Jail Bird

by Jessie Keane

  Lily looked at his broad, well-muscled back and thought, And if you were involved in Leo’s death, ain’t that exactly what I’d expect you to say?

  Suddenly she felt uneasy, as if she’d thoughtlessly leapt into a situation that she ought not to have placed herself in at all. She cursed herself for being so weak, for caving in after the trauma of the shooting and falling into bed with Nick when really she should have stayed away. Kept it business-like. Nick had a good reason for killing Leo, and she was stupid to have let her attraction to him override that.

  ‘Look,’ he said, swiping an agitated hand through his hair, his expression tense with irritation as he half turned and looked at her. ‘Why not move in here? Or back into the safe flat?’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Do I look like I’m joking?’

  ‘Why, so you can keep an eye on me? Make sure I don’t talk to anyone I shouldn’t?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  Lily nodded slowly, biting her lip. Fury was building in her. She threw back the sheet and stood up, started hunting around for her clothes.

  ‘You know what, Nick?’ She rounded on him suddenly. ‘I’ve been locked up for twelve years. Before that I was locked into a loveless marriage, just making the best of it. Before that my parents made me feel a failure and – when I got pregnant – a slut. Do you really think I need to be locked up again, kept safe, kept under control? Do you?’

  ‘Lily, for God’s sake…’

  ‘No! Don’t say another word. I’ve heard enough. Now where the fuck are my shoes?’

  42

  ‘She tried to get the security company to change it all back,’ said Oli accusingly, her eyes resting on her sullen-faced sister.

  They were sitting in the kitchen when Lily got back from Nick’s. Lily came in through the back door and experienced a strong sense of déjà vu. Here were her two girls, replaying a scene from their youth. Saz trying to seize control, and Oli complaining to their mother about it. Same old, same old.

  She felt weary and confused. The drive-by attempt, her angry parting from Nick, had left her drained. She looked at Oli. Looked at Saz.

  ‘I’m going up for a bath,’ she said, and walked through the kitchen, away from them both.

  ‘Hey!’ Saz had followed her out into the hall.

  Lily walked on, heading for the stairs. She couldn’t face another showdown with Saz, not now.

  ‘Hey!’ Saz caught her arm, spun her around.

  Lily looked at her daughter. Registered the intense hatred on her face, saw her own features in that face that was so twisted with anger. Felt sad, and tired.

  ‘Where’s Richard?’ asked Lily.

  ‘What?’ Saz frowned, wrong-footed.

  ‘Your husband. Richard.’

  ‘Out. Golf.’

  That boy’s no fool, thought Lily. Saz in a bad mood was not something anyone would want to encounter close up. Again, she felt a pang of pity for Richard. It would take a very strong man to stand up to Saz – or a very weak one to accommodate her.

  ‘And I don’t see what the hell that’s got to do with anything,’ said Saz, recovering her angry stance.

  Lily looked down at Saz’s hand, still gripping her forearm with bruising force.

  ‘You can let me go now,’ said Lily mildly. ‘You want to talk? Okay, let’s talk.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ snapped Saz.

  Over her shoulder, Lily saw Oli come out and stand in the kitchen doorway, watching them anxiously. She’d foreseen problems and, sure enough, here they were, staring them all in the face.

  ‘You just want to shout the odds,’ said Lily.

  ‘No! Not even that! I just want you to get the fuck out of our home,’ bellowed Saz, releasing her arm with a furious flick of disdain.

  ‘Saz phoned up the security company and asked them to come back and reprogramme everything,’ said Oli from the doorway. ‘Just like you said she would. Only she didn’t have the new passwords or anything, so they wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘Why don’t you shut up, you little snitch,’ said Saz angrily to Oli. Oli went pale. Lily could see how much she hated being at odds with her sister.

  Saz turned back to Lily. ‘I want you out of here.’

  Lily stared hard at Saz’s face, pinched up, ugly and suffused with rage. She knew Saz. Knew that change rattled her. Knew that once she took up a stance on an issue, she’d stick to it regardless of any evidence that she could be mistaken. But for fuck’s sake – she was this girl’s mother.

  ‘Why are you so sure I did it?’ Lily asked her. ‘Why do you want to believe the worst of me?’

  Saz was silent, fuming.

  ‘What is it, Saz?’ asked Lily quietly. ‘Is it that you’ve hated me for twelve years, and if it’s true that I didn’t kill your dad, you’ve been proved wrong and you’ve hated me for nothing? Is that it? What, are you going to lose face if you change your mind?’

  ‘You killed him,’ sneered Saz, nodding her head for emphasis.

  Lily turned away, finding it too painful even to look at her daughter right now.

  ‘Yeah, you go right on believing that,’ she sighed, and went on up the stairs.

  ‘You killed him!’ yelled Saz after her.

  The bath helped. Luxury again. She’d always been a girl with a taste for that, and it had made prison all the harder. She soaked for a long, lazy time in lavender-scented bubbles, relishing the hot water, the time she could spend just wallowing, just day-dreaming…and, despite herself, thinking of Nick.

  She was trying so hard not to think of Nick, but there he was in her mind, intruding, his eyes boring into her own, first fierce and then gentle…and there was a faint echo of his scent still on her body, a welcome soreness that the warm water eased. Her breasts were tender from the pressure of his lips and teeth. There were finger-shaped bruises forming on her thighs. She felt…good; physically satisfied in a way that she had never been with Leo.

  But she had parted with Nick on bad terms. He didn’t want her to contact Julia. But she knew she must, even though it was the last thing she really wanted to do. Every fresh discovery about Leo was making her feel more debilitated, more ground down. Still, she wanted to know, ached to know, who had let her stew inside for all those years. And when she found out who that someone was, she was going to make them suffer, too.

  After an hour or so she got out of the bath, dressed, applied make-up, combed her hair and looked at herself in the mirror and thought, I could be dead right now.

  Someone had tried to kill her. Her gut feeling was that she had been the target, not Nick. She was pretty sure Freddy or Si King were behind it too. Or…she paused, staring at her reflection with a frown. Maybe she had other enemies too. Maybe people had been talking and someone knew she was looking around for answers. Maybe someone thought she was getting too close.

  She shuddered, because when she thought of enemies, it was Saz’s face she saw in her brain, twisted with hatred for her own mother. Saz believed Lily had killed Leo, and refused to be swayed from that opinion.

  But I’m her mother. We were close once.

  Hopefully soon Saz would begin to see that Lily was not the monster she believed her to be. And Lily had to go on with what she’d started. She picked up the phone and dialled out.

  It rang and rang. No answer.

  She dialled again.

  Come on. Pick up.

  ‘Hello?’ said a female voice, just as Lily was about to put the phone down.

  Lily jumped, startled. The woman’s voice on the other end was loud, aggressive.

  ‘Who’s that?’ demanded the voice. ‘Come on, who is it?’

  ‘Julia? Is that you?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Who’s that? What do you want?’

  Now Lily could hear the edge of fear in the voice. Not aggression; fear. ‘It’s Lily. Lily King. I’m…I’m out, Julia. And I’d like to talk to you.’

  There was dead silence from the other end. In the
background, there was a rhythmic noise, like a distant motor.

  ‘Julia?’ prompted Lily. ‘You there?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m here. I’m not talking to you,’ she said, and put the phone down.

  Lily dialled again, but Julia didn’t pick up.

  She put the phone aside. Then she snatched it up again and phoned Becks.

  ‘Jesus! Lily! I wondered where you’d got to,’ said Becks, sounding breezy but with an undercurrent of awkwardness. Lily knew Becks must feel really bad about having to turn her out. But she wasn’t going to hold a grudge over that.

  ‘I’m still here,’ said Lily.

  ‘Where’s here?’ said Becks, giving a half-laugh. ‘Joe said he heard you were staying at The Fort? I said you couldn’t be.’

  ‘Well I am.’

  ‘But Si…and Maeve…’ said Becks falteringly.

  ‘The girls are here with me. Oli. And Saz.’

  ‘Right.’ Becks was quiet again. ‘It’s…nice to hear from you, Lils.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Becks didn’t sound as if it was nice to hear from her old friend Lily. She sounded like Lily had just put the kibosh on her whole day. Desperation seized Lily suddenly. She wanted to go back to a time when their friendship had been an easy, cosy thing; back before Leo had died and she had been sent down. She wanted to feel normal again.

  ‘Maybe we could meet up?’ she suggested. ‘Do lunch with the girls, like we used to?’

  Lunch with the girls. The ladies who lunched. That’s what they had all been, back in the day. Blowing their husbands’ ill-gotten gains before the taxman got wind of too much cash hanging about the place. How carefree and shallow and stupid they had been, living the high life with all their designer gear and moody sports cars and spa treatments, but without a doubt it had been fun. Lily had bought into the luxury lifestyle big-time. After the upbringing she’d had, that chilly, repressive, hand-to-mouth life of proud poverty, it had been like release from a cage. But now…oh, now she knew she’d just exchanged one cage for another. It had been a comfortable one, but a cage nevertheless.

  ‘Monday?’ suggested Lily, hearing the eagerness in her own voice but unable to suppress it. ‘We always met on a Monday, didn’t we, at Luigi’s?’

  ‘Um,’ said Becks, ‘Luigi’s closed down.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lily felt foolish, wrong-footed. ‘So where do the girls meet now?’

  ‘Well…Le Soleil,’ said Becks doubtfully. ‘In Cheap Street.’

  ‘There, then,’ said Lily. ‘One o’clock? All the girls? You, me, Hairy Mary…’

  ‘What about Maeve?’

  It was true that Maeve had once been among Lily’s circle of friends. Now she was among her circle of enemies

  . ‘Does she usually come?’

  ‘Yeah, she does. Usually.’ But if you’re there, it’s going to be tricky.

  Lily heard the unspoken words as clearly as if they had been telegraphed to her over the wires.

  ‘Um…Becks. I don’t think she’ll want to come if I’m there. And…I don’t really want to see Adrienne there, if that’s okay with you?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sure,’ said Becks quickly. ‘I understand, Lils. Totally’

  ‘That’s a date then, yeah?’ asked Lily, trying to ignore the part about Maeve, trying to ignore Becks’s obvious unease with this call. She was trying to start afresh; why would no one let her start over like she wanted to?

  ‘Yeah,’ said Becks, clearly making an effort. ‘Yeah. Great. Sure.’

  Lily rang off, wondering if it was really safe to go out and about after what had happened with Nick outside the restaurant. But bollocks to it. She’d done with all that, skulking in corners, hiding away from the world. Now she was going to come out in the open.

  Then the phone rang, and she picked up.

  ‘Hello?’ It was probably Becks again, wanting to alter something.

  Breathing.

  ‘Hello?’ said Lily again, her heart starting to speed up, her mouth drying to dust. ‘Who is that?’

  But they didn’t answer.

  Lily put the phone down with a shaking hand and sat there staring at it.

  It rang again.

  This time, she didn’t answer.

  43

  Alice was feeling a bit better. The staff were pleased with her; she was talking to them, just a bit. She even talked to her mother–she despised her mother–when the old witch visited, and to her hated brother too. She doled out a few words to them, made her mother happy that she was ‘coming along’, made her brother jealous of the attention; it was all fine, no problems.

  Mostly she talked to Jem, one of the cleaners, who was Malaysian and had come over here to be near her boyfriend. With Jem, she could rattle on a little, because Jem wasn’t interested in anything she had to say, not really. Jem just smiled a lot, and understood only bits of what Alice was saying to her, and that was just fine as far as Alice was concerned.

  ‘This is my boyfriend,’ she said to Jem, and showed her the crumpled photo of Leo that Lily had left with her when she visited.

  ‘He handsome man,’ said Jem obligingly, glancing at the shot while mopping the floor.

  ‘Yes, he is.’ Alice ran her fingers lovingly over the photo. ‘He’s so good to me, he buys me presents.’ Alice felt that this was true, but she couldn’t really remember them. There had been a Tiffany bracelet…hadn’t there? But she didn’t know where that was.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jem with a brilliant smile, remaking the bed.

  ‘He used to take me to his club. He owned a club,’ said Alice thoughtfully.

  What had the club been called? She couldn’t think. Only that they had been there together, and all the girls had flocked around Leo, but he had been with her, Alice. So many lovely women, and his wife was lovely too, she knew this, she had seen Lily…King.

  Lily King.

  The club was called Kings.

  And Lily, his wife’s name was Lily, and wasn’t that strange, because the woman who had called to see her, who had brought her his photo, her name had been Lily too.

  The buxom nurse came in, frowning at the cleaner, who was taking her damned time; she should have been way along the hall by now.

  ‘We went to his club, called Kings,’ said Alice to the nurse, brandishing the photo at her.

  The nurse glanced at it and then away. She was up to her ears in work, and suddenly Alice had stopped being silent and started chattering on to anyone and everyone. She preferred Alice silent, really.

  ‘Did you,’ she said. ‘You done the loo yet?’ she snapped at Jem.

  Jem shook her head, no.

  ‘Well, get a bloody move on, chop-chop, yeah?’

  ‘All the women wanted him, but he only wanted me,’ said Alice. She remembered all the women, even the one who had come on to Leo while she was there with him, the one he had laughed at; oh, how they had laughed at the silly cow…

  But Leo…wasn’t he dead?

  Hadn’t she heard that somewhere?

  Alice fell silent, and turned and stared out of the window at the lake. Later, maybe after lunch, maybe sometime today, she wasn’t sure, she would go for a walk by the lake. She liked that.

  Alice was down there in the evening. It was chilly, she’d put on her cardigan. She liked this time of day; everything was quiet. The light was starting to fade into dusk and the sky was tinged with soft, peachy pink. It would be a fine day tomorrow. She walked around, getting her trainers muddy again, the nurse would complain, but to hell with her. She walked along to the lake’s farthest edge, out of sight of the main building; once it had been a private home, a mansion; a wealthy family had owned it before it became a psychiatric clinic. The lake had been excavated way back in the past, and it was beautiful: big plants there, leaves big as umbrellas, rushes whispering in the breeze, coots and ducks squabbling for territory, and she remembered, she remembered now, yes, Leo was dead; and she pulled out the photo from her pockets, fingered it, caressed his face.

 
A tear slipped down her sunken cheek.

  Leo was dead.

  A woman was walking toward her. Blonde. Smiling.

  Lily King…?

  No. Not her.

  ‘I think he’s dead,’ said Alice, and she started to cry in earnest.

  The woman came up close, and put an arm around Alice’s bony shoulders. ‘He is, Alice. I’m afraid he is. And you wish you were with him, don’t you?’

  Alice nodded. Oh, to be with Leo. They’d had such fun. Such fun. She looked at the woman. She knew the woman’s face.

  ‘I know you…don’t I?’ she asked uncertainly.

  ‘Don’t worry about that now, Alice. You know what? You can be with him,’ said the woman comfortingly.

  ‘How? Can you tell me how?’ Alice asked her desperately.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said the woman, and bent and picked up a handful of stones.

  Now Alice wept again, this time with gratitude.

  44

  Lily could see it on their faces, as soon as she entered the restaurant, as soon as she approached the table where they were sitting, waiting. Becks and Mary and another woman she didn’t know. But then Becks and Mary had had twelve years to make new friendships. No Maeve, thank God. And no Adrienne; Becks had taken note of what she’d said on the phone.

  What she saw on their faces was curiosity. They were looking at her as you might look at a two-headed dog or a dinosaur brought back to life after a million years in a peat bog. She was a freak, and this was a freak show.

  ‘Lils!’ Becks stood up and got a smile on her face. She leaned over and air-kissed Lily.

  Little dark-haired Mary did the same.

  ‘Good to see you again, girl,’ said Mary, going a bit red in the face. Mary had never visited her inside–but Lily understood. She’d have been intimidated by visiting an inmate in prison if she’d been in Mary’s shoes. Only bolder souls like Becks would tough it out.

  ‘You too,’ Lily told Mary with a smile.

  ‘And this is Vanda,’ said Becks, and Vanda, a snooty-faced ultra-skinny blonde stood up and greeted her politely. ‘Vanda, this is Lily.’