The Things We Do to Our Friends(88)

“You were together that night in the Highlands?” I asked.

“We’d been together for a while in a sense,” she said sadly. “Not properly. There’s always been something, though. You know, the funny thing is, she wouldn’t have minded about what you did to that man in Périgueux—whatever exactly it was you did—but I kept it from her because my job was to sort you out and knowing more would have excited her, made her use you in ways that would have been even riskier for you. Sometimes I considered telling her, but I never managed to. She would have been far worse than me, you know. I was protecting you from her. She’d take you and cut you with it in a second.”

She could have been right. If anything, history had shown that Ava was fair. She used her power only when strictly necessary. I thought of how unsure she’d been about the Highlands, and how the knowledge had pained her. She didn’t seem keen to dwell on it, and I never did find out exactly what the setup was with those men. I never went back to save Sorcha from them.

She kept speaking. “When she came up with the idea for the whole thing, I knew you’d probably go along with what we had planned, but it was safer to have that in the background. You never seemed especially concerned with wealth, and we needed you so much. You always held the whole thing together, right from the start, so if the carrot was the money, then what was the stick? I thought it would be good to have both.”

“Something on me.”

She looked at me fondly. “You were perfect. The best of a solid bunch. Tabitha and I found you, back then, right at the beginning. Then she backed off, and I did some digging, and I couldn’t believe it. To be honest, I never thought the skeletons in your closet would be so juicy, such an odd story, and I also questioned whether you’d really even care if it ‘came out’ as such, but you would have, I think. You’ve reinvented yourself so well. And it showed that you had an appetite for what we wanted to do. Your past—it was just so suited to our plan, like it was meant to be, blew the other candidates out of the water. It’s funny, though, I don’t think you have the same level of viciousness as her. Close, but not quite.”

I didn’t feel that Tabitha and I were the same. I’d only ever felt that fleetingly when it had all been going well.

The question sat there on my tongue, burning. “Why don’t you hate me?”

She gripped my hands tightly. “I was relieved when you did it. I’ve been thinking about when she watched The Pig take you down the stairs—she didn’t care much at the time. I’ve seen the way she wants to do it and it’s not what I want. Naively, I thought it would be a proper business, and then it spiraled out of control. It took a while for me, but now I can see how awful it had all become. How awful I’d become.

“I didn’t realize properly for too long, I was so busy doing what I’d always done—trying to please her, trying to make sure you stayed—then when you pushed her, it made me see how unhappy I was. I’d always thought the two of us living together would be perfect, but it hasn’t been. Not at all.”

Her relationship to Tabitha was different from the others’. I thought of Imogen and her essays; Samuel’s debts to Tabitha for the drinking. If anything, Tabitha had owed Ava.

“She trusted you,” I said. “She never had anything over you like with the rest of them.”

“Kind of. There are aspects of my family business that I’d rather were kept separate and, credit to her, she didn’t ask me for money after the initial capital injection, or even mention it—nothing like that—but you’re right, I think she would have trusted me with it all forever. She shouldn’t have. If you hadn’t done what you did last night, I would have ended it in another way eventually. When you did it, when you pushed her, I felt it. Like I was pushing her myself.”

She put one hand on my shoulder, the other still holding a cigarette where the ash hung in a teetering link and then fell to the sidewalk. She gave me a firm shove, right in the center of my chest, so I stumbled back, not so I lost my footing entirely, but hard enough to display how much strength was locked up inside of her.

“Like that, that’s what you did,” she said. “That’s what I saw you do. But we made you into this, not just me, or even me and Tabitha, all of us. We found you and we turned you into everything we wanted. I’ve saved her once, but I won’t do it again. Now it’s you and me, and you can be the star.” She came close with her lips right up to my ear so I could almost feel her tongue on my skin, soft and wet.

“I’ll never tell.” She almost spat it.

And she stepped back away from me. Hands clenched like claws. Hair blowing in the wind.

She was so spectacular lurching toward me on that cold morning. It was one of the only times that the veneer of calm I always associated with her melted away and she had a bit of Tabitha’s wildness.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now we do things differently,” she said.





74


Many years have passed.

If we have the episode for what happened in France, what happened with Tabitha became known as the accident between Ava and me.

I am different now.

I look similar, but so much of someone is in how they move and how they speak. Before, I asked questions. I was odd. My words were stilted and my remarks carefully constructed. Now I speak confidently, and people often comment on how I sound, say they can’t quite place where I’m from, and I don’t elaborate. I’m happy to let them wonder.