Precious Thing (27 page)

But you don’t. ‘If you won’t tell them, I will,’ you shout and try to wrestle the phone from me.

‘Tell them what?’ I ask you. ‘What exactly will you say?’ Something in my tone makes you stop in your tracks and you fix me with a watery stare. It gives me confidence to carry on. ‘Well?’ I ask, ‘are you going to tell them YOU gave her the sleeping pills?’

You are shaking your head in disbelief, ‘No, no, don’t you dare, Rachel. Don’t do this. Don’t do this to me. It was you, you just told me.’ You are holding your head in your hands as if you fear it might burst open.

‘Did I? I said she used to do it herself, every night, she’d crush them up in her drink. But of course you weren’t to know you shouldn’t give her more.’

You look at me like you’ve just drunk a bottle of poison and realised there’s nothing you can do to save yourself. And then you begin moaning and wailing like those people in foreign countries do on the TV news when they’ve lost a relative, unlike here where we lay cheap teddies and petrol-station flowers at makeshift shrines.

I’m sorry Clara, I’m truly sorry. I wanted you to understand. But you don’t. You are not in control of yourself. And if you are not, then someone has to be.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I won’t tell anyone what you did.’

You run crying from the room and I hear your footsteps travelling upstairs. I guess you expect me to leave but I can’t leave you in this state so I wait until it is dark and your dad returns. He asks me if I’m staying the night and I say; ‘Only if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Of course not,’ he says, ‘it’s good for Clara to have you around. No one else understands.’

Creeping into your bedroom I hear your sleep breathing so I pull some pyjamas out of your drawer, slip them on and crawl into bed beside you, just like always.

You see I can’t let you go, Clara, not now. Not ever.

A week later; the funeral. The rain has been coming in torrents, short sharp downpours, but the water seems to evaporate before it hits the ground and the grass is still parched and brown.

It’s September now, but when the sun sneaks out from behind the dark clouds the heat is still ferocious. We are sitting in the crematorium, our own bodies baking and crackling.

‘She always said she wanted a cremation,’ Aunty Laura says, which is patently untrue; Niamh didn’t organise anything in life, so I’m certain she didn’t plan her own funeral.

Laura had asked people not to wear black, an edict all but a few oldies adhered to. I’m wearing a bright green cotton sundress with straps that crisscross my back and brown wedge sandals. I bought them last week, sick of hiding myself away under layers of clothing.
The new me
. And it is strange because I think I already look different; maybe the stress of the last few weeks has helped me shed a few pounds because I can see people looking at me as if they have noticed a change too. They don’t say as much of course, telling the daughter of the dead woman she’s looking well isn’t good form. The same could not be said about you, Clara. Your bones just out from your body. The colour has been stripped from your skin. You are wearing orange again though not the same dress you wore on the day of the barbecue. On any other day I would laugh that we are one colour short of a traffic light but I know today is not the day to make such observations.

The room is full, although not so full you can say it was standing room only. When the vicar talks about Niamh being ‘a woman of spirit’ I think of vodka and stifle a laugh.

The windows are floor to ceiling in the crematorium and the sun is shining through, bleaching us, washing out the fuchsias and greens and blues of our dresses. It is so bright I can be excused for wearing sunglasses indoors. Every so often, like when Aunty Laura stands up and says Niamh was a ‘wonderful mother, sister and friend who fought her demons’, I take the tissue that is rolled up, damp with sweat in my palm, and dab my eyes. My eyes are dry but no one notices because I have my sunglasses for cover.

Back at Laura’s house in Hove there is a buffet and wine and beer in the garden. You look like a ghost, Clara, like you’re not really there, and I am your shadow, following you around, making sure you eat something and drink something to stop you from wasting away. People keep swirling around us, confused by which one of us is the daughter. An older woman with liver spots on her hands and bony fingers gets it wrong and hugs and paws you and says,
You poor thing, just let us know if you need anything,
before she disappears to grab a prawn vol-au-vent. Your grief is so much more obvious than mine, I guess it’s an easy mistake to make.

I only leave your side to dash to the loo and on my return, scanning the room, I find you standing next to Aunty Laura, leaning into her as if you are deep in conversation. My heart is racing because I wonder what it is that you have to say to each other, but as I approach there’s a lull in the chatter and she turns to me and says, ‘Rachel, how lucky you are to have a friend like Clara at such an awful time.’ I smile in agreement.

Finally, mercifully, the garden empties and it is over. Laura insists on driving us home, dropping you first and then me. She’s already offered me a room at her house in case mine is too full of painful memories. But I tell her it’s OK, I want to stay there. ‘I just think the sooner I clear Niamh’s belongings out the better. Not everything,’ I say, ‘but you know … the mess, a lot of the junk.’ She nods because she understands her sister, the way she lived. She understands I don’t want to live like that.

So I’m only half surprised when we reach my house to see her unload empty boxes from the boot of her car. ‘I’d thought I’d help, and well, there’s no time like the present, is there?’ I am touched, really, because I know it must be hard for her losing a sister, even a drunk, selfish one.

We start in the living room, clearing the horrible ethnic throws and cigarette-burned cushions. The historical romances that fill the bookshelves are boxed for the charity shop. We open the windows to let what little breeze there is flow through. With every wipe and polish I feel like I am being released from my old life. I am meticulous, every skirting board and corner of the room is sprayed and cleaned, the carpets vacuumed twice over. At intervals I stand back to inspect my work and wipe the sweat from my forehead. Yes, the decor still leaves much to be desired but it is beginning to look like a different house, like it could be my house. And her smell, that sickly sweet aroma, is being drowned out by polish and air fresheners. I breathe in lungfuls of it.

Upstairs Laura clears the bathroom of half-empty toothpastes and henna hair dye and gloopy nail polishes. I take the towels and throw them out, except for one which is mine and never touched Niamh’s skin. The black bin bags that line the hallways are all that is left of her, and soon they will be gone too.

In the bedroom we are on the final straight. I haven’t ventured in here since Laura came to clean it after Niamh died. The smell of sick has faded but still it clings and I am reminded of the image of her lying motionless on the bed. I blink it away. Laura is humming as she removes Niamh’s clothes from the wardrobe, the outfits that I have seen her in so many times. I don’t want to look at them because if I do I know her body will fill them once more, it will come alive and shout and ridicule me. And she will be wearing that same face that twists with bitterness and disappointment.

The bed is soon piled high with clothes and shoes and Laura starts to take them downstairs, to load them up in her car. We know we both need to carry on until it’s finished, to purge ourselves of Niamh, or at least that’s what I want. Maybe Laura just wants to finish the job because otherwise it will linger over her like a bad smell.

The wardrobe is almost empty. Only a few boxes. One of them I recognise as the old shoebox, with the picture of ankle boots (twelve pounds ninety-nine) where Niamh kept her photos. It’s the same one from all those years before when I was doing my family tree. Inside I find the picture of me as a baby, a crop of ginger hair, and green dungarees. Within the box there is another little album with a few photographs slotted inside One shows a man who looks like he’s in his late teens, holding a baby. His hair is long and dark, his face smiling and strikingly handsome. Something within that picture nags me with its familiarity. The next photograph is of Niamh and the man together. She is beautiful, there is no denying it; maybe the beauty comes from the sparkling, smiling eyes. I can’t help wondering who stole the young Niamh and replaced her with the old bitter one. The final photograph is taken outside, on a park bench. It looks like winter. The sky bright blue, a child in a red snowsuit in the background. The baby is in it again, wearing a hat, a green coat and a toothless grin, perched on Niamh’s knee. I turn it over and see
February 1979,
written in faded handwriting – ten months before I was born.

I go to pull the rest of the photographs out of the box when Laura returns. Seeing me with them I catch something in her eyes and then in a flash it’s gone again. ‘I was just coming to get those,’ she says, ‘I’ll keep them safe shall I?’ And she swoops down and lifts the box with its clues to the past out of my reach.

I must have stored that memory away under lock and key in my mind, choosing on some subconscious level not to acknowledge its significance. Because suddenly it is all so obvious, so utterly, blindingly obvious I wonder how I couldn’t have seen it before. And now that I have seen it, in brilliant, flashing Technicolor, there is no going back. Something inside me is unfurling; the layers and layers of lies that made up the story of me, of us, Clara, it is all unravelling.

No one is ever who they appear to be. Not me. Not you.

I
T WAS UNLIKELY
the police were going to make it a priority. You could almost hear the conversations in the control room –
Got something for you, Sergeant, there’s been laughter in a house in Kensal Rise
– and even with Jake trying his best to explain the wider context, you got the sense it wasn’t exactly blue-light material.

‘I still don’t understand how the fuck anyone could have got in. It’s too fucking weird,’ he said when he put the phone down. He started pacing up and down the living room, pulling at his hair. I wondered whether he was beginning to doubt me; it was a fairly implausible scenario after all. I guess that was what you wanted, wasn’t it Clara? For me to look like I was losing my mind. ‘How can you be sure it is her laugh, Rach, I mean it could be anyone’s.’

See that’s the thing, no one else understood. No one understood how close we were, the way we knew each other right through to our bones.

‘It
is
her laugh,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been more certain of anything.’ I moved close to him and wrapping myself round his neck I whispered in his ear, ‘You can leave if you want to, I wouldn’t think any the worse of you for doing it. I’d understand.’

He pushed me off him like I’d given him an electric shock. ‘Don’t ever fucking say that to me again,’ he said and stormed out of the room. That was the first time I had ever seen him angry.

The police sauntered up to see me a few hours later: a young officer in his mid twenties with dirty blond hair accompanied by a woman who looked like she’d been on the beat too long. Her dark hair was cropped in a no-nonsense mum cut (we used swear we’d never have one, didn’t we?), her narrow, make-up-free eyes surrounded by crow’s feet and a frown line that sliced through the middle of her forehead. She introduced herself as DS Richardson. I showed them in, sat them down and offered them coffee, which they (she) declined.

‘Miss Walsh,’ she said, wasting no time on pleasantries. She managed to speak through her nose and look down it at the same time. ‘I understand you think someone has been in your flat, presumably while you were otherwise engaged with our colleagues in Sussex?’

I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that my name came with a back story these days. My arrest had been all over the news the previous night. Your disappearance alone had been a big story; now a semi-famous crime reporter had been thrown into the mix’ it had
all the right ingredients
as we said in the business. I hadn’t read the papers that morning but I knew they would be screaming
TV Girl in Murder Probe.
In years to come reporters would put me on their CVs:
I covered the Rachel Walsh story.

A few days ago people believed everything I said, I had that sheen that comes with being successful, well known. Now here I was trying to present a story that most sane people would find questionable.
Someone broke into my house and played laughter. What a fucking lunatic.

‘She found a CD playing in the stereo. It was on a timer,’ Jake said. ‘It’s still in there.’ Thank God for Jake. At least one person found the story credible.

DS Richardson walked over to the stereo and paused. ‘You say it’s a recording of someone laughing?’

‘Yes. It woke me up in the middle of the night. Someone wanted me to hear it, to spook me.’ I hated how ridiculous I sounded.

DS Richardson leant forward and peered at the stereo as if it would offer up some clues. ‘May I?’ she said, her finger hovering over the play button.

I nodded and raised my hands to my ears to block you out. I didn’t want to hear your laugh again. Not ever, but it filled the room once more, ricocheting through me. Then mercifully it stopped.

‘It’s sick, really, just sick with everything else going on,’ Jake said. DS Richardson made a point of ignoring his outburst and turned to me.

‘Do you have any idea why someone would want to do this?’ she asked in such a calm, even voice I wanted to shake her.

‘It’s her laughter,’ I said and waited for a reaction. But her face gave nothing away. I wondered if she’d practised the blank look for so long she’d actually lost the power of expression.

‘Whose laughter?’

‘It’s Clara’s. I’d know that laugh anywhere.’ Finally her face moved, a flicker of surprise and disbelief escaping from behind her mask. And then she caught it and froze her features once more.