He Said/She Said(117)

‘Because.’ I could feel the tears coming but I pressed them back. Not because I needed to hide my grief in front of Beth but because I wanted to get as much of the story out while I was still coherent. I owed her that. ‘He knew I’d never turn my back on you without a bloody good reason. So he gave me one.’ I looked at my lap. ‘He reckons you doing your friend’s tyres and then that photo gave him the idea. You know, that you might be a bit . . .’ I twirled my finger at my temple; for the first time it occurred to me that he might have somehow even orchestrated those things. Beth read my face and held up both hands.

‘No, I’m afraid that was all me.’

I let that settle for a while. We all do stupid things when we’re young.

We sat there in silence. In the corridor, a trolley clattered past, and from somewhere wafted a disgusting acrylamide whiff that could only mean hospital food. I picked a grape – not one of mine – and broke its skin between my teeth. Its juice was tart in my mouth.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about you and Kit?’ It came out like an accusation. Maybe on some level that I couldn’t police, that was how I really felt. My life sentence is to examine every prejudice in myself as well as others.

‘I was going to,’ she said, colouring a little. ‘That’s why I was there, in that field. During the eclipse. I’d gone after you – I’m not proud of it – I was going to tell you what a wanker you were going out with.’

‘So what stopped you? Was it Jamie?’

‘No, I was already leaving when he caught up with me. You stopped me.’ My incomprehension must have shown; she tilted her head to the side, and her voice was almost a whisper. ‘I watched you watching the eclipse. I saw you both together; it was magic.’ Her words took me back to the top of the lorry, watching violet light stain the sky, so wrapped up in each other we might have been the only humans in the world. ‘He’d told me the night before what eclipses meant to him and it was still an effort for him to take his eyes off you to look at the sky. I’d never had anyone look at me like that. Still haven’t.’ She twisted the corner of the blanket in her hands. ‘I knew he’d been telling the truth, that what happened with me was a moment of madness, and everyone’s got the right to fuck up, haven’t they? You were good together, Laura, you were the real thing. It’s something you recognise when you see. I couldn’t touch it – oh, I’m sorry.’

My tears were hot and fast. Beth was saying the only thing I could no longer bear to hear. We had been good, me and Kit; we had been golden. For a blinding solar flash, I saw why he had gone to such vile lengths to preserve us. A yowling noise escaped my throat. Beth handed me a tissue from her bedside cabinet, and took one for herself. ‘If we hadn’t been thrown together by the court case, that would’ve been an end to it. I would’ve chalked the thing with Kit up to experience and left you both alone and all this . . . all this shit would never have happened.’

I escaped to this notional other world for a second. There, Kit would never have been tested, never have known his dark capabilities. The gold would have faded over time but never to this base metal. And my children would have grown up with their parents together.

Or perhaps, in this parallel life, getting away with fucking Beth would have given him a taste for it. Perhaps he would have spent the rest of his life making up for his perceived lost time. I’ll never know. And in that other world . . .

‘If we’d never gone to Cornwall, Jamie would still be alive,’ I thought aloud.

‘Well,’ Beth looked straight at me. ‘It wasn’t a completely wasted journey, then.’

Our laughter was sick, uncontrollable and indivisible from our tears. There was a word for it: hysteria. The ancient Greeks believed that a woman’s uterus roamed around her body making her mad. My uterus was anchored by babies to my pelvis, but as we sat in that hospital, rocking with wild laughter that had the nurses running in, I felt that some even more fundamental part of me had broken away and was running loose inside me.

Eventually the laughter died down and we sat in silence that was broken only by the occasional ragged sigh. I took Beth’s hand again and we stayed like that, the curtains pulled tight around us. In the atmosphere of utter honesty, I came close to telling her that I had lied for her in the witness box; or rather, asking her if she knew that I had lied for her. Then an orderly wheeled in supper – mash, cabbage and something brown – and the spell was broken. So what if she knew I had lied? Beth and I had walked our separate hells and finally reached safety together.

I rattled the curtain rings on my way out of the cubicle. ‘Will you come and see me again?’ she asked. I turned around but didn’t answer straight away. Kit’s voice carried across the years, cutting me off. How can you seriously expect to forge a genuine friendship with someone you met like that? Beth’s mouth quivered as if she was waiting for my permission to smile. I mentally silenced Kit. Let me try to get one good thing out of this mess of smoke and steel and lies.

‘Of course,’ I said.

I walked along the shiny corridor, aware of a loosening and release deep inside my chest; the hard guilty stone of my perjury crumbling into nothing. Unlike Kit, I had lied and got away with it. At this thought, something caught in my throat. No. It had not quite crumbled to nothing. I understood, as I left the hospital, that that rock of guilt would never dissolve entirely. I stood on the filthy street, cars rushing past me, as it dispersed into powder, quite invisible, and fine enough for me to carry in my veins for ever.