by Beth O'Leary
The guilt sets in after the shock. It’s all very predictable. When I’m no longer running from him, when the horror isn’t right in front of me, I’m totally sure it’s my fault. I fancied him. I drank his wine and I replied to his texts.
Deb says, ‘What would you tell me? If I said those things?’
And I see the truth of it for a moment. I know what I would tell my sister. I know how fiercely I’d protest that consent is an ongoing process. That no means no whatever you’ve said before it. But then the clarity’s gone again. There’s just horror and shame.
Dylan
Marcus makes me go to the pub with him before I go back to the flat to see Addie.
‘You need to clear your head,’ he says, then he proceeds to buy me four pints, as if that will fucking help.
I cry into my drink. I don’t tell Marcus what Luke told me because, quite honestly, I’m barely thinking about it. All I can think about is the pain in my chest, like it’s cracking, like someone’s pried my ribs apart and left them gaping.
‘Don’t get sad, get mad,’ Marcus tells me, pushing another drink towards me. ‘Addie’s been screwing around with the teacher and God knows who else, pretending she’s all sweetness and light. I knew there was something about her. Didn’t I say? Didn’t I say?’
Addie
Deb wants to stay. But I want Dylan. He’ll be home soon. I need to wash again. I need to wash it all off and then I need to tell Dylan, because somehow that’s almost more frightening than everything else.
But it turns out I don’t need to tell him.
He’s already been told.
Dylan
She looks different when I walk into the flat – her eyes are wide and frightened, kitten-like, and I know then that this is the first time she’s betrayed me with another man. She wouldn’t be able to hide this from me: it’s written all over her face.
‘I know what you did.’
That’s what I say. And then I tell her I’m leaving, just like I practised it in the pub. I tell her there are some things I can’t forgive, and I think to myself, Yes, I’m right, and I’m strong for walking away. I won’t be like my mother. I won’t turn a blind eye. I’ll be strong.
At first she’s very still. She looks so pale and small, like a little wild creature brought in from the cold, deciding whether to hide or fight.
The silence is horrifying; we’re on the edge of something vast and empty. I’m dizzy from drink and sick with horror and I want to climb out of my own skin, be somebody else, anyone else.
‘Aren’t you even going to listen to my side of the story?’ she says into the silence. Her voice sounds like a child’s.
‘Etienne told me everything. There’s nothing you can say.’
The next few minutes are a blur. She throws herself at me, and I think she’s trying to hurt me, her little fists in my chest, her feet stamping, but it’s almost as if she’s trying to burrow into me, too, to get closer. She roars. It’s grief, unmistakably. I think, quietly, So she does love me, then. She doesn’t want to lose me. What a time to find out for sure.
Addie
There is no hurt like it. All the worst things have been confirmed. I’m as bad as I feared. I’m worse.
I tell nobody else, not even my mum.
Deb saves my life, I think. She makes all the calls. She takes me to the police station and never leaves my side. If she wasn’t here, Etienne would have remained as the head teacher at Barwood School, and I’d have fallen apart.
Dylan
The doubt creeps in like damp. I wake up the next day in the log cabin at the end of Marcus’s dad’s garden, as if I’ve slipped back to that long dark winter before I stopped taking money from my parents. India picked us up from Chichester last night; Marcus must have rung her, I register, with a flicker of surprise that soon dulls again. I stare at the ceiling and touch – just for a moment – the thought of living without Addie, and it’s enough to send me curling inwards like an insect, burying myself in the sheets.
I don’t get up until the evening, and only then because my stomach gnaws with hunger.
‘What if there was an explanation?’ I say to Marcus, as we drink whisky on the floor of the cabin, in amongst the clutter of takeaway boxes. ‘What if there was a reasonable explanation?’
‘Like what?’ Marcus is pale, almost gaunt, his eyes bruised with exhaustion. ‘Just look at the photo, Dylan. Who she really is, right there in high definition.’
Addie
I know at least half of my suffering is the after-effects of what I’ve been through with Etienne. But all I can find is grief at losing Dylan.
I don’t feel like he left me – I feel like he died.
He didn’t even let me speak. The man I love would always let me speak. So who’s Dylan?
Dylan
It’s Deb who tells me the truth of it.
One week on from the night at the school, she turns up on the doorstep of Marcus’s log cabin with her face twisted in disgust.
‘You son of a bitch,’ she says. ‘You are an absolute piece of shit and I hope you burn in hell.’
She puts down a large box of my belongings and turns her back on me. ‘The rest of it is at the end of the lane,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t drop it in your fucking lake.’
‘Hey,’ I say. I dither in the doorway – I’m in just socks – and then chase her anyway. ‘Hey! How dare you!’
She keeps walking.
‘She cheated on me! She cheated on me! And you’re here telling me I’m the one going to burn in hell?’
She spins on her heels then. ‘Dylan. You’re an idiot.’
She has never looked more like Addie, small and fierce and conceding nothing.
‘What are you talking about?’ I yell, but I’m starting to shiver now, a sense of wrongness settling on my shoulders through the drizzle. ‘Marcus saw them. And Etienne told me everything.’
Perhaps the wrongness was there already. For the last few days I’ve drunk more than ever, because I’ve begun to see through the haze and remember my Addie, strong and honest, and it’s impossible to assimilate that person with the Addie Etienne and Marcus showed me as I stood weeping outside the school.
‘Marcus saw them, did he? And what was he doing there?’
This isn’t the first time I’ve wondered about that. Looking out for you, is all Marcus said when I asked him. But he was right, wasn’t he, and so following Addie didn’t look like madness, it looked like foresight.
‘And Etienne told you everything. Etienne. Do you know what it says about you that you believed the word of a man you don’t know over the word of the woman you love?’ Deb says.
The wet grass soaks up through my socks. My heart pounds.
‘He forced her. Yeah, she drank some wine. She flirted a little, maybe. And then he tried to rape her.’
Raindrops snag in the loose strands of Deb’s dark hair. She holds my gaze.
‘But maybe you don’t care,’ she says. ‘Maybe you still want her stoned in the village square, Dylan.’
I double over then and throw up on the grass.
Addie
He’s sorry. Nobody has ever been sorrier. He’s a mess of a person, he’s awful, the worst, he’s too easily led, he sees that now, he knows he has to sort himself out, he should never have assumed, he should never have left me, Deb told him everything, he knows now, please, please, he’s sorry. He sits on my doorstep and weeps.
I don’t open the door. I send him one message in response to the stream of gut-wrenching apologies that come that day.
Don’t tell Marcus what really happened, I write.
I can’t explain it, exactly. Perhaps I see something of Etienne in Marcus. Perhaps he makes me feel vulnerable. Perhaps it’s that Marcus has always said he can see darkness in me, and my heart’s never felt
darker than it does now.
I just can’t stand the thought of Marcus knowing.
Promise me that, I say. And then, please. Don’t send me any more messages. I know you’re sorry. I understand why you did what you did. But please. Don’t contact me again.
NOW
Dylan
Marcus’s nose is bleeding; a drop falls on the back of Addie’s pyjamas as she bends over the toilet, retching, and it spreads on the fabric like red ink, its edges fuzzing. There isn’t enough room in here for all of us. My head throbs where Marcus punched me in the temple.
‘Addie, hey,’ I say, pushing Marcus aside to kneel beside her.
He staggers back against the bath. Deb shoves through the bathroom door behind me and I glance up at her for a moment before looking back to Addie, who is clutching the toilet seat with shaking fingers. Her face is washed-out white, cream gone sour.
‘Something she ate?’ Marcus says.
Deb reaches out and flushes the toilet, ever practical.
‘Come on. Come on. What am I missing?’ Marcus says. ‘Why’s everyone acting like I’m the bad guy when she’s the one who forced herself on a guy who wasn’t Dylan?’
‘She did not fucking force herself on anybody,’ Deb says, and then closes her eyes for a moment. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Ads, I – it wasn’t my place.’
‘Everything all right in there?’ Rodney calls from outside the bathroom door.
‘All fine, Rodney,’ I say, keeping my voice steady. ‘Just go back to bed.’
‘Right,’ he says uncertainly.
After a long moment Addie sits back, pulling the sleeves of her pyjamas over her hands, wincing as she jolts her injured wrist. She’s not looking at me. Deb crouches on the other side of her, so all three of us are sitting on the bathroom floor, with Marcus standing over us, backed up against the bath. He’s got a lump of loo roll held against his bleeding nose, and his eyes are already beginning to bruise, but even through all of that I can read his expression, and he looks afraid.
‘What do you mean? What really happened that night?’ he asks me. ‘What didn’t you tell me?’
‘She asked me not to. That was her choice to make.’
I watch Marcus begin to understand. He turns, slowly, to look at Addie. ‘Etienne? He . . .’
Addie doesn’t look at Marcus. ‘It never occurred to you that he might lie?’ she says. Her voice is reedy and hoarse.
Marcus lets out a noise, half strangled, and sits down hard on the edge of the bath. He presses a hand to his forehead. The silence stretches on; behind us all, the tap drips.
‘You let me think . . . Why did you let me think that?’ Marcus says to Addie.
Deb passes him a fresh wad of toilet roll for his bleeding nose, and I am struck by the absurdity of all this, the four of us crammed into this mouldy bathroom, after all the years we spent circling one another, never close enough.
‘You followed me,’ Addie says to Marcus. ‘Didn’t you?’
Marcus turns his head aside. He’s crying, I notice with a start; I catch Deb watching him with her eyes narrowed in thought. He brushes the tears away like he’s just getting something off his cheek, a raindrop or a speck of dirt.
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
He doesn’t speak for a while, and the tap drips on. I think he’s done, that’s it, but then:
‘It was like a – I can’t explain,’ he says, still staring off to the side. ‘I was drinking way too much, I’d fucked up my life, India was mad at me, Dad wasn’t talking to me – but I had this feeling that if I saved Dylan from screwing up his life . . . It was like, you know, that would save me, that would be a good thing I’d done, then I’d be OK. Dylan had always been there for me. I couldn’t see him – I couldn’t – I couldn’t lose him too.’
Deb shakes her head. ‘I’m not buying this. You had some – some problem with Addie. It can’t have just been this messed up crap about protecting Dylan.’
Marcus looks up at the ceiling. My heart beats hard. I want to pull Addie against me, or just to touch her, smooth her hair back, press a kiss to her cheek.
‘I don’t know,’ Marcus says. ‘It was just a . . .’ He gestured to his stomach. ‘A gut-instinct thing. I felt like I just, I just knew she was bad news for Dylan, and then it sort of grew and she was always there, getting in Dylan’s head, until all he thought about was her, until he was consumed by her, mad about her . . .’
‘Oh my God,’ Deb says. ‘You loved her. You loved Addie.’
Everyone goes still.
It was my therapist who first suggested Marcus might have been in love with Addie; understanding that was the key to forgiving him, for me. I was Marcus’s brother, his soulmate, his oldest friend. How he must have loathed himself for loving Addie; how easy it must have been for him to shift that loathing elsewhere, to hate her instead of hating himself.
But we’ve never spoken about it. Not once.
‘You did, didn’t you?’ Deb goes on, insistent, and Marcus twists away suddenly, spinning so his feet are in the bath, hunching over with his hands to his face.
His shoulders shake. He’s sobbing.
‘Oh my God,’ Deb says. ‘That’s why you were there at the school. That’s why you cared so much if she was sleeping with Etienne. That’s why you were always such a prick about her and Dylan.’
I look at Addie. Her eyes are huge, staring at Marcus’s back as he hunches, trembling, on the edge of the cheap plastic bath, and I look at him too and think, He’s so small. How can he have done so much damage?
‘Marcus?’ Addie says.
He slams a foot down in the bottom of the bath and we all jump at the sudden sound in the silence.
‘Of course I fucking loved her. Of course I did. Fuck me, Dylan, you were dense as a brick back then, you were so stupid not to see it that I hated you sometimes’ – his voice rises, fists bunched, shaking – ‘because you would have made it so easy for me to take her. Always pushing the two of us together. Always so keen for us to get along. And I’m not the good guy, I’m not the guy who steps aside for his best friend. Do you know how hard it was? In the end I just wanted her gone, because it was torture, watching you with her, watching you fuck it up, watching you get it right—’
‘You couldn’t have taken me,’ Addie says quietly. ‘I would never have left Dylan for you, Marcus.’
‘And I wasn’t dense,’ I say, without rancour. ‘I was trusting. I trusted my best friend.’
‘Addie, I didn’t know, I swear,’ Marcus croaks, face still in his hands. ‘The teacher . . . I really thought . . . I went to the school sometimes. Saw you working late, with him. There’s no curtains in that place, and with it all lit up . . .’
Addie is staring down at the bathroom floor. I want to tell her I love her, I love her, I love her, I’m sorry.
‘I had to climb on to the skip to see you in the head teacher’s office,’ he says, voice dropping. ‘I remember seeing his hand on your thigh, then you standing, putting your glass of wine down, him following you. Then you . . .’ He swallows. ‘Then you went out of view.’
I close my eyes for a moment.
‘And I never saw you leave. Then Etienne came out and Dylan arrived and Etienne said . . .’
I cut him off. ‘We all know what Etienne said.’
Addie lets out a little sound, a mew.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ Marcus lifts his head a little, still facing away. His voice is thick. ‘Why didn’t someone say something?’
‘I didn’t want you to know,’ Addie says, wiping her eyes. ‘You . . . you were probably the very last person in the world that I wanted to know. You’d have said it was my fault. Wouldn’t you?’
Marcus turns his head just enough that I can see his face from where I’m sitting. He drops his hands, removing the tissue; there are dried, bloody watermarks all down his mou
th and chin. I’ve never seen him like this, so stark, so horrified. He looks very, very young.
‘Of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, Addie. God. I can’t believe you could think that.’
Addie shakes her head, frustrated now. ‘You thought the worst of me at every opportunity. You had it in for me. I couldn’t stand the thought of you knowing.’
‘Even if I was drunk and manic and whatever I was – please, Addie.’ Marcus’s voice cracks. ‘You need to know that I truly thought you were cheating on Dylan. I thought there was something between you and the teacher.’
There is silence for a while. The bathroom tap drips faster and faster, and I wonder if it’s been getting quicker like that all along. Addie shifts a little and lifts her gaze to mine.
She takes a deep breath. ‘You weren’t . . . I . . . I did . . . I had a crush on Etienne. For a moment I wondered – and I let him – and then I didn’t want to, but he didn’t stop, and . . .’ She’s sobbing now too, cradling her injured wrist in her lap, tracing her fingers across the swelling. ‘Dyl, I feel like you stopped being angry with me because something bad happened to me, but that doesn’t make me good. That doesn’t erase the other stuff.’
That hurts my heart – a real, physical pain in my chest.
‘Addie. No. Come on. Imagine it hadn’t ended how it did. Imagine you’d just walked out of his office the moment you’d wanted to. Would you still have said you didn’t deserve forgiving?’
She stays quiet. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I can’t . . . untangle it.’
‘There’s no question, for me. You came close to betraying me, maybe, but you didn’t. I don’t care about almost. I care about what really happened. Everyone’s got the potential to do the wrong thing – if we were measured that way, we’d all come up short. It’s about what you do. And you told him to stop. You walked away. It was me who fucked up, Addie, and I hate myself for not letting you tell me what really happened when I came to the flat that night. I’d become the person I tried so hard not to be. I didn’t listen. I failed you.’