In A Dark, Dark Wood Part 23

The door swings slowly shut behind him and through the narrow gla.s.s hatch I watch his silhouette disappearing down the corridor. And it's strange for a person who lives alone, for someone who's been craving solitude since I came here, but suddenly I feel very lonely ... and it's a very foreign, peculiar feeling.

25.

I'M EATING SUPPER when a knock comes again. It's not visiting hours. so I'm surprised when I look up and it's Nina sliding round the door with a carrier bag. She puts her fingers to her lips.

'Shh. I only got in by pulling the old "Don't you know who I am?"'

'Did you tell them you were Salma Hayek's cousin again?'

'Purlease! She's not even Brazilian.'

'Or a doctor.'

'Quite. Anyway, I said I'd be quick so here you go.' She throws down a bag on the bed. 'I'm afraid they're not exactly haute couture. In fact you're lucky they're not pastel velour. But I did the best I could.'

'They're great,' I say thankfully, riffling through the anonymous grey sweats. 'Honestly. The only thing I care about is that they're not open at the back and logoed with "Hospital Property." Truly, I really, really appreciate it, Nina.'

'I even got you some shoes only flip-flops but I know how grim the hospital showers can be, and I thought at least then if they kick you out at short notice you'll have something to walk in. You're a six, right?'

'Five, actually but don't worry, six is brilliant. Here,' I pull off her cardigan and hold it out, 'take this.'

'Nah, don't worry. Keep it until your own stuff turns up. Do you need money?'

I shake my head, but she pulls out two tenners anyway and tosses them onto the locker.

'Can't hurt. At least then if you get sick of hospital food you can grab a panini. OK, I'd better go.'

But she doesn't. She just stands there, looking down at her short, square nails. I can tell she wants to say something and with uncharacteristic nervousness is holding back.

'Bye then,' I say at last, hoping to jolt her into speaking, but she just says, 'Bye,' and turns for the door.

Then, with her hand on the push-panel, she stops and turns back.

'Look, what I said, earlier I didn't mean-'

'What you said?'

'About James. About the motive. Look, I didn't really think you'd ever ... f.u.c.k.' She thumps her fist gently on the wall. 'This isn't coming out right. Look, I still think it was an accident, and that's what I told Lamarr. I never thought this had anything to do with you. But I was just worried, OK? For you. Not about you.'

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and swing my legs out of bed. I walk uncertainly over to her and give her a hug.

'It's OK. I knew what you meant. I'm worried too for all of us.'

She smooths my hair, and then I drop my arms and she looks at me. 'They don't think it was an accident though, do they? Why on earth not?'

'Someone loaded that gun,' I say. 'That's the bottom line.'

'But even so that could have been anyone. Flo's aunt could have done it by mistake and been too scared to admit it to the police. The police keep banging on about the clay pigeon shoot was the ammunition properly secured, could anyone have got unsupervised access to a live round. They obviously think the cartridge came from there, or that's what they're trying to prove. But if one of us wanted to kill James, why the f.u.c.k would we lure him out to the back of beyond to do it?'

'I don't know,' I say. My legs feel tired and wobbly from the effort of standing just for this short conversation and I let go of Nina's arm and walk shakily to the bed. All this talk of guns and bullets it's giving me a strange, queasy feeling. 'I really don't know.'

'I just think-' Nina starts, and then she stops.

'What?'

'I just think ... Oh screw it. Look whatever unmentionably awful thing happened with you and James, I just think you should tell them. I know-' She holds up a hand '-I know it's none of my business and I can f.u.c.k right off with my unsolicited advice, but I just think, whatever it is, it's probably not as bad as you think, and it'll just look a whole lot better if you tell them now.'

I shut my eyes tiredly, and rub at the b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d itching dressing on my forehead. Then I sigh and open them. Nina is standing there, hands on hips, looking an odd mix of belligerent concern.

'I'll think about it,' I say. 'OK? I will. I promise.'

'OK,' Nina says. Her lower lip is stuck out like a child's, and I know if she still had it she would be clicking the ring she used to have there against her teeth. I remember the sound of it during exams. Thank G.o.d she took it out when she qualified. Apparently patients didn't like seeing a surgeon with holes in her face. 'I'll get going. Take care, Shaw. And if they kick you out at short notice, call me, OK?'

'I will.'

I lie there after she's gone thinking about her words, and thinking about how she's probably right. My head is hot and itching and words like bullet and spatter and cartridge are clattering around inside, and after a while I can't bear it any longer. I get up, walk slowly across to the bathroom with my old-woman gait, and click on the light.

The reflection that greets me inside is, if anything, worse than yesterday. My face feels better much better but the bruises are blazing from purple through to yellow and brown and green all the shades a painter might use to paint the Northumberland landscape, I think with a twisted smile.

But it's not the bruises I'm looking at. It's the dressing.

I begin to pick at the corner of the tape, and then, oh the relief, off it peels with a kind of delicious tearing pain as the tape takes off the small hairs at my temples and hairline, and the dressing itself plucks at the wound.

I'd expected st.i.tches, but there aren't any. Instead there's a long, ugly cut, held together by small strips of tape and what looks like ... Can it really be super glue?

They've shaved a very small semicircle of hair at the edge of my scalp, where the cut snaked beneath the hairline, and it has started to grow. I touch it with my fingers. It feels spikily soft, like a baby's hairbrush.

The relief. The relief of the cold air on my forehead and the itch and pull of the dressing gone. I throw the bloodied pad into the bin, and walk slowly back to the bed, still thinking of Nina. And Lamarr. And James.

What happened between me and James has nothing to do with any of this. But perhaps Nina is right. Perhaps I should come clean. Maybe it would even be a relief, after all these years of silence.

No one knew. No one knew the truth except me, and James.

And I spent so long nursing my anger at him. And now it's gone. He's gone.

Perhaps I will tell Lamarr when she comes in the morning. I'll tell her the truth not just the truth, for everything I've said so far has been the truth. But the whole truth.

And the truth is this.

James dumped me. And yes, he dumped me by text.

But what I've held onto all these years, is the reason why. He left because I was pregnant.

I don't know when it happened, which out of all those dozens, maybe hundreds of times, made a baby. We were careful at least we thought we were.

I only know that one day I realised I hadn't had a period for a long time, too long. And I did a test.

We were in James's attic bedroom when I told him, sitting on the bed, and he went quite white, staring at me with wide black eyes that had something of panic in them.

'Can't-' he started. Then, 'Don't you think you could have ...'

'Made a mistake?' I finished. I shook my head. I even managed a bitter little laugh. 'Believe me, no. I took that test like eight times.'

'What about the morning-after pill?' he said. I tried to take his hand, but he stood up and began pacing back and forward in the small room.

'It's much too late for that. But yes, we need-,' There was a lump in my throat. I realised I was trying not to cry. '-we need to d-decide-'

'We? This is your decision.'

'I wanted to talk to you too. I know what I want to do, but this is your b-'

Baby, too, was what I'd been going to say. But I never got to finish. He let out a gasp like he'd been smacked, and turned his face away.

I stood up and moved towards the door.

'Leo,' he said, in a strangled voice. 'Wait.'

'Look.' My foot was already on the stairs, my bag over my shoulder. 'I know, I sprang this on you. When you're ready to talk ... Call me, OK?'

But he never did.

Clare rang me when I got home, and she was angry. 'Where the h.e.l.l were you? You stood me up! I waited half an hour in the Odeon foyer and you weren't answering your calls!'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I had ... I had stuff-' I couldn't finish.

'What? What's happened?' she asked, but I couldn't answer. 'I'm coming over.'

He never called. Instead he texted, later that night. I'd spent the afternoon with Clare, agonising over what to do, whether to tell my mum, whether James would be charged we'd first done it when I was fifteen, although I was sixteen now and had been for a couple of months.

The text came through about 8 p.m. Lee. I'm sorry but this is your problem, not mine. Deal with it. And don't call me again. J.

And so I dealt with it. I never did tell my mum. Clare ... Actually Clare was kind of amazing. Yes, she could be snappy, and snide, and even manipulative, but in a crisis like this she was like a lion defending her young. Looking back at that time, I remember why we were friends all those years. And it makes me realise again just how selfish I was afterwards.

She took me to the clinic on the bus. It was early, early enough to just take the pills, and it was all over surprisingly soon.

It wasn't the abortion. I don't blame James for that it was what I wanted myself, I didn't want a child at sixteen, and whatever happened, it was my fault as much as his. And whatever people might think, it wasn't that that f.u.c.ked me up. I don't feel a crucifying guilt over the loss of a cl.u.s.ter of cells. I refuse to feel guilty.

It wasn't any of that.

It was ... I don't know. I don't know how to put it. It was pride, I think. A kind of disbelief at my own stupidity. The thought that I'd loved him so much, and had been so mistaken. How could I? How could I have been so incredibly, unbelievably wrong?

And if I went back to that school, I would have to live with that knowledge the memory of us both together in everyone's eyes. The telling of a hundred people, No, we're not together. Yes, he dumped me. No, I'm fine.

I wasn't fine. I was a fool a f.u.c.king stupid little fool. How could I have been so mistaken? I'd always thought myself a good judge of character, and I had thought James was brave, and loving, and that he loved me. None of that was true. He was weak, and cowardly, and he couldn't even look me in the eye to end it between us.

I would never trust my own judgement again.

We were on study-leave when it happened, revising for our GCSEs. I went into school to take the exams, and then I never went back. Not to collect my results, not for the autumn social, not to see any of the teachers who'd coached and cheered me through my exams. Instead I changed to a sixth-form college two train rides away, one where I was sure no one could possibly know me. My day was insanely long I left the house at 5.30 and got home at 6 every night.

And then my mother moved house anyway, to be with Phil. I should have been angry, because she sold my grandfather's house where I grew up, where we'd all lived together for so many years, where all our memories were. And part of me was. But part of me was relieved the last tie with Reading and with James was cut. I would never have to see him again.

No one knew what happened apart from Clare, and even she didn't know about the text. I told her the next day that I'd decided I couldn't keep the baby, and that I was breaking up with James. She hugged me and cried and said, 'You're so brave.'

But I wasn't. I was a coward too. I never faced James, I never asked him why. How could he do that? Was it fear? Cowardice?

I heard afterwards that he was sleeping his way systematically round Reading, girls and boys. It confirmed what I already knew. The James Cooper I thought I knew never existed. He was a figment of imagination. A false memory, implanted by my own hopes.

But now now as I look back across ten years ... I don't know. It's not that I absolve James for the thoughtless cruelty of that text, but I see myself: furious, righteous, and so hard on both of us. Perhaps I absolve myself, for the mistake I made in loving James. I realise how young we were hardly more than children, with the careless cruelty of childhood and the rigid black and white morality too. There is no grey when you're young. There's only goodies and baddies, right and wrong. The rules are very clear a playground morality of ethical lines drawn out like a netball pitch, with clear fouls and penalties.

James was wrong.

I had trusted him.

Therefore I was wrong too.

But now ... now I see a frightened child, confronted with an immense moral decision he was not equipped to make. I see my words as he must have seen them an attempt to shift this irrevocable choice onto his shoulders, a responsibility he was not prepared for, and did not want.

And I see myself just as frightened, just as ill-prepared.

And I feel so very sorry for us both.

When Lamarr comes in the morning I will tell her. I'll tell her the whole truth. Unpicked like this, in the dying light of the evening, it's not as bad as I feared. It's not a motive for murder, just an old, tired grief. Nina was right.

Then, at last, I sleep.

But when Lamarr comes in the morning, there's a new kind of grimness in her face. There's a colleague hovering behind her, a big hulk of a man, with a fleshy face set in a permanent frown. Lamarr's holding something in her hand.

'Nora,' she says without preamble, 'can you identify this for me?'

'Yes,' I say in surprise, 'it's my phone. Where did you find it?'

But Lamarr doesn't answer. Instead she sits, clicks on her tape recorder and says, in a grave, formal voice, the words I've been dreading.

'Leonora Shaw, we would like to question you as a suspect in the death of James Cooper. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. You have a right to ask for a solicitor. Do you understand?'

26.