It wasn’t Libby, of course, it was you, shouting at me. Your hand on my head, holding me down. I was fighting to get away from you. Holding me down, or dragging me out? You grabbed at my clothes, clawed at my skin, gave me scratches on my neck and arms to match the ones Robbie had left on my legs.
Eventually, we were on the bank, me on my knees, gasping for breath, and you standing above me, shouting at me. ‘You stupid fat bitch, what were you doing? What the fuck are you trying to do?’ You fell to your knees then and put your arms around me, then you smelled the alcohol on me and started yelling again. ‘You’re thirteen, Julia! You can’t drink, you can’t … What were you doing?’ Your bony fingers dug into the flesh of my arms, you shook me hard. ‘Why are you doing this? Why? To spite me, is that it? To make Mum and Dad angry with me? Jesus, Julia, what have I ever done to you?’
You took me home, dragged me upstairs and ran a bath. I didn’t want to get in, but you manhandled me, wrestling me out of my clothes and into the hot water. Despite the heat, I could not stop shivering. I would not lie down. I sat, hunched over, the roll of my belly tight and uncomfortable, while you scooped hot water over my skin with your hands. ‘Jesus, Julia. You’re a little girl. You shouldn’t be … you shouldn’t have …’ You didn’t seem to have the words. You wiped my face with a cloth. You smiled. You were trying to be kind. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK, Julia. It’s OK. I’m sorry I yelled at you. And I’m sorry he hurt you, I am. But what did you expect, Julia? What did you honestly expect?’
I let you bathe me, your hands so much softer than they had been in the pool. I wondered how you could be so calm about it now, I thought you’d have been angrier. Not just with me, but on my behalf. I supposed I must have been overreacting, or that you just didn’t want to think about it.
You made me swear that I wouldn’t tell our parents about what happened. ‘Promise me, Julia. You won’t tell them, you won’t tell anyone about this. OK? Not ever. We can’t talk about it, all right? Because … Because we’ll all get into trouble. OK? Just don’t talk about it. If we don’t talk about it, it’s like it didn’t happen. Nothing happened, OK? Nothing happened. Promise me. Promise me, Julia, you’ll never speak about it again.’
I kept my promise. You didn’t.
2015
Helen
ON HER WAY to the supermarket, Helen passed Josh Whittaker on his bike. He was drenched through and had mud on his clothes; she slowed the car and wound down her window.
‘Are you all right?’ she called out and he waved and bared his teeth at her – an awkward attempt at a smile, she supposed. She drove on slowly, watching him in the rear-view mirror. He was dawdling, turning the handlebars this way and that, and every now and again standing up on his pedals to check over his shoulder.
He’d always been an odd little character, and the recent tragedy had exacerbated things. Patrick had taken him fishing a couple of times after Katie died – as a favour to Louise and Alec, to give them some time to themselves. They’d been at the river for hours and hours and, Patrick said, the boy barely spoke a word.
‘They should get him away from here,’ Patrick said to her. ‘They should leave.’
‘You didn’t,’ she replied softly, and he nodded.
‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘I had to stay. I had work to do.’
After he retired, he stayed for them – for her and for Sean. Not for them, but to be close to them, because they were all he had: them, the house, the river. But time was running out. No one said anything, because that’s just the sort of family they were, but Patrick wasn’t well.
Helen heard him coughing in the night, on and on and on, she saw in the mornings how it pained him to move. The worst thing of all was that she knew it wasn’t solely physical. He had been so sharp all his life and now he had become forgetful, confused sometimes. He would take her car and forget where he’d left it, or sometimes return it to her filled with junk, as he had the other day. Rubbish he’d found? Trinkets he’d taken? Trophies? She didn’t ask, didn’t want to know. She was afraid for him.
She was afraid for herself, too, if she was completely honest. She’d been all over the place lately, distracted, unreasonable. Sometimes she thought she was going mad. Losing her grip.
It wasn’t like her. Helen was practical, rational, decisive. She considered her options carefully, and then she acted. Left-brained, her father-in-law called her. But lately, she had not been herself. The events of the past year had unsettled her, thrown her off course. Now she found herself questioning the things about her life she’d thought were least open to interrogation: her marriage, their family life, even her competence in her job.
It started with Sean. First with her suspicions and then – via Patrick – the awful confirmation. Last autumn she had discovered that her husband – her solid, steadfast, resolutely moral husband – was not at all what she thought him to be. She’d found herself quite lost. Her rationale, her decisiveness, deserted her. What was she to do? Leave? Abandon her home and her responsibilities? Should she issue an ultimatum? Cry, cajole? Should she punish him? And if so, how? Cut holes in the fabric of his favourite shirts, break his fishing rods in half, burn his books in the courtyard?
All of these things seemed impractical or foolhardy or simply ridiculous, so she turned to Patrick for advice. He persuaded her to stay. He assured her that Sean had seen sense, that he deeply regretted his infidelity and that he would work to earn her forgiveness. ‘In the meantime,’ he said, ‘he would understand – we both would – if you would like to take the spare room here? It might do you good to have some time to yourself – and I’m certain it would benefit him to get even a small taste of what he stands to lose.’ Almost a year later, she still slept in her father-in-law’s house most nights.
Sean’s mistake, as it came to be known, was just the start of it. After she moved into Patrick’s home, Helen found herself afflicted by terrible insomnia: a debilitating, anxiety-inducing, waking hell. Which, she discovered, her father-in-law shared. He couldn’t sleep either – he’d been that way for years, so he said. So they were sleepless together. They stayed up together – reading, doing crosswords, sitting in companionable silence.
Occasionally, if Patrick had a nip of whisky, he liked to talk. About his life as a detective, about how the town used to be. Sometimes he told her things which disturbed her. Stories of the river, old rumours, nasty tales long buried and now dug up and revived, spread as truth by Nel Abbott. Stories about their family, hurtful things. Lies, libellous falsehoods, surely? Patrick said it wouldn’t come to libel, wouldn’t come to law courts. ‘Her lies won’t ever see the light of day. I’ll see to that,’ he told her.
Only that wasn’t the problem. The problem, Patrick said, was the damage she’d already done – to Sean, to the family. ‘Do you honestly think he’d have behaved the way he has if it hadn’t been for her, filling his head with these stories, making him doubt who he is, where he comes from? He’s changed, hasn’t he, love? And it’s her that’s done that.’ Helen worried that Patrick was right and that things would never go back to the way they’d been, but he assured her they would. He’d see to that, too. He’d squeeze her hand and thank her for listening and kiss her forehead and say, ‘You’re such a good girl.’
Things got better, for a while. And then they got worse. For just when Helen found herself able to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, just when she caught herself smiling at her husband in the old way, just when she felt the family moving back towards its old, comfortable equilibrium, Katie Whittaker died.