The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘There’s always an excitement near the end of the holiday,’ one of the fathers was saying.

  ‘We told you not to mess about in the river,’ Joan’s mother said crossly, arms around herself against the chill, the night’s cold sinking down through the trees towards us.

  ‘It was his fault,’ Linda replied with a shiver, her voice mulish. ‘None of us were going to go for a swim, he just wanted to show off.’

  One of the torches slipped from a hand, and the light speared across our feet before it blinked out. Stuart picked it up and turned it back on, sweeping the beam across the black water of the river.

  It was Stuart who spotted her first, even though it should have been me, even though I should have looked for her, should have known.

  It was Stuart who spotted her, the waterlogged figure snagged on the root of a tree far down one riverbank, but it was a girl who screamed first; maybe it was me.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Maeve’s dad had been lying, of course, she thinks tearfully, desperately. He just wanted to hurt her or maybe he was just trying to warn her off. He was just teasing, just being mean. She pushes the door of the annexe open with a bang and it creaks as it shuts behind her. She sniffs and wipes her nose with a shaking hand.

  She picks up Stuart’s leather satchel from the table and upends it, shaking out the contents – film canisters rolling across the dusty floor, spines of notebooks landing with a clap, the flutter of so many photos. She scrabbles through them, looking at the evidence of where he’s been this week. The Amazonian models, all leg, all arched collarbone and proud profile, draped over concrete architecture. Harsh shadows and red-taloned nails and stiletto heels stabbing into the ground. Is this what he likes? Is this what he’s into?

  She pushes them away, opens a second envelope and finds pictures of her. Softly focused, with flyaway hair, freckles painting her cheeks in the light. Her bluing skin showing through damp lace, her open mouth, plaintive eyes. His hand on her thigh, fabric crushed in his fist. She holds the evidence of his desire in her own hands. See, she tells herself, wiping her chin on her shoulder. See, pictures can’t lie. She flicks through the notebook, searching for something – a sign, a note addressed to her – but it’s just business, just boring scribbles. Her name isn’t in here. Another envelope of pictures. Black-and-white shots of war and devastation. Her knees hurt on the floor.

  The jumble of furniture, the whitewashed walls of the room, look tired, not romantic as they had when she was here with him. The dust of the bare stone floor makes her cough in the dry heat and a bee is flying at the window, its light body making a sound larger than she thought it could. She made the bed for him earlier; it’s neat, with no depression in the pillows from their heads, no imprint of his fist in the mattress from when he was holding himself up over her.

  When she gets to her feet, the motion makes something skid away. She reaches for it, the last envelope, not plastic like the others but paper, old, fraying, edges rubbed red from the lining of his bag.

  There are five faded Polaroids inside. At first, she thinks that the top two are of her, and even when she realizes that the girl in them is floating in a river and not a bath she still thinks it’s her. Red hair frizzed golden by the sun, a pale dress moulded to her skin by the water. A blurry face that looks like hers. The girl in one of the other photos can’t be her because her hair is darker, but it could be. That could be her looking up at the camera with an arm draped over her head and a ribbon around her neck. The next, of a girl leaning against a willow tree with the river behind her, her long dress cinched in under her breasts, her hand holding a bouquet of flowers. That could be her. And the last photo, of a girl standing up to her waist in the water squinting at the sun, a white veil covering her hair, that could be her too.

  She lines them up in front of her with shaking hands, crouches down again. Did that happen? Did he take her down to the river but she forgot?

  It must be the heat that makes her stupid, and slow. Or that it is so long since she saw a picture of her mother as a child, before she lopped off her hair and dyed it blonde.

  Stuart was your mother’s first boyfriend, her father had said.

  Footsteps on the gravel and the door swings open.

  ‘Maeve?’ Stuart calls out.

  She doesn’t answer him. Her legs are weak and sore crouched down, and she slumps to sit.

  He touches a hand to her hair.

  ‘What are these?’ she asks, and looks up with a thready hope that he might be able to fix this.

  ‘They’re old,’ he says.

  ‘Is this my mother?’ she asks, holding up the Polaroid. It feels liquid in her hands; it feels as though, if she squeezed it hard between thumb and forefinger, ink would come spurting out and stain her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re supposed to lie to me,’ she says and stands up. Her breath is hitching and here she is, a useless weeping girl again. ‘So, what? I’m just a do-over, a second best? You fucked her first and then thought you’d have a go at her daughter too?’ Thinking it is one thing but saying the words makes her feel like something is breaking inside her, or rising inside her, horrible and vile. ‘I hate you!’ she says and shoves him. She was never his Ophelia, she was a cheap copy, one in a long line.

  ‘I wasn’t with her,’ he says, holding up his hands. ‘I was never with her, I didn’t touch her. We were friends. I didn’t even take this picture,’ he says, picking up the Polaroids.

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘I didn’t, I swear it. You can ask her.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to her ever again, I won’t!’ she swears and then stamps her feet, pushing him again with a wailing, angry noise.

  ‘Calm down,’ he says, reaching for her. ‘Hey, Maeve, you’ll hurt yourself.’

  ‘Get off me.’ She pushes him again and then flees through the door. Her vision is black at the edges, her head roaring, but she can still hear her footsteps on the gravel and then the grass, and his own behind her, his jogging breath.

  She hates him, she hates how everything has been ruined – her summer, her life. She feels so small, so pathetic and foolish and stupid. She hates him. But as the meadow grass whips past her legs, dried yellow and sharp, she can’t help but listen hard to check that he is still following, that he is chasing after her. Like a child who wants their tantrum, their crying, to be witnessed, because otherwise it wouldn’t really exist, she doesn’t want to be alone.

  ‘Wait,’ he calls, ‘wait, you’ve got it wrong, please.’

  Her legs are tiring now; the ground is hillocked and hard like rock, and it’s difficult to imagine she could have lain down in it only a few weeks ago and imagined it some fairytale bower. When her foot falters over a tight knot of grass she comes to a stumbling stop.

  ‘How can I prove it to you?’ he pants. ‘I’ll take you down to the river now, I’ll get my camera.’

  ‘No, just go away. I hate you.’

  ‘Oh, Maeve,’ he says, hand cupping her face. He looks as tortured as she feels. She soaks it in, his concern, and wants to spit it right back at him, to make him feel worse. He looks at her and she wonders, spitefully, yearningly, what picture she makes now, whether she is still lovely to him.

  ‘Leave me alone, go away,’ she says, hitting his chest with her palm.

  ‘Let me explain.’

  He grabs her arm. His grip spans the width of it.

  ‘Let go.’ She pushes him weakly with the other hand but he doesn’t even rock on his feet. He smells like garlic and wine. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘No, I won’t. Listen,’ he says, squeezing his fingers.

  He’s not going to let her go. Perhaps she doesn’t want him to.

  The sun is behind him, still so bright she can’t see his face properly. A bead of sweat drips down her spine.

  Chapter Thirty

  Maeve is the only thing I’m concerned with now. Finding her and comforting her if she is upset. A crush is a minor drama for a teena
ger, I tell myself without the least bit of irony, and with the application of ice cream and a few soppy films she will be fine. I was, after all, wasn’t I? I finished the last year of school without a blip on a report card or an eating disorder, just a few drunken nights when I pilfered my father’s healthy booze stash in the cellar and vomited all over myself, but what teenager doesn’t drink a little too much? And then I was fine at university, totally fine, working hard and playing hard. Alex said I was the coolest girl he’d ever met, drama-free, easy.

  Maeve isn’t in her room, she isn’t in the junk room, the two spare rooms, the twins’ room, the two upstairs bathrooms or my room. She isn’t in the kitchen, the utility room, the dining room, the lounge, the drawing room, and she isn’t sandwiched inside the glass doors of the flower room. She isn’t in the walled garden and she’s not on the front lawn. She could be in the field, she could be in the woods, or she could be somewhere else.

  I don’t wait for an answer to my knock on the annexe door before entering but there’s no sign of her here. There’s a mess on the floor though, papers, photographs, books, as if a pile has been knocked down in a hurry. I lean over and pick up the photograph nearest to me, turning it the right way up.

  Yellowing grassland and a woman’s sandal discarded on the ground.

  I reach for another; it’s the right way up this time but shadowed by the table above it.

  White rumpled sheets and red locks of hair that trail out of view.

  Sometimes a body knows something before a mind does. Sometimes your diaphragm can spasm, your head sink under a rush of blood up through your neck, and your ears crackle as if they are about to let in all the hidden noises of the world.

  I make a stack of pictures in my trembling hands and flick through them, these pretty pictures of a terrible crime. Her bare legs, his weathered hands, her in a dress in the field, in a dress in a bath surrounded by flowers. So many flowers. I feel my chin dimple, my eyes grow hot. I force myself to look through them, to see what I was too blind to see. Her bare back, her long hair, her body submerged as though she is drowning. And worst of all, her face. Looking at him as if he is some kind of saviour. Looking at him with the brittle confidence of youth that I know is so easily shattered.

  I leave the annexe, photographs, evidence, in hand. Where is he?

  Alex is by the front door when I pass, frowning and drying his hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Did you know the cellar was flooded?’ he asks.

  ‘Where’s Stuart?’

  ‘I saw him running after Maeve,’ he says, nodding across the lawn to the gate to the fields. ‘I guess he found out why she was upset, although I’m not sure he’s the right person to talk to her, she’s probably embarrassed. Did you hear me about the cellar?’

  ‘I called someone for quotes,’ I say distractedly, shielding my eyes to look across the lawn.

  ‘You didn’t think of telling me about it? You’ve had all afternoon, Ruth. This is what I’m talking about. Ruth. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I don’t need to tell him yet, I don’t need to tell him at all – Stuart can do that himself. (Or maybe there’s an excuse, a pitiful voice in my head wonders, maybe these photos don’t mean what they mean.)

  ‘OK,’ he replies, and someone calls from the house. ‘I just don’t need this fuss today,’ he mutters, and returns inside as I set my sights on the gate, the hot meadow beyond too bright to make out.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Listen,’ he says.

  ‘I love you,’ he says.

  ‘And what we had – have – has nothing to do with your mother, you know that, right?’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ Maeve says as the sun gets caught, refracted sharp and white, in her eyes.

  ‘You’re special, Maeve,’ he says, thumb touching her cheek, wiping the tear away. ‘And we fit, you and I, don’t we? Who we are, what we want.’

  She thinks of them together; of his hands on her, of how they fitted around her hips as he pulled her up to sit on his chest, her twitching thighs either side of his head. She thinks of the noises she made and it’s like they’re hanging in the thin air around them, a stabbing humiliation.

  ‘I didn’t take these photos,’ he says of the Polaroids in his hand, ‘your mother and her friends took them of each other. I was never her boyfriend, I had a bit of a crush, that’s all. Like all your teenage crushes. You don’t think I’m jealous of them too?’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked, trust me.’ He tugs a piece of Maeve’s hair and she bats his hand away. He looks at the landscape over her shoulder. ‘Your mother’s not like that, anyway.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He draws out the word. ‘She wouldn’t have let me take her photograph, for one. You think those pictures I took of you mean nothing? These are just girls posing for each other, holiday snaps.’

  Maeve bites the inside of her lip, looks at him, wonders if she can believe him. ‘You said you didn’t want to hurt me, but you have.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry I never told you. I’ll explain more, we’ll have a long talk. Later, all right? We need to get back now though.’ He cranes his neck to look back at the gate.

  ‘I’m not going back.’

  ‘Come on, Maeve.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to them again, ever,’ she swears.

  ‘Someone will see us out here,’ he says. An anxious twitch of his shoulder.

  ‘Why can’t they see us?’ she retorts.

  ‘Maeve.’

  ‘We can go to the woods, like you said. Hide in there.’

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘What are you scared of?’ She feels a fizzing petulance, a giddy heat, at his discomfort.

  ‘You’re just being contrary now, Maeve. We’ve talked about this, about London and the future. Do you want your dad to come down here and see us? For your parents to find out?’

  ‘Come to the woods with me.’

  ‘I can’t, they’ll be looking for you. We can go tonight, if you really want to.’

  ‘Now. You said you would.’

  ‘Maeve.’

  ‘Liar,’ she says. She shifts on her feet. The tufts of dying wildflowers stroke the backs of her legs. ‘I’m going, you should follow me.’

  ‘Maeve.’

  She backs away from him.

  ‘What am I supposed to tell your parents about where you are?’

  ‘Lie. Or tell them you’ve broken my heart and I’m off to drown myself in the river.’

  ‘Maeve!’ he calls out but she’s already gone, running down the hill, whipping past tall grass, feeling the thud of each step in her ribcage, juddering up her spine.

  In her mind’s eye there is a camera at the level of her knees, capturing flashes of light, pale legs, brief snatches of the hem of her dress. There is music too, a suitable soundtrack to the scene. A girl running, her panting breaths loud as if they’ve been recorded later, breathed right into a microphone.

  The only green in the landscape before her is the woods ahead; the rest is yellow, white, dead, bright. But the sky is blue and running down a hill makes it look larger, a pool she wants to dive into.

  It’s too hot, even in motion, the air dry, her mouth sore.

  She pushes on.

  Running, she thinks, only feels triumphant if there’s somewhere to go, if you’re heading for somewhere good, otherwise it feels like running away, like fleeing.

  Picture something nice, the nurses told her when they needed to take blood, inject medication, hook up IVs. Picture a beach, a sweet shop, a princess tower.

  Picture the woods, the river?

  Follow me, she thinks, but she doesn’t need to turn her head to know that this time he isn’t. She’s on her own.

  A stitch in her hip. She stumbles on a bramble and a panicked breath bursts from her mouth. She could fall so easily, fall and bruise and break; her body is that fragile, all bodies are. She hasn’t run i
n years and it hurts her lungs. It makes her think of other hurts, of real wounds.

  Pick me up, carry me, she thinks, legs heavy and unsteady as she continues on.

  Now each sharp blade of grass that pricks her ankles is a lance and her righteous fury is oozing out, leaving familiar, ordinary, unbearable sadness behind.

  The grass falls away from her as she approaches the woods, the ground harder, roots like knuckles. The shade of the trees reaches out and she hurries the last few steps, bursts past trunks and branches and then stops, gasping for air.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  As I approach the gate to the field, Stuart approaches it too from the other side, looking ordinary, looking unbothered. Lifting a hand in hello.

  ‘Have you seen Maeve?’ I ask in a reasonable facsimile of my ordinary voice. I can’t see anything in the field beyond him but grass.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’re such a liar, God.’

  He stops a step away from the gate, startled. ‘What?’

  ‘Alex said he saw you running after Maeve.’ I’m so furious that my hands are clawed, my jaw is shaking. ‘Oh yeah, and I found these.’ I hold up the stack of photos, watch his face go blank.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, nervous tongue swiping across his top lip.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t touch her.’

  ‘It was just a photoshoot, I knew you’d get weird about it. It’s an art project.’

  ‘An art project! You lie like breathing.’

  ‘So do you,’ he retorts, as if we are children again and only bickering.