Gemini Rising (19 page)

Jago is in Gareth’s room. Not only that, but they seem to be having some sort of argument. It’s pretty obvious from here that, if they didn’t have to be quiet to avoid waking up their parents, they would be shouting the house down.

Then, Jago looks out and sees me. Hanging around in his garden like a crazed stalker and resembling a drowned rodent – it doesn’t help to remind myself that now is really not the time for vanity. He disappears from view, and I am kind of relieved that Gareth doesn’t go with him – as he reappears alone at the back door.

‘Sorana! What are you doing here?’

‘Look, I’m sorry to turn up like this. It’s just, things have gone a bit weird next door and I’m worried about Shimmi. I wondered if—‘

‘Shit, I thought something like this would happen – that’s why I was… Never mind.’

‘What do you mean?’

He casts a quick look towards upstairs, and lowers his voice. ‘I heard about what’s going on tonight and I was worried about you.’

‘How do you know what’s going on? I don’t get it.’

‘I… I can’t tell you. I’m sorry, it’s really complicated.’

He looks shifty, and some sort of doubting self-preservation instinct kicks in. I get the same feeling I had when I first saw him looking in my direction – that it must have been a mistake because Elyse, beautiful Elyse, was standing right next to me. They disappeared in the car together after the gig, and then Elyse lied about it; she warned me off him, and now he seems to know more about what’s going on than I do. I realise I don’t know him at all.

‘Jago, what’s really going on with you and Elyse?’ I ask.

‘I don’t think now’s really the… OK, OK – I’ll tell you; stop looking at me like that. When the twins moved in next door, Elyse was all over me. I’ll be honest, I know she’s kind of hot – but she’s not my type, and I can smell crazy a mile off. I suppose she’s not used to rejection, but she got pretty scary… Eventually she moved on to manipulating my stepbrother, and she and I steer clear of each other, which suits me. But I thought you knew all this?’

‘No, I thought…’

‘Sorana, I really like you, OK? You’re nothing like Elyse – or anyone else, for that matter.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah…’

Swoon. Et cetera. I can’t hold back the smile from my face, although I’m well aware that this is neither the time nor the place. He takes a step closer, but then it’s like we remember where we are, what’s going on.

‘Jago, I need you to help me, OK? We’ll go back next door, and get Shimmi, and then…’

‘Look, there is some weird shit going on over there, and you don’t know the half of it.’ He looks upstairs again, towards Gareth’s room. ‘Just come inside, and we’ll sort it out.’

‘No, I’m not leaving Shimmi on her own. I thought you said you were going to help me!’

‘Look, it’s not like you think,’ he insists. ‘I’m going to fix this, OK? Just don’t go back there. Please, trust me…’

So quickly, it’s like the merest butterfly flutter, he kisses me on the lips. It feels like pure electricity. He takes my arm and tries to lead me into the house, and I could almost cry as I break away. If he’s not going to help me, I’m going to have to do it on my own.

A scream rings out from somewhere in the house, somewhere nearby, and it doesn’t stop. Without a second’s thought for Jago’s warning, I carry on running into the house and up the stairs, following the awful, terrified sound. It leads me to Melanie’s bedroom.

Shimmi collapses onto me as soon as I stagger into the dark room, and I realise the screaming voice is hers. I grasp her shoulders and grip hard.

‘Shimmi. Shim, it’s OK. What’s the matter? What’s going on?’

I keep my eyes on her, my fingers clawing the wall to find the light switch. I realise that Shimmi and I are not alone, and that the shadows in the corner are not shadows at all. I see Melanie first. She is holding the glittering knife that I last saw in Elyse’s hand. Elyse is just a limp shape on the floor.

Shimmi has stopped screaming, and it’s ominously quiet. Way, way too quiet. I want to start screaming, too, and hope that somebody else will miraculously turn up and fix this for us – but I know that I can’t.

‘Shim, I need you to help. Go and find the phone and bring it to me, OK? Go!’

Once Shimmi has stumbled down the stairs, I take a step towards Melanie and she slowly looks up at me with huge, clear eyes.

‘I had to do it,’ she says simply. ‘She’s been controlling me for so long, I can’t believe I finally found the strength. Trees can’t grow so close together – they get tangled up and they die.’

They’re so similar to the chilling words I glimpsed in her diary. Even the scene in this room looks like one of Mel’s drawings – ornate, complicated, and full of death and destruction. Melanie releases her grip on the knife; as it falls out of her shaking hand I see that it has blood smeared on it.

‘Mel, what have you done?’

She stares me directly in the eyes, her face motionless like porcelain. A single tear creeps down her face, tracing the line of her scar. Before either of us can say anything, there is a noise outside – a car starting, driving off at great speed with a shriek of the tyres. My heart sinks as the roar of the engine drifts further and further away until I can no longer hear it.

‘Sorana,’ Melanie whispers, now that she knows we are completely alone, ‘I’ve killed her. I think I’ve killed my sister.’

‘Sorana, can you please confirm that it was you who called the police?’

I think back, my brain foggy. I am unable to picture anything but Elyse lying there on the floor, the knife covered in blood. The plastic cup of sugary tea I’m still holding has long gone cold. ‘I called for an ambulance. The police came as well.’

I shouldn’t be surprised – of course when I rang the ambulance, the police turned up as well. After all, I had just told the emergency operator that my friend had stabbed her sister. I just never expected it to get so crazy so quickly.

‘Can you please tell us again exactly where you were when you allegedly heard your friend screaming?’

‘OK…’

The paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital with the twins. Because I was a bit shivery and confused, they thought I might be suffering from shock. When they were convinced I was really OK, the police wanted to talk to me straight away; I was taken away in a police car by myself. I haven’t had time to think about the situation, to get it straight in my head, before being asked again and again what happened. They’ve been really nice to me, and of course they need to get the facts straight, but I’m tired and starting to doubt myself.

‘I heard Shimmi screaming. I went into Mel’s room and…’

Shimmi and I were the only other people there, and Shimmi drove off in her dad’s car before I could even ring the ambulance – she took her chance to get out while she could. Who can blame her? I don’t want to get her into any more trouble, but it’s got beyond that – it’s all going to catch up with both of us.

‘Excuse me, is there a phone I could use quickly, please? I need to ring my mum.’

All I can think about is speaking to my mum before someone else does. I know that – no matter what else – she’ll be on our side. I have the feeling that Shimmi and I are going to need her help. Once I’ve explained everything, she can talk to the police and to Shimmi’s dad. I’m sure she’ll be on my side – won’t she?

‘OK, I think that’s enough for now, Sorana. Why don’t you give your mum a call and we’ll get you another cup of tea?’

The policewoman leads me to a phone I can use and shows me how to get an outside line. Before she leaves me alone, I finally summon the courage to ask the question that is troubling me.

‘What about my friends? Is Elyse OK? And Melanie?’

Another policeman hands me a fresh cup of tea, and they exchange a look over my head. I feel a wave of sickness.

I feel faint with nerves and dread as I clutch the telephone receiver in both hands. The voice on the other end of the telephone, when it finally comes, is confused and groggy, just a noise rather than words. Not surprising, considering it’s nearly five o’clock in the morning.

‘Mum, it’s me. I’m in trouble and I need your help.’

‘Sorana? But you’re in bed.’

In spite of everything, this is almost enough to make me laugh hysterically – my bloody brilliant, ridiculous mum. I swallow the laugh down, along with the sick feeling that has not left my throat.

‘Mum, I’m not in bed. I’m at the police station — something bad’s happened. Please come and help me.’

I wait for my mum to come and collect me, sitting on a plastic chair and sipping my watery tea. Nobody will tell me anything.

On the one hand, I feel so relieved that they seem to believe me and I’m being allowed to go home. On the other, I can’t shake the feeling that something very bad has happened. I was sure Elyse was alive when the ambulance took her away, but now I can’t be certain.

The police keep saying ‘well done’, that I’ve been brave, that I did the right thing. No one is able to say the only thing I want to hear: your friends are all OK, everything’s going to be fine. I’m so tired, I think I must be starting to hallucinate when I see a familiar face approaching. In my confused state, I still don’t know whether to be glad to see him or to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

‘Sorana, you’re OK? Thank God,’ Jago says, taking me by surprise and hugging me. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened. It’s my fault; I messed it up – I shouldn’t have let you go…’

When one of the police officers comes and asks him what’s going on, Jago tells her that he knows exactly what happened and he wants to make a statement. Then I collapse into my mum’s arms the second she walks through the door.

Mum and I are silent all the way home from the funeral. She says all funerals are bad, but that it’s so much worse when it’s for someone this young. All I know is that it was horrific. I don’t think I’d have got through these last days in one piece without her.

I’m so glad that Mum was there with me today. Because of my involvement in the whole thing – which, of course, has quickly turned into the stuff of local legend – I constantly feel as though everyone is looking at me these days, and I just want to disappear until I can make some sense of it myself. I’d say ‘until I get over it’, but I don’t know if I ever will. It sounds so nonchalant, like eventually things will just go back to how they used to be, which simply isn’t true. I suppose everything gets better in time – well, that’s what everyone’s telling me – but I think I’ll always be different because of it.

Most of the other girls from my class were there in the church, with a couple of notable exceptions. The A Group were sobbing ostentatiously and hugging each other all over the place. Even some of the teachers – despite the circumstances, it was still pretty unsettling to see Miss Webb crying. Nathalie was there with her mum, and gave me a tiny wave, which was the only thing that made me feel any better.

There was one thing that felt especially weird. Because, even though it went so very wrong in the end, we did go through it all together, as a gang. So, for me the twins are conspicuous in their absence and I miss them.

The thing is, even if they had wanted to come, I don’t think Shimmi’s parents would have let them. I’m only exempt from that rule because they’ve known me so long and my mum met up with them to talk about what happened. It may seem harsh, but it’s kind of understandable – they believe that the twins killed Shimmi.

It’s got out of control, all the gossip and hearsay and blaming. I was there; I saw what happened. It’s not like anyone forced Shimmi into stealing her dad’s car and driving drunk in the middle of the night. However, it was a night when all sorts of wrong things happened and it was hardly Shimmi’s fault that she got so unlucky.

It’s hard to dispute Shimmi’s parents’ conviction that she changed when she met the twins – but I’d argue it’s not as simple as that. The twins didn’t change Shimmi; they brought out something in her that had always been there. I should know – it happened to me, too. Like so many things, it’s true and it’s not true, all at once; it’s so much more complicated than that.

The saddest truth is that all the whispering and finger-pointing can’t change the fact that Shimmi is dead. The same brilliant, fun, and annoying Shimmi, who was amazing at Maths and hated her ankles and had really pretty green eyes. Shimmi who was someone’s sister and child and friend, not just ‘you know, that girl from the Lower Sixth who got killed, like, joyriding or something – and, by the way, did you hear that Sorana Salem was actually
there
and those weird Johansson twins are crazed cult psychos or something?’.

After Shimmi was killed – flipping her dad’s car off the bridge and into the river, although I literally cannot bear to think about it – most of the speculation was about Elyse and Melanie. It was in the local papers, and then even the
Daily Mail
– which Pete says is a newspaper for idiots, anyway. There was a lurid article, complete with photos of all of us, and bitchy quotes from unnamed ‘close friends’ that had me suspecting everyone in our class for days. A couple of journalists even rang our house, asking to talk to me, but Mum told them to piss off and leave us alone.

Aside from the tabloids, the only people who have done well out of this mess are Trouble Every Day. The fact that we were all – except, ironically, Shimmi – massive fans of the band became one of the key elements of the story. Rumours began to circulate that it was some sort of super-fan suicide pact gone wrong. They got more national press coverage than ever before, and they even wrote a song about it on their second album. That kind of notoriety just can’t be bought. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that their slot has been moved up, so that they are headlining the second stage at Reading Festival this year. I’m also not sure it’s a coincidence that I don’t think their second album is all that good.

Even so, despite the media frenzy and the comparative amount of fuss in our medium-sized town, it’s incredible how quickly it all died down and, for everyone but those most involved, just disappeared. For some of us, after that night, things would never be the same again. In a way, it’s only right – they shouldn’t be.

In those terrible dark days before Shimmi’s funeral, I started investigating. I couldn’t stand not knowing everything. I had to get to the bottom of what happened.

At school, it turned out that we had been right all along. That weird speech Miss Webb gave us, way back when it had all begun, before the twins had even started in our class, was sort of portentous. There was a whole history that nobody had told us, so that it all started to make a strange sort of sense. A history it really was. Elyse and Melanie had been to a lot of schools before ours.

They had started off at the same secondary school, but Elyse was expelled and they both left amid accusations that Elyse was bullying Melanie and a bad influence on the other girls. They started again at another school, together, but were again asked to leave.

To try to solve the problem, they were next sent to separate boarding schools, in different counties. Rather than making things better, it became much worse. The two girls seemed to wither without each other. Elyse’s behaviour went further out of control than ever. Melanie refused to eat or even to talk without her sister there – at all. The pictures she drew became increasingly disturbing, and her sleepwalking grew worse. Separation was clearly not the miracle answer.

The twins’ parents decided to make a last attempt at a normal life for them – by donating money to enrol them at St Therese’s, such a small and perfectly nice local day school, where they could live at home with their dad and both go to the same school again. Perhaps they would grow out of all the little eccentricities that had made life more difficult for them at their other schools. You can’t blame them for trying, I suppose.

And, yes, I did say ‘parents’, plural. I only found this out much later, when my mum and Pete had a meeting at the school with Elyse and Melanie’s
two
parents. It turned out that Elyse’s whole story about her mother had been untrue on more than one level. The twins’ parents were divorced and their mum worked in Singapore – they saw her in the school holidays and often in between. Their parents, especially Mr Johansson, seemed more shocked than anyone at the secrets of their daughters, dark secrets that they claimed to have no idea about.

The main problem – aside from Elyse’s sociopathic tendencies, which kind of explained why she was so charismatic as well as so impossible – was that Melanie had become obsessed with the idea that Elyse was controlling her. Seriously – according to her diaries, she believed that Elyse was actually controlling her brain, stopping her from talking and making her do things she didn’t want to. It may sound ridiculous, but I know better than anyone else just how much power Elyse actually had. Whatever Mel might have imagined, I could understand it.

The twins continued to be as close as ever, but their relationship grew more fraught, and full of arguments that nobody else could comprehend. The scar on Melanie’s cheek was from just one of these fights. Elyse had scored the entire length of her face with a Stanley knife that she’d stolen from the Art room of their old school. When they were discovered, Melanie didn’t even cry or seem to notice the blood streaming down her face and into her pale hair; it was Elyse who was screaming and clutching the side of her own face.

At St Therese’s, everyone had been hopeful that the two girls were on an uphill swing. OK, so they might have got into a bit of trouble here and there, and not always appeared completely normal – which to me for a while seemed such a good thing – but they were making outside friends for the first time and seemed to be getting on fine.

It was at this point in the story that I went round to Amie Bellairs’s house to ask her what happened. Things aren’t bad between me and Amie’s gang now – we hold each other at arm’s length, but it all feels a bit more equal these days. I guess we’ll see if it lasts, but I have a feeling it will. Lexy is officially going out with Josh and, despite my history with him – let’s face it – they go together perfectly. He and I are never going to be close again, but we’re cool. I wouldn’t swap places with Lexy if you paid me, but I’m glad that Josh and I can go back to being sort-of mates.

Amie, her face healed except for a faint scar across the bridge of her nose, made me a cup of coffee and told me about that night when the twins had stayed over at her house. It had been only the three of them for once; it was Elyse’s idea to ditch the rest of the group for the evening. Amie had been enamoured enough to go along with this great plan. Apparently it had started off as quite a laugh – it had been all alcopops and MTV and doing each other’s eyeliner, the usual. My suspicion was that Elyse had suggested something weird – doing the Ouija board, for instance – which would explain why the bland, blonde A-is-for-Abercrombie gang turned against them so quickly. Actually, it wasn’t like that at all.

It had been a great night. Elyse had gone on about how she thought that she and Amie were going to be great friends – and Amie was flattered. At this point, it all sounded so familiar that it made me feel sick. Elyse even offered to draw up Amie’s astrological chart. Amie had been giddily enthusiastic and it had been brilliant fun – until she told Elyse her birthday. At which point, Elyse went mad.

‘She kept saying I must be wrong, that I wasn’t who I’d said I was,’ Amie said. ‘And all because I was a Capricorn. She said I had tried to trick her! I was scared of her, to be honest – she seemed so upset about it.’

Elyse and Mel had left in a hurry, Elyse warning Amie not to speak to her ever again. Amie was genuinely freaked out, but when she told her friends, it sounded so ridiculous that she had vowed to forget the whole thing. Then when the hockey ball incident happened, she became properly scared. I had been so wrapped up in myself – and so sure of Amie’s status as confident queen bitch – that I hadn’t noticed her unravelling. Everyone else found it so easy to write it off as a freak accident – except for Amie.

She was too scared to speak up without proof. She hadn’t suddenly become an innocent victim overnight; her reasons were not all noble, but she set about getting to the bottom of it. This basically involved getting her Facebook sleuth on and investigating the twins’ past. However, what was really going on couldn’t have been guessed by anyone.

Melanie’s diaries, as I had glimpsed, began to illustrate her notion that in order for her to live a normal life, it was necessary for Elyse to die. They couldn’t live together or apart, so one of them could not live at all. Meanwhile, Elyse became all the more obsessed with Trouble Every Day and astrology. Most of all, the whole concept of the Gemini twins – she was sure that I was the key.

So, somehow, we all became involved in what will always be known in my memory as ‘That Night’. We all know what happened after that, and I will always wish it hadn’t.

Elyse wasn’t as badly hurt as we feared. The blood on the knife was from a deep cut in her arm; another slash to her side, which could have been fatal, turned out to be a severe surface wound.

After I left the police station, although I’d told them everything, it was still a suspicious situation. The fact was that Shimmi was dead, Elyse was in hospital, and Melanie had refused to talk at all. I was the only one left. Amid all of the confusion over what had actually happened, I even began to doubt myself.

My saving grace came in unexpected form. Gareth Next Door had not only seen everything, but had filmed it on his phone, zoomed in through the window. However, he refused to admit it – not surprising, considering that this brought his stalking habit into the public domain. Jago tried to convince Gareth to come forward by himself, but he had to go and tell the police in his own statement, in the end.

When this came to light, of course, there was a cloud of suspicion around Gareth that refused to shift. We never did find out who attacked Lexy – but if Gareth knew anything, he wasn’t saying.

There was still one last secret to come out, though. Gareth and Elyse had been sleeping together all along. While she was using him and laughing at him behind his back, he believed that he was her boyfriend. Despite everything that happened, he still refused to reveal anything that might be used against her.

It was his inside information, secretly blabbed to Jago that night, that saved me. Elyse had planned a big showdown at her house and boasted to Gareth that the whole thing was going to blow up. I don’t think Mel planned her side of it – her attack on her sister had been brewing but I think it surprised Mel as much as anyone.

I’m not the only one to blame myself, just a bit. Jago thought that he could sort it out himself. Gareth had told him what was going on in confidence and he didn’t want to break that and risk making things worse. None of us could have guessed it would all end as badly as it did.

Gareth hasn’t wanted to speak to me since all this happened, and I don’t blame him. We’ve all reacted so differently and there’s no right or wrong – my insatiable need for the full story juxtaposed with his denial of the whole thing as far as Elyse is concerned. I think it’ll take him a long time to get over it – but it beats the alternative. At least he and I are both still around.

I was the lucky one that night, and I still know it. I’m so thankful, but it just doesn’t seem fair. We all know what – horribly, tragically – happened to Shimmi after that. For the twins, it may not have been as final but it wasn’t so clear-cut either.

Their dad came home and their mum flew in from Singapore. They stopped Elyse and Melanie from having any contact with the outside world. So, all I heard were the same rumours as everyone else – that Melanie was in a psychiatric hospital, that Elyse had escaped and gone on the rampage; that they were murderous together and suicidal apart. Eventually, Miss Webb found out the details; she told my mum that both of the twins were seeing therapists but were basically housebound. They wouldn’t be coming back to school – not to St Therese’s or anywhere else. Apparently they weren’t doing well and there was talk that they might have to be institutionalised.