The Guest List

by Lucy Foley

  ‘It was all his idea,’ Charlie says. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Whose idea? Duncan’s?’

  ‘No. He’s an idiot. A follower. Will. He was the ringleader. You could tell. And Johnno too. The others were all acting on instructions.’

  I can’t quite imagine Will making the others do that. Anyway, the stags are normally the ones to call the shots, not the groom. Yeah, I can see Johnno being behind it, no problem, especially after that stunt just now. He has that slightly wild air about him. Not malicious, but like he might push things too far without really meaning to. Definitely Duncan. But not Will. I think Charlie prefers to hang the blame on Will simply because he doesn’t like him.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Charlie says, his expression darkening. ‘You don’t think it was Will.’

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘If I’m honest, not really. Because—’

  ‘Because you want to screw him?’ he snarls. ‘Yeah, did you think I hadn’t noticed? I saw the way you looked at him last night, Hannah. Even the way you say his name.’ He does a horrible little falsetto. ‘Oh Will, tell me about that time you got frostbite, oh, you’re so masculine …’

  The ferocity of his tone is so unexpected that I recoil from him. It’s been so long since Charlie’s been drunk that I’d forgotten the extent of the transformation. But I’m also reacting to the tiny element of truth in it. A flicker of guilt at the memory of how I found myself responding to Will. But it quickly transforms itself to anger.

  ‘Charlie,’ I hiss, ‘how … how dare you speak to me like that? Do you realise how offensive you’re being? All because he made some effort to make me feel welcome – which is a hell of a lot more than you did.’

  And then I remember last night, that flirting with Jules. That slinking into our bedroom in the small hours when he definitely hadn’t been drinking with the men.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, my voice rising, ‘you haven’t got a leg to stand on. That whole horrible charade with you and Jules last night. She’s always acting like she has you wrapped around her little finger – and you play along. Do you know how it makes me feel?’ My voice cracks. ‘Do you?’ I’m caught between anger and tears, the pressure and loneliness of the day catching up with me.

  Charlie looks slightly chastened. He opens his mouth to speak but I shake my head.

  ‘You’ve had sex with her, haven’t you?’ I’ve never wanted to know before. But now, I’m feeling brave enough to ask it.

  There’s a long pause. Charlie puts his head in his hands. ‘Once,’ he says, voice muffled through his fingers. ‘But … ages and ages ago, honestly …’

  ‘When? When was it? When you were teenagers?’

  He lifts his head. Opens his mouth, as though to speak, then closes it again. His expression. Oh my God. Not when they were teenagers. I feel as though I have been punched in the stomach. But I have to know now. ‘Later?’ I ask.

  He sighs, then nods.

  My throat seems to close up so that it’s a struggle to get the words out. ‘Was it … was it when we were together?’

  Charlie folds over into himself, puts his face in his hands again. He lets out a long, low groan. ‘Han … I’m so sorry. It didn’t mean anything, honest. It was so stupid. You were … it was, well, it was when we hadn’t had sex for ages. It was—’

  ‘After I had Ben.’ I feel sick to my stomach. I’m suddenly certain. He doesn’t say anything and that’s all the confirmation I need.

  Finally, he speaks. ‘You know … we were going through a rough patch. You were, well … you were so down all the time, and I didn’t know what to do, how to help—’

  ‘You mean, when I had borderline post-natal depression? When I was waiting for the stitches to heal? Jesus Christ, Charlie—’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ All the bluster has gone out of him now. I could almost believe he’s completely sober. ‘I’m so sorry, Han. Jules had just broken up with that boyfriend she had at the time – we went out for drinks after work … I had too much. We both agreed it was a terrible idea, afterwards, that it would never happen again. It didn’t mean anything. I mean, I barely remember it. Han – look at me.’

  I can’t look at him. I won’t look at him.

  It’s so horrible I can barely begin to think about it clearly. I feel like I’m in shock, like the full hurt of it hasn’t sunk in yet. But it throws all that flirting, all that physical closeness, into a new, terrible light. I think of all the times I have felt Jules has purposefully excluded me – cordoning off Charlie for herself.

  That bitch.

  ‘So all this time,’ I say, ‘all this time that you’ve been telling me you’ve only ever been friends, that a bit of flirting means nothing, that she’s like a sister to you … that’s not fucking true, is it? I have no idea what the two of you were doing last night. I don’t want to know. But how dare you?’

  ‘Han—’ He reaches out a hand, touches my wrist, tentatively.

  ‘No – don’t touch me.’ I snatch my arm away, stand up. ‘And you’re a state,’ I say. ‘An embarrassment. Whatever they did to you on the stag, there’s no excuse for your behaviour just now. Yeah, maybe it was awful, what they did. But it didn’t do you any lasting harm, did it? For Christ’s sake, you’re a grown man – a father …’ I almost add ‘a husband’ but can’t bring myself to. ‘You’ve got responsibilities,’ I say. ‘And you know what? I’m sick of looking after you. I don’t care. You can sort out your own bloody mess.’ I turn and stride away.

  JOHNNO

  The Best Man

  ‘Johnno,’ Will says, with a little laugh. The cave walls echo the laugh back at us. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about. All this talk of the past. It isn’t good for you. You have to move on.’

  Yeah, I think, but I can’t. It’s like some part of me got stuck there. As much as I’ve tried to forget it, it has been there at the centre of me, this toxic thing. I feel like nothing has happened in my life since, nothing that matters anyway. And I wonder how Will has been able to carry on living his life, without even a backward glance.

  ‘They said it was a tragic accident,’ I say. ‘But it wasn’t. It was us, Will. It was all our fault.’

  ‘I’ve been tidying the dorm,’ Loner said, when we came in from rugby practice. I’d told him to do it, as I’d run out of other stuff for him to do. ‘But I found these.’ He held them in his hand as though they might burn him: a stack of GCSE exam papers.

  He looked at Will. You’d think from Loner’s expression that someone had died. I suppose for him someone had died: his hero.

  ‘Put them back,’ Will said, very quiet.

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken them,’ Loner said, which I thought showed courage, considering we were both about twice his height. He was a pretty brave kid, and decent, too, when I think about it. Which I try not to. He shook his head. ‘It’s – it’s cheating.’

  Will turned to me, after he’d left the room. ‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ he said. ‘Why’d you get him to tidy it when you knew they were there?’ He was the one that had stolen them, not me. Though I’m sure now that he’d have let me take the blame if it got out.

  I remember how he gave a grin then that wasn’t really a grin at all. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think tonight we’ll play Survival.’

  ‘You couldn’t bear it,’ I say to Will. ‘Because you knew you’d get expelled if it got out. And your fucking reputation has always been so important to you. It’s always been like that. You take what you want. And fuck everyone else, if they might get in your way. Even me.’

  ‘Johnno,’ Will says, his tone calm, rational. ‘You’ve had too much to drink. You don’t know what you’re saying. If it had been our fault, we wouldn’t have got away with it. Would we?’

  It only took the two of us. There were four boys in Loner’s dorm that night – a couple of them had got sick and were in the San. That helped. I felt like maybe one of them stirred when we came in, but we were quick. I felt lik
e an assassin – and it was fucking brilliant. It was fun. I wasn’t really thinking. Just adrenaline, pumping through me. I shoved a rugby sock into his mouth while Will tied the blindfold, so that any noises he made were pretty muffled and quiet. It wasn’t hard to carry him: he weighed nothing at all.

  He struggled a bit. He didn’t wet himself, though, like some of the boys did. As I say, he was a pretty brave kid.

  I thought we’d go into the woods. But Will motioned to the cliffs. I looked at him, not understanding. For one horrible moment it felt like he might suggest we throw the kid off them. ‘The cliff path,’ he mouthed at me. ‘Yeah, OK.’ I was relieved. It took us ages, climbing down the cliff path, with the chalk disintegrating with every step, our feet skidding, and we couldn’t even use the handrail hammered into the rock, because our hands were full. The kid had stopped struggling. He’d gone very still. I remember I was worried he couldn’t breathe, so I went to take the gag out, but Will shook his head. ‘He can breathe through his nose,’ he said. Maybe it was around then that I started feeling bad. I told myself that was stupid: we had all been through it hadn’t we? We kept on going.

  Finally we were on the beach, down on the wet sand. I couldn’t work out how we were going to make this hard. It would be obvious where he was, once he’d got the blindfold off, even without his glasses. It wasn’t that far from the school and anyone could climb up that cliff path – a little kid, especially. Boys went down to the beach all the time. But I thought: maybe Will wanted to make it easy for him, after all, because of all the stuff he’d done for us – cleaning our boots and tidying our dorm and all of the rest. That seemed fair.

  ‘You know it, Will,’ I say. A noise comes up from somewhere deep inside my chest, a sound of pain. I think I might be crying. ‘We should have paid for it, what we did.’

  I remember how Will pointed to the bottom of the cliff path. That was when he produced some laces. Nothing fancy, the laces from a pair of rugby boots.

  ‘We’re going to tie him up,’ he said.

  It was easy in the end. Will got me to tie him to the handrail at the bottom of the cliff path – I was pretty good with knots, that sort of thing. Now I got it. That would make it a bit more difficult. He’d have to do a Houdini to get out of there, that was the part that would take the time.

  Then we left him.

  ‘For God’s sake, Johnno,’ Will says. ‘You heard what they said, at the time. It was a terrible accident.’

  ‘You know that isn’t true—’

  ‘No. That is the truth. There isn’t anything else.’

  I remember waking up the next day and looking out of the window in our dorm and seeing the sea. And that was when I realised. I couldn’t believe how stupid we’d been. The tide had come in.

  ‘Will,’ I said, ‘Will – I don’t think he could have untied himself. The tide … I didn’t think. Oh God, I think he might be—’ I thought I might throw up.

  ‘Shut up, Johnno,’ Will said. ‘Nothing happened, OK? First of all, we need to work that out between us, Johnno. Otherwise, we’re in big trouble, you get that, right?’

  I couldn’t believe it was happening. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up and none of it be real. It didn’t seem real, something so fucking terrible. All for the sake of a few bits of stolen paper.

  ‘OK,’ Will said. ‘Do you agree? We were in bed. We don’t know anything.’

  He’d jumped so quickly ahead. I hadn’t even thought about that stuff, telling someone. But I guess I would have assumed that was what we had to do. That was the right thing, wasn’t it? You couldn’t keep something like this secret.

  But I wasn’t going to disagree with him. His face kind of scared me. His eyes had changed – like there was no light behind them. I nodded, slowly. I guess I didn’t think then about what it would mean, later, how it would destroy me.

  ‘Say it out loud,’ Will told me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and my voice came out as a croak.

  He was dead. He hadn’t been able to get himself free. It was a Tragic Accident. That was what we all got told a week later in assembly after he had been found, washed up further along the beach, by the school caretaker. I suppose the ties must have come undone after all, just not in time to save him. You’d have thought there would have been marks, anyway. The local police chief was a mate of Will’s dad. The two of them would drink together in Will’s dad’s study. I guess that helped.

  ‘I remember his parents,’ I say to Will now. ‘Coming to the school, after. His mum looked like she wanted to die, too.’ I saw her, from the dorm upstairs, getting out of her car. She looked up and I had to step out of sight, trembling.

  I crouch down so I’m level with Will. I grip his shoulders, hard, make him look me in the eye. ‘We killed him, Will. We killed that boy.’

  He fights me off, throwing his arms out blindly. His fingernails catch my neck, scratching under my collar. It stings. I shove him against the rock with one hand.

  ‘Johnno,’ Will says, breathing hard. ‘You need to get a grip of yourself. You need to shut the fuck up.’ And that’s when I know I’ve gotten to him. He hardly ever swears. It doesn’t fit with his golden boy image, I guess.

  ‘Did you know?’ I ask him. ‘You did know, didn’t you?’

  ‘Did I know what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. For Christ’s sake, Johnno – untie me. This has gone on long enough.’

  ‘Did you know that the tide would come in?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Johnno – you’re not making sense. I knew it last night, mate, and in the speech. You’ve been drinking too much. Do you have a problem? Look. I’m your friend. There are ways to get help. I can help you. But stop with this fantasising.’

  I push my hair out of my eyes. Even though it’s cold I feel the sweat come away on my fingers. ‘I was a fucking idiot. I’ve always been the slow one, I know that. I’m not saying it’s an excuse. I was the one who tied him up, yeah, when you told me to. But I didn’t think about the tide. I didn’t think about it until the next morning, when it was too late.’

  ‘Johnno,’ Will hisses, like he’s scared someone might come.

  It only makes me want to be louder. ‘All this time,’ I say, ‘All this time, I’ve wondered that. And I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I thought: yeah, Will could be a dick at school at times, but we all were. You had to be, to survive in that place.’

  It made us into animals.

  I think of the kid, how he was an example of what happened if you weren’t – if you were too good, too honest, if you didn’t understand the rules.

  ‘But,’ I say, ‘I thought: “Will’s not evil. He wouldn’t kill a kid. Not over some stolen exam papers. Even if it meant he might get expelled.”’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ Will says. ‘No one killed him. The water killed him. The game killed him, maybe. But not us. It’s not our fault he didn’t get away.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yeah, that’s what I’ve told myself, all these years. I’ve repeated the story you created. It was the game. But we were the game, Will. He thought we were his mates. He trusted us.’

  ‘Johnno.’ Now he’s angry. He leans forward. ‘Get a fucking grip. I’m not going to let you ruin all of this for me. Because you’ve got some regrets about the past, because your life is a mess and you don’t have anything to lose. A little kid like him – he wouldn’t ever have survived in the real world. He was a runt. If it wasn’t us, it would have been something else.’

  The term ended early, because of the death. Everyone turned their attention to the upcoming summer holidays and it seemed like the kid had never existed. I suppose he barely had for the rest of the school: he was a first year, a non-entity.

  Except there was a grass. One pupil who sneaked on us. I was always sure it was Loner’s fat little friend. He said he’d seen us come into the dorm room, tie Loner up. It didn’t get very far. Will’s dad was headmaster, of course. He was a dick, most of the time –
more to Will than anyone else. But for this, he had Will’s back and mine too.

  And we had each other’s.

  All these years we’ve stuck together – bound by memories, by the dark shit we went through together, the thing we did. I thought he felt the same way about it too, that we needed each other. But what the TV stuff shows is that all that time he wanted out of our friendship. I’m too much of a liability. He wanted to distance himself from me. No wonder he looked so fucking uncomfortable when I told him I would be his best man.

  ‘Johnno,’ Will says. ‘Think about my dad. You know what he’s like. That’s why I was desperate to try and get those grades. I had to do it. And if he’d found out the truth, how I hid those papers – he would have killed me. So I wanted to scare the kid—’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ I say. ‘Don’t you start feeling sorry for yourself. Do you know how many free passes you’ve been given? Because of how you look, how you manage to convince people that you’re this great bloke?’ It’s only made me angrier, his self-pity. ‘I’m going to tell them,’ I say. ‘I can’t deal with it any longer. I’m going to tell them all—’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Will says, his voice changed now – low and hard. ‘You’d ruin our lives. Your life too.’

  ‘Ha!’ I say. ‘It already ruined my life. It’s been destroying me ever since that morning, when you told me to keep my mouth shut. I never would have stayed silent in the first place if it weren’t for you. Since that boy died there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought about it, felt like I should have told someone. But you? Oh, no, it hasn’t affected you in any way, has it? You’ve just gone on, like you always have. No consequences. Well you know what? I think it’s about time that there are some. It’d be a relief, as far as I’m concerned. I’d only be doing what we should have done years ago.’

  There’s a sound in the cave then, a woman’s voice: ‘Hello?’

  Both of us freeze.

  ‘Will?’ It’s the wedding planner. ‘Are you in here?’ She appears around the bend of the rock wall. ‘Oh, hello, Johnno. Will, I’ve been sent to find you – the other ushers told me that they’d left you in here.’ She sounds totally calm and professional, even though we’re all standing in a bloody great cave, and one of us is slumped on the ground tied up and blindfolded. ‘It’s been nearly half an hour, so Julia wanted me to come and … well, rescue you. I should warn you that she’s not—’ She looks like she’s trying to find a way to put it delicately. ‘She’s not as delighted as she might be by this … And the band are about to start.’