by J. M. Hewitt
Your fault… your fault… your fault.
Lisa Michaels, still saying her name, urgently now, bordering on a shout.
‘CARRIE?’
Carrie gave in to the spin, she released her grip from the table, tilted sideways. Her last thought was of her sister as the carpet rose up to meet her and Carrie closed her eyes as she passed out into blissful oblivion.
27
On the eighth week of island living, Alice awoke to fat, bulbous clouds of grey and black that brought with them the distant rumble of thunder. She drew back the curtain in their bedroom and felt her heart sink at the lack of sun.
Fearfully she glanced at Harry, still sleeping. He struggled with bad weather, she’d been sure for years that along with the sporadic depression he suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder. While most people, like her and Melanie, used a rainy day as an excuse to curl up under a blanket with a hot drink and a film, Harry fidgeted and withdrew into himself, only seeming to wake again when the sunshine reappeared.
Alice snapped the curtains closed before Harry woke up and saw the dismal day. Slipping her housecoat on she quietly left the bedroom, wincing at the cold tiles on her bare feet as she made her way into the kitchen.
She stared at the copper kettle on the fireplace, not sure if she could be bothered to start a fire in order to make a coffee, remembering wistfully the days when she could flick a switch and have boiling water in a matter of minutes.
Rain spattered against the window pane, heavy drops that abruptly hammered the thin glass as the heavens opened. Alice moved to the window, staring out of the front, stepping back behind the drapes as three people left the cottage next door.
Willow and Lenon, she noted. Both of them in waterproofs, heads down against the driving rain, baskets and buckets in hand. They’d really taken to island living, she realised. Possibly even more so than Harry, which was ironic, considering this madcap idea had been all his.
Gabe emerged, pulling the hood of his mac up, hoisting a backpack on. Hunched against the rain he moved in the opposite direction to the kids, disappearing over the field, heading towards the woods. What of Liz? wondered Alice. And, not wanting to be there when Harry woke up and saw the disappointing weather, Alice pulled open the door, slipped outside and ran the few feet to Liz’s cottage.
To her surprise, she saw Liz moving around the kitchen, and Alice banged on the glass, raised a hand in greeting.
The door was ajar, and Alice pushed it open, leaned into the room. ‘Hi, are you all right? I just thought I’d pop round, so little to do in this crap weather,’ she said.
Liz stood by the sink, a glass in her hand, gazing silently at Alice. Alice swallowed, the rain hit the back of her dressing gown and it lay uncomfortably damp against her skin. She inched further into the room, lost for words now. Did Liz even know who she was?
‘Liz, you okay?’ she managed.
Liz blinked and the strangeness passed.
‘Hello,’ said Liz, and her words were slow and careful. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Alice smiled, spotting a jar of coffee on the side which made her practically salivate. ‘Love one, thanks.’
‘Sit down.’ Liz waved a hand vaguely around the room and Alice, her bare feet sodden, tip-toed across to a chair.
‘Foul weather,’ she said.
Liz made no reply and Alice stared uncomfortably down at her feet. They were muddy, there being no path between the two cottages, just a strip of grass. She folded her ankles together, reminded herself next time to put shoes on before she went out. A lump came to her throat as she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the door of which she’d just come through. Dressing gown, bare feet, she hadn’t even dragged a comb through her hair or washed her face. How had she become so feral in such a short amount of time?
Harry, spat a vicious voice in her head. This is all his fault.
She became aware of Liz lurching across the floor towards her, walking unsteadily, holding two mugs. Alice half rose, ready to intercept the mugs of coffee from the woman who looked increasingly unsteady on her feet. But Liz made it without incident, and with shaking hands she placed the two drinks on the table.
Alice stared down into the chipped mugs. Water. Liz had served them both water. Alice floundered. ‘No coffee?’ she asked eventually, her voice falsely bright, gently mocking.
Liz shook her head.
Alice’s eyes went to the coffee jar on the counter. Liz followed her gaze, but made no comment.
Alice gave up, sipped at the water. ‘Where have the others gone?’ she asked politely.
Liz blinked, drew in a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, and then, ‘which others?’
‘Your husband and kids,’ said Alice.
‘Oh.’ Liz nodded, and to Alice her head was like a pendulum, heavy as it tipped up and down. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said again.
Alice sighed. ‘How are you feeling, Liz?’ she asked, with genuine concern tinging her irritability. ‘You were really quite ill. You’ve lost weight, are you eating?’
‘Yeah, you know.’ Liz smiled weakly, pushed herself up from her chair and sidled back to the kitchen. The counter underneath the window was cluttered, noticed Alice, pots and jars and bottles. Liz’s hand danced among them, her fingers tapping each container before she pulled out a small, white bottle. Unscrewing the cap she tipped something into her hand, threw it in her mouth and dry swallowed. Placing the container back where she’d plucked it from, Liz walked unsteadily out of the room. When Alice heard the bathroom door close she jumped up and hurried over to the counter.
Diazepam, she saw was printed on the bottle. Liz was on Diazepam. Valium! But why? What was her story?
‘Liz, I have to be going now, I’ll catch up with you later, okay?’ Alice called in the direction of the bathroom. She waited for a moment but when there was no answer, she slipped back out of the door and tripped back over the grass to her own cottage.
When she darted inside, Harry was in the kitchen, looking anxiously at the sky out of the window.
‘Morning,’ he said, and then, ‘Oh, you’ll catch your death going outside like that.’
Alice shrugged off the now soaking dressing gown and snatched up yesterday’s shirt and jeans from the back of the chair. ‘I went over to see Liz.’
‘How is she?’ Harry asked, moving over to the fire clutching a handful of tinder.
‘Same,’ said Alice.
She watched him painstakingly arranging the wood in the hearth. Bitterness flowed in her again, that she had to go through all this hassle just to get a morning coffee. And what would happen when the coffee ran out? What then? She could ask Ben to bring some, she supposed, but no, she would have to explain it to Harry. He had no idea Ben was visiting her, he would be horrified that she wasn’t going along with his ‘living from the earth on a deserted island’ dream.
One thought led to another: what if Ben decided to stop coming? What if he had to go away on his boat, work miles and miles away, or, God forbid, met a woman and settled down? Alice’s heart thumped painfully in her chest.
‘What are we doing here, Harry?’ she asked as she yanked her jeans on. ‘I mean, really, are you enjoying this?’
‘Are you not?’ he sounded aghast, disbelieving. ‘This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, Alice, we need to appreciate it, not fight it.’
Alice opened her mouth, prepared herself to say the words that she had spent years suppressing. ‘It wasn’t my choice.’
Harry carried on, as though he hadn’t even heard her. As though Alice hadn’t even spoken.
‘Living from the land, getting back to nature, doing away with all false substances, that’s what it’s all about, Alice,’ Harry went on, ‘A safe place to raise our child, away from the streets, away from the drugs and the booze and the youth culture.’ He leaned close to her, spoke his next words very quietly. ‘Away from men who snatch our kids off the streets. Melanie had such a narrow escape, Alice, sur
ely you see that?’
Alice swallowed. Harry had missed it, he’d missed entirely the words she’d spoken which she’d thought silently to herself since the day Harry had arranged their wedding without even telling her.
‘It wasn’t my choice,’ she said, stronger, slightly louder. ‘So much of what we’ve done wasn’t my choice, Harry.’ She swallowed again. ‘Out here, I’m starting to realise it.’
Her words were huge, bigger than her and Harry and Melanie put together. She had imagined saying them so many times over the years; always, in her head they were accompanied with a fanfare that finally she had broken out of herself and told him the truth. Never, in all her daydreams, had Harry dismissed her feelings as easily as he did now.
‘It’ll be better in summer,’ he said, craning his head to look out at the black sky. ‘Everything seems so much better when the sun is out, the mornings are lighter, the days last longer––’
‘No, Harry, that’s JUST YOU,’ Alice shouted, her words came out in a bark, clipped and fierce with the hysterical edge of threatening tears. ‘You have no idea of anything, of how I feel, how Melanie is feeling, this wasn’t our choice, Harry, you never gave us a choice. Liz next door, this wasn’t her choice, it wasn’t her children’s choice. It’s you, you men, forging ahead to give your own masculinity a hard-on that it can’t achieve in normal life.’
Harry turned his head to look at her, his eyes grew very small as he grimaced. ‘Alice, there’s no need for talk like that––’
‘There is!’ she slapped her hand on the table, hard, and it felt good, and it sounded good and she did it again. Bang, bang!
‘I always let you work,’ Harry said, quietly now.
She pushed her palms flat into the table top, pulled back her right leg and kicked the leg of table hard. The table screeched across the tiles. ‘Who are you to let me work?’ she spat. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are to let me work?’
She spun away, her bare toes throbbing, not daring to look down, knowing her foot would soon be as black and blue as the swollen clouds outside.
‘…and Gabe would have talked this over with Liz and the twins,’ Harry was saying in an infuriatingly mid-mannered tone of voice. ‘Just like we did, he would have answered any concerns, discussed it in a civil and adult manner just like we––’
‘Oh, Harry,’ Alice breathed his name, all the fight gone as she sank to sit on the cold concrete floor. She laughed, but it was mirthless, dry and brittle. ‘If Liz is so happy to be here why is she next door tanked up on Diazepam?’ She glared at him.
His mouth worked before settling into a thin line. ‘She’s taking Diazepam?’
Alice nodded wearily. ‘I can’t go on like this, Harry. We need to talk, to decide what we’re going to do, how we can get home… Harry, Harry? Where are you going?’
But he was gone, slipping out of the house and into the driving rain.
Alice stared after him and covered her mouth with her hands.
The door to the cottage next door was ajar and Harry pushed it open. Through the gloom he could see Liz in the bathroom, the door ajar, she stood at the sink. Harry opened his mouth to call her name, but closed it again.
Was there something very wrong with Liz? He thought back to the times they had interacted, and his lips pinched together. They had never interacted, she was spaced out all the time, even back in Manchester. His gaze went to the worktop, the plates and cutlery and pans and the small pill bottles nestled in the mess. He glanced back towards the bathroom. Liz hadn’t moved.
She had no idea he was standing in her doorway.
Harry edged to the kitchen area, plucked out a bottle at random. Not Diazepam, he noted, but Zopiclone. Lightly, he touched the lids of the other pill bottles, half a dozen in all, different brands of sedatives and tranquilisers. He thought of his pill bottle, with two tablets left. The bottle wedged down the side of his chair. Those two pills that he hadn’t yet taken, because he’d weaned himself off the medication, because he wanted to live normally, naturally, among people who wanted the same kind of life as him. But here was Liz, moving around like a zombie, carelessly leaving her pills out where anyone could find them.
She had been careless. And since Harry was the leader of this expedition, he figured it was up to him to dish out the lessons. He slipped the bottle of Zopiclone in his pocket and exited the little cottage soundlessly.
He wasn’t going to take any of the pills himself. No, it was just to make people realise they couldn’t leave things like that around where children, or rather, his child, could find them. And if Liz and Gabe had any sense, they would put the rest of the pill bottles away in a safe place, like the bathroom cabinet or a high cupboard. He nodded to himself, fingering the outline of the bottle in his pocket.
It didn’t solve the bigger issue though, Harry admitted. The discord in the group, the fractures and splinters that were preventing them from fully realising how successful they could make this life. What to do about that? He thought of Alice’s words, as painful as they were to recall. This wasn’t my choice.
Harry sat down on the bench outside the Hadleys’ cottage. Perhaps she meant to say it hadn’t been her idea, which was true, it was his idea, but he’d only mentioned it and gone ahead with it because he knew best. He was older than she was, he’d always known what was best for his family. He thought back overall the decisions he’d made in the past that Alice had been reluctant about. Melanie, for one. Alice hadn’t wanted a baby when she’d got pregnant, but Harry had made her see how perfect it would make their little family. And she would agree with him now, wouldn’t she?
Their wedding was another one. Back then Alice had been all work and study, and Harry had known she would never have the time to plan a wedding. So, he had planned it, booked the registry office and found the witnesses. He’d even planned the little wedding tea that they had after the ceremony. A ghost of a smile caught at Harry’s mouth as he remembered. She had wept, Alice had, tears of joy he was sure, that someone loved her so much to do all of that for her. And the house he had bought, equally split with his money and her own. She hadn’t been too sure of that, he remembered, because she fancied herself living in one of those penthouse apartments that had gone up at the waterfront, with elevators and marbled floors. But Harry knew that somewhere slightly out of the main city streets would be better suited to them, somewhere with a garden that they could enjoy as a family.
Harry had known what was best for them. Alice just pushed against it because she liked to think she was independent. But she’d got used to everything he had done, and seen that it was in their best interests, and she would get used to this too. Island living.
He pushed himself up off the bench. Moved backwards out of the rain. He glanced at his cottage, knowing Alice was still inside, remembering her earlier angry words.
Probably best not to disturb her yet. The rain lessened to a light mist. Pulling up his hood he moved off towards the copse of trees, hoping to stumble upon one of the other members of his team.
As he walked the pills in the bottle rattled in his pockets
They hummed out a tune. Take one… take one… take one.
Alice had been nervous that Harry would stick by her side the day after their fight, but he’d been surprisingly easy to dodge and avoid. He hadn’t mentioned their argument when he returned to the cottage, and Melanie had come back home even later than Harry. They had eaten a meal around the table, rabbit trimmed with wild garlic and tinned potatoes, just the three of them, and it was filled with an awkward tension. Melanie refused to even look at Alice, and Alice had neither the patience or even the desire right now to find out what was going on with her daughter.
Instead she thought of later, Ben’s visit, and how much she wanted to see him.
Alice unbuttoned her shirt and it was halfway off her shoulders before Ben held his hand up. Feeling foolish she held it closed to cover herself.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
�
�The police came to my house,’ Ben said. He sat on the little bed, rubbed his hand over his beard. All the while his blue eyes pierced hers.
Alice sank onto the wooden bench. ‘What did they want?’
‘They want to know if I’ve seen you, or your family, or the other lot. They know you’re here, they wanted me to bring them over, but I dodged them this morning.’ He grinned at her, suddenly, out of keeping with his serious nature. A smile so bright she couldn’t help but smile back.
We’re both dodging people, she thought. She Harry, he the police. And at the thought of them again Alice felt the blood drain from her face. The police? Why did they care? She voiced this thought.
Ben shrugged. ‘Someone probably reported you missing.’
‘But we haven’t done anything wrong!’ she exclaimed. Immediately she thought of Melanie, who should be in school. But Harry was home-schooling her, insistent she would learn more over here than in any classroom. The laws were pretty relaxed on home education, though she knew they hadn’t gone through the correct channels of actually informing Melanie’s school. And who on earth would have reported them missing? They had no other family, no real friends to speak of. The immediate neighbours would know by now that the house had been sold with a quick sale company.
Maxine.
Her former friend’s name flashed into her mind, a sense of warmth along with it. Did Maxine still care? Was there someone who didn’t live on this godforsaken island who still gave a damn about Alice?
Ben cleared his throat. ‘Just thought I’d better let you know.’
Alice breathed deeply. On the table in front of her sat a bottle of whisky. Expensive stuff, she noted, the sort the partners at work had in their office. She grabbed it, unscrewed the cap and swigged directly from the bottle. It went down well, and she realised suddenly how much she missed the good stuff.