The Things We Do to Our Friends(70)

We both knew he wouldn’t be coming over.

“So, they’re still in France?”

She had that look on her face. She felt sorry for me. “Yes, not that I’ve been out there for a long time. Can’t stand the food.” She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t think about them. It’s all been difficult for them, and you know that.”

“I’m just supposed to pretend they don’t exist?” I asked.

“You’ve been doing okay so far.”

“I don’t think I’m doing so well now.”

She gave me a weak smile. She must have thought of her son who never left France anymore, a French daughter-in-law who she’d never liked, and a granddaughter who was cold and closed off. I was a flesh-and-blood relative; I was part of her, and I’d done something that she’d heard about in whispers, something no one could fully understand.

I owed her, and I felt like the only way I could pay her back was to make sure she didn’t have to think about what I’d done, to not worry her at all. Then we could just sit and drink tea together, watch TV and pretend everything was normal.

She put her arm around me and squeezed me. She could have asked me why I wasn’t doing so well, but she didn’t. She spoke softly. “What they did to you. The way they treated you. That wasn’t your fault, you know. No child should ever be treated like that.”

There was a lump in my throat. I wouldn’t cry. I wasn’t a crier. I just nodded.

She snapped back into business mode.

“I didn’t get you a present,” she said. “I didn’t want to get something you didn’t want. We can go choose something for you after Christmas if you want.”

“It’s fine; there’s nothing I need.”

I took my bag upstairs and noticed the single paper garland that had been threaded around the banister. A depressing attempt. I rubbed it between two fingers. Flimsy, made of cheap red paper and put up hastily, so it half fell and grazed the floor. I let it sit in my hand, then I pulled at it, wrenching the paper down and stuffing it in the bin in my room.

That Christmas was worse than the last. The pains that I had felt in that week before magnified in my stomach, in my neck. I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat.

Then I realized that the phone calls had stopped. I didn’t know what that meant.

I got up each day but just to shuffle down the stairs and collapse onto the sofa in front of the TV. I found that if I put it on loudly enough, the sounds blocked out all the thoughts in my head, and I could almost ignore them. Only then was I able to sleep, although my granny would come downstairs, shocked, and shake me to, and every time she did I jumped to a start, thinking the police were at the door, or The Pig, or Tabitha had somehow managed to track me down.

“You really are sick,” my granny commented as I lay on the sofa. “I think it’s best that you rest, you’ve obviously been working far too hard. Do you have friends to keep an eye on you while you’re up there? Have you thought about going to the doctor?”

I ignored her and waited until I had to go back to Scotland.





59


The beginning of January was bleak when I arrived back in Edinburgh. The twinkly Christmas lights came down and the city was plunged into darkness, as the sun hardly rose. The tourists vanished and their absence made the divide in the streets even keener. I saw things out of my window that I’d never noticed before. A woman begged on the street, her thin arms lined with scars. I heard about a man who threw himself off the Forth Bridge, plunged into the icy water, and somehow survived, which was surprising enough to be reported in the papers.

My city had played at being charming for a while. That came to an end, and in January it was catty and combative, slapping me around happily in a gale, and even when the wind died down, the sweet malty smell from the breweries that sat in the air some days gathered in my mouth and made me want to be sick.

The fact that Edinburgh seemed to have turned her back on me—the city I’d loved so much right from the very beginning as my fresh start—made me more inclined to leave, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask my granny for money.

Time to plan my escape.

I didn’t believe they’d show the video to anyone, but I also felt that I could maybe convince Ava to hand it over to me. One of the key questions was, did Ava even know about it? I had assumed she’d been the person filming. Notably, the car in the video hadn’t been Samuel’s. They must have gone back up to the Highlands while I had lain there in a dreamlike state, not quite knowing where they were, but they’d tracked The Pig down only a few days after he’d attacked me. I was sure that someone with Ava’s access to money would have been able to orchestrate what I’d seen on that video.

It was worryingly like Périgueux. I couldn’t deny that. If I left, left Edinburgh completely, I wondered what would happen. Would they bring me back? How far would they go and what would they do with the video?

Tabitha turned up on my doorstep after I got back. I watched her out of the window looking ruffled, so unused to me being disobedient. She rang the buzzer again and again.

Georgia peered out. “Are you not going to let your friend in?” she asked.

“No. Ignore her,” I said.

I couldn’t ignore them forever, but I had to focus on my new start and the only way to do that was to get money.