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

by Hannah Begbie

  ‘From how long ago?’

  ‘School days,’ says Adam. Becky can’t speak. She can only hold Maisie and try not to break into pieces.

  The next day, Becky goes to the local police station.

  The woman behind the counter is hunched, pressing a pen onto a pad, midway through writing a sentence, when Becky leans in and says, ‘I want to report a crime.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in just a minute,’ says the woman, glancing up. Blue shirt, black pullover. Practical blue. Police black. Black and blue covering every part of her.

  But Becky does not move until the woman looks up again and this time she speaks clearly and slowly and too loud for the size the room. She speaks the words that will change everything for her.

  ‘I want to report a rape.’

  Chapter 28

  Hackney and Islington

  One year later

  At two in the morning Becky wakes with butterflies in her stomach thinking, No, I can’t go through with it. But then, by daylight, in her little kitchen up on the third floor of this ex-council block overlooking the park, after coffee has been drunk and fingernails picked at, she thinks, all right then. It is another deep breath, in a year that has been full of them.

  It is a warm, bright day. In the park, the leaves on high branches catch the light and sway softly. Morning dog walkers make conversation with each other as their dogs sniff and wag. Nobody is in T-shirt and shorts quite yet. She’ll dress for a light breeze, she thinks. This flat is half the size of their old place, but has twice the view. Is that a kind of parity? Might she really have lost nothing after all? Enough time has passed that she can half-smile at the thought.

  Maisie’s friends think her new neighbourhood is awesome. It’s where any number of struggling music producers and would-be fashion moguls have moved, in search of cheap rents while they chase expensive dreams. The neighbourhood is beginning to get written about in those pockets of the internet seemingly made to be unfindable by anyone over the age of twenty-five. To Becky’s eye, these stories are somewhat overselling a remote, scuffed corner of Hackney, where the shops sell milk and noodles and table tennis bats. Still, she has seen octogenarians with hard East End vowels queuing in the post office alongside wasp-waisted girls with nose rings and asymmetric hair, so perhaps it’s true. Or becoming true.

  What matters to her is that the flat is hers. There will be no help with the bills here.

  She dresses in front of a door-hung mirror.

  She looks different to the Becky of a year ago. Her limbs have lost their pale and sinewy skittishness. She has become rosier, rounder, even dimpled in places. She has been cooking, making slow stews and sugar-dusted cakes with which to welcome her daughter home. ‘Like something out of the 1950s,’ says Maisie, only where is the pipe-smoking paterfamilias proudly washing his car in the driveway?

  Becky sets out for the first bus stop that she’ll need. The cinema that she is heading to is not the closest cinema, but it’s the nearest one still screening Medea, so it’s where she must go if she wants to catch it on the big screen which, she decided only this morning, is something she wants. She suspects it will hurt, and with further hurts undoubtedly in store for the late afternoon, why not get it all over with? A full day of horrors, but ones she has chosen.

  She walks rather than runs now. She has tried running softly and slowly but she can’t connect to this way of moving, not after seventeen years of pushing her body to the point of agony. The urge to burn until she is spent is no longer there. Still, with her newfound ardour for cooking hearty dishes, her jeans were getting tight, and she couldn’t afford a new wardrobe, so she has taken to walking, which is just as well considering the irregularity of the buses.

  Walking has taken her long miles around their new area and she already knows it better than their old patch. It’s harder now, because she is working again and the daytimes no longer belong to her, but as the evenings lighten and lengthen, on those days where after-school things keep Maisie out late, she still tries to walk home, picking a new route as often as possible. Sometimes she thinks of nothing as she strolls through the streets beneath the pointed and mirrored buildings of the City of London, feeling only the sting of particles in her nostrils as she turns on to the pollution-choked A-road in the direction of home. And sometimes, more often than she would like, she feels the still-warm embers in her marrow as she winds through a market selling blackened bananas and haunches of meat wreathed in flies, as her thoughts return to Medea. Was it enough for Medea to watch her husband collapsing with grief at the loss of his children? Did it satisfy, even fleetingly?

  On a good day Becky tells herself it was enough that she walked into the police station to give them her story. Sometimes that feeling lasts for hours, sometimes more than a day. On other days, when doubt and recriminations flood in, she tries to lose herself in the easy tedium of office work. She is doing admin in a small solicitor’s office and she likes the simplicity of it. It requires her to be efficient and organized and conscientious, but nothing else. Nobody needs, or asks for, her ideas. She will not change anything here. Her name goes on nothing. She is useful and she is appreciated for it, and the pay is sufficient so long as she and Maisie never do anything expensive. Nobody demands lifelong loyalty from her here. One day she will look further, cast her net for other ways to spend her days but, for now, it is exactly what she needs. For now, it is enough.

  On her lunch breaks, Becky sits on the green near the office and watches people talk. She allows herself to zone out, watching how tree branches bend and dip in the breeze. She allows herself to be bored. There is no pressure in this job. No one is emailing her or phoning or texting her any more. Instead there are starlings, turning as one above her, and rats slinking around the sides of a canal, and pretty purple-flowering weeds that spout from a clogged drainpipe.

  She has taken to wearing only those clothes that feel good on her skin. On the rare occasion that she buys something new, it is all soft cottons and skirts that float and fall long – styles that may age her but, unlike her old black trousers and button-up shirts, make her feel less held-in, or more softly held.

  Her hair is cut to a short bob. People have commented on how it brings out her rosy cheeks and beautiful eyes, but it is the colour she loves: dyed from mouse to mahogany it glosses for the darker seasons and glows warm in the summer months. And it changes the shape of her face. She is no longer so readily identified as the woman from the trial. In the office, where it’s only six of them, it has never come up. Nor has she raised it. And it’s not a drinks-after-work kind of office. They disband at five, each heading off to their own low-key life.

  After twenty minutes on the bus, Becky has made it to Islington. She passes the Queen’s Head pub. Scott took her out drinking here a few months ago, pushing a vanilla-scented cocktail into her hand before they both sunk deep into a cracked-leather sofa.

  Scott likes the way Becky never tells him he should come out to his parents. Everyone else is mad-keen that he do it, he says, to ‘really rub the gay in their faces before they croak’. He’s just not sure that it’s very kind, is it? Bad enough that he’s torturing them with a lack of grandchildren. But nor does he want to be a Bad Gay, letting the side down. ‘The thing is,’ he tells her, ‘they bought me theatre tokens for my last birthday and said maybe we could all go and see a West End musical together, even though that’s really not my thing, so I think they’re basically trying to tell me they know and they’re fine with it. Don’t you think?’

  She has unpicked all her hatred from his face. His eyes no longer appraise women’s bodies for opportunities to drug then abuse them. His smile conceals nothing. If he frowns, it is not a sly flash of his true self – instead it is some passing discontentment, nothing to worry about. In fact, she has become fond of his face. It is open and animated. Scott cries easily. He throws back his head when he laughs. He likes to hold her hand when they’re talking, and she likes that, too.

  Scott has
a boyfriend at the moment. His name is Ryan. It can’t last, whispers Scott when Ryan is well within earshot, he’s too pretty and too lovely and he makes incredible hummus! Ryan thinks Becky ought to start dating again. ‘You’re wearing too much billowing velvet,’ he tells her. ‘Eventually you’ll be mistaken for a chaise longue and then that’ll be it. You’ll be stuck in some old fruit’s drawing room for the rest of your life. You’re fucking fit, Becky. You need to get out there and get some!’

  ‘No,’ says Scott. ‘I don’t want to share her with anyone, let alone a heterosexual!’ They carry on in this fashion, teasing her and so taking care of her. Maisie says the same things about dating. Becky is thirty-three now. That’s a third of a life, Maisie tells her, with the blissful entitlement of someone who believes anyone she loves will live a hundred years or more.

  Does Becky want another child? And someone to have that child with?

  Not yet. She doesn’t think so.

  Not yet – her watchwords of the last few months. Her mantra. A ‘no’ withheld or postponed. A possibility untested and untaken, but not yet refused.

  Becky steps into the cinema foyer. It is an elegant old art deco picture house that smells of filter coffee and musty frayed velvet. She has timed her arrival so that there will be very little hanging around in a lit theatre; in fact, the adverts are already playing.

  She buys popcorn and a bottle of Diet Coke. Why not? She has taken a day off work for this, one of her precious ‘annual leave entitlements’. Why not enjoy it? She reconsiders and buys a shiny plastic bag of chocolates as well. Because God knows she is about to need them. Isn’t she?

  She picks a seat off to the side and towards the back. It’s midweek, in the middle of the day, and the auditorium is nearly empty, just three other people, all alone, sitting beneath the dancing projector beam. Despite everything, Becky feels a little kick of magic. She loves the smell of the place, the darkness, the way everyone is turned in the same direction. The scale of the pictures. How the sound is loud enough to vibrate in you.

  Becky takes out her phone to turn it onto airplane mode. There is a message for her, confirming her meeting for later in the afternoon. Her stomach tightens. She realizes that she is biting her fingernails again. She taps in a quick reply, confirming.

  They are to meet on a bench on the north side of the garden in Arlington Square. It’s a school day and they’ll have the place to themselves.

  Becky looks up as the official certification card is shown. Medea, rated 15. Becky wonders if they went back and forth to get it there, if anyone ever actually walks out at the warning of strong language and violence, and if she should do it now. But then the film begins.

  As the opening titles play, there is the sting, no less keen for its anticipation, of seeing the name of her director – no, not her director, simply the director – float into view.

  A film by Sharon McManus.

  Everything inside her feels it is flapping and fluttering like a pigeon being chased by a stamping foot. She eats four chocolates in a row, as if they will give her ballast.

  They have kept her idea for the opening credits, letting names in a canary-yellow font float against stormy waters.

  A Bottom Line film

  In association with FilmFour

  Emilia Cosvelinos

  Becky notes that Sharon’s name has been added alongside that of the original screenwriter. She is a co-writer now, as well as director. So that’s how it went after she left the job, thinks Becky. Perhaps it was part of the price extracted for Sharon’s staying on the project? More credit, more money.

  But after the titles fade so does the sting, and she finds herself enjoying it more than she’d anticipated. Mostly she is pleased that it works, this artfully modernized tale of a woman who exacts revenge on her husband by murdering their children and who then, intoxicated by the ease of it, murders the husband for good measure.

  Most of the last script Becky saw has made it to the screen.

  Medea buries her husband’s body and takes control of her husband’s business, and then the town, absorbing and supercharging all his old business relationships, not least the one he had with his best friend who Medea now sleeps with.

  Medea understands perfectly well what her legacy will be when she is found out, which she knows must happen, but still she refuses to run. Up on the big screen, Emilia/Medea is surrounded by a group of men decrying the ways in which she has betrayed them. Medea counters that she spent a lifetime being betrayed and, in tolerating it, betraying herself. She is magnificent in her contempt for them, even as they close in on her, intent on their revenge.

  Becky waits for Medea to be strung up by the men. Only Sharon must have changed the script because now the men paw and rip at Medea’s clothing, groping and slapping her flesh, screaming at her to repent. And Medea doesn’t give them anything they might want from her, no fear or contrition or submission or shame. She scorns them. She pours fresh humiliation on them, naming their shortcomings as they cover her with their hands, half of which punch and slap, while the other half grab for breast and crotch. Their violences overlap, arms pushing against arms to get at her, clenched knuckles smashing down on the spread fingers of their brothers.

  She is the question they cannot solve and it maddens them. They see their own wives in her, in those moments of disdain they catch and ignore but cannot quite forget. She is the short-skirted shop-girl who mocks their hungry glances. With their fingers crowding and cramming up inside her they still cannot have her. She has killed her husband’s children, the children she bore him, and yet she refuses to appear insane. Where are her tears? Why doesn’t she beg? With punches to her ribs and mouth they look for the contrition that will let them sleep easily again, by their wives and mistresses, and across the hallway from their daughters, but finding nothing, and losing hope they walk away loudly naming her a Crazy Bitch, in the hope that it might after all be true.

  Medea’s body turns in the wind. She seems foreign to Becky, in a way that is new to her. She had been so certain, once, of the meaning of the Medea they had crafted from draft to draft, refining and testing each turn until the character’s pain and complexity and her terrible crime was all worked through and mapped, scene by scene. It had made sense then, on paper. But all of that has gone now. The camera lingers on Medea’s face, her eyes still open, pooled with blood from her injuries, yet seeming still to see. She looks dead ahead, scanning the horizon as if she is looking for someone. But who? She knows where her children are. Those that were coming for her have arrived and departed. The leaves on the tree above her bow and ripple. Her body turns to distant rooftops, a church spire, a young girl in the distance, looking at her.

  ‘I want to report a rape,’ Becky had said.

  Becky remembers the sharp pivot to soft kindness in the officer’s voice when she said, quickly, ‘I’ll go and get someone.’

  Moments later Becky was seated in an interview room with white-painted cinderblock walls and cloud-grey linoleum floor.

  A detective had entered, ‘Detective Inspector Whitecross,’ she’d said, but Becky didn’t say anything in response. All she could focus on was the fine telephone wire of dried tea on the rim of the Detective’s mug. She was thinking about Maisie. How would Maisie cope when she found out? Would she have to find out? Might she be spared?

  DI Whitecross offered her tea, by way of a gentle reminder that there was talking to be done in this room. Becky shook her head.

  ‘I witnessed a rape and I’d like to give a statement,’ said Becky, because if she hadn’t spoken quickly, she might have lost her nerve.

  I was raped, Becky said to herself. I was raped. I know I was.

  And now I am in the five point seven per cent of people who report rape. I am five point seven per cent.

  ‘Let me just turn on the recorder, if you’re happy for me to tape this? Saves a few pencils.’

  Becky nodded and started talking before she lost her nerve.

  ‘The w
oman was out of it. I didn’t recognize her at the time. I found out later on that she was an actress called Amber Heath.’

  I was out of it for years. My name is Rebecca Shawcross.

  The chief inspector wrote in her pad as the recorder ran.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. But it didn’t look happy. I don’t think it looked consensual, though I know you can’t tell. All I can tell you is that I was there. I saw them. I saw her.’

  My arms and legs and lungs and stomach, all of me has hurt every day since I was sixteen.

  ‘The man’s name is Matthew Kingsman,’ she said. ‘He is my boss, at a film production company called Kingfisher Films.’

  The man’s name is Adam Thewlis. He was once my best friend.

  I am in the ninety per cent of people who know the identity of their rapist. I am ninety per cent.

  ‘It happened less than two weeks ago. The fifteenth of May. I went to drop off some wine at his house and I saw them together and then I left.’

  It happened sixteen years ago. Very late one Saturday night, or early one Sunday morning.

  ‘I know she made a statement saying she’d been raped. She thought there was a witness and she asked them to come forward. I made a statement to the press where I said I supported my boss. I denied being there. I should have said something sooner. I should have come forward.’

  I woke up and someone had had sex with me. There was nobody there. Nobody said anything to me afterwards. But it happened. Maisie is proof that it happened.

  ‘You’re here now. That’s what matters,’ said the detective, smiling a smile that wasn’t really a smile, and then she asked more questions: time of day, clothing, before, after.

  He knows the truth. He knows that I need the truth, but then he’s always known that, and he kept it from me. He was there. I barely was.

  ‘Did anything prompt you to come forward now?’

  Becky sat in a long silence.

  Finally the detective said, ‘The matter will be joined up with the sexual offences unit and you will be informed if anyone is charged with the offence. You might be required for any court case that arises.’