‘Besides, you’re about to bugger off to Manchester for the rest of the week, so don’t tell me I can’t go and have a coffee with a friend in London.’
The strength seems to go out of Johnny. His broad shoulders droop a little, and he looks contrite, like a child caught stealing. He reaches out his hands and takes hers.
‘I’m sorry, you’re right. I shouldn’t go.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you should go.’
‘I think maybe I should stay with you.’
Amber takes her hands back and walks on into the house, not wanting to engage with where this is going. But she senses this time that Johnny wants to lean into this argument. He has been storing up that feeling whilst he waited for her to come home.
He isn’t aggressive in what he says next, but there is a firmness and directness. He is no longer the eternal kid, but the man in his late forties who he really is.
‘You’re stressed, you’re crabby, you seem really distracted. I know you’re not sleeping well. You’re talking to your friends, which is fine, I have no problem with that. But it also means you’re not talking to me. All since we’ve come back from the Raine place. I do notice these things. I’m not stupid, you know.’ He pauses. There is a new look on his face. ‘And it got me thinking. You and Raine.’
Amber flinches inwardly. It’s finally coming, but worse than she thought it would be. He has finally seen, finally realised.
‘I remember how it was with you two back in the day. I know he meant a lot to you, maybe more than you…’ He stops, shaking his head. Amber can’t stay silent any longer.
‘What, J? What are you trying to say?’
‘I’m not going to psychoanalyse you, babe. You know I think that shit is mostly bollocks anyway. But when we knew him… you and him, it was like…’
‘Like what?’
‘Look, I never met your dad, and maybe Raine was nothing like him, but…’
‘My dad?’
‘Okay, babe, I’ll say it. Raine was such an obvious daddy substitute. And I think his death has hit you harder than you think, and you haven’t acknowledged your grief. And all the other grief it brings back for you. But this job, it’s not going to bring Raine back. It’s not going to bring anyone back. There, I’ve said it.’
Amber almost laughs, a strange rush of relief and embarrassment at the misreading of her relationship with Benny. The second part of the feeling squirms inside her. Johnny has seen but not seen. He has looked at the picture of her and Benny in his head and missed an object clearly in view. She lets it sit there in his head without disturbance.
‘I’m sorry, J.’ She holds her hands out in front of her belly. ‘You’re probably right.’ She leans into his analysis, wrapping more truths into her lie. ‘And with Mum… God, I wish I didn’t have to go and see her the way she is. And I wish you and me didn’t seem so far from all our friends… and I know we said this year would be different, but sometimes I wish we’d never moved here. And I wish I didn’t have this broken part of me that just… just for no bloody good reason malfunctions.’
Johnny is silent for a moment, then comes towards her and wraps his arms around her.
‘How many times do I have to tell you you’re not broken, babe? And like I told you, if the Raine job isn’t helping, don’t do it. You don’t need any extra things messing with your head. You should be taking it easy. And if you’re doing extra stuff, you should be doing it for yourself, not puffing up some dead posh dude.’ He realises his misstep and holds up his hand. ‘I’m sorry, I know what he meant to you. Even if I remember him being a bit of a jerk sometimes.’
‘It’s not about him, it’s about his work,’ she says weakly, feeling the weight of the lie.
Johnny exhales sharply, and Amber feels a flash of anger.
‘Oh, c’mon, you’re always making excuses for all the brilliant arseholes in the music industry.’
He steps back and holds up his hands. ‘All I’m saying is that if you want me to stay, I will.’
‘Really, you should go. I mean, who knows, we’ll all be under house arrest in a week.’ She smiles weakly and hugs him again, but he’s a little stiff in response.
He goes into his studio, no more words between them. Then he packs the hire car, and he is gone, their goodbyes full of unsaid things. The moment he walks out of the door, Amber wishes he had stayed.
She takes out her phone and stares at it. No new messages.
She replays the aborted conversation with Johnny. These half-arguments are always left unfinished by the things she cannot reveal. It makes her think about Genevieve again, and why she might be willing Amber towards a confrontation.
Her suspicion that Genevieve was having Benny and her followed evaporated with the events of the final night at the cottage. And nothing that followed in the years after said to Amber that Genevieve had anything to do with what happened there.
But now, all these years later: these photographs and messages with uncertain motives behind them. It all leaves Amber with a heavy sense of unfinished business.
Then her thoughts loop back round to Johnny and his naive misreading of her and Benny. She doesn’t believe he can be so close to the truth but fail to see it. It doesn’t feel quite right. She does not doubt her own guilt, but she no longer trusts Johnny’s belief in her innocence.
29
Benny
Sunday, 11 November 2001
I stopped as the counter on my camera showed 34. There seemed no part of her body left to explore.
I pulled the sheet over her and put my camera back on the chest of drawers. I lay down on the bed a good distance away from her, but couldn’t sleep. I looked at the clock as it wound itself towards one in the morning.
I felt all the shame that I should in the moment. But I knew the feeling would wear off. She would never know. These photographs could never hurt her. Only I would ever look at them. I would see only what I had seen before, what I had touched before, what had been mine for a short while.
But I kept looking over at my camera, its lens shining a little in the moonlight slinking away from the window. I pulled on some pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, suddenly aware of my own nakedness. I left the bedroom, taking my camera with me, not wanting it in the room with us. The human conscience is strange and irrational like that.
I went downstairs and dumped the camera on the sofa in the living room. I moved through into the kitchen and drank a glass of water while I kept catching my own reflection in the glass. I turned off the lights so I didn’t have to see myself anymore, and looked out on the undulating shadows of the sea.
Eventually I felt exhaustion wash over me, and I climbed the stairs. The temperature in the room had dropped, and Amber had turned on her side, pulling the sheet in bunches over herself against the cold. I lay down on the bed and passed out.
The crack of glass from downstairs must have materialised as a gunshot in the war raging in my dream, because the first waking memory I have is Amber sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking me. She was dressed in a cashmere jumper and huddled under the duvet that before we had thrown on the floor.
The discrepancy from how I had last seen her made me feel as if I was still playing out a strange half-dream in my head. Then I felt the deep cold in the room, and my brain caught up with the time that must have passed. I was gripped by a panic that she knew what I had done. I glanced around for my camera before remembering it was downstairs. Then I read the look on her face. It wasn’t anger in her eyes. It was fear.
‘There’s someone downstairs,’ she hissed at me.
30
Amber
The knowledge that someone loves you has an extraordinarily protective power. It’s like a force field. Amber has always felt that. In a crowd, at a party when she felt the pressure to socialise, or just sitting quietly on her own. She can’t find that feeling anymore.
She couldn’t feel it as she came back from her afternoon walk across Port Meadow, the sun setting, a
low mist forming over the sweep of the grass. She couldn’t feel it as she cooked her dinner on her own in the kitchen, the turned-down radio mumbling in the background. She couldn’t feel it as she tried to read as she ate, unable to finish a sentence or hold a thought in her head.
And every time she tried to fill her mind with anything calm or peaceful, it would be crowded out by the thoughts of the messages, the cottage, all the lies she has told. They settled on her like crows picking at carrion.
She is sitting in the living room now with the TV on, hoping for distraction, but the Netflix algorithms, fed by Johnny’s watching habits, keep serving up grim and violent titles. Even the auto-play trailers put her on edge.
It’s a strange mismatch about Johnny. Laid-back, never angry, but he binges on violent movies. Perhaps that is the knack: to outsource the need for violence to the screen, not store it up inside you until it comes out unbidden and unexpected. Perhaps. After all, few people would meet Amber and think her capable of what she did.
She finally finds something soothing to watch — a mindless makeover show — but still keeps the volume down low. She is listening to the house so she can know what every creak and crack is, so her mind does not invent things. Her phone is on vibrate. She wants to be able to hear from Johnny, but dreads the notifications. Her heart still surges a little in her chest whenever it buzzes.
Johnny messaged when he arrived in Manchester — conciliatory and attentive — but has been quiet for a while. There are a few notifications from group chats, and there is one message from Kay. She’s trying to sound casual, but Amber can detect the concern in Kay’s text at Amber’s failure to respond to her messages since they had coffee. Amber is touched by her concern, but she can’t bring herself to reply. Part of her still believes that nothing good can come of confiding any more in Kay, but another part is creeping towards the idea of letting her in. Amber needs at least one ally in this world.
As she sits, Amber’s growing belly has a dull ache, its tissues and ligaments stretching and rearranging. It is like the feeling after too big a meal, even though she could only pick her way through half of her dinner.
She starts to feel drowsy. Although it’s not late, only just gone nine, she is exhausted by the days of sleeplessness piling up inside her. But she doesn’t want to leave the warmth of this room and venture up the cold stairs to her bed and lie there without her husband. She curls up on the sofa and closes her eyes, the soft flicker of the TV still on as company.
The next thing she knows she is wide awake and standing in the middle of Port Meadow. She knows immediately she is dreaming — a strange lucid state she has encountered before. There is a low mist across the grass, and she knows her father is with her, although he is not visible. She also knows she is being followed again. Then the grass becomes the Norfolk sands, which become the sands where her father died, and everything in her life is crashing together. The waves are pounding great rocks that have risen from nowhere, a strangely metallic sound.
Then she is awake, and she knows that the sound has come from the old knocker on her front door, clanging three sharp raps.
She is up on her feet like a cat sprayed with cold water. She inches towards the windows and with twitching slowness pulls up a corner of the heavy curtains. She can’t see. It’s not clear. It’s too dark outside.
Get a grip on yourself, Amber. She pulls herself straight and marches out into the hallway. She is clutching her phone. She has already selected Johnny’s number and has her thumb ready to dial it.
‘Who is it?’
The voice from the other side of the door comes back, thin and uncertain. ‘It’s Yvey.’
31
Amber
Amber doesn’t open the door immediately. A flurry of words seeps through the old wood that she cannot decipher. Eventually, she unchains and unlocks the door. A light drizzle has set in, and Yvey stands in the dark, damp and small. She has a hood up, but the points of her face are picked out by the light from the doorway.
Amber ushers her in and on through into the living room. Yvey takes off a trendy little satchel bag and shrugs off her jacket — a dark red leather thing worn over a hoodie. She paces around the room a bit before sitting in an armchair. Her hair is pulled back, with just a little of her fringe falling across her face.
Amber can now see even more of Yvey’s resemblance to Benny, the way these things bleed through with familiarity. But it isn’t the Benny she knew. Yvey is like the old photos of the young Benny — dashing and foppish.
Yvey starts to apologise.
‘It’s fine. Just tell me what happened.’ Amber finds the uneasiness she has been feeling has flowed away, displaced by Yvey’s evident distress. It is easy to be calm in a crisis, if it’s someone else’s crisis.
‘I was in Oxford, hanging out with mates. I came in on my scooter.’
That perfect little Vespa Amber had seen at the farmhouse pops into her head.
‘I left it near the station, and my friends all went home, and I went back, and it’s gone. I’m sorry, Amber… I got a cab here. I was a bit freaked out and just wanted to talk to someone I knew.’ She looks away again and half mutters: ‘Mum’s gonna kill me.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘They won’t care about a stolen bike. Anyway…’ Yvey tails off. Amber waits for the completion of her thought, but it never comes, leaving the weight of something unsaid heavy in the room.
Amber is full of different reactions: surprise, uncertainty, even a slight sense of gladness that Yvey has come to her and thrown her out of her own anxiety. Yvey sits forward on her chair, her hands cupped together, and Amber recognises a girl still caught in grief and fear.
‘Let me get you a drink. What would you like?’
‘Do you have any hot chocolate?’
‘I’m sure there’s some lurking at the back of a cupboard somewhere. Make yourself comfy, get warm.’
Amber goes off towards the kitchen and puts on the kettle. The white noise of its boiling stops her being able to think, and she finds she’s grateful for the moment of blankness. But as she comes back in with the drinks, a question nags at her.
‘Do you mind me asking how you know where I live?’
Yvey looks down, embarrassed. ‘Yeah, sorry. Got your address off Mum because I wanted… ah, it sounds dorky… I wanted to write to you.’ She shakes her head as if to underline the foolishness of her idea. Amber wonders for a second if she ever shared her home address with Genevieve, before remembering it is in the footer of some of her emails.
‘It’s not dorky,’ says Amber, and the two sit in an awkward silence for a moment. ‘Look, you should at least call the police. Let them know about the theft — for the insurance. But I’m not surprised your mum doesn’t like you riding that thing. Were you really planning on heading home at this time of night?’
‘Don’t lecture me, please. I feel bad enough as it is. Dad bought it for me, for my birthday. It’s vintage. He had it restored specially. Mum hates me riding it. Especially since Dad…’ She looks away from Amber.
‘I’m sorry. Have you called your mum?’
Yvey grinds a noise in her throat in response, her body language signalling its reluctance, her feet curling up tight under her.
‘She’ll understand. She won’t be angry. She’ll just want you to be safe.’ The incipient maternal instinct surges in Amber, a feeling that still only comes and goes. She puts a hand to her stomach, feeling a deep truth: she will care about this person inside her more than she cares about anyone. She will always want them to be safe, even if she is angry or disappointed. Whatever else she suspects about Genevieve, she has to believe this is true for her too. ‘Maybe you could just tell her the scooter broke down for now. Tell her the rest when you’re ready.’
‘I’ll text her,’ says Yvey sulkily, as if resigned to the inevitable. She gets out her phone, and her thumbs skid across its surface at speed. ‘She’ll be way too drunk to drive, though.’
>
Yvey falls back in her chair, and Amber thinks back to the weekend at the farmhouse. Genevieve drank steadily, but not excessively, never seeming the slightest bit drunk. That was how she remembered her from before as well. She didn’t ever seem like someone willing to lose control. But is she always like that? Does she ever let her grip loosen? What does it look like if she does?
Amber wants to ask Yvey these questions, but knows she shouldn’t. All the same, she can’t shift the feeling that Yvey is sitting on something about her mother. She remembers their standoffishness with each other at the farmhouse, how they rarely seemed to make eye contact. Maybe it means nothing, just the usual dynamics of a mother and her teenage daughter. But she can’t put away the feeling that something is off. She tries to find a way to get under the skin of their relationship.
‘Do you mind if I say something, Yvey, from experience?’
Yvey cocks her head a little.
‘You shouldn’t forget how hard this has been on your mum. I know it can feel at the moment that you’re alone in what you feel, but you’re not. I just hope you find a way to talk about it all with her.’
‘I’ve tried.’
‘She said she felt you were cutting her out.’
‘We had… we had an argument. A big one. I said some mean things… but… You know she never even told me about Dad killing himself — about her thinking that. I had to overhear her talking to friends about it. Didn’t even treat me like enough of an adult to tell me what she was thinking.’
‘She was probably trying to protect you.’
‘I don’t need fucking protecting.’ There is a sudden anger in her voice, a defiance.
‘You might not feel that, but…’
‘She’s just so set on this idea that Dad killed himself. But he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t.’ She sniffs up her frustration. ‘Mum wouldn’t listen to me, though. They never bloody listen, do they? So… yeah, I stopped trying to talk to her about it.’
All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end Page 12
