Anything for Him
Page 14
‘Fliss—’
‘I met Jay—Jason a week later. I think I told him exactly what happened while I was drunk – in any case, he seemed to know the next day, so I must have told him. He helped me… he helped me to forget…’
‘Fliss,’ Mark said gently, ‘you don’t have to feel any loyalty to him. Even if he helped you for a while, he’s not helping you now.’
‘I wanted to help him, too. He was in a bad place, his relationship with his family had broken down, he didn’t have anything, not even a proper place to live.’
‘You loved him?’
I nodded.
‘Do you still love him?’
I hesitated, then I nodded again. I could see no point in denying it.
‘I do get it,’ Mark said, ‘I… when I was still at school, I had a friend. Jay. He was… he was always getting himself in trouble, he was one of these people who seem to want their life to be as difficult and stressful as they can possibly make it.’
My breath caught in my throat. I started to shake, but I held my hands in my lap and hoped it didn’t show.
‘When he was fifteen, he started going out with this girl. It was… okay to begin with, I guess. But he… he hurt her. She was going to have his baby and she tried to make it work with him, but sometimes… sometimes you just can’t make things work. Not with someone like that.’
‘What…’ I said, my voice almost a whisper. ‘What happened to her?’
Mark suddenly became guarded. ‘She… she moved away,’ he said, ‘her parents got divorced, and she moved away with her mum.’
…
I carried on talking with Mark for a while longer, but it was getting late and I was nervous. Jay would be expecting me to make an excuse and go back out to him.
‘Mark,’ I said, ‘I have to go.’
‘I’m not comfortable letting you go back to him,’ he said, ‘please, stay here. He can’t do anything to you while you’re here with me.’
‘Mark, he will,’ I said, ‘if he… if he knew I was with another man, do you really think he’d sit back and take it?’
‘I’m not scared of him,’ Mark said.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘listen to me. For us to be together, you would have to give up everything. We’d have to move somewhere far away from here, and stay hiding for the rest of our lives. I can’t do that to you. This is my mess.’
Mark thought about it. ‘You should go to the police,’ he said.
‘Mark, you don’t get it. Even if he went to prison, he’d get out again! Then he’d have more reason than ever to come after me.’
‘You can’t keep running. Not for your whole life.’
‘I can,’ I said, ‘if I need to. There’s nothing to keep me here. And… and if I left on my own I don’t think he’d be so desperate to find me.’
‘When… when exactly do you think he’ll try to take you away with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘he just said after the wedding. I don’t know where he’s planning to go, he probably needs time to sort something out—’
‘Then we’ll have to beat him to it,’ Mark said.
‘What?’
‘Leave it all to me,’ Mark said, ‘if you’re determined to go back today, then go back. Act normally, and I will get something planned.’
‘You… you’re serious?’
‘I told you. I love you, Felicity.’
‘I… I love you too,’ I said.
30
Jay questioned me at length about what had happened with Mark, but I managed to give him answers that reassured him. I had no idea what Mark would plan in terms of getting me away from “Jason”, but I’d asked him not to ever mention about it in any messages to me, and to keep all the plans to himself, because as far as I was concerned the less I knew about it the better and safer for us both. Also, more importantly, I knew any messages from him would be intercepted by Jay.
‘I think I might have found us a place,’ Jay said when we went to bed that night.
‘Oh?’
‘A house, in the country,’ Jay said, ‘away from all the noise and people.’
I tried to smile. ‘That sounds… nice,’ I said.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ Jay said. ‘I know you don’t want to go.’
‘I do, I just—’
‘When you’re there, you’ll like it,’ he told me. ‘And it’ll be better for when we have a family.’
I thought about my pills. I’d smuggled them into work one day, thrown the boxes away, and hidden the sheets of pills inside a painkiller box instead, which I kept in my handbag.
‘Jay, why do you want to have a baby so badly?’ I asked him. I couldn’t get out of my mind what Mark had said about Sammie being pregnant.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he said, ‘I love you, and I want to have a family with you.’
‘I know, but… why right now? We haven’t been together long, why not wait for another few months, at least—’
‘Don’t you want to have a family with me?’ Jay asked, his eyes narrowed.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, of course I do.’
‘Good,’ he said. Then he reached across and opened the top drawer of the bedside table. ‘I got you something,’ he said. He took out a small, smart-looking box and handed it to me, and when I opened it I saw a necklace – a silver chain with a little blue pendant; a sapphire.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, though I felt strange when I looked at it, as though it was making me half-remember something; something I’d seen before.
The next morning, when Jay went into the bathroom, I remembered the shoe box in the wardrobe that had Sammie’s picture in it, and the more I thought about it the more sure I was that I had seen the necklace in the photo he’d shown me. I tried to put it out of my mind but I couldn’t, until I had to find out for certain.
I waited until I was sure Jay was otherwise occupied – I heard the toilet flush, the taps running, and when the sound of the shower started and I could be sure he’d be busy for a while, I quickly leapt out of bed and across to the wardrobe.
The box was easy enough to find. Jay had quite a lot of clothes and shoes, but not many other possessions, and the shoe box sat pretty much on its own on the shelf above the rail of clothes. I made a careful mental note of exactly where on the shelf it was, and slid it down gently, placing it on the floor and kneeling in front of it.
I quickly found the picture; Sammie, Mark and Jay standing together in their school uniforms, Jay with his arm around his girlfriend. To begin with I wondered whether I had imagined the necklace, but then I made it out, a little pendant that lay against her striped school tie; a teardrop shaped sapphire dangling from a thin silver chain. My blood ran cold. Although I had no way of knowing for certain, I was convinced that the necklace she was wearing had been bought for her by him, and for a moment I panicked as I thought the one he’d given me was literally the one she’d used to wear; that he’d kept it and passed it on to each new girlfriend as if they were just a long conveyor belt of new, interchangeable Sammies. I looked as closely as I could, though my head was spinning and it was hard to concentrate, but I eventually realised that the two necklaces were not identical. Sammie’s necklace contained only a sapphire, while mine had a second stone above it at the point of the teardrop – a little tiny diamond. I quickly dropped the photo back inside the box. It could be a coincidence, but I didn’t think so. Jay was obviously still obsessed with Sammie, and when it came to her, I didn’t think there would be any coincidences.
I was going to put the box back, but a strange impulse made me dig deeper into it, though I had no idea why or what for. To begin with I didn’t think anything was any different to when he’d showed me its contents before, until at the bottom of the box I felt something small and plastic. I took hold of it, and when I pulled it out I saw it was a memory stick. In the bathroom, the sound of the shower continued. He’d been in there maybe five minutes, so I knew I had at least ten or more likely fifteen to
spare. I went into my old bedroom and grabbed my laptop, and took it back into Jay’s room to sit on the floor by the box again. I had no idea what to expect from the memory stick. I supposed it would probably just be more photos, or maybe even old school work or something; I’d kept some rubbish like that, or at least I had done before it got lost in the fire. Even the fact I hadn’t seen the memory stick in the box before wasn’t that significant. It may well have been in there and I just missed it; I had been more interested in the pictures than if there was anything left inside the box.
My laptop seemed to take an inordinately long time to start. My hands began to shake, and I almost lost my nerve, but I focussed on the sound of the shower, and took some deep breaths. I’d have plenty of warning before Jay came out. Even if he suddenly stopped showering, I’d have ample time to put everything back while he was drying himself – something he did almost as meticulously as washing.
I slid the memory stick into my laptop. There was one folder on it, simply called “pictures”. I opened it without any further hesitation, and once I realised what was in it I gasped in horror, and covered my mouth with my hand.
…
The fact that he, and she, had done it in the first place was not so much what shocked me, though the quantity and variety of the pictures took me by surprise. They were poor quality, I guessed from old camera phones, and even without the one or two that showed Sammie’s face, I knew that they were of her. Within the main folder called pictures Jay had organised most of the images into several numbered sub-folders. I quickly realised this was a way of grouping them into themes, though I could hardly bring myself to look, and began to feel sick. All I could think about was Sammie’s age, and the fact that Jay, despite being a teenager himself at the time, had gone to the effort of taking them off his phone to store on his computer, and had organised them. It was like a sort of trophy cabinet, a reminder of what they’d done and what she was willing to do – except that now he wasn’t a teenage boy, he was twenty-seven, and I knew he knew he still had them. Jay threw away things when he hadn’t used them for a few weeks – anything he kept beyond that amount of time was deliberate, and everything he owned he knew about, and he had it for a reason.
I quickly pulled the memory stick out of my laptop and shoved it back underneath the photos, but then I became aware of something else. Whatever was folded up at the bottom of the pile felt like newspaper, and I was sure he’d never shown me any newspaper clippings before. I took hold of it and pulled it from the box. It was folded in half four times, and I opened it out carefully. It was from a local paper, and the headline read: New appeal for information about missing girl.
I skimmed the article as quickly as I could. Every few seconds I stopped and made absolutely sure I could still hear Jay in the shower, and then my eyes would drop back down to the words, trying to make sense of it. It said that Sammie had gone missing in the middle of her exams; that she’d left a note for her parents; and that her disappearance happened the day she learned her parents, who had already separated, were getting a divorce. There was only the briefest mention of Jay and Mark, and it was clear that everyone, her parents included, believed her disappearance was as a direct result of her parent’s marriage breaking down. The article had been written one year after she went missing, and contained a plea from her parents for anyone who might have seen her to come forward.
I folded the article up and put it back just where I had found it, and slipped the whole box carefully back inside the wardrobe. Then I sat down on the end of the bed and thought about what I’d seen. It hardly surprised me that Jay hadn’t told me Sammie had gone missing. There was obviously far more to his relationship with Sammie than he wanted me to know, and I knew I could no longer trust a single word he said. But beyond that, beyond my fear of Jay, my whole nightmarish situation and the revelations about Sammie, something else was scaring and unsettling me, and scaring and unsettling me a great deal. Because only the previous night, Mark had sat there and told me that Sammie’s parents had got divorced and she’d moved away with her mum, when he’d lived in the same village as her and couldn’t possibly have not known the truth. I turned to my laptop again, though I knew I must have precious few minutes left. I found a missing person database, and quickly typed in all the information I had, praying it would somehow come back saying she’d been found, or maybe that there simply wouldn’t be an entry for her at all because she was okay, and it was all some sort of mistake. But there it was, a picture of her face, the date around eleven years ago that she had gone missing, and most damning of all, the information that she was still missing. There was no possible way Mark could really think she’d gone to live with her mum. He knew she was missing, he knew she wasn’t where he said she was, and he’d lied to me. What I couldn’t begin to imagine, was why.
PART 3
Sammie
31
As revision leave started and the exams drew close, Sammie’s world became ever more lonely. Although her mum would talk to her sometimes, more often than not she was too busy, or stressed, or tired, so Sammie gave up trying. She missed going round to Jay’s for dinner, and chattering away with Jay’s mum. She missed the feeling of having somewhere to go when she got back from school – when she had nearly always spent her time with Jay in the past. Most of all, she missed him. She missed being hugged and kissed, and having her hand held and being told she was loved. When she’d had him, she’d felt special – she’d had a special person just for her, and she’d been a special person to him, and the isolation she felt without him was a pain that never seemed to get any better.
He spent more of his time with Mark now that he didn’t speak to her. The two boys always seemed to be whispering together; sometimes glancing across at her so she had no doubt she was the topic of the conversation – that Mark was at work spreading more of his poison about her. On top of this, Jay would flirt with other girls at school – normally not with any success – though after Sammie’s first exam she was horrified to see him walk out holding hands with another girl; someone from his English class, called Kirsty. Sammie followed a few paces behind them, and watched as they sat down together on a bench outside the school gates, and started to kiss.
She was sure that Jay knew she was there, even though she quickly made her way across to the bus stop and tried to ignore them, but she couldn’t help stealing glances. Kirsty was blonde, like her, but that was about where the similarity ended. While Sammie’s uniform practically hung from her body, even with the little bump she now had, Kirsty’s skirt was strained around her thick thighs, and Sammie found herself looking jealously at Kirsty’s chest, which compared to Sammie’s, was enormous. Almost as if Jay knew what she was thinking she saw his hand briefly rest on one of Kirsty’s boobs, before he moved it down to her thigh.
Suddenly Mark was beside her, and when he spoke, it made her jump.
‘Didn’t take him long to move on, did it?’ he said.
Sammie whipped round and glared at him. ‘Fuck off,’ she said.
‘I’m just saying—’
‘I said fuck off!’ Sammie screamed. She gave Mark a shove, and with everyone staring at her, including Jay and Kirsty from the other side of the road, she strode off past the bus stop towards town, hot tears in her eyes, and a feeling of fatigue and nausea that she’d experienced a lot over the past few months. Eventually the nausea became so strong that she had to make a dash for some public toilets, and she was sick three times, then she slumped exhausted against the door, and closed her eyes.
The next day, she had another exam, and she gathered her things together shakily and walked to the bus stop in a daze. She didn’t seem able to muster any anxiety about the exam; in fact she was more worried about the bus journey, which she knew would make her feel sick. The exam seemed irrelevant to her– all that filled her mind was what she was going to do about the future, and her need to plan her next move. A next move, which, at the moment, she was sure would entail running away.
‘Where are you going?’ Mark asked.
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You going into town?’
Sammie didn’t answer and Mark fell into step with her. In truth she had little idea where she was going or what she was doing, she just didn’t feel ready to go home.
‘How did you find the exam?’ Mark asked.
‘I didn’t write anything.’
That shocked him. ‘You… you didn’t write anything?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Why… why not?’
Sammie stopped and faced him. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t give a shit about the fucking exam.’
Mark digested this for a while. ‘It’s up to you, I guess,’ he said in the end.
‘Yes it is.’
She carried on walking, but he didn’t get the hint that she didn’t want his company.
‘Leave me alone, Mark,’ she said.
‘Why? Where are you going?’
Sammie stopped again. ‘I’m going to try and figure out what to do about my baby.’
Any hope she had of getting rid of Mark evaporated. He gawped at her, and then he steered her over to the little brick wall at the side of the pavement and sat down with her.
‘You… you’re pregnant?’ he said.
‘No,’ she snapped, ‘I just enjoy saying stuff like that.’