Kit and I didn’t sit down and decide, as such, that we would keep Beth’s attempt to destroy us to ourselves. Rather, it was understood. We talked around the decision. We told each other that we didn’t want our families to worry, and it’s true that the McCalls already had plenty on their plates. I can see now that my dad’s tragedy was years in the past, and he would have been there for me. Sometimes I think I could have told him part of it, but that’s the thing with secrets. They’re leaky; you can’t decide to share the bits that suit you without a million questions oozing out. You have to solder a part of yourself shut.
To understand why Beth is so enraged, Dad would need to understand the context, and all roads lead back to my lie. I put myself on the line for her. I know from my own counselling that anger always has hurt at its core. Until the night I challenged Beth, I was the only one who had never said the wrong thing. Doubt coming from me was worse than from a stranger.
As far as she was concerned, the person she trusted most in the world first betrayed her and then vanished. In saving ourselves, Kit and I took away Beth’s right to reply. My psychotherapist would doubtless say we took away her closure.
It seemed like the only option at the time, but rather than dousing her fire it has stoked it.
That I was right doesn’t seem to come into it. By then, Beth’s sense of right and wrong had been beaten out of shape. Even mine, when I examine it, now seems unrecognisable from the inflexible moral code my father instilled in me, and which he, and my husband, still think I have always lived by.
Chapter 9
LAURA
11 August 1999
Kit walked one way, while I followed a trail of copper coins towards a cluster of shut-up caravans. An old carousel horse was propped against the nearest one, as though it had galloped away from its rotating prison and finally exhausted itself. The name Eloise was hand-painted on to a scroll on its flank. Just beyond, there was a shuffling noise and a flicker of movement.
‘Hi, is this yours?’ I said, then let the purse drop to my feet.
The woman was lying face down, her clothes – a long skirt, at first glance – pushed aside. The man was on top. Nothing unusual about that, Kit and I did it all the time. But the expressions on their frozen faces were a million miles from anything I could identify with. The man’s back was a cobra’s arch. His unfocused eyes were narrowed to slits and spittle hung from lips curled in a monster’s snarl, darker than anything I recognised as desire. It made sudden, sickening sense in context of the girl’s face. She was looking straight at me; wild eyes locked on to mine. Crude eye make-up streaked her cheeks. Her fingers clawed the earth. That kind of animal terror is something you recognise when you see it, you don’t need to have experienced it. Snot poured from one nostril; mud and fragments of leaf and twig were smeared into the mucus, as though her face had been not just brushed against the ground but pushed into it. I knew what I was seeing. The word was loud and ugly in my head. Four capital letters daubed red on a wall, too big to read, too frightening to say.
‘Oh Christ,’ I said. People talk about blood running cold but mine flushed hot then, it scorched my veins. ‘Are you ok?’ It sounded pathetic.
At this, the man’s head snapped up, and for a moment that terrifying expression was directed at me. I stumbled backwards and gasped to feel the ridged steel of a caravan wall, cold against my back. I don’t know how long we stayed locked in that tableau. It could have been thirty seconds; it could have been three. I do know that the gap between what I was seeing and my ability to deal with it seemed blown wide, as though detonated.
‘God, sorry,’ he said. ‘Embarrassing! She’s fine. Aren’t you?’
The girl blinked at me, but made no move to speak, or even to wipe her face. He pushed himself up and off her. A tensile milky thread trailed from the tip of his penis to her buttocks, then snapped as he tucked a withering erection into his fly with a wince. He stood up from kneeling. Everything about him, from his anorak to his jeans, looked box-fresh, forcedly casual. Brand names in large letters ran across his chest and down his arms. His light brown hair was teased into tidy little peaks. Only muddy patches on his knees and the heels of his hands gave him away.
‘This is awkward,’ he said, with a nervous laugh. When he smiled, I was horrified to realise that he was beautiful.
The girl lay motionless on the floor. Her left leg and buttock were exposed. At first I thought her skirt had been torn, but the fabric wasn’t frayed; then I saw that she was wearing Thai fisherman’s trousers, long wraparound pants that we all wore back then. Laid out flat, they looked like a tesseract with ribbons attached; they were an alternative fashion shibboleth, an unfathomable puzzle for the uninitiated that made wearing a sari look as simple as a T-shirt, but once you knew how to put them on, it was easy. They had no Lycra or give in them; they must have been yanked, very hard, to one side to reveal that much flesh.
I looked over my shoulder for Kit but he wasn’t there.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked her. ‘Has he hurt you?’ She blinked at me and I wondered if she was on something. ‘What’ve you done?’ I said to the man.
‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ he told me, though he didn’t offer me an alternative. He turned to the girl and said kindly, cajolingly, ‘Come on, baby.’
I tiptoed closer to the girl and put out my hand to help her up but she didn’t move. ‘What’s your name?’ She shrank back and crouched against the wheel of one of the caravans. I thought about covering her with my cardigan but it would probably be covered in my hair and Kit’s and could only contaminate a crime scene; even without naming the crime I was already thinking in terms of forensics. ‘It’s ok,’ I said, feeling hopelessly out of my depth.
‘Laura?’ Kit’s voice was clear and close. ‘I couldn’t find anything.’ The caravan walls made a narrow corridor; the man walked backwards along it, away from me, away from his victim and backed straight into Kit.
‘Whoa!’ said Kit. ‘You want to look where you’re—’