What Red Was

by Rosie Price

  Shona’s gaze was direct; Kate nodded, sat up just a little.

  “You sit here,” said Shona, getting up. “I gotta do my hair, and that’s gonna take half an hour at least. I’ll come check on you.”

  “I think it looks nice,” Kate said.

  “Then you really do need some sleep,” Shona said. “Go to bed. Get some rest.”

  Kate went to Andrew’s room and got under his covers, leaving the door open and the light on. Her head was swimming, her body tugged under by the ebbing adrenaline, and she fell quickly asleep. She woke, briefly, to the sound of the door gently closing. Her eyes flickered long enough for her to register that it was dark outside and that somebody had turned the light out, before slipping under again.

  46

  Nothing about the way Lewis behaved that evening made sense to Max. After the screening, there was a dinner. Max waited by the door of the cinema, half expecting Lewis to try to slip away, but he strolled out, nodded at Max.

  “Where’s the restaurant?” Lewis said to nobody in particular, craning his neck and looking back into the cinema, as if the answer to his question might be hidden somewhere inside. If Max had not known what he now knew, he would not have detected anything strange about Lewis’s demeanor. If anything, he seemed more relaxed than he usually was, and as they set off for the restaurant he walked ahead with Zara. Max tried to stay close behind but Alasdair was walking slowly. Zara and Lewis crossed Shaftesbury Avenue and Max followed, dashing out between a cab and a bus, now caught on the island between two lanes of fast-flowing traffic as his mother and his cousin turned off toward Dean Street.

  “Mum,” Max shouted. Zara stopped and turned round. “Wait.” The cars did not stop. “I don’t know where the restaurant is.” His voice was whiny, a child’s voice. Lewis caught his eye. His look hardened and the edges of his mouth twitched, before Max slipped into the road, ignoring the blaring horns that hailed him as he crossed.

  “Well, Alasdair doesn’t know either,” Zara said. She took Max by the arm as they waited for Alasdair to cross, which he did, swearing loudly at a cyclist who swerved around him. The restaurant was not far away, and as they walked Max tuned out the sound of conversation around him and kept hold of his mother’s arm, with Lewis, who was walking in step with Alasdair, at the edge of his vision. When they arrived, the film’s producer and some of the cast were already there in the private room downstairs. The table was already beginning to fill, and Max could not see how he would have the chance to talk to Lewis alone, nor did he know what he could say if he did. He sat down at the far end, away from Lewis but facing him.

  “Max,” Nicole hissed, pinching his elbow as she sat down next to him. She had arrived with Rupert, who was watching them both carefully. “What’s going on?”

  “Come to the bar with me,” he said.

  While they waited for their drinks to arrive, he told Nicole again what he had said to her in the cinema, but more slowly and more deliberately.

  “I don’t understand,” Nicole said. “How would she know all of this? Did Kate tell her?”

  “I don’t think so. She must have just told her about the tattoo.”

  “And Kate told you about it, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Nicole bit her lip. “Are you sure you haven’t misunderstood?”

  Max shook his head. Kate would not have left if it had been a coincidence. Their drinks had arrived, but neither of them made to sit back down. Lewis had turned in his seat and was watching them at the bar. Max looked down at his drink, avoiding eye contact, but Nicole was looking right back at him.

  “One way to be sure,” she said.

  Max shook his head. “We can’t,” he said, but he couldn’t remember what his reason was, and now Nicole was beckoning Lewis. Slowly, he rose, came toward them.

  “Am I in trouble?” he said, leaning against the bar next to Nicole, putting her between him and Max.

  “Don’t fuck around,” Nicole said. “We’re family. But I know what I just saw. What does our mother know about you that we don’t?”

  “Nothing,” said Lewis.

  “Nothing, except that she’s effectively accused you of raping somebody. And you’re not even going to defend yourself?”

  “I don’t hear any accusations.”

  “Kate,” Max said, finding his voice for the first time. “That was you in the film. And the woman was Kate.”

  “There’s your accusation,” Nicole said.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Lewis held up his hands. “Kate. Your friend Kate was raped. Fuck. The one with the curly hair? Moony sort of face?”

  “The one who lived with us,” Max said impatiently.

  “You think I raped her?”

  “I know it was you.”

  “You know it was me?” Lewis repeated incredulously. “You know it was me.”

  “We’re asking you,” Nicole said. “We don’t know, but we’re asking you to tell us where this has come from.”

  Max said nothing. He could see Lewis clearly now, and he wished he couldn’t.

  “We fucked,” Lewis said plainly, speaking only to Max now, as if it were Max who was owed an explanation. “I didn’t tell you because I thought you were into her. And she didn’t want me to tell you in case you got jealous. We fucked and she wanted it.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to tell you. If she’s decided it was something else, well, then we’ve got a problem.”

  Denial was always going to be the easiest option. Or rather, partial denial, a part confession that confessed to nothing but only blurred the truth with omissions and distortions.

  “It’s up to her,” Max said, blunt now. “If she wants to make it official then that’s her decision. But I’m telling you now that I know. We’re telling you that we know.” He glanced at Nicole. Nicole said nothing, bit her lip again.

  “Nicole?” Lewis said, looking directly at her now.

  “I don’t know what you did,” Nicole said. “Probably I’ll never know for sure. But right now, I think you’re full of shit.” Without waiting for Lewis to respond, she walked away from the bar and up the stairs out of the restaurant.

  Lewis was laughing, incredulous again. “What can I say to that? What’s happened to this family?”

  “Admit what you did,” said Max.

  “I’ve done nothing,” Lewis said. “I fucked someone who wanted to be fucked. And I’ve got a tattoo. So cuff me. It sounds to me like you’ll believe what you want to believe.”

  He took a slow sip of his drink, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter.

  “That’s not how you do it,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  Max said nothing, waited for him to keep talking.

  “You don’t pick it out there, in the shop. You have to decide for yourself what font you want, and the size, the coloring. Send it in beforehand, so they’ve designed it all before you go. I could have told Zara that, if she’d asked me. But I guess she wasn’t particularly interested in accuracy.”

  He drained his drink and turned back to the bar; caught the attention of the barmaid. Ordered another.

  47

  Andrew was still asleep when Kate woke the next morning. She didn’t know what time it was. For a while, she watched his chest rising and falling next to her, waiting for whatever it was that was causing the crippling tightness in her own chest to manifest. She could feel that she was still wearing Shona’s trousers, and the wire of her bra was digging into her armpits. When, eventually, she turned onto her front, she saw that there were black mascara marks on the pillow. There had been a great sadness, she knew. But as the recollections began to surface—the darkened cinema, Max’s stricken face, Zara’s silhouette—what came with them was relief. No longer was she her secret’s sole keeper. First Andrew, then Claire. And now Max, Nicole. Soon Zara would know, and William: the know
ledge of this crime was now their burden, not hers.

  She found Andrew’s charger on the bedside table and plugged in her phone. As she waited for it to wake, she unbuttoned the trousers and took them off, took off her bra. Her phone buzzed, the screen loading with phone calls, a dozen or so, that she’d missed from Max, and messages from him and from Claire. She deleted Max’s texts, considered deleting his number, but didn’t. Instead, she wrote telling him that she was at Andrew’s, that he didn’t need to be worried about her, but that she couldn’t talk to him. She told him she would call when she was ready to. To Claire she wrote only two words: They know, and put her phone back on the table.

  Next to her, Andrew had stirred, not quite enough to realize that she was there beside him, and she stayed very still, not wanting to wake him. She didn’t know what Shona had told him, didn’t know what he’d thought of her turning up here, but already the thought of revisiting last night made her feel heavy. She would tell him, but not straightaway. First there would be breakfast. She was hungry, she wanted him to cook eggs for her, wanted to hear about his night, what had they had for dinner, who had come for drinks afterward. She wanted to spend the morning at least in his world, before having to return to her own. This momentary contentment would pass, she knew, because there was nothing that did not pass. What she had felt last night had lifted, and although that did not mean it was gone, for now this was enough.

  Her phone began to ring but she didn’t answer it. The sound woke Andrew, who lifted his head blearily from his pillow, saw that she was there, and put his head back down.

  “You’re here,” he said, closing his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Kate had been right not to rush that morning; it would take weeks, and then months, before what had happened would begin to make sense to her. But it would be worth the wait. After a while, there were moments when she felt a levity that she had never before experienced, not even before the rape. The value of contentment grew exponentially. Summer ended, fiery autumn leaves carpeted the ground and then rotted. Kate witnessed the progression of Max’s life without her in the slimmest of segments: when she and Claire drove past Bisley House at Christmas she saw that the “For Sale” sign had been replaced by “Sold,” and in the new year, an automated email arrived to tell her that Embers was now live. It was painful to know that he had, ostensibly at least, continued on much the same trajectory despite what had happened to her. At such times, she had to remind herself that it had been she and not he who had broken off contact that she had told him she would call, and still she had not.

  A few weeks after the premiere, Kate had gone home to Randwick, and Andrew had come with her for the first time. Through the summer she started visiting Alison far more frequently than she ever had, sometimes every other weekend. That first time with Andrew, Kate had sat at the kitchen table watching her mother climb up onto the worktop to fix a screw that had come loose at the top of the cabinet, holding a power drill in both hands with a pencil tucked behind her ear. Kate wondered then how she had ever thought that Alison, who never leaned on anybody, who never used people as if they were things, who had only ever turned to herself in times of need, was weak. Alison possessed a rare, self-sufficient strength; she existed, continued to exist, without ever requiring approval or encouragement, she gave everything and she expected nothing in return. It was that evening that Kate found the words she needed. And though her voice cracked as she spoke, though she began to sob when Alison asked her why she had waited until now to tell her, why she had for so long carried her burden alone, Kate felt at last that she was safe.

  48

  His dreams began in the weeks that followed that first screening of Zara’s film. Though they possessed many of the characteristics of nightmares—their insistent recurrence, their proximity to consciousness, that just-beneath-the-surface feel, the way in which they wrenched him from his sleep—he would not call them nightmares, because it was only on waking, when he was forced to leave the fantastical for the real world, that he felt truly afflicted. They grew worse as the summer pitched: a feverish mind, perhaps, or heat creating the illusion of two bodies when there was only ever one.

  That was how it always ended, reaching out for her lying next to him, only to find that she was not there. He knew before he opened his eyes that she was not, though he thought that if he kept them closed for long enough the smell of hairspray and coconut he was sure he had smelt would return to him. Once he dreamt that she had kissed him, her hand sliding across his bare chest, her hair brushing his cheek, and he had woken aroused and guilty before he turned and saw that the bed was empty. Max had said nothing to his parents on the night of the premiere, but the morning after he’d told them. They were sitting across from him at the kitchen table, William halfway through a bowl of cereal and Zara complaining of a hangover. Max was surprised by how easily the words came to him, but then Kate had done all of the hard work already, and Zara, in the narrative they had created between them. All that was left for Max was to point to the perpetrator, which he did calmly and with resignation.

  “He’s already denied it,” Max said, before either of his parents had spoken. “They slept together, he said, but she gave consent.” He paused. “I believe her.”

  “She’s your friend,” William said, straightening. Until now he had been looking down at his cereal. By this statement, it was unclear whether William was validating or discounting what Max had just said, but neither of them attempted to expand. Zara was silent, and Max waited for her to say something about the film, to acknowledge her role in what had happened, but she did not.

  “Have you tried to call her?” Zara said.

  “She’s not picking up. Neither is Andrew.”

  “We must make sure she’s all right. Do you have her address?”

  “I’m not going to her flat if she doesn’t want to see me.”

  “I tried to persuade her to go to the police,” Zara said. Max noticed that his mother’s cheeks were flushed; that she was trying to keep her voice steady. But he did not soften his tone.

  “Maybe now she will,” he said.

  “Where’s Nicole?” William said, reaching for Zara’s hand. But Zara pulled it away, brushing her hair from her face, sitting up a little taller.

  “At her flat. She knows,” Max said. He looked squarely at his father. “And somebody needs to talk to Alasdair.”

  When Max got Kate’s message later that morning, he replied immediately to tell her that he would be there whenever she was ready to speak to him. But she didn’t reply that day, nor the next, and the next day he knew that even if she did write, there was very little that could be said. It was then that the dreams started. If he dreamt of her in the early hours, then he struggled to get back to sleep. He’d had little practice at insomnia, given the ease with which alcohol had always brought on sleep, and he was restless. He would get out of bed and go downstairs where he drank squash and read the papers left on the kitchen table. He read them backward: starting with the crossword, and then those articles that required the least attention, before working his way up to the heaviest stories of the day, sitting on the love seat in the kitchen, the window cold against his back.

  * * *

  —

  A fortnight had passed since the premiere, and again Max was awake at three in the morning. He knew that William had been up too, because the kitchen had been clean when he’d gone to bed, but now there were empty pill packets collected by the kitchen sink, and a half-drunk glass of water. William had always slept well, but lately he’d been waking in the early hours. He told Max that he didn’t want to disturb Zara, which was why he’d been sleeping in the spare room, where the blinds were thicker and the mattress was harder, and Max did not challenge his reasoning. That morning, he wondered again how long he could bear to stay at Latimer Crescent. Nicole had offered him his old room in their flat, but he’d told her
he needed to be at home.

  His refusal of Nicole’s offer had been in large part because of William: Max saw that his father was in an impossible position, and this worried him. Max, Zara, even Nicole could choose to believe what they wanted. They could distance themselves from Lewis. But William had his brother to think of, and Alasdair had as good as refused to acknowledge what had happened, had denied that Lewis had a tattoo, even. Physically he was ailing, heavier and slower than ever, and nobody but William had the strength or inclination to rescue him. The burden was great, and Max could see the strain in his father’s sleeplessness, the labored way he climbed the stairs at night, as if carrying his older brother.

  During this time, Lewis continued to work at the same hospital, lived in the same flat. William heard from Alasdair that he’d been dating somebody, but that nothing had come of it: bitterly, Alasdair speculated that his son was too traumatized by previous relationships to trust anybody. William, who did not know what he could say, suggested that Lewis might need therapy, to which Alasdair responded with a coughing fit. For the rest of them, it was far easier just to let Lewis fall and to spare no thoughts for whoever he might take down with him. William, on one of the rare occasions he spoke to Zara about his nephew, said that he was glad Bernadette was not alive to witness this; Zara said it was a shame that Alasdair was.

  Rupert, despite what he had seen on the night of the premiere, had still not been told. It was too easy not to include him, to consider him to be outside of time, too fragile to hear the truth. But one night, when Max was sitting at the kitchen table, his phone started ringing, his uncle’s picture on the screen. A late-night phone call from Rupert had once signaled desperation, but he knew this was something else.

  “Hello,” Max said, picking up.