The Death of Her

by Debbie Howells

  As I thought about everything he’d done to me, what he was going to let his friend do, I screamed as loudly as I could. In that moment, I saw an evil in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. I struggled free from him, then as I backed away, found myself cornered. A new fear had come over me. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do to me. I tried to scream again but I was paralysed, then as he closed in on me, I threw up.

  He jumped back, but not before the stream of vomit hit him full on. In his hurry he caught a lamp on his bookcase, sending it crashing onto the floor. Sweet relief as I heard Auntie Maureen coming. As her footsteps drew closer, Anthony begged me not to tell her.

  ‘Why?’ I stared at him, wondering how he’d explain the vomit down the front of him; liking the power I suddenly had. Why shouldn’t I tell her what kind of a monster her son was? What was in it for me if I kept silent?

  ‘She’ll fucking kill me, I know she will.’

  I didn’t care what she did to him. I glanced around the room, latching on to the first thing I saw that interested me. ‘Give me your radio.’

  ‘Take it,’ he whined, as I snatched it up.

  ‘If you ever touch me again, I’ll tell her everything,’ I spat at him, just as we heard her voice outside.

  I took my trophy home with me. Even though I looked at it and thought of Anthony, it represented a personal kind of victory over a world that seemed against me. I knew Anthony would never be able to look at me. And I was nearly fourteen. Old enough to be left alone. Not to have to go to Auntie Maureen’s ever again.

  Life breaks you down into tiny, dirty pieces. If you’re one of the lucky ones, it builds you up again. When your safety is threatened, when you’re forced to confront fear, they say you grow stronger. But not all of us. Some of us stay broken.

  But you always learn. Not to trust people. That evil comes in many forms. That every bully has an Achilles heel. That silence always has a price.

  As Leah got older, I waited for her charm to fade, for things to get easier, but they didn’t. I had parents who were blinkered in their own small world and I didn’t fit.

  I still had that same freaking wallpaper. My father had refused to spend good money on something I’d destroy. That’s how he put it. I’d already proved I wasn’t trustworthy. But neither was he.

  I wasn’t shocked when I found out about his affair. Wrapped up in my perfect, pretty little sister, my mother pretended not to notice, but I could tell. All those excuses about staying to work late, or having important out-of-the-blue meetings, coming home with booze on his breath and someone’s lipstick not quite wiped away.

  It didn’t change anything. I already hated him. I had a mother who only cared about my sister, and a father who only cared about himself. I’d been born into a fragmented family, where children weren’t born equal, where everyone only cared about themselves.

  Being alone was better, even in my dark, shabby bedroom that was the inverse of Leah’s pretty, light room. Lying on my bed, I’d pick at more wallpaper, unfairness eating away under my skin, into my very soul. One entire wall had been revealed, pocked with the stubborn bits of glue that refused to budge, and I’d started on another, loosening the edge of the paper with a short fingernail, freeing enough that I could grasp it between my fingers and slowly tear it.

  I perfected the art of keeping the pieces as long and thin as possible; when I finished one, I discarded it onto the floor where it joined others, not noticing the untidiness. It didn’t matter. Not to my parents, not to me. They’d made it clear to me a long time ago that I wasn’t deserving of better.

  There was something comforting about the air of decay in there. Maybe because it was the only corner of the bland, suburban home where I felt I belonged, my frustration gouged into the windowsill in a legacy of deep scratches. On the naked wall, black-Sharpie scrawls of anger. Screw you, fuckers. It didn’t actually say that in bold letters, but it may as well have.

  It was the only place I could be alone. With the door closed, I could allow my mind to go wherever it pleased. Not to stupid dream worlds with handsome princes and happily-ever-afters. I wasn’t naive. There were other places that were safer, where illusions didn’t exist, that were more real, where the pretence that life should be happy was dropped; places of darkness.

  Everything was clear in the dark. There were no distractions. Your senses – your intuition – were sharper, louder. There was no escape from what you thought, felt, or saw. And my mind wandered. I couldn’t stop it, any more than I could stop seeing the images that floated past me, opaque, unsettling, whispering in the darkness, playing their stories out against my peeling walls.

  In there, it was my world. I was in control, writing the script of the macabre theatre scenes, manipulating the characters as I pleased. But projected onto my wall, they were no strangers. There was my father, for instance, in his golf clothes. On Sundays, he always played golf – code for picking up bored married women he wanted to shag. He’d taken me with him, but only once, because he realized I saw too much.

  The scene in my room: my father stands above a bunker, only instead of pristine white sand, it’s a writhing, black pit. The word arrogant hangs over his head, uneven heavy letters suspended in the air for the world to see, because that’s what he was. Arrogant and superior and overbearing, with a sense of self-worth I utterly detested. The caring father, successful businessman, loving husband, all stripped away; those images showed him as he was.

  I enjoyed those pictures. With practise, I could make anything happen. Time and time again I’d replay them, watching as someone emerged from the shadows, beside him, or behind him, raising the gun, firing. The gunshot was real. So were the birds, their song deafening, as the breeze ruffled my hair and the red mark appeared on his forehead. As he stopped talking for the last time, as his legs crumpled. His body prostrate, unmoving, lifeless.

  I killed my father many times. Sometimes the killer was another golfer, biding his time, his rifle hidden in his bag of golf clubs. Once it was a woman, her hair the same colour as mine, her eyes blank as she fired, walking slowly away after dropping the gun. And always birds that would swoop down as I reached my arms out, their sound soothing me, my hair fanned across my face by the beating of their wings.

  After it was over, I’d make another mark in the windowsill, gouging through the aging gloss paint, thinking of my father’s hateful face, feeling the anger build inside me because he was still alive. Needing a thousand deaths to assuage the gaping, hollow emptiness in me, because it wasn’t enough.

  I needed more, to make the pain, the hurt, go away. Only one thing helped. Rolling up my sleeve, I reached for the razor blade I kept hidden for such times; pressing it against my skin, carefully, with just the right amount of pressure, feeling the cool metal, starting to cut.

  When the gun became too quick, too painless a death for my father, I reached into my head for something worse. Suffocation: he knew what was happening to him, was fully conscious as he realized he was going to die. A knife: straight through his heart, satisfying for its brutal imagery. I eased the razor blade into my own pale skin, seeing instead a serrated knife across my father’s throat.

  It made sense that a death should reflect a life; that someone guilty of inflicting years of suffering should themselves suffer. It was a thought that obsessed me as I made the punishment fit the crime, the justice lasting as long as the relief when I cut.

  My mother didn’t deserve an ugly death. She wasn’t a bad person, just a weak, obsessive, small-minded one. When it came to her, I had the perfect murderer, a kind of ironic one. My mother was to die at the hand of the person she lived for. Leah. It was Leah who’d wind the narrow pink scarf round her neck, then pull until our mother’s eyes bulged, too weak to fight as her oxygen supply was cut off.

  I could watch over and over, unemotionally, dispassionately, the same, oddly quiet scene every time. The snow starting to fall, my mother collapsing to her knees. Her acquiescence as Leah slowly choked the life out
of her, because Leah could do no wrong. The snow turning to glitter, so that in death, my mother’s body was far more beautiful than it had been in life.

  Killed so prettily, with a pink scarf, snow and glitter. For my mother, that was enough.

  Of course, it was logical that after she’d killed my mother, Leah had to die too. If you asked me why, I couldn’t explain. And when it came to her, I didn’t have to do a thing.

  We’d gone to a nearby lake, a place my mother had taken me to, just once. Leah was standing on the bank, gazing at the giant lily pads that grew there, the buds unfurling in a wave of soft pink across the water.

  As I watched, she stepped out onto a pad, a tiny figure surrounded by flowers, jumping onto the next giant leaf, then the next. I could have called to stop her any time. Instead, I stood and watched.

  As she reached the third leaf, she turned back to look at me, starting to sink, so slowly you couldn’t be sure it was happening. Silently, even with the water at waist height, all the while her eyes staring into mine.

  I sat on the bank tearing the petals off a daisy, until the flowers closed over her head. Then I got up and walked away.

  I didn’t want to think these things. And they weren’t real, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was my life that had made them happen. I’d become a reflection of the light and shadow, love and hate, inside my family and out.

  As more time passed, I couldn’t stop thinking what it would be like without them. We had genes in common, but that was all. By now, I rarely spoke to them. Why would you talk to someone who only ever told you off or put you down? Who took obvious pleasure in pointing out how you were a failure? Who, with every word, reminded you how worthless you were? Words which could so easily have comforted or cared, that were instead chosen to destroy you.

  While I was a nothing, Xander Pascoe was all things to all people. He sometimes reminded me of Anthony. It was his arrogance, the sense of the world owing him a favour. The leer that brought bile rushing to my throat. Yet underneath was steely control. He was only a little older than me, but people did what he said. It was on one of my darkest, most desperate days, that he said, ‘Tell me.’

  And I did.

  He was the one person who listened. I told him how my parents didn’t trust me. How I wasn’t reliable. Look at the state of my room, they pointed out. I couldn’t look after myself, let alone my sister.

  No faith, no belief, no trust, because you’re unworthy, Casey. Can’t do anything right. No matter how hard you try, you’re not good enough. Lucky for us, we have Jen.

  Jen, with her sparkling eyes and her naive, trusting face. Jen, who was the same age as I was, but who was from a world a million miles away from the one I lived in, where dreams came true and no one was ever nasty. The light to my shadow.

  At school, she haunted me, flitting in and out of my classes with her shiny hair and her A grades, always there, everywhere I went. Do you know how that felt, Jen? To be the shadow? To have the name teachers didn’t remember, to be the girl no one wanted to be friends with? You were the lead in the school play, captain of the sports teams. Prefect, future head girl, constantly adding to the list of your achievements. But you didn’t know, did you, that no one has it all; that ultimately, at some point, unfairness is redressed, light fades. That there is always balance.

  For me, there was no escaping you. No shielding myself from your brightness. Not at school, when friends flocked around you. You were in my home, too. I remember how it felt, watching as they paid you to replace me – trustworthy, reliable Jen, so much better at everything than I was.

  They were pretty, Jen and Leah. I used to watch them from upstairs, talking and laughing, but it wasn’t until the second time she came I realized what had happened; how cheap I was. For the price of a few pounds on a Saturday morning, so quickly replaced.

  I let familiar hurt stab me inside, fought the desire to cut myself, lost the battle, grateful when numbness set in. All this as I watched Leah and Jen, the pretty new sister my parents had bought her, spinning round in the garden, the sound of their laughter filling my ears, while another way came to me for how Leah could die. It wasn’t my fault, was it, that I had to watch her with Jen? Or that terrible pictures filled my head, one after another, when all I wanted was for them to go away.

  They were so perfect, Leah and Jen, so liked, so likeable. Jen, who was actually just another freaking teenager. The same as I was, but not the same. She lacked the cloud of reality that hung over me. So lovely, so reliable, so loved by Leah, words that crawled up the stairs and under my bedroom door, every Saturday without fail. Only on reaching me, the letters had been rearranged, so that all I heard was how unreliable I was. How ugly, how hateful.

  Cutting no longer helped. I had a disconnected feeling I couldn’t shake; a life that felt like someone else’s. When I caught my reflection in the mirror, it was someone else who looked back at me. Someone I didn’t know, with white skin and glittering eyes, from whom a power radiated out. I’d no idea what was happening to me.

  A few times, the next step presented itself, dangled in front of me, daring me to be brave.

  Take the step, Casey . . . How close you are. How little it would take to cut harder, deeper, until you hit an artery. Orchestrate your own death . . .

  Staring at my reflection, I watched the thought reflected in those glittering eyes, wondering how it would feel; whether the draining of blood from my body would bring the relief I craved, how long it would take for my life to ebb away. For me to die.

  I floated the thought around in my head. And then something happened that changed the game completely. It was as I stood there, contemplating my end, staring at the face in the mirror, that it smiled back at me, then turned away.

  19

  Charlotte

  I stay away from the hospital for a few days, until Abbie Rose calls me.

  ‘Evie’s going home. I’d hoped her mother would be able to stay, but she’s had to fly back – she lives in Italy. I wanted to ask you if you’d be able to spend some time with her. I understand if you’re too busy, but it’s a big step and, understandably, she’s anxious.’

  But also, there isn’t anyone else. She doesn’t have to say it, I’m all too aware. Jesus, it’s as if I’m an unpaid police volunteer, or something. ‘Of course, Detective Inspector.’ But I’m not doing it for her. ‘When’s she going?’

  ‘The plan is tomorrow afternoon. We’re arranging a police guard round the clock, and I’ll be with her a lot of the time. It’s just . . .’ She makes no mention of the body I found in the field. Does she even know? I wonder.

  ‘You want someone there she trusts.’

  Abbie Rose hesitates, but she doesn’t take the bait. ‘I suppose you could put it like that.’ She pauses again. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of her needing a friend.’

  The next morning, I oversleep. I’m hungover after too much wine, trying to blot out the memory of the girl’s body. It crosses my mind to cancel – but I’ve nothing else planned and I’m curious, wondering what it will be like for Jen, being home. Since the attack, her life has consisted of that hospital bed in that bare white room, with vile food, fussing nurses and Abbie Rose probing into her life.

  I leave it till mid-afternoon. Knowing hospitals, I can’t imagine her being discharged any earlier than that. Then, as I drive over to Helen Osterman’s cottage, I’m reminded of the times we camped there. In truth, being outside Jen’s immediate circle, I wasn’t often invited. About twice, I think, during a year we had a mutual friend, Sophie. Her name comes to me. I haven’t given Sophie a thought in over a decade.

  I overshoot the track to Jen’s house the first time. Then, as I slam on the brakes to reverse into a gateway, someone almost drives up the back of me. Resisting the temptation to shout four-letter words as they hoot then accelerate past, I breathe deeply. Saving my energy. The world is full of arseholes.

  I drive slowly up the track that leads to the house, picking my way round th
e potholes, until I see a BMW parked up ahead, which I guess must belong to Abbie Rose. I like her choice in cars. I pull up behind it then get out, standing there for a moment, looking around, trying to remember where our teenage campsite used to be.

  Round the corner, I notice the battered Peugot Abbie Rose mentioned. Then I shiver as the past comes suddenly back. Ghosts of us all, the friendships, the closed circles; the cruel exclusions caused by teenage politics. I used to be in the background of it all until I made a friend who felt the same way I did. After that, there was no stopping me.

  This place isn’t as it used to be. Not just because the trees need cutting back – they’ve grown too tall, so that they overhang the track, blocking out the light and leaving the house in shade – the hedge, too, is unkempt and wild-looking, heavy with overripe blackberries, the narrow gate in it hung unevenly.

  As I walk up the path, I notice the air of neglect. The paint on the window frames is peeling and there are tiles missing from the roof. Even so, it’s an interesting house. Mostly old – seventeenth century I’d guess – and not big, even with the usual tacked-on additions that have come much later, but it isn’t friendly. In fact, the energy I pick up is anything but.

  The front door is open, and I knock, then without waiting for an answer, go in, curious to see inside. The interior looks as though it’s stuck in a time warp, with a tiny sixties fireplace that needs ripping out and a threadbare patterned carpet, under which, I don’t mind guessing, are huge, uneven slabs of Cornish slate. The walls are wonderfully uneven and the furniture decades old. The odd piece is tasteful, though most of it’s not. And the curtains . . . I’m still trying to find the words to describe them when I hear footsteps.

  ‘Hello . . .’ I call out. ‘It’s Charlotte. Harrison.’