Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  The bar is dark, still early-evening quiet, and we make our way across to you. As we do you stand up, arms outstretched. Your teeth flash a white smile. ‘Rach,’ you say and kiss me on both cheeks so I get a waft of your perfume. Then you stand back and look at Jonny, taking in his dark hair, his almond eyes, his dress-down cool.

  ‘You always did have good taste in friends, Rach,’ and you wink at me before leaning in to kiss Jonny. ‘I’m Clara,’ you tell him unnecessarily.

  ‘Finally, I get to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Jonny says.

  ‘All good things, I hope,’ you laugh, a little nervously. ‘Did I hear you say you were going to the bar, Rach, mine’s a mojito.’

  You listen to me groan. ‘Nice to see some things never change,’ I say.

  ‘Come on, I’ve only just met him, we have a lot to talk about.’ I make a face and you say: ‘I promise I’ll get the next round in.’

  You sink back down on to the sofa and pat the seat next to you. Jonny sits down. ‘Rach never tells me a thing,’ I hear you whisper as I walk away. ‘I’m relying on you to fill in the blanks.’

  From the bar I can hear your laughter. It’s thick and intoxicating. I’m not in the mood for cocktails, I need something heavy and alcoholic so I buy a bottle of red wine. A couple of Jonny’s friends arrive and I say hi to them. When I return to our little section it’s filling up – Jonny’s colleagues, his gang, the friends he’s known for years. The people who have become part of my circle too.

  I look over to the sofa and Jonny is smiling, laughing with you. He doesn’t look around for me, for his drink even. He’s in your thrall. I say hello to a few people on the way and make it over to you but it’s awkward because the sofa is only big enough for two people which means I’m one too many. Jonny sees me and gets up to stand. ‘Rach, you sit down, you two must be dying for a gossip.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ you say to Jonny, ‘we’ve known each other so long we have nothing left to talk about. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other.’ Finally you turn to me, fixing me with your smile.

  It’s a strange thing to say, Clara. You have been away for so long there’s a lot you don’t know about me. But I catch it, the electricity that sparks between us.

  ‘I can still surprise you, Clara,’ I say, chinking your glass as Jonny gets up and makes room for me.

  We watch Jonny mingling with his friends, embracing each other in that bear-hug way that men do.

  ‘I was wondering whether you’d turn up. I’ve been trying to call you all week,’ I say, digging my elbow into you gently. ‘A few phone calls or texts wouldn’t go amiss.’

  It’s only been a few months since you returned and less since your dad died. I worry about you in Brighton, on your own. I want to make sure you’re OK.

  ‘I can see why you’re smitten,’ you say, eyes trained on him.

  ‘I’m glad you came though.’ I give your knee a squeeze. ‘It was beginning to feel weird that you hadn’t met him. I’ve told him everything about you.’

  ‘Everything,’ you repeat. Your voice is flat, distant. I don’t know whether it’s a question or a statement. And then you add: ‘Not everything, I bet.’

  I laugh but I hear it crackling with nerves.

  Your hands are on mine, enveloping them, and you look so deep into me, the way you used to when we knew everything about each other, when we could think each other’s thoughts, and I wonder if I’m wrong. Maybe you are pleased for me. You’re just so hard to read these days.

  ‘It’s touching …’ you say, eyes sparkling, dancing in the light.

  ‘You can see why I love him.’ I feel you loosen your grip. Then you lift your hand and use it to flick back a strand of my hair that has been falling into my face. ‘He loves me too,’ I say and you reach out to me and pull me into a tight embrace. A happiness fizzes through me and then I feel your breath in my ear and your words reach me.

  ‘He doesn’t even know you, Rachel,’ you say in a whisper, ‘he doesn’t know who you are.’

  It’s twelve thirty a.m. and we’re out on the street. The cool air is sobering me up after the warmth of the bar. Jonny’s friend Dylan has his arm draped over you. I want to go home but I hear your voice, ‘Jesus Rachel, you’re twenty-five, not forty-five, for God’s sake come on.’ A cab with its orange light on approaches and you hail it.

  I’m sure Jonny doesn’t want to go either but Dylan insists. It seems you’ve rediscovered your old magic tonight and you’re using it on him. He has that look in his eyes, fired up with a promise of what might happen, and he’s not going to let go. We go to a nameless Soho club, the kind that makes you want to forget everything in the morning. We pay too much to get in and when we slip through the dark curtains that are draped over the door the music thumps through me. I turn to look at Jonny and I know he’s feeling the same. You must catch it because next thing you’re pulling on my arm, dragging me off to the toilets. Once we’re in the cubicle together you produce a little rectangle of paper.

  ‘You need a pick-me-up,’ you say.

  You cut two fat lines of cocaine on the toilet seat and don’t listen to me when I say I’m not in the mood. You swing round and say: ‘Come on, Rach, don’t tell me you’ve gone all straight.’ You hand me a rolled-up ten-pound note and say, ‘It’ll be like old times.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say and I slip out the door.

  When I find Jonny I shout in his ear that he needs to take me home. He has a word with Dylan, telling him to make sure you’re OK. Even if you don’t make it back to my flat I know you’ll have a bed for the night.

  It seems like ages before we get a cab but for once I don’t mind. I’m pleased to be alone with Jonny. It’s September, a warm late-summer night. I’ve always loved London at this time, when most people are asleep, but the city is still alive, awake. It feels like it all belongs to me, the streets, the lights, the moon shining down.

  ‘Looks like your friend is going to make Dylan a very happy man tonight,’ he says.

  ‘She was everything you expected, I guess,’ I say and wait for you to agree.

  We’re holding hands but Jonny’s grip gets firmer and he pulls me closer. ‘Honestly? I thought she was a bit full-on.’ I look at you, sensing there’s more. ‘Oh fuck it, she seemed a bit needy. I guess I wasn’t expecting it, not from one of your friends. Does that make me a bad person?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I say. There’s a smile escaping from the sides of my mouth, creeping across my face. He sees it and kisses me.

  He knows me better than you do, Clara. You are wrong.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE POLICE HAD a search warrant. They were in my flat; I can’t tell you how that felt, the violation of it. Knowing they were in there ripping through our belongings, dismantling piece by piece the life I had so carefully, painstakingly constructed. They would be reading the letters, the cards, the e-mails that Jonny and I had sent each other, sharing our moments of intimacy between themselves like a top-shelf magazine to salivate over. And all the time they would be looking for something, the something that would connect Jonny to you. To your disappearance. The something that didn’t exist.

  I’d filmed those scenes so many times for my TV reports, the men and women in white suits, forensic experts, combing through houses and gardens; going about their business under tents erected to shield bodies from prying media eyes. Now I had become a character in the pages of my own storybook.

  I wanted to believe that maybe you had just taken flight, Clara, left without trace. That there was no one to blame and that all this was an innocent misunderstanding. But at the back of my mind a thought lurked, a sliver of recognition, like I had known this would happen all along. I’d just been waiting, waiting.

  I hadn’t returned Jonny’s mum’s calls. I’m not afraid to admit I was putting it off, like a piece of work you know you’ve got to tackle but that seems so huge you don’t know where to start. And I’d been so absorbed with
my own emotions I couldn’t face confronting someone else’s. But when I saw her number flash up for a third time I knew I couldn’t ignore her any longer.

  ‘Sandra,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, I was just about to call you.’

  I listened to her echo my own thoughts – It doesn’t make sense Rachel, it doesn’t make sense, and waited patiently while she cried, trying to make comforting sounds. But as she fired her barrage of questions – none of which I could answer – I was aware I was about to lose patience. Didn’t she realise I was going out of my mind too? And then the guilt got to me and I offered to drive out to St Albans that evening, ‘so you’re not alone, Sandra,’ I said, ‘I don’t like the thought of you being alone.’

  She agreed, qualifying it with a weak, ‘Only if it’s not too much trouble.’ I thought of the hour’s drive to St Albans in traffic at the end of a heavy day.

  ‘Not at all,’ I told her. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.

  Jonny always joked that if St Albans was a sport it would be golf: prim and proper and ever so middle class. When I confessed to admiring its neat order he teased me that I was turning into his mother: ‘Secretly you want that life, don’t you? – the detached house with a garden and hanging baskets swinging from the door. If I catch you buying a Nissan Micra I’m going to get very worried,’ he joked.

  I noticed as I pulled into the driveway Sandra’s pristine ten-year-Micra had now been replaced by a shiny silver VW Golf.

  The wind whipped at my face as I rang the door and waited, listening to Sandra make her way through the hall. When she appeared from behind it she welcomed me as if I had just popped in for a cup of tea. I gave her a kiss and a hug because I thought the circumstances demanded more than a peck on the cheek but feeling her tense in my arms, I realised my gesture was unwelcome. ‘Come in,’ she said, taking my coat, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Once in the kitchen, she sat me down at the heavy oak table and busied herself opening and closing the fridge, the cupboards and drawers, extracting from them teaspoons, plates, milk and mugs, a cake (lemon drizzle) that looked freshly baked, and laid them neatly and precisely on the table, as if they were the framework on which our chat would hinge. Jonny’s name, still unspoken between us, hung oppressively in the room. I studied the floral patterns on the oil-cloth table cover to distract myself from her manic whistling and resisted the urge to throw the china milk jug across the room and watch it drip down her perfect duck-egg blue walls – anything just to grab her attention and force her to sit down and talk about the real reason I was here. Jonny. Instead I took a deep breath and focused on the sound of the rain drumming against the window.

  Sandra has always struck me as a model of composure, a little schoolmarmish perhaps and prone to saying things like ‘nonsense on stilts’, but solid and firm in a stiff-upper-lip kind of way. When Jonny’s dad died two and a half years earlier he told me how she threw herself into life at the golf club and entering baking competitions, filling her time instead of sitting around and moping.

  And don’t get me wrong, I could see the lemon drizzle and perfectly laid table was just her way of trying to cope, but that was the problem. She wasn’t coping, it was obvious she was falling apart. Her flashing eyes, her sunken face and bed-messy hair told me a truth she would never have admitted to. She was being eaten up by anxiety. Her son was the only family she had left and now he was slipping away too. It was painful to see.

  Finally she sat down and fixed me with her searching, pleading eyes. I felt myself reeling under the pressure. She needed me to offer her theories which would explain away the situation, when I was still searching for them myself. God knows I wanted to help her; I just wished she could have looked at my face for more than a second and seen it etched with pain. I was floundering too, sinking deep, deep into despair. Jonny was her son, but he was also my boyfriend, my future.

  She poured and strained the tea and I heard her say, ‘Just a splash for you, I always remember these things.’ I knew she was waiting for me to begin the conversation so I reached for the jug to add a little more milk to my tea and took a sip of it just to play for time, to allow my brain to turn over and come up with a form of words that hit the right note, both soothing and comforting.

  ‘They’re talking about him like he’s responsible,’ she said finally. ‘He’s the headline every hour. I can’t listen to it.’ She turned to stare at the radio on the counter as if she didn’t trust it to be silent and took a slurp of her tea. ‘And your news station too, Rachel, I would have expected more from them. Can’t you make it stop?’ Her eyes flashed at me for a second before darting back to the table. ‘Cake?’ she said, pushing the lemon drizzle towards me.

  The inflection in her voice was unmistakable. Can’t you make it stop? I began to wish I hadn’t come.

  ‘They’ll carry on running those stories until he’s found, Sandra, and as much as I wish I had the power to stop them, you know I can’t. He was the last known person with Clara, that’s why he’s a suspect,’ I told her as gently as I could.

  ‘I know how the law works, Rachel, I’ve watched police dramas too,’ she said dismissively. She began tapping her teaspoon on the side of her mug. ‘What I don’t understand is why he was with Clara. He didn’t even like the girl.’ She spat the last words out, as if they were dirt in her mouth. ‘He said she always acted like you owed her something. I thought that was a strange thing to say, Rachel, very strange indeed.’

  My reserves of patience were almost exhausted. I knew Sandra was hurting, I knew she was tormented not knowing where Jonny was, but all this, it really wasn’t fair. Don’t make me your punchbag, I wanted to shout. I found it hard to believe Jonny had confided in her, and even if it was true he certainly wouldn’t have wanted her to use the information as ammunition against me.

  Reaching over to the lemon drizzle I cut a slice of cake and put it on my plate. My hands were sticky with the icing so I licked it off. She waited, expecting an answer, but I wasn’t in any hurry to give her one. So I looked around as I pulled the cake apart with my fingers. Next to the wooden dresser was pinned her calendar. Today’s date was circled and BOOK CLUB, written in capitals. Tomorrow was GOLF/MARJORIE. Further down into the following week was BRIDGE. All the events that punctuated her middle-class existence. They would happen without her now, though I suspected the chat would make her ears burn.

  ‘I don’t imagine Jonny told you everything,’ I said finally and without waiting for a response I told her that you’d had some tough times – my exact words were ‘Clara struggled with mental health issues,’ which I thought couched your illness in suitably formal terms for her consumption.

  I sat back picking at the cake, hoping the explanation would suffice.

  ‘I still don’t understand why she would take that out on you as if it was your fault she had a breakdown,’ she said, staring at me for longer than necessary. I let out a long, frustrated sigh. That wasn’t what I had meant. She was twisting my words.

  A pain sliced through my head. I thought it might be hunger so I took another bite of cake; the sugar and citrus immediately made my mouth water. Seeing that I couldn’t talk with my mouth full Sandra carried on. ‘When was the last time you saw her, Rachel?’ she asked. It was the obvious question, one I would be asked again and again until I could tell it so word-perfectly I would be accused of reading it like a script.

  At that stage I’d only recounted it for DCI Gunn, carefully picking my way through the details, making a mental note of what I’d said and how.

  ‘Two and a half weeks ago,’ I told her, ‘at the flat. It was a bit awkward really. Jonny and I were meeting friends in town for dinner but she insisted on coming beforehand.’ I watched Sandra’s eyes narrowing, her clouded mind trying to glean something from my words.

  ‘She’d called me a few days earlier to tell me she was coming, said she was going to a gallery in Bethnal Green and would call by on the way back. I told her I would be pushed for time because I had t
o be in Soho for nine p.m. but she wouldn’t let it drop.’

  What I didn’t tell Sandra or DCI Gunn was why you came, Clara. That the date, January the seventh, seemed to matter to you more than it should. It was my mother’s birthday. A day I’d never celebrated with her when she was alive and one I let pass by unnoticed until you returned eighteen months before. I was surprised how you’d insisted on seeing me to mark it. I didn’t understand why you’d want to rake over the past but I humoured you that first year. Now you were coming back for seconds.

  ‘I can’t let you mark such a big anniversary on your own,’ you said like it wasn’t an offer but a demand. ‘We can have a few glasses of wine, toast Niamh and then you and Jonny can go out. I don’t mind. I’ll be quite happy to chill at home.’

  By ‘home’ you meant my home.

  ‘I won’t be back from work until after seven,’ I said, feeling pushed into a corner.

  ‘Fine, I’ll let myself in,’ you told me and I made a mental note to get my key back from you.

  That evening when I opened the door to my flat a heavy garlicky smell wafted out from the kitchen.

  ‘Rach,’ you said, emerging from the kitchen wearing my apron, ‘have this, I know you’ll need it.’ You handed me a glass of cold white wine. You were wearing jeans and an angora sweatshirt in dusty pink; your hair was down, shining as the light caught it.

  ‘I told you. I’m eating out,’ I said as I watched you dish up two bowls of risotto and put them on the table.

  ‘An hour, Rachel, tell me you can spare an hour?’ You pulled out a chair for me and sat down in yours. I watched the steam rising from the risotto and you blowing it before you put it in your mouth.

  ‘How was the gallery? I asked. I noticed you had used the Skandium dishes I kept for good.

  ‘The gallery?’ you said, and stopped blowing on your fork.

  ‘The one you were visiting in London today.’ I saw your eyes flash, a blush warmed your cheeks.

  ‘Oh, that one. Disappointing really, overhyped in my opinion.’ You weren’t looking at me, just down at the bowl in front of you. And then you said; ‘Would you bring her back, you know, if you could?’ I sighed and pushed my chair back from the table. I didn’t understand the fixation. Why you wanted to revive an old ghost.