by S Williams
The name on the card is not the same as she booked in with. The picture is of the girl, but the name is different. Jamie supposes it could be fake, but imagines that that would be quite hard.
‘Well, well,’ he whispers. ‘Everything’s just got a lot more fucked-up, then, hasn’t it?’
The card is a warrant card: a police ID card stating that the bearer is a Student Police Officer with the Bristol Constabulary. In the picture she is in full uniform, and is smart and unsmiling, with her hair tucked under her cap. Jamie guesses the hair is all one colour.
C. Merrin. Student Police Officer.
Carefully, as if it might go off, Jamie returns the card to its hiding place under the mattress and stands up. He feels numb and on fire at the same time. He holds on to the cleaning trolley for support. That Athene is a police officer, albeit one still newly qualified, was bad enough. But the fact that she hadn’t told them; had deliberately hidden her identity, given them a false name, was absolutely terrifying.
Because that meant that it wasn’t a coincidence. Because that meant that what she had said about being scammed to rent Blea Fell was a lie.
She was here because of what happened.
Jamie feels the acid in his stomach rise, filling him with nausea and a deep throb of fear.
Still clinging to the trolley, he quietly wheels it forward, and opens the door leading to the corridor. He sticks his head out, making sure no one was around.
But the burning question in Jamie’s mind was whether she was here in a professional capacity, or whether it was personal?
‘Who are you?’ he whispers.
Jamie wheels the trolley out of the room and pulls the door closed, locking it behind him.
37
Bella’s Last Day: Sparrow Rock, 4pm
‘Trent, I’m pregnant.’
Bella looked down on the market town, a bustle of activity as it prepared for the new year. The words left her mouth, then were whipped away by the wind. The outcrop of rock hung over the town like a judging post. Up here the wind was bitter, blown in from Norway with no impediment.
‘TRENT, I’M PREGNANT!’
Bella shouted the words. It didn’t matter. No one was there to hear them. Bella just needed to scream them out loud, releasing the pain. She dragged her arm across her face, spreading tears and snot and loss and loneliness.
She sniffed, and blinked until she could see again.
She took the battered diary out of her army satchel and opened it. Looked at the page.
Time to run away, Heathcliff, I’m pregnant.
She looked at the words, trying to make them fit the thought in her brain, but they didn’t seem to have the same power. The same finality. They were like the wind. She could rip the page out and burn the paper, like they had never been there. It wouldn’t stop what was growing inside her.
She turned the page; grabbed her pen with her frozen hands.
Then quietly, she said the other thing. The thing that she’d never said aloud, even of herself when alone.
‘Mouse, he raped me.’
Mouse, he raped me.
More words. More wind. More poison leaving her body.
She looked at the spider marks on the page.
Seven days earlier, Bella had not known what she was going to do. She had left the surgery crying tears that had burned their way out of her body, straight from the white-hot ball of hate at the centre of her mind. She had walked to the woods that sat above the little market town where she sat now, and lit up a cigarette with her Zippo. As she sat there smoking, she had reviewed her life. Her choices, and her manoeuvres within the choices she had been given. As the bitter wind dried her tears into shiny snail tracks down her face, she had smoked herself out of fear and self-loathing into hate and resolution. On the hills in the distance, white caps of snow covered the grey scars of rock that normally smeared the green of the moor.
She had pulled out her Sony Walkman from her army bag and put her headphones on. As the cold synth soundtrack of her life flooded her brain, she had immediately felt in control. Distanced and safe. That time, when she smiled, she let it reach her eyes without touching her mouth.
Sixteen weeks was how long the baby had been growing inside her. That’s what the doctor had said. She had spoken seriously, because it was a serious thing. Something sixteen weeks old growing inside someone fifteen years old. The doctor had asked if she’d told her parents, and Bella had just laughed. She couldn’t help it.
Then she had gone home and hacked all her hair off.
Bella had thought about it all over Christmas.
Sixteen weeks. That would put the conception at the end of the summer holidays. The rape. When the heather was burning on the moor and the dragonflies were buzzing above the pond.
When Trent had returned and wanted to find a new way to be.
Sixteen weeks.
Sixteen weeks of growing and changing and colonising.
Bella stared down at the town below her, willing her heart to become stone.
It had to stop.
It had to end.
38
The Beck
Mary sits down next to Athene. The younger girl was texting a message on her phone, but closes it down and puts the device in her holster belt as Mary settles onto the bench.
‘Just messaging my mum,’ she says curtly. ‘I’m letting her know that I’ll be back later tonight, or maybe tomorrow, depending on how quickly I can finish off here.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be pleased to see you.’ Mary says quietly, looking at the slow water in the beck, taking the fallen leaves to the next valley like sad, desiccated ships from a fallen season.
‘I doubt it. To be honest we’d had a bit of a confrontation before I left. That, as well as the masters, was one of the reasons I needed to get away.’
Mary turns from the water, studies the girl’s face. Athene doesn’t look at her, only watches the river pass by. Now that Jamie had said out loud what she had been secretly thinking, about Bella’s sister, and concretised the thought, Mary could allow herself to see it. The bone structure was similar to Bella’s, with the blunt nose and high cheeks. All she needed was a ton of eyeliner and fuck-you hair and she could be Bella’s older sister. On the girl’s lap is the packet of cigarettes.
Mary suddenly remembers something from their first meeting, in the storm at the café.
‘Who was the cigarette for?’
Athene looks at her, confused. ‘I’m sorr–’
‘Yesterday. When I told you you couldn’t smoke in the café. You told me that it was okay, because you didn’t smoke.’ Mary raises her eyebrows and smiles. ‘Then you said it was because you’d given up.’ Mary leans forward, pointing down at the soft box. ‘Bella used to rip the corner of her packet like you did. I think you were lying to me, so who was the cigarette for?’
Athene looks at the pack of smokes on her lap, then searches Mary’s face, skimming her with her eyes. It’s an odd feeling. Intimate, yet judgemental at the same time. Like the younger girl is trying to assess her in some way.
‘You’re right, I’m afraid I might not have been completely honest with you,’ she says eventually.
Mary takes a breath. ‘Why should you? We don’t know each other, and just about everything you’ve seen must be a little bit…’ Mary tries to think of a word that would describe how Jamie and she had just behaved in front of her in the bar of the Craven Head.
‘Fucking weird?’ Athene suggests, smiling tentatively.
‘And the rest.’ Mary nods. ‘I’m sorry you witnessed that; it must’ve looked really messy. It’s just that all of this is bringing back such… difficult memories. When Bella died it was a real explosion in our lives.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Athene says. Her body relaxes a little.
‘Not just mine and Jamie’s and Trent’s, but others, too.’
Athene nods her head in understanding. ‘A small community like this: it must have been devastating on so many
levels.’
‘It was,’ Mary says carefully. She turns back to watch the creeping beck, keeping Athene in her peripheral vision. ‘Especially for her sister, Martha.’
Mary holds her breath, concentrating all her senses on the girl beside her.
‘I’m sure,’ Athene agrees, still nodding. ‘What happened to her? Is she still around?’
Before Mary can answer, Athene suddenly swings towards her.
‘Oh my God!’ She reaches out and grabs the older woman’s arm. ‘Did she die in the fire?’
‘What? No! I thought you… never mind.’ Mary, flustered, runs her hand through her hair. ‘She was fine, thank God. What do you mean, you weren’t completely honest with me?’
Athene shrugs. ‘I’m not really up here to write a masters.’
Mary keeps very still.
Here it comes, she thinks.
‘Then why are you here?’
Athene stares at the beck for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. When she begins to speak, her voice is much quieter, and Mary has to lean forward to catch what she says.
‘I finished uni, like I said, but I was burnt out. The fact is I had a bit of a breakdown. I’d had quite a… tricky upbringing. There was some trauma in my life.’
‘You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Athene.’
‘But I do, that’s the thing!’ Mary is taken aback by the pain in Athene’s voice. ‘Because I think it’s all connected, somehow. My childhood was a war zone, Mary. I didn’t know why, but I just couldn’t seem to fit. I got into trouble at school. Was always fighting with my mum.’
‘Your mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s she like?’ prompts Mary.
Athene smiles. ‘She’s lovely. I haven’t made it easy for her, but she’s always supported me. Ever since I arrived.’
‘What an odd phrase.’ Mary smiles.
Athene doesn’t smile back. ‘But correct. When I turned eighteen my mum told me I was adopted. My biological mother… well she wasn’t very well. Not well enough to look after me, anyway, apparently. My mum… the woman who’d looked after me all of the life I could remember… turned out not to be my mum, after all. My… birth mother – that’s what they call them – let’s just say that she was somewhat incapacitated.’
Mary feels frozen inside, and each time Athene speaks it is like little bits of her are being snapped off.
‘I’m sorry.’
She doesn’t know! thinks Mary. She remembers the trauma of Martha being taken into care. How the police said that she’d be given a new identity. That Mary mustn’t try to contact her. Mary who was half crazy with grief and guilt at Bella’s death. Who wanted to find Martha and hold her and hold her until the snow came, like Bella had promised.
As if the girl had read her thoughts, Athene says, ‘My mum, the woman who brought me up, offered to help me get in touch, but I was so messed up.’
And then everything begins to slip into place for Mary. Why she felt so emotionally drawn to Athene. Why the girl had flashes of Bella running over her features like liquid lightning. Maybe even why Athene seemed to be drawn to Mary. When Martha was a baby they’d shared, or at least they had in Mary’s eyes, a special bond. That’s why she’d bought her the owl.
Why she’d shut that part of her heart away, after the fire.
Mary shakes her head, pulling out of her thoughts and concentrating on the present; Athene’s still talking.
‘And when I finally got well enough to pursue it, it was no good.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mary’s voice is soft, like she doesn’t want to scare Athene off, but inside she is reeling.
Athene shrugs. ‘There was no record of me, or no follow-through or whatever. Some bollocks anyway.’
‘What?’ Mary says slowly. ‘They couldn’t find you in the system?’
‘Oh, no; I was on the system all right,’ Athene says bitterly. ‘But apparently it needs to be both ways.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Apparently I don’t have a right to track my mother down. Not an automatic right, anyhow. She has to want me, it seems.’
‘Right. Okay.’
A memory knives into Mary’s brain, of Mrs Moss, Martha and Bella’s mother, screaming at her parents’ front door.
‘She’s dead!’ Mrs Moss’ face was dead-daughter white, and streaked with murder-lines that said she would never sleep again. Mary had watched from her upstairs window, hiding behind her curtains, covered in bruises and broken futures. Trent was in jail.
‘She won’t ever see me again!’ the mother had screamed, spittle flying from her mouth. ‘How am I expected to live with that?’
Mary grinds her fist into her leg, diffusing the pain, pulling herself back to the present. ‘What about your father?’
‘Fuck knows. There was no record of him.’
‘Right.’
Mary pictures the fire, burning hot and fast, sending ashes into the sky, like anti-snow. She watches, from inside her head, the figure stumbling away toward the pond on the moor.
Trent.
For whom one death wasn’t enough. A dead Bella had broken her, but not Trent. Trent had gone for more.
‘Anyhow that’s what I meant about the cigarette,’ Athene finishes. ‘I went off the rails, then got myself cleaned up. I stopped drinking and smoking,’ she grimaced. ‘Other stuff too, but I still carry a pack with me, to remind myself. Whenever I feel under pressure, I get one out and kind of look at it.’ She shrugs one thin shoulder. ‘Like a Zen thing. It sort of calms me inside.’
‘And you needed calming last night? And now?’
‘Yes,’ Athene says simply.
‘Why?’ Mary smiles. ‘Because of the storm?’
‘No.’ The young woman’s face is serious. With no make-up on, Mary can see the family resemblance even clearer. ‘Because I’m afraid I was about to lie to you.’
‘What do you mean? You mean the cigarette?’
‘No. Maybe “lie” isn’t the right word. You see the brochure wasn’t the only thing that was sent to me.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mary’s brow furrows with confusion.
Mary watches as Athene reaches into her pocket and pulls out her wallet; a stylish piece of leather with a brass pop-rivet. She opens it and takes out a photograph. Puzzled, Mary leans forward. The photograph is passport sized, like it was from a booth. Silently, Athene hands it over. When Mary sees what it is she lets out a gasp.
‘When the holiday stuff arrived this was attached to it, along with an address for your café. I didn’t have a scooby what it meant.’
Mary can barely breathe. The photograph is of her, back when she was young. It is in black and white and she is staring directly into the camera. Cigarette smoke trails up in front of the frame, obscuring the image, but it is definitely her. Before the years and the deaths and the pain like a clock inside her, ticking away her hope. Before the car crash and the fire.
‘Where did you get this?’ she whispers.
‘As I said, it was sent to me, like the holiday cottage.’ Athene shrugs. ‘Turn it over.’
Mary can’t feel her fingers as she does so. Written on the back, in Bella’s handwriting, are three words.
‘You see why I might want to play it careful?’ Athene says. Mary nods dumbly. She can’t stop staring at the words. ‘Obviously when I received this I didn’t know what the hell it was, or who you were, or anything; still don’t, really. But when I saw you in the café I recognised you immediately. You still look like the girl in the photograph, underneath. You’re still beautiful, you know? And when you started telling me about Blea Fell, and how you were connected…’ Athene shrugs again.
Mary drags her eyes away from the words and stares at the girl. ‘Who are you? Are you Martha?’
Athene raises her eyebrows. ‘The sister? Is that what you think? You think someone has found me and done all this…’
Athene holds her hand out for the photograph, and
Mary can see old burns on her wrist.
I went off the rails, then got myself cleaned up. I stopped drinking and smoking, but I still carry a pack with me, to remind myself.
Of what? Mary thinks. She watches her hands as they return the photograph. It is like watching the hands of a stranger.
‘Good question: maybe I am; let me know when you have an answer. Maybe this Trent knows something? Right now I’m going to get some stuff from the shop, supplies and that, then I’m going to the police station to see if they have any update of this scam done to me and my mum. Maybe there’ll be a clue as to who or why. I’ll catch you later, yeah? When you’ve had a chance to think.’
Mary nods again. She doesn’t say anything; doesn’t trust herself. The past and the present kaleidoscope around and through her. She just watches as the young woman stands up and leaves.
Don’t trust her.
That’s what was written on the back of the picture, in Bella’s scrawling handwriting.
Don’t trust her.
Which meant Jamie was right. Bella must have known about her and Trent. Must have known and said nothing. Must have known and said nothing but felt everything. Mary feels sick all the way through herself. Blackpool-rock sick.
Don’t trust her.
‘Fuck,’ Mary says, watching Athene walking away. ‘Fucking hell, Martha.’
39
Bella’s Last Day: 6pm
Bella lay on her bed, looking at the blue lights metronoming off her ceiling.
Blue. Black. Blue. Black.
She could look at them all night, if she didn’t have things to do. She loved the way they made everything darker. Made separation easier.
Without her really knowing, Bella caressed the slight swelling of her stomach. The embryo that one day would become a girl or boy.
Or at least it would, if Bella let it.
Although she had woken up certain of what she was going to do; now, in the dark, she wasn’t so sure.
