Still Water by Catherine Marshall
I nod. I can’t look.
“Don’t move.”
Still trembling, I turn my face to the wall, and wait.
He is gone for such a short time. I hear his footsteps, nothing more. He doesn’t shout out, run, try to raise the alarm. I see Henry slumping down the rough corner of the building, his legs buckled beneath him, and my head aches, my tears are hot.
“Jem.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“Jem, come here.”
Something in his voice makes me turn slowly towards the entrance to the alley. I gaze the length of it. There is nothing but Gil, standing in the light from the street. I draw in my breath. “Where is he?”
“You’re sure it was here?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure he was dead?”
“I … Maybe he staggered away. Maybe he’s … ” I look wildly round, expecting him lurch out at us.
“You stabbed him.”
I nod.
“And you took the knife.”
“I told you.”
“So where’s the blood?”
I stare at him. I remember the blood.
“Because you plunge a knife into someone, Jem, and you take it out again, there’s going to be blood.”
But there’s nothing. The ground where Henry fell is dry, unmarked. The alley walls feel closer than they did before, the pavement soft like glue beneath my feet and I want to vomit again. I was sick before, I recall. Over some bins. Is that gone too? Gil’s looking at me like I’m scaring him. I decide not to tell him I don’t know what’s real anymore and try to rally. But it isn’t easy coming back from telling someone you murdered their friend and then it turns out maybe you didn’t.
He says, “It’s all got too much for you, hasn’t it?”
I nod, grateful for this excuse which is also the truth. I’m still trying to tell myself maybe he’s crouched wounded somewhere, and his blood got soaked up in his clothes and never hit the floor.
“We’ll go and get a drink, find somewhere quiet.” It’s like he’s talking me down from a roof. “Let’s go back to the hotel, you can get some rest.”
I let him take my arm, gently this time. “I’m sorry.”
“Shh. It’s fine. You’ll be fine.”
There’s a buzzing sound I can’t immediately identify. My hip seems to be juddering.
Then I remember again and take the mobile phone from my pocket. Gil watches me in disbelief. No one calls us any more.
“It’s Henry’s,” I explain.
He says slowly, “What are you doing with Henry’s phone?”
“He dropped it when … ”
The significance of this sinks in, flooding us both with renewed horror. I glance at the display. There’s a number one next to the envelope icon. A message. I look up at him. “Should I open it?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
By the spring of 1996, Marianne had ceased to keep a diary at all. Jem, sleep eluding her, flicked restlessly back through the pages, distracting herself from the great black boulder of reality pressing on the edges of her consciousness. How did you tell the difference, she was thinking, between memories and dreams? Were her memories of her parents any more accurate than her dreams of them, which came every night and with increasing ferocity? How could she know whether her memories represented the people they had been or whether they were nothing more than hopes and fictions? Even you, she thought bitterly, trying to conjure Alex before her so she could rant and wail and demand answers. But he would not come.
As with all her mother’s diaries – as with all the diaries in the world, she thought - the January entries were detailed and regular. She had paid them little attention and anyway she could tell by now what the legibility of the handwriting and terseness of the recording signalled. Weeks of empty pages passed. And then, 20th May, so brief an entry she had missed it first time. So brief it was only three unsteady words.
It’s a boy
Jem frowned. What boy? She flicked back and forth but nothing. It was the final entry. What boy? She lay the diary aside on the bed. Three words, and yet their significance seemed momentous. She shouted aloud – “What boy, Dad? Who was he?” But only the shimmering silence where Alex had once been. There was no one left to ask. No one knows, she thought. I could fabricate my entire background because there’s no one left alive who knows what really happened.
But of course there was, as today had proved.
She shoved her feet into trainers, grabbed her keys from the hall. Eve had been going out but there was a chance now she might be back, and even if she wasn’t Jem would sit on her doorstep and not move until the truth lay tattered and bloody between them. She careered down the lane, onto the road which would take her into town, her feet bumping over the tarmac. Hours ago she had wanted to put as much distance between herself and the terrible things Eve was saying as possible. Running away was what she did. Now she needed every last, tiny agonising detail. Questions filled her head like darts. And in between them, Gil’s voice - we all need to feel wanted and loved … if someone else offered him sanctuary can you really not understand him taking it?
She stopped, leaning forward, panting, her hair in her face and a stitch in her side. Gil understood this stuff better than anyone. He was sympathetic and broad-minded, could always see the bigger picture. But they weren’t your parents, she thought. This hasn’t happened to you.
She was aware of a car drawing slowly along the road in front of her. It was large, grey, a yellow smiley face sticker in the rear window. A flicker of memory, gone before she could identify it, and then the car stopped, its window sliding down.
“Jem?” the driver said.
She met his gaze. Blond, chunky, the guy from the prom. The guy who’d betrayed Gil to Eve and blacked his eye. She said nothing.
“Bloody hell,” he observed. “What’s happened to you?”
It seemed to Jem that whenever her mother came home from hospital she was frailer than when she had gone in. Today she had climbed out of the car as if she were nothing but moving bones. Alex had helped her up the path and into the sitting room, where their tea was now cooling in their cups, the scones Jem had made while he was away untouched on their plates. Marianne sat silent and pale, her fingers twitching in her lap. Jem could hardly bear to look at her.
“So,” Alex said. His voice sounded as artificial as this felt. They never used the sitting room. They never all sat down together in the same place any more. “What news have you got for your mum, Puddle?”
She didn’t know what he meant. Her mother was the most dramatic and eventful aspect of her life, and she already knew all about that. Or did she? It was hard to tell. But she could see her father was desperate for some ordinary conversation to fill the silence so she said, “School?”
“Sure.”
“Um … ” She was invisible at school. It kept her safe. On parents’ nights her teachers looked at her as if they had never seen her before. “I passed my French test. You had to get ten out of twenty and I got eleven.”
“Well done,” Alex said. Marianne lifted her hand, let it fall back into her lap.
Jem could no longer bear it. “I just … I have … ” She stood up and edged out of the room. Once in the hall she ran, through the kitchen and down across the garden, prevented only by the height of the wall at its end from leaping into the fields and sprinting towards the sea, which was out of sight but a drawing presence always. She gulped in the air, which tasted of salt and summer and seemed to be a different thing entirely to the air inside the house.
After a few minutes her father came to join her. He sat beside her on the wall and for a moment they did not speak. Jem picked a daisy out of the lawn and gave it to him. He accepted it solemnly. She cleared her throat. “I don’t think Mum should go back to hospital. It doesn’t make her better.”
Alex paused. “She won’t ever be better, you do know that.”
Fear clutched at her. “She’l
“No, no. That’s the medication. She’ll have good days and bad days, as she always has. But there’s no cure, you know, Puddle. She’ll never be … ”
“Normal?”
“Well that depends,” he said, “on whether you think there’s only one kind of normal.”
Jem thought about this.
“Come on. We can’t leave her sitting on her own, what sort of welcome home is that? I’ll make some fresh tea, you butter your scones for us.”
She returned meekly to the sitting room, knelt on the carpet to slice and butter the scones at the coffee table, sneaked a glance at her mother who looked only tired, and a little confused. “Do you want jam or honey?” Jem said, her voice shaking a little.
“Honey would be lovely.”
Jem turned the knife in the honey jar, spread a thick layer on each half of the scone, and took them on a plate to Marianne. “There you go.” She ventured a smile. Marianne’s smile in return was watery but a reward nonetheless. Jem sat down again to pile damson jam onto her father’s scones. She tried to think of something cheerful to say. “We could go for a walk, when you’re feeling better. We could go down to the beach and collect shells. Some of my shells are all cracked and horrible now, I need some new ones.”
Marianne nodded, as if she thought this a real possibility.
“There’s a new shop on the square,” Jem added, as Alex came in with another pot of tea. “It has all the sort of things you like. I went in with Miranda after school. All those floaty clothes and candles and patchwork bags.”
“Skulls, black leather, alarming jewellery. The usual mix,” Alex agreed. “There’s a new gallery in town too, which shouldn’t worry me too much, their work’s very different to mine, much more in the way of technicolour landscapes and miniature detail. But you know, competition can be a double-edged sword.”
Marianne nodded again. If their efforts sounded too hearty she didn’t seem to notice. Jem prepared a scone for herself, one half honey, the other jam, watching her mother’s slender fingers pleating the material of her skirt, the weightless twirl of her pale hair. There were photographs of her parents, in an album in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, taken before all joy had leached from their lives. They barely looked like the same people. She remembered something else she’d seen whilst outside the hippy-goth shop with Miranda after school and in this new spirit of excavating for good news said, “Oh, you know that lady who has the café on the square? She’s had a baby. A little boy.”
She glanced up, expecting some sort of confirmation from her father, who knew the lady who had the café on the square, or subdued interest from her mother, who on her better days delighted in babies. But Alex looked as if someone had hit him, hard, and her mother was staring at him with tears in her eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Jem said uneasily. Marianne’s tears spilled and streamed, dripping from her jaw onto her clothes, while Marianne made no attempt to wipe them away. She bowed her head into her arms and sobbed, rocking back and forth in her chair.
“Dad!” Jem cried. But he only stood, frozen. “Is it the medication?” she whispered.
He took a step towards her, bent over her. “Marianne.”
She howled, beating him off with her fists, swiping at his face. He reeled back, his arm raised in defence, while she shrieked and screamed and drew blood.
“Stop it!” Jem wept. “Mum! Stop it.” She pulled at Marianne’s arm, wanting only to stop her from hitting him, from making that awful noise, but Marianne swung, knocking Jem into the table and crashing to the floor with the scalding tea and plates and scones.
Alex grabbed his wife’s wrists, holding her off. “Are you all right?”
Jem nodded, but she’d caught her head and her arm when she’d fallen and she didn’t know which was worse, her terror or the pain. Alex bundled Marianne roughly towards the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She sat alone, among the ruins of the tea, and cried.
“What do you mean, what happened to me?”
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry,” Henry said, “but … ” He pushed open the passenger door. “Where’re you going? D’you want a lift?”
“I was going to see Eve Callaghan.” She shivered. “But actually I need Gil.”
“Get in.”
She slid into the warm interior of Henry’s car. The sky had clouded since this morning and she was still wearing only shorts and the Stone Roses vest top she’d plucked from Gil’s floor a million years ago. Since then she’d cried for hours, tried to sleep, then sped from the house without so much as brushing her hair. She probably did look like shit. She said, “I don’t know why I’m getting into your car. You’re one of the bad guys.”
Henry sighed. “I’m not. Really I’m not. We all do bloody stupid things when we’re threatened, don’t we?”
She thought about it. He said, “Have you heard from Gil today?”
“He was with me, a couple of hours ago.”
“He was with you?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
He shook his head. His mobile, perched plugged into the car’s music system, buzzed and he snatched it up. “Yeah? … Thank God. Is she all right? … And you’ve waited till now to tell me … ? All right. See you there.” He dropped it back down. “Gil. He found her, she’s fine. They’re on their way back to the square now.”
“Found who?”
He glanced at her as he turned the car around, snail’s-pacing it through the tourists using the road as their pavement. “Cecily. She went missing this morning. He didn’t tell you?”
“No. I guess I distracted him.”
“We were worried about her. She’s … ” He paused. “She hasn’t been herself lately.”
“Who has?” Jem murmured.
Henry drove in silence for a minute or two. Then he said, “You know Cecily, right?”
“Not really.”
“But you live here.”
“Doesn’t mean I know everybody.”
“You were around here fourteen, fifteen years ago?”
“Yes. I was a child.”
Henry paused. He said, giving up, “Right, okay.”
“Why?”
“Just … ” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.” Reconsidered. “Something happened back then and I want to get to the bottom of it and – ”
“Well my mum killed herself.”
He was wrong-footed. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it was fourteen years ago which is a long time and … ” Her voice wavered. Oh for heaven’s sake don’t do this now, not here, not in front of him.
They had reached the square. Henry parked the car. He said, after a minute during which they both tried to pretend she wasn’t upset, “No, I am sorry. Sometimes you get caught up in something and you lose all sense of other people and their lives – their tragedies – and you just bulldoze ahead. I’m sorry.”
Jem swallowed. “Four and a half months ago my dad died.”
“Oh God.”
“Eve Callaghan told me this morning that my dad had an affair. My mum was always fragile but Eve thinks that finding out about the affair pushed her over the edge. She told me that because of what you said to her about Gil. She doesn’t trust him and she doesn’t want me being pushed over the edge too.”
He was appalled. “So if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t know. You would have been spared that.”
“Maybe. So actually, yes, you are one of the bad guys”
“Jem … ”
“Don’t. Don’t say you’re sorry. It’s just consequences, you know? You lose your temper and you say one thing to one person and the ripple effect is … devastating.”
He was silent. Then - “But Gil isn’t having an affair with anyone but you.”
“No. He isn’t. Eve is wrong. Oh God.” She shuddered. “Why have I said all this to you? I don’t even know you.” She
“It really, really doesn’t matter.”
She opened the door. “Then thanks for the lift – ”
“Cecily had a child.”
She closed the door again. “Yes.”
“And I need – I want – I’d like to know whose it was.”
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“Because he - the baby - died and it’s too painful.”
Jem nodded. “Maybe it’s also none of your business.”
“It isn’t,” he agreed. “It isn’t my business. That’s it, anyway. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“How long did Gil say they’d be?”
“As long as it takes to walk up here from town.”
She kicked off her trainers and put her feet up on the dashboard. Henry shot her an annoyed glance. She ignored him. “I’m going to get a drink,” he said. “You coming?”
“Can I stay here?”
He could hardly refuse her anything. She watched his back as he crossed the grass to the pub, stared back ahead through the windscreen.
May 2oth 1996.
It’s a boy
She remembered: arriving at her father’s gallery one day after school, Alex and the lady from the café – Cecily – coming down from the attic room; Cecily’s presence forever afterwards like a phantom in her peripheral vision, whisking away if she turned her head to see her straight on; Alex becoming less attentive and more patient at the same time; her mother screaming at him and beating him with her fists, a day or two before she died.
And there she was, Cecily, entering the square from the lower corner, Gil beside her. Jem watched them, saw them recognise the car, recognise her. Gil smiled and raised his hand. She waited until he had begun walking up the slope to the driver’s side of the car, until Cecily was right in front of her. And then she released the handbrake.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Move!” Gil yelled, lunging for the car. The slope was shallow but the Mercedes was heavy and as he wrenched at the door and flung inside he felt his own weight lend it propulsion. He cursed, grabbed at the wheel, found the brake. The car tilted, skidding diagonally to a halt. “Christ.” As it stopped Jem was out the other side, sprinting across the grass. He yanked on the handbrake and chased after her. She headed straight for Cecily, slapping down her outstretched arm with force, pushing her so that she stumbled and fell to the ground, Jem’s fists flailing at her head, her face. Gil seized her shoulders, dragging her away, his arms pinioning hers as she sobbed. “Stop it now,” he said against her hair. “Stop now.”