Jody looked out at the car park again. “Our guardians are still on their Med cruise until Sunday night.” Jody always called them that. It was a joke, but also his way of reinforcing the distance he felt towards their parents. It was one of the few things she had in common with him. “So you’re welcome to stay at mine.”
She’d never been invited to her brother’s pad before. Had no idea what sort of place he lived in. Her father had texted the night before, apologising for not being back for her return, but saying that Jody would give her a key to the house and to make herself at home in the meantime. She’d dismissed their offers of cancelling their holiday when it was unclear when she would be discharged from hospital. They hadn’t taken much persuasion.
“Thanks for the offer...” She examined Jody’s face for a reaction. Was he just saying it because he felt he should, or was it a genuine gesture? Jody at least appreciated that the last place she wanted to be was in an empty house, whether it was their parents’ or a new home with stacks of boxes to unpack.
He looked down into his fries without meeting Beth’s eye on the way. “I mean it. There’s a box room; you can have some private time. If you need to get away from all the shit.” He prodded his food around the carton.
“That’s really kind...” Beth didn’t mean to say it the way she did, leaving the sentence hanging as if she couldn’t think of an excuse to say no.
Jody rose, closing and stacking his food cartons. “I’ll eat the rest of this on the way.” He shuffled awkwardly out of the fixed seat, his belly dragging along the loose salt at the edge of the brown tabletop.
They moved to the exit and stood in the doorway looking out at the rain.
Jody covered his shaved head with an old Gentleman Jack baseball cap. “Ready?”
“It would be good not to have to deal with the shit when they come back.”
“I’m not just talking usual parental stuff. They’ve had reporters calling at the house.”
“Why?”
Jody didn’t turn. “Those clips of you on the Internet; you’re an online celebrity.”
Chapter 5
When she’d been in hospital, Beth had asked Jody if she could see the newspaper obituary Luc’s mother had placed, as well as any records that would help her authenticate the events she’d been absent from. The impersonal eulogy had been barely two column inches.
Beth’s mother had never hidden her disapproval when she’d married Luc, but she’d dutifully attended the ceremony in Rouen. She’d given Beth the funeral service pamphlet she’d retained and a copy of Ouest-France. Much of the newspaper’s space had been given to a cover story about the French Ecology Minister, Christiane Vipond, having had a heart attack. The crash had been relegated to a space smaller than the local obituary.
The scant details had only reinforced how Beth had felt about her presence within the collision. But just as she’d been feeling as if Luc’s passing had barely intruded on the world he’d inhabited for thirty-three years, it now appeared the incident had made a media ripple of the very worst kind after all.
Jody had tentatively informed her about the accident site clips having been posted on YouTube, but it had only been on the journey home to his rented home in Stockwell that he’d told her they’d actually gone viral.
There’d only been eighteen spectators on the exchange-student coach that had stopped at the roadside, but the five phones that had recorded the aftermath meant hundreds of thousands of people had been privy to Luc’s last moments.
While Beth had been comatose, people had watched it all over the world, searched for it on their PCs and handhelds to relieve boredom during lunch hours or when there was nothing better on TV. Their suffering and her violent outburst had been entertainment for scores of the curious and the morbid. Celebrity? It had been a repulsive joke. Jody had said under YouTube’s privacy policy, the clips could be potentially removed within five days. They’d already been out there for months, but he’d said he hadn’t taken any action yet because he thought when she was ready, she might want to see them before they were taken down.
After scaling the steps at the front of the Edwardian property, and then another flight to his first-floor flat, Beth was trembling. She didn’t know if it was the exertion or what she’d just been told.
Jody carried her bag into the tiny box room with the single bed in it and placed it on the rug. “It’s more a cupboard, but it’s at the back of the house so it should at least be quiet. I’d give you my room, but you wouldn’t thank me for that. I’ll let you unpack.” He left and carefully closed the door behind him.
Unpack? Beth seated herself on the single bed and lifted her tiny case, containing her handbag from the crash site, a few clothes, toiletries and the new pyjamas night gear her mother had brought to the hospital, onto the duvet. She didn’t usually wear anything in bed with Luc, but she took them out now and laid them carefully across the pillow.
She tried to remember exactly what she’d worn for their last night out. They’d both showered together after the make-up sex they’d had following their brief foray into a familiar argument. They’d washed each other and Beth had started to respond to his touch again, but they’d had a reservation at Oubliez Demain and they’d already been late.
They’d never made it, and now she imagined the candle lit at their table and the chairs empty for the entire evening.
It had been the first time they’d stayed at the cabin in the winter. The January air had been chilly. She knew she’d put on her sapphire blue knitted dress with the empire bodice. She could remember slipping on her black tights and suede heels but couldn’t recall if she’d taken a coat. The clothes had probably been cut from her in casualty.
Her last vivid memory of Luc before the crash was of him looking meditatively at her in the mirror while she applied her eyeliner.
She heard Jody turn on the TV in the lounge and hurriedly tidying up while he waited for her to come out. When she did, he told her to sit down in one of his leather armchairs and said he’d order them some Chinese food when she was ready. She said OK, but that she had to pee, and headed to the bathroom even though she didn’t need to.
She wanted to put off the moment of them both sitting through some junk soap like nothing had happened. Standing in front of Jody’s tiny, toothpaste-spattered mirror, Beth painfully peeled off the last gauze plaster and surveyed her new appearance. The area suddenly exposed was a wrinkled, swollen and anaemic square on the left-hand side of her chin. She touched it lightly with her fingertips and the skin prickled. Victim-support counsellor? She barely knew where to begin with herself.
She’d been told the swelling would go down and that the lacerations would partially fade – particularly if she applied cream and massaged the scarred area. She couldn’t work out which of the crescent wounds had been caused by the crash and which by the insertion of the plates.
Her curls that she’d had cut boyishly short and dyed a deep raspberry shade for their trip looked similarly lifeless, a faded, barely pink tinge as her light brown hair had grown out. It now lay in a low fringe over her dark eyebrows and hung in uneven fronds down to her shoulders. It was distressing to imagine herself lying insensible while it had got so long. It was even more distressing to feel as if she’d seen Luc less than a week ago.
Everyone said that she could have come off a lot worse. That she was lucky to be alive.
She looked different. Not just physically. She saw something absent from her hazel eyes as they reluctantly caught themselves in her reflection. The doctors said there was no discernible brain damage, but Beth wasn’t the person that had left the UK with Luc anymore. However, although her appearance alarmed and upset her, she was almost glad the crash hadn’t left her unscathed.
There had to be some physical manifestation of Luc’s removal. Some side effect of being fleeced of the life she’d known. It was like another mugging, only this one was more brutal than any physical assault. It had made off with everything that was
valuable to her.
Stalled feelings were locked away so deeply they didn’t register anywhere in her expression. She still hadn’t processed what had happened like everyone else had. They were months ahead of her. As far as she was concerned, the crash was a very recent memory. She was outside of the people she knew, dislocated, and didn’t know if she would ever feel part of their world again.
Chapter 6
It was a couple of days after Jody had told Beth about her Internet presence that she finally plucked up the courage to look. Her brother’s tablet had been on the coffee table since she’d moved in, and she’d been eyeing it askance every time they’d sat together in the lounge.
She wasn’t sleeping, had done enough of that. Her limbs felt weak but twitched when she tried to relax them. The bed was tiny and ice-cold even when Jody turned up the radiator. It was March but Beth knew it was nothing to do with the temperature.
Jody’s dated and dusty place was modest but didn’t need to be. Much to Beth’s surprise, her brother had turned out to be something of a success story, albeit a covert one. And she thought that his days with the keyboards were over. He used to play for a variety of semi-professional indie bands. Like bassists, keyboardists were always in more demand than guitarists, drummers and vocalists. It appeared he’d harnessed his skills and was now composing music for computer games and earning a very lucrative living. He even had a timeshare condo in LA that he offered her if she needed to get away. He had to be doing OK.
Jody had never been very ambitious, never seemed to try hard at anything. He’d done effortlessly well at school and in college when he’d seemed to spend all his time smoking marijuana and drinking beer. He was just one of those people that didn’t need to strive but had things land in their lap. His life seemed to consist of the odd meeting, lots of TV watching and the occasional trip to the tiny recording studio next to his bedroom.
Beth got the impression the music and money made no odds to him. His life was simple and it was just a way to get by. He’d lived in the same place for over a decade and had no plans to upgrade. He’d always struggled with his weight but now he seemed resigned to it. He took no exercise except for his wheezing assaults on the stairs.
Her mother and father had returned from their cruise and visited. When they’d attempted to get her to re-engage with the myriad financial demands she had to deal with, and Beth had asked them to put the newly acquired property back on the market, they’d told her she shouldn’t make any rash decisions.
She got that they were trying to plug her back into her life by reminding her of her commitment to Avellana, Luc’s company, but she couldn’t yet face his colleagues, go to the house or anywhere she was meant to be with him. She would have to sooner or later, but Beth didn’t feel any desire to “move forward” as her mother had suggested when it still seemed as if he would walk back through the door.
She still hadn’t cried. Not once. Not even since she’d woken in the hospital. When it finally hit her that he really was gone, she knew it was going to feel like being in another car wreck. She waited for that impact to come but it still hadn’t. How much longer would it take?
She knew shutting herself away was exactly the wrong thing to do. She had to inhabit the past backdrops of her life with Luc and allow herself to contemplate his absence. She was being a coward, and she recognised her parents were right, even if their motives weren’t entirely admirable.
Her mother had never cared for Luc, and the feeling had been mutual. She was waiting for her to mention Adam. It would be coming. Her childhood sweetheart was still single, and her mother had it in her mind that they should have married and made things convenient for her. After all, he was the son of their dearest neighbourhood friends. Surely even she wouldn’t be as crass as to try and put them back together so soon after Luc’s funeral. She was already getting angry about it in advance. And her mother still insisted on calling her Bethany. She was the only person who did.
The media attention had ebbed and her father had told her nobody was calling at the house, and that they only had the occasional call from the newspapers. Would she like to come home? She’d looked at Jody and said she’d got herself settled for the moment. He didn’t make eye contact during her reply but appeared to be pleased with her decision to stay with him.
But even hiding out at his place, Beth still had a gauntlet to run. What she was about to watch at just after three in the morning was going to be excruciating, but perhaps seeing it would be the catalyst she needed for her postponed grief.
Unlocking Jody’s tablet, she touched the Google icon but didn’t want to put her name into a general search. She didn’t care about her own, but Beth didn’t want to see unexpected photos of Luc appear.
She opened YouTube and entered the name of the clip that Jody had scribbled down for her: “French Crash Victim Assault.” He told her to brace herself for the names of the others.
He’d suggested she view one at a time. She touched “search” and the clip plus the others related to it loaded up. She swallowed as she took in what was displayed before her. All were represented by low-grade night shots of the crash site – day-glo paramedics from a distance and the familiar overhanging beech trees. Her eyes skated instinctively but reluctantly about them and their titles. She saw the words “whack job”, “psycho” and “bitch”.
Someone called “thatTODdude” had uploaded the clip she was about to watch. Beth suspended the tip of her finger half an inch over the clip but couldn’t touch it. How could she subject herself to any of this? She stalled, quickly opened another window and logged into her Facebook account.
While she’d been in hospital, she’d given Jody her password and had told him to keep anyone who had posted on her wall updated on her progress. She hadn’t been ready to interact with any of her friends – their friends – and still wasn’t. At his next visit he’d said there had been too many messages to respond to, so he’d just posted that she’d be out of hospital soon.
Perhaps the grief of the people they knew was what she needed to see now. She scrolled through them. Scores of reactions going right back to the crash date. Most of them were from mutual friends. Some of them she didn’t even know. Everyone was “so sorry”. Some users had even “liked” the condolences; thumbs-up to grief and RIP. One woman she’d never heard of had sent her some virtual flowers.
It was a joke. She just wanted to type WTF, tell them all she was sorry if she’d taken up five seconds of their precious time. But she saw faces she knew there. Faces attached to people who had sent cards to her in the hospital. She didn’t want to look at the page anymore, though.
“What’s on your mind?” the box asked.
She typed:
Thanks so much to everyone. You’ll understand if I don’t log in here anytime soon. Please take time to remember Luc and what he meant to you. I love him like he’s still here.
She touched “post” and looked dispassionately at the words on her page, waiting for her own reaction to what she’d typed. Sitting atop the stack of facile sentiments, it was as if somebody else had written them.
WTF indeed. And “what the fuck” could trivialise events more than she’d just seen. She logged out.
When she clicked back to the YouTube page she registered the clip had been viewed 3, 348, 104 times. It had 48, 922 thumbs-up and only 62 thumbs-down. It was one minute and forty-three seconds long. She didn’t allow her eyes to dip to the comments beneath it. Beth swallowed dryly and wondered if she really was ready to see a replay of the event she’d barely physically recovered from. Before she could have second thoughts, however, she hovered her finger over the play symbol, then stabbed it.
Her finger slipped and nothing happened. She wondered if it was a sign. She stabbed it again.
The clip counter rotated in front of her and a commercial began. Beth was dumbfounded. It was for injury at work claims. Somebody was actually making money from hits on the clip. A slate-suited woman asked if she “was suff
ering but didn’t know where to turn.” Beth felt revulsion solidify and spotted a countdown that would allow her to skip the commercial. She poked the screen like it was something dead.
Seconds later the black square became a familiar night-time roadside. It was focused on a parked ambulance.
The accident report stated that the single ambulance had been sent back after it was decided the helicopter could get them both to the hospital faster. Luc had died on board. She vaguely recalled the black straps dangling above her from the ceiling of the helicopter while she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness.
The camera panned left to their inverted car, and it felt like a screw was being tightened in her chest. Gendarmes were on the scene. The clip jump-cut to Luc and Beth lying on the stretchers about twenty feet away. Her stomach hardened and she felt herself turning cold in the seat of the chair.
She hit pause, suddenly aware of her own uneven breathing. She got up from the armchair and staggered to the bathroom, kneeling in front of the toilet. But no liquid came up as her throat pumped. She drank some water from the tap, then padded back to the box room and got back into bed. Twenty minutes later, she seated herself in the armchair with the tablet again.
She clicked the play button and the action resumed.
Chapter 7
The crowd was loud but incoherent, excited comments buffeting against each other. Wind boomed against the tiny mic. A man lit by strobing red and blue smoked a cigarillo right of foreground. The phone took in the scene in a leisurely fashion, panning left from him and getting Beth and Luc on the trolleys centre of frame. Beyond them was the misshapen brown camper, fragments of metal and twinkling glass lying scattered in its wake. Emergency-vehicle headlights illuminated the bodywork and the diagonal rain hosing the road.
Stalk Me Page 3
