فصل 71

71

JULES

When Lena came back downstairs, her face and hands scrubbed clean, she sat at the kitchen table and ate ravenously. Afterwards, when she smiled and said thank you, I shivered, because now that I have seen it, I can’t unsee it. She has her father’s smile.

(What else, I wondered, does she have of his?)

“What’s wrong?” Lena asked suddenly. “You’re staring at me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my face reddening. “I’m just . . . I’m glad you’re home. I’m glad you’re safe.”

“Me too.”

I hesitated a moment before going on. “I know you’re tired, but I need to ask you, Lena, about what happened today. About the bracelet.”

She turned her face from me towards the window. “Yeah. I know.”

“Mark had it?” She nodded again. “And you took it from him?”

She sighed. “He gave it to me.”

“Why did he give it to you? Why did he have it in the first place?”

“I don’t know.” She turned her head back to face me, her eyes blank, shuttered. “He told me he found it.”

“He found it? Where?” She didn’t answer. “Lena, we need to go to the police about this, we need to tell them.”

She got to her feet and took her plate over to the sink. Her back to me, she said, “We made a deal.”

“A deal?”

“That he would give me Mum’s bracelet and let me go home,” she said, “so long as I told the police that I’d lied about him and Katie.” Her voice was incongruously light as she busied herself with the dishes.

“And he believed you would do that?” She raised her skinny shoulders to her ears. “Lena. Tell me the truth. Do you think . . . do you believe Mark Henderson was the one who killed your mum?”

She turned around and looked at me. “I’m telling the truth. And I don’t know. He told me he took it from Mrs. Townsend’s office.”

“Helen Townsend?” Lena nodded. “Sean’s wife? Your head teacher? But why would she have the bracelet? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” she said quietly. “Not really.”

I made tea and we sat together at the kitchen table, sipping our drinks in silence. I held Nel’s bracelet in my hand. Lena sat loose-limbed, her head bowed, visibly sagging in front of me. I reached out and grazed her fingers with my own.

“You’re exhausted,” I said. “You should go to bed.”

She nodded, looking up at me with hooded eyes. “Will you come up with me, please? I don’t want to be by myself.”

I followed her up the stairs and into your room, not her own. She clambered onto your bed and lay her head on the pillow, patting the space next to her.

“When we first got here,” she said, “I couldn’t sleep by myself.”

“All the noises?” I asked, clambering up next to her and covering us with your coat.

She nodded. “All the creaking and the moaning . . .”

“And all your mother’s scary stories?”

“Exactly. I used to come in here and sleep next to Mum all the time.”

There was a lump in my throat, a pebble. I couldn’t swallow. “I used to do that with my mum, too.”

• • •

SHE FELL ASLEEP. I stayed at her side, looking down at her face, which in repose was yours exactly. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, to do something motherly, but I didn’t want to wake her or alarm her or do something wrong. I have no idea how to be a mother. I’ve never taken care of a child in my entire life. I wished that you would speak, that you would tell me what to do, what to feel. As she lay beside me, I think I did feel tenderness, but I felt it for you and for our mother, and the second her green eyes flicked open and fixed on mine, I shivered.

“Why are you always watching me like that?” she whispered, half smiling. “It’s really weird.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and rolled on to my back.

She slipped her fingers between mine. “It’s OK,” she said. “Weird’s OK. Weird can be good.”

We lay there, side by side, our fingers interlaced. I listened to her breathing slow, then quicken, and then slow once again.

“You know, what I don’t understand,” she whispered, “is why you hated her so much.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“She didn’t understand either.”

“I know,” I said. “I know she didn’t.”

“You’re crying,” she whispered, reaching over to touch my face. She brushed the tears from my cheek.

I told her. All the things I should have told you, I told them to your daughter instead. I told her how I’d let you down, how I’d believed the worst of you, how I’d allowed myself to blame you.

“But why didn’t you just tell her? Why didn’t you tell her what really happened?”

“It was complicated,” I said, and I felt her stiffen beside me.

“Complicated how? How complicated could it be?”

“Our mother was dying. Our parents were in a terrible way and I didn’t want to do anything to make it worse.”

“But . . . but he raped you,” she said. “He should have gone to prison.”

“I didn’t see it that way. I was very young. I was younger than you are, and I don’t just mean in years, although I was that, too. But I was naive, completely inexperienced, I was clueless. We didn’t talk about consent in the way you girls do now. I thought . . .”

“You thought what he did was OK?”

“No, but I don’t think I saw it for what it was. What it really was. I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn’t think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girl in town. I didn’t think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn’t think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you’d had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn’t made it clear enough that I didn’t want it.”

Lena was silent for a while, but when she spoke again her voice was higher, more insistent. “OK, maybe you didn’t want to say anything at the time, but what about later? Why didn’t you explain it to her later on?”

“Because I misunderstood her,” I said. “I misjudged her completely. I thought that she knew what had happened that night.”

“You thought that she knew and did nothing? How could you think that of her?”

How could I explain that? That I pieced together your words—the words you said to me that night and the words you said to me later, Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?—and I told myself a story about you that made sense to me, that allowed me to get on with my life without ever having to face what really happened.

“I thought that she chose to protect him,” I whispered. “I thought she chose him over me. I couldn’t blame him, because I couldn’t even think about him. If I’d have blamed him and thought about him, I’d have made it real. So I just . . . I thought about Nel instead.”

Lena’s voice grew cold. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there’s two people doing something wrong and one of them’s a girl, it’s got to be her fault, right?”

“No, Lena, it’s not like that, it isn’t—”

“Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?”