by Deborah Bee
He’s getting really arsey now. He’s not getting anywhere and he knows it. There’s a snap as he closes his laptop and the clink of his cup hitting the saucer. He’s picked up his car keys.
‘I’m only sorry I can’t be of more help,’ Mum says as she opens the front-room door. ‘Is your car nearby, Detective Inspector? Cars have a nasty habit of going missing around here, but you’ll know that won’t you, you being a policeman? You must get complaints all the time.’
‘I don’t deal in car crime, Mrs McCarthy. I deal in killings.’
‘Did you not hear about when Sarah and Adam’s car got nicked? From right out the front of their house. Look, is that your BMW? Theirs was parked almost exactly where yours is now.’
‘That would go through to the car crime division, Mrs McCarthy. As I say, not my area. Why – do you know who nicked it, Mrs McCarthy?’
‘Well, how would I know?’ she says. ‘I’m not a detective inspector, am I?’
‘So you have no idea?’
‘It was one of them gangs, Detective Inspector. You know what it’s like around here. Adam chased them all the way down the road, though. Didn’t catch them, but he chased them all the way down to White Hart Lane. He got the car back the same day. Not quite sure what he threatened them with, but whatever it was it worked.’
‘Don’t you think that information is relevant to our investigation, Mrs McCarthy? Don’t you think you could have mentioned that before?’
He looks like he’s about to explode.
‘You don’t deal in car crime though, Detective Inspector, do you? Plus,’ she adds with a smile as she walks down the front path and opens the gate, ‘you didn’t ask.’
‘I believe the crime wasn’t solved, you see. So no one will know who did it. This area is full of gangs. The police mainly don’t get involved. Don’t even bother to come out . . .’ she says, turning back up the front path. And as she closes the front door behind her, she adds under her breath, ‘And when they do show up they just act like fucking pigs.’ I’m sure that’s what she said. She can’t see me standing at the top of the stairs.
41
Sarah
Day Eight – 6 p.m.
I don’t believe in God so I don’t know why a chaplain is here. He’s praying right next to me. Apparently the lord is my shepherd, therefore I will not want. Could’ve fooled me. It sounds so creepy this close. Don’t you have to sign something before they allow people in like this? Carol wouldn’t have signed anything. She doesn’t believe in God either. When it comes to God, I think she might actually go the other way.
‘Evening, Sarah. The mighty Reverend Cheston has gone. Time for a sponge bath.’
I love Beth. She’s the nicest of the nurses. She must be older than the others. She’s the only one who doesn’t treat me like I’m dead already.
‘So your sister is coming back in a little while, and then your good friend Mr Malin is on his way. So let’s see if we can open our eyes, shall we. C’mon, Sarah. You need to get busy now.’
She’s always so nice. Not patronising.
‘Evening, Carol. Do you want to come back in a while? We have to do a bath before Mr Malin gets here.’
‘I’ve just come to get something out of Sarah’s locker. Her bag is in there, right?’
What’s in my bag?
‘Yes, they brought the bag in with her. Unusual that. One of those policewomen checked it and they definitely took the credit cards, ID and cash. But once it turned into a murder case, you’d have thought they wanted the bag back for evidence.’
‘They haven’t even tried to use the cards. Weird that. You’d have thought they would’ve used them straight away. Cleaned out the accounts before anyone knew about it.’
‘Maybe they sold them abroad – that’s what quite often happens. We had one lady in here whose cards got used to buy thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of garden furniture in New York. The bank didn’t notice. She was eighty-eight.’
‘You wouldn’t think it was possible to spend that much on gardens, would you? I’m trying to find these divorce papers that everyone seems to be going on about. Did the victim support woman ask you about them?’
‘She said that the police were trying to get a copy off Sarah’s solicitor. What’s the big deal?’
‘I dunno. The solicitor says it’s a breach of her client trust or something. I’ve looked at their house. I suddenly thought maybe they’ve been in her bag all the time.’
‘That would be hilarious. The amount of times Langlands has stood in here.’
I can hear them rattling around near the bed.
‘Here they are! So, sister darling, what’s all this then?’
‘What is it?’
‘Well! So she was going for a divorce. Unreasonable behaviour. Good for you, little sister. Finally found your balls, did you? Hardly surprising, given he was a psycho.’
‘Was he?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. She never said much. She hasn’t ever said much. She’s just one of those private types. Bit of a victim really. She wasn’t like that as a child, though. She was much more fun when she was little. There are films of her playing in the garden when she looks so happy, so confident. And then when she was about seven she started to become . . . oh, I don’t know, withdrawn? Moody? She had this accident, apparently. No one talks about it. I was away at school at the time and if you ask my mother, she refuses to accept that anything ever happened. She said once that Sarah made it all up. It all came to a head when Sarah cut herself quite badly. She was cutting all her hair off at the time. With garden shears. We moved after that. Went to live in a house in the city. But ever since, Sarah has been different. You know, a bit sullen, serious, unbelievably private . . . Listen, I’m gonna split. I’ll be back after her bath. I want to catch up with Malin.’
She leaves. And everything starts to get silent again. An accident! There was never an accident. I’m sinking into blackness. The neighbour. Suddenly I remember, and everything gets even worse.
Mr Eades. The man in the garden. The Community Care man everybody loved. He’d had some kind of mental breakdown or something. And the neighbours had all adopted him as their little project. Help out Mr Eades. Give Mr Eades a purpose. And my mother calls it an accident.
He was there, in the shed, every day. I don’t think you can call a disgusting old man showing his ugly dick to a small girl an accident, can you? I don’t think closing the shed door behind the little girl and forcing his disgusting penis inside her little white pants can happen by accident, can it?
I’m swimming in blackness.
His old crooked hands, his long muddy nails, his cracked skin. Do you understand? He said I’d ASKED for it. He said, ‘Pretty little girls are the worst.’ He said, ‘Pretty little girls only want one thing.’ He said, ‘Pretty little girls use their pretty blond hair and their long eyelashes’, and that running to his shed every afternoon to play with the pots ‘is what wicked girls do when they want something else’, and it meant it was all my fault and my mother would say so too, ‘so don’t you dare say anything’ and ‘don’t you dare forget to come back tomorrow or your mummy will tell your daddy what a nasty little girl you are’.
I did not have an accident. I had four years of physical and mental abuse.
I don’t want to remember any more. It’s very dark. It’s very silent. I’m disappearing completely.
42
Kelly
Day Eight – 9 p.m.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your friend.’
‘What friend?’
Beth is nice but, fuck, she seems to find out everything.
‘The girl who committed suicide. Was it just a month ago?’
‘It was a while ago, actually. Yeah. Bad times.’
She’s found me in the Family Room with a carton of Ribena and cheese and onion Walkers cos the vending machine in the hall has run out of smoky bacon. I’ve come to wake Sarah up because, seriously, it’s too fucking l
ong. I’m not even lying. She’s been out for what, nine days? What am I sposed to do? Beth says I have to get on with my life. Stop coming here.
I say that I don’t know how to make any decisions without Sarah. And Beth says it’s my life and I have to grab it with both hands and be brave.
Be brave.
Beth’s sat down for a minute cos she says they’re waiting for a new patient who hasn’t turned up yet but as soon as the ward doors open she’ll have to go cos it’s a car accident and car accidents are usually the worst thing they get up here and they always have to hurry cos it could be life or death. So I start trying to explain what Sarah is like but it’s difficult for two reasons. One, Sarah has changed so much lately. Not since the accident, I don’t mean that, cos obvs she’s changed since the accident. No, I mean that she changed a lot in the two years or so since I met her. Before that it was like she had a light coming out of her. Like, seriously, people just really loved her, for no reason. Or hated her. There were people who found her too bright, too positive maybe. Jealous people. I’m not even joking. I saw a woman go up to her once and spit in her face. Seriously. Like for no reason. She was sitting on a bench in Manor House tube station and she goes up to her and says, ‘Pride comes before a fall’, then spat a fat gob on her cheek. Sarah says she was smiling about something funny at the time and maybe the woman thought she was laughing at her. She shouted it all the way down the platform. And another woman just said ‘bitch’ to her when she walked past her, like under her breath, and she didn’t even know her. That wasn’t even in Tottenham. That was in Bond Street. Mainly, though, it was people who just kind of fell for her. There was another time at some concert or other, when this guy walked right up to her and said that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Like out of the blue. Weird, right? It wasn’t because she was beautiful beautiful. You wouldn’t have looked at her and said Kate Moss or Cara Delevingne or anything. She was sort of beautiful from the inside. She had this kind of sparkle. She wasn’t really aware of it herself. She didn’t act like she was beautiful.
There was the time in this coffee shop. I was telling Beth. Seriously this actually happened. A new Caffè Nero opened in Wood Green and Sarah said we should go for a hot chocolate. This was like a year ago, before they closed off the High Street to make it pedestrianised. She didn’t actually have a hot chocolate. She only drinks skinny latte. She said she had to meet Adam later but that we could go for like half an hour this one Saturday morning. When we got there you had to queue up cos it was new and there were like a fucking million people there and I think they’d done this thing where they’d given out vouchers or something so you could get a free drink. Anyway, we were standing in this queue when this kid starts staring at us. He was a total Downie. He had these great big silver trainers that looked like they were right out of Transformers or something, and a fat brown spot with a hair growing out of it right in the middle of his cheek. So I go ‘retard alert’ and Sarah goes, ‘You can’t say something like that when the person is actually a retard.’ And he gets to our place in the queue and he kind of blurts, ‘Excuse me?’ and she goes, ‘Yeah?’ And he goes, ‘Excuse me, do I know you? I think I know you.’ And she’s really polite back and goes, ‘No, I don’t think you know me’, and she looks away. And she presses her elbow against my arm really hard so I start to laugh. The bloke turns to walk off and we both kind of sigh with relief when he comes right back and he says, ‘What’s your name?’ And she goes, ‘I’m Sarah. This is my friend Kelly and you don’t know us but it’s been really nice to meet you.’ I wouldn’t have said that. I would’ve said ‘Go fuck yourself, you weird fuck’, but Sarah says if you are horrible to people it says more about you than it does about them. And he goes, ‘Well’, and he kind of looks up at the ceiling. And he goes, ‘Well, I love you.’ That totally did it for me. I was like wetting myself. I mean what kind of fucked-up person goes up to a complete fucking stranger and says I love you. Sarah started to laugh too. And she blushed, not because of the ‘I love you’ thing, more cos she didn’t wanna laugh in the guy’s face cos that’s rude and she wouldn’t want to be rude, not even to a retard. And she said, ‘I think you’d better go and sit back down.’ And he did.
So we got our drinks. My hot chocolate had whipped cream on top with chocolate sprinkles. It was a lot more chocolaty than the one you get in Starbucks. Sarah said the Caffè Nero logo looked like it said ‘Caffè Nerd’. We were laughing about that and then we got sidetracked by my English Lit homework. We were doing The Great Gatsby and I was saying how Gatsby was this great big romantic hero and Sarah was saying that he wasn’t much better than a stalker, when, guess what, the kid comes back. He must have been about eighteen, I dunno. He acted like he was about seven. We didn’t get his name. We never got that far. If I had to guess a name for him I would say Malcolm but that’s only cos there was this boy at my nursery called Malcolm who was like four years older than everyone else and he had a nurse with him all the time and he had something wrong with him that made him want to hold his toy car really close to his eye and make its wheels spin around. Anyway, Malcolm was back and he went right up behind Sarah and shouted right in her ear, ‘I want to marry you.’ And she nearly fell off her fucking chair it made her jump so high. And cos I’d seen him coming I could do nothing but laugh out loud and then Sarah started to laugh and then stopped. Cos at that moment Adam appeared. Now you could almost forgive Adam for being cross cos, for him, all that’s happened is he has walked into this cafe, and seen some weird-looking guy go up behind his wife and say something that has like so shocked her that she’s nearly fallen off her chair. As he walked up to the table the weirdo realised that there was some bloke heading his way so he started to try to get away but there were too many people. The whole place goes quiet. And Adam goes to Sarah, ‘What were you doing with him?’ but he’s shouting, really angry. And she just shook her head, like as if to say don’t worry about it. But that just made him more angry. And he said, ‘What the fuck did you do, Sarah?’ By now the whole cafe is silent. And I said, ‘He’s just a weirdo, Adam. He said he’s in love with Sarah, that’s all. But he’s just a Downie.’ And Sarah looked at me like steadily, like not cross with me but just like, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ Across the cafe a tired-looking woman was starting to panic. She was searching for someone, was starting to panic. She’d been staring into her coffee, stirring it round and round, and the silence had jolted her out of it. When she saw Malcolm her eyes widened like she was scared. She could see there was something going on. People had started to stand up. An old man stretched out his hand to Adam and shouted, ‘Stop it, young man. Just stop it!’ but Adam wasn’t even listening. Adam had got the boy by his collar and was pulling so tightly on it that Malcolm, or whatever his name was, was turning blue. Spit was dripping from the side of his mouth. Adam was holding a clenched fist at the side of Malcolm’s head like he was gonna hit him. Sarah was screaming at Adam to stop but Adam wasn’t even looking at the weird kid, he was staring straight at Sarah as if to say, now look what you made me do.
Something snapped in Sarah that day. We were still close, me and her. But she switched off. She got her hair cut. She stopped wearing make-up. She got thin. She was like a shadow of herself.
And then the buzzer goes on the door, and Beth is standing up looking fucking shocked actually and backs to the door and says, ‘And then what happened?’ And I say that the boy was OK, and that the tired-looking woman was never gonna press charges, and that then Adam took Sarah home. So nothing happened really. No one said anything. I don’t think anyone ever actually even called the police. It was Wino’s brother, the weird kid, and the tired-looking woman was Wino’s mum. Maybe that’s why no one called the police. Or maybe it was because, in Tottenham, everyone thinks that the gangs will sort it out better than the police ever will.
I didn’t say the last bit to Beth. She’s gone. The trolley has arrived. The woman on it is groaning. She’s the car crash. You almost feel guilty a
bout being healthy when you see something like that. Hospitals do strange things to your head. I wish I’d got to Sarah’s rooms before the car crash arrived because Detective Inspector Langlands has appeared with his usual bodyguards and is following the trolley up the corridor. I shrink back into my chair with my Ribena. When everything seems quiet I lean over the back of my chair and poke my head out of the door and look up the corridor to the nurses’ station where I can see Langlands talking to Beth. She is nodding towards the room I’m in, looking concerned, and Langlands starts heading my way. It’s too late to leave so I crawl back into the chair in the far corner – the drug smuggler’s chair.
‘Kelly, is it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Kelly, have you been entirely straight with us?’
‘What?’
‘Well, you’ve been here nearly every day just about since Sarah arrived. Perhaps you know more about Sarah than you’ve let on? Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘I should be at home by now, actually. You’re fucking right. See ya.’
I put my blazer on and try to walk past him.
‘That’s not like you, Kelly, is it? Swearing? Teenage attitude?’
‘Goodbye, Detective Inspector. I have to go.’
He’s standing in my way.
‘Did you know, for instance, Kelly, that your friend Sarah has been going to baseball practice for the past year?’
‘Baseball? Sarah? Really? Good for her. If you see my mum tell her I’ve gone home, would ya?’
I had swung my satchel over my shoulder and I was running. Through the double doors. Down the corridor towards the cafeteria where my mum is belting up the corridor towards me. She can’t walk in those shoes. She should give up and wear boring shoes like other mums. When I tell her Langlands is in the ward she stops in her tracks. She turns around fast and comes outside with me and we both find her car, which she’s lost again, in the multi-storey and drive home. She says she’ll call Mrs Backhouse to get me off school for next week too. I’m fucked if I wanna see Kathryn Cowell right now, considering what I need to do. Be brave. I can’t wait for her to wake up any longer. I need to finish what Sarah and I started.
