Guilt took the breath right of my lungs and I stepped behind a woman in white handing out strawberry cheesecake samples to hide from her. Craig had sworn to her – he told me – there was no one else. ‘I told her that I loved her but I wasn’t in love with her any more. We can tell everyone that I turned to you for comfort after things had ended,’ he’d said to me in my flat the night he left her. ‘No one need ever know when we fell in love.’
‘But I’m not in love with you,’ I’d said to him, confused, wishing he would go. He’d seemed so sexy before when he was off limits, but in leaving his wife he was transformed into a liar and a cheat. Exactly what my ex-husband had been.
‘You do love me, I can tell,’ he’d said.
‘At no point did I mention love. It was a bit of fun, no one was meant to get hurt and you weren’t meant to leave your wife. Why did you leave your wife? What did she ever do to deserve that?’
He stayed for what felt like hours, trying to change my mind, until I told him that I would tell his wife if he didn’t get the hell out of my flat. He left saying he’d wait for me and I knew I’d have to avoid him. Seeing his wife was horrendous. I remembered that look well, I remembered how it felt to have your whole world obliterated. To go from being with the man you loved and knew inside and out to dealing with a stranger, one who saw your relationship completely differently to how it actually was.
After that, I promised myself no more married or attached men. Even if he was divine, even if his other half was controlling him by not letting him be friends with any woman he wanted to hang out with, I would stay away because of the devastation it caused.
Everything had been fine, it’d worked, I turned down every opportunity I had to be with a married or attached man and felt very proud of myself.
Until there was Scotty.
Tami
The sound of running water scares me. It bubbles an icy fear through my heart.
It’s unsettled me since Mirabelle died, but after what DS Harvan did and said, the sound now terrifies me. I get a cold trickle of fear running through my body and I have to stop myself from shaking. I try to conjure up the image of her surrounded by flowers and sometimes it works, the terror banished. Sometimes the images combine and there are rose petals in the water, there is Mirabelle at rest in the water and there is no sound. Other times, it is a pointless exercise. I am enslaved and tortured by it, powerless while it rampages through me.
I think the sound is one I heard that night. The night she was murdered. Since I know I didn’t have a bath that night and I don’t think Scott did, either, all I can think is … I might have heard it there. I might have been there when she died.
I’m not sure. That’s the worst part, I suppose. Not knowing for sure if I was there while the bath was running, if I crept up behind her, pushed her in and then held her down until she stopped fighting, until she was gone, if that was where the scratches on my arms came from. Could I have done that? I was so angry. Not that night, but every night and every day since Scott’s arrest, if I’m honest. I was hurt, horrified, shocked, shaken, scared, but underlying that was anger. Most of it at myself, for not guessing, for not seeing it, but a lot at Scott, at Mirabelle. The result, of course, is I’m now scared of what I am doing – running a bath for my children.
The very act of pushing in the plug, turning the five spindles at the top of the tap with my hand, wrenches and wrings my stomach. I reach out and take the organic, sensitive bath wash from the window ledge that doubles as a shelf and flip it open. My hand is shaking, of course. I drizzle some into the bath, watching it turn the clear water a milky white that obscures the bottom of the bath and the fish-shaped bathmat. I look away from the bath then. It’s always at that point, when clouds of white begin to streak the water before dispersing, that I have to look away. It reminds me of something. I’m not sure if it’s real, or if it’s something I’ve conjured up to fit in with the images that the policewoman evoked for me. But it’s making something that was a pleasure, a great way for us to spend time together, a fraught experience.
‘Are you two ready?’ I call out of the bathroom door. I take a deep breath to centre myself, to push away the memories that I am sure are false. I would not do that. I have to keep reminding myself, no matter what I was feeling, no matter how angry I was, I would not KNOWINGLY kill someone. I couldn’t.
Could I?
‘Ready!’ Anansy squeals, arriving in the bathroom first, her towel in hand, still dressed in her pyjamas. Her hair is technically still in the three plaits I’d put in earlier – in reality, strands of her hair are escaping all over her head in a cute, chaotic mess. I remember my mother despairing because I would look very similar to Anansy by tea time, no matter how neat I started the day. I don’t really remember why, that’s just the way it was, to paraphrase Anansy.
‘I’m here,’ Cora says, sauntering into the bathroom, wearing her fluffy dressing gown, a towel wrapped into a turban around her head. She is so from the wrong era, she should be in 1950s Hollywood, with a cigarette holder suspended between the fingers of one hand and martini glass in the other. I can imagine Mirabelle looking that elegantly glamorous of an evening.
As Cora sheds her dressing gown, I want to grab her, stop her from getting into the bath, stop her meeting the same fate as Mirabelle. That is an irrational reaction and instead I get down on my knees to help Anansy finish getting undressed.
It’s OK to put them in the bath. Nothing is going to happen in the bath, nothing bad happens in the bath. What happened to Mirabelle doesn’t happen to people that often. People die, yes, but not like that. Not murdered.
Anansy is splashing water, Cora is not. I’m surprised that Cora is still willing to share a bath with Anansy, but she doesn’t mind. I’ve asked her more than once if she feels weird at all, or if she’d like to have her own baths, but she looks at me as if I am crazy. She loves spending time with her sister, they really are the best of friends. They’ve been closer since Scott was arrested, but almost inseparable since Scott left.
The sound of water being moved by bodies, warm, living bodies, is magnified. Deafening. It’s like standing on top of the ocean in the middle of a storm, everything sounds rough, dangerous, deadly. I close my eyes because I can’t slam my hands over my ears without unnerving the girls, but that, of course, makes it worse. Take away one sense and the others become magnified. I knew that. So why did I do something so stupid, something that almost instantly turned up the volume, brought the ocean crashing all around me?
She sighs. In my head Mirabelle sighs. She looks away over my shoulder as if checking if there is something more interesting out on the street. ‘Yes? What do you want?’ she asks, hostility in her tone. She was being hostile to me? Me?
‘I want you to tell me why you did it.’ I slur.
She focuses on me then, stops looking over my shoulder, stops ignoring me and concentrates on me. ‘You’ve been drinking?’ she says, suddenly full of concern. And then she looks down at my feet. ‘And you’ve got no shoes on. Oh God, Tami, what are you doing to yourself?’
‘Stop pretending you care,’ I say to her. I am swaying because I can’t stay upright and still.
‘Come in here,’ she says and before I can properly protest, she takes hold of my arm, pulls me into the house.
‘Get off me!’ I screech at her, pushing her off. ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me!’
‘Mama, what’s the matter?’ Anansy asks, dragging me back into the bathroom.
I am shaking. My back is flat against the wall. I don’t want to rely on gravity and the present to stop me from falling back there. I need to hold on to something.
‘Are you OK, Mama?’ Cora asks.
Their concerned faces look at me from the bath and I know I am scaring them. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I say, taking a chance on letting go of the wall. I’m fine. I’m not falling backwards. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ I’m fine. Everything is fine.
‘Now, come on, let’s get you out of the b
ath and into bed for storytime.’
I’m fine. Whatever that was, it’s from the same place as the running water. It’s just my imagination. It is not a piece of the jigsaw that is that night. It is not proof that I did it. It can’t be because I wouldn’t do that.
Beatrix
Sweetheart, I know she knows. Just talk to me. I think you owe me that much. Bea x
Four months ago
‘I want a baby.’
It was early on a Saturday morning, he was officially at the gym, he was actually here, in my bed, making all kinds of delectable love to me. Our bodies were intertwined as we lazily whiled away the morning.
‘Come on, Bea, what am I supposed to do with that?’ he asked.
‘I want a baby, Scotty. I’m not getting any younger and if you can’t or won’t, I’ll have to find someone who will.’ I wouldn’t, I wanted his baby, no one else’s. I hadn’t ever felt that urge before, but with him, I wanted him to look at me and love me as the mother of his children. I wanted him to have on his face the expression he had the day I first met him when he talked about her. I wanted him to be like that about me.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
‘I’m letting you know as a courtesy – I’m stopping the Pill, so as of now, you’re going to have to take care of contraception.’
‘Don’t do that,’ he repeated.
‘I’m not asking your permission. I’m serious – if you want to have sex, then you either wear a condom or take your chances.’
‘Bea, this isn’t fair. What you’re basically saying is I won’t get to live with at least one of my children if I keep on making love to you. I’ll have to choose between Cora and Anansy or your child. You know I can’t give you up.’
‘No, what I’m saying is you need to take care of contraception from now on or it’s likely I’ll get pregnant with your baby.’
‘And that’s your final word on the matter?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’
14
Fleur
From The Flower Beach Girl Blog (drafted in my head)
Things I’ve been thinking about:
I have to ask again: why do people lie? I don’t mean the little lies, I mean the big ones. Is it a case of ‘If I’m going to tell a small lie I might as well tell a big one instead?’ Or is it that you think you’re so important you need to distort reality to fit around you? I don’t have all the answers and I know I do it, too. But why do people lie? What good could possibly come from it?
‘Can you tell me about my mother?’
I had no choice but to come here. Noah is great, but he doesn’t understand. His mother died when he was young and he was brought up by his grandmother and his dad and his sisters. He grew up with a family around him, with people who loved him, who knew him and who didn’t lie to him.
Mrs C lied to me, but she admitted it almost straightaway. She’s the only person I’ve met in a while who is honest with me.
She looked apprehensive when she opened the door, then her face relaxed into a grin as she saw it was me. ‘Fleur,’ she said, a smile in her voice. ‘It’s great to see you. I thought I’d alienated you for ever. Come in.’
I asked her if she would tell me about my mother before I stepped in. I was only there to get her to tell me about Mirabelle. Having the knowledge now that she hadn’t willingly abandoned me like I thought has been churning me up inside again. I’d been feeling settled, then I discovered the deal she made to get me a better life; the promises she probably made to the school to keep the smoking incident off my record. I had to find out about her. I had to find out what she was like because I only knew her in pieces. I want the whole picture. I need to know about her.
‘Of course, I’ll tell you anything you want.’
Noah is up in London today at a meeting, so I was at a loose end. I walked around the North Laines for a bit, looking in all the little shops, doing that thing where I look for stuff that’s going to fit. I need sometimes to buy stuff that will fit in that part of me that is missing a piece. Out there is something that will fill the hole in me; will complete me. Weaving in and out of the shops not finding anything and feeling my anxiety rising, I had to get out. I ended up running to the seafront, getting somewhere that was wide open and free, that had space for me to breathe.
With the strong sea air blowing through me, clearing away the fog and the claustrophobia, I knew I had to find out about her. I was stuck where I was in my life because I didn’t know about her. She was gone, and so much was lost to me. Shut away. I had no way of getting her back. The house was still off limits and I couldn’t speak to my dad because he was a liar. I was without a phone because he was a liar.
‘Please don’t lie to me,’ I ask her as I follow her into the house.
Her house is so welcoming, so much like a home. My house growing up felt like a home, but it didn’t feel like this. There is so much of the people who live here jumping out at me from everywhere. The coats hooked over the banister at the bottom of the stairs, the assortment of shoes at the top end of the tiled corridor, where the overloaded coat stand lives. The large, brass-framed mirror as you walk in that is adorned with small fingerprints. The corridor walls covered with drawings by the girls, each one framed and mounted, with their name and age at the foot of it, a reminder of what they did at different stages of their young lives. The walls in every room I have seen have pictures of the girls. They had a couple of Mrs C and her husband, but not as many as the girls.
She takes me through to the kitchen and pulls out a chair for me to sit on.
On the butter-yellow sofa that is pushed up against the wall, little Anansy is installed under a pink duvet. She has her hair in bunches and she is wearing pink sheep-covered pjs.
‘Hello,’ she says, raising her hand briefly before going back to trying to push a large green frog into a small silver box.
‘Hello, I’m Fleur.’
‘Yes, I remember you. You’re Auntie Mirabelle’s daughter.’
‘That’s right,’ I say. That thing happens to me where I get a lump in my throat and my heart starts to race. It was so easy for her to say that. She knew it and she said it. It’s odd being around people like that.
‘Anansy is ill,’ Mrs C says with a slight raise of her eyebrows that tells me she thinks Anansy is pulling a fast one but has let her stay off school all the same.
Dutifully, Anansy forces out a little cough and rearranges her face to look pitiful enough to have been let off school.
‘I thought it was your tummy that felt funny?’ Mrs C says with another raised eyebrow.
‘It is, Mama, but my throat is a little bit coughy, too.’
‘Right,’ Mrs C replies with a ‘give me strength’ expression. Just like a real mother would, I think. I don’t remember if she, Mirabelle, was the kind of mother who let me stay off school if I was ill. I reckon she was all, ‘your head has to be falling off before I think about maybe letting you stay off’. Dad was always keen to keep me at home, but only when he had someone to look after me. When he was between ‘friends’ I had to go in no matter what. I push aside thoughts of him. I bet he’s been ringing my phone non-stop. I bet he’s getting himself all worked up and probably thinking about coming down here to drag my sorry ass back up to London. Well, that’s what happens to you when you’re a liar – people stop speaking to you.
‘Coffee?’ Mrs C asks me.
‘Yes, please,’ I say. I look at Anansy, and she grins at me, the pitiful look banished in an instant. I look around at Mrs C, to see if she’s noticed that her daughter is clearly not ill. Mrs C is at the other end of the kitchen with the kettle in one hand while staring at the tap as if it’s going to bite her if she touches it. I return my gaze to Anansy, who tells me to come and sit next to her by doing the ‘come here’ gesture quickly with her hand so her mother doesn’t see.
Doing as I’m told, I go over to the sofa and she scooches up, and grins at
me again that I’m playing along. She’s cute. Proper cute. There are some girls who are just, you know, cute-looking and pretty-haired, but this one has cuteness running through her. And cheekiness. I’d love to see how Mrs C is going to deal with her when she gets older. There’ll be a line of boys outside the house.
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re not too sick to get yourself some company over there, Anansy Challey,’ Mrs C says, making both of us jump. We huddle together, pulling ‘we’re in trouble’ faces. Anansy shifts again, this time to put her legs on top of mine then the duvet over the pair of us.
I grin at her and she grins back at me, the hole where her front tooth should be adding to her over-the-top cuteness. She’s examining me, I realise. Looking at me at me like I’m something she’s just seen in her storybook for the first time. ‘You’re the little girl who’s like me, aren’t you?’ she says.
I frown at her, then look at Mrs C, who has apparently got over her fear of the tap and has placed her kettle on its stand, but pauses in switching it on.
Anansy could be right, I maybe looked a little like her when I was growing up, we have similar texture hair, and the same kind of lips, and maybe our eyes are slightly similar in shape, but we’re not really that much alike.
‘What are you saying, Ansy?’ Mrs C asks, her affectionate name for her daughter like a knife in my heart. She, Mirabelle, called me Fleury. And I told her I hated that name so she stopped. It was after the time she called me Roza to her friend. I wanted to hurt her like she had hurt me by not telling people about me so I made her stop. I didn’t really hate it, I just wanted her to feel how bad I felt for a moment.
‘She’s the little girl who’s like me,’ the six-year-old on the sofa says to her mother. ‘Auntie Mirabelle told me.’
‘My mother told you I’m like you?’
‘She said there was a little girl who looked like me but she had hair that went all gold in the sun. And she said the little girl asked questions all the time and she liked the beach story too. She said she had to tell the little girl the beach story every night to go to sleep.’