Splinter the Silence (9 page)

Carol looked at Tony as if she hated him. ‘I don’t need to drink. I could stop any time I wanted to.’

He’d given her a long level stare then. ‘You think? Prove it. Let me stay here with you till Wednesday. It’s only four days. You go on the wagon and I’ll be here to support you. Believe me, Carol, I’d love to be proved wrong.’

She glowered at him, her expression a shifting mosaic of petulance and dismay. He wasn’t sure if she was more pissed off at the thought of going on the wagon or having to put up with him in her face all the time. ‘Fine,’ she said, clipped and tight-lipped. ‘If that’s the only way to get you off my case, fine.’ She tipped the last inch of wine down the sink in a defiant gesture. ‘You sleep in here, I’ll take the sleeping bag. I have to get up early and walk the dog. That way I won’t disturb you.’ And she’d stalked off. He suspected she thought she’d got the better of the exchange.

She was wrong. After she’d gone, he took advantage of the soundproofing to search the annexe for alcohol. Three bottles of malt whisky, two bottles of pepper vodka from the freezer, a bottle of gin, five bottles of Pinot Grigio, two bottles of cava, a bottle of brandy and five bottles of craft beer. He swallowed his qualms about her privacy and went through every handbag in the wardrobe, discovering three miniatures of vodka and one of whisky. Then, one by one, he opened the bottles and poured the contents down the sink. The fumes rose up, making his nose tingle. She’d be furious in the morning when she saw what he’d done. But eventually, she’d be grateful.

Twenty miles away, on the outskirts of Bradfield, Ursula Foreman read through what she hoped would be the final draft of her monthly column for
TellIt!
, the popular online news site she’d helped to set up two years before. She ran both hands through her ginger curls in a bid to wake herself up and sharpen her concentration. As she read, she chewed one corner of her lower lip absently, her eyes narrowing as she weighed her words.

Four months ago, she’d written what she considered a thoughtful and measured piece about the effect on young women of unthinking, everyday sexism in TV soaps.

She’d been taken aback by the flood of vilification it had unleashed. A torrent of hate and anger had saturated her social media feeds. At first, she’d laughed about it, complaining about the lack of imagination displayed by the trolls. In response, they’d upped their game. Until then, Ursula had stuck to the accepted axiom – don’t feed the trolls. But she found it hard to stay silent in the face of such grim abuse. Her next column had probed the reasons why men – for it was, she was convinced, almost exclusively men – harboured such powerful negative feelings towards women they’d never met and whose words were unlikely to have any direct effect on their lives.

The second shitstorm was even worse than the first. Ursula wasn’t daunted by her attackers, though she was a little shaken when her partners in
TellIt!
told her to keep it up; her foul-mouthed critics were actually drawing more people to the site than ever before, which was good for business.

The following month, she wrote about the underlying fear that infused the abuse she’d experienced, and its wider impact on women’s lives. A lesser person might have buckled under the loathsome bile that was by now a daily feature of her online life. But Ursula stood firm. Her only concession to the depravity was to ask
TellIt!
’s IT guy to ID the worst culprits, in the hope they could hand the police enough evidence to prosecute the cowardly bastards.

The door of her study swung open to reveal a burly man in a T-shirt and checked fleece lounging trousers. He was waving a pair of steaming mugs in the air. ‘Fancied hot chocolate and thought you might too,’ Bill Foreman said, moving into the room, surprisingly light on his feet for so stocky a man. ‘Put a splash of rum in as well. Reckoned you deserved a bit of a livener.’

Ursula sighed happily. ‘You are my hero. I was about to send this off then call it a night.’

Bill handed her one of the mugs and she cradled it in her hands, savouring the warmth and the rich aroma of the chocolate and the rum. He lowered himself into a battered chintz armchair and Ursula swivelled her office chair round to face him. ‘So what did you go with in the end?’ A journalist himself, he understood how often the finished piece ended up in a different place from the initial plan.

‘A tangent. I’m writing about female genital mutilation. How we’ve become much more aware of it in the past couple of years here in the UK and how we need to make a safe space for women to be able to speak without fear of reprisals.’

Bill grinned. ‘Nothing controversial, then. It’s not hard to imagine how they’ll come back at you on that one. You’ve found a way to upset the fundamentalist Muslims and the right-wing arseholes in the same article.’

Ursula sighed. ‘Depressing, isn’t it? It was a lot easier to be optimistic about equality when you didn’t have to confront the Neanderthals on a daily basis. When you could imagine that people were actually changing their minds because they’d stopped groping secretaries at the photocopier.’

Bill’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘And all the time, it was burrowing underground, hibernating and growing stronger. Baffles me. I’m a bloke. I like football and beer and playing
GTA
with my mates. But that doesn’t mean I have to despise women. It’s not a binary. I genuinely don’t understand the thought processes that go into the kind of abuse you’ve been getting.’

‘That’s because it’s not got much to do with thought processes.’ Ursula leaned forward, her face animated. ‘It’s emotional. I think it’s got a lot to do with the fact that the kind of work men do has changed dramatically. Their fathers and grandfathers did hard manual labour. Yes, it was brutal and exploitative, but society constructed an identity round that. That kind of work made you a man. That was how you could prove yourself.’

Bill swigged his cocoa and nodded. ‘A kind of indoctrination, and the memory lingers on. There’s a lot of men out there with a feeling that they don’t measure up. Buried so deep they don’t even know it’s there, never mind how to fix it. And shouting at women makes them feel better.’

‘Literally or figuratively. I used to feel sorry for them till I found myself on the receiving end.’

Bill stared at the carpet between his feet. ‘Speaking of that, have you been looking at the news feeds at all tonight?’

‘No, I only pulled up what was relevant to what I was writing about. Why? Is there something I should know about?’

Bill sighed and shifted in the chair. ‘That woman we liked on
The Big Ask
– Jasmine Burton. The one you emailed about writing something for
TellIt!
She’s…’ He scanned the room, corner to corner, as if he’d find the right words there.

Alarm made Ursula sit up straight, eyes wide. ‘She’s what? Has someone attacked her?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No, it’s… it’s worse than that. Ursula, she’s killed herself.’

The words vibrated in Ursula’s head like a plucked string. She couldn’t make sense of them. She smiled and shook her head. ‘You must have got it wrong, Bill. You’ve misread it.’

‘No mistake, my love. I double-checked it on half a dozen sites. Her body was washed up by the mouth of the River Exe. Looks like she walked into the river with a pocketful of stones to weigh her down.’

‘The River Exe? Isn’t that in Devon, somewhere like that?’ She gave a false laugh. ‘There’s obviously been a mistake. Jasmine Burton lives in Birmingham.’

Bill shook his head. ‘She’d been staying down there in a friend’s cottage. Apparently she wanted to get away from it all. The trolling, it was starting to get her down, one of her workmates said. Out there on her own, it must have got to her.’

Ursula turned away, putting her mug down with a clatter. ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. We were only emailing last week.’ Her fingers started clattering over the keys as she summoned up the news sites she visited most often. The BBC, the
Guardian
, the
Huffington
Post
, the
Independent
, the
Daily Mail
– they all told the same story as Bill. He sat in silence as she browsed the screen. ‘Poor woman,’ Ursula said at last, her strong voice made small. ‘She seemed so tough. Like she’d never lie down and give in. If she reached the end of her rope… Well, it’s a scary thought.’

Bill hauled himself out of the chair and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Thing is, my love, she was on her own. According to what I read, anyway. She wasn’t living with anyone. No kids. And no matter how supportive your colleagues and your mates are, when you shut that front door behind you at night and it’s you all alone with the nutter-sphere, it’s hard not to feel the walls closing in. It’s not like that for you. You’ve got me, our family, our friends. Plenty of validation when you start to wonder about the crap that’s being sent your way. Jasmine didn’t have that safety net.’

Ursula reached up and grasped his hand. ‘I know. But all the same… It feels like the bastards have won.’

‘Totally get that. And I’m sorry for what Jasmine went through. But you’re not Jasmine and they’re not going to wear you down like that.’

His stout confidence should have made her feel better. But as she sat there staring at the screen, all Ursula could think about was the cold creeping up Jasmine’s body as she walked into the estuary, the mud sucking at her feet, the steady rise of the water covering mouth then nose then eyes, the instinctive gasp for air, the choke and struggle as the river claimed her for itself, the terrifying moment when she knew it was too late to change her mind.

And then the peace.

13

T
he light of morning disturbed Carol’s sleep. No curtains hung at the windows in the main body of the barn. No point when she was doing work that constantly kicked up grit and sawdust. No reason when she welcomed no overnight visitors. Half-awake, she grumbled as she turned over. That was all the encouragement that Flash needed. The dog was on top of her, long pink tongue washing the sleep from her face. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she complained, crawling out of the sleeping bag and shivering in the unheated air.

She’d had the foresight to grab her dog-walking clothes the night before and she quickly dressed in the warm weatherproof gear that blended in with the landscape and the locals. There was a dull ache at the base of her skull and her body craved coffee. But she wasn’t ready to confront her overnight guest yet. Fresh air and a brisk walk up the moor at the back of the house would give her the upper hand.

She deliberately chose a route that took her in the opposite direction from George Nicholas’s house. The last thing she wanted was to have to explain how her evening had ended. He’d have to know, of course. But she couldn’t face him yet.

Half an hour later, she came down the hill at a good pace, moving swiftly over the bent yellow grass from tussock to tussock, the dog ranging round her in wide loops. The cold air had brought colour to her cheeks and seen off the pain in her head. So many mornings like this, a prelude to a day of hard work and mindlessness.

The light in her kitchen window gave her a jolt. She’d never seen that before, coming off the hill. The barn was always in darkness. It was an unwelcome reminder that today wasn’t going to be like all the others. Today she was going to have to deal with Tony and his determination to interfere in her life. She was inclined to tell him to piss off as soon as he’d had a cup of coffee, but she knew him well enough to realise that would be a waste of breath. For a man so well endowed with empathy, he could be remarkably deaf when it suited him.

At the front door Carol paused, getting her breathing under control, composing herself. Then she squared her shoulders and marched inside. Two dozen steps brought her to the door of the separate section where she lived. Without knocking, she walked in. It was, after all, her home. Not his.

The room was empty. Tony’s jacket was slung over her office chair; the annexe was warm and cosy, thanks to the ground source heat pumps that Michael had installed when the barn had been renovated the first time. Carol carried on past the bathroom and into the kitchen, where Tony stood frowning at her coffee machine. Hearing her approach, he turned round and smiled apologetically. ‘I was going to have some coffee ready for you, but I’m not smart enough to figure out how to work this beast.’

‘It’s not that hard,’ she said, unzipping her waxed jacket and tossing it over a chair. ‘Move over, I’ll sort it.’

That was when she saw the array of empty bottles on the draining board. For a moment, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. Then she rounded on him. ‘What the fuck?’

‘It’s a lot easier not to drink if there’s no drink in the house.’

‘How dare you? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

‘I’m the friend who’s here to save you from any more humiliations like last night.’ He spread his hands in a placatory gesture.

Carol was not placated. ‘This is your fantasy, not mine. I never said I was going to stop drinking forever. OK, I gave in to your stupid challenge. I agreed to stay off the sauce till I go to court. But that’s all. Where do you get off, pouring my booze down the sink? Apart from anything else, that’s a couple of hundred quid’s worth down the drain. You may not have noticed, but unlike the drunks you’re comparing me to, I drink premium brands. I drink for the taste, not just to get pissed.’ She shook her head, her mouth a bitter line. ‘You bastard.’

‘I’ll reimburse you,’ he said, mild as milk.

‘It’s not the money, it’s the principle,’ she shouted. ‘You have no right.’

He half-turned away from her. ‘If I don’t, nobody does.’

‘And that’s how I like it.’

He stood up. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. Next time you’re in the shit, find someone else to call.’ He swung round to face her again, eyes hard as flint, chin up ready to take the hit. ‘If you can find someone who can be bothered.’

It was below the belt, but that didn’t make it any less true. He’d never spoken to her like this before. Her pride wanted to tell him to fuck off. But her fear wouldn’t let her. ‘Sit the fuck down and stop grandstanding,’ she growled. ‘I’ll make the coffee.’ She turned her back on him and went through the ritual of grinding and tamping and expressing coffee. Surely he wouldn’t walk? And when she turned round, he was still there, hands clutching the chair back so tightly his knuckles were white. Wordlessly, she put the espresso cup on the table near him before processing a second cup for herself.