Cross Her Heart: A Novel

by Sarah Pinborough

  “And?”

  “I made the call. It was me. I reported us.” My throat is burning and tight. “I broke the deal.”

  54

  Her

  Ava, if you keep crying you’re going to drown in your own snot. I’m not taking the tape off. Not till it’s food time. Jesus. I need you alive until Charlotte gets here. She’s expecting you alive and one of us isn’t a cheat. Unless the police catch her, then it’s all over. But you know what? I actually think she’ll make it. She’s surprising us both, isn’t she? So, for God’s sake, stop sniveling.

  Your mother, she never cried. Not after. Not before. Not even when old Mrs. Jackson, nervous and trembling, took the stand in court and told what she’d seen through the broken window of our den on Coombs Street. How she’d been going home across the wasteland and heard a screech and then had seen Charlotte hitting little Daniel with the brick. Charlotte didn’t even flinch at the details being replayed. I always admired that about her. You could do with channeling some of those genes. Being a little more like her. I wonder how she feels, seeing herself all over the news again. Famous. Child A—the star of the show; Child B—totally forgotten. Clyde without Bonnie. Even she forgot me. When she told. She didn’t think for a second how it would be for me. We were supposed to run away together. Start a new life. Be free. She got freedom of sorts. Yes, she got locked up, but she got what she wanted. Daniel was gone and she was away from her family. Eight easy years later and boom, she’s out on the streets a whole new person.

  My sentence was longer and far worse. There are different kinds of prisons, trust me. You never met my mother. She was bad enough before. Inventing illnesses for me I didn’t have so she could worry and overprotect me. The hoops I had to jump through to get out of the house to see Charlotte. All her neuroses foisted onto me. But after? It’s funny, people think acquitted means you walk free and that’s it. Child B disappears into a sunlit future. What a load of bullshit.

  There was court-ordered therapy. Years of it. Talking, talking, talking, and no matter how often I told them what they wanted to hear, there were more questions. Unpicking me, unpicking Charlotte. So much to remember. Lies are so much harder to embed in your head than truths, even for me, smart as I am. For a while, I just withdrew. Played the simpleton who’d served me so well. And it worked for the therapists, but it backfired into my life.

  Sweet, simple, easily led Katie. Mother wouldn’t let me go to school, of course not. What if I met another girl like Charlotte Nevill? So there were home tutors, specialist teachers, always with her sitting in. I had to keep playing dumb, of course, if I ever wanted the therapists to go away. So I didn’t pass my exams—not well enough to go to university, and that was that. Life over. I was trapped. The little girl who never left home. Poor, fragile Katie Batten.

  I knew I’d find Charlotte again after the news of her release broke. All I had to do was wait. I’d got used to waiting. I’d had to wait all those years for my mother to die, after all. People always leave a trail, and Charlotte was nothing if not impulsive. She’d make a mistake—threaten her new identity somehow—and I’d be watching.

  She must have known I’d come back. I wonder if she ever believed—truly believed—I was dead? Our story couldn’t end that way. Not apart. There was always going to have to be a reckoning, you see.

  I thought she loved me. I thought she was my best friend. And we made a deal. We crossed our hearts and hoped to die and we sealed it with a kiss. We were going to be together forever.

  Deals like that cannot be broken.

  55

  1989

  Before

  It’s the bleakest of days.

  Rain falls, big heavy drops that splash inside their den from the roof with all its slates torn away, and run down the outside walls where the guttering has gone. The wasteland has turned to a sludgy mud of broken bricks and dirt and forgotten things, and their shoes are now caked in it. A rotten damp smell fills the room, and even with vodka and half of one of her ma’s pills inside Charlotte, the blackness of the future can’t be lifted. Not for her and not for Katie.

  They huddle together although they barely feel the September chill, and for a while they’re silent, their hands holding so tightly to each other Charlotte thinks they might fuse together as one. She wishes they could. She wishes it more than anything. This morning, with Ma and Daniel, was bad, and later, some instinct tells her, will be terrible, but Katie’s news is the worst.

  “I’ll fucking kill myself,” she growls. “I will.”

  “Shh.” Katie rests her head on Charlotte’s shoulder. “Never say that. And let me think.”

  Charlotte does, drinking in the exotic scent of Katie’s shampoo but also searching for the Katie smell under it. She wants to breathe it in and she closes her eyes for a moment, imagining filling the emptiness inside her entirely with Katie. There’s space now that she’s let everything else out.

  After Katie, glowering and angry and stabbing at the crumbling walls with a shard of glass, told Charlotte her news, it tumbled free from her mouth, all the crap she’s held inside; Tony, Ma, the chippy, how her shite life is turning her to shite from the inside and how scared she is she’ll end up buried in it. How it wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t always Daniel there, the loved child who makes her feel unlovable. How at least she had Katie, Katie was her lifeline, her beating heart, her rock to smash the world with, her one good thing.

  But now there will be no more Katie. A few more weeks. Precious days that will trickle away too fast. The Battens are moving. Selling the house and taking Katie a million miles away, south to London. A void stretches ahead of Charlotte and she can feel herself on the edge of tumbling into it already. What will her life be without Katie?

  Her ma took Daniel away for the weekend this morning. A special treat for my little soldier, that’s what Charlotte had heard Tony say as she slammed her bedroom door. She didn’t say good-bye. Why should she? Who would care? She could hear them though, Tony fussing over them both, speaking soft to Ma and giving her some money.

  Charlotte had curled up like a fist on her bed, holding her swollen stomach and staring at the pack of cheap pads her mum had given her the day before when the sticky brown blood appeared in her underwear. She’s wearing one now, a bulky betrayal. The curse. She didn’t want it. She doesn’t like it. She’s still only eleven. She wants her changing body to go back to how it used to look, flat and hard like a boy. Like it was before Daniel came along. When things were better.

  Ma has never taken her away for a weekend. She’s never taken her anywhere. And now she’s gone and left her with Tony for two whole days, maybe three, and as her head swirls with drugs and booze and feels heavy and thick on her shoulders, that worries her. It frightens her. Charlotte Nevill, the fearless girl. The troublemaker. The bully. The little bitch.

  “It’s Mummy’s fault,” Katie says, staring ahead, hard. “Everything is always her fault. I wish she was dead.”

  “I wish Daniel had never been born.”

  “We can’t let them do this to us,” Katie says. She sits up and swivels around so she’s facing Charlotte, cross-legged, before taking hold of her hands again. They’re soft and small and neatly manicured. Charlotte’s, much bigger, with bitten-down nails and torn skin scabbing at the edges, look clumsy. Manly. She doesn’t mind manly. Today she loves her hands.

  “No, we can’t.” Charlotte shakes her head. “We won’t. Let’s run away. Let’s do it.”

  “Yes!” Katie says. “We’ll be free. Together forever.”

  Charlotte grins and stands, spinning around like Katie does sometimes when she has too much energy for sitting still. “Bonnie and Clyde, Clyde and Bonnie,” she says and suddenly she’s giggling loud and from her sore gut.

  “Just like them,” Katie says. “In love and on the run.”

  “You’ll be on the run,” Charlotte says, her head swimming as she stops, part drunk, part high, part exhausted. “But no one will come after me
. They won’t care. They’ll all be glad to be rid of me. They can have their perfect family if I fuck off. Live in this shite estate, all happy without me.”

  Katie pulls her back down, shaking her head. “No, we’ll be on the run.”

  Charlotte waits for the world to settle. The half pill she took is kicking in hard. Maybe different from the others, she didn’t look at the packet. It’s good, whatever it is. It makes her feel warm and floaty and sleepy, a blur between her and the rest of the world. Only she and Katie exist, like in one of their games. “What are you on about?” She leans forward and smiles. “Your eyes are perfect blue. Like the sky.”

  “Concentrate, Charlotte! I’m being serious. This is important.” Katie shakes her shoulders and she tries to focus. She does focus.

  “I’m listening, all right?”

  “Good.” Katie is intense. “Why should they get to be a perfect family? Why should they be happy when they’ve made you so unhappy? Why should I have to worry about Mummy ruining my life forever? She’ll never let me go. Even if I run, she’ll find me.”

  “She should have died falling down those stairs,” Charlotte murmurs. She hates Katie’s ma almost as much as she hates her half brother. She hates anything that makes Katie unhappy.

  “Yes,” Katie says. “She should have.” She pauses. “And she still could.”

  A moment of stillness sits between them.

  “And children have accidents too,” Katie continues, quietly focused. Slowly, slowly Charlotte grasps what her best friend is saying.

  “There was the kiddie who electrocuted himself in Cairn Street,” Charlotte says. “He nearly died. They reckon he did for a couple of minutes.”

  “Exactly.”

  The enormity of what Katie is suggesting is surreal, and yet Charlotte finds herself laughing. It’s not a pleasant sound, but angry and bitter and filled with a hard joy. She imagines Ma in tears. Tony broken. No perfect boy and no dumb girl to send to the chippy.

  “We’ll kill them and run,” she says, breathless with the fantasy of it.

  “On the same day!” Katie shines with excitement. “I’ll start stealing from my mother’s purse. She never knows what she’s got in there. And take some jewelry too. We could go to Scotland maybe.”

  “Spain,” Charlotte says. “Somewhere hot. Jean went to Spain once. She said all the buildings were white and that everyone was always happy because they sleep in the afternoons.”

  Katie laughs, a sweet tinkle not like Charlotte’s raucous, uncouth noise. “All right,” she says. “If it has to be Spain, then we’ll get a boat. We’ll go to my dead grandfather’s house first. It’s full of valuable things we could sell and they won’t look for us there, not at first, not in all the shock. I’ll get a key copied. And you don’t need a proper passport to get to Europe. Just one of those cardboard ones from the post office.”

  Charlotte hasn’t got any sort of passport but who cares, Katie will take care of all that. In her head, they’re on a boat, a big ferry, and shrieking together into the salty wind until they’re laughing with tears running down their faces.

  “When?” she asks. Everything seems better already. Even the rain is slowing down.

  “Soon,” Katie says. “Let me get enough money first.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to nick much.” She hates her poverty. It’s like grime under her fingernails she can’t dig out.

  “Don’t be silly.” Katie takes Charlotte’s face in her hands. “You only have to bring you.”

  “I love you, Katie Batten,” Charlotte says. “My Bonnie.”

  “I love you too, Charlotte Nevill. My Clyde. My partner in crime.” She smiles, still holding Charlotte’s cheeks. “We’re definitely doing this, aren’t we? Deal? No more playing?”

  Charlotte nods. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Katie whispers in agreement, before leaning in to kiss her.

  56

  Marilyn

  Now

  It’s dark by the time we get back to town and I can’t risk taking her to Simon’s hotel, so I check into a Travelodge near the center of town, paying for two nights with cash on the off chance the police are watching my banking. Paranoia is catching. I also give Lisa a hundred and fifty pounds to keep on her at all times. She doesn’t want to take it but I insist.

  We make strong coffee and sit on the bed, Lisa cross-legged, the knife she’s stolen from the youth hostel safely out of her coat and on the desk. With her strange blue hair and khaki clothes, she looks so much younger, barely in her late twenties, but this disguise also reminds me she’s a woman who’s had to survive. She’s told me about her life before, about her plan with Katie. But the rest? Prison. Fear. Hiding. Who knows what she’s faced during those times? But that life has given her skills that are ingrained, I think. And they could save Ava. I haven’t told her Ava might be pregnant. There’s only so much she can cope with.

  “Poor Jon,” she says, as the TV plays the news again. “He wasn’t such a terrible person. He was just weak. He would never have taken Ava. And anyway, I knew it wasn’t him. He didn’t know about Peter Rabbit.”

  “Peter Rabbit?” I ask.

  “Daniel’s favorite toy. He got it for his second birthday. His last birthday. Someone left one almost exactly like it outside the house. Jon couldn’t have done that.”

  Jon Roper’s face comes up on the screen again, alongside one of Lisa—my Lisa—and the shock of seeing her there still jolts me.

  “He gave us all the money he made from when he sold the stories to the papers about us. Exposing me. His mother had made sure most of it went in the bank so he wouldn’t drink it away, and when he sobered up, I guess he felt guilty. It wasn’t a fortune but it was enough for a deposit on the house and I could finally put some roots down for Ava and me. I could never hurt him, just as he would never hurt his little Crystal. It’s Katie. I knew from the start it was Katie. It was always games and make-believe with her.” She swallows some coffee and stares into its rich murky brown. “Until the deal.”

  “Why didn’t you mention the deal in court? It would have made sure Katie got in trouble too.” I’m trying to form a clear picture of the past she’s kept boxed up. She told me most of it in the car but it’s still a whirl in my head. Who she was. Who Katie was.

  “I didn’t want Katie to get in trouble. And anyway, I didn’t say a word about anything. Not one. I stayed silent throughout the whole trial. And before. I only spoke three words. I killed him. It was all there was to say. Katie cried and whispered and looked around nervously as she said whatever it took to get herself freed. I sat there like stone. None of it mattered.”

  “Because Daniel was dead?” I phrase it carefully, not because you killed Daniel.

  “Because it was all for nothing.” She stares into space, a window opening into a past I can’t even imagine. Her voice changes too, a hint of an accent, an edge of the north, Charlotte’s accent. “I’d been so wrapped up in myself. In all the shite of my own life. My jealousy of him ate me up. All those treats, how carefully Ma handled him. God, I hated him. I couldn’t see the truth, though it was right in front of me.”

  Her eyes are brimming and I think of the girl they reported in all those newspapers, the monstrous girl who never cried. I’ve never seen Lisa cry either. Are we only ever transfers of adulthood pasted on to our childhoods? How much has she been holding inside? “What didn’t you see?” I ask.

  “When the pathologist’s report on Daniel’s body came back it showed evidence of several injuries received over a long period of time. Sustained, I think was the word. I didn’t know what it meant at first, like it was a new Katie word. Of course everyone presumed it had been me and I let them believe it by my silence. I didn’t care by then. I wanted them to use it against me. Because I should have seen. I should have known.”

  “It wasn’t you.”

  “No. All those times he wanted my attention. My affection. When he foll
owed me. He didn’t want to be alone with Tony and Ma either. Tony was hurting him too. I should have run away with him. Told the social worker. He must have been so scared and alone and I was his only hope, but I was too blind with my own anger and pain and fear, and the pills and the booze, to see. I should have protected him.” Her breath hitches. “But instead I killed him.”

  Her shoulders start shaking and the sobs come thick and fast. Snot runs from her nose as she breaks, wailing quietly with the terrible grief of it all. I wrap her up in my arms, not caring how my ribs hurt with the pressure and rock backward and forward, soothing her.

  “Hush now, hush now, it’s okay,” I say, although I know it can never be okay, this terrible thing she carries inside her. “We’ll find Ava.” I can’t talk about Daniel, I can’t make it better with platitudes and I won’t try. But Ava is alive and I love her and I also love my best friend regardless of her past. You can’t rule your heart and my heart beats for these two.

  “We’ll find Katie,” I say, with grim determination. “And we’ll save Ava.”

  57

  Lisa

  It’s not long past dawn but Marilyn is up and ready to go. Neither of us have slept much. “I want to get back before Simon turns up,” she says. “I’ll shower there. Leave my hair a bit damp so it looks like I’ve just got up. Maybe it’s overcautious, but we can’t take any chances, can we?”

  She amazes me, this woman. All the shit going on in her own life, everything she knows about mine now, and yet she’s still here, with me.

  “I’ll make my excuses as soon as I can and get out,” she continues. “Meeting at the bank or something. Hopefully I’ll be back by lunchtime. You going to be okay?”