She’d given no thought to how she would get back in and soon she was set upon, enveloped in bodies and voices, the smells of strangers, as she struggled for her key.
‘Helena, over here!’ they shouted as she barged the black mass of jackets, arms, and shoulders, careful never to meet a face. Someone pushed a card in her hand – a blonde woman, she thinks – but she was scrunching her eyes shut, trying to get through them, trying to get her key in the door without dropping the milk. This woman had got up very close and said in her ear, ‘We can tell your side of the story. Here’s my card.’
Up the stairs, she’d slammed her inner front door and leant her head back against it with her eyes closed. Scheming lesbian Helena Reed. Jealous lover Helena Reed. Murdering Helena Reed. Edith – cloaked in all the innocence of the un-dead, can do no wrong – lured into Helena’s crimson bed of joy. Now Helena would always be the vamp, in whatever job interview, PhD viva, applying for research funding, meeting a new man, joining a GP practice. Someone somewhere would look up from their desk and say, ‘Helena Reed? From Huntingdon? Weren’t you a friend of that missing girl?’ And the word ‘friend’ would drip with all its sly connotations.
It was typical of Edith, blithe Edith, to leave her with all of this, while Helena did all the worrying. It had been like that from day one, the day Helena had knocked on the door across the halls at Corpus Christi. Edith shouted ‘Come in!’ and there she was, standing on her bed, wearing faded Levi 501s, knocking a nail into the wall to hang up a Modigliani print. On the desk in the window was a vase of anemones, reds and purples and whites, like rich jewels. ‘From my mum,’ Edith said, breathless, still with her back to Helena. ‘Tea?’
Edith was breezy yet determined. She was set on her own course – like the move to Huntingdon – and you could accompany her or you could jog on. Edith, certain; Helena, anxious, following on. She sees how insubstantial she is next to Edith’s luminous features, her charisma. And she hates herself for having been their lapdog. All those Saturday nights watching films on their Netflix account, Sunday lunches in their kitchen, Edith lying on the sofa, reading with her head on Helena’s lap, Will sat on the floor sipping wine. Helena, the only child in audience to the couple.
She wonders, sat here in her airless lounge while she listens to them laughing and talking on the street below, if she should call her parents. But what if they, too, have crows on the front step, imprisoned together, and she would have to hear it and know she was the cause? When will it end, being trapped like this, with the curtains drawn? And if she ever ventured out into the world, what would she find? She’d called the MIT offices yesterday evening, having no responses again from the sergeant’s phone, and she’d got through to a duty person, Constable Monique something, who said she’d ‘look into it’, but nothing had come of it.
‘There’s quite a lot of people outside.’
‘And what did you say your name was again, madam?’
No point calling today. Sunday was bound to be worse, and what could they do anyway? The story was out now and it couldn’t be taken back in. Her own phones – mobile and landline – were filled to the brim with intrusions from people who shouldn’t have her number at all, hectoring and bullying her. She couldn’t bear to play them back, so she switched them all off.
During the night, by about 1 a.m., the crows had flown off (staying at the George Hotel, probably). Another chance: she pictured herself catching a plane to Rio de Janeiro, then another to Manaus, then a boat to where the Rio Negro meets the Solim?es River – the Meeting of Waters, she’d always wanted to see that – and then deep into the tributaries of the Amazon. The world is so big and so beautiful and she’d hardly begun to explore it.
She wandered room to room, planning her escape. Where was her passport? What would she wear? Somehow, when she turned around, it was 7 a.m. and the crows were back on her doorstep and she didn’t know how she’d get past them, let alone to the Amazon basin. She found herself staring at the back of the bedroom door – and the hook where her dressing gown hangs.
She can’t see a way clear. She longs for someone – Edith, if she’s honest – to throw a coat over her head and usher her through it all. She stands before the nets in the lounge and the tears flow out of her in a great outpouring. She cries out, though it is silent, her lips cracked. She will never get out, she will never see the Amazon river. She will never be free or happy. And the girl she loves has gone.
Monday
Manon
‘Lovely top, Kim!’
Kim looks up, surprised.
‘Stuart, me ol’ mucker!’
Stuart looks at Kim, who shrugs.