by Mel McGrath
She smiles and says nothing.
Chapter 22
Nevis
Nevis finds Jessica Easton where Tash said she’d be: on a cross-trainer in the gym. She is thinner and more nervy looking in the flesh. Her phone is balanced on the dashboard of the trainer and she is gazing at something on the screen with a blank expression on her face. Nevis approaches, waving. Jessica frowns and slows to a halt, twists an earbud from her right ear.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s about Satnam.’
A shadow moves across Jessica’s face. She reaches for her phone, taps at the screen, and says, ‘Satnam’s not…’
‘No. I think they’d tell me.’ More to the point, perhaps, it would be all over social media.
‘I thought I’d be able get it out of my head here, but…’ Jessica dabs at her hairline with a small white towel. ‘You’re Nevis, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Nevis has seen the girl at a couple of lectures, she realises, but their paths haven’t crossed otherwise.
‘I heard you were at the bridge when it happened…’ Jessica says, clutching the towel. Another student approaches, gestures to the machine. ‘OK, yes, sorry.’ Jessica picks up her phone and steps off the cross-trainer.
The two women move away towards the edge of the room. ‘I spoke to Tash,’ Nevis says.
‘I know, she texted me.’ Twisting the towel in her sinewy hands, Jessica says, ‘Look, Nevis, what exactly is it you think I can help you with?’
‘I’m just trying to figure out why Satnam did what she did. Did she seem OK to you?’
Jessica looks down. ‘You don’t think she’s going to be, like, brain-damaged or anything?’
‘It’s possible.’ Nevis has thought about this, considered the probabilities, but without coming to any conclusions. Satnam could die, she knows that much, and that is enough weight to carry.
Jessica sighs. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been told but at the end of the day, Tash was way out of line with how she acted towards Satnam. We had no idea Satnam would actually, like, do anything like this, though, we really didn’t.’
‘Is this about the Valentine’s Day party?’
Jessica looks up, suddenly wary. ‘Yeah. What did Tash tell you about that?’
‘That you two had an argument about something and Satnam tried to make it better.’
‘Better. Duh, no, I don’t think so.’ She checks herself. ‘So Tash didn’t tell you then?’
‘She said she was drunk and couldn’t remember. I was hoping you might.’
Jessica holds up her bottle. Nevis follows her to the water fountain, waits while she leans in and presses the tap. ‘Oh, you know, not much, chatting shit… stuff…’
‘Can you be more specific?’ Nevis has the distinct feeling that she’s being fobbed off.
Standing up straight now, the water bottle in her hand, Jessica says, ‘Tash had just started seeing an ex of mine which I thought was pretty disloyal. I mean, I would never do anything like that.’ She raises the bottle to her lips. Nevis watches the cords in Jessica’s neck moving. ‘Satnam got in the middle. She wanted to…well, let’s just say she wanted to tell this guy’s wife. You know, spill the beans. But it was, like, whatever.’
‘Satnam didn’t say anything about being depressed or wanting to leave Avon, did she?’
Jessica wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘Oh yeah. We all wanted to leave, you know?’
So Satnam had talked to Tash and Jess about this, but not to her – not until last Sunday. She feels winded, suddenly, and sad. Over the months of their friendship she’d supposed Satnam had told her everything, all her secrets, her desires, her deepest fears. She’s only just learning how much she does not know and the experience is baffling and painful.
‘Why?’
‘When our grades started falling we should have read the runes and gone home. Like after the summer and that shitty maths course we were forced to do. But it was just, like, impossible.’ She has her back to the wall, pressing into its hard surface with her hands. She has pushed her sleeve up and on her skin, furred as a cat’s, a side effect of the anorexia eating her alive, Nevis spots the tracks from cutting. ‘Our parents would have killed us. Tash is the great hope of the family and Satnam’s parents were hassling her to get married and whatever and I knew mine would go mental. They’re high-flyer medic types. Dad says I’m the only bulb in the family with a dimmer switch. So, you know…’
Nevis waits for the stream of chatter to subside. ‘Satnam was doing much better this term.’
‘Well, yeah, for now. But, honestly, how much longer was that likely to last? I was doing brilliantly last term but now I’m back to failing everything.’
Feeling a sudden desire to stand up for her friend, Nevis goes on, ‘But Satnam was working really hard. So why wouldn’t it have lasted?’
Jessica’s hand comes up and covers her mouth. ‘Oh my God. You really don’t know anything, do you?’
The conversation is beginning to feel like a dance whose steps Nevis has not been taught. Confusion whirls inside her and finding no release settles in a knot somewhere inside her mind. She watches the expression on Jessica’s face harden.
‘Look, leaving Avon was just something we were talking about, OK? Like a fantasy, you know, ditching it all in and going to live on a beach in Bali or whatever. Everyone was pissed. Tash was being her usual bitch-self and she and I got into it a bit. Satnam was just trying to make the peace but Tash said some harsh things to her that were totally uncalled for. It was the kind of stupid drunk-row people get into, so let’s just leave it.’
‘But you said it was about an ex.’
Jessica shakes her head. ‘I’ve got to go.’
This whole conversation has been baffling. Why is Jessica being so cryptic? What’s got into her all of a sudden? What is it that she knows and isn’t saying?
In an act of desperation, Nevis reaches out a staying hand and plants it on Jessica’s bony arm. ‘Please.’
The girl blinks and shaking her off, in a low voice, she says, ‘Trust me on this, Nevis, it’s better you don’t find out.’
Chapter 23
Cullen
Driving home with the window down to clear his head, Cullen allows his mind to wander back to the meeting with the Smith girl. There’s something about her; he can’t quite put his finger on it. She brings up in him an uncanny sense of familiarity, almost like déjà vu. His mind is so distracted by the idea that he narrowly misses a red light and has to jam on the brakes. The stolid mass of the Royal Infirmary rises to his left. How did I get here? It comes to him with a jolt that he must have been driving round the city without realising it. He gazes up at the building, lights ablaze in the dark, thoughts turning to Satnam Mann. Silly girl. Even if she survives, she’ll be ruined.
The lights go green. Cullen’s foot lands heavily on the accelerator. The car surges forward and there is a moment, a microsecond only, when his mind empties and goes blank. At the next set of lights he feels himself come to, as if waking from a dream. Recovering himself and in full control of the car once more, he makes a left turn at the next lights and heads northwest in the direction of Clifton. Christ, he thinks, what’s got into me? Am I going mad?
Shaken, he reaches across the passenger seat to open the glove box and gropes about among all the unopened bills for the quarter bottle of Famous Grouse he keeps tucked away, remembers that the last bottle was empty and that he threw it out. Though hang on, isn’t there a miniature somewhere? In goes his hand again and out it comes triumphant. He unscrews the top with his teeth and takes a swig but the whisky, rather than steadying his nerves, sends him adrift on a sea of memories he’d rather forget. In his mind’s eye he is in the living room at the tiny flat he shared with his mother all those years ago, waiting for the police to arrive. He remembers Amanda producing a half-empty bottle of Courvoisier and a couple of glasses, saying, ‘Here, let’s have a quick snifter, calm our nerves. I’ve got mints for
after. It’ll be all right.’ His jacket was still damp, he remembers, even though it was early morning and he’d been inside for the best part of eight hours and she’d put it in the dryer because it hadn’t started raining until nearly midnight and they had agreed that the story for the police would be that he’d arrived back from the Mathematics Society drinks party at ten thirty and that whoever said they’d seen him later than that must have mistaken him for someone else. Earlier, when he’d arrived home, ragged and terrified, she’d stood by him while he washed his body in the shower and turned the heat up to stop him shivering. ‘It’s just shock,’ she said. He’d been sick of course. That was nerves. She’d said, ‘Oh, my darling boy, whatever it is, it’s best that you don’t tell me. Don’t ever let me hear it from your mouth.’ And so he’d had to sit with it pressing down on him, threatening to suffocate him, until after the police had finished talking to him, which, as it turned out, hadn’t been for the best part of a week. But that’s where his mind is now: that first morning after the incident, scared witless but understanding that his mother, without even knowing the circumstances, would come good on her promise and that when the police came she would lie for him.
Oh, my darling boy.
It had been years since he’d been that, and would never be it again, but from that day on, he became dependent on her nostalgia, on the fantasy she clung to that he had needed protecting because he hadn’t done anything wrong, that she knew he hadn’t, that he couldn’t have, because he had never spoken of it and because he always told her everything. She found out from the police, and so was able to muster the shock and righteous rage that someone should have slandered her darling boy.
Don’t ever let me hear it from your mouth.
He toughened up that night, matured overnight. He never had told Amanda what really happened. He never had to. She knew he was guilty. Why else had she put his jacket in the dryer and escorted him to the shower? Why had she helped him scrub his fingernails and throw his clothes in the wash? Why else had she lied for him?
‘Oh no, officer, that cannot be because, you see, at 10.30 p.m. my boy came home and for the rest of the evening he was here, watching TV, keeping his mother company.’
What he had done, the thing that from now on they would both be forced to wipe from their minds, that had given her a power over him. From then on, he knew that he would always be in her debt and that at any time she could call it in. The truth would undo him and they both knew it. For the past two decades she has chosen to keep the secret, but never for a moment has he doubted the possibility that this might, without warning, one day change. All it would take would be a cross word, a wrong move, a slippage in his attentiveness towards her. For twenty years he has been living in the shadow of what she did for him that night. For twenty years he has known too that she did it not to save him so much as to redeem herself. She was not a woman who had birthed a monster. She was the mother of a mathematical prodigy who, out of envy, two spiteful girls had tried and failed to bring down.
He parks his gloominess in the driveway, puts the bottle back among the bills in the glove compartment and walks to the front door of the house he cannot afford. Veronica is in the kitchen with her earbuds in, humming along to music. On the kitchen island is laid out an assortment of plates. There is a smell of roasting meat.
Cullen stares at the kitchen table, laid for six, two bottles of red wine already uncorked and airing. His heart sinks. He’d forgotten. Right now, feeling as inexplicably fragile as he does, he needs a dinner party about as much as a dose of the clap.
Veronica turns and smiles. ‘Hello darling.’ There’s a moment’s pause during which he does his best to put his face into neutral, but it’s too late. She stops chopping. Her nose twitches. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? The Grays and the Askews coming over?’
‘I’m not feeling a hundred per cent,’ he says, feebly.
‘Don’t be such a misery guts. It’s only the neighbours. They’ll all be gone by 10.30. Have a glass of wine and cheer up. I opened a couple of bottles of that burgundy you like,’ she says, gesturing towards the table without turning round. ‘Since it’s a special occasion, I’ll let you off your alcohol fast.’
Cullen goes over to the table. There’s nothing he can do or say to get out of the evening without incurring Veronica’s wrath. And he does like the burgundy. As well he might from the price tag. He’s pouring himself a glass when the doorbell buzzes.
‘That’s probably the Askews,’ Veronica says, half turning from the sink. ‘They’re always early. Will you go?’
Oh God, he thinks, he can’t stand the Askews. Hateful pair. He goes out into the hallway and, seeing only one figure silhouetted in the acid-etched glass, immediately senses something wrong. But still he heads towards the trouble. What else can he do? He slides the chain on the door before cracking it open. A man is standing on the doorstep. Six foot four, shaven-headed meat mountain. They are not acquainted though Cullen knows instantly why he is here.
Putting his mouth to the gap in the door, Cullen hisses, ‘Please, don’t make a scandal. My wife is in the house. We’re expecting guests.’
The mountain tries to wedge his huge ham of a foot in the doorway. A pulse starts up in Cullen’s neck. His fingers begin to tingle and he can feel his Adam’s apple making its way up and down his throat like the bead of an abacus. He wants to say you can’t do this, I’m the Dean, but it’s obvious even to him that this is ludicrous. Instead, he slams the door, slides the chain into its keeper.
There’s a pause. Then the bell buzzes again, this time more insistently.
‘Are you getting that, darling?’ shouts Veronica from the kitchen.
Cracking open the door, Cullen growls, ‘I’ll get you the money by the end of the week, OK? Only, we’ll need to meet somewhere neutral. I’m not having you coming round my house again.’
The mountain laughs. He names a pub in Redland. ‘Friday, 7 o’clock. Don’t think about not showing.’ He grins at Cullen. ‘I know where you live.’
Cullen shuts the door and leans against it, panting, just as Veronica appears from the kitchen.
‘Are you all right, darling?’
‘Bloody chuggers. And no, I’m not. As I said, I’m definitely feeling rather peaky.’
‘Why don’t you make yourself useful by putting out some nibbles? That might make you feel better.’
Cullen hears himself say, ‘How exactly?’ and immediately regrets it. The Hon. Veronica pouts. The ultimate sanction against which he, and he suspects all men, are powerless.
Dinner is a horror show. Cullen watches as one extravagant dish after another is brought out. The scallops, the salmon caviar, the hulking piece of prime rib. He sits at the head of the table doing his best not to count the money disappearing down the gullets of his hated neighbours while Stella Gray casts barbs at her husband Will for not doing his share of the night-time baby duties, the Askews humble brag about their kids’ music scholarships, and Veronica, in the midst of it all, tries and fails to draw attention to her considerable culinary skills.
‘Of course it’s only the oboe, which is hardly the most challenging instrument in the orchestra, though he really is doing so well with his piano too.’
‘Do help yourselves to creamed horseradish. It’s homemade.’
‘Oh no, bad for the bump. We don’t want to give him any more excuses for keeping me up all night, do we, Will?’
And so it goes on. Cullen watches the first two bottles of burgundy disappear, then another two. At ten, when he can’t take any more, he draws his phone from his pocket and stares at the screen for as long as it takes for everyone to notice and go quiet, then grimaces and gestures towards the hallway with his thumb. So sorry, I’ll take this outside.
Veronica raises her eyebrows.
I’ll pay for this later, he thinks, but never mind.
He’s absent for longer than is necessary. Five pairs of questing eyes meet him on his return.
‘
Not another suicide, I hope?’ Will Gray says.
Cullen hasn’t mentioned Sunday’s events to Veronica though she is clearly the source of the gossip. It hasn’t been in the traditional press and Veronica disdains social media. Has she been listening in to a phone conversation? Or snooping in his email? Or worse still, helping herself to his phone? He glares at Veronica who meets his hostility with a good portion of her own.
‘I have no idea what you mean by “another”, Will,’ he says to his neighbour, ‘since there haven’t been any. There has been a burglary in the Administration building, however, and I’m afraid I do need to go in.’ Saints be praised, he thinks, excellent save, Christopher, excellent.
‘Oh what terrible timing,’ Veronica says, her voice like sniper fire. ‘Well, do hurry home.’
Moments later, lowering himself into the car, he feels as if he’s stepping into the last helicopter out of a war zone. He turns the key in the ignition and reaches for the glove box again. If you’re going to be done for drunk driving you may as well have some fun first. Not that this is any kind of fun. But it’s at least tolerable. He backs the car out of the driveway, intending to head over to the university not to deal with the burglary because, as everyone inside the house already worked out, he lied about that, but to be in the familiar fortress of his office surrounded by his expensive coffee machine and the etching of his alma mater.
To his surprise, at the end of the street he turns away from Avon towards the centre of the city, driving through the still clogged streets, past groups of students on their way to the clubs. He knows where he is going, knows too he wouldn’t be going there if he weren’t wrecked but cannot seem to stop himself. Swinging into the car park on Upper Maudlin Street, he cuts the engine and sits for a moment to compose himself. What he’s about to do is probably a bad idea but it feels too late to turn back so he gets out and stumbling through the automatic doors finds himself in the main entranceway of the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
