by Perks, Heidi
‘But you didn’t tell anyone?’ he says, unable to get his head around why I would never have done this. ‘You didn’t even know if she was still alive?’
I try to explain what happened when I ran home, how Grace had held me until I stopped sobbing, and how she’d told me she would take care of it and what we would do.
It is the second time I’ve ever told this story and telling Ben is so much harder than telling Sally.
‘Jesus, Anna,’ he says as he pushes his mug away and reels back in his seat. He adds nothing more for a moment and I imagine where his mind might be taking him. To a place where he realises that he has never known his wife. That I sicken him. That he can’t trust me again. Will I ever be able to get him to understand how caught up I was in Grace’s web?
‘There is more I need to tell you,’ I plead. ‘About Grace. I need you to understand what she was like.’
I didn’t understand myself for a long while. Not until Grace was safely packed away on the other side of the world was I afforded the space to look back over those fragile years of childhood and adolescence. And only later, when I formed friendships that left me feeling better about myself rather than inadequate or incapable, could I finally fit the last piece of the puzzle into place.
But how can I explain all this to Ben? He wasn’t there to see first-hand the intricacies of our relationship, or to understand how much more difficult it is to break up with a friend than a lover. How hard it was to cut a friend out of my life, particularly one who was entangled in it as much as Grace had been. Especially when she knew the worst thing about me. I cannot possibly explain in such a short time how I’ve still managed to end up with Grace in my life.
I catch Ben checking the time. We have an hour before Nancy will be bringing Ethan home from school. An hour in which we at least need to reach a level of acceptance before our son is back, because I cannot let Ethan know there is a problem. I must protect him from that.
I tell Ben what Grace said to me at the pub that night, my fear about what it might mean.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says. ‘What exactly are you worried about now?’
‘I’m worried about what else she could do,’ I tell him.
Ben has clenched himself into a tight ball. I want to reach out and ease the knots that must be in his shoulders.
Grace knows too much about that long-ago night, more than I ever realised. Was she responsible for Heather’s fall? If she was, then who else might she hurt? She will use what she knows to hurt me more, I am sure. To take away the people I love, the chance of adopting Zadie.
‘But you still don’t know that she did anything,’ he says. ‘You still don’t have the answers.’
‘I have more of them now than I did twenty-two years ago,’ I tell him. ‘That’s why I had to go and see Grace’s mother. She’s the only other person who can help me.’
Chapter Sixteen
Grace
Grace lets herself back into the apartment, tossing her keys so they skitter across the kitchen counter. She turns the tap on full before grabbing a pint glass to fill, gulping its contents down and slamming the glass into the sink.
All she can see in her mind is Anna’s face. At first she’d thought her friend was in trouble, but then she’d spat the words, Just go, Grace. Like she hated her.
She picks the glass out of the sink and hurls it on to the kitchen floor so that it splinters into tiny shards. The noise is more satisfying than the mess that lies in front of her. The fragments sparkle like crystals under the bright spotlights. They are how she feels. Broken, crushed – the emotions make her want to scream, and so that’s what she does. In her perfect kitchen, she screams because of her imperfect life.
Grace has never felt so alone. Even when she was shipped across the world to a place she didn’t want to go to, having to leave her best friend behind. At least then she hadn’t been abandoned by Anna. Her best friend had cried as much as she had at the airport, both of them howling and clutching on to each other. They were sisters being ripped apart. They needed each other like the breath in their bodies.
Grace knew that when she was old enough she would one day return to Clearwater. When she didn’t have to answer to her parents or do what they told her. When she had enough money for the flights on her own. Or enough to live on when she got to England. There were many ‘whens’ that made it impossible for a long time – it wasn’t as simple as the plans she had mapped out – and for years she was angry at her parents for making the choice for her.
‘Oh Gracie, but it’s so lovely here,’ her mum was always saying to her. ‘Why would you want to go back to Clearwater?’
Because she had no one there, except for a mother who fussed around her and a father who talked over her at dinner times when he didn’t even realise she was speaking. Grace remembers the way her mum would smile at her then, her forehead creasing into a stupid little frown as if she was saying, I know, Grace. He’s just got something else on his mind, that’s all. But she never actually said anything. She never said, Henry, your daughter is trying to tell you something.
Grace was invisible to her father. She has always known it, and yet now, as she stands in her apartment with its white walls and clinical kitchen units, she feels it more than ever. All she wanted was his attention, an acknowledgement that she’d done well at school or work, or anything ever in her life. All she wanted was what Anna got from her dad.
She shakes the thought from her head. No. That can’t be right. Anna’s father wasn’t there for her, either. And yet he loved her. He overcooked fish fingers for her tea because she preferred them crispy, and carefully slipped his glasses on to read her school reports as if they were the world news, and always ruffled her hair when she walked past him. Grace saw it all. She saw it and she envied it.
She had nothing in Australia. And the only person, Anna, who’d always given her the attention she needed was on the other side of the world. Grace found it bloody hard to make new friends. Or at least proper ones that stuck around, and weren’t just people to talk to at the water cooler at work.
She’d been mulling over the idea of moving back to England in her early twenties when she met Graham one day at that same water cooler. Suddenly he was filling the empty space that Anna had once filled, giving her time, attention, making her feel special and wanted and important. And so even when her parents moved back five years later, Grace was in a different place.
Graham. The waste of space she married. The pointless father. The man who has called her only once since she told him Anna had disappeared. She picks up her mobile now and stabs her finger on his name, holding the phone to her ear. It is 8.20 p.m. in Singapore. She knows his time zones as well as she knows her own. Graham should be in his hotel room.
‘Hi, love,’ he says when she answers. ‘I’m going to have to be quick.’
Grace grits her teeth, listening to a background noise that she can’t quite make out as she resists the urge to slam down the phone. How dare you, she thinks. His priority will always be something else and yet she keeps allowing it to humiliate her. But she won’t give him the satisfaction of asking where he is.
‘Everything okay?’ he is asking in his irritatingly jolly voice.
‘Are you not even going to ask about Anna?’ she says to him.
‘I’m sorry. I just thought you’d tell me if there was any news.’ Now he just sounds flat again, as usual, already tired by the conversation. ‘Is there?’
Grace bites her lip. She wishes she hadn’t called him. She gets nothing from him any more. She is a ball of anger and frustration, and in a blind moment she’d needed to talk to someone about Anna, but not him. Not her bastard of a husband who doesn’t give a toss about her or their daughter. Who is too wrapped up in his own life to care what she has been going through. ‘No, there is still no news,’ she lies.
‘The police must be doing something about it now?’ he is asking. ‘When was it, Friday she went missing?’
‘Wednesday,’ she says. ‘Wednesday night, Graham.’
‘Then they must be taking you seriously. Have you tried calling them again?’
She’s squeezing the phone so tightly that her hand cramps. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she says and as she hears him begin to say, ‘Wait, I need to tell you—’ she ends the call and hurls her phone across the open-plan room, where it lands with a soft thud on the sofa.
Grace paces to the end of the living room and then back into the kitchen, her hands steepled in front of her as if in prayer, her fingers tapping against each other impatiently. For the last five days she has been going out of her mind with worry for Anna. More than Nancy or any of the others. She’s the one who’s been piecing together what might have happened to Anna, begging the police to believe that something is wrong. She’s the one who has refused to give up when everyone else has seemed to, and for what? For nothing? For Anna to run off to wherever she is and not even have the decency to call and say that she is safe? Alive?
Grace’s breaths come out short and sharp as she paces. She can almost feel the blood rushing through her veins, like it is building into a crescendo and at any moment she might explode.
She cannot get Anna’s face out of her head.
Just go, Grace, Anna had told her.
Grace stands in front of her full-length windows now and pushes her hands against the panes. The thought is there – the wondering how hard she would need to press, the force required to take a window out. She knows she doesn’t have the strength to force its glass, and yet her hands push deeper, testing it, willing it in some ways to shatter.
Eventually she pulls away, picks up the phone from the sofa and hurls it against the glass, watching it bounce off with a disappointing thud.
‘God!’ she screams, clenching her hands into fists.
All her life she has looked out for Anna, picked up the pieces when things were broken. She invited Anna into her own family, until Grace’s own mother looked upon her as another daughter. There were many times when Catherine had refused to take sides if there was an argument between them. Even when everything was spiralling out of control between Grace and Anna, she didn’t automatically stand by Grace.
There was a time, not long before Heather went over the cliffs, that her mum had asked her what was wrong. ‘I haven’t seen much of Anna lately,’ she had said. ‘Is everything okay between you girls? I can’t even think of the last time she was here for the night.’
Everything had not been okay. And the reason Anna hadn’t been there to sleep was because she was staying at Heather’s and inviting Heather to her dad’s, and all of a sudden the arrival of a new girl at school meant that Grace was no longer wanted.
‘Anna’s being a bitch,’ she had said.
‘Grace, do not say things like that,’ Catherine had reprimanded her.
‘Well, she is.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘She’s decided she doesn’t need me as a friend any more.’
‘Oh, I’m sure that’s not the case.’
‘Actually it is, Mum. She’s got it into her head that she’s someone else now and I’m not good enough for her any more.’
‘What have you done?’
That was what her mum had questioned. What have you done?
‘What have I done?’ Grace had yelled.
‘Oh, I don’t mean anything – I don’t mean it like that,’ her mum had said in a fluster. ‘But it takes two to have an argument, Gracie, I’m just saying—’
‘She no longer wants to be here, Mum, is that not enough for you? She doesn’t want to come to your house any more.’
‘Oh Grace, I’m sure she does—’
‘Oh my God, just forget it.’
Grace had given Anna everything: a share of her family, a portion of her mother. Yet still she was able to go home to her own dad and his fish fingers and his stupid reading glasses that were taped up one side with plaster.
Grace jumps when her mobile rings from the floor where it lays, and is more surprised when she picks it up and sees her mum’s name flashing on the screen. Right now she really doesn’t want to get embroiled in one of her mum’s fanciful conversations about the goings-on in her neighbourhood. But at the same time she hasn’t spoken to her in well over a week, and it’s unusual for her to call during the day when she is still under the impression that calls are cheaper after seven.
At the last minute Grace picks up. ‘Hello, Mum.’
‘How are you?’ Catherine asks.
She can already tell there is something off in her mum’s voice, her breath catching with each word.
‘What’s up?’ Grace asks bluntly. ‘Are you ill?’ Her mother often complains about various ailments, though they are never remotely serious.
‘No, I’m not ill,’ she says. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘You sounded like you might be.’
‘No, dear, I’m fine.’
‘Okay.’
‘I just wondered if …’ Her mum trails off and then inhales loudly before finishing, ‘I just wondered how everything is going in Clearwater?’
Grace leans against the back of the sofa. ‘What do you mean how everything is here?’ she asks. ‘Why wouldn’t everything be fine?’
She is glad she never told her mum anything about Anna. She couldn’t bear to see her pandering, panicking, drawing her own conclusions as to what is going on, conclusions that are likely so far from the truth they’re ridiculous.
‘Well, it’s just—’
‘Yes?’ she snaps. A few times since she has moved back, she has felt her mum pushing Grace to tell her something that hasn’t even happened.
How are things with Anna, dear? Are you sure everything is going well? You would tell me if there were any problems, wouldn’t you, Gracie?
Grace cannot imagine what it must be like to live with such a sense of impending doom constantly hanging over you like a black cloud, but then her mother has always loved having something to worry about.
She almost wishes her mum would tell her something mundane about one of the neighbours and is about to ask about them when Catherine says, ‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about whether to tell you this, Gracie …’
‘Tell me what?’ she asks. ‘Mum, just say it. You are ill, aren’t you?’ Now thoughts of cancer and heart disease come crashing into her head, and Grace can feel her mind speeding back to the time when her mum called with the news that her father was seriously ill.
She grips the phone tighter. Her mum may irritate her to the ends of the earth, but she isn’t ready to say goodbye to another parent.
‘Well, if I’m being honest, I had a bit of a turn on Thursday but that’s not why I’m calling, and I’m all right now, anyway.’
‘A bit of a turn? What are you talking about?’
‘It’s nothing to worry about, love. They said it was probably caused by stress.’
‘Who are they, the doctors?’
‘The paramedics, but like I say, everything is fine now.’
‘You called an ambulance?’
‘I didn’t really want to be bothering them.’
‘Why would anything be brought on by stress, Mum?’ she asks.
Her mother’s life is so lacking in stress that she doesn’t believe she is telling the truth, and still she is thinking that there is more to this turn, and that her mum is hiding scan results and tests from her, that she doesn’t actually take in what her mother says next.
‘Anna has been here.’
After a moment Grace replies, ‘Say that again.’
‘Anna has been here,’ her mum explains again. ‘She arrived Thursday morning.’
‘What?’ Grace is shaking her head, thoughts somersaulting over each other. ‘What the hell do you mean Anna has been there?’
‘She came to see me, Gracie. She had some questions.’
‘Are you …? I don’t … Wait a minute, that can’t actually be right?’ she says. ‘You mean she came to
see you last Thursday? As in five days ago?’
Her mum breathes out through her nose, a sound that loudly fills the line. ‘Yes.’
‘What time?’
‘I don’t know what time. I think she got here about eleven – before lunch, anyway. Why does that matter?’ She sighs. ‘You don’t focus on the relevant details, Gracie; you never did.’
‘It matters because everyone thought she was missing.’ Grace’s mind flicks back to the day: Ben’s panic that morning; the way it had subsided by the afternoon when he’d received a text. He wasn’t lying. Ben knew by then where she was. Probably even Nancy knew, too, but they kept this important fact from her – that Anna was actually with Grace’s own mother. ‘What questions?’ she asks through gritted teeth. ‘You said she had some questions.’
‘I told you I was worried about you moving back to Clearwater,’ Catherine says. ‘She had questions about the past, Gracie. Anna wanted to know about the past.’
Grace slides down the back of the sofa until she is sitting on the highly polished wooden floor, her knees bent, her head bowed forward. She closes her eyes, her pulse flickering like a moth as their last conversation in the toilets of the Old Vic flashes in her head.
‘What exactly did you tell her?’ she says.
May 1997
Grace stuffed the box under her bed when she heard her mum coming up the stairs, pulling the valance sheet down so it draped on the floor.
‘Gracie, didn’t you hear me?’ Catherine was calling. ‘Your tea is ready.’
Grace heard her mum pause outside the door before it opened a crack and she stuck her head around. Her eyes scanned the room. The usually tidy bedroom was covered in clothes and scraps of paper where Grace had been attempting her chemistry homework. An empty bag of crisps lay on the bed that she had only just eaten from her packed lunch. Catherine didn’t comment on the mess as she said, ‘No Anna again tonight?’