Precious Thing (19 page)

It’s been seven years since we’ve seen each other, Clara, and now we’re together once more I realise there’s a gulf between us. I don’t know how to reach you, to find you underneath the layers of suspicion and years of conversations we rehearsed in our heads but never actually spoke.

Maybe I was expecting too much, to be flooded with your warmth. Give it time, I think.

But the way you pinch your eyes and look me up and down unnerves me. ‘There is nothing left of you,’ you say as if my weight loss is unwelcome and threatening. It’s clear to me you were expecting to see my eighteen-year-old self and that makes me bristle with anger. Did you think I would have stayed the same? Did you think so little of me? That girl doesn’t exist any more. She disappeared shortly after you left, taking her pounds of fat and baggy clothes with her. When I think of her it’s as if I’m thinking of another person. I try to regain my composure and make a joke about how funny it was to be thin at first. ‘The smaller I got, the more people noticed me,’ I say, and I wait for your reaction but I can’t read the look on your face. I no longer know what you’re thinking. We are distant. I wonder if we will ever get the connection back.

Later, I sit on your squashy sofa blowing into my peppermint tea to cool it, admiring your new flat. It’s housed in one of the imposing whitewashed Georgian mansion blocks that border the sea. From your front window I can see the pier and a jet ski bobbing about, buffeted by the wind. Inside it’s pretty bare, apart from a red sofa which you’ve covered in a beige wool throw and a few wooden carvings picked up on your travels. ‘It needs some work,’ you say and tell me how your dad bought it especially for you.

‘Lucky you,’ I remark without thinking and immediately regret it. Your dad died two weeks ago. I wanted to come to the funeral but you told me firmly that it was just for his close family and friends. I didn’t ask where that left me.

‘He spent the last seven years trying to make it up to me,’ you say, waving your arm around the room, ‘this, all this, and everything else, it was his way of saying sorry.’

You leave that thought hanging heavy, weighing us down. I move uncomfortably in my chair and take a sip of tea.

I ask to see the pictures from your travels, seven years in photos, so I can see where you’ve been. I’d kept in contact with your dad ostensibly to find out how you were doing but sometimes we’d just chat about life or work, adult to adult, and he’d tell me how he’d watched me on TV. I always felt proud when he said that. He’d tell me how he still missed the days when we filled his house with terrible music and singing. I’d tell him I missed his sweetcorn fritters and bad dancing. He just wanted everyone to be happy, didn’t he? It was one of his greatest strengths but it was also his weakness. He couldn’t cope with confrontation.

You whizz me through the albums: in Granada teaching English and you outside the Alhambra. ‘Feels like an age ago,’ you say, pinching your stomach which used to be so flat. ‘All the free tapas gave me this and I’ve never been able to lose it.’ Then we’re in Madrid and you, tanned and smiling with a Spanish boyfriend, Francesco, his arm wrapped round you possessively. After that the landscape changes. We move to India, you wearing sarongs, squinting with sun-strained eyes into the camera. You’re in Jaipur, the skies are whiter, hotter, the signposts more exotic; Agra, the Taj Majal, Palolem Beach in Goa, an ashram in Kerala. You tell me you learnt some
totally amazing poses
and you stretch into one right in front of me. You extend one leg behind you and stretch your arms out front and you stay like that, statue-still, for minutes. The veins in your head pulse and the muscles in your arms bulge from underneath your tanned skin. And I see them, still visible, the criss-cross lines of the razors up and down your arms. The scars of your past.

‘This is “warrior three” pose,’ you tell me through deep breaths. ‘It’s all about control, Rachel, you fix your eyes on one thing and you don’t move.’

The show of strength over, you sit back on the sofa, your forehead glistening from the exertion, and you turn to me triumphantly, as if you have shown me a window into a different world. ‘There’s life beyond Brighton, you know.’

I tell you I’ve been living in London for five years but you shake your head as if it doesn’t count. And suddenly I’m taken back seven years. We’re eighteen again, you are in control, out front, shining for both of us, and I am in your wake. I realise you expect me to assume my old role. But I won’t, I won’t let that happen.

‘I’m glad it all worked out for you,’ I say and see the flash of steel in your eyes. I am treading on dangerous territory but I know I have to walk here if I’m to regain ground. Uncertain of how you will react, I carry on. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did,’ I say, my heart beating through my words. ‘I only wanted to help you, we both did, your dad and I. I hope you understand that.’

You flick through the pages of the photo albums faster and faster, without looking at the pictures, finally pausing at a photograph of your dad outside the Sydney Opera House.

‘It was the guilt that killed him in the end.’

‘He died of cancer,’ I say.

‘It ate away at him. He saw what it was like for me in there. It made me worse, not better. He realised he should never have put me there. He should never have listened to you.’

The anger is frothing up inside me. You aren’t allowed to rewrite the past, to pick your own cast of villains and heroes. This might be your truth but it’s not mine.

‘Do you really think I did it all myself? A doctor had to sign the form along with your dad. He was the one who took you to hospital. He left you there and he did it because he could see you were ill. What about the times he found you cutting yourself, bleeding? He was terrified that one day he would come in and find you dead. So yes, I supported him, I’m not afraid to admit it. Yes we talked about it, he needed someone, but I didn’t put you in that unit. He could see you were broken; he wanted someone to put you back together.’

I think of the weeks running up to that day when he told you he was taking you out shopping and drove you to hospital instead. Our secretive chats when we shared our concerns over you. Slowly, your dad had taken me into his confidence; he began to court my opinion as he deliberated on how best to help you. He came to me as if I had all the answers, and it made me feel special in a strange way, to have his undivided attention.

The day he returned, red-eyed after leaving you, I comforted him all afternoon. He said he could still hear your pleas ringing in his ears.

‘
Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind,’
I told him.

For a while we are quiet; only the noise of the seagulls squawking breaks the silence as it drifts in through your window.

Then you close the photo album and walk across the room to the mantelpiece. Someone has sent you a postcard from Melbourne. You pick it up and turn it over absentmindedly.

‘Did you miss me,’ you ask softly, your question easing the pressure in the room.

I think of how it was towards the end, you and my mother, colluding and dragging me down. I remember how I felt when you’d both gone, the sense of weightlessness. I was energised, as if whatever had been sucking the life out of you had fed it directly into me.

I don’t tell you this. I don’t want you to think I benefitted from your absence.

‘Every day,’ I say. ‘I missed you every day.’ You walk back to the sofa and I stand up, my arms outstretched. ‘Can we put it all behind us?’ I ask and I pull you close. ‘Friends?’

‘Friends,’ you lie.

O
H THE TIME
I wasted on you, Clara: the hours of phone calls, e-mails, the invitations, the laboured arrangements, the holiday (a whole week’s skiing), they all came rushing back to me in snapshots, flickering through my mind. This huge, monumental effort on my part to rediscover the indefinable magic that brought us together and made us feel we were always meant to be. All for nothing.

Why didn’t I see the magic had evaporated long ago?

You’d been playing a game with me, Clara, a cruel sport.

And I’d been playing your fool.

Because the results of the postmortem were no coincidence. You must have planned it all, imagining the moment that they were read out to me, the moment when the truth, sick and twisted, announced itself so clearly and loudly there was no room left for doubt.

You wanted to hurt me.

And you’d chosen the person, the only person after you, who could ever fill the huge void, the aching hole inside me.

You had almost destroyed me once before when you shut me out without warning. I had recovered, built a life for myself, and then Jonny came along, and we were so perfect. He was everything. You must have looked at us and thought we were too perfect. You must have watched us together and thought you wanted to destroy us.

To do that you must have hated me.

The thought of you hating me and me loving you hit me with such force it winded me. The thought knotted and spun around in my mind, making me dizzy. And all the time as if on a giant screen the image of Jonny’s body filled my head, those blue, dead lips, and the waste, the terrible, awful, needless fucking waste of a life.

A scream travelled from my stomach into my throat and out to fill the room but the room was too small for it so it travelled down the hallway and into the kitchen before it burst out on to the street. The whole of London must have heard my scream that night, powered by the furnace that was burning inside me.

Anything that happened now was down to you, Clara. You had driven me to this.

You had set the rules and forced me to play you at your own game.

I couldn’t shake the thought of Jonny, I couldn’t begin to accept he had gone, was never coming back. His loss didn’t follow me around like a shadow; it became part of me, lodging itself deep within my being. I was possessed by it.

Yet the madness of grief also spurred me on, like an engine whirring inside me, never running out of steam. Some people are crushed under the weight of it, others are driven to do more, to be more than they ever thought possible. I don’t need to tell you what category I fell into, Clara.

Initially, when you disappeared, I’d wanted to stay close to your story to gather as much information as I could to find you. That was when I still believed you were lost. But now there were other more pressing reasons for me to be pulling the strings of our coverage. If it was going to be me pitted against you, I needed people to see what you were really like.

So far, in common with most dead people (or those
presumed dead)
, the Clara O’Connor the newspapers wrote about was a carefree, beautiful,
everything-to-live-for
young woman, the heroine in her own tragedy. Even the police had glossed over the murkier elements of your past, desperate to keep your story at the top of the news agenda and help their faltering investigation.

I needed to recast your image and let you know I was on your trail. I needed, somehow, to persuade Robbie to put me back on your story.

My reappearance in the newsroom, just days after Jonny’s body was found, caused its own problems however. Walking towards the news desk I was aware that my presence, my made-up face, my dressed-for-business attire, silenced the chatter. It dropped to a hush, a whisper. Heads lifted, eyes opened wide in surprise. If you carry on as normal when you’re supposed to be locked away, crying and howling and succumbing to your grief, you arouse suspicion. I wanted to shout for everyone to hear:
Just because I can walk and talk and breathe doesn’t mean I’m not dying inside.

But what use would that have been?

Besides, I realised I too had made those judgements; questioning the motives of the father who was too composed at the death of his child or the husband who remembered too clearly the timeline of events leading up to his wife’s disappearance. The bereaved have to act out the roles we cast them in, otherwise they will be the villains.

In the end I just put one foot in front of the other and walked until I reached the news desk. And then Robbie caught sight of me. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee,’ he said uncharacteristically and swept me out of the door.

The
Daily Telegraph
was on the table in the canteen, your picture next to Jonny’s and mine on the front page. Robbie sat down, bacon sandwich in one hand, the other twitching over the newspaper, fighting the urge to turn it over, deny it was happening.

Two Weeks on and Police Draw a Blank,
the headline claimed, and the column inches below were devoted to criticism of the investigation. Robbie’s eyes pinned me down. He expected at the very least a tear, some evidence of emotion, because Jonny was gone and you were still out there, because all the papers carried the story and there was no escaping from it. But the truth was I had found ways to cope, reserves of strength. That’s what people do, isn’t it?

We sat silent amongst the chatter and the sound of the coffee machine, the snatched glances in my direction, people saving their gossip for the walk back to the newsroom. I watched Robbie eat his bacon roll and pretended to read a feature on women having babies in their forties. Instead I rehearsed the argument I was about to present to him.

Finally he licked each finger with a smack of his lips, wiped his mouth with a ketchup-stained serviette and sat back in his chair.

‘Amber Corrigan will do an interview with us,’ I told him. Of course it wasn’t entirely true. At that point she hadn’t agreed to anything but a lie isn’t a lie if you can make it happen. And I knew I could make it happen.

Robbie sat up, the initial flash of excitement giving way to a look of fear.

‘You can’t do it,’ he said.

‘No, but someone else could,’ I said, adding softly, ‘I would just be in the background.’ He squirmed in his chair. He knew it was all wrong allowing me anywhere near the story, especially now that Jonny had died, but I could see him making the calculation in his head. ‘Officially, of course, you would know nothing about my involvement.’