by cass green
‘Elliott!’
I crashed out of the flat and ran down the stairs and out the front door, hearing her call my name again.
I began to walk quickly and mindlessly until I came to an ugly modern pub that was entirely out of character in these quaint streets. Inside it was gloomily lit and a few old men were sitting in corners, staring balefully into their pints. It felt as though the wallpaper had soaked up all the smells of times gone by and a powerful urge for a cigarette hit me in the back of my throat in Pavlovian response.
I ordered a double Jack Daniel’s and soda from a taciturn, Scottish barman and went to sit in the corner. My phone began to buzz with a call and I looked down and pressed decline. I had to think. I couldn’t talk to her right now.
The drink warmed my throat and I closed my eyes for a moment.
Anya had killed a man. She did it to save her life.
But I couldn’t seem to keep hold of these slippery facts. I knew that Anya would be suffering right now, desperate to know that I was not judging her.
I wasn’t. Who was I to judge anyone?
A man was dead. A man who had terrorized the woman I loved more than anyone in the world. Why couldn’t I focus on this, the most serious part of the whole equation? She needed me now.
Now, she needed me.
That was it. That was why I ignored her next call and the texts that pinged onto my screen, one by one.
Where are you, babe?xxxxxx
Please ring me I’m going crazy here wondering what you’re thinking.xxxx
Elliott? Please ring I’m freaking out xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I’m scared now. What are you doing? Xxxxxxxxxx
I didn’t like to think of her being scared; maybe thinking I was going to the police like some moral crusader. What a joke that was. It wasn’t enough though; it wasn’t enough to make me call her back.
The truth was, a feeling I can only describe as a deep loneliness had wrapped itself around me like a cold shroud. Her panicky entreaties weren’t even beginning to penetrate it.
I felt as though all the things Patrick and Julia said about me being part of the family, one of them, really meant nothing. When things got tough, they hunkered down together and only let me in when all the drama had passed.
I pictured them, a war council of three, sitting round the table in Lathebridge, or in that Islington flat they’d kept hidden away. They’d be drinking good red wine and talking calmly about what to do. Did I even figure in the conversation?
Anya needed me now, yes. But she hadn’t told me any of the history with this Michael Copeland. She hadn’t come to me when he reappeared in her life and she hadn’t come to me when she pushed him off a cliff.
Pushed him off a cliff …
A bizarre yelp of twisted mirth erupted from my mouth. I had no idea where it came from. As a couple of heads turned my way with wary expressions, I had the insane urge to laugh like a lunatic at the ridiculous television-drama nature of this event.
‘I’m sorry,’ I pictured myself saying. ‘But my wife pushed her stalker off a cliff and I’ve only just found out.’ I could almost feel the words forming on my lips.
This was no good. I was going a bit mad here. I tapped out a message.
We’ll talk when I’m home but I need to get my head together. I do love you. X
I wanted to switch off my phone but first I began to scroll through London friends’ numbers.
Jamie and his wife had not long had a baby. I couldn’t impose on them.
My oldest school friend, Ant, was, I knew from Facebook, currently working at a school in Vietnam for a charity.
Clare and Stu were a couple I knew from working in a call centre while I did my degree. They lived in South London. I’d lost touch because Anya wasn’t that keen on Clare, who came from Newcastle and had a tendency to speak her mind when she’d had a drink.
I mentally scrolled through the friends I’d gone through the later years of school with and realized I hadn’t spoken to them in a long time. Didn’t that happen in most marriages, especially when you moved away? That you lost touch with your friends? I wasn’t even sure some of these numbers were current. People seemed to have fallen away since I met Anya. Had I really felt she was all I needed? When had I become that person?
I could feel my plan to keep some distance deflating by the second. Anyway, I had to get to work tomorrow.
I couldn’t face going home, but maybe I could go back to Casterbourne.
I braced myself for the tide of disapproval that was about to slap me in the face over skiving from work and rang the woman who owed me no favours at all.
IRENE
She hadn’t known who else to call.
Frank was a stranger, someone who had done an old woman a kindness when she had been in need. He wasn’t family, or even a friend. But there was no one else here.
Right after it happened, when the nice West Indian doctor came and found her in the corridor and spoke to her very slowly and quietly, Irene hadn’t really followed what she said. She’d known, anyway, when everything went crazy in Michael’s room. She’d had a mother’s instinct that he was lost to her.
They had made her wait to speak to the police; a nice enough young female constable who looked about twelve and a very slightly older male with a big Adam’s apple who kept swallowing, as if he was nervous. They had asked about Michael’s state of mind too, just as the doctor had.
She’d had to tell them that, yes, he had been made redundant a while back, and yes, he had been prescribed anti-depressants by the doctor. That yes, maybe he had some odd ideas about things sometimes. She hadn’t meant it to come out like that, but it felt as though they were guiding her in a certain direction.
It was obvious what they thought. That Michael had chosen this end for his too-short life.
Frank had come quickly when the nurse asked if there was anyone they could call for her. She’d greeted him in a flurry of apologies and all he’d done was bow his head and say he was terribly sorry for her loss and that his ‘humble abode’ was open to her during this difficult time. She had slept solidly for ten hours, much to her amazement, and hadn’t yet had the sort of crying fit that she knew would hollow her out and leave her fit for nothing. Tears had leaked slowly almost constantly but she had made herself act in a dignified way, the humiliation and loneliness of having to rely on a stranger being an effective stopper on her emotions.
Frank lived in a tidy three-storey house not that far from the seafront. Evidence of his late wife was everywhere, from the framed photos of the couple, to the embroidered and knitted items that seemed to cover every surface.
‘She liked knitting, my Sylvia,’ he’d said as she entered, with a kind of gruff warning that Irene shouldn’t criticize. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it, never having had any skills in that area herself. He had prepared a ham salad that she didn’t eat and then she had taken herself off to a bedroom with a patchwork quilt and swirling dust motes caught in the early evening sun.
She had lain there, flat on the bed, like a statue on an ancient crypt. The pain inside pressed and probed into every part of her body and she felt as though a sudden movement might shatter her into a million fragments. The light bled from the day and still Irene lay there, staring up at the ceiling and thinking that now there was only her. There had been four of them and now there was only her.
Then she had curled into a ball and wept until she almost needed to vomit.
It had been a very long day.
It was Frank, last night, who had asked whether the hospital had talked about his belongings. Irene had told him that Michael had been found without anything that could identify him. As she said it, Irene had suddenly sat upright, realizing how stupid she had been. Where was Michael’s car?
Frank had known where impounded cars were kept and insisted on driving her over there. Irene could drive, but hadn’t for years, and was in no fit state right now.
Getting it back, though, proved to be a night
mare. Irene had tried to explain the whole thing to a spotty youth who looked totally disinterested and who, at first, had refused to believe she had any right to pick up the car.
There happened to be a copy of the local paper lying crushed and dusty in a corner of the waiting room and Frank had brandished it at the young man and started talking, in a very imposing voice, about how he was distressing a grieving mother and ought to be ashamed of himself.
Eventually, they had been allowed to take the car, which had been found with keys in the ignition when it was towed away from the car park near where Michael met his death.
The inside of the car, an ugly big thing in Irene’s view, was filthy, the floor covered in crisp wrappers and takeaway coffee cups. There was a key on a plastic fob that belonged to a boarding house in Casterbourne.
So now Frank was driving her there, without complaint, so she could collect the rest of Michael’s things.
‘It has to be done, doesn’t it?’ she said and her voice came out sounding much more clipped than she’d intended. It sounded like the voice of a woman who was in control. This, at least, was a comfort. Then she found herself asking a question she hadn’t anticipated.
‘Frank,’ she said, ‘why are you bothering to help me like this? You don’t know me.’
He turned from the road and looked at her gravely, before replying.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If you want the honest answer.’
After a while they pulled up in front of a terraced house with a slightly tatty sign that said ‘The Squirrels’, with a picture of a rather sinister-looking red squirrel scowling from it and a ‘Vacancies’ notice beneath.
They were high up in the cliffs now and the sea was a dismal grey skein, the sky white and oppressive. It felt as though the air itself was weighted, pressing down on Irene’s scalp. She had a headache. She asked Frank to wait in the car then forced her weary limbs to carry her to the front door, where she rang the doorbell.
A few moments later a man in his fifties with a moustache and a military sort of bearing opened the door and frowned at her.
‘Are you that man’s mother?’ he said, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. Irene was only able to nod. There was clearly going to be no small talk, which was a blessing in its own way. She came into the dim interior of the hallway, where a narrow hall table was covered in a lace runner and a blaze of coloured tourist leaflets, and the man regarded her with droopy, heavy-lidded eyes.
‘I’m sorry about it all,’ he said, then quickly, ‘Anyway, it’s this way.’
She was led up some stairs that had a worn carpet runner in faded reds and golds and up to a first-floor landing. The property smelled strongly of sickly pine air freshener that tickled Irene’s nose.
The man opened a room on the right of the corridor.
‘This is where he was staying,’ he said. ‘Then he just sort of … disappeared. It’s lucky we’re quiet or we’d have had to get rid of his stuff. I’m sure you understand that we are a business.’
Now he had started speaking he barely seemed able to shut up. Irene suddenly felt very weary and merely mumbled a reply as she looked around the room, which was surprisingly cheerful after the unprepossessing hallway and its owner.
The walls were painted a sunny yellow and the curtains were white with little blue flowers on them. A dresser, a desk and a chest of drawers all matched the pale wood of the single bed, on which there was a small suitcase with items spilling out. Irene immediately recognized a fleecy gilet of Michael’s and suddenly found she was sitting on the bed, rather than standing by it, just as though someone had taken her out behind the knees.
‘Are you going to be alright?’ the man flapped next to her. ‘Only my wife is at a hospital appointment and she usually deals with the guests.’
‘I’m okay,’ said Irene a little breathlessly. ‘Maybe you could get me a glass of water, if you could be so kind?’
The man hesitated and then disappeared out the door, leaving her relieved and alone. She made herself stuff a pair of pyjamas and a T-shirt into the case, then pulled out the T-shirt and held it to her nose. It smelled a bit musty and didn’t especially make her feel close to her son. Tears were spilling down her cheeks again and she got to her feet, in an attempt to wrest control of herself.
She walked over to the desk where there was a plastic folder, with paper inside. She looked closer and then felt confusion and exhaustion fogging her brain. What did this mean?
Inside the plastic wallet was a sheet of paper – a type of printed form, as far as she could tell. Its heading said ‘Expert Detection Services’ and there were headings like, ‘Scope of works’ and ‘Findings’. It all seemed to be biographical details about a person called Anastasia Ryland; not a name Irene had ever heard before. It listed her height and weight, her eye colour.
Was it some sort of missing persons report? No … Irene understood in a rush that it was something else. It looked like Michael had been trying to find this person.
There was no other information other than details about where she lived – in Casterbourne – and worked – in London, for a company who could have done anything at all, as far as Irene could tell.
It was all very odd.
For a moment it felt as though this really would all be too much for her and she steadied herself with a hand against the table, while she tried to take some deep breaths. There was no one else to do this. Whatever had been going on in Michael’s life, he had been trying to work something out, hence this strange mission to the seaside.
She heard someone coming and turned, heart beating and feeling unaccountably guilty. The man came back into the room bearing a small glass of water and a worried expression.
‘Here is your water,’ he said. ‘Are you all done?’
‘Yes, and thank you,’ she said, taking the glass and sipping from it. The water tasted much more chlorinated here than she was used to, but as he made no move to take the glass back she felt forced to drink it all, knowing it was going to go straight to her bladder.
They went down the stairs in silence, but Irene could almost feel the weight of something the man wanted to say. She felt a strange sympathy for him. He was clearly the sort of man who left all the real communication to the woman in his life and was at sea, having to deal with her. When they reached the front door, she wanted to reassure him that she understood he hadn’t meant to seem brisk. She opened her mouth to speak just as he said, ‘Look, there is the matter of the bill.’
Embarrassment blazed across her cheeks. She had entirely forgotten that the dusty little room must be paid for. How silly of her.
She fumbled for her purse in a flurry of apologies and the man made a great deal of hunting for a card payment device, when she produced a bank card. The transaction wouldn’t go through at first and Irene feared she might go mad in this small, dark hallway, with this fussy, unsympathetic man.
Irene turned her head to the window as Frank started the engine and he must have sensed she didn’t want to talk. They drove in silence for a few moments. Irene wanted to be in her own home now, alone, more than anything else in the world.
But that couldn’t happen yet.
‘Frank,’ she said, breaking the silence, ‘I don’t want to treat you like a taxi driver, but could I impose on your kindness for one more thing?’
‘Of course,’ he said, turning to look at her.
‘Can we go to one more address?’
ELLIOTT
I knew it was going to be hard not confiding in Zoe about five minutes after I got to her flat. She let me in with a wry expression and a greeting of ‘Hello, you massive skiver.’
There was no sign of Tabitha, which was a relief because I didn’t feel like making conversation with someone I didn’t know. I walked into the living room, where the television was showing an episode of Love Island, and sat down on the low, squashy sofa that had a tasselled African print throw over it. A book by Kamila Shamsie that Anya had been pressing me to read
for ages lay face down on the table. The air smelled pleasantly of something garlicky. I let out an involuntary sigh as the sofa absorbed my weight and felt as though I were breathing properly for the first time today.
All I’d said to Zoe was that I needed a night away from home – just one night – and she hadn’t asked any more questions.
But now, as she emerged from the kitchen holding two bottles of Asahi beer, she had an expression that was going to brook no excuses.
‘Here,’ she said, handing me a bottle. ‘So … trouble in paradise then?’
I grimaced and took a long drink of the beer, which felt so crisp and reviving I almost sighed with pleasure. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to remember why I’d thought coming here was a good idea. Some part of me desperately wanted to offload the burden of what I had learned today. But I couldn’t tell her. It was simply too much to bring to her door.
In that moment, something came to me like it had been perfectly gift-wrapped. ‘It’s just that …’ I took another swig. ‘You know we’re trying for a baby and everything …’
‘Yeah, go on,’ said Zoe, curling her legs up underneath her on the chair opposite me.
‘… well I think I’m having doubts about it.’
Zoe let out a long sigh and sat back in the chair.
‘Fuck,’ she said and took a sip of her beer. ‘And Anya feels differently, I take it?’
It was scary how quickly this was all coming to me now. Maybe it wasn’t a lie.
‘Well, I think she guessed,’ I said, extemporizing wildly. ‘We had a few words last night and I just think some time away from each other will be a good thing.’ There was a silence and then I added, a bit lamely, ‘Thanks again for putting me up.’
Zoe was frowning now and pulling on her bottom lip – a habit when she was deep in thought.
‘Was it …’ she said after a few moments, ‘a really bad fight? I mean, she didn’t …’ She bit off the end of her sentence and took a swig of her beer, her cheeks darkening with what I assumed to be embarrassment, judging by the way she was avoiding my eyes.
