Girl Unknown(84)

I was on the ground almost instantly, brought to my knees, pain flooding in to replace thought. One thing shines clear: Chris’s words spat at me in the darkness – ‘Keep her then,’ he said. ‘The little bitch.’

What then?

Hands cupping my face. The warm run of blood from my nose. Someone saying: Jesus Christ! The rough edges of cloth pressing against my face and – oh, God – the pain. Pressure in my head unbearable now, ready to burst, like just before a sneeze only far, far worse. Vaguely, in the background, He shouldn’t drive. Someone should go after him. More footsteps. I can hardly see. Asphalt under my feet, moving now, stumbling indoors where the lights are too bright and there’s something very cold on my face, ice, a new and different pain. Take it easy, she says, and I try to focus. Concern in her eyes, the liquid softness of them. And I’m back there at the very beginning, in a place I have lost, a place I have longed for, where there’s nothing, only time and love and endless possibility. And her, just as she was. Linda, I say and I kiss her.





23. Caroline


It was so dark that night. Not a star in the sky, the moon obliterated by the cloud of smoke blending into the blackness. As I stood at the side of the road, watching the red tail-lights of Chris’s car in their wild dash away from me, I fancied I saw a glow coming from over the dark hump of the land – the dying embers of the fire on the bridge.

I had tried to keep him there, for his own safety, not out of any desire to see them reunite. I was glad they were done with each other – one of her tentacles severed – even if the manner of it had been ugly and hard.

‘Lying, to her, comes as easy as breathing,’ he had told me, bitter tears in his eyes.

He wouldn’t be dissuaded and I didn’t try.

‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ I had argued, meaning the closed bridge, the island cut-off. But his need to put distance between himself and her overrode my concerns for his safety. He listened to my pleas and warnings, my quieter regrets – ‘I wish she had been gentler on you’ – then muttered an apology about David and put the pedal to the floor.

I was staring after his car, exhaust fumes mingling with the night air, when I felt it. Something hard in my pocket. All the commotion in the restaurant, the lovers storming out, David hurrying after them, everyone had forgotten about the ring. I remember picking it out of the salver, slipping it into my pocket, then going out into the night with the others. Now I stood there, turning it over in my fingers like a worry bead.

The tail-lights were gone, but the hazy glow remained – a dirty orange smear on the horizon – and I imagined it to be the same colour as the pocket of hot air I felt inside myself. The sac of heat I had carried within me since the day I’d first heard her name. It wasn’t anger, or jealousy, or resentment – those hard, robust emotions pushing outwards with defiance. Rather, it was something inward-looking, fragile, its membranes delicate. I had to carry it carefully inside me lest it break. It’s a shy emotion, guilt. It cowers in the darkness, sits quietly for years, not bothering anyone, until something comes along – or someone – and pokes it with a stick. Then it swells, its membranes straining to hold it in, pressing up against your insides like another organ – a womb. For that was where I felt it. A pocket of hot air where a baby had once been.

Like you, you mean?

The venom in her words. A smirk pulling up the corners of her mouth, eyes glittering and hard. She knew. She knew what I had done. All afternoon and into the evening, I had kept it inside me – the knowledge of his betrayal. I had gone through the motions as I always do – the dutiful wife, the dutiful mother – locking away the knowledge of his betrayal so as not to ruin the evening. But it had leaked away inside me, like alkali seeping from a battery, the slow corrosion worming down through me, mingling with the pocket of hot air to produce something noxious. As I walked back towards the house, I felt the slosh of it inside me, dangerous should it get out. Lethal.

Holly was standing outside, her face caught in the light thrown by the kitchen window.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked, and she jumped, the sharpness of my tone giving her a fright.

‘Inside.’

It was like entering a different house from the one we had left a couple of hours previously. All that busy energy, the sense of anticipation before a night out, gone now, replaced by an uneasy stillness. I found myself walking softly, as if wary of disturbing someone, but whom I could not tell.

The light was on in the kitchen, illuminating the undressed salad, the vegetables half-peeled and abandoned, spilling over the side of the chopping board on to the table. Straight away, I knew something was wrong. I knew it in the way Zo? seemed to have backed into a corner, her hands behind her on the counter, shoulders a little high and tense.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. Even from that distance, I could see her contracted pupils – small pinpricks in the green fabric of her eyes.

‘Nothing,’ she said. But I knew it wasn’t nothing. I knew it from the way David was leaning against the counter, swaying slightly, as if he hadn’t heard or noticed me. His nose was bloodied and while her pupils had shrunk to almost nothing, his had dilated. Two black discs fixed on her, like a drunk.

‘Linda,’ he said to her, and I just about caught her reaction – that recoil of horror – before my eyes snapped in his direction.