Heart-Shaped Bruise (3 page)

I almost did because I’m desperate to know how miserable Juliet is. That’s the only thing keeping me going right now, knowing that even though she’s out there while I’m stuck in here, I’m the one who’s free. But I didn’t reach for it and Doctor Gilyard didn’t read it out, so I guess I’ll never know now.

I’ll never sleep again, wondering what’s in that letter.

I think Lily has started smoking because of me. I’ve never seen her smoke before, but now she sits with Naomi and me whenever we’re having one. Naomi says she has a crush on me. I don’t know about that, but if she does, she has exceptional taste.

Today after breakfast, Naomi was with Doctor Gilyard so it was just us. I watched as Lily tried to skin up, her forehead pinched and her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. It was funny at first; she was concentrating so much it looked like she was trying to disarm a bomb. But after a few minutes, her hands started to shake. When the tobacco began to spill from the ends of the thin paper I took it from her and rolled the cigarette with a few quick flicks of my wrist.

When I gave it back to her, she didn’t light it.

‘Homesick,’ I said, picking my roll-up back out of the ashtray.

She looked at her feet. I saw her toes curl in her shoes. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I wasn’t asking.’

It was a statement, not a question. There are words you can’t say in here; you don’t ask why, you don’t ask how, you don’t ask about tomorrow and you never ask about home.

It’s one of the only rules I observe here without protest.

I don’t know what Naomi and Lily did to get put in here. I know what they were
charged
with, but I’m not writing it down. I want you to know them for who they are, not what they’ve done. When they get out of here, that’s all they’ll be. That’s all any of us in here will be, right? What we’ve done. You must know that, being in here, too.

At school they drummed it into us that God will forgive us anything if we ask him to, but that isn’t true, is it? Forgiveness is useless if other people still remember what you did. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever shake off my mistakes or if I’ll just carry them around with me for ever like a bunch of red balloons.

Our don’t ask, don’t tell rule isn’t one Doctor Gilyard pays much attention to.

‘Tell me about the day you found Juliet,’ she said to me a couple of weeks ago.

I ignored her but she pushed on because she’s as stubborn as I am. One day, one of us will win. I’m looking forward to finding out which of us it will be.

‘It was three weeks after your father’s trial, right?’

Silence.

‘Juliet was in Witness Protection. How did you find her?’

Silence.

‘It was your Uncle Alex, wasn’t it? He told you where she was.’

Silence.

‘What did you go there to do, Emily?’

I didn’t speak to Doctor Gilyard for the rest of our session, but when Lily asked me if I ever get homesick, I told her that I didn’t. I don’t know why; there’s just something about her sad little smile and fragile fingers that makes something in me soften.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t have a home,’ I said between puffs of my cigarette.

She lifted her chin. ‘How come?’

I shrugged. ‘When you go to boarding school home stops being one place.’

I guess that’s why it doesn’t bother me, being in here. I’m used to it, to eating when I’m told, to sleeping in a room that isn’t mine, in a bed that isn’t mine.

‘When I think of home,’ I said, almost to myself, ‘I think of the flat I was born in.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘On the Scarbrook Estate in Finsbury Park.’

She thought about it for a second or two. ‘Is that a council estate?’

I smiled. Most people think I was born in Surrey because that’s the story they tell in the papers. They print pictures of our house and Dad’s fleet of vintage cars (it’s not quite a
fleet
, but four doesn’t sound as impressive, I suppose) so people think I’m
a proper princess. And yeah, it’s true, I did go to a £30,000-a-year boarding school and we had a villa in Puerto Banus and I drove a Mercedes and wore dresses made of kitten hair and I had a baby unicorn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all true.

But I was also born on a council estate.

‘So when did you move to Godalming?’ she asked.

I sat back and smiled. She knows I live in Godalming. She’s not that naïve.

‘When I was three,’ I told her. ‘When Mum left.’

‘Where did she go?’

I tensed. As sweet as Lily is, there’s a line and her toes were on it. ‘I dunno.’

‘What? She just left and never came back?’

I had to stop because it was like Lily had my heart in her hand and she was squeezing it hard enough to leave a bruise.

So I stood up and she watched me carefully as I stubbed my cigarette out. She probably had a dozen more questions, but she pressed her lips together and for once, she didn’t follow me when I walked away.

I haven’t said a word to Doctor Gilyard since she wouldn’t read me Juliet’s letter. It’s become a battle of wills now. I don’t even know what I’m fighting for any more; I just know that giving in first feels too much like breaking.

‘I’d like to go back to the day you found Juliet,’ she said this morning, like that was actually going to happen. Like I was just going to say,
Okay, Doctor G
, and spill my guts.

I snorted and crossed my arms.

‘You didn’t do anything, did you, Emily? You followed her to London in August, so why wait until you both started college in September to speak to her?’

She waited for me to respond, but I looked away.

Doctor Gilyard’s office is almost bare. There are only a few bits of furniture – the chairs we sit on, the coffee table between
them, a bookshelf, a desk and swivel chair, but that’s it. No plant in the corner of the room, no framed diplomas, no paintings of calm country scenes.

It’s an empty, hopeless room, but if I have to ignore her, there are still half a dozen things I can distract myself with. A ring on the coffee table. A loose thread on my chair. Recently I’ve been focusing on a crack in the wall. It’s nothing, just a thin line in the plaster that looks like someone’s brushed past the wall with a pencil, but I’ve been staring at it for weeks. It’s bigger than it was when I first noticed it, I’m sure of it. I’ve convinced myself that if I keep staring at it, it’ll get bigger, and if it does, a crack will become a gap and a gap will become a hole and I’ll be through.

‘Why didn’t you confront her, if that’s what you went there to do?’ she persisted.

When I didn’t respond, I heard her scribble something in her notebook.

‘I went back to Juliet’s interview transcripts yesterday. She says that she doesn’t remember seeing you before you met that morning at the college, is that right?’

Juliet doesn’t remember seeing me because I made sure I wasn’t seen. For a month we moved around each other. I followed her everywhere; across bridges, down escalators. I trailed behind her at the supermarket, watching as she sniffed peaches and read the backs of cereal boxes. Once, I even sat in the row behind hers at the cinema. I can’t remember what film it was, I just remember looking at her – looking and looking – waiting for her to do something, to laugh, to cry, to fall asleep. Anything. It
was as if my life had become a reaction to hers. If she had run out of the cinema that afternoon, I would have run after her. If she had stayed and watched another film, I would have stayed and watched her.

By then, I knew her routine. Every morning she bought a green tea from the café on the high street and drank it in the bookshop next door, sitting on the floor of the poetry section with her back against the wall. She would emerge an hour later with a half-read paperback between her fingers, then head to the park to watch the office workers sitting on their jackets eating Pret A Manger sandwiches in the last of the summer sun. In the afternoons, I followed her around art galleries or watched as she picked through the clothes rails at charity shops. Some afternoons she would just sit on the top deck of the bus and ride it until the end of the line, then get off, cross the road and get another bus home.

I guess it became my routine too, because when I got back to the perfect but hollow flat Uncle Alex had found for me, the only thing that made those long, long nights bearable was knowing I’d see her the next morning, walking out of that café with a white paper cup.

But she never saw me. Not once. And I was surprised because I expected her to look up every time someone got on her carriage on the tube or sat on the bench opposite hers at the park. But she’d be too distracted by a book or she’d be sketching something in the black Moleskine she carried with her everywhere. I was desperate to see what she was drawing. I wanted to cross
everything out, write,
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
on every page.

Three Wednesdays in a row she met a man at a café near Euston station. The café was always frantically busy. Tourists chatted excitedly while men in dull-coloured suits swept in and out, in and out, each of them barking into their phones, then at the baristas, then at the tourists for leaving their backpacks on the floor. So neither of them noticed each week as I sat at the next table, pretending to be engrossed in
The Catcher in the Rye
. They were distracted, I guess. He was her counsellor. Sahil, a quiet, elegant man with long fingers and hair the colour of poppy seeds. He was a lot like Doctor Gilyard; they both have that poise, that smoothness I want to disturb. Juliet told me later, when we were friends, that she’d been seeing him since her parents died and when she moved to Islington, he continued their sessions.

‘Why did you want to meet here, Nancy?’ he’d asked her that first Wednesday.

I wonder if he had to tell himself not to call her Juliet.

When she didn’t respond, he crossed his legs and looked across the small, round table at her. ‘What makes you uncomfortable about meeting at UCL like we usually do?’

I lifted my eyes from my book then but she didn’t respond. She just shrugged and continued to trace the rim of her coffee cup with her finger.

That’s how it was every week; she didn’t say much and she never said Dad’s name. Never. She just said
him
whenever she had to mention him. It was like he didn’t exist, like it never
happened. Maybe that’s why she wanted to meet at that café instead of the hospital, because she thought she was better.

After all, she’d taken a match and thrown it over her shoulder. She was Nancy Wells – she never had to say Dad’s name again. But each time I heard her say
him
I wanted to take a handful of her hair and pull until she said it.

I know she couldn’t sleep, that much she told him. She said that she woke up most nights gasping, the sheets sticking to her skin. She had tablets for it, but when Sahil asked why she wouldn’t take them she said that she didn’t need to, that not all the dreams were bad. She said sometimes she dreamt she was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking at the sea.

When she described it – the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea – it made me think of that cottage in Brighton where we took Nanna Koll every summer before Gramps died. There was a tree not far from it and I would climb it and look across at the sea claiming everything I saw as my own; the birds, the hills, our postcard-perfect cottage with the red-painted shutters. So when Juliet said that standing on the edge of that cliff in her dream was so beautiful that she threw herself towards the sea, I knew why.

Sahil asked her if it was scary, falling like that, but she said that it wasn’t, that it made her feel light and strong, all at once. But then she said that before she hit the water, she realised she had wings and started to fly.

I’d stared at her then. I couldn’t help it, because when he asked her what she thought it meant, I knew what he was trying to do: he was trying to make her think that she saved herself that
night, from Dad. It made me so angry that I wanted to fly across the table at him, remind him that she wasn’t the only one who’d lost everything.

But as I was about to, Juliet shrugged. ‘Sometimes you just dream about flying,’ she said, dipping the tip of her finger into her latte, then licking the froth away.

That night I had the same dream, that I was falling – falling and falling – but I had no wings. I still have that dream, and every time I do, when I hit the sea, it swallows me whole.

‘Emily,’ Doctor Gilyard said then, and the shock of it was like tripping up a kerb.

When I recovered, I sat a little straighter and turned my cheek towards her. ‘Have I ever told you about my cat?’

She looked at me for a moment too long, then said, ‘Your cat?’

‘Yes,
my cat
.’

‘Okay, Emily.’ She nodded. ‘Tell me about your cat.’

‘His name’s Duck.’

‘Duck?’

‘Yes.’

She took a deep breath, then smiled. ‘You have a cat called Duck?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

‘That’s his real name. I’m not making it up.’

‘Okay, Emily. Tell me about Duck.’

‘I’ve had him since he was a kitten,’ I told her, twirling a
strand of hair around my finger. ‘Dad came home with him one afternoon, out of the blue.’

‘When?’

‘When I was three—’

‘Before or after your mother left?’ she interrupted.

‘After,’ I said too quickly, charging on before she could ask any more about it. ‘He let me name him, hence Duck. It was my favourite word at the time.’ I grinned at the memory and it felt kind of nice, even if the muscles in my cheeks felt ancient. ‘Uncle Alex was mortified. He tried to get me to call him something more fitting, like Charlie or Tigger, but Duck stuck.’

‘What’s Duck like?’

‘He’s not like other cats. He doesn’t climb trees or sit by our pond, swatting at the koi carp like the other cats on our street.’

‘Does he chase birds?’

‘He doesn’t even notice them; they just strut around him, pecking at the grass while he sleeps in the sun. But he’s fascinated by squirrels,’ I told her with a slow smile. ‘He has no idea what to do with them, though. He chases after them, then stops. It’s as if his instinct is to go for them, but he doesn’t know what to do next. So he just stands there, looking at them as they scuttle over the garden fence.’