It wasn’t signed, but it was obvious it came from Katie’s mother. She warned you—and not just this once either. In the police station, I’d listened to the detective ask Lena about an incident just after Katie died, about how she threatened you and told you she would make you pay. Is that what you wanted to tell me? Were you afraid of her? Did you think she was coming for you?
The idea of her, a wild-eyed woman, mad with grief, hunting you down—it was horrifying, it frightened me. I no longer wanted to be here, amongst your things. I raised myself to my feet, and as I did, the house seemed to shift, to tilt like a boat. I could feel the river pushing against the wheel, urging it to turn, water seeping into cracks widened by accomplice weeds.
I rested one hand on the filing cabinet and walked up the stairs into the living room, silence buzzing in my ears. I stood for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the brighter light, and for a second I felt sure that I saw someone, there on the window seat, in the spot where I used to sit. Just for a moment, and then she was gone, but my heart bludgeoned my ribs and my scalp prickled. Someone was here, or someone had been here. Or someone was coming.
My breath quick and shallow, I half ran to the front door, which was bolted, just as I’d left it. But in the kitchen there was a strange smell—something different, sweet, like perfume—and the kitchen window was wide open. I didn’t remember opening it.
I went over to the freezer and did something I almost never do—I poured myself a drink: cold, viscous vodka. I filled a glass and drank it quickly; it burned all the way down my throat and into my belly. Then I poured myself another.
My head swam and I leaned against the kitchen table for support. I was keeping an eye out, I suppose, for Lena. She’d disappeared again, refusing to be given a lift home. Part of me was grateful—I hadn’t wanted to share a space with her. I told myself it was because I was angry with her—supplying diet pills to another girl, body-shaming her—but really I was afraid about what the woman detective said. That Lena isn’t curious because Lena already knows. I couldn’t stop seeing her face, that photo upstairs with her sharp teeth and her predatory smile. What does Lena know?
I went back to the study and sat down on the floor again, gathered up the notes I’d pulled out and began to rearrange them, trying to establish some sort of order. Trying to get a sense of your narrative. When I came to the picture of Katie and Lena, I stopped. There was a smudge of ink on its surface, just beneath Lena’s chin. I turned the picture over in my hands. On the reverse you had written a single line. I read it aloud: Sometimes troublesome women take care of themselves.
The room darkened. I looked up and a cry caught in my throat. I hadn’t heard her, hadn’t heard the front door go or her footsteps crossing the living room, she was just there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, blocking the light, and from where I was sitting, the shadow profile was Nel’s. Then the shadow stepped farther into the room and I saw Lena, a smear of dirt on her face, her hands filthy, her hair tangled and wild.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. She was hopping from one foot to the other, she looked hyper, manic.
“I wasn’t talking, I was—”
“Yes, you were,” she giggled. “I heard you. Who were you—” She broke off then, and the curl of her lip disappeared as she noticed the picture. “What are you doing with that?”
“I was just reading . . . I wanted—” I didn’t have time to get the words out of my mouth before she was upon me, towering over me, and I cowered. She lunged at me and grabbed the picture from my hands.
“What are you doing with this?” She was trembling, her teeth gritted together, red-faced with rage. I scrabbled to my feet. “This has nothing to do with you!” She turned away from me, placed Katie’s picture on the desk and smoothed it over with her palm. “What right do you have to do this?” she asked, turning back to face me, her voice quavering. “To go through her stuff, to touch her things? Who gave you permission to do this?”
She took a step towards me, kicking over the glass of vodka as she did so. It flew up and smashed against the wall. She dropped to her knees and began gathering up the notes I’d been sorting through. “You shouldn’t be touching this!” She was almost spitting with rage. “This has nothing to do with you!”
“Lena,” I said, “don’t.”
She drew back sharply with a little gasp of pain. She’d put her hand on a piece of glass, it was bleeding. She grabbed a sheaf of the papers and clutched them to her chest.
“Come here,” I said, trying to take the papers from her. “You’re bleeding.”
“Get away from me!” She piled the papers on to the desk. My eye was drawn to the smear of blood across the top sheet and the words printed below it: Prologue, in heavy type, and below that: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning.
I felt hysterical laughter rise in me; it burst out of me so loudly that Lena jumped. She stared at me in amazement. I laughed harder, at the furious look on her beautiful face, at the blood dripping from her fingers to the floor. I laughed until the tears came to my eyes, until everything blurred, as though I were submerged.
August 1993
JULES
Robbie left me on the window seat. I drank the rest of the vodka. I’d never been drunk before, I didn’t realize how quickly the twist comes, the slide from elation to despair, from up to down. Hope seemed suddenly lost, the world bleak. I wasn’t thinking straight, but it felt as though my train of thought made sense. The river is the way out. Follow the river.
I’ve no idea what I wanted when I stumbled off the lane, down the bank, onto the river path. I was walking blindly; the night seemed blacker than ever, moonless, silent. Even the river was quiet, a slick, frictionless, reptilian thing, sliding along beside me. I wasn’t afraid. What did I feel? Humiliated, ashamed. Guilty. I looked at him, I watched him, watched him with you, and he saw me.
It’s a couple of miles from the Mill House to the pool, it must have taken me a while. I wasn’t quick at the best of times, but in the dark, in that state, I’d have been slower still. So you didn’t follow, I suppose. But eventually you came.
I was in the water by then. I remember the cold around my ankles, and then my knees, and then sinking softly into blackness. The cold was gone, my whole body burning, up to my neck now, no way out, and no one could see me. I was hidden, I was disappearing, not taking up too much space, taking up no space at all.
The heat buzzed through me, it dissipated and the cold returned, not on my skin but in my flesh, in my bones, heavy, like lead. I was tired, it seemed a very long way back to the bank, I wasn’t sure I could make it back. I kicked out and down, but I couldn’t reach the bottom and so I thought that perhaps I would just float for a while, untroubled, unseen.
I drifted. Water covered my face and something brushed against me, soft, like a woman’s hair. There was a crushing sensation in my chest and I gasped, gulping water. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a woman scream. Libby, you said, you can hear her, sometimes at night you can hear her beg. I struggled, but something squeezed my ribs; I felt her hand in my hair, sudden and sharp, and she pulled me deeper. Only witches float.
It wasn’t Libby, of course, it was you, shouting at me. Your hand on my head, holding me down. I was fighting to get away from you. Holding me down or dragging me out? You grabbed at my clothes, clawed at my skin, gave me scratches on my neck and arms to match the ones Robbie had left on my legs.
Eventually, we were on the bank, me on my knees, gasping for breath, and you standing above me, shouting at me. “You stupid fat bitch, what were you doing? What the fuck are you trying to do?” You fell to your knees then and put your arms around me, then you smelled the alcohol on me and started yelling again. “You’re thirteen, Julia! You can’t drink, you can’t . . . What were you doing?” Your bony fingers dug into the flesh of my arms, you shook me hard. “Why are you doing this? Why? To spite me,
is that it? To make Mum and Dad angry with me? Jesus, Julia, what have I ever done to you?”
You took me home, dragged me upstairs and ran a bath. I didn’t want to get in, but you manhandled me, wrestling me out of my clothes and into the hot water. Despite the heat, I could not stop shivering. I would not lie down. I sat, hunched over, the roll of my belly tight and uncomfortable, while you scooped hot water over my skin with your hands. “Jesus, Julia. You’re a little girl. You shouldn’t be . . . you shouldn’t have . . .” You didn’t seem to have the words. You wiped my face with a cloth. You smiled. You were trying to be kind. “It’s OK. It’s OK, Julia. It’s OK. I’m sorry I yelled at you. And I’m sorry he hurt you, I am. But what did you expect, Julia? What did you honestly expect?”
I let you bathe me, your hands so much softer than they had been in the pool. I wondered how you could be so calm about it now, I thought you’d have been angrier. Not just with me, but on my behalf. I supposed I must have been overreacting, or that you just didn’t want to think about it.
You made me swear that I wouldn’t tell our parents about what happened. “Promise me, Julia. You won’t tell them, you won’t tell anyone about this. OK? Not ever. We can’t talk about it, all right? Because . . . Because we’ll all get into trouble. OK? Just don’t talk about it. If we don’t talk about it, it’s like it didn’t happen. Nothing happened, OK? Nothing happened. Promise me. Promise me, Julia, you’ll never speak about it again.”
I kept my promise. You didn’t.
2015
HELEN
On her way to the supermarket, Helen passed Josh Whittaker on his bike. He was drenched through and had mud on his clothes; she slowed the car and wound down her window.
“Are you all right?” she called out, and he waved and bared his teeth at her—an awkward attempt at a smile, she supposed. She drove on slowly, watching him in the rearview mirror. He was dawdling, turning the handlebars this way and that, and every now and again standing up on his pedals to check over his shoulder.
He’d always been an odd little character, and the recent tragedy had exacerbated things. Patrick had taken him fishing a couple of times after Katie died—as a favour to Louise and Alec, to give them some time to themselves. They’d been at the river for hours and hours and, Patrick said, the boy barely spoke a word.
“They should get him away from here,” Patrick said to her. “They should leave.”
“You didn’t,” she replied softly, and he nodded.
“That’s different,” he said. “I had to stay. I had work to do.”
• • •
AFTER HE RETIRED, he stayed for them—for her and for Sean. Not for them, but to be close to them, because they were all he had: them, the house, the river. But time was running out. No one said anything, because that’s just the sort of family they were, but Patrick wasn’t well.
Helen heard him coughing in the night, on and on and on; she saw in the mornings how it pained him to move. The worst thing of all was that she knew it wasn’t solely physical. He had been so sharp all his life and now he had become forgetful, confused sometimes. He would take her car and forget where he’d left it, or sometimes return it to her filled with junk, as he had the other day. Rubbish he’d found? Trinkets he’d taken? Trophies? She didn’t ask, didn’t want to know. She was afraid for him.
She was afraid for herself, too, if she was completely honest. She’d been all over the place lately, distracted, unreasonable. Sometimes she thought she was going mad. Losing her grip.
It wasn’t like her. Helen was practical, rational, decisive. She considered her options carefully, and then she acted. Left-brained, her father-in-law called her. But lately she had not been herself. The events of the past year had unsettled her, thrown her off course. Now she found herself questioning the things about her life she’d thought were least open to interrogation: her marriage, their family life, even her competence in her job.
It started with Sean. First with her suspicions and then—via Patrick—the awful confirmation. Last autumn she had discovered that her husband—her solid, steadfast, resolutely moral husband—was not at all what she thought him to be. She’d found herself quite lost. Her rationale, her decisiveness, deserted her. What was she to do? Leave? Abandon her home and her responsibilities? Should she issue an ultimatum? Cry, cajole? Should she punish him? And if so, how? Cut holes in the fabric of his favourite shirts, break his fishing rods in half, burn his books in the courtyard?
All of these things seemed impractical or foolhardy or simply ridiculous, so she turned to Patrick for advice. He persuaded her to stay. He assured her that Sean had seen sense, that he deeply regretted his infidelity and that he would work to earn her forgiveness. “In the meantime,” he said, “he would understand—we both would—if you would like to take the spare room here? It might do you good to have some time to yourself—and I’m certain it would benefit him to get even a small taste of what he stands to lose.” Almost a year later, she still slept in her father-in-law’s house most nights.
Sean’s mistake, as it came to be known, was just the start of it. After she moved into Patrick’s home, Helen found herself afflicted by terrible insomnia: a debilitating, anxiety-inducing, waking hell. Which, she discovered, her father-in-law shared. He couldn’t sleep either—he’d been that way for years, so he said. So they were sleepless together. They stayed up together—reading, doing crosswords, sitting in companionable silence.
Occasionally, if Patrick had a nip of whiskey, he liked to talk. About his life as a detective, about how the town used to be. Sometimes he told her things that disturbed her. Stories of the river, old rumours, nasty tales long buried and now dug up and revived, spread as truth by Nel Abbott. Stories about their family, hurtful things. Lies, libellous falsehoods, surely? Patrick said it wouldn’t come to libel, wouldn’t come to law courts. “Her lies won’t ever see the light of day. I’ll see to that,” he told her.
Only that wasn’t the problem. The problem, Patrick said, was the damage she’d already done—to Sean, to the family. “Do you honestly think he’d have behaved the way he has if it hadn’t been for her, filling his head with these stories, making him doubt who he is, where he comes from? He’s changed, hasn’t he, love? And it’s her that’s done that.” Helen worried that Patrick was right and that things would never go back to the way they’d been, but he assured her they would. He’d see to that, too. He’d squeeze her hand and thank her for listening and kiss her forehead and say, “You’re such a good girl.”
Things got better, for a while. And then they got worse. For just when Helen found herself able to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, just when she caught herself smiling at her husband in the old way, just when she felt the family moving back towards its old, comfortable equilibrium, Katie Whittaker died.
Katie Whittaker, a star of the school, a diligent and polite student, an untroubled child—it was shocking, inexplicable. And it was her fault. She had failed Katie Whittaker. They all had: her parents, her teachers, this whole community. They hadn’t noticed that happy Katie needed help, that she wasn’t happy at all. While Helen was laid low by her domestic problems, befuddled by insomnia and plagued with self-doubt, one of her charges had fallen.
By the time Helen arrived at the supermarket, the rain had stopped. The sun was out and steam rose from the tarmac, bringing with it the smell of the earth. Helen scrabbled around in her handbag for her list: she was to buy a joint of beef for dinner, vegetables, pulses. They needed olive oil and coffee and capsules for the washing machine.
Standing in the canned-goods aisle, looking for the brand of chopped tomatoes she considered most flavoursome, she noticed a woman approach and realized with horror that it was Louise.
Walking slowly towards her, her expression vacant, Louise was pushing a giant, near-empty shopping trolley. Helen panicked and fled, abandoning her own trolley and scurrying to the car park
, where she hid in her car until she saw Louise’s own vehicle swing past and out into the road.
She felt stupid and ashamed—she knew that this wasn’t like her. A year ago, she wouldn’t have behaved in such a disgraceful way. She would have spoken to Louise, squeezed her hand and asked after her husband and son. She would have behaved honourably.
Helen was not herself. How else could she explain the things she’d thought of late, the way she had acted? All this guilt, this doubt, it was corrosive. It was changing her, twisting her. She was not the woman she used to be. She could feel herself slipping, slithering as though she were shedding a skin, and she didn’t like the rawness underneath, she didn’t like the smell of it. It made her feel vulnerable, it made her feel afraid.
SEAN
For several days after my mother died, I didn’t speak. Not a single word. So my father tells me, in any case. I don’t remember much about that time, although I do remember the way Dad shocked me out of my silence, which was by holding my left hand over a flame until I cried out. It was cruel, but it was effective. And afterwards he let me keep the cigarette lighter. (I kept it for many years, I used to carry it around with me. I recently lost it, I don’t recall where.)
Grief, shock, it affects people in strange ways. I’ve seen people react to bad news with laughter, with seeming indifference, with anger, with fear. Jules’s kiss in the car after the funeral—that wasn’t about lust, it was about grief, about wanting to feel something, anything, other than sadness. My mutism when I was a child was probably the result of the shock, the trauma. Losing a sister may not be the same as losing a parent, but I know that Josh Whittaker was close to his sister, so I am loath to judge him, to read too much into what he says and does and the way he behaves.