by Rebecca Reid
Max started to get dressed. ‘Okay, let’s look for her.’
By the time everyone else had filtered down to breakfast it was clear that Zadie really had gone. They ate pancakes and drank black coffee while Chloe silently fumed. Why didn’t they care? Why weren’t they worried? Why weren’t they doing anything to help? After breakfast her anger boiled over. She grabbed Max by the arm as he walked along a corridor.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I want to call the police.’
‘The police? What the hell for?’
‘About Zadie, about what happened last night.’
‘We have about £500 worth of coke in this house, plus God knows whatever else. If you call the police, there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘I don’t care—’
Max took her arm, gently. ‘If I get in trouble, they’ll take my scholarship away. I won’t be able to go to Australia. I might not even be able to play rugby here any more. That’s my whole career – fucked. Please. Don’t do this. I promise you, we’ll get back to the house and she’ll be there, and she’ll understand.’
Chloe studied his face. He was calm, but earnest. ‘They’d really take your place away?’
He nodded. ‘It’s a morality clause. They have them for our places at uni, too, you know. We could all get kicked out. You’re on thin ice with the tutors, right?’
That hadn’t occurred to her. Was it true? Could she get kicked out? She imagined having to tell her mother that she had lost her place. Her mother having to tell everyone in their town she had boasted to about her clever, clever daughter. The first in the family to go to university.
‘And you’re really not worried?’ she asked, searching for a reason to do as he asked.
‘No. Trust me, Zadie does stuff like this all the time. She slices up her arms then calls an ambulance, takes an overdose just when you’re due to arrive home. This is who she is. I love her, but she’s a chronic attention addict. I promise, she probably just fell over and bashed herself last night, the booze made it seem worse than it was, and now she’s gone off in a huff because I took her up on her offer of a free pass.’
Max reached out and stroked Chloe’s hair. She flinched at his touch. ‘You’re a good friend. Better than she deserves.’
‘I should go home. She’ll be at the house, or in our room. I can take care of her.’
‘Or you could stay and take care of yourself. You’re not her mother. Eventually, she is going to have to look after herself.’
‘Eventually, yes, but I can’t just leave her right now.’
‘She left. Not you. Listen, I adore Zadie, but she doesn’t want anyone to be happy. She doesn’t mean to be like this, so selfish, so dramatic. She loves you. She loves me. But she doesn’t know how to love us, and if you give her an inch, she’ll take a million miles. She sees you getting close to Rav and making your own friends and it scares her. She wants to take you away from everyone else so you’re just hers. But if you let her, she won’t want you any more.’
Chloe sighed. She knew she should tell Max he was wrong. Call the police. Never mind what that meant for his future. Or hers.
‘I’ve been going out with her for six years. I know how to handle her. The best thing you can do is get back in the hot tub, have a glass of rosé and try to enjoy what’s left of the weekend. Give Rav the snog he’s clearly been chasing all weekend.’
So she did as she was told. And every time the guilt knife twisted in her stomach, she told it that she was only staying another twenty-four hours, that Zadie hadn’t wanted to talk, or to be looked after, and that, when she got home, Zadie would be there, telling herself she was being practical, not just trying to save her own skin.
But of course, Zadie wasn’t there. On Monday they were due to be going back to university around midday. Chloe woke earlier and couldn’t wait. The guilt had become too much, too loud, too insistent. She got a lift to the station with one of the waiting staff, who seemed to have been instructed to bend over backwards. She paid an eyewatering amount for a train ticket and willed the train to move faster, cursing every single pause on the line. Chloe went to her own room first. Everything Zadie owned was gone – all her clothes, all her books, everything – and the scent of her was a little stronger in the air than it had been when Chloe had left. She walked to Archer Crescent double quick, counting her steps, praying that her every instinct was wrong. She rang the doorbell for minutes at a time, then pounded on the door until her hands ached. She sat on the doorstep, listening for any tiny noise, praying to hear Zadie’s feet on the wooden floor. But there was nothing.
Chloe called Zadie’s mobile. Then called her again. And again. And again, until her phone was hot and the buttons had made an outline on her cheek. Then she called directory enquiries and found the number for Zadie’s parents’ house. She rang them until it rang out, again and again and again. She wrote Zadie a text. And then an email. And then, out of complete, sheer desperation, she wrote a letter. By the time she had walked to the postbox and shoved it in she was starting to hyperventilate. She stumbled back to Archer Crescent, eventually found the spare key and sat on the stairs to wait for Max to come home.
Finally, he came through the door, throwing his heavy leather bag into the hall and chucking his suit carrier over a sofa. He didn’t seem to have noticed that Chloe was sitting, watching him.
‘She’s not here,’ Chloe called down, after a while.
Max jumped, looking up at where she sat on the stairs. ‘Fucking hell, Coco.’
‘Zadie isn’t here.’
‘She’s probably gone home to blow off some steam. She does that sometimes.’
‘I called her all day. She didn’t answer. I even called her parents’ house. She’s gone.’
Max disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a pint glass of water. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do about this.’
‘Did you do it? Did you hurt her?’
Max shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t need you to believe me.’
‘She said you could be awful when you were angry.’
‘I’m sure she did.’
‘Don’t you care whether she’s okay or not?’
Max ran his hands through his hair. ‘To be completely bloody honest with you, Coco, right now, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’m knackered, I’m hung over and I’ve got a meeting with the coach about my Australia move. I’m not going to let Zadie’s latest stunt derail anything for me.’
Chloe hadn’t ever known anger like this. She got to her feet and looked Max square in the eye. ‘You disgust me.’
‘Get out of my house.’
Chloe didn’t know who else to call, so she dialled Rav’s number. He arrived half an hour later with a bottle of white wine. Then they crawled into her single bed and he held her to his chest.
‘I can’t believe I didn’t do anything,’ she whispered.
‘There wasn’t anything you could do.’
‘I could have called the police. I could still call the police.’
‘That’s not your choice. That’s up to Zadie. She might want to, she might not. But you have to let her have that.’
Chloe nodded, feeling her tears soaking into her hair. She sat up.
‘Can I ask something?’ Rav asked.
Chloe nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Why are you so sure it was Max?’
‘She said his name. It was the only thing she said, afterwards. Just his name. And as soon as I saw him the next morning, I knew. I could see it all over his face. He did it. He’s got a temper. She told me before he had a temper, but I had no idea he would do something like this. Can you imagine?’
Rav waited a few minutes, stroking her gently. Then he sat up. ‘You don’t look very well. When I first met you, you had this look about you, this glow. And it’s gone. All that time with Zadie. When did you last eat properly?’
; ‘We were doing better. She was doing so much better. She was happy.’
‘I’m not talking about Zadie. I’m talking about you.’
Chloe nodded again.
‘Come with me,’ said Rav.
She followed him down the chilly corridor to the bathroom, an ancient one with peach-coloured tiles and a chipped white bath. He ran the water so that the room filled with steam and stole a generous lug of someone else’s bath oil from the shelves next door. Then he undressed Chloe and leaned over the bath, using her flannel to wipe the make-up she hadn’t taken off since the party. He washed her hair with what he told her he had judged to be the most expensive-looking shampoo on the shelf and followed it with conditioner. He said nothing while she quietly sobbed, and when he was finished and she was clean, the water a murky beige, he wrapped her in a towel, led her back to her bedroom and found her some pyjamas which hadn’t been touched since the first week of term. He made a decent stab at drying her hair with a little portable hairdryer and then he told her to get into bed.
‘I should be embarrassed,’ she said sleepily. ‘You’re treating me like a baby.’
‘Sometimes we all need to be looked after,’ he said quietly. The sun had only just gone down. When was the last time she had gone to bed at a sensible time, in her own bed?
Rav stroked her hair. ‘You can stay if you like,’ she whispered. There was no way he could have done all this without expecting something.
‘I’ll stay until you fall asleep, then I’m going back to my room.’
‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’
‘I do. But not like this.’
She drifted into a heavy, irresistible sleep. While Zadie’s loss still thumped in her head, she had to admit that she needed this.
For a long time after Zadie disappeared, Chloe kept looking for her. She went to the History of Art department, but they told her they couldn’t release details about another student. She left messages on Zadie’s voicemail until the mailbox was too full and she couldn’t leave any more. Sent text after text after text. She wrote letters to Zadie’s parents’ house, addressed to Zadie, addressed to her parents. She disguised her handwriting on the envelope. She even found an email for Zadie’s father at work and sent him a missive pleading with him to tell her that his daughter was okay. She harboured hopes of going to their house, of turning up on the doorstep and somehow being able to tell Zadie how sorry she was. Rav told her not to, and she knew that he was right. Zadie clearly didn’t want to be found. She still dreamed of her most nights. Long, banal dreams of walking around Archer Crescent, washing up glasses in the kitchen, helping Zadie to pick an outfit.
After three weeks of concerted effort she received a very short email from Zadie’s parents telling her that Zadie wasn’t coming back to university and that she would get in touch with Chloe if and when she was ready. Its tone frightened her. Reminded her that Zadie’s family were powerful, that they were real adults. She had burned with shame after reading it, horrified by the idea that they might know what she had done, or rather what she hadn’t done. She told herself over and over again as she lay awake at night, her heart pounding with guilt, that she hadn’t done anything wrong. But she didn’t believe it.
The weeks wore on and, finally, the Easter holidays came. Then the summer term. And before long, Chloe was spending two days packing up her bedroom – the bedroom that she and Zadie had in some sense shared. She got a lift back to Surrey with Lissy, who lived nearby, and when she arrived back at her parents’ house it seemed smaller, just like the cliché always said.
Lissy helped her to unload her things, made polite conversation with her mother, who seemed charmed and relieved in equal amounts, then threw her arms around Chloe.
‘I’ll call you next week and we can find a date to go house shopping. We can do a proper Ikea trip! I’m so excited!’
While living with Lissy wasn’t quite what she had dreamed of, Chloe found she was almost looking forward to it. There would be Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn prints on the walls. Heart-shaped candles on the table. Herbal Essences shampoos in the shower. It would be normal. Not what she had planned, but nice. Obviously, moving into Archer Crescent was no longer an option. The house was to be rented out to a family, which would presumably be an enormous relief to everyone who lived nearby.
Lissy had moved heaven and earth to find a place for Chloe in her house, convincing the three other girls that they should give up the four-bed that they’d found close to campus and the big supermarket in favour of a five-bed so that Chloe could join. She’d seen a steeliness in Lissy, as she strong-armed the girls into picking a slightly smaller, slightly shabbier house, which surprised her.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Chloe had asked her.
‘Because we’re friends,’ she had answered.
Her reply had surprised Chloe. What sort of a friend had she been to Lissy? Occasional chats and texts, a few nights out. Nothing spectacular or dramatic. Nothing like what she had had with Zadie. But then, Lissy was here, and Zadie was gone.
Rav liked Lissy. He hadn’t said it outright, hadn’t admitted that he liked Chloe more when she surrounded herself with gentler, more normal people. But it was implied. Chloe wondered if maybe she liked herself more now, too. She often felt like the smartest, funniest person in the room. She didn’t replay everything she said back in her head to try to work out whether she sounded stupid or not. She’d managed to scrape a 2.1 in her end-of-year exams. But despite all of that, she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if her phone rang tomorrow and it was Zadie summoning her to anything, whether it was a party or to help her bury a body, she would smack aside any obstacle that prevented her from being there.
31
Now
Her mother’s self-help books hadn’t, as far as Chloe could remember, had much to say about what to do when it transpired that your husband had been having an affair with your best friend, who was now dead, and that he was, at least in part, the reason she had died. So she had spent the following weeks sleepwalking. Going to work. Avoiding her friends. Ignoring the hundreds of calls from Rav. He had apologized a thousand times, and then, when he had finished apologizing, he had been defensive. ‘I know I cheated, but this was years ago. We were kids. We’ve built a whole life since then. I’ve forgiven you for what happened with Max. Why can’t you forgive me?’ Eventually, she supposed, she would tell him that she didn’t care that he had cheated on her all those years ago. It wasn’t the infidelity that bothered her. It was the fact that he had watched her constantly wondering what had happened to Zadie for almost the entirety of her adult life. He knew how confused and guilty and angry she felt. And all along it had been entirely within his power to wave a magic wand and make all that not knowing disappear. But he had chosen not to. That was the betrayal. But she didn’t feel ready to say any of that to him. And it made the constant ache in her chest worse when she allowed herself to think about the fact that her husband knew her so little that he wasn’t able to work any of it out. So instead she spent late nights and early mornings walking the pavements around her house, as if, if she could keep moving fast enough, she could escape everything that had happened. She slept alternately for hours and hours, and then not at all, falling asleep at her desk then staying awake all night. Trying to work out whether it was even possible to rebuild her life from here. Trying to forget Rav’s ashen face and Max’s expression of righteous anger. And then, before she had even begun to untangle the whole thing, she found herself with another, more pressing issue to deal with.
Chloe had never really felt that she knew her own body. She didn’t admire herself in the mirror while she got dressed. She didn’t have a specific feature that she liked to highlight with her clothes. She had barely ever even masturbated, and when she had attempted it it had been more through a desire to understand the fuss than out of anything resembling lust. She’d been given a vibrator years ago, and she used it intermittently, but only really in an attempt to
understand why other people liked them. And yet now, she could feel that something was different. It wasn’t just that she felt sick from the moment she woke up to the moment she fell asleep. Nor was it the fact that her breasts were so swollen that putting on a bra made her wince. Her jeans were tight, she slept longer and deeper than she ever had before, and she woke with a ravenous hunger she had never previously experienced. But that wasn’t why she knew she was pregnant. She would have known without any of the symptoms. She just – and she couldn’t really explain how or why – knew. There was something different. Something inside her which was undeniably, unquestionably, alive.
She bought a pregnancy test at a chemist’s a mile or so from the house, making sure that no one from her school was lurking behind her. Then she went to a pub, bought a pint of sparkling water and went to the bathroom to confirm what she already knew. She sat, her jeans and knickers around her ankles, feeling completely and utterly calm. Even the bleachy odour of the pub bathroom smelled sweet to her. In films, people always peed on the stick then placed it face down while they waited. But Chloe watched the urine seep down the little window. The two pink lines appeared, vivid and rude, without waiting a second, let alone the three minutes the test suggested.
It was the first pregnancy test she had ever taken. Thanks to good contraceptive fortune, and having clockwork periods, she had never had so much as a scare before. She had sat with Zadie, once, while she took one. Zadie had been ashen-faced when they bought it, and they had walked back to the house in silence. She had sworn Chloe to silence. ‘Max would have a fit,’ she had said. ‘It would ruin his whole future.’ Chloe wondered now if it might have been more about the fact that a pregnancy would have aroused Max’s suspicion that Zadie was sleeping with someone else than a concern for his future. It was weird. Every time she had a memory of Zadie, now, she found something mean to say about her. Little digs. She had never said a single bad word to, or about, Zadie, until recently. And now she couldn’t stop.
