Simply Heaven (56 page)

My knees ache. The bag fell somewhere over by the chest. The far corner from the door. I heard it hit the wall and bounce. I turn along the bed, make my way back across the open floor. Feel instantly vulnerable again, with nothing to orient myself against, as though this room has turned into a chamber the size of the Steppes, as though it’s littered with crevasses. Sweep my arms out, one by one, to the sides, as I crawl.

And then it’s there, under my hand. And the leather feels like monster’s skin so that I cry out in horror and then again in relief, clutching it to my chest like a baby when I realise what it is. Thank the non-existent God, fervently, wholeheartedly, like a Mullah with a new Mercedes, and tear at the zip with numb fingers.

It’s chaos inside. Feels fuller than when I last held it. Someone has been through it and thrown things in on top. I feel my wallet, my keys, a jumble of credit cards, and also, not all that much to my surprise, something that feels like my passport, my driver’s license, a bottle of perfume, a bra, a bunch of necklaces, a paperback, several of the plastic blister strips they put round pills. Of course. Of course they’ve made it look like I’ve taken off in the night, the way I did before.

And finally, down in the bottom, my fingertips brush against the lighter. It slips away, comes back.

‘Thank you, God,’ I say again. ‘Thank you thank you
thank you
.’

It’s a little room, my cell. Not more than four metres by five. I see, now, why my voice sounded so muffled: the walls are lined with tapestries: tattered, scotched, rotting on their hangings, but effective. Everything in here is designed to stop noise travelling: thick layers of carpet, drapes on the bed, heavy coverlet of some sort of padded damask. In the tiny light of the flame I make out what I’ve got available. It’s as I had already mapped out with my hands. Desk, chair, suitcase from which a couple of bits of shredded cloth protrude, two bedside tables. No lamps. I rush over to the door, feel along the panelling around it, but there’s no switch.

I find a candle, though, on the desk: half burnt down and thick with dust. It flares up when I put the flame to it, then fades, gutters, settles. I reckon I should get maybe four hours’ burn out of it.

Plans. I’ve got to make plans. This can’t be it. There’s no way I’m going to let this be it. There must be a way out of here. You can’t build a priest-hole with no internal latches. It makes no sense. It would be as though they wanted to keep people in rather than protect them
…

And it’s then that I notice that I am not, after all, alone. Because there’s a figure lying, very still, under the covers of the bed.

Her eyes, mercifully, are closed. Sunk hollow in desiccated sockets, lashes dusty on white kid skin. The nose, fleshless, like a mountain peak. Nostrils, stretched over bone, gape dark and bottomless in unsteady candlelight. Cheekbones so sharp they could have been sculpted. Jaw elegant and spare. Her mouth has fallen slightly open in death. I can glimpse neat nacre teeth between lips downturned at the corners in an expression of frozen grief.

My heart takes a good couple of minutes to slow down. For a moment, as the candle guttered under my panicking breath, I had thought I’d seen her move, and it takes some time for my sense to overcome my senses. But I can’t approach the bed. Prop myself, instead, against the wall, in a corner, shivering from shock as much as cold, and stare.

The counterpane, ragged like all the other fabrics in the room, covers most of the body. A few strands of faded chestnut hair on the indented pillow. There are stains. Even by candlelight, I can see that there are stains. She’s died here, and transmuted here and, I dare say, until I came along, those who were responsible for putting her here had thought that this would be the last of her. One arm lies straight by her side. The left hand lies casually on the pillow, as though she had merely fallen into a deep, narcotic sleep, was waiting to be awakened by a kiss. A diamond and emerald necklace, dangling loose where once it hugged the collarbone. Two gold bangles round the decayed remains of a pink satin fingerless evening glove. And on the third finger, a baguette-cut solitaire and a thin gold wedding band.

Edmund’s wedding band.

Because I know without needing to be told that I am looking at the mortal remains of Lucinda Callington-Warbeck-Wattestone.

I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d caught a serious clout against the door and my head was jangled, but even then, even at that point, I was getting my story right in my head, turning myself into the victim and him into the villain. Andy went upstairs – he was muttering something about painkillers, I remember – and I took the opportunity to make good my escape.

Like I say: I wasn’t thinking straight. But the last day comes back to me in sporadic bursts. The seat burning my thighs as I chucked myself into a car that had been sitting out on the street all morning and drove off without waiting, as I usually would, on the kerb, while the aircon kicked in. The light, near-blinding without sunspecs, bouncing off the white-painted Queenslanders along the highway. Difficulty breathing because my nose seemed to be running. Stopping off at one of those stores you find in seaside towns – all white bread and animal-fat Popsicles – and picking up a pack of Longbeach because they were the only smokes they had behind the counter. Ripping the pack open there and then and sparking up with hands that shook like aspen leaves, and this chick at the register, a slack-jawed larrikin with the sort of complexion you can only get from a lifetime spent indoors serving and eating cheese toasties, taking her finger out of her nose and saying ‘Hey! There’s no smoking in here!’ as though I was shitting on her countertop or something. And, having had the bottle knocked out of me, I couldn’t find a response. Just gave her a flash of the blackening bruise around my eye, dropped the smoke on the lino, ground it out with my foot and left.

When I got back into the car I saw in the rear-view mirror that there was blood all down my front. My nose had been bleeding and I’d not noticed. My face and throat were a mass of congealing gore. I think I was still in shock, as I hadn’t felt anything. No pain, no particular emotion: just a fuzzy blankness and a desire for peace.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? That you’d see a woman covered in blood and only think to complain about her smoking?

After that I go blank again. The next thing I remember is pulling through the gates at our property and noticing that I was yawning. Big, grasping yawns, that cracked my stiffening jaw and gripped my spine. I’d driven the twenty clicks without registering a metre of it. The pain had started to kick in. A dull throb at the back of my head and the sort of ache that feels like nails on blackboard under the skin of my face. I could barely keep my eyes open. Blinked – winced – blinked again, felt tears forming as another yawn ripped itself out of me.

The house came into sight. It seemed a very, very long way away: lost among trees and more mirage than reality. I eased my foot off the gas, trickled up the hill and pulled over on the edge of the turning circle, under the fountain. They have a fountain in the front of the house, my folks. It looks a bit like Southfork.
Dallas
was the show that informed my mother’s aspirations during the backroom years.

Turning off the ignition and pulling on the parking brake seemed to eat up the last of my energy. I guess the blow to the head did me more damage than I initially realised. Now the car was still, the draught from the aircon suddenly cut, a wave of nausea flooded through me. It was as though someone had unzipped my spine and my muscles had come unplugged. Slumping back against the headrest, I raised one leaden arm and dropped my hand on to the horn. Watched, as though through the thick glass windows of an aquarium, as the front door opened and my mother and Yaya emerged, crossed their arms in irritation at the disturbance, and, realising that it was me, hurried forward across the brickwork paving.

*

Our lounge. Mum and Yaya leaning over me, brows furrowed with concern, not a word coming out of Mum’s mouth about the damage to her soft furnishings, though to be fair she did spread the wipe-clean tablecloth from the verandah beneath me before she let me lie down on the couch. Yaya had filled a plastic pudding basin with a robust solution of antiseptic and hot water and dabbed at my face with a sponge she’d fetched from the washing-up bowl in the kitchen. The effects of the one, no doubt, cancelling out the effects of the other.

It was the dabbing that brought me back to my senses. It was as much jab as dab. The combination of bruises, broken skin, astringent and my grandmother’s none-too-steady hand was enough to bring Dillinger back from the dead. Djab. It was like being headbutted by a dobermann that had got itself attacked by a swarm of bees. Djab.

I grabbed her by the wrist. ‘Yaya,’ I said, ‘if you do that again I’ll have to kill you.’

‘Ah, she’s alive,’ said Yaya. ‘Alive and still got her dirty mouth.’

My mum had lit up one of her menthols, was studying me with that hard look she gets when things go wrong.

‘What in’a hell happanda you?’ she enquired. ‘Have you got in another fight or something?’

Still groggy, I took a few seconds to remember.

Mum and Yaya, standing side by side, glaring at me like a pair of owls.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ I said, partly to stall for time.

‘Well, there’s a surprise,’ said Yaya, reached behind the couch and produced the blue plastic bucket she uses for cleaning the kitchen floor. This has been the receptacle for family nausea since I can remember. She handed it to my mother, who held it out to me.

It’s a strange thing, with lies, how often they become truths. The moment I saw the bucket, I felt my gorge rise in response. I grabbed the rim and threw up, loudly and violently, and my mum, holding it steady, stroked my hair off my forehead the way that only mums can do.

‘That’s it, lovey.’ Her voice was soothing, with not a trace of the disgust a normal person would be feeling under these circs. ‘Get it out. You’ll feel better once it’s over.’

Yaya left the room and came back. When I looked up, she was standing beside my mother with a glass of water in one hand and a wodge of kitchen roll in the other. Silently, she handed them to me, watched as I drained the glass and mopped the sweat from my face, then equally silently, she took them back and laid them down on the coffee table. Went and sat on the couch on the far side, hands folded in her lap.

Mum pulled the gilt and marble ashtray across the table and perched beside it on one corner.

‘Did he do this? Jesus, look at the state of you. Do you want us to call a doctor?’

I shook my head. Doctors. Nuh-uh. Doctors mean reports. Doctors meant I would go down on record as the kind of sap who gets beaten up by her boyfriend.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Yaya. ‘I think that nose might be broken.’

‘No,’ I said, firmly. ‘It’ll be OK.’

Mum stubbed out her cigarette, half-smoked. ‘Can always get it fixed later, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Was never much of a nose, anyways. So. This door you walked into—’

‘I didn’t walk into a door.’

‘OK. Now we’re getting somewhere.’

I hate myself now. I am a liar. I am a liar and I’ve only just realised the full consequence of my lie. There’s Lucy lying there dead in front of me, and I’m cold all over because it’s made me realise the truth about myself. I killed Andy as sure as Edmund killed his first wife. The fact that neither of us knew about it makes us no less culpable.

There are moments in life that you only realise were pivotal much, much later on. This was one of them. I had a choice, in those few seconds, as to what sort of person I would be in the future. I could be the person who told the truth and took the consequences. Or I could get some sympathy, be the victim, come out the Good Guy in the eyes of the world. These were my choices and I’m damned for ever by the one I took.

Mum sparked up another menthol. ‘Yaya,’ she said, ‘Call Don.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Too bloody right yes,’ she said. ‘Your father’s going to want to know about this. What were you doing, letting him do this to you, anyway?’

I don’t know what made me do it. Weakness. Pride. Revenge. Fear. None of them motivations to throw away someone’s life by.

But I did it anyway. I started crying.

‘That bastard,’ said Mum. ‘That
bastard
. It’s OK, lovey. We won’t let him get you. You’re safe now.’

And once I’d started crying, I couldn’t stop. Months of slow death, of frustration and rage and loss and self-loathing and deep, deep shame.

She lit another fag off the butt of the old one. Waited while I howled out my misery. That’s my mum. Never one with the cuddles, never one with empty words of comfort. She was waiting until I’d calmed, because she’s never any good until she can take action.

Yaya fiddled with her worry beads. Clickety click click.

Eventually I slowed down. My head hurt, and so did my body. And my heart was the worst of all. Betrayed and ashamed, I lay and rubbed my forehead, felt the pull on my swollen skin.

Mum spoke. ‘So what do you want to do about it?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to talk to him? Do you want your father to talk to him? Do you want him out of the house? What do you want, Melody?’

I couldn’t think of an answer. I could barely think at all.

She waited a while, looked at me with that hard, judgemental, well-get-up-and-do-something expression of hers. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t care,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to see him. I wish he was bloody dead. I wish he was in hell.’

It takes a while until I realise what I’m seeing. I don’t mean Lucy. I mean what’s round her neck. I mean that the diamond and emerald necklace is more of an emerald necklace with diamonds. I mean that, against the shrivelled skin, in the cavity of her collarbone, there lies an emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg. The Callington Emerald.