Into the Water 13 страница

A flash of understanding crossed Louise’s face; she understood, in that moment, as did I.

‘You threatened her, ’ I said. ‘With exposure. ’

‘Yes, ’ Lena said, barely audible. ‘I did. ’

Louise left without a word. Lena sat motionless, staring at the river outside the window, not crying and not speaking. I had nothing to say to her, no way of reaching her. I recognized in her something I know I used to have too, something maybe everyone has at that age, some essential unknowability. I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one. I remember you at seventeen and me at thirteen, and I’m certain that our parents had no idea who we were.

‘I lied to her. ’ Lena’s voice broke my train of thought. She hadn’t moved, she was still watching the water.

‘Lied to who? To Katie? ’ She shook her head. ‘To Louise? What did you lie about? ’

‘There’s no point telling her the truth, ’ Lena said. ‘Not now. She may as well blame me. At least I’m around. She needs somewhere to put all that hate. ’

‘What do you mean, Lena? What are you talking about? ’

She turned her cold green eyes on mine, and she looked older than before. She looked the way you did the morning after you’d pulled me from the water. Changed, weary. ‘I didn’t threaten to tell anyone. I would never have done that to her. I loved her. None of you seem to get what that means, it’s like you don’t know what love is at all. I would have done anything for her. ’

‘So, if you didn’t threaten her …’

I think I knew the answer before she said it. ‘It was Mum, ’ she said.

Jules

THE ROOM FELT colder; if I believed in spirits I would have said that you’d joined us.

‘We did argue, like I said. I didn’t want her to see him any more. She said she didn’t care what I thought, that it didn’t matter. She said that I was immature, that I didn’t understand what it was like to be in a real relationship. I called her a slut, she called me a virgin. It was that sort of fight. Stupid, horrible. When Katie left, I realized that Mum was in her room, right next door – I’d thought she was out. She’d overheard the whole thing. She told me she had to speak to Louise about it. I begged her not to, I told her it would ruin Katie’s whole life. So then she said maybe the best thing was to talk to Helen Townsend, because after all Mark was the one doing something wrong, and Helen is his boss. She said maybe they could get him fired but keep Katie’s name out of it. I told her that was stupid, and she knew it was. They wouldn’t just be able to fire him, it would have to be done officially. The police would get involved. It would go to court. It would be made public. And even if Katie’s name wasn’t in the papers, her parents would find out, everyone at school would know … That stuff doesn’t stay private. ’ She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. ‘I told Mum at the time, I said Katie would rather die than go through that. ’

Lena leaned forward and opened the kitchen window, then fished around in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke out into the air. ‘I begged her. I mean it, I actually begged, and Mum told me that she’d have to think about it. She said that I had to convince Katie to stop seeing him, that it was an abuse of power and that it was totally wrong. She promised me that she wouldn’t do anything without giving me time to persuade Katie. ’ She crushed her barely smoked cigarette on the window sill and flicked it towards the water.

‘I believed her. I trusted her. ’ She turned to face me again. ‘But then a couple of days later I saw Mum in the car park at school, talking to Mr Henderson. I don’t know what they were talking about but it didn’t look friendly, and I knew I had to say something to Katie, just in case, because she needed to know, she needed to be prepared …’ Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. ‘She died three days later. ’

Lena sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘The thing is, when we talked about it afterwards, Mum swore she never even mentioned Katie to Mark Henderson. She said they were arguing about me, about problems I was having in class. ’

‘So … Lena, hang on, I don’t understand. You’re saying your mum didn’t threaten them with exposure? ’

‘I couldn’t understand it either. She swore she hadn’t said anything, but she felt so guilty, I could see it. I knew that it was my fault, but she kept acting like it was hers. She stopped swimming in the river, and she became obsessed with telling the truth, she kept going on and on about it, how it was wrong to be afraid of facing the truth, of letting people know the truth, she just went on and on …’

(I wasn’t sure if that was odd or perfectly consistent: you didn’t tell the truth, you never did – the stories you’d been telling weren’t the truth, they were your truth, your agenda. I should know. I’ve been on the dirty side of your truth most of my life. )

‘But she didn’t, did she? She never told anyone, or wrote about Mark Henderson, in her … story about Katie, there’s no mention of him. ’

Lena shook her head. ‘No, because I wouldn’t let her. We fought and fought and I kept telling her I would have loved to see that piece of shit go to prison, but it would have broken Katie’s heart. And it would have meant that she did what she did for nothing. ’ She gulped. ‘I mean, I know. I know what Katie did was stupid, fucking pointless, but she died to protect him. And if we went to the police, that would mean her death meant nothing. But Mum just kept going on about the truth, how it was irresponsible to just let things go. She was … I don’t know. ’ She looked up at me, her gaze as cool as the one with which she’d fixed Louise, and said, ‘You would know all this, Julia, if you’d only spoken to her. ’

‘Lena, I’m sorry, I am sorry about that, but I still don’t see why—’

‘Do you know how I know my mother killed herself? Do you know how I know for sure? ’ I shook my head. ‘Because on the day she died, we had a fight. It started over nothing, but it ended up being about Katie, like everything did. I was yelling at her and calling her a bad mother and saying that if she’d been a good parent she could have helped us, helped Katie, and then none of this would have happened. And she told me she had tried to help Katie, that she’d seen her walking home late one day, and had stopped to offer her a ride. She said Katie was all upset and wouldn’t say why, and Mum said, You don’t have to go through this by yourself. She said, I can help you. And, Your mum and dad can help you, too. When I asked her why she’d never told me about that before, she wouldn’t say. I asked her when it happened and she said, Midsummer, June the twenty-first. Katie went to the pool that night. Without meaning to, it was Mum who tipped her over the edge. And so, like that, Katie tipped Mum over the edge, too. ’

A wave of sadness hit me, a swell so forceful I thought it might knock me from my chair. Was that it, Nel? After all this, you did jump, and you did it because you felt guilty and you despaired. You despaired because you had no one to turn to – not your angry, grieving daughter and certainly not me, because you knew that if you called I wouldn’t answer. Did you despair, Nel? Did you jump?

I could feel Lena watching me, and I knew that she could see my shame, could see that finally I got it, I understood that I, too, was to blame. But she didn’t look triumphant, or satisfied, she just looked tired.

‘I didn’t tell the police any of this, because I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to blame her – more than they already do, in any case. She didn’t do it out of hate. And she suffered enough, didn’t she? She suffered things she shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t hers or mine. ’ She gave me a small, sad smile. ‘It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t Louise’s or Josh’s. It wasn’t our fault. ’

I tried to embrace her, but she pushed me away. ‘Don’t, ’ she said. ‘Please, I just …’ She tailed off. Her chin lifted. ‘I need to be by myself. Just for a bit. I’m going to go for a walk. ’

I let her leave.

Nickie

NICKIE DID AS Jeannie told her to, she went to talk to Lena Abbott. The weather had cooled, a hint of autumn coming early, so she wrapped herself up in her black coat, stuffed the pages into the inside pocket and walked across to the Mill House. But when she got there, she found that there were other people around, and she was in no mood for a crowd. Especially not after what the Whittaker woman said, about how all she cared about was money and exploiting people’s grief, which wasn’t fair at all. That was never what she intended – if only people would listen. She stood outside the house a while, watching, but her legs ached and her head was full of noise and so she turned around and walked all the way back home again. Some days, she felt her age, and some days she felt her mother’s.

She had no stomach for the day, for the fight ahead. Back in her room, she dozed in her chair, then woke and thought that maybe she had seen Lena heading for the pool, but it might have been a dream, or a premonition. Later, though, much later, in the dark, she was certain that she saw the girl, moving like a ghost through the square, a ghost with purpose, fairly whipping along. Nickie could feel the split of the air as she passed, the energy buzzing off her, she could feel it all the way up there in her dark little room and it lifted her, stripped the years back. That was a girl on a mission. That girl had fire in her belly, she was a dangerous girl. The sort you don’t mess with.

Seeing Lena like that reminded Nickie of herself way back when; it made her want to get up and dance, made her want to howl at the moon. Well, her dancing days might be over, but, pain or no pain, she decided she would make it to the river that night. She wanted to feel them up close, all those troublesome women, those troublesome girls, dangerous and vital. She wanted to feel their spirit, to bathe in it.

She took four aspirin and got hold of her cane, then made her way slowly and carefully down the stairs, out of the back door and into the alley behind the shops. She hobbled across the square towards the bridge.

It seemed to take a very long time; everything took so long these days. No one warned you about that when you were younger, no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness. She should have foreseen it, she supposed, and she laughed to herself in the dark.

Nickie could remember a time when she was fleet of foot, a whippet. Back then, when she was young, she and her sister ran races by the river, way upstream. They tore along, skirts tucked into their knickers, feeling every rock, every crevice in the hard ground through the soles of their flimsy plimsolls. Unstoppable, they were. Later, much later, older and a bit slower, they met in the same spot, upriver, and they walked together, sometimes for miles, often in silence.

It was on one of those walks that they spotted Lauren, sitting on the steps at Anne Ward’s place, a cigarette in her hand and her head leaning back against the door. Jeannie called out to her, and when Lauren looked up, they saw that the side of her face had all the colours of the sunset. ‘He’s a devil, her old man, ’ Jeannie had said.

They say you speak of the Devil and then you feel the heat. As Nickie stood there, remembering her sister, her elbows propped on the cold stone of the bridge, chin resting on her hands, eyes cast down at the water, she felt him. She felt him before she saw him. She hadn’t spoken his name, but maybe Jeannie’s whispering had conjured him up, the small-town Satan. Nickie turned her head and there he was, walking towards her from the east side of the bridge, cane in one hand, cigarette in the other. Nickie spat on the ground like she always did, and said her invocation.

Usually she’d leave it at that, but this night – and who knows why, maybe she was feeling Lena’s spirit, or Libby’s, or Anne’s, or Jeannie’s – she called out. ‘It won’t be long now, ’ she said.

Patrick stopped. He looked up as though surprised to see her. ‘What’s that? ’ he snarled. ‘What did you say? ’

‘I said, it won’t be long now. ’

Patrick took a step towards her and she felt the spirit again, angrily hot, surging up from her stomach to her chest and into her mouth. ‘They’ve been talking to me lately. ’

Patrick waved a hand at her in dismissal, said something she couldn’t hear. He continued on his way, and still the spirit wouldn’t be silenced. She called out, ‘My sister! Your wife! Nel Abbott, too. All of them, they’ve all been talking to me. And she had your number, didn’t she? Nel Abbott? ’

‘Shut up, you old fool, ’ Patrick spat. He made as if to come towards her, just a feint, and Nickie started. He laughed, turning away again. ‘Next time you speak to her, ’ he called over his shoulder, ‘do give your sister my best. ’

Jules

I WAITED IN the kitchen for Lena to come home – I rang her phone, I left voicemail messages. I fretted hopelessly, and in my head you scolded me for not going after her, like you’d gone after me. You and I, we tell our stories differently. I know that, because I’ve read your words: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning. You were heroic, without context. You didn’t write about how I got there, about the football game, or the blood, or Robbie.

Or the pool. When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, you say, but what a selective memory you have, Nel! I can still feel your hand on the back of my neck, I can still remember fighting against you, the agony of airless lungs, the cold panic when, even in my stupid, hopeless, drunken stupour, I knew I was going to drown. You held me there, Nel.

Not for long. You changed your mind. With your arm locked around my neck, you dragged me towards the bank, but I’ve always known that there was some part of you that wanted to leave me there.

You told me never to talk about it, you made me promise, for Mum’s sake, and so I put it away. I suppose I always thought that one day, far into the future, when we were old and you were different, when you were sorry, we’d return to it. We’d talk about what happened, about what I did and what you did, about what you said and how we ended up hating each other. But you never said that you were sorry. And you never explained to me how it was that you could have treated me, your little sister, the way you did. You never changed, you just went and died, and I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.

I want so desperately to see you again.

I waited for Lena until, defeated by exhaustion, I finally went to bed. I’d had so much trouble sleeping since I returned to this place and it was catching up with me. I collapsed, drifting in and out of dreams until I heard the door go downstairs, Lena’s footsteps on the stairs. I heard her going into her room and turning her music on, loud enough for me to hear a woman singing.

That blue-eyed girl

said ‘No more’,

and that blue-eyed girl

became blue-eyed whore.

I slowly drifted back to sleep. When I woke again the music was still playing, the same song, louder now. I wanted it to stop, was desperate for it to stop, but I found I couldn’t raise myself from the bed. I wondered whether I was awake at all, because if I was awake, what was this weight on my chest, crushing me? I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, but I heard the woman singing still.

Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water –

come back here man, gimme my daughter.

Suddenly, the weight lifted and I rose from the bed, furious. I stumbled into the hall and shouted for Lena to turn the music down. I lunged for her door handle and yanked the door open. The room was empty. Lights on, windows open, cigarette butts in the ashtray, a glass next to the empty bed. The music seemed to be getting louder and louder, my head pounded and my jaw ached, and I kept shouting even though there was no one there. I found the iPod dock and ripped it out of the wall, and at last, at last, all I could hear was the sound of my own breath and my own blood pulsing in my ears.

I returned to my room and phoned Lena again; when there was no answer, I tried Sean Townsend but the call went straight to voicemail. Downstairs, the front door was locked and all the lights were on. I went from room to room, turning them off one by one, stumbling as though drunk, as though drugged. I lay down on the window seat where I used to sit and read books with my mother, where twenty-two years ago your boyfriend raped me, and again I fell asleep.

I dreamed that the water was rising. I was upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. I was lying on the bed with Robbie at my side. Outside, rain thundered down, the river kept on rising, and somehow I knew that downstairs the house was flooding. Slowly at first, just a trickle of water seeping under the door, and then more quickly, the doors and windows bursting open, filthy water pouring into the house, lapping against the stairs. Somehow I could see the living room, submerged in murky green, the river reclaiming the house, the water reaching the neck of the Drowning Dog, only now he was no longer a painted animal, he was real. His eyes were white and wide with panic, and he was struggling for his life. I tried to get up, to go downstairs to save him, but Robbie wouldn’t let me, he was pulling my hair.

I awoke with a start, panicked out of my nightmare. I checked my phone, it was after three in the morning. I could hear something, someone moving around the house. Lena was home. Thank God. I heard her coming down the stairs, her flip-flops slapping against stone. She stopped, framed in the doorway, the light behind her illuminating her silhouette.

She started to move towards me. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her, and I saw that she wasn’t wearing flip-flops at all, she was wearing the heels she wore to the funeral, and the same black dress, which was dripping wet. Her hair clung to her face, and her skin was grey, her lips blue. She was dead.

I woke up, gasping. My heart was hammering in my chest, the banquette beneath me was soaked with sweat. I sat up, confused, I looked at the paintings opposite me and they seemed to shift, and I thought, I’m still asleep, I can’t wake, I can’t wake. I pinched my skin as hard as I could, dug my nails into the flesh of my forearm and saw real marks, felt real pain. The house was dark and silent save for the river’s quiet susurration. I called Lena’s name.

I ran upstairs and along the corridor; Lena’s door was ajar and the light was on. The room was exactly as I’d left it hours before, the water glass and the unmade bed and the ashtray untouched. Lena wasn’t home. She hadn’t been home. She was gone.

PART THREE

MONDAY, 24 AUGUST

Mark

IT WAS LATE when he got home, just after two o’clock in the morning. His flight from Má laga had been delayed, and then he’d lost his ticket for the car park and it had taken him an infuriating forty-five minutes to find his car.

Now he wished it had taken longer, he wished he had never found the car at all, had had to stay in a hotel. He could have been spared, then, for just one more night. Because when he realized, in the darkness, that all the windows of his house had been smashed, he knew that he wouldn’t be sleeping, that night or any night. Rest was over, peace of mind destroyed. He had been betrayed.

He wished, too, that he had been colder, harder, that he had strung his fiancé e along. Then, when they came for him, he would be able to say, ‘Me? I’m just back from Spain. Four days in Andalucí a with my fiancé e. My attractive, professional, twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend. ’

It wouldn’t have made a difference though, would it? It wouldn’t matter what he said, what he did, how he’d lived his life: they would crucify him anyway. It wouldn’t matter to the newspapers, to the police, the school, the community, that he wasn’t some deviant with a history of chasing after girls half his age. It wouldn’t matter that he had fallen in love, and been fallen in love with. The mutuality of their feelings would be ignored – Katie’s maturity, her seriousness, her intelligence, her choice – none of these things would matter. All they would see was his age, twenty-nine, and hers, fifteen, and they would rip his life apart.

He stood on the lawn, staring at the boarded-up windows, and he sobbed. If there had been anything left to smash, he would have broken it himself then. He stood on the lawn and he cursed her, cursed the day he’d first set eyes on her, so much more beautiful than her silly, self-assured friends. He cursed the day she’d walked slowly towards his desk, full hips swinging gently and a smile on her lips, and asked, ‘Mr Henderson? Can I ask for your help with something? ’ The way she’d leaned towards him, close enough that he could smell her clean, unperfumed skin. He’d been startled at first, and angry, he’d thought she was toying with him. Teasing him. Hadn’t she been the one who started all this? And why should it be him, then, left alone to suffer the consequences? He stood on the lawn, tears in his eyes, panic rising in his throat, and he hated Katie, and he hated himself, and he hated the stupid mess he’d got himself into, from which he now saw no escape.

What to do? Go into the house, pack the rest of his things and leave? Run? His mind fogged: where to go, and how? Were they already watching? They must be. If he withdrew money, would they know? If he tried to leave the country again, would they be there? He imagined the scene, the passport official glancing at his photo and picking up a phone, uniformed men dragging him from a queue of holidaymakers, the curious looks on their faces. Would they know, when they saw him, what he was? No drug-dealer, no terrorist – no: he must be something else. Something worse. He looked at the blank and boarded windows, and imagined that they were inside, they were waiting for him there, they’d already been through his things, his books and his papers, they’d already turned the house upside down searching for evidence of what he had done.

And they would have found nothing. He felt the faintest gleam of hope. There was nothing to find. No love letters, no pictures on his laptop, no evidence at all that she had ever set foot in his house (the bedlinen long gone, the entire house cleaned, disinfected, scrubbed of every last trace of her). What evidence would they have, save for the fantasies of a vindictive teenage girl? A teenage girl who had tried herself to win his favour and been resoundingly knocked back. No one knew, no one really knew, what had passed between himself and Katie, and no one need know. Nel Abbott was ash, and her daughter’s word worth just about as much.

He gritted his teeth and fished for his keys in his pocket, then walked around the house and opened the back door.

She came at him before he had time to turn on the light, barely flesh, nothing but a dark maw, teeth and nails. He batted her away, but she came again. What choice did he have? What choice did she leave him?

And now there was blood on the floor and he didn’t have time to clean it up. It was getting light. He had to go.

Jules

IT CAME TO me, quite suddenly. An epiphany. One moment I was terrified and panicking, and the next I was not, because I knew. Not where Lena was, but who she was. And with that, I could start to look for her.

I was sitting in the kitchen, dazed, punch-drunk. The police had left, gone back to the river to continue the search. They told me to stay put, just in case. In case she came home. Keep calling, they said, keep your phone on. OK, Julia? Keep your phone on. They talked to me as though I were a child.

I couldn’t blame them, I suppose, because they’d been sitting there asking me questions I couldn’t answer. I knew when I had seen Lena last, but I couldn’t say when she was last in the house. I didn’t know what she’d been wearing when she left; I couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing when I saw her last. I couldn’t distinguish dream from reality: was the music real, or did I imagine that? Who locked the door, who turned on the lights? The detectives eyed me with suspicion and disappointment: why did I let her go, if she was so distressed after her confrontation with Louise Whittaker? How could I not have run after her, to comfort her? I saw the looks that passed between them, the unspoken judgement. What sort of guardian will this woman make?

You were in my head, too, admonishing me. Why didn’t you go after her, like I went after you? Why didn’t you save her, like I saved you? When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning. When you were seventeen, Nel, you drove me into the water and held me down. (That old argument, back and forth – you say, I say, you say, I say. I was losing the stomach for it, I didn’t want to have it any longer. )

And that was where it was. In the buzz of exhaustion, the sick thrill of fear, I saw something, caught sight of something. It was as though something moved, a shadow just out of my line of sight. Was it really me, you asked, who drove you to the water? Was it you, or was it Robbie? Or some combination of the two?

The floor seemed to tilt and I grabbed hold of the kitchen counter to steady myself. Some combination of the two. I felt breathless, my chest tight as though I were going to have a panic attack. I waited for the world to go white, but it didn’t. I kept standing, I kept breathing. Some combination. I ran to the stairs, bolted up them and into your room, and there! That picture of you with Lena, when she’s smiling her predator’s smile – that isn’t you. That isn’t your smile. It’s his. It’s Robbie Cannon’s. I can see it now, flashing up at me while he lies on top of your body and pushes your shoulders down into the sand. That’s who she is, who Lena is. She’s a combination of the two of you. Lena is yours, and she is his. Lena is Robbie Cannon’s daughter.

Jules

I SAT DOWN on the bed, the photo frame in my hand. You and she smiled up at me, bringing bright hot tears to my eyes, and finally I cried for you as I should have done at your funeral. I thought of him that day, the way he’d looked at Lena – I’d misread that look completely. It wasn’t predatory, it was proprietary. He wasn’t looking at her as a girl to be seduced, to be possessed. She already belonged to him. So maybe he’d come for her, to take what was rightfully his?

He wasn’t hard to find. His father used to have a string of flashy car dealerships all over the north-east. Cannon Cars, the company was called. That didn’t exist any longer, it had gone bankrupt years ago, but there was a smaller, sadder, low-rent version in Gateshead. I found a badly designed website with a picture of him on its homepage, the photo taken some time ago, by the look of it. Less paunchy then, still a hint of the handsome, cruel boy in his face.

I didn’t call the police, because I was sure they wouldn’t listen to me. I just picked up the car keys and left. I was feeling almost pleased with myself as I drove out of Beckford – I’d figured it out, I was taking control. And the further I drove from the village, the stronger I felt, the fog of tiredness clearing, my limbs loosening. I felt hungry, savagely hungry, and I relished the sensation; I chewed the side of my cheek and tasted iron. Some old part of me, some furious, fearless relic, had surfaced; I imagined myself lashing out at him, clawing at him. I pictured myself an Amazon, ripping him limb from limb.

The garage was in a rundown part of town, under the railway arches. An ominous place. By the time I arrived, I was no longer brave. My hands shook as I reached to change gear or flick the indicator switch, the taste in my mouth was bile, not blood. I was trying to focus on what I had to do – to find Lena, to make Lena safe – but all my energy was sapped by the effort it took to push back against memories I hadn’t let surface for over half a lifetime, memories which rose now like driftwood out of water.

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