Alice is about to suggest another shot, she likes the sharp, potent taste of it on her tongue, but suddenly Grace appears by her side. Her face is white, even in the softer lighting of the bar, and her expression is stony. Alice squints at her tipsily, smiles, and offers her the spare tequila shot. She doesn’t smile back.
‘I need to talk to Felicity,’ she says in Alice’s ear, leaning close to her, her breath warm against Alice’s cheek. At first Alice thinks she’s just leaning close because of the noise of the bar, but then she realises that she doesn’t want anyone to hear – she’s looking around cautiously, as if they’re on a covert spy mission, not in a busy bar on a Friday night.
‘Well, all right,’ Alice says, not understanding. ‘Go for it, then. She’s just there, with Nate.’ The two of them have moved slightly away, are huddled over one of the trendy little tables, laughing at something or nothing.
Tom and Alice never laugh like that.
‘I can’t go over there,’ Grace says, and then mutters something under her breath that Alice doesn’t catch.
‘What?’ she says, but Grace isn’t looking at her anymore, she’s looking past her to Felicity.
‘Can you help me?’ she says, still not meeting Alice’s eye.
‘Help you what?’ Alice asks, confused, but Grace just shakes her head impatiently. Behind her, the younger girls are clinking glasses, their long, lithe limbs moving in unison.
‘Talk to him for a bit, I need to speak to Felicity on her own. If I don’t do it now I’ll lose my nerve,’ she says.
‘What are you talking about?’ Alice says, really confused now, and then Grace leans in close to her again, wraps her fingers around Alice’s wrist. Her hands are cold, surprisingly so.
‘Keep Nathaniel in here, where people can see you,’ she says. ‘I need you to do this for me, Alice.’ A pause. ‘I never ask for much from this friendship, do I, Alice, but I’m asking now.’ She reaches for the tequila shot, downs it in one, her expression never changing.
Alice doesn’t know if it’s the steeliness in Grace’s tone, or the strange, hunted look in her eyes, but in the end she gives in and does as she says, obeying her as she gives her a tiny shove to where Felicity and Nate stand. What does she mean, I never ask for much from this friendship? She makes it sound like Alice doesn’t care about her at all, which is completely unfair.
To Alice’s horror, as they approach, Felicity and Nate move together and begin kissing, properly kissing, but Grace doesn’t flinch; she moves forward like a bird of prey with its eye on the target.
‘Grace!’ Alice hisses at her, but she just carries on until she’s standing right in front of them, unmoving, still with the same weird, fixed look on her face. Christ, is she pissed?
Obviously, they break apart. Alice feels embarrassed for Grace – what the hell is she playing at? But Nathaniel has that amused glint on his face again, as if her odd behaviour doesn’t bother him at all.
‘Felicity, can I talk to you?’ Grace says, and Alice sees a flicker of annoyance cross Flick’s face, which, to be honest, is pretty understandable given that Grace is being so weird. They are standing so close to Nathaniel that she can smell his aftershave; a deep, musky smell that somehow manages to set Alice’s nerve endings on fire, even though she is willing her body, her stupid, treacherous body, not to react.
‘What about?’ Flick says, but she’s a good friend, and clearly she can see that Grace is upset. Casting an apologetic look at Nathaniel, she obediently follows Grace away from the table, towards the back of the room, where the neon green sign of the fire exit lights up the doorway. It flickers, just briefly, like a warning.
And then Nate and Alice are alone.
Chapter Eighteen
Hannah
Hannah doesn’t know how long they’ve been at The Upper Vault; time has become elastic, the way it does when you’re very, very drunk. She knows she’s been dancing, but now one of her shoes has come off, and for some reason she finds that very, very funny. One foot is completely bare, she’s not even wearing any socks and her toenails are painted red, a bright, frivolous red that makes her want to laugh. So she does.
She laughs and laughs, and she doesn’t think about the bloodstains on her sheets, or the look on the nurse’s face, or the way Chris’s eyes blurred over when they confirmed what both of them already knew, their expressions soft but firm. Loss was part of their everyday lives; Hannah didn’t want it to be part of hers. She doesn’t think about the tiny pair of knitted baby bootees she bought herself in a stupid, selfish, happy moment last week, that are sitting in the bottom drawer of their dresser, that she wishes she had burned or thrown out with the rubbish. After all, they are worthless to her now. Aren’t they?
She is stumbling, and she feels a bit sick. The room is so loud, pulsing music and bodies, it has filled up so quickly, this place, and all of a sudden there are too many people, too many strangers, all crowding around her but none of them has noticed that she can’t find her shoe and none of them cares that she’s just lost her baby.
And then Hannah feels a hand on her arm.
She looks up, and it’s Felicity’s new boyfriend, the one with the big hands, Ned, Nick? Her brain gropes around for his name; she can’t remember.
‘It’s OK, I’ve got you,’ he says, and he’s got an arm around Hannah’s back. He’s helping her to the side of the dancefloor, even though she didn’t ask for help and she doesn’t need it. She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-up Hannah. Sensible Hannah. Oh, Han will be the first one to get married. The first one to have kids. She’s a mother to us all already! She remembers Grace saying that, she doesn’t know when. When they were young. They’re not young anymore. Her body isn’t young, not young enough. This wouldn’t be happening if it was.
‘You’re all right,’ he says, and it’s Nathaniel, that’s it, she has remembered now, handsome Nathaniel, the doctor, the one Felicity’s so excited about. The one Grace doesn’t seem to like, for some unfathomable reason that she isn’t prepared to explain. Why will none of them open up to each other? When did life become about keeping their cards close to their chests?
‘We need to get you some air, some water,’ Nathaniel is saying, and Hannah laughs, again, because he sounds like a real doctor, now, and because he probably came out tonight to get away from work, not to have to look after a drunk, sad woman who doesn’t know her limits. And then the laughter has turned to crying, and suddenly she is sobbing, big, sloppy tears that splash down her cheeks and onto her shirt. One of her buttons has come undone, exposing a sliver of skin, and Hannah reaches up to try to do it up but she can’t see properly through her tears and so she just leaves it and lets herself cry, snotty, ugly sobs that clog up her throat and make her head ache.
‘Hey, hey,’ Nathaniel is saying, and then there’s a bump and a rush and Hannah realises they’re outside, they’ve come outside onto the street downstairs and he still has an arm around her waist. ‘What’s the matter, hey? What’s wrong?’
Her cheeks are cold, the tears freezing on her skin, and she lets him guide her to a little low wall outside the bar. Hannah’s bare foot tenses at the harsh texture of the pavement; she is hobbling slightly, like an old woman. There are cigarette butts on the ground, lots of them, and someone’s left a glass out here too, the dregs of something in the bottom of it. She feels her stomach churn. There is something dark in the air, something she can’t put her finger on but she can sense it, closing in around them. It is the same sense of darkness she used to feel when they were younger, when Felicity’s father was around – a sort of creeping dread. She doesn’t know why she’s feeling it now.
‘We need to get you home,’ Nathaniel says, and he looks worried, his blue eyes swim in front of her, intense with concern. At the thought of going home, of sobering up and dealing with it all, a fresh wave of tears assaults Hannah and she pitches forward into his shirt, never mind that he is a man she has only just met, that she doesn’t know him at all, and that she
is making a colossal fool of herself. In the moment, all she can do is cry.
Hannah expects him to push her off, but all he does is place a hand on her back, a large, gentle hand, and rub it in small slow circles, allowing her to sob. After a minute or two, she sits up, feeling pathetically grateful for his kindness.
‘God,’ she says, when she can speak, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I…’
‘No problem,’ he is saying, ‘really, it’s fine. Are you all right? Is there anything I can do? I’ll go get the girls, but I don’t want you to be…’ He trails off.
Hannah forces herself to take deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, makes herself look up at the crystal black of the night sky above them, focus on the stars, weak, but just about visible even in London.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, trying harder to articulate the words. ‘I’m just—’ She looks at him, into his eyes. He’s obviously a kind man, and she feels a jab of happiness, that Felicity has someone who might finally look after her, that she has, for once, chosen somebody good. She thinks how it would feel to say the words aloud, to unburden herself.
‘I lost a baby,’ Hannah says, ‘yesterday. I miscarried at eleven weeks.’ She says the sentence without breaking down, speaking matter-of-factly, and somehow, it isn’t as bad as she’d thought. It even helps, the acknowledgement, the sense of relief at saying the thing that has been inside her all night, the only thing she has been able to think about. The reason she has drunk so much, got herself into this state. It is because she lost her baby.
Not because she’s a bad person.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, very gently, and he reaches out, puts a hand on hers, leaves it there. There is such comfort in it, and in the simplicity of his words, that tears threaten to take over again and Hannah has to force them back down. He doesn’t deserve her crying all over him. Felicity will probably be furious. But even as Hannah thinks this, she knows that she is doing her friend a disservice, that she won’t be furious, she will be sad. She will be sad for Hannah, and for Chris, and she will understand. She will realise the loss, perhaps the most of them all, because it is a loss she has already experienced, albeit in a different way.
‘She’s done it already,’ Hannah says aloud. ‘She’s lost all the children she was ever going to have.’
Nathaniel’s hand grows stiller on her own.
‘What?’ he says then, and his voice is different, more stilted.
‘Felicity,’ Hannah says, and the grief blooms again in her chest, unstoppable this time, for now she is crying not just for herself and this baby, but for Felicity, the hand life has dealt her, the crushing loss she too must have felt when she woke up from the operation, too young and confused to know what her father had done to her. ‘She can’t have children. She will know how it feels.’
Hannah thinks of her, stoic and brave, being coerced into a decision that would alter the path of her life forever, and then she thinks of how selfish she herself is, sitting here sobbing because her baby has been taken. She can try again, can’t she? But Felicity can’t. Hannah should have told someone, she should have reported Felicity’s father when she had the chance. She knows she should. They all feel guilty about it.
‘It’s not fair,’ Hannah says aloud, stupidly, into the empty night sky, and she doesn’t realise what she has done, what she has said to Nathaniel until it is too late, far, far too late. She has told a secret that was never hers to tell, but in the early hours of the morning, her body loose and slack with alcohol, she doesn’t realise the impact of her words.
‘I didn’t know,’ Nathaniel says, hoarsely, and Hannah tries to reach out to him, wanting to comfort him in the way he has comforted her, but instead she pitches forward, her stomach lurches and she throws up, all over the cigarette butts, all over the floor, and all over her one remaining shoe.
Grace
Felicity doesn’t believe me. The force of that fact hits me full-on, square in the face, a blow to the stomach. The pain feels that way; almost physical. I have told her what happened, and Felicity, one of my closest friends in the world, simply does not believe me.
It is the same thing as with my mother – it is happening all over again.
I can see it in her eyes, even before she says the words.
‘Are you sure, Grace?’
Am I sure?
Am I sure that the man inside the bar, her new boyfriend of two months, Nathaniel Archer, is the man who raped me last year on a hot summer’s day, at a garden party hosted by my parents?
‘Yes, Felicity,’ I say, slowly, as though talking to a child. ‘Yes, I’m sure. It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve spent the whole night trying to find a way to tell you, a way to warn you. I couldn’t not tell you, Flick – he’s dangerous. Tonight has to be the last you see of him.’
My legs are shaking, slightly; we’re out at the back of The Upper Vault, on the fire escape, and neither of us has a coat. I am gripping onto the iron handrail to keep myself steady; the metal is freezing beneath my fingers. The music from the club can still be heard from behind the thick fire door, but it’s faint, as if someone has turned the volume down on the rest of the world and it’s only the two of us now, Felicity and me, out on the corrugated iron steps, the concrete below us. I am telling her the truth – not my version of it, as my mother cruelly said, and not Nate’s version of it, the one everyone believed, but the truth. The indisputable fact that Nate Archer, a client of my father’s business, raped me in my childhood bedroom in the middle of the afternoon on a hot July day, for no reason at all other than because he could.
I have been trying to put that day to the back of my mind ever since. I have buried it, deep within me, after the initial shock and shame and the awful, life-altering days afterwards; the days in which I tried to talk to my parents and had them disbelieve me. My own mother refused to believe what I’d done, and my father wouldn’t dare speak up against Nathaniel; the son of the man who owns one of the biggest private hospitals in England and thereby pays my dad’s wages. My parents and I had never been close, but this was the final straw.
After that, I didn’t tell anyone. Not even the girls. So when they ask why I am alone, when they try to cajole me into dating, when they ask why I never want to be set up with anyone, I lie. I tell them I am happy alone, when the reality is that what Nate did to me has left me terrified of men, of what they might do. It has shown me that the truth is irrelevant – no matter what happened between us, the fact is that there were no witnesses, there was only the two of us, and that when it came to his word against mine, the people I told chose to believe him over me.
I didn’t report it, of course. I couldn’t bear the idea of another person looking me in the eye and telling me I was lying. I simply didn’t think I could take it.
And so I shut it down, locked it away, pretended, at times, that it had never even happened. I never spoke his name again, I didn’t look him up online, I didn’t seek him out to try to get some form of justice, retribution for what he did. I simply erased it. Continued to live my life, as best I could. But I shut myself down, slowly, bit by bit – as the weeks and then months went by, I distanced myself from my colleagues, I alienated my parents; the only people I could be a version of myself with were the girls, the three of them. I told myself that was enough, that I’d carry on, get through it. Nobody would know, and so nobody would think any less of me. And I’d never have to see the man who did this to me again – despite the fact that he wouldn’t leave me alone.
In the weeks and months afterwards, Nathaniel called me. I’d given him my number that day, stupidly, before what happened, and he abused it – ringing me at all times of the day and night, even trying to pass on messages through my father. He emailed me, multiple times, as though nothing had happened, asking me to come out for dinner, telling me he couldn’t stop thinking about me. That I’d put a spell on him. To my parents, it was further proof that he was telling the truth –
he just liked me! He was a handsome, successful doctor – the undertone of their words was that I ought to be grateful.
Eventually, I blocked his email address, changed my phone number. It worked; the calls stopped. It took months for me to finally allow myself to relax, to accept that it was over. He couldn’t get to me – whatever game he was trying to play with me was finished, dead. Perhaps, I thought, he’d got bored, moved on. I gave my new number to the girls, told them I’d had to switch it for work reasons. I thought the man who haunted my dreams was gone.
But now Nathaniel Archer is back. He is here, and Felicity is in love with him. It is obvious, so obvious. She is my friend, and she is in danger.
That’s why I had to tell her the truth.
I didn’t think, not for one second, that she wouldn’t want to hear it.
Alice
Alice is on her own, texting Tom, sitting on one of the velvet sofas in the back when Nate slides up beside her again, to where they had been talking together on the low soft seats that line the back wall of the bar. He’s looking a bit odd, shaken almost, says Hannah got sick outside and that he’s called her a cab home.
‘I saw her as I was on the way to the bar,’ he says. ‘She was on her own, dancing like a lunatic, missing one of her shoes. Sorry, in all the palaver I forgot to get our drinks.’
Immediately, Alice goes to get up, concerned for Hannah, but he puts a hand on her arm, just like he did back in the pub. Just for a moment, but it is enough for Alice to feel the spark of electricity between them. How different his touch is from Tom’s aggressive grip.
‘She’ll be gone already, I think,’ he says. ‘She was out of it; I didn’t want to leave her alone to come and fetch one of you guys. I didn’t know where Felicity and Grace had got to – have you seen them, at all?’
The Wild Girls Page 21
