Final Cut(98)

‘Even if I die now,’ I say, ‘they’ll find the film. Your confession. Out there for everyone to hear.’

His eyes burn but, as I watch, something inside them dies. He knows there’s no escape. He knows there’s only one way this can end now. He drops the poker and it clatters off the rocks. His head falls for a second, but then he looks up. His eyes lock with mine, and with a sudden surge he reaches out. I think he’s going to grab me, to try to push me over, and maybe he is.

‘Daisy?’ he says. ‘Baby …’

I think of what he did to me, to Daisy, to Zoe, and who knows how many more. I summon all the strength I have and push. He stumbles, then falls with a curdled scream that might almost be laughter. I watch as he goes. His body plummets without grace, cartwheeling as it falls, and smashes into the deep, grey water. He goes under. Once, twice, three times. I breathe deep, gasping at the cold, clean air, and wait, my eyes fixed on the sea below.

The waves swallow him one final time then close over his body. This time, he doesn’t come up.





Tomorrow





56


I park the car and get out. It’s early morning, not long after dawn. The late-summer light is thin, but already I can tell it’s going to be a beautiful day. I check the address. Stone steps lead up to an imposing front door and I find the buzzer and press.

Dr Olsen has retired, but she’s agreed to see me. I’ve told her the truth, that I’ve pieced it together; finally, I know what happened. After a few moments she buzzes me up.

‘Alex, darling,’ she says when she opens the door. She looks exactly the same as I remember her. She holds out her hands and takes both of mine. ‘It’s so lovely to see you!’

She pulls me in and we embrace. ‘It’s Daisy, now,’ I say, and she apologises. I tell her it doesn’t matter. I’ve only recently got used to it myself.

‘Well, you must call me Laure,’ she says. ‘Come on in! There’s no way I’d have recognised you!’

I smile. Her flat is smaller than I’d expected, but comfortable. She makes me a cup of tea, then sits on the sofa while I set up my camera. I’m making a new film, now. It’s about what happened in Blackwood Bay. It’s about trauma, and abuse, and the effects they can have. It’s about shattered lives. It’s about me.

I’ve told her there are still things from back then that I can’t remember, and there are still days when I find myself doing something with no recollection of how I came to be doing it.

‘You have a tendency to dissociate,’ she says. ‘You may have always had that, but it’s likely it was exacerbated by the terrible abuse you suffered. It’s not uncommon.’

‘You mean people pretend to be someone else?’

‘Not exactly. Dissociation can take several forms, and of course things rarely fall into a neat diagnostic pattern. For many people, it’s like no longer feeling they’re in their own body. Or they feel they’re under water and their limbs aren’t behaving. For you? Back then, I suspect that when you were being abused you would dissociate to avoid the pain. You’d imagine yourself having Sadie’s life, rather than your own, and it’s possible that when you dissociated during the traumatic abuse you would almost become her.’

‘Is that why I killed her? Because I was jealous?’

Her voice is soft.

‘Daisy, dear. You were being abused, terribly. You were drinking and taking drugs, often against your will. You were told that if you didn’t comply, you’d be killed. And let’s not forget that you’ve told me Bryan said the plan was only to scare Sadie, so that she wouldn’t tell your friend—’

‘David?’

‘Yes, David. So she wouldn’t tell David any more than she already had. It’s likely that after Sadie’s death you experienced overwhelming guilt, probably self-hatred. It’s my feeling that it took you every ounce of strength you had left to go to David and tell him you needed to get away. After that, your mind fractured. Subconsciously, you tried to kill Daisy – the person who had murdered Sadie – while at the same time resurrecting Sadie and giving her back the life you knew had been taken. You ran to London having done this consciously, having decided to call yourself Sadie, but when the abuse continued in London you carried on dissociating and believing you were her, eventually finding it harder and harder to determine which of your memories were real, Daisy experiences, and which were fantasy, Sadie memories.’

‘And then I attacked that guy. Gee.’

‘Yes. And you had to run again. Why you chose Deal, I don’t think we’ll ever know. It’s possible you were just going to the coast, and possible, too, that you intended suicide. Anyway, you experienced something called a dissociative fugue, in which people usually lose their memory of who they are, and dissociative amnesia, which meant that your memories of life before your fugue didn’t return. And then, when you phoned Dev and he called you Sadie—’

‘I thought I was her.’

‘Yes. Your Sadie memories became real. Your Daisy ones were erased completely.’

‘And then I changed my name anyway. To Alex.’

‘Yes. Burying the truth even further.’

I sigh and gaze out of the window over her shoulder. The guilt hasn’t gone away, the feeling that I could’ve done more to escape, that I should’ve fought harder, tried to save Sadie’s life, even if it cost me my own. Even though I know, really, that it was futile. Bryan would’ve killed us both.