The Friend

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘What happened that night she was attacked?’ Cece asks. ‘You say you saw her? You say your story relates to her?’

  ‘I … I lied to the police. She was saying stuff, there was shouting. I pushed her. She shoved me first, I pushed her back, there was so much going on, all of us fighting and then she was on the floor. And she’d banged her head on one of the rocks we keep in the beach hut.’

  ‘So all of you were on the beach with her that night?’

  This isn’t my story to tell any more. This now involves the other two. They would go mad if they knew I was talking like this. Especially Hazel, who has only just calmed down with the paranoia. ‘I … I can’t say any more. I’m sorry, I’ve used you as a bit of a sounding board. I just needed to hear it out loud before I talk to Sanjay about it.’

  ‘Are you going to tell your husband everything?’ I know she means about the night on the beach.

  ‘I don’t know. I want to. Like I want to tell you, but it’s not just about me.’

  ‘Anaya, do you think one of the others did that to Yvonne?’ she asks.

  ‘Thing is, Cece, I wanted to do that to Yvonne. That’s why I have to talk to Sanjay. This secret has poisoned me, slowly, slowly. I was so sick when Yvonne found the pictures; she didn’t even ask how they came about, she just saw them and knew they’d be leverage, which they were. And I hated her for that. More than once I wanted to do her harm. Not to stop her telling, more to protect other people from her. And I wanted to follow her that night. I wanted to follow her and to smash her head in. And then someone did. And I feel awful about it. Because I can understand that feeling. I had that feeling.’

  ‘But you didn’t, that’s the important thing.’

  I stare at Cece and decide that I need to be honest again. ‘Didn’t I?’

  She glances to the ground. Stumped. This is it. This is why I can’t go to the police. I learnt last time that it’s always your word against someone else’s. Whether I did or didn’t, if Hazel or Maxie say I did, if I say that Maxie did, or Hazel did, it would be my word against someone else’s. And that hasn’t gone well for me in the past.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cece. I’ve burdened you with all of this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s completely fine. I understand.’ She smiles. I want her to hug me again. To offer me the comfort and care she did before I told her I could have tried to kill Yvonne. I want to relax into her hold, allow myself to let go again. She reads my mind and steps forward, envelops me with her arms, and hugs me. I do it then – I let go, allow her to comfort me, to let me be weak for one moment in my life.

  11 p.m. It’s only when I’m pulling into the driveway, see Suhani’s car there, that I realise I didn’t ask Cece not to say anything to anyone. But she won’t. She wouldn’t … I have a feeling I can trust her. Maybe that’s naïve and silly, but I do. Anyway, once Sanjay knows, once his mother knows, it won’t matter any more. My marriage will most likely be over but at least I won’t have this awful secret hanging over my head any longer. I’ll be free to tell everyone everything and I won’t feel locked into this world of secrecy with Hazel and Maxie any more.

  Cece

  11:30 p.m. ‘Are you all right?’ Sol asks.

  I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed with my thumbs pressed into the centre of my forehead, trying to push away my headache. I open my eyes and stare at my husband, momentarily confused by who he is. ‘No, I don’t think I am,’ I say to him.

  He enters the room and shuts the door behind him. When I came back from talking to Anaya, the children were in bed, he was in his office and I came up here and sat on the bed, shaking. I eventually calmed down enough to stop shaking and to sit myself cross-legged and try to get rid of my headache, but I’ve not been able to do anything else.

  This was what I was scared of. Anaya had good reason to want to shut up Yvonne. They probably all did. How am I going to tell Gareth that it was her, if it was? How am I going to say, this woman was using something truly horrible that happened to a friend to get into a world that she wasn’t a part of? If I was Anaya, wouldn’t I want to shut up Yvonne? I wouldn’t do it, but I’d want to. She admitted as much. She admitted she wanted to, she could have been admitting that she did from the way she said, ‘Didn’t I?’ Because, in the heat of the moment, when you can see everything you love slipping away, wouldn’t you do something out of character to protect yourself? Look what I’ve agreed to in order to get rid of Gareth. I can imagine Anaya’s desperation.

  ‘Anything I can do to help?’ Sol asks.

  ‘I’m not sure anyone can help,’ I say. I sound bleak. I feel bleak. They are all going to have good reasons to have wanted to harm Yvonne Whidmore, I suspected that. But then, I am doing what she did. I am going to find out information as their friend and then use it against them. How does that make me any better than Yvonne Whidmore? I didn’t think this through when I made this deal with Gareth. That isn’t like me. I think things through, I look at different angles and I try to work out the best solution. There is no best solution in this scenario.

  ‘I love you, you know, Cee?’ Sol says.

  I turn to him in the gloom. ‘I know,’ I reply automatically.

  ‘And I’m so sorry for being so epically crap these past few weeks.’

  I say nothing because I do not want a row. I do not want anything else to deal with right now, not when I am battling with what I will do with this information about Anaya. I feel dreadful. Hollow inside, deceitful in those newly hollowed out spaces. I manipulated that story out of her by asking her every day how it was going. I do not want to row with Sol on top of being a terrible person.

  ‘Whatever it is that’s bothering you, you can tell me about it, you know, he tells me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. I can’t, of course.

  ‘And if you can’t tell me about it, remember that I love you. And I know you’ll always do the right thing.’

  I crawl over the bed to him and he opens his arms. We come together in a wonderfully familiar hug. His smell, the salty, fresh, acrid scent of the man I’ve chosen to share my life with, moves through me, and it feels like coming home, like we’re finally together again. It doesn’t take long for us to start kissing and slowly undressing each other. It doesn’t take long for us to find our rhythm, to slip back into being with each other.

  He’s said what I needed to hear, I realise before I let go. I have to do the right thing. And I know what the right thing is, whether I like it or not.

  Part 11

  WEDNESDAY

  Maxie

  1 a.m. Ed is kissing my neck. I was sitting on the counter, thinking. Thinking about my secret and how I want to tell someone, how I want it all to be out there so everyone can judge me accordingly, when he came in from the living room. I didn’t think he knew I was here, but he came towards me and pulled me off the counter. The second my bare feet touched the ground he started doing this. Kissing my neck, running his fingers through my hair. His lips never stray towards my mouth, though – they simply cover my neck, my chest, my breasts in kisses until he is moving us across the room, to the table, then he is laying me down, opening a condom and rolling it on and entering me. All without pause, all driven by him, all so unlike the him I’ve come to know in recent years. Afterwards, he stares into my eyes, breathing like he has just run a race, blushing like he has shown himself up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says between breaths. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have done that.’ And then he’s gone. Leaving me alone in the kitchen – my body quivering with not understanding what happened, my mind reverberating with echoes from our past.

  Hazel

  2 a.m. My phone bleeps.

  It’s been silent for a while. Anaya has virtually stopped responding to messages since I ran away from her in the street; Maxie responds but doesn’t give anything away. I’ve tried to go back to normal texts: Do you fancy meeting up to knit? Do you want to make cocktails? Tea down at the play centre? And nothing.
Always an excuse from Maxie and usually silence from Anaya.

  This isolation, this purgatory, is driving me insane.

  I move off the close-lidded toilet into the bath and pull my legs up to my chest, wrap my dressing gown around me. It’s pink and silk, something Ciaran bought me in the early days; there’s no warmth in it, but it will have to do. I have to sit in here because if I don’t, Ciaran comes to find me and makes me go back to bed. Then he holds me. I’m sure he thinks it’s comforting or reassuring or something, but really, it’s claustrophobic. He rests his full weight on me, it feels like. His arm is heavy on my chest and if I move it to my waist, he returns it to my chest minutes later, even in his sleep. He doesn’t seem to realise that when he makes me sleep like he wants to, I can’t breathe. It literally feels like he is crushing me. The nights that the children aren’t here are worse. He will find me, then bring me back to bed with promises of cuddles until I fall asleep. Cuddles that involve sex, of course. No, not sex, not love-making – baby-making.

  I hate myself for thinking like that. It’s like, since Yvonne’s attack, I am trying to destroy everything good in my life by turning on them. First Anaya and Maxie, now Ciaran.

  I hunch up a little more. I sit in here because there is a lock on the door. I would fill the bath, get in and allow the water to ease my worries, but the sound would wake the children.

  My phone bleeps again, a reminder that someone is trying to reach me. I lean out of the bath, my fingers graze the smooth screen and I press the home button, type in the code.

  I think we should all go to the police together. Tell them the truth. We haven’t done anything so we shouldn’t be suffering like this. Let me know what you think. A xxx

  We haven’t done anything. Ha. Ha-ha-ha! Speak for yourself, Anaya. Speak for your bloody self.

  ‘Hazel,’ Ciaran whispers through the door. ‘Hazel, come back to bed.’

  ‘I’ll be there soon,’ I whisper back.

  He turns the doorknob, checking that I haven’t forgotten to keep him firmly on the other side. ‘Come on now, Hazel.’

  ‘I said, I’ll be there soon.’ Now leave me alone! I don’t say that out loud, but I still clamp my hands over my mouth. I need to stop this. Maybe Anaya is right. Maybe we should go to the police and confess. Then this torture, where I am starting to hate everyone and everything, can finally end.

  THURSDAY

  Cece

  11:45 a.m. I knock on the navy-green door of 83 Turram Lane. I hope, hope, hope that the person who opens the door won’t be—

  ‘Cece, isn’t it?’ Ciaran says. ‘How nice to see you.’

  I find a smile for him, and I watch a moment of suspicion slither behind his eyes before representing itself as a welcoming smile on his lips. He is incredibly good-looking. I can see why Hazel fell for him. I can see why the woman I met yesterday fell for him, too. You do not see someone like him – polished, poised, perfect – and think he is a violent psychopath.

  ‘Yes, it’s Cece. Is Hazel in?’ I reply.

  He raises a hand, scratches his ear. ‘Erm, no, sorry. She’s out right now. Would you like to leave a message?’

  ‘Erm …’ I begin, thrown. She is always at home on Thursdays.

  ‘Who is it?’ Hazel calls from inside the house.

  ‘Oh,’ he says with a little laugh, his face creasing into a beautiful smile, ‘look at that. She is in after all. Must have snuck back in while I was upstairs.’

  I widen my smile. ‘Yeah. Must have. My husband does that to me all the time.’

  Without breaking eye contact, he leans back slightly to call into the house: ‘It’s your friend Cece.’ He has a particular inflection on the word ‘friend’. I wonder if I would pay as much attention to that ‘tell’ if I didn’t know what sort of a person he really is. What he has planned for Hazel.

  ‘Cece?’ Hazel’s voice comes closer. ‘Hi.’ She steps into the doorway where he stands, ushering him aside. He’s still watching me, biting his lower lip and trying to keep a genial look on his face. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

  ‘Look, I know it’s cheating,’ I say, and reach into the large cream cloth bag I have slung over my shoulder, ‘but I was wondering if you could teach me that purl thing, because I found out you need to be able to do that to make something like this.’ I pull one of Harmony’s favourite jumpers from the bag. It’s a raspberry red-pink and she would lose the plot if she knew I had taken it from her room to use it in this. I needed a reason to see Hazel and this was the only way. ‘I saw this type of stitching on Harmony’s jumper and I found out it was basically purl. I can’t do purl. So, could you teach me purl? I know you sussed me out the first time that I couldn’t knit to save my life, but you have to admit that I have come on loads since then. But there’s only so much you can learn from internet videos before you have to learn from the expert.’ Since the meeting up seems to have dried up, this is the only way to get Hazel to talk to me. ‘Please?’ I say. ‘This is my daughter’s favourite jumper. If I could knit like it, I do not think I would be able to get cooler in her eyes.’

  Hazel is clearly flattered, but guarded. I wonder if something has happened with Anaya and Maxie? Now I know for definite they were all together and that they did all lie to the police – an inference from what Anaya said – I wonder if this will work? There is no way she will come to me like Anaya did. I need another ‘in’.

  ‘Go on then,’ she says. ‘But we’ll have to be quick, it’s school pick-up in three hours.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her as I step forwards. ‘Three hours is going to be more than enough to learn everything I need to.’

  Yesterday, I drove to Essex to meet a woman called Lynne Smythe. I’d spoken to her on the phone, I told her who I was, I said it was nothing to do with the police or the papers and I just wanted to talk to her. She’d hesitated on the phone, then said, almost resignedly, ‘All right, then,’ and gave me her address.

  We sat at her kitchen table and Lynne Smythe cried. She asked me if it was me really, and not a friend as I’d told her on the phone. When I confirmed it was a friend and not me, she cried again. She was incredibly thin, and her brown hair was greasy and unwashed. She wore a cardigan far too big for her and she constantly, nervously, picked at her nails. She stared out of the patio doors at her two children – a girl aged about fifteen and a boy aged about three – and told me her story. The story of how she had got involved with a man called Kier Hamill, also known as Ciaran Hamilton, Hazel’s partner.

  She told me: I met Kier after my husband left me. My ex-husband was a lazy, abusive bastard who couldn’t keep it in his pants. You know, most of the time I could just about put up with it, ignore it, but when I found out he was putting it about, trying it on with my friends and the like, I finally had the courage to end the relationship. It wasn’t easy, of course, and my ex-husband dragged it out for months. Just when he’d got me convinced that we could work it out, that he was going to change, help out around the house, take some real responsibility for our daughter instead of just being Disney Dad with his grand gestures and days out, he left me for another woman.

  I’m only telling you this because it’ll give you some idea of where I was when I met Kier. My self-esteem was bad enough after all those years in a crap marriage, but at that point it was on the floor. I met him on a girls’ weekend away. My mum was looking after Monica, my oldest, so I could get all dressed up and let my hair down. Kier was completely different to my ex-husband. We spent so much time chatting that night, and he was attentive, caring – he made me feel so incredibly desirable.

  When I came home again, we kept in touch and he’d come down to visit, stay in a luxury hotel nearby so he wouldn’t infringe on my time with Monica, and so he wouldn’t be putting any pressure on me. I’d go and stay at his hotel and he’d treat me like a princess. Nothing was ever too much for him, and he loved treating me. With him, I totally rediscovered my sex drive. I rediscovered what it felt like to have a man
want you, and to want a man. I’d forgotten what it was like to have an orgasm, or to not have someone shagging you like a battering ram. After about six months, he got a temporary contract in the area and it seemed silly for him to rent a house at extortionate rates when I had all this space here. So he met my daughter and he moved in temporarily.

  It was only looking back, afterwards, that I realised he was good at convincing me to do things that went against my better instincts. When Monica met him, she thought he was great. We’d go out, the three of us, and we’d have a brilliant time. Being with him was heavenly. He used to bring me flowers, buy me little presents, and if he ever needed to borrow a little cash to tide him over, he always paid me back straight away.

  And Kier totally helped my confidence in dealing with my ex. I managed to get him to pay child support, to actually see his daughter; I suddenly had the ability to stand up for myself. That was all thanks to Kier. It was a bit rocky at first, when he moved in, but that’s what happens when you start living with someone, I thought. I mean, most of my friends loved him, my mum loved him for what he’d done for my confidence. I loved him.

  About three months after he moved in, he wanted us to try for a baby. I was too long in the tooth for that, I told him. And besides, I’d already got my little girl, she’s all I ever wanted. But, like with everything else, he convinced me that it would be a wonderful thing, it’d be this unbreakable bond between us. Oh God, oh God …