“We didn’t know you and Eve had ever gone out together,” the interviewer interrupted.
He stared back. “You must have done! Everyone knows that! The whole world knows that! Anyway, it only lasted a couple of months because I got pissed off at her slapping me whenever I tried to lay a finger on her and despite her Dad telling me that I must be making progress if she was only slapping me instead of trying to outright kill me, I went off and shagged Daisy instead.” He stopped suddenly and wrinkled his nose. “Should I have said that aloud? Nah, everyone knows that already – we couldn’t have been more public! Anyhow, Eve just seemed relieved that I’d moved on, like she’d been waiting for it to happen. So all this time later, she’d finally met this bloke that she absolutely adored, that she completely trusted, and she seemed really annoyingly happy with, and finally – at last – Siân has her opportunity to properly break her heart for her. And my other best friend’s as well in the process, the twisted little bitch! So sorry Mum,” he looked straight at the camera. “If you want to see me you’ll have to come out to the flat because I won’t be setting foot in the house if she’s there.”
Rob threw something at him from somewhere in the background and tapped his watch, and Quinn turned round and inserted himself into his car without another word or glance at the camera, and started putting his balaclava, helmet and gloves on.
Then they cut to a very brief shot of Pete moving around the pits doing something, then to a shot of me sitting in the stands looking utterly devastated with a tear rolling down my cheek. Bloody telephoto lenses! At least they hadn’t spotted me when I was sobbing properly.
Then they showed me getting into the car and the race up until the accident. I watched it carefully. Nope. I still couldn’t remember a thing. It was weird seeing myself sitting motionless with my head flopped down. You’re supposed to put your thumbs up to the marshals to show you’re ok, and if you don’t, then they know you need help. Men immediately ran over and then they were on the radio, and then the paramedics came down. By the time I was being lifted on to the stretcher and they were putting the pads on my chest, a cameraman had got quite close, and they captured what Jo had said about whether I should have been driving and whether she’d checked the car carefully enough. After the ambulance drove off they interviewed Paul who was cagey. “Well there was enough room for her to have taken her foot off the accelerator, start to brake and yank the wheel round and slide sideways into the gate at a less dangerous speed. We need to examine the car carefully to see if there has been any catastrophic mechanical failure causing her to head straight at the post at full speed.”
I wasn’t sure how the production team were getting their information, but the next bit was them down at the garage, apparently on Tuesday towards closing time. They asked Jo if they’d solved the mystery of the accident yet, and she said ‘no, we’ve found no obvious mechanical cause’ and turned away.
Then they were in the office with Mr. Entwistle. “Well Eve came into work as usual this morning but the men were saying that she wasn’t seeming herself. And then Dewhurst came in to say he’d put a spanner into her hand and she’d looked down at it like she didn’t know what the hell it was or what she was meant to do with it – so I knew something was definitely wrong. I called her in here and started asking her some questions and she just said, ‘yes’ to everything. So I told her a job to do and she said ‘yes’ and didn’t move, and I said, ‘well off you go and do it then’ and she just sat there, so I waved my hand in front of her face and there was no reaction, so I got Jo to take her back to A and E. I believe they’ve done a brain scan and found a small bleed, but there’s nothing to be done except let it get better. So I’ve told her to stay away for the rest of the week.”
Then the interviewer said, “Well I’m sure all the production team and the viewers wish Eve a speedy recovery.” And then the episode finished.
I walked out into the living area and Quinn looked a bit shame-facedly at me. “Told you I’d properly shot my mouth off – and there you were having done a good job of putting on a brave face.”
I sat down on the settee beside him. “Oh well,” I said. “Can’t be helped…” It had really touched me that he’d taken my side over his sister’s and twice called me his ‘best friend’. That was a stomach slamming, it really was.
“Call me dumb…” I started.
“Ok, you dumb cow,” he said promptly.
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve always known that your sister did these things because she hates me, but somehow I’d never noticed the pattern that you pointed out – the deliberate campaign intent. I’d just taken each incident in isolation…”
He sat silently, pulling at his earlobe as though undecided about saying something.
“Actually, I need to show you something.” He got up abruptly and went to get his tablet. He went onto Facebook and clicked onto Siân’s page. He glanced back up at me. “I don’t tend to bother looking at her page, but obviously I get feeds from her, and I’ve never seen anything like what we were suspecting. But I just had this instinct, when you said what you said last night, that something was definitely going on… I just know my sister…”
I raised my eyebrows queryingly at him.
“And so I searched and searched and looked in all the photo albums and couldn’t find anything, and then I noticed that whenever she posted a normal picture of her and Kes she’d also post a Googlemap, and say something like ‘check out the latest.’ But there was no link added so I spent ruddy hours going back through her timeline and finally I found this oblique reference to a new blog she was starting with a link added. And it goes through to the password protected front page of this.” He turned the screen round to show me.”
“So we need to know the password?” I said, disappointed.
“She put the password bold as brass a bit further on in the timeline – but coded in such a way that only those in on the secret would guess what it connected with.” He typed something in. “And I found all this…” He handed it over to me.
“Do I want to see this?” I asked apprehensively without looking down.
“Probably not,” Quinn said honestly, “but I need to talk to someone about what to do about it, so it would really help if you’d take a look…”
He looked the other way as I scrolled through. “Oh my God,” I murmured. “Shit. Oh my God.”
He looked back at me, distaste writ across his face. “We’re going to have to tell him, aren’t we? I mean – now she’s managed to screw her way into the centre of the documentary, media interest is going to hot up and someone’s going to find this stuff.”
“Why doesn’t she use Snapchat or some other thing that wipes it out straight away?” I said appalled.
“Because,” he said patiently as though explaining something to a child, “she clearly wants it to be found…”
I stared at him with dawning horror.
He pulled a face. “Yup, I know. I know, Eve. And it’s not just Kes that will get hurt either. When Kes referred to a graveyard, he didn’t say the half of it. That was the Anglican church graveyard. But there’s a picture further back of them at it in the Sacristy of Mum’s Catholic church…”
“Sacristy?” I queried with wrinkled brow.
“The room where the priest gets the fancy gear on and keeps the monstrance and thurible and gets the sacraments ready for mass – the only thing worse would be for them to have gone at it on the altar itself – and if they’ve done that, even she seems to have drawn a line at advertising it…”
I let the tablet in my hands drop down into my lap. “So you’re worried about your Mum?” I said. “What with her being so ill and everything?”
He nodded and looked truly miserable.
Kes came back in about half an hour later. Quinn had taken to fortifying himself with any alcohol he could find in the flat, but due to my brain injury the only place I could take refuge was in a cup of tea.
Quinn looked horrified that Kes w
as back so soon, presumably he’d been hoping to put it off. He put a glass of whisky straight into Kes’s hands and looked in a panic stricken way at me.
“Kes,” I said. “We need to talk to you.”
Kes looked wary. From the look on our faces it clearly wasn’t going to be good. I patted the place beside me on the sofa. He sat down twisted sideways and looked between my face and Quinn’s who was still standing up behind the sofa. I indicated with my eyes that Quinn should sit down in the armchair on the other side of Kes.
“There’s no nice way of putting this,” I plunged in. “So I’m just going to hand you this tablet, and tell you that what’s on the screen is a blog that Siân’s been keeping and allowing some of her friends access to, and I want you to scroll through, and then it’s up to you whether you want to see anymore or not…”
Kes froze. Quinn lowered his eyes again. I handed Kes the tablet. He scrolled down, his whole body motionless, his expression rigid.
“We thought you needed to know about this as Quinn and I think it might get out into the media…”
He clearly couldn’t even speak. I understood that it must feel as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. Betrayed already by Siân, to find out that she’d been blogging every sexual act out to all and sundry for the past six months was betrayal beyond all comprehension.
“Do you want to take this to your room and look through every single post to see what is there so there are no surprises? Or do you want me to take this away from you now and you just know that there’s probably a lot more of it out there but you don’t need to see it?”
He stared at me almost blindly for a moment, then stood up with the tablet in his hand, walked to his room and slammed the door.
Quinn put his head down in his hands and sat there with his shoulders tensely hunched. I found that my nails were digging painfully into my palms and I had to consciously unwind the fists leaving red half moons. Then I got up and put the radio on.
“Coffee?” I offered.
He shook his head. “I’ll stick to this…” He lifted the whisky bottle at me. I came back and sat at the end of the sofa nearest him.
“Thanks, Eve,” he said gratefully. “I think I would have ended up chickening out.”
“Which of us should go into him in a bit?” I said.
“If you think he’s going to be crying,” Quinn said cravenly, “then I think it ought to be you. It’s proper scary when men cry…”
“I don’t think I have anything comforting to say,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Quinn responded. “I don’t think my telling him that ‘never mind it makes him look proper virile’ will go down well right now.” He gave a slight crack of unhumorous laughter.
In the end it was me that got to go in. He was lying face down on the bed. I sat beside him and put my arms round him and he sat up and hugged me really tight and started sobbing heaving painful wrenching sobs. Drained as I was right now of all emotion but emptiness, I had nothing to offer except my silent presence and the return pressure of my arms around him.
Kes didn’t go to college on Thursday. Quinn went off to work. At lunchtime Jo popped in with armfuls of flowers. She was panting by the time she got to the top of the stairs.
“All your bloody well-wishers,” she said ungratefully. “They’ve been arriving all morning from the general public who watched the episode last night. And these are only half of them. The garage looks like someone’s died!”
We started distributing them around the flat.
“Oh, and I probably need to warn you that Dewhurst and Bolton both brought a different paper in, and the headline across the front page of both was along the lines of ‘Was Eve so unhappy she tried to take her own life?’ With pictures of the crash and dotted lines of the trajectory you could have taken to get out of it and your actual trajectory and so forth.”
“Really?” I was amazed.
She looked fiercely across at me. “You didn’t though, did you? Please tell me you didn’t!”
I shook my head. “Not my style,” I assured her.
But after she’d gone I went online and googled my own name and the first thing that came up was all the media reports of the accident. The YouTube footage, of which there were many, had all had hundreds of thousands of viewings. I had to count the noughts to understand just how many people had been interested enough to look. My name seem to be referred to hundreds of times in forums, and while trying to look for ‘U’d betta beliEVE it!’, I came across another one called ‘U wouldn’t Adam and Eve it!’. Bloomin’ ridiculous! I thought. I tried not to actually read anything that anyone was saying, but because of a headline in capitals, I glimpsed a newspaper feed that was claimed that fans of the programme were speculating whether either Pete or Siân may have sabotaged the car. I closed down my browser in disgust. People were just unbeliEVEable!
Around half five the doorbell rang. I went to the intercom. It was Kathleen Quinn. I ran down to open the door to her. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. She still looked painfully thin and her skin was papery looking. She looked like seventy year old grandmother, not a recent mother.
“Can you manage the stairs?” I asked concerned.
She walked slowly up them, holding onto the rail.
“Adam’s still at work,” I said. Kathleen was the only person I referred to Quinn as ‘Adam’ to, else she looked repeatedly blank at me like she didn’t know who I was talking about.
“Table or comfy chairs?” I asked.
“I’m better upright,” she said. “Stops me getting indigestion.”
“Have you brought your lemon barley water?” I asked.
She handed it to me. When I’d returned with a mug of hot barley water for her and a mug of tea for myself and I’d sat down opposite her at the table, there was a short silence. I wasn’t going to fill it. She’d clearly come here to talk to us, so it was for her to set the agenda.
“So-” She said at last, “my daughter…”
I said nothing.
“Has she really done all those things to you that Adam said on the programme?”
I nodded. “Worse actually. She told that night club bouncer boyfriend that I’d stolen drugs from him to get me beat up, then told us that she would have come and watched me being beaten up if she could, and then she was the one who set the guy on me with the knife who I ended up having to stab to stop him killing Adam. I thought you knew. It all came out at the police station when Con was there…” But he hadn’t told her, I realised. They’d all conspired not to tell her so she wouldn’t know her daughter was sleeping around and getting involved with drugs and violence.
Kathleen was sitting there looking at me, with her right hand doing a constant unconscious repeat action, rubbing her fingers against her thumb, her dry skin making a tiny rasping sound in the silence. That hand, I thought, that had slapped me on the back of the thighs so often when I was young, and slapped me around the face when she was particularly angry, and dragged me over and over again by the wrist up the garden path to my front door.
“I didn’t know what Adam did to your beautiful Flopsy either until he confessed on the show. She was a lovely natured rabbit. You adored her.”
I said nothing. The silence lengthened. The tiny rasping noise carried on.
“I’m sorry about my children.” Kathleen suddenly said. “I had no idea.”
“Oh I was thoroughly horrible too though…” I dismissed. “I’m sorry I nearly killed Adam that time. If you hadn’t have worked out it was me…”
“You were six and you were traumatised.” She said firmly, as though that finally was the end of it for her. A line drawn under the whole incident. “I’m sorry I treated you so badly when you were a child and blamed you for everything my children got up to…”
Oh God, I thought. She’s going to die. She’s going round setting everything straight.
The silence lengthened again.
“There’s something else you need to know about what Siâ
n’s up to,” I suddenly blurted out.
Her eyes gripped my face. She’d known there was more. She’d known she’d have to ask someone other than her son or her husband.
“She’s posting pictures online of herself having sex in all sorts of different places.”
I could see Kathleen trying really hard not to react.
“And Adam and I think they may get into the media soon. And if it does, then I need to warn you that there is one of her having sex in your church.”
Her face, already greyish looking, went white.
“I can’t make it sound any better,” I said. “But I think the media will leave you personally alone.”
“What? Because I’m a dying woman?” She said sarcastically.
“Yes,” I said. “But it won’t stop you feeling humiliated when it all comes out. Even if you spoke to her now, and made her see sense and made her close this blog down, I think other people will have already harvested those photos and they’ll be out there somewhere whatever you do…”
We both heard footsteps running up the stairs. We both recognised the approach of Quinn. He stopped short at the door when he saw his mother. Then slowly turned round and closed the door with a careful click. If there’s one thing that can make Quinn blanche, then it’s unexpectedly seeing his mother. He came and sat down at the table and looked warily at her, biting his lip.
She fixed her eyes upon him. “I’ve been talking a few things over with Eve here.” He tensed at the ominous tone. “And I am frankly shell shocked and appalled at all the things you, your sister and your father have been keeping from me over the past few years.” She saw his lips part to make an excuse. “And don’t you be telling me it’s because I’ve been ill. I was perfectly fit and healthy a year ago and you conspired to keep me in ignorance.”
No wonder, I thought. When she was fit and well she had a bloody good aim with a plate.
I glanced at Quinn. “I’ve told her about what Siân’s posted online.”
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