by S. J. Watson
“And are you?”
She inclines her head toward me. Her lips are twisted into a scowl, but I think I see something else there, too. A grudging respect, maybe. A hint of pride. We’re the same, me and her. A friend in nameless trouble and us, rightly or wrongly, taking the blame.
“You drink. I know that. Drugs, too, I imagine.”
She says nothing.
“I was the same at your age, you know?”
“That right?”
Her sneer lacks conviction and I laugh quietly. “You’d be surprised. There’s not much else to do, is there?”
She gazes back out to sea.
“I remember it, you know. Too young to go clubbing, or even drinking in the pub. It was speed with me, at first anyway.”
“Speed?”
“Just a bit. Then . . . well, other stuff.”
She stares down at her lap and fiddles with a ring she’s wearing on her middle finger, twisting it round. The cheap silver glints.
“How about you?”
“Just weed,” she whispers. “And booze.”
“You’re sure?”
A shrug tells me no, but that’s all she’s prepared to admit to.
“Ellie, too?”
She shakes her head.
“Where d’you get it? Is it the boys?” I think of the one we saw her with in the café, the charmer I’d encountered on the beach. “Your boyfriend?”
She looks away, breathes deep. Is she crying? I can’t tell.
“Tell me what happened to Ellie.”
“I don’t know, but she didn’t run. She wouldn’t. And if she did, why did she come back?”
“So . . .” I speak hesitantly, as if the wrong thing might startle her into flight. “She was taken? Dumped out there?”
She doesn’t answer, but I take her silence for a yes.
“You were worried about David,” I say. “Last night.”
She freezes, for a moment. “Is he going to be all right?”
I speak softly. “I don’t know.”
She looks round now. Her eyes are dry.
“David is your friend?”
“Yes. Ellie’s, too.” She hesitates. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“He helps with homework. He gives us food. A sandwich. When . . . you know.”
When your mothers don’t bother, I think. Or your fathers.
“So that’s all?”
She reaches into her jacket for her pack of cigarettes, and I remember a different time. Daisy is sitting where I am now, and I’m on the bench just next to her. It’s dark, winter, the bandstand feels cavernous. Both of us have a lit cigarette. I take a final drag and flick the butt under the bench opposite, where it lands with a shower of red sparks.
“I mean,” says Daisy. “He’s all right. He has this telescope. It’s really cool. He lets us look through it. You can see the stars, the planets. I’ve seen a galaxy, even. You should come up some time.”
I shiver. A telescope. It’s like I knew all along. I suppose I did.
“He has a telescope?” I say to Kat.
She nods.
“Where?”
“On the roof.”
I close my eyes and picture it. David’s right there, taking the plastic cover off. He’s asking the girls what they want to see; it’s bright tonight, he’s saying, the seeing is good.
The seeing? Somehow I know what that means—there’s not too much turbulence in the atmosphere, the image will be sharp and clear—but how? Did Daisy tell me? Or did he?
I shut my eyes and see him. He’s looking down at my hands. “You brought your camcorder.”
My eyes flick open. I’m back in the bandstand, Kat next to me.
A camcorder. My first.
“There’s Betelgeuse,” says Kat. She’s looking up, and I follow her gaze until I see the reddish blob.
“Want to hear something interesting?” I say. “The thing you’re looking at now probably doesn’t exist.”
“But I can see it.”
“Yes. But the thing is, it’s so far away that the light it gives off takes over five hundred years to get to us. That means that what you can see through the telescope now is what Betelgeuse looked like in 1500 and something. And Betelgeuse is a supergiant right at the end of its lifespan. Any day now, it’ll explode.”
We both look at the red star.
“But don’t forget you’re looking back in time. By the time we see it explode from Earth, it will already have happened. Five hundred years ago.”
She’s silent for a minute, then she says, “It’s your favorite, too?”
I search for Andromeda. No, I want to say. But I keep quiet. I hug my jacket against the cold.
“Shall I tell you what I think?” I don’t wait for her to answer. “I think Ellie was taken out onto the moor to teach her a lesson.” I pause. “Or as a warning.”
Her silence is enough.
“A warning not to tell anyone what’s going on. That’s what I’m guessing.”
She stares into the distance. Her hair falls over her face.
“I can help you,” I say. “If you let me. If you tell me who’s hurting you.”
She’s silent. The cigarette glows in her hand, forgotten.
“It’s not your boyfriend, is it? Or not only him. Who else?”
I wait but, still, she doesn’t answer. I reach into my pocket and find my phone.
“Can I show you something?”
I find the film I was sent earlier and press Play.
“What’s this?”
“Watch.”
She does, wordlessly. When it’s finished she looks back to me. “That’s the girl they killed.”
She says it without question, without thought. There’s no doubt; she knows that’s what happened.
“Who sent it? Do you know? Who’d have this?”
She shakes her head. I press Play once more. Daisy poses and pouts. She puts on her sunglasses and turns away from the camera.
How’s this? she’s saying, even though I can’t hear her; there’s no sound, it’s just her voice in my head.
Am I doing it right?
I freeze the screen, zoom in. There’s a reflection in the mirror of her sunglasses, a blur really, only vaguely recognizable as a human face, impossible to know whose it is.
Except now I do know. I’ve known all along, I’ve just been pushing it away, keeping the certainty at arm’s length, avoiding it like it’s a dead thing I don’t want to look at. An animal, bled out in the snow.
It was me. I was there. Behind the camera, telling her what to do, directing her, lending her my jacket and my glasses and my heels. It was me filming her as she pouted and preened outside her trailer. It was me.
But why? And how did the person who uploaded it get hold of it?
I put my phone away. “I think it’s a warning.”
“Who from?”
“From the person who killed her. Who else? They want me to stop asking questions.”
She doesn’t argue. She knows I’m right.
“It might not be a bad idea.”
“I’m not scared, Kat. I’ve been through some shit you wouldn’t believe. It’ll take more than this to scare me.”
She stares straight at me. “You really have no idea,” she says. “No idea at all.”
“What d’you mean?”
She stands up. “I have to go.”
“Kat,” I say. “Please talk to me. I can help you.”
“You can’t,” she says. “No one can.”
I watch her leave the park. I knew David, too; I know that now. So why do I have no recall of him? I lift my phone once more. Daisy’s face fills the screen.
My head falls. I try to think back to the day I filmed it, but I can’t. The memory is there, but hidden, or it’s like looking through gauze; the film is scratched and burned, too many frames are missing for it to make sense. I get only sensations. Walking up th
ere. Getting ready. Sharing my makeup, even though surely she has some of her own, taking the camcorder out of my bag.
The camcorder. Why don’t I remember it? It must’ve been my first. It must’ve been where all this started, this need to record and preserve. But where did I get it?
It means a lot to me. That much I know. But did I steal it, get the bus into town and slip it into my bag, walk out of the shop, praying I hadn’t been seen and that there were no security cameras?
No. I don’t think so. That was never my style. Lipsticks from the chemist’s, perhaps. Cans of cheap cider, maybe. But not a camcorder. Not something worth hundreds.
So where, then? Where did it come from?
Maybe it was a gift? Yes. Not wrapped up with a bow, it was in a plastic carrier bag, but a gift, still. I remember not knowing what it was. I remember it being a surprise. I remember being told I’d earned it.
But from whom? And how? The voice was a man’s. It belonged to someone I loved but was also scared of. I knew even as I took it out of its box that the camcorder came with conditions. I’ve rubbed your back, now it’s time for you to rub mine.
I shiver. I feel a hand on me, on my shoulder; it’s pushing me, gently. Go on, it says. Go on. Like we agreed, like you promised. You can’t back out now. It pushes harder; I almost stand. I open my eyes, but I’m alone.
Can it have been my mother’s boyfriend? When I remember him I see only his face, crumpled with dislike. There’s no way he’d have given me a camera.
David, then? Maybe. I can’t stop feeling that he’d be all right now if I’d never come, if I’d never started shoving my nose into other people’s business. And I can’t stop feeling guilty. I can’t stop thinking I loved him once.
I need to remember him. He’s the key.
41
I ring St. Mary’s and tell them I’m a friend of David’s. As I wait to be connected I think of the telescope on his roof, the scratched mark on the trailer wall in Daisy’s bedroom, the photo in Zoe’s. I need him to wake up. I need to see him, to make him tell me how we’re all linked, what’s happening. Who took Ellie and why, who killed Daisy. I’ve hit a wall; as much as I try to remember, I can’t get through it. But when I call the ward the nurse she tells me there’s been no change in his condition. She doesn’t sound optimistic.
I put down the phone as a wave of guilt swells through me. I breathe through it and try to focus. I have work to do, a film to make. It’s nearly Christmas and they want the taster by the end of the year. And for me, I have to find out what’s happening to the girls and try to stop it. Someone is getting them into drugs, abusing them. Someone is taking them out and leaving them on the moors to teach them a lesson. I have to work it out. I mustn’t unravel.
I press Play. Two kids—twin boys, it looks like—whiz past on a bike. An open pizza box lies on a table with five or six hands grabbing at it. A farm, pigs snuffling at the trough. A bunch of kids flying a kite somewhere farther along the cliff, near the lighthouse. A black screen, a flash of light, a blurred shape as the camera struggles to focus but which resolves itself into a person. Into Ellie.
I lean in. She’s laughing, exuberant; her head is thrown back with joy. Next to her there’s another girl I don’t recognize, and slightly behind her two older boys. As the camera is steadied I realize they’re sitting on camping chairs arranged in a loose circle, the ground underfoot is muddy, and behind them a horse peers over a half-door.
The stables. This is good, I think. It’ll go with the footage I shot there. Monica’s voice cuts in.
“Any more for any more?”
Ellie looks up; the others too. The screen is blocked momentarily by the back of someone’s legs as they walk into shot and I realize the person with the camera is sitting on a chair opposite Ellie and trying to film without being noticed.
“Ellie?”
Monica hands her something, though I can’t see what.
“Anyone else?”
A couple of the others mumble something.
“Grace?”
The girl next to Ellie holds out her hand and receives her gift, too. Monica walks into shot and turns to face whoever’s holding the camera.
“Kat?”
A voice from behind the camera. “I’m okay, thanks.”
So it’s her filming. The girl called Grace laughs as the screen goes dark and the sound becomes muffled. Kat’s covering the lens, I suppose; maybe she’s shoved the phone between her knees, or rammed it under her arm. “Oh, come on!”
“I said no.”
“Leave her,” says Monica, and a second later the camera lens is unblocked. Ellie is in the corner of the screen now, and I see she’s holding a cigarette. I zoom in. It’s a joint, of course. Monica holds a lighter in front of her face, but as Ellie leans forward to light it she almost topples off the chair. She giggles as she rights herself, stoned already, perhaps drunk, too. At her feet there are empty bottles, wine and vodka, plus a carton of orange juice and a discarded stack of plastic cups. The camera wobbles as Monica turns to sit herself on one of the empty chairs.
“Right,” she says cheerily. “So we’re all happy?”
There’s murmured assent, a giggled profanity. “Happy, Ellie?”
Ellie nods vaguely. She’s inhaling deeply on the joint.
“And you’re looking forward to the party?”
Grace answers.
“Party? What party?”
“I told you. There’s a party tonight, Grace. You said you wanted to go. Remember?”
Grace nods, once. “Kat?” says Monica. “You’re going, too? And Ellie?”
The smiles drops from Ellie’s face, but she says nothing. I wonder whether it was filmed before she disappeared. Before she was taken.
“Richey will be there to look after you. Don’t worry.”
Ellie looks over to Kat. Is Richey her boyfriend, the one in the café? The younger girl’s eyes flash briefly on the camera that Kat must have cradled in her hand and it’s as if she’s looking straight at me, but then she raises her gaze. Her eyes are wide and desperate, and she seems both unspeakably young and far, far too wise for her years.
“Now,” says Monica. “There’s something else. That woman? Alex? She’s asking questions.” She surveys the girls. “And we must all be very careful about what we tell her. Mustn’t we?”
A murmur, but no one replies.
“Or else there’ll be no more of this. Understand?”
She looks round, but if there’s any more I don’t hear it. Kat must’ve realized she was about to be spotted, that she’d lose her chance to send it to me.
The screen goes black as the film ends and silence rushes in.
I hear voices, interrupted occasionally by music. A radio. With my ear pressed against the wall, I can just about hear her moving around, too, right at the very threshold of perception. She climbs the stairs right next to me and a minute or two later there’s the rumble of pipes as the boiler fires.
I return to the window and wait. I walked up to the bandstand last night, as if I expected Kat would still be there, but it was empty. Just a broken bottle under the bench, a littering of spent cigarettes carpeting the floor. A girl, out in the far corner of the park, barely visible in the gloom. But no Kat, and neither have I seen her today.
Not that it matters, I suppose. I didn’t know what I was going to say to her. To thank her for the film, I guess. To ask her when it was taken and what happened at the party, and why Ellie didn’t want to go with the other girls. As if I couldn’t guess.
I know what happens at these parties. Young girls stand around, terrified but trying not to look it, hoping they seem keen enough to not get a beating. Men choosing which they prefer, a nod and a grunt and then it’s fifteen minutes upstairs.
But does Monica know that’s what’s going on? In the film she hadn’t seemed cruel. When she’d insisted that Richey was there to protect the girls, she sounded like she believed it was true.
A creak from ne
xt door. She’s on the stairs again, and at first I’m hopeful she’s leaving. But then I hear the TV go on and a little later the noise of cooking.
It’s after lunch when I hear her key in the lock. She appears at the window, carrying a jute bag, dressed in a weatherproof jacket despite the weak sun. I sit back out of sight and watch as she locks the door behind her before setting off, glancing at my door as she goes. I wait five minutes, counting each of them off on my phone’s digital display, then leave Hope Cottage. It’s now or never.
Monica’s front door is locked; the handle doesn’t give. When I peer through the frosted glass I see a light in her kitchen at the end of the corridor, but there’s no noise, no flickering light from the television, no radio. I step back. I have to get inside. I have to find out what’s going on.
All that separates her yard from mine is a wooden fence. There are some rickety garden chairs beneath the table in the far corner and I unfold one and stand on it. It’s high enough for me to get over the fence, and I drop down on the other side into the mirror image of the yard I’ve just left. The same ceramic pots are lined up against it, an almost identical table sits in the opposite corner. She’s arranged two gnomes with cracked faces on a low stone wall on the other side, while a third has toppled over and lies beneath them, its head smashed.
The patio door is locked but shifts a little when I try it. I find a rock at the back of the yard, where it’s weighing down a tarpaulin, then use it to hammer upward on the bottom of the handle. I’ve no idea why; it’s some instinctive knowledge I don’t remember learning but must have. After a few seconds the door lifts and I find I can slide it open. I’m inside.
The kitchen is untidy: pots and pans molder in the sink, a day’s worth of unwashed plates are stacked next to the kettle, plus three or four mugs, one of which is filled with dirty cutlery. A stale smell pervades, cigarette smoke and fried food, trash that needs emptying. I’m not sure why I’m here, what exactly I’m looking for. It’s as if I thought getting inside would tell me instantly what I need to know, but I’m going to have to search. In the living room there’s a crumpled blanket on the sofa, the ashtray that still hasn’t been emptied since the other day, or else it has and has since been refilled with dead cigarettes. Two wineglasses, both empty other than the dregs of red. I suddenly see Monica as unutterably sad; I picture her lying under the blanket, staring at the television, smoking, drinking wine, pickling herself in her misery. Why are you living like this? I think. What is it that’s eating you up? A failed love affair, and now you channel your love into the girls and fester in your disappointment? Is it this place? Then get out. And if it’s guilt, then tell someone. Get it off your chest.