It Ends At Midnight, page 18
‘What did he mean?’ I say, stupid in shock.
She shakes her head, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. ‘Oh, Sylvie. You know what he meant.’ She reaches over the table and grabs my wrist, her fingers tight. ‘That’s why it’s so important to me that we sort out the Linda situation.’
Linda. Yes. Of course. I’d hoped we could leave the subject behind. I should never have underestimated Tess’s tenacity, though.
‘She’s made contact,’ I say. ‘But I don’t think she’s very happy to hear from me.’
Silence from Tess. I look over at her before jumping up in shock. It’s like what happened the time before, the seizure that she suffered. But this time she’s fallen awkwardly on the floor, bashing her head on the corner of the table as she’s gone down. There’s a trickle of blood seeping across her forehead. As before, I clear the space around her, pushing the table away from her and the chair too.
Again like last time, it’s over in less than a minute, but again, not before she’s lost control of her bladder. Once the seizure subsides, I lean down beside her, pulling her into my arms.
‘I’m sorry, Tess. I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘Are you OK?’
She blinks up at me, groggy. ‘What’s happened? Have I had another seizure?’
I nod. ‘Yes, you did. Can you sit up? Your head is bleeding.’
Slowly, she manoeuvres herself up, leaning against me. I can feel her pee seeping into my tracksuit bottoms, her back warm against me. She puts her hand up to her head and dabs at the blood, holding her fingers up in front of her afterwards, staring at the viscous stain.
‘I should get you to bed,’ I say. ‘You shouldn’t keep sitting on the floor. Do you need to speak to your doctor?’
After a moment Tess turns to me, blinking. ‘I don’t need to,’ she says. ‘They warned me that this might keep happening until the new medication kicks in. They’ve given me something that helps to control them, though it’ll take a while to kick in. Lev . . . Levetisomething. I can’t remember the name now.’
‘Glad they’ve got you on something that might help, anyway,’ I say. ‘Now come on. Let’s get you upstairs and changed. Would you like to have a shower?’
The pee is starting to smell. I can feel it cooling now, the sodden material clinging clammy to my leg as I stand up. Tess leans on me heavily and I walk with her upstairs to the bathroom. She slumps down on the side of the bath and I turn on the shower, holding my hand underneath the stream of water to check that it’s warmed up.
Once it’s hot, I turn to Tess. She’s stripped off, standing naked in the middle of the pile of her clothes. I don’t mean to, but I start in surprise. She’s very upright, her chin raised, as if she’s defying something. I haven’t seen her naked since we were in our teens, but now I can’t look away. Her stomach is flat, unmarked, her limbs lithe. I’ve got more stretch marks than she has. Our gazes meet and for a moment we lock eyes before I realise that I’ve sucked in my tummy and I’m holding my breath. I move away from the shower, breathing out as slowly as I can so that it’s not obvious that I’ve been holding in my gut.
She moves past me into the shower. ‘Can you stay in here with me, Sylvie? I’m just worried in case it happens again and I hit my head.’
‘Sure, yes,’ I say. I really don’t want to be in here any more, too conscious now of my appearance in comparison to hers, the hours I haven’t spent working out, but I catch myself. I might be feeling defensive, but it’s not some competition. Tess is desperately ill, not flaunting her physical perfection in front of me.
I sit down on the bath while she showers, looking anywhere but at the shower cubicle, pulling the damp material of my joggers away from my leg.
‘Can I have a towel, please?’ Tess says, and I go to the towel rail and give her the towel, handing it over still without looking at her. She makes her way out slowly and I follow her into her bedroom where she dresses in clean clothes, slowly, her movements almost languorous.
‘What were you saying? Before, I mean? Did you say something about Linda?’ Tess finally says once she’s fully dressed and rubbing at her wet hair with her towel.
‘I did, yes. I found her on Facebook, sent her a message. She got back to me.’
‘How does she sound?’
‘Angry. Really, really angry.’
‘In what way?’
‘In an angry way,’ I say, irritated with Tess’s questioning despite my concern for her. ‘She said you were lying, asked why I had backed you up. She says we knew what we saw.’
Tess puts down the towel and picks up a comb, running it through her hair in a slow, deliberate way before she answers. ‘It was all so confusing.’
‘That’s what I was going to tell her,’ I say, my words rushing out of me.
Tess looks over at me, her eyes piercing through me. ‘I was so sure for years that I didn’t see Stewart lunge at her. The more I think about it, though, the more unsure I am. I can’t even remember where you were when she hit him. I’m so scared we got it all wrong. We were both hammered. How could we be so certain that she attacked him unprovoked?’
I’m frozen to the floor. ‘You were sure at the time. That’s why I backed you up.’
She ignores what I’ve said. ‘It’s been bothering me so much. Even worse, what we said to Stewart beforehand. That preys on my mind.’
I don’t know what to say for a moment. I’m completely winded. Finally, I get my breath back under control. ‘Why are you doing this, Tess? I don’t understand. I thought we’d left it all behind forever.’
‘Sylvie, Sylvie.’ Her voice is a caress. ‘The chances are, I’m going to die pretty soon. It’s just, the more I think about it, the worse it seems, that we lied all those years ago. We protected ourselves instead of backing her up and I can’t forgive myself for that. If you’re honest with yourself, I bet you can’t forgive yourself, either.’
My jaw is clenched shut. I don’t dare reply. She continues talking.
‘I know you’ve done your best to do the right thing over these last years, but I also know how important it is that people are honest. I’m not meaning to sound preachy, but I’m bothered about your application to become a judge. I think we committed perjury and it’s really worrying me.’
Something’s stirring inside me, breaking through the shock. It’s white-hot, searing. It’s rage. Tess has always been jealous of my career, the way I succeeded where she failed. Her support has always been lukewarm, her resentment of my work conversations with Marcus palpable in the way she always tries to change the subject. Now I understand. Underneath all the talk of making amends and finding closure, I can see the truth. She’s setting me up somehow, trying to fuck with my head in the way that only Tess can do.
But then I look at the cut on her head, I smell the whiff of her urine from my clothes and the rage subsides. She’s facing something bigger than I can possibly comprehend. Sure, it might make no sense that she’s decided to fixate on all this now, but who’s to say how someone reacts given a serious diagnosis of illness. I might have put Linda out of my mind, packed it all away from the moment that I left Edinburgh. But I can see it’s important to Tess.
‘What do you want to do?’ I say in the end.
‘Confess to Linda. Tell her we were protecting ourselves. Protecting Stewart, too.’
I take a deep breath. ‘I understand how strongly you feel,’ I say, ‘but I’m really worried about this. Not just for my own sake, but for yours. It’s not just that we didn’t back her up in court, didn’t confirm that Stewart had lunged at her and wasn’t letting go. It’s why he did it. What he thought. Is that really something we want to go into? Could you handle that coming out?’
She nods her head. ‘However bad, it would make me feel so much better, knowing that it was all out in the open,’ Tess says. ‘This is going to be so hard to deal with as it is, without having that hanging over me.’
I want to say that I don’t understand why it should be hanging over her. It’s not like it’s her future that’s at stake. She’ll feel better about herself, that’s all. My career will be in ruins. But I know what Tess’s conscience is like, a slumbering beast, slow to rouse, but unstoppable in its fury once it’s fully stirred. It is inarguable that without our testimony, Linda might have been cleared, the verdict at worst not proven. By saying we didn’t think we’d seen Stewart touch her, it ruined her claims of self-defence, made it look like an unprovoked attack. I do understand it.
Tess is beginning to look more and more distressed. I can’t bear the idea that I might drive her to another seizure. I know how much she already has to deal with, and I’m overcome now with guilt, that I’ve added to that.
‘I’ll speak to her,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell her what we did. Why we did it.’
‘You do that,’ Tess says. ‘Do it fast. We don’t have much time.’
‘I promise.’ With that, I leave.
But as I walk away from her house, Marcus’s words come back to me.
Maybe this whole brain tumour story is a lie . . .
I shake my head, keep walking. The thought doesn’t leave me, though, a little smear of mud across an unmarked screen. Along with the doubt still lurking in the back of my mind. I thought Gareth was safe. But maybe he’s not what he seems, either.
28
Time’s done something strange. It’s stretched, curled round itself. I can’t get a handle on it, days merging. Without work, I’m a paragraph without punctuation, the words running over into each other without an end in sight. I give no one my new number; no one calls my landline. Not that anyone has for years. I sent one message to Linda, right after leaving Tess’s that afternoon, the one that seems now so far away. Only a few words.
I need to tell you something. You’re right – we lied. I’m sorry.
I sent it, then deleted the app from the phone. I can’t bear to look again to see what reply she might have sent. Just as I can’t bear to log into my email, or check in at chambers, see if anyone has left any messages for me. They’ve taken my diary, my cases – they can deal with any issues that might arise. I’ve got nothing to add.
I sit in my flat, night blurring into day and back to night again. I scavenge from the fridge, the back of the freezer. Even the old packs of noodles that have been sitting there for years. I can’t bear the idea of walking into a shop for fresh food, dealing with people. Or daylight. I don’t want anyone to see me. I can’t face running into someone I know, trying to make idle chit-chat, Fine, yes, you? Not so good, under investigation for sending indecent images to a child. Not the way the conversation should go.
The mess is still where the police left it, the piles of clothes from the drawers that they emptied, the papers strewn across the floor. I can’t bring myself to tidy up. I can’t bring myself to wash, to change my clothes. I’m slowly putrefying in the dark of my flat, the blinds shut at all hours. The doorbell rings occasionally but I ignore it, pushing the missed delivery cards to one side when I go out occasionally for walks at the dead of night.
The only way that I mark time is watching box sets, all the series I’ve meant to watch for years, never had time. The Wire, The Sopranos, The Deuce, segue to the Godfather films. I even manage The Seventh Seal, Death playing chess almost a welcome diversion from my bounded reality. The nightmare isn’t a dream. I’m not going to wake up from it because it’s here already, pressing down on me. Even if all this bullshit about Philip is resolved, there’s still the truth of the matter with Linda.
If it’s the truth . . . I’m not listening to the doubts Marcus has seeded in my ear. Of course it’s what he’d want to think.
And the matter of what lies behind that, too. I’m not going to think about that, though it stalks my dreams.
Good as I am at ignoring the doorbell, this time I can’t. Someone’s leaning on it. It’s been going for at least ten minutes and while I thought it would get easier to tune it out as it kept going, it hasn’t. It’s got louder and louder in my head, building up to a crescendo of noise that’s threatening to burst my head open. The bell is going continuously and the person is thumping now on the door, an angry noise, and I can’t deal with it any more, I want it to stop because it hurts, everything hurts. I get up from the sofa where I’ve been sitting for the hours and stagger to the door, flinching from the sunlight that streams through once I open it.
It’s so bright and I’m so dazzled by the glare after all those hours spent sitting in the dark that I can’t tell who it is that’s making all the noise. A figure stands against the sunlight before a voice says ‘Sylvie’, and now I know. It’s Gareth. I shrink back inside.
He pushes past me into the flat, stopping and looking around him as if in disgust, or confusion.
‘It’s after twelve, Sylvie. Why are you still in the dark? It stinks in here.’
He opens the blinds and even though it’s cold, the beginnings of winter, he pushes the windows up too, as far as they’ll go before they hit the locks. A gust of crisp air blows through the room, cutting through the fug of stale sweat and old food.
‘Jesus, what the fuck is going on? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days,’ he says.
Days. I guess it has been. Blinking still in the light, I shuffle back to the corner of the sofa in which I’ve been nestled and curl my feet back under me, wrapping myself in the blanket that’s stiffened into place around me, it’s been left unshaken and festering for so long. Gareth sits down next to me, but not too close. I can see his nose twitching. I know I smell, but I’ve become inured to it. I’m still in the same tracksuit bottoms I wore to Tess’s house, her urine still ingrained in them.
‘Sylvie, seriously. What the hell is happening? Your phone goes straight to voicemail, you’re not replying to emails. You haven’t looked at Facebook for days. I don’t have a landline number for you.’
‘No one uses their landline,’ I interrupt.
He pays no attention. ‘Your chambers said you were on an extended leave of absence. I ran out of options to find you. So I came down. I was coming anyway to meet your friend Tess, finalise the arrangements for her party at New Year. I’ve been really worried about you.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, though I know it’s pathetic to try and pretend. Obviously, I’m not fine. I’m very far from fine.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
‘It’s . . . it’s really difficult. I don’t even know. But the police . . . the police think that I . . .’ I’m trying to speak, but putting it into words is hard, so hard. I haven’t spoken to anyone for the best part of a week and my tongue feels swollen now, stuck to the roof of my mouth, my throat like sandpaper.
‘What do the police think?’
‘They think I sent indecent photos to a child. And that I made a pass at him,’ I say, rushing the words out so that I don’t have to hear them, and without any warning, tears spring out of my eyes and I start to sob, great raucous noises bursting from me, snot streaming out of my nose. Gareth makes no move to comfort me but sits, watching me, though it takes me some time to realise that he’s at such a remove from me.
Eventually my tears subside. ‘I’m sorry, it’s been a really bad week,’ I say.
‘Why do the police think that?’ he says.
I can’t ignore his distance any more. It’s almost palpable. ‘I don’t know. They haven’t given me any information. They’ve taken all my devices and searched the flat. That’s why it’s such a mess.’
‘Have they charged you?’
‘No, they haven’t. As I said, I don’t know what’s going on.’ I’m curling up tighter and tighter in my corner, bewildered at the tone of his voice, the edge that’s emerging. ‘Do you think it’s something I’d do, Gareth? Do you seriously think I’d send dirty photos to a fifteen-year-old defendant in one of the trials I’m presiding over? Don’t you know me any better than that?’
‘I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all.’
His contempt stirs something up in me, a smoulder of anger. ‘You’re the only person who has any nude photos of me, Gareth. How do I know it wasn’t you?’
His face goes completely still. I don’t dare meet his eyes in case I turn to stone.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ I can’t finish the sentence. This is all wrong, very, very wrong. ‘Of course I didn’t do it. Or you. Someone is setting me up. Most likely the defendant himself, or one of his friends.’
Gareth’s face relaxes, only by a tiny amount, a shift at the corner of his mouth perhaps a tiny sign that he’s hearing what I’m saying. He uncrosses his legs and crosses them again but this time his foot is pointing in my direction, his torso too, even if his head is still averted somewhat. He might be listening.
I press on. ‘Believe me, I’ve done nothing but think about this. I’ve sat here for hours and hours, trying to work it out. Between this and Linda—’
‘What about Linda?’
‘I told her I lied,’ I say. ‘It was the last message I sent before I turned my phone off.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’m too scared to find out. I’m too scared to do anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Gareth, I really don’t. I don’t understand how any of this happened.’
I start to cry again, quieter this time but no less impassioned, and this time I feel Gareth’s hand on my shoulder, his arm round me, and I sob into his chest until I’ve exhausted all the tears I have left to cry.
After a while, Gareth gets up and starts to tidy. Now that I’ve calmed down, I’m conscious of how rancid my clothes are, how greasy my hair is. I need to have a shower. It’s too shaming to be like this with Gareth here, all clean and smelling of shampoo and aftershave.
‘I must wash,’ I say.
‘You’re not kidding,’ he says. ‘How long has it been anyway?’
‘I’m not sure. What day is it today?’
‘You really don’t know? It’s Saturday. Saturday lunchtime. I’m going to meet your friend late afternoon. We don’t have much time left to decide what she wants for this party. I don’t even know how many people are coming.’
