The smell of the whisky and the heat of the alcohol in my chest brought to mind childhood fevers, fraught dreams, waking with my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, pushing damp hair from my forehead, rubbing Vicks into my chest. There have been times in my life when I have barely thought of her at all, but lately she has been in my thoughts more and more – and more than ever over the past few days. Her face comes to me; sometimes she is smiling, sometimes not. Sometimes she reaches for me.
The summer storm started without me noticing. Perhaps I dropped off. I only know that when I came to, the road ahead looked like a river and thunder seemed to shake the car. I turned the key in the ignition, but then it struck me that the whisky bottle in my lap was only two-thirds full, so I switched the engine off again. Under the drum of thunderous rain I could hear my breathing, and just for a moment I thought I could hear someone else’s breath too. I was struck by the ridiculous notion that if I turned around, there would be someone there, on the back seat of the car. For a moment I was so sure of this that I was too afraid to move.
I decided a walk in the rain would sober me up. I opened the car door, checking the back seat, despite myself, and stepped out. I was instantly soaked through and blinded by water. A fork of lightning split the air and in that second I saw Julia, drenched, half walking, half running towards the bridge. I slid back into the car and flashed the lights on and off. She stopped. I flashed the lights again and, tentatively, she made her way towards me. She stopped a few metres away. I wound down the window and called out to her.
She opened the door and got in. She was still wearing her funeral clothes, though they were sodden now and clinging to her small frame. She’d changed her shoes, though. I noticed that her tights had laddered – I could see a small circle of pale flesh on her knee. It seemed shocking because whenever I’ve seen her before, her body has always been covered – long sleeves and high collars, no skin on show. Unreachable.
‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked. She glanced down at the whisky in my lap, but made no comment. Instead, she reached over, pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was strange, heady. I could taste blood on her tongue and for a second I succumbed, before pulling violently away from her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wiping her lips, her eyes cast down. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve no idea why I did that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Neither do I.’ Incongruously, we both started to laugh, nervously at first and then wholeheartedly, as though the kiss were the most hilarious joke in the world. When we stopped, we were both wiping tears from our faces.
‘What are you doing out here, Julia?’
‘Jules,’ she said. ‘I was looking for Lena. I’m not sure where she is …’ She looked different to me, no longer closed off. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, and she laughed again, as though embarrassed now. ‘I’m really frightened.’
‘Frightened of what?’
She cleared her throat and pushed her wet hair back from her face.
‘What are you afraid of?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t … This sounds strange, I know, but there was a man at the funeral, a man I recognized. He used to be Nel’s boyfriend.’
‘Oh?’
‘I mean … not recently. Forever ago. When we were teenagers. I’ve no idea if she’d seen him more recently than that.’ There were two high spots of colour in her cheeks. ‘She never mentioned him in any of her phone messages. But he was there at the funeral, and I think … I can’t explain why, but I think he might have done something to her.’
‘Done something? You’re saying you think he might have been involved in her death?’
She looked at me imploringly. ‘I can’t say that, of course, but you need to look into him, you need to find out where he was when she died.’
My scalp shrivelled, adrenaline cutting through the alcohol. ‘What’s this man’s name? Who are you talking about?’
‘Robbie Cannon.’
I drew a blank for a moment, but then it came to me. ‘Cannon? Local guy? The family had car dealerships, a lot of money. That one?’
‘Yes. That one. You know him?’
‘I don’t know him, but I remember him.’
‘You remember …?’
‘From school. He was in the year above. Good at sport. Did well with girls. Not very bright.’
Her head bent so that her chin almost touched her chest, Jules said, ‘I didn’t know you were at school here.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve always lived here. You wouldn’t remember me, but I remember you. You and your sister, of course.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and her face closed, like a shutter slamming shut. She put her hand on the door handle, as though making to leave.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘What makes you think Cannon did something to your sister? Did he say something, do something? Was he violent towards her?’
Jules shook her head and looked away. ‘I just know that he’s dangerous. He’s not a good person. And I saw him … looking at Lena.’
‘Looking at her?’
‘Yes, looking.’ She turned her head and met my eye at last. ‘I didn’t like the way he looked at her.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll, uh … I’ll see what I can find out.’
‘Thank you.’
She made to open the car door again, but I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’ll drive you back,’ I said.
Again, a glance at the bottle, but no word. ‘OK.’
It took just a couple of minutes to get back to the Mill House and neither of us spoke until Jules had opened the car door. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I wanted to tell her.
‘You’re very like her, you know.’
She looked shocked and gave a startled, hiccupping laugh.
‘I’m nothing at all like her.’ She brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘I’m the anti-Nel.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, but she was already gone.
I don’t remember driving home.
The Drowning Pool
Lauren, 1983
FOR LAUREN’S THIRTY-SECOND birthday, in a week’s time, they would go to Craster. Just her and Sean, because Patrick would be working. ‘It’s my favourite place in all the world,’ she told her son. ‘There’s a castle, and a beautiful beach, and sometimes you can see seals on the rocks. And after we’ve been to the beach and the castle, we’ll go to the smokehouse and eat kippers on brown bread. Heaven.’
Sean wrinkled his nose. ‘I think I’d rather go to London,’ he announced, ‘to see the Tower. And have ice creams.’
His mother laughed and said, ‘OK then, perhaps we could do that instead.’
In the end, they didn’t do either.
It was November, the days short and bitter, and Lauren was distracted. She was aware that she was acting differently, but couldn’t seem to stop. She found herself sitting at the breakfast table with her family and all of a sudden her skin would flush, her face would burn, and she would have to turn away to hide it. She turned away when her husband came to kiss her, too – the movement of her head was almost involuntary, beyond her control, so that his lips brushed her cheek, or the corner of her mouth.
Three days before her birthday, there was a storm. It built all day, a vicious wind ripping down the valley, white horses riding the breadth of the pool. At night, the storm broke, the river pushing at its banks, trees felled along its length. The rain came down in sheets, the whole world underwater.
Lauren’s husband and son slept like babies, but Lauren was awake. In the study downstairs, she sat at her husband’s desk, a bottle of his favoured Scotch at her elbow. She drank a glass and tore a sheet of paper from a notebook. She drank another glass, and another, and the page remained blank. She couldn’t even decide on a form of address – ‘dear’ seemed dismissive and ‘dearest’ a lie. With the bottle almost empty and the page still unmarked, she walked out into the storm.
Her blood thick with drink and grief and anger, she made her way to the pool. The village was empty, hatches battened down. Unseen and undisturbed, she clambered and slipped through mud to the cliff. She waited. She waited for someone to come, she prayed that the man she had fallen in love with might miraculously somehow know, might somehow sense her despair and come to save her from herself. But the voice she heard, calling her name in panicked desperation, was not the one she wanted to hear.
And so boldly she stepped up to the precipice and, eyes wide open, pitched herself forward.