by Byrne, Tanya
Naomi just roared, ‘I’m fine! I’m in love, I don’t need drugs!’, so it won’t be long until she threatens to kill herself and they sedate her, which is good, because we’re having spag bol for dinner. I don’t do much willingly here, but I’m first in the queue for spag bol.
I just had to stop writing because the new girl approached me.
‘Are you her? Are you Emily Koll?’ she asked, her eyes wide.
I’m not wearing my YES, IT’S ME, EMILY KOLL T-shirt today so I nodded.
She took that as her cue to sit next to me and as she did, I looked at her, at the gold crucifix around her neck and her unbrushed brown hair. She looked so fragile, as though her clothes were the only things holding her together, but she was bold enough to sit next to me without being asked, so I had to give her that. She’s braver than most of the girls in here.
‘You’re not what I expected,’ she told me with a whisper.
I made a show of rolling my eyes and snapping this notebook shut because what could I say? It wasn’t a compliment, was it?
‘You’re blond.’
I am blond. That’s what surprises people the most when they come here. They expect to meet the red-lipped, red-haired girl they’ve seen in the papers. But they find me – tiny, blond, doll-faced me – and they stare at me as though they’ve been betrayed. They want the wild redhead. Tiny blonde girls don’t do what I did.
‘Is it true? Did you really do that to that girl Juliet?’ she asked.
She was breathless and I love and hate that, how people are in awe of me and terrified of me, all at once. So I smiled at her. ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’
You shouldn’t either, by the way.
Emily Koll. Slipped that one in, didn’t I?
I probably should have told you that straight away, on the first page. I wasn’t trying to trick you; if I procrastinated, it’s only because I know what people think of me. I’ve read what they say about me in the newspapers, that I’m wicked, that I’m so rotten my bones are the colour of bitten-down apple cores.
But there’s more than one side to a story, and this is mine.
First, the facts:
Yes, my father is Harry Koll.
Yes, Juliet’s father is Jason Shaw.
Yes, my father is one of London’s most notorious gangsters.
Yes, Juliet’s father ran the police investigation to take him down.
Yes, my father broke into his house and shot him in his bed.
Yes, Juliet stabbed my father when he tried to shoot her too.
No, I didn’t know. About any of it. That Dad was a gangster. That he could just shoot someone like that. The dad I knew put me on his shoulders at Arsenal games and read me Goodnight Moon when I couldn’t sleep and came to all my cello recitals. All of them. So I don’t know who that man is, the one who sells drugs and kills men in their beds.
I don’t suppose it matters what I say now. You can take this notebook and tear it to pieces. You can burn it and let the ashes float away like dirty confetti, because all you’ll remember is that my father murdered her father. If you ask Juliet, she’ll tell you that’s all you should remember. Maybe you should. Call me mad, call me wicked, but I’m under no illusions – I know how easy it is to pick sides here – her father was the big brave policeman and my father is the gangster who shot him. He got what was coming to him. I did too, I suppose. But I told you – I didn’t know. I need you to remember that while you’re drawing that line between Juliet and me. And that’s fine, draw it. Go on. I’ll stay on my side of it if you remember that I didn’t know.
Here’s another fact for you: yes, I went after Juliet. That’s why I’m here. Why most of the girls here are too scared to sit next to me. But don’t believe everything you read in the tabloids, there was no vendetta. When I found out what Dad did, my instinct wasn’t to go after Juliet. I reacted like anyone else would have; I was horrified, ashamed. For months I tried to ignore it, to wash the taste of it from my mouth with cheap vodka and cigarettes.
But it wouldn’t go away.
Doctor Gilyard says that’s when it started – the crazy – but it felt more like grief. It was like this blackness that crept into the corners of my life until everything was grey and dirty. My insides felt burned out, like if you cut me open, all you would find would be smoke. No heart. No bones. There was nothing left, just the anger. It followed me everywhere. It sat on my bed and watched me sleep and when I had to eat, it looked at me across the table.
So I gave into it, rolled around in it, swam in it, deeper and deeper, until it pulled me under. When I emerged, I had only one thought: Juliet. It was her fault. That’s how it started, the day I traced that line back to the night she stabbed Dad and everything fell apart. So I suppose I don’t always avoid straight lines.
Sometimes I run across them.
Sunday. Music therapy.
As a group, we don’t agree on much in here, but we are united in our hatred of music therapy. I actually like music, so it shouldn’t be such an ordeal. But if Her Majesty’s Prison Service is trying to teach me that violence isn’t the answer, they really shouldn’t make me do music therapy with Kim, an over-eager Australian girl who insists on playing ABBA songs as though we can dance the crazy right out of us.
She’s twenty-two, so I guess we’re supposed to relate to her, but she’s so happy. Happy happy happy, all the time. Happy when Halina (16, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) wets herself. Happy when Reta (17, schizophrenic) starts bickering with the aliens sent to earth to protect her. Happy when Val refuses to stand up, let alone take an instrument from the box. Happy happy happy.
She’s clearly the maddest one here.
Once, I asked Doctor Gilyard what the point of it was.
Of course she responded with: ‘What do you think the point of it is, Emily?’
‘It’s clearly a form of torture,’ I muttered. ‘If that lunatic plays “Dancing Queen” once more, I’m writing to Amnesty International. I’d rather be waterboarded.’
‘Which lunatic?’
I huffed, but I suppose you do have to specify in this place.
‘Kim! Get her in here,’ I said with a wave of my hand. ‘Ask her about her mother. She’s off her nut if she thinks that banging a tambourine is going to stop Reta thinking that she’s BFFs with the High Priestess of Maladoth.’
‘You don’t think it helps?’
‘Of course not!’
She took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘So it wouldn’t help to play the cello?’
I’d been waiting for that. Waiting.
‘It’s impossible to play along to “Dancing Queen” on the cello,’ I told her with a smug smile, but I still felt my heart in my throat.
She can’t.
She won’t.
She won’t.
Doctor Gilyard started our session this week by asking me if I often lose my temper.
That’s all she ever does: ask questions. Questions. Questions. Questions. If the sun slants into her office at the right angle, you can see all the question marks floating in the air. Question marks and dust. I try to catch them on my tongue sometimes, as though they’re snowflakes. I can’t, of course, but it’s fun to see the look on her face as I try.
The first time I did it, she looked so worried that I don’t know how I didn’t laugh. Now she knows me well enough not to flinch when I do stuff like that. She just closes her notebook and when she puts her pencil on top of it, I stop because what’s the point of giving her what she wants if she isn’t going to write it down?
I swear I wouldn’t do half the stuff I do if someone wasn’t paying attention.
But I guess she’s learned a trick or two over the last few months, which is why she didn’t tell me about Juliet’s letter today. Usually, she would try to hand it to me and I’d huff and puff and refuse to take it. But today she just put the envelope down on the coffee table in front of me and sat back in her chair.
There was a ceremony to it, to
the way she turned it over so that I could see my name and the address written neatly across it. And I looked at it, then at her, and when she picked up the pencil again, I felt the silence roll out between us like a red carpet.
I didn’t say anything for the rest of the session and it actually hurt not to. There was this pain – this ache – in my stomach as I looked at the letter. She usually reads them out to me so I waited and waited, but she didn’t. She just let it sit there, on the coffee table, while she waited for me to give in and reach for it.
I almost did because I’m desperate to know how miserable Juliet is. That’s the only thing keeping me going right now, knowing that even though she’s out there while I’m stuck in here, I’m the one who’s free. But I didn’t reach for it and Doctor Gilyard didn’t read it out, so I guess I’ll never know now.
I’ll never sleep again, wondering what’s in that letter.
I think Lily has started smoking because of me. I’ve never seen her smoke before, but now she sits with Naomi and me whenever we’re having one. Naomi says she has a crush on me. I don’t know about that, but if she does, she has exceptional taste.
Today after breakfast, Naomi was with Doctor Gilyard so it was just us. I watched as Lily tried to skin up, her forehead pinched and her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. It was funny at first; she was concentrating so much it looked like she was trying to disarm a bomb. But after a few minutes, her hands started to shake. When the tobacco began to spill from the ends of the thin paper I took it from her and rolled the cigarette with a few quick flicks of my wrist.
When I gave it back to her, she didn’t light it.
‘Homesick,’ I said, picking my roll-up back out of the ashtray.
She looked at her feet. I saw her toes curl in her shoes. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I wasn’t asking.’
It was a statement, not a question. There are words you can’t say in here; you don’t ask why, you don’t ask how, you don’t ask about tomorrow and you never ask about home.
It’s one of the only rules I observe here without protest.
I don’t know what Naomi and Lily did to get put in here. I know what they were charged with, but I’m not writing it down. I want you to know them for who they are, not what they’ve done. When they get out of here, that’s all they’ll be. That’s all any of us in here will be, right? What we’ve done. You must know that, being in here, too.
At school they drummed it into us that God will forgive us anything if we ask him to, but that isn’t true, is it? Forgiveness is useless if other people still remember what you did. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever shake off my mistakes or if I’ll just carry them around with me for ever like a bunch of red balloons.
Our don’t ask, don’t tell rule isn’t one Doctor Gilyard pays much attention to.
‘Tell me about the day you found Juliet,’ she said to me a couple of weeks ago.
I ignored her but she pushed on because she’s as stubborn as I am. One day, one of us will win. I’m looking forward to finding out which of us it will be.
‘It was three weeks after your father’s trial, right?’
Silence.
‘Juliet was in Witness Protection. How did you find her?’
Silence.
‘It was your Uncle Alex, wasn’t it? He told you where she was.’
Silence.
‘What did you go there to do, Emily?’
I didn’t speak to Doctor Gilyard for the rest of our session, but when Lily asked me if I ever get homesick, I told her that I didn’t. I don’t know why; there’s just something about her sad little smile and fragile fingers that makes something in me soften.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t have a home,’ I said between puffs of my cigarette.
She lifted her chin. ‘How come?’
I shrugged. ‘When you go to boarding school home stops being one place.’
I guess that’s why it doesn’t bother me, being in here. I’m used to it, to eating when I’m told, to sleeping in a room that isn’t mine, in a bed that isn’t mine.
‘When I think of home,’ I said, almost to myself, ‘I think of the flat I was born in.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘On the Scarbrook Estate in Finsbury Park.’
She thought about it for a second or two. ‘Is that a council estate?’
I smiled. Most people think I was born in Surrey because that’s the story they tell in the papers. They print pictures of our house and Dad’s fleet of vintage cars (it’s not quite a fleet, but four doesn’t sound as impressive, I suppose) so people think I’m a proper princess. And yeah, it’s true, I did go to a £30,000-a-year boarding school and we had a villa in Puerto Banus and I drove a Mercedes and wore dresses made of kitten hair and I had a baby unicorn.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all true.
But I was also born on a council estate.
‘So when did you move to Godalming?’ she asked.
I sat back and smiled. She knows I live in Godalming. She’s not that naïve.
‘When I was three,’ I told her. ‘When Mum left.’
‘Where did she go?’
I tensed. As sweet as Lily is, there’s a line and her toes were on it. ‘I dunno.’
‘What? She just left and never came back?’
I had to stop because it was like Lily had my heart in her hand and she was squeezing it hard enough to leave a bruise.
So I stood up and she watched me carefully as I stubbed my cigarette out. She probably had a dozen more questions, but she pressed her lips together and for once, she didn’t follow me when I walked away.
I haven’t said a word to Doctor Gilyard since she wouldn’t read me Juliet’s letter. It’s become a battle of wills now. I don’t even know what I’m fighting for any more; I just know that giving in first feels too much like breaking.
‘I’d like to go back to the day you found Juliet,’ she said this morning, like that was actually going to happen. Like I was just going to say, Okay, Doctor G, and spill my guts.
I snorted and crossed my arms.
‘You didn’t do anything, did you, Emily? You followed her to London in August, so why wait until you both started college in September to speak to her?’
She waited for me to respond, but I looked away.
Doctor Gilyard’s office is almost bare. There are only a few bits of furniture – the chairs we sit on, the coffee table between them, a bookshelf, a desk and swivel chair, but that’s it. No plant in the corner of the room, no framed diplomas, no paintings of calm country scenes.
It’s an empty, hopeless room, but if I have to ignore her, there are still half a dozen things I can distract myself with. A ring on the coffee table. A loose thread on my chair. Recently I’ve been focusing on a crack in the wall. It’s nothing, just a thin line in the plaster that looks like someone’s brushed past the wall with a pencil, but I’ve been staring at it for weeks. It’s bigger than it was when I first noticed it, I’m sure of it. I’ve convinced myself that if I keep staring at it, it’ll get bigger, and if it does, a crack will become a gap and a gap will become a hole and I’ll be through.
‘Why didn’t you confront her, if that’s what you went there to do?’ she persisted.
When I didn’t respond, I heard her scribble something in her notebook.
‘I went back to Juliet’s interview transcripts yesterday. She says that she doesn’t remember seeing you before you met that morning at the college, is that right?’
Juliet doesn’t remember seeing me because I made sure I wasn’t seen. For a month we moved around each other. I followed her everywhere; across bridges, down escalators. I trailed behind her at the supermarket, watching as she sniffed peaches and read the backs of cereal boxes. Once, I even sat in the row behind hers at the cinema. I can’t remember what film it was, I just remember looking at her – looking and looking – waiting for her to do something, to laugh, to cry, to fall asleep. Anyt
hing. It was as if my life had become a reaction to hers. If she had run out of the cinema that afternoon, I would have run after her. If she had stayed and watched another film, I would have stayed and watched her.
By then, I knew her routine. Every morning she bought a green tea from the café on the high street and drank it in the bookshop next door, sitting on the floor of the poetry section with her back against the wall. She would emerge an hour later with a half-read paperback between her fingers, then head to the park to watch the office workers sitting on their jackets eating Pret A Manger sandwiches in the last of the summer sun. In the afternoons, I followed her around art galleries or watched as she picked through the clothes rails at charity shops. Some afternoons she would just sit on the top deck of the bus and ride it until the end of the line, then get off, cross the road and get another bus home.
I guess it became my routine too, because when I got back to the perfect but hollow flat Uncle Alex had found for me, the only thing that made those long, long nights bearable was knowing I’d see her the next morning, walking out of that café with a white paper cup.
But she never saw me. Not once. And I was surprised because I expected her to look up every time someone got on her carriage on the tube or sat on the bench opposite hers at the park. But she’d be too distracted by a book or she’d be sketching something in the black Moleskine she carried with her everywhere. I was desperate to see what she was drawing. I wanted to cross everything out, write, I KNOW WHO YOU ARE on every page.
Three Wednesdays in a row she met a man at a café near Euston station. The café was always frantically busy. Tourists chatted excitedly while men in dull-coloured suits swept in and out, in and out, each of them barking into their phones, then at the baristas, then at the tourists for leaving their backpacks on the floor. So neither of them noticed each week as I sat at the next table, pretending to be engrossed in The Catcher in the Rye. They were distracted, I guess. He was her counsellor. Sahil, a quiet, elegant man with long fingers and hair the colour of poppy seeds. He was a lot like Doctor Gilyard; they both have that poise, that smoothness I want to disturb. Juliet told me later, when we were friends, that she’d been seeing him since her parents died and when she moved to Islington, he continued their sessions.
