The Whispers

by Perks, Heidi

  ‘Are you okay?’ she’d asked when Anna didn’t reply.

  Anna had stared straight through her.

  ‘I want to spend time with you, Anna,’ Grace went on. ‘Just the two of us, the way it used to be.’

  ‘It’s been nineteen years, Grace,’ Anna had said. ‘I’m a different person now. You don’t have any idea—’ She had stopped abruptly.

  ‘I don’t have any idea about what?’ Grace had asked but Anna had shaken her head and turned back to the barman.

  Grace had placed a hand on Anna’s arm, to get her attention, to twist her back to face her. ‘I don’t have any idea about what?’ she’d repeated, a little firmer this time, because she needed to know what Anna wasn’t telling her.

  Anna had pulled her arm away and opened her mouth to speak and Grace had looked closely into her friend’s eyes and sworn that she saw tears. But then Caitlyn had appeared at the bar and asked, ‘Need a hand?’ and out of the corner of her eye Grace had caught Nancy watching them and imagined that Caitlyn had been sent to collect her.

  Yes, nineteen years had passed. And of course their lives had changed. But when Grace moved back she’d been hoping to get close to Anna again. Yet now, when she looks back at the last three months, she can see that she’s been kept at arm’s length, but whether it is Anna’s doing, or the influence of her friends, she isn’t so sure.

  Now, as the wind picks up, she pulls her gloves out of her pocket and slips them on, tugging her coat tighter around her. A knot of anxiety balls inside her. She should never have left the pub when she did, she thinks, as she strides out on the walk. And yet Anna hadn’t tried to stop her when she’d called herself a taxi. Grace swore she had even noticed a flash of relief on her friend’s face when she said she was going. A look that had made her shrivel inside and wish she had never agreed to come.

  She continues to walk, and the air seems tighter with each breath she takes. The slope inclines only gradually, and Grace is fit but it isn’t this that affects her breathing. The closer she gets to the tip of Crayne’s Cliff, at its highest point just around the corner, the more she dreads what she might see.

  She tells herself again that by now someone would have found Anna if she were splayed on the pebbles at the bottom of the cliff. But it is so quiet.

  The wind is biting, still managing to pierce her ears under the rim of her woolly hat. She pulls it down tighter as she approaches the bend, all the time her heart beating rapidly.

  Only she can’t look. Because Grace knows all too well what the cliffs can do to someone. And if she looks and sees a flash of the red coat Anna was wearing last night, Grace knows her life will be changed for ever. And the anticipation, the dread of what she might see, is too overpowering.

  At the bend in the path, Grace stops. Her head is so consumed by the idea that Anna is lying beneath her that when she eventually leans forward and opens her eyes it takes them a moment to adjust. She lets out her breath, scouring the beach one way, then the other, but there is no sign of Anna or her distinctive coat. No flash of colour, nothing that shouldn’t be down there. A wave of relief washes over Grace as she takes a step back. She holds a hand over her mouth, not realising just how much she has been dreading to see Anna below.

  Eventually she pulls herself away from the edge and turns on the path, her heart still racing as she heads back in the direction of her car. It is a relief not to have found Anna there, but she is still missing. As Grace paces, she makes a decision: she needs to talk to Ben Robinson.

  October – Nine weeks earlier

  Anna

  I unbutton my jacket and slip it off, folding it and resting it on the arm of the sofa, though I keep pressing it down with one hand because there’s some comfort in its familiar feel. It’s almost like it anchors me, which sounds ridiculously dramatic but I can’t explain the tightening I’ve had over the last few weeks, the spiralling, the sensation of losing little pieces of me.

  I have told myself that if I am here I need to trust Sally, but I’ve never found it easy to trust people, not totally. There are things I don’t share with anyone – not Ben, not Nancy or any of the others. I lost my ability to trust a long while ago, and if I am honest right now there is only person I could talk to and that is Grace.

  Would it make me feel better to talk – really talk – with Grace? This I don’t know. Once I knew her better than I knew anyone, but it’s been too many years and so for now I find myself holding her at bay.

  Sally wants to know how my week has been. It is an open-ended question that I realise is intended to encourage me to talk about whatever is at the forefront of my mind. And the first thing that springs into my head is what happened six days ago.

  I had been standing in the school hallway, sheets of A4 paper flapping in my hand as I reeled off the list of actions our small committee needed to complete for the school open evening in three nights’ time. This was the fourth year I’d been on the committee, so I knew well enough how much we had to get through before lunchtime and as yet we’d barely got started.

  Out of the window I saw Grace scurrying across the playground. It was ten past nine, which meant she must have been late dropping off Matilda. Her face was creased into a frown and she only looked up at the last minute, catching my eye through the glass.

  Everything okay? I mouthed.

  Grace stopped and I watched her release a deep sigh. I went out to join her. ‘Oh, it’s just …’ She flapped a hand in the air. ‘Graham,’ she said, ‘nothing new.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. Grace had talked about Graham in as much detail as I had about Ben: basics mainly, like where we met our prospective husbands, how long we’d been married.

  She’d met him a decade earlier, a year after Ben and I got together. All of us met through work, though that was where the similarities stopped. Ben has nothing of Graham’s ambition or success. He wouldn’t dream of living most of the year in a different country, away from his wife and son, nor would I let him. The money that comes from a job that demands your life isn’t important to either of us. And yet as far as I’d gathered, the set-up worked for Grace and Graham.

  But as we stood in the playground that morning, Grace was saying, ‘The man has no concept of doing what’s right for his family. He’s a selfish prick.’

  I could see a flash of hatred in her eyes, or something that resembled it.

  ‘He hasn’t seen Matilda in weeks,’ she went on.

  ‘I’m so sorry. It must be hard, him living so far away. Can he not get the time off?’

  ‘He could if he wanted to,’ Grace admitted flatly.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry, Grace,’ I said, ‘I never realised things were that bad.’

  Grace shrugged and looked away. ‘Anyway, what are you doing in there?’ She gestured to the hall.

  ‘It’s for the open evening on Friday. I’m helping out, so we’re just getting together to see what needs to be done.’

  ‘That’s good of you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I like doing it.’ I smiled.

  ‘Tell you what, why don’t you come to mine after the open evening?’ she asked, her face brightening at the idea. ‘It would be good to chat. I can do some dinner, open a bottle of wine …’

  My mind raced ahead to the plans I already had for Friday evening. Every year Nancy, Caitlyn, Rachel and I go to Giovanni’s for pizza after the open evening. I was certain Nancy had already booked a table, and it was the first chance the four of us had to talk about our various summer holidays over some wine without the kids running about.

  Grace was clasping her hands together, a smile broadening on her face. ‘To be honest, it would just be lovely to have someone to talk to, and we haven’t properly had the chance yet,’ she was saying, and my stomach lurched at the prospect of letting her down. So instead I said, ‘Yeah, great. Why not?’

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased.’ Grace leaned forward and squeezed my arm. ‘It’ll be like the old days. I can’t wait.’

  I watched
her leave the playground, trying to bat away the thought that I already knew I wouldn’t go. Ben has told me before I make things harder for myself when I’m not honest up front, when I don’t admit I already have other plans.

  I should have suggested another night. I could even have asked her to come with us, and yet I’d done neither, and by Thursday I was still committed to being in two different places the following night, torn between what I thought I should do and what I actually wanted to do. And now I was burdened with both a heavy guilt that I was likely to let my oldest friend down and an annoyance that I’d found myself in this position in the first place.

  That evening I called Grace and lied. I told her I was so sorry but Ben was going out and I needed to be home and so could we do it some other time? And then as soon as I hung up I tapped out a message to the girls asking them not to mention our pizza plans, and for the first time in a while I felt like I was back in school again.

  ‘I can’t imagine her finding out what I did,’ I say to Sally now. ‘I mean, I should have just gone to her place. Grace knows no one in Clearwater these days. I should have been there for her, but I chose the others.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re beating yourself up about this decision, Anna. Maybe instead of doing that, you can focus on trying to understand why you made the decision you did. Why you didn’t ask Grace to come with you?’

  ‘I know that sounds a lot easier,’ I say.

  ‘But it wouldn’t be?’

  I give my head a mild shake. Grace is always so keen to talk about our pasts, about our holidays as kids, our camping trips, how she often jokes that her mum thought she had two daughters. It only took a week for Nancy to comment that her incessant sharing was grating.

  ‘You don’t have anything in common,’ she said to me. ‘You must be able to see that.’

  It is true, I can see that we don’t any more, and Nancy is the one who knows me better than anyone now. She knows, and she also wonders why I am clinging on to a friendship I had nineteen years ago. ‘You don’t owe her anything,’ she has said to me.

  As if she knows what I am thinking, Sally says, ‘Your relationship with Grace must be very different now from what it was when you were children. Do you maybe think you’re both trying to find your places in each other’s lives again?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are. It is different. We are different to what we were.’

  Grace had everything I had wanted when we were children. I don’t just mean things, but her home life and family, too. While she wanted for nothing, I was permanently looking for more. I wanted to be her. But I don’t any more.

  ‘I have everything I want now,’ I say to Sally. ‘And I don’t think Grace does.’

  ‘Do you think there’s any part of you that doesn’t want to be reminded of the past, Anna?’ Sally asks. She has put aside the blue-spotted notebook that is always open on her lap and looks as if she is frowning as she pulls the Alice band out of her hair and then immediately pushes it back on to her head. ‘And that being with Grace does that to you?’

  I drag my jacket off the sofa and ball it in my lap again, running my fingers along its soft cotton. ‘Yes, I think you’re right. I don’t want to go back there.’

  ‘Is there any reason in particular?’ she asks, and then, ‘I would like to understand more about your family, the lack of a mother figure in your life.’

  ‘No, there’s nothing,’ I add, all too quickly, and even though this isn’t true it has nothing to do with my mother.

  Sally chews on the corner of her lip and almost shrugs as she says, ‘How about you tell me a bit more about Ben before we finish today? I don’t feel I know much about him yet.’

  I smile at the mention of my husband’s name. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything at all you’d like to tell me.’

  ‘Ben’s great. We have a good marriage,’ I say. ‘It’s steady, we don’t argue, we don’t fight.’

  Sally doesn’t respond, and I feel the need to go on. ‘Ben had a very different upbringing to me. His parents are still together and he has a sister he gets on with really well. It’s like a Stepford family.’ I laugh. ‘It’s kind of nice, though. It’s what I always wanted to be part of: a perfect family unit. I’m comfortable. Maybe it sounds boring but …’ I shrug.

  ‘Not boring. There’s a lot to be said for finding comfort in a relationship. Especially when everything else is unsettled. If Ben offers you stability, that’s good. Have you spoken much to him about how you’ve been feeling, about the loss of your dad?’ Sally asks.

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t think he’d necessarily understand,’ I say, and I can practically see her surprise at what might sound like a U-turn in an otherwise picture-perfect marriage. ‘My friend Nancy says my marriage is so easy-going,’ I tell her. ‘That’s what Ben and I are like, we just,’ I splay a hand and run it along an imaginary horizontal line, ‘we kind of float through.’

  ‘You don’t think you could talk to him?’

  I straighten awkwardly in the chair. ‘It’s difficult to explain, we just, I just … I just haven’t spoken to him.’ I don’t add that I don’t want to, but yet for reasons I can’t explain to Sally right now this is the case.

  ‘Have you told Ben you’re here today?’ she asks.

  I turn away and study the road beyond Sally’s window. ‘No, he doesn’t know,’ I admit. ‘No one does.’ I bite my lip, not wanting to turn back to see her expression. I’m ready to go now, our time is surely up.

  ‘Anna, is there a reason you haven’t told him?’ she is asking me, likely thinking that there is no good reason not to tell my husband when I am here because of my grief. But possibly Sally already knows this isn’t true. And yet the truth is way worse than anything she could imagine.

  Chapter Four

  Grace

  It is nine forty. Just over eight hours since Anna was last seen. All Grace has managed to ascertain is that Anna and all three of her friends were still at the pub at the end of their evening, at the point when they called a taxi. But for some unfathomable reason, three of them left and made it home while Anna didn’t.

  Grace climbs into her car, glancing back up at the cliffs and then to the shuttered-up Old Vic, and drives along the road that runs down the coast, glancing out of the windows to each side as she goes. Hoping for what she isn’t quite sure, perhaps a flash of a red coat. Maybe a part of her thinks she’ll see Anna sitting on the shingle beach, for whatever reason not wanting to go home, but safe.

  Only there is no sign of her and now Grace is approaching the mini roundabout and she needs to turn right to avoid the main road to Weymouth. But this isn’t the way Anna would have walked if that is what she’d done last night. She would have taken the backstreets – the lanes you don’t want to drive through unless you have to because they are so narrow, but are a shortcut if you’re walking.

  Anna could have taken any one of a number of routes back to her house. But Grace decides to drive the most direct route to the new estate where Anna lives, crawling as slowly as she can, peering out either side of the car until she is on Anna’s road, and then pulling up outside the four-bed detached house that looks like every other one on the street.

  The road is a perfect little cul-de-sac of houses, replicated across every other road in the near vicinity, save for a variety in the number of bedrooms. Some have three, a few even five, but the fact is it is easy to get lost around the roads because all the buildings look the same.

  At first, a glimpse of her friend’s car in the driveway startles her into thinking that Anna is home, but of course it means nothing. The curtains in the Robinsons’ windows are all still pulled, and Grace imagines what Ben might be doing behind them – frantically pacing as he makes numerous phone calls, maybe? She wonders if he has made one to the police yet.

  Grace doesn’t know Ben well. To look at he is uncannily similar to the perfect ideal that her sixteen-year-old best friend hoped for in her future husband. She and A
nna had once cut out pictures from magazines, their heartthrobs similar: dark hair and boyish Robbie Williams looks. Grace, on the other hand, ended up with a man who couldn’t look less similar. With his grey hair, receding at the temples from a young age, Graham hadn’t pulled her in with his looks. Instead, she’d become more attracted to his caring and attentive maturity as she got to know him, though somehow even that had dwindled over the past few years.

  Grace had been taken aback when she’d first seen Ben Robinson in the flesh. He was the epitome of tall, dark and handsome, dwarfing Anna, who didn’t even reach his shoulders. He had smiled broadly at Grace when they met, shaking her hand, a waft of something Hugo-Boss like drifting from him.

  But here it is, three months on, and she knows little more about him other than his family come from Cornwall, he has a job in engineering that takes him to London once a month and that while he and Anna couldn’t have more children, Ethan is more than enough for him.

  It is the little things that are missing, though, the things best friends should share. Grace has no idea what Ben does that annoys Anna, whether he clips his toenails in the bed or if he always falls asleep reading the news and she wakes up to find his iPad face down on his stomach. And similarly she has no idea of the good things: how supportive he was through Ethan’s birth or whether he’s any good at choosing birthday presents.

  There are the deeper things, too, like what makes Ben tick, whether he truly makes Anna happy, or if there are things her friend isn’t comfortable with that she might not have even shared with anyone.

  Grace also knows Ben has just turned forty, because not that long ago he celebrated with a dinner party. Anna had pulled her aside in the playground one morning, pretending to have a conversation about something else entirely when she’d dropped it in. ‘Oh, Ben’s forty in two weeks, we’re not really celebrating. All he wants is to have some friends over to dinner. God, Grace, I wish I could invite you too, but it’s Ben’s thing, you know?’