Lasting Damage (24 page)

Your house is a stunner – we're so jealous! Does it feel like home yet, or do you still feel like you’re playing house? I remember you said that about the last place too, and felt as if someone might snatch it away from you when you weren’t looking! Relax, it’s yours! Meanwhile, I wish someone’d snatch our dilapidated hovel – and preferably sort the leaky roof out while they’re at it! Anyway, thanks again for making us feel so welcome!

Leigh, Jules, Hamish
and Ava

PS. Jules insists that one of the Trinity punts must be called ‘Lion on a Shirt’, but I think that’s probably stretching it a bit!

Chapter 11

Monday 19 July 2010

I walk out into the heat, stop as the dizziness takes hold. I close my eyes and lean against the police station wall, propping myself up to make sure I don’t end up on the ground. A car horn beeps. I can’t tell how far away it is. It’s probably my taxi. I ought to look, but I know better than to risk it when my mind is breaking up into clumps of woolly grey. I won’t open my eyes until I’m certain the world will look normal again. The worst thing about these attacks is the visual distortion. If I keep my eyes open, it’s terrifying – like falling further and further back inside my head, being dragged by an internal current away from my eyes, which stay fixed where they are as I recede into the depths.

‘Connie!’ The car horn again. I recognise the voice, but can’t identify it. I’m still resting against the wall with my eyes closed when I feel a hand on my arm. ‘Connie, are you okay?’

My sister. Fran.

‘Just a bit light-headed,’ I manage to say. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. What are you doing here? How did you know . . . ?’

‘I rang Kit when your phone went straight to voicemail. He told me you’d need a lift home.’

Because I made him angry, and he left me stranded.

‘I’m not taking you home yet, though. Get in the car.’

Not taking me home?
Where, then?
I open my eyes. Fran’s Range Rover is parked half in and half out of the disabled space closest to the building. The driver and passenger doors are hanging open. It makes me think of a film I saw when I was little about a magic car that could fly; its doors were its wings.

Fran’s wearing the faded jeans and orange and white striped rugby shirt that I think of as her non-work uniform. Sometimes, when I’m at her house and see them drying on the clothes rack, I think about stealing them and throwing them away, though there’s nothing particularly wrong with them.

‘I’ve ordered a cab,’ I say. ‘I ought to wait.’

‘Forget the cab. I’ve called Diane in on her day off to cover for me because I need to talk to you – now. Like it or not, you’re coming with me.’

‘Where?’

‘The tea rooms at Silsford Castle. We’re going to have a cup of tea and a chat.’ Fran sounds grimly determined. Nothing about her tone suggests that any of it will be fun.

I allow her to push me into her car. It smells of a mixture of crisps and Johnson’s aloe-scented baby-wipes, which she still uses all the time, even though Benji is five and there is currently no baby in her branch of the family. I’m aware that I have no right to find this irritating. Fran gets in on the driver’s side, dumps her bag in my lap and sets off without bothering to fasten her seatbelt.

‘Why Silsford Castle?’ I ask. ‘Why not somewhere that’s on our way home?’

‘Home? Where’s that, then?’ Fran turns to look at me, to check her words have shocked me as they were intended to.

‘What?’ I snap. A stab of fear makes my gut twist. ‘What do you mean?’

She shakes her head as if to say ‘forget it’. ‘Is your phone still switched off?’ she asks.

‘No. I turned it on when I—’

‘Turn it off. Don’t ask why, just do it. I don’t want any interruptions.’

I obey the order, aware that I probably ought to protest; that would be most people’s response. Does it say something bad about me that I find it soothing to be told what to do, so I don’t have to think for myself?

Why did Fran ask me where home was?

‘You need to go back to the doctor,’ she says as we leave Spilling town centre behind.

‘What’s the point? He can’t find anything wrong with me.’

‘He can’t be looking very hard,’ she mutters.

We drive the rest of the way in silence. As Fran pulls into one of five disabled parking spaces on the cobbles outside Silsford Castle, I can’t stop myself from saying, ‘You’re not allowed to park here.’

‘I don’t care about allowed. And I’m okay with it ethically because I’ve got you with me,’ she says. ‘If walking out of the police station and nearly collapsing for no reason doesn’t count as a disability, I don’t know what does.’

I hate her for saying it, for making me panic about what will happen when I get out of the Range Rover. Will the dizziness strike again? What if I don’t have enough time to get to something I can lean against?

Fran hasn’t asked me how it went with the police. She must know why I was there.

I’m fine when I step out of the car into the sunny afternoon. Therefore it can’t be going from inside to outside that sets me off, and it can’t be standing up when I’ve been sitting for a while. All I’ve managed to establish, after months of monitoring myself, is that I can have a dizzy attack at any time, in any circumstances – there’s no way of predicting it.
Or avoiding it
.

The tea rooms at Silsford Castle smell of cinnamon, ginger biscuits and roses, as they have since I was a child. The waitresses’ aprons haven’t changed either – they’re still pale blue, frilly-edged, spotted with tiny pink roses. Without asking me what I’d like, Fran orders two cups of Lavender Earl Grey, then heads for the round table in the corner by the window, the same table Mum always made a beeline for when she brought us here as kids for what she called our ‘weekend treat’, after our Saturday morning trips to the library.

Right, then, girls – shall we get out our library books and read one while we have our chocolate fudge cake?

‘Why am I here?’ I ask Fran.

She narrows her eyes, peering at me. ‘Is it Benji?’ she says. ‘It must be.’

‘Is what Benji?’

‘The reason you’re pissed off with me.’

‘I’m not.’

‘If you don’t want to babysit every Tuesday night, you don’t have to – just say the word. Tell you the truth, Anton and I don’t like it any more than you do. It’s like you’ve got a timeshare in our son. Often we want to do things as a family on a Tuesday and we can’t – it’s carved in stone that you have to have Benji, or that’s how it feels sometimes.’ Fran sighs. ‘Loads of times I’ve nearly rung you and asked if it’d be okay for us to keep him just this once, and I’ve chickened out, in case you’d be offended. Which is ridiculous. Why am I scared to be honest with you? I never used to be.’ I’m not sure if it’s herself she’s angry with, or me.

A timeshare in our son
. She didn’t think up that phrase today. She and Anton have been bitching about me and Kit – probably as much as we’ve been bitching about them.

Mum was the one who said, after the first time I babysat for Benji, ‘Maybe it could be a regular thing. You and Kit could have him every Tuesday, overnight – give Fran and Anton a break, and give you a chance to get to know him properly, not to mention a bit of practice for when you have your own.’ It didn’t matter what Fran or I thought; Mum wanted it to happen, so it happened.

This can’t be why Fran has brought me here, to talk about babysitting. ‘I don’t care,’ I tell her. ‘I’m happy to have Benji every Tuesday, some Tuesdays, no Tuesdays – whatever you want. You and Anton decide.’

Fran shakes her head, as if there was a right thing to say and what I’ve just said wasn’t it. Sometimes I feel as if, more and more, I’m speaking a different language from the rest of my family; translation in either direction adds a dollop of provocation, a patina of offence, that wasn’t present in the original.

‘That house in Cambridge, 11 Bentley Grove – you’re not buying it, are you?’

Why does she sound triumphant, as if she’s caught me out? I open my mouth to remind her that I can’t afford a 1.2-million-pound house, but she talks over me: ‘You’re
selling
it.’

‘What?’

‘Come on, Connie, don’t bullshit me. It’s your house. You own it, you and Kit. You’re the ones who’ve put it up for sale.’

This has to be one of the more absurd things that’s been said to me in my life so far. It almost cheers me up. I start to laugh, then stop when I see the waitress heading our way with a serving-trolley. As she lays out saucers, cups, spoons, tea strainer, milk jug and sugar, I can feel Fran’s impatience radiating across the table; she wants an answer.

‘Well?’ she says, as soon as the waitress has retreated.

‘That’s the maddest thing I’ve ever heard. Where did you get that idea from?’

‘Don’t lie to me, Con. I don’t know how the dead woman face down in a pool of blood fits into the story – I’m not convinced you didn’t make her up, though I can’t think why you’d—’

‘Will you shut up and listen?’ I snap. ‘I didn’t make anything up – I saw what I told you I saw. Do you think it’s my idea of fun, spending the whole morning at the police station for no reason? I don’t care if you believe me or not – it’s the truth. I don’t own 11 Bentley Grove. A doctor called Selina Gane does. Ask the police if you don’t believe me.’

‘Then why were you looking at it on Roundthehouses in the middle of the night, if you don’t own it already and you can’t afford to buy it?’ Fran asks. ‘Don’t pretend you were just browsing. There’s a link between that house and you and Kit.’

‘How can you know that?’
Damn
. Have I just admitted she’s right? She seems to think so, if the gleam of triumph in her eye is anything to go by. Why aren’t I a better liar? ‘All of a sudden, you’re interested in 11 Bentley Grove,’ I say bitterly. It’s easier to be angry with Fran than with myself. ‘On Saturday you didn’t give a shit. I asked you if you thought I’d imagined what I saw – do you remember what you said? “I don’t know. Not necessarily. Maybe.” That was it – the sum total of your response, before you turned your attention back to Benji’s supper.’

Fran pours cups of tea for us both. I wait for her to defend herself but all she does is shrug. ‘What should I have said? I didn’t know what I thought – how am I supposed to know whether you saw a dead woman on Roundthehouses or not? Mum and Dad were both kicking off in their different ways – I figured you had enough to deal with from them, so I took a back seat.’ She puts down the teapot and looks at me. ‘Soon as I’d put Benji to bed that night, I logged onto Roundthehouses myself. While you were stewing about my lack of interest, and slagging me off to Kit for sure, I was looking at photos of 11 Bentley Grove. I did nothing else all evening, even though the pictures didn’t change. That’s how uninterested I was.’

Something made her connect the house with me and Kit
. It’s an effort to swallow the tea that’s in my mouth. ‘What did you see?’ I ask, my voice cracking. ‘Tell me.’ Why didn’t I see it, whatever it was? I spent hours looking.

‘You’re pathetic, Connie,’ Fran says matter-of-factly, ignoring my question. ‘You sit there thinking the worst of everyone, harbouring your secret grudges and resentments, blowing stupid things up into huge problems and dwelling on them endlessly, making sure never to say a word about what’s bothering you so that no one has the chance to explain that they’re not quite as bad as you’ve decided they are.’

‘What did you see, Fran?’

‘You flinch every time Mum opens her mouth, as if she’s the devil in oven gloves. Yes, she can be annoying, but you should do what I do: tell her to get a grip and then move on, forget it. Same with Dad. Tell all of us to piss off if you want to, but be upfront about it, for God’s sake.’

She’s clever, Fran. She makes everything sound so manageable and normal. Listening to her, I could almost believe that the Monk family was an entirely harmless organisation, that its members were allowed to leave Little Holling as and when they pleased, and would suffer no adverse effects if they chose to exercise that freedom.