It Ends At Midnight, page 25
‘I remember now, Sylvie. For all these years I took your word for it that you were sure about what happened, that this was for the best because I’d get in trouble too. You made me believe it was me, but it wasn’t.’
‘Why would I have told Stewart to go for Linda? He was my boyfriend. I hated her. I hated the fact he’d got off with her before,’ I say. Old jealousies, long forgotten, bursting up inside me now.
‘You could hardly blame Linda for that. Are you still refusing to admit what Stewart was like?’ Tess says. ‘Fuck’s sake. At some point you need to accept the truth. He was a complete shit.’ She’s agitated, a note in her voice close to panic. But she’s on the attack, no longer wounded prey. ‘That’s what I told Linda – I mean Gareth. You could never see Stewart for what he was.’
Another bang. I jump, nerves shredded now. The impact of what Tess has said is sinking in. I’m standing now, careless as to my balance, where I’m standing on the pitched roof. Tess is sneering and fury is beginning to rise up in me, bubbling up from the bottom of my stomach.
‘What do you mean, that’s what you told Linda? Have you been trying to blame me for everything?’
Gareth turns his wrath on me. ‘Stop fucking lying, Sylvie. You owe me the truth. We’re going to settle this, once and for all.’
I’m panting now, anger, dread, adrenaline all coursing through me. I can hear Tess breathing heavily too, Gareth breathing easy, light on the balls of his feet like a boxer ready to land his next punch.
‘I can explain. It all happened so fast,’ I say. ‘None of us could be sure what happened. But Stewart didn’t deserve to die.’
Tess is laughing again, a high-pitched hysteria. If stress is a trigger, any minute now she’s going to have another seizure. If it’s true she’s ill, that is.
‘I can’t think of anyone who deserved to die more than Stewart,’ Tess says. ‘He was a complete shit. We should have stopped him.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’ Gareth says.
There’s more fireworks now, more banging. Midnight must be approaching. I’m hanging on Gareth’s every word, Tess’s too, trying to catch every nuance of what they’re saying. Tess hasn’t replied and I look over to her to see her clutching her head, bent over against the sky. She’s so close to the edge . . .
‘Please stop it. I’m not feeling well,’ she says. ‘I think I’m going to . . .’
‘Oh, please,’ I say. ‘You don’t think we believe you, do you? The whole thing’s a lie. Brain cancer doesn’t look like this.’
‘It’s exactly what it looks like. Linda had a secondary brain tumour – it’s what killed her in the end,’ Gareth says. I’ve been dumped in ice, my body freezing now, my head submerged too.
Tess looks up, her face contorted. ‘I told you I was ill. You have to believe me. And you have to start telling the truth. Linda didn’t seduce Stewart. He assaulted her. Stewart raped me, did you know that? The night you thought I had a threesome with them. It wasn’t what I wanted. You kept covering for him and covering for him, but all the time . . .’
Words that change it all. Everything I’ve ever thought, turned on its head. Stewart the aggressor, Linda the victim. Tess the victim too. Me? All I’ve ever done is see myself as the victim, closed myself off from any truth that might threaten my future.
‘Tess,’ I say, ‘Tess, what the fuck?’
She’s crouched over now, a seizure taking hold. I’m frozen in place.
‘What’s going on?’ It’s Marcus. He’s on the roof now, looking around him wildly. He catches sight of Tess on the edge, pushes past me, Gareth too. By now he’s going too fast. Both men lose their footing, slipping down the slope of the roof.
Tess is on her side, convulsions taking hold of her. She’s caught by a low parapet, but Gareth goes straight over it, falling over the edge. Marcus is only a few seconds behind, but his legs have caught on the parapet.
Time’s stopped. The bullet in the matrix but it’s slipped through my fingers. Too late to catch Gareth’s fall. The words Tess has spoken crash through my mind. Rape. Stewart. Her cancer.
It’s real.
The shield I’ve built around me all these years is cracking. I can’t deny it any more. It was all my fault.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ Then I move.
Gareth’s gone. I can’t even think. Tess is in front of me, her body juddering. The ice that’s bound me in place shatters, fire now in my veins. I move over her as fast as I can, throwing myself at Marcus’s legs, pulling at him to bring him back up. But Tess’s body arches, and she kicks me in the back so hard I stumble, fall. I’m over the edge now, still holding on to Marcus. She kicks me again.
She’s right. I’ve always known the truth. I just couldn’t handle it.
Marcus has nearly managed to pull himself up. He’s almost safe. He gives one last wrench, throwing himself sideways to catch at the edge, bring himself over, and as he does I lose my grip. The past is crashing down on me. Too tired to break my fall. I’m at the edge now, hands grabbing onto nothing, my leg catching onto part of the structure. All that holds me there.
Bangs in the sky, great thumps. Headlong over the edge now, nothing between me and the ground but air . . .
It’s a blur of pain now, shooting agony from my leg. The drop’s looming below me. My leg caught on the parapet, my dress too. I’m being held by a thread. I try to drag myself up but I can’t, gravity’s pull too strong on me. I’m screaming, my mouth wide open, but nothing’s coming out.
More noises on the roof above. More bangs. Fucking fireworks. The pain’s unbearable in my leg. There’s no one to help me. I shout again, twisting madly, trying over and over again to pull myself up, flailing like a broken puppet in the void.
The pain’s excruciating now, bolts of electricity searing up my leg from my ankle. A crack of metal and the pain stops. But now I’m falling.
Flashes of red, gold, green, purple.
Sparks. Smoke. An artillery of explosions.
Midnight.
12:04:59
It’s nearly over now. A minute more, maybe two. It’s going to end. This agony will be over. Though the pain has lessened now, adrenaline spiking through.
I can see so clearly now. Everything I buried has come to the surface. I was always chasing my dream. Too caught in ambition to deal with the truth. It’s almost funny. A tragedy, right there.
I did make Tess take the blame for it. It was safer. She didn’t have plans – I had everything to lose. So I told her what she’d done and she believed me. What she thought she knew, what I knew I knew, all these years . . .
I hope the boy gets off lightly, that boy who told the truth in court. I looked at him and wished I’d had the strength. I was too selfish, though.
My mind’s wandering. I’m jumping from place to place, year to year. The pain’s nearly gone. Seconds left, at most.
Back at the beach now. I remember. Everything I’ve hidden. I did tell him to go for Linda. Pride – I didn’t want him to see how hurt I was, that I’d meant so little to him. Spite, too. I’d persuaded myself it was all Linda’s fault. If he’d never got off with her that New Year, none of the rest of it would have happened. I didn’t care what she wanted. I didn’t care what he did to her now. I wanted her to suffer like I was. Or at least, a part of me did.
I couldn’t watch it, though. I ran away. But then I came back. Stewart bumped into me. He was staggering. Confused. I thought he was drunk. He saw me, almost fell upon me, and the smell of him, the weight . . . it took me straight back to that night, the pain I’d felt. The shame.
I pushed him off me, watched him fall, a sick thud as his head hit a jagged rock on the ground under the sea buckthorn. I ran away without stopping to check. I didn’t know he’d already suffered one head injury.
I didn’t know he was going to die.
I wonder if it felt like this. Did he know? Did it hurt?
I wish I could say I’m sorry.
Not to him. To Linda. To Tess, for making her feel so guilty all these years. It was my fault. I was covering up so many lies, I made myself forget what was true.
No more hiding now. Too late.
All too late.
It’s the end . . .
TESS
It’s February before I can face returning to the place where it happened. Marcus and I take the train, the short taxi drive to Regent Terrace. I look at the iron railings, the gap cut in the front from where they removed the bodies. I lay a bunch of white roses, Sylvie’s favourite.
The days after that night are still a blur. I spent most of them in bed, shaking. I don’t remember much from being brought down from the roof other than being wrapped in a blanket and held tight in a warm room. The police tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t stop crying.
Whenever a firework went off, I started to scream. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear them without screaming. They asked so many questions. It was endless. We went up to watch the fireworks; it ended in disaster. Drunk people and roofs don’t mix. We should have known better.
The toxicology report for Sylvie shows a considerable level of alcohol. A few times over the legal limit to drive. Of course she wouldn’t have been able to stand up.
I should hate Gareth for what he did, how much he lied to us. Somehow that’s all gone. He must have been hoping for years that he’d find me or Sylvie, furious at how we’d let his sister go to prison, convinced that the stress of this was what caused her to develop cancer. Die. After that he took his mother’s name, his camouflage in place for the day he tracked us down. It would have been hard for him to find us at first because of Sylvie’s avoidance of social media, my marriage and change of name. When he saw Sylvie’s name badge at the conference, he must have known it was his only chance to get close. When I asked her to start looking for Linda it was a gift from heaven to him, the opportunity at last to work out what happened. Who set his sister up.
Sylvie didn’t know how much I hated Stewart. How scared I was of him. But she’d been terrified of losing him. He’d been her ticket out of obscurity, the wallflower lingering too long at the sides of the room. When he started going out with her, she was made, no door at school left unopened. She turned a blind eye to everything.
I was too drunk to be sure what happened that night. I thought I saw Stewart put his hands on Linda, I saw her back away. I thought I heard him shout something, maybe even she told me you were up for it. I saw Linda lean down, pick up the piece of driftwood from by the fire. I saw her hit Stewart on the head, how he staggered back, away from the fire. I voiced my suspicions as to what I’d seen to Sylvie, but she said no. She said I was drunk, I’d got myself confused. The more she said it, the less sure I was of what I’d seen, the images dissipating in my mind like smoke in wind.
When the police asked their questions, I told them nothing of what I thought I’d seen.
Sylvie was adamant nothing happened. She was standing right there and she saw nothing. I agreed because I didn’t know what else to say. What else to do. She was my best friend – I didn’t want to see her get into trouble.
I knew how much she liked him, how possessive she was of him. It made no sense that she’d have encouraged him to go after someone else. It was all Linda’s fault. That’s what I thought for years . . . The dead boy was Sylvie’s ex-boyfriend. Linda was nothing to us.
Not back then.
The thought of her never left me, though. It built and built, her face in the fire, her face in court, the betrayal we wrought on her day on day, year on year. I knew what Stewart was like. I did nothing to stop him. Linda told me what he did to her – I didn’t pay attention.
So much for the sisterhood.
‘Linda was acting in self-defence. We should never have protected him. I was so drunk and Sylvie was so adamant that Linda had assaulted Stewart out of the blue . . .’
‘She was adamant about a lot of things. She was convinced your cancer wasn’t real, you know,’ Marcus says. ‘And that I was secretly in love with her, too.’
‘She always had such a thing for you,’ I say. ‘Even though you were only ever just friends. She thought I stole you off her. It was really sad. I guess I didn’t realise how much pressure she was under. If I’d left it alone . . .’
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Marcus says. ‘She was tricky before, but after she was charged it’s as if she’d lost all grip on reality. I was going to tell you, her Head of Chambers has been in touch – she’s completely exonerated. It was all a set-up by the boy. His dad backed him up because he didn’t want to get him into trouble, but when they established that the photographs were fakes, he came clean, told them it was all lies. The QC is being investigated too. He’s a close family friend of the defendant’s dad and was turning a blind eye to it all. Forget robbery – they’re being done for attempting to pervert the course of justice. They’ve dropped the charges against the other two boys. Sylvie’s name would have been clear. She’d have been a judge. It’s so sad . . .’
‘It is sad,’ I say. ‘But that’s what she did to Linda. OK, in a different way, but Sylvie was happy to let her be convicted for something she didn’t do. She was always desperate to protect her own reputation, make sure nothing got in the way of her career. Even back at school. I knew I had to get her to stop and take a proper look at herself.’
‘You were doing the right thing,’ Marcus says. ‘She needed to confront her part in the past. Someone went to prison because of her.’
‘Because of me, too,’ I say.
‘I think you’re being punished enough,’ Marcus says.
‘Maybe.’
‘Are you sure you’re doing OK on your own?’ he says. ‘I could move back in. Treatment can be really hard.’
I shake my head. ‘You know it’s not what either of us want,’ I say. ‘We knew it from the start, really. I’ll be OK. They say the treatment’s working. I’ll have to wait and see.’
‘I’ll keep in touch,’ he says. ‘If you’d like me to.’
I hug my arms round myself. ‘I know it was all too late, but I did try,’ I say. ‘I did try to get her to tell the truth.’
Marcus pauses for a while before he replies. ‘At least she came right at the end.’
‘She did.’
She saved him. Her hands on him, pulling him back. If only I hadn’t lost control at that moment, unable to restrain myself from kicking out at Sylvie. She was hanging on to Marcus for dear life – he so nearly went over the edge, too. I gaze at him for a moment, wondering if he knows how near to death he came.
Turning away, I look at the iron spikes on what’s left of the railing, tracing one of them with the tips of my finger. All those years of friendship, of rivalry. It ended here.
A shiver runs across my scalp, a breath of cold wind. I wrap my coat round me. It’s time to go.
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Harriet Tyce, It Ends At Midnight
