by C. J. Skuse
The bus leaves the hanger at 3.50 a.m. and, as with all journeys involving other human beings in confined spaces, it is predictably irritating, long-winded and, at times, makes me wish I was dead. My phone runs out of charge four times, that’s how long it is. But I pass the time sleeping, texting Raf and checking out the contents of the envelope Tenoch left for me in the safety deposit box – he really has seen his gatita right.
It was good to have got the story out. I don’t know what Freddie will do with it – maybe he’ll make up some shit that I visited him before Seren shot ‘me’ dead, I don’t know. I don’t actually care. I think I wanted to get it all straight in my own head. There are so many rumours about where I’d been, what I’d done, how many dicks I’d severed en route, I want the truth to get out as well. Maybe I just wanted to talk to someone who had known the real me. The real me before I became the new me.
It’s an express service terminating at Rutland, so there aren’t too many stops – Ridgewood, Albany, Walloomsac, Shaftesbury. I alight at Manchester, half an hour away from the house according to Google Maps. I’ve scribbled the address down in my Notes app, swiped from an old Facebook post of Mabli’s, inviting all her classmates to her birthday party before she changed her security settings. I jump in another cab and arrive as the big yellow school bus pulls away from the kerbside at the bottom of their drive.
The box is still dripping and one corner is saturated to the point that the cardboard has begun to sag. I clamp it with my gloved hand and begin the gravel-winding, woodland walk up to the house.
Seren told me once it was ‘just like Honey Cottage’, our grandparents’ house in Wales. But it isn’t. For a start it’s about three times the size and it’s not stone-washed-white but clapboard white with a cobblestone path leading to an ornate green door. A Christmas wreath sways in the breeze. There are green-and-red fairy lights wrapped around the porch pillars and a sign stuck in the dirt saying, Santa Please Stop By. As I wend my way along the cobbles, I notice several mismatched flower pots beneath the porch. I put down the box on one of the pots and as I’m about to knock, the door flies open.
‘Oh, hey there, I was—’ She’s holding a watering can and it’s dripping from the spout. Intended for the pots, I presume. There’s no flicker of recognition as we stand face to face, sister to sister – me under the porch, Seren on her Welcome to the Gibsons coconut mat. ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were the mailman! Can I help you?’
I don’t speak. Whole seconds tick by. She doesn’t recognise me at all. Me and her in the same space and time, feet away for the first time in years.
‘How about a toastie? Extra salad cream?’
Her eyes become hooded. Her face darkens.
There it is. The flicker.
‘Jesus! No! No! Christ no!’ she screams, like she’s being led towards the Wicker Man.
She drops the watering can with a clatter and the door flings back. She runs into the hall, skidding on another coconut mat which slips beneath her feet. She screams for her life.
‘Somebody! Help me! Help me!’
There’s nobody around, she’s made sure of that, moving to somewhere no other sod lives. She runs, up the wide, winding staircase two at a time. A distant door slams. I retrieve my box from the flower pot and place it down beside my rucksack and the shabby chic wooden sign that reads Home Is Where The Heart Is in curly script. The hallway is peppered with photos – skiing, Christmases, pumpkin-carving, first day at school. Ashton laughing his head off at some clown; Mabli cuddling one of her dearly departed rabbits.
The place is magnificent – I can tell that from the hallway cos you can see in to all the other ground floor rooms – the enormous pine kitchen with white marble island, the sprawling family living room with its gigantic squashy cream chairs. On a thin table in the hallway sits the most ornate bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen – funeral flowers, it looks like – blue hydrangeas, cream roses, white carnations and Asiatic lilies stretched wide open like they’re laughing. It looks like it’s been stolen from Liberace’s headstone. I pick up the card. My offer still stands. In Deepest Sympathy – FLC.
Freddie. Litton. Cheney. Same gilt-edged card.
I close the front door behind me, checking momentarily outside for signs of heroic lumberjacks or maple syrup sellers who have heard her screams, but seeing signs of neither, I climb the stairs. There are many doors on the first-floor landing but it’s obvious which one she’s behind – the closed one, at the end of the cream runway – I hear her breathing heavily, a muffled high-pitched wheeze, and the door judders, like she has her back against it.
‘Seren?’ The wheezing stops, like she’s clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘I want to see you. Let me in.’
‘The police are coming,’ she says with a shaking voice. ‘They’ll be here any second. And I’ve got a gun.’
‘What are you going to tell them? Your dead sister’s ghost has come to attack you? Come on, I want to talk. You owe me that at least having shot me in the face and buried me. I don’t have a weapon. And I only have one hand. You’re properly in the driving seat here.’
It’s minutes before the door opens the tiniest crack and an eye appears through said crack. A wobbly voice says, ‘I have a gun.’
‘Yeah, you said.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘You’ve come to kill me.’
‘If I wanted to kill you, I’d have killed you by now.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘I want to know why you killed me. Or why you said you killed me.’
It takes an age, maybe seven minutes, but she does eventually open the door fully – a small handgun, pointed straight at me. Still crying, still unable to control her breathing or her shaking hands.
I pick up my crap hand with my good one and wave at her with it. She stares at it, like everyone does. And there we are, a Mexican standoff, her inside her bedroom door, me out on the landing. ‘I’m going to stand here until you talk to me or kill me again. Your choice.’
‘I will shoot you if you come closer.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
She has on a typical Soccer Mom outfit – pink hoody, boyfriend jeans, brand-new Converse and her hair is longer. It used to be all sharp bob and angles but since she’s had kids it’s gone to shit – somewhere between the Rachel cut and Tarzan.
The distant peal of sirens alerts us to life outside these walls again.
‘You better see to that. I’ll wait up here.’
I take a seat on the little baseball glove chair in what I presume is my nephew Ashton’s bedroom, even though I’ve never met him. She points the gun at me all the way down the stairs until I can’t see her anymore. I overhear the convo. But for once in her life, amazingly, she doesn’t rat me out.
‘Uh yeah, it was that trophy-hunter pair who were here last week. Same ones. They got in through the living room window and they stole a… candle, a Yankee Candle, and… some holiday cards. And then they left.’
‘Just left?’ A man’s voice. The front door closes.
‘Yeah, I’m so sorry to waste your time. I guess I’m still a little jumpy after you know… everything.’
I sneak into Mabli’s room – see her desk where she films her vlogs, her Stranger Things fairy lights on the wall behind her bed, her shelves full of toy animals and trophies she’s won for spelling bees and writing competitions.
‘Ma’am, you still seem a little scared, would you like me to check around the place for you? Make sure everything’s secure?’
‘No, I saw them drive off, they’re long gone. It was a different car to last time only I didn’t catch the plates, I’m sorry. I’m fine, honestly. A little shaken up but—’ She did the nervous laugh I knew well from our phone calls.
‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call? Your husband?’
I linger at the top of the stairs, leaning over the bannisters. ‘No, we’re separated,’ she says. ‘He doesn
’t need to know about this. Nobody was hurt. Can I get you a coffee or something?’
‘No, ma’am, thanks all the same. If you’re sure you’re OK?’
It takes a few more questions and a guided tour of the downstairs before the officer is happy enough to leave her, at which point, I venture back down myself. I find her in the living room, locking her knives in the safe behind the overlarge family portrait. Even walking slowly into the room, I make her jump.
‘Is that necessary?’ I ask her.
‘I think it is,’ she says, turning the combination on the safe and settling the portrait back in place. The room is heavily decked out in Christmas fluff, fake snow and feathery boas and a large tree stands proudly in the corner, already trimmed with popcorn, gingerbread figures and an angel that a child has made. Either that or they bought it from a blind cobbler.
‘You and Cody are separated?’
‘Yeah,’ she says, removing her gun from the back of her jeans but not pointing it at me, just sort of holding it. ‘We’re in touch.’ It’s as though she resents every word she utters; like each one costs her money.
‘I’m pretty hungry. Any chance of that toastie?’
She doesn’t answer for a while but when she does she says Kitchen and points the way with her gun.
The ceilings in all the downstairs rooms are white with fake wooden eaves to make it look olde-worlde even though the place was probably only built in the last ten years. The kitchen countertops are spotless white, flecked with shards of glitter, and there are two sets of bi-fold doors looking out over a huge flagstone sun terrace. Beyond it is a vast, sloping green valley. Seren sets about making the toastie while I pull out a stool at the opposite end of the breakfast bar.
‘It’s a nice place, Seren. Great for the kids. Whereabouts did you kill me?’
She stops unwrapping slices of fake cheese, momentarily, before starting up again like she’s been rebooted. ‘Out there.’
I hop off the stool and look out onto the terrace. The table and chairs are gnarled metal, the same green as the door. It’s the only thing about the place, apart from Seren, which looks stark and uninviting. I stare out at the flagstones. She knows what I’m doing before I do.
‘We had it jet-washed when the police were done.’
I nod, looking past the terrace down to a sloping lawn and an area where there’s a veg patch and some chickens peck about inside a large wire pen. ‘The papers said it was on the doorstep.’
‘Papers lie.’ She stops peeling squares of plastic cheese from plastic wrappers and stares at me. ‘How do you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Kill someone? How do you do that and not feel anything? I haven’t slept a full night since it happened. Why can’t I be as nonchalant as you are?’
‘Because you’re not supposed to be,’ I say. ‘I killed because my brain is wired up all wrong. I killed because I liked it.’
‘Liked? Past tense? You’ve stopped?’
‘Well, I think I’m in what psychologists call the “period of de-escalation”.’
‘How long does that last?’
‘No idea. I’m happy though. And I’m letting that be enough for now. How come you’re not in prison for my murder?’
‘We’ve entered a self-defence plea because the woman – you – had been hounding us so much.’
‘I had?’
‘Several times over the past year. She’d been violent. Followed my kids to school. Tried to take Mabli coming out of a dance class. She broke in and stole my purse, all my cards. Found out where Cody worked, stalked him. Sent threatening notes. All she wanted was you.’
‘Nightmare,’ I say.
‘A living Hell,’ she smiles, but her eyes don’t. She tries to tug open the bread bag. ‘And now you’re here.’
It’s the most she’s said so far, and it says everything. ‘Did you know it was her when you shot her?’
‘Of course I did,’ she spat.
‘So why did you do it?’
She sighs, deep into her chest. ‘I guess I snapped. I thought it would get rid of you for good. Didn’t fucking work though, did it?’
‘How is killing a perfect stranger going to get rid of me?’
She throws down the bread bag, unable to get her fumbling fingers to twist off the plastic tie. I reach across and open it – her hand moves towards the gun. I remove two slices of bread, throw them towards her, and tie up the bag. I sit back down.
‘My life for the past year has been on hold, waiting for this day. Waiting for you to come here and finish me off. I don’t sleep anymore – I doze and I wake with up with heart palpitations. I don’t work, I can’t work. I’m on anxiety medication. I’ve driven my husband away, my kids’ll be next cos I snap at them all the time. And it’s all because of you.’
‘You don’t sound anxious now. You sound… angry.’
‘That’s because I am. The fear of you has always been bigger than you. And now you’re here, I can see you’re just… a woman. A woman who doesn’t even look like my sister anymore. You’ve lost those lines between your eyes and you’re not scowling. It’s weird… this is the calmest I’ve felt in a long time.’
‘I had surgery.’
‘Obvs.’
The griddle smokes and she lifts it up and slides my toastie out onto a plate. I don’t even remind her to put the blob of salad cream on the side – she just remembers. Except it isn’t salad cream. It’s called Miracle Whip.
‘The fuck is this?’
‘It tastes the same.’
I dip my toast point in the blob and lick it. ‘You’ve been living here too long. It tastes like shit.’ I look up at her. Her hand goes straight to the gun.
‘You never said anything. In the diaries. About… me,’ she says.
‘You read Freddie’s book?’
‘He sent me a copy. He wants me to talk to him for his sequel. I won’t.’
‘I said plenty about you.’
‘But you never mentioned… what you saw at Honey Cottage.’
‘I told you I wouldn’t.’
She tidies up the condiments, wipes the counter, even though it doesn’t need wiping. ‘It’s the one question he keeps asking me. All the journalists ask me – Why does Rhiannon go after sex offenders? Why paedophiles? Is it because she was molested as a child?’
‘And what do you tell them?’
‘Nothing. I think that’s what I find so hard – is it my fault you turned out the way you did?’
‘Why would it be your fault?’
‘Because that’s when you turned. That summer when you saw what Grandad was doing to me. Yeah, you did bad stuff to me before that, your personality changed after Priory Gardens, but we were bringing you back, me and Mom and Dad. It was working. You were coming back to us. Then we went to Honey Cottage that summer and… you flipped.’
‘Do you remember that conversation we had that night, lying on top of the hay bales in the back field?’
‘I’ve blacked a lot of those summers out.’
‘You said to me, “While he’s got me, he won’t touch you.” That’s when I knew, one way or another, Grandad was going to die. I saw him hit you that morning when you forgot to bring in the eggs. And later when he was doing that stuff to you in the barn…’
She scrunches her face like she’s got sudden brain freeze.
‘I was going to push him down the stairs, or stab him when we went on that picnic at Ogmore – I hid the kitchen knife in my bag. I was going to do it. I was planning to lure him into the long grasses, saying I’d found a dead bird.’
Seren’s fully crying by this time. ‘And you’d never have said a word, would you?’ I shake my head. ‘Nanny was so mad at you. “Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you call for me?”’
‘You smiled at me, at his funeral.’
‘You’d killed my monster,’ she said. ‘I felt good.’ She wiped her eyes roughly on a piece of kitchen paper and threw it in the sink. She was angry ag
ain. ‘But I felt bad about feeling good because he was dead.’
‘He raped you, Seren. I couldn’t let him get away with that. I’d kill all your monsters for you. I always will. Cos I love you. I am capable of feeling love.’
She shook her head, not looking at me. ‘What about the calls, the silent messages, all the emails you’ve sent me? If you love me so much…’
‘I didn’t send you anything.’
‘What about that letter to the Evening Post about killing that woman in the farm shop? And the letters to the Gazette and the Mercury?’
‘Not me, not me, and what’s the Mercury?’
‘What about my birthday last year and that horrible thing you sent to my office?’
‘What horrible thing?’
‘Oh come on. The… turd in a Tiffany box?’
‘I didn’t send that.’
It dawns on her face, and her eyes search mine. ‘The dead cats?’
I shake my head. ‘I wouldn’t kill cats.’
I tuck into my sandwich and she stands there, hands resting on the island, gun behind the butter tub, thinking things through.
‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’ she says, more to herself than to me. ‘You didn’t do anything? Send anything to me or Cody this past year?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve had better things to do than dick about with you, Seren. My stans just messing with you, I expect. It didn’t mean anything.’
She sits down on the stool opposite. ‘Like when you used to set fire to my clothes as a kid. That didn’t “mean” anything, either, did it?’
‘I only did that twice. I was bored.’
‘Stealing my stuff?’
‘You never shared.’
‘Cutting off my hair when I was asleep?’
‘Two times I did that.’
‘Stabbing me with the scissors?’
‘Yeah. All right. I was a bitch to you, whatevs. You’ve shot me in the face and sent me to a morgue. I think you more than got your own back.’
She nods and sort of laughs and looks to the ceiling as though someone up there will help her.
‘I did love you,’ I said. ‘I still do. I don’t kill people I love. I kill for them. And I killed twice for you, if you remember.’