Three Little Lies Page 26

  The next day she was gone. I was insane with worry until she called the following day to say she was in France. I relaxed for the next few weeks. Daniel didn’t say much, staying out most of the time. I let him get on with it. He was nineteen, after all, not a baby. When Sasha got back from France in September, I watched them like a hawk, but they seemed to be staying away from each other, so I thought that was that.

  Until New Year’s Eve. I went to the supermarket to get the things we needed for the party that evening, but halfway there I realised I’d forgotten my purse. The house was quiet when I let myself back in. Daniel had said he was going out, and I assumed Sasha was in her room. But there was something about the quality of the silence in the house that didn’t seem right: loaded, potent. I tiptoed up the stairs, holding my breath. As I crept along the landing, I thought I heard a muffled thud and a giggle from Sasha’s room. I knew what I was going to find before I flung open the door, yet still I did it, and there they were under the covers: flushed, full of desire, her hair falling over him like a shining curtain.

  This time, they were defiant. They were both adults now, they said as we gathered around the kitchen table once more. They weren’t doing anything wrong. I listened with mounting horror as they told me they were in love, about their plans for Daniel to ‘put the Royal College of Music thing on hold’ so he could follow Sasha to Manchester the following autumn. This couldn’t happen. Daniel was so talented, he had a real chance at a career, but if he threw it all in for a ridiculous infatuation, he’d never be able to get it back. It would be too late. I had to think quickly. If I’d had more time, I might have come up with something less devastating, but as it was, I seized on the idea that came to me as if it were divine inspiration. I’ll never forget the looks on their faces, the way the colour drained from them. As soon as I’d said it, I half-regretted it, and later, of course, I would have cut my own arm off to take it back, but it was too late. It was done. It is done, and I do a reasonable job most of the time of keeping it at arm’s length. But up here, among the relics of the past, it’s not so easy to stop the memories from crowding in. I never told Tony about Daniel and Sasha, thinking it a burden best borne alone.

  There’s one more scrapbook in the box. I lift it out gingerly. It feels slimmer, less bulky than the first one, and I am relieved to see when I flick through the pages that at least there are no photos in it, only writing. I read a sentence at random: She’s taunting me, the way she flaunts her body. She pretends it’s not for me, but she knows I am watching her. Oh God. I turn the page. He’s been inside her, I can tell. Why does he get everything I want? When will it be my turn?

  I think of Ellen, pleading with me to tell her anything that might help her to find Sasha. Should I show her these? Do they actually change anything, these teenage yearnings of Daniel’s from so long ago? No. Best to put them back in their boxes. Pretend I never found them. I go to put the book back in the box but something is pulling at me, something that isn’t right. I open the scrapbook again, the one with the writing in it, and look at it while trying not to read the words, unable to bear it. I skim read back and forth over the pages, and then I stop, the blood freezing in my veins. I am a mother: I know my children’s handwriting. This is not Daniel’s writing. This book belongs to Nicholas.

  In a daze, I reach for my phone in my pocket and fire out a quick text. As I press send, I hear someone coming up the ladder behind me. I turn and see a head sticking up through the loft hatch.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ he says.

  Ellen

  September 2017

  Karina won’t answer. I keep ringing and ringing, trying to wear her down, but it goes to voicemail every time. It’s not even personalised, just a mechanical voice telling me to leave a message. She doesn’t want to talk to me, and I wonder if it’s for fear of what she might say, the secrets that might spew out of her like a dam bursting.

  It’s after 10 p.m. on a Friday, which seems a crazy time to go out, but I need answers and I can’t wait a minute longer for them. I make the journey once more round the South Circular. I keep the doors locked and daren’t open the windows. Someone tried to get into Rachel’s car once when she was stopped at the traffic lights. She saw what he was doing and managed to lock the doors milliseconds before his hand reached the handle of the passenger door. Sometimes I worry about what would happen if I had an accident: would they be able to get me out with the doors locked? It always comes back to how I feel, though, and with the doors unlocked or the windows open, I don’t feel safe.

  I step out into the cool air, pulling my skirt away where it has stuck to the damp skin on the back of my legs. Karina’s house looks back at me blankly in the darkness, daring me to ask the questions I am afraid to hear the answers to.

  I ring the bell and wait. There are no footsteps, no shape looming through the frosted glass panels on the door. A dog barks inside the neighbour’s house, a fierce yapping that would drive me mad if I had to listen to it all day. I know she’s in; she just doesn’t want to answer the door. I try the bell again, but still nothing, so I lean down and pull open the flap on the letterbox.

  ‘Karina! It’s Ellen!’

  The dog next door goes crazy at this, jumping up against its own front door, its claws scraping the paintwork, but there’s still no movement in Karina’s house.

  ‘I know you’re in there,’ I call through the bristles in the letterbox. ‘I just want to talk to you.’

  The door flies open and I nearly fall through it.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, come in then,’ Karina hisses, pulling me in and slamming the door shut behind me. In the gloom of the poorly lit hallway I can see that she’s still wearing her party clothes. ‘Quick, come through to the back. Maybe he didn’t see you.’ She grabs my arm and leads me past the door to the front room, half-empty glasses from the party still sitting forlornly on the coffee table, through to the kitchen at the back of the house. All the lights are off apart from the light in the oven hood, which casts a dim glow.

  ‘Who? Daniel?’

  She sits down at the small formica table in the corner and, without speaking, gestures for me to do the same.

  ‘You think Daniel’s watching the house?’

  She shrugs in the silence.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘She’s asleep. Why have you come back? What do you want, Ellen?’

  ‘I want you to tell me the truth,’ I say simply.

  She flakes a small piece of dried food off the table with her thumbnail. ‘I already have.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Please, Karina. Help me find Sasha.’

  ‘You’ll never find her. I doubt she wants to be found.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ I am getting closer to the truth now; it’s a shadow over me, cold but intangible.

  ‘Nothing.’ The shutters clang down again. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I think I might, a bit,’ I say cautiously.

  She looks at me blankly.

  ‘I’ve seen Daniel,’ I go on.

  ‘What? Where?’ She pales further, throwing the red patches of skin around her eyes into stark relief.

  ‘He was in my flat when I got back from your party earlier.’

  ‘What did he want?’ Her hands are clenched and shaking in front of her on the table.

  ‘I know it’s hard for you, Karina, to have all this raked up again, and I’m sorry to be the one to do it.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He said… that you weren’t telling the truth… at the trial.’ I hate having to use these words, words that cast doubt on her experience. If Daniel is lying, I am siding with a world that thinks it’s a woman’s own fault if she gets raped, a world that doesn’t believe a woman even when she has the scars to prove she has been hurt. A world that prefers to place the burden of proving rape on the victim rather than that of proving otherwise on the supposed perpetrator.

  She remains silent.

  ‘Karina, I�
�m not going to judge you.’ Even as I say this, I don’t know how true it is. We all make judgements, all the time. We judge the girl who was silly enough to walk home alone in a short skirt; we judge the girl who got drunk and into bed with someone she didn’t know and then changed her mind; we judge the girl who kissed a famous footballer twice her age and complained when he stuck his hand in her knickers. We do all this as if the men in question had no choice in the matter, no control over their own actions, no responsibility.

  ‘You will,’ she says, looking down at the table. ‘You won’t be able to help it.’

  ‘What about Olivia and Tony? Tony’s dying, Karina. Are you going to let him go to his grave without telling him the truth?’ She looks up. I sense a chink in her armour and press my advantage. ‘Let’s go there now, to the corner house. Tell us all what you know. You should have seen them, Karina. They’re broken.’

  ‘What I’ve got to say won’t help them.’ She’s shutting down again.

  ‘It’ll be the truth, though, won’t it? That’s got to be better, in the long run. Please, Karina.’

  ‘I can’t.’ She speaks so quietly I can barely hear her.

  ‘I’ll ring Daniel then, shall I? Get him round here, see what you’ve got to say to him?’ I hate myself for attacking her like this, but I don’t know how else to break through.

  ‘No!’ She pushes her chair back, the legs scraping on the floor.

  ‘Then let’s go and see Olivia and Tony. I know it’s late, but I don’t think they’ll mind.’ I never knew them to go to bed before midnight back in the old days.

  ‘All right,’ she says, and behind the reluctance, there’s a note of something else, something I can’t identify. Is it possible that she still feels the pull of the Monktons, even now?

  ‘Come on,’ I say, standing up. ‘We can go in my car.’

  In the hall, Karina pulls on a wool coat, gone bobbly with age, and zips up a pair of ancient boots with scuffed toes. We don’t speak in the car. She sits huddled with her coat pulled tight around her, like a security blanket. We park a few doors down, and she looks at her old house opposite, her expression unreadable. In the orange glow of the streetlamps we make our way up the path. The front door is ajar, but I ring the bell anyway. Nobody comes.

  ‘Shall we…?’ I say, gesturing to the open door.

  I push the door further open and peer into the gloom of the hallway. There’s a faint sound of voices in the kitchen, but the door is shut so I can’t make out the words, or who is in there.

  ‘Hello?’ I call.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Karina impulsively. ‘This doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘Look, Karina,’ I say impatiently, ‘if you’re scared of Daniel, of what he might do to you, I don’t think you need to be. He doesn’t want to hurt you. He just wants you to tell the truth.’

  She grabs my arm, her face glowing white in the half-light.

  ‘It’s not Daniel I’m scared of,’ she says.

  ‘Well, you’ve got nothing to fear from Olivia and Tony,’ I say impatiently. ‘Come on.’ I pull her in by the arm, down the hall to the kitchen.

  We hear a man’s voice saying, ‘Please, Mum. You have to understand,’ and Karina tries to pull her arm from my grasp, but I won’t let go, throwing the kitchen door open.

  First I see Olivia, seated at the head of the table, her hair loose and tangled, staring at us in horror. She looks up to her right, so I follow her gaze and there is Nicholas, haggard and wild-eyed.

  ‘Don’t come in!’ Olivia half-rises from the table, but Nicholas pushes her roughly back down into the chair.

  I look from Olivia to him and back again in confusion.

  ‘Go,’ she says urgently.

  I take an uncertain step back, but Nicholas grabs wildly for something from a wooden block on the side, and then there’s a knife in his hand and he’s holding it to Olivia’s throat. She gives a small, strangled cry.

  ‘No. Don’t go,’ Nicholas says to me and Karina, sweat glistening on his forehead. ‘Stay exactly where you are.’

  Karina

  December 2006

  I wasn’t going to go to the party. I knew I shouldn’t, knew it was stupid. If only I hadn’t, how different things might have been. At 7.30 p.m. I was still lying on my bed in jeans and a T-shirt, but suddenly something propelled me from the bed, as if I’d been given an electric shock. Defiance pulsed through me. Why should Nicholas stop me from going to a party I’d been looking forward to for weeks? I wriggled into the sparkly dress I’d bought specially, holding it away from the raw spot on my back, the one I’d been trying not to think about.

  I rummaged in the back of my wardrobe for the bottle of vodka I’d been keeping there and took a few swigs while I applied my make-up. By the time I left the house, I’d drunk half of it. It made it easier to ring the bell, and when I saw some girls from school in the piano room, I joined them. By the time I saw Nicholas, when I came out of Sasha’s room to get another drink, I’d almost convinced myself it was going to be all right. He chatted to me normally as we walked down the landing away from Sasha’s room, while we were in earshot. But as soon as we were on the stairs, he gripped my arm, his fingers like iron.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten, Karina,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t think you’ve got away with it.’ He released my arm and slipped his hand around my waist. ‘About here, isn’t it?’ he said, pushing hard against the exact spot where he had pressed the glowing tip of his cigarette just a few days before. I gasped in pain. ‘Yes, that’s the sort of noise I want to hear you making,’ he said into my ear as we reached the bottom of the stairs. He removed his arm and moved away from me into the piano room.

  I was filled with a certainty that I’d made a huge mistake coming here. I needed to go home. There was a tiny, silly, scared part of me that wanted to tell Mum all about it, and I half thought I might if I left now. But I’d done that once before when it was Dad who was hurting me, coming into my room at night, slipping his hands under the covers, telling me it was our little secret, and she hadn’t believed me then. She’d told me not to be so silly, and when I told the teachers, she made me take it back, say I was making it up for attention. Why would she believe me now?

  I rummaged through the pegs, trying to find my coat. Every time I thought I’d got it, it turned out to be someone else’s black jacket, and I gave a little sob of frustration.

  ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’

  Daniel put a tentative hand on my back. I flinched and he snatched it back. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ I sniffed. ‘I just wanted to get some air. I’m looking for my jacket but I can’t find it.’ I dissolved into stupid, unwanted tears.

  ‘Don’t cry, Karina, come on. Right, stay here, don’t move.’ He returned a moment later with a wodge of toilet roll.

  I blew my nose. ‘Why are you being so nice to me?’

  ‘I’m just a nice guy, I guess.’ He smiled. ‘Plus… I’m not feeling so great myself tonight. I need something to distract me.’

  I didn’t tell him what was really wrong, of course. I just said I’d had a bit too much to drink. We stood there by the coats and talked and talked. He got me some water, and after a while, he took my hand and started to stroke it. It felt so nice I started to cry again, so he got me some more toilet roll, and then he put his hand gently on my hair and told me everything was OK. I drank some more wine then, and so did he, and I wondered why I’d never seen how lovely he was before. I don’t know if Nicholas saw us talking – I didn’t see him go past, although he was there in the back of my mind, the fear of what he would do to me hovering like a black angel of death waiting to strike. Then Daniel leaned forward. I could have stopped him, I should have stopped him, but the wine was making my head swim in a delicious, hazy sort of way, and there was a stinging on my back where the fabric of my dress kept catching on the sore spot, and I thought: fuck it. Fuck Nicholas. I closed my eyes and I kissed Daniel and it was amazing, and after a while I let
him lead me upstairs, because it was better if nobody saw us.

  Somebody did see us, though. I slipped across to the bathroom after we’d finished, and as I made my way dreamily along the landing to meet Daniel downstairs, as we’d agreed, Nicholas’s door flew open and he dragged me inside. Before I even had time to register what was happening, he had pushed me back on to the bed, all the breath knocked out of me.

  ‘Slut,’ he hissed, looming over me. ‘I saw you going upstairs with him. My fucking, sainted brother. The musical prodigy. The golden child. First Sasha, and now you. Why does everybody choose him?’ I stifled a sob.