by Rosie Walsh
When we got in, there had been a red flashing light—a sight I’d grown to dread—and a message from Alex’s mother, who by then was in a psychiatric hospital. Her voice had been like smashed porcelain. Your daughter won’t get away with this. She can’t. Sarah killed my baby. She killed my Alex, and she’s going to prison, I’ll make sure of it. She doesn’t deserve to be free. She doesn’t get to be free when Alex is . . . is . . .
She’s going to make sure you go to prison, Hannah had echoed, scowling tearfully at me. Cuts and bruises were flung like pebbledash across her body. You killed my best friend. You don’t deserve to be here if she isn’t. She started to cry. I hate you, Sarah. I hate you! And that had been the last thing she had ever said to me. Nineteen years had passed; nineteen years, six weeks, two days, and she hadn’t spoken a single word to me, no matter how hard I’d tried, no matter how many interventions our parents had staged.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie,” I whispered. I rubbed my ankles with shaking hands. “If it helps in any way, I have never forgiven myself. Hannah never forgave me either.”
“Oh yes, Hannah.” He looked at me, then immediately away, as if I disgusted him. “You told me you lost your sister.”
“Well . . . I did.” I traced a wobbly line through the sand. “Hannah stopped speaking to me. She cut me out of her life, permanently. So I don’t feel like I have a sister. Not really.”
He looked briefly at the line I’d drawn in the sand. “Hannah never spoke to you again?”
“Never. And God knows, I’ve tried.”
He went silent for a while. “I can’t say I’m as surprised as I should be. She’s stayed in regular touch with my mother. You can imagine the conversations.” His voice was flinty. “But that’s by the by. The fact remains, you have a sister. Even if she wants nothing to do with you, you have a sister.”
I paused. Wished I could bolt. I am the woman he can hardly look in the eye. I am the woman he probably wished dead all these years.
“I am so sorry your sister was best friends with mine, Eddie. I’m so sorry I took them out of the house that day. I’m so sorry my reactions weren’t the right ones when he . . . when that man . . .” I took a swallow. “I can’t believe you’re Alex’s brother.”
Eddie flinched. Then: “I want you to tell me everything,” he said, and I heard the effort it was taking to keep his voice neutral.
“I . . . Are you sure?”
His body—his strong, warm, lovely body, of which I’d dreamed so many times, gave a sort of twist of assent.
So I did.
* * *
• • •
I tried so hard to keep my place in Mandy and Claire’s friendship group that summer—so miserably, exhaustingly hard. In the weeks following our GCSE exams they met up every day, but they invited me to join them only a handful of times. “God, Sarah, stop reading into it,” Mandy said, when I found the courage to confront her.
We were teenage girls. Of course I read into it.
During their time in each other’s pockets they’d developed a new code of behavior they were unwilling to share with me, so my first few weeks in year twelve were a minefield. I said the wrong things, talked about the wrong people, and wore the wrong clothes, realizing only when I caught the edge of an eye roll that they’d moved on.
On the day of my seventeenth birthday I came into school and found that they’d stopped sitting in our corner of the sixth-form common room and had moved somewhere else. I had no idea if I was invited.
During the spring term Mandy started going out with someone from Stroud, the town where we went to school. Greggsy, his name was. He was twenty, and therefore a catch: no matter that he had a nasty, weasellike face, or a questionable relationship with the law. Claire was sick with envy and spent all her time trailing around after them. I began to lose hope, certain that this would be the final straw for me. Girls who went out with older men were of a higher caliber. They were sexual, successful, self-contained; untouched by the pimpled anxieties of the sixth form.
Mandy might take Claire before she pulled up the ladder behind her, I thought, but she certainly wouldn’t take me.
But one day in March Mandy said quite casually that Bradley Stewart had been asking about me. Bradley Stewart was Greggsy’s cousin. He drove an Astra. He was one of the best-looking boys in that nasty group, and I was pathetically pleased.
“Oh?” I said, not looking up from the Diet Coke label I was peeling. It was important I played this right: Mandy would use my words to shame me at a later date, if I seemed too keen. “I suppose he’s all right.”
“I’ll hook you up,” she announced breezily. Claire, with whom Mandy had fallen out earlier, was fuming, and I realized this opportunity would never have presented itself if they hadn’t fought.
We didn’t go on a date, because nobody went on dates back then. We just met up on the pedestrian street outside the Pelican, with all the other teenage drinkers. We drank bottles of Hooch and Smirnoff Ice, and tried to be sharp and funny. Bradley, with his black hair and black trainers and his piercing eyes, somehow persuaded me off to the multistory car park on the London Road “for a drink.” He steered me into a wall and started kissing me. He put his hands up my top, and I let him, even though he was rough and impatient. He put his hands down my jeans, and I let him. I didn’t want to, but I had had almost no experience with boys and a chance like this wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. He tried to have sex with me; I said no. He asked for a blow job, settling eventually for a nervous hand job. I didn’t enjoy it, but he did, and that was enough for me.
Then he didn’t call, and I was crushed. I stared at Mum and Dad’s phone for days, eventually giving in and trying his number when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Nobody answered. I even got the bus to his house, near Stroud. I walked past his front door three times in thirty minutes, rain soaked, hopeful, and hopeless.
“You should have slept with him,” Mandy advised. “He thought you must be seeing someone else. That or you’re frigid.”
Claire, back in favor, laughed.
I could feel it slipping away already, that tiny flash of value I’d held since Bradley had taken me off to the Brunel multistory. So I told Mandy to tell him I was ready to put out (her words) and he called me.
We became a couple, of sorts. I convinced myself that it was love and never imagined that I might deserve better. Nor would I have wanted someone better: I was part of a gang now; I belonged everywhere. I existed on that higher platform with Mandy and there was no way I was going back down.
Bradley often told me about other girls who fancied him and my teenage heart would freeze with terror. He went days without calling me, never walked me to the bus stop, and often insisted on going without me to the Maltings, a nasty meat market of a club, so that he could “be himself.” More than once he decided this while we were in the queue, knowing I had nowhere to stay if I couldn’t stay at his. The day I passed my driving test, he failed even to congratulate me. He merely suggested I drive over to his house for sex.
* * *
• • •
“Sounds like a top bloke,” Eddie said.
I shrugged.
He looked at me briefly, and I was reminded of our first morning together, when we’d sat facing each other across his breakfast bar. Me, him; the smell of bread and hope. Then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. “Do you mind if we just get to the point?” he asked quietly. “I understand why you’re telling me this stuff, but I—I just need to know.”
“I’m sorry. Of course.” I grappled with rising chords of panic. It was years since I’d talked out loud about what had happened that day. “I . . . Why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting too hot to sit still.”
After a moment Eddie got up.
We walked up past a pastel-blue lifeguard’s hut and onto the boardwalk, which snaked so
uth all the way to Venice. Bikes and Rollerbladers whisked past us; gulls cartwheeled above. The morning’s brief cloud cover had been burned away and the air now shimmered with heat.
* * *
• • •
It was summer, a Monday afternoon in June. Mum and Dad had gone to Cheltenham for something and had left me in charge of Hannah after school. Hannah had Alex over. After an hour pretending to do their homework, they’d told me they were so bored they might seriously die and instructed me to drive them to Stroud for a Burger Star. I’d said no. Eventually we’d compromised with a hanging-out-eating-sweets session on Broad Ride. They’d made a den up there a few years ago, when building and maintaining a den was still an acceptable way to spend a day. Now, long past that sort of thing, they liked to go up there to listen to music and read magazines.
I was sitting on a rug a little distance from them, reading one of my A-level texts. I had no interest in their whispered conversation about some boy in their class, but they were twelve years old and I wasn’t letting them out of my sight. Hannah was too much of a show-off to be responsible for her own safety. She didn’t understand the slimness of life; the consequences of a twelve-year-old’s bravado.
It was a warm day, the sky carrying thin twists of cloud, and I felt about as peaceful as I was capable of feeling back then. Until I heard the sound of a car, thumping and buzzing with overamplified music. I looked up and my heart lifted and sank. Bradley had called earlier, wanting me to drive over to pick him up. His car wouldn’t start, he’d said, could I come and get him? Maybe lend him some money to fix it?
No, I’d said to both. I was looking after two twelve-year-old girls; plus he already owed me seventy pounds. “Borrowed Greggsy’s new car,” he said now, ambling toward me with a rare smile. “Seeing as you were too lame to help me out.” He looked at Hannah and Alex with interest. “All right, girls?”
“Hi,” they said, goggling at him.
“Since when did Greggsy drive a car like that?” I asked. It was a BMW. Souped up, just how Bradley and Greggsy liked their cars, but a Beamer all the same.
“He came into a bit of money.” Bradley tapped his nose.
Hannah looked excited. “Did it fall off the back of a lorry?”
Bradley laughed. “No, mate. It’s legit.”
He couldn’t sit still for very long. After about ten minutes on the blanket he suggested we go “for a race” in our cars.
“No way,” I said. “Not with the girls.” I’d been in a race with him once before: Bradley versus Greggsy back and forth on the Ebley bypass late at night. It had been the most frightening twenty minutes of my life. When it had come to an end, in the new Sainsbury’s car park, my head had flopped down onto my chest and I had cried. They’d laughed at me. Mandy, too, even though she’d been just as scared.
Hannah and Alex, however, teetering on the wobbly diving board into adolescence, thought it was a great idea. “Yeah, let’s go for a race,” they said, as if it were a little sports car Dad had lent me, not a banger with a one-liter engine and a head gasket whose days were numbered.
They went on and on, Hannah and Alex, Bradley riding on their coattails. It’s not the M-fucking-five, Sare. It’s just a shit little road going nowhere. Alex kept flicking her blond hair over her shoulder and Hannah copied her, only she was less convincing.
My need to protect Hannah had not dwindled as the years had passed. If anything, it had strengthened as she’d transitioned from fearless child to swaggering girl. So I refused. Again and again. Bradley got more irritable; I got more stressed. Neither of us was used to me saying no.
But then the matter was taken out of my hands. Hannah, giggling, ran over to Bradley’s passenger door and got inside. Bradley ran round to the driver’s seat, quick as a wink. I started shouting at them, but nobody heard me because the car Bradley had borrowed had a dual exhaust and he was roaring the engine. He shot off toward Frampton and my stomach spilled out through my legs.
“Hannah!” I shouted. I ran toward my own car, Alex behind me.
“Shit!” she breathed. She sounded impressed and frightened. “They’ve gone!”
I made her do up her seat belt. I told her she shouldn’t be swearing. I prayed.
* * *
• • •
“And off we went,” I said, coming to a halt on the boardwalk.
Eddie turned away from me and stared out to sea, hands jammed in his pockets.
“You were on the village green because you’d just been walking along Broad Ride,” I said. “Weren’t you? The day we met. You were there for exactly the same reason as me.”
He nodded.
“It was the first time I’d been up there on the anniversary of her death.” His voice was tight, bound securely to prevent collapse. “Normally I’d spend it with Mum, who’d just go through old photo albums and cry. But that day I just . . . I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to be out there, in the sunshine, thinking good things about my little sister.”
Me. I’d done this. Me and my weakness, my monstrous stupidity.
“I walk along there every year on June second,” I told him. I wanted to fold myself around him, absorb his pain somehow. “I go there, rather than up to the main road, because Broad Ride was their kingdom that afternoon. They had nail varnish and magazines and not a care in the world. That’s the bit I fly back to remember.”
Eddie looked briefly at me. “What magazines? Do you remember? What nail varnish? What were they eating?”
“It was Mizz,” I said quietly. Of course I remembered. That day had been playing out in my head my entire adult life. “They’d borrowed my nail varnish. I’d got it free with a magazine; it was called Sugar Bliss. We had Linda McCartney sausage rolls, because they were both having a vegetarian phase. Cheese-and-onion crisps and a tub of fruit salad. Only Alex had smuggled in some sweets.”
I remembered it as if it were yesterday; the wasps hovering over the fruit, Hannah’s new sunglasses, the swaying shades of green.
“Skittles,” Eddie said. “I bet she brought Skittles. They were her favorite.”
“That’s right.” I couldn’t look at him. “Skittles.”
* * *
• • •
I caught up with them at the main road. Bradley was trying to turn right, toward Stroud, but a succession of cars stuck behind a tractor had held him up.
Stay calm, I told myself, as I got out of the car and jogged up to his passenger door. Just get her out and treat this all as a joke. He’ll be okay if—
Bradley spotted me and quickly turned left instead, engine roaring. I ran back to my car.
“You can speed up if you want,” Alex said. Already Bradley’s car was nearly out of sight. “You can floor it. I don’t mind.”
“No. He’ll slow down and wait for me so he can race me. I know what he’s like.” Blood pounded in my ears. Please, God, let nothing happen to her. Let nothing happen to my little sister. I looked at my speedometer. Fifty-five miles per hour. I slowed down. Then I sped up. I couldn’t stand it.
Alex turned on my stereo. It was a group of American kids, Hanson, singing a silly earworm song called “MMMBop.” Nineteen years on I still couldn’t bear to hear it.
After a horrifyingly short time, Bradley was racing back toward us on the other side of the road at sixty, maybe seventy miles per hour. “Slow down!” I yelled, flashing him. He must have U-turned in the road up ahead.
“Chill!” Alex said. She flicked her hair nervously. “Hannah’s fine!”
Bradley shot past, beeping, and then screeched the car round onto our side of the road. “Handbrake turn,” Alex marveled. I came almost to a stop, watching them in my rearview mirror. I barely breathed until they had straightened out and were driving behind us again. I could see her there, in his front seat, a whole head shorter than him. A little girl, for Christ’s sake.
&
nbsp; She stared straight ahead. Hannah was only that still when she was afraid.
“How do you know what a handbrake turn is?” I heard myself ask. I was driving slowly, my hazard lights on. Please stop. Give me my sister back. I wound down the window and pointed frantically toward the verge.
“My brother told me,” Alex said. “He’s at university.”
For a moment I felt angry that her brother—some idiot—thought it was clever to teach his little sister about handbrake turns. But then Bradley dipped back so he could roar up behind us, screeching on his brakes at the last minute. I gasped. He did it again. And again, and again. I tried several times to stop, but each time I did, he tried to overtake me. So I continued driving, just like he wanted me to. I couldn’t let him fire off ahead with my sister again.
He carried on like that until we started to approach the dip in the road, not far from the Sapperton junction and the woods. But by then he must have become bored, because he didn’t stop when he revved up into the back of my car; he hit it. Gently, but still hard enough to make me panic. I’d only had a license three weeks.
“Shit,” Alex said, only more quietly than before. She was still trying to look excited, but it was obvious she was afraid. Her slender fingers were closed tight around the old gray webbing of the seat belt.
We descended into the dip, Bradley flashing and beeping on my tail. He was laughing. And then—even though we were heading down into a blind bend—he pulled out to overtake.
Everything seemed to hang like a droplet on a tap, ready to fall and smash.
A car came round the bend on the other side, just as I knew it would.