We walked down the beach and sat on the sand where it sloped to the water. For a long time we watched the Pacific crashing in on itself; sheets of silver foam on a relentless journey to nowhere. Eddie had his arms looped around his knees. He took off one of his flip-flops and splayed his toes in the sand.
The shock of longing almost winded me.
‘I don’t know how to do this, Sarah,’ he said eventually. His eyes were glassy. ‘I don’t know what to say. You . . .’ He spread his hands wide, looked helpless.
Once upon a time Eddie had a sister, a sweet girl called Alex. She had blonde, tangly hair. She sang a lot. She had large blue eyes, full of life and plans, and she loved fruity sweets. She had been my sister’s best friend.
My stomach clenched as I held her in my mind’s eye, waiting for what I knew was coming.
‘You killed my sister,’ Eddie said. He took in a sharp breath and I closed my eyes.
Last time I had heard those words, it had been through the big Panasonic answering machine next to Mum and Dad’s phone. It was one, maybe two, weeks after the accident and Hannah had finally been discharged from hospital. She had refused to get into the car with me; refused even to go home. There had been a scene, and eventually a patient transport bus had been found to take her and Mum home, while Dad and I drove.
When we got in, there had been a red flashing light – a sight I’d grown to dread – and a message from Alex’s mother, who by then was in a psychiatric hospital. Her voice had been like smashed porcelain.Your daughter won’t get away with this. She can’t. Sarah killed my baby. She killed my Alex, and she’s going to prison, I’ll make sure of it. She doesn’t deserve to be free. She doesn’t get to be free when Alex is . . . is . . .
She’s going to make sure you go to prison, Hannah had echoed, scowling tearfully at me. Cuts and bruises were flung like pebbledash across her body.You killed my best friend. You don’t deserve to be here if she isn’t.She started to cry.I hate you, Sarah. Ihateyou!And that had been the last thing she had ever said to me. Nineteen years had passed; nineteen years, six weeks, two days, and she hadn’t spoken a single word to me, no matter how hard I’d tried, no matter how many interventions our parents had staged.
‘I’m so sorry, Eddie,’ I whispered. I rubbed my ankles with shaking hands. ‘If it helps in any way, I have never forgiven myself. Hannah never forgave me either.’
‘Oh yes, Hannah.’ He looked at me, then immediately away, as if I disgusted him. ‘You told me you lost your sister.’
‘Well . . . I did.’ I traced a wobbly line through the sand. ‘Hannah stopped speaking to me. She cut me out of her life, permanently. So I don’t feel like I have a sister. Not really.’
He looked briefly at the line I’d drawn in the sand. ‘Hannah never spoke to you again?’
‘Never. And God knows, I’ve tried.’
He went silent for a while. ‘I can’t say I’m as surprised as I should be. She’s stayed in regular touch with my mother. You can imagine the conversations.’ His voice was flinty. ‘But that’s by the by. The fact remains, you have a sister. Even if she wants nothing to do with you, you have a sister.’
I paused. Wished I could bolt.I am the woman he can hardly look in the eye. I am the woman he probably wished dead all these years.
‘I am so sorry your sister was best friends with mine, Eddie. I’m so sorry I took them out of the house that day. I’m so sorry my reactions weren’t the right ones when he . . . when that man . . .’ I took a swallow. ‘I can’t believe you’re Alex’s brother.’
Eddie flinched. Then: ‘I want you to tell me everything,’ he said, and I heard the effort it was taking to keep his voice neutral.
‘I . . . Are you sure?’
His body – his strong, warm, lovely body, of which I’d dreamed so many times, gave a sort of twist of assent.
So I did.
I tried so hard to keep my place in Mandy and Claire’s friendship group that summer – so miserably, exhaustingly hard. In the weeks following our GCSE exams they met up every day, but they invited me to join them only a handful of times. ‘God, Sarah, stop reading into it,’ Mandy said, when I found the courage to confront her.
We were teenage girls. Of course I read into it.
During their time in each other’s pockets they’d developed a new code of behaviour they were unwilling to share with me, so my first few weeks in year twelve were a minefield. I said the wrong things, talked about the wrong people and wore the wrong clothes, realizing only when I caught the edge of an eye roll that they’d moved on.
On the day of my seventeenth birthday I came into school and found that they’d stopped sitting in our corner of the sixth-form common room and had moved somewhere else. I had no idea if I was invited.
During the spring term Mandy started going out with someone from Stroud, the town where we went to school. Greggsy, his name was. He was twenty and therefore a catch: no matter that he had a nasty, weasel-like face, or a questionable relationship with the law. Claire was sick with envy and spent all her time trailing around after them. I began to lose hope, certain that this would be the final straw for me. Girls who went out with older men were of a higher calibre. They were sexual, successful, self-contained; untouched by the pimpled anxieties of the sixth form.
Mandy might take Claire before she pulled up the ladder behind her, I thought, but she certainly wouldn’t take me.
But one day in March Mandy said quite casually that Bradley Stewart had been asking about me. Bradley Stewart was Greggsy’s cousin. He drove an Astra. He was one of the best-looking boys in that nasty group, and I was pathetically pleased.
‘Oh?’ I said, not looking up from the Diet Coke label I was peeling. It was important I played this right: Mandy would use my words to shame me at a later date, if I seemed too keen. ‘I suppose he’s all right.’
‘I’ll hook you up,’ she announced breezily. Claire, with whom Mandy had fallen out earlier, was fuming, and I realizedthis opportunity would never have presented itself if they hadn’t fought.
