by Rebecca Reid
Zadie’s test had been negative, and they had laughed about it afterwards, throwing it into the bin, covering it up with tissues because Zadie claimed it ‘wasn’t worth the stress’ of telling Max that they had had a near-miss. They had celebrated by getting drunk, because that was all they ever did. And Zadie had half joked that she was going to name Max’s first baby after herself, just as his father had named him after himself. ‘Zadie Two.’ She had smiled. ‘Men do it all the time. Why can’t I?’
So, there it was. She had been right. How far along was she? She tried to count on her fingers, but the previous weeks and months were so nebulous, running together into a mass of confusion, excitement, misery and pain. There were ways to find out, of course. She could go to the doctor. Go to the hospital. She could sit down with a calendar. Or she could wait. And hope that, when it came to it, she just knew.
Zadie
The sky was a purple-yellow colour when Zadie woke. She sat up without thinking. Her ribs screamed in objection. Looking down, she saw that she was naked. Her arms were a mess of livid bruises, as if someone had dipped a brush of purple paint in a jar of water. She stood up, almost admiring the spectrum of damage across her arms, her thighs, her neck. Her lip was crusted with blood, her eye socket swollen. She looked horrific. Chloe lay asleep in bed, her hair spread out over the pillow, her snub nose perfect in profile and her eyelashes long on her cheeks. What must it be like to be so uncomplicated? So fundamentally good?
Chloe had been such a good friend to her, and Zadie had paid her back with betrayal. She deserved everything that had happened to her. She knew Chloe would be better off without her around.
Zadie picked a pair of jeans off the floor, next to the ruined white dress, which lay in a puddle next to Chloe’s green one. What else? She needed a top. On a chair, she found a jumper which she didn’t recognize but looked like it was a boy’s. A pair of socks, probably Chloe’s.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered as she zipped up the jeans, a little too big, but wearable. Making the word cracked the scab on her lip. She winced.
Her handbag was in the hall, and her trainers. Everything else could stay here. Then she started walking. One foot in front of the other. What time was it? Light, but not very. After a while, she reached the village, a sleepy little place just coming to life. The station clock said it was eight a.m. The next train was mercifully soon. Only when the train started moving did she open her phone and dial.
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this. Please come.’
By the time the train had ground to a halt her father had arrived at the station. He didn’t ask any questions. If he wondered where Max was, what had happened, how his daughter could have crashed out of university so spectacularly, he didn’t ask. And if he noticed the bruises that she had covered with make-up, he said nothing.
Her phone vibrated incessantly. Chloe called. Texted. Called again. Messages begging her to answer, asking where she was, threatening to call the police. Zadie watched the display light up but couldn’t convince her fingers to move to open the phone. And even if she did, what would she say? Guilt hung heavy in her stomach. The first real, proper friend she had ever had, and look where it had ended. But this was what she did. She ruined things. She curdled the things she touched. It was stupid to think that she could belong here, that she could manage it. She would be safe at home, far away from people who she could hurt. Or people who could hurt her.
Her father didn’t want to take her back to the house. He said he would send someone for her things later. But she had to go. She unlocked the door with shaking hands. Put the ring, in its box, on the kitchen table. Max’s parents wouldn’t leave her alone until they had it back. Then her keys next to it. She put her phone in the kitchen bin, where she had put so many bottles before, then poured a bottle of water over it for good measure. It stopped buzzing. Chloe’s name disappeared from the display. ‘Bye,’ Zadie whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’
On the way home, Zadie lay down in the back of her father’s estate car. She watched the dappled sky move past the car window while her father played Classic FM on the radio, occasionally humming. Neither of them spoke.
At last, they grew close to their family home. He indicated and turned into the drive, the drive she had run up and down as a little girl, walked up to get phone signal as a moody teenager. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Her father caught her eye in the wing mirror and smiled.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
But she knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t make it work, because that was the sort of person she was. She wasn’t ever going to be able to have what other people had – friends, relationships, jobs. Lives. She watched the back of her father’s head for a while, pressing her finger into one of the bruises on her leg and wishing for his sake that she had been the kind of person who knew how to build a life and resist the temptation to raze the whole thing to the ground.
One Year Later
Chloe’s hands were freckled on the bar handle of the pram. She hadn’t thought she’d been in the sun much lately. But she must have been. She peeked over into the basket of the pram, smiling at baby Rose, who lay on her back, holding her foot in her hand, seemingly transfixed by the leaves on the trees overhead.
‘Thank you for coming with me.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Lissy. ‘It’s nice to get out of London.’
‘You don’t think it’s a bit morbid?’
Lissy shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. It’s all part of life. The sooner this lot get used to it, the better.’ She pointed at Claudia, who was toddling ahead, fat legs in little white bloomers, a pale pink hat jammed on her head. ‘Anyway, as far as she’s concerned, it’s not a graveyard, it’s just another park to play in. Do you know where we’re going?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘No. Her mum didn’t say where it – where she – was. Just that it was here.’
The graveyard was a pretty one, known for playing host to the graves of various Victorian poets who’d met their end from opium or consumption. It sat behind a beautiful, ancient church where upper-middle-class couples fought to get married every summer, attending Mass for six months beforehand just so they’d have it in their wedding photographs. It was as chic as being buried could be. Not that Chloe would have expected anything else from Zadie. Tasteful to the last.
If Lissy had found the request to come to the graveyard strange, she hadn’t said so. In fact, she had been brilliant in almost every way over the last year. From the moment Chloe had stood on the doorstep, sobbing, Lissy had been there, just as she always had been, calmly unbothered. Chloe had stayed with them for several weeks after the Revelation, as she had taken to thinking of it. She and Lissy had sat up night after night, Lissy breastfeeding an apparently endlessly starving baby, Chloe weeping, obsessing, questioning what she should do. Lissy had offered very little advice, realizing, as friends so rarely do, that Chloe didn’t need direction but time. She offered no judgement when Chloe said she wanted to stay with Rav, no judgement when she said she wanted to leave. She helped make lists, do sums. Asked all of the questions that have to be asked.
It had been too late for the kind of abortion that Chloe felt comfortable with. And anyway, she was nearly thirty-six. It was probably now or never. And as she looked down at Rose, she struggled to stir up any guilt from inside herself at having brought her into the world. She was too perfect to regret.
Rav’s mother had been, to Chloe’s immense surprise, generous and kind. ‘I told you I would buy you a house if you had a child,’ she had written in her now weekly email. ‘And I meant it. It will be up to you whether or not Ravinder lives with you both. But my grandchild must have a home.’
So she had purchased a little two-bedroom with a tiny garden, a mile away. Close enough that she could walk to Lissy and Guy’s house, come rain or shine, but far enough that she never had to walk past her old flat again.
There were strict rules about what c
ould be left on graves. Zadie’s mother had instructed her not to bring all sorts of extraordinary things, like teddy bears, for example. Chloe had tried not to be offended that it seemed plausible she might bring such a thing.
She had also answered Chloe’s questions. It had felt selfish to ask her about Zadie, about the fifteen years that had passed between the party and the day that Zadie had died. She had heard herself ask Astrid to talk about her and, to her great relief, it seemed Astrid wanted to. The words had come spilling out, story after story about Zadie and her attempts to wrestle with life, to be a person in the same way that everyone around her had found so easy to be.
Astrid said that after Zadie moved back home she had gone travelling. Tried a term at art school but dropped out when a teacher said something crushing about her work. Then it had been yoga, more travelling, a whirlwind marriage with someone she met in Bali who turned out, to no one’s surprise, to be a complete shit. She’d painted intermittently. Moved back home, moved out, moved back home again. And as she’d got older and all her good-time friends found the straight and narrow, she had become sadder. Every failure seemed to leave her more bruised and more delicate.
Chloe had found herself pouring with silent tears as Astrid described how Zadie had moved back home for the last time three years ago. Only then, she rarely left. She had a dog she adored, a puppy she’d adopted from the streets on one of her travels. She liked the gardens, and being outside. But according to Astrid, Zadie had found less and less that she could bear, and towards the end she spent most of her time walking alone in the countryside or in her childhood bedroom, painting. Astrid had told Chloe she was welcome to visit, to come and see the family. She had apologized for allowing Zadie to disappear so comprehensively. ‘I thought it was what she needed,’ she had said on the phone. ‘I wanted to make things easier for her. But I’m not sure anyone could have done.’
Astrid believed, rightly or wrongly, that Zadie wasn’t a person who could live in the world, at least not like her siblings and her friends could. ‘Life was such a battle for her,’ she had said. It sounded as if her death had come as absolutely no surprise. Zadie had taken an overdose in the woods, left an uncharacteristically short letter for her family, apologized for hurting them, but explained she had nothing left in her any more.
Finally, Chloe had told Astrid she was sorry. Sorry for pretending that Zadie was living in their shared room, sorry for everything she did or didn’t do. She told her she was horrified by what had happened to her at Max’s party. She had wanted to confess about Rav and Max and everything that had happened in the previous months. But that wasn’t for Astrid to contend with. She already had plenty of weights strung around her neck.
‘Darling girl,’ Astrid had said before they finished the conversation, ‘Zadie was like this for as long as I can remember. What happened to her was awful, but it’s not why she ended up the way she did. That was written in the stars for her from day one, I am afraid. I could tell from when she was a little girl that something about her was different. That life was going to be harder for her than it was for other people.’
She and Lissy continued walking, scanning the names on headstones.
‘How are things with Rav?’ Lissy asked.
Chloe shrugged. ‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘He’s good with Rose.’
‘He is.’
‘And he still loves you.’
‘He does.’
‘But maybe you need a fresh start.’
‘Maybe we do.’ Chloe kicked a lump of grass. ‘I know it should have a conclusion. An ending with a bow on it. Either back together, in love, having more babies. Or broken up. Over.’
But the truth was, they weren’t either of those things. He had been in her life for so long that she didn’t know how to be without him. And even if she had, she didn’t want to be without him. But she could never unlearn what she knew about him. It would always be true that Rav had something inside him which had allowed him to do a terrible, unforgivable thing. Could you forgive the unforgivable? Or could you learn to live with it well enough that you could be happy?
‘He’s having therapy,’ she ventured. ‘Has been for a while. Then I think we might try living together. I don’t know. Some days I want to get it all back, to be together soon enough that Rose won’t remember us apart. Other days I want to start all over again.’ She stopped. ‘That’s it,’ she said.
Lissy took the pram. ‘Take as long as you need,’ she said, turning away and pushing the pram back towards the church, little Claudia sitting on her hip.
The headstone was white, with neat black writing. ‘Zadie Elizabeth Henrietta Barber Lister, 1985–2020. Beloved daughter and sister. What we keep in our memory is ours, unchanged for ever.’
Chloe wondered who had chosen the quote. One of her parents, she supposed. Or perhaps a sibling. All those children who had tumbled around the house would be adults now. They would never have known Zadie as Chloe had, as a raging, laughing, burningly brilliant party girl. They would remember her as Astrid had described. Erratic. Unreliable. Unhappy. She tried to push away the memory. In order to say what she needed to say, she couldn’t feel sad for Zadie. She needed to allow herself her anger. She took out the flowers she had placed in her handbag. A little bunch of hyacinths she had grown herself. They smelled sweet and sharp. She placed them in front of the headstone, and then, having looked around to make sure that no one was there to see, she sat down on the grass.
‘Long time no see.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know where to start, Zaid. You’d talk for me, if you could. If you were really here. I wish I knew what you would say. I imagine it, sometimes. I guess what you’d tell me to do, what you’d think. When I’m picking an outfit or trying to decide something, there’s this voice in my head, and I always tell myself that it’s you, that you’re still with me. But how could that possibly be true, when I didn’t even really know you when you were alive?’
The late-afternoon sun was on her shoulders, seeping through the cotton of her dress. She looked up at the sky, bright and brilliantly blue.
‘I wish I’d known you as well as I always told myself that I did. I wish I hadn’t spent the last sixteen years comparing every single friend I made to you and always finding that they came out wanting. Lissy’s my friend. I never wanted you to meet because I knew you’d think she was boring. I thought that, too. But she’s not. She’s kind. She drove us all the way here so that I could talk to you, and she’s looking after my baby so that I can sit here and tell you – tell you what? I don’t know what to tell you. That I’m angry with you, I suppose. I’m angry that you didn’t tell me that you wanted Rav, or that he wanted you. Angry that you slept with him all those times when you knew I was falling in love with him. Even angrier that you didn’t tell me what he did. I know it wasn’t your fault. I know it was him. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him.
‘You weren’t kind to me. You know that? You weren’t kind. And you weren’t a good friend. I’ve spent all these years trying to convince myself that you did like me and that I was important and that you did respect me, because I thought that if you didn’t it said something about me, that I was too suburban, too boring, too provincial, too unspecial to be worthy of your friendship. But it wasn’t that, was it? It wasn’t about me. It was about you. You couldn’t be my friend, not properly, because you didn’t know how to treat people. You didn’t know how to treat Max, or me, or anyone in your life.
‘I wish you were still here. But I don’t know if I would like you if you were. Because you weren’t a good friend. You weren’t kind. You didn’t love me like I loved you. You weren’t any of the things that I’ve spent the last sixteen years telling everyone that you were. And I’m angry with you for that. I forgive you for sleeping with Rav and lying to me about it, and making me lie to your parents, and telling me not to make friends with people who you thought were dull. But I can’t forgive you for that. I don’t forgive you for that. I do miss you, thoug
h.
‘I think about what kind of a godmother you would have been to Rose. Whether you’d have been the one who noticed that she looks so much more like Max than Rav.’ She paused, somehow expecting the admission to have changed the world around her, not quite believing she could have said the words out loud without them changing things. But there was no one here. At least, no one who could hear her. Her chest felt a little lighter. It felt good to confide in her friend. And they were, she supposed, by some warped logic, sort of even now.
She got to her feet. ‘Bye, Zaid.’
Acknowledgements
Two Wrongs was predominately written during a very strange time, when the whole world sort of ground to a halt because of Covid-19. I can honestly say that it has never been harder to be creative than it was during those weeks where the only contact with the outside world was an hour-long walk in the evening or an occasional trip to the supermarket. I spent a lot of time not writing but comparing myself to other writers on Instagram and feeling sorry for myself.
But, while finding the motivation to write was almost impossible, eventually I came to see Two Wrongs as the structure that held my life in place. It gave me a reason to sit at my desk every morning, and something to focus on when being so far away from friends and family felt especially hard. So, in rather a meta way, I think the first entity I have to thank is the book itself.
By extension, I must thank Tash Barsby, who edited Two Wrongs with such thoughtfulness and skill, taking it from a collection of chapters to a real book. I am for ever grateful both to Tash, and to Transworld at large, for the purpose, joy and escapism that writing these books allows me. I would also like to thank Darcy Nicholson, who is no longer my editor but whose editorial voice will for ever live in my head when I am writing.
