by Deborah Bee
43
Sarah
Day Nine – 6 a.m.
You don’t realise until you have no memories at all that you are a product of them. When you are an empty sheet of paper, you can’t even relate to yourself let alone to anyone else. You have no north and south. No right or left. You don’t know how to think and you don’t know what you think. Now that I have remembered things – I think – I wonder if I was better off not knowing.
And then I can’t help but wonder what kind of a life I would have had if the five-year-old me had acted differently. Had looked different. Had not befriended a kindly old gardener who let her play in his shed with the old pots.
What would I have been like if it hadn’t happened? Would I have been happier, sunnier, more successful – more like my sister?
I can remember now, quite clearly, standing behind the kitchen door in the shadows, looking out into the garden towards the dark trees at the bottom and the hedge with the shed. I can remember thinking, this proves that everything is evil! There aren’t fairies or gnomes or magic toadstools. There can’t even be a Father Christmas. There’s no unicorns or fairy dust or magic shoes or flying beds. Not if nasty people can do nasty things and you can’t stop them. And I told my dad. And even though my mother told him I was a liar, and I was just making something dreadful up to be dramatic, the next thing I knew was that I wasn’t allowed in the garden any more, not unless my dad was there, and suddenly we were moving house, and suddenly we had no garden and no need for gardeners ever again. And my mum wouldn’t look at me. She said what would people think? Why had I wanted to shame her family?
I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I don’t ever tell anyone anything. I’m not one of those people who lets life happen to them. I just think it’s important to know what happens to pretty little girls. Better not to be a pretty little girl.
I bet, up to now, you thought that pretty people have an easier ride in life. Everyone thinks that. The not-pretty people think that. Pretty people don’t. If you’re pretty it goes one of two ways: you’re either coveted or despised – coveted by men, despised by women. Not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them. I’ve been avoided by women because, and they’ve actually said this, I make them look worse. I’ve been spat at by women in the tube station, for looking too happy. I was slapped once for eyeing up someone’s boyfriend – I didn’t know who she was talking about. I’ve been passed over for promotion for being lightweight – i.e. pretty. Then you get the underhand spite. These women claim to like you. Some of them genuinely think they do. I used to work with this woman, Leila, who was frankly as fat as a house and not attractive by anyone’s imagining. The postroom boys used to say that she’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every ugly branch on the way down. But she was nice. She seemed nice. She obviously knew she was no oil painting. She was forever hiding under her fringe, fluffing it out a bit with her fingers to try to make it look thicker and more come-to-bed-ish. As if. Anyhow, everyone thought it was terrific that she was so especially friendly to all the especially pretty girls. But after a few times of being introduced as the gorgeous Sarah, the lovely Sarah, the beautiful Sarah, I realised that that was her way of undermining me. Anyone she felt remotely intimidated by, because they were prettier than her, she’d introduce as lovely or beautiful. As though that was all they were. Just a pretty face.
Men are a different story. Men have not really progressed from cavemen. They just want to own you like a rock or a stick or a motorbike or a watch or something. They want to win you, they want to enjoy you and then they want to own you, and when they can’t own you they want to hurt you. In that order. Every time. Now I remember everything. I remember friends’ boyfriends or even husbands whispering how much they wanted to fuck me, with their partners standing in the same room. Remember them pushing themselves against me while their wives were right next to them. Remember being felt up by weirdos on buses, falling asleep once on a train and waking up to find a man wanking over me. I remember being stalked by people I didn’t know and people I did. On the beach, in shops, in cafes, in cinemas, at concerts, on planes, I remember complete strangers telling me they wanted to marry me. I am a walking, talking honeypot. I was.
And when I fall for the patter, when I’m coerced and manipulated into thinking that this is going to be the right man, the same thing always happens. Nice, less nice, controlling, unkind, violent. And then you can’t get away. And you can’t change the way that people are. And men can’t help themselves. It’s like they are hard-wired. You have to change yourself. Keep yourself plain, keep your friends few, keep your answers short and your eyes down.
What about Adam? Yes, what about Adam? I know what you’re thinking. Not so astute then, was I? Look, I thought I’d found someone different. Someone who wasn’t trying to consume me but would just love me, not for what I looked like, but for what I was inside. For a while it worked. We got the house in South Tottenham. We painted it in nice colours, we agreed on wool carpets and hung nice velvet curtains. We had good jobs and a nice car. But I was wrong. Perhaps the drinking changed him. When we first started going out he didn’t drink, not so much. But when he lost his job he started drinking at ten in the morning. Maybe the weed twisted his mind. After our first year of marriage he was smoking all day and all night. He would come to bed at five. He would be drunk and stoned. I would ball up the duvet tightly under my chin, and sleep on and off, waiting for his footsteps on the stairs. If I was lucky he’d pass out on the sofa, sometimes next to a pool of sick on the carpet. If I was unlucky he would come into the bedroom. And when I heard the door swing open, my hands, my top lip and the back of my neck would start to sweat. And he would snap on the overhead light, lurch towards the bed and then pull as hard and as fast as he could on the duvet, so that it whipped out from under my chin and burned the skin on my neck and tore at my nails. In that state his eyes couldn’t focus. His hair would be as wild and twisted as his eyeballs. His voice would be low and threatening and slurred. Sometimes, as he tried to grab me across the bed, he would fall on his elbow, and just the feeling of the mattress and the sheets and the need for sleep would overwhelm him. Sometimes he would sit in the chair by the window, just for a second, just to catch his breath, and while he decided what was to come next, his head would tip forward and within a second or two he would be snoring and dribbling onto his shirt. And sometimes, if I tried to make a dash for the door, he’d catch me by my ponytail as I slid across the mattress, and wind my hair around his hand and drag me back onto the bed. When you cry, lying on your back, the tears go in your ears.
I had my hair cut.
I don’t go around telling anyone all that because I don’t want people to decide what I am, based on that. I’m not defined by being a victim. I’m not defined by being pretty. I’m defined by being me.
When I went to see the solicitor about getting a divorce I wasn’t going to tell her anything about all that either. It felt disloyal. The solicitor was young. I was her first case. But she said I didn’t even have any grounds for a divorce unless I told her something. I thought I would get away with a not-so-specific version but she said that the legal system doesn’t work that way. The law states that you have to have proper reasons to end a marriage.
I was away the morning the postman delivered the brown envelope containing my divorce papers to Adam. I was away for a few days. At a conference in Liverpool. He wasn’t going to let me go but I said I would lose my job if I didn’t. He needed my money. I’d had to give him the address of the conference, the address of the hotel and the names of the people I was travelling with. He’d given his permission. My mobile started vibrating at 8:49, which is about two minutes after the postman usually arrives. Adam would have had to sign for it. My phone kept vibrating until about four in the afternoon when it suddenly went quiet. That was the point that I got really nervous. I don’t know why I thought he would behave any differently from how he usually behaved. I suppose I thought that something legal mig
ht make him see that I was stronger than he thought I was. That I could stick up for myself, after all.
I’d already told him that we should break up. One morning when his hangover had worn off, I’d told him that I needed to be on my own for a while. I’d practised saying that in front of the mirror. I’d said that I thought it would be best for both of us. To start off with he thought I was kidding. He laughed. And I considered laughing the whole thing off but I had got that far. I had practised so long. So I said, ‘No, I’m not joking.’ Then he broke down and wept. He begged me. He wiped his eyes and his nose on the cuff of his denim shirt. He said he couldn’t live without me. Then he stopped crying and said surely I couldn’t live without him. He said I wouldn’t last a second, that I was stupid. He said I was a joke. He said, seriously, if I thought I could live without him, then go on then, get a solicitor. I don’t think he thought I would.
I was going back to my hotel room at the Travelodge to call Brenda. I thought she might have seen him. I’d seen one of those pre-mixed gin-and-tonics in the minibar earlier. I swiped the card through the door handle. The room felt hot. The windows were the sort that don’t open but the air con had been on. The bed was made. The bathroom light was on. I hadn’t left it on.
He was sitting in the chair in the corner by the net curtains. He was smiling. He’d told the reception desk that he was there to give me a surprise. He’d shown them his passport just in case. Married. He said it was a special anniversary. He’d asked them to bring champagne. There was a plastic champagne bucket. The ice had long gone and the bottle was sitting sadly in the tepid water. He untwisted the metal cage, still smiling, and flipped out the cork. There were matching plastic wine glasses with hollow stems on a pink plastic tray. He said, ‘You know, we are actually celebrating.’ He said, ‘This is the start of a new chapter in our marriage.’ He said, ‘I’m prepared to be fair’, and that if I came home now, like right this very second, he would not kill me, yet, or my dad and my mother, or my friends. He handed me back the divorce papers, in the same manila envelope that my solicitor had sent them in. I folded them and put them in my bag. I took a sip of the warm champagne from the cheap glass and waited for the inevitable. I don’t remember what happened next. Not now. Not yet.
I have given up. I don’t expect to wake up. Not really. I’m not even sure I want to any more. Even if I did wake up, I wouldn’t make a good invalid. And my mother would make a rotten Florence Nightingale. Imagine if you were stuck in a bed all day with a bagful of urine by your side and a tube shoved down your throat. I don’t want that kind of life. It’s not any kind of life. They won’t keep me alive much longer. I can’t see, I can’t feel, I can’t hear.
I am sinking again into nothing.
Down into blackness.
It seems safer.
And then Kelly’s face appears.
Kelly.
Right in front of my face.
Kelly.
Right there.
So bright.
44
Kelly
Day Nine – 7 p.m.
I’m in the cafeteria. Let me tell you what just happened. You won’t fucking believe it.
I was in talking to Sarah, like normal, all about fucking everything, and Beth came in. If I’m honest, I’m a bit pissed with Beth cos she obvs told Langlands about the whole Adam and Caffè Nero thing, which got him totally wound up.
My mum was like fucking furious about it. Said the pigs are fucking stupid if they can’t even find a fucking proper suspect and that the trouble with them is that they have to appear to solve the case and they don’t really care who goes down for it so long as someone does and we have to be careful not to lead the police up the fucking garden path, cos she says, if it’s possible for the police to go up a fucking garden path, they’ll go up a fucking garden path. Anyhow, Beth comes in and says that Langlands has been going on about CCTV cameras. She was being all nice and everything, asking me about school and stuff. But then she said that, on the night of the mugging, the camera in White Hart Lane near the park was out, which he thinks is like totally suspicious but, like, what’s he even talking about? Is he fucking Denzel Washington or something? Does he seriously think there’s some organised crime to dismantle CCTV, like ninjas in masks climbing up lamp posts or something? I told Beth. ‘It’s a game,’ I said. ‘Everyone does it.’ I told her about the gum on the lens and the baseball bat. ‘And every time the council has to come back to put up new ones.’ The council knows the gangs do it, but the police don’t do anything about it. They don’t do anything about gangs in South Tottenham, full stop. My mum says the gangs get more respect than the pigs anyway. So Beth says Langlands thinks no CCTV footage is like a fucking lead or something. Like it means something. Genius. The CCTV that does work, at the junctions each end of the road, apparently shows no one suspicious-looking on the streets at the time, so Langlands thinks the gang, if there was a gang, he said, must have peeled off into the park. ‘And we all know who owns the park.’ I said that to Beth. She said, ‘Kathryn Cowell’, and I nodded. I’ve taught her well.
And she said I should tell Detective Inspector Langlands. And I said I might. But I didn’t need to, cos I know for a fucking fact that she will.
Anyway that wasn’t the good bit.
My mum finally arrived. She’d got a CD player out of the attic and wanted to try out her Take That CD. Jesus. And she starts having a go at Beth, who was doing Sarah’s physio, cos she said that Langlands is going up the garden path. And she said that he should go out and find the real killer and the person who did this to Sarah instead of wasting everyone’s time. And Beth said we shouldn’t talk about it in front of Sarah. And my mum said that, next thing we knew, Langlands would be saying that Sarah killed Adam, and maybe Beth should check while she’s doing the physio to see if Sarah had extendable rubber legs cos that would be what she would need if she was gonna whack a really tall bloke.
Beth laughed and gave Sarah’s ankles a pull and we all laughed and then Beth went to get some clean towels and my mum went to get a screwdriver cos the fuse had blown in the plug of the CD player and I was standing next to Sarah and then guess what happened. This is the good bit. You won’t believe me. Her eyes moved. Seriously. Her fucking eyes moved.
I was like, ‘Sarah. Your fucking eyes just moved.’
And I got my hand and I moved it in front of her face like close to her eyes.
And I was like, ‘Do it again, Sarah. Do it again!’ Like shrieking.
And I moved my hand from left to right, right to left and her eyes followed my hand. And I was like, ‘Sarah’s waking up.’
And I was like, ‘Beth! Fuck, Beth! Come back, Mum! Sarah, you’re waking up. Do it again.’
And Beth ran in to find out what I was screaming about and she was smiling, but saying not to get too excited. And my mum ran in and just started crying and laughing at the same time. It was amazing.
It was me who woke her up.
I woke her up.
But Beth said that I ought to leave her alone with Sarah for a bit so that she could organise some checks and that I really ought to go and get a cup of tea or something in the cafeteria and she would come and meet me in like an hour to tell me what was going on.
So I’ve been here for like two hours. And she did say she would come. And my mum sent a text to Carol. She was on her way in anyway and she’s gone to meet Malin as soon as she can find him. And I sent a text to a lady at Sarah’s work to say that maybe she was waking up so they should send a tape of their voices or something. And I thought I could go to Sarah’s and get her some clothes cos she won’t wanna wear that blue gown thing when she wakes up, will she? I can get her that big purple scarf that she loves. And I think I’ll have another Coke.
Mr Malin has just walked into the cafeteria. It’s late now and no one else is here. The cafe shut like half an hour ago and there’s just the hum and glow of the vending machine for company. But Malin is here and Beth is walking in behind him.
My mum is there too. And Carol. They all look too serious. WTF. She’s fucking waking up and they’re not even pleased.
Malin is dragging the plastic chair out from under the table. The legs drag on the floor.
‘Kelly,’ he says, in that fake-caring, patronising, I’m-older-and-smarter-than-you-are twatty voice that he has. ‘Kelly, I’m really sorry. Sarah is not waking up.’
‘You weren’t there, Mr Malin. You weren’t fucking there. You didn’t see. She moved her eyes. She’s fucking waking up, I know it.’
Beth put her arm around me.
‘You know she moved her eyes, Beth. Tell him she moved her eyes.’ I can feel sick coming up my throat. I am so hot. They are so fucking stupid.
‘Kelly, what you saw is misleading. I’m so sorry.’
‘You weren’t fucking there, you twat.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Kelly! Will you not speak to the doctor like that.’
‘Mum, you weren’t there. She moved her eyes. She could see my hand.’
‘Kelly, I’m afraid that it’s a common involuntary reflex response to motion that you witnessed. It’s not a voluntary response. Do you understand? Sarah is in a persistent vegetative state right now. That’s what we see on the brain scans and on all the other tests. You need to understand that Sarah is not aware of anything. There is no high brain function at all. I wish there were. We will keep monitoring her though, Kelly. We will keep hoping that she will come through. But you have to prepare yourself for the worst outcome. We all do.’
He is looking around at all of us. In the light from the vending machine his face is glowing green. He could be in a horror movie.
