by Holly Seddon
The individual details are not so important right now; just one simple fact is clouding out every other thought: Greg wrote a hit list and put my name on it.
*
When Marianne crawls under her covers, she can still think of nothing but this.
The bed is cold and unwelcoming, the sheets creased and gritty. She thinks now of Noah’s clean sheets and warm skin. The smell of sandalwood and orange. And his double-glazed windows and Neighbourhood Watch signs. She considers messaging him to ask for help. ‘Save me from my dead husband, from whoever he really was.’
Her fingers tap the screen to life and hover over the WhatsApp icon. She imagines him rubbing his eyes and sitting up, his face folding into a frown as he reads her message.
Then she imagines trying to explain what started all this, how she went rooting around on the dark web after finding out Greg had been on there. Noah is brunch and sunshine, optimism and future. He’s not darkness and mistrust, he’s not the past. And what would he say anyway?
‘Why don’t you go to the police? Do you have something to hide?’
Noah, and hopefully his daughter too, are her prize for getting through this unscathed. She cannot risk dragging them into it.
Marianne puts her phone down hard on top of a pile of books that teeters next to her bed. She wraps her duvet around herself, shuffles into the middle of the bed and listens to the night outside. The babble of nightlife has always calmed her. She and Greg used to make up little stories to accompany the sounds of footsteps, snatches of conversations. ‘Do you think they love each other as much as we do?’ she’d say, when they heard couples.
‘Impossible,’ he would reply.
She listens to taxis taking lovers home to bed, distant police cars patrolling. Drunk friends staggering home, their heavy footsteps slapping arrhythmically. People, lots and lots of people, a safety net of ears and eyes.
Only now she imagines that those slow, crunching tyres belong to someone keeping surveillance on her flat. That those hard footsteps belong to a killer, with a flaming bottle ready to throw through her window. The sound of someone in the alley is no longer a drunk pissing in the dark, but a man with a knife clamped between his teeth shinning up the drainpipe. Risk rippling through every tiny sound, terror hiding in every creak of this old building.
She closes her eyes tight, grinds her head back into her pillow and knows that sleep will not come.
Sam
The grey stones of the alley are slick with drizzle and the high walls of the neighbouring yards rise up to block out the light. There’s not a soul around. Everyone tucked up inside on this Sunday night, feet in their warmest socks, pyjamas straining over bellies full of roast dinner. They’ve bathed the kids, ironed work uniforms and school shirts, made tomorrow’s sandwiches. Maybe there’s been an argument or two; Sundays are like that for some.
But the heating is back on and thank god for that, they think. At last that strange sticky summer is behind us and we can turn our misty eyes to Bonfire Night or Christmas or New Year. To something nice and good and wholesome twinkling on the horizon.
Tonight, the whole city glows in a picture-perfect scene while I creep quietly in the dark shadows underneath.
Even if they did leave their cosy homes and brave the damp, they would not see me. They don’t want to consider that people like me exist, stealing oxygen from the mouths of babes, planning wicked things. And so I walk in plain sight while they look straight through me. A ghost in a house that refuses to be haunted.
I head to the flat by the back way, watching for witnesses while a fat raindrop works its way down my neck. No eyes, no ears. I’m silent as a snake easing my way along the ground, closing the gate in a practised move and avoiding the puddles that dot the small yard.
The key twists in the door’s lock and the tiny metallic sound is lost to the wind. Inside is black and I listen for life. There is none. I switch on the kitchen light and my home is filled with amber yellow.
I dump my keys on the table. Then I slide out of my boots, peel off my socks and stretch my toes on the floor. When did I last rest? Truly, properly rest? Not the one-eye-open sleep of the damned. Not waking at dawn to place myself in someone else’s world, ready to shred it from inside out. I can’t remember the last time I actually slept all night until I woke up naturally. I lust for it. I want to feast on sleep, gorge on unconsciousness. That kind of sleep has been beyond my grasp for years.
I pull off my damp jeans and walk bare-legged into my bedroom, where I change into pyjamas. In the bathroom, I stand over the sink and rub my hands through my hair, shaking out the dust and cobwebs I accumulated in her loft.
My heating has also come on for the first time this year. In the lounge, my nose wrinkles at the tell-tale smell of burning dust and last year’s dead insects warming to a crisp. I pour a glass of red into a heavy, ornate wine glass. One of the only relics of my former life. It was a long time before I dared to drink again and it weighs heavy in my hand.
I light a fire and sit in the armchair next to it, sipping my drink and picking up a book I’ve tried to read for months. Picture-postcard, just like them. But nothing like them at all.
Marianne
Monday, 13 September 2021
Sometime between two and three, Marianne’s wild heart slows enough for her to pass out. She wakes to her alarm just four hours later, groaning into the morning air. She smokes a cigarette still lying flat on her bed, staring into the morning, feeling just as bewildered as she did last night.
She pulls herself loose from the covers, downs a coffee and tries to shower herself human. It is a display reminiscent of those early weeks after Greg died. Robotic rituals. Going through the motions. One foot in front of the other. All the other clichés that bubble up around death.
One of the first times she’d really listened to Noah at the bereavement group was when he spoke about this. He talked about the early months after Louise’s kidneys finally gave up. How the routines his daughter demanded, just by being a baby, had been his salvation. They kept him going until he wanted to keep himself going. Was that when she’d first noticed his body, as he stood to talk? The muscular thighs, the slabs of chest under muted but expensive T-shirts? Realising in the process that her own blood was still pumping? Oh, for those days of pedestrian grief.
She dries her hair, paints a mask over her ghoulish face and pulls on clothes. Despite waking up on time, the morning has slipped from her grasp and she’s already running late. Marianne stuffs everything haphazardly into her bag, including Greg’s notepad and her own list of names, and forces herself out of the door.
*
Twisting the key with trembling fingers, Marianne manages to start the engine of her car. She drives, somehow, on the correct side of the road and in the right direction. The sunshine feels like a joke. She stares at the other drivers aghast. Ignorant bastards. They frown, they glare, they beep, they forget to indicate. It’s as if they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. So you have some chores to do, a job you don’t like, you’re late, your kids are annoying, so fucking what, she thinks. So fucking what. Someone wants me dead!
She is reminded, quite out of the blue, of her father. How he had called on her mother’s landline, just before Marianne took her A levels. ‘Who is this?’ Marianne asked pointedly, although she knew.
‘It’s Dad,’ he said. ‘I have some health news.’
Terminal.
She’d not thought of him in a long time. William Heywood, a partial dad and then an unvisited headstone. Marianne was eighteen when he died, and he was never much cop before that. Even when he’d tried to make last-ditch amends – and he really had – she’d refused to accept the sticking plaster. The girl who needed those efforts was no longer around, she’d grown up a little harder for it.
Besides, cancer doesn’t override who you are, and he had been a rubbish dad so then he became a rubbish dad with cancer. But that word. Terminal. An ending in sight. She’d never th
ought of how he must have felt to hear that. To receive that knowledge. And when he told her, wheezing down the line, she’d let it pass through her like everything else he’d ever said.
‘There’s so much I wish I’d done,’ he said, his voice pleading. She’d assumed he meant keeping his family.
Now she knows he was referring to much more than that. All those opportunities lost. There’s so much she’s never done, never dared. Treading water instead of swimming. So now she knows the unique terror her father must have felt. And for her, there is an utterly unique sense of isolation. An end in sight, and no one else can see it. If it’s even true. That old caveat, messing with her mind more than ever.
A horn beeps and she slams on her brakes just before the nose of her car is wiped off by a van overshooting some lights. Her body rattles with adrenaline, the class-A surge of a near miss. Is that how it will feel, before she feels nothing?
Do the others on the list share this knowledge? Are they driving around in a daze, wondering how the axe will fall? Or are they oblivious? Still cocooned in the blanket-soft ignorance that she’d existed in, until she went snooping through Greg’s things. Until she pulled that damn thread.
*
The secondary school where she’s worked for nearly ten years is a big Brutalist building that wasn’t fit for purpose even when it was built in the fifties. The large school hall in the centre and the upper classrooms are accessed by seams of staircases that create a kind of Spaghetti Junction experience during the morning rush. Normally Marianne makes sure she’s safely ensconced in the staffroom before the kids arrive. Not today. She pushes against a tide of rucksacks and zombie teens.
Abi tries to make conversation over coffee, her eyes kind and concerned. But it’s her job to safeguard the kids; if she knew anything Marianne had seen or done … and besides, there are other secrets she doesn’t want Abi to unearth. If Abi knew about Marc, knew how close to the sun Marianne had flown before, her career could be over anyway.
She ricochets through the morning, late to staff meetings, spilling water down herself and having to rush out to the bathroom mid-lesson. She’s ill-prepared and stilted in class and her students eye her suspiciously; is this shambolic act a trick? But her colleagues don’t seem to mind. At lunchtime, a biology teacher and prized gossip called Susan Abbot puts her hand over Marianne’s in the staffroom and asks how she’s doing. Oh. They’re making allowances because of the anniversary, of course. A memo probably went around the staff. Don’t upset the Widow Heywood. ‘I’m OK,’ Marianne lies, freeing her hand from Susan’s and abandoning the ham sandwich she’s been nibbling. Marianne’s phone buzzes with a reminder. ‘Just need to make a call.’
It takes ten minutes but she finally gets through to the right department at Greg’s bank. ‘We can send those statements out,’ the friendly voice says.
‘Oh, thank you,’ Marianne sighs, unsure if the statements will tell her anything helpful but hoping they will somehow prove her worries wrong.
‘All you need to do,’ the woman continues, ‘is to write in to the head office, listing the precise dates of the statements you’d like.’
‘OK …’
‘And you need to enclose a cheque for ten pounds—’
‘A cheque? I don’t think I have any cheque books. Who uses cheques anymore?’
A less friendly pause. ‘Do you bank with us too?’
‘No,’ Marianne says. ‘Sorry.’
‘We can’t take a payment any other way then, I’m afraid, but if you go into your bank and ask, I’m sure they can order you a cheque book.’
‘OK,’ she says, trying to mask her impatience. ‘I’ll do that then. Thank you.’
‘Sorry, madam, there’s more I’m afraid. You also need to enclose a death certificate, proof of your own identification, which can be a copy of your passport or driving licence, and proof of address.’
Marianne pauses, deflated. ‘Is that it?’
‘Yes, madam, that’s it.’
‘And how long will it take when I’ve sent in all that?’
‘Well, it depends on whether it’s straightforward and how far back the statements need to go,’ the woman answers brightly. ‘But it should be within a month.’
‘A month? Oh, Jesus Christ.’
‘Can I help you with anything else today, madam?’
Marianne pinches her nose. Since seeing her name on that list, she’s not been able to think beyond one day, let alone a month.
‘Madam?’
‘Sorry, no. But thank you.’
*
Marianne has a free period after lunch. She’s horribly behind on her work in a way that would usually have her working every second, staying late tonight, hobbling home and working on the sofa. Instead, as the staffroom thins out, Marianne pulls the notepad from her bag and looks again at the list of names that she’s copied.
Andrew Mackintosh, Godalming,
date of birth: 2 July 1964.
Rosie Parsons, Tottenham,
date of birth: 23 April 1993.
David Ross, Reigate,
date of birth: 18 October 1976.
Pavel Bourean, unknown,
date of birth: unknown.
She wonders again if they know they are in danger. Their names look so benign, just three average people living in average places. And someone almost unknown who might as well not exist at all. Surely they can’t know anything, Marianne reasons. It’s only through sick chance that she stumbled upon her own name. Unless, of course, these are people Greg knew from his dark web activities, but from what she could tell, no real names are ever used.
Except, she shivers, in hit lists.
She should find them and warn them, that’s the right thing to do. That’s what Greg would do – her idea of Greg, anyway. More than that, she wants to find out how they knew her husband, how they were all connected, why someone – maybe even Greg – wanted them dead. Or maybe, just maybe, they can tell her it’s all a misunderstanding.
‘Are you OK?’
A brilliant supply teacher called Hayley hovers next to her, concerned eyes peering out from under a vibrant red fringe.
‘What?’ Marianne says, turning to stare at the woman.
‘Sorry,’ Hayley says, ‘but you were, I don’t know, hyperventilating, I guess.’
‘Oh god, was I?’
She nods, eyes searching Marianne’s.
‘Asthma,’ Marianne says, looking away. ‘I’m fine.’
Sam
I sleep until I wake up. No alarms.
I take a shower somewhere near the boiling point and make a strong coffee. In my sleep, I dreamt, as I often do, about the ones that came before. This strange net of connected targets that seems to be tightening around this final woman.
All of these people are knotted together in some way. Caught through their own behaviour in the same sticky spider’s web. I shouldn’t care, it’s not my mystery to solve, but it chews at me just a little.
I had thought them individual stones but now I see them all laid out in my mind like a row of pebbles. The way that a child’s fat little fingers might lay them out. Stop. Don’t.
I’ve been looking at them too closely to make out the connections but the powers-that-be are always one step ahead. And the customer is always right. I snort at memories of myself, back when I needed to know who, why … A motive by proxy.
Now I just turn up, clock in and get the job done.
No feelings. Life is so much easier that way.
Marianne
The final period is with Year 10. They’re knees deep in World War Two, which takes a toll at the best of times. The sheer waste of young life. And it’s happening still, of course, out there, which makes teaching this group even tougher. Something teachers are expected to teach in retrospect and ignore contemporarily. A discussion she and Greg had often, almost always growing heated. ‘I’m doing what I can to make the past relevant to today’s crises,’ she’d say. ‘But these kids need to pass th
eir exams, that’s my priority.’ His dark eyes would blaze but he’d drop it.
As the textbooks open on pictures of bright shiny buttons and new uniforms, she thinks, of course, of Greg. Just thirty-four.
‘Miss?’
Like all those wasted soldiers, he was in his prime. He ran, cycled, ate wholesomely, didn’t really drink. Even when they’d smoked, he’d smoked far less than her. He was squeaky clean, inside and out. She’d thought so, anyway.
‘Miss?’
At least, unlike the war dead, his tip-top organs were salvaged to help other people. She thinks of them sometimes, little parts of him scattered on the breeze, alive in their way. A legacy that’s something like children, but not. Not close enough.
‘Miss Heywood, are you in there?’ The laughter of the class snaps her to attention and Marianne arches an eyebrow.
‘Excuse me?’
The laughter stops suddenly and the tall teenager in front of Marianne shrinks.
‘What can I do for you, Tamsin?’
*
While the pupils work, sniffling and smirking with the excitement of home time looming, Marianne eases her phone out of her bag and holds it cautiously under the desk. Phones are banned, not just for pupils but teachers too. Safeguarding is taken so seriously now that she could be suspended if she was found doing this, but every second Marianne waits feels like the tick of a bomb.
Glancing up every few minutes to check that her charges are still eyes down, Marianne fumbles to unlock her screen and search Facebook for the names and places engraved on her itching brain. Now she has dates of birth and locations, it should be easier to sift the right people from the hundreds of results.
She quickly finds, she’s pretty sure, the right Rosie Parsons from Tottenham. She looks similar to the thumbnail at least: pretty, blonde, youngish. In her profile picture she wears a nurse’s outfit that Marianne thinks looks genuine rather than fancy dress, but who the hell knows? Maybe she’s an actress. Or a stripper. Rosie’s account is locked down tight and her friends list is invisible to the public. Marianne’s thumb hovers over the ‘add friend’ button but something stops her. Does she really want to announce her interest in this way?
