“I didn’t imagine it,” I say, stung.
“Okay, if he really was involved with Julia, why didn’t he introduce himself to anyone, Liv?” Will asks quite reasonably.
I don’t have any answers. I look around as the crowd thins out, people heading to the hotel where Joanie has organized a small-scale wake. There’s definitely no sign of Dirty Blond here.
Will and I give a couple of Julia’s journalist friends a lift to the hotel. The talk is light and polite, with only passing mentions of Julia. It’s ironic that someone with so much personality should have so little influence over her own funeral. I feel heavy and alone with my grief and my misery continues at the hotel, which is nondescript: beige and modern, the sort of place Julia would have hated. There are a few complimentary bottles of wine, which disappear fast, leaving only tea and coffee—and the cash bar. The room is hot. Soon, all the men have taken off their jackets, which only adds to the informal, lighthearted atmosphere of the wake. Most of Julia’s journalist friends have disappeared. I see a couple of girls I recognize from uni in a corner, but they are engrossed in their conversation and don’t notice me.
I speak to Paul and Becky for a while. They are concerned and attentive, almost making me cry with their kindness. After a while it emerges that Becky’s teaching term has just ended—the private schools always break up before the public ones—and she is leaving for Spain the next day. On hearing this news, I insist the pair of them head home so she can pack and they can spend a last evening together, and after some reluctance, they go, taking Martha with them.
Alone for the first time since the service ended, I look around the room. Will is over by the window, talking to Robbie and Wendy. After the pitying looks they gave me in the mortuary, and Wendy’s words about Julia’s selfishness, I can’t bring myself to join them. As I watch, Will’s phone rings—I recognize the ringtone, one Hannah downloaded for him, coming from the pocket of his jacket, which is slung over the chair beside me. I glance across the room. Will is still deep in conversation. He hasn’t heard his mobile. I fish it out of his jacket pocket, still ringing.
It’s Leo.
“Hi,” I answer.
“Livy? So sorry to bother you while you’re at the funeral.” Leo doesn’t sound like he means the apology. His tone is self-important and overly insistent, much like his hand on my arm the other day.
I clear my throat. “It’s fine, we’re nearly finished.” And, indeed, the room is emptying fast.
“Awful about Julia. I only met her a few times, of course, but she was so full of life.” I sigh. Leo isn’t unintelligent, but he’s falling back on the same inadequate platitudes as the rest of us. “How, er, how was the funeral itself?”
“It was okay,” I said. My voice fills with tears. “Actually, it wasn’t okay at all.”
“I know.” Leo’s voice fills with sympathy. He sounds genuine this time. “I’m glad Martha and Paul were there for me, to pay my respects.”
“Thanks.” I sniff. “Sorry. Did you want Will?”
“I’m afraid so—it’s one of the French accounts. Is he nearby?”
I head over to Will and hand him his phone. I don’t want to stay and chat with Robbie and Wendy, so I make an excuse and retreat to the bathroom. I look around for Dirty Blond as I cross the room. But he still hasn’t arrived. Clearly he isn’t going to.
The anxiety I felt before settles into a knot in my chest.
Dirty Blond knows something about how Julia really died.
I am sure of it. And now I’m not only miserable that Julia is gone.
I’m scared too.
GEORGINA
And God said: “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you.”
Genesis 9:12
This will amuse you.
Before I met the One, there was Georgina. She was our babysitter when I was twelve or so—and thought, of course, that I was too old to need a babysitter. I tolerated Georgina because she was pretty, or at least appeared so to me then.
It was summer—and my mother was having a party to celebrate our moving to a new house in the area. Naturally my father was not there, but Georgina was. I remember she arrived at the party in a daringly short skirt. Her hair was in braids, and her full lips were coated in a bright red lipstick, giving her the veneer, at least, of adult sophistication. Most of the men at the party—husbands of friends of my mothers—couldn’t keep their eyes off her. But Georgina was my property. It didn’t occur to me that she was eight years older that I was—not to mention five inches taller. I had never been kissed, and I decided, in that moment, that I wanted Georgina to kiss me and that nothing was going to stand in my way.
It was hot, a textbook summer’s afternoon, complete with blue skies and the perfect amount of breeze. The adults were standing in the garden, sipping wine and beer, smoking, chatting. It was all very boring and suburban. Georgina herself was busy flirting, the little tramp, enjoying the attention of all those older men. I told her I needed to speak to her around the side of the house. Reluctantly, she followed me.
We stood between the rough brick of the kitchen wall and the lilac wisteria that trailed down the rickety wooden fence that divided my house from its neighbor.
“What is it?” Georgina asked, her tone impatient.
“Kiss me,” I said, looking up at her. The sun was catching the fine hairs above her top lip and making her long fair braids shine like gold.
Georgina laughed. “Puh-leese,” she said. She bent down and pecked me on the cheek. “See ya, kiddo.” She turned away, clearly intending to head back to the party.
I was outraged. That was not the kiss—or the attitude—I had been looking for. I grabbed her wrist, twisting the skin as she tried to pull away.
“Stop it,” she snapped.
“No.” I stared at her, full of confidence. “Kiss me. Or I’ll tell Mum you stole her necklace.”
“What are you talking about?” Georgina frowned. “What necklace?”
The item in question—a bequest from my late grandmother—was in fact in my own pocket. Using the cover of the party, I had just taken it myself and I was looking forward to selling it next time I found myself in the center of town where I could pass unquestioned and anonymous. I can’t remember now what I wanted to buy with the money, but it wasn’t the first or the last time I took small items from my family and friends. Strangely, though the objects themselves were invariably missed, I was never suspected as the thief. Too good at covering my tracks, even then.
Georgina was still frowning. I repeated my threat.
“You won’t tell your mum any such thing,” she said, and despite her words, I could hear a slight uncertainty in her voice.
I twisted the skin on her wrist, harder than before. “I swear,” I said, “that I will.”
She hesitated. “Go on, then, you stupid little creep, but she won’t believe you.”
I released her and she marched off, back to the party. I filled with contempt. How dare she doubt me?
A few minutes later I crept up beside my mother and informed her that I had just seen Georgina taking the necklace from the jewelry box in her bedroom. Mum took Georgina into the kitchen, where Georgina denied everything. Her attempt to put the blame for the accusation on me was somewhat undermined when Mum demanded to see her pockets—into which I had, of course, slipped the necklace as I made my threat.
Mum was shocked and upset. So, naturally, was Georgina. I watched from the kitchen door, enjoying the spectacle.
Georgina left the house with Mum threatening to call her father as soon as the party was over and tell him what she had stolen. This was a heavy threat, because it was well known that Georgina’s father was a drunk and a bully. I caught up with Georgina halfway along the road, insisting that if she would only kiss me after all, I would tell Mum the whole thing had been a prank.
Georgina angrily agreed. She pulled me behind the nearest buddleia bush and proceeded to kiss me. Properly. With tongues
and everything. I had never experienced anything like it. After about ten seconds, she pulled away, leaving me inflamed with excitement.
“Okay?” she snarled.
I pointed to her chest. “Show me them too,” I said.
Georgina protested.
I insisted. “Or my mum tells your dad.”
Georgina hesitated, then unbuttoned her shirt. Less angry now, her face was red and her fingers were trembling. One of the little plastic buttons popped off. I picked it up, took a good look at Georgina’s breasts, then asked her to raise her skirt.
Again, she hesitated, then hitched it up. I peered at the tops of her skinny legs, at the triangle of blue cotton.
“Down,” I ordered.
She wriggled the pants halfway down her legs, turning her face away from me. I took my time examining what she had revealed, enjoying her shame as much as her body. After a while I told her she could go.
As she readjusted her clothing, she looked me in the eye. “So you’ll tell your mum the necklace thing was a joke, yeah?”
I turned and walked away, rubbing the plastic button from her shirt between my fingers.
She called after me. “Please?”
A smile crept across my lips.
I returned to the party. No one had noticed my short absence. I had, to be sure, lost out financially today, but I’d gained something far more precious.
Did I tell my mother the truth?
What do you think?
A few hours later Mum made her phone call and a few days after that I saw Georgina in the street with a black eye and a few days after that we got a new babysitter named Kim.
CHAPTER FOUR
After the wake, Will drops me at home, then drives into the office to deal with whatever Leo needed doing on the French account. He seems distracted as he says good-bye, and it flashes through my head that he may be about to speak to Catrina, who, after all, works out of the Paris office. The old fears flicker inside me. Could seeing her again have reignited his desire for her after all?
No, that’s ridiculous. There is nothing in Will’s behavior that justifies my thinking that. I put on a wash and tell myself not to be stupid.
Mum calls as I’m hanging out the wet clothes. She sounds terrible, all croaky and snuffling. She keeps saying how sorry she is for missing the funeral, for not being there to support me. I can hear in her voice that she’s not wildly impressed that Will has gone back to work this afternoon, and immediately I leap to his defense.
“It’s hard when you’re not family,” I insist. The way I was sidelined at the funeral by Joanie and Robbie springs into my head. “Leo was actually very sweet, but Will’s too senior to take off the whole day. He’s deputy MD now as well as planning director, remember?”
Mum falls silent. I wonder if her memories are taking her back to my sister’s funeral eighteen years ago. It was so different from Julia’s, I hadn’t really thought about it earlier, but now the recollections fill my mind. Whereas Joanie made use of a nondenominational mortuary and requested no flowers, as per Julia’s supposed suicide note, the church near Mum and Dad’s was awash with blooms of every description. In a terrible parody of a wedding, flowers filled the side aisles with sweet scents—not just the lily of the valley and roses that decorated the church, but also hundreds of bouquets laid inside and outside the church by the friends and neighbors who had gathered in force to support us. The press was there too. Plenty of people were moved, I suppose, by Kara’s death—and by her youth and her beauty.
At Kara’s funeral, everyone cried. Girls her own age and their boyfriends, all red-eyed and weeping and clutching each other for comfort. And the parents: her friends’ parents and my parents’ friends. They approached Mum and Dad with horror in their eyes.
“Impossible to take it in.”
“Such a lovely girl.”
“The worst nightmare.”
Dad fielded them all with his customary tact. I’m not sure Mum even heard them. She stood at his side, nodding and murmuring, but her eyes were dead. I knew both my parents were hurting, but back then, full of my own grief and without children of my own, I had no concept of the depth of their pain. I’m not sure I can really imagine it now. Or perhaps I just don’t want to.
Mum dissolves into a coughing fit, then asks what the weather’s like with us.
“Mild,” I say. “A bit sticky, but okay.”
We both fall silent. It’s funny, you’d think Kara’s death and then Dad’s would have brought us together, but each bereavement just seems to show us more distinctly how separate we are. Kara was Mum’s favorite. Her baby. While I was a classic older sister, forging ahead at school, working hard in all my classes and diligently practicing the piano every night, Kara skipped and dreamed through her childhood. She rarely sat still for more than a few minutes yet had phenomenal focus and an excellent memory. She effortlessly got better grades than I did despite giving the appearance of doing very little work. She was a talented artist too, spending much of her free time on sketches of the actors and pop idols she romanticized and adored.
Kara and Julia were both stunningly attractive, but apart from their pale skin, they were complete opposites in both looks and personalities. Mum once said that it was as if a butterfly and a tiger had decided to become friends. She liked Julia, though. I think both my parents hoped that Julia’s street smarts would protect naïve, gentle Kara from the big bad world she had entered by leaving home and going to college. I was always closer to Dad, who in his quiet, solid way felt like the backbone of the family, my go-to parent for comfort and advice.
I say good-bye to Mum and wander restlessly around the house. My mind flickers back to the funeral and the angry face of the blond man.
A hefty dose of Nembutal, a note, and the coroner’s verdict may stack up on one side of the argument for suicide, but that furious look on Dirty Blond’s face adds up to a powerful counterargument. I think back to Julia’s text.
PLS CALL. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.
Suppose she and Dirty Blond had fought that Saturday? My theory about him being married and Julia finding out and dumping him isn’t the only possible scenario. Julia had lots of boyfriends, and despite that rule about never sleeping with married men, she was rarely exclusive. Even the few ex-boyfriends I did meet over the years lasted only three or four months. She’d told me about Dirty Blond only a few weeks ago and didn’t seem inclined to introduce him. Maybe he minded being kept at arm’s length. Plenty of her former lovers had.
If they’d fought and Julia was heading for an evening in alone, that would explain her text to me and that she’d had a couple of drinks. But what if Dirty Blond had come back later in the evening? Julia would have let him in—that would definitely explain the lack of evidence of forced entry—perhaps hoping another conversation would heal the rift. Julia was five-six and slender. She told me Dirty Blond was tall and muscular, and indeed, the man I saw at the funeral was over six foot. I’d previously wondered why there were no signs of a struggle, but how hard would it have been for such a strong, young man to force her to take the Nembutal? Or maybe he just slipped the drug into her Jack Daniel’s?
I check the time again. Julia’s flat is only a few minutes out of my way to Zack’s school. I usually walk to pick him up, but if I drive, I should have at least forty-five minutes to see if I can find something the police have missed.
I grab my keys and set off.
* * *
The air feels damp and heavy as I get out of my Mini. The car was bought at Julia’s suggestion and in the teeth of Will’s opposition. He thought it was too small to be our family vehicle—his own Rover comes courtesy of Harbury Media—and wanted me to get a station wagon for ferrying the kids around town. As I shut the Mini’s shiny, scarlet doors, I remember Julia oohing and aahing over its curves. Such an icon, Livy, she’d said admiringly.
Did I buy it because I knew she’d be impressed? Or because at some level I was aspiring to Julia’s own, streamlined exis
tence? Either way—and I hate to admit it—Will was right about it being too small for family life.
Outside Julia’s front door, my hands tremble as I fit my key in the lock. The last time I stood here, I had no idea that Julia was dead. Now, the image of her body on the sofa is seared into my brain. It’s not there now, I tell myself. Her body is gone. Burned. As I open the door, I wonder for the first time what Joanie will do with the ashes. No one has, so far, mentioned this, at least not in my hearing. Neither, now that I come to think of it, has there been any talk of a will. It would be unlike Julia not to have made one. A self-confessed control freak, she carefully filed all her paper invoices and bills in color-coded folders, reflecting—she once told me—the more extensive files on her computer.
Julia’s flat is eerily quiet. It feels somehow stale and anonymous, like a hotel room, but maybe that’s just because it hasn’t been lived in for over a week. I glance at the photos lining the hall corridor—from a holiday Julia and I took to Africa the year after Kara died. I had met Will just a few months previously and bored Julia insane by talking about him at every opportunity. She tried to get me to flirt with the guys we encountered on the trip, but I refused. It wasn’t just loyalty to Will. I was always useless at talking to people I didn’t know. Julia, on the other hand, was a born flirt. Even back then, when she was only nineteen, she had a uncanny knack for zoning in on the alpha male of any group and catching his eye. Of course, it helped that she was strikingly beautiful. Not in the same fragile, elegant way that Kara was; Julia’s features weren’t regular or doll-like, but her eyes danced when she talked, her laugh was a throaty and sensual cackle and she looked like she’d be the best fun you’d ever have in bed.
“That girl practically sweats sex,” I remember one of her ex-boyfriends saying admiringly.
None of that is reflected in Julia’s choice of photos from that African trip, which hang on the wall: a series of shots of the various animals we came close to—monkeys, a pair of giraffes, and my favorite, a baby elephant.
You Can Trust Me: A Novel Page 6
