by Tina Seskis
Sissy knew she would never understand what had caused Nigel’s journey back from the very edge of death. She often found herself going over that pivotal day at the hospital, the one when she thought he was actually about to die on her, fail to hold out long enough to even see their baby. She never stopped wondering what had saved him. Was it her outburst itself, the heart-wrenching, long-overdue outpouring, irrefutable proof at last of her love for her husband, of rage and bewilderment that he would simply fade away, unchallenged, that he would leave her without a damn good fight at least, and with the doctors just stood around watching, doing nothing? Or was it the new drugs the doctor had put him on, their barely legal experiment on the half-human she still called her husband? Or perhaps it was simply a miracle, as her parents had always thought, a benevolent gift of life sent to them by almighty God himself. She guessed she’d never really know, and anyway it didn’t matter now – she had him back and she’d always be grateful for that. He’d even rallied enough to see their daughter on the day she was born, just a week later – Nell had been delivered in the very same hospital, and they’d taken her straight over to the cancer ward when she was less than an hour old, and Nigel’s joy at meeting his daughter had had even the stoniest of ward sisters dabbing at her eyes. And when, five years later, they’d eventually had a son too, it was all so fantastically miraculous that Sissy swore she would never take anything for granted ever again.
Sissy squirmed to the edge of the deckchair and, her bottom firm against the wooden strut that held the canvas, hauled herself out of it. As she stood up, the banging in her head worsened and she felt perversely weightless, spinny. It was clear she’d had far too much sun. What time was it, how long had she been asleep?
‘Please could I have some of your water, Nige,’ she said. He passed it to her and as she leaned against the railing she laid the cool of the glass against her forehead and then against the top of her chest. When she drank it the water was over-chilled and her teeth twinged, and it hurt the back of her throat as she swallowed.
‘Are you OK?’ said Nigel. ‘How long were you in the sun? You’re very red in the face.’
‘I fell asleep,’ said Sissy. ‘The sun must have come around – I was in the shade before. So much for me trying to give my skin a rest.’ She seemed anxious now, and they both knew that it was Sissy who suffered most these days, worrying about every last mole on her or Nigel’s freckly body, or the slightest fever one of the children got – and she still found it hard to go to the beach, but the kids loved it, so usually she managed, as long as they were in full sun suits (which looked odd on these beaches, no-one else wore them). But today, because the weather had been due to be so hot, she’d said she fancied just a quiet couple of hours writing her diary on the balcony, and Nigel had understood.
Nigel took Sissy’s arm and led her inside, helped her onto the bed. By now she’d started to feel sick and her insides felt watery, as if they were being liquidised. It was gone five, Nigel had told her, so she must have been asleep in the sun for over two hours, and now she was lying down she felt like she couldn’t ever get up again. Her limbs felt heavy and independent, as if they belonged to someone else. The children had the TV on and the Italian voices were fast and high-pitched, and there was laughter from a live audience of excitable minors, and although Nell and Conor would have had no idea what was being said they were being swept away on the outré vitality of it, and laughing in all the right places.
When Nigel came back in to check on his wife he was alarmed to find she could hardly lift her head now. He either needed to keep her cool and get her to drink lots of water, or else he would have to get her to a doctor – he’d already spotted the signs of heatstroke, his cousin had had a mild dose of it all those years ago in Australia. Nigel turned the air conditioning to full, and the unit swept up and down rhythmically, blindly squirting out cold air, but the room was so hot the air had warmed up again by the time it reached her. He grabbed a couple of towels and soaked them in the sink, then he wrung them out like he was strangling someone and took them, still dripping, into Sissy and placed them on her forehead and over her body, but she was no longer reacting to him. Her face was red like soup and burning up, and she seemed barely conscious. As he raised the glass of water to her lips, her head was bowling-ball heavy under his arm. It was alarming how quickly she’d deteriorated since he and the children had got back – at first she’d seemed just flushed and a bit groggy perhaps. He’d already been debating whether he needed to call a doctor, but when he saw her eyes start to roll towards the back of her head he knew he couldn’t delay any longer, and he yelled at his daughter to bring him his phone.
51
Balham
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, at the height of an unusually balmy British summer, Sissy’s decorating was going even more badly than usual, mainly because she felt like she was in danger of actually going mad. Since Thursday night she hadn’t been sleeping at all well, and she’d had that familiar feeling of dread that she’d harboured for so long about Nigel, and everything else for that matter, but it seemed that it was worse than ever today. As well as her desperate worry about her friend’s safety, about whether she was alive or dead, she kept playing over Renée’s meltdown last night at what had happened in America, and she wondered how Renée had coped all these years, carried on as if everything was normal – and how she, Sissy, had been oblivious. No wonder poor Renée had become hysterical last night. And on top of all that the kids were playing up and Sissy couldn’t quite deal with them at the moment, so she put down her scraper to turn on the Disney channel while they ate their tea – it wouldn’t hurt just this once. After messing about with two remotes for what seemed like ages the TV finally sprang into life, causing Sissy to shriek so loudly that both her kids turned their wide sad eyes on her, and Conor said over his boiled egg, ‘What is it, Mummy?’
Sissy didn’t need to listen to what the newsreader was saying. As soon as she read the caption, ‘Live, Hyde Park’, and saw the white police tent and the grungy brown of the water, she knew they’d found her. It had actually happened, she really had drowned – and as Sissy flicked the channel frantically to a re-run of Top Gear she felt as faint as she had on holiday in Sardinia, the time she’d nearly died of heatstroke.
Her poor, poor friend. Siobhan was dead!
Sissy felt the grief as if she’d been punched in the stomach, hard. When Nigel had died it had been too quick, too unbelievable to take in, so her feelings had been stuck for days, weeks even, her brain unable to comprehend what had happened. On this occasion she’d been prepared for death, had dreaded it, whilst also hoping desperately that Siobhan would turn up at her desk on Monday morning with a comical tale of a wild weekend. It had happened before – but not this time.
Sissy tried to think logically through her grief and panic. Siobhan had drowned, was dead. But not only that – she, Sissy, had left her to drown. What on earth had been wrong with her? How had she convinced herself that it wasn’t Siobhan, a great big splash like that? She knew she should have gone after her. Why hadn’t she? Why? She’d let her friend drown, had just jumped in a cab and gone home to bed, leaving her helpless and dying at the bottom of The Serpentine. They’d all left her, Sissy tried to remind herself, it hadn’t just been her – plus she’d been drunk for once. Surely it wasn’t anyone’s fault. The splash must have sounded like a bird, they couldn’t all have been wrong – but inside Sissy knew she was as complicit as the rest of them.
Sissy sat down on the faded sofa and dropped her head between her knees to try to stop the roar in her head. The children sat mutely watching Top Gear, even though Nell especially didn’t like it, all the cars looked the same to her. A new thought came to Sissy now, and it made her feel physically sick. She accepted she was at fault morally, was sure of that, but what exactly was she culpable of in the eyes of the law? Obviously it wasn’t murder – but did her inaction constitute some kind of crime, even manslaughter perhaps, through negligenc
e or something? Would she be arrested? As she tried to control her panic, aware that the kids were watching her, she remembered a couple of the others flippantly saying that if anything had happened to Siobhan they’d just pretend they hadn’t heard the splash – but they wouldn’t really do that, surely? No, they would all have to go to the police, file a report, admit that they’d abandoned her, and gone home.
Sissy’s thoughts began unravelling further. What if she even ended up in prison over this, left the children without a mother or a father? She started panting, hyperventilating almost, and although she’d thought she would never cry as hard again as she had over Nigel’s death, she’d been wrong. Her children looked desolate, already aware, as children usually are, that there was yet more sadness and heartbreak to come in their poor young lives. And as Sissy sobbed, she remembered all over again that Siobhan was dead, and she cried even harder – for her lost friend, for Nigel, for her children, already so damaged – for what the fallout from her madness that night might ultimately prove to be.
Sissy could bear no more. She jumped up, stumbled from the room and ran upstairs to run Conor’s bath, leaving her children to finish their tea alone at the second-hand dining table, shocked, but safe for now, in the capable hands of Jeremy Clarkson.
52
Barnes
Alistair Smart was getting extraordinarily fed up with his wife now. Over the weekend she’d been even more of a bitch than usual – moody, monosyllabic, forever shouting at the boys. She’d even bloody taken up smoking again, and in the house too, what the hell was wrong with her? Even when Rebecca from next door had popped round to invite them to a barbecue the following weekend, Natasha had seemed unable to put on her normal ‘everything’s-fucking-marvellous’ front, and Rebecca had left nonplussed, assuming Natasha and Alistair must have had a row.
Unknown to Natasha, there was another reason Alistair was so uptight – he hadn’t heard from his lover all weekend, she just wouldn’t answer her phone, and nearly a week had gone by since he’d had sex (well, proper sex, with a woman anyway), and he’d realised how addicted to the real thing he seemed to have become of late. Even relentless wanking just didn’t seem to do it for him any more.
Alistair thought he may as well pretend to do some writing, mainly to get out of his wife’s way – plus he had a nice sturdy lock on the door now, so his web browsing was that much more relaxing, although it did lack a certain frisson which he missed a little. As he made his way up to his sunshine-filled office overlooking the common, with its cheery fucking pictures of beach huts and camper vans that Natasha had chosen and made him want to vomit, his naked little toe caught on something, and when he looked down he saw that the stair carpet was threadbare, unravelling in fact. They desperately needed a new one. Alistair smiled to himself. Once his little arrangement with Lucinda Horne (Horne by name, horny by nature as it turned out, landing as she had in his inbox like manna from heaven) was sorted, he wouldn’t need to worry about paying his half of the ludicrous mortgage, or about replacing the car or the carpet, or even about paying for winter trips to Courchevel or the Caribbean – just to complete the alliterative landscape of their financial future. (Yes! He was a writer, an artist at heart, he hadn’t lost it.) Although no money had actually come through yet, it was definitely on the cards, the deal was about to be done, worth absolutely loads his agent had assured him; and it was such a relief to have got his publisher off his back at last.
‘You little bugger,’ Sebastian had said, when Alistair had presented him with three full volumes of Bottersley Dog School’s Woofy Adventures. ‘I thought you were going to give me one almighty heart attack, winding me up like that, giving me the impression that you’d done absolutely sod all for eighteen months. This new stuff is going to fly off the shelves, kids aren’t going to be able to get enough of these characters, it’s like Harry Potter with dogs, but without the magic.’ Alistair had looked at his agent witheringly at this point, but he knew better than to say anything – and to be fair to Sebastian, he was on the cusp of landing Alistair a quite sensational deal, one that would enable him to carpet the entire sodding street if he wanted to. It was bloody miraculous.
The whole thing had been managed so neatly, so seamlessly, had turned out to be a complete doddle in fact. It seemed that little Miss Horne was so in awe of the great Alistair Smart she would have agreed to pretty much anything. He’d been generous, he felt – a full thirty per cent to her, seventy per cent to him, and besides, sales would be absolutely huge with his name on the cover, far more than she’d ever hope to achieve on her own. So he was doing her a favour really. They had met to discuss things at the Holiday Inn at Brent Cross – she was coming down from Stevenage and was scared of driving in central London, and to make sure there was no chance of them being overheard he had booked a room, and when she’d walked in she’d been so cutesily pretty, so child-like, but with the most voluptuous assets, that he felt himself explode inside; and having spent years and years being faithful to his wife (and for what?), managing his extreme sex starvation as best he could, he found that having already taken one lover it was just too easy to take another. Lucinda had been so impressed by him, so naive and giggly, and although in truth it did creep him out that she’d grown up with his stories, was one of his original fans (she even had a signed photograph from 1997, she’d told him), once they’d agreed terms in principle, which only took one cup of room-made tea and a shortbread finger, he found that her age and immaturity didn’t put him off after all, in fact it was a bloody great turn-on, and it most definitely hadn’t stopped him pulling her down with him onto the just-too-convenient bed, and as she squealed delightedly he’d groaned and then come, all over her amazing tits.
‘Alistair,’ said his wife, for maybe the fifth time, and as he turned and looked at her she stared at him open-mouthed, slack, like a rubber band that has been pulled too tight, and then she nodded mutely towards the flat- screen TV on the wall behind the kitchen table, and he looked vaguely at the news, but he was so mesmerised by thoughts of the marvellous Miss Horne that he had no idea why his wife wanted him to watch a body being pulled out of The Serpentine.
53
Somerset House, Central London
Juliette felt like a child again as she stood in the middle of the vast building, clutching the knowledge (adoptive parents’ names, recently learned place of birth) inside her head, the fee (one folded-up five-pound note) tight in her fist, and her passport (complete with de rigueur terrible photo) deep inside her handbag.
Now Juliette was actually here at Somerset House she felt an uncomfortable obligation to go through with the search – Renée would never let her leave at this point, not without at least trying. Renée was doing her best, but she couldn’t hide her ridiculously over-the-top excitement, and it saddened Juliette that it almost seemed like entertainment to her friend, as if Juliette’s past of rejection and abandonment was some kind of treasure hunt, with the fantastic prize of a mummy at the end of it. She privately thought that Renée ought to sort out the issues with her own mother rather than keep chasing after hers, but she tried not to be upset with her, she knew Renée meant well.
At the enquiry desk Juliette was timid; there were other people around, and she felt ashamed somehow. But once she’d half-whispered her reason for being there, one of the clerks came straight round from behind the counter and led her towards a private room that smelled of furniture polish and stillness. Renée gestured to ask whether she should come too, but Juliette shook her head apologetically, suddenly aware she needed to do this herself – and that seemed to upset Renée, almost as if she were being left out of the best bit.
‘So, let’s see,’ said the clerk, peering over the top of his glasses as he settled into his chair behind the massive desk. He wore a burgundy cardigan with a grey bow tie, like a friendly old uncle, and Juliette started to feel a little better, despite a twinge of guilt about making Renée stay outside. ‘Your adoptive parents’ names, please.’
‘Cynthia Jane Greene and Giles Arthur Greene,’ said Juliette, and although she had spent all but the first few weeks of her life with her adoptive parents, here in this wood-panelled room they felt as unreal, unconnected to her as long-dead movie stars.
‘And your place of birth, dear.’
‘Acton,’ said Juliette, as confidently as she could manage. The man was perceptive and looked at her, gently inquisitive.
‘Or maybe Clacton,’ she admitted, and as she said it she thought for the thousandth time how strange it would be if it did turn out she’d been born there – after all, that was where Renée was from. The man looked puzzled.
‘I’m afraid I’m not a hundred per cent sure,’ she added lamely.
‘Oh. Well, we can always check Clacton too if we need to.’ He coughed. ‘Erm, I don’t suppose you know which Acton?’
‘Er, no … oh no, is there more than one?’
‘I’m afraid so, my dear, there are four or five, I think.’
Juliette looked crestfallen. ‘Shall we try the one in London and start from there?’ he said. She nodded gratefully.
‘And may I see your ID, please?’
Juliette handed over her passport. The photo was from when she was thirteen and she’d had great silver braces on her teeth and a velvet hair band taming her hideous hair, and she remembered the horror she’d felt when, after what seemed like a lifetime, the machine had spat out the photos, as if in disgust, and Juliette had begged her mother to let her take them again. But Cynthia had just smiled and said they were fine, not in a mean way, but in a way that made Juliette feel unconnected with her mother, not misunderstood exactly, just un-understood. She wondered whether her real mother would have acted in that way, and then she thought, well, maybe she was dead, or a hopeless alcoholic, or so deadbeat her daughter wouldn’t have had a passport at all, would never have gone anywhere. And then she thought she might be about to be one step closer to finding out, and it made her feel light-headed, faint almost.
