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‘I’ve got nothing left, Astrid.’ Her voice cracks.
‘Oh, Helen, that’s not true. You’re doing so well.’
‘I was, but I’m not any more. I’ve . . . I’ve been very weak
today.’
At last, there it is. The admission.
‘Come on, Helen. It’s not too late to stop. It’s just a little set-
back. Don’t have any more. Please.’
‘It’s all right for you. You’ve got your Mum and Josh. You’re
still so young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I’m all
washed up.’
If only I could tell her what’s happened, but I can’t, can I?
Not while she’s drinking. Before I can stop myself I tell her to
hold on and that I’m on my way round right now. She’s at that
dangerous self- pitying stage. I’ve got to be strong and help her
before she loses it completely. It could quite easily have been
me who broke first. When I think of how close I’ve come
lately . . .
My hands are shaking so much it takes me ages to get my feet
into my shoes and tie the laces, partly because it’ll be the first
time I’ve left the house on my own since opening that enve-
lope, and partly because turning up at Helen’s flat while she’s
drinking is going to test me to my limits. I’m fragile enough as
it is at the moment. But if I leave her on her own, who knows
what might happen?
I’m on high alert from the second I leave the cottage, walk-
ing as fast as I can without actually breaking into a run. I’m
there in under five minutes, panting as I press the bell and stare
up at her window. At last, the curtain twitches. A few minutes
later the buzzer goes and I push open the heavy glass door and
head for the stairwell. The door to her flat is ajar when I get
there. The telly’s on in the background.
As I move further in, I see her in the kitchen, emptying a
bottle of wine down the sink. My shoulders relax.
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‘Shall I make us both some coffee?’ I say, trying not to look
at the red wine sploshing against the stainless steel, averting
my eyes from the telltale purple ring in the large wine glass still
standing on the counter, like the one I saw not so long ago on
her draining rack and wondered about.
She hands me the empty bottle and goes and slumps in an
armchair. I push it through the flap of her swing bin as fast as I
can. I don’t want to hold it any longer than I need to. It makes
a loud clinking noise, and I bet if I rootled around in there I’d
find another empty. She probably wanted me to see her tip it
down the sink – a ruse to cover up how much she’s already had.
I know all the tricks.
All the while I’m busying myself with the coffee- making,
Helen is staring into space through dull, heavy- lidded eyes. I’m
right. She’s drunk a lot more than half a bottle.
While I’m waiting for the coffee to brew I pick up the empty
wine glass, take it to the sink and swill it out with water. Then
I use it to rinse away the last traces of wine down the plug hole.
‘Here, get this down you.’ I put the tray on the coffee table,
then sit on the sofa opposite.
‘It’s good of you to come,’ she says, pointing the remote at the
TV and pressing it wildly, impatiently, her thumbs stabbing at
the buttons. Eventually, she finds the right one and turns it off.
I keep my voice as low and calm as I can. After all, I’ve no
idea what kind of drunk she is, whether she’s the type to get
obnoxious and aggressive or just maudlin and sleepy. I’m hop-
ing it’s the latter.
‘It’s not a good idea for you to be on your own right now,
Helen. And I know you’d do the same for me.’
She leans forward and grasps the handle of the mug, takes a
mouthful of coffee and sinks back in her chair with it.
‘Helen, what you said on the phone just now – it’s not true.
There’s still time for you to turn things around.’
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She blows air through her cheeks. In the harsh overhead light
she looks older, drained. It’s horrible to see her like this, with
her hair all wiry and unkempt and her blouse gaping open.
I want to tell her that she’s wrong about it being ‘all right for
me’, that however rosy it looks from where she’s sitting, I could
lose everything if this Laura ups her game. Laura. She’s proba-
bly not called Laura at all. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to
give Mum her real name, surely?
Helen closes her eyes and, within a few minutes, her breath-
ing changes. She’s fallen asleep already. Whatever I say to her
now, she won’t remember in the morning. Gingerly, I extricate
the mug from her fingers. Her eyes open briefly. Seconds later,
she’s dropped off again.
I stay for a while, just in case she wakes, but soon she’s out
for the count and snoring her head off. Then I empty her mug
of coffee down the sink and pour her a large glass of water,
which I leave on the coffee table. Just as a precaution, I empty
out her wastepaper bin and put that next to her armchair too.
As I pull her front door shut behind me it strikes me that the
whole time I’ve been in Helen’s flat I haven’t once had the urge
to drink. Even with all this other weird shit going on, helping
Helen has made me stronger. Maybe it’s true what they say at
AA. Maybe this Twelve Step thing really works.
But when I’m back on the street the panicky feeling returns.
It might still be light, but that doesn’t stop the tension in my
neck and shoulders, the sensation that I’m being watched wher-
ever I go. I can’t get back to the cottage soon enough and, even
when I do, the fear still clings to me like a wet shirt and I have
to check each and every room before settling down in front of
the TV. I can’t concentrate on anything, but at least it’s back-
ground noise.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that
whoever’s doing this to me is someone Simon met at AA. He
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used to make a point of going to meetings in different parts of
London. Said it was good not to get too attached to one group.
Spread the misery, he used to joke.
Oh, you’ve done that all right, Simon. You’ve done that all
right.
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28
The next morning I wake with a stifling sense of unease. It’s
only seven fifteen, but I need to get up and clear my head. It’s a
miracle I slept at all, but in the end I was so exhausted my body
must have taken over and switched off my mind. That’s what
drinking used to do – silence the maelstrom of my thoughts.
They always come back in the morning,
though –
the
thoughts, the regrets, the fears – they never go away for long.
As I’m pulling on my jeans and sweater I think of Helen, alone
in her flat, waking up with a stonking headache and the jitters.
I should call her later, after she’s had a chance to sleep it off.
Make sure she’s all right.
It’s low tide and the beach is empty, save for the gulls. It’s
already warm and the sea is glassy and luminous. Other-
worldly. The early- morning sun glitters on its surface.
For a while I just stroll along the water’s edge, trying to con-
vince myself I’m not scared. Maybe it’s a good thing that Josh
and Richard have gone to Berkshire. It gives me time to think,
to work out what I should do, if there’s anything I can do.
Who is this person who knows all about my past? Someone
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Simon got close to? Close enough to let her take his photo. To
disclose his guilty secrets. Our guilty secrets.
The tide has washed up a dead eel that gleams silver in the
sun. A gull makes a beeline for its glistening bead of an eye.
With one stab of the beak, it plucks it out. I clap my hand to my
mouth. I know it’s just nature and that the eel is already dead,
but the savagery of it still shocks me. I watch as the gull rinses
the eyeball in the shallows, then gobbles it down.
I hurry past, suddenly afraid of the emptiness of the beach and
the immensity of the sea. I know it’s just words on a piece of paper, but it’s a real threat this time. You’d better not get too comfortable in sleepy little Flinstead. You’d better keep your wits about you from now on.
And to deliberately put my name on a death notice like that . . .
Soon I’ll be level with the beach huts on stilts, the ones with
their backs turned, defiantly, to the water. I set off in a diagonal line towards the wooden steps that lead up to the path in front
of them, unnervingly aware of my own vulnerability. It reminds
me of the time I came down here at night, how the fear crept up
on me like the tide.
I squint in the sunlight. Something that looks like crockery
is strewn all over the sand up ahead. I jog over there to check it
out. It is crockery. A pretty teaset, some of it smashed, lies scattered on the ridge of pebbles and shells left by the tide. I look
up and see that one of the huts’ windows is wide open. The
crockery must have been thrown out deliberately.
As I reach the path I see exactly what’s happened. Several of
the huts have had their doors kicked in, padlocks sawn off;
personal contents litter the decked platforms and spill on to
the path: cushions, towels, plates. A plastic bucket and spade.
Green shards of glass from a broken bottle on a dark, drying
stain on the concrete.
I recognize the Carter hut straight away and it too has been
damaged. The door is hanging off its hinges. I know it’s only a
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beach hut, little more than a small, painted shed, and no one
has been hurt, but it’s still a shocking sight. I should tell some-
one. Call the police. My heart hammers in my chest.
I look in both directions. Surely someone else will be along
soon. Someone I can share my dismay with. Someone who’ll
take over and phone the police themselves. But there’s no one
in sight. I climb past the hanging door and step over the thresh-
old into the hut. It doesn’t seem to have been ransacked, like
some of the others, but the single bed is all messed up, and two
of the cushions are on the floor. Perhaps whoever’s responsible
got frightened off before they had a chance to do any more
damage. Unless . . .
A sudden impulse makes me open the cupboard under the
counter, the one I last saw Josh tidying something away in. It’s
one of those unconscious actions I don’t even question till I’m
in the process of doing it. The cupboard is empty apart from a
box of glasses on the bottom shelf and a blue- and- white polka-
dot bikini on the top shelf. I rock back on my heels. It must
have been the bikini he hid in here, because the box is large
and heavy and I would almost certainly have heard the glasses
clinking against each other if he’d been picking it up and slid-
ing it inside.
I take hold of the bikini top and draw it out. It’s a skimpy lit-
tle thing and there are grains of sand in the bra cups. It doesn’t
mean anything. It could belong to anyone. A friend or relative.
Or maybe it belongs to one of Josh’s ex- girlfriends.
I think back to the other day, when Richard conveniently left
us alone together in the house. For all I know, that’s a common
occurrence, an unspoken arrangement between father and son.
I could end up telling him all the sordid details of my life like
some shame- faced penitent when all he wants is a bit of fun
over the summer. A couple of weeks ago, that’s all I wanted too.
I step towards the broken door to make my way out and see
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if anyone else is coming along the path and catch sight of some-
thing that most definitely wasn’t here before. A half- empty bottle of brandy and two glasses on the wide shelf that serves
as a kitchen counter.
A pulse beats in my throat. There’s still a drop of amber liq-
uid in the bottom of one, and a lipstick smear at the top. Josh
said his dad never used the hut, hasn’t for ages. So either the
vandals stopped and helped themselves to a glass of brandy, or
Josh is messing around with someone else as well as me.
I lift the glass up and breathe in the fiery tang of solvent and
burnt caramel and my insides fold over. I almost gag with long-
ing. Why the hell am I worrying about what Josh may or may
not be up to? Someone out there appears to want me dead. This
is nothing compared to that. Nothing.
I put the glass down and wrap my fingers round the neck of
the bottle, feel the comforting weight of it in my hand. I imag-
ine unscrewing the top and lifting it to my lips, the brandy
scalding my throat, searing my oesophagus like liquid fire. Just
a few good swigs and it will all go away. I won’t care about any-
thing any more. Josh. Simon. The girl in the puffa jacket. The
fractured events of that terrible night. Just a few good swigs
and it will all start to fade.
The sound of a dog barking brings me to my senses. I lurch
out into the sober glare of the sun and come face to face with
two stout old ladies and their excitable Bichon Frise. They’re
both staring at me as if they think I’m the perpetrator and
they’ve caught me
red- handed. The stouter of the two women
raises her walking stick in the air and points it straight at me.
‘This is Richard Carter’s hut,’ she says. Her tone is indignant,
accusing. It doesn’t help matters that I’m still grasping the bot-
tle of brandy.
‘I know. I’m a friend of the family.’
She squints at me from behind thick- lensed spectacles. The
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little white dog strains on its lead and barks. More dog- walkers
are turning up now, staring at the huts in horror, tutting and
exclaiming. One of them, a middle- aged man with a black Lab-
rador, pulls out his phone and starts taking pictures.
‘Bloody bastards!’ he says. ‘I’d like to get my hands on them!’
Walking- stick Woman’s companion peers behind me into
Richard’s hut. ‘We should call the police,’ she says, giving me a
sidelong glance. She clearly still thinks I’m a suspect.
I return the bottle to the hut and come out again. I need to
start acting the part of concerned citizen. ‘Looks like they only
got as far as kicking the door in on this one.’ I gesture with my
head towards the beach. ‘There’s crockery all over the sand
back there.’
She purses her lips. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ she says at last. ‘Bored
teenagers, no doubt.’ I pull out my phone. I’ve never actually
rung Josh before. He sounds surprised when he answers.
‘Your dad’s beach hut’s been broken into. So have lots of
others. I’m here now.’
‘Shit!’ I hear him relaying the information to his dad.
‘Dad says can you let Charlie in the art shop know? He lives
in the flat above the shop. He’ll able to board it up for us till we get back. Dad forgot his phone in the rush to leave yesterday, or
we’d ring him from here.’
‘Sure.’
The two women are now chatting to someone else. Seems
like I’m off the hook.
‘You’re luckier than some,’ I tell him. ‘There’s bottles of wine
been smashed, and plates and cups and things.’ I take a deep
breath. Part of me wants to mention the brandy and the messed-
up bed so that he knows I’ve seen it. But a bigger part doesn’t.
Because while I’ve got a deranged stalker on my tail I’d much
rather keep Josh on side. Besides, I’ll know from his reaction if
it means something, and I don’t want to know. Not yet.