by Karen Perry
Movement behind him. This time he didn’t imagine it. A third party. A witness to what he had said, to what he had attempted to do. Zoë looked up.
Suddenly he couldn’t bear it. He pressed his arms hard over his face and thought of every sad, sweaty encounter on the dance-floor at Wesley, every look of amusement and apology he’d received before the girl turned away and started giggling with her friends. He thought of Melissa Lynch in the orchestra and that time he’d tried to kiss her, heard the surprise in her laughter, her voice in his head saying: ‘You’re the kind of guy girls want as a friend, Robbie. That’s the great thing about you. Knowing we can be friends without things ever getting complicated by sex.’ Even poor Claire Waters, who looked more dead than alive: Robbie knew, in his heart of hearts, that not even she would touch him. Zoë’s words were in his head, the way she had looked at him. He knew that she had seen right through him, taken the measure of him, and what he felt now was a swelling of shame. He thought again of what Holly had told him, what she had said. The noise rose to a crescendo, all those screaming strings, the screech of brass, and he pushed his fingers deep into his ears. It made no difference. The music was inside his head. No matter what he did, he couldn’t block it out.
Did he say her name? He cannot remember. All he remembers is the surprise on her face as she fell backwards. The sound her head made as it met the edge of the diving board – a sharp crack like a small pistol going off. Her mouth opening but no sound coming out, nothing but a gasp of air as she fell backwards.
Blood bloomed from the side of her head, spreading out into the waters of the pool. His mother was there, too, although he has no recollection of her arrival. She’s in the pool screaming something at him, but he doesn’t hear the words. Debussy is still in his head. He can hear the whines of the violins, the jagged edge of the cellos’ bowing. How can he still hear them? Why haven’t they been silenced?
Arms going around him, the strong clasp of hands against his back. ‘It will be all right,’ a voice whispers. ‘Everything will be all right now.’ His father leans over Zoë, for all the world like he’s going to kiss her again. Debussy is in Robbie’s head, playing in an eternal loop, the waves of the music like the waves of the sea, moving in tides, endlessly back and forth. His father leans over Zoë. Robbie closes his eyes.
26. Girl Unknown
The evening before Caroline and Holly fly back to France, Susannah calls over with a bottle of Margaux – a Christmas present, she says. They sit at the kitchen island and drink it, just the two of them, trying to summon some semblance of festive cheer. There are no decorations, not even a Christmas tree.
Susannah, the one true friend who has stuck by her, leans on the counter and imparts her news. ‘He has a new girlfriend.’
Caroline absorbs the information with mild shock. She has not spoken to Chris since Zoë’s death and neither has David, apart from that first terrible phone conversation when they had called to break the news. His reaction, the instant outpouring of grief, was awful. He has not spoken to them since, ignoring calls, emails, messages. Caroline reads into his silence the measure of accusation.
‘Another infant,’ Susannah goes on, a sneer in her voice. ‘Not quite as young as Zoë but not far off.’
They had met at a concert, apparently. It seems that, for all the coolness and hostility between Chris and Susannah, there is enough contact between them to keep her up-to-date with his love life.
‘I’m glad,’ Caroline tells her. ‘At least he’s moving on.’
Susannah gives her a mild look of pity. ‘No, he’s not,’ she says, her voice softening. ‘He’s stuck in the past. This is just his way of hiding from it.’
For a while, Caroline had wondered if the shock of Zoë’s death might have hurled the two of them back together. But she has learned that people deal with these things differently. Some try to carry on as normal; others cower behind a wall of silence. And some, like Chris, seek to replicate what has been lost, searching out some other young girl with blonde hair and a cool, feline gaze, a bold, meddling streak kept hidden beneath a patina of innocence.
David is waiting for them in the arrivals lounge. He sees them come towards him pulling their luggage behind them. They look tired, as if the journey has taken longer than the two hours of the flight. He goes to greet them and they embrace, all three of them together, a momentary triumvirate before they break apart. To anyone watching, their reunion must seem strange. Clearly, they are family, but despite the emotion of the reunion, there are no smiles. He reaches to take the bags; Caroline turns away and wipes at the corner of her eye; Holly stands with her hands in her pockets, looking about her.
A whole season has passed since he has seen them in the flesh. Their corporeal presence seems at once startling to him as well as comforting. Holly has grown taller. He is alive to all the changes in her – the new curves, the thinness of her face, grace in the way she carries herself. She catches him looking and he nods towards the exit. ‘The car is this way,’ he tells them.
Some time towards the end of the summer, they had made the decision to part. It was not named as a separation, more a side-effect of the need to protect Holly. Both agreed that it was in her best interests to return home and continue her education, as they had planned before all this happened. They wanted her, in as much as it was possible now, to have a normal life. One of them had to remain behind for Robbie. There was no argument, although that didn’t mean there was no guilt. Weighing up the needs of one child over the other. Caroline would return to Dublin with Holly, while David stayed on.
As the car passes over the long, meandering bridge back to the island, Caroline feels the tension in her limbs returning. That sick feeling is with her again, panic in her chest. She keeps her eyes trained on the sights outside the window, her hands tightly gripped in her lap. Strange to see those same fields and roads, grey now in the dim light of a cold December day. When they had first come to Île de Ré, she had heard it described as a Mediterranean island that had somehow got lost in the Atlantic. During the summer months, with the glittering turquoise waters surrounding it, the yellow dust of the roads, the geraniums and hollyhocks pouring colour over every concrete surface, it was easy to believe that description. Now, with a chill wind whipping over the island from the ocean, trees bending to it, a spray of rain on the windscreen, Caroline feels as if she has come to a different island – hostile, unwelcoming, cold.
As he drives, David tells them about a heron he has seen on his walks near the house. It is large, he says, estimating its wingspan to be two metres, maybe more. In his conversations at the market, he has discussed the bird. Others have seen it, too, and believe it to be a great blue heron, very rare in these parts. David wonders aloud if it might have made a nest nearby. Briefly, he scans the horizon, as if looking for the bird in flight.
The villages they pass seem deserted – many of the houses look shut up for the winter, shutters bolted closed, windowboxes empty. The little car gathers pace as it bypasses Saint-Martin, heading west towards the village of Loix. Caroline doesn’t ask David where the car came from – a small white Citroën, several years old by the look of it. It is just part of the changed picture. Everything feels different and strange. This car David is driving, his altered appearance – older, roughened, hardy – serve as a reminder of the life he has carved out for himself during the months he has spent on the island without her. When he drives, it’s not with the interest or relaxation of a tourist. He sits hunched forward, intent on getting to his destination. His eyes are fixed on the road, barely glancing past it to the landscapes that surround him.
Caroline takes all this in wordlessly. Four months have passed, punctuated with phone calls, emails, Skype. We are strangers to each other, she thinks, as the little car shuttles through an intersection, on to a long, straight road over the salt flats.
‘So, how is he?’ Caroline asks.
They are alone in the house. Holly has gone to the village to buy bread, le
aving the two of them sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. It is too cold to sit on the terrace. Stray leaves swish and scatter over the flagstones.
‘He’s the same.’
‘Has he said anything?’
‘No.’
‘Anything at all?’
‘Nothing, Caroline,’ he says, adding: ‘I’m sorry.’ As if it is his fault. In a way, it is.
He watches her taking that in, her lips pursed, sees her bite down on her inner cheek, then look away. There is something controlled about her now, not like when it first happened and she was overcome with emotion. Fear, anger, bewilderment – he had sat at this very table and watched her sobbing uncontrollably, heard the scraping sound of air wrenched into her lungs, her face ruddy with tears. But that was then. Now she is composed, which makes her seem even more distant from him – the sternness of her control over feelings that had once ravaged her. He thinks about reaching across the table for her hand, decides not to.
They sit in silence for a moment, and he thinks of the bedrooms upstairs, his lonely occupancy of the house all these months. It is a relief when the iron gate clangs and they hear Holly stepping into the hall.
Over a lunch of chorizo stew that David has prepared, Holly updates her father as to her progress in school, the subjects she likes, the friends she has made. David asks, tentatively, if there has been any trouble over what happened during the summer. He is referring to the brief flurry of media interest in the aftermath of Zoë’s death. A couple of tabloids and one of the Sundays had shown particular interest in the more prurient details. It didn’t help that one of the players in the incident was a journalist, another a lecturer who had made minor waves in the weeks beforehand over some colourful language employed during a radio interview. There was no door-stepping or even minor harassment, but both David and Caroline had been fearful of the impact it might have on Holly when she returned to school. There had been a little teasing, and a lot of staring and pointed fingers, but the teachers were vigilant and Holly herself seemed capable of shrugging it off. There is still the fear that it might start up again once the trial begins in a few months’ time, but for now, they are all grateful for the respite.
A week before she flew to France with Holly, Caroline had come in through her front door, picked up the post lying on the mat, tossed it casually on to the shelf, then taken off her coat. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one of the envelopes slipping off the back of the shelf and sliding down behind the radiator. Getting a closer look, she saw there was a tiny gap between the wall and the lip of the shelf, a small sliver of space just wide enough for a slim envelope to slip through. Finding it impossible to retrieve the fallen letter, Caroline had rooted out David’s toolbox and unscrewed the shelf from the wall. The letter was wedged behind the radiator. Unable to reach it with her fingers, she had taken a knife from the kitchen and tried to poke it out. Eventually, it had slipped on to the floor along with some other post she hadn’t known was there. One was a letter from a charity, another a credit-card bill, but the last bore the insignia of the university. Caroline felt something drop in her stomach.
Opening it quickly, she scanned the text, dread spreading to fill the pockets of air inside her. The missing letter. The one she had blamed Zoë for destroying. All that time it had been lying in the darkness. Perhaps Zoë had shoved it down there, but it was unlikely. Caroline knew it was nobody’s fault, except perhaps her own.
Even now, back on the island, she isn’t sure whether to tell David about the letter or not. What would be the point? So she carries the knowledge inside her, a small additional burden alongside her guilt.
The juvenile detention centre is not far from La Rochelle. The car journey takes a little over an hour. David and Holly spend another hour drinking coffee in a nearby café, looking in some shop windows, before they return to the car to wait. From where he is sitting behind the steering wheel, he can see the doors to the detention centre open when Caroline comes out. The wind catches her hair, blowing open the flaps of her coat. She catches the sides and pulls it tight around her, head down, hurrying to the car. From the way she is holding herself, refusing to meet his eye, he can tell that it did not go well. She opens the door on the passenger side and gets in, exhaling as she does so, as if she has been holding her breath the whole time she was in there.
‘Well?’ Holly asks, and Caroline shakes her head. No.
David starts the car, pulls it out on to the main road and tries to imagine the hour she had spent in that little room: Caroline twisting a tissue in her hands, begging Robbie to talk to her, and all the while he sits still, hands cupping his elbows, keeping his gaze fixed on the windows up above and to the side, his face blank of expression, like the distant, beatific gaze of some dead saint.
David drives and Caroline cries. He reaches out and she takes his hand and holds it in her lap.
Caroline blames herself for Robbie’s silence. If that snap decision were reversed, undone, or done differently, she might have prevented it. Peculiar, the way the body takes over from the mind in a situation like that. She remembers being in the water, holding Zoë in her arms, knowing that the girl was dead and there was nothing that could be done to change it. Caroline can almost see herself standing there, waist-deep in cool water, the strangeness of Zoë’s limbs cast in a bluish light and seemingly at broken angles because of the refraction. She can see herself taking it in – the horrifying enormity of it. She feels the hammer blow in her heart, an instant shattering at the realization of what has happened.
The decision happens in her body more than her head. Quickly, she drags Zoë to the pool’s edge. David is on the terrace now, but he makes no effort to help her, frozen within his own shock. Weighted down with lifelessness and water, it takes every ounce of Caroline’s strength to push the body up on to the flagstones, then to haul herself up afterwards. Still Robbie stands there. An echo of her own shrieking voice seems to hang in the air. Jesus Christ, what have you done? He says nothing. Are the words beginning to jam up inside him already? Swiftly now, because there are lights coming on in the other houses, Caroline goes to her son, but she doesn’t take him in her arms. She doesn’t cradle his face in her hands, tell him it’s all right, it will be okay, murmur words of reassurance. She doesn’t do anything like that.
‘What happened?’ she demands, her voice firm but low. She doesn’t want the neighbours to hear. ‘Tell me quickly. What happened?’
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look at her. His eyes are fixed on the pool beyond, his face bluish in the early morning light. Vaguely, she is aware of Holly having appeared, and David, emerging from his trance. He seems to sleepwalk past towards the dark figure stretched out by the lip of the pool.
A car engine splutters somewhere out on the street. The sky is streaked orange with light. She moves away from Robbie so she can think. What to do? Call an ambulance? Call the police? For one crazy moment, she considers getting all of them into the car and fleeing the island, getting far away from the body lying stretched upon the terrace. A kind of madness is taking her over and she pulls back from it. She needs to think quickly, to put a story together and have them all agree on it. There isn’t much time. The sun is rising now, and in the early-morning light, dawn touching the innocence of the flowers, you might never think that a murder had just happened.
Murder. The word is in her head. She seems to fill up with it. She has been spared the sight of the blow but some shadow of it suggests itself in her imagination. When she had come into the garden, it was the rocking water that she saw first – the way Zoë’s body lay lifeless, a thread of blood, dark beneath the surface.
An accident, she decides. That is the only solution. She slipped and fell backwards. A tragic fall.
Afterwards, she will think back to those moments again and again – standing by the pool, lost in thought. This was where her deception began. Later, she would lie to police officers, to solicitors, to social workers. But all of the lies cam
e undone in the end, once they’d got Robbie alone: he picked up a pen and wrote out his confession. By that stage Zoë was lying cold in the morgue, and Robbie had not spoken a word in the twelve hours since he’d killed her.
Caroline wonders if she had gone to him then, if she had taken her son in her arms and rocked him to and fro, the way she had when he was a small boy with some wound or other injury, if she had done that might she have stopped the sealing up of words inside him? Could she have prevented his burrowing down into a darkened place deep inside him? In her life, she has known longing, but it is nothing compared to the visceral need she carries around inside her to hear her son speak. How she misses the sound of his voice – it’s an ache that’s become lodged in her chest.
It was Holly who went to him in the end. Putting her arms around her older brother, whispering something to him. His eyes remained fixed on Zoë, and Caroline remembers looking back and seeing the figure of her husband, crouched over Zoë, his face close to hers, peering at her intently, as if expecting that at any moment she might wake up.
The days pass and begin to form a pattern. They take turns visiting Robbie, in the same way they alternate the cooking. Rain lashes the island, keeping them indoors, and there is something comforting about being holed up with the fire lit, playing Scrabble, reading, talking. Slowly, a form of normality returns, and David feels himself relaxing into the company of his wife and daughter. In the months he was alone in this house he was often troubled by the notion that she was with him still – Zoë. In the hours of the night, when sleep failed to come, his thoughts would turn to her, remembering how she was on that last day. Sometimes, alone in the house, chopping onions in the kitchen, or perusing one of Alan’s books in the study, he thought he could hear the whisper of her voice or the pad of her footstep and would turn to survey the room, half expecting to see her standing there, her head to one side, biting down on a mischievous smile that kept surfacing, as if it has all been an elaborate joke. Zoë, his daughter. He is certain of it now. Samples taken at the autopsy, her DNA clearly matched to his. It is beyond doubt, and there is some comfort to be taken from that.