The French Girl(84)

Suicide?

Suicide. Caro is murdering me. Has been murdering me for a good while now, surely, for this drug to have taken effect to this extent. I should feel something about that, and I do, but it’s a small feeling, a tiny glowing ball of panic, smothered deep within me beneath cotton-wool layers of exhaustion and apathy. I can see what’s happening, I can see what’s going to happen, but I seem incapable of being anything other than a detached observer. The cold, hard, fear-forged Kate is gone, blasted away by mere chemicals; she may as well never have existed.

But . . . murder. How long has Caro been thinking of murder? Whilst I’ve been wondering . . . I’m not sure if I’ve said that out loud; Caro’s head turns to me, so perhaps I did speak. “I’ve been wondering . . . if we would have been friends . . . if I hadn’t been with Seb. Whilst . . .”—it’s almost funny; a gasp of a laugh escapes me—“you’ve been planning murder.” I think she stops in what she’s doing, I think her face is thrown into uncertainty for a moment, but my eyes are barely open. After a moment, they drift closed once more. I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t jumped off the wall into Seb’s arms; if I’d turned to Tom instead. How would the spider’s web have been spun then?

But Caro is talking now; I wrench my eyes open again. She is talking, though she is doing something with her glass at the same time. Washing it, I realize, and putting it away, all the while taking care not to touch it with her bare fingers. Now she is rubbing down the wine bottle with the dishcloth, still talking. “. . . But actually everyone will believe it. Even your secretary Julie was saying how you didn’t seem yourself today, how you haven’t for a while. You’ve been overcome with guilt at killing that girl, you see. It’s what they’ll say; your death will be the proof of it. There’s no real evidence to point to any one of us over another; you and I both know Modan’s case is weak, but suicide is as good as a confession, isn’t it? Then this will all go away . . . And, yes, I know you must be thinking that nobody would believe you had access to drugs. But you’ve had a drug dealer’s number stored in your phone for a good long while now. Ever since my party, actually.” She gives a small self-congratulatory smile and reaches for my phone, which is lying on the counter. She scrolls adeptly through the contacts, then pushes it in front of my face, but it’s just a blurred mess of color to me. “You really should put a security code on your iPhone, you know.”

As she speaks I realize I have to do something, and I have to do it now before it’s too late for me to do anything at all. I summon up all the strength I can to make a grab for her, but once again I’ve already missed the moment. The grab is more of a swipe really: she jumps back easily, out of my limited field of vision, and the follow-through overbalances me, tumbling me into an awkward heap on the floor. It feels good to lie down. My cheek is resting against the lovely coolness of my kitchen tiles.

I don’t move. It’s unclear to me whether I even could if I tried. I look at the tiles, at the contrast of their smooth sheen with the uneven texture of the rough black grout; I let my focus relax further, and it seems that I am buoyed up on a sea of pale ivory tiles stretching before me to the horizon.

But Caro is still talking. I’m only getting snatches of what she’s saying, though, and only flashes of vision. It’s simply too difficult to keep my eyes open, and I can’t imagine why I should be trying to. There’s something about Seb kissing her, but I don’t know when that happened: recently, or in France, or years ago as teenagers? It doesn’t matter anyway. Time is stretching out, each event like a pearl on a string, each leading inevitably to the next. Seb was Seb, is Seb, could only ever have been Seb, and in his careless affection for Caro—never enough but sometimes too much—he sparked something in Caro, who could only ever be Caro. And therefore here we are . . . but Caro is still talking, and it’s all of it about Seb, about him sowing wild oats before settling down, how he said she was the only one who understood him, who was always there for him . . .

At one point I open my eyes again and find my iPhone a few inches from my nose. I don’t think it was there before.

My eyes close again.

Something shakes me impatiently and insistently until eventually I open my eyes again. Caro’s face is swimming right in front of me; she has pulled my head up by the hair.

Perhaps she says something—her lips move, but I can’t make sense of it, and she recognizes that; she speaks again, almost defiantly, and this time I understand. “We wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have been friends.” I see her flat eyes, the intensity within them, and deep down I marvel at it: that insistence, that passion for what she wants. I think I had that once, but the drug has wrested it from me now.

Something bangs. It takes a good while to recognize it’s my own head, lolling back on the floor after she drops it.

Time passes. Or perhaps it doesn’t. I’m an unreliable witness to life now.

At some point I become aware of Severine folding her beautiful walnut limbs fluidly to sit cross-legged beside me on the cold tiles, her eyes fixed on mine, and I feel . . . something. It takes a while to identify it, but I do: it’s gratitude. Gratitude for her continued presence. I feel it wash through me now I’ve named it. Don’t leave. I don’t say the words, but I can see she won’t: for the first time I have penetrated her inscrutability and can read what those dark eyes hold. She won’t leave me. She will never leave me. She will be here until there’s no more here for me. And now I know at long last what the point of her is, why Severine has been here all along. For this. This is where the ribbon of time has been leading for me. There should be no emotion because this was all determined a long time ago. Because Seb is Seb, and Caro is Caro, and Kate is Kate, and Tom is . . .