by Lisa Jewell
I never told her that. I wish I had. There isn’t a day that passes when I don’t regret the fact that I never told her how much she meant to me, how much I adored her. And then when she was fourteen, it all slowly seemed to fall apart. She got quieter and quieter. She lost weight. She was grumpy, monosyllabic. The light died in her eyes. It just died. And I tried to talk to her about it and she would say: I’m fine, I’m fine. But I knew she wasn’t fine and I’d heard rumours about a girl at school giving her a hard time but I never saw any evidence and she refused to talk about it.
And then one day my silly, shining, bouncy, chatty, gorgeous baby sister went to school and she never came home.
A few days after she died, my mum found her diary. I expect you know about this and what was inside it. Daddy will have told you by now. Viva had a big crush on one of her teachers, and he in turn gave her a lot of attention. Way too much attention in my opinion. He led her on. He made her think she was a big part of his life. More than just another student. On the night she died she’d written in her diary that she thought he might be waiting for her somewhere in town. That she was going to go along and see if he was there. But he wasn’t there. He was at the school until late. Maybe she’d thought he was going to save her from her bully? That he was her last chance? No one will ever really know why she went there, but when he didn’t turn up, she felt bad enough to take her own life. And when she took her life, she took mine with it.
You don’t have a brother or sister yet. But until you’ve experienced the incredible mix of emotions that a sibling brings to your life it’s really very hard to imagine. The love and the hate, the fun and the fights, the rivalry and the kinship. No one else knows your world like a sibling does. They’re there, every crap summer holiday, every day off school, every time your parents argue, every boring Christmas Day, every birthday party, they’re there. And they are a part of you. And with Viva it sometimes felt like we were continuations of the same person, that I began where she ended, and vice versa.
When she left, she took with her any sense I had of myself as a worthwhile person. Without her I was just this blank space. When she died my whole world turned black. The blackness faded over the years, but it never went away. Sometimes a good day might feel grey. But nothing ever felt white. Not ever. Not even my wedding day. All I could think was that my sister should be there.
Lots of people lose a sibling. But not everyone does what I did. And while I cannot ever excuse the choice I made last year, and the terrible actions I took, I wanted to explain to you exactly what pushed me to do the unforgivable thing I did. Because not only did Viva’s diary tell us about her feelings for her English teacher but it also gave us the full and shocking picture of the bullying she’d been subjected to by a girl called Nikki Lee. I won’t go into the detail. It’s too upsetting. It’s too vile. But I remember sitting there at sixteen years old, with my sister’s diary in my hands, tears flowing down my cheeks, vowing to myself that if I ever saw Nikki Lee I would kill her. I would kill her with my own hands.
And then one day, during a visit to the Lake District with my mother in 2011, I saw her. We’d stopped for ice creams at the side of Lake Buttermere when a coach pulled up. I saw him get off, our old English teacher, and then I saw his wife and son. I pointed her out to my mum: I said, Look, isn’t that Nikki Lee? It seemed unbelievable, unthinkable. But the more we looked, the clearer it became.
My mum went mad. She ran across the street and confronted Tom Fitzwilliam, screamed at him and hit him. Nikki must have seen my mum coming and was already back on the coach with her son. Tom calmed my mum down and the coach left. But after that I became obsessed. I googled them all the time, working out where they were, what they were doing. The fact that the two people who, in my opinion, had destroyed my sister were living together as married couple, had had a child, had made lives for themselves while my sister lay rotting in the ground sickened me. I became consumed by rage and hate. So when I read in the local paper that Tom Fitzwilliam had been appointed the new head at the Melville Academy I found out where they were going to be living and bought a house as close to theirs as possible.
For months I watched them. I watched Nikki Lee running around the village, pretending to be a normal person. And then on that dreadful Friday last March, she actually came to my front door. And because she was Nikki, all her attention was fixed on Daddy, not me. It was as if I didn’t exist.
She gave us a blanket she said she’d knitted herself. It was so ugly. Daddy tried to pass it to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I could hardly breathe, and I threw up after she’d gone. I decided then that I would confront her, that night, while her husband and son were out. I decided then that I would tell her I knew who she was, who she really was, that I would tell everyone who she really was. And I knew without a doubt that there was every chance I might kill her.
When I arrived she was sitting in her kitchen. I knocked on the back door and she let me in. She was surprised to see me there, but she was friendly. I said I’d come to thank her for the blanket. Then I asked her if she recognised me. She said no. Then I asked her if she remembered a girl called Viva Hart. She said she didn’t but it was clear she was lying. I saw it all flash across her face: the realisation of who I was and why I was sitting in her kitchen. The conversation became fractious. I got angrier and angrier. I showed her the photos of teenage girls I’d found on their hard drive when I hacked into their network. I told her her husband was still a pervert, that he shouldn’t be allowed to work with children. She called me a mad bitch. I grabbed her. I thought she’d fight back but then I remembered my sister’s diaries: Nikki Lee never did her own dirty work. She wasn’t a fighter. She was a coward. And so, of course, she ran away from me. She turned her back.
And that’s when it happened, Eloise. That’s when I made the decision that shaped your life, my life, Daddy’s life, all of our lives, forever. It didn’t feel wrong at the time; in fact it felt horribly right. For days afterwards, I felt euphoric. I was glad I’d killed Nicola Fitzwilliam. I had no regrets. As far as I was concerned she deserved to die. I had honoured my sister. I had balanced the universe. I was at peace.
But now, as I sit here writing to you, I wish more than anything that I hadn’t done it. I wish I could turn back time and do everything differently. I wish I’d confronted Nikki Lee at Lake Buttermere, climbed on board that coach and told her what she’d done, told her exactly what I thought of her and her seedy pathetic husband. I wish I could have exposed her in front of all those people and then walked away and got on with my life.
Instead I let the shock of seeing her sit in the pit of my stomach like a poisonous seed. I let it grow and grow and grow until it consumed me, consumed me to the point where I put my hatred for Nikki Lee before my love for you and Daddy.
I only had you for two days before Daddy came to take you home. You slept in my bed the first night. Every time the nurse put you in your crib you cried. So eventually I asked them to leave you in my bed. I was in and out of awareness all that night. Everything felt dreamlike, hazy. But there was one moment when I awoke from a short, hard sleep and turned to face you and you were awake, eyes wide open in the dark, and you had a piece of my hair clutched tight in your fist and you were staring at me. Staring with the widest, gentlest, calmest gaze. And for a split second I thought you were Viva. I cried and my tear splashed on your cheek. I wiped it away with my fingertip and your skin was so soft it took my breath away. And you blinked at me, and it was as if you were saying, It’s OK. We’re all going to be OK.
And then Daddy took you the next day and I didn’t cry because I knew you’d be fine. I’d seen it in your eyes. You’d shown your true self to me and I saw you. And I knew you. And I let you go.
Happy birthday, beautiful child. I don’t know you. But I do love you. Always and forever. And ever after that.
Your Mummy
Epilogue
The chihuahua is called Diego. Freddie thinks it’s a s
uperb name for a dog from South America. It follows him to Romola’s front door now as he goes to leave. Romola doesn’t follow him. She’s still at the kitchen table, being served her dinner by her mother who is called Maxine and is really nice. Romola never sees him to the door when he leaves. She never says goodbye at the end of a date or at the end of a phone call. She says it makes her feel anxious to say goodbye, she can’t explain why, it just does.
Maxine had offered to cook for him too, but they’re having lamb and Freddie can’t eat lamb, the texture is too textural, the flavour is too dead. Plus his dad had said that maybe they could get a takeaway tonight.
So Freddie says goodbye to Diego and he closes the door of Romola’s little house behind him and he walks the five minutes towards the flat where he and his dad now live.
They’d moved out of the big yellow house in Melville and now they have a nice two-bedroom flat in a Georgian house really close to Freddie’s school. It had seemed a shame to have to leave the big house in Melville, especially so soon after spending all that money on having it redecorated. But it was a crime scene now and who wanted to live in a crime scene? Well, Freddie wouldn’t have minded actually. After his experiences with the police last year, when he’d had to tell his dad about planting the red suede tassel from Red Boots’s boots at the scene of the crime to try to incriminate her and then had to wait outside the interview room while his dad told the police what he’d done, he’d become obsessed with police procedure. He no longer wanted to work for MI5. He wanted to be a forensic detective.
The governors at the Academy had asked Dad to step down. It was too much of a distraction, they’d said. They’d kept him on in an advisory capacity to steer the year elevens through their GCSEs from the back seat. But that was almost a year ago and he is currently officially unemployed. He says he’s taking a sabbatical, then deciding what he wants to do next.
Freddie’s main hobbies now are seeing Romola (which he does virtually every day, even if it’s just for five minutes after school), seeing his trauma therapist once a week (which is boring but interesting at the same time), and investigating his mum. Because after what happened to his mum he’d basically felt as though he’d never known her at all. Rebecca Mullen had killed her because she’d bullied her sister. Rebecca Mullen said his mum had been horrific and terrifying, that everyone at her school had lived in fear of her and her gang of cronies. Yet to Freddie, she was just Mum. She never bullied him or shouted at him or made him feel scared. Apart from that one last time, when she’d been ill in bed and screamed at him and called him a fucking little shit and pushed him over. And he’d seen it then, the possibility of this other side to her. And that is his latest project. It’s called The Information, after another Martin Amis novel. Because that is what he needs. Information about his mum, to try to work her out.
He’d brought all his mum’s stuff from the house in Melville, put it in three big cardboard boxes labelled ‘The Information 1’, ‘The Information 2’ and ‘The Information 3’. He’s going through it forensically and also augmenting his research with occasional question-and-answer sessions with his father. But these are generally unhelpful as on the whole his father appears to know nothing about his former wife, about what made her tick. He says that when he met her on the bus that day, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-five, he hadn’t known that she was the school bully who’d ruined Viva Hart’s life. He said he hadn’t known that brown-haired Nicola Lee on the bus was the same person as blond-haired Nikki Lee. He hadn’t known at any point. He hadn’t known until Viva Hart’s mum had hit him in the Lake District. And then, he said, he’d known immediately and then, he said, everything had made total sense.
He hadn’t been able to explain exactly what he’d meant by that. All he’d said was that his mum had always had a cruel streak and now he understood why. Freddie had written down those words – ‘cruel streak’ – and pondered them, wondering if maybe he had inherited a tiny bit of his mum’s ‘cruel streak’ because of the secret things he sometimes thought or did.
And then yesterday Freddie found something really strange in one of his mum’s boxes, buried towards the bottom of a box filled with teenage mementos. It was in a DL envelope, so old that the bit that you lick had gone bright yellow and crusty. There was nothing written on the outside of the envelope; inside the envelope was a bunch of shiny dark brown hair tied with an elastic band. Freddie brings it out after their take-out.
‘What is this?’ he says, pushing it across the table to his dad.
The hair is way too long ever to have been Freddie’s hair and too dark to have been his mum’s. Freddie already has a bad feeling that he knows who the hair belongs to. The words from the newspaper article have been swirling around his head all day. But he wants his dad to give him a different explanation, one that doesn’t make his chest feel tight. He watches his dad peer into the envelope, sees his fingers going inside, pulling out the hank of hair.
He glances up at Freddie. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘In Mum’s stuff.’
His dad returns his gaze to the envelope.
‘Whose hair is it?’ asks Freddie.
His father’s face has gone grey. All the skin on his face looks like it’s suddenly fallen away from his bones. He sees him gulp.
Freddie stares at his dad, waiting for him to say something.
But he doesn’t.
Acknowledgements
Book number sixteen and it feels like I am always thanking the same people in the same way for doing the same things. But that is because I am a very lucky author. I have such loyal teams working on my behalf in a dozen or more different countries, I have the best readers in the world and a brilliant support network of friends and family.
So thank you, as ever, to Selina, Susan, Najma, Cassandra, Celeste and everyone else at Cornerstone.
To Richenda Todd, for impeccable copy-editing.
To Jonny, Catherine, Melissa, Alice, Luke and everyone else at Curtis Brown.
To Deborah and Penelope and everyone else at Gelfman Schneider.
To Sarah, Ariele, Daniella, Haley, Kitt and everyone else at Atria.
To Pia, Christoffer, Anna and everyone else at Printz Publishing.
To all my publishers across the world who I’ve yet to meet.
To all my readers, the ones I’ve met, the ones I’ve yet to meet, the new ones, and the old ones.
To all the booksellers everywhere
To all the librarians.
To my wonderful family, my lovely girls, my remarkable friends.
To the Board. You are stupendous.
To you, for reading my book. I hope you liked it.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473538344
Version 1.0
Published by Century 2018
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Copyright © Lisa Jewell 2018
Cover: Getty images
Lisa Jewell has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain by Century in 2018
Century
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
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www.penguin.co.uk
Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780896434
