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

by Hannah Begbie

  She gets out of the bed and staggers stiff-legged past the walk-in wardrobe where she had spent half the night with Scott. He was fun. That was nice. Now she feels like shit. She goes into the bathroom: towels rippled in piles on the floor, bottles knocked over.

  Faced with a full-length mirror now, a ceiling light illuminating her naked white legs, she stands pale in her pink cotton pants and T-shirt. She doesn’t remember undressing. She doesn’t remember leaving the wardrobe. There is an angry smear of blood down her thigh almost to her knee, some dark, some fresh, it has moved like a slow and quiet river out of her. She swallows, digesting this violent image of blood against skin where previously there had only been sun cream and chlorine.

  Her thoughts snag and begin sifting back through time. It hadn’t been that long since her last period, a week or so at most. A family lunch, old friends, she’d played Happy Families with the child closest her age, then visited the toilet. How silly she’d been not to bring sanitary towels, couldn’t find anything in the cupboards, had to make do with a rolled bunch of rough recycled toilet paper. And now her body is bleeding again and there is obviously something wrong with her stupid body that it is bleeding again so quickly.

  Then she sees a red mark across her ribs like a cat has clawed at her, and she has to step forward to examine herself closer in the mirror just to check it isn’t crayon or pen. It doesn’t wipe away and she wonders why. Part of a game with Scott, perhaps.

  She drinks water from the tap and then sits on the toilet to have a wee. She feels too bad to care that there’s no lock on the door. The house is quiet anyway. It feels like early morning. If people are awake, they’re downstairs. The loud music has gone.

  Knickers round her knees, she wonders why the seams of her blood-stained pants are wrong. They’re facing outwards. The label at the back is hanging into space behind the waistband of her soft pink cotton knickers. Why has she done this? Was she so drunk that she took them off to wee and put them back on the wrong way round?

  She stands and takes off her pants, then nearly trips in the leg holes. She starts turning them back the right way but even with her eyes half-closed, focusing on trying not to be sick, she notices that something is not right. There is a whiteness mixed in with the blood in the crotch area.

  She cannot believe it. It cannot be right.

  She crouches a little and pushes a finger into her vagina, which feels sore, then examines it. Amidst the blood smell of iron is the chlorinous smell of semen. It’s not new to her. She had given Dave Lowden a hand-job at the Spring Ball and afterwards wiped away the rest of it in a toilet cubicle and, curious and unwatched, smelt it, just so she knew.

  But how is that here?

  She throws up. She vomits green bile and pale liquid onto the tiled floor, then retches and retches.

  Where is Scott and did he do this to her?

  She does not remember anyone doing anything to her and this is the moment she knows she did not dress inside out.

  She would never choose to turn herself inside out.

  She holds the pants, still half inside out – at a distance, as if they are someone else’s entrails.

  She lowers herself to the floor, cowers, curls into a ball, hiding herself from the reflection in the mirror, afraid to see how much of her has been lost, taken.

  And then she loses more: over and over, vomiting onto the bathroom floor. She is all the colours of the rainbow, what with the pearlescent-white semen and rose-red blood and infected green bile and girly pink scraped skin. All the colours of the rainbow, and yet none of them.

  Her skin hurts like the ripples at the start of skin peeling from flesh and frame. She puts palms to ribcage and feels upward to where her heart is, then down and across to the place where her lungs lie, side by side. Feels where her stomach sits, and around the circumference of the ribcage to the lower back, where her kidneys are. These organs that have grown with her and served her so well, they are all still there. And yet, she thinks she can feel each one of them cower in pain, the bruised edges and centre of each, trying to recover from the moment that someone has been inside her and jostled, in search of what they want.

  She needs to be dressed and gone but on crawling into the bedroom she can’t see her own clothes, just a heap of parental clothes, spilling out of the walk-in wardrobe – the stiff-collared blue office shirts of Dad, the pencil skirts and tulle-frilled tops of Mum, all pulled off the rails, trampled and mangled between wood and wire hangers.

  Becky is crying quietly, vision blurred, when she finally locates her jeans, folded neatly beside the bed, her shoes placed next to them, as if she’d just taken a swim in a beautiful lake. Was this some kind of parting gesture intended to make the aftermath easier? She pulls on the jeans – far too tight and close now for a frame that is so bruised and sore. She steals a soft plain jumper from a shelf and puts it on.

  She isn’t crying now. She isn’t hysterical. She feels unsteady and ill, but her actions are precise. She needs to go.

  She creeps downstairs.

  There are people asleep on the living-room floor: a mess of bodies lying piled and entwined, heavy and asleep. Music plays at a low volume. All the shutters are closed. She sees nobody who is awake.

  She opens the front door and steps out. It is very early morning. She notes this, another fact that lies outside of her.

  As she walks the streets back home that morning she feels the edges of herself blur. She needs to find an anchor before she disappears entirely, needs to know whether she has lost something or whether she has been stolen from.

  One is carelessness, and one is a crime.

  One she blames herself for and one she can blame another for.

  For all she knows it is not a crime. For all she knows she is the one who said, Yes, take me, fucking take my body.

  But she doesn’t know for sure.

  And she is sick, again and again. Where? She does not remember. She does not care.

  If she goes to the police they will look at her face and beads and her spaghetti-strap top first, and listen to her voice second.

  Did you have sex with someone you knew? Do you know for sure that something was stolen and not simply lost? Making an accusation? That’s someone’s life you’re playing with!

  But whose life? And what will become of her life?

  Even if she goes to a police station she will not be able to answer a single question: no who or when or how. She does not know anything. She can guess, but she does not know. Not for sure.

  And if she reported it, and the story got out? Slag and slut is what they would say of her in the corridors at school. They would say they saw what she wore that night, that they saw the look on her face and heard the game she was playing, all that time, behind closed wardrobe doors.

  Bringing it on herself, the slag.

  Making it happen, the slut.

  She arrives home, and takes a hot shower, and then goes to bed, where she cannot sleep.

  After midday, Mary texts her to report that she and Brendan had sex and to ask where Becky got to. Was it Scott??!!

  She lies under the covers and feels a dull ache somewhere in her arm. She holds her hand up to the light and sees that a chaotic line of fingerprint bruises has appeared round the top of her wrist, like a bracelet of small grey pebbles.

  Was it Scott? Becky asks herself. Was it Scott?

  She holds her wrist lightly, covering the pebble shapes with her hand and fingers. Closes her eyes but she still can’t sleep. It is like there is a high-voltage buzz in her head. She feels high, like adrenaline is making her alert to everything.

  She draws her hand into her stomach and curls round it, and soon enough she falls asleep this way.

  When she wakes into another day, in some ways nothing has changed. There are no new facts or anything like that.

  But she remembers it as a new formulation now: I passed out and while I was unconscious somebody stripped off my clothes and had sex with me and then put my pants b
ack on me and then left.

  The numbness of shock has gone. Now the blame burns a boulder-sized hole into the middle of her.

  Some weeks later, when she’s back at school, Becky runs into Scott in an empty corridor. He is in front of her before she is even aware of him. He smiles at her.

  ‘I heard about this,’ he says, indicating her stomach. ‘That’s a pretty huge thing.’

  She pushes past him without replying. He tries to catch her arm and she evades it. She spends an hour shaking in the girls’ toilets.

  She worries that when she gives birth to the baby she’ll be so full of hatred that she’ll grab it from the doctors and swing it by the ankle so that its head breaks on the delivery-room wall.

  Where do these ideas come from? She has been polluted. Changed. She is a ruined person. Scott isn’t. Scott still mooches along with his friends.

  A few days later, Mary asks again if Becky was all right at the party all those weeks ago. She keeps asking because Becky just hasn’t been her normal self since then. Becky shrugs and then Mary says she wasn’t going to say anything but she heard that Scott said they got off with each other and were maybe going to do more but then they both got so off their tits on these strong pills he’d got that they could barely sit up straight let alone do anything else.

  ‘I think Scott really liked you,’ Mary tells Becky. ‘At the time.’

  Becky sees Scott just one more time before she gives birth.

  She finds him sitting alone out on the school playing fields. She has gone to find him, and she has. She knows she only has days to go, and then she might never come back here.

  He looks up at her as she approaches.

  She looks him in the eye. ‘I just want to tell you that I know about you, OK? I know,’ she says.

  ‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ he says.

  She wants to stay. She had promised herself she’d have the whole thing out, but she’d expected him to deny it. He looks pathetic. Frightened. And she can’t do it anyway. She turns and walks away from him, her foetus – his foetus – awake and kicking hard.

  ‘Becky!’ he calls after her, but no, she won’t come back. A sob bubbles out of her throat as she wobbles away. She still wants to kill herself.

  She almost hates Adam for what he has done, binding her to being alive.

  She doesn’t go back to school again, except to sit her exams. She is in and out.

  The day she brings Maisie home from the hospital, she opens her bottom drawer and takes out the pink pants she has wrapped in a plastic bag, and throws them away. She fills the drawer with spare nappies and wipes.

  Adam and his parents are off buying a cot and clothes for the newborn.

  There is no more room for questions. She has a daughter now.

  She breastfeeds her girl, and waits for peace to fill the hole that was burned in her.

  Chapter 24

  ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’

  Please, just don’t say nothing.

  Becky has spent the day in silence.

  By the time Adam and Maisie find her back at the hotel, curled up and shivering under the duvet, she has showered the worst of the vomit away. They fuss and flap over swollen eyes and pale skin and dry lips. Time to get you home, one of them says in motherly tones. Adam calls for Matthew’s car to drive them home, forgoing their planned second night at the hotel.

  She falls asleep on the way back and wakes in her own bed, early the next morning – disorientated and hot, under layers of blankets. The morning light is still low and the birds are waking at once quietly, and then loud – their songs tumbling and bumping into each other. She has the sense that her body has become unmoored in space and yet, in time? She is more clearly orientated than she ever remembers being: the day she has been holding off is here now. At the office they will think she is still on holiday so for the meantime she is safe to go about her business unquestioned. So long as she is careful.

  The house smells of fresh laundry – Adam must have hung a load that night after their return. She finds him curled up like a guard dog at the foot of her bed on a blow-up mattress.

  Silently, so silently – she must be careful not to wake him – she folds back the duvet, skin bristling with early morning cold. The reflection she catches in the mirror is smudged and tangled, hair standing on end like field stubble, but her skin shines white and her eyes are bright. The person she sees is both someone she recognizes and someone she has not seen before.

  Her toes bend softly on the floorboards as she makes her way toward the doorway but she stops a moment before leaving, turning to see the shape his face makes.

  Adam would have had such a different life without her. He might have travelled to South East Asia and Australia. He might now be married with a baby, be on his third business enterprise, instead of paying two sets of utility bills and visiting a family he doesn’t live with, loyally servicing a sixteen-year-old lie.

  She no longer wants him to make sacrifices for her. She wants him to be free.

  She wants to be free.

  Enough, now.

  On the bus into the city, sitting with her eyes closed, she can smell the dry cleaning chemicals of skirts and jackets whipped out of their polythene body-bags, and the cloying hand-washing florals of silken City shirts, and body odour, and perfume, and stale shoes.

  She feels inside her pockets for her tools: for the empty and folded, gum-edged envelope, flat and clean and ready to be filled. For the nail scissors: nicely sharp at one end, handles smooth and round as a child’s rattle the other, ready to be used. She has cleaned them. They are the same scissors she must stop cutting herself with.

  She grasps her phone tight in her palm and checks her social media feeds every minute. Refresh, refresh, refresh, until she knows exactly where she is going.

  Scott always posts what he eats for breakfast, and where. If he does repeat a breakfast choice – Variety isn’t always possible, even for the most organized – he’ll be sure to include some life advice like Smile, and the world smiles with you! He likes to treat himself with positivity and kindness. He calls it self-care, like it’s something he invented. These are the posts that make Becky want to hurl her phone through a window, because she hates the freedom of it. It is not a freedom that should belong to him. It has been paid for, day after day after day, as she sublimated and ignored and blamed herself for his crime.

  This morning he has cared for himself by going for an open water swim in Hampstead Ponds. Hashtag-blessed and fuck you, she thinks. And then he has further self-cared with a ‘good breakfast’ of almond milk flat white and acai granola. Picture: spoon half in, half out, glazed pottery bowl, sunshine, a café next to his office called cafffine, whose sign is totally Instagrammable what with the white Courier font on black background and their triple-F logo.

  She gets off the bus and walks at pace. Checks her phone. A post, two minutes ago: Second coffee of the morning. Too addicted, but I need a vice!

  She waits across the road. Leans against a red-brick wall. Some foul dark liquid has pooled and is drying in a treacling mass where the brickwork meets the pavement.

  She sees Scott emerge from the café.

  He was worn his duck-egg-blue trousers. Leather satchel, latest phone, the best hair – one coffee just isn’t enough for a man with such an appetite for fashion and caffeine and other people’s bodies.

  She hates him and is a little afraid of him.

  She feels unprepared for how quickly his digital pixel existence has become him in flesh and blood.

  She tells herself, come on. This will be an end to not knowing, an end to never being certain. She needs to hear him tell her what happened.

  She does not want to end his life. Not now. What she wants is for her chosen words to have the impact of a weapon, to be a blunt instrument that will cause irreversible harm to his psyche, his emotional wellbeing, his mental fucking landscape. What she wants is an apology. An admission. An explanation of the crime committed, in
full, with nothing left out. Evidence and atonement and closure.

  If he denies it, she will take the proof she needs.

  She feels the scissors inside her pocket and crosses the road, looking directly ahead. She is so fixed on where Scott has disappeared into an office building three doors down, at the same time checking her phone for how many ‘likes’ his dull caffeine habit has attracted, that a taxi swerves to avoid her. A teenage girl in tracksuit and wellingtons grasps her phone flat to her chest, having stopped her call to look at the woman who nearly died. But when she sees that Becky is OK, that Becky seems barely to have noticed, she continues her conversation.

  Becky steps through the revolving doors and says to the man at reception:

  ‘Karin Styles. I have a meeting with Scott Allen, Simpson Financial?’

  The man nods and calls through on a flashing landline, to an office upstairs.

  She made this appointment yesterday. Of course Scott will be delighted to meet with her to discuss how she might invest her spare capital. It was easy.

  ‘Third floor,’ says the porter. ‘Just head to reception there.’

  On the third floor, Scott’s PA shows her into a white and glass and grey meeting room. ‘Just hold on a moment,’ she says, ‘Scott’s just finishing up on a call. Can I get you some tea or coffee or water?’

  Becky declines, sits and waits, leans her elbows on the glass meeting table then at the sight of a greasy smudge draws them away immediately, as if electrified. What if that streak of cells comes from Scott’s greasy fingerprints? Or his elbows lathered in the Kiehl’s body cream he so loves to buy in bulk in case it’s discontinued? How disgusting, she thinks, to have him touch her like this, in such a manner that she can’t control. And she nearly retches as another thought occurs, that he has been in this room many times before, perhaps recently, talking and breathing, and that it’s possible she is now inhaling the sour spittle from his enthused conversations about Birmingham and Cannes and his life’s fucking achievements.