The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  Making a show of not listening, Bo sticks his fingers in his ears and begins loudly singing, la la la. ‘No babies, diseases or unfortunate events.’

  Anna, who has already polished off her second glass, fakes a smile.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ says Bo.

  At the table is Anna’s home-made pâté which is, of course, delicious, because, though Anna herself rarely eats, she makes it her business to be an amazing cook. Even when we were students and all we cooked was beans on toast, Anna would always come up with some delectable little variation on the theme, a grating of cheese, a splash of Lea and Perrins, a sprinkle of mustard powder, a spoonful of treacle and a splash of lemon and then sit and watch us eat it.

  ‘So, mate, what’s the plan?’ Dex asks, tucking into his third slice of pâté. ‘There’s a farmer’s market at the weekend, apparently.’

  ‘Fossils. Wine. Walks. A small addition to the Big Black Book. Otherwise, there is no plan,’ Bo says.

  Anna spreads a cracker and lays it delicately on her plate. ‘You’re going on a date?’

  ‘Already arranged,’ Bo says, knocking back his second glass. He’s swiped right on a woman living in one of the villages in the south of the island. ‘Because why not? Let’s just say I’m field testing my app’s performance in rural areas.’

  Anna leans in, her eyes bright, and momentarily rests her head on Dex’s shoulder. ‘What about you, darling?’

  ‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ says Dex.

  Bo has helped himself to seconds, and with his mouth full says, ‘Between getting trashed and bouts of casual sex, I’m intending to go on some lovely walks with my friends. Only if you want, though. It’s all really chill. Tomorrow morning we could go over to the Weares. There are feral goats everywhere and the fossiling is good if you get the right day. There’s a climbing outfit down that way too, if anyone fancies it. You climb up this rock face and onto the top by the prison. It’s kind of cool.’

  ‘Oh God, all that lycra,’ says Dex, camply.

  The pâté finished, Anna brings over the chicken. Neither Bo nor I have much talent in the kitchen, Bo because he always eats out and me because there’s always someone else’s washing up in the sink at the flat in Tottenham and because, until a month ago, I was always broke. The supposedly legendary entrepreneurial millennial spirit somehow passed me by. Ambition too. Hence temporary teaching assistant. Great work when there is any but, like any line of work these days that doesn’t involve tech, finance or roasting artisan coffee, terrible pay.

  Bo has now opened a third bottle.

  ‘By the way, Casspot, you’re looking very hot. Is that a new outfit or have you done something to your hair?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Oh?’ Anna’s eyebrows rise.

  Dex leans over from the other side of the table and plants a kiss on my hair. ‘You got that promotion! Why didn’t you say?’ ‘Let’s drink to promotions,’ Bo says, raising his glass.

  The glasses clink prettily and for a moment silence falls and is then broken by the strangled screech of some nocturnal creature.

  Anna puts down her glass. ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘The cry of the Mer-Chicken,’ jokes Bo.

  ‘We’re about to eat its mate and it’s very, very angry,’ says Dex.

  ‘Whoever heard of a Mer-Chicken anyway?’ Anna says.

  ‘Everyone on Portland?’ says Bo.

  ‘It sounded like a vixen to me,’ I say.

  ‘Mate, if you’re talking about that thing in the porch it’s a crap stone mermaid with eighties hair someone bought on sale in the local garden centre,’ says Dex. ‘Wooo, I’m scared.’

  ‘Obviously that’s not the real one,’ Bo says.

  ‘Oh, and could that be because there is no real one?’ Dex eye-rolls.

  ‘Portlanders say it’s a harbinger of death,’ Bo goes on.

  ‘Don’t be creepy, darling,’ says Anna, addressing herself to Bo and, wielding the carving knife and fork, in her practical way, adds, ‘The only chicken in this house is the one sitting on the table getting cold. Now, leg or breast?’

  Later, after another few glasses of wine, we are sitting over plates of Normandy apple tart Dex bought from the French bakery in Butler’s Wharf when I hear myself say, ‘Maybe we’re rather creepy?’

  There is a stillness around the table. If you really want to know the truth, the Big Black Book has given me a queasy feeling for years. After what happened at the festival, I don’t know any more. Somewhere along the line did we lose our moral compass?

  ‘Oh dear, Cassie’s in one of her dark moods.’ Dex wipes a paper napkin across his lips.

  ‘Where did that come from all of a sudden?’ says Bo.

  ‘I don’t know . . . just all the in-jokes, never bringing new people into the Group, the Big Black Book.’

  Let me tell you a little about the Big Black Book. It feels as though we summoned it into being a lifetime ago. All these years later it still seems like the product of a spell. But it came out of one ordinary evening, when we were celebrating Anna’s birthday in Pizza Express. I was the girl who ordered the Veneziana back then, not because I particularly liked it (raisins on a pizza, God no), but because they donated 50p to charity if you did. I see that now for what it was – a particularly self-defeating form of virtue signalling, a product of the feeling of inadequacy which shadowed me then. I still had only the skimpiest notion of why Anna, Bo and even Dex seemed to want to hang out with me. Now I know that they saw me as living in a parallel moral universe, one that was no better or worse than theirs, only different and, in their view, as charmingly quaint as a piece of the expensively retro furniture with which they decorated their newly purchased bank-of-mum-and-dad luxury apartments. Anna, who viewed anything edible as reason to engage in moral combat, ordered a salad niçoise with no dressing or dough balls. Naturally, the boys always ordered whatever they wanted, never imagining that anyone would be stupid enough to do otherwise.

  Bo had stumped up for a bottle of cava – this was when he was still a struggling IT entrepreneur – and we were raising a glass when Anna said, ‘For my birthday, I’d like everyone to tell us all a secret. Don’t you think it would be fun for us to know something about each other that nobody else does?’

  We decided it would.

  We met the following evening at Bo’s. As I recall, Dex told his secret first. At age fifteen he’d lost his virginity to his PE teacher called Jamie. It happened one night in the Sainsbury’s car park behind the school. In exchange for his secrecy, Jamie gave Dex a pass out of PE for the rest of the term. At the time Dex revealed his secret, he and I were still a couple, and no one thought to ask whether Jamie was a man or a woman. In retrospect this was, of course, a mistake.

  Bo admitted to dognapping the family lurcher, Grace, in whom his parents took more interest than they did in their children. He caught a train home from boarding school, picked up Grace and, without his parents’ knowledge, took her on the train first to London then to Leeds where, claiming to have found her wandering the street, he dropped her off at the nearest shelter. His parents spent months trying to track the dog down but never found her. His father withdrew from the world and his mother fell apart. A year or so after Grace’s disappearance the new owners got in touch with Bo to thank him for bringing the dog into their lives. They’d named her Joy. It still tickled Bo to think about it.

  Anna admitted to sleeping with a reality TV star. She and Bo were in the off phase of their on-off romance at the time. I could tell you the star’s name but everyone’s forgotten him now. Back then, though, he regularly made the front pages of the tabloids.

  ‘Picture or it didn’t happen,’ Dex said.

  Anna whipped out her smartphone, itself a small miracle in those days, tapped a few times on the screen and there he was, in the buff, lying on the bed in a posh hotel room, Anna’s bag just visible on the table beside him.

  ‘We need to know everything and we need to know it now,
’ Dex said. (Again, I should have known.)

  Anna had loaded the image onto her MySpace page though the rest of us hadn’t seen it there. One of her followers had asked her to grade the date out of ten. Flirting (9), Kissing (3 – he had smoker’s breath), Other Foreplay (6), Overall (7).

  We all noticed Bo had gone very quiet.

  ‘That’s not really a secret, is it?’ Dex said.

  ‘It would be if we all did it and only showed each other – oh my god, that’s genius. We should keep a joint Black Book!’ Anna said.

  ‘Dex and I are, like, monogamous,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then Bo and I can do it.’

  And that was how the Big Black Book was born, as an instrument by which Anna and Bo could take unspoken sexual revenge on one another, though it was never a book, really, but rather a secret Facebook group and, latterly, after Bo decided that Facebook was insecure, an encrypted site on the Cloud. It should have stopped there but when Dex and I split and Dex began an open relationship with Gav, there was a crazy period when all four of us were uploading pictures of our dates in the buff, captured whilst they were asleep or looking the other way. It became a game, though looking back I can see it was a kind of warfare conducted by other means, as everything involving Anna always was.

  We kept the Book secret as our lives morphed and we moved to different corners of the capital. We were working all hours, Anna in PR, Dex in a law firm then at a gallery, Bo in software design and me in teacher training, and the Book became the thing in our present we all had in common. In the backs of our minds we all feared that, without the secret of the Book to keep us together, we’d wind up as cybermates: four friends who were once closer than family, sending each other smileys on high days and holidays and gradually, inexorably, losing touch with each other’s real lives.

  As it was, the four of us would sometimes meet for Sunday brunch and talk about the week’s encounters: the guy who wanted his ankles stroked, the woman who showed up with her friend. Soon it became a reckoning of the weird and the inadequate and the bizarre, a sort of Domesday Book in which our sexual experiences were recorded and ticked off. We became the holders of each other’s secrets and by that means we survived as friends. None of us ever stopped to think about the invasion of other people’s privacy or whether by what we were doing – capturing the images of lovers when they were at their most vulnerable – we were in some small way stealing some private essence of their innermost selves and repurposing it for the purposes of gladiatorial combat.

  ‘It would only be creepy if other people were doing it, but because it’s us, it’s not,’ says Anna now.

  ‘Us? You haven’t done it for years, Anna,’ Dex says.

  There’s a moment’s silence, punctured by Anna who, in a tinkly, brittle voice, says, ‘As you all know, I’m happily, happily married.’

  Everyone around the table holds their breath. It’s as if we’re all suspended in time. Then, all of a sudden, Bo lets out a bitter little laugh.

  7

  Anna

  1.30 a.m., Sunday 14 August, Wapping

  Anna is standing to one side of the main stage at the front, swaying to the music, glad, on balance, despite all that unpleasantness earlier, that she’d come.

  She hadn’t wanted to, not really, but had forced herself out for Cassie’s sake. Plus it would have looked bad if she’d cancelled at the last moment, even if, as she’d done before, she’d lied and used Ralphie as an excuse. But it has turned out to be really quite a relief to have a night away from Isaac. What a bloody bore husbands could be. Bo did warn her. He said, marriage is for bores, don’t do it, Anna. And yet, it was because of him that she had. Daddy had warned her too. She remembers him saying, ‘Is that Isaac fellow really the best you can do? He’s a solicitor, for God’s sake.’ He’s a terrible snob, but it’s always the ones who have the least right to be who turn out to be the worst. Daddy just wanted her to marry someone who was either very, very rich or from a family who sat at the top of the Establishment. Preferably both.

  Anna takes a sip of beer and runs the bottle along the scars on her forearms, smiling at the memory of Daddy telling her to keep her limbs covered so prospective beaus wouldn’t see them and assume she was a fruitcake. Which was exactly what she was. Mostly thanks to Daddy’s grim ministrations. Mummy wanted her to marry Bo, who had flirted and charmed his way into her affections and because he’d been to Harrow. She had always sensed that her mother resented lovely, kind, sensible Isaac, who was immune to her flirtations. What would they think if they knew who their grandson’s father really was? Not that Anna would ever tell them about Ralphie even though her mother, she thought, would probably be thrilled and a little envious. Her father? Who knew? In some odd way she thought he might turn protective, two decades too late.

  She wouldn’t want to give either of them the satisfaction. In any case, men generally don’t seem put off by the scars. There are three, just over there, really obviously checking her out. All younger. All fit.

  She turns herself slightly so as to present a side-on view of her long, slender legs and tiny waist. The lovely sharpness of her collar bone. Absolutely no one would know she’d had a baby. Stomach like a runway. They’re very insistent, her admirers. It must be something to do with the aftermath of sex. Even Bo and Dex. Like dogs scenting a bitch on heat. They’re not even conscious of it. How could they be? They’ve no idea what she’s been up to. Which only makes it all the more delicious.

  As for the other thing with Oliver, that will calm down and sort itself. There may well be a rapprochement. And if there isn’t, there are plenty more fish. Ha, maybe she could build a secret profile on Bo’s new app? But no, that wouldn’t be wise. Maybe one day, when Bo has had sex with everyone in London, he’ll boomerang back.

  Speaking of, here he is, making his way through the crowd with three Coronas aloft. Which must mean . . .

  She waits until he’s near before asking, ‘You didn’t find him?’ Even though they’ve been losing and finding one another all night, it makes Anna anxious when a member of the Group goes off on their own, particularly when it’s one of the boys. It’s been fifteen minutes since Dex disappeared without saying where he was going.

  ‘Nope.’ Bo passes out the beers and takes a long swig of his own, doesn’t meet her eye. She knows exactly what this means. He hasn’t taken the time to look. A whirl of irritation, like a little spinning top, starts up inside, but she knows it won’t last. It never does when the whipping cord is Bo.

  ‘Maybe we should just go,’ she says, taking a sip from her beer. She checks the time on her phone. She’ll stay on if the boys want to though she’s rather hoping they won’t. She’s never really liked festivals anyway, too touchy-feely, far too woo-woo and it’s just occurred to her that at this point, she’s got everything she wants from the evening. The company of Dex and Bo (particularly Bo), a session leafing through the Big Black Book, which set off her imagination and led to some great sex, albeit with an upsetting finale, and a ton of male attention. Plus celebrating Cassie’s birthday, naturally. She could hop in an Uber and be at the house in half an hour. Isaac will be asleep, so it’d be a lovely undisturbed rest of night in the bed in the spare room or she could slide in with Ralphie. The prospect suddenly seems incredibly appealing.

  ‘It’s not even two yet,’ says Cassie.

  ‘Don’t be boring, Anna,’ Bo says, shooting side eyes.

  Anna takes a step back, stumbles, really. A thin thread of alarm worms its way up through her belly and into her chest. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if Bo thought motherhood and marriage had made her boring. Christ, if only he knew! Not just about Ralphie, obviously, but about Oliver too.

  ‘Obviously, I didn’t mean go home,’ she says, smiling. A very sour taste collects in her mouth. Why does she still give Luke Bowen the power to hurt her? Why does she allow it? She watches Bo drain his beer almost in one. They started drinking around nine and are all quite pissed, but Bo takes the biscuit.
Part of a recent pattern. Well, the last couple of years anyway. The pressure of work, all that, he says, but you have to wonder about the timing.

  She begins to rock in time to the beat of the indie band on stage, whose music she actually hates, to show Mr Bojangles that she’s still switched on, still sexy, still knows how to have a good time.

  ‘I vote to stay. Just in case that dickwad has got himself into some sort of trouble,’ Bo says, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

  Dear Bo. He’s always been under the illusion that the Group is a democracy. Dex knows it’s not, so does Cassie. But Bo? No idea. Anna does her best to stifle a laugh of relief. Bo’s forgotten his little jibe, if that is what it was. He never holds grudges, never remembers much these days, though that might be the drink. She wonders if he could be taking pills or anything else on top of the booze?

  ‘Where do you think he can have got to?’ Cassie shouts above the music.

  No one answers. The indie band plays a half-hearted encore and wraps up its set. Moments later some old nineties numbers, perennials from the Britpop era, thump from the sound system while the next band gets set up. This is stuff her parents might have listened to if they hadn’t been opera bores. Does Anna actually remember those nineties tunes or have they gradually become earworms over the years? Most likely the latter since, for reasons she’s never cared to investigate, she doesn’t choose to recall a great deal from her childhood. It’s funny how rich girls are always the saddest. Rich girls like her, anyway, the sort who aren’t the right kind of rich (father a corporate lawyer, how boring) never precisely the most acceptable form of thin (not tall enough, not classy), seldom just OK. The thought occurs to her then that her life began in Cool Britannia and spat her out in Brexit Britain. This probably means something, though she’s too juiced to think about what exactly.

  Beside her Bo and Cassie are making silly hip-hop hands to some old House tune. Cassie sticks out a hand and drags her into the circle. To Cassie’s horsing around Anna allows herself a decorous bounce which is fine because it shows off her fabulous hair. One of the few advantages of being someone like Cassie is you get to look ridiculous and no one cares. Anna doesn’t have that freedom because looking absurd isn’t hot. She envies Cassie her carelessness. Her authenticity.