After the party, p.19
After the Party, page 19
Rebecca was hurt that night, but it’s unclear what that means. Marie went to get help; she wanted to get help. She went to flag down a car and by the time she got back, Rebecca was gone. I lie back on my pillow and push the duvet away, to let the morning air settle on my bare body. Where could she go?
It’s uncharacteristically warm for this time of year and more than anything I want familiarity and to be outside. I need to paint, to feel the rough wooden paintbrushes in my fingers and focus on something, anything. My thoughts are so jumbled, I can’t make sense of them, and every time I try to see things clearly, they contract and fade away.
I collect my paints and large sketchpad and drive to my parents’. It’s still early,; mist shrouds the fields and hovers along the shallow bank of grass that runs up the country lane to their cottage. The yellow house sits underneath a stone-grey sky, shafts of sunlight curling around the thatched rooftop, encasing it in a clear dome-like sphere.
My bench is cocooned underneath a willow tree, by a riverbank running down a steep curved hill. I grab blankets from the boot of my car and position them on the bench. I enjoy the cold on my face and being outside even on frosty mornings like this. I settle into my spot, but this time face the house so I can take it in. How many times have I drawn this view?
The mustard-yellow has darkened over the years to a deep bronze and the flowers have died, bending to the winter temperatures. The dashings of slim stems have turned to a brown twine, and the clutches of emerald leaves are spiky and gnarly. The plants that usually look outwards, like they are enjoying the view of the vast fields in front of the house, have turned inwards, like a spell has taken hold of them and their beauty has vanished, contorting them into monsters, from good to evil.
I look up at my old bedroom window; the curtains are open but it sits in darkness. I pick up my paints and lean over onto the table, pressing into the damp boards. I start with the outline of the house and, as I progress and the mist lifts and the house fully reveals itself, I realise that it’s helping me understand what’s happening.
Like my dream last night, like how I would daydream about Dean and me, or my friendship with Marie. It’s all a glossy veneer, but I’m lifting it and what’s below is ugly and bleak. It’s like my childhood house, the charming yellow brick building I painted long ago, with the tufts of rose bushes and colourful warmth emanating from each window – now everything is dead. I paint, salty tears scratching my cold cheeks. I think about the meadow in my dream, the good, then the evil. I think about how I never stepped forward to see what was illuminated by that strip of moonlight, but I can’t help but think it’s the key to this somehow.
The front door opens as I smear a charcoal grey across the sky. Mum’s wrapped up in a big parka coat, scarves bundled around her neck masking her lips. She carefully wades down the garden path holding a tea in each hand, and as she gets closer, all I can see are her blue eyes, and the seriousness in the creases below them. She places the mugs down on the table, saying nothing, and sits down opposite me obscuring my view of the house.
‘Thanks,’ I say, reaching across the table for the tea.
She gets herself comfortable, before pulling down a scarf. She’s not smiling; instead there’s hesitation in the twitching of her nose, the small lines that spark from pursed lips.
‘What is it?’
She looks at me, but not really, her eyes skimming past me towards the field, darting from left to right.
‘Mum?’
‘Let me come sit next to you, give you some of my body heat.’
She picks herself up and slides my bag full of paintbrushes and paints further down the bench, taking their place.
‘That’s better.’
‘Seriously, what’s going on?’
‘I’ll miss this,’ she says. ‘Finding you out here. Looking out my window of a morning and wondering if you might be sitting here.’ She takes a sip of tea and relaxes. ‘I’ll miss you.’
I still haven’t replied to the agency. I never sent that email. I’ve avoided looking at my emails too and worry slightly that I might’ve missed out. They can’t want me now, can they?
‘I don’t think I’ll take it anyway.’
Mum leans into me. ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t get back to them, and with everything going on with Rebecca, and Marie…’ I don’t finish my sentence, and the thought trails away. What will life look like in a day, a week, a month, a year? Will Rebecca be safe and in London, at one of the expensive and wild Christmas parties she told us about? Will Marie be okay? Will they charge her? Will I go into work and there be two empty chairs behind me?
Finally I think about Dean. Maybe he’ll go back to Scotland to be with his family, or, worse, he’ll stay and then I’ll still see his dark head over my computer screen. I’ll still walk with him to our cars at night. I’ll still love him, won’t I?
‘Are you okay?’
Mum is pressing her hand onto mine, her head tilting so she’s nestling on my shoulder, in the crook of my neck.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve never seen one of your paintings look so forlorn.’ She traces her other hand around the white edges, circling it like this morning’s mist.
‘Don’t be sad, Elizabeth, everything will be okay.’
She strokes my hand now, gently and rhythmically, until I feel all the cold I should have felt this morning. My bones suddenly ache and tremble.
‘Let’s go inside. I’ll make you French toast with cinnamon.’
I shake my head, because I need the cold, I need it to whip across my face. I look down at my pink hands, pale and rosy like the diluted blood from my dream. I wince.
‘Please, lovely, let’s go inside.’
‘It’s not going away.’ I blurt.
‘What’s not?’
‘The feeling.’ I pull my hands away and make a fist, lightly punching my stomach. ‘All the pain of this week, the worry of Rebecca, Marie…’
She moves away. ‘Love is like that, it doesn’t just disappear.’
‘But it should, shouldn’t it?’
She shakes her head.
‘Like that Beatles song, Why did you not treat me right, Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight. He isn’t the person I thought he was, he isn’t the same, so why do I feel…’ I throw the paintbrush across the front garden and it catches a plant pot and falls awkwardly. ‘Like I love him still.’
‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘But it should. My love was attached to someone else, not him, not someone I didn’t really know. Not someone who didn’t treat me right.’ I want to stand but my legs ache from the cold and remain rooted. ‘Not someone who doesn’t love me back.’
As I say it, I realise how petulant it sounds. In all of this, Rebecca is still out there, alone and scared, hurting. I look down at the painting and it’s hideous. The plants writhe and spit like seaweed lashing against cold rocks, but instead they hit the yellow house, not daffodil-yellow, but like muddy earth.
Mum reaches forward and pulls back a stray strand of hair from my face, pushing it delicately behind my ear, the way she used to when I was little. She leans forward and dabs my cheek softly with the back of her gloved hand and I realise I’m crying.
‘Rebecca will be okay. Marie will be okay. You and Dean, you’ll be okay.’
For a moment, I believe her. But, much like my painting the ugly truth has reared its head. I see the small white cottage overlooking the village green fade away. Open double doors leading out onto the courtyard and The Beatles playing as Dean cooks and I paint on the patio. I see the mornings in bed with coffee, the afternoons at the farmer’s markets, the nights spent hosting dinner parties or lying intertwined on the sofa watching nothing. They all disappear.
There’s a hum deep in my coat pocket and I fetch my phone, hoping it’s a call from Inspector Williams with good news. Instead, I see Marie’s name flash up. A message: ‘I’m at home now, please can we talk.’ The feeling bleeds back into my body and I’m no longer numb and immobile, but I jump up, clawing at my paints.
‘What is it?’
‘I have to go, I’m sorry, I’ll come back later.’
‘Elizabeth, please, don’t leave like this.’
‘I have to, Mum. I promise I’ll explain later.’
‘Leave your paints and sketchpad here. If it’s that urgent, you’ll smudge it, it’s still wet.’
I don’t care if I ruin it, but Mum has a hand flattened against the edges and she looks at me stubbornly.
‘I don’t know what can be so important.’ She points at the picture. ‘I can see how you’re feeling, but I won’t let you treat your art like that.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘No, you won’t, you’ll come here for dinner and you’ll let me cook and look after you, because God knows you’re not looking after yourself and you’ll just go back to your house and get worked up and paint sad pictures. You’re not alone, Elizabeth, you have parents who love you very much.’
I lean forward and throw both arms around her, pulling her in so tightly that all I want is for her to take my hand and lead me inside and sit me down at the old wooden kitchen table. I want the mindless chatter as she twirls batter and we drink tea, I want the simplicity of it.
I let go and pull at my coat.
‘I’ll see you later.’
‘Be careful.’
I march towards my car, full of questions I’m ready to face the answers to.
Chapter Nineteen
When I pull up outside Marie’s house in Norwich, all the urgency I felt fades away. I don’t know what I’ll say to her, or what she’ll have to say to me. More than anything I want her to open the door and look like her, in one piece with her scruffy dark hair pulled to the side and a mischievous grin pasted across her full cheeks. Then I want to walk away, just knowing I’ve seen her, that she’s okay. But I won’t be able to, because even if she looks exactly like how I remember her, even if she looks okay, she’ll be rotting inside. Her world is crumbling and I’m a brick she needs to slot back into place.
As I walk up the path, there’s a car on the driveway I don’t recognise as Marie’s, but I nudge the thought away. She must have a temporary car, as hers has been towed away by the police. I narrow my eyes. There’s something familiar about it, though.
I knock and she answers in light grey joggers and a dusty pink jumper, her hair scraped back but not messy, slicked with grease into a tight bun. Deep blue bags hang from puffy eyes and her brown skin is dappled and swollen.
‘Lizzie, you came,’ she says, smiling slightly, like she’s drugged … or drunk.
She holds the door open wide and beckons me in. The curtains are drawn closed and the lounge smells of stale crisps and vinegar. She watches me as I move across it until we’re facing each other square on. She does look like a stranger now, fidgeting awkwardly, hopping from one foot to the other.
‘Mum’s gone to get some food.’ She bites her lip and rubs her forearm across her face. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I turn away from her, my best friend; it’s almost too much to bear to see her like this. I clear room on the sofa and sit down slowly. She takes a few steps towards me but hesitates and sinks to the floor.
‘Say something.’
I bow my head, not knowing what to say. ‘Are you okay?’ I say finally.
She lets out a small shriek and starts to cry. ‘No, I’m not. I fucked up.’
‘How much trouble are you in?’
She shrugs, but not like she doesn’t care, like it’s the last thing on her mind, there’s other more pressing matters, she knows that. ‘I just want them to find Rebecca okay. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, it was just...’
‘Had you been drinking?’
She nods, sucking in her lips. ‘Not a lot, but enough. I was just so upset, I’d had a big bust up with Robbie and he texted me telling me to not come home, and…’
‘I know Robbie left.’
She pulls her knees up to her chest, looking so small and frightened. ‘He’s gone to his parents.’
‘I went to see him.’
‘Why?’ she says, sniffing.
‘To try and make sense of it all. To understand why you lied to me, to see if you lied to him.’
She bites the inside of her cheek. ‘I didn’t tell him anything.’
I’m not sure if I believe her. I remember his determined expression, but there was fear and panic there.
‘He should be here for you.’
‘Should he? After what I did?’ She looks at me. ‘Maybe me and Robbie weren’t working anyway.’ She shrugs again. ‘I can’t think about him right now.’
We sit in silence for a while as she wipes her cheeks with her sleeves.
‘What happened that night?’
She nods, then looks away. She’s told this story many times now, and I can see how much she doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s consuming her. ‘After you left, Rebecca and Dean got into a fight. I was literally just about to leave,’ she says, exasperated. ‘I was out the door, walking towards the car, and I was just going to drive to yours in the hopes you’d let me stay. Rebecca caught up with me, grabbed my wrist and asked me for a lift home. I asked her if she was okay. She looked wasted, swaying from side to side, but she pushed past me and waited until I followed her. When I caught up with her, she was yanking at the car door. She kept dropping her bag and sighing.’
Marie hugs her knees closer then looks at me, like the next part will be painful. ‘I knew when I got in that car what their fight was about. I knew she’d found out about Dean and me.’
She shakes her head and burrows further into her knees.
‘Why did I let her get in the car?’ She sits up suddenly and throws her hands in the air like it’s the most obvious question in the world. ‘Why did I do it?’
‘Do you have to speak to the police again?’
‘Yes. I can imagine I’ll be in a lot more trouble if—’ She stops.
‘You didn’t say anything because you’d been drinking?’
‘I was so scared, Lizzie, it just happened so quickly. I was tipsy, but not drunk. I kept reasoning with myself that night, and then the days afterwards.’
Marie’s eyes widen and she takes in a sharp breath. ‘She was awake, she was okay, I think, I don’t know, but—’ She pauses. ‘She didn’t want to go home. She wouldn’t say where she wanted to go, she wouldn’t talk to me about Dean, she just said, “Don’t take me home,” over and over again. I asked why, and she said she couldn’t, that her dad would be too angry at her. I tried reassuring her, I said my dad used to get angry at me when I’d been out drinking but it was just because he was concerned, but she shook her head. She told me it wasn’t like that.’
I slip off the sofa and sit opposite her, stretching my legs out alongside hers. She looks up at me pleadingly. Her desperate need for support right now is harrowing. I think about her sitting alone with her thoughts. Replaying the conversation over and over until she can’t make sense of it anymore.
‘I pulled up outside your house, I sat in the car with Rebecca in complete silence until she finally asked why we were there. “You won’t let me take you home,” I said.’ She looks up at me, awkwardly. ‘She said, I can’t see Lizzie right now.’
‘What does that mean?’
She shakes her head. ‘So I said I had no choice but to take her home. I just didn’t want to be in the car with her any longer, Lizzie, I couldn’t stand that there was something in her that was about to erupt, I could feel it, like heat emanating from her.’
She sniffs, nuzzling into her shoulder to wipe her nose. ‘On the way to her parents’, there was something in the road. I swerved and hit a tree. It was raining so heavily that night I could barely see anything, and I wasn’t even driving that quickly. There was this awful loud crunch. Rebecca fell forward and I think she hit her head on the dashboard, there was blood, but she was awake, Lizzie, she was just disoriented, we both were. But I asked her, I said, “Are you okay?” She nodded. Lizzie, she was fine, I know she was.’
I nod for her to continue.
‘I got out the car and I looked back in again.’ She holds out her hands in two sharp lines to signal the importance of it. ‘I told her I was going to try and flag down a car. I waited maybe five minutes, and I looked back in and Rebecca, she was bleeding from her head, but she was okay. I told her I was going to walk up to the cluster of houses just before Church Corner, you know, where the road forks? I was going to get help.’
‘Why didn’t you call someone?’
‘Don’t you think I tried? My phone was dead and I searched through Rebecca’s bag and hers wasn’t there. I thought it had fallen out either when we crashed or when she kept dropping her bag. I couldn’t think, I didn’t have time to think, so I walked at first, then I ran. It’s like the urgency of it caught up with me after the initial shock of crashing.’
She called me before she left the party. What was she going to say?
‘Then I thought I heard a car as I was running, and I looked back and I saw lights and I screamed, as loud as I could, to try and flag it down. I ran back, but then I noticed the passenger door open, and Rebecca wasn’t there. I was so scared.’
She presses her fingertips into her eyelids, like she’s trying to erase the image.
‘I got in my car and I tried the ignition and it worked. I couldn’t believe it. As I reversed, I saw there was a huge dent in the front of the car, and pieces of the bumper and front lights fell off, but I didn’t think about it. I thought about driving to Rebecca’s to check she got home okay, but she just had to have, it was only a few roads away, and I was so scared. Maybe I wasn’t tipsy, maybe I was drunk, but I drove home.’
