Dead Lovely (10 page)

Kyle sat in the double room next to Krissie’s and cried. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was crying about but there were several possibilities.

His marriage was over.

He had hurt his wife, and he hadn’t meant to.

He had got carried away with one of their oldest friends.

And he was powerless to change any of the above.

Kyle had been taught very young to control his emotions. As a toddler, he spent many evenings on the second step of his family’s rather large West End townhouse learning to control his emotions. As a teenager he spent long sleepless nights in his
boarding
school dormitory learning to control them. And as a husband he had controlled them for so long they had disappeared.

It was a relief to cry, but he did not have the
comfortable
facial expressions of a seasoned crier, and when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he did not like what he saw and decided to turn his attention to things that he could control. He wiped his eyes and picked up the phone …

‘Mum, can I come and stay with you for a bit?’ he said, somehow comforted by the vision of his mother on the other end of the phone – a
well-dressed
woman sipping a cup of tea in her rather large West End townhouse.

‘Of course you can, Kyle. Is everything okay?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ Kyle replied, and she did not question him further as she, too, had secured her feelings in a lockfast place.

Both felt relieved when the conversation was over, and both stood up, sighed a quick determined sigh, and got on with the (revised) business of the day.

For Kyle’s mum this involved transforming the storage-for-furniture-past-its-use-by-date room back to its original use as her only son’s bedroom.

For Kyle, this was packing and leaving as fast as possible. He would not talk to Krissie again, he would apologise to his wife, but with the expectation that further discussions were likely to take place via lawyers.

Before he had packed the rucksacks (without folding anything), he was already feeling better about things. It had to happen. It was messy, but it
was always going to be messy, and at least now he could get on with his life.

Sarah always used to get annoyed with Kyle for his ability to pick himself up and keep going. When they argued, she would inevitably storm out the door and he would inevitably resume reading his paper. This irritated Sarah more than anything. He should come after her, or at least sit in regretful silence for a few minutes to mourn the pleasant evening they had lost. But no, Kyle seemed to need no recovery time. He turned straight to the Letters to the Editor.

Kyle left the room without sweeping for
forgotten
items. He shut the door without checking again that it was definitely locked. He signed the bill without scrutinising it, and then took one of each of the newspapers on the coffee table in the foyer without wondering if he would be allowed to read them.

Kyle walked with a skip to the bus stop. He sat down on the bench and began to read the travel section of the
Herald.
Then it came to him. He could give up his job and travel. He and Sarah would sell the huge house in Glasgow and the cottage on Loch Katrine and he would take the £233,000 he
estimated
he’d get in the divorce and go places he’d never been before. He was so excited that he phoned his friend Derek to break the news.

‘I’m going to Bulgaria!’ he said. ‘You were right. All
women are the same and I’m going to
Bul-fucking-garia.
Let’s celebrate, at the pub!’

‘Oh mate, I would,’ Derek said after a brief
commiseration.
‘But I promised I’d go to Homebase and get some trellis.’

Kyle hung up, a little dejected, but thought, ‘Fuck it! If I can go to Bulgaria by myself then I can go to the pub by myself too.’

He was wondering what he might wear to the pub when Krissie walked towards him, looking white and unwell.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ he replied, then returned to the travel article.

The two of them somehow managed to remain quiet until the bus appeared sixty seconds later.

Krissie had watched Kyle waltz out of the hotel and waited till she saw the bus coming through the valley before heading to the bus stop herself.

She had a plan, one that had come to her in the hotel room like lightning. A clear, clever and sensible plan.

She would go home, get Robbie, and hope for the best.

After all, what else could she do?

There was nothing to be gained by telling Kyle or the police, and everything to lose. So she would go home, carry on with life, and hope for the best.

As she sat beside Kyle on the bench, part of her realised the plan was an unviable one that had been made in a hungover upset haze. It wasn’t sensible, clever or moral, and the talkers in her head were arguing about it full swing:

Tell him!

Don’t tell him!

Just tell him.

Don’t.

I killed Sarah!

Shut up.

But I killed her!

She was about to blurt it out when the bus arrived. Just in time.

Krissie sat alone and pressed her nose against the glass, squinting back towards the Devil’s
Staircase,
an insignificant wriggle on an insignificant hill. She thought she could see something – a speck of purple maybe? The purple fabric of a tent, leaking out of a crack in the side of the hill? A hand in amongst the purple, grabbing at life, pleading to be found and not left there, please?

‘Tickets!’

Krissie yelped so suddenly that the ticket inspector lost his balance.

‘Sorry!’ he said, righting himself with a grimace then marvelling at the state of the ticket bearer. Her eyes were red, she had bruises on her face and her hair was scraggly with a gash showing through.

Krissie handed over her ticket and looked back towards the hill. There was nothing there.

The bus passed through the bleakness of Crianlarich, towards the loch, then alongside farms and distilleries. The path that had taken so long to walk whizzed by her in a blur and suddenly she was surrounded by the houses of her city. Glasgow. It embraced her, the wetness and darkness of it, and she felt safer. She would disappear into it and be okay.

As the bus edged its way to Buchanan Street, Krissie turned her mobile on. She would ring her mum and dad and tell them she had blisters or such like, and had had a bit of a fall and then take Robbie home. Somehow she felt that being around her son would protect her. She could redeem herself as a mother, cocoon herself in the warmth of Robbie’s need and forget everything. After all, it would be selfish to endanger Robbie’s welfare by remembering.

Krissie waited for the bus to find its place, and disembarked. When her mobile rang, she stopped still in the middle of the terminal, terrified by it. Could it be the police? While hundreds of people stood huddled together looking up at a flickering electronic timetable, Krissie slowly, carefully, retrieved her phone from her jeans pocket.

The screen was blurred. She felt dizzy as she looked at it, unable to make out the words of the caller, but as the ringing seemed to get louder and
louder, she thought she saw ‘Sarah Mobile’ written on the screen.

Krissie fell onto a bench as the next bus from Stirling was announced by an English accent to be arriving at 1443.

She gulped, pressed call back and listened for the ring.

But it didn’t come.

What came instead was the bus from Stirling, at 1443, as predicted, and a low-battery warning signal and then nothing.

‘I’m going crazy!’ she thought to herself. ‘I’m seeing things.’

In the taxi on the way to her parents’ house Krissie kept thinking strange, dissonant thoughts like: one thing was for sure, a naturally guilt-ridden woman who is postnatally depressed should not have an affair with her best friend’s husband and then murder the best friend. It doesn’t help. In fact, it makes things significantly worse. If it hadn’t been for the affair/murder episode, Krissie would have been well on the road to recovery.

As it stood, she was now in a haze of guilt-grief, unsure which to consider first. She had killed her best friend. She was a murderer and she would go to hell. Krissie hadn’t believed in hell for some time, but now she did, and she would spend eternity in it.

Krissie considered the moment when everything changed, when she became the devil’s daughter. It
happened when Sarah said something about her being a liar and Krissie pushed her.

That split-second push had changed her from a normal everyday human being with reasonable flaws like drinking too much and being slightly vain and very impatient into a murderer. A split-second push, and things had changed forever.

She thought to herself that maybe that was why falling in love felt like grief, because with both, an identifiable single moment turns things upside down. You’re cruising along quite easily and suddenly (with a kiss, or with a push), you take a sharp turn to the left or right, down towards hell.

As the taxi drove through Glasgow everything reminded Krissie of Sarah. She saw Sarah’s face in every shop window, at every bus stop, at the church hall where they were Brownies together, at the park where they’d seesawed, at the chip shop where they’d smothered chips with curry sauce, at the hospital where Sarah had worked, at the street where Sarah grew up. Sarah. The friend she thought she would always have, always love. The friend she had killed.

When the taxi dropped me at the door of Mum and Dad’s house, the haven where I had grown up, and Mum said, ‘Kriss, darling, what’s wrong? What are you doing home?’ I nearly blurted, ‘I came home, Mum, ’cause I killed Sarah!’ Luckily I didn’t. Luckily I said, ‘I got blisters and had a bit of a fall and we fell out! Where’s Robbie?’ I asked.

Mum looked at me strangely, like everyone had been doing that day, and then asked me to quieten down.

‘Robbie’s asleep …’ she said, ‘at last. Krissie, don’t be alarmed, but he’s under the weather.’

Mum had taken Robbie to hospital the night before after a long evening of unsettled crying. He’d been diagnosed with an ear infection and prescribed paracetamol and antibiotics. He’d be fine, as long as we kept his temperature down and as long as he
completed the course of antibiotics. I rushed up to my old bedroom at the top of the stairs. Robbie was puffing away in the cot in the middle, his mouth open and his face red. I touched his burning cheek then raced back downstairs.

‘How could you not have rung and told me?’ I yelled at Mum. ‘I’m his mother, for God’s sake! I would have come back.’

‘Shhh, Krissie, you’ll wake him, love!’ Dad said, shutting the door to the living room.

‘We tried to call you, darlin’ … You didn’t answer.’

I hadn’t had a tantrum for a long time. I hadn’t stamped my feet, clenched my fists, and screamed. I let loose on this occasion with childish accusations about how they didn’t trust me, how they didn’t think I deserved him.

Then I gathered medicines and clothing and when Robbie (inevitably) woke up I rang a taxi.

Projection it’s called. While I was guilty of
adultery
and murder, my parents were guilty of not summoning me back early enough to avoid adultery and murder. Better to concentrate on their guilt rather than mine, my subconscious had decided, much better.

While I waited for the taxi, Mum and Dad stared at me with worried looks on their faces.

‘Stay here,’ Dad said.

I didn’t answer.

‘You’re in no state, darling,’ Mum said.

I didn’t answer.

‘Or could I come with you?’ Dad suggested.

‘This is ridiculous, Krissie. You’re being
completely
unreasonable.’ My mum was getting angry. It was lucky that the taxi arrived before her anger broke my juvenile silence.

As the taxi joined the Clydeside Expressway I noticed that a police car – which was several vehicles behind us – joined too. It drove at forty miles an hour off the bridge and down the slip road, and then seemed to follow us along the Clyde, past the Tall Ship and the Exhibition Centre and the burnt-out antiques warehouse. We passed through three
roundabouts
and the cars between the police and us exited.

Was I being followed?

My heart raced as we drove down Dumbarton Road then up the steep tenement-lined Gardner Street. I peeked out the back window and saw that the police car had stopped on Dumbarton Road, where it waited.

I paid as fast as I could and stood with Robbie at the foot of my tenement building. The red sandstone hovered over me. I did not want to go up there, but as the taxi drove off I saw to my horror that the police car was coming up the hill.

I quickly opened the door to the close, struggled upwards with my very heavy and now screaming child, went inside and locked the door.

I expected my flat to somehow reflect my state of mind but it was just as I’d left it: clean fresh wooden floors, artwork on the walls, lived-in eat in kitchen with loads of spices, comfortable sofas and floods of light. Back when I was happy, when I opened the door to my haven I would exhale with satisfaction and contentment. I would open the windows and let the air in.

This time, I cuddled Robbie then placed him under his baby gym, my gear beside the buggy in the hall, and raced around the house shutting all the blinds. Then I grabbed a bottle of red wine, opened it, and started drinking. From the living room, I had a good view of my street and the main road
perpendicular
to it. I peered through a crack in the wooden venetians and saw him there.

The cop.

Five-ten or so, hat on, radio and male. He was standing next to the cafe on the main road, obviously trying not to arouse suspicion.

It didn’t work. I knew he was watching me. Knew that at any moment he would glance upwards
inconspicuously
to check that I was still in. Knew that he was waiting for armed cover to help raid my house, cuff my hands, drag me down the close, down the street, while my sick child looked on, the trauma staining his brain like beetroot.

He glanced up at the window, just as I suspected, and I quickly moved back from the blind.

I had to revise my plan.

I figured Matt must have found Sarah. Maybe I’d dropped something at the top of the cliff, or maybe there were marks from where Sarah fell. Somehow, he must have found her body and informed the police immediately.

In which case, I could either: come clean, lose Robbie and go to jail forever; or not come clean, not lose Robbie and not go to jail forever.

I decided on the second option, which meant I was on the run from the law.

I had never been on the run from the law before and my lack of experience made for poor and
haphazard
preparations.

First I booked two tickets to India over the
internet.
I would take Robbie to Goa, as I had such happy memories of my time there with Chas. We would live in a house, near a beach, out of reach. The tickets cost twelve hundred pounds altogether, which I put on Visa.

Next I took my phone and intercom off the hook and turned off the computer.

Then I packed passports. Luckily Robbie had one after the whole Italy trip disaster. At least
something
positive had come out of it – we could not only run from the law, we could fly from it.

Next I shoved some clothes, toiletries and headache tablets into my rucksack.

After that I wrote a letter to Mum and Dad and then ripped it up and wrote another one and then ripped that up. What could I tell them?

I peered through the crack in the venetians again and saw the cop still standing there. I wouldn’t be able to leave via the front door. I looked out the back. Marco was doing something in the communal bin area. I would have to escape from the flat another way.

I remembered the old bag’s flat opposite mine had been broken into via the loft once. The guy had crawled in through the small square opening in the shared close and bashed through the ceiling of the bathroom.

I decided I would do the same – crawl through the lofts of these interconnected tenements, exit through another manhole in another close and walk out. Simple.

Robbie had calmed down. The Calpol Mum had given him had kicked in, and he was wriggling happily on the padded blanket of his baby gym, banging his fists against ducks and squeaky balls and smiling. I left him in the living room and went to check the route.

I opened my front door and made sure there was no-one around, then dislodged the wooden door from the manhole and pulled myself up and into the loft. It was a dusty wooden place filled with insulation, random pieces of plywood and an artificial Christmas tree. I crawled along the beams, past specks of light,
but very quickly reached a dead end. It was bricked up. I crawled the other way, estimating the size of my flat and the size of the one opposite me, and realised that the lofts were not interconnected at all; they were separated by the gradient of the hill and by bricks.

When I jumped back down to the close, dust and insulation followed me. Alerted by the noise, the old bag across the landing peered at me through the glass of her front door. I ran inside and shut the door.

There was no way of escaping through the roof. I would have to sneak out the back.

Robbie was still playing on his mat and had rolled onto his tummy. He held his head up with
excitement
and kicked his legs on the ground.

I dressed myself in celebrity disguise – coat, glasses, hat, scarf – then put my rucksack on my back, picked up Robbie and hid him under my coat. He thought this was tremendous fun, and began eating the straps of my rucksack with wet,
determined
gums.

I walked down the close and made my way to the back door, but Marco was coming in from the bins.

‘Krissie? What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Just heading out for a walk.’

I turned around and walked towards the front door. It would look altogether too weird to go out the back.

When I opened the door to the outside world I saw the policeman. He was sitting at an outside table drinking a coffee. I upped the pace and headed in the opposite direction.

Walk fast, my talkers said, don’t stop, don’t look, get down Gardner Street to the taxi rank on Dumbarton Road, just walk fast, don’t stop.

‘Krissie!’

I ignored the voice and walked fast, not stopping.

‘Krissie Donald!’

I ran down the hill. But so did the cop. And he was fast. He was gaining on me.

‘Krissie!’

His arm grabbed mine and I had no choice. I had to stop. The tears were ready to flow, the penance was ready to be said. I turned to face up.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t recognise me?’

‘Sorry?’ I said, surprised that a policeman nabbing a murderess would speak in this familiar, relaxed, almost excited tone.

‘It’s Johnny, Constable Johnny Wallace!’

With this statement, I realised that I was not in trouble, that I was safe and did not have to run off to India never to be seen again. Unfortunately, though, I had no idea who Johnny Wallace was.

‘Oh, hi!’ I said, turning my head to the side a little to see if he looked familiar from a different angle.

‘You really don’t recognise me?’

I said I was sorry as adorably as I could and he
leant towards me and whispered in my ear. ‘Clatty Patty’s? Then yours?’

‘Ah,’ I said, still tilting my head to the side and squinting.

Annoyed by my obvious lack of recognition, his tone changed. Hitherto his voice had oozed, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m a cop!’ Henceforth it would ooze, ‘You’d better watch your step, girly-girl!’

With this tone in place he stepped back and said: ‘We had sex twice and in the morning you called me a taxi because I didn’t know the first line of
Anna
Karenina
.’

I remembered him! The sex had been good but he was two coupons short of a toaster. ‘That was a penultimate experience!’ he’d said jubilantly after coming.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry! Of course. You look great! Lovely to see you. I’d better get going, though.’

He raised his eyebrows and toyed with his
truncheon
threateningly as I said goodbye and headed back towards my flat.

‘Ms Donald!’ he yelled after me.

I froze and a girly-girl voice came at me from behind.

‘
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
…’

I turned around, attempted to smile at him, and then walked back to my flat.

Once inside, I put Robbie back under his baby
gym and he immediately rolled over onto his front. This was new, this vigorous rolling, and he seemed very pleased with himself about it. After nine months of doing very little, of lying around like a blob, I thought fleetingly, it must seem quite exciting to roll over.

I went to the bathroom to wash my face. In the mirror was a woman with red eyes, bruises, bag-lady hair and very odd clothes. Who was I? And what was I thinking? Hoping for the best? Escaping? I couldn’t get away from this, away from my guilt, ever. I had to tell.

I was about to ring the police when I heard an enormous bang from the kitchen. I ran into the dark room and looked around. Nothing was out of place. As I turned to leave the kitchen I heard another loud bang. It was the window. The window had banged. I walked towards it slowly, and gently nudged one of the venetian slats upwards. Putting my eye against the slit, I looked out towards the evening sky and then down towards the drying green below, where I saw Sarah standing, dressed in a shapeless purple tent, her white dislocated arm
trailing
behind her.

I dropped the slat and ran to the front door to check the lock. It was secure. I put the chain on and then raced around the bedrooms checking the windows. They were all shut, but the banging started again.

Bang. Bang. Bang.
The thud echoed in my head, from the front door this time.
Bang. Bang. Bang.

It was Shakespearean. Sarah was obviously trying to get in. Her ghost was coming to get me.

I raced into the living room to get Robbie and stopped dead over the little padded mattress of the baby gym that he’d been lying on seconds earlier.

He wasn’t there.

She’d taken him! Sarah’s ghost had taken my son!

‘Robbie! Robbie, where are you? ROBBIE!’ I shrieked, terrified.

I raced around the flat. Into the bathroom, behind the shower curtain. In the kitchen, under the table, in the pantry. Then I ran into the bedroom, sobbing hysterically as the banging continued on the front door. I searched frantically in the wardrobe and behind the curtains and under the bed.

And there he was. Eating fluff from under my king-size bed. I looked at him and he smiled, with fluff on his bottom lip, and then all of a sudden he crawled towards me on all fours with a huge grin.

My baby was crawling!

I gathered him in my arms and moved back into the hall. The banging had stopped.

When I looked out the kitchen window again I saw a large Apple Mac box in the rubbish area with some ripped bubble wrap floating in the wind behind it.

I was seeing things. I was mad.

I walked from the kitchen to the hall and the banging started again, moving up a gear. To my horror, the front door began to move and shake.

I tucked Robbie under my lilac fleece as the door throbbed and shook. Stepping back towards the wall of the living room, I slid downwards to the floor, resigned, with Robbie in my arms. We were huddled together in a ball of whimpering purple, waiting.