The Wicked Girls

by Alex Marwood

  A cigarette is at its most delicious in damp sea air. She rests against the station wall and savours every last lungful. Waits as the lights on the front fade to insignificance and Martin releases a final, surrendered sigh. He’s gone, thinks Amber, and Jade is safe. No one to tell, no one to see.

  She takes her phone from her pocket, dials 999. Looks at the watery sun as it leaps over the horizon, gets out the last of the cigarettes, crumples the pack and puts it, tidily, in her pocket. ‘Hello,’ she says, calmly, when the operator answers. ‘I need help. I think I’ve killed someone.’

  She lights the last of the cigarettes, sits back and waits.

  Epilogue

  Jim’s mother goes up to bed and they do the washing-up. She’s aged noticeably since their last visit, and seems relieved to hand over the chores, though she has always been one of those old-fashioned women for whom late rising, public displays of emotion and leaving the washing-up are all, if not mortal ones, sins nonetheless. She’ll be eighty in a couple of years, thinks Jim. I wonder how long she can keep this house going for. Maybe we should be talking to her about her plans, before she gets too frail to make them.

  Kirsty washes and he, still knowing his way round the kitchen of his childhood, dries and puts away. Kirsty is quiet. Has been all day. She must be exhausted, he thinks. Apart from her nap in the car while I drove us over here, she’s barely slept since the night before last. She stands on one foot as she scrubs; dangles her sandalled other to take the weight off it.

  ‘How’s the knee?’ he asks.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘A bit hurty.’

  ‘I’ll get you some ibuprofen,’ he says. ‘I’m sure Mum’s got some in the bathroom.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ says Kirsty. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’

  Jim puts down the dishcloth and makes his way as quietly as he can to the bathroom. It’s all so familiar. Same old Flower Fairies on the hall wall, same old umbrella stand by the front door. At what point in life do you stop buying things? he wonders. He loves the stability of his mother’s domain: the memories in every chair, the china picked out with his father before their wedding and cared for and husbanded so that the service is still intact nearly fifty years later. But he doesn’t remember them ever doing the acquisitive thing that seems to be expected of you these days. By the time he was aware of his surroundings, they’d reached a point where they only went to the shops to replace things when they actively wore out. They never spent their time combing country-house sales looking to upgrade, or threw out curtains simply because they’d tired of the pattern, the way he and Kirsty do.

  He tiptoes past his mother’s room and lets himself into the bathroom. White tiles, cautiously chosen to not reflect the vagaries of fashion, dark green lino, sink and bath and toilet plain white and still good a hundred years after they were first installed. The room smells of lavender and talcum; old-lady smells, he would think, except that it’s how his parents’ bathroom always smelled, one of the earliest scent memories he possesses. He is suddenly filled with nostalgia; a strange nostalgia for something that still, after all, is. What if she has to move out? he thinks. If she has to move down to something smaller, has to choose which belongings to take with her? I think it would slay me. I think I’d want to cry myself to death.

  He opens the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet and shuffles through its contents, feeling, as he always does when he goes through other people’s stuff, a bit like a burglar, like a snoop. His mother is taking statins, he notices. He must remember to ask her about them tomorrow. And how her arthritis is. The first night is always such a rush of news and greetings and suitcases tucked beneath beds. They rarely get on to the family stuff until all the details of his schoolfriends’ parents’ funerals are out of the way. He finds the ibuprofen, tucked in with the Rennies and the Night Nurse and the Sudafed; tips a couple into his hand and takes them back to the kitchen.

  Kirsty has finished the crockery and is on to the casserole dish; scrubs with a level of concentration that he knows from experience is a sign of tension. We’ve not talked yet, he thinks. Another piece of talking that’s been sidelined by the necessity of action. I hate parting on a quarrel. The ‘sorry’s need to be said. He comes over and holds the pills out in his hand. Kirsty takes off the rubber gloves, wipes a strand of hair out of her eyes and takes them.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  ‘You didn’t say how you did it.’

  There are shadows under her eyes and her expression is faintly haunted. Jesus, she’s tired, he thinks. I must make her stay in bed tomorrow morning, even though she gets embarrassed about doing it here. ‘Oh, stupid,’ she says. ‘That bloody shingle beach. I don’t know how anybody gets up it without breaking a leg.’

  ‘The beach? You were on the beach?’

  A touch of colour crosses her complexion. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Jim,’ she says. ‘There were loads of people. I’m not going anywhere by myself in Whitmouth ever again.’

  ‘Well, thanks for coming home,’ he says, and touches her shoulder. ‘It means a lot to me.’

  For a moment she looks like she’s going to cry. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Jim. I’m a bad wife.’

  ‘No.’ He gazes into her eyes, wills her to believe him. ‘You’re a wonderful wife. I’m just sorry I shouted.’

  ‘I’ll be better,’ she promises. ‘I won’t do it again.’

  ‘Shh,’ says Jim, and puts his arms round her, there at the kitchen sink. ‘Shh, Kirsty, it’s OK. I’ll be better too.’

  ‘It’s all of you,’ she says. ‘Nothing is more important than all of you. You must know that. I would never hurt you on purpose. You have to know that.’

  He strokes her hair, shushes into her scalp. ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘You make me whole.’

  The grandfather clock in the hall whirrs in preparation for a strike. He glances over her shoulder at the clock on the stove, sees that it is nearly ten o’clock. She always watches the news at ten; it’s part of her emotional make-up, as essential to her routine as the news wires on the internet in the morning. ‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘I’ll make you a cuppa and we’ll watch the news.’

  She stiffens slightly in his arms. As he breaks away, he sees a strange look on her face, almost an unwillingness. He laughs, runs his palm down her cheek. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart,’ he assures her. ‘Once a hack, always a hack. I don’t really want you to change. It was a—I was cross. I didn’t mean it. You wouldn’t be the woman I married then, would you? Go on. I’ll be through in a minute.’

  She goes off to the living room and he hears the sound of the adverts, blasting loud, at his mother’s volume, for a moment, before she finds the remote and zaps them down. He puts on the kettle and hunts in the cupboard for a biscuit. He knows his mother always keeps digestives in the house. There’s usually a cake, too, but even as an adult he still feels bound by the rules in place in his childhood. Cake is something you eat at teatime. Fruit’s expensive; you have one piece after lunch, and cherries are counted out in batches of ten. Sweets are things you get after lunch on Sunday, if you’ve been good. If you’re hungry, have a piece of toast. But don’t eat too much, mind; you don’t want to spoil your dinner. He smiles at the memories, feels comforted, as he always does, by the everlasting presence of his childhood. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be Kirsty, he thinks; there’s so very much to be made up for.

  He finds the biscuits and puts four on a plate, puts the plate and the tea mugs on a tin tray with the Guinness toucan on it. His father must’ve half-inched it from a pub at some time, though he still finds it impossible to imagine that his parents could ever have had moments where scrupulous morals weren’t observed. He makes two mugs of tea, sugars it up, nice and sweet, the way Kirsty likes it but rarely allows herself to have. Really, this is what the big stuff of life is made of. It’s not the holidays and the dinners out and the wish for more, it’s about the cups of tea and the curling up
together after a long day. It’s about forgiving and forgetting and making allowances. It’s about honesty and truth and trust, it’s about making a place of safety and keeping the ones you love warm within it.

  He takes the tray through. The room is dark: just the standard lamp in the corner, dust and old-fashioned tassels on the shade, and the flickering light from the television to light her serious face. She’s on the sofa, knees pulled up and feet tucked underneath her, her arms wrapped around a cushion in her lap, watching. He puts the tray on the coffee table and hands her her tea; settles down beside her, thigh touching her toes, companionable. Some people in grey suits are shaking hands outside a white concrete building with flags.

  ‘So what’s the news?’ he asks.

  ‘United Nations. Pakistan. Security Council not doing its stuff. The usual.’

  She wraps her hands round the mug as though they are cold; blows on it like a child. ‘D’you want a biscuit?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Go on.’

  He smiles as he watches her almost dunk, then remember and stop. Though most New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside, she’s stuck with this one, has a theory that you eat more of the things if you don’t have to chew them. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he tells her again. ‘This is nice. Just … you know.’

  Kirsty unfolds a hand from her mug and puts it in his. Squeezes. They turn their attention back to the television just in time to see stock shots of Whitmouth seafront, some footage of police cars and jostling crowds, and a picture of that woman Amber Gordon, the one from last week whose plight made Kirsty so angry, while the voiceover intones. An arrest, this morning. A murder in the night, the suspect in custody, charges expected tomorrow.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘What’s gone on there, then?’

  Kirsty is silent, her face a mask as she watches the scenes unfold.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Jim. ‘I don’t believe it. I felt really sorry for her last week. Good God, I even felt sorry for her yesterday. Didn’t I say so? God, Kirsty, didn’t I?’

  Still she doesn’t speak, but nods robotically in agreement.

  Jim puts down his mug. He feels as though every belief he’s ever held – all his liberal pieties, his loosely Christian belief in redemption, his adamant conviction that a child cannot be labelled evil, however monstrous their acts – has been smashed with a sledgehammer. How could she? he thinks. How could she?

  ‘Oh my God,’ he says, surprised at the strength of his feelings. He feels as though he personally has been betrayed; as though Amber Gordon has come up and physically slapped him in the face. ‘I don’t know what to think any more. I really don’t. How are we supposed to argue for the innate goodness of the human spirit when people like this … How could she?’

  He watches as police manhandle a female figure beneath a blanket up the steps of Whitmouth Police Station. They’re not gentle, and the crowd is ill-controlled. He sees her trip on the first step, then she is hauled upright and practically thrown through the doors.

  ‘Well, if it’s true,’ he says, ‘bang goes everything I ever believed in. I guess I’m going to have to accept that it’s true. That some people just are born evil, like they say. I suppose it’s possible. I didn’t want to believe it. But, God – like attracts like, I suppose. Hindley and Brady. Fred and Rose. Her and Can trell – God.’

  He glances over at his wife, surprised that she’s so quiet. Normally she would be talking as much and as quickly as he is, watching a story like this. He’s shocked to see that her face is wet with tears. They stream unstoppably down her cheeks, but her mouth is closed and her eyes, still wide, continue to stare at the screen.

  ‘Oh, Jeez, babe,’ he says, and enfolds her unresponsive body into a hug. ‘I’m sorry. I know you’ve been fighting her corner. But it’s not that bad. You’re knackered. It’s OK, Kirsty. I shouldn’t have kept you up. Come on. Up you get. Let’s go to bed. You need to get some sleep.

  ‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘It’ll all look better in the morning.’

  Acknowledgements

  Books never come into being in the solitary confinement of an ivory tower. I owe debts of gratitude to many people; I only hope I don’t cause offence by failing to mention any of them.

  Laetitia Rutherford and her colleagues at Mulcahy Conway Associates. A good agent is much more than the superficial job description. Laetitia’s sharp brain, unerring ear, sound advice, dogged approach and, frankly, at some points, patient nurse-maiding, have honestly revolutionised my existence. I can’t express my gratitude enough.

  There are so many people at Sphere for whose knowledge, inventiveness and enthusiasm I have reason to be grateful. But particularly, of course, Catherine Burke and Thalia Proctor. Such a relief to find one’s work in safe hands!

  My dear friend John Amaechi, whose professional wisdom in matters of both child psychology and identity have been invaluable, as have his always-entertaining from-the-spotlight tales of media interpretation over the years.

  Alastair Swinnerton, for a late-night flippancy that turned into a solution.

  Mum and Bunny. No need to explain.

  Dad and Patricia. Ditto.

  William and Ali Mackesy, whose support and love have carried me a long way.

  Cathy and David Fleming, for the same reasons.

  In no particular order: Chris Manby, Antonia Willis, Brian Donaghey, Charlie Standing, Stella Duffy, Shelley Silas, Lauren Milne Henderson, Jo Johnston Stewart, Venetia Phillips, Claire Gervat, Diana Pepper, Chloe Saxby, Jonathan Longhurst. And the Board, of course. What’s said there, stays there ;)