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‘Yes. Let’s get going.’
I look up to find Blue Eyes studying me. Intent is how you’d describe her expression.
‘And that’s the last you remember?’ she asks. ‘She left you in the gardens?’
‘No, we walked back down. I helped her over the railings. Passed her the dog. I asked her if she wanted me to walk her the rest of the way and she said no. We parted company on Boston Avenue, just along from… from where she was found.’
12
Rachel
‘So you remember nothing after saying goodbye?’
‘No. Next thing I was back home, hanging up the dog lead and my coat. I remember having a shower and getting into bed and I remember how cold I was, which was weird because I’m always so hot these days. I had to get up and put my dressing gown on. Trembling from head to toe I was, flipping like one of those fortune-telling fish you put on the palm of your hand. I remember Mark climbing into bed later. He was warm, always is. I used to call him my hot-water bottle. I can remember spooning against him, trying to get some warmth. That’s the last I remember.’
I’m lying, but the rest is none of her beeswax. I was in the mood, to put it bluntly. That conversation with Jo had lit something inside me. Obviously I had no idea what had already happened to her by then; all I knew was that the connection between us had made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t for a long time. I circled my arm around Mark’s waist, thinking how a year ago he’d had too much of a belly for me to reach round him but how now, despite him drinking more, I could almost touch my fingers to the mattress on the other side. I kissed the warm hollow between his shoulders, smelled his skin, stroked him, pushed my hands through the hair on his chest. But nothing stirred. After a minute, he grumbled, lifting my hand away as if it were an object he needed to put to one side. A moment later he was snoring and I was lying on my back closing my eyes tight against the sting of rejection, opening them again, making kaleidoscopes. Another moment and heat was climbing the walls of me, shortening my breath. Sweat ran in trickles into my hair. I kicked the covers off and wrestled myself out of my dressing gown. I was boiling, literally, boiling like a kettle.
And more. I can’t explain it; it was like I was carrying all the anger of the world in that moment. All the anger of women. You see, they talk about hormones and they talk about the change, but sometimes I think we’re angry for a reason. I was full of rage, full of it. I couldn’t separate what was my body and what was my mind. Because reasons, real reasons, kept coming and coming at me in the darkness, the man I’d married and loved snoring next to me. I was stuck in this thankless no-woman’s-land between kids and parents. I had put and put and put into this land: blood and tears and scars and milk and flesh and love and the unacknowledged woman-hours that didn’t count, never counted, like man-hours did, and love, and love again – measureless, infinite quantities of it. I had volunteered my body to give us our two children. I had given the very bones and skin of myself in service as gladly as you’d give a cardigan to a friend when the evening turns chilly –here, have this– only for them to take it home and wash it on the wrong setting, return it misshapen, no longer fitting. Ruined. I had donated my body and my life to love. My body and my life had repaid me with nothing, frankly. After all the bleeding and the baring and beating of my mother’s heart on the sidelines of the football pitch and the ballet classes and the nativity plays and the broccoli on the fork,come on, eat it, love, it’s good for you, it’s a tree, pretend it’s a tree and you’re the giant come to eat a whole tree… For what? For what? Ashes. Ashes from a tree left black and standing after a forest fire, a tree that’s dead but doesn’t know it yet.
And now, when my body had tried to reclaim some interest on all that love, there was none. Mark did not see his body as something of service, certainly not to me. He had never had to give it whether he wanted to or not. There were no wars on; he’d never had to volunteer to fight. Maybe women don’t make wars because we’ve already got a war going on every single day of our lives: our own bodies, fighting against us. The world telling us that we’re beautiful as we are while it sells us diets and clothes that would only ever look good on a twig, telling us that it’s fair, that it’s equal, when it isn’t, like one big gaslighting god.
Whatever, thoughts like that rolled in as I tried to get the boiling water inside me under control, mop up rivers of sweat with the tissues from the box beside the bed, fetch a towel from the bathroom to lie on. There were more thoughts but I’ve forgotten them; more rage but it burned itself out eventually. The bottom line was that Mark and I hadn’t done anything in getting on for a year. He didn’t see me that way anymore. He didn’t see me at all.
We ground through Sunday. I didn’t check the news sites that day. I was a zombie, living in a zombie state. Roast chicken dinner I spent two hours preparing eaten in near silence.Pass the gravy.I walked out with Archie but headed up Halton Brow, so I didn’t see the flickering black and yellow tape on the corner of Boston Avenue, the police van, the officer with his clipboard asking passers-by if they’d seen anything. It was only when I was trawling through the online local news at five thirty on the Monday morning that I saw the article.
Girl critical after random knife attack.
I sipped my tea and read on, a pain building in my gut.
A young woman was found bleeding and unconscious at the corner of Boston Avenue and Festival Way late on Saturday night.
Boston Avenue. The pain tightened. My throat closed. I put my mug down on the table.
Customers of the Red Admiral pub were on their way home from an evening out when they saw the girl lying on the pavement.
‘We thought someone had been fly-tipping,’ said Mr Simon Kitchener, a resident of Festival Way. ‘But when we saw it was a girl, we called 999 straight away.’
The woman was taken by ambulance to Halton General Hospital, where she was given an emergency splenectomy and a blood transfusion. She had sustained two knife wounds to the ribs and a contusion to the back of the head. A spokesperson for the hospital described her condition this morning as critical. The woman was carrying no identification on her person but was later identified by a friend who had reported her missing as Joanna Weatherall, from Hampshire. Police are appealing for anyone who might know the victim or think they saw anything suspicious to come forward.
My heart was battering by now. Hands to my knees, I made myself breathe.
‘Oh God,’ I whispered to no one. ‘Oh my God oh my God oh my God.’
A flash: a knife tip pressed against skin. Breakthrough, the sudden pooling of red blood, the soft plunge of blade into warm flesh.
I knew it was her. Jo. Joanna. She hadn’t told me her last name, but I knew. My leg shook. I planted my foot down flat to stop it. Read the whole article again before sending it to the printer. I tried to sip my tea, but I hadn’t the strength in my hands to lift the mug. After a few minutes, I walked at the speed of a pall-bearer into the living room and pulled the article from the printer tray. I didn’t read it again. Only the headline. Back in the kitchen, I fetched my clip file from the dresser, slid the article into a clear plastic sleeve and clipped Jo inside with the other stories before sitting down again. My head was in my hands but I had no memory of putting it there. I was shaking from head to toe, crying, but it seemed to me that I’d been crying for a while. It was her. Who else could it be?
‘I’m so sorry, Jo,’ I whimpered. ‘I’m so, so sorry, love.’
13
Ingrid
Transcript of recorded interview with Ingrid Taylor (excerpt)
Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button
HS: Ms Taylor, can you tell us how you first came to be in Rachel Edwards’ house?
