by cass green
‘Christ,’ I said, then, ‘Where do you think he is now? Liam, I mean?’
Anya shrugged. ‘My honest feeling is that he’s dead. As I said before, probably an overdose somewhere in southeast Asia.’
Previously she had said he had probably fallen foul of people he knew in the UK but I let it go.
‘Wasn’t there CCTV or anything then?’ I said. ‘At the station?’
‘No, I guess there wasn’t,’ she said gently. ‘Not everywhere then. I did think about going to the police, you have to believe that. But I was too scared. And anyway … Mum and Dad told me not to.’
And there it was, again. Of course they’d known and I hadn’t.
Anya looked down at her hands.
A silence fell across the room then. The sounds of next door’s television bled through the wall; the tinny strains of Casualty.
‘Shit,’ I said, after a few moments more. ‘I can’t believe you’ve never told me any of this stuff before, Anya. Why? Why the hell haven’t you?’
‘Oh Ell …’ Anya wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘When could I tell you? What would have been a good moment to share all this?’
‘I don’t fucking know!’
Anya curled herself up into the chair, face pressed into a blue fluffy cushion she’d had since she was a girl, when it was in her bedroom.
‘It must be nice to be so perfect,’ she said, her voice muffled by new tears and the soft fabric of the cushion. ‘Never doing anything wrong.’
‘I’m not perfect by a long way,’ I said quietly.
‘Oh no?’ she said, looking up, her voice harsh. ‘I’m not sure you know what it feels like to be eaten up by guilt. It’s like having something corrode away at your insides. It’s like, it’s like …’ she started to cry again. ‘It’s like cancer.’
‘I know exactly what that’s like.’ A pause. ‘There are things you don’t know about me. We all have regrets.’
Was this it? The time when I shared what had happened to Mrs Mack? It seemed so.
I found myself letting it out. I told her in just a few sentences about my friendship with the old lady, my tantrum, my betrayal. Funny how it could be expressed in a handful of sentences in the end, this bag of pain that I had carried like a dead weight for all these years.
That expression was back, the unreadable one. She had stopped crying and seemed very calm now.
Was she disgusted? I found that I couldn’t meet her gaze so I looked down at my hands until she broke the silence.
‘I guess we both had things to hide from each other, didn’t we?’ was all that she said.
I don’t think I had ever felt so exhausted as I did right then. I laid my head back against the sofa and closed my eyes.
‘No more secrets?’ I said quietly.
‘Well …’
My eyes were instantly open again, a charge of new worry snapping in my spine. But for the first time in what seemed ages, she was smiling at me, a languid, untroubled smile that surprised me.
‘There is just one more,’ she said. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted to tell you since I got in. But then we got side-tracked by all this shit.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Tell me what?’
‘I’m pregnant, Ell. I’m actually pregnant.’
ELLIOTT
This is where I want to slow right down.
People talk about pregnancy lasting longer than expected. Some think this is nature’s way of easing you into it all, a slow run to the seismic changes. But, in the light of what was to come, the thirty-eight weeks of Anya’s pregnancy seem to have happened in speeded-up time.
When the morning sickness kicked in, those weeks were certainly long for Anya. ‘Morning’ sickness. What a misnomer. Anya had it quite hard and I’m sure none of that passed with any speed.
I sometimes look back at that night, with the two of us having supposedly spilled all our worst secrets, and wish I could press the pause button.
We finally went to bed after two am that night, both utterly spent after the evening of revelations. I didn’t react as I should, when she told me about the baby. Too many things were competing for space in my head.
That horrible story about Alice Adebayo.
Finally telling her about Mrs Mack.
In fact, when she said she was pregnant, I’d been unable to respond for a couple of seconds until I’d seen her stricken expression and the bright teardrops filming her eyes. Then I’d gathered her into my arms and kissed the top of her head.
It was just too much to take in, while I was still trying to process all this … past. She’d kept so many secrets from me, both over the history of our relationship and more recently. Two people were dead; both accidental, both from falls that were horrific in their own way. Neither was her fault, exactly. But she hadn’t done the right thing, either.
And now she knew the very worst thing about me. The fact that I felt guilty about my part in an old woman’s death didn’t get me off the hook. I still let it happen.
We existed in a state of polite friendliness for a couple of days and then I found her slumped on the bathroom floor, crying after a bout of sickness, and all distance melted away.
I got through my disciplinary hearing and resolved to do everything I could to regain Jackie’s trust in me and get back on with the job I loved.
I managed to make excuses about seeing Patrick and Julia for a while. Endless invitations for lunch arrived, and I made a host of excuses. It hurt Anya, but I couldn’t help that.
The fact that they knew everything about what had happened to Anya – both in Cambridge and with Michael Copeland – was an irritation that felt like a stone in my shoe. Particularly the latter. Maybe it was because I had been parentless for so very long, but I couldn’t understand it, however hard I tried. We weren’t children, running to Mummy and Daddy when things got tough, were we?
So, yes, you could say I was bitter.
But I knew I couldn’t put it off for ever.
Patrick rang me one day and suggested we have a beer together.
We decided to meet that evening in Lathebridge, at my suggestion. He had offered to come over to Casterbourne, but I didn’t feel that any of our small number of pubs were quite his scene.
He said he’d pick me up and, as I climbed into his red Jaguar, we exchanged brisk, awkward greetings. The seat was low and luxurious and the interior smelled new. I was quickly told that it was new. You couldn’t resent Patrick’s enjoyment of spending his money. He got so much pleasure out of having good things around him, and never seemed to take it for granted. Anya told me her parents donated to lots of charities, which was more than we did beyond the occasional Big Issue purchase, so who was I to judge someone showing off about their two-litre four-cylinder turbo-charged diesel whatever?
Patrick kept up a steady stream of chat as we drove to a pub on the seafront in Lathebridge. I nodded and responded in all the right places but was conscious of shifting about in my very low but ergonomically designed seat. I hadn’t felt awkward with my father-in-law since the very earliest days of knowing him. I didn’t know what to do with this sensation.
Finally, we were sitting in the upmarket gastro joint, me with a pint of Stella, him – being of that generation that’s blurry about drink driving – with a large glass of Pinot Noir. There was nowhere to hide.
It was early December now and the pub was festooned with Christmas finery.
We sipped our drinks in silence for a few moments and, finally, Patrick put both of his hands on the table and gave me an imploring look.
‘Elliott,’ he said and then took a breath. ‘I hope you know that me and Julia care about you, well, almost as much as if you were our own son.’
His ruddy face blazed even redder as he said this, as did mine. We usually left the emoting to Julia and Anya. I mumbled something and then took a too-big gulp of my beer, trapping a painful gas bubble in my throat as I did so.
Then he spoke again, his voice low.
‘
I know Anya has told you about her sister,’ he said, ‘about our Isabella.’
It was the first time I’d ever heard her mentioned by Patrick or Julia. There was a photograph, just the one, on their piano, along with all the ones of Anya doing ballet, riding horses, or grinning up from sandy beaches and boats.
This one showed Julia looking exhausted but rather beautiful, a bundle in her arms that she held towards the camera. All you can see is the tiny wizened face of the baby who was destined to live for only a week after the photo was taken.
‘Julia was a carrier of Strep B, you see,’ said Patrick.
I knew this already but nodded, encouraging him to continue. Anya had explained that this common bacteria could, in some women, be passed to babies during delivery. She was going for a test soon, herself.
‘We didn’t know then, of course.’ He paused and stared down at the wine glass in his hand. He was gently twisting the stem, almost as though he was unaware of doing it. ‘Bloody unlucky, because most of the time babies survive the infection. But sadly, that wasn’t the case for Isabella.’
‘It must have been awful,’ I said quietly.
Anya had once said, a little guiltily, that she found it hard to connect with the idea of her dead, older sister. Patrick and Julia being who they were, it wasn’t something they brought up in passing, so this surprised me. But I could tell where it was heading.
‘And then, two years later, our Stasi was born.’
Most of the time, Patrick and Julia called Anya by her preferred name, but now and then they slipped into their childhood nickname for her. Patrick’s eyes shone and he cleared his throat, before taking a sip of his drink. Then he raised his eyes to meet my gaze and I was taken aback, a little, by the look in his eyes. They seemed to blaze at me with some sort of purpose.
‘The thing is,’ he said, leaning forward slightly, ‘that when she was born and I looked down at her in my arms, I vowed that I would never, ever let anything bad happen to her.’
I stared back at him. For the strangest moment, I wondered if this was a warning of some kind but then his face broke into its customary warm smile and he said, ‘I’m so excited that you two have this wonderful new life ahead of you!’
‘Um, yeah, me too,’ I said, and drained the last of my drink. It had gone too fast.
‘What I’m trying to say, Elliott,’ he said, serious again, ‘in my usual bull-in-a-china-shop way, is that I can’t apologize for my daughter not telling you some of the things you now know. That’s business between you and her. But maybe …’ he paused, frowning ‘… maybe she did it for the very best of reasons. Not because she didn’t trust you. But because she was scared that only Julia and I could still love her.’
That, finally, broke through and, a bit too loud, I exclaimed, ‘I’ll always love her!’
Patrick smiled, and it was an oddly sad smile.
‘I know that, Elliott,’ he said. ‘And she knows too.’
His phone pinged with a text message then and, glancing at it, he sighed.
‘Damn,’ he said, ‘seems I forgot to take my tablet.’
‘Does it matter if it is a bit late?’ I asked. He pulled a doomy face.
‘According to Julia it does, because it will muck up what I have to take later.’ He downed the last of his glass of wine and placed it on the table, decisively.
‘Right!’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I might just whizz home and take it before I drop you back. That okay with you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, although inside I wished I could just go straight home. I hadn’t banked on seeing Julia quite yet but decided I might as well get the rapprochement with the in-laws over in one evening.
We pulled up in front of the house with the familiar crunch of gravel on the driveway.
I got out of the car and followed Patrick inside. He called out, ‘Darling!’ in a cheery voice and was met with an, ‘In here,’ from Julia’s study, which was one of the first rooms down the hallway on the right.
‘I’ll just get that tablet,’ said Patrick, heading for the kitchen at the back of the house. ‘You go and say hello.’
I poked my head into the open door of Julia’s study. She was sitting in warm lamplight on a sofa that took up one end of the room. The dark red walls were covered in various posters of books she had published, plus one large poster for an Oscar-nominated movie called Loves Me Not. This had been an international bestseller that ended up being made into a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Stone. Julia (or more likely her assistant) had discovered it in what they called the ‘slushpile’, in her business. That’s the constant stream of manuscripts from hopeful, unpublished writers that arrived every day in her inbox.
She had a soft, grey blanket over her knees and her glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her face looked thinner than the last time I had seen her.
‘Hi,’ I said, a little shyly. She rose from the chair without a word and clasped me in a hug. Her head only came up to my chin. I hugged her back, a bit shocked to smell that her hair wasn’t very clean. Apart from the last time I had seen her, that strange night when I had felt unwelcome at the front door, I had almost never seen her anything less than immaculate. It troubled me.
The hug seemed to go on for longer than was usual and, when she pulled away, her eyes were sparkling a little with emotion in the reflected light of the lamp. I could feel my wariness dissolving.
‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. She smiled what seemed a sad, slow smile.
‘It’s so good to see you, Elliott,’ she said in her low, perfectly modulated voice. ‘We have missed you, you know.’
I didn’t know how to respond to this. It was unlike her to say something like this and I was touched, but a little confused.
‘Yeah, well …’ I said, lamely.
‘And how is Anya feeling?’ she said.
‘She’s okay,’ I replied. I knew for a fact she had spoken to her mother that day, so was unsure why she was asking me.
Her eyes searched my face.
‘I mean, about the baby?’
I made a puzzled face. ‘I’m not sure what you mean?’
She lowered her voice then, and her eyes flicked to the door, almost nervously.
‘I mean, does she seem happy and excited? About the baby coming?’
I gave an embarrassed little laugh. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘we both are.’
She nodded and then placed a hand on my arm.
‘I think this will be a big change for you. It may be that it takes time for her to adjust but if you’re ever worried, at any time, I want you to—’
She stopped speaking abruptly then as Patrick called out, ‘All sorted! Fancy a drink first, Elliott, or should I run you home?’ He appeared in the doorway and clearly knew we’d had an odd exchange because his brow furrowed.
‘Everything okay, Julia?’ he said, rather pointedly.
She smiled tightly. ‘Everything is fine,’ she said. ‘I was just asking about how Anya was feeling.’
Patrick and his wife exchanged loaded looks and then Patrick was all bluster again.
‘Right, right!’ he said. ‘Anyway, we should probably get you home to our daughter and that bump, shouldn’t we?’
‘Yep,’ I said, and met Julia’s eyes. She was staring right at me, her expression flat.
WINTER 2018
ELLIOTT
Despite Julia’s odd comment and everything that had happened that autumn, things fell into an uneasy peace as we headed towards Christmas. There was an odd sense that we were living in a permanent held breath; that this was the calm before the storm.
Anya was feeling well now and, as her bump gradually expanded, the distance between us conversely closed over cosy evenings watching telly. She saw surprisingly little of her parents and we hunkered down at home, a unit, a soon-to-be-three.
She never spoke about anything that had happened, recently or in 2003. It was as though a lid had been firmly sealed on the whole topic in a w
ay that I marvelled at. It also scared me a little, how effectively she was able to compartmentalize.
If I ever tried to bring any of it up, she closed things down quickly, becoming distressed and protectively placing both hands on her growing belly.
But I wasn’t so good at forgetting.
I often found myself, in quiet moments, trying to work out a series of complex emotional equations.
For example: Would Irene Copeland rather know her son was a stalker who was killed unwillingly? Or is it better to think he was just a lonely man who ultimately took his own life? And here was another one: Adebayo’s family had had fifteen years to heal … if you ever really did after such a sudden and violent death of a loved one. Would knowing the truth help, or merely rip open wounds in places where scars had formed?
Quite the conundrums, these.
They were the thoughts that went round and round my head, often in the middle of the night while Anya gently snored beside me. She had a stuffy nose all the way through the pregnancy and the snoring was something new but kind of endearing all the same.
Then there was the flowers thing.
The Scandi Netflix drama we’d liked in the autumn returned for its second series. We settled in to watch it that evening, and the programme started with a recap of the last series.
The shock of the finale had been that the killer playing cat and mouse with the police detective had turned out to be one of her own team. The final episode had been from the killer’s point of view, and we’d seen them buying a large bouquet of flowers, which they then left to die before scattering over the body of the second victim.
Something sparked in my mind and I found myself glancing at Anya, only to find she was staring at me with the oddest expression, her eyes bright. She’d said that Copeland sent her dead roses. She looked away, wordlessly. Maybe this was bringing back painful memories.
A horrible thought thumped into my brain from nowhere.
Is that where you got the idea about the flowers?
No. It was a coincidence. This sort of thing was always happening in crime dramas, for Christ’s sake. Copeland probably got the idea from some equivalent back in 2003.
