‘Would she kill for you?’ The boy is staring at me, trying to understand. These words are ones he knows, but they have never been arranged in quite this formation – and I can tell from the gravity of his gaze that he realizes they mean more than the sum of their parts. We are both quiet and still, enclosed in our little bubble. His hands clasped neatly in his lap around the hamster. The slow sweep of his eyelashes as he blinks. The faint scratch of the carpet bristles on my legs as I kneel in front of him. These tiny things are filling the room, leaving no space to breathe.
It’s a revelation, a curtain drawn swiftly up from a dark stage as the lights snap on. The sudden ruthless clarity of it hurts me. I understand why I’m here, and why I have asked them to come. It makes sense now. When someone is responsible for your misery, you want to hurt them. You want to do to them exactly what has been done to you. That’s justice. Not the sterile courtroom she evaded, with its inadequate pronouncements and punishments. Something deeper, more primal than that. If an animal lunges at you in the wild, you don’t stop to think. You fight back. This woman ripped my life to shreds with her carelessness. She strolled away from what she had done without looking back. You take from me, I take from you.
I’m rising to my feet and going to the balcony window, unlocking the catch and stepping outside. Air rushes up coldly into my lungs. I’m looking at the swarming cars and the street, three floors below, and I can feel the force of gravity – almost see it – wrenching the whole world down. And when I hear the sound of footsteps I’m not surprised that he’s there, sidling up beside me, drawn to this force, his head tilted very slightly to one side. His eyes are wide and steady, gazing up at me. Every second expands and stretches. I take a small step towards him. This next part will need to be quick. A jolt of time, swift and instantaneous, changing everything.
My hands are millimetres away from his shoulders when he moves. He doesn’t quite understand, but he’s backing away, into the safety of the room, and I’m alone on the balcony with the wind in my face, and the tears have come so fast that I’m choking with surprise and I can hardly breathe, because of course I can’t do it. Because I’m playing at being someone I’m not and can never be. Because even the thought is ridiculous. Because there are no answers here or anywhere else, and the idea of taking life away revolts me as much as it always has, and the enormity of the knowledge that there’s nothing I can ever do to fix what has been broken is slamming into me hard and fast without compromise, and for the first time.
Away
Caroline, May 2015
I STAY AT the bathroom window for some minutes after you’ve gone inside – staring at the windows of your house, trying to make out some flicker of movement behind the glass. I think about you crossing the living room, making yourself a drink, settling down on the sofa. Amber next to you, sliding her legs on to your lap as she lies down and asks you how your week has been. Or perhaps you’re leaving the conversation for later and you’re upstairs together, not talking at all.
I realize that I’m shivering. My skin is speckled with goosebumps and when I glance behind me I see that the bathwater looks cold and clouded, congealed suds of foam floating on its surface. Mechanically, I drain it and pull my clothes back on. In the bathroom mirror, my reflection evaluates me. My make-up has started to run, and I can feel my foundation getting oily. I move my hand up to rub it away but even this small action feels too complicated and, in the end, I let my arm fall back limply down by my side.
The woman’s voice is replaying in my head – the soft evenness of her tone, her dispassionate final words. A voice down the line, hundreds of miles away, coming to me from my own home. She is there and I am here, with you disturbingly, electrically close … and suddenly it seems that everything is in the wrong place. I don’t want her there, and I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. Right now. In the back of my mind, a thought half stirs, an ugly, unexpressed fear. I’m thinking of Eddie and, although I know that he’s with my mother and that he’s safe, I still don’t like the idea of this woman being so close to him, not now that I know what I know.
The thought gives me the surge of energy I need. I fling open the bathroom door and hurry through to the bedroom, pulling my suitcase out from underneath the bed. At random, I start snatching up my clothes, bundling them haphazardly inside. I’ll tell Francis that we just have to leave. That there’s been some kind of emergency and we need to get back. My head is fuzzy and I can’t work out the details, but I’ll think of something. I’m still snatching up handfuls of our possessions when I hear the doorbell ring downstairs.
I stand motionless, listening, and then Francis’s voice floats up to me. ‘Can you get that, Caro? I’m cooking.’
I look round at the half-packed room. I’ll see who is there, then come back and finish it off. I run downstairs, glimpsing the figure through the opaque glass: female and slight, long hair falling over her shoulders. As I pull the door open I see that it’s Amber. She looks as if she hasn’t slept in days, her eyes sunken into their sockets and the surrounding skin bruised violet with exhaustion.
‘Carl’s back,’ she says, with her customary directness, as soon as I open the door. ‘I’ve told him you’re here.’
Even though I have expected it, something shudders through me at her words. ‘What did he say? How is he?’ I ask.
She spreads her hands out silently. ‘Shocked,’ she says, at last. ‘He’s trying to make sense of it – understand how it could have happened. As we all are,’ she adds, cool evaluation briefly flashing in her gaze. ‘Anyway. Can we go out?’
Wrong-footed, I hesitate. An image of the woman in my house flickers again at the corners of my mind. ‘I need to get home,’ I say. ‘You were right.’
‘That’s as may be,’ she counters swiftly, ‘but I need to talk to you first.’ There’s a kind of savage intensity to her tone, and somehow from her the word need feels stronger, overturning mine. I look at her, and there are still so many unanswered questions in my head, pulling me towards her. And there’s still you, just across the street, only metres away.
‘It won’t take long,’ she says swiftly, sensing my weakness. ‘We can just go to the park or something. Francis?’ Her voice is suddenly gaily raised. ‘It’s Amber. I’m just going to borrow Caroline for half an hour, if that’s OK? I want her advice on something.’
There is a pause. ‘Errrm – OK,’ he calls back at last, his tone tinged with confusion.
My eyes meet Amber’s, and she shrugs. There’s nothing to do but pull on my shoes and follow her as she turns and walks briskly down the road, weaving through the back streets towards the riverside park. She doesn’t speak as we walk, and I’m unable to help second-guessing what she wants to say. I know she still believes I came here deliberately. That I’ve followed you like a pathetic stalker, desperate to be close to you again.
‘I’m not what you think I am,’ I find myself saying. My voice is brittle and I have to stop and breathe for a second to quell the tremble that might signify weakness. ‘I’m not trying to come between you and Carl.’
Amber is twisting round, looking for a suitable place for us to sit. ‘Here,’ she says, walking swiftly over to a bench shaded beneath a canopy of willow branches close to the river’s edge. She curls up at one end, drawing her knees up to her chest, waiting for me to join her. ‘I have no idea if that’s true or not, Caroline,’ she says. ‘I’ve got no way of knowing. But that’s not really the reason I wanted to speak to you.’
Slowly, I sit. She’s not looking at me as if I’m an object of her hatred, or even her pity. Her expression is more one of cautious evaluation, as if she’s wondering whether I am the last piece of the puzzle that she’s trying to put together.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
She brushes her hair back from her forehead and runs her hand down its length, grasping it into a fist and tugging on it gently. The mannerism looks familiar and I find myself wondering if I do it myself. ‘I wasn’t really honest with you, that first day we went to the coffee shop,’ she says. ‘When I said that I didn’t know Sandra.’