The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘No. That would seriously cost you.’

  ‘Look!’ shrieked Pip as we reached the top of the steps near the pond. He’d seen an old lady down at the water’s edge, with three cocker spaniels straining at their leads.

  ‘Stay close to Mummy,’ I said. ‘We don’t talk to dogs unless we know them, remember?’

  Murray cleared his throat. ‘Oh yes, we’re off to Dumfries first thing tomorrow. There’s a litter of puppies for sale and we’re going to take a look.’

  ‘Puppies? Why?’ Was Gretel in need of a fur coat?

  ‘Well, I didn’t want another dog so soon after Bailey. But Gretel thought Pip might like a puppy.’

  Pip? Gretel had never shown the slightest interest in him. Now she was buying dogs for him?

  ‘We had a long chat about it all, and Gretel’s keen to be involved. She thinks she’s ready to make the move. To set up home together.’

  Oh brilliant.

  ‘We’ve got our eye on a house in Morningside. A family house. Gretel’s mother is on that side of town too, so it makes sense. She can keep a closer eye on her.’

  And a closer eye on Murray, too.

  ‘Gretel thought the Puppy might be something for her and Pip to . . . to bond over.’ He winced slightly.

  ‘Lovely.’

  That’s when I saw them, sitting on a large picnic rug on the grass to our right: Jody and Vichard, Molly and Cameron, Cleodie and Rose. Should I pretend I hadn’t seen them? Too late, Jody was waving.

  I walked over. ‘Hi, everyone.’

  ‘Hi!’ said Molly, over-brightly.

  ‘Hi Janey,’ said Jody, stretching her face into a smile. ‘We’re having an inky-dinky picnic.’

  ‘Just a complete spur of the moment thing,’ said Molly. ‘I made some cupcakes with Cam this morning and we made about a million too many.’

  ‘Ah right,’ I said nodding vigorously, as though there was clearly no option, in such circumstances, other than to have an emergency picnic. If they had neglected to invited me that was entirely understandable, in the drama of it all.

  But – oh God – why should this hurt? I felt like I’d been shoved back into primary six again, when I’d been the only one in the class not invited to Hilary Grogan’s birthday party.

  Molly reached into a Tupperware container and thrust three gloopy greenish cupcakes into my hands. ‘Here, have some. They’re courgette and buttermilk.’

  I stood awkwardly, clutching the cupcakes. What was it about this woman and courgettes?

  Cleodie budged up, all elbows and knees, flipping a Tupperware lid across the rug and knocking over Vichard’s milk. ‘Sit down here, Janey.’

  I lowered myself and Pip into the space next to Cleodie and Rose, trying to avoid a splodge of green icing. Murray remained standing, grimly surveying the park like a secret service minder in his dark suit and overcoat.

  ‘This is Murray,’ I said, gesturing to him with my cupcake-filled hands. ‘Pip’s dad.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Rose. She looked shyly across at me and climbed onto my lap. Oh, she was gorgeous. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and squeeze, to lay my cheek against her warm little head.

  Stop it, Janey.

  Jody craned her head round to talk to Murray. ‘So, you’re a lawyer, I hear?’

  ‘I’m at McKeith’s,’ said Murray, quietly, as though it was slightly embarrassing for Jody that she didn’t already know.

  ‘I nearly went into law,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Just as well I didn’t, or I’d never have started my garden-design business.’ She sighed, and hugged her knees into her chest. ‘I mean, they say women can’t have it all. But I have. Vichard comes to work with me every day – he just pootles around the gardens. He has his own little trowel and fork, and we’re out there in the rain and shine, breathing the fresh air whatever the weather. It’s so much better for him than any boring, stuffy old nursery, isn’t it, my love?’

  So we weren’t mentioning the trip to A&E a few weeks ago when he’d shoved a yew berry up his nose. Or the three bouts of bronchitis last winter, each of which required hospitalisation. One of Jody’s favourite conversational topics was how Vichard practically lived at Sick Kids.

  Vichard certainly didn’t look convinced about the benefits of his outdoor lifestyle. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and eyed his mother balefully.

  ‘Oh, part-time working’s the answer, for me,’ said Molly, and launched into a monologue about her job, saving sick owls. We heard about the adopt-an-owl scheme she’d masterminded to help fund the sanctuary, and the joy of introducing recovered owls back into the wild. There were some downsides to the job too, such as the reams of paperwork that had to be filled in when a new owl was admitted.

  ‘Proofreading’s quite good too,’ I piped up. ‘I can do it when Pip’s in bed.’

  ‘You’ll need a proper job, though, sooner or later, won’t you?’ said Jody. ‘What did you do before Pip?’

  ‘I was a legal secretary,’ I said. ‘And a PA to, er, to Murray.’

  I glanced at him, but he was staring, solemn-faced, down towards the duck pond.

  Molly looked excited, all of a sudden. ‘Paul’s looking for people. Isn’t he, Jode?’

  Jody stretched out her legs and yawned, as though it went without saying that I wasn’t the sort of person he was looking for. ‘Any more of those rice cakes left, Moll? I just can’t stop eating today.’

  ‘He is,’ persisted Molly. ‘He’s setting up this charity. A music charity or something. He got a big bung of funding from somewhere and he’s trying to get it off the ground. He’s looking for administrator-type people. He’s an actor, really, but that’s on hold for the moment because the hours are so tricky and the income is so uncertain.’

  ‘Well, I’m on benefits,’ said Cleodie happily.

  Jody and Molly froze, as though she’d announced she was an international heroin smuggler.

  ‘I did my back in last year and had to leave my job. Hopefully when my novel’s published I’ll be self-supporting again. In the meantime, Rose’s mum pays me cash in hand.’

  Silence, except for the wind riffling through the trees behind us, and the sound of Cam’s little teeth crunching on a carrot stick.

  Jody just stared, as though she’d encountered a new species. Molly made a low owl noise by blowing into her cupped hands.

  ‘Backs can be such a nuisance,’ I said.

  What a stupid thing to say, as though we’d be better off with our heads attached straight onto our legs, like the people who populated Pip’s paintings.

  But Cleodie winked at me.

  Murray sighed audibly and looked at his watch.

  I lifted Rose onto the rug, dropping just a tiny kiss on the top of her head, then rounded up my family – my almost-family – and took them home.

  20

  Janey

  It had been a strange experience, reading Hattie’s diary of that autumn term. It was as though those few months of my life had been excavated, cleaned and polished, and given back to me again in a little bright string of moments. We’d been so . . . not exactly happy perhaps, but spirited. I began to see how our friendship had kept the harsher realities of life at bay, whether that was Grandpa’s death, my mother’s indifference, or Hattie’s family beginning to collapse in on itself.

  But it couldn’t do so forever. The time came when I realised that things were very wrong with Hattie. What she told me, during lunch break on one dank Friday afternoon in December, never faded in the years that followed; it stayed fresh and red, stamped into my mind.

  We were supposed to be doing choir. The carol service was fast approaching and Miss Spylaw had been so horrified by last week’s rendition of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ – a complicated four-part arrangement that she’d composed herself – that she’d scheduled extra practice sessions. But Hattie had steered me firmly past the double doors of the school hall and out into the grounds.

  *

  She took a shuddery deep breat
h. ‘I had to get out.’

  ‘You don’t look a hundred per cent,’ I said, shaking my head gravely. We used to love fussing over each other in this way, one of us coaxing the other to miss games or go to the nurse for a lie-down at the slightest excuse. But today she really didn’t look well: her face was pinched and thin, her hair stringy and dull. She was probably coming down with a cold. I offered her a cherry Tune.

  Arm in arm, we walked over to our secret place. Behind some trees, on a bank at the end of the hockey pitch, we had found an old school sign, abandoned on the mossy, crackly ground. We’d decided it was probably Victorian, or at least from another era, more resonant and mysterious than the 1980s. It was underneath this sign that we’d buried the Shapiro drop-box, although there’d been nothing worth hiding in there yet.

  We sat down on a low stone wall that marked the school boundary at that point. There was a belt of trees beyond it, which we liked to imagine was the edge of a vast and ancient woodland. It probably would have been, in olden times, Hattie had assured me.

  But now, she sat and stared at her shoes. ‘Something’s happened, Janey. At the house. I wouldn’t normally tell anyone. But I know it’s safe to tell you things. It’s just like telling myself.’

  ‘Was it the strange whooshing again?’

  ‘I saw what it was, Janey,’ she said, twisting her fingers. ‘The whooshing thing, I mean. I got the feeling it was going to happen, just as I was reaching the first floor landing, and I swung right round, and I saw it. The black, fluttery thing was her hair. It was a woman, falling.’

  ‘Falling?’

  ‘Yes, through the gap in the middle of the stairs. She landed on the tiles. With a terrible sound.’ Her voice tightened into a squeak.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, not at all sure that it was.

  ‘She’s still there, Janey. Lying face down, with dark hair spread out all around her head. Her neck is at a funny angle to her body.’ Her eyes darted under closed lids, as if she was seeing it in her mind.

  ‘Sh-she’s still there?’ My heart was beating hard. ‘Have you told your mum?’

  ‘Mum doesn’t seem to be able to see her.’

  ‘Oh.’ I should have been excited, reaching for the Dominic Shapiro book, arranging séances and vigils and marking things in notebooks. But it felt different this time, there was no ‘oh well’ shrug, no wide eyes to tell me she was relishing the drama, and that we were, on some level, playing a game. And now that I thought about it, the piano lid, taped shut, hadn’t been a game. The music case jammed under the umbrella stand – as far away from Hattie’s room as possible without actually being out of the house – hadn’t been either. She’d done those things because she was terrified. Terrified of things that weren’t even there.

  A cold, leaden feeling settled around me. It felt like a dreadful worry that couldn’t be solved – like when Grandpa was diagnosed with lung cancer. A sense that the only way out of this was through it, and that ‘through it’ would turn out to be an appalling place.

  ‘What did your mum say?’

  ‘When we were leaving for school I said casually, “Mum, what’s that in the middle of the floor?” and she just glanced over her shoulder and gave me a blank look. “What’s what?” she said. So I just left it. She’s very angry with me, anyway, because of not going to my piano lesson yesterday. I didn’t want to push it.’

  After break, she fretted silently through double maths, staring out the window and chewing the end of her ponytail. I made some notes on the back of my jotter, and I came up with three possible explanations:

  1. The body was real, and Hattie’s mum was lying.

  2. The falling woman was a ghost.

  3. Hattie was seeing things that weren’t there, which meant that something was wrong with Hattie.

  I felt a little better after that: I was unconcerned about the first two options, and there was only a one-in-three probability that the third was true.

  After school we took the bus together to her house. Her hand trembled as she unlocked the black front door. I held on firmly to her arm as she pushed it open and we went inside.

  There was nothing there, no body in the hallway. Hattie stood and stared at the floor, her mouth set into a grim line, as though it was half likely that something would materialise there.

  Then she sat on the bottom stair, wrapped her arms around herself and began to cry.

  ‘It’s okay, Hattie. I’m here.’ I patted her arm, a little desperately. ‘D’you think it was real? Or could you have imagined it, because you’re so stressed and everything? I mean, if your mum couldn’t see it?’

  She buried her head against my chest and sobbed, her body shaking in my arms.

  Oh, Hattie.

  I laid my cheek against her hair. She smelled of school, the fug of mince that had lingered in the dining hall that lunchtime, and the lemon soap they’d always used here at Regent’s Crescent in the sparkling-white porcelain bathrooms. She smelled of laundry folded into warm, neat piles on the Aga when Mrs Patel had been ironing.

  A sense of peace came then, so soft, so unexpected that I almost forgot to breathe. I didn’t need to know any more. If she was mad, I would be mad too. If she was ill, neglected, haunted, lied to, or misunderstood, then I would be too. It didn’t matter about probability, and options 1, 2 and 3. There were no options other than to stay there with her, clinging to her on that bottom step, one still point as the world tipped and spun around us.

  When she stopped crying, she wiped her nose with her sleeve and took a pen out of her schoolbag. She’d just drawn an outline, on the black and white tiles, of where the corpse had lain, when her mother walked in.

  *

  And the next day, my world fell apart.

  French had finished late – quelle dommage! – and Hattie and I had to queue up for our lunch, which was cold roast pork with roast potatoes. Mrs Peston, the teacher on lunch duty, had a go at Hattie because of her untidy ponytail – locks of dark hair had escaped, snaking down her back. Hattie, normally robust about being told off, seemed to shrink into herself. She looked thinner than she had even the day before, her shoulder blades sharp beneath the thin cotton of her blouse.

  We sat down at one of the long wooden tables, a little way apart from the others. She was just staring down at the grey disc of meat on her plate, her bottom lip nudged out slightly.

  ‘Hattie, what’s the matter? Is it your mum? Was she angry about you drawing on the floor yesterday?’

  ‘No. She didn’t say anything about it.’

  That was a relief. Renee had surveyed the hallway and suggested that maybe it was time for me to be getting home. She’d said it calmly, but something in her voice had made the skin on my back crawl.

  ‘Well, that’s good!’

  ‘But I’ve got something to tell you.’ And she closed her eyes.

  My first thought was that she had cancer. That was what all the headaches and the being sick was about. It wasn’t just old people like Grandpa who got it. A girl in our year was in hospital with leukaemia and I’d been thanking God, every night in my bed, that it wasn’t Hattie. Maybe this was my punishment.

  I put down my knife and fork. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m leaving. Mum’s arranged for me to go to boarding school. At Ramplings.’

  ‘But that’s in England, isn’t it? All the way down the bottom, near London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’ Maybe she meant that she’d be going in a few years’ time, for her GCSEs or her A levels or something. Or maybe it was like a finishing school, where you went after normal school to learn ballroom dancing and flower arranging.

  ‘I’m leaving at the end of term, Janey.’

  Panic coursed through me. I searched around for any chinks of light.

  ‘But you’ll still be here over Christmas.’ I made it a statement, not a question. ‘And Easter, and the summer holidays.’ Nine long weeks.

  She shook her head, and a single tear plopped down, o
nto the little slick of grease where her potatoes had slid across the plate.

  ‘We’re leaving as soon as term finishes. We’re moving to Suffolk.’

  It just wasn’t possible. ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know. She went on about making other friends. Being near James. Say something.’

  Other friends? This couldn’t be right. Hattie’s mum adored me. Hattie’s mum thought I was a treasure. Hattie’s mum . . .

  ‘Oh Janey, don’t cry.’

  Somewhere across the dining hall, somebody dropped a tray. Crockery and cutlery fell to the floor with a clatter. It wasn’t the sort of school where everyone cheered if you dropped something, but there was a silence, punctuated by a few giggles, before the noise rose back to normal levels.

  Normal. How could all these people go on as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn’t just cracked down its centre.

  We pushed our plates to the side and held hands across the table, weeping until the hall emptied and one of the kitchen staff came past with a broom, whistling as he swept away the detritus of the busy lunch hour.

  *

  The next couple of weeks flew past with dizzying speed, crashing to a halt with the last day of term and the carol service that evening.

  My nerves jumped in my stomach as I proceeded with the rest of the choir into the darkened cathedral. Because it just didn’t make sense, her missing the last day of term like that. I’d accidentally told her yesterday – it was impossible to keep secrets from Hattie – that I was planning to make a Victoria sponge, so that we could cut it in the form room at break and have a goodbye party for her. I’d brought in lemonade, too, and paper plates and cups from Woolworths, and an oversized card saying ‘We’ll Miss You!’, and these items had wiped out nearly all my pocket money. I only had five pounds left now to buy all my Christmas presents.

  And then there was the box, that box with all her stuff that gave me such a funny feeling when I saw it. I needed to ask her about that tonight, because she’d be coming, surely. Even if she’d been too busy to come to school, packing up her room, maybe, or getting measured for her new Ramplings uniform, she wouldn’t want to miss ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, not when I was the understudy, with a real possibility of singing it, on account of Sarah Lyon-Darcy having just recovered from tonsillitis. Not when she knew there’d be no one else to bother about it, what with Granny being at the bridge club Christmas drinks.