“People might hear what? That there’s an us? So, what, it’s fine for us to have sex so long as nobody knows?”
“That’s not what I—”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” She stuck her head out of the door and shouted, “HEY, EVERYBODY! WILLA AND I HAVE SEX.”
Straight off a voice shouted back, “WE KNOW,” followed by peals of laughter.
I jumped up and slammed our door. “What the fuck.”
She glared at me, almost smiling, her face flushed with heat. Then a cloud passed over her eyes, a gradual understanding. Her mouth changed shape. She shook her head. Quietly she said, “You’re embarrassed, aren’t you? I embarrass you. This embarrasses you.”
She gave me a chance to say something. Every chance. My mind just wouldn’t operate. Couldn’t. There was just too much going on in my brain. Too much chaos. Too much disaster. She waited as the silence swelled between us. And I just kept looking at her.
She walked to her desk and picked up a thick ring binder, the words human biology surrounded by hearts drawn in fluorescent pink marker. She said, “I’m going to revise in the library. Perhaps while I’m out you should ask to swap rooms.”
And then she left.
I pulled my purse out of my locker and picked up my school bag. Then I walked down the corridor, keeping my face fixed dead ahead so I didn’t meet anyone’s eye. I ran down the stairs and out into the midday sun. Then I walked, fast, but not so fast that I might attract attention, down the wide tarmac drive until I’d passed the school gates. I kept going until I found a phone box. Then I called a taxi and when it picked me up I asked the driver to take me to the station. From there I took a train to London, then the tube and then another train from Victoria. My mother met me at Lewes wearing dark glasses and a headscarf, plus a Burberry trench coat which, despite the warm evening, was buttoned up to the neck. I could stay one night, she said, and then she would drive me straight back to school. I said, “Absolutely not.”
***
All we knew was this: the body was female, it had been found in a Martenwood warehouse and it had been there some time.
And this: my father was being interviewed by the police.
That night my mother holed herself up in the den with the curtains drawn tight. She was there when I went to bed, and still there early the next morning, slumped on the sofa like a discarded rag doll, mouth open, hair disheveled, mascara smeared beneath her eyes. Beside her, an empty gin bottle rolled on its side. I covered her with a blanket, switched off the TV and righted an old black-and-white snap in a frame. It had been taken by some paparazzi at a club in London, and had later appeared in the back pages of Tatler. In it, my mother, on her twentieth birthday and at the height of a brief modeling career, is dancing on a table, holding a cigarette in one hand and the neck of a bottle of champagne in the other. Wearing a mini-skirt, long boots, a white vest top and several long chains of beads, and she’d been caught mid laugh with her eyes shut and mouth open, the beads and her long hair flying round her head like ribbons flung from a maypole. In it, she looks startlingly beautiful, young, wild and completely, deliriously happy. My father is in the photograph too, standing half shadowed in the background with his eyes fixed on my mother, grinning broadly and applauding, his expression somewhere between wonder and animal desire. According to the story, that’s the night they first met, but things must have moved along fairly fast. My mother’s modeling days came to an abrupt halt, and not even ten months later I came along. I held the picture up close so I could look at her face. Even from a black-and-white photograph you could tell she was plastered, and it occurred to me that there must have been a time when my mother was a happy drunk. I couldn’t ever remember her being like that. Where other people would become truculent or loud when they’d been drinking, my mother would slip into a quiet despair. Booze made her cry.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stood in the doorway of the conservatory, gazing at that expanse of white marble, that spotless white surface, the rigid, gray pool of cold concrete that lay underneath. I thought about that one, single chance I’d been given to talk to the police on my own, the morning we’d retraced her footsteps to school. What I could have, should have told them: what happened with the scissors that night, how culpable I was, what I had done. I should call them perhaps, ask for another chance to talk. But how could I start telling them things now that I hadn’t mentioned before? I was scared. Things were already bad enough.
Finally I could hear my mother moving around, the TV switched on, then straightaway off. I went back with two mugs of tea.
“Mum,” I said, “I want to ask you something. It’s important.”
I gave her the tea. She placed it on the floor and crossed her arms.
“Yes,” she said, “I am all ears.”
I realized I hadn’t planned how to phrase what I wanted to say. I paused, looking at her. After a moment, I said, “D’you think—”
“Do I think he did it? Is that what you’re asking? Do I think your father killed Laika? How could you ask such a thing, Willa? How could you even think such a thing? Of course he didn’t do it.”
I said, “You don’t think—”
“No,” she said, “not for one second do I think.”
It was rare for my mother to ever sound cross. I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t…” My voice trailed off.
“Your father couldn’t get away with murder, Willa. He doesn’t have the wherewithal. He’d get caught and he knows it. He’d make all sorts of stupid mistakes.”
A thought fluttered through my mind too fast for me to net it. I blinked, trying to catch the sense of what she’d said.
“Take this away, will you? I’m not in the mood for tea.” I took the still hot mug from her outstretched hand. It was clear the conversation was over.
“Can I get you anything else?” I asked.
Without looking at me she said, “I could murder a gin.”
***
A police liaison officer turned up at our house in the morning. They hadn’t yet managed to identify the body, but they did know this: it wasn’t Laika. The dental records had been conclusive. I clutched my mother, wiping away the tears streaming down my face.
My father was released. He arrived home gray and uncommunicative, then spent the following week holed up in his study with the door slammed shut. During those strange, strained days my mother hung by me like an orbiting moon. Something about her continual presence reminded me of being a child. Then one morning, after my father had appeared in the kitchen in pursuit of fresh coffee and my mother, wearing rubber gloves, had manifested from somewhere upstairs, I realized just what it was: it had been exactly like that when Laika and I were small. When my father was at home, my mother was always close by. If we weren’t out, either at school or attending an endless stream of holiday clubs, she was by our side. She brushed our hair and read us books and sang to us while we took baths. She never, ever, let us be around him on our own.
But now he said he wanted a word, alone, with me. I followed him into his study, not looking back in case I met my mother’s eyes. He shut the door. Then he sat back in his black leather chair and templed his fingers. I stayed standing, pinned to the wall.
“I thought we should have a little chat,” he said in an equable tone; “thought I’d better check in with my little Golden Girl, make sure you’re doing okay. Can’t be easy for you, what with that girl’s body being found, all these rumors flying around, me being taken off by the police. God knows what’s been going through your mind.” He leaned back, one arm supporting the elbow of the other, his thumb resting on his jaw. “You know what I’ve always appreciated about you, Willa? You always tell the truth. That’s a good trait. A trait I appreciate. Makes you someone I can trust.” His voice soft, he added, “You’re a good girl, Willa.” I felt myself filling with a sort of violent headiness, like vertigo, or the plummeting sensation that comes before a faint.
“Tell me something,” he said, “did you think that was Laika?”
“What?”
“You didn’t somehow imagine that Daddy had chopped your little sister into pieces and stashed her body inside one of my own warehouses?” His voice was mild, almost amused.
“Jesus, Dad, no. Of course not.”
“How about your mother?” He gave me a benign smile.
“She wouldn’t ever”—he doesn’t have the wherewithal—“ever think that.”
