by Nicci Cloke
And then school started, and Lizzie left, and the need to push him got too strong to ignore.
So I did.
But I pulled him back. Pushing him was enough; I don’t want actual blood on my hands. And, if I’m honest, I’ve seen the way he’s started cracking since Lizzie disappeared. Aiden’s not a bad person, he’s just done stupid things. Thoughtless things, yes, cowardly things. But not malicious. I’m not happy about it, but I’m starting to feel sorry for him.
I look at him, rocking with the bus, his face turned towards the window. He looks like a shadow. Big bags under his eyes, his face blank.
Yep, I’m starting to feel sorry for him.
But there’s no need to let him know that just yet.
AIDEN
THE BUS IS packed, standing room only, and I’m glad, because I’m not sure I’m ready to sit side by side and make small-talk with Scobie just yet. I keep thinking of how he reeled me in, the lengths he went to in order to make the Autumn Thomas profile real; the photos he must have spent hours stealing. My own stupid stupid stupidity for not checking deeper, even when Scobie himself had shown me exactly how to tell a profile was fake. He must have been laughing at me this whole time, fooling me just by giving her a few more friends, a few more photos. Because I was vain. Because I didn’t believe it could ever happen to me. I move aside to let a lady with a buggy wedge herself in next to someone’s piled-up luggage, and Scobie is shoved aside by two huge guys who carry on their conversation in the middle of the bus, totally unconcerned by all the people crammed up beside them.
How could he do it? How could he sit there with me, on Shark Night, just acting like we were mates?
The bus makes its way up Pentonville Road, stopping and starting with the traffic. I think of Lizzie, caught in a stranger’s frame. The photos haven’t made her feel more real to me after all; instead, she feels like a ghost. I try to picture her on this road, wondering if the police have taken the last photo seriously; if, right at this moment, they’re working through CCTV footage of people packed on a bus just like we are. No luggage, just a tiny handbag. Whatever she thought she was coming into London for, she didn’t think she was staying.
And all the time, the thought keeps niggling. Would Lizzie have done any of this if it wasn’t for me? Scobie blames me. Scobie thinks that this all began that night at the prom. That it all started with me. The lies I’ve told. The things I’ve done.
I glance over at him, stuck between an old lady with a huge, overstuffed trolley she’s trying to drag past the talking guys to get off at her stop, and two school kids in blazers, both playing on their phones. Scobie’s face looks calm, relaxed; nothing like the way it did on the Tube platform, his features all twisted as he yelled at me.
But I get it. He was angry. I would’ve been too.
Just as I’m about to look away, he glances up. A look passes between us and it feels horribly like we’re sizing each other up, like neither of us knows whether we can trust the other. In the window behind him, I see the shops of Upper Street, the groups of smokers spilling out of the pubs, their breath huffing out in clouds.
‘This is our stop,’ Scobie says, and we force our way out as the doors clap open. The two school kids get off ahead of us. I look down over one’s shoulder and see her Facebook inbox open, five different conversations going on. I hope she knows them all. I hope they’re all kind to her.
Out on the pavement, the air is so cold it feels like it’s biting my face, my hands, the back of my neck. The sky is a sulky grey, the clouds heavy and white. Scobie heads for the traffic lights, Angel station behind us, where a crowd of people wait to cross the road, shopping bags rustling. On the other side I can see a couple of pubs, windows fogged, but when the crossing starts beeping, and we follow the flow of people, Scobie walks past all of these and carries on up the road. We don’t speak. We put our heads down against the icy wind, and we walk. We pass some smaller shops, a Tesco Express, and then I see it, on the corner of a side street, just as slushy rain starts falling. The Winchester. A normal, unassuming pub exterior, white and dark red, the doors dark wood. When we get to them, Scobie tugs one open, looks at me, and then walks through. He doesn’t worry about the door hitting me on my way in.
THE PUB IS dark inside, warm after the freezing evening. The walls have wood panels and purplish, floral wallpaper; there’s a deer’s head on one, framed paintings of old-style London on another. The tables and chairs are all mismatched wood, and the room we’ve walked into, long and thin, bends left where the bar and a dining room are tucked away. It’s not as busy as you’d expect it to be, right in the middle of Angel, but a few of the tables have people sitting at them; most of them young and professional-looking, on their way home from work.
Scobie hangs back a bit, looking around him, his phone in his hand. The girl behind the bar comes towards us, smiling, so I say, ‘Pint of lemonade, please.’
‘Orange juice,’ Scobie says, when I glance at him questioningly, and I relay that back to the bartender as if she hasn’t just heard for herself. She’s young, probably not far off our age, with hair dyed a bright orange colour like a highlighter pen. She’s wearing a polo shirt with the pub’s name stitched onto the breast, and denim shorts and dark tights, the kind that are thin enough to see through. When she turns around to get Scobie’s orange juice from the fridge behind the bar, I see she has Disney characters tattooed on the backs of her calves; Mickey Mouse on one, Goofy on the other.
‘What happened to your face, anyway?’ Scobie says, not actually looking at me.
‘Deacon,’ I say, and that’s the end of that conversation.
‘Anything else?’ the bartender asks with a smile.
‘That’s it, thanks,’ I say, trying to give her one of my own, and I pay for the drinks.
‘We could sit,’ Scobie says, vaguely, and after a few seconds’ pause, I head for a table and he drifts after me.
‘So this is the big plan?’ I ask. ‘We come here and… have a drink?’
He shoots me a look. ‘It’s better than anything you’ve done.’
That, I can’t deny, is true.
We sit and sip in silence, just the ice clinking in our drinks. My stomach knots as I imagine Lizzie sitting here, waiting. But who was she waiting for?
‘Why here?’ Scobie asks. ‘Why would they pick this place?’
I shrug. I have no idea. Up close, it’s just a normal, everyday sort of pub. There’s a sign for a basement bar that’s open until 3 a.m., and I wonder if Lizzie was here that late, if the photo some random guy would later find of her was taken in the early hours of the morning, if Lizzie was here all that time. She was alone in the photo, and I don’t know whether to find hope in that or not. Did she leave alone?
The bartender is on our side of the bar now, wiping tables, straightening menus, glancing repeatedly at the clock.
‘Well,’ Scobie says, as she gets closer, ‘here goes.’ He necks the rest of his orange juice, and when she’s at the table next to ours, he waves her over.
‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘but we’re wondering if you can help us. A friend of ours has gone missing, and we think she was here.’
‘Blonde girl?’ she asks, and we must both straighten up instantly because she shakes her head and looks at us sadly.
‘Police were here about an hour ago,’ she says. ‘Nobody saw anything. I’m really sorry, it’s horrible.’
‘No CCTV?’ I ask, trying to keep my voice conversational.
She frowns. ‘Yeah, it’s really weird actually. We have cameras all over the place, but the footage from that night is all messed up or missing. Some kind of fault with it.’
Scobie frowns too. ‘What kind of system is it?’
‘A really fancy one. All digital, all online, you know.’
‘Jen!’ Our barmaid jumps and glances nervously back towards the bar, where a shorter, older woman is standing, arms crossed. She’s dressed casually in jeans and a hoody, but she’s obviously the
manager. Jen makes an oops face at us and grabs our glasses, hurrying back. We can’t hear what the manageress says to her, but from the sheepish look on Jen’s face, it seems gossiping on shift isn’t encouraged.
We sit in silence, watching people come and go. A group of guys in suits come in and head for the bar. Close behind them are four girls dressed up in tight dresses and huge, shiny high heels. The lights get lowered just slightly and the music goes up a few notches.
‘What now?’ I ask Scobie, and he turns and looks at me in disgust.
‘What do you mean, “what now”?’
‘We can’t just sit here, Scobie. This isn’t achieving anything.’
‘It’s achieving a lot more than just sitting at home.’
I push my chair back. ‘I’m going to the toilet.’
But Scobie’s gone back to studying the group of guys at the bar, and he just ignores me.
THE TOILETS ARE through a set of wooden doors opposite the bar. While I’m washing my hands, I look at my face in the mirror. More and more these days, I don’t recognise myself. My eyes look scared, shadowed with bags like bruises. And then there are the actual bruises. They don’t even hurt any more, until I actually look at the swelling, the cut in my lip, and then each one gives a spiteful little twinge.
Why am I doing these things? Why am I here? I’m still washing my hands, the water painfully hot, and I’m imagining Lizzie sitting out there, wondering who she was waiting for. And I’m tired, I’m afraid, I’m remembering Scobie’s hands at my back and the train rushing towards me and I’m wishing he’d never pulled me back. Steam is billowing out of the taps and when I finally snatch my hands back, the skin is tight and pink.
‘Where did you go?’ I whisper, and I wonder if we’ll ever know. As I head back towards the bar, my legs feel heavy. In the tiny hallway, I fish out my phone, looking at the time. Running out, I think, without meaning to.
And then it starts to ring.
Mum.
I hit the volume down button to mute the call and watch it ring out as I head back into the bar. Scobie’s standing waiting for me, looking from his phone to the bar and back again. When I get closer, I realise that he’s looking at the photo of Lizzie again, figuring out where she was standing. What she could see. The thought makes me feel sick. The thought of going back to Abbots Grey without knowing makes me feel even sicker.
When my phone finally diverts the call to answerphone, it stops ringing. I breathe a sigh of relief, about to open the internet, but it starts ringing again almost immediately. Mum again. Not a good sign. I have to answer, trying to keep my voice normal as if I’ve just popped out to pick up milk rather than, oh, just nipped into London to search for my missing ex-sort-of-girlfriend.
‘Hey.’
Her voice streams out of the phone at a volume that makes even Scobie, beside me, look up. ‘Aiden, where the hell are you? Get home now.’
‘Sorry, I just had to –’
‘I don’t care what you just had to, I need you home. Now. Immediately.’
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Is everything okay?’ She takes a deep breath and is about to launch into a full-on takedown, but then there’s the sound of a door opening and a man’s voice in the background.
‘Mrs Cooper?’
‘Just a minute.’
The door closes again, and this time, when she speaks, she’s almost whispering. ‘The police are here, Aiden.’
I feel like someone put the pub around me on mute. I don’t hear people talking, don’t hear the music, don’t hear anything except for the faint buzzing in my ears.
‘What?’
‘The police are here. To speak to you. Come home now, Aiden, please.’
And it’s the please that gets me. While every instinct is screaming at me to run, to get to Dad’s or somewhere, anywhere, as far away as possible, it’s the please that will put me back on that train. I can’t leave Mum to clear up another one of my messes. I hang up and turn to Scobie.
‘I’ve got to go back.’
He looks up from the screen, from the blurred shadow of Lizzie’s face. ‘What? You can’t.’
‘I have to. The police are at my house.’
He follows me without another word.
ON THE TRAIN we sit opposite each other on one of the sets of four seats. It’s busy going this way; the carriage full of people in business suits commuting back to their fancy country mansions, their tidy little commuter towns. Abbots Grey is just one of many along this belt of railway, and this train stops at each of them, making the journey excruciatingly slow – or at least it seems that way to me. Scobie’s face is tight, his mouth twitching as he watches the landscape sail past. He’s disappointed. We’re leaving without any answers, and Scobie hates not having the answers.
I have one answer, but it isn’t enough. I remember myself just a couple of hours ago, on my way into London, thinking that Lizzie might be about to appear and reveal she’d been Autumn all along. Did I really believe that?
And then I remember her AskMe page and the weird answers. I take out my phone and look at them again. Properly, this time, without thinking that she might be just minutes away from me, laughing at me.
First up is the one that still makes my heart leap. The question: ‘Do you love me?’ The username ‘aiden k’. The only question on the page she hasn’t answered.
Underneath that, a question that’s just like most of the others.
haha how can your sister call herself a reality star when she’s the fakest slut on tv? The username ‘sxxybitch353.’ And Lizzie’s answer is a quote from Streetcar.
I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – don’t turn the light on!
I read it, and I remember her in her Blanche outfit, in her spotlight on the stage, while I wait in the wings. The lines are delivered to Hugo Frith, the guy in the year above who played Mitch. He’s recently been cast in Spoilt in the Suburbs, just a little part, someone’s brother who appears at a few parties. The kind of part the producers test all the time, checking out the internet feedback before giving that person more airtime. I hear Lizzie saying the lines to him so clearly it’s like she’s right next to me, and a shiver goes through me.
Third:
Why are you even on here? Are you like 12?
She kept a rough sort of diary. And she said there that she had to go away and be quiet and remember “just to make it last longer.” She felt there’d never be anything as good again for her – so she had to make it last longer.
An Inspector Calls. I think again of that afternoon in Gerber’s class. He made her love him. And that’s where it all went wrong. Is that how she feels about me? I look up and out of the window, at the fields flashing by.
Why wouldn’t she? It’s true.
I go back to the words and try to put my feelings aside, try to approach it like someone who doesn’t know Lizzie would. A diary. Maybe she’s leaving clues to her diary. A chill runs through me at the sort of things that might say.
Another question:
you think you’re well fit don’t you?
Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart – and I have all of those things.But I have been foolish – casting my pearls before swine!
Another Blanche quote, and this one makes me squirm each time. Casting my pearls before swine. Maybe, if I’m really generous with myself, I can think that she meant the boys of her summer. The guys I’ve seen in her photos, in back gardens with beer cans, their arms cast round her like she’s furniture. Maybe I can believe she hated all of them: Lauren, Deacon, all of their friends. That they were a waste of her mind, her spirit, her tender heart.
Or maybe I have to admit what I’m sure is the truth. She’s talking about me.
r all the Summersall women sluts? bitches be cray
Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! –
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me,
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
Her Ophelia monologue. Hamlet and Ophelia: doomed, damned, disastrous Hamlet and Ophelia. If that’s how Lizzie sees me and her – I stop that thought immediately, because Ophelia ends up drowned. Ophelia ends up mad and then dead.
I read through the quote over and over, trying to see it just for the words, trying to ignore the memory of Lizzie in her spotlight, her voice saying the lines in my head. But the words aren’t much better. And I, of ladies most dejected and wretched, That sucked the honey of his music vows. I think of all the things I said to her. All the jokes I told, all the times I listened. I think of her leaning her head against me in the beige and brown light of backstage, I think of her typing to me late at night.
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh. It dawns on me slowly – it’s not Ophelia who’s mad here.
It’s Hamlet.
Scobie glances over at me. ‘What are you looking at?’
I hand him the phone, and he frowns. ‘Lizzie still had one of these?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Why?’
