The Date

by Louise Jensen

  ‘Bitch.’

  Horrified, my hands covered his as I grappled for breath, until Chrissy yanked him away from me. We stood, chests heaving, eyes burning into each other.

  ‘I know.’ His words dripped poison. ‘I know what you did.’

  ‘Please…’

  ‘Let’s go somewhere dry and private and talk about this properly,’ Chrissy said. ‘Calmly.’

  ‘Keys,’ Ben demanded, holding out his hand as I shivered in my too-short dress. For a second I thought about refusing, my neck still hot from the heat of his hands, but Chrissy was right. We needed to talk about things properly. I dropped my key ring into his hand before slipping into my coat and pulling on my gloves.

  Silently we walked, soaked to the skin by the time we reached my car. There was so much to say but none of us had any words. Ben climbed into the driver’s side, while Chrissy settled herself into the passenger seat and I found myself in the back like an outcast.

  Three’s a crowd.

  As we sped through the darkness, towards home, I rummaged around for something I could say, anything, to explain myself. But I couldn’t. I was furious with Chrissy for betraying my confidence. I knew I should never have told her. I stared out of the window, the sky and sea merged into one giant pool of blackness.

  ‘Why?’ I fired the word at Chrissy.

  ‘I love him,’ she said simply, twisting around in her seat. ‘I wanted him to know everything about me and that meant telling him everything about you.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to do with Mum. With me.’

  She fell silent as Ben screeched off the road and hurtled towards the clifftop. For one single, horrifying moment I thought he was going to drive over the edge, but he slammed on the brakes. I clung onto the door handle as we skidded across black ice, stopping perilously close to the edge where the treacherous sea crashed its fury. Nobody came up here in the winter. It was hazardous.

  ‘Go on then,’ he yelled at Chrissy. In the moonlight he had a deathly pallor, his fury palpable and I had to keep reminding myself his anger was justified. I’d feel the same if it was the other way around. ‘Tell her what you told me.’

  Chrissy hung her head and I couldn’t think there was anything she could say that could shock me now. Ben knew the truth.

  ‘Sharon Marlow was my mum,’ she said softly.

  ‘No. No. No!’ I screamed so loudly my throat was raw as I thrust open the car door and stalked into the blackness, wanting it to swallow me up. Wanting to walk away from Chrissy and all she represented. How could she be the daughter of the woman who died during Dad’s robbery?

  ‘Ali,’ Ben yelled and the fire in his voice soldered my feet to the spot.

  The rain was slowing, a light sprinkling of snow began to fall, dusting Chrissy’s shoulders. She looked like an angel as she stood by Ben’s side, wind whipping her hair. She tried to slip her fingers into his, but he wrenched his hand away.

  ‘Ali, my mum was Sharon Marlow.’

  ‘Please, don’t. Please, stop.’ I didn’t want to hear it, but she carried on regardless.

  ‘I got a letter from your dad just before his release and I thought it wasn’t fair he gets to live his life with his family. My mum’s gone. My brother too. My dad started drinking after Mum died and never recovered. We barely have a relationship at all. I got curious, I suppose, about the life he’d be going back to. The man who had caused it all. He was the only one of the Tanmoor Three left to blame. David Webb and Wayne Lindsell are dead. I wondered what you thought of him. His children. I thought I’d find you on Facebook, just a glimpse into your lives, but I couldn’t locate you. There was nothing on Google about you dated after the news reports following his conviction and I thought you must have changed your names. I tried to move on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about you all. Wondering if you’d forgiven him. Were waiting for him with open arms. I hired a private detective, and—’ She shrugged, her arms wide. ‘Here I am.’

  ‘So what did you want? What do you want?’ I didn’t feel I knew her anymore, this woman I’d shared a house with for the past four months.

  ‘I just wanted to see you, just once. Honestly, I thought that would be enough, but then we got talking and I found out about your mum dying and the way your voice went steely and cold whenever I tried to bring your dad up and you told me you had nothing to do with him and I knew. I knew you were hurting as much as me. I knew you had lost both your parents too and I felt a kinship. A connection that nobody but you could ever understand, and I wanted to tell you who I was, but I thought you might reject me. I liked you. Both of you. More than like.’ She gazes at Ben.

  ‘Our dad killed your mum,’ I shouted.

  ‘He didn’t. He was there but he didn’t. He tried to stop it, but the papers didn’t report that.’ She closed her eyes as though remembering. ‘Wayne was screaming, threatening to kill everyone. He was out of control. David was waving the gun. Your dad tried to talk him into putting it down. I remember it. All of it. Maybe it came out in court, maybe it didn’t. The jury had probably made up their minds anyway. But I wasn’t called to testify. I was a mess. Put on antidepressants at such a young age. Pills, pills and more pills when what I really needed was a cuddle. Love. Dad couldn’t bear to look at me because I reminded him of Mum.’

  ‘I am so, so, sorry.’

  ‘I know you are, but you can’t hold onto the past, Ali. I forgive your dad because holding on to hate for all these years… Well, I’ve only been hurting myself.’

  There was something in her eyes, an empathy. An understanding that was my undoing. I broke down.

  ‘Do you forgive me as well?’ I thought I asked the question in my head, but she stepped forward and took me in her arms.

  ‘Ali. There’s nothing to forgive you for. It wasn’t your fault.’

  Those were the words I had waited to hear for most of my life and as soon as they left her mouth the wind snatched them and carried them away along with my shame and my guilt.

  I clung to her while she supported my weight, while everything flashed before my eyes, opening the door to the policemen, the scorn on Melanie’s face, the cake tumbling to the floor, but this time I didn’t push the images away. I allowed them to fully form and then I let them go into the night sky into the blanket of clouds obscuring the stars. Eventually my tears ran dry and I peeled off my gloves and fished in my clutch bag for a packet of tissues, blowing my nose and wiping my eyes before I could face my brother.

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for what happened to Dad, Ali. I never did. But what you did to Mum? I will never forgive you for that. I won’t.’

  Sobs tore through my body, the freezing air burning my lungs as he turned and ran back towards the car. Chrissy and I trying to keep up with him, our heels skidding in the ice.

  ‘Stop,’ Chrissy called as the engine revved. Headlights beamed.

  Ben began to spin the car around, turning back towards the road.

  ‘Wait.’ I waved my arms. No matter what he thought of me, he couldn’t leave us here. We were miles away from town and we’d freeze.

  Kicking off my shoes I started to run, the gravel ripping my tights, Chrissy panting hard beside me. Just as Ben began to accelerate back towards the road I broke into a sprint, running into his path. He’d stop. He had to. But he didn’t slow. Didn’t veer out of the way. I waved my arms.

  ‘Ben!’ My cry sucked away by the pounding sea.

  Almost in slow motion, he leaned back on his seat, yanked the wheel to avoid me, but the wheels were spinning and fighting against the black ice that kept the car coming at me.

  ‘Ali!’ I saw Ben’s mouth move. The terror on his face.

  ‘Noooo!’ The last thing I remember was Chrissy’s hands on me. Pushing. Falling. My head thwacking against something cold and hard.

  Nothing.

  54

  ‘You hit her with the car, didn’t you?’ The blood. The wing mirror. The bumper.

  ‘It was a
n accident,’ Ben says, his voice small, and I am transported back to when he was five, standing forlornly over Mum’s favourite vase, smashed on the floor, his bottom lip trembling. ‘There was black ice. I thought I’d hit you both. You were so still. So silent. Covered in blood but you had a pulse, and when I checked you over, I realised, apart from your head, there weren’t any other wounds. It was Chrissy’s blood that had showered you.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She didn’t… she isn’t…’ He falls silent but he doesn’t have to say any more.

  ‘How did I get home?’ My mind a blank page after falling.

  ‘You were unconscious. By the time I’d sorted… everything out, you’d come round, taken the car and gone.’

  ‘I drove?’ I screw up my face, trying desperately to remember something, anything, about the journey home. There’s nothing. I am incredulous I could have picked up my bag, driven home and then gone to bed as though nothing had happened, but then I remember Mr Henderson telling me about shock, how the mind will try to protect us by blocking things out or creating some semblance of normality. For the first time I feel a flicker of understanding for that woman who had murdered her entire family and then cooked them dinner as though nothing had ever happened.

  ‘I thought you’d have driven straight to the police station,’ Ben continues. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I walked across to the cottage and sat for ages, remembering the picnics we had with Mum, do you remember? I’d always bring Ollie the Owl and he’d have his own teacup and saucer. I loved this place. I cried as I watched the sunrise, thinking it would be the last one I’d ever see. Waiting for the police to come and take me away. But they didn’t. And I started to think maybe you hadn’t told them. Maybe you were protecting me. I had to find out. When I came to yours and realised you couldn’t remember anything it seemed like fate. A chance to think. Plan. At the hospital when you asked me to lie to the doctors about falling and you were insistent you didn’t want to speak to the police, it gave me… the facial blindness was… an opportunity, I suppose. A chance to make you suffer, like I was suffering. I loved her you know. Chrissy.’

  ‘You took her phone. Posted on Facebook. How did you post on my Instagram page if my phone was in the car?’ I can’t comprehend what he’s telling me. Please don’t let it all have been him.

  ‘I logged into your account from my phone. You still use Matt’s name as your password for everything. You really shouldn’t.’

  ‘Did you send me the flowers?’

  ‘Yes. The fact you couldn’t remember anything about your date was perfect. For me. You nearly caught me once, though, when I switched on your radio. I nipped out the back door and Branwell came charging down your driveway. He knew it was me. I had to drag him onto the street really quickly. You looked me straight in the eye and had no idea. You thought I was in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Even if I hadn’t thought you were away, I would never have thought you could do this to me. But wait! It can’t all have been you, Ben!’ I am desperate for it not to be. ‘You chased that man out of my garden. You were beaten up.’

  ‘He was going door to door for the electric, flogging smart metres. I cornered him, demanded his wallet and phone. Let him hit me.’

  He grins as though he is proud of what he has done. Look at my spelling test Ali-cat. I got ten out of ten.

  ‘The…’ I’m uncomfortable bringing this up in front of my baby brother. ‘The sex tape…’

  ‘Me and Chrissy. She liked to experiment. I knew you’d assume it was you and be too embarrassed to show anyone to ask. It’s always all about you, isn’t it, Ali?’

  ‘You’ve made it about me. You’ve put me through hell, Ben. You were the one in the garden banging on my window? I was terrified.’ He must have banged on James’s window too, to make it seem random at first. Increase my paranoia. ‘You can’t have hated me that much.’

  ‘Hate,’ he says. ‘You murdered our mum.’

  ‘It really wasn’t like that. Ben you were too small to remember how it was. She couldn’t feed herself. Dress herself. Go to the toilet. She had no dignity. She had no life.’

  ‘She still laughed. Made jokes.’

  ‘She put on a brave face for us. That’s all.’ Kim’s Game – the tea towel covering the tray – Ben only remembering what he wanted to be true. ‘She couldn’t carry on.’

  ‘She had me! She had us.’

  ‘And she loved us. She did. But she wanted to go.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. She’d never have chosen to leave me.’

  ‘She was in pain all the time, Ben.’

  ‘She was getting better.’

  ‘She was dying.’ We are shouting at each other now. All the while I am working the knots furiously behind my back. Loosening. Twisting my wrists from side to side, the skin chaffing.

  ‘Iris said she’d get better. She promised. She would have known. She was the adult.’

  ‘She was a coward. Look.’ I soften my voice. ‘We’ve never talked about it properly and we should have done. You were too young to understand then, but you’re not now. Mum had motor neurone disease. You don’t recover from that.’

  ‘But Iris promised…’

  ‘Iris was trying to protect you. I was trying to protect you. Ben. Mum wanted to go. She begged me to help her. How could I have said no? She was suffering. It was the kindest thing.’

  ‘It was murder.’

  ‘It wasn’t. Not really,’ I say weakly.

  ‘If it wasn’t. If it was really what she wanted, why didn’t you tell me? I had to find out from someone else. Imagine how that fucking felt?’

  ‘It’s a shock. I know. I understand. Look. Let Matt go. It’s nothing to do with him. Untie me and we can go home. Talk about this properly. I’ll answer any questions you like.’

  ‘I can’t let Matt go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ve already told the police Matt is going to kill us both. “My husband. Matt. He’s killed my aunt. Hurt my brother. He’s trying to kill me. He’s going to kill us both”.’ He mimics my voice. ‘They’ll never for a second suspect me. You’ll go over the cliff and so will Matt, and I’ll say he was trying to kill me too and in the struggle he was the one to fall.’

  Ben slices the knife down his arm and crimson trickles over his skin. ‘Look what happened when we fought.’ I know that even if I could recognise his features he would still be a stranger to me in this very moment.

  It takes Ben four attempts to heft Matt over his shoulder. His knees strain under the weight as he carries him out of the door. I scream and scream, my cries mixing with the hungry gulls screeching for food. Ben returns empty-handed and I am broken. Limp, as he picks me up and carries me outside, but when I get to the edge I see Matt is on the ground. He has not thrown him over. Yet. Momentarily I feel an ember of hope that he has changed his mind, until he says: ‘I wanted you to see. I want you to know how it feels to have someone you love taken away from you.’

  He dumps me on the floor and the wind is knocked out of me. Something hard and sharp digging into my back. ‘Ben.’ I keep talking, my fingers rooting around for the object I have fallen on. A piece of flint. I begin to saw the knot. Slowly. Methodically.

  ‘Stop!’ I cry as he takes a step towards Matt. ‘Do you remember I used to read to you when you couldn’t sleep? Those nonsense poems you loved.’

  ‘Don’t, Ali. It means nothing anymore. My whole childhood has been a lie. All of it.’

  ‘Not all of it. Not even most of it. I’m so, so sorry about Mum, but if I could go back, Ben, I’d do exactly the same thing. I would.’

  He lunges forward with the blade and I duck, but he’s so close to my face, I can feel the whoosh of air as the steel slices past my ear.

  ‘Wait.’ I’m still working frenziedly at the rope. ‘If she hadn’t been expected to die, there would have been a post-mortem. They’d have found the tablets and there’d have been an investigation. The doctor knew Mum would have bee
n too weak to undo the lid from the bottle. They’d have known she had help. I’d have been arrested. There wasn’t an investigation because it was classed as an expected death, Ben. Expected.’

  There’s a snapping sensation. A release of pressure and my hands are free.

  ‘Ben.’ The ground feels shaky as I try to spring to my feet, my knees weak and powerless. He looks uncertain now and I know he is processing what I have just told him. ‘Give me the knife.’ I put out my hand. ‘Please.’ We circle each other like sharks, as the ocean below roars hungrily.

  ‘“The Owl and The Pussy-cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat”,’ I begin, and he begins to cry. Behind him a backdrop of frothy sea and cloudy sky merge into one.

  ‘Benjamin… put down your weapon,’ booms a voice. A familiar voice. PC Hunter.

  ‘We traced Ben’s phone. Are you okay, Ali?’ PC Willis shouts. ‘Step backwards.’

  But I can’t. I am not going anywhere without my brother.

  I stretch out my hand. He shakes his head.

  ‘“They took some honey and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five-pound note.”’ I’m speaking softly now but his lips move with each and every word I say. He’s remembering how it felt to be young. How it felt to be loved.

  ‘“The Owl looked up at the stars above and sang to a small guitar—”’

  With a guttural cry Ben launches himself towards me, the knife slipping from his fingers. I open my arms to receive him, but I am bowled over, PC Hunter charging forward.

  ‘He’s dropped the knife!’ I scream. Ben’s eyes widen with panic as he backs away. ‘Stop. He’s dropped the knife!’ My throat is raw but it’s too late. Ben has stepped backwards again, disappearing over the edge.

  55

  There is a moment as Ben disappears over the cliff when time seems incredibly slow and incredibly fast. Incredibly cruel. I’m unable to breathe, making odd half-hiccup noises while a pressure in my chest builds and builds until it is released in one gut-tearing, heart-wrenching scream that rasps like sandpaper in my throat.