Two Wrongs

by Mel McGrath

  She lifts her head from her arms. Sitting opposite is Daniel something or other, a student she hardly knows, who catches her eye and makes a sad-emoji face. A moment later an email notification appears on her screen via the university’s intranet. Is Satnam going to die? Daniel xoxo.

  It’s only been a few hours since the incident on the bridge and the gossip mill is already churning. Wanting no part of it, Nevis is rising and gathering her things to leave when there comes a tap on her shoulder and she turns to see a tall woman, about her age, with straightened dark brown hair and too much makeup.

  ‘It’s Tash,’ the girl says in response to Nevis’s blank expression.

  Nevis searches her mind. The name Natasha Tillotson pops up. One of the girls in the Valentine’s photograph on Satnam’s feed. Something odd about that photograph, though her mind can’t quite organise itself to work out what. The expression on Satnam’s face?

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tash blocks her way, her face darkening. Nevis protests but still Tash does not move.

  ‘You were there on the bridge, weren’t you? That’s what everyone’s saying.’

  ‘Get out of my way, Tash, please.’ She puts her arms out and gives Tash a hard shove, then finds herself running. A handful of students she does not know are standing waiting for the lift. She runs towards the stairs. On the ground floor she pauses to catch her breath.

  There are things she knows, things she has kept from the police, from Honor, from everyone. The conversation that evening when Satnam reached for the TV remote and switching it to off, said, ‘I’m thinking of leaving Avon.’

  ‘Why?’ Nevis asked, puzzled. Satnam had never given any hint that this was on her mind.

  ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘But you’ve been doing brilliantly.’ This was true. Satnam had struggled towards the end of the first year but since the autumn her grade average had shot up.

  ‘There are things you don’t know about, Nevis. I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.’

  A sharp stab of rejection hit Nevis between the eyes. She said, ‘I thought we were best mates.’

  Satnam reached out and took her hand. ‘We are, and that’s why I can’t tell you.’

  Nevis felt herself pull away. The pain between her eyes reached around her head like a badly fitting hat. Rising from the sofa then, she’d said, ‘I’m going to the library.’

  She moved out into the hallway and grabbed her backpack from her room. When she returned, Satnam was standing by the door, her hands pressed together in a pleading gesture. ‘We could leave Avon together, transfer somewhere else.’

  But Nevis’s legs were already moving from under her, propelling her away from the source of her anguish. Sweeping past Satnam she swung open the front door and tumbled out of the flat onto the landing. She had already reached the bottom of the stairs and had her hand on the door when she heard Satnam cry out, ‘Nevis, come back, please.’

  The phrase haunts her now. The desperation in Satnam’s voice. The cruel way she had ignored it, selfishly caught up in her own muddled feelings of rejection, her fear of having to expose herself. Satnam had been about to confide in her, to share her secret and all she could think about was the secret that she, Nevis, was keeping. If she’d only turned and climbed the stairs and they could have sat back down on the sofa and finished their chips and they could have talked. But there was no way back from her wounded pride. Her stupidity. That pain which clutched her skull. She saw now how much keeping her own secret had twisted her, how it had crept in and poisoned the only real friendship she had ever had. Satnam had offered her a chance to break away from all that but when it came to it, her courage had failed her and she’d abandoned her friend when Satnam had most needed her support.

  She makes her way home, climbs the damp, greasy staircase to the flat which, until the early hours of this morning, she shared with Satnam. At the top of the stairs she stops and fingers the keys in her backpack and alights on Satnam’s phone. A bloom of relief that the police had believed her when she’d said she didn’t have it. The desire she had only moments ago for a cup of tea and some Marmite toast has gone now. She feels dirty, itchy. Making her way to the tiny bathroom, she pulls off her clothes, dives in the shower with the water on its hottest setting and scrubs herself with a nailbrush until her skin hurts. Afterwards, she opens the bathroom door and takes a step out. The door to Satnam’s room which remains half open from when last night, in a panic, Nevis rushed in, hoping against hope that the woman on the other end of the phone was wrong, that there had been some mistake and that the Satnam she knew and loved was fast asleep in her room. Inside the room empty air stirs. On the bedside table sits the opened bottle of vodka Satnam must have thought would give her courage. Nevis wonders now if she should have told the police everything she knew and whether not telling them had simply added to her betrayal but it is too late now. She has lied to them, or, at least, failed to tell the truth and there is no way back from that.

  She shuts the door to Satnam’s bedroom and moves through the hallway to her own. Shaking out the coverlet and laying it over the bed, she picks up the lamp and bends the dent in the lampshade strut back to the perpendicular, straightens the poster and replaces the socks in their colour coded pockets in the drawer. Finally, she puts her own phone and Satnam’s on to charge. Her shift at the chippy starts in four hours. Till then, what’s called for is sleep. She falls into bed naked, screws her eyes shut and waits. From two floors down the rumble of traffic makes its way into her bones before it reaches the ear. Twenty minutes later her head is still swimming. Getting up, she pulls on fresh underwear, a clean pair of Levi’s 501s and one of her several identical long-sleeved Breton tees. In some corner of her mind a small, angry red top spins. How strange that she should be angry. But perhaps in the circumstances anger is forgivable or even normal? Or perhaps it’s just a defence to make the guilt endurable.

  There are things you don’t know about, Nevis.

  She wonders if all this will make her crazy.

  Unplugging her phone from the charger, she half hopes by some miracle to see a message from Satnam, whilst knowing that miracles only happen in films. Satnam’s phone sits charged and locked. She tries a few number combinations and, failing to open it, slides the device into her pocket. In the kitchen she puts the kettle on to boil and, digging out a filter from the drawer beside the fridge, measures two scoops of ground coffee onto a scale, then tips it into the AeroPress, taps the dead silverfish from an old Games of Thrones mug and sets the press over the lip. Scenes from last summer in Hackney flicker in her mind: Sat and Luke and Honor sitting under the cratch cover at the ship’s bow eating Honor’s spag bol, watching the swifts swooping to catch mosquitoes dancing above the water. Sat and Nevis sitting on the bank of the canal spotting kingfishers while Luke and Honor shared a spliff on deck. Returning in the dimming light and accidentally disturbing a troupe of cygnets bracketed by their anxious parents. What else can she recall? Satnam was struggling academically back then. There was coursework over the summer which Nevis helped her complete. Her grades weren’t disastrous but she had twice flunked maths and had just completed a remedial course. Satnam hadn’t told Narinder and Bikram that. She said once that if she failed to shine academically, her parents would put more and more pressure on her to drop out and get married. They had picked a suitable candidate. Their discovery that she was seeing Luke most likely exacerbated the situation. She didn’t talk about it much, but Nevis knew that Narinder and Bikram didn’t like Satnam dating period, let alone dating a gora from outside the culture. When she’d said she’d had enough did she mean she’d tired of fighting her parents, grown weary of having one foot in each culture and forever being caught between two cultures? Had she told Luke that their relationship had no future? Is that why Luke had dumped her back in November? Had she decided to go back home and marry? Is that what she meant when she’d said she was thinking of leaving Avon?

 
; If that was so, then why had she made such an effort to improve her grades this year? Why had she told Nevis that as a result her parents had eased up on her about getting married and begun to be more focused on seeing her graduate and getting a good job? And why had she drunk a bottle of vodka, downed a bunch of pills and taken herself off to the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

  Was she feeling the loss of Luke? Had she tried to get back together with him and been rejected? Or had her parents changed their minds and started pressuring her to leave Avon and marry? What did she mean by saying there are things you don’t know? What things and why had she kept them to herself? Didn’t they share everything? Had Nevis done something to kill their friendship? Was that what she was going to tell her when she called her to the bridge?

  The coffee trickles into the cup. She adds some water from the kettle, sits down at the tiny table and checks her texts and voicemail inboxes. A couple of messages from Honor. On Satnam’s social, Daniel and a few others have written sentimental or otherwise morbid get-well messages. She finishes her coffee and checks her student email but Dr Ratner has not yet responded to her request for a deadline extension. She’s about to leave the system when she sees another notification. She clicks. An email from Tash Tillotson pops onto the screen.

  You know, don’t you?

  Her eyes slide across the words. She reads again, desperately searching for another meaning but the words remain the same. She feels herself fall and wobble. In her stomach something bitter churns. She just makes it to the bathroom in time before the sickness rises.

  Chapter 10

  Cullen

  Cullen comes off the call with the Vice Chancellor feeling uneasy. The pain in his head has gone south into his neck. He calls out to Tina in the departmental office to fetch him some ibuprofen and thinks he should probably get a better office chair. The university will never pay for it, of course. Another thing to find money for.

  He’s knocking back the pills with a slug of Famous Grouse when Veronica calls.

  ‘I’ve just got back from shopping,’ she says, ominously. She has a way of saying the most unwelcome things in such a lovely, mellifluous tone that it catches you unawares. She’s been catching Cullen unawares for years. He really should have spotted from the moment he met her, he close to finishing his PhD, she a new graduate, that the Hon. Veronica Fanshawe-Drew would prove to be a money pit. Even then he saw that she was a daddy’s girl, dreamy and fun-loving but also spoilt and hopelessly impractical. One time, he remembers, she spilled hot sauce on her dress and, rather than wash it, threw the thing away. He should have read the runes right then. But he’d had so little experience with women, he was so completely naïve, and God, Veronica had such energy, she was so absolutely charming and so physically beautiful whilst being so completely unlike her. More to the point, she seemed so impressed with him, that he couldn’t help being won over. She appeared to have it all. A beautiful loft apartment in central Manchester, a paid internship in an art gallery and family with money. She was the only person Cullen had ever met who bought art. The thought she might be the sort of woman who would require financial upkeep didn’t occur to him. Within months Cullen had moved into Veronica’s loft apartment. Fourteen weeks later the Fanshawe-Drews lost everything in the financial crash and Cullen discovered that the flat was heavily mortgaged. Still Cullen thought everything would be fine. He and Veronica were happy and, with his newly minted PhD and the offer of a lectureship at Manchester Metropolitan, he felt secure enough to ask her to marry him. After they returned from honeymoon Veronica began to complain that the funding cuts made her job impossible and she wanted to leave. Cullen focused his own energies on finding a better paid job. A Senior Lectureship came up at Avon, Cullen applied and got it. The pay was modest but Cullen didn’t tell Veronica that. They moved to Bristol and Cullen was shocked by how much more expensive than Manchester it was. Veronica drifted for a while then managed to use her contacts to swing a part-time job at the Bristol Art Gallery. Everything seemed to settle until Veronica came home one day to say she’d spotted her dream home, a Georgian villa on the northern fringes of Clifton. It was way more than they could afford but Veronica wouldn’t be persuaded out of it. Her father called in a few favours to secure the couple a mortgage and seven weeks after Veronica had first spotted it in the estate agent’s window, the house was theirs, or rather, it was mostly the bank’s. Perhaps only the study and the downstairs cloakroom truly belonged to them, but over the years that would change as the mortgage was paid. With two salaries it would be manageable but they couldn’t afford to be complacent. A year into the job at Avon Cullen vaulted over Mark Ratner to take the position of Head of Department and increased his salary by 20 per cent. A year after that he was promoted to Dean. It was around that time Veronica started complaining of stress and before long she’d left the gallery with no plans to work again. So far as Cullen could tell she now spent much of her time at the gym or in the cafe inside the gym or window shopping. He’d wanted a lover and a wife but it seemed to him increasingly that he’d become the keeper of a very expensive exotic pet. That’s when, for him, the loneliness set in. Her desire for a baby only made things worse. Strangely, he still loved her, though it would have been easier if he didn’t.

  ‘Is that why you’re calling?’ he asks now.

  ‘No, darling, of course not. I’m calling because there was a man in the drive when I got back. He said he needed to talk to you. I offered to give him your number but he said it would be best face to face so I told him to come back when you’re in. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it but he looked a bit of a thug so I was worried.’

  Cullen blinks and swallows. He doesn’t recall giving out his address. On the other hand, people like that, thugs, they can find that stuff out pretty easily these days.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be nothing.’

  ‘I won’t then. You’ll be home in good time tonight, won’t you darling? I’m still ovulating.’

  ‘One of my students attempted suicide last night so probably not.’ In fact the incident on the bridge is unlikely to keep him late but he has no desire to encounter the man on the driveway or, indeed, Veronica on heat. He could do with a night on his own. A few drinks in the pub and a nice supper somewhere. Maybe even a film. Return once Veronica is asleep. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t tell me any of the details, I can’t handle it. The man in the driveway was bad enough. Now we’re trying to get pregnant I need to stay centred.’

  A sour feeling rises from Cullen’s belly and settles in his mouth. Veronica’s use of the plural subject pronoun displeases him. We are not trying to get pregnant. Veronica is trying and Cullen is going along with it for the same reason he always goes along with his wife, for the sake of an easy life and because being married to the Honourable Veronica makes him feel a little less like the dishonourable Christopher. He switches off the pregnancy monologue and allows his mind to focus on more immediate things, like the conversation he’s just had with his old flame, the VC, Maddy Ince. He did not, for a minute, believe what he had told Keane, that it was possible that what had happened to Satnam Mann was an accident, and he told Maddy so. Nonetheless, he thought that if the parents were willing to believe it was then they should go with it, not only out of solidarity but also because the accident theory offered the university – and himself – a get-out clause. An unfortunate accident. End of story. His advice to Maddy, therefore, was to allow the whole thing to blow over, which was precisely what he sensed Maddy wanted to hear. Not that he was ever likely to disagree with Maddy on anything of substance. She’d made sure of that. He was OK with the fact that he was, at least to some extent, Maddy’s creature. It was she who’d helped him leapfrog over Ratner and secure the position as Head of Department and, before long, Dean. They went way back, knew one another’s secrets.

  A part of him feels oddly admiring of Satnam Mann. Envious almost. Isn’t suicide a rational response to unbearable pain? W
hen you look at it like that, doesn’t it seem perfectly reasonable, courageous even? Who hasn’t wanted to be free of the bewilderment of being alive at least once? For some people, people like him, and, he knows now, like Satnam, the feeling that you could take your own life at any time is just an extension of everyday existence. More than that, it’s a freedom knowing you’ve always got an out. Funny, Cullen usually has a gift for detecting that small, insistent bead of self-destruction which lurks inside more people than are willing to admit it. Like dogs trained to scent out cancer, Cullen has a nose for a death wish. Which makes it all the more surprising that he missed it this time round.

  He swallows another coffee, asks Tina to take messages if anyone calls and heads down the corridor and then down two flights of stairs and through a series of fire doors to Mark Ratner’s office in the Biosciences building.

  ‘Bit busy right now. Can it wait?’ Ratner says.

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if it could wait.’ Has Ratner gone mad? He might be a decade older but Cullen is his senior. He doesn’t have to wait for Ratner any more. Ratner has to wait for Cullen.

  Ratner hasn’t heard the news so Cullen relays as much as he knows. ‘I’ve just spoken to the VC. She’s keen for us to lie low on this but in private wants an audit of the bioscience modules.’

  ‘Why?’ Ratner says, looking alarmed.

  ‘She’s just being cautious. Wants to make sure we’re not putting undue pressure on the students.’

  ‘Biosciences is a challenging subject,’ Ratner says.

  ‘Do you have a pen? I’d like to write that down.’ Cullen watches Ratner go red then recover himself. ‘Look, Mark, I think you know what I’m going to say.’

  ‘Yes. All eyes on the department for a while. Best behaviour.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well you don’t have to worry about me. I’ve been a good boy for months now.’