Into the Water(46)

My breath quick and shallow, I half ran to the front door, which was bolted, just as I’d left it. But in the kitchen there was a strange smell – something different, sweet, like perfume – and the kitchen window was wide open. I didn’t remember opening it.

I went over to the freezer and did something I almost never do – I poured myself a drink: cold, viscous vodka. I filled a glass and drank it quickly; it burned all the way down my throat and into my belly. Then I poured myself another.

My head swam and I leaned against the kitchen table for support. I was keeping an eye out, I suppose, for Lena. She’d disappeared again, refusing to be given a lift home. Part of me was grateful – I hadn’t wanted to share a space with her. I told myself it was because I was angry with her – supplying diet pills to another girl, body-shaming her – but really I was afraid about what the woman detective said. That Lena isn’t curious because Lena already knows. I couldn’t stop seeing her face, that photo upstairs with her sharp teeth and her predatory smile. What does Lena know?

I went back to the study and sat down on the floor again, gathered up the notes I’d pulled out and began to rearrange them, trying to establish some sort of order. Trying to get a sense of your narrative. When I came to the picture of Katie and Lena, I stopped. There was a smudge of ink on its surface, just beneath Lena’s chin. I turned the picture over in my hands. On the reverse you had written a single line. I read it aloud: Sometimes troublesome women take care of themselves.

The room darkened. I looked up and a cry caught in my throat. I hadn’t heard her, hadn’t heard the front door go or her footsteps crossing the living room, she was just there all of a sudden, standing in the doorway, blocking the light, and from where I was sitting, the shadow profile was Nel’s. Then the shadow stepped further into the room and I saw Lena, a smear of dirt on her face, her hands filthy, her hair tangled and wild.

‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked. She was hopping from one foot to the other, she looked hyper, manic.

‘I wasn’t talking, I was—’

‘Yes, you were,’ she giggled. ‘I heard you. Who were you—’ She broke off then, and the curl of her lip disappeared as she noticed the picture. ‘What are you doing with that?’

‘I was just reading … I wanted—’ I didn’t have time to get the words out of my mouth before she was upon me, towering over me, and I cowered. She lunged at me and grabbed the picture from my hands.

‘What are you doing with this?’ She was trembling, her teeth gritted together, red-faced with rage. I scrabbled to my feet. ‘This has nothing to do with you!’ She turned away from me, placed Katie’s picture on the desk and smoothed it over with her palm. ‘What right do you have to do this?’ she asked, turning back to face me, her voice quavering. ‘To go through her stuff, to touch her things? Who gave you permission to do this?’

She took a step towards me, kicking over the glass of vodka as she did so. It flew up and smashed against the wall. She dropped to her knees and began gathering up the notes I’d been sorting through. ‘You shouldn’t be touching this!’ She was almost spitting with rage. ‘This has nothing to do with you!’

‘Lena,’ I said, ‘don’t.’

She drew back sharply with a little gasp of pain. She’d put her hand on a piece of glass, it was bleeding. She grabbed a sheaf of the papers and clutched them to her chest.

‘Come here,’ I said, trying to take the papers from her. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘Get away from me!’ She piled the papers on to the desk. My eye was drawn to the smear of blood across the top sheet and the words printed below it: Prologue, in heavy type, and below that: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning.

I felt hysterical laughter rise in me; it burst out of me so loudly that Lena jumped. She stared at me in amazement. I laughed harder, at the furious look on her beautiful face, at the blood dripping from her fingers to the floor. I laughed until the tears came to my eyes, until everything blurred, as though I were submerged.





AUGUST 1993





Jules


ROBBIE LEFT ME on the window seat. I drank the rest of the vodka. I’d never been drunk before, I didn’t realize how quickly the twist comes, the slide from elation to despair, from up to down. Hope seemed suddenly lost, the world bleak. I wasn’t thinking straight, but it felt as though my train of thought made sense. The river is the way out. Follow the river.

I’ve no idea what I wanted when I stumbled off the lane, down the bank, on to the river path. I was walking blindly; the night seemed blacker than ever, moonless, silent. Even the river was quiet, a slick, frictionless, reptilian thing, sliding along beside me. I wasn’t afraid. What did I feel? Humiliated, ashamed. Guilty. I looked at him, I watched him, watched him with you, and he saw me.

It’s a couple of miles from the Mill House to the pool, it must have taken me a while. I wasn’t quick at the best of times, but in the dark, in that state, I’d have been slower still. So you didn’t follow, I suppose. But eventually you came.

I was in the water by then. I remember the cold around my ankles, and then my knees, and then sinking softly into blackness. The cold was gone, my whole body burning, up to my neck now, no way out, and no one could see me. I was hidden, I was disappearing, not taking up too much space, taking up no space at all.