The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, breaking the silence, ‘for all this … You didn’t have to really.’ For a moment she thinks she’s going to cry. She coughs to disguise the emotion in her voice. ‘Did you know too?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That Sam and I had been seeing each other while he was still with Honor?’ She stares at him hard. Don’t dare lie. She can’t handle lies today.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  ‘Were we that obvious?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘So how?’

  ‘I came back one weekend and saw his car parked outside the flat.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  He smiles wryly. ‘What could I have said? Melody don’t do it, you’re making a mistake? Don’t betray your friend, he’s not worth it?’

  ‘All right …’ She raises her hands in the air in surrender. ‘All right. I hear you.’ The sharpness of his tone startles her. She takes a breath, goes back to unpick his words. ‘You didn’t think he was worth it?’

  ‘Look, as a friend I like the guy. I was never going to be the one whose life he screwed. I just credited you with a bit more … I dunno,’ he takes a hefty glug of wine, ‘intelligence, self-respect. I didn’t think you would have gone there.’

  His criticism nettles her. Heat rises up her back and neck. You wanted honesty. She just hadn’t expected it to be so brutal. Glancing up, she catches his eyes reflecting the orange flames of the fire.

  ‘You sound like my dad,’ she says in an attempt to defuse the atmosphere. He doesn’t play along.

  ‘When was he there for you, Mel? I mean really there, I don’t mean just a presence in the house? How many times did you call me because you couldn’t get through to him? Did it ever occur to you what he was doing when he was absent? Yeah … consultants work hard, but not that hard. He didn’t have to go to that conference and leave you when you were pregnant.’

  ‘He thought I’d be fine, I was pregnant not ill.’

  ‘And that’s why he asked me to keep an eye on you, was it?’

  Melody curls her knees tight, locks them in to her chest with her arms. ‘He told you? We hadn’t told anyone …’

  ‘You hadn’t told anyone.’

  The room shifts around her. When she turns her gaze away from the fire, light trails linger in her vision. Patrick comes into focus then slips back out again, his edges fuzzy and indistinct. She can’t deal with this today, can’t face any more conflict. She’s been sitting too close to the flames, allowing her brain to broil, and now she wants to lie down, press her hot cheeks against cold sheets and close her eyes. From experience she knows she needs to move quickly to beat the waves of nausea rising inside her. If she’s not asleep within five minutes, she’ll throw up.

  ‘I need to go to bed,’ she says, hauling her body from the chair.

  ‘Yours is the room at the front. And Mel …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry … about the baby …’

  She raises her hand and rakes it through the air. What has happened has happened. She knocks her leg on the arm of the chair on the way out. He says something, words she catches but needs time to process. Right now she is focused on sleep, achieving it as quickly as possible.

  It’s like stepping into a fridge, icy, blissful. The nausea subsides. She peels the covers back – at least they had duvets in the 1980s – burrows her head into the cool pillow and screws her eyes shut against the world. As she teeters on the precipice of sleep, her mind organises his last words into a sentence. It was for the best. She hears her own breath, the sharp intake of it, and tries to hold down the thought. But it crumbles away. Sleep fills her.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Eve

  HIS FLAT REMINDED me of some of the city’s cooler eateries, with that industrial retro look they favoured: a large open-plan living and kitchen area with stainless-steel finishes and bare light bulb pendants hanging down over the table. A few oversized frames hung on the wall adding splashes of colour, a carefully curated selection of sculptures and objets placed around the room to add interest.

  ‘Nice,’ I said. There was a built-in coffee maker, semi hidden from view, ‘Very nice.’ I immediately regretted the repetition, the way it sounded so fangirly. ‘Weird, though, are you always this tidy?’

  It was true, there was not one thing out of place. I would have liked to set my mum loose in here, challenge her to find fault. It would have been her first fail.

  ‘You mean am I sad?’ He looked at me, eyes twinkling, face arranged in mock indignation. Oh Jeez, I thought, he is really quite attractive, which was the strangest thing, because in the whole six months since Mark’s departure, I hadn’t even thought of myself as vaguely sexual, as someone who might fancy again and be fancied. This is what happens when you get pissed. I reminded myself that David had told me he was a prick, though I couldn’t remember exactly why he was supposed to be a prick. I realised I was thinking all this while staring at him and quickly snapped my eyes away from his, feigning interest in an old film poster hanging on the wall next to me. The idea that he would even be interested in me was laughable. Look at this place and then look at yourself. My gaze fell to my trainers. God, I was still in my running gear, wearing an old T-shirt.

  ‘Well, yes … I was just trying to be polite.’

  ‘The cleaner comes on a Saturday.’

  ‘You must be her favourite customer.’ I laughed nervously, unsure of how far to push my sarcasm on someone I didn’t know.

  He handed me a mug. ‘Thanks.’

  He moved towards the sofa, picked up a remote and the room was filled with music. ‘I have a few minutes to inflict my musical taste on you.’

  He peered over the top of his mug, gave me the full force of his attention. ‘So what do you do when you’re not fighting injustice, Eve?’

  Shit, I thought. The taxi better hurry up.

  His vibrating phone announced the taxi’s arrival ten minutes later. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed. He stood over me waiting for me to grab my bag, then walked me through to the hallway. His hand pulled the latch open but not the door. He lingered. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe we’ll bump into each other again …’

  I was standing by the entrance to what I assumed was his bedroom. The door was ajar so I had a clear view inside. Two small lamps on each side of the bed cast a cool light on the room. White wooden floorboards shone, the perfectly made bed without so much as a crease. At the side of his bed a book and something else. It took a second for my eyes to adjust and bring it into focus. An Obi-Wan Kenobi nesting doll. The words were on my lips, ‘I have one of those,’ like it was proof we were soulmates, when I remembered I didn’t have it any more. It had gone missing from my flat. The doll my dad gave me for my fourteenth birthday. Stillness settled in my head. An eerie calm. My eyes saucered wide. Then BOOM. The bomb exploded inside me. My face contorted in horror, my gaze wouldn’t leave his room. I heard his sentence drift unfinished into the air between us. Pull your eyes away from that doll. Smile. Get out. Leave the flat. Now. Lying eyes, I wished I had them. It could have been different. Everything could have been different if he hadn’t looked at me and understood what I had seen burning in them.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  DI Rutter

  HE POUNCES ON her as she swipes herself through the doors. Has he been standing there all morning?

  ‘Morning, DS Ravindra,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you on your mobile.’

  ‘I was driving.’

  ‘There’s something you need to see.’

  He hands her a photocopy of a newspaper story from the Sussex Times dated 19 October 1987.

  BOY, 10, FOUND NEXT TO MOTHER’S BODY.

  A boy aged 10 was found cradling the body of his dead mother more than 24 hours after police believe she committed suicide. The pair were holidaying at their cottage in Climping, West Sussex, when Rosemary Crighton is believed to have
taken an overdose. Police say the boy had been playing with friends and returned home to find his mother dead. The boy’s father, who had been working in London, arrived the next morning to find his son asleep next to her body.

  Mrs Crighton’s father, Patrick Carling, described his daughter as a wonderful mother who doted on her son. ‘We are devastated by her loss.’

  Victoria scrambles to get the words out, ‘Patrick Carling, Melody’s friend … he must have changed his name to his grandfather’s. She left the station with him yesterday. Get a team to his address in Hammersmith.’ She runs through to her office, finds the address Melody wrote down for her. Dalling Road, Hammersmith. The same street as the pub Eve left on the night she disappeared. Why hadn’t she looked last night?

  ‘Alert our colleagues in Sussex. DS Cook and DC Rollings should be almost in Climping by now. Tell me we’ve got an address for Rosemary Crighton’s old house.’ She glares at him. She can’t let it happen again, for Eve, for Melody, for herself.

  ‘We do, ma’am.’

  ‘Well get Cook and Rollings there immediately.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Eve

  THE CAR SLOWED. From my position lying in the back seat, tiny vibrations shot through me. The sound of wheels ripping through gravel filled my ears. I was awake, although not entirely; drifting between two states of consciousness. Each time I scrabbled to regain control over my brain, the effort felled me and I slipped back into my fractured reality. The dream where I was hurtling through the sky, and down where the world spread out below, everyone was going about their lives. They didn’t see me falling, a black dot on the horizon. And that was the single most terrifying thing. No one knew I needed help.

  Footsteps on the gravel crunched towards me. I heard the click of a door opening. A cool breeze brushed my cheeks. The pressure of a hand on my arm pulling me upright. Once my body was at ninety degrees, the light of a torch beamed into my face. I closed my eyes against the brightness that sent sparks dancing on my eyelids. But also so I wouldn’t see the man behind it. How long was it since I’d watched him fix us a coffee in his flat, homing in on his eyes, the sparkle of them, the angular cut of his features anchored in his strong jaw. Whatever I saw in his face now, I knew I wouldn’t see this.

  He had administered something – a drug, though what I couldn’t be sure – to induce the drowsiness. Even if he hadn’t, I think I would still have pissed myself. My first thought when he hauled me out of the car was this. Embarrassment that my leggings were soaked, that he would know I had lost control of my bodily functions. Until I remembered he was probably going to kill me, and if there was ever an excuse to let my standards slip, then this was it.

  My feet touched the ground for the first time in hours. I was upright, or as close to upright as I could get, dizzied from the motion of the car and the drugs racing round my system. He dragged me forward. The torch projected a circle of white light immediately in front of us but everything else was steeped in black. Unlike the darkness that descended on London, pierced by office lights and street lamps and the glow of neon takeaway signs, this was comprehensive, complete. We were alone. It couldn’t have been clearer.

  He hadn’t spoken yet, which was both eerie and reassuring. I recall these moments as a transition, a kind of phoney war. From a certain angle I could almost convince myself that everything would be OK, that my world had not yet been shunted so far off its axis as to make realignment impossible.

  I clung to my mum’s words: It’s never too late.

  There’s nothing that can’t be fixed.

  I knew they weren’t true.

  I was still dressed for a late summer’s day, in lightweight running trousers and a T-shirt, but we had driven into a changed season. A squally wind beat through invisible trees, branches creaked and groaned; somewhere behind us a tin can was lifted up from the ground and blown back on to the path. A dog barked, distant, echoing.

  I heard the jangle of keys, we stepped up towards a door, and to my left the brush of a plant on my skin. I turned, pink flowers leaning in the wind. Hibiscus syriacus. I knew we were here.

  My breaths came rasped and quick. My poor battered heart was beating out of its cage.

  I screamed but the sound was lost in the rush of the trees and wind.

  The terror. Nothing had come close.

  Chapter Thirty

  Melody

  IN THE FEW moments it takes her to assimilate her surroundings, she is a child again, at her grandparents’ house. It’s 1986. The duvet cover is thin, patterned with blue cornflowers, infused with a smell that is both roasted food and mustiness. Not altogether unpleasant, but distinct. Beyond the door the scent of frying bacon drifts down the corridor into her room.

  Clues begin to undermine her initial perception. The dryness of her mouth, the acrid taste. She pulls back the covers, hot and sweating, to find she has slept in yesterday’s clothes. Her legs are too long to belong to her nine-year-old self, the evidence of breasts is another giveaway. She looks again. The spare room at her grandparents’ house was permanently dim, positioned at the back of the house to duck any natural light. This room is filled with it, bleached out under its rays. She forgot to close the curtains last night. And at the window, pressed against the pane, a mass of colour. Large pink funnels of flower. They could be beautiful, in another life.

  She knows exactly where she is.

  Absurdly, her first thought is for water. She is gripped by a furious thirst that blinds her to everything else. Her bones, her throat, her body are so dry she imagines every atom of moisture has been sucked out of them overnight. She craves liquid. The knowledge that the bathroom is next door drags her creeping out from her room. She freezes, a foot suspended mid step as she hears voices from the kitchen. Her brain is slow to dispel the threat; the tinny sound, music: it takes a few beats for her to be satisfied it is Radio 2, Saturday morning classics. They used to listen to it together, coffee and croissants, and she’d take the piss out of him that he was old before his time. ‘My mum listens to this,’ she’d laugh. Not so funny now. She moves quickly, on tiptoes, figuring the smaller the surface area to come into contact with the floorboards the better. The old cottage is her enemy now; every creak and groan and unoiled hinge works against her.

  The squeak of the tap, the water spitting out unevenly, traitors all of them. She thrusts her mouth under the tap. Gulps. When she is satisfied, she takes one hand, cups it and throws cold water into her face.

  Patrick.

  There is the Patrick she has known half her life and now there is the other Patrick, the one revealed to her in sounds and sights: gravel, flowers, a throwaway comment as she headed for bed last night. His inverse. Positive and negative. He deserves more than this, doesn’t he? Surely eighteen years of friendship, a previously unblemished track record, would buy him a bit of slack. Not Patrick, no, no, no! Wasn’t that the way she reacted when police told her that David Alden had attacked her? Disbelief. So why not extend the same courtesy to Patrick?

  There is a reason. Amongst all the whys that are screaming through her head there is something else. A million tiny incidents that have punctuated their history examined from a different perspective.

  ‘Come on, don’t tell me you don’t see it,’ Sam would say.

  The conveyor belt of blondes, small and slim. ‘He’s still trying to find you,’ Sam teased. ‘Shame that you’re mine,’ and he’d lock his arms around her waist proprietorially.

  It’s not the kind of conceit you admit to. ‘We’re friends, get over yourself,’ she’d tell Sam. But when they were together in a room, no matter how many others were there she’d catch Patrick watching her, eyes lingering a fraction too long. There were times when he didn’t look her way at all, didn’t call for weeks. Often when she assumed that his infatuation had extinguished, she would fan the flames again only to back off. It was good to feel wanted. Sam wasn’t the only one who played games.

  Fear balloons in her chest. It has dri
ven the residue of last night’s hangover from her mind. She is startlingly alert, more than she has been in six years. Time matters. Every microsecond counts. Edging out of the bathroom, she listens again. A song playing, happy, melodic. Saturday morning listening. Patrick’s coat has been discarded, thrown over the banister. She slips down the hallway, dips her hand into the left-hand pocket, where she feels a packet of gum. In the right-hand pocket there is nothing. Think. She gropes around once more, her last hope. He is not stupid. He is not going to leave his phone lying around. Her only hope is to get out.

  Three steps and she’s at the door. Every thought that is unrelated to her escape is wiped from her mind. The moment is too huge, too terrifying to accommodate anything else. It is all she can do to propel her body forward, force herself to live it.

  The air around is so stretched she doesn’t dare breathe it for fear it may snap and bring all manner of horrors cascading down upon her. She tries to still her shaking hand, allow it to pull on the latch. Make no noise. Her heart soars when it opens.

  Once outside, wind brushing her skin, she runs, like a cartoon character whose legs are ahead of their body. Distance, ground between them, that is what she craves. Only then can she stop. Stones scratch at her feet, bushes scour her ankles and arms. When she reaches the end of the drive, she stops for a second. Which way? Right or left? What is it to the left that lures her? The distant roar of the sea. Of course, she thinks. It had to be.

  Thick trees and bushes flank the lane, form a canopy overhead. The sun projects shapes of light on the path. There is no one around and she can’t call out yet, not when she’s this close to the cottage. She must keep going. As long as she’s moving and his footsteps aren’t trailing hers, she’ll be all right. Casting a look backwards, she sees the cottage grow smaller.

  She pauses, frozen by the familiar sound of wheels on gravel. About one hundred metres ahead, where the lane curves around the bend, a car is approaching. She starts to wave, flag it down for help. Relief surges through her only to dissipate, replaced by terror. The car edges closer to her. It is Patrick’s. He is behind the wheel.