Tell-Tale

by Sam Hayes

  ‘We have to get out,’ she said urgently, blinking as they went outside. She scanned the street for Burnett, expecting to see his angular body bent over her car, cutting the brakes, planting a crude bomb beneath the seat, wiring her life for destruction. Shapes morphed in and out of her vision, teasing her brain into believing he was there, doing all these things, stepping seamlessly back into her life as if he’d never even been away.

  ‘Get in the car,’ she ordered. Reluctantly, Josie did as she was told. Panic leached from mother to daughter. Josie pulled the seat belt across her body, clicked it in place as her mother crunched the car into reverse.

  ‘Mum, stop it. You’re scaring me.’

  Nina had to get Josie to safety. Her fingers clawed at the steering wheel and her feet shook on the pedals. Then a sudden jolt as she smacked the car against a wall. Nina wrenched herself round, yanking the wheel to opposite lock. As she sped forward, as she forced the car to maximum revs, she swore she saw Burnett standing outside the stage door watching their escape.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Nina said, her hands shaking round a mug of tea as Laura’s fingers stroked channels of calm into her shoulders, ‘when we all four went out for the first time? You said that Mick was my missing half.’

  Laura had stopped crying now. Instead, her tears had turned to laughter – an incredulous gutter cry of disbelief that Tom had actually left her. Nina’s arrival had served as a timely distraction, except that Nina also appeared in a terrible state. Somehow, as the women swapped woes, each found a measure of solace. But why Nina had insisted on locking both back and front doors, checking the windows and closing all the curtains, Laura had no idea.

  ‘I still think that,’ she said. She dropped down into the sofa. ‘You know, I never once thought that about Tom. That we were two inseparable halves of a whole. You’re so lucky, Neen.’

  She gripped Laura’s hand. ‘I am,’ she whispered, but instead of providing comfort, it just reminded her of everything she had to lose. ‘I have a long way to fall. You said it yourself.’

  Laura nodded, trying to make sense of what Nina was saying. They sat together, working speedily through a bottle of wine while their daughters gossiped upstairs about their distressed mothers. Tom briefly returned home to collect some belongings, chucking clothes angrily down the stairs, comforting Nat when she cried and begged him not to leave.

  Nina stared out of the living-room window as he drove off. ‘Whose car is that?’ She squinted at the dark green vehicle as it sped off down the street. ‘I thought Tom drove a silver BMW.’

  Laura made a disgusted noise. ‘He did until it was taken off him. Company cutbacks. He’s been driving about in that Rover for a couple of weeks now. My heart bleeds for him.’ She laughed hysterically. ‘He was annoyed that he didn’t get the newest model.’ Laura laughed again. ‘Serves him right.’

  Nina nodded slowly. Then her mobile rang.

  Mick moved in with Nina eleven days after the picnic they’d shared on the Downs. ‘Why wait?’ he’d said, and she’d agreed, hating the thought of him living in that trailer park. It made sense. She’d been missing work, too lazy to leave Mick’s warm bed to catch the early bus to the city. And Mick needed the extra space for his paintings. Even her tiny bedsit allowed him more room to spread out than his trailer did, although it meant giving up part of the kitchen.

  ‘We’ll eat out,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t have any money,’ Nina replied.

  ‘Then we’ll steal.’

  ‘We’ll be thrown in prison.’

  ‘I’d die without you,’ he said, laying her down amongst the tubes of paint, the sketchbooks, the shoeboxes stuffed with photographs, the remnants of their once separate lives. On the mess, they forgot who they were, left behind the people they’d been just days ago. Nina thought only of who she would become, completing the transformation. From that moment, Mick became as integral to her life as the new colour of her hair, or the unfamiliar name on her chequebook.

  A week later, Mick sold two paintings, cementing his belief that Nina was his lucky charm; that he had found her for a reason. ‘I got sixty quid,’ he told her proudly. He decided, from that moment on, he would change the way he painted. He was done with his old ways and banished to the past everything that had gone before. He only had to think of Nina when he held a paintbrush and his canvas was filled with the future. That was what he told himself as he stroked the knots of her spine, wondering how he would have survived without this young beauty in his life.

  As well as the TV work, Nina had taken on another job making sandwiches three nights a week in a local factory. Mick had added warmth, comfort and purpose to her lonely life. She drank up his presence as if she were quenching a great thirst. Mick was everything she wanted him to be – friend, lover, comedian, playmate, soulmate.

  When Josie came into their lives a few years later, Nina believed things would be this good forever. She had forgotten the past. She had stepped out of a horror movie and taken the lead role in a love story all set for the happiest ending ever.

  ‘It’s a sad ending.’ Nina recalled Ethan Reacher’s guffaw as she’d tried to sidestep his probing questions about the nonexistent film stunts she’d been grilling him on.

  ‘Sad ending?’ Laura said, only half listening to what Nina was whispering under her breath. She’d been distracted since the phone call a minute ago, and wasn’t making any sense. ‘Bloody right it’s a sad ending,’ Laura continued when Nina stared vacantly ahead, her skin bleached white. ‘It’s a sodding tragedy, that’s what it is.’

  She snatched wet washing from the machine and picked out several men’s shirts, bits of underwear and other items that were clearly Tom’s. She dropped them into the pedal bin. ‘I can’t believe he actually admitted to having an affair. I suspected as much.’

  ‘Don’t let him leave,’ Nina said quietly. She stared straight ahead at the kitchen tiles, vaguely aware of her friend’s ranting.

  ‘What?’ Laura stopped what she was doing.

  ‘Get him back.’ Nina was deadly serious. She put a hand on Laura’s arm. ‘If you let him go, that will be it. Over.’

  ‘Bloody good job.’

  ‘It’ll be like he’s dead,’ Nina said. ‘Do you really want Tom to be dead?’ She turned her gaze to Laura, desperately trying to pass on her meaning. ‘Don’t let him die,’ she whispered before calling out to Josie that it was time to go. She wanted to get back to Mick.

  They set off on the short drive home, wheels spinning as they pulled off the gravel. Her head swam with the crazy, mixed-up images of the last few days. She knew that, if Burnett had his way, dying was something she would soon be doing herself.

  CHAPTER 49

  -Have you ever felt as if ur life’s over?

  I crush my head between my palms.

  -Yes

  -What did you do?

  I pause. How can a few words sum it all up?

  -I made another one.

  -I miss my mum so much. Do u miss urs still?

  -Of course, I type. Truth is, I can scarcely remember her. It’s odd how our minds become a scrapbook of smells, words, feelings, images. A patchwork of a life long gone.

  -Dad won’t speak about her. He’s moody all the time.

  -He’s coming to terms with it. Let him grieve in his own way.

  -He’s different with me now. Cold.

  -That’s normal after a loss like this. Pretending to be a fifteen-year-old girl is hard when all I want to do is throw the arms of a mother around her.

  -But he hasn’t been the same with me for a long while. I can hear her small sob, sense the tinge of sadness in her voice because she thinks her daddy doesn’t love her any more. When he looks into her eyes, it’s me he’s going to see. Another message flashes up. -When I was little, he loved me so much.

  -It’s your mum he’s angry at, not you. I have no experience of decent fathers to share with her. I leave it at that in case she becomes suspicious. -Does that man still
come to your house? I have to know.

  -Not for a while, Josie types.

  -How’s school? I ask, relieved beyond belief. Suddenly, a new icon pops up telling me that dramaqueen-jojo has added a new picture to her album. Until now, there was just the tiny image of her next to her name.

  I click on it. I hold my breath as the loading bar crawls slowly along the bottom of the window, bringing up a larger version. That same breath leaves my body in a dam burst when a full-size image resolves on the screen. Josie’s hair is hacked short and banded with bleached white and purple streaks. Her eyes are ringed with smudges of black, from both eyeliner and exhaustion. She looks nothing like the girl I remember.

  -School sucks. don’t go much, she types. My fingers slip over the keys, repeatedly typing the wrong letters as I try to reply.

  -Why not? U must go to school.

  -Don’t do anything now Mum’s dead.

  I can hear her sobbing; feel the weight of her head as it drops to her desk. I can see the soft indent as she curls onto her bed, praying that the days will pass quickly.

  -What have you done to your hair? It’s the wrong thing to say, but the server wouldn’t cope with everything I really want to tell her.

  – I want 2 look ugly. The cursor flashes on the screen.

  -What do you mean?

  -Then no one will like me. How do u know my hair’s changed?

  Something from way back stirs in my mind, that whenever anyone told her what a pretty little girl she was, she pouted and said she wished she was ugly. Even as a teen, she didn’t like compliments.

  -It’s just different 2 when I knew u. Shorter. That’s all. I pray that this covers my mistake. -Why wouldn’t you want anyone to like you?

  -Because being loved too much can hurt just as much as being unloved.

  Her reply echoes a thousand times through the internet, spreading like a virus. She tugs on every cell in my body. Stopping myself from going right back to help my daughter is so much harder than leaving her in the first place.

  The gash split my cheek. What little sense of reality I possessed had been smashed from my head by the blow. I don’t recall exactly when it happened, just that I was left with a wound that refused to close and was a talking point wherever I went, when my aim was to be completely the opposite.

  ‘You should see your GP about that,’ the pharmacist commented, nodding at my cheek.

  ‘Just the Steri-strips, please. And paracetamol.’ I held out a five-pound note. My headache had grown worse during the morning.

  I’d checked out of the motel before the owner asked any more questions. Blood had soaked on to the lumpy foam pillow during the night and made a mess of the sheets.

  ‘I don’t think that will heal without stitches,’ the pharmacist persisted.

  ‘I’ll give these a try.’ I took the paper bag and my change. I used the rear-view mirror in my car to stick the strips to my face. Before I left the motel, I’d showered, symbolically washing away everything that had gone before this day as well as the congealed blood on my face. For a while the strips held fast. But after an hour’s driving, I’d curled over the steering wheel from the pain and the wound strips had peeled off, leaving my skin gaping wide again. I couldn’t arrive looking like this. I pulled into a lay-by and stared at myself in the mirror. Who – or what – I wondered, had I become?

  I was woken by a banging on the glass. My head rested on the passenger seat and the gear stick pushed up under my ribs. There was a man’s face staring at me, but all I could see was him – that scrawny face pasted on to the body of an anonymous lorry driver.

  ‘Shift forward a bit, love . . .’ He mouthed something about his truck, the mobile café up ahead.

  Terrified, I drove off into the night, unsure if I was dreaming or driving or, perhaps, even dead.

  Adam agreed to let me read the alternative draft. He left the computer lying warm in my lap but before starting on the crazy assortment of notes and rambling files that he’d opened, I logged in to Afterlife. The strange conversation with Josie had left me more confused than ever.

  My daughter doesn’t want to be loved.

  Now, I am sitting here smarting from the virtual slap in the face she’s just given me when she swore and logged off, upset that I’d mentioned her father again. Tears are trickling down my cheeks when Adam comes back to my room. He wraps me up in his arms until I don’t feel real, until my anxiety melts someplace else. Adam becomes the antidote to my crumbling future simply because we have one thing in common: the past.

  I sob uncontrollably on to his shoulder.

  ‘I haven’t read it yet.’ We stand on the sloping floorboards in my crooked-ceilinged room, him bending his neck because of the cross-beam, and me bending my neck the other way so he can’t see my teary face.

  He holds me out at arm’s length. ‘There’s something else wrong, isn’t there?’

  I want to pour out my heart to him but I can’t. It’s too dangerous and I’ve already said enough.

  It’s then that I realise what has happened. He’d wrapped his arms around me and I hadn’t pushed him away. I’d felt the buckle of his belt and the rigid form of his chest against me. His legs ran the length of mine. I’d caught a trace of his scent and a whiff of his aftershave. I’d even smelled the fabric conditioner on his shirt – all the things that an embrace brings, and I’d noticed as if it was my very first time. As if I was hugging the only man I’d ever loved, as if he was still in my life, as if Adam did not exist.

  I break down into tears again, desperate to tell him the truth. I’m not sure if I’m standing or lying crumpled on the floor or spinning around in space. The strong grip under my arms tells me that I am on the floor, knees bent against the knotty boards, palms collecting splinters.

  ‘Frankie, let me help you . . .’ His words are gentle as he guides me to the bed. He sits me down and crouches in front of me. ‘Speak to me. Let me in.’

  Then we both laugh – me hysterically through the tears, and he because he reaches for a box of tissues but overbalances. He saves himself by grabbing on to something. My leg.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says awkwardly. Our smiles are brief, dropping away from embarrassment. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ve wanted to talk to you properly since you arrived at Roecliffe, but you’ve done a superb job of shutting me out.’

  I sniff. I blow my nose. He tries to read my sadness. I shrug, plucking another tissue from the box. ‘I’ve had a lot going on.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he demands. He’s been so patient, so kind. It hurts to shut him out when I know all he wants is to help me. This is too much to bear on my own.

  ‘I can’t,’ I reply, giving away that there is indeed something to tell.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Frankie.’ He stands and shoves himself against the window sill, arms locked, jaw set. His knuckles are knotted and white, as if he’s about to fling something across the room. He swings round. ‘I don’t fucking understand why you’ve taken a job at the very place you should want to escape from.’

  He fires more questions, but I don’t hear them. Suddenly I want to tell Adam everything. Like me, he is searching for something he can’t have: another chance with those you love most.

  ‘I’m here at Roecliffe,’ I whisper, jumping right in, ‘because I’m hiding from one of the men who was involved in the death of your sister. He’s out of prison now. He found me.’ Adam is wide-eyed, a statue. ‘I thought that Roecliffe would be the last place on earth he’d look for me.’ I swallow. My mouth is dry. ‘And, in a strange way, I needed to come back. Crazy, I know. It was a big risk.’ I shrug, push my fingers through my hair. ‘It was because of me that they were caught. I saw . . . what happened. I told the police. I identified all but one of them.’ I hang my head in shame, but quickly glance up at Adam again, staring him right in the eye. ‘The one who actually killed Betsy, the man in the hood, he walked free.’ The knot of guilt grinds my stomach. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And it’s then, as Adam pu
lls me close, that I realise the person I’m really hiding from is myself.

  CHAPTER 50

  The horrid room where I’d seen the cameras, the place I believed was the centre of hell, was at the end of the forbidden corridor. I decided to search there first.

  They couldn’t have her. We were leaving soon.

  I ran out of the dormitory. The linoleum-covered floors, the cracked tiles, the painted panels on the walls, the waist-height trails of grubby finger marks, each telling a grim story, flashed past in a blur as I charged on.

  I stood outside the dreadful room, breathing heavily yet trying to keep down the vomit as I summoned the courage. I burst right in, not caring what happened, hoping they would take me instead. The room was dark, empty, silent. There was a stink.

  ‘Betsy!’ I yelled. Turning, I ran out and legged it down another corridor that splayed out at right angles to the first. Door after door, I banged on them all, and flew down a dog-legged staircase that took me to a different entrance to the basement. I pushed through and found myself in a low-ceilinged chamber stacked with old furniture, barrels, paint cans and machinery. There was yet another door off this chamber but it was locked. I swear I heard a pitiful wail coming from behind it.

  Forcing my jellied legs to work, I tore back the way I’d come, dashing to the usual basement entrance. I pummelled my way through the series of doors, lashing out at light switches, straining to hear the wail again. The cry could have been Betsy.

  I stopped, listened. All I could hear was my rasping breath entering and leaving the cage of my ribs. It was where I kept all my fears, stored up over the years, and now they were coming out, pouring out, in my desperate search for the little girl who had brought meaning to my life. She was like a younger sister to me and I’d let her down.

  ‘Betsy?’ I cried. My voice bounced through the chambers, dislodging clouds of dust, ghosts of the past, remnants of fear draped like torn, bloodied clothes over the stacks of rubbish. I was seeing things, imagining a cave of horror, watching the small skeletons crackling and shifting on the floor as I stepped over the bones of children long gone. ‘Are you here?’ I shivered. It’s not real, I told myself over and over as the horror of what had been going on dawned on me.