by Claire Askew
Greg shrugged.
‘I’m a doctor,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t go down well.’
Ishbel had stood there, feeling the rain pushing her clothes against her, making them heavier and heavier, plastering them to her skin.
‘People have so many secrets,’ she said.
Greg threw his cigarette on the ground. She heard it fizzle as the lit end hit the wet tarmac. He took a step towards her, then stopped. She felt the same strange ache she’d felt that night in the hospital: she wanted him to take hold of her and tell her everything was going to be okay.
‘Look,’ he said, now standing next to her in the full pelt of the weather. ‘I didn’t really know Abigail. But I’ve known plenty of men like that kid. That Jack kid. They’re so smooth, so plausible. She was tricked. Men like that make having secrets seem exciting.’
Ishbel had watched as the shoulders of his jacket began to darken with rain.
‘Whereas in fact,’ he added, ‘secrets are nothing but a pain. You regret ever making them.’
Ishbel glanced back at the small huddle of bodies under the carport. Aidan was shaking hands with the grey-streaked female undertaker, but his mouth was a hard line. Barry Kesson had bundled his family quickly away before Aidan had had the chance for a face-off that Ishbel knew he’d dearly have loved. Jack Egan’s parting words bounced around inside Ishbel’s skull: she belonged to me. She belonged to me.
‘She would have come back to you,’ Greg said, as though he’d been thinking of those words, too. ‘In time. I didn’t really know her, but I know she was smart. She’d’ve seen through him eventually. She would have come back to you.’
Greg reached out through the rain and put one hand on Ishbel’s shoulder. She flinched a little at his touch, but forced herself to hold his gaze. Water oozed in the fabric of her coat.
‘You have to believe that,’ he said.
Behind her, Pauline had called her name across the car park. She ignored it.
‘In time.’ She echoed Greg, but her own voice was nowhere near as strident.
‘Yes,’ he said. The way he glanced behind her told her that Pauline was beginning to advance towards them. ‘I’m so sorry that Ryan Summers took that away. That opportunity for her to see her mistake. To learn.’
Ishbel turned her face upwards a little, let the rain hit it more squarely, to hide her tears.
‘He’s just so awful.’ Ishbel realised she wasn’t sure who she was talking about. Jack? Or Aidan? Perhaps she was talking about Ryan Summers. She didn’t know.
‘He’s twenty-one,’ Greg said, choosing Jack from the unspoken list. ‘Twenty-one-year-old men are awful. Having been one, I apologise. He’ll be sorry, mark my words. He’s playing the tragic boyfriend now, but just wait until he gets typecast in that role. Wait till he’s forty and it’s still all anyone ever talks to him about.’ He paused for a moment, and then added, ‘And you know, he probably did love Abigail. Not like you love her, but . . . in his own awful twenty-one-year-old sort of way, he probably did.’
Ishbel looked directly at her friend. She felt like this was the first attempt anyone had made to say something meaningful – truly meaningful – to her in two full weeks.
‘I’m sorry about everything,’ Greg said. He dropped his hand from her shoulder. It’s absence held the sleeve of her jacket against the skin.
Pauline was almost upon them.
‘I have to go,’ Ishbel had said then. And then, because she felt there were other things to say but no way to ever begin saying them, she added, ‘Thank you, Greg.’
She’d pulled out her keys and dashed towards the car.
As she’d sat in the queue of traffic at the roundabout at Elm Row, the anger she’d felt towards Aidan had begun to solidify. She realised she wasn’t crying any more.
‘This roundabout has never worked,’ she hissed, as though talking to an invisible passenger. ‘People turning right out of Broughton Street just queue up all the way round.’
She’d looked out of her passenger-side window at the Theatre Royal bar, its tall upstairs windows and gaudy painted jester figurines. She’d always found them quite charming – their primary colours defiant in the face of even the worst Edinburgh weather – but now they looked cheap, fake.
‘I’ve left my husband,’ Ishbel said, aloud. Then, louder, ‘I’ve left my husband. I’ve left my husband and my only daughter is dead.’
She’d crawled up Elm Row in the wake of a number 8 bus. The traffic had stopped her outside the bridal shop where they’d bought Abigail’s prom dress, the one she’d thought about wearing that day, before Aidan had stopped her. It was a bridesmaid’s dress, really, but then, what was the difference? Ishbel had glanced back at the holdall in the back seat and wished, again, that she’d packed that dress. Ahead of her, above the roof of the bus, the clock tower of the Balmoral Hotel loomed in the low cloud. Ishbel had allowed herself a moment to daydream: she could check in there, hand her car keys to the kilted valet, walk upstairs and lie down on a fancier and more comfortable bed than she and Aidan could ever have justified buying. No one would ever find her. When she ran out of money, she could live in the clock tower like Hallam Foe. But no, of course not. When the bus had finally moved, she’d driven right past the front of the Balmoral with its beautiful balustrades and old-fashioned revolving door, and turned left onto Waverley Bridge, then left again onto Market Street.
She’d checked into the Premier Inn using her mother’s maiden name. Aidan could still find her, of course – Rehan had asked her to text him and let him know where she was, and as he was technically a policeman, she’d felt like she had to. But no one else could reach her for now. When she opened the door to the poky room, with its cookie-cutter artwork, its regulation teabags and bland-smelling shampoo, relief had carried her inside like a wave. That was twenty-four hours ago now.
She wasn’t quite sure where those hours had gone – the holdall was still sitting at the foot of the bed. All she’d taken from it was one change of clothes: she’d peeled off her outfit from the cremation and dumped it in the bath. For a while she’d stood there in her underwear and watched streaks of grey rainwater run out of the pile of cloth and into the plughole. For a while, and then a while longer. It had begun to get dark.
She’d closed the curtains and lain down on top of the spotlessly made bed, still dressed. She must have slept, though she didn’t feel like she had. When she opened the curtains again – heavy on the rail thanks to their matte blackout lining – a pillar of spring sunshine had streamed into the room. To the east, beyond the Calton Hill observatory and the shoulder of Leith, she’d watched a black stripe of weather moving landward. A rainbow trailed behind it like the tail of a kite. One of those Edinburgh days, she thought. Right out of the old local joke: ‘Don’t like the weather? Just wait five minutes.’
She hadn’t eaten for a full day, and she didn’t really care. I’ve left my husband and my only daughter is dead, she reminded herself, every so often. The TV – which had been switched on and waiting for her when she first walked in the room – flashed and glowed. Sometime during her fitful sleep, she’d woken to find that TV showing an extended episode of Newsnight, devoted to, what else, the Three Rivers shooting.
‘. . . so to what extent,’ the Newsnight presenter had asked, ‘can there really be an investigation in a case like this? Can there ever be justice for these families?’
The camera panned to a member of the panel who, according to the bar below his face, was a retired deputy chief of police from somewhere in Colorado.
‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘you’re right. A case like this, it’s hard to think about it in terms of justice. Because what justice can there be for these families, when the gunman can’t be held accountable? Right now there’s a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, we’ve seen that in the community already. And I think that’s understandable. But at the end of the day, it’s a fairly open-and-shut case. We know who did it, we know all the details of how he di
d it – the only thing we’ll never know is why he did it. And although that’s a question that may torture us all for the rest of our lives, it’s not the business of law enforcement to answer that question.’
Ishbel had cast around, sleepily, for the remote, and hit mute.
Ishbel’s blood felt fizzy. She’d lost a whole day to the suck of grief, to this bland room – she needed to do something. She crawled on all-fours to the end of the bed, hauled the unzipped holdall up onto the duvet, and tipped the contents out in one quick jerk. The pink diary bounced out, settled itself atop the haphazard pile of cloth.
Ishbel sat on the hard hotel mattress, looking down at it. She hadn’t noticed before, but now she saw that the cover had lettering embossed onto the leather, and picked out in screen-printed gold. Be so good they can’t ignore you, it read. It was the sort of sentiment that, three weeks ago, she’d have scoffed at.
‘People can always ignore you,’ she imagined saying, Abigail’s heart-shaped face frowning back at her.
She cast her eyes around the hotel room, looking for something that might help her break the little padlock. The lock on her daughter’s secret diary. Your dead daughter, she reminded herself. Your only daughter. Your daughter who is dead.
Her eyes came to rest on the tea tray with its two clean cups, its saucers and sugar packets. The knives the hotel provided were blunt, bendy plastic, but the teaspoons were stainless steel. Ishbel stood, grabbed one, jammed its handle into the loop of the little padlock, then braced the diary against the table. For ten or so agonising seconds, she levered the spoon against the padlock’s hasp and thought nothing was going to happen. Then suddenly, there was a metallic pop, and the padlock broke free. It cracked against Ishbel’s kneecap, and she let out a cry – a mingling of pain, shock and triumph – as it fell to the floor.
The diary opened with a delicious crackling sound: the cheap glue binding splitting in a million tiny ways. The first entry was from Abigail’s first day at college: over eight months ago, the previous September:
First day of college today. Was late – mortifying. Didn’t realise the 21 bus was so fucking slow. Still, it was only Freshers stuff today so I guess it didn’t matter too much.
Met some other folk off my course. Mostly girls. Almost all younger than me, most of them are straight out of high school. Lots of pretentious bitches who want to be Meryl Streep or something. There are only three guys on the whole course. Chatted to one of them, Jack. He’s the oldest person on the course, about eighteen months older than me or so. He’s pretty hot. But guys who do drama are basically always gay, so I need to not get my hopes up.
Ishbel almost bailed here, as the short entry gave way to plain white page. The sensation of reading Abigail’s most private thoughts – with the knowledge that Abigail was dead chilling her like the shadow of some terrible obelisk – was almost too strange to bear. But she knew that she couldn’t not turn the page.
There were a few entries about the drama course, vague vignettes of days spent signing up for classes and chatting with course-mates in the canteen. Various complaints about the number 21 bus and having to get up early. Then, about two weeks in:
Got paired up with Jack in class. Think I might be a bit in love with him now, which is SUPER AWKWARD as I am still worried he might be gay. The way he dresses is so cute – he always wears a button-down shirt with a cardigan over it. His favourite shirt is this Ben Sherman one that’s a pink check – pink shirt = gay, right??? I know it’s his favourite cause he wears it basically every other day. And then he wears this dark grey lambswool cardigan all the time. And these thick-framed glasses with tortoiseshell frames. He ought to look like someone’s grandpa but actually it looks pretty cool. He looks like a poet – no wait, he looks like an actor. He totally looks like he’s an actor already. Dark curly hair and this big smile. His teeth are so white that I try not to smile with teeth when I’m around him in case he notices mine are yellow. But he’s gay, right? I mean he’s into drama and he’s well dressed and he’s SO NICE. No way he’s not gay.
Ishbel felt a spike of anger, trying to match this tender description to the man who only the previous day had yelled at her in the cold crematorium. She was determined that, at twenty-one years old, he was a man, though diary-Abigail breathlessly referred to him as a boy. As she read on, the anger rattled her. She remembered what Greg had said about secrets and tricks.
OK, so Jack is definitely not gay. (I guess he might still be bi.) We were chatting and he mentioned his girlfriend. I guess I must have had some kind of look on my face because he looked at me and then he said, ‘I mean, she’s my ex-girlfriend now.’ So, great, he’s not gay. GREAT! But also, nice work Abi, you totally failed at playing it cool. But also also also, he wanted me to know that he doesn’t have a girlfriend RIGHT NOW, so . . . does that mean he’s interested? It would be basically the best thing that ever happened to me if he is. I am so totally over being a nineteen-year-old virgin and having to fucking LIE all the time.
Ishbel didn’t have the stomach to read the next few entries in any detail. She’d found herself skipping whole pages, because she could tell from the first sentence that they’d be too painful to read. She could feel her little girl slipping away from her – being pulled away from her by this young woman, this adult woman who seemed to have snuck up on Ishbel from some shadowy alternative world. She thought of Abigail aged four, pulling on her powder blue tutu to perform in her first ever ballet recital. She thought of her aged seven, trying on Ishbel’s lipstick for the first time at her birthday party. She thought of the time they’d chatted, awkwardly and in low voices, about the coming of Abigail’s first period, when she was twelve. Each of those moments had come with a pang of horror at how rapidly time was rushing by. But those small flashes of pain were nothing compared with the agony of sitting in a hotel room, realising that time had stopped now, and there would be no more growing up, no more moments to record, no more firsts or lasts. The agony of reading Abigail’s account of losing her virginity: It’s okay, I knew it would hurt and I don’t think Jack noticed. I had a little cry in the bathroom and then I was fine. When I got back he was asleep. Ishbel cried then, too.
But there were stranger things to come. An entry in December read:
So you know I’ve been wondering how Jack has so much money always? Well today I found out he’s basically a drug dealer. That little creeper Ryan Summers came and told me during the SU meeting. I didn’t believe him at first but it bothered me, so I decided to just ask Jack and he fessed up. I guess that explains why he has so many nice clothes and always looks so great. That explains his car and everything. We had a big fight about it and he told me I was naive and sheltered and I should run home to Mummy and Daddy’s big house. He’s a fucking asshole and I want to hate him but I’m sitting here missing him so much. I’m an idiot.
For a few moments, Ishbel struggled to breathe. There, in her daughter’s own handwriting, was the name of her murderer. They knew each other. They had spoken. SU, Ishbel realised slowly, was the students’ union. Abigail had been a fair-weather member. Ryan Summers must have been involved in it, too. For the life of her, Ishbel couldn’t imagine him wanting to be part of such a thing – it didn’t fit with the shadowy picture she’d built in her mind.
A few days later:
So happy Jack and I are back together. I missed him so much it hurt. And I can live with the job – that’s what he calls it, ‘the job’, which is kind of funny. Whatever. I can live with it if I ignore it. It’s none of anyone’s business, anyway. Definitely none of Ryan’s business. Little freak came to find me again and told me he thought it was a bad idea that I was back together with Jack. Like anyone asked him! I don’t even know him. Don’t even want to know him.
Then, in late March, a short one:
Long time no see, diary. I guess I’ve been busy. In the end I cracked and agreed to help Jack with the job. I’ve got pretty involved. Guess that explains the absence, right?
&nb
sp; Ishbel had felt a sensation like kicking up through water. She’d become completely submerged in the diary – in the weird, adult voice of her daughter – that coming back to the hotel room, with the TV showing Neighbours on mute and the window’s quiet smatter of rain, felt like surfacing from the depths of a choppy sea. It was true, then, what Grant Lockley had said about Abigail and the drugs. She could no longer pretend that it wasn’t. Ishbel’s face burned.
‘Baby,’ she said, aloud, into the stale quiet of the hotel room. ‘You silly, silly, silly girl.’
She blinked: once again, there were tears. On the crumpled duvet, Abigail’s diary sat open to the most recent entries. They’d grown so perfunctory that each double page held ten or so:
Drop-off today after college. J got us stuck in traffic on the way back and I had to make up some shit about where I was. Disapproving mother–daughter chat. Wish I had money to move out.
Ishbel remembered that evening. She’d accepted her daughter’s version of events – something about the bus, that same number 21 bus, being diverted down some strange new route. Abigail had been late for dinner, and hadn’t sent a text or called to say where she was, hence the disapproving mother–daughter chat. Ishbel felt stupid now. There must have been signs, and she must have ignored every last one.
Missed all my classes today but got cornered by Mr Welsh in reception. SU meeting was just starting and I couldn’t think of an excuse. Hadn’t been for weeks. Ryan Summers was there and made some gross joke about Jack and me. I’m so fucking sick of him creeping around me. After everyone had gone I told Mr Welsh Ryan’s been making me uncomfortable. Mr Welsh is going to log it as a formal complaint and talk to him. I made it sound way worse than it was. Serves the little freak right. Jack thinks he’s in love with me but I think he’s just a pathetic loser who likes other people’s business. He ought to get high sometime, that’d sort him out.
Ishbel closed her eyes. Her head felt like it was full of noise: blood shuttling in her ears and this voice, the voice of this awful, abrasive woman that her daughter had apparently turned into. There was also Greg’s voice – She was tricked. This wasn’t who she really was – and Jack Egan’s words from the crematorium, as though he were arguing with Greg. Take a look at yourself. Who’s the real monster? But as Ishbel re-read the page, the voices faded. She felt like she’d been digging for a long time, digging at frozen earth with her bare hands: she was hungry and tired and had cried so much over the past fortnight that she wasn’t sure she could ever bring herself to cry again, about anything. But now she’d reached what might be, possibly, the thing she’d been digging for all along, and it felt like a moment of calm, a fleeting white space where she could think clearly.
