by Lisa Jewell
‘Because I felt like it,’ she whispered back into his.
‘Yeah, but why?’
‘I dunno. I suppose I didn’t want you to sit there tomorrow morning telling me what an amazing time you’d had. Didn’t want to be the loser at home in her pyjamas.’ She fixed him with a penetrating look. ‘Why did you come?’
He glanced at Izzy, just as Izzy looked away from Harrie and glanced at him.
Kirsty nodded knowingly. ‘She’s way out of your league.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ he said.
‘Seriously. Look at her. And she’s older than you.’
‘Only just. A few months.’
She looked at him sceptically.
‘A year,’ he said. ‘That’s nothing.’
‘And where does she live?’
‘Harrogate,’ he said. ‘Like Mark. They all know each other from posh world. Polo and stuff.’
Kirsty rolled her eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘good luck with that.’
‘I think she thinks I’m different.’
‘Well, that’s for sure.’
‘Look, it’s not as if we’re fucking urchins, you know. We’re not that different.’
Kirsty gestured at the high-ceilinged room, the lit-up bar, the chesterfield sofa, the leather-topped fenders and the brass chandelier overhead.
‘I mean, intrinsically,’ said Gray. ‘Inside. We live in a nice house, we go to perfectly OK schools, we have holidays and a decent car. Mum and Dad drink wine.’
‘Yes, but there’s a big difference between that and this.’
‘Whatever,’ he said, ‘I just don’t think it matters. Not when two people have a … connection.’
Kirsty rolled her eyes.
‘Cheers,’ said everyone as Mark passed out the cocktails. Gray turned and brushed his beer against Izzy’s cocktail. She held his gaze for a split second and smiled. Then she looked away again and he followed her gaze to Mark, who was laying out a row of small white pills on the surface of the bar.
Izzy rubbed her hands together and said, ‘Oooh! Goody!’
Gray stifled a groan. He should have guessed. Posh kids and drugs.
‘No, thank you,’ he said when Mark pushed one towards him with a fingertip.
Mark looked at him disapprovingly. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said.
‘No, honestly. I’m fine with the beer.’
Izzy nudged him. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s only E. You can share one with me if you want.’
‘Seriously, it’s not my thing.’
‘Oh, Gray. You’re so adorable.’
This time the ‘adorable’ didn’t strike him as a compliment.
‘I’ll share one with you,’ said Kirsty, gently touching his arm.
‘What! No way! You’re fifteen! I can’t take you back to Mum and Dad off your tits on E.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Mark, leaning across the bar on his elbows, ‘why don’t you two share half. A quarter each. You’ll barely notice anything. And you’ll be back to normal by the time you get home.’
‘Then what’s the point?
‘It’ll just take the edge off. You know. Make the world seem a little nicer for a little while.’
‘Oh, please, Gray.’ Izzy held his arm. Then she pulled him to her and put her face right next to his: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, her bare arm around his waist. ‘Please.’
‘Seriously,’ said Mark, ‘it’ll just be like an extra-nice hour of your life and then you’ll be home safe in bed.’
Gray shrugged, knowing he was losing the battle and feeling a small unfamiliar part of him telling him that, actually, it might be fun and that maybe the chemical boost might be what it took finally to get him across the line between being ‘adorable’ and being a guy that Izzy might want to kiss.
He nodded and Mark smiled and cracked a pill into halves, gave one half to Izzy, halved the other and gave a tiny chunk each to Kirsty and Gray.
‘Are you sure?’ Gray mouthed at Kirsty. She nodded back at him and they swallowed the pill fragments down.
Mark passed Gray another beer and Kirsty another Coke and turned the music up even louder and the lights off, so that the room was lit only by the bar lights and a church candle burning on the coffee table behind them.
Gray and Kirsty watched the others for a while, the almost theatrical performance of their conversation, the hooting back and forth, the in-jokes and the banter. Gray was beginning to think he’d imagined the mutual attraction between Izzy and himself when suddenly Izzy’s cousin turned to him and said, ‘So, Gray, do you have a girlfriend? Down in Croydon?’
Izzy nudged Harrie in the ribs and threw her a mock-horrified look. ‘Harrie!’
‘What?’ said Harrie. ‘I was just asking.’
‘No,’ Kirsty interjected, ‘he doesn’t have a girlfriend. In fact, he’s never had a girlfriend—’
Gray clamped his hand over his sister’s mouth and wrestled her halfway to the floor. She fought back and resurfaced, pinning Gray’s arms down to say, ‘He’s never even kissed anyone, apart from our mum.’
He pushed her back down to the floor and said, ‘That’s not true. Seriously. She’s just saying that because she hates me.’
‘You know what? I don’t think I kissed a girl till I was seventeen,’ said the taciturn, slightly cross-eyed boy called Alex. ‘Or was it sixteen? Actually, might have been thirteen. I don’t know. I do remember thinking it was a long time to wait, anyway.’
‘I’ll kiss you,’ said Izzy, turning to Gray.
Gray let go of Kirsty and blinked. ‘What? Look, it’s not true that I haven’t, so you don’t need to kiss me just to be kind.’
‘Oh, Gray, I promise you, kindness has nothing to do with it.’
And then, before he could protest or even decide if he wanted to protest, she was kissing him, in front of everyone: her arms tight around his neck, her tongue in his mouth, her small breasts hard against his chest.
He struggled briefly against her embrace, but soon the animalistic thud of the music, the golden darkness, the raw atmosphere, the tequilas, the beers, the E and this girl, here, in his arms, the taste of her mouth, the genuine desire coming from her and into him, all combined to bring him to a state of oblivion where the two of them were all that existed. His head swam with kaleidoscopic images, changing, moving, diverging and converging and then pulsating in time to the music into what he suddenly realised was the unfurled fan of a peacock’s tail. It shimmered in his mind’s eye, the great span of it, the iridescent layers of green and indigo and purple, dancing and swaying. He lost himself for a moment in the beauty of the thing, losing consciousness for a while of the fact that he was kissing Izzy, that her hands were in his hair, that the others were watching and cheering and whooping and clapping, that this was crazy, what was happening, just crazy. When they finally drew apart he looked into her eyes and he saw the peacock markings there, in her irises, and he leaned into her ear and said, ‘You are beautiful.’ And she leaned into his ear and said, ‘You are beautiful too.’
On the other side of the bar Mark pulled a small bag from his pocket, lined up another set of pills on the counter. Again he broke one in half. He pushed one half towards Gray, the other towards Izzy.
This time Gray didn’t need to be persuaded.
Thirty-two
‘Hello?’ Lily almost whispers. ‘Is that Mrs Monrose?’
‘No,’ says the quietly spoken woman, ‘I think you may have the wrong number.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I know that’s not your name. Of course. My name is Lily. I spoke to you a few weeks ago. After the marriage to your son.’
There is a short, tense silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ says the woman, ‘I still think you have the wrong number. I don’t have a son. I don’t know anyone called Lily.’
‘But this number. It is on my husband’s phone bill. It is the number he called when I spoke to his mother. After our wedding. It is you.’
‘I think there
has been some confusion,’ says the woman. ‘A misprint, maybe. I don’t have a son. I don’t have any children at all.’
‘But I recognise your voice!’
‘No,’ she says vaguely, ‘no, I don’t think so.’
Lily can hear her voice becoming distant as she moves the phone away from her ear. She shouts, ‘You are his mother! Why are you lying?’ Then she stops, reins in her temper. ‘He’s missing, you know? He’s been missing for five days. Please, when I go, will you take down my number, immediately? Write it down. Somewhere safe. Please. If you hear from him, you must let me know.’
The line buzzes and dies. The woman has hung up.
Thirty-three
The door to the house is locked. Alice and Frank walk towards the gate at the side of the house that leads into the gardens. This too is locked, with a rusting padlock and curls of barbed wire on top. They return to the front door and peer through the windows on either side through cupped hands; they see a curved hallway with tiled floors and a sweeping staircase up to a wide half-landing bathed in sun. Grand double doors lead off from both sides, and there are more doors behind the staircase. Frank sighs.
‘Are you OK?’ says Alice.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Fine.’
‘No more memories?’
‘Not yet.’
They clamber through the flowerbed outside the front-left window and reach awkwardly to look through into the room beyond. It’s a dining room, with a long table covered in books and piles of paper, a brass chandelier, a fireplace with matching leather wing chairs on each side, other unidentifiable pieces of furniture hidden under dust sheets. They repeat the action on the right-hand side of the house. Here there is a grand sitting room with three dust-sheet-covered sofas in a U shape, an ornate fireplace with a gilt mirror above, more dust sheets and cardboard boxes. It looks almost as though the inhabitant had been halfway through moving house when they left.
Alice takes out her smartphone when she hears a ringtone nearby. She looks at the screen, but it’s black. She puts the phone back in her pocket, and then starts slightly when she hears a phone ringing again. She takes her phone back out of her pocket, looks at the black screen again. The ringing continues and continues and continues. She looks at Frank.
‘Where’s that coming from?’ she asks.
He turns his ear to the house. ‘It sounds like it’s coming from inside.’
They stand for a while in the flowerbed, statue-still, listening to the phone ringing. Finally it stops; then a moment later it starts again.
A chill runs through Alice and she looks anxiously at Frank. He has clearly understood the significance of the ringing phone in the empty house. Within days of Frank arriving in Ridinghouse Bay and within hours of him remembering having been in this house, a phone is ringing and ringing behind the locked door. It can’t be unrelated.
They ring the doorbell once, twice, three times. And then both move away from the house to look up towards the windows on the upper floors. They’re looking for shadowy movements, for any sign of life. But there’s nothing. Drawn curtains, dark glass. And the eerie, haunting sound of an unanswered phone ringing into oblivion.
‘Come on,’ says Alice, taking hold of Frank’s shoulder, ‘let’s go home.’
He pauses, looking reluctant to move from this place. But then his shoulders soften and he turns to Alice and smiles and says, ‘Yes. OK.’
‘We can always come back.’
‘Yes. We can.’
The phone is still ringing as they crunch back across the driveway, its desperate insistence fading to a distant complaint as they step over the rusting chains and then swallowed up completely by the roar of passing cars as they step back on to the pavement.
For a while they walk in silence. It’s hard to know what to say.
‘Any theories?’ Alice tries as they round the corner and see the comforting jumble of town below them.
Frank looks blank, shell-shocked. He shakes his head.
She tries again. ‘Someone really wants to talk to someone in that house.’
He nods vaguely. And then suddenly he turns to Alice, his expression stricken and terrified, and he says, ‘I think we should go to the police. I think we should go now. Seriously.’
‘What!’
‘The longer I’m here, the more I know that I’ve done something really bad. That phone ringing – it was about me. I know it was. Someone was ringing about me. Someone who thought I’d be there. And maybe it was someone who loves me. Or maybe it was someone who wants to kill me. Or maybe it was someone I’ve hurt. But they were calling here. And here is close to you. And I cannot be in your house any more, not without knowing who I am. Because I’m really starting to think, Alice, really, really, that who I am is bad. Please, Alice, take me now. Take me and leave me there. Let the police sort this out. I mean it. I really do.’
Alice inhales sharply. She feels a kick to her gut and a tiny burst of nausea.
She stares at Frank for a while, her eyes locked on to his. He looks genuinely terrified. She wants to hold him, but she senses that he does not want to be held, that he wants to escape. She sighs, softly, and says, ‘There are no police here. The nearest police station is eight miles away. And it will be closed on a Sunday. I could call the police, but I’m not sure what I’d say to them: Hello, there’s a man in my house who thinks he might have done something, to someone, somewhere. Please come immediately.’ She smiles tightly, desperate to be right about someone for once in her life, desperate to keep Frank and prove to herself and the world that this wasn’t a mistake. And even if he’s right, even if he has killed someone, he’d have a good reason for it; she knows he would. ‘So listen, stay one more night. Please. One more night, then in the morning, after I’ve dropped Romaine at school, I’ll take you. OK?’
He looks unconvinced.
‘And remember,’ she continues, ‘that pub? We were going to go there for lunch? To try their famous toffee Yorkshire puddings and see what you could remember? Yes?’
He lets his head drop slightly and nods.
‘Come on then. We’ll go via home and book a table. It gets busy there on a Sunday. And we’re a big group.’ She touches his elbow and begins guiding him gently towards town. ‘We’ll just take Sadie. Give her some quality time without those two other buffoons. And if we’re lucky, there might be some live music. They often have live music. I wonder what sort of music you like, Frank. Indie guitar bands, I reckon, by the look of you.’ She’s blathering, deliberately, not wanting to give Frank a chance to think or talk, not wanting him to remember that he doesn’t want to be here any more. Because Alice really, really doesn’t want Frank to go. She doesn’t want to leave him at a police station and get a smug call from him in few days saying, Thanks for everything – my wife and I are so grateful to you. Or a call from the police saying, He’s an axe murderer. We’ll need to bring you in for questioning.
She doesn’t want anything other than to wake up in his arms every morning between now and the end of time.
‘Elbow,’ he says vaguely.
‘What?’
‘Elbow,’ he repeats, with more feeling.
She looks at his elbow, questioningly. ‘What? You mean …?’
‘That’s what I like. I like Elbow. Are they real? Are they real music?’
‘Yes,’ she smiles. ‘Yes, they are. They’re really good.’
‘Can we listen to some? Later?’
‘Sure,’ says Alice, taking his hand in hers. ‘Of course we can.’
‘Wow!’ he says, his whole demeanour brightening. ‘I can’t believe I remembered that.’
Alice squeezes his hand and smiles at him. ‘Batter,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Yorkshire puddings. They’re made of batter. Big golden puffs of batter.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I think I remember those. I think I do.’
Then he puts his arm across her shoulder and pulls her to him and they walk towards the hea
rt of town together, the dark shadow of the house on the cliff fading away behind them.
Thirty-four
1993
More people arrived at about eleven, fresh from the Hope and Anchor. Mark swung the front door open to them and they trailed into the house. Gray watched from the door of the snug. He wasn’t sure he liked the look of this lot. They were older, weather-worn, burly and rough around the edges. Most of them were drunk. Mark looked unfazed by their arrival.
‘Come in, come in!’ he called out, high-fiving and fist-touching and taking carrier bags full of beer. ‘The party’s through there.’ He gestured towards the doorway where Gray was standing. The new arrivals looked around the house as they entered, checking out the ceiling heights and the sparkling crystal chandeliers. A small guy with his hair held back in a lank ponytail seemed to be the one responsible for bringing everyone to the house. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he called out to Mark over the shoulders of the men in front of him, ‘we picked up a few stragglers en route.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Mark, clasping the man’s hand tightly and then doing a complicated twisty handshake. ‘The more the merrier. Definitely. Come in, come in.’ He gestured the last few people in. There were roughly twenty of them, mainly men, a couple of younger-looking girls and a woman who looked about fifty with a shaved head and pierced eyebrows.
The three girls looked round curiously as the new guests arrived. Alex stood up smartly and said, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome!’
They lined up at the bar while Mark served them all drinks. Gray stood at the side of the room and stared at them. The guy with the ponytail was making a spliff on the bar. The shaven-headed woman was smoking one she’d made earlier. Two of the younger men were hitting on Izzy and Harrie, who appeared not to be at all unhappy about this. He turned to see what Kirsty was doing and saw her sitting on the fire fender staring into the dead embers.
‘Come on,’ he said, joining her, ‘let’s go home.’
She turned to look at him and he could see immediately that something wasn’t right. She was smiling at him lovingly, her eyes filled with sparkles. ‘My beautiful brother,’ she said, pulling him towards her and then holding his face between the palms of her hands. ‘Just look at you. Look at your beautiful face. You are such a good person. Such a beautiful person.’ She pulled him towards her and held him hard against her.