her feet. It was a surreal moment. When you spend nearly ten years thinking that someone has died and that it was somehow your fault, well, I went into a kind of shock. I sat there, shaking, feeling as though I’d downed too many cups of coffee. A waitress had to come over to check that I was all right.
Why was she using my name? What did it all mean?
I wanted, needed, answers.
It wasn’t hard to find her address. Amazing how easy it is to find details from a newspaper article. Teacher. Independent school. Bath.
I took the early morning train to Bath. I’d never been before but the pretty Georgian buildings and the twee little parks turned me cold. It reminded me of York, of my unhappy childhood. Of course Karen would end up somewhere like this; I couldn’t imagine her slumming it in Sheffield or Birmingham or any other urban, cosmopolitan city. She wasn’t cool enough. She was too vanilla. For the whole journey her deceit churned in my mind, around and around. She let me believe she was dead. Was she trying to escape me? Maybe she’d been rescued and ended up in hospital? But I had rung around all the hospitals. She’d never been admitted.
I waited outside the school that wet day at the end of March, obscured by my umbrella. I recognised her straight away despite her change of hairstyle. From a distance she could have passed for me, I suppose, or for what I used to look like. My hair was nearly down to my waist now, my face brown and weathered from spending too long in the sun, so that I looked older than my twenty-nine years. Karen, though, looked fresh-faced and, more annoyingly, she looked happy. She had a coat slung over her shoulders, one arm in a sling, and she was holding a polka-dot umbrella. She almost skipped through the school gates, choruses of, ‘Goodbye, Ms Elliot, have a lovely break,’ echoing in her wake from pupils and parents alike. I followed her as she made the ten-minute journey home by foot. I saw her enter a basement flat in a wide, busy street and watched from the pavement above as she kissed a tall, handsome man with blond hair in their kitchen. My life had turned to tatters and yet she had everything.
I stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast a few streets away and did some more research on my phone. I found out that she’d taken up my place at Middlesex to do a PGCE. She didn’t have a degree of her own, I remembered, so she’d clearly had to pretend to be me to use mine. My purse, passport, National Insurance number … everything had been in my backpack. I’d thought it had been destroyed by the fire. Yet Karen must have had them all this time.
I’d never hated anybody so much in all my life as in that moment. The anger was so deep, it swelled and grew so that I felt pregnant with it.
The bitch had stolen my life. And I was determined to get it back.
29
I made enquiries at the school, found out that they were on their Easter break. I skulked around outside her flat, but it was always in darkness, although I once noticed t
he old biddy from upstairs watching me from her bay window. I wondered if they were on holiday, whether my journey had been wasted. Then a stroke of luck: on the Wednesday I saw a light flickering on in the window below the pavement. It was mid-morning and rain hung in the air, the sky the colour of the nicotine stains on the ceiling of the squat I’d lived in. I descended the steps, ready to confront her, hoping her bloke would be at work. I knocked on her door, my heart hammering, wondering what I would do when I saw her, what I would say. I heard footsteps padding down the hallway, a low, deep cough, and I froze. It sounded like a man. I was about to turn around and run back up the stairs when the door was wrenched open. And there, standing in the doorway, was Sean.
We stared at each other, our faces mirror-images of shock. He looked different: older, more weathered, less groomed. He’d been handsome once, with a charm I hadn’t been able to resist. Until I’d finally grown up and seen through to the bully he really was. The suits and long wool coats he used to favour were now replaced by jeans and a fleece. His eyes were harder than I remembered, his body stockier and more muscular, as though he’d been pumping steroids.
He found his voice first. ‘Beth?’
I nodded, fear cutting into me, wondering why he was in Karen’s flat.
‘What the fuck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Cornwall!’ he growled.
‘Cornwall?’ I could barely breathe, let alone speak, and the word came out in a squeak. Before I could react further he’d grabbed me by the throat, dragging me into the hallway and slamming me up against the wall, his fingers pressing into my windpipe. He kicked the door shut with his foot. ‘Yes, Cornwall,’ he spat; his breath smelt of coffee and I flinched. What had I ever seen in him? He repulsed me.
‘Please … I can’t breathe …’ I spluttered. He released the pressure on my throat and grabbed my upper arms instead, his fingers pressing into my flesh. There would be bruising later.
Last Seen Alive Page 19