Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020

by Hannah Begbie

‘I’m messing everything up.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re a good mum. You’re totally good, Becky.’

  She folds herself into his arms. Hears him drop the packet of popcorn as his arms wrap around her.

  After standing in the doorway together for a long moment, he disentangles himself to close the door, then turns back and holds her at a distance, gripping her arms lightly.

  She feels his warmth soothe the fused and sparking ends of her adrenalized impulses. Feels his kind eyes glance at her collarbone and follows his gaze down the waves of hair covering her breasts. He looks at her again, as if to say: OK? Are we OK about this?

  And she pulls his head to hers, kissing him. She can smell his deodorant and his skin.

  She takes him to bed.

  Afterwards, they shower, separately. They are shy with each other and dress hurriedly. Aware, too, that if Maisie returns then they must be dressed. And if Maisie doesn’t return soon, they need to go and look for her.

  As Adam darts around trying to find his T-shirt he says, ‘Are we? You know was that all ri …? I thought it was …’

  Becky goes to him and kisses him again and smiles. ‘Yes. I am glad. Yes and yes. Now, Maisie,’ she says. ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘She probably wants us to go looking for her.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that to make me feel OK about looking for her?’

  ‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘I want to find her as well.’

  ‘You don’t think something’s happened, do you?’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he says.

  And a spark lights, scalding, inside her. She wants to say: Stop saying that to me. You don’t know that everything will be fine.

  But she says nothing.

  As they walk down the hotel corridor together Adam says, ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘You will anyway.’

  ‘Not if it makes you feel uncomfortable, the last thing I want to do is make you feel …’

  ‘How I am supposed to know if you don’t …’

  ‘OK. Those things, on the inside of your thigh.’

  ‘Oh.’ There are three or four of them, neat blood-mark snips, high up, where you’d only find them if you’d been as close as he just has.

  ‘Did you, you know … do it to yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. Ashamed, relieved.

  He glances at her as they continue to walk. She doesn’t need to look at how deep the concern has sunk into his skin, she can hear it in his voice.

  ‘But that’s worse than the bruising? I thought you said you’d stopped doing all that but, look, I don’t want it to sound like pressure, I just wondered if all this Amber Heath stuff is making you a bit … I dunno, the stress of trying to keep your film afloat?’

  ‘It hasn’t been fun.’

  He grasps her hand. ‘You know I’ll look after you if it falls apart.’

  ‘I know. I just really want to make that film. I feel like I have to at least have that, after everything. You paid for me to do all the stuff that let me get my foot in the door. I can’t walk away with nothing apart from a few years helping other people make their own things. I want to have my thing.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘If I get hit by a bus, I want Maisie to have something that she can say I did. Something I made happen, that I put all of myself into.’

  ‘You could also try and avoid buses.’

  ‘I’m trying to stay alive, obviously.’

  But then she remembers that of course he doesn’t take that for granted. He has seen her not wanting to be alive. He heard her admit it and then he tied himself to her, so that if she went, he’d be blamed.

  They wait side by side for the lift in silence, heads bowed. She grips his hand tightly.

  Had he loved her that much, even then? To hold her in the world like that, at such a cost? Even when she was broken, withdrawn, in hell, swollen with a baby she couldn’t wait to be rid of, full of anger and hate. Her own father hadn’t loved her through that.

  Had Adam felt sorry for her? Or had he loved her? She supposed, one day, that she might ask him and now that day has come into view, and so chaotically. What had she meant, pulling him into her, wrapping her legs around him to lock him into her, feeling him come inside her, and wanting her whole skin to be touching his – what had that meant?

  ‘You could put the job aside for a bit,’ he says quietly.

  ‘It can’t just be any old film. It has to be Medea and it’s not the time to walk away. Projects have a moment. If you miss it, it becomes something that didn’t get off the ground. Nobody wants to be a part of one of those, something everyone else walked away from. It’s just how it is. If I don’t make it now, it’ll die. I know it.’

  They pass through reception. They check the pool complex. Maisie isn’t there. Fear pricks through Becky’s body.

  As they walk toward the bar to check if she’s there, Becky wonders: what am I doing? There had been a few flings in the past, but she’d wiped them from her memory as quickly as they had happened. She can’t wipe anything away now: Adam is by her side and she can feel his cum trickle out of her, an unfamiliar wetness. And then she is back there, remembering all those years ago as she looked down into the crotch of her knickers and found semen there. Suddenly she is dizzy. She holds Adam’s arm. I’m going to pass out, she thinks.

  He looks at her. ‘You need to eat something.’

  ‘Let’s find Maisie first.’

  Maisie is not in the bar, or in the games room either, and they are running out of rooms in which to find her.

  ‘She might have gone back to the bedroom,’ says Adam. ‘We could go back and leave her a note.’

  ‘Let’s keep looking.’ Their conversation has dried up. What more is there to say, other than: Where is she? Is she OK? Is she safe?

  They head into the hotel grounds. Uplighters pick out the shapes of topiary hedges arranged around a wide lawn. Adam and Becky walk in silence over its sprawling softness. It is a warm night, a light breeze pushing clouds out of the way of the stars. Night-singing birds call to each other.

  Becky decides, then and there. If Maisie is found – if she is not drowned, stabbed, strangled or otherwise destroyed – then she must be done with her questions. She has to know.

  She had hoped that time would close the gap in her.

  Well, that hasn’t worked, she thinks with a hard, unsparing voice. All it’s done is chew her up and spit her out again.

  But she is definitely ready now. She will face it and fight it. Let it be agony. Let there be violence. Let the stitching show afterwards, but things cannot stay the same. She cannot go on damaging herself and those around her.

  Give me back my girl, and I will seek out Scott in real life.

  No more digital toxicity, no more distraction, no more procrastination, no more weakness. She will take the risk, risk it hurting, and so start to heal. That is the deal she cuts with the universe.

  Then, things will be different.

  ‘I told Kate that I’m in love with you,’ says Adam, taking her hand. ‘She said she already knew that. She said she thought we’d all been kidding ourselves for a long time.’

  Becky puts her hand to his chest to quieten him. There – close by – voices.

  ‘What will you say to her?’ says Adam.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Try not to kill her.’

  They move in a wide arc and Adam speeds up toward the sounds.

  ‘Wait,’ says Becky, holding him back, taking his hand and guiding him past great topiary animals, to where black and white flagstones make a hedge-rimmed chessboard. Maisie and the boy from the pool are sitting on it, cross-legged, facing each other. In the starlit darkness, the end of a joint flares as he inhales then passes it to her. Becky watches her little girl take it and smoke it with assurance. She has done this before. Obviously she has. There are no coughing fits. Maisie licks a finger and damps down the side of the Rizla paper where it is burning
too fast.

  ‘We were doing exactly the same at her age,’ Adam whispers. ‘Come on, shall we go get her?’

  She hesitates.

  ‘No,’ she says, gripping his hand. ‘Let’s leave them. I have to trust her.’

  And I don’t have to be governed by my past.

  When Adam lets go of her hand and puts his arm around her, kissing the top of her head, she knows she can do it. She believes with every breath, in every cell, that it is time to trust herself again.

  When Maisie returns to the room, Becky is tucked up under the covers and watching a film on TV, eating from the bag of popcorn Adam dropped on the floor earlier. She had kissed Adam goodbye at his door an hour ago and it had felt exhilaratingly teenage and special, the idea that she would see him again soon, as if there was only History and double Geography to get through.

  Maisie drops her handbag on the floor and sets off toward the bathroom.

  Becky switches off the TV and kicks her duvet away. ‘Mais, wait. I’m sorry.’

  Maisie turns around and fixes her mum with a bloodshot gaze. Her face is crumpled and smudged and Becky thinks she can see blades of grass in her hair. An image of her daughter and aftershave boy tumbling on the lawn spreads quickly in Becky’s mind like ink dropped on blotting paper. But she bids it leave. A blank page. She must trust that her daughter dealt with whatever happened in the best way she knew how.

  ‘You look very stoned,’ says Becky, smiling.

  Maisie still doesn’t say anything and Becky wonders whether she is almost too stoned to speak. ‘I’m truly sorry for earlier.’ She tries again. ‘I messed up. Just because I’m scared, doesn’t mean you should be, in fact I want the opposite for you. I want to make sure you’ve got everything you need for the world of adults, I …’

  ‘Do you think you might be finding it a bit hard to let go?’ Maisie asks gently.

  ‘Yes,’ Becky blinks back her tears. ‘You may have been an adult for all of eleven minutes but in my eyes you’re still my baby.’

  Maisie walks toward her mum. ‘I grew out of bootees, like, years ago.’

  ‘You never really wore them. Always kicked them off. You liked to have free feet. Happy birthday, darling.’

  Maisie perches on the edge of the bed. ‘Thanks, Mum. Are you not now incredibly pissed off with me that I’m stoned?’

  ‘No. Just incredibly jealous. Did you have a nice time?’

  ‘I had a fine time. Seb is fine but, turns out, not all that.’

  ‘I love you,’ says Becky. Maisie jumps onto the bed and lays her head down on Becky’s stomach. That’s where you came from, thinks Becky, as she strokes her daughter’s hair. I was your first home.

  Chapter 22

  Becky wakes before Maisie. Her daughter is sixteen now, asleep in the adjoining double bed, looking like she did when she was a baby, her cheeks smooshed into the pillow, peaceful.

  Becky runs her hands over the bedsheet beneath her own body, feeling for the small patch where the cotton hardens, as if glued. It did happen, after all. She did it with Adam. And today they are going to walk around Dungeness and get fish and chips for lunch. She is looking forward to seeing him. She is starving hungry. A bag of popcorn for dinner was not enough.

  Daylight streams through the top of the curtains. She wonders how late they have slept. Have they missed breakfast already?

  She reaches for her phone, charging on the bedside table, and discovers both that it is 10.15 a.m. and that Amber Heath has been taken to hospital following a suicide attempt. She is in intensive care. Her family have asked for privacy. None of her friends have gone on the record. Calls to her agent have not been returned.

  Becky tries to read everything, but nobody has more information.

  Twitter has anger – raging calls for Matthew to face justice, as well as plenty of comments along the lines of ‘she lied, she got busted’ – but no new information.

  Maisie stirs and opens her eyes.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You’re really white.’

  ‘No, I don’t feel great,’ says Becky. ‘I think I’ve got a bug or something.’

  ‘I’ll go and get Dad.’

  ‘No. Go and have breakfast with him. Have a nice time.’

  ‘What about Dungeness?’ says Maisie.

  ‘You and Adam might have to go without me.’ She is craving having the room to herself. So that she can pace, or throw up, or curl into a ball or cut, cut, cut at her legs.

  Maisie leaves and, under the covers, Becky thinks of Amber wired up to machines, one that has pumped her stomach and another that helps her breathe.

  Would Amber have ended up like this if Becky had spoken up about what she saw?

  Becky is to blame, surely she is to blame. All she can think about is that night in the playground, those moments before Adam came for her, and how she had thumped her legs, how she had stopped short of thumping her stomach as blame ran so hot through her blood she thought her soul would melt. Her fault for ending up that way.

  Now she cries, and she tears at her scalp and hair, wanting to tear out chunks, to disfigure herself, make herself bald and ugly and naked. Claws at her legs and arms like a cat defending its life from a predator. What about Amber’s family? What of the sickness and blame sitting inside Amber’s mother, that she raised her daughter all wrong – in a way that made her so vulnerable to damage?

  Amber should not be the person to die. This is not her fault.

  Amber is Medea is Becky is Medea: but the goal was revenge, not death.

  Becky cannot bear to be with herself any more. Clambers out of bed and pulls every miniature out of the fridge. She lines them up on the bed and unscrews the tiny top off one, then tips the stinging stuff down her throat, swallowing and gagging. She looks at the others but doesn’t touch another, she already feels so sick.

  She lies on her back on soft maroon carpet and thinks of Maisie and Adam in Dungeness: how these beloved people will be stepping between the vast makeshift shacks and daffodil-yellow wooden houses, over the pebbles – perhaps discussing whether Becky is all right, if she’s really all right. She can see the lighthouse and the waves and the cut-out shapes of cacti in her mind’s eye, all set against the grey backwash of a sky that’s lost its sun, clouds assembling, tumbleweeds spinning. And in the far distance the nuclear power plant dominating, all white and peppermint-green matrices gated up in thin metal. A black burnt-out house frame against the horizon. Pylons holding out their arms, offering nothing: these will surely remind Adam of the place they were both raised, a trigger to tell Maisie how hard it was for her mother then, how dreadful it was to feel so alone with something so new and yet so precious.

  Perhaps Adam will think of last night, and regret it.

  They have only been gone an hour, promising to come back for her as soon as she starts to feel right. She has declined their offer of going straight back to London. There will be paparazzi on her doorstep again, won’t there? Maisie will want to know what Becky thinks about the news but she is not ready for that.

  Colours mix and the staid lines of the room blur around her. She needs to get to the bathroom.

  She vomits into the toilet bowl, straining her insides like she wants them to come unstitched from her, lungs and heart streaming out blood before their tubes and flesh splash into the water beneath.

  There is one thought she cannot bury.

  If you are the woman who saw me, you can call the police direct if you don’t want to speak to David. Please, just don’t say nothing.

  The eyes are the windows to the soul, she tells herself, as she looks in the mirror and washes her mouth out.

  Her thoughts swim back and back, heart thrashing in her chest, a sick rush back in time, but she digs her fingernails into the present – don’t take me there, please don’t take me there – by running the cold tap again and sticking her mouth under it. Rinsing and spitting. She pushes the bathroom door closed, there isn’t a lock. Notices that perhaps she is sore down th
ere and pushes her underwear down to around her knees, sits heavily on the toilet, cradling her head on her hand, arm resting on her thigh, and sees the crotch of her pants – lace, a bold magenta – stiff now. Feels around her pubic hair and yes, it is there too. Like glue.

  And she is being sick again, even before she knows it, all across the marble floor, losing the strength she needs to stop what is now certainly happening – God, no, she remembers nothing after her eyes rolled back, lying back into the coats with Scott and he said I’m so fucked Becky, I’m so fucked, are you? And she was too gone to say anything at all, she was just thudding with drugs like she was underwater, pummelled, pinned under by the waves. Waking up, nothing, nobody who can tell her who—

  Chapter 23

  Hampstead, London

  14 September 2003, the morning after the party

  She is lying down, is all she knows – lying down in a bed, but she doesn’t know where, at first. Arms by her side, she pulls something up between her fingers, like pulling up grass, but she is not in a field of living green stuff, she is somewhere un-alive where the air smells stale with smoke and sweat. She looks down. She is holding the coverlet she had seen earlier, so pretty and pink and swirled like the silken inside of a conch shell. She has fallen asleep at the party.

  She doesn’t know how she got there. In that moment, all she thinks she’s lost is time.

  She sits up and tries to swallow, but without enough saliva the movement hurts her throat. She feels around the sore edges of her mouth with a dry tongue. Next an aching pressure down the length of her spine – the way she had been sleeping, perhaps. Bolsters herself with both hands, legs out straight. For a moment she feels little and young, like a child in ballet class doing the exercise with toes pointed up, toes pointed down – good toes, naughty toes, good toes, naughty toes.

  It is then that she feels something warm escape from between her thighs. She looks under the pink coverlet, too dark to see though. She feels afraid and ashamed at the thought that perhaps she has wet herself or, worse, is spilling dark menstrual blood onto their beautiful covers. She thinks this is the worst she will feel, she does, so appalled at the thought of soiling other people’s things she tears pillowslip from pillow and rams it between her legs, eyes filling with tears at the thought of a parent’s reaction to such damage. Injury, accident or stupidity?