The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Melody

  ‘WHERE WERE YOU going?’

  Past tense, she thinks. Wherever it was, I’m not going there any more. In the split second she was deliberating which way to run, whether to run at all, he had caught her up. The car kicking up a gritty cloud of dust on the lane, Patrick’s face emerging through it, waving an arm in front of him to clear the fog. ‘I only went to get some milk,’ he smiles, a look she’s seen a thousand times before but no longer recognises. He has his arm around her shoulder, pulls her in towards him. She recoils but he holds her tight. ‘Come on, bacon sandwiches, tea. Saturday mornings don’t come better than this.’

  Her chest heaves from the exertion of running but her breaths are shallow, wheezing. ‘I’ll walk,’ she says, attempting to keep her voice even. ‘I need a bit of fresh air.’

  He pushes her forward and with his hand on her head forces her down into the car. ‘Fresh air is overrated.’

  Pretending, it’s what I’m good at, she tells herself. What she needs is to pull off the performance of her life. Right here and now, in this kitchen. At this old oak table ringed with cup marks. Where Patrick would have sat as baby, as a boy, drinking juice. Happy families. What went wrong?

  Drink the tea, eat the sandwich. Smile. Smile like you know the person sitting in front of you, because he is reading every flicker and twitch in your face. Every time your eyes dart to the door. He sees it all. Pretend, for fuck’s sake.

  Her eyes drift to the window. It is pocked with dirt and grime, sticky with sap from the trees. A weak light filters in but the room is cold, her breath mists in front of her.

  ‘Not hungry?’ His voice makes her start. Tea sloshes out from the mug she is holding. She shakes her head. She feels the panic press down on her, sending shoots of pain deep into her chest. Tears surge. She needs to suppress them. Once they come, she will be powerless to control them.

  Her gaze falls back to him. He regards her with faint amusement, smirking when their eyes lock. He is enjoying it, this spectacle, watching her fry like an ant under his magnifying glass.

  ‘Why?’ she says. Fuck pretending. If she’s going to die, she wants some answers.

  He rocks back in the chair, locks his hands behind his head, yawns as he stretches out. He’s going to keep her hanging for a bit longer, eke it out. Isn’t that what she’s been doing to him?

  The silence splinters when his fist smashes down on the table like a gavel.

  ‘Why do you always have to ruin it?’

  He can recount, with alarming precision, each occasion when she has ruined it. The night in the club in Ibiza, drunk on shots, when they danced so close their bodies moulded together. They lasted until five in the morning, when they got a taxi back and she rested her head on his lap. He stroked her hair, bright blond from the sun. He thought she understood then that what they had was special and should be nurtured (if only he knew that two nights later she was swimming naked with Sam). Why, when she turned to him with a broken heart, did she not see as clearly as daylight that all she needed was right in front of her?

  ‘I could have spared you all that shit if only you’d listened. But you’re just like her.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘My mother. You can’t even remember, can you?’ He waits for an answer. ‘I told you all about her when we were camping that night. I hadn’t told anyone before. I told you what happened. She didn’t die, she committed suicide. She killed herself because my dad destroyed her with his affairs. Every time it happened she’d tell me we were leaving and then he’d win her back. Words, that’s all they were, just hollow empty words. Because he’d go and do the same again. She was beautiful …’ he pauses, his voice grows shaky, ‘like you.’

  A memory rises to the surface, faded, blurred. A photograph of a woman, blond hair, jewel-green eyes. A chain around her neck. ‘You showed me a picture of her that night with the chain?’

  He nods. ‘Funny that your memory starts working now. It was the school holidays when she did it. My dad was supposed to be coming down that morning. She told me to go out and play so I went out to the garden, built a den with my friends. We could spend hours there, getting lost in games we’d dream up. I only came in because I was hungry. She hadn’t called me for lunch so I went inside. She was in the living room lying on the floor. I thought she was asleep, but when I touched her she was so cold, she wouldn’t wake up. I just lay next to her, talking at first, telling her what I had been doing. She looked so peaceful, so calm. Just the two of us there in the room. She was wearing the chain I had given her for her birthday. They buried her in it. I imagined there was always part of me with her.

  ‘I told you all this, everything, and we kissed. You can remember that much, can’t you? And the next morning you laughed as if it had been a joke. You laughed and said I had tried to kiss you and you didn’t mention anything else.’

  She doesn’t think this is true. Not all of it. They kissed, that much she recalls, and he told her something about his mother, but surely she would have remembered this, the manner in which she died, Patrick finding her and lying next to her body, chatting about football teams and dens as the heat faded from her? That information would have wedged itself deep in her brain, sprung up again the next morning the moment she looked at his face. She wouldn’t have laughed, not even about the kiss. She would have shown more consideration.

  ‘I don’t …’ She stops. Anger distorts his face. She shuffles in her chair, hears it scrape along the flagstones. A pulse throbs through her body.

  ‘It happened. All of it. Don’t tell me it didn’t happen, don’t try to make excuses for yourself. I’d bought you the same chain as a present. I was waiting for the right time to give it to you. But there was never a right time, was there?

  ‘Tell me, was I too nice, too dependable, did you want someone who was more of a bastard?’ He laughs, a throaty cackle. ‘Obviously that’s why you started fucking Sam.’

  Her mind whirs. ‘That weekend I cancelled on you. You came back and saw us in the flat, didn’t you?’

  ‘Everything.’ His laugh is vicious. ‘He was all over you.’ He sees her shudder. ‘Don’t worry, you weren’t naked, you were in too much of a hurry for that, evidently. Too immersed in each other to see someone watching.’ His eyes spark and dance. ‘That hurt, let me tell you, seeing the weight of him on you, the look on your face.

  ‘Did he tell you he was going to leave Honor? Or did you not mind sharing him with your friend? Well?’ His voice is sharp, deafening. ‘Or was it just about the sex?’

  Words stick in her throat, choke her.

  ‘Yeah, I thought as much.’

  He heard her phone buzz that Friday night in the pub. He read the message. He knew where she was going. Another clandestine meeting with Sam. For ages he’d wanted to stop her, warn her about what she was getting into, but the chance hadn’t arisen. She was always out, with Sam, at work, too busy. The time they spent just the two of them was non-existent. When he saw the text, he knew he had to do something. The plan formed in his head. He could bring her here. ‘You’d promised to come after all. A promise is a promise,’ he says smiling. ‘But I doubted you’d agree to it so I slipped a little something into your glass of rosé at the pub. You were so intent on getting plastered I knew you wouldn’t notice it.’

  ‘You drugged me?

  ‘Flunitrazepam is the medical term, though it’s often referred to as the date rape drug. Not that I would ever have raped you.’ His eyes grow wide in horror. ‘That wasn’t why I did it.’

  If she survives this, at least she’ll know she can have more than one glass of wine before she falls over. If she survives.

  ‘It’s not that easy to detect in the bloodstream. By the time you were tested it would have gone.’ His tone is so matter-of-fact she finds herself losing her grasp on reality.

  ‘Well that’s a relief,’ she says, her voice thick with forced sarcasm. ‘That you weren’t going to rape …’ She m
eant to stand up to him but by the end of the sentence her words have lost their bite.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Make you see what he was like and what you were doing. It took you ages to wake up, you were out for the whole night, half of the next morning. I was watching you, looking after you the whole time. You looked so peaceful, your lips so red against your skin. And then you woke up and you looked around and freaked out. I couldn’t calm you down. I didn’t want to hurt you. Honestly. You left me with no choice.’

  I ruined everything again.

  ‘You play dead very well; you even convinced me, a doctor, that you were dead. Mind you, I was panicking, thinking the worst anyway. I drove back to London that night. I remembered walking past the stretch of common with you in the summer, just through the gate, and I decided to leave you there.’

  ‘And Eve?’

  ‘That was unfortunate, a mistake on my part, but once she knew it was me I had no choice. Still, it was risky doing it a second time. Lucky for me that David Alden had been released. I knew if I left Eve in the same place with the chain they’d think it was him again. It caused a delay, mind you, I had to search for an identical one first on the internet. They stopped making them.’

  ‘You kept her here while you shopped for a chain? You are sick.’

  He shakes his head. ‘That’s just a convenient, lazy argument to convince yourself you’re better than me. I’m not sick, Mel, I’m perfectly sane. You hurt me; you have no idea of all the different ways you twisted the knife into me over the years. I couldn’t go on any more without telling you how I felt. I didn’t want to hurt you.’ He peers at her intently. ‘It. Was. A. Mistake. Understand? You freaked out and I panicked and since then all I’ve been doing is trying to protect myself. It’s not evil that made me kill Eve, just self-preservation. You’d be surprised at what you can do when you’re pushed.’

  He’s wrong. Mel wouldn’t be surprised at all. She could have killed Sam the other day, and if someone magically handed her a knife now she would drive it into Patrick’s chest without a second’s hesitation.

  ‘It’s actually something of a relief to tell you. I’ve carried it around for so long, the guilt. Because I do feel guilty. Especially when you went back to him. I kept on trying to show you it wouldn’t work. When was he ever there when you needed him?’

  The phone calls, the shadows in the garden, the car tailing her.

  ‘I was always there, Mel.’

  She can’t look at him. She feels her insides dissolving. She sinks down into the chair as if there is no substance left to her. David, Sam, all the people he has placed under suspicion. And it was him all along. Sam was a shit, arrogant and conceited, a bully, too, but next to this …

  Still he continues. He has to stop, she has to do something to make him stop … ‘And then you went and got pregnant. That would never have worked, would it?’

  The baby.

  Oh God, no, no …

  ‘You gave me something that night when you came to the house …?’

  ‘It doesn’t always work … I guess you were lucky.’

  Fury engulfs her, a tidal wave that swallows her up. There are tears now, she is sure of it, too many to stop. Screams that aren’t his so must be her own.

  ‘Nobody can hear you,’ he says.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Eve

  ‘NOBODY CAN HEAR you,’ he said.

  I stopped screaming, stumbled inside, heard him click a switch. A naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered into life. The glow was harsh and dazzling and made my head spin. I reached one hand out to the wall to steady myself, closed my eyes against the brightness, against everything.

  ‘You OK?’ The stale coffee scent from his breath mixed with the smell of the place, wet, damp, like clothes that had been left too long to dry. The walls were the colour of cream from gold-top milk, open wounds in the paintwork, bubbled with spots and warts.

  What do you think?

  Gently he nudged me towards a door to our right. The living room, I presumed, with a huge fire taking centre stage. It looked like a throwback to a different era: my mum’s taste in decor circa 1988, the greens and pinks dulled and washed out under a layer of dirt and dust. My whole body shook. Cold penetrated my bones. Icy draughts scoured my bare skin. I tried to swallow but my throat constricted with fear. I coughed.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sit down. I’ll get some water.’

  His tone wasn’t harsh, not in the way I would have expected, more accommodating and obliging, which disconcerted me all the more. I gazed over to the window. Nothing but blackness outside.

  Helplessness and panic swelled in my head, rooting me to the chair while my mind bawled at me to move. I should be doing something, thinking my way out of this hole. Where were my will and guts and determination? Why was I sitting in a green velvet armchair waiting for a glass of water? For death? My eyes darted around searching for a way out, a poker from the fire, a heavy ornament, the things that are always on hand in films and novels to defend yourself with.

  I looked up and saw his face appear through the door.

  ‘Here.’ He handed me an old plastic cup, a child’s one with a faded image of Winnie-the-Pooh on it. Of course he wasn’t going to give me a glass. Not for me to smash it in his face. I drank greedily in noisy gulps, placing the cup at my feet when I had finished.

  With my throat lubricated, the words came untangled: ‘Why have you brought me here?’

  ‘Oh Eve,’ he said, shaking his head slowly, eyes stabbing me. ‘Let’s cut the crap.’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Yes you do know. You saw it. I’m annoyed with myself. I’m sorry … really, one lapse of concentration and here we are.’ He raised his palms in the air. ‘I hope you believe me. I was fond of you, right from the very first time we met. You reminded me of Mel. I mean, you look like her, you do know that, don’t you? Of course you do, you’ve seen the photographs. The similarity is striking. I was quite taken with you, those green eyes of yours. Hers aren’t so bright any more, lost their lustre, which is a shame. But you had that spark too that she used to have. Plucky … I think is the word they use. You are very similar. Don’t look so horrified, it’s meant to be a compliment.’

  ‘So what now?’ I was sitting on my hands so he wouldn’t see them shaking.

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you? So tell me, Nancy Drew, did you think it was me?’ His eyes pinned me down. I dropped my gaze to avoid him. ‘Look at me, Eve.’ I refused. I stared at his feet, grey New Balance trainers with a red N. I was aware of my breaths, shallow and rasping, and the deafening pulse that drummed through me. But still I wouldn’t look up. A small, final act of defiance.

  His arm stretched out. I closed my eyes, braced for a crack against my face, my head. His fingers came under my chin, gently titling my head up. ‘Open your eyes, Eve. Look at me.’

  I opened them. His face filled my vision. I watched his mouth move. ‘Look at me.’ I stared at the patchwork of lines on his lips, dry and cracked like the walls of the cottage. His jaw was covered with stubble, except for a small scar on his chin where no hair grew at all.

  I watched his mouth form more words: ‘Did you know it was me?’

  I looked up at him, pupils huge and black. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I knew it was you.’

  He moved in, right up to my face, so there was only a few centimetres between his eyes and mine. He didn’t blink. Sucked in air. Air that was meant for two of us. He was so close there was none left for me to breathe.

  ‘Liar,’ he said. Spit landed on my cheek. ‘I’ll ask you again. Did you know it was me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all documented. They’ll find the files. Everyone will know it’s you.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t believe you.’ His lips were almost on mine; the question reverberated off them, sent charges of panic through me. I pushed him to get him out of my face but
he grabbed my arms, shook me so hard I felt my head loosen from my neck. I opened my mouth to scream but there was pressure around my throat now. His hands locked around my neck, pulsing and tightening, pressing deep into my arteries. I pictured the indents his thumbs would leave on my skin, which in turn made me think of plasticine and how I used to love sinking my fingers into it to leave their mark. What mark would I leave behind? I considered this too, albeit fleetingly, before I remembered. Melody still didn’t know. I had come so far but I hadn’t warned her. It was my last thought, pushed out the next second by a swelling in my head. Pressure rose behind my eyeballs. I had the sensation that my body was being filled with foam that expanded inside me, crushing my lungs, blocking my arteries.

  Lightness flooded me.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Melody

  SHE PLEADS WITH her eyes. There is no other way to ask him to stop. His hands are pressing into her neck, ‘Compressing your carotid arteries,’ Sam would correct her. He is not here. Melody thought she never wanted to look at his face again. What she would give for it now, to have him unclasp Patrick’s hands from around her, to allow her to draw in one breath and then another.

  It’s unlikely she’ll see him again, or anyone else. She closes her eyes, tries to conjure up a congregation of people she’d like to see before she dies. Her dad, her mother. David. She needs another minute with David because how else can she say sorry for not believing him, or herself? For destroying his life when deep down she knew, always did, that he wasn’t capable of hurting her.

  She feels another pulse on her neck. The pressure forces her eyes open. Patrick is too close to her, stealing her, eyeball to eyeball. Dilated black pupils swallow up the blue of his irises. He steps back so she can see his face now. No glee just sadness, twisted fucked-up emotions. ‘There is nothing to be scared of Mel.’ Perhaps he will let her go after all. She believes this for no more than a second as she watches his breath wisp in the air between them. His. Not hers. She has none left. She forces her eyes closed again and stills herself before going under. She imagines her brother Stephen. They’re children, still young enough to take a bath together. Melody submerges her face. Stephen’s voice reaches her through the water. He starts the count. One … two … three …