The Club(65)

Jess turned the TV on, and found that whatever was on the stick had already automatically begun playing. She pulled a leather footstool up to the screen and tucked her clasped hands under her chin. Just five minutes, she told herself she would give it, with a glance at her watch – that was all she really had anyway before her absence would be noted.

At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at and listening to at all. The footage, while it appeared to have been edited to a fairly professional standard, had been shot from a strange angle and under far from optimal lighting conditions. It began abruptly, without opening credits, just a black screen with some numbers in the corner, the crunch of a car stopping on gravel, some vague noises like muffled footsteps, distant voices. Then a door could be seen opening. Then a light could be seen coming on. Then two figures could be seen entering what was now clearly a living room, in a hotel perhaps – or at one of the other Homes, Jess guessed, although there was little to offer a definite clue. Some wall. Some carpet. Some curtains. A table. A drinks cabinet. A phone.

The woman – slim, pale, tall, dark-haired, strangely familiar – entered the room first, hugging herself with both arms, and strode across to the windows and closed the curtains. The man leaned out of the door, as if to check they had not been followed. He turned another light on, crossed the room on unsteady legs to a drinks cabinet, dropped awkwardly into a squat and started rifling through it. The woman was now visible only intermittently, pacing up and down the room, still hugging herself, her face obscured by her long dark hair, for the most part only her legs and the lower half of her in shot. She was young – twentysomething? That was what Jess would have guessed from what she was wearing – all black, nondescript. He looked a good dozen years older, at least. Then, in answer to a question that the mic hadn’t quite captured, the man – still squatting in front of the drinks cabinet, a tall glass in one hand now – looked back over his shoulder.

That was when Jess realized she was looking at Jackson Crane. It might have been old and fuzzy footage but there was no mistaking that face. That was when – with a jolt of the heart, her hands instinctively now on her cheeks, her mouth open wide in shock – Jess registered that the numbers in the corner of the screen were a date and a year and a time, that what she was watching was not a movie outtake but real-life time-stamped footage. With another jolt, she realized exactly what date and time she was looking at.

How often, despite the police’s dismissive reaction, had she tried to tell people what really happened that night, what she had seen, who she had seen? Jess had long ago lost count. Her aunt. Her uncle. The nurses at the hospital. Her friends. Her teachers. Every time she had seen him on TV, on a magazine cover, on the side of a bus. ‘That’s him,’ she would tell people. ‘That man is him. The one who was driving the car.’ And they would tell her about shock and how it affected our brains, our memories. They would tell her he was a Hollywood star who lived in America. And she would see the looks her aunt and her uncle gave each other, the way that when she said it to other people, their faces froze a little and they tried to change the subject. And after a while her aunt and uncle had suggested that it was not something she ought to bring up all the time at school, or at least when she first met people.

What does it do to someone, to be repeatedly told that what you know to be true is a lie? How does it change the way you relate to the world, to other people? How you process your grief, how you carry your anger. All that pain, all that rage – she could literally feel it, like a weight pressing down on her heart, her lungs.

Jess had been maybe eight years old, the very first time she saw a picture of Jackson and Georgia Crane together, in their wedding photos, on the cover of an ancient, well-thumbed copy of Hello! at the hairdresser. She had known without a doubt that the slender woman in the ivory satin dress, gossamer-fine veil resting lightly on her sharp cheekbones, was the one who had been in the car that night. She had wanted to go to the police and her uncle had promised her he would write to them. One of Jess’s fantasies had been that she managed to get a letter to Georgia herself, that it snagged her conscience and she went to the police and confessed. And the older Jess got, the stronger and more compelling the fantasy became, in some ways. Because surely she had a guilty conscience, this woman who was always turning up as an ambassador for worthy causes, talking in interviews in magazines and on TV about trying to use her platform for good, to highlight injustice or oppression or inequality. But if she had a conscience, then why had she not done something already? Why had she not done anything at the time? That hypocrite. That nasty hypocrite. When she allowed herself to dwell on it, Jess’s anger at Georgia Crane had burned almost as fiercely as the anger she felt towards Jackson Crane himself.

She was ten when they first got internet at home, dial-up, and the very first thing she did was to go on all the Jackson Crane fan sites and cross-reference the dates and try to work out where he had been at the time of the accident. It had taken a long time. And her uncle and aunt had kept calling up to see what she was doing and she kept calling back: ‘It’s homework.’ The dates did work, though. That was what it took a ten-year-old girl one evening to discover; something that the police had clearly never bothered to check. That Jackson Crane had been in England at the time of the accident, filming that awful Christmas movie.

She’d run down the stairs so fast she had literally bounced off the wall coming around the bend halfway between floors, skidded into the kitchen so fast her aunt and uncle both jumped in their chairs. She was panting so hard she could hardly get the words out to tell them. And in her head, at the time, even though it was all so real and still so painful, maybe one of the ways she dealt with it was by thinking of herself as some kind of detective – Nancy Drew, solving the mystery of her parents’ murder, like in one of her books – and now that fantasy seemed to be coming true. Except that they didn’t seem excited, her aunt or uncle. Neither of them had immediately pushed their dining chair back and strode to the phone on the wall to call the police. Instead they’d exchanged a look as eloquent as a sigh, and her uncle had gone into the other room without a word, and her aunt had sat her down for a serious conversation about how much this was upsetting everyone, and how she was too old for it now. And her aunt had rested a hand on the back of Jess’s hand, and looked her in the eyes, seriously, worriedly, and said, ‘Do you understand me, Jess? This has to stop now. It’s not good for him, your uncle, all this stress, on his heart. For any of us. It’s not healthy for you, love.’ And after that, every time she went online, within about five minutes one or the other of them would remember something they needed from the airing cupboard in the upstairs room where the computer was, or pop in to see if she wanted a squash or a biscuit.