The Girl I Used to Be

by Mary Torjussen

  “And before that?”

  “When Rory wasn’t well.”

  “It’s not right, Gemma,” said my mum softly. “And it’s not fair, either, that you’re taking on the whole burden. I thought Joe would go back to work soon, but you need to have a think about the way you want to live your life. It’s not fair that you’re the one working all the time.”

  I was glad Joe wasn’t there; she would have said the same thing then, too. It always caused problems when she complained about the way we lived.

  “I know,” I said. “I need to reconsider things. But Joe wants us to go and live in Ireland. His brother, Brendan, is moving there.”

  “What will he do over there? Is there work?”

  “He seems to think I could set up my business over there.”

  “And he’ll stay home with Rory?” Her mouth tightened. “But surely you couldn’t just start up in another country?”

  Luckily Rory interrupted us to ask if he could have a bath. They’d had a Jacuzzi put in when they had their bathroom refitted the year before and it was always the highlight of Rory’s day. Her attention was on him then; she took him upstairs while my dad cleared the table and tidied up the kitchen.

  “No, sit down,” he said, when I tried to help. “Have a rest.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind but couldn’t. I had so many thoughts racing around my head. Joe was the least of my problems right then, though of course my main concern was stopping him from finding out what had happened. I knew I should go to the police. I knew now where David lived, and as long as Rachel hadn’t warned him, it would be easy for them to question him. I was furious that he thought he could get away with it, but I was terrified, too, at what he might do next. I knew I needed to act before he could do anything more.

  At seven o’clock I heard my phone beep from my handbag in the living room. My dad passed me my bag. “It might be Joe,” he said. I knew he thought I was there because we’d fallen out.

  It was a text from Rachel.

  I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.

  Relief surged through me.

  It’s OK, I replied. He’s your brother. I know you loved him.

  I sat in the sun a minute longer, then sent another message: You know you have to delete these texts?

  Immediately she replied, I will. I’m deleting them straightaway.

  I had to know. What are you going to do?

  This answer took longer. I need to get away from him. I might go abroad and put all this behind me. I thought I’d better warn you because of work.

  Don’t worry about that, I replied. As long as you’re safe.

  She asked, What are you going to do? You should tell the police now. Please, just tell me before you do.

  She was right on both counts. She needed to get away. I needed to tell the police.

  A second later she sent another message: We should go to the police together.

  But Rachel, I wrote, if I talk to the police then you are implicated.

  I know, she replied. I’ll admit everything. I can’t believe the way I’ve acted. I’ve told David I overheard you on the phone saying you were thinking of going to the police, so he shouldn’t do anything for a while. I said you wouldn’t tell me what was going on.

  Then another message popped up: He’s back.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  GEMMA

  UPSTAIRS, MY MUM was sitting on a chair in the bathroom, watching Rory in the bath. It was a huge corner whirlpool bath and he would happily spend hours in there with all his toy fish and dolphins. I stood in the doorway and watched my mum as she chatted to him. Her face was soft and happy, and she smiled when she saw me there.

  “It’s like looking at you all over again,” she said. “It’s just wonderful, like a glimpse into the past.”

  I knelt down by the side of the bath and tipped some water over Rory’s hair. He laughed and splashed me, drenching me.

  “Will you tell me what’s troubling you, sweetheart?” she whispered. “What’s on your mind?”

  Rory’s ears pricked up at this. “What’s on your mind, Mum?”

  I gave my mum an exasperated look.

  “She’s trying to guess what’s for supper.” She stood up and reached for a warm, soft towel. “Can you guess what it is?”

  Rory stood up so quickly he almost slipped over. He clambered out of the bath and let my mum wrap the towel around him. “And wrap one around my head,” he said. “Like in the spa.”

  My mum raised her eyebrows at me.

  “We play spas, sometimes,” I admitted. “He has cucumber on his eyes and I have to paint his toenails.”

  “And does Daddy do that, too?” she asked Rory.

  “No, but we did it to him when he was asleep on the sofa.” He laughed. “Show her the photos, Mum.” He hugged me and just for that moment I forgot all my worries.

  * * *

  * * *

  LATER, WHILE RORY was in bed and my dad was at a quiz night at their local pub, my mum and I sat on the patio. They have a fire pit, which my dad had lit before he went, to take the chill off the evening. She’d poured me a gin and tonic and I guessed she was trying to get me to open up to her.

  “Is there something wrong at home? Have you and Joe been arguing?”

  “No. Well, in a way. He’s got himself all excited, thinking we could move to Ireland. But I couldn’t do that. I’ve got the office and I wouldn’t be able to operate over there. As you said, I don’t know the area and I’m not qualified to work over there. It’s just a pipe dream for him, really.”

  “Does he accept that?”

  I sighed. “He and Brendan seem to think it could work.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he find work over there and let you take a few years off with Rory and get qualified then? You could keep the office open here and take on a manager. It’s doable, isn’t it? You could even come back every month or so. Flights are very cheap from Liverpool to Ireland.”

  I kept quiet. I couldn’t say to her that Joe had no intention of getting work. I knew what my mum thought of that. She’d been wary ever since he gave up his job to look after Rory.

  “That’s not the problem, though,” I said. “I can deal with him.” I wanted to tell her what the problem was, but how could I? And then I thought, if I couldn’t speak to her, I couldn’t speak to anyone, so I said tentatively, “You remember what happened to me when I was eighteen? At that party?”

  She stiffened. “Of course I do, pet.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I should have let the police take it to court. It wasn’t fair, what I did.”

  “What you did wasn’t fair?”

  “No. Alex was arrested but then let go without being charged, and people thought he was guilty just because he was arrested.”

  “But he was guilty, Gemma! You mustn’t feel bad about that.”

  “I know, but he didn’t have the chance to put his case forward, did he? Going to court would have been horrible, but at least he would have had the chance to have his say.”

  “What could he say?” she asked angrily. “He’d either say you agreed to it—and how could you prove you hadn’t?—or that he hadn’t done anything. There was no evidence by then. If you’d gone to the police at the time, it would have been different, but two weeks later? You think he would’ve just admitted it?”

  “I had no choice,” I said, trying to keep my temper. “We went on holiday the next day. By the time I was ready to tell the police, I was in another country.”

  “I know, pet,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t blaming you. I just meant that after two weeks there was no evidence. His defense lawyers would have made things really difficult for you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. But . . . I don’t know. I just think he should have had a voice. If he
had, he might not have . . . Well, he might still be alive.”

  “It was terrible what happened to him,” she said. “It was. But that’s not your fault, Gemma. And his death may well have been an accident anyway. There was nothing to show he’d done it on purpose.”

  I knew he had, though. Even though we weren’t friends, I’d seen him most days for two years and I’d got an idea of the sort of person he was. He was proud and ambitious; he lost his reputation and his dreams when he was arrested. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he drowned at New Year’s, just four months later.

  “He’d always wanted to go to Oxford, you know,” I said after a pause. “I remember on our induction day when we were sixteen, we had to say what we wanted to achieve by the end of the course. I could tell from the way he talked about it that he’d succeed.”

  My mum said nothing, her lips tight.

  “And I don’t think the arrest would have stopped him practicing law,” I said. “I rang the Law Society a few years ago to ask them.”

  She looked sharply at me. “What did you do that for?”

  “I needed to know. I phoned a long time after I heard that he’d died. Years. Of course I thought he’d killed himself and then Caitlin said maybe he’d done it because he couldn’t have the future he’d wanted.”

  My mother made a sound then, a kind of Well, he should have thought of that kind of noise.

  “But when I spoke to them, they said that as the charge had been dropped, it would be possible for him to practice law. He’d have to declare the charge, but they thought it would be okay.”

  “And you’re thinking you would have done better taking it to court, to let him have his say? Gemma, sweetheart, you did the right thing. The only thing,” said my mum. “What would that have done to you? And they could have paid for the best lawyers; you know that.” Her voice wobbled and I could see she was holding back tears. “Think how you would have felt if they’d found him not guilty.”

  I knew that would have crushed me, and I knew, too, that that was exactly how I would feel if I were accused and couldn’t have my say, too.

  And I thought of the ripples from that one night in August, when everything changed forever for Alex and for me, and for our families, too. We’d all suffered the aftereffects of that night. The pain didn’t just belong to me.

  I spoke without thinking. “I met his sister the other day.”

  “Alex’s sister? I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “I didn’t even know he had a sister until recently,” I said. “I didn’t know anything about him.”

  “I only knew because Lauren’s mum told me,” said my mum. “She came round to see me after you and Lauren had moved away.” She grimaced. “I think she wanted to gossip about it. I had to avoid her for a while.”

  I knew how she felt. After I’d reported the rape, a few girls from school wanted to talk to me, and I’d felt there was something almost indecent about their interest. After a while I wouldn’t answer the door to them and would get my brother to say I was out when they phoned.

  “Their mother died last year,” I said.

  My mum was quiet, and then said, “She must have been young. What was the matter with her?”

  “She had cancer.”

  “Oh, the poor woman. That on top of everything else.”

  I wanted to tell her what Rachel had told me, about their mother’s dependency on her, the fact that she’d wanted to die. I couldn’t. Though I wasn’t to blame, I was involved. I would have given anything for that not to be the case. My mum, though, didn’t need to be. She didn’t deserve to hear those things.

  “How did you meet her?”

  Just then my dad came back and spared me from having to answer that. We chatted then about the quiz and the team that had won, and we didn’t go back to talking about Rachel and her family, though my mum kept looking at me all evening, and I knew the question was preying on her mind.

  FIFTY-SIX

  GEMMA

  Wednesday, August 16

  THE NEXT MORNING I waited until the office was open, then sent Rachel an e-mail through the work system. It was the only safe way to communicate as there was no way David could intercept the messages.

  Everything OK last night?

  She must have been on her own at her desk, because she replied quite quickly:

  I think so. I’m not sure. Who can tell, though?

  I winced. Surely she should be able to go to sleep without worrying about someone taking explicit photos of her. And then I thought of myself, in my hotel room in London, and became fired up. I started to type an e-mail, saying:

  I’m going to talk to the police when I come back to Chester. You can come with me if you want to but I’m going anyway.

  Before I clicked Send, I stopped. David was her husband. Was she really going to wait for the police to come round? Surely she would tell him—or he would guess. That would be worse. Much worse. I shuddered. What would he do if he discovered she knew that and hadn’t told him?

  I deleted my message. Instead, I wrote: You shouldn’t have to live like that, and she replied, I know.

  There the conversation ended. I went out with my mum and dad to take Rory on the ferry over to Liverpool and spent the day at the museums. Later we went for afternoon tea at a hotel, before going back to our car on the underground train. That was the thing that impressed Rory the most; he hadn’t been on an underground train before and was beside himself. The fact that he was carrying a box of cakes from the hotel only added to his happiness.

  Later in the afternoon, back at my parents’ home, we borrowed the paddling pool from the next-door neighbor and she kindly sent her little girl, Evie, in to play, too. I don’t know what it is about water and Rory, but if you want to keep him amused, just give him some water and he’ll be happy for hours. So I sat outside to make sure the children were safe while my mum and dad napped on their garden chairs. Clearly the day had taken it out of them.

  I pulled out my iPad and went back to look at the photos that Jack had had on Facebook, the photos of us throughout the two years we’d all spent together. I’d meant to tell Rachel to send Jack a friend request so that she could look at them, but I wasn’t sure whether they would upset her too much. From the comments under the photos it was clear Jack had only recently put them up, and name after name of all the friends I’d had in school popped up to make fun of us all. I wondered whether any of them remembered how that summer term had ended, though they would have known at the time, of course.

  “Who was that girl . . .” I imagined them saying. “That scruffy little redhead . . . Didn’t something happen to her? I can’t remember now what it was . . . Did she die or something?”

  I blinked hard to stop the tears falling.

  And then I gathered my courage and looked at the photos from the party that Jack had put on Dropbox.

  I turned the iPad away from the sun. I could see which albums I’d viewed, and clicked on the next one. It was clear that Jack had run out of steam, or maybe even just run out of film, because of course it wasn’t a digital camera that he was using then. The last fifty or so photos were random ones rather than several at a scene. So there was a group of girls doing karaoke, then a photo of the fire pit with all the smokers sitting around with bottles of beer. Then there was Lauren, sitting in the hammock with Tom. I stopped at that one, remembering that I’d wanted to go home at that point, but Lauren had avoided my eyes. I could just about see the love bite on her neck; it looked at first like one of the pink flowers on her dress.

  I steeled myself. Now I was about to see what happened while I was upstairs. There were people dancing on the patio, though I think they were just doing it for a laugh. Or at least I hoped so. The next scene was the kitchen. Jack must have been making his way back into the house. Lauren was in the kitchen now.

  I remembered her telling m
e in the taxi going home that night that someone had tipped them out of the hammock and she’d got mud on her dress. I didn’t reply, didn’t say a word. I’d pretended to be asleep.

  I got goose bumps as I realized that the photos I was looking at now were taken when I was upstairs.

  In the first shot she was at the kitchen sink, splashing her face with water. Tom was holding her hair up and for a second I saw how much Jack had liked her, as the droplets of water splashed her face, her hair held aloft, giving her an air of grace that the love bite completely destroyed.

  In the next shot she was sitting on Tom’s knee, her arm casually around his neck. How much had it hurt Jack to take that photo? And behind her, just about to walk out of the kitchen door into the hallway beyond was a young man. Not a boy. You could never have called him a boy.

  This man was dressed in jeans and a Coral T-shirt. It was a T-shirt that was on sale in Glastonbury that summer. The same T-shirt that Alex had been wearing all evening.

  It wasn’t Alex, though, who was leaving the room unnoticed by the crowd.

  It was David.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  GEMMA

  MY REACTION WAS so physical it was as though someone had thumped me in the chest. For a second or two, no matter how wide I opened my mouth, I couldn’t breathe. I put my head between my legs and tried to breathe, just as I had in the days and months, even, after that party. My parents were napping on their chairs on the deck and I could hear the distant sounds of Rory and his little friend as they splashed around.

  And then it was as though the air burst out of me and with one huge gasp I started to hyperventilate.

  “Mum!” Rory ran over to me and shook my arm. “Mum! What’s wrong?” He screamed, “Granny! Granny!”

  I heard my mother gasp, then shout my dad’s name. She came running over to me, but all I could see was a blur.

  “What is it, Gemma? What’s the matter?”

  I was struggling to breathe again. My chest was tight and felt like a balloon was about to explode, but I just couldn’t get the air out.