What does she remember? The heat of the day that lingered on into the evening; the ceaseless rain that followed; the earth beneath her feet, solid and unyielding; the way she floated up above her body for a moment, wondering what was going to happen next, almost as if it had nothing to do with her at all.
Sometimes she doesn’t know who she is any more. What she does know is that the girl she was died that night, and somebody else took her place. Ever since, this new person has been scrabbling for a foothold, clinging on to the rock face, dirt under her fingernails. Like trying to breathe underwater.
There are very few people in her new life that know about the old one. It’s better that way. She avoids the awkward questions, changes the subject. Acts like she is a normal person, just like everyone else. When underneath her skin, guilt and lies crawl like cockroaches.
When you leave something behind you, you think that’s it. It’s gone. But you can’t leave yourself behind. This is it; this is you, for life.
She’s been ignoring the past for a long time, but she’s beginning to wonder if she will be able to ignore it for ever. It lives in her, like a tumour or a parasite. Maybe now it’s time to try and make sense of it, to wrench it out into the light, examine it. Face it.
Maybe it’s only by going back that she will be able to move forward.
Chapter 23
2016
I sit in bed in the Travelodge, sipping metallic-tasting tea heavy with the unmistakeable tang of UHT milk, glued to the TV. The journalists obviously haven’t been given any information, but they are spinning out the story nonetheless. The police clearly won’t let them speak to the dog walker who found the body, so they’ve interviewed other dog walkers, who can only say versions of the same thing. No, they didn’t see anything. No, nothing like this has happened here before. The empty space in the bed where Pete was gapes beside me, but I can’t even begin to probe my feelings about that now.
My mind is twisting and turning, trying to make sense of it. I need to know who it is. Please let it be one of those nameless, anonymous women, the ones I didn’t even recognise last night. The police will want to talk to everyone who was at the reunion, I am sure of that. I will call them, find out, and when I know it’s a stranger, that will be it, it will be over. They’ve given a number to ring on the news, so I reach for my mobile, my thumb jabbing at the numbers.
They won’t tell me on the phone, of course. They want to speak to everyone who was at the reunion and ask me if I can come in straight away to the makeshift incident room they’ve set up in the school hall. I call a cab, showering and dressing quickly, my need for the body in the woods to be a total stranger pressing within me like an overfull bladder.
In the cab I text Polly to check Henry’s OK. She texts me back a terse, ‘He’s fine’, with no kisses. It’s not like her, but I guess she’s in the middle of making breakfast or something. As we near the school I see police cars and a big, outside-broadcast van from the local TV station. A crowd of rubberneckers has already gathered, despite the fact that it’s nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, and a freezing wind is buffeting in from the sea.
‘Whereabouts you going, exactly?’ asks the cab driver. ‘Dunno if I can get all the way down here, looks like they might have closed the road off. You heard about what happened?’
He pulls over and I pay him, telling him I’ll walk the rest of the way if I can. I climb out into the cold, my town-dweller’s coat no protection against this vicious east-coast wind.
There’s a police car blocking the road, with a young policeman in uniform standing beside it. As I cross the road, he comes over to me.
‘Can I help you?’
I explain that I was at the reunion last night and have been asked to come in. His face changes and he asks me to wait for a few minutes while he speaks to someone. He moves away a little so that I can’t hear what he’s saying, muttering into his walkie-talkie. I stand awkwardly by the car, looking around. I am watching the reporter I saw earlier on TV trying to tame her flying hair into some kind of submission in preparation for another live broadcast, when the policeman comes back.
‘OK, you can go down to the hall now. Ask for DI Reynolds.’
I retrace my steps from last night down the school drive, my neck buried in the collar of my coat, trying to control my breathing. It’s a relief to get inside out of the wind. The hall looks different in the cold light of day. The disco, the debris, the banners from last night; it’s all gone. At a nearby table Mr Jenkins is sitting alone, unshaven and pale. He takes the cup of tea proffered by a uniformed policewoman gratefully. I am reminded that I don’t know who organised the reunion. I can’t imagine it was the school itself; surely they’ve got better things to do. But somebody must have dealt with the school, set up the Facebook page, gone round with a bin bag last night and swept the floor, though I have no idea who. Nobody seems to be coming to talk to me, so I walk over to him.
‘Mr Jenkins?’
‘Yes?’ He looks up, his face all dark shadows and worry.
‘Hello. It’s Louise Williams.’
‘Oh, hello there. You were there, were you… last night?’ He doesn’t show any sign of recognising me, either from the reunion or from school. I suppose I was neither a brilliant student nor a particularly naughty one: completed my homework on time, didn’t play up in class, achieved good if not outstanding grades. I slipped under the radar.
‘Sorry to intrude, but I was wondering… do you know who organised the reunion? Was it the school?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It was a former student who contacted us and asked if it would be OK to use school premises. She booked the bar and sorted the licence and all that, hired someone to decorate the hall, clean up afterwards, everything. Just asked that we provide a member of staff to man the door. She thought it would be nice to have that connection to the school. I didn’t mind doing it.’
‘Did you meet her? The woman who organised it?’ I try to keep my voice neutral.
‘No, it was all done by email.’
‘And… what was her name?’ I struggle to form the words.
He looks around as if for permission from the police, but there’s no one nearby. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ he says doubtfully. ‘Her name was Naomi Strawe.’
‘Oh. Straw? As in dry grass?’
‘No, with an e: S-t-r-a-w-e.’
I don’t remember anyone of that name. My heartbeat slows a little.
‘Was she in our year?’
‘She said she was. I think there was a Naomi, wasn’t there? Maybe Strawe was her married name. To be honest we didn’t really check whether anybody was actually from the class of 1989.’ He looks worried. ‘I just assumed that anybody who wanted to come would be from your year – I mean, why else would you go to a reunion?’
‘So did she show up, this Naomi?’
‘No. That’s the strange thing. There was a badge for her – she sent me all the badges of the people who’d said they were attending, and hers was one of the only ones left.’
Not the only one. There would have been a Tim Weston badge left on that table as well. I’m about to ask more, when I see a tall, bulky woman in a dark trouser suit making her way over to us.