Heart-Shaped Bruise (12 page)

‘When has
anyone
called you a Guido?’

She lifted her chin. ‘I’m just saying: they’re so sensitive.’

‘Mum—’

‘Alright, alright. I’m going.’ She held her hands up. ‘I’ll stop embarrassing you.’

Sid and I watched her stumble over to the bar with her empty wine glass and when she was out of sight, he turned to me.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he started to say, but I stopped him.

‘It’s okay.’ I shook my head.

‘Yeah, but she isn’t always—’

‘I know.’

‘I wish you’d met her when—’

‘Don’t, Sid. Please don’t apologise.’

I squeezed his hand again and he squeezed it back and you know what? I don’t care. Say what you like at me. Yes, I’m mad. Yes, what I did was awful, but I made him feel better that day. I know I did. Because I was the only person in the room who knew how he felt. Who knew what it was like to be ashamed of someone you love.

Doctor Gilyard thinks I didn’t do anything to Juliet, that I
couldn’t
do anything, but that isn’t true. I
wanted
to do stuff. I wanted to ruin everything she had, to carve my name across it all, but I had to be careful. I couldn’t do anything to scare her, anything she’d tell Mike and Eve about, because the Witness Protection team would move her and I might never find her again.

That’s why I followed her when I first found her. I got to know her routine, what books she liked, what films she’d seen. It was those little things that made her trust me, that made us friends. Like the first time we went to the canteen at college and I ordered a green tea because I knew she’d get one, too. If I hadn’t done that, we would never have been friends and if we weren’t friends, she wouldn’t have invited be back to her house and as soon as she did that, I could do other stuff. Nothing big. I took
things. Moved things. Tore pages out of her notebook.

I suppose you think that’s nothing.
After what you’ve read in the papers, you were expecting something awful, blood even, a few broken bones. But that would have been too easy. It was the little things, I knew, that would unpick her – slowly, slowly. Like when she bought that book from the stall under Waterloo Bridge. When she put it on the shelf in her bedroom, I waited for her to go downstairs and I took it. She asked me if I’d seen it a couple of days later, if she’d left it in one of my bags.

I’d frowned. ‘You didn’t go to that stall with me. Sure it wasn’t with Sid?’

She’d wavered then, her forehead creasing. I wonder if she’d asked herself if someone had been in her room, if Mike had rearranged her CDs or Eve had borrowed her yellow scarf.

She must have thought she was going mad.

I called her Juliet once. I remember the thrill of it – even now, as I’m writing this – how it made my heart flutter. We were at a pub in Camden. Sid and I were playing darts and he was apologising to everyone standing within ten feet of the board when I threw a dart clear across the pub. It almost hit an old boy who was sitting at the bar reading a copy of the
Mirror
. He looked unamused, so Sid offered to retrieve it. Juliet was in the loo at the time so when she returned to find him gone, she looked bewildered.

‘Oh, Juliet,’ I said with a sigh, letting the name hang in the air between us for too long before I tilted my head. ‘Missing your Romeo?’

She tried to smile, but I saw.

I saw.

The next day I sent her flowers – a bunch of pink roses. It was her birthday; not Nancy’s birthday, Juliet’s birthday. 2 October. She told me once that her parents used to buy her a bunch every year for her birthday, I knew she meant her father did, so you should have seen her face when Mike walked into her room with them. I’d asked her what was wrong as she tore through the bouquet looking for a card, spilling pink petals across her bed.

‘Nothing,’ she’d said, out of breath. ‘Nothing.’

Doctor Gilyard asked me once if I got any pleasure out of being Rose Glass. How could I not enjoy that? Enjoy asking Juliet question after question; if she missed her parents, how she was related to Eve, why she didn’t see the friends from her old school any more. I’d ask and ask and ask until she began fidgeting and changed the subject with a brave smile.

But the first time I saw her cry wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be.

I suppose if I wanted to play the villain here – be the gangster’s daughter – I wouldn’t admit that. I’d say that I’d enjoyed seeing her cry, that it had renewed my conviction. But it didn’t.

It was a Sunday. I always had lunch at her house on a Sunday, but when Mike answered the door, he looked surprised to see me. When he let me in, the kitchen didn’t smell of anything, either. There was nothing in the oven, no smell of coconut. Eve’s mother wasn’t there, fussing over the roast potatoes and adding more salt to the gravy. Eve was sitting at the table, staring at a
mug of tea she obviously had no intention of drinking. When she looked up at me, I could see that she’d been crying.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, my heart dropping to my feet.

For a moment, I thought that was it, the blade had dropped and they knew. I half expected Mike to grab me by the arm and shake me, tell me that he knew who I was.

But he just sighed. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing,’ Eve snapped.

My cheeks burned, even though it wasn’t aimed at me. When her gaze found mine across the kitchen, I had to tell myself not to run.

‘Mike and I had a row this morning,’ she told me. My shoulders fell.

‘If your mother hadn’t—’ he interrupted.

She glared at him, her hands clenching into fists on the table. ‘Can we not?’

He glared back at her and it seemed to go on for ever before he huffed and marched over to the kettle. Eve sighed to herself and rubbed her forehead with her hand as he began banging around, getting a mug out of the cupboard and slamming it down so hard on the counter, I don’t know how it didn’t break.

Then she looked up at me again. She looked exhausted. If Juliet had been there, she’d have known what to do. She would’ve leaned down and hugged her, told her that everything was going to be okay. But I just looked at her as I tugged on a loose button on my jacket.

‘We had a row.’ Eve sighed again. ‘Nancy overheard. She got
upset and ran off. We don’t know where she is and she won’t answer her phone.’

I looked over at Mike. He still had his back to us and my nerves felt as tight as ropes as I watched him make me a cup of tea I didn’t even want. I’d never seen him like that before – I’d never seen either of them anything other than sparklingly happy – so I could see why Juliet was so freaked out. I was freaked out, too.

I should have been thrilled, I suppose, that Juliet was upset, that there was a crack in her perfect little life. But then I thought about her, sobbing into Sid’s chest while he stroked her hair, and something in me hardened.

‘I’ll find her,’ I said with a sigh.

Eve’s face brightened. ‘You will? Oh, thank you, Rose.’

When I looked at Mike, I saw the muscles in his back relax through his T-shirt.

‘Thanks, Ro,’ he said, turning to face me again.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told them both with a small smile, heading out of the kitchen.

As soon as I got outside, I called Juliet. She answered, which I wasn’t expecting.

‘You alright, Nance?’

‘Have you been to the house?’ she asked. She always called it the house, never home.

‘Yeah. What happened?’

I heard her sniff. ‘They had an argument. It was awful, Rose.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know. I was upstairs and I heard Mike screaming. Literally screaming, Rose.’ She stopped to suck in a shaky breath. It sounded like something in her was broken. ‘I had no idea he had such a filthy temper. I thought he was going to hit her.’

Something in me tightened and I laughed. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘You should have heard him, Rose.’

‘Where are you? Are you with Sid?’

‘No. I’m on my own.’

I wasn’t expecting that, either. ‘What? Why didn’t you call him?’

‘I’m a mess,’ she said with another sniff. ‘I don’t want him to see me like this.’

I should have respected her for that, for not running to him sobbing, begging to be rescued, like most girls would have. But really, it made me hate her more, because she had him but she didn’t think she needed him.

‘Where are you?’

‘At the bookshop.’

When I got there, I found her sitting on the floor of the poetry section. A friend would have brought her a green tea, but I just sat next to her.

‘Hey,’ she said when she saw me. She seemed relieved and I tensed, half expecting her to start slobbering all over me. I don’t do well with slobber. Mercifully, she didn’t move.

I nodded at the book she was holding. ‘What you reading?’

She closed it and showed me the cover.
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

‘Atticus is about to shoot the dog,’ she said. The
so maybe
everything will be okay
floated unsaid between us.

We sat there for a minute or two, her staring at the red cartoon bird on the cover and me staring at her staring at the red cartoon bird on the cover.

Some girls are good at this. Juliet is. If we’re out, at a gig or in the pub, and she goes missing, Sid sends me to the toilets to look for her. She’s almost always there, sitting on the edge of the sink consoling a hysterical girl whose boyfriend has just got off with someone else. It’s sort of amazing, how she can talk to anyone. I don’t know how she does it, but she always knows what to say, knows the right way to stroke someone’s hair so it isn’t creepy. When to speak, when to listen. The truth is, Juliet is actually really sweet. So sweet that I wanted to break her open sometimes, find that bad bone.

I know she has one.

‘You alright?’ I said eventually.

She shook her head and sniffed. ‘Not really.’

I began tugging on the loose button on my jacket again. ‘Was it that bad?’

She looked up at me then. The skin under her eyes was bruised with mascara but she didn’t look ugly, she looked vulnerable. Even when she was broken, she was beautiful.

‘You know when you think everything is perfect,’ she said, lowering her voice as though she was telling me a secret, ‘then you find out it’s not?’

I thought about Dad and I almost laughed. I used to want things, you know, before then, before her. I wanted to live in
Paris and play my cello on street corners for spare change and applause. I can’t imagine doing any of that now.

I tried to smile. I wonder if she could see it – the bitterness – haemorrhaging out of me, bleeding through my pores. ‘Yeah.’

‘It kind of breaks your heart, doesn’t it?’

I nodded and tugged on the loose button so hard, the last thread gave way. ‘Life is never what you think it is, Nancy. What you need it to be.’

I suppose I could have said something more comforting, but I wasn’t trying to comfort her.

She looked at me and I was sure she was about to start crying again, but she just smiled. ‘Thank you.’

I frowned at her. ‘For what?’

‘For never lying to me.’

I nodded and it was one of those perfect, perfect moments. I had to look down at the button in my hand in case she saw my eyes light up. ‘Everybody lies, Nance.’

‘At least you tell the right ones, Rose.’

I know I said I had to be careful, that I couldn’t go too far, but I did once. I didn’t think I was ashamed of anything I did to her, but I guess I’m ashamed of that because I didn’t write it down earlier. Some part of me mustn’t want it to committed to paper forever, but you should know, in case you think I lost my nerve, that I had my head turned by a pretty boy.

You should know what I am capable of.

Juliet had a photograph. She didn’t show it to me, I found it, between the pages of a book I’d taken from her room. I’d had the book for weeks. My intentions only strayed as far as taking it, I had no purpose for it after that, so it had languished at the bottom of my bag until a particularly restless night when I went in search of something to read. I can’t even remember what book it was now, I just remember how my heart stopped, then restarted at
double speed as the photograph fell out and landed on the floor by my feet.

I picked it up, turned it over and there they were: Juliet, her mother and father. I didn’t know what to do; I felt like an old lady on
Antiques Roadshow
who’d found a priceless brooch at the bottom of her jewellery box. So I just stared at it.

Juliet was tiny in it – three, maybe four – with the same big eyes and wild curls. It was her birthday, I guess, she was wearing a green dress not unlike one I had when I was that age, except that mine had a ribbon around the waist and a pink silk rose. She was laughing – dancing, I think – and her mum and dad were clapping. Her dad looked younger, but just as I remember him. I’d never seen her mum before, though. She was thin, too thin, the veins in her hands as thick as ropes. Her head was wrapped in a brightly coloured scarf and I realised that it must have been the last photograph of the three of them.

I don’t know how Juliet had it. Maybe she had it that night – the night she stabbed Dad. Maybe she carried it everywhere with her, tucked into some secret pocket in her purse. Or maybe she begged one of the Witness Protection team to go back to the house and get it.

Either way, it had survived, and I had it.

The shock dissolved and I reached into my bag, my fingers fumbling through the empty fag packets and balled-up tissues for my neon-pink lighter. As soon as the flame touched the corner of the photo, it caught and began to curl. The flame was orange,
I remember, bright orange, and I was rapt as I watched it devour the photo in one hot gulp.

When the flames reached my fingers, I ran into the bathroom and dropped it into the sink. Of all the things that come back at me at night, it’s the image of that burnt photograph in the sink. If I closed my eyes right now, I’d see it. I wonder sometimes, when I think of her, of what I did, if that’s what my heart looks like, if it’s thin and burnt and black.

Val’s back. I walked into the TV Room after breakfast, and there she was, staring at the telly like she never left.