Dying for Christmas (16 page)

The girl obligingly wiped her hands on her grey apron and took the photograph from her outstretched hands.

‘Yes, I am sure it was her. She had many bags for the shopping, I remember.’

‘And she definitely wasn’t with anyone?’

The girl shook her head so that her black ponytail wobbled.

‘No, she was by her own.’

Martin rolled his eyes at Kim. Another dead end. They’d spent the morning going around all the different departments of the store they now knew Jessica Gold had shopped in on Christmas Eve. Checking the timings of her bank-card purchases had enabled their colleagues to find her on CCTV at various points, but there were too many people to be able to track her exact movements in between so they’d circulated her photograph around the shop. This sighting by a student who was working temporarily in the café over Christmas was the first positive identification but, like the CCTV footage, it failed to provide any new clues. Jessica, it seemed, had done her Christmas shopping in Oxford Street, along with thousands of others. Alone.

And then disappeared into thin air.

* * *

‘Are you looking forward to tonight’s present, Jessica?’

We were sitting on the sofa following an unsuccessful dinner of greyish moussaka that Dominic had declared inedible and scraped into the bin despite my groaning stomach.

‘What’s the best present you ever got?’

I thought about it. Not the sessions with Sonia Rubenstein, which had been mortifying at the time, though later on I’d come to appreciate them. Certainly nothing Travis had ever bought me. ‘I love how non-materialistic you are,’ he said to me on my first birthday together when he presented me with a battered hardback copy of a Kurt Vonnegut novel he’d found in a charity shop. ‘I don’t have to worry about buying you stuff that you probably won’t ever use.’

Then I remembered a birthday when I was in my teens. Or maybe it was Christmas. It was remarkable because my brothers had clubbed together to buy me a present. It was an eyeshadow palette, and it was probably a big hint to me that I ought to be paying more attention to my personal grooming, but it was the first time I realized that despite all our differences and their constant teasing, they did care. I was about to share this story with Dominic but then I remembered that he’d had a little sister too. And then I didn’t feel like saying anything at all.

Today’s present was irregularly shaped. Even as I was opening it, painstakingly smoothing out the paper as I went along, feeling along the bumps of the glitter, trying to spin out the time before I had to face whatever was coming, I heard her.

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘So very cold.’

Inside the layers of wrapping was a glazed ceramic mug, pink with yellow and green spots and a bright red star. On the front was emblazoned the message:
Best Brother
. It was the kind of thing kids made at special ceramics cafés where parties of schoolchildren chose an item of crockery to decorate themselves and then collected it once it had been fired in the kiln. I remembered going to one with my mum and being appalled to find I couldn’t take my work home there and then. I’d painted a bowl for my dad’s birthday and was desperate to see it all shiny and beautiful.

The inside of the mug was purple with bright blue rings. The whole thing was typically over the top, like you’d expect from a child let loose with a paintbrush and unlimited colours.

‘From your sister, I take it.’

‘Well, duh.’

The juvenile expression sounded preposterous coming from this grown man with his flick knife, and the metal cuffs he kept attached to the radiator.

‘Bella made it for me at one of her friends’ parties. She was always going to parties. She had so many friends, you see. Not like me.’ Here Dominic made a mock-sad face. ‘I was too clever. The other children didn’t like it. You weren’t supposed to be clever, and if you were, you were supposed to be embarrassed about it. I could never be bothered with all that crap.’

Somehow this didn’t surprise me.

‘But everyone loved Bella. She was just one of those kids who could get away with being clever, and sporty, and pretty, because she acted like she didn’t know it. And if anyone ever pointed it out, she acted like it was the most astonishing thing she’d ever heard.

‘At home the honeymoon stage was over, but things had never quite gone back to being as they were before she arrived. Mrs Meadowbank had moved away, but Daddy had other special friends. He and Mummy would argue about them when we were supposed to be in bed. They’d carried on sharing a bedroom, although Mummy still came in to see me in the night sometimes, though she didn’t stay. Even through sleep I could feel her presence, hot and heavy.

‘She was fat, was Mummy. Did I tell you that? She used to do all these diets. Soup only, no carbohydrates, eating only on alternative days. The worst was the oily-fish diet. She tried to eat salmon or mackerel three times a day until fish oil came out of her pores. The whole house stank of it. Nothing worked though, because she had no self-control. She’d spend all day carefully weighing out cereal and potatoes and then at night she’d go into the garage and gorge herself on chocolate and biscuits from a secret stash she had out there. Sometimes I’d spy on her. She made me sick. Mind you, not as sick as she made herself, if you get my meaning. And she was drinking by this time. She favoured those miniature bottles so she could hide them in her coat pockets, and kid herself they didn’t count. She kept the empty bottles in her handbag – every time we went out she headed straight for the nearest bin so she could get rid of them all, pretending she was chucking out a tissue or something. She clinked when she walked.

‘Anyway, Mummy and Daddy kept up a pretence of being normal for Bella. That’s the kind of effect she had. You wanted to show yourself in the best light when she was around.

‘In one way, of course, that was a relief. No more sitting scrunched up on that stool panting like a little dog. No more sharing a bed with Mummy. But in another sense, it made me explode with anger. Why were they making such an effort to put their best selves forward for her, while I’d had to put up with all their twisted shit? Why me?

‘Can you imagine how that feels, Jessica?’

The weird thing was he was appealing to me for approval. He wanted to hear he was right to be angry, right to feel the way he’d felt.

‘Did your parents have a favourite?’ he wanted to know now.

I’d been deliberately trying to push my parents from my thoughts. Thinking about them gave me an exquisite ripple of pleasure followed immediately by a vicious rush of pain. Had they favoured my brothers? Almost certainly, yes. They were so straightforward, so easy. They made friends, played sport, had girlfriends. Theirs were the usual problems my parents’ many child-rearing manuals had prepared them for. A predilection for violent video games, an aggressive stage in their teens where they locked horns with my father over curfews and clearing up, a bag of weed in a jacket pocket, a middle-of-the-night phone call from the police when one of them was involved in a fight outside a local pub. Those things my parents could deal with, indeed almost enjoyed dealing with. But with me it was different. They weren’t prepared for the singular difficulties I presented. They’d been expecting schoolgirl quarrels and petty jealousies. They’d imagined arguments over boys and make-up and skirt lengths. They’d already decided in advance that they’d be more laid back this time around, would allow me the freedom to make my own mistakes as they hadn’t always with the boys. What they hadn’t expected was a child who struggled to make friends and who rarely went anywhere except into the dark recesses of her own mind. Who talked about voices in her head.

‘If they had a favourite, it wasn’t me,’ I said eventually.

Instantly his hand was outstretched, fingers gripping my knee like a vice.

‘I knew it, Jessica,’ he said. ‘I knew as soon as I saw you we were kindred spirits. We are both damaged.’

He picked up the mug from my lap and turned it over in his hands like a hallowed object.

‘No child should be made to feel second-best. I feel that very strongly. And if parents allow that to happen? Well then, they should be brought to account.’

What I felt very strongly was that I didn’t want to know how.

‘Dommy, I’m cold,’ said the child’s voice. ‘Please, Dommy. I’m so cold.’

Could he hear it?

‘But you loved her too? Your sister? It was obvious from that photo of the two of you.’

I was saying it for her benefit. So she’d know she was loved.

‘Oh yes. I loved her. Well, as much as I’ve ever loved anyone. But you know, Jessica, love is pretty much overrated. It comes, it goes. It’s conditional on so many things and the fact is, most of the time you don’t really know what they are. So it’s pretty much an artificial construct.’

He thought he was clever, all right.

‘When the time came for me to go to secondary school, following all that Miss Fullerton business that my parents refused to talk about, there was much debate about where I should go. There was a decent state secondary down the road, and a couple of well-thought-of private schools. I didn’t really care where I went. I knew wherever it was the teachers would dislike me and the other kids distrust me.

‘Then one day I overheard my parents talking. Arguing. Well, yawn, yawn. They were always arguing. But then I heard my name mentioned, and started listening more closely. “It’ll be good for him to go,” my father said. “And for us.” “For you, you mean,” my mother said. “Admit it, you’re frightened of the boy.”

‘Then they argued about me some more until my father told her it would be better for Bella too. That made Mummy stop and think for a while. And then she said, and I can hear it now, as clearly as if she was right where you are, “I’ll only agree to let you send Dominic to boarding school if you promise Bella can stay here.”

‘That stupid fat cow bartered me like a box of fucking eggs.’

Dominic looked as if he might be about to cry. He looked ugly then and I almost felt sorry for him.

‘You must have found it hard not to resent Bella for that,’ I said in my best Sonia Rubenstein voice.

‘And therein lies the rub.’ His smile was back. ‘In the end it came down to this. What was worth more, the pain of losing someone I loved, or the pleasure of inflicting pain on the people I hated?’

‘I’m cold,’ she said.

And suddenly, so was I.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The next morning there was hair on the floor of the kennel. I picked it up in my fingers and let it play over my face, tickling my skin. When I put my hand up to my head, I was relieved to find there was still hair attached to my scalp, but it felt decidedly thinner, and there were small patches where there was no hair at all.

While I was holding a lock of hair in front of my eyes, inspecting the roots to see if I could see what was causing it to fall out, I noticed something weird about my hand. I was sure the skin of my palm felt thicker than it normally did, like it had grown an extra layer. Worse, the nail of my little finger was completely missing. I prodded the space where it used to be gingerly with my thumb and felt an answering jolt of pain.

Dominic seemed agitated today as if the preceding six long days of incarceration had taken their toll on him as well. He kept pacing the floor at the far end of the apartment, close to the windows, stopping every now and then to gaze out at the river, as if it might hold the answer to his problems.

‘We need fresh air,’ he announced suddenly, looking out at the grey day. ‘Come here.’

At the door, he grabbed my elbow, propelling me roughly out on to the iron balcony.

By now he was in a foul mood, as if it was somehow my fault he’d been kept cooped up all this time. We sat on the wrought-iron bistro chairs and stared in silence at the brown, mud-churning river beneath us.

‘Arrogant pricks,’ he said.

I was silent.

‘Those people who built that,’ he continued, gesticulating at the Shard, the much-discussed building that spiked into the skyline in the distance on the far side of the river. ‘A building like that, it’s basically a great big ego stroke to the architect and developer. A huge giant wank.’

It was the first time I’d sensed just how insecure Dominic’s own ego was. It was like there wasn’t room for anyone else’s. It was too much of a threat.

I was pondering this new revelation when I suddenly found myself being hauled out of my chair.

‘Don’t go silent on me, Jessica.’ He was pressing me up against the balcony railing. Looking down, I could see the river swirling angrily underneath.

‘I’ve seen the way you look at me sometimes, as if I’m some kind of idiot you just need to keep placated. You need to give me some respect.’

He was pressing harder against me from behind so that I was bending ever further forward over the railings.

Now my feet were losing contact with the ground. The river looked suddenly extremely close. I gazed in desperation across to the other bank but there was no one about, and even if there had been, we’d only have been two faint dots on a sixth-floor balcony.

‘Do you understand me, Jessica?’ His voice was wet in my ear.

‘Yes,’ I shouted into the wind. My hips were now balancing on the top of the railing – I could feel the metal digging into the sore place where the tattoo was. One more push from behind and I’d topple right over, down into the muddy water below. ‘I understand you. I’m sorry.’

And then my feet were back on the ground again, and he’d moved away as if nothing had happened.

‘We really should be going in now,’ he said in a completely different voice. ‘It’s freezing out here, sweetheart, you look like you’re actually trembling.’

‘I’m cold,’ said a child’s voice in my head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

That’s how long it took for him to break me all over again.

When we went inside he told me we were going to play chess.