What You Did

by Claire McGowan

  ‘Oof. Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’ I ran my fingers through his hair. Shaggy and full back then. ‘You’re nice, aren’t you.’

  ‘I’m not that nice.’ His gaze wandered but he didn’t push me off. His fingers began to stroke my nylon-clad thigh. I wished I’d taken the tights off.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ Hard not to adopt a little-girl voice. Karen would never do that. She’d just march in there and take what she wanted.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m ready. For – you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. For . . . that. What we haven’t done.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I want it to be you. The first time.’

  He paused. ‘Ali, are you sure? I mean, it’s kind of a big deal, isn’t it, the first time.’

  ‘I know it is. That’s why I want you.’ I fixed my eyes on the picture of his mother. Would she like me? Would we become friends? I couldn’t imagine her meeting my own mother, what they would ever talk about.

  Mike took this in for a few moments that seemed to last years. What I was really saying. How I was laying myself before him, to be taken, to be hurt as he chose. And he made a decision.

  The next day we were in Hall together for brunch, holding hands in public, wearing matching college hoodies as the sun came in the window, and I can honestly say I’ve never before or since felt happiness like that, so pure and shining. So full of hope.

  ‘I suppose you heard what happened.’

  Mum read the papers every day, she knew everything that went on. Almost a week now since it happened. It was hard to believe.

  My mother’s voice was hard. ‘I saw it in the paper.’ A long silence stretched between us, so many things to say that saying anything at all felt insurmountable. I hadn’t spoken to her in – oh, it was almost five years.

  ‘He’s been suspended from work. Until the trial. But that won’t be until he recovers.’ And he wouldn’t recover without a transplant, and that meant sending Cassie under the knife. I felt trapped by choices, all of them bad. ‘What I’m saying is – I need the money. The money Dad left.’

  She was silent. I remembered how I’d screamed at her, after the funeral. That I didn’t need his money – not even that much, a few grand – that I didn’t want anything more to do with her. That she should have walked years ago, the moment he first hit her. The moment he first hit me. And here I was crawling back.

  Then she said, ‘It’s your money, Alison. I always said you could have it. I’ll have them draw up a transfer.’

  ‘Thanks. I – I’ll send the account details.’

  Another long silence. ‘It must be hard,’ she said, and I heard a crack of sympathy in her voice down the line, from her dingy little semi in Hull, and my heart threatened to crack open the same, and I could not bear to let it in, so I hung up, and found myself with tears scorching my throat.

  ‘Ali?’

  Bill was in the doorway, bags of shopping in his hands. He’d been gone when I came in from the hospital and forced myself to call my mother. He was always washing up, or cooking, or even doing laundry and making beds. As if he had to earn his place here, as if I wasn’t totally reliant on him already. I imagined what my mother would say about that – or what Karen would say, for that matter. I was being weak again. Replacing one man with another. And although it was nice, to have him do all this, it only made the house feel even less like my own. He did things differently, stacked the dishes in the wrong cupboards, bought the wrong brands of cleaning products. Everything had changed.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Did something happen at the hospital? Is Mike—?’

  ‘No. Well, he’s not good, but no change. The police came.’

  ‘Why?’

  I searched Bill’s face, his dark eyes. I tried to think of a time he’d ever hurt me, or been cruel, or neglectful, or failed to consider me. I couldn’t. Bill would not have told the police about Martha. He wouldn’t do that, not to me. He’d promised me as much, because to tell the truth would be to bring me down as well, and I believed Bill would never do that, even though I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. No, it must have been Karen.

  Bill was still watching me, the bags weighing heavy on him, and I wondered why he didn’t put them down. ‘Well, what happened?’

  ‘It’s Karen,’ I said. ‘She’s fighting back.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I remember the first time I ever saw the spires of Oxford. Unlike most people in my year, I hadn’t been before I came down for interview. My school didn’t bother running outreach trips; none of us were expected to go to university at all, let alone here. I got off a coach on the high street on a freezing December evening, my breath streaming into the cold air. There was no one around. I struggled to follow the map I’d drawn myself from Dad’s road atlas, and when I walked down a small alley into Radcliffe Square, there it was: the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, its lights blazing against the cold starry sky. When I reached college a few streets later, it was like something from Narnia or Tolkien, the tiny gate set in the stone walls, the hidden garden with touches of snow round the edges. And it had me then – I started to want what I’d never even known I was allowed to before. I knew, too, that I would likely not get in. Everyone else on interviews was so loud, so confident, and I shrank back as they hit balls on the pool table in the common room. In the centre of them all, her eyelinered gaze taking everything in, was Karen. I would not have dreamed that we’d both get in, and more, that she’d become my best friend.

  More than three years later, Martha Rasby would lie dead behind the same walls. And now I was here again, finally, to try and find out why.

  ‘Ali!’

  Victoria had aged, I saw with a shock. I remembered her as a posh, horsey twenty-year-old, but her hair was touched with grey and her eyes disappeared behind severe glasses. She’d put on weight, too, and the vanished years hit me. We were women in our forties now, as Martha should have been, but she was gone.

  Victoria Adams, who’d surprised everyone by being quietly excellent at Chemistry, when we’d all thought she only knew how to ride horses and buy clothes, had become Dean of Admissions at our college five years ago. I’d messaged her on Facebook, pretending I was scoping out a college for Cassie, and she’d warmly invited me to visit. It occurred to me that maybe people in my year had had these same entry points. Ways of being ushered in, of making things easier. That was what privilege meant.

  I knew that college would have been winding down at this point in the year, some students busy with Finals and the others slacking off ahead of the summer. The place seemed quiet, no one revising on the lawn like we used to. When I knocked on the door of her office – her name, Dr Adams, painted in cursive script – she came to meet me. ‘Oh, you didn’t bring your daughter?’

  ‘She’s in the middle of exams. Between you and me, she hasn’t made her mind up about applying yet.’ Poor Cassie. She was unlikely to get in, with her mediocre mocks results. I remembered how Mike had turned to me, bewildered that we hadn’t turned out another top-hitter, and I’d felt, obscurely, that it was my fault, with my lower-class genes.

  ‘Well, it’s lovely to see you. How’s Mike?’ From the way she said it, I could tell she didn’t know. Maybe the news didn’t penetrate these walls.

  ‘Ticking along,’ I lied.

  ‘Coffee?’

  I let her make us some, filling a little kettle from a sink hidden away in a cupboard. The walls were hung with pictures of Matriculating classes going back years. I got up and scanned them, looking for ours. I found it, searching for us among the scrubbed, moon-faced first years in our black and white garb. There I was, with my unplucked eyebrows and ratty hair. Karen in the back row, wearing too much eyeliner. I remembered she’d turned up in fishnets that day. And Martha, standing out with her shining pale hair.

  Victoria had come up behind me. ‘Seems like a long time, doesn
’t it.’

  ‘Eons. But this is great, you’re working here!’

  She sat down at the sofa area, placing the two mugs on the coffee table and indicating for me to join her. ‘Things have changed since our days. I don’t know if you’ve seen the brochure, but we have a new boathouse, a new common room—’

  I had to play this carefully; I didn’t want her to throw me out. ‘Victoria – something odd happened the other day.’ I’d already decided not to mention the rape. If the college didn’t know, I wanted to keep it that way. ‘The police came to see Mike.’ I left out the part where Mike was unconscious, sinking further every day. How easy it came to me, all these lies.

  ‘Oh?’ She was frowning.

  ‘They were asking about – Martha.’

  I saw her jump at the name, as if I’d slapped her. Martha had been her best friend, and I tried to imagine how it would have been to lose Karen back then.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you remember, after the ball, they interviewed lots of us?’

  Her hands were white around her coffee mug. ‘Yes. It was so horrible.’

  ‘They had this idea that Mike – that maybe Mike had been with her. I think he helped her sit down or something. You remember, she was – she’d been drinking more than usual.’

  ‘I tried to stop her.’ Victoria’s voice had dropped. ‘I said I’d take her home, but she – I couldn’t get her to leave.’ Guilt saturated her tone. It had been our creed back then – make sure your friends get home safe. Call them a taxi. Always our responsibility to keep ourselves safe, never the men’s not to hurt us.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. The thing is, the whole business seems to be surfacing again. I guess because they never caught the guy.’

  ‘Why now?’ she frowned. I knew that, as soon as I left, she would likely Google Mike and find out the whole thing. Word of it would spread through our college network, over email and Messenger, whispered in City wine bars and at sporadic birthday meetups until everyone knew: I’d married a rapist. Unless I could turn this all around.

  ‘I don’t know. A cold case thing, maybe.’

  ‘And what can I do?’ Her manner had cooled so much I felt chilly.

  ‘I just need to see what you remember. Try to – piece it all together, I guess. It’s so hard to recall every moment.’

  She relaxed a fraction. ‘I know. I find myself reliving it all the time. How did I manage to lose her for so long? You know, you’re drinking, you’re having fun, and before you know it three hours have gone by.’

  I nodded. ‘It’s all such a blur. When did you last see her?’

  She squinted. ‘I guess it was in Main Quad. She was dancing with a whole crowd of people and I saw her stumble, so I said maybe get some water, yeah, but she wouldn’t. You know, Christian had broken up with her that week and I think it was the first time she’d ever been turned down for anything. You remember Martha, she was so lovely, but nothing bad had ever happened to her. It was a shock. So she was drinking – a lot, for her.’ She glanced at me. ‘I did see her with Mike at one point, in there – the Fellows’ Garden. I remember because – well, he was usually with you.’ She would have noticed, as others did, that Mike and I weren’t together at the ball. She’d maybe have seen our altercation on the lawn. Perhaps she’d even have speculated as to what Mike was doing with me in the first place, when I’d give up and realise it was just a dalliance for him. I didn’t ask if it was Victoria who told the police Mike had been seen helping Martha into the garden – any number of people might have done that.

  ‘How was she then?’

  ‘Pretty drunk. I tried to take her home but – she wouldn’t. She wanted to stay.’ Victoria shrugged, but I saw the weight of guilt on her. If only she’d insisted harder, Martha would maybe still be alive.

  I picked up my coffee and sipped. ‘He said he took her there to sober up – that she wanted some peace and quiet, so he left her there, and then a while later someone ran up to say she’d been found.’ That someone had been Jodi, of course, always first with bad news, but I shied away from revealing I could, in fact, recall many details of that night verbatim. ‘Then the police talked to all of us and it seemed like they’d made their minds up about Mike, because he’d been seen with her.’

  Victoria traced absent-minded circles around her coffee cup. ‘Martha was an only child,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s why her parents spoiled her a little. They were just broken when she died. It ruined them.’

  It had ruined a lot of things, her death. And yet the six of us had managed to walk away unscathed. Or so I’d thought. ‘It was so awful.’

  She frowned at me. ‘You saw Mike after he left her in the garden?’

  After so many years, it came smoothly into my mouth. ‘Yes – he said she was fine then. It was just – bad luck. Wrong place wrong time.’

  Her frown deepened. ‘Worse for Martha.’ I wondered if I hadn’t played it right after all, if I’d made things even worse.

  ‘Of course.’ I set my cup down, leaned forward earnestly. ‘Victoria, I think about Martha all the time. I know we weren’t that close, but she was so lovely, so pretty. But I’m just trying to help my husband. None of it was his fault.’ But was it, was it? Could I be so sure now? I held her gaze, steady.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just giving you a heads-up, in case the police start looking into it again. I didn’t think the college would be happy.’ It would be bad for them too, to have it all dredged up again, the death of a student within its walls, the suspicion that another student had strangled her, left her spread out on the cool green lawn with her white silk dress torn and rumpled, her skin even paler than the fabric. No one needed that image in their minds. Martha was dead, and that was a tragedy, but there was nothing we could do about it now.

  Victoria nodded, and although I knew now we’d never be cordial again, I also knew I’d got what I came for. ‘Of course not. I’ll just tell them what I did back then. That she was drunk, and Mike took her to sit down.’

  It’s funny how, at times like this, words take on so much weight. How many I’ve spilled over the years, careless, like pocket change, but in the two times in my life where I’ve been close to a crime, every one is like a landmine. Victoria had said, I did see her with Mike. Mike had never told me Victoria saw him with Martha. The way he’d described it, he’d just left her in the garden then gone right away. Helping her out. Not lingering in a dark, perfumed garden with the most beautiful girl in our year, drunk and willing.

  My taxi reached the train station, having passed so many familiar landmarks it made my heart ache, and I climbed the steps. It was then that I finally thought to take out my phone, and there they were: three missed calls from Cassie’s school.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said once again. ‘How can you suspend her when it’s not her fault?’

  Cassie was outside the office of the deputy head, Miss Hall, in the waiting area. I could hear her ragged sobs through the walls. They were different from the ones she’d cried when her father was stabbed. More broken. Like she’d given up already. A crying jag, my mother used to call it.

  ‘We believe she sent the image to Aaron. And unfortunately it seems a few other boys were – exposed to it.’ As if Cassie was at fault, contaminating them. Miss Hall was a sporty, inscrutable type, wearing a grey trouser suit. I saw a cross peep out from around her neck. What must she think of us?

  ‘So what? It’s of her, she’s entitled to if she wants.’ I was trying to sound reasonable, sex-positive and forward-thinking, as if I truly believed in the right of my fifteen-year-old daughter to photograph herself topless, her bra and vest top huddled shamefully around her waist, and send it to her boyfriend.

  ‘Technically, Mrs Morris, it’s illegal to send sexual images of anyone under eighteen.’

  ‘Even of herself?’

  ‘Even of herself, yes.’

  ‘So let me g
et this straight. It’s not illegal for these boys to share a picture of her . . .’ My vision popped around the edges, thinking of them, those disgusting animals, walking tubes of semen and sweat, scrolling their fat dirty fingers over their phone screens. Leaving smears on her face. ‘. . . but it’s Cassie getting in trouble for taking what she thought was private? Why aren’t they being punished? Why isn’t Aaron suspended?’

  ‘Unfortunately, we can’t prove Aaron sent it on.’ She was twiddling a pen between her red, dry fingers and it was starting to get right on my nerves. I wanted to punch it out of her hands.

  ‘Of course he did, don’t be ridiculous . . .’

  ‘He claims a friend stole his phone.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘He won’t say.’

  I stared at her over the desk. ‘I suppose it’s just a coincidence that Aaron’s captain of the rugby team, and his father paid for the new sports centre?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss other pupils with you. This is about Cassie. We really feel it would be best for her if she was removed from school for a few weeks.’

  ‘She has exams!’ She’d only managed to go to school twice, and both times I’d been called to pick her up.

  ‘There’s a centre. Many students aren’t enrolled in school and . . .’

  That was just great. Cassie, shunted off to the special centre with the home-schooled weirdos and the kids who’d been excluded for setting fire to things. Away from her friends, her routines. Just because some sleazy boys had looked at her picture. And how had Aaron got it? Had he forced her into posing? I felt my blood boil in my ears and I was worried, I really was worried for a minute I was going to hit the woman.

  ‘I honestly believe this is the best outcome,’ she said smoothly. ‘As you know, technically we aren’t required to let her sit exams anyway because of the fees issue.’

  I stood up. I didn’t really know why but suddenly I was on my feet and leaning on her desk. I’d knocked over a pot of pencils and I didn’t apologise or move to pick it up, and it was intoxicating. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Miss Hall. A student suffers a terrible loss – her father could die – and then she’s humiliated in front of the entire school, sexually abused really, and all you can think about is punishing her, making her suffer even more. I imagine the media would love to hear about this – a young girl bearing the brunt of what a boy did. Not a word about punishing him for passing on a picture of her, oh no.’