by S. E. Lynes
‘Bella?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I can’t really remember. I think I just meant he was out late. I was just trying to tell you how much he cared, that’s all. I mean, I was drunk, Ave. Those cocktails!’ She pulls a face. Maybe she too can feel the simmering and is afraid of it.
‘In vino veritas,’ I say.
‘What?’ She looks at me blankly.
‘Nothing. It’s just that I got the impression you were trying to tell me something but you were… I don’t know… afraid? I’m probably overthinking, but hey, who can blame me? You were so insistent, that’s all. You were telling me how much Neil loved Abi. I know he loved Abi. But you said “no matter what” and, I don’t know, it was as if… as if he’d done something terrible and you were trying to tell me he hadn’t done it on purpose…’
I am watching her. I am watching her every move, her every tic, her every passing shade of skin. Beneath her tan, a rose blooms on each cheek.
‘Bella?’
Her eyes fill. ‘Neil would never do anything to hurt Abi. He loved her. He loved her so much.’
‘I’m not saying he didn’t. I’m just wondering if something happened. Maybe… maybe he was running late, maybe he was driving too fast…’
She stands up. Her chair scrapes across the floor.
‘He didn’t run her over, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t do anything.’
‘I’m not saying he did.’ I raise my palms to her. ‘I’m not saying anything. I just want you to be honest with me, that’s all. If there’s anything that struck you as odd that day, anything at all. It’s just that Jasmine knew the name of Abi’s toy, and that’s impossible. It’s impossible, Bella, totally impossible, unless she saw Neil or you with it. And I know that may not sound like much, but I can’t explain it, and today when I thought back to our conversation last night, I realised neither did he. So if there’s something you might have noticed, something that didn’t quite chime, it might not seem important to you, but it’s important to me, do you see? I’m not trying to incriminate anyone, I just want to know what happened, because my little girl could still be out there, and if she is, I want her back. Surely you can understand that?’ A tear snakes down each cheek almost without me noticing. And in all of this, in all of it, I’m still worried about upsetting her.
Too late. She is picking up her phone and dropping it into her tote.
‘Bella, please,’ I say. ‘Don’t take this personally. I’m in hell here – can’t you see?’
She sniffs loudly, pushes her forefingers flat to her lower lashes, the way she did that day. Carefully. Conscious of her appearance even now. Conscious of it then.
‘Bella, come on.’ My voice rises. ‘She’s my baby girl. I’m her mother. You don’t know what it’s—’
Too late I realise what I’ve said.
‘I don’t know what? What it’s like? I’m not a mum, so what, I’m some kind of psycho?’
‘No.’ I raise my palms to her, half stand. ‘Look, I know you lost a baby,’ I say gently. ‘Babies. And I’m so sorry.’
Her eyes round. ‘Who told you that?’ Her eyes close, open, roll. ‘Oh. Of course.’
‘Neil was upset, that’s all. It just came out.’
Her face hardens. ‘Just came out, did it? One of your little chats? He always did talk to you, didn’t he? Miss Classy, Miss Perfect, Miss Talented, with your piano and your nice speaking voice… so much better than the likes of me. Chavs.’
My legs straighten, almost tipping over the table. I shift, perch on the edge of the seat. ‘What the hell? I would never use that word.’
‘You basically think you’re better than us, don’t you?’ Bella sneers down at me. ‘You think what happened gives you the right to accuse us of doing something horrible. You’re upset – I get it. You’re grieving – I get that as well. Do you know why? Because I’m not as thick as you think, that’s why. I can hold more than one thing in my tiny little brain. I’m gutted for myself obviously. And for Neil. But I can be gutted for you as well, you know, and I am, I really am. I find it difficult to see little Fred, but that doesn’t mean I’m not pleased for you. I’m not pretending my grief is anything compared to yours, but we were devastated, me and Neil, devastated for us and for you. He’s not been the same since that day, and we’re having a terrible time, really terrible. We haven’t been there for you, I know that and I’m sorry, and you haven’t been there for us, but that’s no one’s fault. Sometimes it’s no one’s fault, Ava. But you don’t get to go around accusing Neil of having something to do with Abi’s death, all right? And I’d appreciate it if you could stop with your little midnight heart-to-hearts with him, all right? He’s my husband, Ava. Mine. Not yours.’
My head throbs. ‘What? Bella, what are you even saying? Where the hell is all this coming from? I’m not after Neil – that’s nuts.’
‘Why? Because he likes beer more than champagne?’
‘What?’ My face heats. ‘This is mad! I don’t look down on you; I never have. You look down on me, if anything.’
‘What? No I don’t.’
‘You do. I never have the right clothes, for a start. I don’t wear the right shoes and I don’t have the right hair. All the times you go out for drinks and you’ve never invited me, never, in all the time we’ve known each other. Even before Abi went missing. I’d ruin your Instagram, wouldn’t I? I’m just not glamorous enough.’
‘That’s not true.’ Her eyes fill.
‘Well neither is me being a snob. If I’ve seemed like that it’s because just standing next to you makes me feel like I’ve faded to grey, like I’m an alien who’ll never understand the rules. You’re so… so glamorous, all the time. Look at you! It’s a random Tuesday night in a deserted café and look at you! And look at the state of me! I might’ve felt a bit jealous on occasion, that’s all. And I’m not attracted to Neil in that way, and even if I were, which I’m not, he would never do anything because he’s loyal and he loves you, and I’d never do anything because I’m married to Matt.’
‘Not happily though.’
My mouth drops open.
Chin tipped out, Bella shifts her bag to her shoulder, seems to be about to leave.
‘Not happily?’ I shout. I am shouting. In a café. Bella freezes. ‘I was happy. I was happy until my daughter was killed or kidnapped or drowned or whatever the hell happened to her. I’m sorry, you’ll forgive me if my relationship has suffered a little under that small amount of stress.’
Tears fall from my chin. My nose is running, I can barely see, but I do see that Bella is crying too, her chin puckered with misery, her eyes darting, shining with panic and confusion.
‘I was happy,’ I cry at her, even though she is visibly cringing. ‘And we were getting there until I found out that my husband, my own husband, had been lying to me for a year over the small matter of the death of our daughter and who left the door open, the door that, had it been shut, would mean she would still be here today – and your husband, Mr Nice Guy, Mr Fucking Fix-It, was backing him up in some bullshit big boys’ don’t-tell-the-missus conspiracy. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not in my right mind just now, all right?’
I gasp back a flood of grief; my head falls into my hands. ‘I don’t think I’m better than anyone, I never have. I’m just cross at everyone, that’s all, and I feel grey and tired and alone, and some days I can’t be bothered to wash myself, let alone my hair, and I’m not trying to accuse anyone, honestly I’m not.’ I sob into my fingers. ‘Well, maybe I am but I don’t want to. I don’t want to be this person, and I was so sorry to hear that you guys have had problems, of course I was, and of course I’ve got room for that, it’s not that my grief is… I mean, it’s not a competition. Oh God, I don’t want to be like this, I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to fall out. I just want my daughter back. I just want my little girl so badly.’
The rolling sound of a shutter. The music dips. When I glance up, I see
Bella nodding, though not at me.
‘Ava,’ she says quietly. ‘They’re closing.’
‘OK.’
I wipe at my face with my fingertips. Silence presses in. A moment later, she taps my shoulder and hands me a paper napkin.
‘Thanks.’ I press it to my eyes, blow my nose. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘OK.’
‘I really am.’
‘I said it’s OK. I am too. I didn’t realise I made you feel like that.’
‘Me neither.’ I blow my nose.
‘I think we had each other all wrong.’
‘I think we did, but I’ve always really liked you. You’re kind and you’re fun and you’re… you’re yourself, you know?’
‘And I like you, Ava. I never invited you out because I didn’t think it was your scene, that’s all.’
I nod. ‘I’m sorry; I don’t know why I said that. Let’s go home, eh?’
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I think I’d rather walk by myself. No offence. I just need to get my head straight. But it’s OK.’
‘Are you sure? Well, listen, all I want to say is… if you do think of anything, even a tiny thing, please, please, please tell me, OK. I’m begging you.’
For the first time in this whole encounter, our eyes meet. And perhaps it is the intensity of the moment, but it is as if we are seeing each other for the first time. We are just women, I think, trying to survive in a world not made for any of us.
‘OK,’ she says, her smile watery. ‘I will; I promise.’
I close my eyes, feel the pressure of her hand on my shoulder. A second, and it is gone. Another second, the squeak of the door hinge; another, the rush of a car on the high street; another, the clatter of the door. One more and the music stops. I am alone – bewildered, ostracised and alone.
Thirty-Six
Matt
Matt finds Neil eating cereal, standing feet crossed, his back against the kitchen sink, bowl cupped in one hand. It is 6.45 a.m. He is dressed for work: clean white overalls, grey T-shirt, yellow work boots. He is clean-shaven, his hair slicked back.
‘Morning.’ He waves his hand vaguely to indicate that Matt should help himself, the fresh smell of shower gel coming off him ‘There’s cereal. Or toast. Do you want tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee, thanks.’
Moments later, Neil hands him a café-style latte.
‘We’ve got one of those machines now,’ he says with a note of apology. ‘We’ll be eating sun-dried tomatoes next.’
‘You already eat sun-dried tomatoes.’ Matt smiles. His face resists, his skin dry and thick as an elephant’s. On no sleep, the thought of food makes him feel sick.
‘Aren’t you cycling?’ Neil asks, eyeing Matt’s suit.
‘I’ve got a meeting in town. Embankment.’
‘I can give you a lift to the station if you want. I’m in Surbiton this morning.’
‘Great.’
Neil looks at his watch. ‘Ten minutes?’
‘Sure. Is Bella OK?’
Neil nods. ‘She’s fine. I took her a tea but she doesn’t get up till half seven, quarter to eight.’
Matt nods, though he’s not sure this explains the tear-stained mess that was Bella when she returned home last night at ten, saying she’d had a row with someone called Shannon and was going straight to bed. She barely looked at him and, horribly, he’d felt himself to be an intrusion in something difficult – difficult and private. A few minutes later, he made his excuses and went to bed so that Neil could go to her.
‘I’ll get a Travelodge tonight,’ he says now to his friend.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Neil throws his bowl in the sink. Matt knows that deep down Neil would prefer it if he did stay in a hotel, given the apparent state of things with Bella, but that these are not words that can be exchanged between them.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I need to be on my own, I think.’
‘Cool. If that’s what you want to do.’
‘Sure.’
Five minutes later, Matt hurries down the stairs. The front door is open and Neil is loading some gear into the back of his van.
‘Shall I shut the door?’ he calls out, aware of the crashing irony of the question only after it leaves him.
‘Yeah. I just need one more thing.’ Neil disappears into the side return, presumably to fetch more tools from his shed. Neil’s is a super-shed – concrete base, reinforced and insulated, the door twice padlocked against theft. Very Neil, thinks Matt, almost smiling as he makes his way to the van, passing behind the open back doors. A glance inside reveals the electric cement mixer, a stiff yard brush, a pickaxe, a couple of spades.
He climbs up into the front of the van. A moment later, Neil walks back down the front path, singing to himself and carrying a large red tool bag the size of a small suitcase. He disappears momentarily; Matt hears the van doors slam behind him. Another second and Neil is clambering into the front.
‘Right,’ he says, starting the engine. A blast of music. He turns the radio down. ‘All set?’
‘Yep.’ Matt clutches his sports bag on his lap, his rucksack with his laptop snug between his feet.
Neil pulls out of the street. As yet, the traffic is thin. Above, peach and grey clouds give way to white, September establishing itself: chilly mornings, warm days. They chat, Matt thinks later, about nothing. The weather, Neil’s job, Matt’s job. Neil drops him at the station, toots the horn as he drives away. Matt waves him off but turns before the van disappears out of sight.
It is only later, on the train into Waterloo, that Neil will appear again in his mind’s eye, carrying his red tool bag down his front path, singing to himself. The image will release in Matt a toxic cloud of spores, which will reproduce through the cells and tissue of him until, later still, when he grabs a takeaway flat white from a bar on Villiers Street, he will pinpoint the source of the rot and discover that it wasn’t words or body language or any kind of misplaced gesture but an object as innocuous as a bag, a new red tool bag, carried with perfect nonchalance down a suburban front path, and even then, it is only because of everything else that has gone before, everything that Ava said last night, that this apparently harmless detail is the one that finally sickens him.
He is early for his meeting. In the public garden at the back of the Embankment, he sits on a bench and sips his coffee in the sun. Commuters bustle by – urgent, purposeful. He thinks back to that day, to Neil showing the cop around the Lovegoods’ kitchen extension.
‘Listen.’ Neil placed a hand on Matt’s arm, his voice quiet and low. ‘We’re just going to check Johnnie’s place.’
He was so natural, so open. Matt remembers the policeman, who looked about eighteen.
Sitting now in the sun, he remembers too how he went inside to look for himself. He has not stopped to wonder why, why he would check after Neil had checked. Was there a subconscious lack of trust even then? He doesn’t think so. Abi was his daughter; it was normal to rest his bike against the wall and step into his next-door neighbours’ house. It was normal to creep up the hall, listening out for Neil and the police officer talking on the first floor. It was normal to stand at the kitchen door and stare through the glass to Neil’s work site.
But there was almost nothing there – only the shell of a large hangar-like room, the ceiling held up with great rolled-steel joists, the back wall to the garden almost entirely gone. A house on stilts. Venetian, he thought then, or a Tudor jetty. He remembers thinking it, even in that charged moment, remembers how random thoughts like that came to him that day, as if from some earlier version of himself. Standing there staring, he remembered his and Ava’s kitchen looking like that – a smaller model – when Neil did their extension. Two brooms, two spades and a pickaxe leant against the right-hand wall, a neat pile of rubble at their base. Neil was always a tidy worker. A tool bag lay at the far side next to the open-mouthed, frog-like drum of Neil’s electric mixer, the same one in which Matt had helped him mix concrete. A lone washing machin
e stood over to the left, connected to a standpipe. On top of the washing machine, a mud-splashed radio, a half-eaten packet of digestive biscuits, a kettle, also spattered with dried muddy water and three grotty white mugs with the Radio Jackie logo just about visible under streaks of dried coffee.
Hearing voices coming down the stairs, he hurried back to the front door, though too slowly to avoid being caught in the hallway by Neil and the cop.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just needed to look for myself, you know?’
Neil volunteered to show the policeman round, he thinks now, trying to fit it all together with this horrible poisonous feeling. He himself double-checked. But what bothers him, what bothers him now, is that in amongst the brushes, the spades, the heavy tools and the cement mixer, the mugs and the kettle, the radio and the half-eaten packet of biscuits on the top of the lone washing machine was Neil’s tool bag. Neil’s brand-new black tool bag, the white stitching still bright. The size of a small suitcase. He didn’t think about it at the time; it wasn’t one of the thousand random thoughts he had that day, but now he remembers that Neil told him it cost a couple of ton. Two hundred pounds. The Rolls-Royce of tool bags.
But it was black, with white stitching, still bright. It was new. And it was not red.
Afterwards, Neil suggested they split up.
‘I’ll head to Kingston,’ he said. Said he would check Bushy Park.
Did he?
A wave of nausea threatens to bring up the coffee he has just drunk. He puts his head between his knees and feels the sun on the back of his neck. His forehead pricks with perspiration and all he can see is that bag. The size of it. The brand-new condition of it. The size. The size, the size, the size.
When Ava knocked for Neil, he was at home, which was unusual but not alarm-bell-ringing. Later, when the more unpleasant glimmer of suspicion fell upon them and their best friends, the dogs sniffed their way around their house too and found nothing. Nothing. Because Abi wasn’t – had never – been there. Afterwards, he and Neil separated again. They only hooked up in the evening – Neil said he’d been far as Barnes, handing out the printed photographs and taping posters to lamp posts from Strawberry Hill to Richmond.