by Jessie Keane
‘Hi Vanda,’ said Lily. Vanda nodded frostily, as if someone had just given her a dog turd for a present.
Lily’s conviction that this was a mistake deepened as they ordered. Vanda kept shooting odd looks at her, and Mary seemed uneasy. Becks was babbling nineteen-to-the-dozen, trying to keep it light, but the atmosphere at the table was tainted, and Lily quickly realized that it was her who had tainted it, simply by showing up. She was out of place here among the girls, stuck here like an interesting exhibit in a tent at a funfair.
Roll up, roll up. Come and see the amazing Jail Bird, fresh out of prison!
The starters came, and the wine, and they ate and drank, the others talking about inconsequential things: hemlines, Botox, the latest decorating trend, who was sleeping with who. By the time the mains arrived, Lily was wishing she’d never pushed for this. And when Vanda turned to her and opened her mouth, she just knew that she shouldn’t have done it.
‘So…I hope you don’t mind my asking…but what’s it like? Inside, I mean.’
Lily’d been waiting for the question. It had been simmering under the surface of all the other conversation for a while now, and here it was, finally, bursting to the surface, boiling over at last like lava.
She sipped her wine and looked around at their faces. At Vanda’s, coldly curious. At Mary’s, embarrassed but curious too. At Becks, who looked back at her with a hint of desperation in her eyes as if to say, Hey, this was your idea. I didn’t want to do it.
‘Only I heard,’ Vanda was going on, ‘that the culture shock of coming out–particularly after a long sentence–is so intense, so hard to cope with, that many–no, most–people who come out go back inside within a year. Did you know that?’
‘But that ain’t going to happen to you, is it, Lils?’ said Becks quickly, with a nervous little laugh. ‘Because you didn’t do it–right?’
‘Yeah, but even so. All that time in there,’ said Mary, her dark eyes, fringed with thick black lash extensions, resting on Lily’s face. ‘Must have been awful.’
Lily pursed her lips and looked around the three of them. Reminded herself that they meant no harm, and that their reaction was probably a natural one. ‘It’s a big adjustment,’ she said.
‘And you’re back at home now,’ said Becks. ‘With the girls. Jesus, I bet Maeve was happy about that.’
‘Seems like she couldn’t have her own kids, so she was keen to have yours instead,’ said Mary.
Lily gave a thin smile. ‘She only had ’em on loan,’ she said.
‘Oh fuck, talk of the devil…’ said Becks, her eyes on the big window at the front of the restaurant, beside the pavement. They all turned and looked. Maeve King was walking by, strutting with her usual bossy little fat woman’s walk, her flicked-up blonde hairdo catching the sun. She glanced into the darkness of the restaurant as she went past, and probably saw nothing because of the reflections of the cars passing by in the big sheet of glass, but the expression on her face was pure poison. She knew they were in there. Knew Lily was there with them.
‘Oh shit,’ said Mary.
Lily looked at Becks. ‘Does she know we’re meeting up today?’
Becks shrugged awkwardly. ‘I had to tell her you’d be here. Couldn’t just let her show up, now could I?’
‘And she said…?’ prompted Lily.
‘She said,’ Becks sighed, ‘no way would she want to come if you were here.’
‘And I bet that’s the polite version.’
‘It’s difficult, Lils,’ said Becks, her expression unhappy. ‘I got to try to keep Maeve sweet, you know that. Joe does work for Si sometimes, I can’t rock the boat too much.’
‘Looks like you’re rocking it now.’
‘Yeah, but…I can’t do it too much or too often, Lils. You’re my best mate and I love you, but I can’t. Sorry’
There was a tight silence.
‘Your daughters must have grown very attached to Maeve,’ piped up Vanda. ‘It was good of her to step in. For twelve years, after all.’
Twelve years was time enough to turn an impressionable young brain any way you wanted it to go, Lily knew that. She sat there and wondered how often in the course of a day Maeve had bad-mouthed her to the girls. How often they’d been told Mummy was a killer, Mummy didn’t love them, Mummy never remembered their birthdays or Christmas or any fucking thing, that she was in jail with scum and that was where she belonged because she was scum too.
Lily had switched her attention from Becks to Vanda. ‘You close to Maeve?’ she asked.
‘We’re all friends of Maeve’s,’ jumped in Becks quickly. Her pale blue eyes held Lily’s and said, Please Lils, don’tstart anything. ‘We’re friends of yours too, Lils. Me and Mary anyway. Vanda don’t know you.’
Yeah, and she ain’t going to know me either, thought Lily, who had taken against the chilly-looking woman big-style.
‘It’s hard, Lily,’ Becks went on. ‘We’re all friends, and this feud between you and Maeve is awkward for us.’
And you might have to pick sides? Lily wondered, looking around the table at them. They all dropped their eyes, got busy with cutlery, napkins, any fucking thing. Well, Vanda was already on the Maeve team of cheerleaders: that much was obvious. But she had thought that Becks–and Mary–would be on her side. Maybe she was wrong about that.
Maybe she was wrong about a lot of things.
Suddenly she felt like even another mouthful of food would choke her. She threw her fork down on the plate and stood up.
‘Look, it’s been fun, but I have to go,’ she said, wanting only to get away now. ‘Got to see my probation officer–as you do. I s’pose I’m lucky they didn’t fit me with a Peckham Rolex.’ Lily gave Vanda a cold smile. ‘That’s an electronic tag, Vanda. Something they sometimes like to fit on us ex-cons, keep track of them. Otherwise I guess there’s no telling where us bastards’ll end up or what mischief we’ll get up to, is there?’
Vanda went red. ‘Really…’ she sniffed.
‘You look a bit hot, Vanda, allow me to cool you down.’ And Lily grabbed the water jug and dumped the contents over Vanda’s expensive hairdo.
Vanda shrieked and surged to her feet in fury.
Other diners turned and stared.
Water was dripping off Vanda’s couture suit, cascading in runnels over her heavily made-up face.
‘Oh Lils don’t…’ started Becks, but Lily was already striding off across the restaurant to the foyer, furious tears pricking her eyes.
God, she’d been such a bloody fool. You couldn’t reclaim the past, make it whole and clean again. Too much dirty water had washed under the bridge; it was no good trying to pretend it hadn’t. She didn’t fit into this–their world–any longer. She didn’t give a toss whether the rug in her hall matched her hair colour or whether the kitchen worktops were granite or marble or even fucking cardboard. She used to care. She didn’t now. She’d changed, moved on. They hadn’t.
She was at the door when Becks caught up with her, grabbed her arm.
‘Lils! I’m sorry, I didn’t know Vanda was going to come out with all that,’ she said.
Lily gulped down a calming breath and forced a smile. ‘Don’t worry, Becks. Not your fault.’
‘Are you all right?’
All right? Yeah. Dispossessed, hated, cast out into the wilderness for something I didn’t do, but all right.
‘I’m fine,’ said Lily. ‘Going to look up another old friend this afternoon.’
‘Oh. Who?’
‘Julia.’
‘Julia?’ Becks’s jaw actually dropped. ‘But you…ain’t you heard what happened to Julia?’
Lily was frowning. ‘I know she married Nick, and they divorced. I know she was humping Leo.’
‘Yeah, but wait. There’s something you don’t know,’ said Becks.
‘Oh yeah? What?’
Becks told her. Later Lily went off to see her probation officer, like the good little lifer out on licence that she was, but
for hours afterwards she couldn’t get Becks’s words out of her head.
45
Lily was still feeling staggered by Becks’s revelations about Julia when Jack phoned her at home that afternoon. She felt safe at home, despite all the difficulties, despite Saz’s ongoing hostility. Here she was barricaded inside behind her state-of-the-art security system. Nowhere else felt truly secure now, not really. This was what the King brothers had reduced her to. Or would reduce her to, if she let them. Her thoughts strayed again to Julia, to what Becks had said.
‘She won’t see you. She don’t see anyone. Not now.’
And after that, the explanation. The dawning horror of it. And why, why in God’s name hadn’t Nick told her about this? Was this the reason he hadn’t wanted her to see Julia? Was he…oh God…was he in some way implicated in what had happened to Julia? Was that why he’d hidden these facts from Lily?
Maybe he was hiding more than that, she thought, and felt sick, and afraid.
Nick.
He’d been her first love. Once, she had believed they were meant to be together. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Leo had snatched her away from him, and worse, far worse than that, he had let Leo do it. And then Leo had snatched Julia. Lily tried but she could not stop herself from seeing all sorts of awful patterns emerging here, and they all converged on Nick. Nick her lover. Nick who might be her friend, but who could also be, in that covert and concealed way of his, her enemy.
She and poor bloody Julia had Nick and Leo in common. They had mixed, up close and personal, with these bad, hard men, and somehow it had destroyed them. Would she too become like that–shut away from the world because the world was too dangerous, too frightening to engage with? Already she felt it in herself, her reluctance to leave the safety of home again.
No.
They weren’t going to corral her with fear. They weren’t going to fence her in, make her mind her mouth. No way.
Then Nick phoned.
‘Hi,’ she said, feeling flustered at the sound of his voice, bewildered with all that was spinning around in her head about him.
‘Hi to you too,’ he said, and she could tell that he was smiling. ‘I want to see you.’
She felt a shiver of sheer lust rocket through her. But then…oh God, all these things in her mind, tormenting her. What Becks had told her about Julia. And Nick had been evasive, even angry, when she had raised the subject of Julia to him.
‘I…I’m really busy,’ she said lamely, unsure. Then, hearing the stony silence that greeted this she added: ‘Maybe in a few days…?’
‘A few days?’ There was a mixture of laughter and irritation in his voice. ‘Hey, lady. I can get women any day of the week, you know. I just have to click my fingers, and there they are.’
He was only teasing, she knew that, but still she felt annoyed. ‘Then why don’t you bugger off and do that?’ she snapped.
Silence. Then he said: ‘What’s going on, Lily? Has something happened?’
‘No. Nothing,’ she lied.
‘Only the last time I saw you, you were a lot warmer than this.’
‘Bad day,’ shrugged Lily.
‘Well…call me when you’re having a good one,’ he said, and hung up.
Shit, thought Lily, slamming the phone down, feeling sad and bewildered.
Immediately it rang again. She picked it up quickly, thinking it was him, apologizing, but it was Jack, who lost no time in adding his bit to the shit-storm that she already sensed was blowing her way.
‘It’s Alice Blunt,’ he said.
‘Alice? What about her?’
‘You sitting down?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do it.’
Lily sat down. Her heart was racing. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be good news.
‘Is she all right?’ she asked, dry-mouthed.
‘No. She ain’t. I’m sorry as fuck, Lily,’ said Jack on a heavy sigh, and then he told her the news.
They weren’t pleased to see Jack and Lily at the clinic, but no change there. They hadn’t been pleased last time, and this time when Lily asked to see the manager, she and Jack were ushered straight into a small office where a large, red-faced woman with a bad perm and a well-filled black twinset sat behind a desk. She didn’t waste a moment.
‘You’re Mrs King, you visited Alice?’ she rapped out.
‘Yeah, that’s me. Lily King.’
‘You told a member of my staff that you’d been in Australia, but that wasn’t true, was it? You’ve been in prison.’
‘Yeah,’ admitted Lily.
‘And is this yours? Did you leave this with Alice?’ The woman pushed the crumpled photo of Leo across the desk to her. Lily picked it up. It was damp, the image turned faintly green.
‘I thought it might…I don’t know. Jog her out of it. Or something,’ said Lily.
‘I was told by the nurses that your visit upset her. That she started acting strangely at that point. When you came here, gave her that.’
‘I didn’t intend any harm,’ said Lily, feeling nauseous. She didn’t want to start believing that she had been responsible in some way for Alice doing what she’d done. ‘How…? I mean, what happened?’
The woman sat back, her eyes still hostile but slightly less so. ‘She drowned herself. In the lake.’
Lily’s feeling of sickness intensified. She thought of Alice’s room up on the first floor, with its outstanding lakeside view. Of Alice, sitting there day after day, looking out at the cold green waters and plotting her own demise.
‘We found the photo on her body,’ said the woman.
Maybe it comforted her, thought Lily. But she couldn’t get past the remembered image of Alice screaming and screaming when she’d shown her the photo. Oh Jesus. Maybe it didn’t comfort her at all, seeing his image. Perhaps it brought home to the poor demented cow all the more that he was lost to her. It could be that the photo had set about this chain of events and led straight to Alice’s death at her own hands.
At her own hands. Alice had killed herself–so why then was Lily sitting here feeling like a murderer?
‘Of course incidents like this look very bad for us,’ said the woman.
Lily stared at her blankly. And is that all you care about? she wondered. It wasn’t the best of times to ask, but Lily thought, what the hell?
‘Can you tell me,’ she said hesitantly, ‘who paid the fees for Alice’s care?’
‘No,’ said the woman, going even redder in the face. ‘I can’t. And now, if you’ll excuse me…’
‘Well…when’s the funeral?’ The least she could do was send some flowers.
The woman’s eyes were openly hostile. ‘I don’t think that need concern you.’
‘So much for that,’ said Jack when they stood out in the foyer.
Alice’s brother Malcolm was coming down the stairs, carrying a cardboard box. Alice’s belongings, thought Lily. He spotted her standing there and bustled over, all truculent attitude and low intelligence, just like before.
‘Tell me you’re not thinking of going to the funeral,’ said Jack, eyeing the approaching man beadily. ‘You’d get lynched.’
‘No, I’m not going within a mile of that,’ said Lily with a shudder. She’d felt cold and shaky ever since Jack’s call. She couldn’t help it. Alice. Poor bloody Alice…‘Jack, I still want to know who paid her fees.’
‘Don’t sweat about it. I’ll find out, one way or another,’ said Jack, and then Alice’s brother was suddenly there in front of them, radiating aggression.
‘They said you upset her,’ he started in, dumping the box on the floor and stabbing with one pudgy finger at Lily.
Jack stepped forward. ‘Ease up, pal,’ he advised.
The brother subsided, but only slightly. He was breathing hard, pumped, eager to take his rage out on someone, anyone. ‘They said this silly mare showed her a photo of that git Leo King. Made her flip. Our mum’s in bits over this.’
Jesus, wha
t if that’s true? thought Lily in anguish. What if I really did push her over the edge?
She was aware of people moving in the background, nursing staff pausing, their eyes anxious. Did they have security here during the day? They must have. But right now, there were no reassuring uniforms in sight.
‘You need to cool down,’ said Jack.
‘You cool down, arsehole,’ spat Malcolm, his eyes still fastened with hate on Lily’s face. ‘This is your fault. My mum’s been admitted to hospital with pains in her chest, and it’s all down to you.’
The mother bothers him, thought Lily. Not the fact that his sister’s just killed herself.
He wasn’t just angry at Lily. He was angry that his mother cared enough about his sister to mourn her death. She had that strong impression again, of this troubled man hanging on to his mother like a prize–Look, she’s all mine!–and wondered what would happen to him when the mother finally died. What then? Madness, she suspected. He looked more than a little mad already.
‘You need sorting out,’ said the brother, and surged, red-faced and bulging-eyed, toward Lily.
Jack lashed out fast and punched him right-handed. Malcolm dropped like a sack of shit and hit the floor. He lay there, eyes open but dazed and unfocused.
‘No,’ said Jack, pointing down at him. ‘You do.’
‘I think we ought to get out of here,’ said Lily as a chorus of protesting shrieks went up from the nurses.
‘Seconded,’ said Jack, and they stepped over Alice’s brother and hurried from the building.
46
‘Someone tried to kill me,’ said Lily.
They’d fled the clinic and now they were sitting in the car outside Julia’s house. When Lily blurted that out, Jack looked at her like she’d flipped.
‘You what?’ he said.
‘I think someone tried to kill me.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I think they did.’
‘Um…how?’
‘Drive-by. Obviously they missed. But I’m not absolutely sure I was the target. They could have been aiming at who I was with.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘Nick O’Rourke. Made a mess of his car.’
