The Woods, page 4
“Jesus, Tess—what have you been doing? Crawling in the mud? Rolling round in the bushes?” It’s Nicole who says it, and Caitlin laughs. Bella, in the center, doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t laugh at me like the other two, but she doesn’t support me, either.
“Come on, Tess, fess up. Who have you been rolling around in the bushes with?” Nicole says.
“Tess with a boy? As if,” Caitlin says.
Nicole finds this hilarious. And Bella? She isn’t laughing. But she still. Doesn’t. Say. Anything.
My hand squeezes the carrier bag. I want to get out the clippers and hack off their stupid flicky hair, silence their mocking words with a trowel in the face. Instead, I keep walking, head down, shoving Nicole with my shoulder as I march past.
My eyes are swimming with hot tears as I round the corner.
“Tess—wait.”
I can hear Bella running up behind me, but I don’t slow down.
“Hey,” she says, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
“Am I okay?” I turn to face her, letting her see the tears.
“Look—I’m sorry, okay?”
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why do you let them be such cows to me?”
She raises her hands and lets them drop. “I…I don’t know. But Tess, come on. You don’t help yourself, you know. Look at the state of you—you’re not eight anymore, a chubby tomboy in dungarees.”
Chubby. She actually said chubby. Yes, I know I’m a state—my T-shirt’s too tight and my jeans are filthy. No makeup, hair a halo of frizz. But I’ve been bloody gardening, not going to a goddamn nightclub.
“You’re embarrassed by me,” I say, my voice flat.
“No—of course not,” she says, but there’s a pause before she says it and no conviction in her voice.
“Well, fuck you, Arabella Cooper. Just fuck off with your friends. Pretend you don’t know me and then maybe I won’t embarrass you anymore.” I swing the carrier bag and smack her in the arm with it before walking away again, fast enough that I’m out of breath in a minute.
I don’t look back to see if she’s following. I know she won’t be.
Bella comes into my room later that night.
“You awake?”
I close my eyes and stay huddled on my side. She sighs and lies on the bed next to me, on top of the covers. She smells of cigarette smoke and the woods.
“I’m so sorry, baby sis. I was a total bitch. I should have said something. I should have told them to shut up.”
“Why didn’t you?” I say, turning to face her.
“Because…I don’t know. There are no excuses, are there?”
“I wish you didn’t care so much about what they think. They’re so horrible—nasty, horrible girls.”
“They’re not all bad,” she says. “Nic’s really funny and Caitlin can be, like, really kind sometimes.”
“Huh. I’ve never seen that.”
“It was just teasing, you know. They do it to everyone, not just you.” She pauses and a gurgle of laughter escapes her. “And Tess—seriously—when you came round the corner. You really did look like you’d crawled out of the hedge. You were covered in mud—it was all over your face. And there were leaves in your hair. It was like some wild woman had jumped out at us.”
There’s no cruelty in her laughter and reluctantly I smile. “Yeah, hardly catwalk-ready.”
She laughs again and I shush her, aware of Dad sleeping across the landing.
“I really am sorry, though,” she says. “I wish I could be more like you sometimes. You really don’t care what you look like or what people think.”
I think of the half hour I spent sobbing when I got back to the house, how I wanted to smash every mirror. My eyes still feel swollen and sore.
“What were you doing, anyway?” she asks. “Mud-wrestling?”
I hesitate. Should I tell her? About the garden? I imagine showing her. I imagine it becoming our place, not just mine. But, oh yeah, it’s not mine anymore, is it? Bella’s pretty boys are moving in.
“Nothing. Just crawling through hedges. As you do.”
She laughs again, softly, reaches out to tug on one of my curls. “You’re mad, baby sis. Totally nuts. Don’t ever change.”
“You neither.”
She yawns. “Can I sleep in here tonight?”
It’s only a single bed and Bella’s a quilt-hogger, but I move over anyway, closer to the wall. “Course you can.”
I close my eyes and drift off to the sound of my sister’s soft breathing.
NOW
Chapter 6
ANOTHER SUMMER OF DEATH?
Body found in the woods
Police have confirmed that on August 23, 2008, a body was recovered from woods near West Dean in the Vale of Glamorgan and that another person has been taken to the hospital, where they are reported to be in a stable condition. No identities have been revealed.
IS THIS THE WORK OF A SERIAL KILLER?
Police have revealed the identity of the dead body discovered in the woods near West Dean as that of Arabella Cooper, aged eighteen. It is believed her sixteen-year-old sister was discovered unconscious nearby. Officers have not yet revealed if they are treating the death as suspicious, but after the murders of seventeen-year-old Nicole Wallace and nineteen-year-old Annie Weston, and with Rachel Wells still missing, fears are growing that a serial killer is preying on the teenage girls of this area.
COOPER DEATH “A TRAGIC ACCIDENT”
An inquest has ruled the death of Arabella Cooper a tragic accident, stating that the embankment was unsafe due to an earlier storm and that, under the influence of alcohol, the girls fell. Arabella Cooper’s death was caused by a “fatal head injury” from rocks at the base of the embankment. Evidence shows that the severe storm that heralded the end of a three-week heatwave caused part of the embankment to give way, causing the girl’s fall.
I keep all these newspaper reports in a box under my bed. I’ve carried this box everywhere I’ve lived in the last ten years. Dad doesn’t know. He never knew I pulled the papers out of the bin after he threw them away without showing them to me. He never knew I carefully cut out each story and put it in a box. He never knew I’d lie awake at night crying over the things I overheard in the village said about my sister, all those gossips whispering in hushed voices about Bella being a troublemaker, some drunken hell-raiser.
I took the box to the police station once. Dad doesn’t know that, either. I tracked down the detective who’d questioned me in my hospital room, and a week after the inquest ruled Bella’s death an accident, I waved in front of him the stories that talked about a serial killer and screamed at him to do something, to find out the truth. Because, awful though the idea would be, I wanted to stop all that gleeful gossip, I wanted there to be some other explanation than a drunken accident in the woods.
I remember the pity on his face. He picked up all those newspaper cuttings from the floor after I’d let them drop and he smoothed them all out before putting them back in the box carefully and neatly. He was kind, I remember, but kind in the way you are to a distraught child, or a doddery old woman who’s forgotten where she lives.
The inquest said it was an accident so an accident it was. Case closed. He put the lid on the box and sent me away, and I don’t think I’ve opened the box since. As my grief grew less sharp edged, I burned with humiliation and tucked the box farther away under the bed to gather more dust, telling myself he was right, the inquest findings were right, everyone was right. It was an accident.
But I never threw the box away.
“So what’s the plan then? Are you going to become Tanya Nibbington, Norfolk’s most famous tree surgeon?”
We’ve moved on from tea and are halfway down the bottle of wine Sophie brought with her.
“I have no clue. I’m already freaking out about how I’m going to pay the rent on this place.”
“But you’re still being paid at the moment, aren’t you?”
“Yeah—while it’s still a suspension. But let’s be realistic—they’re not going to let me back, are they? After that, I’ve probably got about three months before I run out of money.”
Sophie’s silent for a moment. “Plenty of time to find something else—to figure out what you want to do. And if you’re stuck, I have a sofa bed, no problem.”
“You’re an angel. And as much as I’d love to stay with you, I hope it doesn’t come to that. Homeless and jobless is not a look I’m going for.”
Sophie squeezes my hand. “Hey, maybe there’s one tiny positive in all this. You have time now to go back and be with your stepmother. To be there for your dad.”
My throat tightens. It’s not just the walls closing in at the thought of going back there, it’s the whole bloody world. “I can’t. I can’t go back there.”
“But…Tess, your stepmother’s dying.”
“Do you know, I haven’t been back there for longer than a day in nearly a decade? Not even to see Julia since she was diagnosed. I’ve only visited her in the hospital.”
“Seriously? That’s…shit. Why?”
“Because…I told you my sister died in an accident. But I never told you it was the night of Dad’s wedding to Julia. I never told you I was there…”
She looks at me, waiting for more. I swallow hard.
“Look, Soph, it…it was like this. We were out in the woods and we both fell, or something—I was unconscious. When I woke up her body was right there next to me. She was dead. And I still don’t remember what happened, how we ended up there.”
Everything from the night of the wedding is coated in a layer of fog. I waited, afterward, for my memory to come back. A trickle of little things did come back—a flash of entering the woods after Bella, the feel of rain on my head as the storm broke. As I healed from my injuries, as I watched Bella being buried, as we cleared her room, I waited, expecting the trickle to become a flood. The police stopped asking questions after the inquest declared her death an accident, but still I waited.
The bits I do remember are things I didn’t want Dad to know. I remember drinking champagne and being drunk almost to the point of passing out. I remember someone half-carrying me upstairs. But who? Max? Dad? God—Jack or Sean? And shouting—Bella and me, and someone else. So much shouting, barely heard above the storm. But the fog is like a curtain I can’t pull aside.
Sophie leans back. “Shit,” she says again.
“Yes. It was. Totally shit. I’ve never…I was sixteen. Everyone was saying it was this tragic accident, but I refused to accept it. I was convinced something terrible had happened, but I couldn’t remember. I was plagued by the most awful nightmares afterward—my sister rising from the grave, stalking me through the woods like some zombie horror show. I couldn’t wait to get away—from the house, from the woods. From everyone that reminded me of her.”
“Christ, Tess, that’s understandable, but…”
“I miss her,” I say, pressing my hand against my rib cage where the ache of regret is almost physical. “I miss her so much, but I’ve refused to let myself think about her. But she keeps appearing in my dreams and then last night—it wasn’t one of the nightmares—Bella was here, in this flat, and it was so real.”
There are tears in my eyes and I can see Sophie blinking back tears of her own.
“I’m so bloody angry with myself,” I burst out. “I’ve spent all these years running from my memories of Bella and everything that happened, to the point where I’ve let Dad deal with Julia’s illness all on his own, because I’ve been too damned scared to go back. I hate the place. It’s become like a phobia I’ve let run my life. And now Julia is dying and I’m still running? That whole crap-fest with Rebecca—it’s all tied to this. Ten years and I haven’t even begun to face up to it. I’ve left the wounds open and raw and festering and where has it got me? I’ve let down my dad. I’ve let Julia down. I’ve lost my job and may end up facing criminal charges. You’re the only friend who really knows any of this. I’m a mess, Soph. A stupid, pathetic mess.”
Sophie puts down her glass and leans in to hug me. “Oh God, babes, you are, aren’t you? A total mess.”
I let out a laugh that’s half sob and pull away to wipe my eyes.
“And still, knowing all that, admitting all that, I can’t face going back there.”
Sophie just looks at me.
“Don’t give me that teacher look. I know what I should do. I don’t want to be like this, scared to the point of hyperventilating over some bloody trees and a ten-year-old nightmare. I want to be…”
“You want to be a brave soldier?”
I laugh again. “Yes, I do. Screw Tanya Nibbington—I want to be Maeve Larson, intrepid detective, afraid of nothing. I want to go back and say fuck off nightmares, screw you, woods—you’re not haunted. I want to dream of my sister without it being a nightmare. I want to be there for Dad and Julia.”
She stays silent as my fear and conscience wrestle for dominance.
“Look,” she says eventually. “I can’t tell you what to do, all I can do is promise that if you do go, if you do channel your inner Maeve Larson—hell, forget that, if you channel the inner Tess, the one who can take on the horror show that is the eleventh grade and come out alive—I will be here for you, on the end of a phone and waiting with a bucket of wine when you get back.”
I waver and the woods crowd into the pause. I can’t stand the thought of going back, but how can I let my dad be alone when Julia dies?
My phone rings as I’m clearing up after Sophie leaves. It’s a mobile number I don’t recognize, so I answer cautiously.
“Hardy-girl?”
My throat closes up at the familiar voice and it takes me a moment to find my own.
“Max?”
His words, his voice, sends me spiraling back in time and disorients me. Me and Bella—Tess and Arabella, named for the Thomas Hardy heroines from the books my mum loved so much. Although, in the books, it’s me who had the tragic death. Even though Max always called us both Hardy-girl, it was only me who took it as a caress, for whom the nickname felt like a kiss. Bella always hated her full name, more so after she actually read Jude the Obscure and decided Arabella was a complete cow. She took offense at the choice, even though I think Mum just liked the name.
“How are you, Hardy-girl? God, this is a blast from the past. I hope you don’t mind me ringing so late. I just got off the phone with your dad.”
“He told you about Julia?”
There’s a pause. “I can’t quite believe it. It’s hard to imagine her not being there anymore.” His voice breaks. “I feel so guilty for not visiting more.”
He doesn’t need to feel guilty. After Max’s dad got posted abroad, he and Lena were sent to boarding school—they probably saw more of Julia and Greg on school holidays than they did their own parents. Even after she moved in with Dad, he visited more often than Julia’s own sons. But then, Jack and Sean had their issues with her. So did me and Bella.
God—her sons and her stepdaughters, all lined up against her in hostility, the only people on her side the children of her best friends.
“Dad said she hasn’t got long left—days, weeks, I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, his words coming out on a sigh.
I brush my hand across my cheek to wipe away a tear. I do love her some, even if it isn’t enough. I loved her for giving us Max. We only got to keep him for a couple of years—Bella’s death took him away again, and I haven’t seen him since—but, oh, that soaring crush I had when I thought my heart would burst just looking at him. Everyone else had crushes on Jack and Sean, Julia and Greg’s gloriously handsome sons, but it was always Max’s quieter strength and kindness that tugged at my heart.
“I was calling to see if you wanted a lift back with me and Lena. We’re heading down there in the morning.”
He makes it sound so easy.
“I was…” I pause. I was what? Am I going to tell him that I wasn’t actually planning on visiting my dying stepmother? I can’t. I can’t say that out loud to Max. Even after all these years, I want him to think well of me.
“Yes. Yes, please,” I say. “A lift would be great.”
The trees grow taller in my mind, the woods get darker, but it’ll be okay. I’ll be with Max.
Ten years of no contact and it turns out Max and I live twenty miles apart. I could have got on the train as soon as I phoned Dad to tell him I was coming, but instead I’m waiting for Max, hovering and looking out of the window for his arrival like I used to as a teenager. I chew my lip. Dad sounded so relieved I was coming back. I hate to think how much strain he’s been under since Julia was diagnosed. How lonely he must be.
After Bella died, Julia was the strong one, thrown into this family just as we all fell apart. She did all the practical stuff while me and Dad tottered around, shell-shocked and completely messed up.
But there was always that sticking point—if she’d never come into our lives, Bella would probably still be alive. The knowledge has been a festering thorn in my side for ten years and it makes it hard to be in the same room with her without constantly wondering what if. The relationship we’d been building, stepmother and stepdaughter, destroyed by Bella’s death.
Christ, I’m not sure I can go through with this. I’m wondering if I have time to call Sophie for another pep talk when I hear the toot of a horn and head downstairs on shaking legs.
The sun is out today and I shade my eyes to see him as he gets out of the car. Max. My Max.
“Hey, Hardy-girl,” Max says, and I let him fold me up in his arms. He smells different, but his arms feel the same, still give me the same strength as he squeezes tight. Maybe he can help me channel my inner Maeve Larson.
