The Guilty Party

by Mel McGrath

  ‘Takeaway?’ offers Bo.

  No phone signal. Internet ordering doesn’t seem to have reached the Isle of Portland.

  ‘Oh fuck it, let’s just drink,’ says Bo.

  And so Anna lights the candles and brings in the cake from its hiding place in the pantry and there’s a flourish of birthday hoorays and we all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and we eat cake for supper and are happy. Or making a very good job of pretending.

  ‘A toast to Rachel, and the Big Black Book,’ says Bo.

  Rachel, Rachel. If only you knew.

  But Rachel doesn’t. Rachel will never know. In our world, Rachel is just a number now, an entry, a trophy, a token. A small cog in the machine that is the Group. A little part of a big, dark secret.

  We raise our glasses: ‘To Rachel.’

  ‘And especially to us,’ adds Anna.

  19

  Anna

  11.00 p.m., Saturday 13 August, Wapping

  Anna has never been a fan of music festivals. The combination of mud and bad toilets, staged hedonism and awful boho outfits has never appealed, though she’s naturally careful to hide that from the Group. After all, no one likes a spoilsport and everyone likes Anna, because she makes it her business to be liked. Being liked is all part of the game, the game she’s been playing, one way or another, all her life, the only one she knows.

  In the taxi on the way over to Ollie’s, Anna recalls a dinner party held by her parents in the house with the red roof and the owl in the garden. Where was that? Farnham, which means that Anna must have been six. Yes, six is the red roof and the owl. By the time she’d hit seven they’d moved yet again. So Farnham, then. She remembers sliding down the stairs, unable to sleep, and her father taking her onto his lap. He adored her back then, though he was also never at home, so there wasn’t enough of his regard to offset her mother’s obvious distaste and almost none at all after the divorce. Small plates of profiteroles sat in front of everyone around the table. Profiteroles. So glamorous. Not unlike Helen herself. Anna remembers her mother’s hair, as teased and puffed as a mushroom cloud, and the look of disapproval on her face. She remembers her father’s meaty breath in her ear. ‘Have mine, darling, but don’t let your mother see.’ She remembers him cutting at the little shells with a fork and spoon to make them easier for her to eat, the joy of the warm chocolate sauce and the cold cream in her mouth.

  It didn’t last. Nothing good in that house ever lasted. Anna recalls her mother rising from her seat and walking to the end of the table, those few seconds of dread before her mother leans down and, whispering softly so no one else, not even her father, can hear, says, ‘People don’t like greedy girls.’

  Then something happening to her face, a kind of slickness, as if someone had popped her in the toaster for a spell, and taking Anna’s hand, loudly now, so as to be heard by everyone at the table, saying, ‘Go back to bed, darling. We don’t want to get into bad habits, do we?’

  She thinks now that’s when it began. The food thing obviously, but also the idea that, when it came to love it was a bad habit to want more than was your due.

  Over the months of their affair, Anna has wanted more but will never ask for it, not least because she is certain that Ollie has no more to give.

  People don’t like greedy girls.

  Isaac wouldn’t like her either, if he knew how insatiable her need for love was, if he ever saw beyond the façade. Anna makes it her business to ensure he never does. Luckily, Isaac is a very loyal person rather than an observant one. He’s easily put off the scent. Her infrequent and largely dutiful bedroom encounters with him appear to be sufficient to do just that. So long as they are having sex, however tiresome and underwhelming, it won’t occur to Isaac to look too closely, or in that particular territorial way men sometimes do with their kids, at baby Ralphie. If no one tells him, Isaac’s very unlikely to find out. So long as she guards against anyone telling him, Isaac will never work out for himself that Ralphie isn’t his kid. Bo certainly won’t tell him because Bo doesn’t know. Beside herself, only Cassie knows and only then because she guessed. This is one of the reasons why, along with good manners, Anna has never mentioned her husband’s name to Ollie, though her lover knows she’s married. What he doesn’t know, he can’t use against her.

  Visits to Ollie usually have to be planned days ahead but tonight presents an opportunity to act spontaneously. A short text exchange in the lavatories does it. Ollie is out drinking with some mates but it’s nothing he can’t cut short. As for Anna, she’s had her excuse formulated more or less since she arrived.

  The Uber pulls into the familiar block of warehouse apartments. Anna can never quite remember what the building is called – is it Cinnamon or Cinnabar or maybe Cardamom? But if she ever gets dementia the postcode will be one of the few things she’ll always recall: SE1 4RY. Just across the river from Dex and Gav and a five-minute walk from Bo. She pictures Isaac sitting beside her aged bird-like frame, her liver-spotted hand in his, a puzzled look on his face. The absurdity of it makes her laugh out loud. The driver’s eyes flick to the rear-view mirror and she feels the need, suddenly, to reassert herself before the laughter turns to tears.

  ‘It’s best to turn left into Tooley Street,’ she tells the Uber driver now. ‘It’s the block on the corner with the big picture windows.’ She likes Ollie to press her up against those windows, loves the feel of the cool glass on her skin, imagines the view from the outside. She gets out of the cab and crosses under the walkway to the entrance, keys in the flat number and is buzzed into the atrium. A former eighteenth-century grain store, the building has been expensively reinvented to look just industrial enough, a style borrowed, so far as Anna can tell, from waiting-room magazines in posh dentists’ offices. The effect is impressive, architectural, studiedly uncosy, the opposite, in fact, of the warm spiciness suggested by the name. She passes into the immaculate foyer with its bank of mail boxes and in one corner, beside the double lift, a modern console table accessorised by a single orchid freighted with pure white flowers, something of a cliché these days. Over the months there has been quite a turnover in orchids. They’re never watered, never tended, only ever replaced by some unseen hand. Quite often the corridors smell newly cleaned and the large warehouse windows are fiercely shiny but the maintenance always seemed to happen by magic. There’s none of the cheery, comforting mess of wheelie bins and shabby front gardens which dominate Anna’s street in Queen’s Park. In her texts to Ollie, she calls the place the CCO, or Centre for Covert Operations. There’s a precision to it and a hardness she associates with espionage or chemical warfare research. Everywhere else but here she’s the greyhound, or maybe the lurcher: beautiful, lean, a stupendous performer, but pliant, happy to pretend to be none too bright; but in this industrial-enough building, surrounded by the uninventive trappings of corporate money, she’s able to leave her greyhound/lurcher self behind. This stripped brick cube is where Anna McEvoy gets to play the urban fox.

  Ticking across the parquet floor in her heeled sandals, she reaches the lifts (which should really be called elevators in a building with such New York loft pretentions) and presses the call button. It occurs to her that, in the months she’s been coming here, there has never once been a family either inside the lift or waiting for it. Not a single child, nor any sign of one. A respite from her ordinary life.

  The doors open and she steps inside, pressing the button for the seventh floor. On the way up she searches for the tiny bottle of salt spray she keeps in her bag and wilds her hair a little. Ollie likes her to look as if she’s just come off the beach, not the easiest thing to pull off in London. But she’s good at the business of pleasing and manipulating men. Or boys, as she prefers to think of them. It’s another reason the place makes her feel so comfortable. Something so reassuringly masculine about it. In feminine worlds she feels rather lost and panicky.

  The lift heaves to a stop. She steps out into the corridor and waits a microsecond for the motion sensitive li
ghts to click on. At the end of the corridor, the door to apartment A is already ajar. Ollie will be in the shower. He’s finicky about his hygiene, which is one of the many things Anna likes about having sex with him. If she gets there in time, she might join him. She pads down the carpet, enters the apartment and closes the door behind her. The sound of running water from the shower room, as predicted. On the table in the living room is a bottle of champagne, two glasses and a couple of lines of coke along with a rolled twenty. The bottle is as yet unopened, which is unusual. She goes over and perches on the leather sofa, being careful not to stir the air enough to blow away the lines. Ollie likes to do coke before sex. Anna thinks he’s probably got an ‘issue’. Coke has never really been Anna’s thing but tonight Isaac is on Ralphie duty and it feels different somehow. She picks up the rolled note and hoovers a line – there will be more where that came from – pinches her nose and blinks. Her heart begins to tick and everything gradually brightens into sharp focus. How perfect, she thinks, stripping off her clothes and leaving them draped over the modular sofa, that no one has ever suspected this. Not Isaac, who’d hardly notice if she had stranger sex on the sofa beside him if a big match was on, but no one in the Group, the people who, after all, know her better than anyone.

  Naked now, she heads into the bathroom.

  In fact it’s a wet room, all marble and hard surfaces, one of those fashionable domestic installations designed to make the householder feel they might be in a boutique hotel somewhere exotic but unthreatening. Hong Kong or Buenos Aires, rather than, say, Kinshasa or San Salvador. In her own house she would have hated it, all those sharp edges for Ralphie to hurt himself on. But here its very anonymity, the air of bland luxury, excites her in a way that nothing at home ever did or does.

  Ollie is in the shower and waves at her to join him. Through the steam she catches a glimpse of his erection, which is presumably what he intends, since he has positioned himself rather artfully against the glass. He’s probably had a line or two already. She thinks about the full-length picture window and wonders if there’s any way of enticing him out of the shower and into the living room. For a man with almost no sexual boundaries, he’s oddly shy about having sex against the window, worried that someone with a river-view flat on the other side of the bridge and a telephoto lens might take a picture and post it on social media. Anna has thought about that too, which is why, whenever they do it against the window, she always hangs her head so that her face isn’t visible, which makes the whole experience slightly uncomfortable, obviously, but worth it for the possibility that someone she’s never met will spot her naked body and want it and not be able to have it.

  Tonight, though, there are to be no negotiations. Ollie is too coked to wait. She opens the shower door and goes in. The trick with having sex in Ollie’s shower is to avoid the flip-down seat because the slats dig into her flesh and also leave unsightly marks. She must also remember to stand clear of the water which otherwise washes away her natural lubrication and makes sex not only slightly painful but also – unforgivably – a bit squeaky. Naturally it isn’t possible to say any of this to Ollie. God, it’s all so complicated. Not for the first time a surge of envy shoots through her. Oh, to be average-looking like Cassie and not have to worry about inelegant noises or unflattering angles. Men have sex with women like Cassie for fun but they have sex with women like Anna so they can feel like kings.

  Ollie takes her in his arms a little too roughly, then in a flash, spins her around and presses her up against the glass of the shower. It’ll all be fine once the coke really kicks in. She’ll begin to enjoy Ollie’s heavy-handedness. If he’s as blasted as she thinks he is, he’ll be able to hold off his orgasm. Which will give her more time to settle in. At some point she’ll think about Bo. There’s always a point when Bo comes into it.

  Later, when they are back in the living room, he in his expensive loungewear, she in her festival outfit, he cracks open the champagne. She throws back a glass overly quickly and feels slightly bilious.

  ‘I’m so sorry I can’t stay,’ she says. This isn’t true, but telling the truth would be both rude and unwise, as it so often is.

  Ollie smiles and stays her with his hand. ‘We need to talk.’

  Please, she thinks, not a declaration of love. Not a state of the union address. Not a plea for her to leave Isaac. To her surprise, though, it isn’t that. It’s the opposite. In a calm voice Ollie explains that he’s met someone. ‘Someone real,’ are his exact words. This will be his and Anna’s last meeting.

  Anna’s stomach is a sour mash. Champagne and coke only add insult to the injury. How could Ollie have sex with her knowing he was going to dump her right afterwards?

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ he says, ‘we were going to have sex whatever and I just thought it would be more fun this way. I was actually trying to be considerate.’

  The acrid mess in her stomach rises up into her throat and makes it hard to focus. She feels her insides dissolving. It’s almost as if someone has thrown her across the room. The humiliation is a roar. She’s more wounded lioness than urban fox now. A panic rises then, suddenly, as if by some as yet undiscovered neurochemical process, her brain has reached a point of absolute clarity. Or maybe the coke just makes it seem that that way. Her eyes pendulum from one expensive object to another, landing finally on a blue vase on the side table. Helpless in the face of her own rage she picks it up and spinning on her heels gallops forward. After that it all gets rather confusing and blurry, as if someone has wrapped baking paper around her head. She remembers coming at Ollie with the vase in her hand but the only thing after that she can be absolutely certain of is stepping out of the cab in Wapping some time later with a stranger’s hand on her arm. The owner of the hand, a small dark-haired woman with an East European accent, looks rough, ill or maybe out of it. A scarf – some tacky blue and yellow thing with pom-poms – hangs limply around her neck.

  Can’t she see Anna’s preoccupied, not in the mood. What? She’s actually asking Anna to pay for an Uber for her? A complete stranger? Is she mad?

  No, no, no, girl. I’m not taking you on. I’ve got problems of my own.

  20

  Cassie

  Evening, Friday 30 September, Isle of Portland

  Why are we drinking so much? Cassie asks herself. Anyone would think we are trying to obliterate some shared memory, a secret only we know. It won’t go away, that memory, that secret. It will sink into the deeper layers of our friendship until, returning to the surface some day, it will begin to destroy us from the inside. It will eat us alive.

  Twit twoo.

  Fool’s gold.

  If I could speak out right now, what would I say? Would I start with the money I took from Marika’s bag? A roll of fifty-pound notes bundled in rubber bands. Would I say I took it because I knew Marika was so wasted she would never remember the encounter? Would I confess that I did not stop to think why Marika might be carrying so much money at a festival or what might happen to her if it was stolen? Or would I start with what I witnessed in the churchyard? Would I say I was not alone? Would I say I saw what was happening and I chose to protect myself? What would I say about the drowned woman in the river? Would I say I didn’t kill her but with my silence I let her die?

  Who were Marika’s friends? Did she have siblings? Who were her parents? Do they cry with anguish at her fate? What happened to Marika not just at the end of her life but at its beginning? Did she have a happy childhood? Were her teens full of mad intensity? Did she graduate and instantly meet obstacles to her dreams? Is that why she left Lithuania for London? How soon did she discover that the streets aren’t paved with gold? That, even if you are a graduate with a decent job, you will barely be able to afford to rent a room in a shabby shared flat overlooking a bus station? When did she realise that the capital no longer welcomes its youth or makes a place for us? Did she sense, at the end, that London would care less about her death than it did about her life?

  Are all t
hese questions making me feel nauseous or is it the wine? Am I drinking in order to ask these questions or because I am asking them? Am I trying to forget? I have no answer. All I know is that I must climb up the stairs to the little bathroom at the top of the cottage with the view over Chesil Beach and, kneeling over the toilet bowl, wait for the stomach churns. Outside the owl hoots. What did you do? I told you, Marika. We’ve been through this. You already know. I did nothing. None of us did. We could have helped you but we chose instead to close our eyes. We did not kill you, Marika, but we are complicit in your death and we are now refusing to discuss it and acting like it never happened. It’s a sickening thought, bringing up the wine I drank in a desperate bid to chase the thought away. No matter how sick I am, though, I know I will never be able to rid myself of bitterness. This is my secret, the price I pay for turning away. There’s laughter coming from downstairs. Once the nausea has subsided a little I go back down to find the others playing Truth or Dare.

  ‘You want to go next, Casspot?’ asks Bo.

  ‘I’ll pass, thanks. Feeling a bit rough, going to take some air.’

  It is a mild night and in the pewter light of a full moon, I’m imagining all the ghosts and demons that the Isle of Portland can throw at us. Mer-Chickens and Black Dogs and the haunted souls on the transport ships. It is very strange, this island. Even the cottage is strange. I feel as if I am not quite here.

  I don’t remember now which of us, later in the evening, decides it might be a good idea to go on a Mer-Chicken hunt at Chesil Beach. It’s one of those crazy notions which, in the conjuring of dope and booze, seems to have its own internal logic. Bo is first out of the gate, followed by Dex, with me and Anna bringing up the rear. In the moonlight the quarry is soft with shadows, Chesil Beach a blank, on one side the iron grey of the sea, with its slice of silver light.