by Phoebe Locke
A pale face beside hers in the reflection. Mouth twisted into a scream.
And then the daylight hit again, the window closest slamming shut. She pulled back from the glass, turned round to the seat beside her. Empty. She pressed a hand against her chest and wondered if the sinking feeling there was fear or disappointment.
The train was slowing, her stop ahead. She mustn’t panic. This, at least, she had learned.
Being around the university made her think of her own freshers’ year, of first meeting Miles. That heady, swelling feeling of being away from the farm, of breathing city air and being able to talk to anyone; tell them anything. It had lasted at least a day or two, before the dread began to seep back in, before she started leaving her curtains drawn each morning. By the time they met, two weeks after she moved into her room, she was thinking of leaving. Because leaving home didn’t mean leaving things behind. She was who she’d always been, no matter what she told her new flatmates. And there were nightmares even then, in that single bed with its plastic-wrapped mattress and the sheets that smelled of home. Even with the ugly bright tube light which lit every corner with a forensic and welcome intensity. She was just waiting. Waiting for that face to detach itself from the shadows and creep across the wall towards her, waiting for that little girl’s fingers to link through hers.
She’d decided very quickly that she wouldn’t have friends. That people couldn’t be trusted – and that they also – more so – shouldn’t be needed.
Miles had had other ideas.
He’d always claim that he spotted her first at the Freshers’ Fair, a week before they actually met. He’d say that she caught his eye because – pause for emphasis, party guests smiling – she was the only first year who wasn’t actually at the Freshers’ Fair. Whilst everyone else milled around the stalls, primping their hair and eyeing others across the courtyard, Sadie was simply stomping past, her weekly rations stuffed into flimsy Happy Shopper bags.
This was so firmly entrenched in the legend of them that Sadie now thought of it as memory – remembered herself that afternoon with her plasticky cheese and her half-loaf of bread, her five packets of instant noodles and her own-brand energy drink. It had become true because he had said it enough, and that made her afraid, now.
Their first real meeting was at the student union’s sandwich shop, a grotty, white-countered place with half-emptied mayonnaise sachets turning gluey on the tables. She was queuing between lectures, a new ring binder digging into her hip, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She’d turned around and there he was.
‘Hi.’
‘Erm . . . hi.’ She returned her attention to the counter, only a couple of people ahead of her now. She wasn’t interested in conversation.
‘I’m Miles,’ he said, undeterred.
‘Sadie,’ she said, through some kind of ingrained politeness, though she barely turned her head in his direction, pulling the folder from her side and hugging it in front of her.
‘Nice to meet you, Sadie,’ he said, and though she heard the smile there, he said nothing more.
Often, when Miles told the story, he’d talk about how he wanted to write his number on a napkin; slip it into her bag or her paper-wrapped sandwich. Sadie would play down the fact that it felt less like a meet-cute and more like a pick-up, and she’d never mention how she had marched home after her lecture, bristling at the fact that this floppy-haired boy had dared to touch her (still afraid that she would open the door to her room and find that little figure sitting there).
But then they were assigned the same personal tutor, and he in turn assigned them neighbouring slots for their first meetings with him, and so, on a sunnier day, in a stuffy corridor, they met again and somehow – she wasn’t sure, even now, how – he convinced her to meet him for a drink. From that day on, the only visitor to her room had been him. She’d finally been free.
Temporarily, at least.
And now a different woman (maybe) had persuaded him for a drink. A different woman knew his secrets when Sadie had always considered him an open book. She stood outside the pub, wondering. Was it even her right to pry?
He never asked her questions, those first years. He seemed to know instinctively that she had come to university to leave it all behind; to forget the farm, to forget the place she had grown up, the things that had happened there (The Tall Man made us special). Instead he told her facts: the speed of a star, the depth of an ocean. All of these wonders, all of the things he wondered about. She started to trust him, started to unfurl in his warmth, just a little. Gradually she let him persuade her to things, to clubs and crawls and outings. He showed her that their three years there didn’t have to be something she simply endured; that they could be enjoyed, savoured for what they were: a chance to truly start again, to be whoever she wanted to be.
She took a step back, afraid of herself. She had jumped on a train at the first sign of something being wrong – wasn’t that exactly the mistake she had made at every possible juncture in her life? (Or was it, a small, insidious voice inside her head asked, the only thing she had ever done right?)
What was she hoping to find here, at some anonymous pub on campus, no shadows in sight? There were things, there were secrets between her and Miles, but perhaps that was inevitable. Perhaps this was another thing she should leave undisturbed; should let the layers of their life slowly settle over it until it sank away. He’d never asked her questions. It was important she remembered that.
She turned and walked away, before she could change her mind. Made her way through the campus, angry with herself and dizzy with memories. The two of them in that single bed, clothes and lips cider-sticky, and the smell of his skin left behind on her sheets. Leaving a lecture and finding him leaning against the wall outside the theatre, one foot pressed against the bricks, hands thrust in his pockets.
When she found herself behind a group of undergrad girls, she almost expected to recognise them – and then she remembered that almost twenty years had passed; that she had a daughter closer in age to these girls than she was.
Amber. The thought of her like a jolt to an exposed nerve, everything flowing back. And I won’t tell. What had he done?
‘Who’s doing this one? Dave the Laugh?’ one of the girls asked, smoke from a rollie drifting back towards Sadie.
‘No, thank God,’ one of the others said, and then she turned and smirked at her friend. ‘It’s Magic Miles.’
‘Yes!’ the smoking girl fist-pumped the air. ‘I love a good Banner lecture.’
Sadie’s heart contracted hard. Miles’s students. Tall and lean and dressed in painted-on jeans and ballet shoes, their hair long and tangled and tumbling. The kind of girl who might end an email with a winking emoji.
Before she knew it, she was following them into one of the lecture theatres, newly refurbished and smelling of plastic and paint. It was bigger than the one she remembered, the seats sloping endlessly down. The stage seemed so far away, so many students filing into the rows, that she felt suddenly nervous on Miles’s behalf. Did he really do this every day?
The curiosity was irresistible and so she took a seat in a corner near the back, sinking low behind a group of laughing boys. She watched the way they all settled into their places, notebooks removed from bags, laptops opened, phones fiddled with. The last lecture of the day, yawns unstifled.
And then Miles came in. He entered from the back of the room, surprising her – she’d expected him to walk out from backstage, like a rock star – and bounded down the stairs, tossing a wave of his hair back as he went. She shrank into her seat, afraid, but Miles bounced down and down and then loped across the stage to the lectern, a stack of papers under one arm, his satchel slapping his hip. All around her, students watched him. Conversations carried on but their eyes tracked him as he took off his bag and organised his things, their lips turned up in the little involuntary smiles that tended to follow Miles places. Her own mouth felt dry and rigid.
A silence f
ell with a raise of Miles’s hand, and he stood there, a metre or so from the lectern, and smiled up at them all. ‘I never get tired of that,’ he said, his voice magnified and made wrong by the mics at the edge of the stage. ‘OK, so. We’re nearing the end of your first year: the very first step in your long careers in Sociology, am I right?’
The wrongness was not just the microphone, she realised. Up there, he was stagey, contrived. He was the Miles who might tap a girl on the shoulder in a sandwich shop, who might assume a conversation began simply by saying his own name. She recognised him and yet she didn’t, and she couldn’t stop her gaze from travelling to the back of the stage, where the lights cast a long and thin version of him against the wall.
‘So, come on,’ Miles said, taking another step away from the lectern and grinning at his audience. ‘Let’s talk about deviance. You know you want to.’
A polite wave of laughter rose up and as it did, she felt it. The breath on the back of her neck, slow and even. Cold. The pressure of a hand on her shoulder, though she did not turn her head to check.
She waited. She had always been waiting.
The voice, when it came, was so familiar that she ached, her eyes filling with tears. Soft and smooth, each word stroking the hairs on her skin upright.
I can make you special, it said. If you ask.
22
2018
It’s 7 a.m. when Federica calls, the phone whirring against the glass-topped bedside table in time with the bleating of the alarm clock. Greta answers, swinging herself upright and pushing her vest top back down over the soft rolls of her belly. Too many doughnut breakfasts and midnight hotel room beers; no time for walking anywhere. Federica doesn’t bother with greetings; gives the essential information and then is gone, leaving Greta to process the news as she fumbles for the alarm clock.
Miles Banner has agreed to talk to them.
They arrive at his flat, third floor of a sullen high-rise in an unloved estate in Battersea, two hours later. Federica and Greta and Tom all shuffling into the narrow hallway, laden with equipment, while Amber spends the morning being interviewed by a Sunday paper’s magazine, any cameras other than theirs banned. In the lift on the way up, Federica frowns at her notes, hair pushed back as usual by her sunglasses despite the cloudy day.
‘This is going to be a tough one,’ she says, for perhaps the third or fourth time that morning. ‘You saw him outside that courtroom. He’s a broken man.’
Tom gives a shocked laugh. ‘Is that any surprise?’
‘It’s not a surprise but it’s no good to us. I need him to break down, to tell us something real. It’s no use if he’s got nothing left. I’m telling you, I saw him in that stand. He was empty. Dull. It won’t translate on film.’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe that’ll be interesting.’
‘Does Amber know he changed his mind?’ Greta asks.
Another shrug. ‘He might have told her. Or maybe she persuaded him, I don’t know.’
‘I don’t get the impression they talk all that much.’
Federica’s eyes shoot sideways. ‘Did she tell you that?’
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Probably worth asking her on camera. That could be a way in. She was a daddy’s girl, right? She had to have been. Definitely a heartstring worth plucking.’
Tom turns away, eyebrows raised, and checks his phone. Federica carries on, oblivious. ‘I think I finally talked her into filming at the school, though. So we can do that when we go to interview the teacher. Is that Thursday, Greta?’
‘Yeah. We’re meeting her after school finishes.’
‘Great. I like the idea of empty classrooms, empty hallways, Amber walking around and remembering her old life. Before, you know? If we wait ’til dark, that’ll work well.’
‘We’ll have to hire better lights,’ Tom says.
‘Yeah sure – whatever you need, we’ll get. We’ll tell Amber it’s a night shoot and she can have the afternoon off or whatever. Keep her sweet.’
‘OK.’ Greta scribbles this down in her notebook. ‘I’ll speak to the school about later access and costs too.’
Tom looks at her. ‘Isn’t Thursday your mate’s birthday dinner?’
‘Oh. Yeah—’ She glances at Federica. ‘It is, actually—’
The lift clunks to a stop, doors grinding open. ‘Right, follow my lead,’ Federica says, stepping out into the corridor and leaving them to bring the bags.
‘You’re taking that night off,’ Tom whispers to Greta. ‘Don’t let her take the piss.’
She smiles at him. ‘Yessir.’
Federica knocks on a door halfway down the hall. ‘I’m dreading this,’ Tom says in a low voice, and Greta nods. She is not looking forward to meeting Miles, broken or otherwise, either.
And then he is opening the door, allowing Federica to kiss him on both cheeks, standing aside to let them in. The man she has seen in the dock and in newspapers (though the photos of him were always small, tucked halfway down articles, the headline images always reserved for those of his tragic and terrible wife and daughter) is smiling politely at her, thanking her for coming. Offering to take one of the bags.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Sure.’ He closes the front door and stands facing it for a moment, as if he’s hoping that when he turns around they might magically have disappeared. Greta backs away, following Tom into the flat.
It’s a dim, dingy space; its windows shadowed by the next block, many with the blinds drawn anyway, and there is a strong smell of starch – of boiling pasta and ironed shirts. The hallway leads past a bathroom, its door patterned opaque glass and open; the room inside compact and bleached-clean.
The living room has its blinds at half-mast, a pair of mismatched sofas at right angles to the two skinny windows. Miles sits in one, Federica sinking down beside him, her knees clicking. Tom sets up the camera, checking the light while Greta fiddles with the laptop, butterflies circling in her stomach. Miles is not as she expected; he seems diminished somehow. Without the flashes of paparazzi cameras, his skin has a yellowish tinge, his eyes small and watery.
‘Thanks so much for seeing us,’ Federica says, swirling a large, brown-stoned ring around her index finger. ‘I know it hasn’t been an easy decision.’
Miles smiles weakly and nods. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t commit before. It’s been difficult . . . the press attention —’ He trails off, glancing at Greta and Tom. ‘Can I get anyone a coffee?’
‘We’re fine, thanks, Miles,’ Federica says. ‘Now, are you OK if we start rolling? As I mentioned on the phone, we’re going for quite a natural feel, so don’t worry about looking into the camera – but don’t worry if you do, either. Just relax. This is your chance to put your side of the story out there with Amber’s.’
Miles licks his lips, his eyes darting around the room in search of a natural place to settle. It makes him look nervous, which Greta knows Federica will like. She likes long pauses and comments made when the subject isn’t sure filming has begun, rarely edits footage down. My Parents Are Murderers was full of them – online commenters often rave about a section when Danny, asked about the day police raided their house, the day the diggers came rolling in and began tearing up the lawn where his swing-set sat, trailed off mid-sentence, his eyes on his lap. Off-camera, you can hear Greta ask ‘Danny, do you need a break?’ before Danny looks up, looks past the camera at her, and nods, the first tears rolling silently down his cheeks. They talk about the scene with the next-door neighbour, a grizzled old woman who sat on her porch for the interview, looking out at the house. The same neighbour who watched as those police officers pulled the first severed limb from the dusty ground, and who, when Federica asked her ‘Did you ever suspect the Millers were different? That something terrible might have happened there?’ answered simply ‘No. They were normal people.’ And then looked into the camera for a second, two, three, before her puckered mouth spread into a smile.
Gr
eta doesn’t think they can expect any unplanned moments with Miles. She was right there with Federica when he testified in court, his voice low and controlled, his hands folded in front of him. Greta wouldn’t have described it as dull the way Federica did, but she agrees it was empty. The only word that came to mind when she saw him there was drained. She saw him leave the courthouse, when a woman in a zipped-up duffle coat came pushing through the crowd of photographers and threw a paper coffee cup at his face, the liquid arcing out and splashing across the pale pavement. His face never changed, his focus always locked straight ahead. This, here, with his shifting eyes and his lip-licking, is the least composed she has seen him.
‘OK, let’s start at the beginning,’ Federica says. ‘Why don’t you tell us what Amber was like, growing up?’
Miles looks down at his hands. ‘She was . . . bright. Quiet, when she was very small. We spent a lot of time together, obviously.’
‘Yes. That must have been hard.’
‘It was . . . a turbulent time. For both of us. But Amber is very resilient.’
Federica frowns. ‘Is she?’
Miles coughs. ‘It was a difficult childhood, with me working and trying to care for her alone. As you might expect. But she did well at school; she made friends. I suppose I rather thought I’d gotten away with it.’
The words hang on the air. Miles shifts in his seat, eyes flicking to the camera and then away again.
‘And Sadie,’ Federica says, when enough of a significant pause has passed to satisfy her. His wife’s name slipping out so casually even Greta feels winded. ‘Perhaps you could tell us a bit about what it was like to have her home again. It must have been quite a shock, her reappearing like that?’
Miles blinks at her. ‘Of course. Of course it was.’
Greta tries to picture it. The house, late at night, Sadie Banner staring up at it. Her hand raised to knock at the door, hesitating. Wondering whether or not to step back into her life. Wondering whether it was safe.