by Deborah Bee
‘She came to the station, but what did she do before she came to the station?’
‘She still can’t remember. Celia says that’s totally normal. It’s just too traumatic for her to remember. Same as if you are in a car crash. You forget everything.’
DS Clarke rubs out the line between FIGHT and FLIGHT on the board and writes a plus instead, adding a question mark on the end.
‘What?’ says PC Chapman. She looks at the board again. ‘Both?’
‘Yeah. Well maybe. I mean, she’s smart enough.’
DS Clarke looks down at her phone. She’d had a text, then a missed call from Sal.
‘Shit, Dawn,’ she says. ‘Send Halsall to pick up Sal. Urgent. We need to get her into court to get an injunction. We’ve told the solicitor she’s coming. You get back to Clare. Push her. Don’t let her pull any stunts. Ask her again about the paraffin. Read her face. She’s not that smart.’
DS Clarke scrolls through her call log and puts her phone to her ear.
Twenty-Five
Clare
I’m back in Cerise.
I feel like I’m going mad.
‘Are you sure it was paraffin?’
‘I don’t know.’’
‘Did it say paraffin on the outside of the bottle?’
‘Yes, I think so. That’s why I thought it was paraffin.’
‘How much paraffin was in the bottle?’
‘I can’t remember,’ I say.
How would I know? And why does the stupid policewoman keep calling it paraffin if she thinks it wasn’t paraffin?
I can tell she hates me.
I hate her.
She was nicer than this before.
‘Was the liquid in the bottle the same liquid he was pouring over you?’ PC Chapman says.
I’m trying to think.
‘I don’t think I could see,’ I say.
‘Why not? Why couldn’t you see, Clare? What prevented you from seeing?’
I wasn’t blindfolded.
Sometimes he did that. Blindfolded me so I couldn’t see where the matches were going to land. So I’d cry out more.
Coco.
Coco.
Time to play.
To start out with, that’s what I did. Cry out.
But then I realised that’s what he got off on.
Sometimes it was more fun for him to see me watch them land and ignite. Then fizzle out. Sometimes he would let them burn. For a few seconds.
Naughty match hurting naughty Coco.
The smell of burning hair mixed with burning paraffin . . .
‘Maybe I had my eyes shut,’ I say. ‘Maybe it was going in my eyes. It always used to go in my eyes.’
‘So, you previously said you thought you were drinking out of a paraffin bottle?’ she says. ‘But you don’t know that it was paraffin you were actually drinking.’
‘Look, I don’t remember, right.’
He’d not made me drink anything before.
This was new.
Panic.
You’re holding me back now? Coco.
Holding me back.
‘Did it smell, Clare,’ PC Chapman asks. ‘When you drank it, did it burn your mouth, your tongue?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Did it burn when it was in your mouth?’
PC Chapman looks like she’s losing her patience.
‘I don’t know,’ I whisper.
She’d have drunk it. I bet she would. People always think they know better.
She hands me a tissue.
Not kindly.
More like she just wants me to shut up crying and tell her more things.
‘It was mouthwash,’ she says.
‘What was mouthwash?’
‘The liquid that you drank. The tox report on the ingested chemicals shows that it was mouthwash. Blue mouthwash, but you said you didn’t know that.’
‘I didn’t know what it was. I know my sick was blue. That’s all I can remember.’
She doesn’t believe me.
I start to feel hot.
‘It looked like paraffin. It was in a paraffin bottle.’
‘And did it taste like paraffin?’
‘How would I know what paraffin tastes like?’
‘I see,’ she says.
I can tell she doesn’t see.
‘I’m going over to your house later, Clare. Is there anything you would like me to bring you?’
‘He smashed it up. The house, I mean,’ I say. ‘He’ll say I did, though.’
‘Is there anything you would like me to bring you?’ she repeats, as though she can’t hear me. Like she’s losing patience with me.
‘I don’t know. Wait, in the front bedroom, on the left side of the bed, there’s a chest of drawers. In the bottom drawer, just bring me the clothes from there. Leggings and jumpers, I don’t have much. And some underwear, plain white, just bring the plain white underwear, nothing else. Do you think I’m going to be here a while?’
PC Chapman’s expression softened.
‘We do need you to stay here, Clare. You’re OK though, right? They’re good people?’
I nod.
‘And my shoes. My trainers. I’ve only got one pair. They’re by the stairs. Well, they were by the stairs.’
Babe. You know I don’t like you in sneakers.
Just heels for me.
Let’s make those stubby little legs as long as we can, shall we.
Her phone buzzes.
She nods at me. ‘Excuse me, I just need to . . .’ she says and disappears through the door clicking it shut behind her.
‘He’ll tell you I’m mad, that I’m mental and I made all of it up,’ I say, but she won’t hear me. ‘He’ll say I’m always drunk, but I’m not. And I’m not mad.’
I watch her walking down the hallway, half running.
Coco.
Come on, Coco.
Don’t pass out on me now.
I don’t want you to miss out on all the fun.
When I go upstairs Sally has gone and there’s the smell of sick coming from the bathroom.
I wonder if I made her do that.
Now I feel bad . . .
Sally’s not in the kitchen.
Or any of the social rooms.
Or the laundry room.
I ask Mrs Henry and she says she’s gone to the police station.
Something about her ex.
Mrs Henry makes me some onion soup out of a packet and there are lumps of powder in it where she hasn’t stirred it. There’s a bread roll next to the bowl but I’m not hungry for either.
I go up to my flat and slump on the bed, looking in all the empty drawers.
Someone has lined them with 70s wallpaper.
I hang my dressing gown/bathrobe – whatever it is – in the wardrobe, on the only hanger. It’s one of those metal ones from the dry cleaners.
I take the dressing gown off the hanger and fold it into a drawer.
I look out of the window at the trains leaving London.
I could have disappeared.
Found a town by the sea.
Somewhere in the north.
Got a job in a café and a bedsit overlooking a bay.
I could’ve got a dog, taken it for walks in the morning when the sky and rock pools glow pink, our feet leaving tracks in the sand.
I fall asleep dreaming of making tea for old people.
Folding paper napkins.
Reading a book with my dog snoring by my feet.
When I wake up, it’s getting dark.
Walking into the shared lounge, I can see the street lights are flickering to life. Proving there’s life out there.
While I’m stuck in here, watching the trains.
Maybe I shouldn’t have shouted at Sally.
She’s right, I should wash the bathrobe. It’s a fire hazard.
There’s a knock at the front door.
I figure if I don’t answer then whoever it is will just go a
way.
I like it here.
Sitting here, in the dark.
There’s another knock and I still don’t answer.
Then the sound of a key in the lock.
The girl with the blonde hair comes through the door, silently, and shuts it behind her.
Quietly.
Like a proper burglar. One you see on the telly.
She doesn’t see me because it’s dark.
‘What do you want?’ I say.
Just like that. Not even nasty.
‘Oh!’ she jumps. ‘You’re here! Hi! I did knock!’
‘Where’d you get the key?’ I say.
‘This used to be my flat. I made a mistake. Sorry,’ she says, turning to leave.
‘Do you usually knock on your own door before you go in?’ I say. ‘How come you still have a key?’
‘Look, I made a mistake, OK? Sorry,’ she says angrily not looking in the slightest bit sorry. ‘I’m Kitty!’ She smiles at me, but stops when I don’t reply. ‘What’s under your plasters?’ She points to my chin and neck. ‘Did you hurt yourself, did you? They said you hurt yourself.’
‘I didn’t hurt myself.’
‘They said you did.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Look, I’m not saying you’re a cutter or anything.’
‘A cutter?’
‘A self-harmer. I’m not saying you are,’ she’s talking too fast. Filling in the gaps. ‘It’s just they said you’d hurt yourself. Burnt yourself and stuff. That’s why they took all our knives away. Plastic cutlery. Didn’t you notice? We all noticed. Can’t even cut a piece of fucking toast with a plastic fucking knife.’
I breathe.
I count to ten.
I’m hot.
They’ll spot you a mile off, babe.
They’ll have you sussed from the start.
‘Just go back to why you were breaking in to our flat again . . .’
She looks around her. Thinking, thinking.
‘Can I be honest with you?’ Kitty asks.
That’s always a prelude to a lie, at least it was in Gareth’s case.
‘I liked being up here. Better than on the second floor . . . Feels safer being further from the front door. Helps me sleep better.’
‘OK, you can go. Leave the key,’ I say, getting up from the sofa with my palm outstretched.
She hands over the key.
‘Ask to be moved next door, if you’re that bothered,’ I say, edging her out and shutting the door behind her.
I wouldn’t like her, even if she was telling the truth. Which she wasn’t.
Downstairs, there’s a group of women watching Midsomer Murders on the telly in one of the social rooms.
Not Sally.
No lights on.
Just the telly lighting the room.
They’ve all got blue faces.
They’re all staring.
Not saying anything.
Arms folded.
Some of them resting mugs on their stomachs with their feet on the coffee table.
Well, Big Debbie and Sarah are.
‘I prefer this new Inspector Barnaby,’ says Big Debbie.
‘So do I,’ says Sarah.
‘Shut. Up! He’s not a patch on the old one,’ says Abigail, laughing.
‘What do you mean? What old one?’ says Sarah, confused.
‘Why did you say . . .’ starts Big Debbie, but gives up.
‘Your little one’s awake, Prashi,’ another woman says, poking her head around the door.
Prashi pushes herself up and out of her seat. ‘Night, ladies. Tomorrow is another day.’
‘For Pete’s sake,’ shouts Big Debbie at the telly, ‘you don’t get a black eye walking into a door. What a fucking cliché.’
‘She’s just saying that to cover up. I’ll bet the husband did it,’ says Abigail.
‘It’s always the husband who did it,’ says Sian, a quiet woman who’s sitting in the corner reading a copy of the latest Hello! magazine. ‘That’s why there’s no point watching these shit dramas.’
‘I thought she did it by accident,’ says Sarah. ‘She said she walked into a door.’
They all look at Sarah like she’s a halfwit.
‘Trevor Eve wouldn’t be playing the husband if it wasn’t a juicy part. It must be him,’ says Abigail. ‘Do you remember him in Shoestring? I used to love him in that show.’
‘The point is,’ says Big Debbie, getting up and pulling out her box of fags, ‘whoever wrote it, the scriptwriter, should have come up with something a bit more original than “I walked into a door, doctor”. Doctors ain’t stupid. If you went into casualty with a black eye and said, “Oh yeah, doctor, I just walked into a door”, they’d laugh you out the place.’
‘It’s a TV detective series,’ says Sian. ‘You don’t get Albert Fucking Einstein writing the script.’
‘Albert Einstein didn’t write scripts,’ says Abigail.
‘But if he had of,’ says Sian, ‘the husband wouldn’t have done it every time, right?’
‘If he had of, we wouldn’t understand a sodding word of Midsomer Murders,’ goes Big Debbie. ‘I know!’ she says. ‘Let’s play excuses for injuries.’
We all look up at her, not quite sure what she means.
‘Like, my first time, at the hospital, when my husband tried to strangle me with a bit of garden twine, I told ’em I got my head caught in the bit you pull the blinds up with. The cord, like. Like that’s definitely possible!’
We all start to giggle.
‘I mean, what my head can ’ave been doing I just don’t know,’ she says, starting to really laugh.
‘When my husband threw me down the stairs,’ says Sian, ‘I said I was doing my trainer up, at the top of the stairs, and fell headfirst. When they said it didn’t sound like a very safe place to do a trainer up, I said it weren’t my fault that that’s where it’d come undone.’
Mrs Henry is coming out of the office to see what the noise is about. She’s smiling, glad we’re all getting along.
‘You know you can’t smoke . . .’ she says to Big Debbie.
‘I’m going out the back in a minute,’ says Big Debbie.
‘I said I’d fallen out of a tree when my husband broke my nose,’ says one of the Indian ladies, the one who had been entirely silent up until that point. We all stop laughing and gape at her. ‘I can’t imagine why I said it. I could see them all thinking, “what’s a middle-aged Indian woman doing up a tree in the first place”. It was just the first thing that came into my head. I thought about changing the story once I’d realised, you know, that it wasn’t very believable, but then I thought they’d just lock me up in a lunatic asylum. It would have been all right, but I had a wedding sari on at the time. All gold embroidery and bells.’
We all hoot with laughter. So does she.
‘They asked how high the tree was and I said “forty foot”. And then they said, “where was the wedding?” and I said “Grosvenor House Hotel” and the doctor said “that sounds rather incredible to me” and I said, “Indian weddings are always incredible.”
‘Did they actually believe you then?’ says Sarah.
Big Debbie shakes her head. ‘To my mind,’ she says, ‘the more unbelievable the better. ‘I walked into a door’ just don’t cut it no more.’
It was like we were all a bit pissed. Soon as someone piped up with another story, we’d fall about.
‘When I told my doctor I’d stood on a hockey stick,’ says Abigail, ‘she said that my story was about as believable as this bloke who’d come in with a hoover attachment stuck to the end of his willy. Said he’d been advised to hoover naked because of a dust allergy and that during the process he had become “inexplicably fatigued” and stopped to “take a nap” while the hoover was left running, and while asleep his penis had flopped into the vacuum hose.’
‘Did he actually say “take a nap”?’ shouts Sian, wiping tears from under her eyes.
<
br /> We shriek.
‘And “flopped”?’ I say.
‘Was it a Henry?’ shouts Big Debbie. ‘Was he wheeling Henry along behind him?’
We shriek some more.
‘Or a Hettie’ says Sian.
Sally walks in, just before ten and we were starting to calm down a bit.
‘You see? I guessed it was Trevor Eve that did it, all along,’ says Sarah, really loudly, as the credits start to roll.
‘We all said it was Trevor Eve that did it,’ says Big Debbie, coming in from the garden in a cloud of Marlborough smoke.
‘He’s not going to play a bit part, is he?’ says Abigail. ‘He was Shoestring.’
‘He was something else as well,’ says Sian.
‘But he was mainly Shoestring,’ says Abigail.
I nod at Sally.
She nods back.
She’s been crying.
‘Wanna a hot chocolate?’ I say.
‘You bet,’ she replies. ‘Can I have the Frozen mug. I’ve always wanted to be a princess,’ she says.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Me too,’ she says.
Twenty-Six
Sally
There was so much noise coming out of the TV room that I don’t think that Kitty heard me get buzzed through reception, or close the lobby door behind me, she was so busy staring into the mirror at herself, listening to the other women talking, hanging on their every word, but out of sight of them, so they couldn’t see her.
One of them was saying something about falling out of a tree, and there was a conversation about Henry vacuum cleaners, you know, the one that’s got a face drawn on it and there’s a pink one too. Anyway, they were laughing, screaming with laughter, some of them.
It reminded me of when I was last at a refuge; the women were like that there too, sometimes. Well, just a few times, a bit like when you used to go on Girl Guides camp or hen nights, when everyone forgets themselves, stops trying to be someone else, someone more impressive, just for a minute.
I had my back to the door and I was just breathing slowly for a minute, pulling myself together; what with Terry and everything, I didn’t really feel like joining in. It’s not really my type of thing.
Then I thought I heard Clare’s voice and I was surprised, cos I wouldn’t have thought it was her kind of thing either.
