What Lies Between Us(21)
I asked him to get one inside his lip saying Heathcliff, my favourite-ever Emily Bront? character, but he shook his head, laughed and never offered a reason why he refused. And that’s where the memory ends. Like so many others, it’s just another snapshot of a time past and never bettered.
I finish cleaning my teeth, sit on the rim of the bath with the phone in my hand and take a deep breath. I can’t put it off any longer, so I click the email link to the news story.
‘Convicted killer Jon Hunter dies after an 18-month battle with leukaemia,’ the story begins. ‘Hunter, 46, was convicted and jailed for life 23 years ago for the murder of his girlfriend. She was found . . .’
‘No!’ I hiss. Seeing her name infuriates me so I stop reading because I know the lies the article is about to repeat. I glimpse two photographs of Jon used to illustrate the story. One is of the man I loved, performing onstage where he belonged. The second was taken by a fellow inmate and sold to the papers. Jon’s hair is still long but now it’s white, along with his beard. Even in such a grainy image I can tell the light has long been extinguished from his eyes. I guess being locked up in one room for so many years can do that to you. I’m already beginning to see it happen with Maggie and she’s only been upstairs for a fraction of Jon’s time.
I scroll further down without reading any more until I reach a photograph of that girl. She’s sitting on a beach, wearing a blue bikini, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses is balanced on the tip of her nose. She is smiling like she doesn’t have a care in the world, because I suppose she didn’t. The resemblance between us back then is uncanny.
I hold the phone to my chest and rack my brain, trying my hardest to remember her, but I still don’t think our paths crossed. She didn’t hang around with the band, I didn’t meet her at any gigs or parties and I know for a fact that she wasn’t Jon’s girlfriend like the papers said because I was. Ask anyone who hung around us at that time and they’ll tell you that we were besotted with one another. So it frustrates the hell out of me when they keep referring to them as a couple.
An unwelcome thought creeps into my head. Or perhaps I just don’t want to remember her? Perhaps they did have a relationship that I didn’t know about and she’s one of the missing pieces of my history? I shake my head until the suggestion dissolves. ‘No,’ I say aloud. It simply isn’t possible. My memory might be vague but I’m not stupid.
Jon wasn’t my first partner and I certainly wasn’t his, but he was the first man I ever loved. He was also the last. Imagine that, living a life without love for all these intervening years. I don’t need anyone to tell me how pathetic that sounds.
He’d known soon after the first night we slept together that I was fourteen, even when I’d tried to convince him I was eighteen. He was twenty-two and I hadn’t wanted to scare him off by admitting the truth. When Saffron opened her big jealous mouth and gave it away – to try and split us up, I assume – I could have slapped her. However, her truth had the opposite effect and Jon admitted it excited him knowing that what we were doing was forbidden. ‘I like my bananas green,’ he’d said with a grin.
He made me promise not to tell anyone at school about us – no easy feat when you’re a teenage girl who wants everyone else to be envious of your relationship with the singer of the hottest band in town. But Jon warned me that if it ever came out, he would deny it for the sake of his career, then he’d dump me. Boasting wasn’t worth the risk.
Sometimes when Jon and I met in town after school, he’d sulk if I’d changed out of my uniform in the bus station toilets first. He preferred me to keep it on. I don’t think we would’ve got away with our relationship in this day and age. They’d accuse him of grooming me and would throw around words like paedophile or child molester. But he wasn’t any such thing. Unless you were in our relationship, you couldn’t possibly understand what we meant to one another. He loved me, he looked after me, and he wanted what was best for me. He was my boyfriend, my best friend and my father all rolled into one. And I’ve never since allowed anyone to make me feel as special as Jon did.
It was false accusations that ruined Jon’s life when I was facing my own battles. There are so many blanks and Maggie is to blame for all of them. If she hadn’t done what she did to me, I could have defended him. I could have told the world he wasn’t capable of doing the awful things he was jailed for. It’s because of her that he has died in prison and half his life was wasted. As a result, so was mine. I might not be behind bars, but I might as well be.
His loss burns like I’d only been with him this morning. I notice that I’m no longer clutching the phone to my chest. Instead, my hands are pressed against my stomach. And I’m rubbing it gently and remembering my second pregnancy. I’m remembering the child I had with Jon.
CHAPTER 16
MAGGIE
Hearing Hunter’s name come from my daughter’s mouth has left me flustered and unable to sleep. Now as I lie in the darkness of my room, my fingers anxiously kneading bunched-up ripples of duvet, I keep replaying the sound of him laughing at me the first time we came into contact.
Tonight, the news of his death has come so out of the blue that I didn’t have time to rehearse a suitable reaction. I’m not a vindictive woman but I hope his end was a long, drawn-out, agonising affair. I’m relieved that after all this time, the three of us no longer share the same space on earth. We are free of him and he’s incapable of hurting Nina again. It’s over. Perhaps now, there’s a chance she can try to push past whatever memories she keeps of him and reclaim normality amid the chaos she’s created. Well, as much normality as there can be when you keep your mother chained up like a Russian circus bear.