Текст книги "Lost Girls"

Автор книги: Celina Grace

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Twenty Six

The Sticks Bar was small and dark. I had found the shabby, anonymous looking street fairly easily but had walked the length of the road twice, up and back, before I found the bar. A discarded newspaper blew against my legs and I had to stop and disentangle myself before walking on. I don’t mind waiting in bars by myself but I always have to gather my courage to actually enter them. I suppose it’s the fear of not knowing what’s behind the door.

The walls were painted dark red, and with the low ceiling and dim lighting, it felt like stepping into a cave. I walked as nonchalantly as I could to the bar and waited to be served, glancing about me as discreetly as possible. I was looking for a flash of blonde hair in the gloom. There were few people there but I still stood for five minutes at the bar, feeling utterly invisible, before the barman deigned to notice me.

Drink in hand, I made my way slowly around the bar, peering through the gloom for a sight of Jessica. I couldn’t find her. I made my way to a table for two at the back of the room, sat down and leant my head against the dark red wall. I kept my eyes shut for a minute, trying to breathe deeply and not think of much. Then, a little calmer, I opened them.

Jessica sat opposite me. I suppose I must have been getting used to her sudden appearances and disappearances – I hardly jumped at all. The merest squeak came from my mouth, quickly muffled.

“Hi,” I said, voice hardly shaking at all.

“Been waiting long?”

“Not long,” I said, rather tightly. “Not long in one way.”

“I know exactly how you feel, Maudie, believe me.”

She had an odd way about her tonight, a kind of suppressed glee. She kept buttoning herself down; I could see her doing it. I was reminded, unwillingly, of the last night I’d ever seen her, before her reappearance – when she stood in the kitchen of the cottage in Cornwall, her eyes gleaming in the naked light of the kitchen lightbulb. I heard her ten year old voice as clearly as I could hear her now: Tonight, we’ll do it tonight. The ritual. What in God’s name had she conjured up?

Her blonde hair was twisted up tonight, in a messy coil on the back of her head. She wore her long black coat and, underneath, a purple velvet shirt. There was a heavy, silver ring on one of her long fingers and she wore the necklace that I’d bought her. It shimmered against the pale skin of her throat.

Jessica took a big mouthful of her drink – I could see it distending her cheeks.

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“At the beginning, of course.”

“But which one?”

“For God’s sake,” I said. “You tell me.” I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded like a stranger, a cold, censorious stranger.

Her manner changed. Before she had been wild, fey, fidgeting about in her seat and turning her glass around and around, inking wet rings of condensation on the table top. Now she sagged. I could see the slowly welling gleam of tears in her eyes.

“Begin after Cornwall,” I said, more gently.

She looked down at the table and a tear fell. I was pierced by the memory of sitting opposite Becca and telling her the same story. Now here was the second half, Jessica’s second half.

“Cornwall,” said Jessica, slowly. I couldn’t read her voice – it sounded purposefully flat, as if she was trying not to betray any emotion whatsoever. I knew how she felt.

“Cornwall...” I prompted.

She glanced up at me with a flash of anger. “Alright,” she said. “Give me a chance. I’ll tell it in my own time.”

“Okay,” I said, chastened. We both looked at our drinks. I noticed her nails were bitten, the nail polish on them chipped and flaking.

“Cornwall,” she said, once more. Then she took a deep breath, steadying herself for the plunge.

*

“I think I was about fifteen when I first realised something was wrong. Really wrong, I mean, not just the wrong kind of thing for a teenage girl. Before that, I’d had problems, you know, but I didn’t really connect anything with anything. I just thought my – my situation was a bit fucked up. Which it was, of course – Christ, so much more than I could have imagined. But I didn’t know. I didn’t even know I suspected. I think there was just a sense of – of things being – off kilter. As if you’re looking at the world through different coloured glasses to the rest of the people.

“You know that old chestnut about trying to describe a colour to a blind person? I mean, how do you describe blue to a person who’s never seen the sky, or the sea, or – or cornflowers, or anything like that? You know what I mean? All I knew was that something was wrong, something underneath, but I didn’t know if I was right. God, it drove me mad. Imagine being fifteen, and stuck in a house with – wait, I’m getting beyond myself.

“I was fifteen, or so I was told. I lived in this very sterile, new-built flat, apartment, with my aunt. She said she was my aunt, but she looked nothing like me, nothing – she had dark wavy hair that was always a bit greasy and was going grey... she used to get it covered up with dye sometimes, but most of the time she didn’t bother. And she had olive skin and dark brown eyes. I mean, I know genetics can do funny things but you know, Maudie, what I look like. What we look like. We used to pretend we were sisters, do you remember?

“The flat was like a hotel, one of those totally anonymous chain hotels; all beige carpet and magnolia walls and some god-awful landscape painting on one wall. In a mock-gold frame. I saw a lot of those hotels later on in life... but I’ll come to that later. It had four bedrooms so was pretty big, and every so often some other kids stayed over. My aunt – Tracey, her name was – said she was fostering them, short-term, you know, for the council. They were always girls, normally about twelve, maybe a little bit older. Tracey told me that they’d been through horrible situations and they were emotionally damaged, and because of that, they might tell a lot of lies. So I wasn’t to take anything they said to me very seriously. But they never said much – they just stayed in their rooms and watched TV. They never stayed long. I think the most time any of them were there was about a week. They used to creep me out a bit, to be honest, they were so silent. I used to run into them in the kitchen when I was getting something to eat, and they’d just look at me with these big eyes, all in silence.

“It’s hard to explain just how weird things were. For a start, I had no memory of anything before my time at the flat. I don’t even remember arriving at the flat. Do you see what I mean? Well, put it this way, have you ever had a general anaesthetic? It’s not like falling asleep and waking up. There’s no sense of time having passed. It’s like a slice out of time, you’re conscious one minute, the next you’re not, then you come back to life and in between is nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what my life was like. There was me, in the flat with Tracey, and the weird kids, and before that, nothing. Not a single thing.

“Of course, I knew that wasn’t normal. I didn’t go to school so I had no – what’s the word? – no frame of reference, but I knew that most people didn’t just pop into being aged fifteen. So I asked Tracey, and guess what she told me? I’d been in a car accident, a bad one. It had killed my parents. I’d survived, but I’d gone into a coma, a long one, six months or something, and only now was I really recovering.

“When she told me that, I sort of accepted it. I mean, I couldn’t remember anything anyway, nothing. And I used to get these really bad headaches, migraines, I suppose, which fitted in with the car crash story, and I had weird digestion, lots of stomach bugs and urine infections, nice stuff like that. But I didn’t have any scars on me.

That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was the men that sometimes came to the flat. It was mostly just this one man – Colin, his name was – and sometimes he brought another guy with him, I was never sure of his name. And – I can’t really describe it – I’d look at them, or they’d catch my eye and I would just – break. I would go to pieces inside. I can’t really describe it... it’s as if the second I saw them, a gigantic rush of – of horror would swamp me. They never said much to me but occasionally, they’d laugh together. At me, I think it was. I can’t describe how that made me feel. Just – it was so black, this wave, it was like drowning. I used to get really out of it, you know, with booze, if I knew they were coming round and I couldn’t leave the house. God, it was –

“I just sort of carried on. I mean, I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt so bad, so I kind of buried it and just went on, day to day. There were little, odd things though, that cropped up. I remember asking Tracey if I could have my birth certificate so I could get a passport – I think I had some sort of idea about going abroad – I wanted to escape for a bit, to run away – and she said she didn’t have it. She said she’d lost it.

“Anyway, the day I turned sixteen – or the day Tracey told me I turned sixteen – she threw me out. She said it was time for me to take care of myself now, that she’d kept her end of the bargain and kept me until now but enough was enough and it was time for me to make my own way in the world. You can just see it, can’t you? A sixteen year old kid with memory loss, out on the streets of London. Yeah, we were in London, some god-awful bit of South London, by the way. The really shitty part, with the pound shops and the bookies and the off-licence with the sign saying ‘we can’t sell alcohol before eight o’clock’ – that’s eight o’clock in the morning – and the crappy, crappy boutiques with their synthetic, awful, fake-jewelled-studded clothes in the smudgy window, and the obese, sweating black girls with their fifty screaming, corn-rowed kids in tow, and the scrawny, skaggy white girls with their horrible greasy hair and their toddlers sucking on a can of Red Bull, and the alcoholics trying to buy Special Brew at nine o’clock in the morning, and the mad people, who’d been thrown out of any kind of care home due to being complete arseholes and a complete lack of anyone, anyone, who had any kind of class, or dignity, or worth...

“For the first couple of years, I thought I was going to be okay. I had a little bit of money that Tracey had given me and she’d told me to go to this café up in the East End, where someone would give me a job. So I went there, and they did give me a job, and I was a waitress there for a year or so. I lived in this tiny, shitty little bedsit in Walthamstow, and went to work, and came back and slept and did my usual bury-my-head-in-the-sand type thing, so I wouldn’t be able to think about anything. I kept getting the black waves, every so often, mostly after men talked to me in the café. I got through it by drinking a lot and smoking and not thinking about what it might mean.

“After a while, I started going out with this bloke, Michael. He used to come into the café – he was the foreman of a building site nearby – and after a while I moved in with him. It was about the same time I got sacked for being drunk at work. Michael said it didn’t matter, he’d look after me, and for a while it was fine, I just sort of stayed at his place and we went out and had fun. He was really into his coke and, after a while, I got into it too; it made me feel even better than the booze. After a while, I wasn’t getting the black waves anymore, not as long as I could do the white lines. Then Michael started getting a bit arsey with me, having a go at me for taking all his charlie and never paying my way. I said I didn’t know what I could do and he said he could think of one thing I was good at...

“The only surprise was how long it took me to become a hooker. I didn’t even mind it so much after a while – I liked the attention. I liked the fact that I was getting paid for doing what other girls were stupid enough to do for free. I couldn’t understand why anyone – anyone – would want to fuck for fun. But that’s what men wanted and so that’s what they got – at the right price, anyway.

“After a while, I left Michael and set up on my own, in Soho. I shared with this other girl, Susie. She was okay. We used to work, and then we’d go out clubbing and pretend we were normal girls on a night out.

“Ironically enough, it was one of my regulars who saved me. He was an older guy, he must have been in his mid-fifties, and he saw that I was getting more and more strung out. He came round to see me but he didn’t want sex with me, not that time. Instead, he just made me sit on the bed and tell him what was wrong. And I just broke down; I was such a snivelling, sobbing mess – you should have seen my face, snot pouring from my nose, no wonder he didn’t want to fuck me – and he told me I needed to get off the drugs, that I needed to talk to a therapist and that he would make me an appointment with a drugs counsellor. And he did, and I went along and after that, it was okay. Not good, you understand, but better. And it got better, slowly, day by day. Susie came along with me for a while and things were going really well. But then she had a major relapse. I had to get away from her and so I moved down to Brighton. And I kind of pulled myself together, slowly. That’s when things really started coming together.

“My therapist in London had recommended another therapist in Brighton. He specialised in repressed memories, recovering them, that sort of thing. That wasn’t why I went to him, though – it was more that I needed a therapist and this was the only one I knew of that was any good. So we start the treatment and he does the repressed memory thing on me.

“All my memories were still there, from my childhood. Right up until the age of ten. Not wholly, not completely, but enough. You were there, although I couldn’t remember your name. My parents. Our house in Hellesford. Myself as a young girl, an innocent young girl, before all these terrible things had happened to me.

“I remembered what happened that night. The night, the night we were going to go to the stones. I remembered walking up the road by the farm, how big the countryside was all about me. It was so cold... I didn’t go to the stones, I don’t know why. I think I walked to Penzance. There was still a lot missing – I remember vaguely, very vaguely, waking up in an alleyway somewhere, hidden behind cardboard boxes. I went into a cafe somewhere – I remember the steamed up windows and they had plastic ketchup bottles on the tables that were shaped like tomatoes. A man sat opposite me and started talking to me – or did I go there with him? Then there’s nothing, a complete blank, for the next few years.

“Well, you can imagine. It was like an earthquake in the middle of my life. But in spite of it, I was glad. Because I’d always known that there was something more to my story than the bits that I could remember. It was like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place.

“A journalist in one of the national papers did an article on all the famous kid disappearances. I think Ben Needham’s name was mentioned, and a few others, and just a little tiny paragraph at the end mentioned me. Jessica McGaskill. I was reading it in a coffee shop, and when I got to that bit I – I fainted. Fell right to the floor, got cappuccino everywhere.

“And after that, I knew. I knew who I was, or who I had been. I did my own research and I compared more memories, and I was certain. I was scanning the papers every day, to see if I could find anything else – I almost wrote to the journalist who had written the first piece but I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea...  Anyway, one morning, there was something in the paper about Angus and the school thing that he owns – sorry, owned – a college, right? And as soon as I read that, I remembered your name. And I knew I had to find you.”

She stopped talking. We were the last people in the bar and the barman was stacking chairs around us. I unclenched my fingers from the edge of my chair.

Jessica was looking down at the table. She hadn’t looked at me once during her recital.

“It’s weird,” she said. “Being able to remember something and then you hit a complete wall. Like it’s a photograph in your mind and then you come to the blank part and it’s like the photo fades out. And there’s nothing left. Nothing you can see, anyway. But you know, deep down, you do know what happened. You just can’t retrieve the memory.”

I stood up abruptly. I still couldn’t speak. She opened her mouth to say something but I didn’t wait to hear it. I ran for the toilets and crashed open the cubicle door.

I didn’t vomit, although for a few minutes I was sure I was going to. I hung over the porcelain bowl, gagging and gulping. My whole body ached. Eventually, I stood upright, moving like an old woman. I felt faint.

I heard the door to the bar open and Jessica’s voice a moment later.

“Maudie, for God’s sake. Speak to me!”

I caught sight of my face in the mirror over her shoulder: I looked deathly white.

“Christ,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would get to you so badly.”

“Don’t worry.” My mouth felt numb – I couldn’t form the words properly.

“You’re as white as a ghost,” she said. “I think you need another drink.”

I managed to get back to the bar, walking by her side with her arm under mine. She ordered the drinks, triple vodkas for the both of us; just as well, as the barman would never have served me. Jessica steered me back to the table and we drank our drinks, grimacing, as if they were medicine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, managing to speak properly. “I don’t know what happened there.”

“You scared me.”

“I was scared myself.”

I felt as if I’d just avoided a terminal accident, or I’d stepped away from a crumbling cliff top just in time. I drank the rest of my drink and felt the vodka move through me at quicksilver speed, numbing me, protecting me. That awful feeling of panic subsided and I sighed.

“Jessica–” I began.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything now.”

“But–”

“That’s all there is,” she said. She sounded very sad. “That’s all that needs to be said.”

“But–”

Her chin came up again. Her eyes glittered. “That’s it. That’s all there is. The whole truth. So now you know.”

Chapter Twenty Seven

A shadow bent over me. I made a low noise in my throat, something like ‘ugh’. I felt the warm pressure of Matt’s hand on my shoulder.

“I’m off, darling. Don’t get up.”

I managed to raise my head two inches from the pillow. “What?”

The hand squeezed my shoulder. “I’m off, darling.” One final pat. I collapsed back onto the pillows. “Go back to sleep. You look all in.”

I didn’t hear him leave. The next thing I was aware of was the phone ringing. I buried my head in the pillow, wanting to shut out the real world for just a little bit longer.

My eyes remained stubbornly shut but now my mind was racing. I gave up, sitting up in the tangled bedsheets, and reached for the bedside clock. Ten thirty-two. I collapsed back on the bed with a groan.

The phone by the bed rang again, shatteringly, sending me upright and clutching my chest. I reached out a shaking hand to the receiver, then drew it back. I lay back down and pushed my head under the pillow.

The phone rang again. I kept my head under the pillow, listening to the ringing of the phone, once, twice, three, four, five – the answerphone clicked on and I heard the hesitant sound of a voice.

“Maudie, are you there? Maudie?”

It wasn’t her. I sat up, catching the next part of Becca’s message. “Maudie–”

I scrambled for the phone, and reached it just in time. “I’m here–”

“Maudie?” There was a gasp in her voice, as if she’d been crying. My mental antennae went up, quivering. Becca never cried.

“Yes, it’s me. What’s wrong?”

There was a silence, and then another faint gasp. “Can I come round?”

“Now?” I looked down at myself, at my stained nightshirt and unshaven legs.

“Please. I need to talk to you.”

“Of course.” I said it automatically. Once I’d put the phone down, I rolled back onto my front, prone, face in the pillow. I lay there for five minutes, cursing under my breath. Then I got up, got in the shower, and attempted to smile.

Becca had been crying – it was obvious. The tip of her nose was red, the edges of her eyelids were inflamed, and her face had that puffy, tear-soaked look. I gave her a hug and let her sit down at the kitchen table.

“Tea? Or something stronger?”

“It had better be tea,” she said, miserably.

I busied myself with the kettle and mugs. Cravenly, I wished I’d never picked up the phone. I didn’t want any more revelations. I didn’t want to hear anything bad, not now.

I plonked a mug down in front of her, and sat myself down with my own drink. Mentally, I braced myself.

Becca looked up at me from her red-rimmed eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

I said nothing for a moment. I said nothing because I felt precisely as if someone had swung a heavy, booted foot into my lower belly. “Are you sure?”

“I did three tests. I thought the first must have been a mistake, but three – you wouldn’t get a false positive from three, surely?” She started to cry again and I could feel myself struggling not to grimace. “I can’t believe it, – I don’t know what to do, Maudie-”

I held onto my hot coffee cup, drawing meagre comfort from the heat of the porcelain. I thought for one awful second I was going to be sick.

“Is it–” for a moment, the name of her recent boyfriend deserted me. “Is it Martin’s?”

She nodded.

“Well, you can’t have it,” I said. The words came out of my mouth, abruptly, without me even thinking about them.

Becca’s eyes widened. “I haven’t decided–” she began.

I talked over her. I could hear my voice getting louder with every word. “You can’t have it. I won’t let you do this. You can’t do this.”

“Maudie–”

I stood up abruptly. My coffee cup fell out of my hands and smashed on the floor. A wave of coffee and porcelain shards splashed up against my legs.

Becca was getting up too, her eyes and mouth wide.

“Maudie, for God’s sake–”

“You can’t have it!” I bawled. “If you have it, it’ll die, don’t you know that? If you have a girl, she’ll die, they always die, you might kill it, you’ll kill it without even meaning to–”

She was coming round the table, her arms stretched wide, her face rigid with alarm. “Maudie–”

“Leave me alone! Just get out!”

She flinched back but I only kept screaming.

She stepped back, raising her hands. “Alright, alright, I’m going,” she said. “I’m going to call Matt.”

“No!”

“Alright, alright. Just – just calm down.”

I turned and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I was choking with tears; salt water was blinding me. I fell onto the bed and pulled the pillow over my head, screaming and hitting out at the mattress beneath me. I thrashed around until I could barely breathe, until I had to stop and just lie there in the semi-dark, crying bitterly.

I hadn’t heard Becca leave but I could tell that she had because the flat had the empty feel to it. After a few minutes, the phone started ringing. I heard Matt’s voice, his worried voice, come through on the answerphone, repeating the same question. Maudie, are you there? Are you there? But I wasn’t there. I didn’t know where I was, but wherever I was, I intended to stay there for a long time. I kept still on the bed, my face buried in the sheets, not moving, not thinking, until I fell asleep.