Nemesister: The gripping women's psychological thriller from Sophie Jonas-Hill

by Sophie Jonas-Hill

‘I suppose so, but don’t you fret none. We try and get together when we can, don’t get together much seein’ as … darlin’ … you okay?’

  Have I crashed your … have I crashed?

  ‘Sorry, it’s nothing …’

  ‘What?’ He frowned.

  Crash.

  The sound of tyres on grey dirt, of velocity interrupted.

  ‘What you doing, you crazy bitch?’

  ‘Crashed,’ I said, gripping the wheel. ‘I remember a car, maybe …’ I closed my eyes and caught a whiff of something hot and metallic. ‘A car, a crash, a … a road accident?’

  Red looked at me and nodded slowly. ‘It’s a possibility. I’d be surprised if there’s been a road crew out this way in a good while, bound to be a few potholes.’

  ‘Did you see a car?’ I asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Coming here, you must have come here down the road, did … did you see anything like a crash?’

  ‘Well now …’

  ‘How long have you been here? It must have happened nearby for me to have walked.’

  ‘I came up yesterday,’ he said, glancing over to the boathouse and the tree. ‘I don’t recall anything …’ he straightened up. ‘Anything unexpected.’

  ‘You saw nothing?’ I asked, but he was silent. In the space between us the marsh clicked and sighed under the ochre sky and the wind rattled the grass.

  ‘Sure as I see you here.’ Red sniffed. ‘Ain’t nothing down that road but a whole heap of empty. My wheels are the only ones for miles.’

  ‘Until your brother gets here.’

  He smiled. ‘S’right. Or, unless I get her going.’ He patted the hood of the truck.

  ‘But,’ I said and his smile dimmed. ‘If I did crash … what if it was the other way, I mean, further on past this place?’

  Red considered what I’d said, his expression that of a man wondering how best to kill a wasp. ‘I suppose so. Seein’ as I came in from one way, guess I never checked t’other.’

  ‘It could be that way then,’ I said. ‘I could go see?’

  ‘You will not,’ Red said and clapped his hands together, brushing dust off them. ‘You, darlin’, is still half asleep and all beat up with a bullet wound in your side. You’s gonna stay right here.’

  ‘No, really, I should go, if my car’s there, maybe …’

  Red pulled a hurt face. ‘Spending time with me is such a trial for you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘Sure you didn’t.’ He ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged on his smile. ‘Look, you go get a shower, and when you’re done, if my truck ain’t ready, we’ll strap up your feet and go see, if you really got to.’

  I got down from the truck. ‘Yeah, I think I should, get out the way, you know? I’ll go wash up,’ I said and hobbled toward the kitchen door.

  ‘You best close up the front,’ Red said after me. When I glanced round at him, he shrugged. ‘Not sure if this has occurred to you in all your considerations, even if you had cause to crash your vehicle all by yourself, someone else had cause to shoot you.’ He grinned. ‘Whoever it were, they might not be done with you yet. Wouldn’t want some ungentlemanly type slippin’ in while you’re takin’ a bath.’

  I made it to the kitchen and stood in the gloom by the sink. I ran water into a glass, watching to see what Red did. The smell of river mud was an assertive undercurrent to my now-familiar perfume of sweat and blood, the whole concoction rising up around me as I lurked in the darkness. Red disappeared from my line of sight and then reappeared, picking at an engine part. I pulled the door to until it was standing half open and gave me a little cover. All I found as I opened cupboards and pulled out drawers was an old lamp, a couple of buckets and a mismatched collection of cutlery and plates, the dog ends of other kitchens. There were blades, but nothing grander than a butter knife. If my unknown shooter chose to disable Red, or if the man himself turned nasty, a dented potato masher would not be much use. I put my empty glass down by the sink. No matter how much I tried to fit him into the puzzle, I couldn’t make Red into my shooter, though that didn’t mean I’d trust him with a potato masher.

  I closed up the main door as he’d instructed. There was a hasp and ring on both sides, and a large padlock hooked through the ring on the inside. I eased it out so I could flip the hasp over but then paused, padlock in hand. I didn’t have the key, so although I fitted the arm of the padlock back into the ring, I didn’t close it up. I felt safer not locking myself in right now.

  I stood in the main room and let my gaze wander over its greying walls with their tidemark of rising damp, and the cancerous swelling of ceiling plaster in the corners. I felt as though I was trying to remember something in a world where everything had been long forgotten.

  The staircase creaked on my way up to the landing. The first door was locked, though I gave it a push just to make sure it meant it. Its round, ceramic doorknob refused to budge. The door at the end stood open to reveal a mildewed bathroom, and a glance confirmed the other as a small bedroom where Red had, hopefully, spent the night.

  I’d forgotten I’d no idea what I looked like, until I met the stranger in the bathroom mirror. Red was right, something had made an almighty mess of my forehead. Distracted by the geometric quality of the swelling, I almost forgot to check the bathroom door for a lock. There was one – though I doubted it would hold under a sustained attack.

  The mirror doubled as the door to a shallow cabinet, which I opened to postpone facing my reflection again. It revealed two white shelves spotted with black mould, their paint peeling and coming off in flakes. There was an ancient tube of something curled up on the lower one, and next to it a medicine bottle. It was empty, but had once held a prescription for the relief of angina. The name on the label was almost gone, but I made out what could have been a Mr D-something. So Red had a heart condition? I wasn’t convinced, even in the face of the medical evidence. Nothing for it then, but to look.

  I closed the door. I was not a stranger, though I was unfamiliar. I saw my reflection as if I were both the observer and observed, like one does in a dream. I already knew my hair was short and dark, but I saw then that my roots were that sort of in-between brown and blond colour, dyed to blue-black at the tips. God, but my forehead really was a mess, the swelling at my hair line purple and angry looking, with a starburst of dried blood. I moved as if to touch it, but faltered as I looked into my eyes. They were brown, the sort people call hazel, and though I knew they would be, and that of course they were mine, there was something other about them; a sense that the face in the mirror, the gaze that met mine, was watching me as much as I watched it. I smiled, and my reflection smiled too, as if she knew something I didn’t, as if she’d seen me across a room quite unexpectedly, and was amused to see I’d been invited to the same party. The light from the square of window was bright in the corner, and cast the space behind me into shadow. The longer I looked, the more the sensation grew that there was someone else there only in the mirror world, someone looking at me as he sat in the tub, arms up behind his head, long shadow-made limbs.

  ‘Pop, pop, pop, firecracker! You’s all fourth o’ July.’

  The words came to me with a rush of emotion. A smile grinned from my memory and sent me reeling back from the glass. I spun round, so sure he was there, only he wasn’t. I was alone with the echo of those words trickling.

  ‘Pop, pop, pop – firecracker!’ And that smile, that smile; black, warm, all for me. It curled its way deep into my spine, and left me cold and shaking.

  I strained for the words again, but they were gone and I couldn’t remember who’d said them, me or my reflection. Paris … why did I have to get to Paris? I wasn’t just a library with no autobiography section; the travel guides were also missing. I rubbed my face and looked down.

  I was wearing track pants, which when new might have been pale blue with white piping along the seams, but were now unspeakable. They were not a style of garment that cou
ld take a lot of pocket stuffing, but when I stepped out of them, I ran my hands over the seat for the sake of argument. The left pocket crackled. I pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was a flyer for a bar, printed on black shiny stuff that was sufficiently water-repellent to have survived its soaking. It was printed with the image of a dancing girl sat in a martini glass, and written above in neon pink was the single word, PARIS.

  I exhaled.

  This was the PARIS, my Paris? A place labelled ‘drinking, dancing and entertainment’? I frowned, disappointed. So, what? Was this just the last place I’d gotten drunk before driving out here to crash? There was an address, so if Red ever got his old truck running again, we could head out that way. Perhaps I’d left my purse, if I’d ever had such a thing. I re-folded the paper and put it on the edge of the basin, feeling none the wiser. Then I picked it up and put it back in my pants pocket, deciding against leaving it around.

  I remembered Red’s offer of jeans and an undershirt, but there was no sign of them on the rail beside the two utilitarian towels. If this was his idea of a weekend getaway, he was Spartan in nature; no four-ply double plush luxury for old Red. Then, seeing as he was a military man, maybe this was the charm for him, like going back to basic training?

  I checked the lock again before I turned on the shower, then kicked my despoiled track pants hard against the bottom of the door. When I was sure it was jammed as tight as I could manage, I ripped off my bloodied, sweat-stained t-shirt and surrendered to the shower. The water was the simplest, most innocent pleasure I could have imagined, memory loss or not. I was convinced I could even hear steam rising from my feet as the water embraced them.

  I was careful of the bandage Red had applied. Stained dark though it was, it was still tight to my skin and I didn’t want to see what lay beneath just yet. I angled myself so that it was free of the water, and tried to wash around it. There was a Lilliputian bottle of shower gel on the side. I squeezed out what was left into my hands and worked it over my body, taking a perverse glee in the brackish sludge that washed down the plughole.

  Crazy as it sounds, it was only looking down as I washed myself, one hand over the bandage, that I saw my hands for the first time, I mean, kind of really took in what they looked like. My nails were pink, bubble-gum pink, set with rhinestones and sharpened into talons. Now the filth that had encrusted them since I’d woken was gone, they looked startlingly bright against the bathroom tiles. Hooker’s claws – a couple missing on my right hand and my real nails raw and stubby underneath, like shelled prawns.

  The memory of them flashed behind my eyes, of me getting them done. I caught the echo of a smell, hot acrylic dust, plastic and acetone, and the whir of the pendant drill as it sharpened their points. I knew they were for a special occasion, because they really weren’t my usual sort of thing. I could remember how it felt to watch my hands change, like slipping on the wrong gloves, and how I’d been talking all the time to the girl who sat opposite me, a white dust mask over her nose and mouth. She’d been nodding, and I’d talked, loud and fast, as if I was trying out a new voice, a rehearsal. I’d watched the girl as she worked and I talked, to see if she realized I was acting, sneaking a glance when she looked down at her tools, trying to gauge the impression I made on her. Then I made her laugh, a joke, something filthy – she laughed, mouth hidden behind her mask, eyes crinkling at their corners, dark eyes, make-up moist.

  I shivered, and the vision receded, or became a memory again, a single picture fluttering alone in my darkness. I wiped the water from my eyes and looked down at my body as if it was someone else’s, laid out for inspection against the slab of the wall. My bikini line was stripped bare, deforested. That wasn’t me either, I was sure, not a wax job that severe, that punishing. I ran my fingers over the mound of my flesh, hardly a trace of stubble. And I’d applied fake tan too, and I knew I’d done it, or rather, it wasn’t a professional job, because there were streaks at the top of my thighs, and its tobacco tone darkened clumsily over my knees.

  I squeezed the last of the shower gel into my hand and gave my thighs a final scrub. An ounce of it might have gone a long way, but couldn’t get my sort of dirty clean. I dropped it into the tub, closed my eyes and let the water run over my face. Had I been a girl in a glass, like some cocktail olive, served up skewered on a pole?

  I became aware of a dry, musty smell: curled cinnamon and sandalwood. At first I thought it was the scent of the soap, but the perfume grew stronger and the hissing of the water seemed to recede.

  ‘Be careful, little fish,’ a voice whispered to me. ‘Ya swim with a fisherman …’

  Laughter buzzed in my ears, rich and purple-gold and sweet, like a curl of honey from the pot. An image came to me: my hand holding a gun.

  ‘What the hell you doin’, you gonna shoot me now?’

  It wasn’t in the shack but somewhere else, somewhere bright and loud, music pulsing through my feet. I screwed up my eyes and pressed my head against the tiles, desperate not to force it,.

  ‘What you doin’ you crazy bitch?’

  But the voice wound down the plughole with the dirty water, until it was nothing more than the gurgle and splash. In frustration, I gripped my hands together, screwed up my face.

  ‘Not all men who do evil, become evil.’

  I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in the towels, hugging them close as the floor seemed to lurch under my feet. I let my legs give way and knelt down, one hand on the floor to steady myself. My other hand spasmed, jumped, as if it meant to clutch at something, or as if I’d dropped something I’d be desperate to hold onto. Not the gun, though, a soft thing, a precious thing – pearl buttons on blue velvet? Then the ghost of the sensation melted into the cracked linoleum. I crouched, listening to my breathing come back under my control. The movement of the room subsided, then the fall of water from the shower grew loud enough to mask the rest of the world again. Whatever had come to me, had gone. I opened my eyes, and stood up.

  The bathroom’s single window was above and a little to the left of the toilet. From where I was, it showed me nothing but sky through the grimy glass, but I figured it might give me a new perspective on the world outside, if I got a little closer. I put one foot on the can, then stood up on it to grip the windowsill and peer out. I could see the side of the house and a whole lot of green, undulating swamp, bisected by the thin, grey road, running like a scratch across a marble tabletop. Directly below me, I saw Red’s truck, hood still yawning open, then he came up for air from below it, wiping his hands on his jeans. He stood for a moment, absorbed with his work, while sunlight caught on a wing mirror on the ground and reflected off the windshield.

  Had Red shot me? Paris, Paris, Paris – the word buzzed around my head like it was trying to find a way out, a fly caught against glass. The light made my eyes hurt. There seemed to be as little out there to help me remember, as there was in here, so I got down. Red was busy with his truck. He’d promised to take me into town when it was fixed, and I didn’t want to interrupt the fixing, so decided to get the clothes myself, leaving the water running in the hope that the noise would cover my movements.

  The house was never silent, but I had the feeling it was holding its breath as I stepped out onto the landing, oozing disapproval along with the damp from the walls. My spine tingled; how many hurricane seasons and rainstorms had this place lived through, how many more before it would give way to the inching, creeping wetness?

  ‘I’ll outlive you, whatever,’ I promised it. The floorboard under my foot creaked as I moved forwards, as if it was sniggering behind my back.

  The compact bedroom was sparsely furnished, the iron bedstead and skinny mattress spread with a thin sleeping bag. I looked over the banisters, checked the towels were as tight around me as I could make them, then went in.

  There was a small case on a chair under the window and a narrow wardrobe with a grey suit hanging on its door. I read the label, not bad. I might not have remembered my name but I remem
bered this one. There were shoes by the suit, well-polished and well-heeled.

  ‘I am not always as you see me here.’

  I inhaled and the fabric smelled of aftershave and cigarettes. When I poked my fingers into his case, I found neatly folded clothes, shirts and pants. I deliberated for three whole seconds before I pulled out a pair of jeans and a white tank. Red could get angry with me, but I’d rather he did so when I wasn’t naked.

  Once dressed, I was going to leave, then I remembered the shoes and picked one up. They’d be big, but if it came to it, maybe I could stagger a few feet further down the road if I padded out my feet with his socks. They were nice quality, very well-heeled indeed, much too smart for a fishing trip.

  I put the shoe down and pulled the mouth of the case open again. Where were the plaid shirts and cargo pants your regular weekend fisherman would wear? Sure, a fisherman would have some 5O1’s and a couple of plain t-shirts in his bag, but what fisherman bothers to pack a suit? Did he intend dressing for dinner?

  I patted the case into shape, stepped back to make sure it wasn’t obvious that I’d searched it, and saw a pile of small change and a matchbook on the bedside cabinet, just like in every good detective story.

  ‘Well, of course,’ I said and picked up the matchbook. It was black and glossy, and when I turned it over, had a word printed on it, in neon pink script.

  PARIS.

  I snatched up the towels and made the bathroom in three strides, locking the door behind me. I leant against it, the noise of the shower roaring in my ears.

  If Red wanted me dead, I would be. He could have pressed a pillow over my face while I lay on the couch and dumped my body in the swamp out back. If he knew me, if he knew who I was, he had a reason for not finishing me off and for not refreshing my memory. If he thought I still remembered nothing at all, maybe I’d buy myself time, until I actually did remember what the hell it was he wasn’t telling me.

  I needed a plan, I needed something - fuck, I needed to stop my heart racing and my stomach doing an adrenaline-powered three-sixty. I needed to get a grip. I looked up at the bathroom window, blinking at the bright, blue white square of it on the wall.