The Rift

by Nina Allan

  “I don’t think you’ve given it long enough,” she said. “This contract – it’s what you’ve always wanted, Johnny. You can’t give it up. Not so soon, anyway. You’d be kicking yourself in no time. You have to give things a chance.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “God, no.” What does that have to do with anything? she almost added, then didn’t. It came to her that she didn’t want to make out as if there was nothing between them any more, not even to prove a point. That wouldn’t be true, and it wouldn’t be fair on either of them. “That’s not what this is about. I meant what I said, that we should leave things as they are for a while, see what happens. That doesn’t mean you have to come rushing home the moment you start feeling lonely. I don’t think you should.”

  “And you still won’t change your mind? About coming out here?”

  She sighed. “I can’t, Johnny. There’s stuff I need to sort out here. And there’s the house.”

  “We could have a house over here.”

  “I can’t,” she said again, more gently. “Nothing’s changed.” She paused, listening to the sound of his breathing, and then found herself suggesting they have this conversation again in six months’ time. Johnny seemed much more cheerful after that, back to his usual self in fact, joking and taking the piss and telling her about the cool South Korean horror movie he’d been to with his flatmate, the Japanese track engineer.

  “Ryu’s a total horror nut,” Johnny said. “He’s seen more films than I have.”

  He told her they’d been thinking about moving out of the team accommodation and renting somewhere closer to the city centre. “It’s a bit of a ghetto, this place,” he said. “A bit one-track.”

  “Ha, ha,” Selena said. She hoped she hadn’t promised Johnny more than she’d meant to. Moving to Kuala Lumpur would have been a disaster for her, for the simple reason that she had no reason to be there other than Johnny. She admired Johnny for what he did, not just because he was great at it but because he loved it so much.

  She wondered how different their lives might have been, if she’d been more ambitious – if she’d nursed a hunger for something, the way Johnny always had with his racing, with his monster trucks. Johnny would never have tried to stand in her way, she knew that, he’d have welcomed it. He wasn’t like some of the others at the track, that creep Hoppo Bennister, for instance, who referred to his girlfriend Rose – a senior staff nurse at North Manchester General – as the kitchen staff.

  Hoppo had been mad as hell when Johnny landed the Kuala Lumpur contract, and Selena was glad.

  What a mess, she thought. Her, she meant, not Johnny, Johnny was cool. His mentioning the Japanese track engineer made her think of Stephen Dent, the maths teacher with the koi carp, the man she’d befriended during the summer of Mum’s affair. No one had known about Stephen Dent, only Julie, who had made certain Selena knew she knew, not threatening her exactly, but simply making it clear that she had the information.

  Information that Julie could use to make her life difficult, if she had a mind to. Selena had been the last person to see Stephen Dent alive. She’d spent the following six months tortured by the idea that she’d been to blame in some way for his suicide, that she’d let him down.

  Then Julie had gone missing, and her grief over Stephen Dent had taken on the aura of a dream. A selfish private fantasy that was also shameful. She had barely known the man, after all, so how could she grieve for him?

  Out of the blue, she found herself wanting to tell Johnny about Stephen Dent, about his hopeless, pathetic love for Hiromi Shiburin, about the horrible way he had died. Most of all about the koi carp, how lovely they had been, how vulnerable to harm.

  The way we all are, here in our fish bowl. The whole stupid lot of us.

  Selena knew that Johnny would never say, You mean this bloke killed himself over some dead goldfish? Johnny would get it, and even if he didn’t, he would never take the piss.

  Vanja was right. He was kind.

  “I should go,” she said at last. “We’ve been on for ages. This call must be costing you a fortune.”

  She half expected Johnny to argue, but he didn’t. Quit while you’re ahead. That was Johnny all over.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “Soon.”

  After they’d hung up, Selena logged on to IMDb and looked up The Shoe. The film was directed by Aislin Warner, and told the story of a young homeless man, living on the streets of Glasgow in the late 1980s. He originally leaves home because he suspects his stepfather of killing his younger sister, although the audience doesn’t know that at the beginning. The film opens with the homeless guy, Tony, meeting a woman at the local benefits centre and gradually beginning to put his life in order. He gets a council flat and then a job, even goes back to college part-time to study history.

  When anyone asks him about his past or his family, he tells them he was brought up in a children’s home. He recounts stories about the other kids there, invents whole lives. Then one day he receives a parcel through the post. Inside the parcel is a child’s shoe. The shoe awakens terrible memories in Tony, because the shoe is his sister’s.

  The film won prizes at several independent film festivals, but although many critics had written positively about the movie, most of the discussion seemed to centre on whether or not Tony was partly to blame for the death of his sister. No one seemed that interested in the alternative childhood Tony had constructed for himself. The consensus seemed to be that Tony had created a false past in order to avoid feeling guilty, or to appear more righteous than he was. Better.

  Only one critic, someone called Mark Samphire, mentioned something called false identity syndrome. Samphire argued that the shoe was important not because it proved Tony’s guilt, but because it challenged Tony’s invented version of reality. The shoe proved that Tony’s sister Leanne had existed, even if it couldn’t prove – not by itself, anyway – how she had died. Only Tony knew the truth about who had killed her, and once his real past had been revealed to him, he was finally ready to let that truth be known.

  * * *

  “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” Julie said. “With Mum, I mean? She’s not answering her phone.”

  “She’s still at Auntie Janice’s,” Selena said. Julie looked at her as if she’d said Margery had emigrated to Australia, or joined MI5, or something.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or not?”

  “She freaked out a bit, that’s all. She needs some time by herself.”

  “Time by herself with Auntie Janice?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What did she say to you, Selena? I know there’s something. It was you who wanted me to go and see her, remember? You’ve been acting strangely ever since we went round there.” She paused. “You can tell me, you know. I won’t break.”

  Selena hesitated. “Mum called me the same night, actually, after I got home. She said she didn’t believe you are who you say you are. She doesn’t want to see you again. The being at Auntie Janice’s is real, though. I phoned up to check. I didn’t tell you because I think she’s being ridiculous and I didn’t want to worry you. I’m sure she’ll be feeling differently by the time she comes back.”

  Julie gazed at her impassively. “Is she all right?” she said at last.

  “Who, Mum? I have no idea. I haven’t been able to speak to her. She’s always out when I call. That’s what Janice says, anyway.”

  “So Janice is covering for her?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I don’t really care, to be honest. I know it sounds awful, but I don’t give a stuff what she thinks. It’s one less thing to worry about.”

  They fell silent. Julie’s attention was clearly elsewhere. She seemed to have lost all interest in the subject of Mum, or Janice, and maybe that was good. As Julie said herself, it was one less thing to worry about.

  “Have you ever seen a film called The Shoe?” Selena asked suddenly.


  “I don’t think so. What’s it about?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Did you mean what you said to Mum, about working in pathology?”

  “I think so. I haven’t really decided yet. I don’t want to go on filing patient records for the rest of my life, but it’s hard to think about the future with – well, with knowing what I know. It’s like being in prison.”

  “Prison?”

  “You know what happens when someone’s committed a crime? They don’t even get considered for parole until they start to express remorse for what they’ve done. But what if you didn’t do it? What if the evidence you gave was true all along? You either have to lie, or stay in prison. I know I’m not actually in jail but that’s how I feel. If my own mother believes I’m a lunatic, what hope is there?”

  Not a lunatic, Selena thought. Just not Julie.

  “What if you had proof, though?” she said.

  “What do you suggest? March a bunch of people down to Hatchmere, see who gets taken?”

  In the film The Shoe, Tony Costello starts out by insisting he has no idea why anyone would want to send him a child’s shoe, that the parcel must have been wrongly addressed, that there was another Tony Costello, all kinds of excuses. In the end it’s his wife, Marina – the woman he meets at the dole office at the start of the film – who forces him to face up to what’s happening.

  She doesn’t bully him though, or threaten him. She helps him to understand that hiding the truth will never let him feel safe in the way he imagines.

  “You have the pendant,” Selena said. “I’ve been wondering. Would you let me borrow it, just for a little while? I think I know someone who might be able to help.”

  The look on Julie’s face – a kind of dumb horror, as if Selena had suggested something unspeakable. Like calling the police, say. Telling them she’d been abducted by a bunch of aliens.

  “The silverwing is all I have,” she said quietly. “If I lose it, I lose everything. I lose who I am.”

  “I’m not talking about giving it up. I’d like someone to have a look at it, that’s all. There’s a woman in London – my boss knows her. She specialises in identifying, I don’t know, alien metals. She has a degree in it, or something. Vanja will know. If we could get the metal analysed, we might have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.” She paused. “Vanja’s not like other people. She doesn’t judge. You can trust her completely.”

  “What would you say to her?”

  “That my sister owns an unusual piece of jewellery and would like to know where it came from.”

  “I don’t know.” Julie hunched her shoulders, curving in on herself as if she were cold.

  “Vanja won’t tell anyone. Not unless you want her to.” Selena thought of the various unsavoury characters who turned up at the shop to see Vasili, the seedy-looking men with their expensive leather jackets and bulging back pockets and designer stubble, the elaborate tattoos, Vanja showing them through to the back office with a resigned shrug, flipping them a double ‘v’ the moment the door was closed: fucking arsehole, what a knob. “You’d like her.”

  After what seemed like an interminable interval, Julie nodded. “Just ask her what it would involve if I said yes.”

  “I’ll ask her tomorrow. And don’t worry.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.” Julie laughed, then pressed her lips together, trying to make a smile and not succeeding, and Selena wondered if this was how it was going to be from now on: for most of the time she’d be able to convince herself that Julie was coming to terms with whatever had happened to her, that things were returning to normal. Then suddenly and out of nowhere this ground-level fear, like a bomb had gone off.

  The way things had been with Dad, in other words. Selena remembered how it had been the last time she’d seen Ray alive. They’d had their usual Sunday lunch at The George, then afterwards they’d played darts with a few of the regulars, mates of her dad’s, or half-mates, people he knew by name, anyway. It had been a laugh. Ray had seemed relaxed, happy even. At the end of the afternoon he’d hugged her and mussed her hair like any other father. See you next week, love, he’d said. Four days later he’d taken himself off to the lake to search for aliens and had his heart attack.

  All that madness, still churning away inside him. Selena had been powerless against it. She’d barely had a clue.

  Ray had appreciated her love, she knew that, needed it even. But it had never been enough to make him well again.

  * * *

  “You remember I told you about my sister?” Selena said.

  “Not the crazy one?” Vanja opened her eyes wide, faking innocence, then grinned. She was wearing steel-blue eye shadow, as a diversion, Selena guessed, from what looked like the remains of a bruise. Vanja saw Selena looking and grinned again. “What is it you say, I fell down the stairs, or what?” She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, dushen’ka, it’s not what it looks like. We had some trouble with a guy who was staying with us over the weekend. Vasya had to throw him out in the end. He broke all my flowerpots. Anyway, what’s the problem with the crazy sister?”

  “Her name’s Julie.”

  “Julie, then. What about her? You’re not asking me to give her a job, are you? We have enough crazy round here with Vasili.” She leaned forward on the counter, laced her fingers together and steepled them. She was wearing a topaz ring, a great white elephant of a thing they’d had in stock for several months. Selena had known for some time that Vanja had her eye on it, probably because it was so ugly. Vanja often turned up wearing items of jewellery no customer would look at twice. Jewellery orphans, Vanja called them. Built like battleships and twice as durable.

  “Nothing like that,” Selena said. “Julie has a piece of jewellery she thinks might be valuable. I was wondering if we could get someone to look at it for her.”

  “What kind of a thing is it, then?”

  “A necklace. A pendant, really. The frame is silver but the central stone is unusual. I thought at first it was an agate but now I’m not so sure.”

  “You’re not sure? You know what an agate is. So what are you telling me?”

  Selena sighed. This was the problem with Vanja – it was impossible to get one over on her. Living with Vasili would make that inevitable, she supposed. A baseline qualification. She had always admired Vanja’s tenacity but that didn’t stop it being damned inconvenient now and again.

  “This is going to sound weird,” she said.

  “You’ve already told me you have a crazy sister. How weird can it be?”

  “Julie’s not crazy, she’s just—”

  “So now you’re going to tell me she’s confused.”

  “Yes,” Selena said, then laughed. Not half as much as I am, she thought. “The thing is, Julie thinks there’s a chance that this pendant – well, that it might have come from somewhere else.”

  “Botswana, Bolivia, Birmingham? Where are we talking about?”

  “Julie claims the pendant is of extraterrestrial origin.” Amazing, Selena thought. I’m turning into Dad. Isn’t that what people say happens when someone dies?

  Vanja began to laugh, then abruptly ceased. “You’re not joking, are you?”

  Selena shook her head. “I’m afraid not. I know how it sounds but, I was wondering, aren’t there tests you can do? That metallurgist you told me about, the one who was selling the silver that came from meteors – wouldn’t she know?”

  “You mean Nadine Akoujan?” She tapped her teeth with the end of a biro, something she only did when she was nonplussed, or as Vanja would put it, flummoxed. Vanja had once asked Selena if she thought she should get one of those diamond tooth studs. So I could flash it when I flummox, Vanja grinned. Think it would suit me?

  No, Selena had said. Imagine what it would look like when you’re seventy.

  I had no idea you’d turned into my ma. Anyway, Vanja had insisted. I quite like the idea of being one of those mafia grannies. She hadn’t mentioned the tooth stud since but Sel
ena had the feeling she was still thinking about it.

  “People bring Nadine all kinds of weird stuff,” Vanja said finally. “She has some strange stories. Would you like me to call her?”

  “How much would she charge?”

  “Nadine does a lot of work for us. We pay her a salary. The money’s no problem.”

  Julie’s the problem, Selena thought. “Does she ever find anything? The kind of thing Julie is talking about, I mean?”

  “What do you think? Most of these cases turn out to be a waste of time. Hoaxes, or else just mistakes. But every now and then.” Vanja tapped her teeth again with the Bic. A black one, with a broken end. “Things come to light. Things that should not be here but are here anyway. Stuff, you know.”

  As in stuff you might find under the sofa. Alien artefacts.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Van.” It was amazing, how much better she felt just by admitting it. Like a balloon rising upwards into clear air, its tether flapping behind it like a question mark.

  Vanja rested her cheek on her hand, spun the Bic in a circle on the counter, making a rattling sound. “Understanding what’s going on all the time is boring, don’t you think? I hear your story and I remember how it feels to be excited about the world. I remember how the world is a mysterious place. I’d like to meet her, your Julie.”

  “She’s just my sister.” As if the word ‘just’ could ever apply to Julie. Where Julie was concerned, there were and always had been strings attached.

  There were moments when Selena almost wished Julie had stayed missing. It was an awful thing to admit, even to herself, but she knew it was true.

  “Thanks, Van,” she said. She hoped the conversation would end there, but no such luck.

  “You going to tell me what the deal is with her, or what?”

  “What do you mean, what’s the deal?”

  “You tell me. For years there is no sister, no sister at all. Then you tell me you do have a sister, but she has been ill. Next time you mention her, she wasn’t ill, she has been missing. Now you tell me she’s been stealing shit from aliens. I know you, Selena, and you’re not a bullshitter. So what’s the deal?”