In Too Deep (7 page)

The only thing I could think of was from me.

I tripped on the bottom stair, saving myself with my hands, hurting my wrist. I didn’t care about the pain. I charged upstairs to the top-floor window where I’d seen Rick, screaming out to him as I went.

I didn’t mind what he’d done, or why he’d done it . . .
I’d found him!
He would come home, and I’d forgive him, and everything would be fine again. I knew no miracle would bring Jacob back – I’d had to identify his body, after all – but if we could just get back to three out of four, I’d settle for that. With half of us gone, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could carry on.

I knock back the remaining wine. It’s only a small bottle, but being the second one, I’m already starting to feel numb.

The thing is, when I got upstairs and burst into that front bedroom, Rick wasn’t there. Not a trace of him, though I swore I caught a whiff of his aftershave in the still, dusty air of the derelict place.

But they say that’s what happens when you go mad, when you’re so convinced you’ve seen something that doesn’t exist, when you believe it with all your heart and soul. It’s an easy slippage into an alternate reality. And once there, it’s almost impossible to get back.

As I turned to leave, hating myself for being so stupid, I suddenly screamed.

The face was looming above me – a pale face in a ghastly old oil painting hanging on the wall opposite. My nerves were in tatters. It must have been what I’d seen from outside – a badly painted 1970s portrait of a man much older than Rick.

I swiped it off the wall in anger, knowing no one would notice or even care. The place was derelict anyway. Then I kicked a hole in it.

There was no Rick. And there was no happy ending. Just me descending into madness.

‘Mum,’ Hannah says, coming back into our room, making me jump. Cooper trots in beside her. ‘This place is really nice. You should see the pool and spa area.’

Hannah is breathless and beautiful, and glowing with something I envy so badly I can’t even give it a name. Probably once I’d have called it love.

‘But what I don’t understand,’ she continues, a frown forming, ‘is how Susan knew my name just now when I saw her on the stairs.’ She takes my hand and tries to pull me off the bed. ‘I swear we didn’t tell her.’

At least Mum has stopped going on about Dad turning up at the hotel. Frankly, it’s a bit sick of her to think like that, as though he’d actually want to torture us. But I know she has to chew through this in her own way.

I had this crazy idea that being away from all the stuff at university would somehow help me get through it, but now I’m not so sure. Stuck-on shit follows you wherever you go, I’ve come to realise, while the nasty, angry, bitter voice in my head says:
Good, you deserve it
.

But when I look at Mum, I know that she doesn’t deserve it. I so badly want to help her, but the thing is, I so badly can’t.

She looks at me from the bed, a sweep of fear touching her face for a second. Then I reach out and take her hand, pulling her up. Lying there like that, it looks as though she’s almost given up.

‘We must have told her your name,’ Mum says. ‘I probably mentioned it when we checked in. How would she know it otherwise?’

We definitely didn’t tell her
, I think, but I don’t want to make Mum worry. I didn’t fill out any forms, and Mum didn’t write down my name on the one Susan gave her. In fact, I felt a bit awkward, wondering if I should introduce myself, but I decided against it. I was more preoccupied with the text I’d just had, not knowing whether to reply or not.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I say, smiling.

‘So,’ she says, looking all sleepy after her bath. ‘How about that game of chess?’

I smile again. ‘Sure.’ Right now it’s the last thing I feel like doing.

‘Life’s a bit like chess, isn’t it?’ I say as we lug the big pieces to their start positions.

They’re much lighter than they look, being made of hollow plastic. For some reason, I want to hurl and kick them across the lawn. The other family who were playing earlier are sitting on the terrace now, while Mum and I try to remember if it’s the king or the queen who go on their own colour square.

‘All wrong moves and regrets,’ I add, thinking I sound about a hundred years old. The hotel looms behind us, watching on.

‘I guess it is,’ Mum says thoughtfully. She switches the knights and bishops around for the third time, then goes to the wrought-iron table nearby and takes a sip of her wine. We got some drinks on the way through the bar. Mine’s just a juice.

‘You go first,’ I say, and so Mum grabs a pawn’s head, shoving him forwards a couple of spaces. ‘Finely calculated opening move,’ I add.

She gives a little shiver in the late-afternoon spring sunshine, the setting light glimmering through the trees making a halo around her head. She looks beautiful, but her eyes are sad.

‘Took me ages to figure it out,’ she says, winking.

A few moves later, with me thinking I’ve backed myself into a corner, I spot the young boy from the previous family standing a few feet away, watching us play.

‘Hi,’ I say to him.

Mum turns, smiling at him, but then her smile falls away as she sees him properly. Unruly dark hair drooping sideways over his forehead, full lips the colour of blood, jeans with ripped knees, and his hands shoved accusingly on his hips as he watches our game. We’re both thinking the same thing. I just want to hug her, wishing the kid would bugger off.

Mum sees Jacob still stuck at age eleven. But for me, he’s followed me through my childhood and beyond, standing beside me as a young adult in my dreams – his voice low, his chin covered with fine hair.

The boy says nothing. He just stares idly at us, almost with a mocking expression. Behind him, on the terrace, his parents and sister are chatting, laughing, rubbing salt into our wounds.
Why don’t they
all
just bugger off?
I think, wondering what to say to the kid to make him leave us alone. It’s the last thing Mum needs.

‘Who won your game?’ I ask, hoping he’ll be shy and scuttle off.

‘Me, of course,’ he says confidently. ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he adds, pointing at where I’ve just put my knight.

‘Why?’ Engaging him was not what I had in mind. Thankfully Mum has retreated to the table again, her back towards us as she drinks her wine.

‘Cos look,’ he says in a whisper, pointing to Mum’s bishop. The boy draws a line across his throat and laughs.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah.’

He picks up my piece and moves it to a different square.

‘You can’t do that,’ I say. ‘It’s cheating.’

‘She didn’t see,’ he says cockily as I put the piece back where I had it. ‘Everyone cheats,’ he says, just as Mum joins us again. Her cheeks are flushed.

No
, I think.
No, they don’t
, but the boy runs off to his parents who are calling him back.

‘Your go, Mum,’ I say as she studies the giant board. She decides on a simple pawn move, as if she doesn’t know what else to do.

For some reason I don’t say anything about the killing she could have made. I hate myself for it, but then I’m well practised at keeping quiet.

‘Although, thinking about it,’ Mum says with a faraway look in her eyes, ‘I’m not sure my life is anything like a game of chess. I don’t feel I’ve been making my own moves at all. Not for a very long time.’

And I know exactly what she means as on my next go I’m able to topple her bishop.

‘But it’s not even close to seven o’clock,’ I say as we head back to the hotel. She leads me into the bar, telling me she has to take our empty glasses back. I know she’s been drinking more these last few months.

Though the drinking that goes on at university actually makes Mum’s few glasses of wine each night seem lightweight. Before I went, she and Dad lectured me about alcohol, drugs, sex, all the kinds of things parents get hung up over. I convinced them I’d never touch drugs and wouldn’t get wasted on booze. The rest I left to their imagination, which probably isn’t the cleverest thing I’ve ever done. It’s all about reassurance with parents, making them think the best when they’re hardwired to believe the worst.

‘What shall we do now?’ I say, looking around the deserted bar as she stands there expectantly. ‘There’s no one here to
mingle
with.’ I say it in a silly way, hoping it will make her smile.

‘Susan definitely said guests gather for drinks,’ she says for the third time.

She seems nervous, distracted, as if she’s searching for something, her eyes darting around the old panelled room. Even though it’s still light outside, the bar is dim and sombre, filled with the musty smell of log fires lingering from the winter, though it’s brightened by vases of daffodils dotted around the room.

‘How about a walk down to the village?’ I suggest. ‘Or I could show you the spa area.’ Anything but another drink. I want her to last the evening without crying or falling asleep by nine o’clock.

Mum glances at her watch just as my phone vibrates again. I stare at the screen. The sight of his name makes me tense up. I shove my phone back in my pocket without reading the message. I wish he’d just take no for an answer and get on with his life. Let me get on with mine. What’s left of it.

That was pretty much what I told him last time I saw him. He’d hounded me for days after I broke up with him – after that terrible evening in his room. Yet another reason to screw up my eyes, block my ears, hoping it will all just go away.

‘Or we could stay here and wait?’ Mum suggests, planting herself on a velvet-topped bar stool. ‘See if anyone turns up.’

Then her face lights up as the bartender comes out from a back room.

‘May I have a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, please?’ she says, watching as he pours. Resignedly I sit down beside her and ask for a bag of nuts. I’m starving.

‘Who’s texting?’ Mum says, trying to sound interested.

For a moment I consider telling her. She and Dad pretty much guessed I had a boyfriend last term, figured out that things had got into a mess when I came back from uni early before Christmas. It didn’t take a mind-reader.

But it’s no easier to tell her now than it was then.

Harder, in fact.

I fully intended on going back for the last week or so of term after I’d got my head round things, got some
answers and decided what to do, but then it all kicked off with Dad, and since then everything’s been horrid. Even more horrid.

‘Just someone from uni,’ I say. I ask for some water. The nuts are salty.

‘A boy?’

‘Yeah, actually.’

Keeping it all inside is hard work. Then I’m thinking of James whoever-he-was in the pub last week. It was risky and stupid, but it felt good to get some stuff off my chest, even though it’s left me paranoid.

Mum gives a slightly boozy wink. ‘That’s nice, love.’

No. No, it’s not nice at all
, I want to tell her, but don’t get the chance as someone comes up behind us, interrupting the moment, making Mum shudder and gasp as a friendly hand comes down on her shoulder. As she turns round, I see her eyes close briefly, a look of pathetic hope pulling at her features as she prays it’s Dad standing there, about to cradle her in his arms.

Forgive and forget
. . .

But of course it’s not. It’s Susan, smiling, eyeing each of us in turn.

‘How are you both settling in?’ she asks.

Then she tells us about a local craft fair we might be interested in as she mindlessly toys with a pen between her strong, slender fingers.

I’m not really listening to what she’s saying and have to force my eyes off the pen, telling myself that it doesn’t mean anything, that they’re as common as salt, a dime a
dozen. All I know is that I have to get Mum away before she makes the connection as well. If I don’t, it will ruin the evening for sure.

‘Susan,’ I say as lightly as I can manage. ‘You surprised me.’

Air escapes my lungs, punctured by disappointment as she comes up behind me.

It’s not Rick.

I take another breath, catching Hannah’s eye. I can immediately see that she knows exactly what I was thinking.

I have these little fantasies. Bucketloads of them, actually. And as time’s gone on, they’ve increased in number. To begin with they were mostly aimed at me – fantasies that involved me not waking up, perhaps dying mysteriously in the night from a broken heart so I wouldn’t have to deal with things any more.

Or I dream up scenarios where I get diagnosed with an incurable disease, an illness that takes me swiftly so Hannah doesn’t have to witness my demise. Other times I pray I’ll get hit by a bus or a train, me stepping out not-so-carelessly into its path, reaching out for the hand of my son as he welcomes me over.

But as the weeks have turned into months, as I realise that, unlike Rick, I’m here to stay, the stories in my head have turned into fantasies of his return. He comes home in many guises and ways – from delivery men, to customers at work, to patients in hospital who have lost their memories.

That last one is perhaps my favourite – wrapping everything up in a neat parcel of forgiveness. A terrible accident, Rick was saved and taken to hospital, remaining in a coma for months. With no ID and an admin error, the police didn’t make the link. He somehow slipped through the net of identification and, when he woke, his memory was fuzzy and he didn’t know who or where he was.

I’m always drenched in sweat when I wake from this particular dream. However hard I try, there’s always a piece of the puzzle – of
Rick
– missing, leaving a gaping hole in the middle. And in the dream, when I’m rekindling his memory, teaching him who he is again, I watch myself telling him lies, piecing him back together just the way I want him.

‘Mrs Forrester?’

‘Mum . . .’ comes the unmistakable tone of my daughter. A mother always reacts to the sound of her own child.

‘Sorry, love, I was miles away.’ I take a sip of my drink, trying to seem unfazed. Susan is standing beside me, her eyebrows raised, her lips poised in a ready-to-go smile.

‘Will you be dining at the hotel tonight?’ she asks. ‘We only have one table left if you want it.’