He Said/She Said(100)
Chapter 54
LAURA
21 March 2015
Wilbraham Road is as alive today as it was dead last night. There seems to be a builder’s van for every car. A cement mixer churns in Ronni’s front garden: good. I can scream at Kit without the neighbours overhearing anything.
I shower, rubbing stretch-mark oil in circles into my baby bump. I wash the last pink berry stains from my hair and blast it with the dryer. There’s half an hour before Kit’s due home. In the study, I spread before me Beth’s little dossier on Jamie. I tear out the staples and cover the desk with individual pages, as if the clue to the understanding is not in their content but their formation. I’m aware of the irony that I’m planning to explain to Kit something I barely understand myself. The truth, and the threat, seem to shift with every rearrangement.
I must telephone Antonia Balcombe. I’ve made a living from awkward phone calls and I’ve trained people to do the same, yet I can’t remember being more nervous about dialling a number. What would I tell trainees? That nerves only attack if you don’t know what you’re going to say; have a script, believe you’re right, be clear about your objective. What do I need from Antonia? I list bullet points on the back of one of Beth’s print-outs.
Corroborate what Beth said, how true is what she said about Jamie
Sympathise with her/congratulate her on finding the courage to leave
When is Jamie out, maybe we can cut out middleman and you can keep me in the loop yourself – Beth out of the picture
Offer to meet up – she come here or me go to her?
The final point is really a warning within a question.
How do you think Beth seems? Is she stable?
I call the landline because I don’t want to catch Antonia on the hop with this. The phone rings out six times and then there’s a click and whirr of an old-fashioned tape-recorder answerphone, the kind that broadcasts the message to the whole room. This ties another knot in my tongue.
‘This is a message for Antonia.’ For the first time in years I give my old name. ‘It’s Laura Langrishe. From . . .’ I’m about to say the trial but then picture Antonia’s kids listening in. ‘From Cornwall, from Truro. I, ah, I met up with Beth Taylor yesterday – well, you probably know that by now. I think you might have been expecting me to call. There’s a lot I’d like to talk to you about.’
Should I warn her not to let Beth get too close? I chicken out. Instead, I dictate my own numbers, landline and mobile, to the machine, and then ring off, setting the phone down next to me on the computer table.
I look again at Kit’s map of eclipses. His trip complete, he can now replace a red thread with a gold one, stretching in a little arc north of these islands. He’s even cut the gold thread to size and set it out on top of the printer. I think about pinning it on the map, just for something to do, then think better of it. To deprive him of the ritual would be like opening a child’s advent calendar. A shaft of tenderness breaks through my anger at him, confusing me further. I want his help. I want to scream at him. I want him to hold me. I want to push him down the stairs.
Downstairs, the walls and floor are clean, for the most part, but the bin is already starting to smell, a horrible cloying fruity odour that’s mixed in with the dried-out bone broth cup. I pause for a moment of brief nostalgia for my blunt pre-pregnancy sense of smell, then haul the bin bag and its contents through the hall. On the front doorstep I drop the lot in the wheelie bin. The whole job takes less than four seconds. I’ve turned my back to the street when I feel a rush of air at my neck, displaced by the body behind it.
‘Laura!’ Beth barrels into me, pushing me into the hall with more force than I could ever equal. I trip on the threshold and fall forwards, leading with my belly as the Minton tiles rise up to meet me.
Chapter 55
KIT
8 May 2000
On the morning of the trial, I woke up with a long, hungry intake of breath, like someone had been holding a pillow to my face. I was momentarily disoriented to find myself in a chintzy room above a pub. Laura slept – also fitfully – by my side, a twitching innocent embodiment of everything I had to lose. We were in Truro town centre but you would never have known you were in a city from the silence outside. Where were the refuse lorries? The sirens? The fights? I lay awake in the hotel room, which was so suffocatingly floral I was surprised it hadn’t given me hayfever, and wished myself back in London.
I was uneasy about leaving my brother. Our father’s death had been a release that bordered on anti-climax; or it would have been, had Mac not taken up the hellraiser’s baton like it was a bottle the old man had pressed into his hand. I worried about him; I worried about Ling and little Juno: but most of all I worried about myself.
I was shot through with the stupid, childish longing for a magic wand. When I was young, and my world consisted of my family, my telescope, and a yard of Philip K. Dick novels, I daydreamed constantly of Kit’s Adventures in Time Travel. I ran through the usual fantasies from killing Hitler to fixing the lottery, but now I knew that, given the power of time travel, I’d return to the previous August and intercept Beth on her way to Lizard Point. One momentary loss of reason had undermined my whole sanity; I took monthly health checks at the STI clinic and kept them up ridiculously, superstitiously, long after any infections I might have passed on to Laura would have showed up.