When She Was Good

by Robotham, Michael

  All of these thoughts go through my mind, as I drive home from the police station. It’s near midnight as I search for my keys. The door opens. Sacha looks relieved rather than angry.

  ‘I hate that you don’t have a phone,’ she says. ‘I’m going to get you one.’

  She steps back and I stumble as I pass her. She catches me, holding my arm.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

  The dam breaks. I struggle to get the words out.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘Badger?’

  ‘Jimmy.’

  She leads me to the kitchen and pours me a large Scotch. I hold the glass in both hands and tell her bits of a story that suddenly feels fragmented in my mind, like broken shards of ancient pottery that some archaeologist must piece together.

  ‘You’re not making much sense,’ she says, leading me upstairs, turning on a shower. ‘Can you do this?’

  I nod. She leaves.

  I crawl beneath the spray and squat in the corner, hugging my knees, letting the water wash over me, wanting to be clean.

  52

  Evie

  I wake when I hear Cyrus arrive. He and Sacha are talking, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. I wonder if it’s about me. I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do. I want Cyrus to miss me. I want him to search for me. I want him to care.

  Now he’s in the shower. I’ll wait until they’re both asleep before I sneak downstairs. I can’t risk going out the front door in case the men are watching the house; and the gates to Wollaton Park will be locked by now. I can hide in the park, or climb over the gates.

  The pipes have stopped rattling. Cyrus is out of the shower. I wait for his light to go out and give him twenty minutes to fall asleep before I push boxes aside and crawl out from my hiding place. Quietly descending the stairs, I avoid the third step from the bottom because I know it creaks.

  Cyrus’s bedroom door is closed. I imagine him lying in his tangled sheets, with his shirt off and the birds inked into his skin. The hummingbirds and robins and hawks and ravens. I once dreamed that they became animated when he slept and moved across his skin, hopping and flitting between his limbs like they were the branches of a leafless tree.

  I cross the landing and step on to the lower stairs, when I hear a door open. I duck down and watch through the spindles. Sacha Hopewell emerges from my old room. She’s dressed in a pyjama top. Her legs are bare. I think she must be going to the bathroom, but she goes further and knocks gently on Cyrus’s door.

  ‘Are you awake?’ she asks. I don’t hear his answer, but she turns the handle and slips inside. They’re talking. The door is open.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

  She hushes him. Bedclothes rustle. Bodies move.

  They’re having sex. I want to stop the sounds. It’s disgusting. She’s a liar. She tells people one thing and does another. She’ll promise to stay but then leave. I feel hollow inside. Hurt. Angry.

  I shouldn’t care, but I do. I want to cut the bitch. I want to watch her guts tumble out. I want to slice off Cyrus’s dick. He’s a man like all the others. He can’t help himself. He can’t help me. He can’t have me. He doesn’t want me. I’m damaged goods. Unclean. Unlovable. Untouchable. Garbage.

  53

  Cyrus

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I say. It sounded like a door closing and a latch clicking into place.

  Sacha is lying with her head on my shoulder and one leg across me. I can feel her breath against my neck and the dampness between her thighs.

  I slide away from her.

  ‘Aren’t you sleepy?’ she murmurs, cuddling my pillow instead.

  I pull on boxer shorts and go downstairs, wanting to check the doors and windows. Poppy is in the laundry, wagging and thumping her tail against the washing machine. She’s pawing at the back door and whining.

  ‘What’s out there, girl?’ I say. ‘Can you smell a fox?’

  Having checked that everything is locked, I return to the kitchen and notice the dripping tap and a glass resting on the drainer, still wet. I hold it up to the light and see fingerprints and lip-prints. Poppy is still scratching at the back door.

  I hear footsteps behind me. Sacha leans on the door frame. She’s put on my dressing gown.

  ‘Did you get hungry?’ she asks, pointing to an empty Tupperware container beside the fridge. ‘I left you some pasta.’

  ‘I didn’t eat that.’

  There is a beat of silence before I start moving.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Sacha.

  ‘Evie!’ I say.

  ‘What? Where?’

  I am climbing the stairs, taking them two at a time. When I reach the attic, I push boxes aside, looking for Evie, but she’s not here. Maybe I’m wrong. Looking more closely, I notice how the old dust sheet is bunched between two wooden chests. I hold it against my nose, imagining I can smell her, the girl in the box, the girl who survived.

  ‘Why would she come here?’ asks Sacha, who has followed me.

  ‘Poppy.’

  I push past her again, descending the stairs even more quickly.

  I keep a spare key in the electricity box, or Evie picked the lock, which is something she learned to do at Langford Hall. She was right above our heads. Did she hear us? How will she react? Evie can get jealous because she doesn’t like to share things and has transferred her feelings on to me before, mistaking our friendship for something more; something deeper.

  Having reached the laundry, I open the back door. Poppy bolts down the steps and runs into the garden. She goes zigzagging across the lawn, nose to the ground, getting further from the light. She pauses at the garden shed and sniffs at the door. I push it open with my hand.

  ‘Are you there, Evie?’

  I scan the darkest corners, between metal racks full of garden tools, potting mix and fertiliser. I remember another shed, at a different house, when a teenage boy in blood-soaked socks crouched behind shelves and listened to sirens getting closer.

  Poppy is on the move again, investigating left and right until she reaches the rear wall, where she stands on her hind legs, bracing her paws on the bricks, looking up into the branches of a tree. I follow her gaze but see nothing but new leaves and distant stars.

  My eyes adjust. A small patch of white is visible where one of the larger branches meets the main trunk of the oak tree. It could be a shoe or a boot. It could be nothing. I change my angle. Poppy barks.

  ‘I can see you, Evie.’

  The silence expands. A light breeze rustles the leaves.

  ‘Dumb dog,’ she mutters.

  ‘What are you doing up there?’ I ask.

  ‘Bird watching,’ she replies sarcastically.

  ‘Are you stuck?’

  ‘I’m not fucking stuck,’ she snaps. ‘Do you think I’d climb up here if I couldn’t get down?’

  I wait. Evie hasn’t moved.

  ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll turn me in.’

  ‘I could turn you in whether you’re in the tree or down here.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Are you still hungry?’ asks Sacha. ‘I could make you pancakes.’

  ‘Shove them up your arse,’ says Evie.

  ‘That’s not very polite,’ I say.

  ‘Polite!’ she scoffs. ‘I heard you two, shagging like rabbits. Moaning. Oh … oh … oh … yes … yes …’

  She makes the sound effects. I blush on the inside.

  ‘You broke into my house.’

  ‘I came to see my dog.’

  ‘Are you going to come down?’

  ‘No.’

  Poppy barks and wags her tail. Evie has shifted sideways and is looking at the ground.

  ‘I can help you get down.’

  ‘Piss off !’

  She unhooks a small rucksack from her shoulder and swings it over a nearby b
ranch. That’s when I recognise her problem. She has climbed so high that the branch immediately below her is almost out of her reach. Getting up was OK, but lowering herself down is more difficult because she has to hang from the upper branch and feel for the lower limb with her toes.

  I look around and see the trellis that she must have used to climb on to the wall. I do the same, hauling myself upwards, spreading my arms to keep my balance. I’m under the tree, holding on to a branch above my head. Shuffling sideways, I position myself below Evie, so I can reach up and take her foot, placing it on the branch below. Once she has a firm footing, she lets go and I wrap my arms around her thighs and let her slide down against me, until we’re embracing, her face next to mine.

  ‘You can let me go now,’ she says angrily.

  ‘Are you going to run away?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Promise me you won’t.’

  ‘I promise,’ she says, pushing me away when my grip loosens. ‘You smell of her!’

  I swing my legs off the wall and jump into the garden, turning and holding my arms out to Evie. She ignores me and makes her own way to the ground.

  ‘We should get into the house before anyone sees you,’ I say.

  ‘Are they watching?’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘They killed Ruby.’

  ‘I know.’

  Back in the kitchen, Poppy goes from person to person, excited by developments. Evie says she isn’t hungry, but Sacha begins making pancakes because she wants to be useful.

  Evie is sulking, but it’s probably for show. She doesn’t seem hurt, or traumatised, but Ruby’s death must have affected her deeply.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,’ I say. ‘I should have listened. I was wrong.’

  Evie doesn’t want to waste her breath accepting my apology. ‘I can’t stay. I have to go,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not safe out there.’

  ‘It’s not safe in here.’

  She eats four pancakes with butter and maple syrup, secretly feeding pieces to Poppy under the table. She knows I won’t approve; and that I won’t say anything. I’m glad she’s safe, but we can’t stay at the house – not while they’re still looking for her.

  ‘What if I can find a safe place? Someone who will look after you,’ I say.

  ‘Not the police.’

  ‘No.’

  Sacha chimes in. ‘Where can she—’ but answers the question before she finishes. ‘Badger.’

  ‘We’ll sneak Evie out of the house in the morning.’

  ‘How?’

  I motion to the garden. ‘The same way she came in.’

  54

  Evie

  I have a different dream. Not of Terry, or of Cyrus. I dream of waking in a warm bed in a cold house, listening to my father slip from my mother’s side and tiptoe past my door. He lights our gas stove and sets a kettle on the flame, before dressing in his work clothes – trousers, vest, shirt, cardigan and a thick sweater my mother had knitted him.

  After making tea, he cuts two slices of bread, smearing them with jam, eating alone in the darkness, before putting on his heavy boots, and lacing them on a kitchen chair. The cuffs of his trousers are stiff with blood.

  Drifting back to sleep, I wake again to the sound of a metal shovel scooping coal into a bucket. Papa is crouched in front of our pot-bellied stove, arranging the bigger lumps of coal in the centre of the grate and the smaller pieces around the outside. ‘There is an art to lighting a coal fire,’ he told me, as he showed me how to hold a sheet of newspaper over the front of the stove, helping the flames draw up the flue.

  The fire isn’t for Papa’s benefit – he is off to work – but an hour from now, when I crawl out of bed, the main room will be toasty and warm, melting the ice that clings to the windows.

  My sister Agnesa and I share a bed. She is six years older than me and doesn’t like people very much because she says they make promises they don’t keep, but she is never specific about which promises she means.

  On Sundays we’re allowed to stay in bed until the church bell rings nine times. Agnesa has to drag the blankets off me because I don’t want to get up. She helps me get dressed and brushes my hair and makes me bread and jam and milky tea. Mama is still in bed and won’t get up until later. She blames it on her nerves and takes a lot of pills, as well as her special medicine, which she buys in half-bottles and keeps in the pocket of her dressing gown, or stashed around the house.

  Mama wasn’t always sick. The winter makes it worse. The cold. The dark. She says it leaks into her bones. She says it makes her sad.

  Papa says that one day he’ll take us to America and we’ll visit the place in Hollywood where they have stars on the pavement as well as in the sky. That’s why we have to learn English and practise every day, listening to tapes and watching American TV shows. He makes us write out sentences at night in exercise books, both sides of the page because paper is so expensive.

  Mama loves American movies, especially musicals. Elvis Presley is my favourite actor. I wanted to marry him until Mina told me he was dead and that he died on the toilet. I didn’t believe her until she showed me a story on the computer at school. Mina is my best friend. She’s a Roma, so not everybody likes her.

  Before Mama became sick, she was very beautiful. She won a beauty pageant when she was seventeen and they gave her a shopping voucher and a modelling contract. A photographer took pictures of her and said she was going to be famous, but she didn’t like the jobs they offered.

  ‘What was wrong with them?’ I asked.

  ‘They wanted me to take off my clothes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To sell the pictures.’

  I didn’t know what she meant, not then. I didn’t understand that men liked looking at naked women. Sex was still a mystery to me, like the Holy Trinity and Jesus rising from the dead.

  Mama didn’t become a famous model. Instead she fell pregnant at eighteen and married Papa. They were fruit-picking when they met – working for a rich man who wanted my mama to marry him, but she chose Papa instead. Agnesa was the baby growing in her tummy. She grew into a swan. I came along six years later. I was the ugly duckling, small for my age with my papa’s tangled hair and pointy chin and panda-eyes because I was born too early. ‘Undercooked,’ Papa said. ‘You didn’t wait for the microwave to go ding.’

  I hated being the youngest because Agnesa bossed me around. Wipe your mouth. Wash your hands. Tie your shoes. Don’t talk with your mouth full.

  When I was seven, I found a bottle of nail polish in the bins behind the shops. It was still wrapped in plastic, but somebody had torn off the label. Agnesa was thirteen and wanted what I’d found. We fought. She pushed me. I fell and broke my arm. When I came home from the hospital, Agnesa painted my nails, making each of them look like a ladybug.

  A voice interrupts my dream. I fight to hold on to Agnesa and the ladybugs, but Cyrus is shaking my shoulder. Speaking softly.

  ‘Time to go.’

  ‘It’s still dark,’ I murmur.

  ‘Yes, but not for long.’

  I dress in the same clothes as yesterday and meet them downstairs. Sacha is watching the road outside from the library window.

  ‘The police are still there,’ she says.

  ‘We’ll go across Wollaton Park,’ replies Cyrus. ‘Badger is going to meet us at the university.’

  ‘Who is Badger?’ I ask.

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Does he know who I am?’

  ‘No, but he’s a good man.’

  There is that term again: ‘a good man’. What does a good man do? How is he different from a normal man, or a gentleman, or any of the other ‘men’ except for Terry and Cyrus and Papa?

  I point to Sacha. ‘Is she coming?’

  ‘She’s going to pretend that we’re still here. She’ll collect the papers and pick up some milk and answer the door if anyone rings.’

  Clearly, they’ve been talking about this;
planning things while I’ve been sleeping. It’s like being back at Langford Hall, having people decide things for me. I can’t remember the last time I woke up and had total control over my life.

  Sacha kisses Cyrus. I make a gagging sound, which they ignore.

  ‘How will I contact you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ll call.’

  ‘You don’t have a phone.’

  She unzips a pocket of her jacket and takes out a mobile phone, an old-fashioned one, with a flip-top screen.

  ‘I bought it from a pawn shop,’ she says. ‘It isn’t very smart, but you can make calls and send text messages.’ She hands it to Cyrus. ‘I’ve etched the phone number on the back and put my number in the contacts.’

  Cyrus flips open the phone and looks at the screen. He finds Sacha’s name and hits the call button. Her phone chirrups in her pocket. In return, Cyrus hands her his car keys. ‘The brakes are spongey and you’ll struggle to get second gear, but she’s a good old stick.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’ asks Sacha.

  ‘I call her Red.’

  ‘That’s what Spencer Tracy called Katharine Hepburn.’

  ‘I know. You remind me of her.’

  Sacha makes a scoffing sound, but I know she’s flattered. I have no idea who they’re talking about, which is annoying.

  Outside, the garden is emerging from darkness, becoming solid around the edges. As we open the door into the laundry, Poppy dances around my feet.

  ‘What about her?’ I ask.

  ‘Sacha will look after her.’

  ‘Can’t we take her with us?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  I look at Sacha, meeting her eye to eye, for perhaps the first time since she arrived back in my life.

  ‘Promise to look after her.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Cyrus lifts me on to the wall and scrambles up after me. We drop on to the other side and walk across dew-covered grass that looks like it is covered in a million jewels, which are crushed under our boots. Emerging from the oak trees, we follow a sealed path to the opposite side of Wollaton Park.

  Matching Cyrus stride for stride, I ask him what happened yesterday.