Authors: Catherine Hunt
After the sixth one she forced herself to stop, dropped the phone on the bed as if it was red hot, clasped her hands together behind her back so she would not touch it again. Now, she thought, let the bitch wait, let her suffer.
It felt so good imagining Laura suffering, imagining her staring at the phone, horrified by what she was seeing, dreading the arrival of the next message. The possibility that Laura was not actually reading the texts, was doing something else entirely, never entered her mind.
She breathed deeply; lay back on the bed, and thought of Joe, of love instead of hate, of life instead of death. After a while, she felt cool enough to pick up the mobile again and send another text.
Anna looked at the message she had just tapped out and fury rose in her, starting in her gut and reaching her throat, almost blocking it. It wasn’t until her jaw began to ache that she stopped clenching it. If Laura were suffering now it would be just a tiny amount of the suffering that she had inflicted on
her
; a pinprick compared to what
she
had gone through.
She heard, as if it were yesterday, the voice of the self-important psychiatrist in the hospital where she’d been taken twenty years before. In her darkest hours, she talked to him of the schoolboy Joe, the saviour, of how she loved him, how she was sure he returned that love.
The doctor had said she was ‘obsessive’ and she recognized that was true. How could it be otherwise when she knew, beyond any doubt, that she and Joe were made to be together and that she must fight, tooth and claw, against all the difficulties fate threw in the way? It was a match made in heaven and nothing and no one would threaten it.
The shrink had been full of grand theories and enjoyed explaining them.
‘You can be obsessed about so many things, Annabel,’ he said, ‘but the real obsessions are centred on abstract ideas like love, hate, revenge, life or death. It starts at ten miles an hour, speeds up to sixty, then to ninety and you just can’t stop or slow down. In the end, you lose control and you crash and burn.’
Well he was wrong about that. She wasn’t going to crash and burn. She knew the dangers, knew how to deal with them; she knew all about self-control. She had ditched that old, pathetic schoolgirl self, and the hated name of Annabel that reminded her of it, totally and forever. It was a pity she could not let rip the vengeance inside her, but that time was coming. Very soon. For now she needed to follow the plan, to point the finger of suspicion firmly elsewhere.
Quickly, while the calculating part of her brain was still in charge, she tapped out one more text and then gave herself up to the memories because she couldn’t stop them, however much she tried.
Christmas 1997
For one crazy moment Annabel Roberts thought he wanted to dance with her. The boy from the beach: Joe Greene. Dancing with her. Was it possible? She felt a rush of exquisite pleasure.
Then she realized. He was taking photos. That was all. The three beloved cameras were round his neck and he was snapping away at the dancers.
Her legs had gone weak with shock and she was desperate to sit down or lean against the wall. She stopped dancing, suddenly self-conscious again, her bravery gone. From the side of the room she watched as a dozen girls surrounded him, posed for him. They were laughing and shouting and pulling him in to the dance. The old feelings of isolation, of not fitting in, swept over her.
And then it happened.
A girl walked up behind him, put her arms around him and he turned and lifted her off her feet. He pressed her close to him and together they began a slow, sensual dance.
Annabel’s brain refused to take it in. She couldn’t, wouldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing. They stared. Stared at a girl with shining, black, shoulder-length hair. A pretty, petite girl with a creamy, spotless complexion and pale pink lips parted now in a wide smile. And a stab of pure hate, visceral and primeval, went through her like a gunshot.
Joe kissed the girl long and hard, the girl whose name was Laura Maxwell. Annabel knew it was a picture she would never ever be able to wipe from her mind. It was imprinted on her eyes for all time; she would see it as clearly on her dying day as she did now. The sounds of the crowd faded in her ears and she thought she might faint; she was going down in flames.
She had to get away, from the two of them, from the hellish party. She stumbled out into the hall, and then Michelle Cullen and Jennifer Fleming were at her side. She couldn’t speak to them, couldn’t speak to anyone, she was desperate to find a quiet place, somewhere a million miles away.
She headed towards the front door but the hallway was more crowded than ever and the two girls were crushed up against her. They smiled, they giggled, they whispered secrets to her, told her what a great dancer she was. Then they offered her some pills. They said the pills would make her happy, very happy, so happy she would dance all night. They said they were going to take some themselves, but they never did.
Annabel hardly hesitated. She put two of the little white pills into her mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of wine. She would have swallowed anything then, even poison, especially poison, to get away from what she was feeling.
Half an hour later she had her escape, but it turned out to be no escape at all for it led to a place of darkness and despair.
Little rushes of happiness started to run through her, loosening the tension and the rage. In the next hour, the highs got bigger and longer and the nausea and disorientation she’d felt at first, disappeared. She was happy, euphoric, and the fact that she never usually felt this way, made it all the more potent.
She saw no more of Joe or Laura Maxwell, and the thought of them became less painful. Her world became a wonderful, benign place as it had never been before. The people around her were her friends, her very close, very dear friends. She looked at them and was filled with a warm glow. She wanted to hug them tight.
Jennifer Fleming touched her arm. It felt great, sensual, her flesh tingled with heightened sensation. She drew the girl towards her, embraced her, rubbed her face against her cheek and kissed it. Pleasure rippled along her skin. Standing behind, watching, she saw Maria Burns, smiling. Maria, who had not spoken a word to her for eight months, seemed to be looking at her now as if she was her best friend. Annabel was enchanted. To be friends again with Maria. Her heart swelled with the thought of it.
They were dancing. All of them together as she’d always wanted. Anna and her friends. She loved them. The music pounded deep in her soul and she loved it. It sounded so good, clearer, more vibrant than she’d ever known it, as if she was dancing on the notes themselves. And she had discovered she had a talent. She could dance. Now that she knew it, she was never going to stop.
She felt so up there, as if she was in heaven and so she failed to notice Maria Burns slip away from the dancers and head over to a group of older boys, failed to notice her giggling with them and pointing at her.
Soon afterwards Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ came on. The bitter-sweet words rang loud in her ears and when the boy appeared in front of her and put his arms around her, she reached out to him and held him tight.
She pressed herself against him, revelling in the intensity of touch that the drug brought with it. If she had known she had taken Ecstasy, she would have thoroughly approved of its name. When the song ended and he took her by the hand, she went with him. He was going to a club, he told her as he led her out of the house, going dancing, and he wanted her to come with him. How about a drink first? There was some in the car.
There were two other boys in the car. They started kissing her, groping her breasts then pulling off the tight, Lycra top. To begin with they didn’t need to use much force because, by that time, the drug was working at full strength and Annabel’s inhibitions were long gone. She felt a bond with these boys – men, really, as they were all eighteen-year-olds – and she didn’t put up much resistance when they started to touch her. By the time her drugged brain realized something was going badly wrong and she tried to fight them off, it was way too late. They held her down, forced her legs apart, and they all had sex with her.
They dumped her back at the party, on the front doorstep, confused and stunned. Violated. It was freezing cold but she didn’t want to go inside. The Ecstasy high was gone, abruptly chased away by what had happened to her. No gradual comedown, just a hard landing. She leaned against the wall of the house, sank to the ground, and began to sob, head in her hands.
It was there, about ten minutes later, that Michelle Cullen’s mother found her when she came to pick up her daughter. She tried to talk to the traumatized girl, tried to get her up off the ground, but Annabel just yelled at her to fuck off and leave her alone.
Annabel’s father got the same result. He had arrived shortly before and was waiting inside the house wondering where his daughter had got to. He stood in front of her, flanked by the Cullens and a growing number of interested onlookers, as his daughter screamed at him to go away. He looked at her; she was fast becoming a public spectacle and his concern mixed with embarrassment and, try as he might to suppress it, disgust. His eyes took in the low, too-tight top, now badly disarranged, the heavy smeared make-up, the hysterical behaviour. He grabbed hold of her left arm and pulled her sharply towards him. To his surprise there was no resistance. She stood up quickly, throwing her arms around him and almost overbalancing him. As fast as he could, he hustled her out to his car.
She cried all the way home, refusing to answer when he asked what was wrong, shouting at him to let her be. He was used to her moods and he was used to ignoring them, but this was different. Usually she was sulky or gloomy, giving him monosyllabic replies and shutting herself up in her room. He had never known her cry and scream like this. He felt his nerves wearing thin. It was hard enough to deal with his wife’s depression; he could not cope with a crazy daughter as well. He had to fight down the urge to stop the car, slap her face and tell her to pull herself together, and just for once in her life, behave normally.
In the days that followed, Annabel lived in a pit of despair. She was tired beyond belief, depressed beyond belief. She wouldn’t get out of bed because she didn’t want to take any more part in life. She simply wanted it to end. She never spoke about what had happened to her, even though she knew it would not have been hard to track down her attackers. But they would deny it or say she’d wanted it and she couldn’t bear the humiliation. The horror of the sex they’d forced on her was inextricably bound up in her mind with the horror of witnessing Joe, her Joe, kissing Laura Maxwell.
She lay rigid in her bed, weeping. Sometimes it was noiseless and then, as the cruelty of life began to burn in her, the sobbing increased in intensity until she was choking with tears, her head throbbing and her chest aching. She felt as if some part of her had died and that she dragged it with her, a cold heavy weight, draining away all her strength.
Her mother forgot her own problems for once and resolved to help her; now her daughter was having a breakdown, she felt drawn to her – a kindred spirit in the same kind of agony as herself. She tried her best, but her determination wavered as Annabel refused to speak to her or engage with her in any way, except for furious outbursts of hostility. She couldn’t cope with aggression and before very long retreated into her sad shell and handed over her child to the doctors.
The GP suspected drug abuse but not sexual abuse, and since his patient would not talk to him or let him fully examine her, he prescribed sedatives and said he’d arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. The day after his visit, three days before Christmas, Annabel swallowed the whole lot, plus some of her mother’s lorazepam tablets, and hoped to die.
She didn’t even come close. Her father found her lying on her bed, comatose, and the hospital pumped out her stomach. She did better with the second attempt, a few weeks later. She was back at school and Maria Burns and Jennifer Fleming and Michelle Cullen were sniggering big time. Someone had scrawled ‘Slag’ across her school books. These things contributed to her suicidal state of mind, but none of them was the decisive factor. That came on a Friday afternoon when she saw Joe standing at the school gates. He was chatting to some girls; one of them was Laura Maxwell.
Annabel had gone straight to the chemist to buy some razor blades before returning to the near empty school and that all too familiar girls’ cloakroom. She locked herself in a cubicle and slashed her wrists. It was the weekend, she thought, no one would find her this time.
She watched the blood running down her fingers and on to the floor. It did not flow as freely or as powerfully as she’d expected but eventually, surely, her life must drain away. In a detached way, she wondered if the urge for self-preservation would suddenly cut in, but there was no sign of it yet. All she felt was a tremendous tiredness and relief – relief that this attempt was going to work.
A short time later she started to feel sick and confused and couldn’t remember where she was. She opened the cubicle door and fell to her knees, began crawling across the floor towards the washbasins. It was there, underneath one of the basins, that she collapsed and lost consciousness. It was there that a conscientious caretaker, checking the cloakroom an hour later, flashed his torch beam. Pools of congealed black blood gleamed in the light.
Harry had always known his wife had a lover but he’d never come close to finding out who it was. The hidden cameras, the bugs, the spying – the man had eluded them all. He’d even employed a private detective who had cost thousands of pounds and come up with a big fat zero. After six weeks, Harry had fired him, convinced the detective was lazy or stupid or both. Because Harry knew, knew without a shadow of a doubt, that his wife was cheating on him. She’d just been too clever to get caught.