The Girls (33 page)

Her heart ached.

Tyler had said it herself.
History repeating itself.

The same green-eyed monster living inside her mother had taken up residence in Tyler’s soul too. Like mother, like daughter. Because Adele fully believed that a woman who would deliberately allow her four-year-old child to see her kissing another woman’s husband so that she could maintain some kind of claim over him would also be capable of doing something unspeakable to her sister.

The police appeared to think that the girls had nothing more to tell them. They mentioned that they would be talking to Tyler and her mother, just as soon as they could find them both at home. Then they thanked them for their time and saw them from the station.

They drove past Tyler’s school on the way home: the hard-faced Victorian monolith, source of so much mystery and obsession to her own daughters. She thought of Tyler, somewhere in there, unfed, unwashed, lost and scared. And then of her two daughters, sitting now in the back of the car, Fern rubbing her satin strip over her top lip, Catkin staring crossly through the window.

Grace was awake. The WPC had told them that. She’d woken up the night before and claimed to remember nothing.

Leo dropped them all home. They saw Dylan’s mum leaving the building, dressed in her petrolstation uniform of green polo shirt and matching trousers. She smiled at them, politely and hurriedly, worried, it seemed, that they might want to engage her in conversation. Adele watched her striding up the hill towards the main road.

Once inside the flat, Adele made tea. Then she opened the French windows on to the garden and stood for a moment, trying to breathe it all away. ‘Girls,’ she said, distractedly, ‘we’ll start lessons after lunch. Why don’t you all go out into the garden? It’s such a beautiful day …’

Thirty-five

5 July, 9.19 p.m.

Tyler can’t sit still. She has too much energy burning up inside her. She pushed Willow off the swings earlier, because she had to push something and Willow was asking for it with her incessant talking. Every time she closes her eyes she sees Grace looking up at her through the bars of the lift. Looking up at her as if to say:
See. See how I’ve won.
And she hears Dylan’s voice, all weird with sex, saying
I love you, Grace
. And all day long Tyler’s head has been black and red and flashing and hot.

And all day long she’s thought of what her mum said a few weeks ago when she came home drunk after her first date with her new man. When, because her mum was being all soft and loving, not quite like a mum but at the very least like a fun friend who cares, Tyler had said, ‘Mum. I’ve lost Dylan. Grace has stolen him from me.’ And her mum had looped her arms around her neck and stared cross-eyed into Tyler’s eyes and breathed sour and sweet into her face and said, ‘Make her pay. Dylan belongs to you. If she wants him she has to pay.’ And it hadn’t made any sense at the time. But it’s starting to now.

She sees Leo leave the Rose Garden. A moment later she sees Grace leave too. She sees her walk towards the alleyway. She watches Leo as he waits for his dog to poo at the bottom of the hill. Then he too walks towards the alleyway and she tiptoes over and watches from behind a small tree. He’s talking to someone. It must be Grace. She can’t quite make out the voices. Yes, it is; it’s Grace. She can see the brush of her hair, the dense curls that Dylan had his hands all over earlier. And then she sees her throw her arms around Leo, hold him to her. And she remembers what she’d heard Clare saying earlier, telling Pip that Leo was going to be their new dad. She was talking crap, obviously she was, because she was drunk. But she was trying to claim him for herself. And now Grace is doing the same. And this, this is too much. She thinks of her mum’s words:
Make her pay
. And she remembers the pot of blue and white pills in Gordon’s bedroom that Catkin had shown her last week.

‘These are good,’ she’d said, nestling one into the palm of Tyler’s hand. ‘Sleeping pills. Kind of trippy.’

They’d swallowed them down with tap water and lain about in the garden all afternoon feeling swoony and silly and nice. She wonders now how many of those little pills it would take to knock Grace out. Knock her out sideways. Just for a while. Just for long enough to show everyone on this garden what kind of a girl she is, to humiliate her – completely. She pictures herself crushing some of those little pills and dissolving them in water, but she can’t work out how she’d get Grace to drink them. And then she remembers seeing Adele injecting Gordon’s bad leg with something the other day. She remembers the pile of dressings and hypodermics on his chest of drawers. She glances again at the alleyway, sees Leo leaving Grace there and heading back to his flat. She can see then the shadows of Leo and Adele moving about in their kitchen, clearing things away, Gordon appearing behind them. She looks behind her at the figures in the playground. Catkin and Fern. Her garden sisters even if she knows now that they’re not her actual sisters. She has no time to lose. She moves fast and quiet. And then the plan comes together like a dream.

But half an hour later she’s forced to abandon her project halfway through, has to leave Grace there, not quite ready, not quite paying the price. She burrows through the tunnel behind the bench and runs back to the playground. Then Dylan appears, sits there on the swing, waiting for Grace. Waiting like an idiot.

And then a moment later, there’s little Pip, the sister who hasn’t fucked up Tyler’s life, and she comes towards them and says: ‘Have you seen Grace?’ and they all say they thought she went home. And oh, her face, her little face. Poor Pip, not understanding. Heading up the hill. Tyler sees her cross paths with Max. They do not talk. And then it all begins.

The drunk mum comes.

Then everyone else comes.

Then the blue lights come.

Then Grace is gone.

And Tyler watches disconsolately from a distance, watches and thinks:
You didn’t get all that you deserved. Not even half.

Ten Months Later

Thirty-six

Cherry-blossom spume overhead, sugar-pink sharp against baby-blue sky. Adele had brought the girls to the Tate for a learning trip. It was too nice to be indoors, one of those spring days that made you nostalgic for a summer that had yet to begin. The girls walked ahead, light-footed in summery clothes. The Thames ran lazily alongside, like an old dog.

A woman came towards them, slow-walking in a cream jacket and cream skirt, blond hair bobbed and fringed, tanned legs and a small smile, as though someone had just said something nice to her.

As she came nearer Adele felt a jolt of recognition. Was it? Could it be? After all these months?

‘Clare?’

‘Oh my God, Adele.’

Hard to gauge whether Clare was pleased or horrified.

‘Wow, how are you? I haven’t seen you since …’

‘Last summer, I know.’

‘How are your girls? How is Grace?’

‘They’re both fine. Really good. And yours?’

Adele pointed to her girls, standing now at the water’s edge, hands gripping the wall, staring into the river. ‘All present and correct.’

Clare smiled. ‘I’m sorry’, she said, ‘that I didn’t say goodbye. It was all so … you know. After Grace was discharged, she really didn’t want to come back to the flat. So Chris found us another place, about a mile away. It was ready to move into and it all happened so quickly.’

‘We miss you.’

‘Oh, gosh.’ She laughed wryly. ‘I’m sure you don’t. I don’t think we were really cut out for that kind of communal living. All that … exposure … I don’t think we were very good at it. We’ve got our own garden now. Totally private.’

‘So, you and your husband, you got back together?’

‘Yes.’ Clare smiled that small, warm smile she’d been wearing when Adele first saw her just now. ‘Yes, we’re back together. It’s good.’

Adele sensed that any second now Clare was going to say:
Well, I must be on my way
. She checked the girls from the corner of her eyes. They were still standing at the river wall.

‘Listen, Clare,’ she said. ‘I just wondered. In those days after the garden party, the police were everywhere. Asking questions. Then when Grace woke up, it all stopped. And I wondered: What did Grace say? About that night? Did you ever find out what happened?’

Clare blanched. ‘Well, sort of. Grace told us that she did something. Earlier, before the attack. She wouldn’t tell us what exactly, but we guessed. It tied in with the forensic evidence and of course it was all a bit shocking. But it meant at least we knew that nothing had … I mean, that she hadn’t been attacked sexually.’ She shrugged. ‘Teenagers. They think they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. And that’s the thing with a garden like yours – there’s so much leeway for teenagers to make mistakes. Isn’t there?’

Adele nodded. ‘But the overdose. Did the police ever find out who was responsible?’

Clare sighed. ‘Grace said it was an accident. Someone had offered her something and she’d taken too much.’ Clare shrugged, clearly unconvinced by Grace’s explanation but not able to push past it. ‘She said she wanted to put it all behind her. Get on with her life. So she begged us to get the case dropped. And we did.’

‘Gosh,’ said Adele, overawed by the gentleness of this reaction. ‘But she might have died.’

Clare shrugged. ‘I know. It was a hard decision to make. Chris and I – we wanted someone to blame. We wanted someone to suffer. But in the end, we had to respect what Grace was asking of us. We had to let her choose.’

Adele nodded. This echoed her liberal parenting ethos, but she was not sure that even she could stomach the not knowing. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I admire your restraint. I really do.’

‘I don’t think there’s much to admire about any of it, to be honest. The whole thing was just a terrible aberration.’

‘And Dylan? Are he and Grace …?’

‘They’re still an item.’

Adele recoiled slightly with surprise. This she had not imagined. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. He’s over all the time. They appear to be that rarest of things: real teenage sweethearts.’ Clare smiled, and then shrugged, as if to say:
We’ll see how long it lasts
. ‘How’s Gordon, by the way? Did you ever manage to get him back to Africa?’

Adele laughed. It already felt like a distant memory, and in some strange way she almost missed him. ‘Yes. He went back last August. Three stone lighter. Apparently he’d put it all on again by Christmas. His wife likes him fat.’

‘Or maybe she likes him dead.’

Adele laughed loudly. Clare laughed too. And Adele felt something settle deep inside her, something that had been jumping around her gut in the dead of night for months. The sense of unfinished business. But here she was, here was Clare, pretty and bright, reconciled with the events of last summer, in a house with a garden and a husband. And maybe now Adele could forget about the other things, the unsettling things, that had emerged in the days after the summer party: the Google search for ‘how to fill a hypodermic needle’ that Leo had found in their browsing history, timed 9.22 p.m. on the night of Grace’s attack. The packaging from one of Gordon’s NHS-prescribed sterile hypodermic needles that she’d found buried in the bottom of Fern’s wastepaper basket when she’d emptied it the next day. Dylan’s expression of innocent certainty when she’d asked him if he’d brought a bottle of water out to the playground that evening; ‘No,’ he’d said, ‘definitely, definitely not.’ The awful pondering on the unknowables like: How could tiny Tyler have single-handedly felled a big girl like Grace? Pulled her up the hill? Without any help? And the terrible flicker of her girls’ eyes as they watched the girl with the blond ponytail creeping across the bottom of the computer screen at the police station, the awful heaviness in the car on the way back home that seemed full of buried words.

Because although Tyler was the girl with the broken heart and the damaged mother and the reasons to want to hurt Grace, her girls too had felt the impact of Grace’s presence in the garden. And even though Tyler wasn’t their sister, they’d grown up with her as though she was. And hadn’t it been her choice to keep her daughters at home, forcing them to forge stronger-than-average attachments to the friends they lived amongst? Hadn’t that probably warped their perspective on the nature of friendships, of loyalty, on how far you would reasonably go to support a friend?

So they’d decided, she and Leo, decided to leave it. They were sure, they thought, sure that whatever the truth of it, whatever their daughters’ real involvement, they had learned from it. That they would never again allow themselves to be caught up in someone else’s madness. They were sure. They really were.

And there was Tyler, emerging suddenly into the blue sunshine from the gallery. She stopped when she saw Clare and her face fell. Adele saw her hands curl into anxious fists. She smiled at her encouragingly.

‘Look who it is!’ she said.

Tyler unfurled her fists, raised one hand to Clare, then ran to the river wall to join the others.

‘I’m schooling Tyler now too,’ she explained. ‘In fact, Tyler has all but moved in with us.’

‘How come?’

‘Oh, you know, the old
benign neglect
getting a bit too close to plain old-fashioned neglect. Her mum’s got a new boyfriend. Turned out she was barely coming home. So the minute Gordon moved out we made up the spare room for her. Told her it was hers whenever she needed it. Which seems to be all the time. So …’

Making amends. Paying back the universe for the sins of her children. For the sins of her husband. And for the sins of herself. After all, had she not lost faith for moments during that terrible time, faith in her husband, faith in her neighbours? Had Leo not encouraged the confidences of vulnerable people, made himself a crutch for others to lean on when he should have been paying attention to his own children? And had they not seen what was happening to Tyler, seen the physical, the emotional deterioration and not done a thing about it? Had they not both made their own terrible mistakes?