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FIFTY-THREE
When I look back on the days that followed, I see them only as a tangled mess of distorted shapes. My memories, a kaleidoscope. No order or sense to them.
I remember the guilt though; the way it tore at me. I felt it physically the same way you’d feel a broken leg or stab wound. I was crippled by it; couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
I’d wake in the night gripped by fear; gasping for air, covered in sweat. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. All day my body shook.
I tried praying, but after, ‘Dear Lord. . .’ the words wouldn’t come. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but rather because I didn’t feel I deserved to say it.
What if it had all been a hideous mistake?
I thought about the earring in Matty’s apartment, the hatchet, of him lying about the crisis centre. Of all the times he’d said he was there when he wasn’t. I thought of Niamh Keenan, her face so mutilated even her parents struggled to identify her. And of Gemma Nicholls discarded in the bushes just minutes from where we lived. Of how Matty seemed amused when he heard she’d been mistaken for a mannequin.
I thought about the dead parents he’d pretended were still alive, and that it was him who’d suggested I collect clippings of the murders.
But then I thought of what my mother had said about the police arresting the wrong guy once before. What if they had done the same thing again? What if the killer really was that odd-jobs man after all?
I thought how much I loved Matty and that surely I’d have been able to tell if he was a serial killer. I thought about his warm eyes, the way they’d crinkle when he smiled, the way he always stuck up for me. A murderer wouldn’t behave like that. They wouldn’t be able to.
And what about the police profile? Matty wasn’t a loner or socially inadequate. Frankly that label fit my mother better than him.
Then just as I’d persuaded myself he wasn’t guilty, another memory would explode in my head making me question myself all over again. The night of the pizza. That terrible drive.
Matty had a knack for making you think you were overreacting, blowing his ‘games’ out of proportion.
Do you seriously think I meant to hit you in the face with that ball?
I didn’t realise you couldn’t breathe.
Lighten up, Soph. I was only mucking around.
But what if he wasn’t mucking around? What if he had meant to hurt me? To scare the hell out of me?
I didn’t know what to believe or even what I wanted to believe.
‘I’ve got a tummy ache,’ I told my mother. Resorting to old tricks. ‘I think I’m getting sick.’
She was lying in bed, a good half hour after she should have been up. She didn’t look as though she’d slept any better than I had.
‘You’re going to school,’ she said, even though it was clear she had little intention of going to work.
I decided the truth might get better traction than a phantom illness.
‘I can’t go,’ I told her. ‘Please don’t make me.’
She sighed deeply, patted the bed for me to sit down next to her. I perched on the edge, picked at my cuticles.
‘I can’t face it,’ I said. ‘Let me stay off, just today.’
She didn’t answer straight away, which I took as encouraging. A rookie error, I should have known better.
‘Hiding under your duvet isn’t going to make any of this go away. I won’t lie to you, going to school today is going to be hard, maybe the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Which is why you’ve got to do it.’
‘That makes no sense.’
She placed a hand on my arm, a sure sign there was a lecture coming.
‘Being brave isn’t about going to war and acting the hero. It’s about being scared to death of a thing but doing it anyway because you know it’s right. I get that you’re afraid to go in today. Your friends will talk, some might even blame you. It’s going to be tough as hell. But get through this and you’ll get through anything.’
