When we got in, there had been a red flashing light – a sight I’d grown to dread – and a message from Alex’s mother, who by then was in a psychiatric hospital. Her voice had been like smashed porcelain. Your daughter won’t get away with this. She can’t. Sarah killed my baby. She killed my Alex, and she’s going to prison, I’ll make sure of it. She doesn’t deserve to be free. She doesn’t get to be free when Alex is . . . is . . .
She’s going to make sure you go to prison , Hannah had echoed, scowling tearfully at me. Cuts and bruises were flung like pebbledash across her body. You killed my best friend. You don’t deserve to be here if she isn’t. She started to cry. I hate you, Sarah. I hate you! And that had been the last thing she had ever said to me. Nineteen years had passed; nineteen years, six weeks, two days, and she hadn’t spoken a single word to me, no matter how hard I’d tried, no matter how many interventions our parents had staged.
‘I’m so sorry, Eddie,’ I whispered. I rubbed my ankles with shaking hands. ‘If it helps in any way, I have never forgiven myself. Hannah never forgave me either.’
‘Oh yes, Hannah.’ He looked at me, then immediately away, as if I disgusted him. ‘You told me you lost your sister.’
‘Well . . . I did.’ I traced a wobbly line through the sand. ‘ Hannah stopped speaking to me. She cut me out of her life, permanently. So I don’t feel like I have a sister. Not really.’
He looked briefly at the line I’d drawn in the sand. ‘Hannah never spoke to you again?’
‘Never. And God knows, I’ve tried.’
He went silent for a while. ‘I can’t say I’m as surprised as I should be. She’s stayed in regular touch with my mother. You can imagine the conversations.’ His voice was flinty. ‘But that’s by the by. The fact remains, you have a sister. Even if she wants nothing to do with you, you have a sister.’
I paused. Wished I could bolt. I am the woman he can hardly look in the eye. I am the woman he probably wished dead all these years .
‘I am so sorry your sister was best friends with mine, Eddie. I’m so sorry I took them out of the house that day. I’m so sorry my reactions weren’t the right ones when he . . . when that man . . .’ I took a swallow. ‘I can’t believe you’re Alex’s brother.’
Eddie flinched. Then: ‘I want you to tell me everything,’ he said, and I heard the effort it was taking to keep his voice neutral.
‘I . . . Are you sure?’
His body – his strong, warm, lovely body, of which I’d dreamed so many times, gave a sort of twist of assent.
So I did.
I tried so hard to keep my place in Mandy and Claire’s friendship group that summer – so miserably, exhaustingly hard. In the weeks following our GCSE exams they met up every day, but they invited me to join them only a handful of times. ‘God , Sarah, stop reading into it,’ Mandy said, when I found the courage to confront her.
We were teenage girls. Of course I read into it .
During their time in each other’s pockets they’d developed a new code of behaviour they were unwilling to share with me, so my first few weeks in year twelve were a minefield. I said the wrong things, talked about the wrong people and wore the wrong clothes, realizing only when I caught the edge of an eye roll that they’d moved on.
On the day of my seventeenth birthday I came into school and found that they’d stopped sitting in our corner of the sixth-form common room and had moved somewhere else. I had no idea if I was invited.
During the spring term Mandy started going out with someone from Stroud, the town where we went to school. Greggsy, his name was. He was twenty and therefore a catch: no matter that he had a nasty, weasel-like face, or a questionable relationship with the law. Claire was sick with envy and spent all her time trailing around after them. I began to lose hope, certain that this would be the final straw for me. Girls who went out with older men were of a higher calibre. They were sexual, successful, self-contained; untouched by the pimpled anxieties of the sixth form.
Mandy might take Claire before she pulled up the ladder behind her, I thought, but she certainly wouldn’t take me.
But one day in March Mandy said quite casually that Bradley Stewart had been asking about me. Bradley Stewart was Greggsy’s cousin. He drove an Astra. He was one of the best-looking boys in that nasty group, and I was pathetically pleased.
‘Oh?’ I said, not looking up from the Diet Coke label I was peeling. It was important I played this right: Mandy would use my words to shame me at a later date, if I seemed too keen. ‘I suppose he’s all right.’
‘I’ll hook you up,’ she announced breezily. Claire, with whom Mandy had fallen out earlier, was fuming, and I realized this opportunity would never have presented itself if they hadn’t fought.
We didn’t go on a date, because nobody went on dates back then. We just met up on the pedestrian street outside the Pelican, with all the other teenage drinkers. We drank bottles of Hooch and Smirnoff Ice, and tried to be sharp and funny. Bradley, with his black hair and black trainers and his piercing eyes, somehow persuaded me off to the multistorey car park on the London Road ‘for a drink’. He steered me into a wall and started kissing me. He put his hands up my top, and I let him, even though he was rough and impatient. He put his hands down my jeans, and I let him. I didn’t want to, but I had had almost no experience with boys and a chance like this wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. He tried to have sex with me; I said no. He asked for a blow-job, settling eventually for a nervous handjob. I didn’t enjoy it, but he did, and that was enough for me.
Then he didn’t call, and I was crushed. I stared at Mum and Dad’s phone for days, eventually giving in and trying his number when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Nobody answered. I even got the bus to his house, near Stroud. I walked past his front door three times in thirty minutes, rain-soaked, hopeful and hopeless.
‘You should have slept with him,’ Mandy advised. ‘He thought you must be seeing someone else. That or you’re frigid.’
Claire, back in favour, laughed.
I could feel it slipping away already, that tiny flash of value I’d held since Bradley had taken me off to the Brunel multistorey. So I told Mandy to tell him I was ready to put out (her words) and he called me.
We became a couple, of sorts. I convinced myself that it was love and never imagined that I might deserve better. Nor would I have wanted someone better: I was part of a gang now; I belonged everywhere. I existed on that higher platform with Mandy and there was no way I was going back down.
Bradley often told me about other girls who fancied him and my teenage heart would freeze with terror. He went days without calling me, never walked me to the bus stop and often insisted on going without me to the Maltings, a nasty meat market of a club, so that he could ‘be himself’. More than once he decided this while we were in the queue, knowing I had nowhere to stay if I couldn’t stay at his. The day I passed my driving test, he failed even to congratulate me. He merely suggested I drive over to his house for sex.
‘Sounds like a top bloke,’ Eddie said.
I shrugged.
He looked at me briefly, and I was reminded of our first morning together, when we’d sat facing each other across his breakfast bar. Me, him; the smell of bread and hope. Then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Do you mind if we just get to the point?’ he asked quietly. ‘I understand why you’re telling me this stuff, but I – I just need to know.’
‘I’m sorry. Of course.’ I grappled with rising chords of panic. It was years since I’d talked out loud about what had happened that day. ‘I . . . Why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting too hot to sit still.’
After a moment Eddie got up.
We walked up past a pastel-blue lifeguard’s hut and onto the boardwalk, which snaked south all the way to Venice. Bikes and rollerbladers whisked past us; gulls cartwheeled above. The morning’s brief cloud cover had been burned away and the air now shimmered with heat .
It was summer, a Monday afternoon in June. Mum and Dad had gone to Cheltenham for something and had left me in charge of Hannah after school. Hannah had Alex over. After an hour pretending to do their homework, they’d told me they were so bored they might seriously die and instructed me to drive them to Stroud for a Burger Star. I’d said no. Eventually we’d compromised with a hanging-out-eating-sweets session on Broad Ride. They’d made a den up there a few years ago, when building and maintaining a den was still an acceptable way to spend a day. Now, long past that sort of thing, they liked to go up there to listen to music and read magazines.