The Dare, page 6
‘Catherine said it made me look grown-up, but she’s done it a bit too tight. She’s given me this jacket, too. Said I could keep it.’
I try not to look bothered, but I am. I’d love a denim jacket like that. How come Alice gets all the good stuff? It isn’t fair.
14
Now
Gloria sweeps round my feet with the dustpan and brush, asking me to step aside for a minute. Two people are sponging wine off the wall. The faces peering round the living-room door withdraw and conversation resumes. Normality is being restored, except nothing about this situation is normal. Nothing about this situation is right.
Now Ross’s hand is on my elbow and he’s leading me gently into the study, away from the scene of destruction and the other guests. Away from the ghost in the hallway.
But the ghost follows us in.
Instinctively, I back away till I’m standing as far from her as possible, which isn’t nearly far enough in this small, square room. My bottom knocks into the unit where Ross keeps his vinyl collection, and that’s where I stay, pressed up against the shelves. Her perfume reaches my nostrils. It smells of coconut. Maybe if she wasn’t Catherine Dawson, I might be complimenting her on it, asking her what it is, but right now it’s an affront to my senses. It repulses me.
Ross hovers between us. One minute he’s fussing over me, checking I’m okay, the next he’s apologizing to Catherine. Why is he apologizing to her? What the hell is going on? How does she know Ross?
‘Lizzie? Lizzie Molyneux? Is it really you?’ Her voice makes my scalp shrink. ‘You’re Ross’s girlfriend?’
Ross looks from me to Catherine and back to me again. ‘Is one of you going to tell me what’s happening here? Do you two have some kind of history?’
I gulp. ‘You could say that.’ I’m amazed I can speak at all.
Ross stares at me, willing me to explain, but what can I say? Where would I begin?
‘Lizzie was my little sister’s best friend,’ Catherine says, lowering herself into the Ikea chair in the corner of the room, the one I use when Ross and I both need to sit in front of the Mac at the same time.
Ross raises his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Is that it?’
‘Alice died,’ I say. There, the words are out. But now my tongue has stuck to the roof of my mouth. My knees begin to tremble.
Ross motions for me to sit down, nods at the leather chair, but I stay where I am, my back pressed to the unit, refusing to meet her eyes.
‘Lizzie was with her when it happened,’ she says. I hold my breath as she looks down and twists a ring on her finger. ‘Alice was killed by a train. It was an accident,’ she says. ‘A tragic accident.’
My chest heaves and air rushes into my lungs, almost choking me with its force. I try to compose the muscles in my face, try to keep them soft and light, but they tighten and contract. My jaw clamps tight like a vice. It’s a wonder my teeth don’t shatter in my gums.
Ross is staring at me, mouth open, his forehead creased in a frown. I watch his face as he takes it all in, absorbs the shock of it. He glances anxiously into the hallway and I know he’s torn. Torn between staying here and finding out what the hell is going on, and returning to his guests – our guests – to check they’re okay.
I think I see the exact moment when he makes a decision. ‘I’m going to leave the two of you to talk,’ he says. There’s a reluctance in his tone, but still he moves towards the door. My eyes scream at him to stay. I can’t be on my own with her. Why can’t he see that? What’s wrong with him? But he’s already gone.
Every muscle in my body tenses as I wait for this apparition in front of me to dissolve and for the real Catherine Dawson to appear. The Catherine Dawson who stood outside my bedroom window in the middle of the night. And not just once either. She threw a stone at the window only that first time, but I always knew when she was there, could feel her toxic aura radiating through the curtains. I told Mum and Dad in the end and she stopped shortly after. But the damage was already done. Whatever it was she’d whispered to Melissa and the others at Alice’s funeral was enough to start the rumours when I went back to school.
She bows her head. ‘It took us a long while to come to terms with Alice’s death.’ Her voice is low and flat. I watch her throat move as she swallows, my eyes travelling from the sharp blades of her collarbones to the blood-red beads that spill down the front of her black dress.
‘I left home about a year after you and your parents moved away. Trained as a nurse. I only joined the practice a little while ago. I had no idea you were …’
Something inside me gives way. The new practice nurse. The one Ross keeps referring to. The one who went with him to visit a patient the other night, who ate chicken and chips with him while I waited at home, wondering where the hell he was. It’s Catherine Dawson. What kind of freakish coincidence is this? What kind of headfuck?
Slowly, I move towards the leather chair and sit down, my hands gripping the armrests. It’s the first time I’ve allowed my eyes to linger on her face since that first shock of recognition in the hall. Apart from a few lines around the mouth, she looks exactly the same as I remember her. Alice is there, too. In her eyes, her jawline, her colouring. Is this what she might have looked like, if she’d had the chance to grow up?
‘I acted badly for a while,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry for that, Lizzie, but I was grieving. My little sister was dead and …’ She takes a second to control her breath. ‘I just wanted to know how my baby sister died. Why she died. I couldn’t accept the fact that we’d never know.’
I swallow, nervously. None of this is real. It can’t be. Catherine Dawson turning up at our party. Catherine Dawson working with Ross, eating takeaways with him. How is that possible?
‘Lizzie? Are you all right?’ Her voice is gentle, concerned. The sort of voice a counsellor might use. But of course, she’s a nurse now, a professional. It’s been twelve years since Alice died.
The silence between us lengthens.
‘I’m not trying to give you excuses,’ she says at last. ‘I’m just trying to explain what it was like.’ She’s looking directly at me now, an imploring look in her eyes.
I turn away. I don’t want to feel sorry for her, but somewhere in the back of my mind I know I’m recalibrating my emotional response, that despite everything, a part of me is already trying to understand.
She stands up. ‘I’ll leave. I’m ruining your party.’
‘No. Stay and have a drink with your colleagues.’
I can’t believe what I’m saying. But then, people change, don’t they? Learn from their mistakes? Feel remorse? What do I know about losing a sister, what that does to a person? I know what losing a best friend is like, so how much worse must it have been for Catherine and her parents? What must it have been like in the Dawson home in the weeks and months following Alice’s death? Besides, if I turf her out, what will Ross’s colleagues think? He’ll hate it if I cause a scene, especially in front of Gloria Williams.
I stand up, and so does she. For one dreadful second I think she’s going to step forward and embrace me, but if that’s what she contemplated doing, she quickly changes her mind and moves towards the door instead. She pauses at the threshold.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers.
I watch her leave the room, unable to follow her, unable to move. My past has caught up with me, like I always knew it would. All this time I’ve been living on a fault line. Now, finally, something inside me cracks and shifts.
15
It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning and the last of the guests left half an hour ago. In different circumstances, Ross’s medical-school pals would probably still be here and I’d be tucked up in bed already, but they, like his colleagues, must have sensed the need to leave us to it.
The house that just five hours ago looked so pretty and inviting, so warm and glowing, is now littered with empty glasses and paper plates. I can barely look at the stained walls in the hallway, that lovely Mindful Grey now more like something out of a crime scene.
Ross is chewing the inside of his bottom lip. He takes a deep breath through his nostrils and leans forward in the armchair, arms crossed over his knees. He looks shattered.
‘Lizzie, why didn’t you tell me any of this?’
I’m curled up on the end of the sofa, my hands clasped round a mug of chamomile tea. A headache throbs at my left temple.
‘I was going to tell you. It just never seemed to be the right time.’
‘It must have been horrendous, seeing that happen to your best friend.’
‘I didn’t see it happen. By the time I came to, it was over. All I saw was …’ I close my eyes till the image goes away.
Ross shakes his head. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with all that trauma and I never even knew.’
I take a sip of tea. ‘It was such a shock, seeing her sister in our house, seeing you chatting away with her in the hall.’ My words barely scratch the surface of how that felt, how it still feels. ‘She was so horrible to me after Alice died. She blamed me for her sister’s death.’
Ross comes over to me on the sofa and strokes my cheek with his finger. ‘Oh, sweetheart.’
I want to tell him what it was like for me back then, but what can I say? Where can I start? And how can I tell him that it’s not just Catherine’s reappearance that’s upset me, though God knows, that’s bad enough, it’s what she represents. The past and all the things I don’t want to have to think about. The things I’ve deliberately not thought about, that I’ve packed away at the very furthest corners of my mind.
‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ he says, ‘because I’m not trying to make excuses for her behaviour. I’m absolutely not. Scaring a thirteen-year-old girl late at night is a despicable thing to do, but …’ He shakes his head. ‘Grief affects people in different ways. She’d just lost her sister.’
‘And I’d lost my best friend and was having to contend with rumours that it was me who’d killed her!’
He exhales through closed lips. ‘I’m presuming you had some kind of counselling to help you cope with all this?’
‘Of course I did.’
Angela Harris. I see her face before me, as if the last twelve years have been stripped away and I’m back in that bland, beige room with the picture of snow-tipped mountains on the wall and the box of tissues on the table between us. I watch her lips part as she readies herself to speak, hear her dispassionate voice asking me, once again, if there is anything else I’d like to tell her, anything at all that might be troubling me.
Ross sighs. ‘I think you should get some sleep and we’ll talk again in the morning. It’s late and we’re both tired. I don’t want you getting ill.’
We both know what he means. Tiredness and stress: a dangerous combination as far as my epilepsy is concerned. He’s never witnessed me having a full-blown seizure and, with any luck, he never will. He thinks he’s seen me at my worst – puking into a toilet bowl when I had a stomach upset, drenched in sweat. He hasn’t seen me at my worst. Nowhere near. But then, nor have I. That’s the worst thing about this condition – other people witness my body doing things I’ll never be able to see.
I watched a video someone had posted on YouTube once, and it confirmed all my worst fears. The thought of Ross seeing me thrashing about like a drowning fish, foaming at the mouth, wetting myself. I screw my eyes shut, but it’s no good. The images won’t go away. They line up like a series of disturbing black-and-white pictures in old medical textbooks.
‘Come on,’ Ross says, helping me up from the sofa. ‘I’ll bring you a glass of water.’
I trudge upstairs, trying not to look at the ruined walls in our hallway. Some of the lining paper has torn where Ross has tried to sponge them clean. There’s no way we’re going to get rid of the stains. The whole thing will need repainting.
It must be getting on for 3 a.m. before he finally comes to bed. I’ve been awake the whole time, tossing and turning and getting myself all worked up. I knew something bad was going to happen. I sensed it, like the feeling I get before a seizure, when the world feels out of kilter and you can’t put your finger on what’s changed. It’s like the universe has been sending me signs.
At first, I thought it was the news story about Elodie Stevens – similar cases always have an effect on me – but then there’s that box Mum and Dad suddenly decided to bring over – why didn’t they just leave it in the attic? – and the little train that appeared on the wall, and all those weird phone calls. And now, to top it all, Catherine bloody Dawson has walked back into my life. There must be a reason for all this. It must mean something.
I hear Ross cleaning his teeth and peeing, then he climbs in next to me, his right arm encircling my body, his feet entwined with mine. I know if I told him what I was thinking, if I voiced my fears, he would try to placate me with statistical theories of improbability. He would tell me, gently and patiently, that these are all random events and that the universe is most unlikely to arrange itself purely on my behalf, and he would be right. But still …
Instinctively, I touch my stomach. Still no sign of my period. This business with Catherine has wiped it clean out of my mind.
I wait until Ross begins to snore before I slide carefully from his grasp and out of bed.
16
I tiptoe downstairs and rummage in the bottom of my bag. I need to get this pregnancy test done and find out one way or another.
The light’s been left on in the study, so I go in and sit on the leather swivel chair to read the instructions, trying my best to ignore the faint but lingering scent of coconut. Ross’s Mac whirrs into life. I must have accidentally leaned on the keyboard as I spread the leaflet out.
I stare at the screen, my eyes stuck fast to the headline of an all too familiar news article. So this is why he was so long coming to bed. He’s been googling the accident.
NETWORK RAIL SAFETY UPGRADES
TOO LATE FOR ‘OUR ALICE’
The distraught parents of 13-year-old Alice Dawson, killed by a train on an open crossing that traverses the Garleywood Public Footpath in Garleywood Tippet, have told of their heartbreak at losing their precious daughter.
‘Alice’s death has devastated our family,’ says Mick Dawson, Alice’s father, owner of Dawson’s Meats in Garleywood. ‘She was a beautiful, kind girl, popular with all her schoolfriends and loved by everyone who knew her. I don’t know how our family will ever recover from this.’
The exact circumstances of Alice’s death are unknown. She was out walking with a friend, 13-year-old Lizzie Molyneux. The two girls were frequent users of the Garleywood Public Footpath and had used the crossing safely on numerous occasions. But at 11.25 on the morning of 19 July 2007, Alice was struck by a four-carriage train. The post-mortem revealed that she died on impact. Lizzie Molyneux was found by the train driver and guard on the side of the track, having suffered a seizure. Lizzie, an epileptic, has a history of severe tonic clonic seizures. She has no apparent recollection of her friend stepping on to the track. An inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death. The Garleywood Public Footpath crossing is part of a planned series of safety upgrades, says Network Rail spokesman Bill Redditch. ‘Too late for our Alice,’ say the shocked community of Garleywood Tippet, many of whom are now calling for its immediate closure.
My eyes skim the article I last read twelve years ago and promised myself I’d never read again. I can’t help being struck by the disparity between the description of Alice and the description of me. The thought of Ross sitting down here reading this on his own in the early hours of the morning fills me with sadness. Fills me with shame. I know the reporter was only quoting the words of her father, and of course Mick Dawson would have said those things, that Alice was beautiful and kind, popular with all her schoolfriends, loved by everyone who knew her. She was his precious little girl and he’d just lost her in the most devastating way imaginable.
But seeing her portrayed in this angelic light makes the references to me sound ugly and clinical: an epileptic; severe tonic clonic seizures. Maybe if we’d both been hit by the train and I’d survived but been injured, it might have been different. I’d be a victim, too, instead of just the ‘epileptic’ friend who can’t remember what happened.
Perhaps I’m being oversensitive and reading things into it that simply aren’t there. Perhaps the phrase ‘no apparent recollection’ does not imply a question mark hanging over my testimony. I know it’s wrong of me to even think this way. After all, I survived. She didn’t. What does it matter how I was described by a stupid reporter?
I torture myself by imagining the split second before it happened. Did Alice see the train bearing down on her? Did time slow down the way people say it does in moments of danger, her short life spreading before her in a tapestry of colours and emotions?
My scalp tingles as if Alice is shimmering over my shoulder. Reading about her own death. And though I know it’s stupid, I can’t help looking round. I don’t want her to have suffered even a nanosecond of that torment and yet I can’t help feeling she must have done. Why else do I keep seeing these pictures in my head? The terrible panic in her eyes. Her beautiful face contorted by a scream. What monstrous thing is my brain trying to reveal? And why now, after all this time?
I stand up and it feels like I’ve been sitting here for hours. My lower back is stiff, my legs almost numb. I pick up the leaflet for the predictor kit and turn away from the screen, force myself to read the words, to follow the instructions, try to shut everything else out and focus purely on them.
The extractor fan in the downstairs toilet is loud, and for a second I think that Ross will wake up and come down, but he won’t. Of course he won’t. Once Ross is asleep, he’s dead to the world, especially when he’s been drinking.
