The Rose Petal Beach (41 page)

‘That’s not fair, is it Bix?’ Anansy asks.

They used to call Mirabelle ‘auntie’ like she was a relative, and I used to love that they didn’t do that to me. I was their mate, I was their Bix. Now, when they call me it, it cleaves a knife through
my core. I am not their friend, am I? I have done some terrible things to their family. I stop in the middle of the street, lower myself to their level.

I pull them into a hug. ‘I love you two,’ I say to them. I release them and they both look confused. ‘I didn’t have a dad growing up.’

‘Everyone has a dad,’ Anansy explains. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have been borned.’

‘She’s right,’ Cora says.

‘Yes, she is. I mean, my dad left when I was very young.’

‘Why, were you a bad girl?’ Anansy asks.

‘Were you?’ Cora adds, suspiciously.

‘Would you not eat your dinner?’

‘Did you draw on the walls?’

‘Did you break your mama’s favourite necklace and hide it down the side of the sofa?’

‘Did you spill drink in the car when your mama told you to be careful?’

‘Did you break your sister’s favourite doll and then pretend it was someone else?’

‘I didn’t do that!’ Cora screeches, rounding on her little sister.

‘You did, you did, you did!’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t.’

I only wanted to reassure them, give a pep talk that would make them feel loved and wanted; reassure them that their lives would turn out OK even if their dad was away. I wanted them to know that Scott would never do what my dad did – he wouldn’t leave for someone else and then refuse to pay for his child or even to see them. He wouldn’t reject his offspring every time by saying her mother was the town bike and he had no way of proving she was his; Scott would never say, when confronted with DNA evidence, that he had no room in his life for her no matter how old she is when she tries to contact him. He wouldn’t make her feel worthless.

I watch Cora and Anansy bickering, and I’m reminded of the time I rowed in the street with my best friend from school.

Twenty-seven years ago

Eilise Watford was a redhead like me. We both got called ginger snap and we didn’t care. We didn’t care about anything because we were best friends and we lived on the same road. We used to walk to school together and we’d walk home together. And sometimes we were even allowed to play out front together. Last summer we’d spent lots of time outdoors when Eilise’s mum went to visit her sister in Wales who’d had a baby. My mum looked after me and Eilise when Eilise’s dad was at work and we always had her over for dinner. Sometimes Eilise was allowed to stay over and we slept in the same bed.

That day, when we were walking to school because we were big girls now and we were allowed to go to school together on our own, she called my mum a bad name.

‘Don’t say that about my mummy,’ I screamed at her and grabbed handfuls of her hair, pulling at it. I’d heard the big children who smoked in the park call one of the girls that word and laugh at her and she’d cried and ran away. ‘Don’t call my mummy that!’

‘She is! She is a whore!’ Eilise screamed back, trying to get my hands off her head. ‘My mummy said so. She kissed my daddy so she’s a whore.’

I clawed at her, feeling my short, ragged nails touch her face. I wanted to get her eyes, I wanted to hurt her like her word had hurt me. Her hands pulled at my clothes. We screamed at each other, no words, just screaming, and then Mr Johnson who lived in the house we had stopped in front of was pulling us apart.

‘Stop this at once!’ he said, holding us apart. He was big and strong and was practically holding us off the ground. ‘You’re nothing better than common street trash. I shall have both your mothers tan your hides.’

He dragged us both back to our houses. My house was nearest to his so we stopped there first. When Mum opened the door she was shocked that I was there, being held firmly by the neck by Mr Johnson.

‘What the devil?’ she said.

‘Fighting in the street,’ Mr Johnson said, sounding very cross. ‘The pair of them. I’m going to take this one home. I hope you tan her hide.’ He let me go and marched Eilise off to her house.

‘Bea, what do you think you’re doing?’ Mum said, snatching me into the house but checking the road to see who was looking. I didn’t care who was looking.

‘She called you a bad name!’ I screeched at her. She had to know it wasn’t my fault.

Mum frowned at me, not understanding. ‘What bad name?’ she asked.

‘She said you kissed her daddy. She said you were a—’ I heard our creaky backdoor open, and creak shut again as the latch went. My eyes doubled in size because someone was in the house. I heard footsteps in the backyard. I was wrong: someone was leaving. I’d only just left for school, who could have been in the house?

‘Bea,’ Mum said, pretending she didn’t hear someone going out the back.

I ran. I couldn’t get my legs to move fast enough to get me upstairs but I tried. I knew who had been in the house. Even at nine I knew that Eilise wasn’t going to be my friend any more. And I knew it was all my mum’s fault.

‘Do you think we can hold off on the arguing until I get you into school?’ I say loudly to Cora and Anansy. ‘We don’t want to be late.’

Cora looks at Anansy and she shrugs in reply. ‘Suppose so,’ Cora says.

‘Yes,’ Anansy adds. ‘Suppose so.’

At least I haven’t got children. At least they’ll never feel about me how I used to feel about my mum sometimes.

I’ve been a bit distracted. By sex. By that wonderful, all-powerful thing called sex. It might be love, but at the moment it seems to be sex that is the main reason for my distraction. Sex with Noah, obviously.

It’s not new to me, sex; I am not a fresh-cherry, nothing like that. I’ve been doing it since I was eighteen. That’s what I told her, Mirabelle, Mum, anyway. (To Dad, I’m obviously a virgin.)

I knew that she’d done it younger – obviously she did because I exist – but she would flip if she thought I’d done it younger. Like, say, at fourteen. I didn’t. Like Dad ever let me out of his sight long enough for
that
to happen! I was sixteen and he was safe. Like, you know –
safe.
Nice. Didn’t rush me, didn’t do anything I didn’t want. Safe. He was a boy who was in his second year of university, and he thought I was older. By that I mean he
said
he thought I was
older when Lariska’s brother got hold of him, but he knew I wasn’t. I didn’t look it, I didn’t talk it, I might have acted it a little, but at the end of the day we both got something out of it.

And they’ve been all right since then. A couple of ‘goods’, a couple of ‘mind-blowings’ – that’s the session not the whole thing – and a couple of ‘so darn amazings I couldn’t speak afterwards’.

What Noah and I have, though, is
sex
. It sort of needs to be said in a soft, sultry voice to emphasise how exquisite it is.

It’s beautiful. So beautiful I ache when I think about it. I feel echoey, as if the absence of him and us being physically together reverberates throughout my whole body, right down to the littlest skin cell. My body doesn’t feel right without him.

I think he feels that, too, by the way he takes my hand, kisses my neck, twirls my hair around his forefinger. We struggle without each other. Which is going to be a bitch because I’m not leaving Brighton. I can’t. And he’s just taken a huge contract for the next year based up in London. He can work remotely for a few weeks, but he needs to be in London. His whole life, his whole family are there. He’s a family man, and I left my family. I left my family to find my family.

Either way, Noah isn’t moving down here because some girl he met is staying here.

‘What’s going on in that whirling mind of yours?’ he asks. He strokes over my bare stomach and my body instinctively moves towards him, craving his touch. ‘I can almost see the wheels turning. What are you thinking through?’

‘You. Me. Us. What happens when I find out what happened to my mother. How soon afterwards you’ll move back to London.’ You see, that’s what makes this sex so different. It’s the honesty that comes with it. Before, it’s always been about playing that game, holding back, not being
that
girl. With him it was like that in the beginning, but now it is easy, necessarily honest.

‘Don’t be getting ahead of yourself,’ he says. ‘One day at a time until we know what happened to your mother.’

‘I can’t help it. I think I’m staying here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else now. You love London, don’t you?’

‘Brighton’s growing on me,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking about commuting.’

‘Living here and going up there?’

‘Yeah, I don’t see why not.’

‘You’d want us to live together?’ I ask. ‘Because I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’

‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea, either. It’s been good, this, though. Being in this hotel together all this time.’ His hand moves lower and the ache becomes a pleasurable pain that yearns for us to hook ourselves together.

‘Let’s talk about this again when I know what happened to my mother,’ I say. His fingers are still working lower, reaching for me, my body is longing to be with him.

I’m blatantly ignoring the fact that I may never know what happened to her. Especially since
nothing
has happened with the investigation. They know nothing more than they did when I first got here, they have no new leads or clues. I get the impression they’re not looking very hard ’cos they think they know who did it.

I have two new phones and one new number. I turn on the phone with my old number once every day to get messages from my dad, the other phone is the one I use now. I still can’t talk to Dad. Maybe one day, but not at the moment.

The thing I have to get my head around right now, though, is finding the courage to go into the house where my mother was murdered.

This café, a five-minute walk to the hospital, is rammed, the tables are crammed close together to get as many people in there as possible, and there are still people standing by the counter, lurking, waiting for anyone to move even a fraction so they can take their place.

We don’t speak, Tami and I. Those hand-holding chats I was sort of hoping for haven’t materialised. I have dinner with them, she puts the girls to bed, and I tidy up the kitchen. She goes to her office – yes, every time she opens the door I feel a trickle of shame – and stays there for hours. Well, at least until I have returned to my room. I have watched television, I have read the entire internet on my phone, I have tried to count the number of piles there are in the carpet. Anything other than think about Wednesday, today. Even if she could bring herself to speak to me, what would I say?

I can’t tell her I am scared. That’s not the person I am. That’s not my role in this drama I find myself in. In this drama, I am the scarlet woman. I am the marriage wrecker. I am the whore. I have no feelings beyond carnal, man-stealing ones, nor any right to any other type of feelings.

Everything that Tami says to me seems to be punctuated with the W word. I remember when Cora was first learning about reading, she would add silent letters onto words without your knowledge so I-Spy would become a game of randomness: something beginning with G could as easily be ‘table’ as it could be ‘glass’ because of the
silent ‘G’. Tami does this with sentences: ‘Your dinner’s ready [
whore
]’. ‘Do you have any washing you want putting in [
whore
]?’

To be honest, her long-suffering betrayed wife act is starting to PISS ME OFF.

I’ve done wrong, yes, but I didn’t do it on purpose, I didn’t set out to hurt her. She really does need to start getting over it. I have bigger things to worry about. And I can’t focus on that because I’ve got Mrs Betrayed Wife sitting opposite me. As I become more agitated, more wound up, I start to stir the coffee in my cup a little more forcefully. A lot more forcefully, actually. Until I’m bashing the cup hard.

‘Is there a problem [
whore
]?’ Tami asks.

‘No, no problem.’

She returns her gaze to her cup. I return to abusing mine, satisfied when she raises her gaze again. ‘What’s the matter? You’ve clearly got a problem. Why don’t you share it and save us all the passive-aggressive crockery abuse [
whore]
?’

‘I’m … this is a really tough situation and you’re acting as if it’s nothing.’

‘How am I supposed to act?’

I shrug.
Not like this. Not like I’m evil,
I think.

‘If you don’t know, how am I supposed to? The thing is, I can’t give you absolution and make you feel better about the choices you made.’

Am I asking for absolution from her? I don’t think so. I just need a friend. People drift like clouds in your life, they may stay around for a while but slowly and surely they drift out again when your life experiences don’t match up.

I do not need absolution for falling in love with a man who fell in love with me. I just need a friend. And Tami is it because she hasn’t drifted out of my life.

‘I don’t want absolution, I just need a friend.’

‘You’re not sorry at all, are you?’ she says.

‘I am sorry I hurt you, but I honestly didn’t mean to,’ I reply. I
am sorry for the pain, for the disruption, but I am not sorry for falling in love. How can I be? You can never be sorry about falling in love. ‘I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love with him. You really can’t help who you love.’