The Guest List(64)

‘But then she started going off him,’ I tell Olivia.

Olivia raises her eyebrows. ‘She got the ick?’ She seems a bit more engaged now.

‘I think so. By the Easter holiday she’d stopped talking about him so much. When I asked her she told me that she realised he wasn’t quite the guy she thought he was. And that she’d spent too much time wrapped up in him, that she really needed to get her head down and focus on her studies. She’d got a low 2.1 in an essay she’d handed in and that had been her wake-up call.’

‘Jeez,’ Olivia says, rolling her eyes. ‘She sounds like a massive geek.’ And then she catches herself. ‘Sorry.’

I smile. ‘I told her exactly the same thing. But that was Alice, all over. Anyway, she wanted to make sure that she did the decent thing by him, told him in person.’ That was Alice all over too.

‘How did he take it?’ Olivia asks.

‘It didn’t go that well,’ I say. ‘He was pretty horrible about it all, said he wouldn’t let her humiliate him. That she would pay for it.’ I remember that because I remember wondering what he could possibly do. How do you make someone ‘pay’ for a break-up?

‘She didn’t tell me what he did, to get her back,’ I tell Olivia. ‘She didn’t tell me or Mum or Dad. She was too ashamed.’

‘But you found out?’

‘Later,’ I say. ‘I found out later. He’d taken this video of her.’

A video of Alice had been uploaded to the university’s intranet. It was a video she had let him take, after the fancy Reeling Society ball. It was taken down from the server the second the university found out about it. But by then the news had spread, the damage was done. Other versions of it had been saved on computers around campus. It was posted to Facebook. It was taken down. It was posted again.

‘So, like … revenge porn?’ Olivia asks.

I nod. ‘That’s what we’d call it now. But then it was this, you know, more innocent time. Now you’re warned to be careful, aren’t you? Everyone knows that if you let someone take photos or a video of you it could end up on the internet.’

‘I guess,’ Olivia says. ‘But people forget. In the moment. Or you know, if you really like someone and they ask you. So I suppose everyone at uni saw it, right?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But the worst part is we didn’t know at the time, she didn’t tell us. She was too ashamed. I think maybe she thought it would spoil our image of her. She’d always been so perfect, though of course that wasn’t why we loved her.’

The fact that she didn’t even tell me. That’s the part that still hurts so much.

‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘I think it’s too difficult to tell the people closest to you. The ones you love. Does that sound familiar?’

Olivia nods.

‘So. I want you to know: you can tell me. Yeah? Because here’s the thing. It’s always better to get it out in the open – even if it seems shameful, even if you feel like people won’t understand. I wish Alice had been able to talk to me about it. I think she might have got some perspective she couldn’t see herself.’

Olivia looks up at me, then away. It comes out as little more than a whisper. ‘Yeah.’

And then the tinny sound of an announcement comes from the direction of the marquee. ‘Ladies and gents’ – it’s Charlie’s voice, I realise, he must be doing his MC bit – ‘please take your seats for the wedding breakfast.’

I don’t have time to tell Olivia the rest – and perhaps that’s for the best. So I don’t tell her how the whole thing was like a huge stain upon Alice’s life, on her person – like it was tattooed there. None of us had realised quite how fragile Alice was. She had always seemed so capable, so in control: getting all those amazing grades, playing on the sports teams, getting her place at university, never missing a trick. But underneath that, fuelling all this success, was a tangled mass of anxiety that none of us saw until it was too late. She couldn’t cope with the shame of it all. She realised she would never – could never – work in politics as she had dreamed. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have her BA, because she’d dropped out. There was a video of her giving some guy a blowjob – and more – on the internet, now. It was indelible.

So I didn’t tell Olivia how one June, two months after she came home from uni, Alice took a cocktail of painkillers and pretty much anything else she could find from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom while my mum was collecting me from netball practice. How, seventeen years ago this month, my beautiful, clever sister killed herself.





AOIFE


The Wedding Planner


It’s my fault, what just happened, with the bridesmaid. I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming: I knew there was trouble brewing with that girl. I knew it when I gave her her breakfast this morning. She held it together during the ceremony, even though she looked like she wanted to turn and bolt out of there. Afterwards, of course, I tried to keep my eye on her. But there have been so many other demands on me: the guests were so insistent, so rabid, that the waiting staff – all mostly older schoolkids and students on their summer holidays – could hardly cope.

The next thing I knew, there was the commotion, and she was in the water. Seeing her I was suddenly transported back to a different day. Powerless to help. Having seen the signs, but ignoring them until it was too late. Those insistent images in my dreams: the water rising, my hands reaching out as though I might be able to do something …