‘May this man’s soul rest in peace,’ she murmured to herself, reading the traditional words off a stranger’s headstone as she strode across the uneven grass, ‘But as for me? My soul will never rest in peace.’
*
The churchyard was now overcast and Celeste shivered as the temperature dropped. The morning sunshine had disappeared, and the skies had taken on that heavy leaden texture that promised snow. Celeste zipped her jacket right up to her chin and went back to the first grave to collect her tools. She didn’t think the Fiat could cope with heavy snow. She needed to get through the country lanes and head back to London before the road conditions got too bad.
Before leaving she picked up the sweets and sat behind the headstone, leaning back against the cold granite. Her stomach was hollow. A cold chill ran along the length of her spine. She opened the packet and took out a jelly baby – red – those were his favourites. The soothing soft texture and sickly-sweet taste reminded her of happier times from her childhood. A few snowflakes began to fall. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh wet smell of snow and let the flakes land on her closed eyelids.
There had been good days. Mostly when her mother had been out of the way. She remembered sledging on the South Downs, hurtling down the steep slopes on a makeshift sleigh, their bodies pressed together as she held him tightly round the waist, then his rosy cheeks as they raced up the hill to go again. One day, they had built a snowman at the very top. She had felt on top of the world that day, looking out over the sweep of the valley and the river below, raised up by his trusting love for her.
She had been in so much trouble later on because she had wound her scarf around the snowman’s neck and forgotten to bring it home at the end of the day. She had a memory of being slapped around the face so hard that the next day she could still see the bruise marks of her mother’s fingers imprinted on her cheek.
Her eyes were stinging. Snowflakes mingled with her tears. One by one she ate her way through the whole packet of jelly babies, while her legs and the surrounding grass slowly turned white under a light covering of snow. Then she rolled onto her knees, opened her workbox, took out a cutter and pulled up her sleeve to expose her forearm. She made two light cuts in the shape of a cross and, with her head spinning, watched in fascination as the drops of blood slid down the curve of her forearm and dripped onto the snow. She wiped away the blood oozing from her wound with the tips of her fingers, then brought them to her lips before tapping them on the top of the headstone in a bloodied, symbolic parting kiss.
She pulled down her sleeve. Then she screwed up the empty sweet packet and stuffed it in her pocket.
Feeling faint, and sick, and ashamed, she held on to the headstone and levered herself unsteadily to her feet.
It was time to go.
*
Celeste arrived back in London tired and emotional after her trip to Shearham. It had been a stressful journey back into town with the rush hour traffic made worse by the driving snow and the slushy road surfaces. She turned down an invitation from Anya and Jessi to join them at the local pub. Instead she heated up a microwave meal and decided to spend what was left of the Friday evening working at the kitchen table on the college assignments that she should have handed in that morning.
Celeste was taking a part-time professional diploma in digital marketing at a local college of further education, the Victoria Technology Institute. Having dropped out of school before her A levels, she had missed out on the opportunity to go to art school or university – much to the disappointment of her teachers because she was a talented student. But now she was trying to put her life together and make a fresh start. Ultimately, she wanted to have a business of her own – something like an online graphic design business that would allow her to use her natural creative and artistic skills and yet be her own boss. She couldn’t face the idea of going into an office every day.
In the meantime, she needed to earn a living and Meghan’s offer of a part-time job at Seventh Heaven (though she was being paid scarcely more than the minimum wage) was perfect. Celeste had a natural flair for flower arranging and Meghan was willing to give her floristry training on the job. While Meghan was strict (and frequently irritated by Celeste’s poor punctuality and extravagant wastefulness with flowers and materials) she was also compassionate. She had been friends with Celeste’s mother when they were at school. Although they had grown apart years earlier because Celeste’s mother had lost her way in alcohol and drug abuse and become insufferable even before her children were born, Meghan knew something of Celeste’s dysfunctional childhood and the trauma and troubled times that Celeste had been through recently and was willing to help where she could.
Celeste realised that long term the traditional floristry business was not for her. She couldn’t hack getting up every day at the crack of dawn. The cold room where they stored and prepped the flowers gave her coughs and chilblains, and her pale hands were being wrecked by the freezing water and thorns. But her work at the florist’s tied in very well with her further education studies. As part of her digital marketing course she was required to do a practical project designing a website and had offered to do this for Meghan free of charge. Until now Meghan had relied almost exclusively on local business and word of mouth. But in these troubled times sales were falling and she needed to ‘rethink her business model’, as Celeste kept telling her in her newly acquired ‘marketing-speak’. The current Seventh Heaven website was basic and crude, in need of a complete revamp.
This week’s assignment was on the topic of ‘Website Optimisation’. Celeste rubbed her eyes and yawned as she read through the introduction to the course notes:
‘This module introduces key concepts underpinning effective website design and the purpose of user-centred design and website optimisation. It will enable you to build and publish a simple, well-designed, and optimised website using WordPress that is aligned to specific business goals.’
Befuddled by the jargon, she groaned. ‘And what does that mean in plain English?’
‘Additionally, you will understand design principles and best practices for copy and A/B testing along with exploring User Experience and User Interface as part of user centric design. The Website Optimisation module also covers how to use evaluation tools and metrics to implement monitoring and to capture, track, and measure website activity to develop deeper insights and optimisation best practice.’
‘How am I supposed to write a paper on that? How on earth is that going to help me design a website?’ Celeste read on through the notes drumming her fingers on the table and getting more and more frustrated and agitated. The marketing jargon was confusing enough but the technical information was beyond her. It was so hard to concentrate. The cuts on her arm were stinging and she was weary from the long drive home. Forty-five minutes and two bars of chocolate later she slammed down the lid of her laptop.
‘I give up!’
She changed into a long-sleeved shirt and sent a text to Jessi.
‘Get me a G&T. I’m coming down to the pub. This course is doing my head in! I need a drink.’
When she walked through the door of the Devonshire Arms on the corner of the street, Jessi and Anya were both tapping away on their phones sitting at the table furthest from the bar. Jessi looked up and beckoned her over, holding out the extra gin and tonic.
‘God, I need this!’ said Celeste.
‘What’s up?’ said Anya turning over her phone.
‘It’s not important,’ said Celeste. ‘Just this digital marketing course driving me nuts. I’m stuck on the assignment. I’d need a degree in computer programming to be able to understand it! It’s for computer geeks!’ She glanced over at Anya’s phone face down on the table. ‘Who were you chatting to?’
‘Oh, no one important,’ said Anya evasively. ‘Just someone from work.’ She put the mobile away in her handbag.
*
When they got back to the flat later that evening, Anya flung her bag down on
the sofa as she always did before going off to change into her PJs. While Jessi made the coffee, Celeste sat down on the sofa and switched on the TV. She couldn’t help herself. She reached over and found Anya’s phone in the bag. She knew Anya’s new code. The girls had giggled about it the other evening – the date that she had lost her virginity. Celeste had a good memory for details such as dates. She scrolled through the latest texts, and there it was, a text from one of Anya’s old schoolmates that Celeste had met once or twice.
‘OMG Ben’s back in town!!!! Does she know? He asked me for her number!!!’
PAST
6
She’s known him for years, since they were about three years old in fact. They both go to the same fee-paying village primary school on the outskirts of Guildford. Besides meeting at the school gate, their mothers know each other from the local tennis club at Shearham. The women move in the same set of prosperous, middle-class ‘homemakers’ whose husbands commute into London to work long days in financial institutions in the City, leaving them free to enjoy a privileged existence within the Surrey bubble…
Celeste has many play dates and parties round at Ben’s house as a little girl. He has a hot tub, and a swimming pool and his mother always seems happy to host. Her friends never come to hers to play and she wonders why. As she grows older, Celeste becomes aware that there’s something wrong with her own mother. It’s the whisperings and sudden silences of the other women at the school gate that first make Celeste aware of it. Stacey has become incapable of partaking in the endless round of tennis and lunching and dog walks and yoga and shopping trips with which the Shearham mums fill their time – and they shun her for it.
Celeste becomes more watchful of her mother and resentful of the hours that she spends asleep on the sofa, and embarrassed by her funny, slurred way of talking. Even when her mother is awake Celeste thinks it’s like she’s not really there. Sometimes Stacey’s still in her silk dressing gown when Celeste is dropped home from school by someone else’s mum because her mother is incapable of driving or has forgotten to come and pick her up.
Ben’s mother is one of Celeste’s self-appointed ‘guardian angels’ who ‘rallies round’. Celeste spends hours at his house after school until her father arrives to take her home when he gets off the London train. This might explain why from the time they are in junior school, Ben bosses her around and boasts that he is ‘richer’, ‘stronger’, ‘braver’, ‘faster’ and ‘smarter’ than her – and it might also explain why she believes him. Children pick up on the cues of adults.
Ben pretends to hate having a girl around but secretly enjoys the power. In all their imaginary games of murder in the dark or hide-and-seek or zombie warfare, she’s the one who gets tied up in cupboards or lost in the woods or blindfolded and shot.
And it’s Ben who first gives Celeste a name for her mother’s ‘sickness’ when she is six years old.
‘My dad said your mum is a “Alco-Ho-Lick”,’ he says proudly.
‘What’s that?’ said Celeste.
‘It means she’s sick in the head,’ he says, picking up on the conversations of his parents. And when Celeste is old enough to understand the meaning of the word, she reflects that his explanation wasn’t so far off from the truth.
Celeste’s father resents Stacey’s alcoholism too, and finds his own way of coping, in the shape of a glamorous, possessive, social-climbing younger woman who gets her claws into him, and becomes his mistress then a few years later his wife, after an acrimonious divorce in which he becomes estranged from his children.
When Stacey loses her husband and her luxurious, all-expenses-paid lifestyle, she and the children get ejected from the Shearham social elite. They move to a small, run-down, semi-detached property ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’. Stacey can’t afford the fees at the tennis club. Her modest maintenance payments evaporate mostly on booze. Celeste gets relegated to the ‘B list’ for birthday parties and sleepovers.
Things get worse when Stacey is involved in a car accident and injures her back. The accident is her fault – she was driving under the influence, five vodka tonics to the wind, at four in the afternoon and she drove through a red light. Thankfully no one else is injured though her car is a write-off and the person she drove into claims fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of damage. She lost her self-respect years ago. Now she loses her licence too.
Stacey’s GP prescribes opioid painkillers for the excruciating pain in her back. Stacey succumbs to the cocktail of spirits and tramadol. The painkillers give her short-term relief and euphoria followed by debilitating lethargy and depression. She continues with the pills long after the back pain subsides. So now Stacey’s an opioid addict as well as an alcoholic, and whenever she’s at home Celeste feels more and more like she’s living in one of Ben’s zombie apocalypse games.
Celeste still spends some evenings at Ben’s. His mother insists on it. ‘We must be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves,’ she says. It doesn’t bother Ben too much because he has discovered his big brother’s secret stash of psychological horror gameplay and developed his own addiction. He spends hours lost in awesome dystopian gameworlds – competing with anonymous online players in a compelling mix of survival-horror, and hack-and-slash pornographic fantasy involving freaky scenarios and erotic enemies to be eliminated. Though she is a reluctant player, Ben teaches Celeste the basics of gaming. She doesn’t admit it to herself in words, but her instinct is correct: he finds it all the more exciting when she is in the game to crush and destroy.
Because she is intelligent and hardworking, Celeste is awarded a scholarship and a full bursary at the same private grammar school that Ben and all their rich friends are moving up to, but the snubs and the sniping make her feel she is there under sufferance. Having an opioid addict and alcoholic mother shatters Celeste’s self-confidence. She spends her life in a state of social anxiety and stress, trying to shield her mother’s embarrassing behaviour from the critical eye of her friends and to conceal from them the chaotic existence that she calls home.
Celeste is in fact much smarter than Ben and desperate to be included in the ‘friendship group’ in which he rules as alpha male. He’s her golden ticket to social acceptance and sometimes he remembers that they were once best friends and lets her tag along. Because he can, he uses and abuses her to write his homework and slip him the answers in exams and research his assignments and forge his absence notes. She never says ‘no’. She’s the butt of his banter and the subject of his memes. Her house, her hair, her make-up, her clothes – nothing is off limits. She pretends not to care. She takes it ‘in good sport’. But it’s hardly surprising that she struggles with self-image and is borderline anorexic. By the time she’s sixteen the psychological damage is done.
He’s ‘legend of the rugby pitch’… ‘a top guy’… ‘fittest catch at every party’… Everyone loves him…
She does too. She’s loved him for years. Pouncing on each scrap of kindness he slings to her like she’s a hungry stray bitch.
Ben is a player and a bully and Celeste is his victim.
She gets it – everyone needs someone to kick sometimes…
She promises herself that one day she will fight back.
PRESENT
7
It takes me less than an hour to complete the assignment that our tutor set for the weekend. I think I could teach him more than he knows. By lunchtime I am going stir-crazy sitting in my empty room.
It’s less than twenty-four hours since our trip to Shearham and already I’m crossing off the days to next Friday’s class. I forced myself to stay away from your flat off the King’s Road last night. I don’t want to be that creep who hangs out on street corners. But this is different.
Almost without thinking I find myself sitting on the pavement on the opposite side of the road from Seventh Heaven. I have come up with the perfect disguise. I’m in my oldest clothes, sitting on an old blanket with my head bowed, my features shielded by a baseba
ll cap and in front of me an empty plastic cup and a cardboard sign that reads:
‘I need £10 for a hostel tonight – please help’
No one bothers me. No one wants to catch my eye. Some of the shoppers glance in my direction then quickly look away, with a quickening of the step and tightening of the grip on the straps of handbags and shoulder bags. A few – not many – fumble in pockets or purses and drop a few coins into my cup. Most of them want to pretend I’m invisible, which suits me fine.
But You – You notice. You see me through the foliage and displays that decorate the shop window. I don’t know if You recognise a likeness, but You know I’m there. And I can see You in a delicious peep show as you move up and down, in and out of view like a marionette busy with the customers. At one point the shop is empty and you pause right in front of the window, looking straight at me, while you push back your hair. Is it pity or something else that makes You stop and stare?
Late in the afternoon, my patience is rewarded. I hear the gates of Seventh Heaven grinding open on the side street and then I see You behind the wheel of the Seventh Heaven van, pulling out into the queue of traffic. Thank God for red lights! Seconds later, I have left my pitch, collected my bike from where I left it parked further up the street and am following in your tracks.
*
It was unusually quiet in Seventh Heaven for a Saturday morning. Perhaps, after Valentine’s Day local residents were tired of romantic gestures and extravagant gifts. Celeste was thankful that Meghan had tasked her with redesigning the window display to remove all the Valentine’s motifs and replace them with flowers and decorations looking forward to the spring season and Mother’s Day. It was absorbing and creative work, which helped to take her mind off the memories rekindled by her trip to Shearham and the unsettling events of the past few days.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 4