The Things We Do to Our Friends(66)

“Strangle you!” Tabitha shrieked.

All of the rest of them were listening silently, but I knew they would take the lead from Tabitha when it came down to it.

I changed tack. I tried to speak calmly. “There’s no need for this at all. For you all to be here. I don’t need to sit down and go through it all again. I just need to know how this happened. I thought we researched them? All of them? But this wasn’t a one-off. Sorcha knew about that man; she knew he was violent.”

“What do you mean?” Ava interjected.

“It felt like a trap. He’s a predator. Whatever we thought we were doing, he planned it.”

“A trap!” Tabitha said. “No, no, nothing like that. Honestly, your neck! I feel terrible for you.”

Standing to one side of her, Imogen winced at my injuries.

Ava and Samuel were in the background, but they were more of a blur because I was wholly concentrated on Tabitha, her eyes so wide. Her hand had somehow managed to land on mine, consoling me, stroking my wrist.

I spoke before I’d properly considered my words: “I can’t do this again. I’m out.”

Tabitha pulled her hand back as if I’d electrocuted her, and even as the words left my mouth, I knew it was more complicated than just saying that’s it and walking away.

What did I really think was going to happen? That I could stop what we were doing but still be friends with them?

Then Tabitha was begging me, jabbering away. “No, no, Clare. You just can’t! We’re doing so well. I know what happened was awful, but you can rest, fully recover, then we’ll get back to it? You do trust me, don’t you? You’ve seen how much we can achieve, and we can’t do any of it without you. You’re vital to the whole thing. This—this just got…out of hand.”

A rush of words and excuses. A most un-Tabitha-like panic.

“I agree. I just think this is where it ends for me,” I said.

And the idea of what that end would be like solidified.

It was the first time I’d thought of a swift escape, of leaving them and starting somewhere new, and I let it sit there, not expanding upon it, but still allowing the thought to form for us all.

There was silence. You could almost see Tabitha working out where to go next, tactically.

“Give me a few days, Clare,” she said. “I can make this right; I know I can.”

I should have said no, but seeing her there, the person I had thought I’d do anything for, hearing her make that promise, I can only say that it was impossible in that moment to pull away from her.

I said “Okay” in a quiet voice. Agreed, even though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. I had no idea what making it right meant. I thought sorting it out was about me—about looking after me.

“I want to know what’s going on up there at that house, what Sorcha knew,” I said, trying to lay down my own terms, but she was hardly listening, because they were all around me, reaching for me, and it was lovely, in that moment, having them all on my side. That could be enough to banish the dark thought crows.

Not since some of those early dinner parties, since France, had I enjoyed them as a tactile swarm. Imogen’s arms on me, Samuel cuddling me too, their combined glow dousing me in something warm. Tabitha pressing her powdered cheek to mine and Ava’s collarbone hard against my back. Us moving together as one beast. When I stepped back from them all, I couldn’t work out Tabitha’s face exactly, but she was happy, certainly, with a faint smile.

I think all I needed was for them to acknowledge what had happened to me. I got it in that moment, but then Tabitha looked past that, needed to do something else. Thought I wanted more.

“The things we do for our friends,” Tabitha said to no one in particular. “We help them. We have to. Anyway, we’ll tell Finn you’re sick. You don’t need to worry about anything. Come back and stay at ours for a few days.”

And, of course, as we left together, I realized how little we’d actually discussed of what would come next. Tabitha steering and shrieking and taking up so much room, as always, while the rest of them had stayed in the shadows.





56


I slept in Imogen’s bed—she’d been relegated to the drawing room.

There was a new addition: a huge print at the bottom of the bed, pinned up to the wall.

Caravaggio’s Judith.

His version was unlike Klimt’s. Imogen would have described it better, but to me, it was a measured kind of horror. Their expressions were realistic, but also too restrained. Holofernes’s darkened eyes bulged a little as the blood spurted from his neck in an extremely tidy arc, and Judith was tentative as she guided the sword into the skin.

Tabitha and Ava were absent some days, and Imogen and Samuel weren’t around. Later, when everything had come to an end, Ava assured me that there were no drugs involved during those days spent at Tabitha’s flat. But why, then, did the rest of the week take on a euphoric blur of feverish sleep and hazy waking hours? Dreams of Judith with her sword, of Tabitha’s hair plaited and wrapped around my neck in a flaxen rope, of ducks running about squawking in my face, and then their guts spilled and mixed with plucked feathers. Meaningful or meaningless images.

In England, they seemed very fond of Calpol—the silky sweetness of it coating my mouth as a child at my granny’s—and I think of that taste when I remember those days in bed at Tabitha’s.