Now – 11th March
It’s a grim morning, cold and blustery, the city cowering under a sky like end times, tumbling boulders of granite-grey cloud sitting so low it feels like they might crush us all. For once it’s a relief to ride the escalator underground into the tail end of the morning rush with all the wet raincoats and dripping umbrellas, the contorted skeletons of folding bikes, which make me think of the broken body I’ve left behind in the lift shaft of Castle Rise.
He’s never far from my mind.
I managed a few hours of mercifully dreamless sleep last night, brought on by beer and whisky and the exhaustive efforts of screwing a younger man. I might have slept longer if Callum hadn’t woken up shouting around three a.m. He left then, even though I stroked his shoulders and kissed his hair and told him everything was fine. Maybe if I’d told him I didn’t want to be alone he would have stayed, but we both carry our shame close to the surface and take our time in exposing our wounds to one another for salving.
Suddenly the weight of all that earth above me begins to feel like a hammer poised to fall on my skull and I realise I need to get above ground.
At Warren Street I’m spat back out on to Euston’s dank topside, the traffic at a standstill, pumping exhaust fumes into the heavy air, and I see my bus turning the corner away from me as the driving rain fills my eyes. I shelter briefly in an alleyway near the stop until the next 29 arrives.
There’s a seat halfway down and I’m grateful to have it, even if the big guy in the window smells like he’s carrying rotting meat inside his distressed-leather jacket. Not an artfully distressed one, but the kind that has been slept in and on and under, which might have put out fires and soaked up puddles of indeterminate fluids.
At Mornington Crescent a frail elderly woman with chestnut-brown hair beautifully curled under a plastic headscarf gets on and I see the panic on her face when she sees she will have to stand, how tightly she grips the handrail. I get up and help her into my seat and it’s only once I’m close to her that I realise we are probably the same age.
I’m going to keep fighting. Even if I feel like shit right now, tired and scared and besieged, I won’t allow myself to fold.
I get off the bus at Camden High Street, go straight into Poundland and buy an umbrella, which probably won’t last all the way home, but I only need it to keep me dry the half-mile to Ella’s place. Thinking of her holed up there for days, knowing she won’t be eating, I make a quick circuit of the nearest supermarket: basic supplies, tea and sugary things.
By the time I reach the front step of the chopped-up Edwardian townhouse she lives in, the umbrella has buckled against the wind, two spokes broken and its skin flapping with each new gust. I hold down the buzzer until the door is answered. The boy doesn’t ask who I’m visiting, barely looks up from his phone and immediately heads back into his own room.
The house is full of muffled noises as I go up to the second floor, the sound of music playing and feet moving over creaking, clacking floorboards. Silence from inside Ella’s room. I knock and wait and when she doesn’t answer, knock harder, pushing away images of her overdosed in bed, choked on vomit, already long gone.
I’m readying to bang harder when she finally opens up. She isn’t surprised to see me. She isn’t anything, standing there in crumpled joggers and a jumper with frayed cuffs pulled down over her hands. Her eyes are puffy, lips cracked dry, her hair lying flat and greasy.
‘I was going to call you today,’ she says in a hoarse voice, and walks away. ‘I think I’ve got a virus or something. I don’t feel good.’
Her room smells sickly: stale breaths and her unwashed body, the bin, which needs emptying, and takeaway cartons mouldering on the counter. This isn’t like her. She’s usually fastidious about her little flat, insists she needs to be because it’s the only way to live healthily in one cramped room where your bed is only ten feet away from your kitchen sink.
She’s crawled back under the duvet. There are books on the floor to her side, her laptop half covered with papers. It looks like she’s tried to do some work but I guess the distraction wasn’t good enough.
There’s no hiding from what we’ve done. I could have told her that if she’d answered the phone when I’ve called her.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask, trying to sound upbeat.
‘I can’t eat anything.’
‘You need to try. I’ve brought pastries and some sandwiches and stuff.’
Ella rolls over in bed, turns her back to me.
I start to clean up. This doesn’t come naturally but it needs to be done. I clear all the debris into a bin liner, knot it and leave it out in the hallway for later, fill the sink and put her dirty cutlery and bowls into it, wipe down the small square of counter while the kettle boils, then make a pot of coffee.
There’s a dinky cafe table and two folding chairs set up in front of the only window and I spread out the food there, pour our coffees, feeling absurd as I do it, acting like everything is normal when inside my head I’m raging at her, wanting to drag her out of bed by her arms, shout at her to pull it together.
‘Come on, Ella. Just eat a croissant or something, then you can go back to bed.’
She hauls herself up, drags a knitted blanket off the bed and wraps it around her shoulders before she sits down opposite me. She picks up a Danish pastry and takes a single bite out of it, her eyes drifting away towards the window. The long garden out there is untended, wildly tangled with glossy creepers and the barbed whips of last year’s blackberry crawlers laid like tripwires across the weed-choked grass. At the bottom is a rickety black shed with a bush growing through its collapsed roof. Not a view worth looking at.
‘Have they found him?’ Ella asks finally.
‘Not yet.’
‘They’re going to.’ She takes another mean bite of her Danish. ‘I keep thinking about the sound he made. . .’
That dull crunch, the clang of bone hitting metal.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I tell her. ‘All that matters is what we do next.’
She snorts. ‘Wait to get caught – that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?’
Whatever I expected, this is worse. I knew she’d be guilt-stricken but I didn’t think she’d be so defeatist. She’s spent the last eighteen months fighting battles for other people, often thankless and unwinnable ones, but now, when it matters most, when her liberty and mine is hanging in the balance, she gives up?
This isn’t the Ella I know.
She’s been alone too long. Four days here, talking herself into this state. I should have come sooner. I should have known her conscience would get the better of her. She’s still her father’s daughter.
‘Ella, lovey, I know you’re scared. I’ve been going crazy with this too.’ She gives me a sceptical look. ‘But we need to hold steady, okay?’
‘Okay,’ she says, too easily, and throws her chin up. ‘We’re both calm and collected now, having coffee, eating pastries. What do we do next?’
This is why I never wanted children. They dig themselves into holes and when you pull them out they blame you for making them muddy.
‘We need to keep acting like normal,’ I say firmly. ‘You have to get back to your life. We can pass off a few days in bed as a bug, but much longer and it’s going to start to look like you’ve got something to hide.’
Her fingers are shredding the rest of the Danish pastry on to a plate, slowly, violently tearing it into tiny pieces, her face flushing.
I keep talking.
‘When he does get found – and he will, you’re right, probably soon – it’s really important nobody can point back to now and say, “Ella was acting weird.” You understand that, right? You need to look innocent.’
‘But I’m not,’ she snaps.
Here’s the anger she kept buried right after it happened, bubbling up hot and directionless. I try not to take it personally; stay calm, because one of us has to. Just like that night, it’s on me to be the cool head and a small part of me resents it even as I feel for her.
Ella buries her face in her hands. ‘I killed him.’
‘In self-defence.’ I unpeel her fingers from her face, making her look at me. ‘Ella, you can’t get consumed by guilt. You have nothing to feel guilty about. He attacked you. He made the decision to put himself in danger the second he did that. You were entirely within your rights to fight back.’
‘Then why did we dump his body?’ she asks. ‘If I was within my rights, why didn’t we call the police?’
I wonder how clear her recollection of that night is. Between the fear and the drink and the shock at what she’d done, how aware was she of the conversation we had and the agreement we came to?
‘We went through this already,’ I say wearily. ‘Where do you think you’d be right now if we called the police? You’d be on remand somewhere. Or out on bail, at best, waiting to go to trial. Ella, for God’s sake, is that what you want? Do you want to go to prison? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be locked up?’
She looks away from me. ‘Maybe it’s what I deserve.’
The quietness and the low pitch of her voice set my nerves jangling.
‘Please tell me you’re not thinking about confessing.’
Ella starts to bite her thumbnail; the skin there is already red and cracked from being incessantly worried at.
‘Confession isn’t good for the soul,’ I tell her. ‘You won’t feel even a tiny bit better if you go to the police. All you’ll do is add more fear and stress and danger to the situation you’re already in.’ I’m not even sure she’s listening to me, but I can’t give up on her. ‘Sweetheart, I understand that you feel guilty. But you being in prison isn’t going to bring him back to life and it isn’t going to make the guilt fade any faster. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘It’s not up to us, is it?’ she asks, her voice dull, all drained of anger. ‘This isn’t a question of confess and go to prison or keep it in and stay free. We could get caught for this, Molly. We committed a crime and it’s going to be investigated. Aren’t you scared?’
‘I’ve never been more terrified in my life.’
For a few minutes neither of us speaks. The rain lashing the window turns to tiny hailstones, which come at the glass in waves, peppering it like shot. I can feel thin draughts trickling in around the wooden sash, finding my exposed neck, a sensation like a blade pressed to my skin.
‘We were so stupid,’ she says quietly, staring at the blank wall in front of her. ‘He’s down there covered in our DNA.’
‘If he was at the party he’ll have come to congratulate you, hugged you, whatever. There’s bound to be a perfectly innocent reason for your DNA to be on him.’
Ella looks at me. ‘What about yours?’
I force a smile. ‘Well, you know how I get around younger men.’
She laughs and it’s just as fake as my smile but it feels like the ice melting.
Ella picks up a chicken wrap, tears the packaging off it and takes a big bite. I let her eat, top up my coffee and pass her a bottle of orange juice. I want to smoke but I can’t open the window because of the rain, so I just hold my cigarette for comfort.
‘What’s important now is that we use this time to work out our story,’ I say.
A stiff gust of wind rattles the window.
‘And working out a good story starts with the truth.’
‘I told you what happened,’ she says, concentrating on picking pieces of chicken out of her wrap. It’s not real meat. It’s the kind they blow off the bone with water jets and stick together with glue; uniform and too white, its texture all wrong.
‘Callum heard you arguing with him.’ I want her to look up but she doesn’t. ‘He said it sounded like you knew each other.’
She stares out of the window, where the hail has stopped but the rain keeps coming.
‘When I told you I didn’t know him, that was the truth. I didn’t really know him.’ She picks the blanket back up and draws it around her shoulders. ‘I met him last year after some Guardian masterclass, I can’t even remember which one now. A load of us went for drinks, and him and me got talking. We went back to his. We had some completely mediocre sex. I didn’t come. He didn’t care. I left straight after.’
The blanket is up around her jaw and she’s sinking into it, ashamed even though she has no reason to be.
‘Then what?’
‘Then,’ her face tightens into a bitter smile. ‘Then he started emailing me. He wanted to see me again, when was I around for coffee or lunch or something? He thought there’d been a spark. Didn’t I feel it? Was I too stuck up to date someone like him? Wasn’t he useful enough to me? Who the fuck did I think I was?’ She spiels it out in a monotone, like this isn’t the only man she could tell this story about. ‘I ignored him. He went quiet. Then he started again, tried to be more polite. Told me he had a contact I should talk to at Lambeth Council about some dodgy dealing with a Chinese development firm. I thought it stank and even if I believed it I wouldn’t have wanted anything from him.’ She bit her lip. ‘Maybe I should have shot him right down then, but I just kept ignoring him and eventually he seemed to get the hint. I thought he’d moved on to someone else.’
‘And then he turned up at your party?’
She nods. ‘I didn’t see him, though, that’s the weird thing. He must have been there because he followed me down the stairs, but he didn’t come up to me when we were there.’
‘Probably realised it wasn’t a good place to start a scene. Not if he was planning on. . .’
‘Raping me,’ she says, in a small but forceful voice. ‘That’s what he was going to do, Molly.’
‘I know, sweetheart.’ I reach across the table and rub her arm, proud of her for facing up to the reality instead of making the emotionally easier retreat. ‘But he didn’t get the chance. Did he?’
‘No.’ She wipes her nose on the back of her hand and for a split second I see something pass behind her eyes which looks a new kind of terrible and I don’t want to press her on it but I have to.
‘Ella, if he did, you need to tell me. I’m sorry, but the DNA, we might need to do something more about him.’
My mind begins to whirr through the options. Fire? Bleach? Bleach then fire, pour whatever we need to down the lift shaft and throw a match on top of it, let him burn.
‘We don’t need to worry about that.’ A single, fast tear runs down her cheek. ‘You know, I always wondered how I’d react in that situation. I thought I’d freeze up and just . . . let it be done to me.’
The expression on her face brings tears to my eyes. It stirs memories I don’t want to examine but can’t avoid; the feel of Dralon under my bare skin and a fist hovering over my face and a smile so wide I saw a missing tooth right at the back.
I dry my face and Ella apologises even though she doesn’t know why.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him before?’ I ask. ‘If you’d told me while he was emailing you, maybe we could have done something.’
‘I didn’t think he was going to go this far,’ she says.
‘Have you got his emails still?’
She shakes her head. ‘I deleted them as they came in.’
‘There’s going to be a paper trail to you.’ I roll the unlit cigarette between my fingers. ‘But he fell into the lift shaft by accident, right?’ She nods. ‘When the time comes we stick to that. We believe it one hundred per cent. He came to your party, he had some drinks, he wandered off into the building and he fell. That’s all we know.’
Again she nods, slightly firmer this time, and I see a little of the fear leave her face. We’ve had days of this, both of us, running through worst-case scenarios and all the ways we might get caught and all the ways this could have been avoided, and I want to ask her why she didn’t just bang on Callum’s door when this man was harassing her, but she’s calm now and I know it will sound like I’m blaming her for what happened, which I shouldn’t. I understand the desire to fight your own battles. I respect it.
But that pride of hers has brought us to this. Two frightened women in a bedsit, putting on brave faces for each other, while we contemplate our precarious futures.