That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Go to Frannie’s,’ he says, though it hardly needs saying. ‘She needs to be there too.’

  ‘We need to do something about Evan,’ Joe says dispassionately. ‘He’s just threatened me.’ They’re sitting in a row by Frannie’s back doors. He’s looking out on to her wild garden. Mint is currently ravaging it, entwined around buddleia bushes and lavender. She doesn’t care.

  The windows are giant, floor to ceiling, covering the entire back wall. Joe, Cathy and Frannie are fish in a bowl, looking out.

  ‘What?’ Frannie says, and Joe irrationally thinks, for just a second, that she is about to faint. Her hands are up by her face. Her waist is minuscule, her striped t-shirt tucked into jeans.

  And then she laughs, a hard, sardonic laugh, a bitter laugh. It is so un-Frannie. ‘This could not really be going any worse, could it?’

  ‘It isn’t funny,’ Joe says.

  ‘I’m not seriously fucking pissing myself,’ Frannie says, drawing her arms around her waist and looking levelly at him. ‘So keep your sanctimonious lines to yourself. This isn’t a TV show.’ She opens a bottle of his merlot – still bought for him, every fucking week – not looking at him. Their sacred ritual, now tainted too.

  ‘What is up with you?’ he says to her, but she turns away from him, refusing to answer. ‘Evan is going to tell,’ he says.

  ‘What does he want?’ Cathy says. Her face is drawn, like she hasn’t slept or has a virus. Dry lips, eyes downcast, rings underneath her eyes. Joe wonders briefly what’s up with her, but he can’t ask. They each hold so much power. He doesn’t feel it with Frannie, but he does with Cathy. If any of them annoys the other, crosses a line … any one of them could end it.

  ‘Partnership.’

  ‘For nothing, I assume,’ Cathy says. ‘One fifth of the business, in exchange for nothing.’

  He hadn’t thought about that. God. So they’d be giving it away.

  When will this end? When will the tendrils of it stop spreading like Frannie’s mint outside?

  Something is simmering underneath every word he speaks, each breath he takes. The kind of thing that only reared its head occasionally in the past. When he was stuck in traffic and somebody pulled out in front of him. When he had five minutes to prep for a meeting and Windows started a mandatory update. Momentary rages, punches thrown. Little groans of frustration. Stroppy texts sent. This, though, is a dangerous kind of sadness, not anger, but it feels related. As though at any moment he might shout or cry, he isn’t sure which.

  ‘Call his bluff,’ Frannie says. She fiddles with the baby monitor in her hands, then stands and begins to clear up, like the conversation is over. Cathy looks at her curiously.

  ‘He’ll fucking shop us,’ Joe says. ‘He will. He will. He’ll tell Mum. He’ll tell the police.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cathy says, folding her hands in her lap. ‘Don’t panic.’

  Joe stares at Frannie’s back as she tidies. Where’s his Frannie gone? Gentle, smiling Frannie who could always ease an atmosphere?

  He tries to calm and slow his breathing. In and out. In and out. Come on. Pretend you’re operating. Pretend you’re doing something involved, and fiddly, and meditative. A simple bitch spay on a nice slim dog. The first cut, a straight, beautiful line that would heal easily. The parting of the skin, then fat, then organs. Something he could do with his eyes closed.

  ‘I think we should give it to him,’ Cathy says quietly. She looks at Joe, her eyes clear and glassy. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I mean – it’s the … it’s the family business,’ Joe says.

  ‘I don’t think we have a choice.’

  ‘It’s blackmail, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Fuck him,’ he shouts. ‘Fuck everything.’ He’s so angry now. He’s so angry they spoke about it so openly, in the fucking reception. He’s so angry Evan has capitalized on it. Without any further ruminating, he reaches over and punches Frannie’s wall. A satisfying, fast strike that stings the skin across his knuckles. And then – release. His shoulders sag.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Cathy says sharply. A piece of previously neat plaster falls to the floor. They all stare at it in shock.

  ‘Grow up, Joe,’ Frannie says.

  Cathy turns away from him, staring out of Frannie’s window and so too does Joe, looking at the endless rain, at the spreading weeds. The thing is, he thinks, staring at it, weeds don’t stop growing because you constrain one part of them. It’s too late, it’s too late. It’s out there now. He could cry about it, now that the anger has left him, looking at those little wet green leaves, spreading because it’s the only thing they know how to do. The natural thing. The thing they were always going to do. The inevitability of it.

  Part IV

  * * *

  CONSPIRACY TO BRIBE

  50.

  Joe

  They’ve moved to the kitchen table. ‘That’s not fair. It’s ours. We can’t just give it to him – this … opportunist.’

  ‘Well, life’s not fair,’ Joe says with a stiff gesture, more an upward creaking movement of his shoulders than a shrug. ‘Will’s fucking dead. Hardly fair on him.’

  Cathy winces. She has her face cupped in her hands, is gazing at him over the table. She’s flushed and sad-looking. ‘But – I mean. We’ve got to be sure. We can never take it back. And, whatever we do, Evan will know forever.’

  All three of them ignore the piece of plaster sitting near Frannie’s doors, the redness blooming across Joe’s knuckles.

  ‘That’s just it,’ Frannie says. She’s wiping her already-clean worktops in huge circles. She’s always enjoyed cleaning, the same way Cathy enjoys work. Joe once asked how she was so good at it. He always leaves a tidemark of filth on his consulting table when he wipes it, and she ends up doing it for him. She had said, ‘The trick is to stop when it’s actually clean?’ and they’d got the giggles for ten full minutes.

  ‘What’s to stop him blackmailing us again?’ Joe says.

  ‘Nothing,’ Cathy says. They exchange a glance that Joe can’t read, can’t interpret, their identical eyes flashing in the dimness. Frannie starts removing hob rings and putting them in the sink, rolls up the sleeves of her striped top.

  ‘Do you need to do that now?’ Joe says irritably.

  ‘Do you need to punch my walls?’

  ‘Let her clean,’ Cathy says.

  Frannie sprays something on to the hob. ‘I don’t want us to give away part of our business to Evan. He’s a lech. Fuck,’ she says, her voice louder, scrubbing hard at the splashback tiles behind her hob. ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this.’

  ‘We have no choice,’ Joe says again.

  Cathy’s cheeks have gone even redder. She blows air out of the side of her mouth. ‘I agree.’ She gets another bottle of wine and pours everybody a glass without asking. Frannie ignores her.

  ‘We’re not giving it to him,’ Frannie says, standing there with one sleeve rolled up and a spray bottle of Flash in her hand like a gun. Something swoops in Joe’s stomach, like a dove has just taken off. ‘Really, I’m not giving it to him,’ she says again.

  Annoyance rises up through Joe, replacing the horror of the image of his sister with the makeshift gun. He is suddenly irritated by everything about her. Her beautiful house. Her total disengagement with practising veterinary medicine even though everybody wanted her to. Her stupid mistake that landed them here.

  ‘You’re being an idealist,’ Joe says. ‘Life isn’t the fucking Green Party.’

  Frannie’s eyes are wide, still standing there by her oven. ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘Who knows?’ Cathy says with a sigh.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Joe says.

  ‘I said who knows what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Er, why?’

  ‘Because you are not making any sense.’ Cathy picks up a glass coaster with bright colours blown through it, and begins turning it around, upending it on one side, then the other. ‘You’re ruining Frannie’s walls and offending e
veryone.’

  ‘Piss off. We have no choice but to make Evan a partner,’ Joe says, his teeth gritted. God, he doesn’t want to feel this way. Full of poison, of jealousy, of anger. But if they fuck it up, if they don’t manage to control this …

  Joe drops down his head, massaging the back of his neck, which is tight with tension. He wishes Lydia were here with her soft, warm hands to push his muscles around. Lydia. He’s filled with nostalgia about his wife. For how it used to be, how it once was. When he’d tell her every single appointment he’d had throughout the day, and she’d tell him the ludicrous excuses the criminals at work had provided, her legs in his lap.

  ‘It’s pretty simple,’ he says eventually.

  ‘What?’ Frannie says. Her eyes look massive. She has two scoured lines underneath her cheekbones.

  ‘I mean …’ Joe says again. ‘If everybody viewed payoffs as pointless, there would never be any, would there?’

  ‘Guess not,’ Cathy says. She looks at him warily. ‘What are you saying?’

  Joe folds his arms over his chest. ‘You’ve not seen enough movies,’ he says, and Cathy gives a wan side-smile.

  ‘This is …’ Frannie rolls her shoulders and lifts her eyes to the ceiling. ‘I can’t do this,’ she says.

  ‘Same,’ Cathy says drily.

  ‘No, I mean.’ Frannie covers her face with her hands, her shoulders beginning to shake. ‘I’ve tried and I’ve tried …’ she says. ‘To be – to be okay. But we’re not okay. Are we?’ Her voice rises a few octaves.

  Cathy is up, standing next to her, within seconds. Joe stays at the table, watching them.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Cathy says. ‘We all feel like this sometimes. It’ll pass. We’ll pay Evan off. It’ll be fine. It’s only money. Better to lose twenty per cent than one hundred.’

  Frannie makes a low, moaning sound and Joe gets over himself and joins them, there in front of her oven, the bloody Flash spray smeared across it, the hob rings in the sink, leaving greasy brown imprints where they sit. Cathy’s hand grips his in the group hug, Frannie’s head lolls against his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she says.

  ‘I know,’ Cathy says.

  ‘We’ll pay him. We’ll make him go away,’ Joe says.

  ‘This wasn’t your fault,’ Cathy adds. ‘It could have happened to any of us.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ Frannie says. ‘And now they’re going to know what I did, when they find him.’ And the anguish with which she says it is what stops Cathy and Joe’s reassurance. Instead, they stare at each other over Frannie’s head. Cathy is completely still, just looking at Joe.

  ‘That you hit him?’ she says softly.

  ‘That I hit him twice. Okay?’

  Goosebumps cover Joe’s shoulders. His teeth begin chattering. He thinks of the image of Frannie with a gun. How natural it looked. How anybody here could be in danger in the right circumstances, at the whim of anybody’s temper, their volatility, their desperation. No, he thinks. Not this.

  51.

  Cathy

  ‘I’ll just – I’ll just hand myself in,’ Frannie says. Her nose is running, two clear tracks of liquid dripping on to her philtrum like a child’s.

  ‘What …’ Cathy says, but she’s speechless, truly speechless. All the blood. That’s why. Something has gone very cold inside her, right in her middle. Who is this woman standing in front of her? How could she have lied to her the other night at their parents’, when she thought they were finally being honest?

  Cathy thinks of Tom suddenly, and how she left him high and dry in her bed, his face disappointed, his naked form embarrassed. Fuck. Why is she like this? So loyal to these two? He’s right. He’s right. It is claustrophobic to live near to her siblings, this near, to keep their secrets, to bury bodies for them. If she could choose, would she choose Frannie and Joe? She doesn’t know, despite loving them, but she does know this: she would choose Tom. She hardly knows him, but already she prefers him.

  And it is that which cements the decision in Cathy’s mind: she is not going to sacrifice herself any further. Not even for her sister. Not for the stranger her sister has become.

  ‘I hit him accidentally,’ Frannie says. She pulls at the neck of her t-shirt and wipes her nose on it. ‘And then he sat up, just as I stopped. I was so … he started yelling at me. Saying I was mad, I was the mad woman he’d seen earlier, he was going to tell everyone. He kept gesturing to his side, where I’d grazed it. Saying he’d call the cops. And I just … there were just a few inches in it.’

  ‘In it?’

  Cathy glances at Joe. She’s stepped back from Frannie, but his arms still encircle her. His face has changed and hardened. She shivers, there in her sister’s kitchen, though she isn’t cold.

  ‘Between the brake and the accelerator,’ Frannie says into Joe’s chest. ‘The worst had happened, I don’t know. It was – you probably know a word for it. Fatalistic, maybe? He was … it was just – I panicked.’

  ‘You hit him again,’ Cathy says, staring at the tableau of her brother and sister. God, they’re fucked. They’re absolutely fucked. She looks at the ceiling and tries not to cry. They should have handed Frannie over. Testified that she wasn’t in the wrong. God knows, but, right now, it feels as though they have chosen the worst path of them all. Burying a fucking body. What were they thinking?

  ‘I ran over his legs,’ Frannie says thickly. ‘And then I waited. I just … how can it be a crime? To move your foot slightly over one pedal rather than the other … and then to just – do nothing? I was so scared. You’ve no idea.’ Her eyes seem to turn down as she tries to explain herself. ‘You have got no idea how that situation felt to me. How frightened I was.’

  Cathy says nothing, not knowing what to offer up. Jesus Christ. It was murder. It was murder, after all. The blood. The delay. Frannie’s faux-straightforwardness, her simplicity: she relied on her own reputation within the family to get away with this. ‘You never said. I asked you so straight-up the other night. And you never said.’

  ‘Where?’ Joe says.

  ‘Mum and Dad’s.’

  ‘Oh, right. Without me.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Cathy says. ‘Don’t be so petty,’ she adds, even though she knows she would feel exactly as he does: vulnerable.

  ‘I’ll go now, to the police,’ Frannie says, disentangling herself, her hands up, white palms out. She grabs her handbag.

  ‘Don’t be dramatic,’ Joe says, his face red. ‘It’s too late. It’s too fucking late. We’d all go down for all sorts. Sit back down.’

  Cathy deflates right there as they stand apart, just looking at each other. One of Paul’s paintings from nursery is pinned to the corkboard by the door to Frannie’s kitchen. It looks like Frannie, a tall stick figure with dark hair, his handprint in pink beside it. Cathy sighs, the air leaving her like she is a popped balloon. Joe’s right, of course. Angry but right. That ship has sailed. It is too late.

  She was thinking of taking the blame for Frannie only yesterday. On the verge of just doing it, some days, to end the suffering her little sister never deserved, that – Cathy thought – had been thrown over her like a hailstorm, one that Cathy could weather better than Frannie, and with fewer unintended consequences.

  ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ Joe says through gritted teeth. Cathy gets that uneasy feeling again, the one she first got in the market, when Joe puffed up like this. Protective Joe. Short-fused Joe. Only his enemy is now Frannie, once his greatest ally.

  ‘They’re going to find him,’ Frannie cries. ‘I had to tell you before they found him and the injuries weren’t … what I said.’

  ‘Let’s just – look. Let’s speak tomorrow, about Evan,’ Cathy says. ‘Let’s just go – go away and all sleep on it.’ Something seems to be bubbling away in Joe and she doesn’t like it. She feels it too. Anger. Justifiable anger towards their sister who has misled them. The circumstances are no longer the same, even if the outcome is. Frannie inten
ded it, and now everything is different.

  ‘No,’ Joe shouts at Cathy.

  ‘Joe,’ Frannie says tearfully.

  ‘Fuck this absolute shit,’ Joe says. ‘Nope.’ His square shoulders, bigger than they once were, are now retreating down Frannie’s dark hallway. ‘And fuck you,’ he says to Frannie. He opens the door and the room is blinded, momentarily, by her security light, a rectangle of brightness let in and then shut out again, the room still as dark as it once was, as though no amount of light can be held in here, preserved, to keep the darkness from them.

  Cathy arrives home and goes immediately out into her garden. She can’t be confined. She needs to look at the horizon, the fields beneath it, the sky above, and breathe.

  She jumped into action, when Joe called, even though Tom was over. She ushered him out, his expression somewhere between confused and fine, as is his way. She feels the breeze cool the tears on her face as she stares and stares at the horizon. Who is she? Why does she answer these calls from people who cause her this pain? The questions seem obvious, all of a sudden, though she’s never once asked them.

  The night sky is still and ancient. Sometimes, if Cathy stares for long enough, she gets a dizzying feeling of her own insignificance, of the infinity of the universe beyond them. Similar to the feeling she gets when she visits old monuments and imagines how many hundreds of thousands of people have passed over there before her, each with their own set of problems and concerns. She breathes and thinks and stares up at the sky, gulping in the warm summer air as she cries.

  At the bottom of Cathy’s garden is a stone outhouse, with a slate-tile roof, boarded-up windows. Ivy creeps up the side of it. Who else has sat here and cried? Cathy thinks. Millions of people. People in the 1940s during the war. People in Victorian times, with a single candle illuminating their faces. Millions. Hundreds of millions. She once read that one hundred and seven billion people have ever existed, and the thought comforted her then, as it does now. She is here, by herself, not in her siblings’ houses, wanting them to come to hers. She is alone.