About Last Night

by Adele Parks

  ‘I’ll call her now,’ she mumbled. Pip tried Steph’s mobile but there was no answer, the phone was dead or off again. ‘She’s probably at the hospital. They don’t allow mobile phones to be switched on there. I’ll try her home number, her mother or father will be there.’

  Subhash didn’t know Pip very well at all, despite Stephanie’s numerous colourful and complimentary personality sketches, but he didn’t need to know her well to understand that when she managed to talk to Stephanie’s family, she was burdened with more bad news. The colour drained from her face, her fingers drummed up and down on the table and she sat in a blatant pool of anxiety. He listened to a series of ‘uh huhs’, ‘ohs’, and ‘OK, OK’, before Pip hung up.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They’ve taken Steph into the police station for questioning. She’s been there all day. Her father is looking for a good lawyer.’

  48

  Steph was put in a small room which had a tiny Formica table and three plastic chairs in the centre of it and very little else. Notably, there was no window and so the air felt stale, it had been breathed in and out too many times. The chairs were arranged so that one chair was on one side of the tatty table and two on the other. The set-up was stark and intimidating. Sergeant Brown said she was to wait until someone came to talk to her. Steph tried not to show her frustration or fear.

  ‘And how long might that be?’ She’d wanted to sound polite but her voice came out strident and shrill.

  ‘There’s been a big security alert in the shopping precinct. We’re quite tied up,’ the sergeant explained. ‘It won’t be a bomb. It’ll just be some bored kids. Setting off alarms and making crank calls.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ observed Steph.

  ‘Well, yes.’ The policewoman looked uncomfortable and Steph wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She didn’t know much about police procedure but she knew enough about human nature to realise that this process would not be speeded up if she came across as an unlikable smart-arse.

  So, as an afterthought, Steph commented, ‘It’s marvellous that you are taking it so seriously.’ Then she wanted to kick herself. What else would the police do with a bomb alert? Or a dubious alibi to a hit-and-run case, for that matter. Serious was their thing.

  ‘It creates a lot of paperwork,’ added the policewoman with a sigh.

  ‘I can imagine. What a nuisance,’ Stephanie tut-tutted.

  What was wrong with her? Nerves, she supposed. She couldn’t seem to find the right tone. A bomb scare was more than a nuisance. Forgetting your sturdy, re-usable shopping bags when you went to the supermarket was a nuisance. A bomb scare was a tragedy. The problem was Steph had been up close and personal with tragedy this week and had been forced to keep her chin up and carry on as normal, no matter how unnatural normal felt. Now, she no longer knew what normal was. She sounded like an idiot. A clueless idiot.

  The sergeant asked if she wanted a cup of tea. Steph said no thank you but someone brought her a cup anyway. A young policeman, he looked as though he was about a year older than Harry. At first, Steph ignored the tea in the chipped mug but after what seemed like a lifetime of being left alone in the room she eventually took a sip, simply because it was something to do. The tea was milky and sugary which suggested they’d recognised she was in shock.

  Steph looked around the room. It was even less interesting than a dentist’s waiting room, at least there she might expect to find some dog-eared, three-year-old magazines about antiques or horse riding. In the police interview room there was nothing to read except the posters on the walls which cautioned drivers to hide their valuables and lock their doors. Steph thought perhaps she ought to have locked Julian up more carefully so he was safe from stray drivers and perhaps she should have hidden him away so he was protected from loose, enticing women. There was a clock on the wall that slowly counted out time. Steph had been left on her own for twenty-two minutes now. She wondered whether all the police staff were really very busy or whether this was part of the process. Maybe they wanted to make her sweat or give her time to think. Was she on an enormous naughty step and her ‘time out’ was supposed to bring her to her senses?

  Steph knew she was unlikely to be deprived of food or water, she didn’t expect that she would be beaten or even threatened. She was a middle-class woman of a certain age, who lived in Riverford. There would be a lawyer and a series of uncomfortable questions.

  And yet.

  And yet it was torture. Stephanie Blake was a woman who had always lived her life well. She’d tried to be a good person, a good neighbour, friend, daughter, mother and wife. It hadn’t always been easy. Sometimes, it had been tricky but she rarely gossiped, she found no pleasure in insulting, slighting or hurting and she felt uncomfortable lying. She wasn’t a saint. Sometimes, she did fall into gossip and she could be a little snobby or impatient but she was aware of these faults and tried hard to keep them in check. She had tried to be good. So what had gone wrong? How could she possibly be here, in a stale room breathing in the air criminals had expunged?

  Julian’s affair? Her thing with Subhash? What came first? The chicken or the egg?

  Carefully she bent forward and rested her cheek on the scratched Formica table. The cool plastic took some of the heat out of her cheeks. She wasn’t sure if she was hot with fury or with shame but she burned.

  Steph stayed still with her head resting on the table for a long time. Exhaustion might have overwhelmed her and she might have even dropped off to sleep for a few moments, it was hard to know because asleep or awake she fought nightmares.

  Why weren’t the police coming to talk to her?

  What would she say if they did?

  It was now obvious that Pip had decided not to offer an alibi. Stephanie was hurt. It wasn’t a searing, gaping hole of a pain, like the pain of knowing her husband had screwed someone else, it wasn’t even like the pain she’d felt for months when she’d imagined that she wanted to be with Subhash and knew that she couldn’t be. It was a throbbing, insistent pain. Betrayal and heartache, it seemed, came in many, many guises.

  Stupid, scatty, spineless Pip. The anger bubbled in Steph’s chest and head. It rushed about like hot lava but there was nowhere for it to flow. She should be with Julian right now. Or the children. She shouldn’t be here. Pip could have saved her from this indignity, at least. What would it have cost her to tell this lie? It was not as though Pip was above lying, she did it all the time if it suited her needs. Her needs! That was the point. Steph hadn’t asked anything of Pip for years now. Probably the last time she’d asked for a favour was almost twenty years ago when she had first introduced Pip and Julian. She’d asked Pip not to be too charming around him.

  Steph remembered the conversation so clearly. Pip had travelled to Birmingham for Steph’s nineteenth birthday celebration. Steph and many of her friends, including Julian, were meeting in the student bar and then, if the night had the right vibe and the students had enough cash, their plan was to go a local pizzeria and finally on to a nightclub. Steph and Julian were just good friends at that stage. Ostensibly. Even so, she’d had the foresight to warn Pip off. Julian and Steph could never become an item if he’d had a dalliance with Pip first.

  ‘What do you mean too charming?’ Pip had giggled as she linked her arm through Steph’s. It was a chilly late February evening and they were briskly walking to the pub to save a couple of quid on bus fares.

  ‘Don’t seduce him,’ Steph had clarified.

  ‘Me?’ Pip looked startled, as though she thought the idea was absurd. Steph never knew for certain whether Pip honestly didn’t know how attractive she was to the opposite sex or whether she was just good at playing disingenuous.

  ‘You seduce everyone you meet, Pip, whether it’s consciously or not,’ Steph had found herself having to explain. ‘So I’m asking you to take care not to seduce Julian. OK?’

  ‘I thought you said there was nothing going on between the two of you.’

  ‘There is
n’t. But who knows—’

  ‘One day there might be,’ Pip had finished Steph’s sentence as she so often did. The girls had collapsed into giggles, their hot breath causing plumes in the cold night air. They looked like a couple of happy baby dragons.

  Pip had been as good as her word and had never tried to be particularly charming in that way with Julian. Whatever signals she sent out to the rest of the male population that first night, in the shabby pub, the tacky pizzeria and the sweaty nightclub (it had been a great birthday), Pip had managed to direct all her compelling allure away from Julian. She’d been friendly and interesting but not too friendly and not too interesting. Steph had been extremely grateful for Pip’s sensitivity and had never asked anything of Pip since. Now, Steph was beginning to wonder whether she’d been far too grateful to Pip. Perhaps she should have continued to demand various favours over the years, big and small, to keep Pip in the habit of granting them. Perhaps she could have requested the odd cup of sugar and maybe she could have worked up to asking for a kidney. OK, Steph didn’t need a kidney but then Pip might have been more rehearsed in the art of granting favours when it came to providing an alibi.

  Suddenly, a terrible thought occurred to Steph. Maybe Pip hadn’t actually even granted her that favour. Maybe, she simply hadn’t fancied Julian anyway, he certainly wasn’t her type, and that was the reason she hadn’t tried to charm him. Or maybe (and this theory was even harder to believe in light of Pip’s legendary beauty and Julian’s recent infidelity but Steph ran the idea around her head anyway), maybe Julian simply wasn’t interested in Pip and had been impervious to any charms she might have displayed. Was that possible? Steph didn’t know. She was too wound up to think properly. One thing she did know was that she had found herself doing endless favours for Pip. She was always helping out with Chloe’s childcare. Pip asked for advice about everything, from which brand of flour she should bake with to whether or not she should employ an accountant. Steph had helped decorate Pip’s flat and she was always lending her clothes and bags and even their spare bedroom. She was continually giving Pip lifts from A to B and back again.

  Pip owed her!

  But it was impossible for Steph to be unjust. A lifetime of being reasonable and seeing things from everyone’s point of view (which was a great help when adjudicating tussles between the children) meant that she had no choice but to understand Pip’s side of this. Had Pip asked for all of the stuff she had done for her over the years? No, she had not. Steph knew that she had helped with these things and Pip had always been delighted to receive help but Pip had not specifically asked for all these favours. Not all. And even if she had asked, at no point had she held a gun to Steph’s head. Steph had given her support, her time and even her resources freely because she loved Pip. Pip was like a sister to her. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Pip.

  That’s what hurt.

  Steph considered lying on the floor of the small interview room, rolling around on the scuffed lino and howling until she was hoarse. She had been betrayed by her husband in the worst way and now by her friend in an equally damning manner; her husband was in a coma and therefore unable to defend or explain himself but also not a fit receptacle for her anger. Her parents and children were no doubt trauma tised, there would probably be permanent psychological damage. She imagined a strange reversal of type, her parents seeking psychiatric help, lying on a leather couch while a bespectacled doctor listened as they blamed all their woes and insecurities on her – their criminal daughter. Couldn’t Pip at least have mentioned last night that she wasn’t prepared to offer an alibi? Then Stephanie would have had time to think of something else or she might have behaved differently this morning. At the very least she could have protected the children and her parents from the excruciating scene in the hallway. How much had the boys understood? Did they know that their mother had lied to the police and that she was in deep trouble? Deep, deep trouble. How worried they must be.

  Lying on the floor and howling until she was hoarse was indeed an option but Steph knew it wasn’t acceptable behaviour. The truth was she had to take some responsibility for this mess she was in. She had been with Subhash that night and she hadn’t wanted to say so. Steph took a deep breath and then let the air back out through her nose. She clawed through her fuggy mind for some reasonableness and a sense of proportion. Perhaps she shouldn’t blame Pip for not lying to the police. It was a big ask – she realised that. When it came to the crunch, it had probably been too nerve-racking. Lying about a parking ticket was quite a different thing to lying about someone’s whereabouts during an investigation into a hit-and-run (and anyway Steph had never approved of Pip lying about parking tickets).

  Steph’s stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten properly for days and she’d had nothing for breakfast this morning, other than a cup of tea. How long had she been in this room now? A glance at the clock confirmed that she’d been here for just over an hour. If she had been surer of the system (was she wishing she was a more hardened criminal?) she might have had the confidence to bang on the door and yell out that she knew her rights and someone had to talk to her soon but, as it was, she didn’t know her rights. Not at all. The sergeant and the PC had been keen to point out that she wasn’t under arrest and that she didn’t need a lawyer, although she could have one if she preferred. She had said it was unnecessary. Now she thought perhaps she could do with some legal advice. She’d lied to the police and they knew it. That wasn’t good. She didn’t even know if the door was locked or watched, maybe she could simply stand up and walk right out of here. For all that she didn’t know, the questions remained the same. When would they come and talk to her? What would she say when they did?

  As she wasn’t under arrest she had not had to hand over any of her possessions. Steph picked up her handbag from the floor and began to root through it for some sort of entertainment. It wasn’t that she was bored, far from it, but she was becoming irrational, going round in circles, and she needed something to keep her mind and her hands busy.

  Steph’s bag stored her life, or at least everything that was important to her in her life. There were house and car keys and her purse naturally, but those articles didn’t offer any sort of diversion. This wasn’t the moment to empty her bulging purse of receipts (she had a tendency to hang on to receipts, sometimes for longer that the item purchased even lasted). Nor was this the moment to do her make-up although she did have mascara and a lip salve tucked inside one of the bag’s pockets. There were two phones, hers and Julian’s adultery phone. Hers was out of power and she definitely didn’t want to reread Julian’s sex texts again. Then, tucked inside the zip pocket, Steph spotted what she was hoping to find, a tiny photo album in which she stored the school photographs of her boys. School photographs were never the most complimentary or unique photographs, more often than not the moments captured were ones of distraction or embarrassment, yet Steph had a fondness for these photos. She was attracted to the regularity they represented. She liked to flick through the album and look at how her children had grown. There were only three photos of Freddie, one taken at nursery, one from his reception class and the latest. There were three more of Alfie and a total of nine photos of Harry. She took a moment to pull the pictures from the album and then she lined them up on the Formica table. Harry’s photos first, beneath those Alfie’s and then little Freddie’s. She cast her eyes over the inverted pyramid of snaps.

  How quickly they grew. In a blink of an eye Harry had transformed from a chubby-cheeked cherub to a brooding tweenager. He’d once had dimpled knees and now all his joints jutted out at awkward angles, he put Steph in mind of one of those collapsible clothes horses that her mother used to use to air clothes – a series of sharp slants and tilts. His body was at the stage that suggested (threatened) that muscles might suddenly flourish. He was so often anxious or irritated these days. Steph glanced at his photos and tried to pinpoint a year when the easy smiles and giggles were no longer offered up. He was her oldest
and yet in some ways she felt most protective of him. She’d never quite shaken the feeling that he was their experiment. They’d been so clueless when he was first born, sometimes she thought it was a miracle he’d made it this far, trapped as he was between her inexperience and her paranoia. She had managed, though, she had mothered him as best she could and now here he was, at an age when a boy needed his father.

  Stephanie carefully examined Alfie’s photos. His beauty always surprised her. His piercing eyes and wide, frank beam seemed so out of place in this dingy police room, Steph was ashamed that she’d brought him here, even his 2D form deserved better. Then there was her baby. Freddie still had a rosebud mouth that was nearly always prepared to pucker up and bestow a kiss. That would probably end this year if he was anything like his brothers. Soon he would place conditions upon his kisses, only exchanging them for gifts or as greetings and never at the school gate. The school photos did not prove that Freddie had skin that felt as soft as butter, although that was the case, and they did not reveal his trademark flexibility, which came with soft, young bones. He was so bendy that the rest of the family marvelled when they caught him watching TV, a foot hooked up behind his ear as though this position was the most natural and comfortable on earth. The foot-hook always raised a laugh, even from Harry. The photos didn’t smell like her boys, or sound like them; when she stroked the glossy paper the photos did not feel warm and soft and yet they captivated her, held her, shook her. Steph felt weak with longing.