by Jessica Moor
‘I know you’re not.’
He turns the key in the ignition and the car springs back to life.
‘So you still want to learn to drive?’ he asks.
‘No.’
29.
Now
‘Jenny?’
Nazia had never called her by her name before, not out loud, but the name seemed to do its job anyway.
Jenny paused, and when she looked back she managed a smile. She’d eaten most of the pink lipstick off her mouth.
‘All right, Naz? What you following me for?’
Nazia stopped short, realizing she wasn’t yet sure of the answer herself. Instead, she countered with her own question. There were only questions here.
‘Where’re you going?’
‘Off.’ Jenny sniffed. She looked resolute, and her shoulder made an odd movement, as if she were hitching a bag higher on to it, but there was nothing there. ‘Cops’re distracted. Ruckus with Lynne. I don’t know. Don’t care. I’m off.’
‘What for?’
‘Got to go.’ Jenny’s teeth were working back and forth across her lips. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to go. Rattling, you know?’
‘I thought you said you’d got your methadone sorted?’
Nazia didn’t mean it to sound accusing, but it seemed that way to her ears. It reminded her of the way Sabbir had sounded the first time she’d said she didn’t want to play with him any more. Jenny was dancing a little on the spot, as if desperate to move, but at Nazia’s words she became still.
‘Sweet of you to remember that, Naz. Sweet of you to ask about me. You’re a mate.’
‘Yeah.’
Nazia didn’t know why she felt like crying, but that didn’t make any difference, because the tears were starting to come anyway.
‘So why’re you leaving?’
‘Nothing for me here.’
‘You’ve got me,’ Nazia said. Why did her voice sound so strange to her ears, so full that it might burst?
Jenny didn’t say anything to that. Maybe she didn’t hear it.
‘Not safe here,’ Jenny said. ‘Not for me, anyway. You’ll be all right, though. I’m sure you’ll be all right.’
‘Why’s it not safe?’
Jenny’s cheeks sucked in.
‘There’s . . .’ Whatever she was thinking seemed too vast to be able to get out of her mouth, so she shrugged, and started dancing in place again, looking anxiously back at the refuge. ‘Look, I just know, all right.’
‘But . . .’ Nazia reached out a hand to take Jenny’s. ‘Whatever it is, we could work it out. Tell the police.’
Jenny just laughed.
But then she stopped and looked Nazia in the eye. Clearer than Nazia had ever seen her look at anything. Not just sober, but penetrating. Alive.
‘I’m going to tell you something, Naz. Then I’ve got to go, okay?’
‘What is it?’
Jenny put her hand on Nazia’s arm to pull her closer. There was something in the gentleness of her grip that broke Nazia’s heart.
‘I’ll tell you what really happened. But you’ve got to keep it safe, okay? Don’t go blabbing. Not yet. We’ve got to pick our moment, Naz. Got to wait till it’s the right time. Can you do that?’
Nazia nodded.
30.
Then
Her mother asks her what’s wrong. She laughs.
‘Oh, it’s a silly thing, but Jamie drove a bit fast yesterday. Not too fast. Probably not over the speed limit – you know Jamie, he’s very sensible.’
Her mother is frowning slightly – the shape of the frown is still there, although the eyebrows are not.
‘And you know what young men are like. Boy racers. Ha ha.’
Her mother laughs and tells Katie that she’s too much of a worrier and that she shouldn’t worry about Jamie; he’s a lovely young man. ‘He’ll look after you.’
Then Katie’s mum hugs her. She doesn’t do it much these days. It’s as if she knows she’s not doing Katie any favours by getting too close.
‘He’s nothing like your dad, Katie.’
‘What?’
‘I know you’re scared of car accidents. You’ve always been a nervy girl, right from when you were tiny. But truly, you don’t need to worry so much. He’s nothing like your dad.’
* * *
• • •
She confronts him about it a couple of days later, if you can call it a confrontation. The feeling that she needs to say something has hatched inside her like a family of baby snakes; now, she can think of nothing else.
She tells herself that to talk to him about it is the healthy thing. It’s the kind of thing, she thinks, that any of her friends would have parroted, if she’d felt able to call them.
‘I don’t speed,’ he says, looking straight at her. ‘Don’t be stupid, Katie. I wouldn’t risk my career like that.’
‘You were doing fifty . . .’
‘Fifty?’ His laugh is as clear as a bell. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a thirty zone. I was doing thirty-five, absolute tops.’
There must be something in her face that continues to ask questions, even though she’s holding her tongue. Jamie laughs and pulls her close to him, nuzzling her hair.
‘Don’t worry, beautiful,’ he says. ‘I know you were scared, but I wasn’t speeding. It just feels faster in a smaller car.’
* * *
• • •
She doesn’t sleep. Sometimes she doesn’t because he’s not there; sometimes because she can’t navigate the limited stretch of bed when he is there. So it’s easier to say that she just doesn’t sleep at all.
‘’Course you can’t sleep when you’ve got no routine. It’s the inconsistency,’ he says. ‘If I’m always there, you’ll get used to it. If I’m never there, you’ll get used to that, too. But it’s all the changing. I could just go away,’ he says, leaning in close, his eyes teasing. ‘Do you want me to go away?’
Her mouth smiles, but her hands reach for him reflexively.
‘No, don’t go away,’ she says, her eyes fixed not on him but on the jumble of her mother’s pill bottles on the kitchen table. ‘Don’t go away. Don’t go away.’
* * *
• • •
There is endless time to turn it over in her mind at her office desk. Her daily undertaking – transferring information from one spreadsheet to another – makes her mind flabby through lack of use. The only thing that can keep the muscle strong is the exercise of anxiety. She really needs to get one of those mindfulness apps, she thinks. Take control of her thoughts. Shift her perspective.
She knows in some distant way that the job is making her unhappy, that applying to be an administrative assistant in a City law firm was nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to the terror of graduation. But when it comes to thinking about a new job, the first thing that she can think of is fitting in with Jamie.
‘I’m not leaving London,’ he’d told her when she first brought it up. ‘No way. I’m doing well here.’
Besides, he had added, he didn’t understand why she would want to be anywhere else. Her network of friends was there, and his. And her mother. The constant, dead weight of her mother.
She is deteriorating by the day, the sheen of waxed paper invading her skin. She’s vague about her oncology appointments. She won’t let Katie come with her. She mentions numbers – white blood count, that seems to be the number everyone’s interested in – as if they are works of art that would be diminished by the indignity of interpretation. Perhaps it’s her mother’s philosophical side emerging, but she seems removed from the idea that anything about her treatment could be either good or bad. All these things, they just are.
Jamie drives her to and from her appointments. He, too, simply is.
But Katie feels herself straining at the le
ash, with all the subtlety of a frantic dog.
A new job – that seems like the thing to think about.
He finds her looking through a brochure one day. Graduate scheme with the UN.
‘What’s this?’ He picks it up.
‘Oh.’ Katie makes to shove it away, but he has already grabbed it.
His voice is calm, velvety even.
‘Are you thinking about working abroad?’
She isn’t thinking about applying for the job in any serious sense. It’s just an idea to play with, like a shadow puppet on a wall.
‘Not really.’
She says it too quickly.
He looks at her for a moment then blinks and glances away so quickly that the mood switches to casual.
‘I think it’s kind of selfish, Katie,’ he says.
There it is. One of Jamie’s judgements, hard and smooth as a pebble.
‘What about your mum?’
He’s right. Of course he’s right. What kind of daughter would think of leaving a mother who was so ill, whose baby-cloud of hair is barely clinging to her head in a chemo halo?
‘I’m not thinking about it,’ she says.
In her mind’s eye, her mum’s pale, dry lips curl up into a dead-saint smile.
‘Good,’ Jamie says.
With one quick motion he tears the brochure in two, then two again. The pieces in his hand, he glances up at Katie and smiles.
‘Glad that’s settled, then.’
* * *
• • •
That night Katie wakes up to feel Jamie inside her.
She forgives him before she even gives herself a chance to be angry. She lets him finish, lets him roll off her. Then she murmurs, very quietly, ‘I’m awake, you know.’
She’s sore.
He doesn’t seem to hear her for a while. Maybe he didn’t – he’s still panting. Then he replies, quietly, as if it doesn’t change anything – ‘Oh.’
‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
It isn’t the question that Katie really needs to ask, the question that sits deep inside her, but it’s the only one she’s able to formulate.
Jamie sits up, switching the light on and glaring at her.
‘Why? I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want you to be tired tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’ Katie feels herself searching for the next reasonable thing to say, although reason seems hard to reach when they are lying there in the rumpled bed, their shapes distorted by the distant light of the street lamps.
There is no reason when it comes to love, after all. It isn’t supposed to make sense.
Stop analysing it, Katie.
Maybe she said yes and just doesn’t remember. It scares her how much she forgets things now. But that’s not Jamie’s fault.
She doesn’t know what to say, so she gets up and goes to the toilet, as if it had been normal sex deserving normal rituals. He will expect her to stay there for a few moments, so that gives her time to think.
If he’d asked her, of course she would have said yes. There never feels like any option of saying no, because then he’d sulk and turn away from her and she would lie beside him feeling cast out.
And besides, she would have wanted it. She likes sex with him, craves it, initiates it.
‘You’re all I want,’ he tells her, pressing a kiss into the top of her head when she lies back down beside him in the dark.
* * *
• • •
They go for a walk in the park the next day, sitting on a bench to watch a pair of stags rut violently in the carved hollow of a dried-up lake.
He keeps asking her what’s wrong, and she keeps not knowing the words to say.
It would seem excessive to call what happened between them a violation. No violence, for one thing. No struggle. And if she had been awake, it would probably all have ended up the same way.
‘You’re worried about your mum,’ he tells her. ‘You’re fixating on this because you feel like it’s something that you can control.’
Perhaps it is true. It might as well be true. Katie starts to cry, and he hugs her.
‘You look pretty,’ he tells her, when she’s calmed down a little. ‘Even when you’ve been crying, you look pretty.’
She hates crying. It feels like crying relegates her to the children’s table, and yet she finds it very hard to stop these days.
That night he does it again.
31.
Now
It was pretty clear that Lynne had gone because she’d decided to go. A glance at her room told them that. It had been done neatly. Whitworth half expected to see a thank-you note on the bed.
He didn’t linger there long, though, once he heard the shout from downstairs. He dashed back to the office, to find Brookes enraged.
And Jenny gone.
Fuck.
It was obvious, Whitworth realized as he looked wildly round the tiny key-work room, as if it had swallowed Jenny up somewhere in its fluorescent lighting and cheap carpet. So shamefully obvious that Jenny had known something. She had known it all along, she must have done. Whatever it was, it had to be why she had followed Katie that night, maybe even part of why Lynne and Peony were missing.
* * *
• • •
Nazia was sitting in the lounge, her face slightly dazed beneath a heavy woollen beanie.
‘Have you seen Jenny?’ Whitworth asked, trying to keep his voice calm. Nazia’s head jerked and she flushed a little.
‘She said goodbye,’ she replied.
‘What kind of goodbye?’
‘Just . . . goodbye.’
‘How long ago?’
Nazia shrugged, seemingly lost for words.
Whitworth felt something inside him sputter and stall and wheeled around, back down the corridor to where Val was still standing.
‘Detective, you need to . . .’
But Whitworth was sick of hearing what it was he needed to do. ‘Where’s Jenny’s room?’ he asked brusquely.
‘Jenny? But Lynne . . .’
‘Jenny knew something about Katie’s death.’ Whitworth knew he was taking a gamble, but everything could happen more quickly if Val Redwood were in a more cooperative mood.
Val’s forehead creased. She made a noise that would have been a laugh if she hadn’t been such a humourless woman.
‘Oh, Detective, I very much doubt that.’
‘Well, Mrs Redwood, you’re entitled to your opinion, and I’m entitled to mine. But as a police officer, I’m asking you again. Where is Jenny’s room?’
Val Redwood eyed him for a few seconds. It occurred to Whitworth that she might be idiotic enough to demand a warrant. She sucked her puckered red mouth first to one side of her face, then to the other, before finally letting her hand drift to her pocket and withdrawing the heavy bunch of keys.
‘Come on, then.’
* * *
• • •
Jenny’s room was neat. Anally neat. The kind of neatness that can only come with emptiness.
Three little stubs of lipstick – red, pink, purple – were lined up like a row of soldiers on top of the chest of drawers. The bedspread was as flat and featureless as a blank page. There was nothing in it to indicate that Jenny either did or didn’t plan to return. If Whitworth didn’t know smackheads and how they worked, he might have been inclined to suggest that they should wait and see if she was coming back.
He hurried in, then stopped short, noticing the clumsiness, the gracelessness, of his own footsteps in that still, bloodless room. Brookes was hovering around in the hallway and Val stood at the door, leaning against the doorframe with her glasses in her hand. She had the oddest expression on her face, as if some internal scaffolding had collapsed and gravity was doing its work on her.
‘What would Jenny take?�
��
‘Hmm?’ Val looked up at him. She spoke mildly, as if she had forgotten to be her usual, obdurate self. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What would be important to Jenny if she was doing a bunk? What would she take?’
‘Oh, Detective . . .’ Val put her glasses on and gave a strange little smile, which gave a kind of coherence to her face. ‘Jenny doesn’t have anything worth taking.’
She walked over to the window and looked down into the garden. The light was starting to fade. ‘Women don’t come here if they’ve got anything to lose.’
‘Hmmm.’ Whitworth picked up one of the lipsticks then cursed himself for disturbing the scene and put it down again.
‘Now, if you’ll let me get a word in edgeways, I thought you’d better know that we’ve had more threats.’
Val shoved another stack of print-outs under Whitworth’s nose. He took them automatically. Her mouth sucked in and disappeared, her head snapping to look at Whitworth. ‘Does this mean you’re actually going to start taking the things I say seriously? Does this mean you’re going to start seriously looking at this stalker?’ She rummaged in the overcrowded pocket of her black slacks, producing a piece of crumpled paper. ‘Here’s a new one from today. Rape threats. Directed at me, thank you very much.’
Her hand was trembling as she passed the sheet to Whitworth. If she’d been a little easier to like, then maybe he would have tried to comfort her, but instead he just took it.
* * *
• • •
How about i come over and fucking rape your fat whore cunt and maybe you’ll see how fucking stupid you sound talking about so called rape culture you overprivileged bitch.
* * *
• • •
Whitworth handed the paper to Brookes.
