Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  I watched DCI Gunn’s expression change and his voice grow quieter. ‘We have reason to believe Miss O’Connor was worried for her safety.’

  Questions screamed through my head.

  ‘Time,’ shouted the director so loud it made me jump, ‘hand back now.’

  And so I did.

  Who was out to get you, Clara? The bogeyman? Were you scared of shadows and shapes that came out at night? Domestic violence victims or witnesses in murder trials, I can see why they might be ‘worried for their safety’. But not you. What was there to be scared of? You never said.

  I’d hoped you told me everything. I’d wanted us to share all our secrets just like we used to. But at that moment the realisation crept over me that maybe I had been deluding myself all along.

  I sat for a moment after I came off air, making a play of gathering my things together, but whatever I tried to grab – my notepad, my make-up bag – dropped out of my hands. My body was incapable of carrying out the simplest task.

  Around me the TV crews packed cameras away, retrieving cables and microphones. Photographers downloaded images of you, producers shouted into their mobiles to news desks, ‘Corrigan … no, I said CORR-I-GAN, double R. And GUNN as in a pistol but with a double N.’ Reporters sat, laptops on knees, filing their stories for the next day’s newspapers. The wheels of the news machine turning as if nothing had happened.

  My phone rang with a number it didn’t recognise. I answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Rachel. I’ve just seen you. About Clara. What the hell is going on?’ The voice was screeching, hysterical. ‘Has something happened to her?’ Sarah Pitts asked.

  I didn’t even think about how she got my number. I moved away from Jake and the cameraman to a quieter corner of the room.

  ‘I don’t know anything else,’ I said. ‘The police think she came to the bar.’ I whispered that into the phone, feeling guilty as if the act of whispering made me complicit.

  ‘She did come, Rachel.’ Sarah sniffed and gulped the sobs away. ‘Just after you left and then she went to find you. She said you’d called her and you were meeting up because you’d had an argument about her boyfriend.’

  I let her finish and listened to the snot and the sniffs. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I just held the phone with one hand and held my other hand out in front of me. To make sure I was still real since nothing else seemed to be. And when I saw the deep brown of my nail polish and the veins on my hand and the moonstone ring on my middle finger and I was finally convinced this was happening to me, ‘I didn’t speak to her. I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t there. I went for chips and then to a hotel.’ I kept my sentences short and drew a breath with each one. I wouldn’t give in to hysteria.

  ‘But she took the call in front of us.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Oh God, I could have been one of the last people to see her,’ Sarah said, crying again. I imagined her face, puffy and red.

  I looked up. Jake was hovering over me.

  ‘They’re throwing us out of here now, Rach.’ I nodded and motioned to him that I was winding up on the phone.

  ‘Sarah, I have to go.’

  ‘I should have made sure she was safe.’ Her voice begged for reassurance.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you.’

  An hour before there had been cars and colours and grass outside the police station. Now there was only white. White under a grey sky. It was quiet too. The snow can do that, can’t it? Deaden sounds, silence everything. It felt like the world was standing still, taking a moment to catch its breath. I walked into the car park wishing my footsteps didn’t have to leave a trace. Wishing we didn’t always have to ruin everything that began so perfect and pure.

  I know what you’ll be thinking at this point in the story, Clara. Not a word to DCI Gunn or Jake? Why not tell them I knew you? The answer is nothing and everything. I couldn’t think logically. Trust me, you don’t in these circumstances. Maybe I believed that if I told someone all this would have become real. And I wasn’t ready for that, much as I came to regret it later. Instead I did what was expected of me: I scripted a version of your story for the evening news bulletin that wasn’t my own. When we were done we sent it back to London on the satellite. All that guff that people write on their CVs, about being calm under pressure, professional, well it was true of me that day, though even then I knew it might be construed differently.

  The trains to London had been cancelled, which is how Jake came to be sitting in my car that afternoon, both of us eager to escape Brighton. If we’d been honest we would have admitted it was hopeless. The traffic backed up around the Old Steine hadn’t moved in ages, just exhaust fumes steaming in the cold. The light was failing too, and outside on the pavements only a few outlines could be seen, trudging home, curved in the wind. I stared at the Pavilion, thinking its exotic lines looked so out of place and forlorn that day they could have been blown in from the Orient by the storm.

  In the end it was the traffic and travel woman on the radio who pointed out the obvious. The A23 out of Brighton was shut because of the heavy snowfall.

  ‘I’ll call Robbie,’ Jake said, and I nodded.

  Remember that game we used to play, Clara? The superpower one.

  ‘If you could do anything Rach,’ you’d say, ‘and I mean anything, what would you do?’

  ‘I’d fly, you know I would,’ was my reply every time. ‘Sometimes at night I think I can. I go above the rooftops, anywhere I want to go.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you want to be invisible, or see into the future? Imagine the possibilities,’ you’d say, trying to fire up my imagination.

  But I never wanted to see into the future. The power to lift myself up and away from home, from my mum and the mean girls at school, that was all I wanted.

  I wished I could fly that day, away from the grey of the sea that loomed over me, up and over the snow-filled Downs. Away from you. Away from what was happening.

  Jake and I booked into a hotel, one of those new ones that claim to be boutique and part of a chain at the same time. It was the kind of place I would have come to with Jonny, not a work colleague. Velvet armchairs and low lighting. But I was grateful for the comfort, the log fire in the lounge, the way the smell of it permeated the air. I took in lungfuls, deep-down breaths, and closed my eyes to block out the day.

  Laughter came from the far end of the room, frivolous and naughty. I looked up and saw two women. One was in her twenties, probably not much younger than me. Groomed in a footballers-wives kind of way. Candy gloss on her lips, long blond hair, straightened. The woman next to her shared the same jawline and almond-shaped eyes although her features had begun to sag and collapse with age and the years had creased her skin. Mother and daughter. I wondered what it was like to look at someone and see an image of yourself three decades on. Not that I ever would. My image of Niamh Walsh is forever preserved in 1997.

  I watched the younger woman sweep her hair back from her face. The huge diamond she was wearing on her ring finger caught the light of the candles and winked at me. I thought of Jonny and the future he’d allowed me to believe I could have. I pulled out my phone to call him. If he answered, I told myself, it was a sign that everything would be all right. I dialled. It went straight to answerphone. ‘Call me as soon as you get this message,’ I said, speaking to no one. ‘I love you.’

  ‘You sure you can force one down?’ Jake was back from the bar, pouring two large glasses of deep purple liquid from the bottle.

  ‘We all have off days.’ I said, cradling my phone.

  ‘Not the great Rachel Walsh. Don’t tell me you’re actually human?’

  ‘Fuck off, Jake.’

  He leant across the table and touched me. A warm touch that hit the cold of my skin.

  ‘I thought you might have been spooked by another e-mail or letter.’

  ‘I haven’t had one for over a week,’ I said.

&nbs
p; I didn’t want to think of that, to introduce another problem into the day.

  ‘Anyway, look on the bright side, you’re stranded in your home town. At least you can catch up with old friends.’

  ‘I wish,’ I said but he didn’t hear me because the barman was hovering over us to take our order.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could turn the TV on, just for the news?’ Jake asked. The barman looked around at the almost empty room and then nodded.

  ‘I’ll have to turn it off afterwards, though,’ he said for no discernible reason.

  You were in the headlines, Clara. That photograph again. I looked away when I saw it. You weren’t the lead story though, you were second up. I heard the words ‘manhunt’, ‘young artist’ and then I heard my voice, or the television version of it.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Jake, as if we were about to go on a fairground ride.

  I didn’t want to watch. I never wanted to see that picture of you again. I played with the candle on the table, dipping my little finger into the liquid wax and peeling it off. Only when I heard myself say, ‘Rachel Walsh, National News Network, Brighton,’ did I look at the screen again.

  ‘Not exactly award-winning, but it did the job in the circumstances,’ Jake said, leaning forward to chink my glass.

  We ate in silence, and afterwards, leaning back in the chair, a calm settled over me. In the morning you would turn up. This kind of thing happened to other people. Not us.

  The sound of my phone beeping interrupted my thoughts. I felt warmer still. I knew it would be from Jonny. Everything would be OK. It was a private number which made sense because he was in Afghanistan.

  I opened it.

  It read:

  Do you wish her dead?

  I read the words again and again. A pain stabbed me between my eyes. The phone was hot, too hot, burning my hand. I threw it on the table, startling Jake.

  ‘Whatsup?’ he asked.

  I said nothing. My face told its own story.

  He took the phone from the table.

  ‘What the fuck does this mean?’ There was a twitch in his jaw, a flex of a muscle. ‘Is this him?’

  ‘I don’t …’ My sentence trailed off. ‘How would he have got my number?’ I asked, aware that neither of us knew the answer.

  The Oxford English Dictionary definition of stalking is this: to harass or persecute someone with unwanted and obsessive attention.

  Well, Bob had certainly made me the focus of his obsessive attention but I can’t say I ever felt persecuted. And he wasn’t called Bob, as you know, Clara, though I don’t think I ever explained to you why I gave him a name, and that name in particular: a) Because with a name came a personality and a face and when you knew someone they weren’t as scary; b) Bob was a cuddly, granddad name, a woolly-jumper, pipe-smoking man whom I had no need to fear; c) As far as my memory served me, I hadn’t covered any stories where a Bob had featured as a rapist or murderer which would have precluded him from being the woolly-jumper, granddad Bob of my imagination.

  You warned me to be more careful, take him seriously. But I imagined he lived in the suburbs, watched daytime TV and had a comb-over. And when he tired of watching This Morning and Cash in the Attic and realised he had no one to talk to, probably never would, he wrote letters and e-mails to people like me who came into his living room every evening. He wanted to believe we were his friends. Once he asked me to smoke a pipe with him because he said I looked like the kind of ‘girl who would’. And when he craved more than just chat he’d ask me to ‘read the news in leather’. He should have known better, a man of his age. A letter a day, e-mails too. But it was low-level, harmless, wasn’t it? Still, I went through the motions, reported his correspondence to a woman in Human Resources called Hayley who listened with a serious face and gave me a lecture on what to do and a brochure which said I wasn’t to walk home alone if I thought I was being followed. But I knew Bob wouldn’t do that.

  Now I didn’t know what to believe. With one text, he’d crossed a line. When I closed my eyes I couldn’t conjure up an image of him any more; he’d disappeared into the shadows.

  Tiredness came over me, bleeding into my head. I needed the day to end. I said goodnight to Jake and went to my room. Inside it was like a fridge, the air conditioning inexplicably cranked up in January. I found an extra blanket in the wardrobe and got into bed, pulling the duvet around me. It was cold and crisp. All around me was dark, the dark of heavy curtains blocking out streetlights. I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to erase my thoughts. Instead I saw colours and images and light, flashing, speeded up. A film reel playing and no button to stop or pause it. We were the stars of the show, Clara, you and I. On and on it ran. But wait – it was going backwards, taking us to a time where our faces were happier and our smiles more innocent. Then finally it stopped. At the beginning. On the day we first met.

  Chapter Four

  September 1993

  ‘NOW WHO HAS a spare seat next to them?’ Mrs Brackley has her arm round me. They all do that. It’s the bit I hate the most, being a novelty.

  A couple of girls raise their hand slowly in the air. ‘She could sit next to Gareth, miss,’ one says and then I hear a boy’s voice pipe up: ‘That’s if she doesn’t mind the smell of his farts.’ The class erupts into laughter. I try to block it out. That’s how I always deal with it, in these classrooms that all look and smell the same. I am almost fourteen now and Niamh has promised this is the last time we’ll move but she has said that before. So why should I believe her?

  My eyes are drawn to one girl at the back of the class who isn’t laughing. She looks older than her peers, bemused by their behaviour, almost serene. A bubble of calm surrounds her. She is pretty. No, not pretty. I think she is beautiful. I watch her gaze shift from the desk and move dreamily towards the window, like she knows none of this matters because there are better, more important things waiting for her out there.

  ‘That’s quite enough of the joking, James,’ Mrs Brackley says, her arm raised in the air as if that gesture alone has the power to silence the laughter. Her face is shiny, hot from the classroom, and her cheeks are bright red. She’s wearing a stripy shirt in satin, red, brown and yellow, and there are rings of dark circling her armpits. Through the window I see the September sun, low in the sky, bouncing off the bike-shed roof and sending shards of light across the playground. It makes me squint.

  ‘Rachel.’ She turns to me and I get a whiff of tea and biscuits from her breath. Rich Tea, or maybe Hobnobs. Niamh says I’ve got a great sense of smell. But I’m not so sure, I think anyone could tell when she’s been drinking. ‘I’m going to let you choose where you want to sit. There are two seats at the front here,’ she says, pointing to them, ‘or one at the back.’ Before she has even finished her sentence I know there is no choice. Like a magnet I am being pulled towards the girl at the back of the class, drawn into her force field.

  With my rucksack on my back I walk towards you, aware that there are thirty pairs of eyes trained on my steps. There is a snigger that travels like a Mexican wave around the class when I place my bag on the desk next to you. I don’t understand why they are laughing but I don’t dwell on it for long, I am too busy looking at you. Your hair is thick and brown, loosely tied back so a few stray curls tumble out on to your face. ‘Clara,’ says Mrs Brackley, and only then do you look up, ‘I’m sure you’ll make Rachel feel welcome.’

  I have never known a Clara before, I was expecting a Sarah or Louise or Helen like all the other girls. But then I realise those names would be too ordinary for you. Clara suits you.

  ‘Right class, books out. It’s Much Ado about Nothing. We’ll pick up where we left off last week,’ Mrs Brackley says.

  There’s a collective groan, although no sound comes from you. ‘Clara, you’ll have to share your book with Rachel for the time being.’

  Finally you turn to look at me and I’m struck by your eyes, pierced by the blue of them. I fight the urge to smile because you ar
e not smiling. You are sizing me up, I think, and instinctively I want to pass whatever test it is you have set me. So I find myself holding your gaze and we stay there, unblinking, locked in a moment that seems to go on forever, neither of us wanting to give in. And then, as if it has been synchronised, our eyes snap shut at precisely the same time and when I open mine again I see your whole face has come alive with a smile and the blue in your eyes is rippling and glistening like water. I don’t understand the weird alchemy of friendship but I know that in the briefest click of an eye something has happened. A current of excitement, of possibility, is fizzing through me and suddenly the sniggers and the new-girl stigma melt away as if they never existed.

  I watch you reach for your bag and pull out your copy of Much Ado About Nothing. Instead of putting it on the table you rest it on your lap and give me a gentle nudge. I look down to see two red squares of raspberry loveliness sitting on the page. You take one and press the other into my hand. We unwrap them quietly and slip them into our mouths when Mrs Brackley’s back is turned and a moment later we’re sitting chewing, the scent of raspberry Hubba Bubba like a cloud around us. ‘It’s my favourite,’ you whisper as you lean in to me.

  Somehow I knew it would be because it’s mine too.

  At break time no one says, ‘Rachel, come with us,’ they just file out without looking my way. Novelties do that; they wear off quickly. I’m not bothered though. You look around to see if I’m next to you. I am and we slip into step with each other as if it has always been this way.

  ‘It was my mum’s idea,’ I say when we stop and sit down on the wall that separates the playing field from the playground, ‘to move here.’

  ‘Didn’t you miss the sea in London? I’d hate not to be able to walk to the beach and hear the waves.’ Your eyes are closed as if you are listening out for the roar and the crash of them. I hear the seagulls above and watch as they swoop down and poke at empty crisp packets and chocolate wrappers.

  ‘I’ve never lived by the sea so I’ve never thought about it. And my aunt lives here so we used to visit now and then.’ I think of the visits to see Laura, what they did to Niamh’s mood afterwards. I’d get the silent treatment, or worse, screamed at for nothing.