Authors: Alex Marwood
Still full-tilt now, though she knows already that he is no longer behind, that that last grab was his swansong. But she runs
and runs, leaps a hole the size of a lorry wheel, surprises herself with the cat-like grace with which she lands. She doesn’t
slow until she has tumbled – crashing into the middle of a stag party – into the light.
Amber is shocked by how easy it is to make the change, now she’s started. She’s been so afraid of her anger, of being unable
to control it if she ever gave it rein, that she’s amazed by how restrained she can be as she lets it play out.
Instead of the frenzied stuffing of bin liners, the shower of clothes from upstairs windows, the bonfire-of-the-vanity products
that the weak indulge in, she has quietly come home, waited for Vic to wake up, and told him it’s time for him to leave. No
screaming, no shouting, no tears: just a calm statement of fact. The mortgage is in her name, and for once, instead of running
when things get difficult, she has stood her ground and stated her case. She’s not flung him on to the street with a suitcase,
not changed the locks – though she thinks she probably will, once he’s cleared his stuff – or emptied the bank accounts. She’s
just told him that he needs to make other arrangements, and that then he must be gone. And then, quite calmly, she’s gone
to bed.
It’s gone lunchtime when she wakes. She’s only had a few hours’ sleep, but they’ve been deep, dreamless and restorative in
a way she can barely remember. She feels awake and alive; strong and decisive. The house is silent. Mary-Kate and Ashley curl
round each other on the bedspread, chins on paws, gazing. A tail thumps as she sits up, and they jump down to follow as she
goes downstairs.
He’s still sitting at the kitchen table where she left him, staring into space, his face blank as though he’s rebooting, his
hands flat, palms-down on the table. She has an eerie feeling that he’s been here all this time, switched off and waiting
for stimulus. He doesn’t acknowledge her as she enters; doesn’t, as far as she can see, even blink as she crosses the room
and puts on the kettle. The dogs skirt wide, eyes fixed on his rigid shoulders as though they expect him to spring suddenly
to life like a big cat. She opens the back door to let them out, goes to the fridge to get the milk.
He leaps to his feet as though an invisible hand has thrown the On switch. ‘Let me get that,’ he says.
‘Nope, you’re OK,’ she replies; tries to put herself between him and the fridge door. But he keeps on coming. Snatches the
milk from her hand – she cedes her grip on it to avoid having a mess to mop up – and takes it to the countertop. Goes into
the cupboard and gets down the mugs. ‘Earl Grey?’
Behind his back, she shrugs. ‘Earl Grey,’ she says. She’s never learned to like PG, not really. ‘Thanks,’ she adds. No point
in dropping the façade of civility when it’s all going to be done and dusted sooner or later anyway.
Vic drops the bags in the mugs, pours in the water. ‘Do you want something to eat? You must be hungry.’
‘No thanks. I’ll get myself something in a bit.’
He adds milk, spoons in the sugar. ‘Come on. I can make you a bacon sandwich.’
She shakes her head. ‘Thanks.’
‘Amber, you should eat,’ he says in that reasonable voice of his.
She can’t stop herself snapping. ‘No, Vic! I said no!’
He does that infuriating shrug that indicates that all women are mad. Takes his tea and sits down at the table. ‘How did you
sleep?’
Her mood is deteriorating rapidly. She grunts and takes her tea over to the door and looks out at the dogs. They are sniffing
and wagging around the gap at the bottom of the gate. I must take them for a walk, she thinks. Poor little sods don’t get
nearly enough exercise.
‘I was thinking,’ he says, ‘about maybe building a proper barbecue. You know. Bricks and that. Then we could have people over.
Not have to go out all the time.’
Shit. He’s pretending it never happened.
‘What do you reckon?’ he asks. ‘We don’t do enough entertaining, do we? Wouldn’t you like that?’
Amber sighs and turns back to the room. ‘No, I wouldn’t, Vic. I don’t want you to do any DIY or make me meals or try to be
nice. Thank you, but there’s no point.’
Vic raises his eyebrows. ‘Wow.’
‘I’ve said my piece,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you thinking I didn’t mean it.’
‘And I don’t get a right of reply?’
She tips her tea down the sink. She doesn’t want it any more. ‘No. You forfeited that when you fucked my friend.’
‘One mistake,’ he says.
She feels like screaming. Wishes she hadn’t tipped the tea away because the satisfaction of dashing hot liquid in his eyes
would be exquisite. Instead she puts the mug down hard in the sink and snatches the dogs’ leads from the hook by the door.
‘I’m going for a walk.’
She goes out and crouches down by the dogs. It’s hard to clip the leads on: her hands are shaking and the dogs are dancing
with anticipation. She feels him behind her, in the doorway, watching; shakes Mary-Kate by the collar to make her stand still.
‘God, you can really bear a grudge,’ he says.
‘I’m not talking about it. I’m not!’
‘You at least owe me that,’ he says.
She flings herself to her feet and dashes for the gate. ‘No I don’t!’ she snarls back. She struggles with the bolt. It’s hardly
ever used because they always go in and out through the front,
but she doesn’t want to have to push past him, doesn’t want to be confined within those walls, until she’s regained control
of herself.
‘Here, let me help you,’ he offers.
‘No!’ She’s barely aware that she’s shouting. ‘Just fuck off, will you?’
‘Amber!’ His voice is calculatedly reasonable; designed to make her angrier. ‘Come on, love. Calm down.’
The bolt gives suddenly. Shoots back and gouges a great runnel of skin out of her thumb. ‘Shit!’ she screams. ‘Shit, shit,
shit!’
‘Oh my God,’ he says. ‘Let me look.’
He steps forward, his voice all concern, his face all enjoyment. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing. All she knows is
that she wants him nowhere near. She hauls the gate open and steps backwards on to the road, screaming into his face. ‘Just
keep away from me! Fuck off! Don’t fucking touch me!’
She wheels on her heel and finds that Shaunagh Next Door is standing on the weedy verge with her baby buggy and the gimlet-eyed
biddy, Janelle Boxer, from number ten. They look thrilled. She doesn’t care.
‘I want you out of this house, Victor Cantrell,’ she shouts. ‘You just get out of my house!’
She turns to the women. ‘What are you looking at?’ she snarls.
‘Luke, please. Just turn the sound off.’
‘I need the sound,’ says Luke. ‘I can’t tell if there’s a troll coming if I haven’t got sound.’
‘You’ve played this game at least a thousand times,’ Kirsty says. ‘You must be able to remember by now.’
The noise is driving her mad. The beeps and boops assail her ears like tiny flaming arrows. With the tinny tinkle of JLS from
Sophie’s earphones and Jim’s throat-clearing, she feels as though she is under assault from all sides. Her shoulder is stiff
where she wrenched it, and a bruise on the back of her thigh makes sitting uncomfortable, moving more so, even without the
wriggling fear of a deadline to hit and a forgotten car-insurance bill.
Luke doesn’t raise his eyes from the screen. ‘Just let me get to the end of this …’ he says, and swoops his arms out as a
dwarf leaps out from behind a pillar and lobs a vial of poison. ‘Awww,
Mum
,’ he says. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
‘Go and play upstairs,’ she orders. Wishes for the millionth time that she was the kind of parent who made her kids share
a bedroom to make room for an office. She feels like a teenager doing prep. You’d never think I was this family’s main breadwinner.
I’m the only person here who doesn’t have a space of her own. Even Jim’s got his shed, goddammit.
‘In a minute,’ says Luke.
‘
Now
. I’m working.’
‘It’s not
my
fault you didn’t do your work in time,’ says Luke. Hammers at the Fire button repeatedly. Leaps out of his seat, punching
the air. ‘Yesssssss!’
Kirsty slams down the lid of the laptop. ‘Luke!’ she shouts. ‘OK, OK,’ he says, and presses the volume button, ostentatiously,
for her benefit. ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist.’
He sits back down again and hunches over his screen. Kirsty takes a deep breath, counts to ten, lets it out. Opens the computer
and stares at the pitiful collection of sentences she’s achieved since nine this morning. She can’t remember words being so
hard to find before; but then she can’t remember having to write under such duress.
Jim’s been quiet and humble all day, staying pointedly out of her way and bringing her cups of coffee on the hour, and all
it’s done is make her worse. I mustn’t resent him. It’s not his fault. He’s trying, God knows he is. But can’t he go and sit
in that damn shed and give me some
space
?
The stuff I do for this family, and they don’t have the first idea. But why the hell did I stay? I didn’t
need
to go to that stupid club. I’ve seen enough of them to know what it would be like. I could’ve come home a whole day earlier
and used my imagination instead of getting scared half to death for the sake of a bloody kill fee.
She’s got away lightly from her experience, she knows, but that doesn’t help her settle. The stags on Brighton Road piled
down the alleyway, but her assailant was long gone, her bag and its contents strewn along the tarmac. So she’s got her phone
and her notebooks and her MP3 player and all the accoutrements of her daily life still with her. That the guy’s motivation
was clearly not robbery, she can’t afford to think about right now. She’s not told Jim. Not told anyone. She’s damned if she’s
going to miss her deadline for the sake of being given an incident number and told to get in line.
She reads back what she’s written, fiddles with the cursor key as though doing so will magically conjure words on to the
screen. Even by the standards of the
Tribune
, it’s pants. Repetitive pants. There’s not a phrase, an observation, an adjective she hasn’t already used last week. This
is the bit of journalism she hates: the Groundhog Day of unresolved stories. She doesn’t want to think about Whitmouth again,
doesn’t want to revisit it, even in her mind. And yet now, by default, because a staffer prefers the ongoing drama in Sleaford,
she is the expert, and has to churn out holding copy until something happens.
I hate that place, she thinks. I can’t believe I actually liked it when I first went there. And it’s not just last night –
it’s all of it. The fact that going there has brought back a past I thought I’d overcome, my unpayable debt. The fact that
the people remind me of the family I’ll never see again, the fact that I feel my arse expand with every unspeakable meal in
its grease-spattered outlets. The horizontal rain that soaks your pores with salt, the things that slide underfoot on Marine
Parade. The blistering, blustering half-mile trudge to the end of the pier, the plastic seats in the pubs. The overwhelming
smell of cooking oil. What can I say that’s new? I said it all last week. The place hasn’t changed.
She reads, again:
Despite it all, the crowds still come to Whitmouth. The council vans that ply the seafront remove five tons of rubbish from
its bins alone each day: rubbish that includes 8,000 soft-drinks cans, 5,000 polystyrene food holders, 30 discarded shoes
and 220 soiled nappies. No local business wants to discuss the specifics of their income, but it’s clear that business is
good. Funnland, the theme park where suspected fifth victim Hannah Hardy’s body was found three weeks ago, claims gates of
roughly 3,000 a day. 1,250 tickets are sold for the tiny electric train that goes to the end of the pier, half of them oneway,
and The Old-Fashioned Sweet Emporium sells over 10kg of Whitmouth rock …
Blah, blah, blah. She highlights, deletes. Presses Control+Z to reinstate. It’s 116 words, and she needs 1,500; she can’t
just waste it. Pulls up the STUFF file on her desktop, cuts and pastes into it, saves. Tries again.
In 2007, the most recent year for which there are statistics, 1.37 million people visited Whitmouth, spending, on average,
£46 a head a day. Of those, 236,000 stayed a night, a weekend, a week – averaging four nights a head – in the town’s four
sprawling caravan parks, its 17 hotels and 87 B&Bs. All in all, that’s an income, for the town, of £95m and change. Tourism
is big business in Whitmouth – it’s the only industry of any real significance. Half the working-age element of the 67,000-person
population is employed – mostly on minimum wage and mostly seasonally – by the tourist trade. So the impact of the Seaside
Strangler’s reign of terror would be expected to be greatly more far-reaching than the devastation of the victims’ families
and friends. The Strangler, one would have thought, would be threatening the livelihood of the whole community.
Apparently not.
She shifts in her seat, feels the shriek of broken blood vessels. Suppresses a groan. Does a word count: 160. This is bollocks.
Why am I bothering? It’s taken me twenty minutes to turn that lot out, and that was the easy bit. And all for what? I
know
this is going to get pulled; that something more interesting will happen somewhere else in the country between now and Friday,
when they finalise the news features. Unless the Strangler strikes again, Whitmouth will be old news, not even fit for Monday’s
fish-and-chip wrappings.
‘Bollocks,’ she says out loud. Jim looks up from the City pages of
Private Eye
. ‘Sorry,’ she says. They have an agreement that salty hack language will not leak into family life.
‘Having trouble?’
She nods. ‘I’m tired. And knowing it’s probably not even going to run doesn’t help much.’
‘Shall I get you a coffee?’
‘I’ve got coffee leaking out of my pores.’