Good Me Bad Me(83)

His words, when they come, hurt me.

‘I was warned about you. People said I was stupid. Reckless even. Having you here would only cause trouble, but I didn’t listen, I thought I could handle it.’

The piranhas are back. The fortune fish too, a new trial beginning.

‘I thought I knew everything about you – maybe not everything, but most things. I thought you trusted me. I trusted you, I took you in for god’s sake.’

‘I do trust you, Mike.’

His fist crashes down on his desk, I jump. It’s nothing compared to what you used to do but from Mike, gentle, understanding Mike, it feels savage. Brutal. He’s angry with me. His head’s starting to clear, grief is a fog, a mist. Hangs low, obscures the landscape. Obscures what’s really there.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ he says. ‘If you trusted me, you would have told me.’

‘Told you what?’

He pauses, downs a mouthful of whisky, arches his fingers on the desk. Twin tarantulas, ready to pounce.

‘In our sessions, the things you said. Jumbled. Inconsistent. You were so hard to guide. You hated me asking you about it, tried hard not to say his name, but I knew something about the night Daniel died troubled you more than I thought it should. But when I asked you, kept asking you, the story was the same and I believed you. I wanted to at some level, you’d been through so much, but now I’m not sure any more. I’m not sure of anything.’

His fingers relax on the desk, more pianist than spider. Whisky is also a mist, one that confuses the mind until you’re not sure what to believe any more. Drink some more, please, Mike.

‘What you told the court, about what happened that night, was it true, Milly? Did your mother kill Daniel? Did she?’

‘Why do you think I’m lying?’

‘Because you do, don’t you? You lie. You lied to me, didn’t you? You lied to me about Phoebe when you said you were getting on fine.’

‘We were.’

He swipes a glass paperweight off his desk, it collides with the wall, doesn’t break, leaves a dent in the paintwork, lands on the ground with a thud.

‘You’re scaring me, Mike.’

‘Well you scare me, do you know that?’

There it is. The truth. His. He feels the same about me as everyone else does. As I do about myself. I lower my gaze.

‘I’m sorry, that was unnecessary, Milly.’

He drinks another whisky, adjusts the photo frame that sits on the right-hand side of his desk. I felt jealous and lonely when I first saw the pictures in the frame. A collage of Phoebe, all different ages. Blonde and perfect and beautiful, not contaminated like me. He shakes his head, smiles at his daughter. Not fondly, but with regret perhaps. Regret about what? She’s gone but she’s everywhere still, in the spaces and gaps that are supposed to be mine now.

The phone on his desk rings, he looks over at it but doesn’t pick it up.

‘It’ll be June,’ he says. ‘I called her while I was waiting for you to come back but she didn’t answer. She’ll know something’s up though, I wouldn’t normally call this late.’

‘Why did you?’

‘I’m writing a book about you, did you know that? No. Well, I am. It was all I was able to think about. How stupid and arrogant of me.’

He doesn’t tell me why he called June but I can feel the place in this family I’ve been carving, manipulating, since Phoebe’s death, start to dissolve in front of me. Quicksand. Sinking. Me.

‘You can stop pretending now, Milly. I know.’

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

‘It had been going on for months, hadn’t it? Facebook, the school forum. Text messages. The police returned Phoebe’s phone yesterday. She’d been bullying you for months, hadn’t she?’

I know what he’s thinking, that all roads lead to me.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Christ, we spent enough time together.’

‘I didn’t want to worry you or cause any trouble. I thought Phoebe and I might become friends – sisters, even.’

He opens one of the drawers in his desk, removes something, looks down at it then lifts it up and places it in front of him.

Phoebe’s laptop, Mike had it.

‘She didn’t think I knew,’ he says.

‘Knew what?’

‘About Sam.’

‘Sam who?’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t know, hadn’t heard anything about it at school?’

‘No, nothing.’

He asks me if I’m lying. I don’t answer because I am but only because I’m too scared to tell the truth. The flashes of what could be a new life for me here in this house stop me. So close. If I can just ride this next storm, if I can persuade him.

‘His dad and I go way back. We studied together years ago, stayed in touch when they moved to Italy, we saw them this summer. We’d all been having a bit of a laugh about it behind their backs, a long-distance romance. Sam’s mum had seen some of the emails but not all of them. Not the ones where Phoebe told him her suspicions about you.’

‘But I thought she didn’t know about me?’

‘Well she did,’ he replies.

His fists clench, open. Clench. He reaches for the bottle of whisky, pours a measure, drains it again but doesn’t pour another. I wish he would, his edges and ability to reason are starting to soften with the warmth of the alcohol, I can see it.