by Mark Edwards
That was why she did this. The money was simply a bonus.
She drove up to the house and parked beside Darpak’s car. She sat in silence, touching up her make-up in the mirror, thinking again about Larry and about Mum, who still believed in him.
She ran over what she’d told Suzanna, hoping she hadn’t given the impression she was arrogant. She knew people took an instinctive dislike to those whose lives seemed too perfect. She was only thirty-two and successful, with a handsome husband, a beautiful house, a thriving business and – it was inferred – an incredible love life. She was a guru. A sexpert. How could her love life not be perfect? She saw the way men looked at Darpak, the nudge-nudge wink-wink. She could read their minds. You lucky bastard.
Her life was pretty good, she supposed. But that didn’t mean she was satisfied. For driven people like her, it could always be better. That was the great tragedy of being ambitious. You were never happy.
‘I’m home,’ she called after she forced herself to get out of the car and go inside.
There was no response. She went up the stairs and approached the bathroom. The door was shut and she could hear the shower running. For a moment she was tempted to go inside and surprise him, undress and get in with him. Do what people thought they did all the time.
Instead she went into the living room, kicked off her shoes and slumped on the sofa. The whole room was cream and white, flooded with natural light, no mess, no dirt. The view of the garden was lovely, even now the trees were shedding their leaves. She felt a glow of satisfaction, a rare moment when she allowed herself to pause and appreciate what she had. Sure, Darpak’s money had paid for this place initially, but now she was his financial equal.
She leaned forward and noticed something. Darpak’s phone was on the coffee table.
She knew she shouldn’t pick it up. She shouldn’t key in the PIN code (his mother’s birthday). She definitely shouldn’t open his messages. But then she thought how he’d been acting recently. Kind of shifty. Like he felt guilty about something. It had been bothering her for weeks, though he denied anything was wrong.
She looked over her shoulder. The shower was still running. What was he doing in there? Having a wank? That thought made her think, Sod it. She opened the Messages app, expecting to find nothing. Messages from his boss, his sister, his mates. Or maybe, deep down, she expected to find something worse. Something that would tilt her world off its axis.
There it was: a text from a number that didn’t have a name assigned.
A photo of a naked pair of breasts, taken in a mirror. It was a selfie. A topless selfie.
And a message: To keep you going till next time xxxx.
Chapter 10
Jessica was tempted to keep Olivia off school but Will insisted it was better to act as if everything was normal. She watched Olivia trot into the classroom and head over to her peg, where she hung her backpack before trying to get her coat off. She struggled with the zip and Jessica saw her lower lip wobble before Ryan Cameron noticed and hurried over to help her. He caught Jessica’s eye and smiled before leading Olivia over to one of the tables, where a jungle scene had been set out. Mr Cameron crouched beside Olivia and drew her into a game involving a toy elephant at a watering hole made from blue paper. She seemed so happy and relaxed; like a different little girl from the one who had tossed and turned between her parents all night, muttering in her sleep, before refusing to eat breakfast this morning. Getting her into her school clothes had been a struggle too.
‘I don’t want to go to school,’ she had yelled. ‘I want to stay here.’ There’d been a pause before she added the chilling words, ‘With Izzy.’
Will had already gone to work by that point. Felix was sitting on the stairs, sneaking in some bonus time with his iPad. Jessica had slumped on the sofa, clutching Olivia’s uniform. ‘Everybody has to go to school.’
‘Izzy wants to stay here.’
‘Izzy isn’t . . .’ Jessica had stopped herself. What was she going to say? Izzy isn’t real? Izzy isn’t with us any more? Olivia had waited, head cocked, until Jessica found herself saying, ‘Izzy’s not a little girl. I mean, she wasn’t a little girl.’
‘She was once. A very pretty girl. Like me.’
That had made Jessica smile, despite everything. ‘You certainly are very pretty. And so was Auntie Izzy.’ Perhaps, Jessica had reasoned, if she brought Isabel into the daylight, talked about her in a normal, rational way, Olivia would stop having these weird fantasies about her. ‘Do you want to see a photo of her when she was your age?’
But Olivia had suddenly lost interest and decided, two minutes before they were due to leave, that she was starving.
‘How has Olivia been this week?’ Jessica asked Mrs Rose now.
‘Much better, actually. She’s been on the green balloon ever since we had our chat.’
‘Oh, that’s great.’ Jessica yawned.
‘Keeping you up?’
She bit down on a follow-up yawn. ‘We had a bad night, actually. Olivia woke up at two. She might be tired today as well.’
‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Rose said. She glanced over at Olivia. ‘Goodness. You know, sometimes when I look at her it’s like being thrown back in time. I was saying this to your mum the other day, when she picked Olivia up. She looks so much like Isabel. Apart from the hair. Actually, she’s like a perfect cross between the two of you.’
‘I’m surprised you remember us so well,’ Jessica said.
‘Oh, Isabel was a very memorable child. I mean, you both were. And, of course, I remember all the strange goings-on. You were celebrities, weren’t you?’
She meant Larry, obviously. Izzy had already left Foxgrove by then, and Jess would have been in year five, or ‘third-year juniors’, as it was called back in the day.
‘I was very upset to hear about Isabel,’ Mrs Rose said. Without warning she grabbed hold of Jessica’s hand. Her eyes shone with emotion. ‘You mustn’t ever forget her, Jessica. She lives on in you. You and Olivia.’
Jessica pulled her hand away, shocked. ‘I won’t forget her. Of course I won’t.’
‘Good. Because she was a special person.’
Jessica wasn’t sure what to say, or how to react. All the other parents had left already. Olivia was still playing with the jungle creatures.
‘She loves animals, doesn’t she?’ Mrs Rose said, suddenly looking a little awkward. ‘She was telling us all about her cat.’
‘Her dog, you mean? Caspar?’
The teacher frowned. ‘No, she definitely mentioned a cat. Oscar.’
‘I think you’re getting confused. Oscar was Izzy’s cat when we were children.’
‘Oh. Really? How strange. I’m sure she said Oscar.’ She looked Jessica in the eye. ‘I might remember you and Isabel clearly, but I certainly don’t remember what your pets were called.’
She closed the door, not quite in Jessica’s face.
Jessica was halfway home when she realised where Olivia must have heard about Oscar. She hit the button on the steering wheel that opened her phone, scrolled through the numbers and called Mum.
‘Quick question,’ she said once they’d exchanged greetings. ‘Do you remember Izzy’s cat, Oscar?’
‘Of course I do! Lovely old thing, he was. Izzy was heartbroken when he died. We all were.’
‘Have you ever spoken to Olivia about him?’
There was a pause. ‘No. Why are you asking?’
‘Just . . .’
Jessica found herself doing what she’d sworn she wouldn’t do. She told her mum what had happened during the night, along with all the other strange things Olivia had done and said during the last couple of weeks. It came out in a rush, with Mum silent at the other end of the line. Jessica left out only two things: Olivia climbing on the balcony, and the car that had followed them the night before. As she finished talking she felt momentarily lighter, unburdened. But she had a horrible feeling she was going to regret being so open.
The pause this
time was so long that Jessica thought her mum had hung up. Then she heard an intake of breath.
‘It’s happening again,’ Mum said. ‘This family. We’re susceptible to it.’
Jessica went cold inside. This was not what she wanted to hear.
‘But maybe it’s a good thing,’ Mum went on. ‘If we can communicate with Izzy . . .’
Jessica heard a noise in the background. Pete calling Mum’s name. In response Mum shouted, ‘All right, I’ll be there in a second.’ She sighed heavily.
‘What’s up with Pete?’
‘He’s sick, that’s what. Got it coming out of both ends, and muggins here is having to nursemaid him.’
Jessica really didn’t want to picture ‘it’ coming out of Pete, at either end, but was relieved to have something else to talk about. ‘What, is it a stomach bug?’
‘He insists it must be food poisoning. They had a Chinese meal at the RAFA last night and he’s blaming that.’ The RAFA was the Royal Air Force Association Club, which, as a former airman, Pete was a member of. They had a bar where he and his old friends hung out. Mum never went, said it was too boring listening to Pete and his mates rattling on about the old days. ‘He’s saying he knew he shouldn’t have eaten that “foreign muck”, but I reckon it’s a virus.’
‘Oh dear. Poor Pete.’
‘Poor me having to look after him! He’s not the easiest patient.’ She raised her voice. ‘All right, I’m coming! I’d better go. Listen, we need to talk about this thing with Olivia. I’ll call you later.’
She hung up, leaving Jessica feeling even more uneasy than before the call. It took her a few seconds to remember why, but then it came back to her: Olivia saying ‘Get well soon’ to Pete.
Jessica tidied up the mess in Olivia’s room, sweeping up the fragments of the christening plate, throwing away the torn poster, putting everything else back in its place. As she worked, she realised how much colder it was in Olivia’s room than in the rest of the house. Because it’s haunted, said a little voice in her head, a voice she pushed away. Of course it wasn’t bloody haunted. The radiator, which was only warm at the bottom, needed bleeding. That was all.
She went off in search of a radiator key. There was one around somewhere, but she couldn’t find it in the kitchen drawer. Thinking back, she remembered that Will had recently bled the radiator in his office on the top floor. Knowing him, he would have shoved the key in the nearest drawer.
She didn’t come up to Will’s office very often. The room was quite small and crowded with Will’s stuff. There was a turntable on the desk, with shelves containing his favourite vinyl, much of it reissues of albums he’d loved when he was a teenager. Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Kate Bush, Public Enemy. Some of his old records were framed on the wall. Morrissey gazed down from above the desk, beside a picture of Will’s current fave, Lana Del Rey.
His collection of Funko Pop! toys – pop culture figures with oversized heads – was lined up on another shelf. He had stacks of graphic novels and old DVDs. Among all this were framed awards for websites he’d worked on, boxes of ancient CD-ROMs and old hard drives, all the files he intended to organise one day. Somewhere there was a folder of emails from the early days of their relationship. He had printed them out because, he said, they were the closest thing he’d ever have to an archive of love letters. Some of them were quite explicit. She prayed the children never found them.
She sat at the desk and rifled through the drawers. They were full of pens, headache tablets, screen cleaner, all sorts of junk. No radiator key. In the second drawer down she found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. They had both given up smoking when she got pregnant with Felix, but she knew Will still smoked the occasional ‘social’ cigarette. She picked up the almost-full packet and sniffed it, the smell shooting her back in time, and she was tempted to light one for old times’ sake. She wondered what Will would do if he came home and found her smoking. Laughing at his imagined reaction, she dropped the packet back in the drawer and slammed it shut.
She didn’t want to go downstairs yet, so she prodded the keyboard, bringing the iMac to life.
Will’s desktop photo was one of Jessica’s favourite pictures: six-year-old Felix holding one-day-old Olivia, gazing with amazement at his new baby sister. Forgetting why she had come to Will’s office, she found herself opening the computer’s photo library. The albums had been automatically organised by person. The great majority of photos were of her, Will, Felix and Olivia. But there were albums of other family members too, along with Will’s closest friends. And an ‘Isabel’ album.
She opened it and scrolled through. The pictures went back to when she and Will had first got together, when she’d invited him to Beckenham to meet the family. She’d been so nervous that weekend, afraid that he’d think she was suburban and dull. But he thought Mum was hilarious and he said Isabel was lovely, although she’d been in a bad mood that weekend and was quite distant, not making much effort. Perhaps because of that first encounter, Will and Izzy were never close, but they’d developed a cordial relationship, and the four of them – Will and Jessica, Izzy and Darpak – had spent a lot of time together. Most of these photos depicted nights out as a foursome, Christmases spent together, lots of Sunday lunches.
She was about to click back to look at more baby photos when she spotted a subfolder labelled ‘Izzy Website’. She opened it and found herself looking at a collection of pictures, some of which were familiar: photos in which Izzy was smiling, looking sleek and groomed but also approachable. These were the pictures that Will had used when he revamped the Mind+Body website. They all had dates attached and Jessica was surprised to remember this had been only a few weeks before Izzy’s death.
She sighed, staring at her lost sister, before noticing that there were a number of pictures she hadn’t seen before, presumably out-takes from the same photo shoot. In most of these pictures, which had been taken on the balcony – that fucking balcony – Izzy wasn’t looking at the camera. She was gazing into space, frowning. Jessica moved her fingers to her own lips, shocked by how unhappy Izzy looked in these pictures. Like someone whose heart had been broken. Beautiful and sad.
This was a side of herself Isabel never showed to the world. In public she was always happy, confident, full of joie de vivre. The successful businesswoman and wife. The sadness in Isabel’s eyes reminded Jessica of when her sister was fourteen or fifteen, when she went through a dark period, typical teenage angst connected to a cheating boyfriend and tension at home. Jessica was surprised that her sister had allowed Will to photograph her like this, without her mask of contentment.
She was still contemplating the pictures – the radiator key and the chill in Olivia’s room completely forgotten – when the doorbell rang.
She hurried downstairs, thinking it was probably a delivery guy with the first of the Christmas presents she’d ordered. Christmas. Whenever she thought about it, a chain of tasks appeared before her like, well, a string of fairy lights, their brightness outshining all the other things on her mind. She would need to hide these presents, buy wrapping paper, then there was all the food to pre-order and the tree and . . .
‘Oh.’ It wasn’t the delivery man. ‘Mum. What are you—?’
She stopped. There was someone standing behind her mother on the front step. A man with white hair and a mottled, bulbous nose.
‘Jess, you remember Simon Parker, don’t you?’
The old man smiled, revealing a perfect set of what could only be dentures.
‘Hello, darling,’ he said. His voice, the theatrical way he spoke, brought it all back. She knew why he was here and it was only her overriding fear of appearing rude that stopped her slamming the door in his florid face.
Chapter 11
‘It’s blowing a gale out here,’ Mum said. ‘Aren’t you going to invite us in?’
Anger bubbled up in Jessica’s belly – how dare Mum bring Simon Parker here? But before she could work out how to turn them away without causing huge a
mounts of upset, they were inside, the door shut behind them.
Simon walked a few paces down the hallway, looking around like an estate agent who’d been sent to value a property, hands clasped behind his back. His stomach was bigger than it had been, hair thinner, but he was still wearing a white suit – not the same one, surely – and his blue eyes were as sharp as ever.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Hmmmm.’
Mum gawped at him like he was about to impart some devastating piece of wisdom. Jessica remembered that credulous, desperate look. It was all coming back to her, the events of 1993, the last time she’d encountered this man. He’d had an assistant then, a middle-aged woman who never spoke but who spent a lot of time staring at Jessica and Izzy with bulging eyes. Jessica was transported back in time to their childhood bedroom.
‘Did you see the way she was looking at me?’ Izzy asked, peering through the slats of the top bunk at Jessica below.
‘Like she wanted to gobble you up.’ Jessica put on a troll voice. ‘I’ve got my eye on you, little girl.’
Izzy clamped her hand over her mouth.
Jessica got up and brushed her fringe over her eyes, which she opened as wide as they’d go. She pretended to be Madam Grimm, as they called her, drifting around the room like a fairy-tale witch, long fingers outstretched, as silent as the object of their fun. Izzy lay on her back on the bunk bed, trying not to giggle. She gazed at the posters: Kurt Cobain on one wall, Snoopy on another.
