Yes, she would talk to the girl. She just wasn’t sure what she was going to say yet.
Nickie still had Nel’s pages. The ones they’d worked on together. She could show the girl that. They were typed, not handwritten, but surely Lena would recognize her mother’s words, her tone? Of course, they didn’t spell things out the way Nickie had thought they ought to. It was part of the reason they’d fallen out. Artistic differences. Nel had gone off in a huff and said that if Nickie couldn’t tell the truth, then they were wasting their time, but really what did she know about the truth? They were all just telling stories.
Are you still here? Jeannie asked. I thought you were going to talk to the girl, and Nickie replied, “All right. Keep your hair on. I will. I’ll do it later. I’ll do it when I’m ready.”
Sometimes she wished Jeannie would shut up and sometimes she wished more than anything that she was here, in the room, sitting by the window with her, watching. They should have grown old together, getting on each other’s nerves properly, instead of bickering over the airwaves like they had to now.
Nickie wished that when she pictured Jeannie, she didn’t see her the way she was the last time she came to this flat. It had been just a couple of days before Jeannie had left Beckford for good, and she was pale with shock and shaking with fear. She had come to tell Nickie that Patrick Townsend had been to see her. He’d told her that if she kept on talking like she had been, if she kept on asking questions, if she continued to try to ruin his reputation, he would see to it that she was hurt. “Not by me,” he said, “I wouldn’t bloody touch you. I’ll get someone else to do the dirty work. And not just the one fella either. I’ll make sure there’s a few, and that each of them takes his turn. You know I know people, don’t you, Jean? You don’t doubt that I know people who would do things like that, do you, girl?”
Jeannie had stood right there in that room and made Nickie promise, made her swear she’d leave it alone. “There isn’t anything we can do now. I should never have said anything to you.”
“But . . . the boy,” Nickie said. “What about the boy?”
Jeannie wiped the tears from her eyes. “I know. I know. It makes me sick to think of it, but we’ll just have to leave him there. You have to be quiet, say nothing. Because Patrick will do for me, Nicks, and he’ll do for you, too. He’s not messing around.”
Jeannie left a couple of days later; she never came back.
JULES
Tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?
I woke with your voice in my head. It was midafternoon. I can’t sleep at night, this house rocks like a boat and the sound of the water is deafening. In the day, it’s not so bad somehow. At any rate, I must have fallen asleep because I woke with your voice in my head, asking:
Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? Liked or enjoyed? Or was it wanted? I can’t remember now. I only remember taking my hand from yours and raising it to hit you, and the look on your face, uncomprehending.
I dragged myself across the hall to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I was too exhausted to undress, so I just sat there while the room got steamier and steamier. Then I turned off the water and went to the sink and splashed my face. When I looked up I saw, appearing in the condensation, two letters traced on the surface of the mirror, an L and an S. I got such a fright that I cried out.
I heard Lena’s door open and then she was pounding on the bathroom door. “What? What’s happening? Julia?”
I opened the door to her, furious. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “What are you trying to do to me?” I pointed back at the mirror.
“What?” She looked annoyed. “What?”
“You know very well, Lena. I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do, but—”
She turned her back on me and started to walk away. “Christ, you’re such a freak.”
I stood there staring at the letters for a while. I wasn’t imagining things, they were definitely there: LS. It was the sort of thing you used to do all the time: leave me ghostly messages on the mirror or draw tiny pentagrams in red nail polish on the back of my door. You left things to scare me. You loved to freak me out and you must have told her that. You must have, and now she was doing it, too.
Why LS? Why Libby Seeton? Why fixate on her? Libby was an innocent, a young woman dragged to the water by men who hated women, who heaped blame on them for things that they themselves had done. But Lena thought you went there of your own volition, so why Libby? Why LS?
Wrapped in a towel, I padded across the hallway and into your bedroom. It seemed undisturbed, but there was a smell in the air, something sweet—not your perfume, another. Something cloying, heavy with the scent of overblown roses. The drawer next to your bed was closed, and when I pulled it open, everything was as it had been, with one exception. The lighter, the one on which you’d had Libby’s initials engraved, was gone. Someone had been in the room. Someone had taken it.
I went back to the bathroom and splashed my face again and rubbed the letters fr
om the mirror, and as I did, I saw you standing behind me, that exact same look on your face, uncomprehending. I whirled around and Lena raised her hands as though in self-defence. “Jesus, Julia, chill. What is going on with you?”
I shook my head. “I just . . . I just . . .”
“You just what?” She rolled her eyes.
“I need some air.”
• • •
BUT ON THE FRONT STEP I almost cried out again, because there were women—two of them—at the gate, dressed in black and bent over, entangled in some way. One of them looked up at me. It was Louise Whittaker, the mother of the girl who had died. She dragged herself away from the other woman, speaking angrily as she did.
“Leave me! Leave me alone! Don’t you come near me!”