Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  Fuck off.

  I shuffled back inside, every sound amplified; the creak of the pipes were your footsteps, the draught from the door your breath sneaking up on me. Cortisol flushing through my blood. I wondered how long I could take this.

  You are not coming

  But I knew you would.

  The truth, it’s what you’ve always wanted.

  It’s all anyone wants.

  At some point in the afternoon the light disappeared, the way it does in winter: one minute it is day and then you blink and night has fallen too soon. I peeped out through the shutters, the inky blackness broken up by the lights of the city. I needed air.

  Food, fresh air, I was calculating in my head. Ten minutes. I could be out and back in ten minutes. Then my coat and keys and phone were in my hands and I was heading for the door, leaving my world of waiting behind, stepping out into a different one of movement and bustle and change. The cold slapped my face. I steadied myself for a moment on the gate before marching ahead.

  The headlights and streetlamps cast shadows that danced on the path. Horns and sirens went off, erupting in my ear. I was walking forward but looking back all the time, scanning the street for you.

  In the takeaway, a woman in front of me. Fat enough to be a regular customer: Sausage and chips, no make that fish and chips … actually throw in another portion of chips. And a Coke, make that two.

  Hurry the fuck up.

  I asked for chips, open, and sprinkled them with extra salt and vinegar. They were too hot to eat, but walking back home I shovelled them in anyway, mouth half open, huh huh huh blowing air to cool them.

  Turning into Kempe Road I saw two figures walking in the distance, moving away from me. One, a man, crossed the road to the other side. The second person carried on past my door as if heading down towards Queen’s Park. Then suddenly my view was obscured; I was on the ground, chips sprayed out in front of me. I looked around and saw a stray paving slab.

  ‘Fuck.’

  On my feet again I scanned the street once more. Then, a jolt surged through me, as if my eyes had sent the message to my body before I understood what was happening. The figure that had been moving away was getting bigger now. It was coming towards me, edging closer.

  Closer and closer still.

  Someone in the darkness, collar pulled up against the cold. Hair covered by a hat. But the walk, that strange lollop, I would have recognised it anywhere.

  I stopped outside my flat, the beat of my heart coming up through my throat, banging in my head. I swallowed hard. And then I looked up and saw your face.

  ‘You’d better come inside.’

  We didn’t breathe. There was silence, even our feet were soundless on the floorboards, as we floated like ghosts through the hallway.

  The air was stretched, taut, my heart thumping, boom, boom, boom. Or maybe it was yours I could hear too. Stereo sound.

  In the living room we sat on the sofa. There were two to choose from but you sat on the same one as me. We did this without exchanging a word. Who blinks first?

  I’d had enough of the games, Clara. I wanted to hear it all, to shake it out of you. You killed Jonny: why, why, why?

  ‘Welcome back from the dead,’ I said, looking at you properly for the first time since you’d gone. You looked like a ghost. How fitting.

  You said nothing, but your staring eyes didn’t stray from me. They had a strange reflective quality to them. I could see myself in them. Could you see yourself in mine?

  You removed your hat slowly to reveal bottle-blond hair, telltale dark roots beginning to creep through. You’d cut it short, or hacked it to be precise. I wondered if you’d done it yourself, or if James had done it for you. How romantic, your little game of playing dead.

  In other circumstances I would have told you the colour made your skin look sallow and tired and highlighted the dark circles under your eyes. It made you look like a hooker, Clara, but I didn’t want to provoke you. Besides, I was mesmerised by your appearance. You had loomed so large in my head, this powerful mastermind of my downfall. And now? Now I saw you for who you were. The skin around your face was pinched, your eyes still heartbreak blue but tired and beaten. Under your fingernails, thick rims of dirt. Life was eating away at you. I wondered how many more bites it would take to finish you off completely.

  ‘Jonny,’ I said. It was a question, a statement, an accusation all rolled into one. You looked down at the table, shaking your head.

  ‘Later …’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You get to go first, and when you’ve told me everything, I will tell you about Jonny,’ you said. I felt the heat prick my face, my anger frothing to the surface. My reward for telling you what you want to hear was to find out how my boyfriend died. In my head I counted, one … two … three. Don’t rise to the bait. You were in control, that’s what you wanted to think. I would play your game. For now.

  I was focusing on that thought, control, stay calm, when I saw your hand slip down and fumble in the pocket of your thick black coat. When you pulled it back out I saw the glint of metal.

  My eyelids clicked. I blinked. I was staring at the object in your hand. The light bouncing off the metal.

  The glint of metal on a knife.

  Something slipped in my head. My plan, so tightly woven, began to unravel. My plan to lure you here and keep you talking until Jake came back and found us. My plan for him to call the police. My plan to clear my name and prove my case. Because only when the police saw you here, alive and breathing, could I finally convince them I hadn’t killed you.

  But now you were sitting in my living room where I watched TV and read the papers and drank wine and relaxed, and you were sitting here with a knife.

  Everything had changed.

  Your fingers skimmed the top of the blade. You smiled.

  The thought of you smiling as you closed your eyes and sank it into me sent waves of icy panic through my body.

  You could still surprise me, Clara.

  I found myself smiling back because if I didn’t I might have laughed, manically, or screamed in fear and frustration. I felt the momentum slip away from me. I thought I was in control but you had wrested it from me.

  I needed to clear my mind, to think of a way through.

  And then your voice pierced my brain like a hot needle.

  ‘You think I won’t, but I will, trust me, Rachel. I’ve got nothing left to lose.’

  I nodded slowly.

  I understand.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ I asked, at pains to steady my voice.

  ‘Tell me the truth about Niamh.’

  Everything always started with Niamh.

  I sat for a moment thinking of what you wanted me to say, before you said it for me.

  ‘You killed her,’ you told me.

  ‘So why all this,’ I said, pointing at the knife, ‘if you’re so sure you know already?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know, what you tried to cover up for years. You gave her the sleeping pills and you killed her and then you let me believe I had done it. You twisted it all and made me think I had killed my own mother,’ you said, your voice rising to a shriek.

  ‘I didn’t know she was your mother. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Sorry?’ You sounded surprised to hear the word come from my mouth. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry she was your mother. I’m sorry she was mine.’

  ‘You fucking bitch. You cold-hearted fucking bitch. She loved me.’

  I couldn’t help it; rich, ironic laughter was escaping from me. She loved you. I tried to bring it under control as your eyes burnt into me.

  ‘She loved you so much she fucked someone up against a wall and then left you. Some love,’ I said.

  ‘If she could have turned back the clock she would have.’

  ‘And not given birth to me? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘She was going to tell you, you know, that day before my eighteenth, before everything
happened. I’d made her promise. I felt so wrong keeping it from you. That was why she was so nervous, so uptight, she was working up to it. She was trying to make everything perfect that day and then you argued with her and spoiled it and she couldn’t do it then. She hated you for spoiling the moment. And then you killed her.’

  I remembered Laura’s words; you begged Niamh not to tell me, Clara, to give you time to let it sink in, and now you expected me to believe your lies. I thought back to that morning of the barbecue before you came round, the crackling heat of the day hanging heavy in the house. Niamh chopping and humming and talking too fast, her eyes darting around. On edge. It was because she wanted to make everything perfect for you, not me. Even a decade later I saw it as clearly as if it were happening right now in front of me. You were lying. You were trying to torment me with your twisted version of the past; you wanted me to think I had got it wrong.

  ‘We both know that’s not true. You can’t come here and expect the truth from me and still spin me your lies,’ I said.

  It was your turn to laugh. You threw your head back, your hand still resting on the knife.

  ‘Jesus, what the fuck do you know about the truth, Rachel? You have no concept of it. Everything that happens to you is moulded to fit your own ends. You killed your fucking mother so you need to cast her as this evil villain to absolve yourself from what you’ve done. Poor little Rachel, poor unloved, neglected Rachel. But it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t like that. She tried hard with you, Rachel, she tried to make you love her but she couldn’t. She didn’t live up to your expectations, she wasn’t quite good enough so you wrote her off. Literally. You got rid of her like some unwanted fucking baggage because you got it in your mind you would be better off without her. And then you moved on to me.’

  I let you continue with this monologue of yours, the torrent of accusations, the raw fury you’d suppressed for so long finally finding its outlet. You had no idea what it was like to have Niamh as a mother. All you had was a two-month-long honeymoon that would have turned sour and destructive if she hadn’t died.

  You were in full flow and with every sentence I watched the flush on your face grow deeper, the beads of sweat on your top lip multiply, the tremble of your hands become more pronounced. I was watching, watching, never taking my eyes off you for a moment.

  ‘That day,’ you spat, ‘that day when you told me what happened – and don’t dare, don’t fucking dare deny you told me – you said you’d given her the sleeping pills and then you saw my reaction, you knew you’d made a mistake by telling me. Didn’t you? You knew you’d totally misjudged it. You revealed yourself to me that day, all the things people had told me about you and I had never believed. Well, I started believing them then.

  ‘You knew it had all changed, that all of a sudden your best friend had become your biggest threat because I wanted to go to the police. I wanted you to tell them what you had done. I wanted you to face up to it. But you would never do that, would you, Rachel? So you did what you always do, you turned it round and made me think I had imagined what you said, like I was going fucking crazy. Oh God, I was such an easy target, my mother had just died and I was literally collapsing with grief and guilt and I came to you with it, this guilt I had about giving her one fucking sleeping tablet, and you made it grow inside me. You fed my fucking guilt every day, always there, watching over me, suffocating me. Don’t worry, Clara, I won’t tell anyone, you’d breathe into my ear, your secret’s safe with me. It all became so clouded, so foggy, I didn’t trust myself to think any more, let alone remember clearly what had happened. You’d created this fucking nightmare for me. How could you do that?’

  You stopped to wipe fat tears away from your face with the back of your dirty hands, streaking your face as you did it. You looked so pitiful, I wanted to reach out to you, but I knew I couldn’t. Not yet.

  ‘Going away, even knowing you had persuaded my dad to have me fucking sectioned, even knowing he believed you over me, that was nothing compared with the relief I felt just to escape from you.’ You jabbed your index finger at me, as if you were going pierce me with it.

  ‘I thought I never wanted to see you again but when I came back I realised I had to see you to prove to myself you had no power over me any more. And then we met and you were so nice, so fucking lovely, it broke my heart. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d got it all wrong. I’d come back hating you and wanting revenge and yet you’d do things that were so wonderful and kind and you’d make me laugh and I’d feel this love for you seep into the hatred again, diluting it.’

  ‘And then you changed your mind,’ I said.

  You started laughing again, a horrible, empty cackle that echoed in my ears, and your tears were mixing with the snot on your face but I didn’t dare move to offer you a tissue.

  ‘Jesus Rachel, are you for fucking real? I changed my mind when you tried to push me off a mountain.’

  I closed my eyes. We were living in parallel worlds; there was no use in trying any more because somehow, whatever I did, whatever happened to you would always be my fault. I let my head slip down into my hands as your words kept coming at me.

  ‘That day, you know in the mountains, it was so beautiful, the sky and the powder, all of us peeling down the slopes. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You reminded me why we’d been friends, the fun, your ridiculous beer-drinking party trick. And then we went for that one last run. We were climbing the mountain on the chair lift and I thought, I need to know. I needed to know if I’d dreamt it all up in my mind and you really were my friend. Because I couldn’t stand the doubt any longer. I needed to get everything straight in my head. That’s when I asked if you killed her. I was watching your face all the time and I saw it, just a beat, a tiny ferocious flash of anger, and then you hid it again. But you knew, didn’t you, that you’d let your mask slip. You knew that all your efforts at friendship had been in vain because I’d seen it. Oh God, we used to joke that we didn’t need words to communicate. Well I didn’t need you to say anything that day because your eyes told me everything.

  ‘The next thing we’re on a black run, of course it was quiet, we were literally on our own, the last run of the day, and I was trying to go fast to get away from you and you came at me with your poles, so close to the edge, and you pushed me. That’s all I remember; the next thing I was waking up in hospital.’

  There was nothing really to say to all of this, no point in defending myself because it was all so fanciful, the work of a 100 per cent fucked-up mind.

  I let you take a breath.

  ‘That’s some theory you’ve come up with, Clara. I guess you found a kindred spirit in James? After all, he convinced himself it was my fault his sister drowned, my fault she capsized in the lake. And who made him believe that? Sarah of course. What a coincidence that you’ve all become such good friends.’

  Your eyes bored into me. ‘Sarah knows what she saw in the lake. Even after all these years she knows what she saw. Lucy’s canoe capsized and you were the only one close to her. You shouted you were helping. But you didn’t help, did you? You kept your oar just out of her reach and Sarah saw it all but she couldn’t get to Lucy on time, and when she told the teachers, you were so convincing in your lies that no one believed her. No one believed that you would deliberately let someone die just to get your own back. Lucy pushed you in the water one day and made everyone laugh at you and the next day she was dead. Because you can’t stand people making a fool of you, can you, Rachel? You can’t stand the shame of it, so she had to pay.’

  I couldn’t believe you were throwing this at me now, the oldest story, the one we had gone over so many times and every time you told me you believed me.

  ‘Fuck, when I think of how I stood up for you at school when everyone else was against you. I didn’t want to believe you could do that. You are so fucking evilly persuasive, the way you cast your spells and make people believe anything.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I asked, unable to sit back and
take your accusations any longer. ‘So let’s get this straight: I am the crazy person here, am I? Well let me ask you this: do I have a whole county’s police force looking for me? Have I lied and plotted to frame my friend? I’m not hiding out in a beach hut with filthy nails and bleached hair. Look around, Clara, look for fuck’s sake,’ I shouted, rage surging through me. ‘I am successful, I have a great job, I have this flat, I had a boyfriend who worshipped the ground I walked on. Everything in my life was so fucking perfect, so clean and ordered, and you … you couldn’t stand it, could you? So you had to destroy it. You went and killed Jonny to get back at me for something I haven’t done.’

  ‘No,’ you screamed, ‘don’t you dare turn this round. I did not kill Jonny. I didn’t fucking kill him. He wasn’t supposed to die.’

  ‘Well he’s dead, Clara, so whatever was supposed to happen doesn’t matter much now, does it?’

  You scratched your head with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife as if you were scratching a drying sore.

  ‘He wasn’t meant to die,’ you said, your head rocking back and forth gently like you were repeating a mantra. ‘We just needed him to get to you. Can’t you see that? You deserved to be punished, Rachel, someone had to punish you for what you did. Someone had to stop you.

  ‘It was James’s idea to play dead and frame you for my murder, at least that way you would finally pay the price for what you did to his sister and Niamh. We had it all planned. I arranged to meet you on Friday night and then I’d vanish. I wanted to get away from everything here anyway, James did too; we were going to India to start with. So what did it matter if everyone thought I was dead.’

  ‘So why involve Jonny,’ I spat, my mind reeling at your cunning. ‘Why not leave him alone and he’d still be alive?’

  ‘Because I needed the police to think I was having an affair with Jonny.’

  My motive.

  The penny dropped.

  There was no air to breathe in the room. I was too hot, flames licking my head, fire in my stomach.