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‘Katie, can you set the table please?’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘Ketchup and that.’ I didn’t look at her. I didn’t look at either of them.
‘Oh my God why are you in such a mood?’
‘I’m going for a bath.’ I left them to it, made a point of closing the door quietly.
To the muffled sound of Katie’s outrage at her mother’s appalling rudeness, I climbed the stairs on aching legs. Lazy pair, I thought. Couldn’t be bothered to answer the sodding door, waited for me to come home to flick one small switch to put the heating on, couldn’t be arsed to fetch three plates from the cupboard and put them in the oven to warm or get the ketchup out of the sodding fridge, and I bet, I flipping well bet, the washing was still in the machine, setting in its creases so that it would be an absolute nightmare to iron. And meanwhile, tired out, wet through and fed up to the back teeth, I was the one who’d gone to get their pigging dinner. Meals on wheels, me, and all I’d got was awhere’ve you been?
‘Where’re you going now?’ Mark was calling up through the banister at me as if I’d gone mad. ‘I thought we were eating.’
‘I said I’m going for a bath. I’ll catch my death in these wet clothes. Eat without me.’
Just because I didn’t wait for the heavy sigh didn’t mean I couldn’t hear it. Didn’t mean I didn’t know he was shaking his head at me either. I put a bath on to run, pictured Mark glued to the television like he’d lost the use of his limbs, Katie upstairs stuck seething in front of some Netflix drama with umpteen series – orseasonsas she called them now – probably in her onesie, sticking diamonds to her toenails or staring at herself in the mirror or taking her fiftieth selfie of the day or scrolling endlessly through bloody Instagram or whatever the hell it was that took all her time between her one shift a week at Lee’s bakery and the next, and neither of them answering the door. Although if the house stank of fags, one of them must have. Maybe it was a canvassing politician who’d called round. The Avon lady. Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The water wasn’t too scalding hot so I lowered myself in and let it carry on running. Soap bubbles like blown glass, the smell of my rose bath foam. My head hurt, as if I’d bashed it. When I put my hands into the shining suds, my knuckles stung. The rage still coursed around my system. I felt the hot power of it. Perhaps that was what was giving me these bursts of strength. They made up for the sudden attacks of tiredness that made me think I must have been hit round the head by a tree. I didn’t know much, but I knew something – if Katie and Mark had seen me half an hour ago, they wouldn’t be talking to me like I was nothing. There’d be at least a bit of recognition.
I pushed my head under the water. I missed Kieron.
23
Rachel
They hadn’t set a place for me, obviously. They hadn’t cleared their plates into the dishwasher or wiped away the crumbs from the bread and butter. The washing was still in the drum, starting to smell. A hot thumb of irritation burned somewhere around my sternum. But it was an ember of an hour ago.
‘Mark?’ I called out.
No answer. I can remember thinking he must be back in front of the idiot box, but actually it turned out later that he’d gone to the pub. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even realise until he crawled into bed around midnight, stinking of beer and cigarettes.
‘Have you been smoking?’ I asked him, but he was already snoring, one hand on my boob. I knew he wasn’t making a pass so much as passing out; that if I reciprocated, he wouldn’t respond. Like an overtired toddler, he was clutching a comforter to help him get to sleep.
But that hadn’t happened yet, and when it did, it was the least of my worries, to be honest. As it was, as I ate my cod, chips and mushy peas (peas a bit crusty on the top), what floated to the top of my mind wasn’t Mark, Katie, Kieron or even poor Jo, but the chap in the cemetery. I don’t know if it was a delayed reaction or what, but it was only then, after I’d had my bath and got warm to my bones and got some dinner down my neck, that I started to remember in vivid detail how I’d pulled on that jump lead with the strength of a lion, enough to make my own knuckles bleed. And how I had woken as if from a dream, on my knees, with a pain in my head and no clue as to what had just gone on, or why.
Thinking about it there in the kitchen was like coming up from under anaesthetic. It was the same feeling as when I’d read about Jo a few days earlier, found out she’d been stabbed and left for dead moments after we’d gone our separate ways. The knife in my bag… I must have put it in there for self-protection, but I couldn’t remember doing it. And now the jump leads in my hands, my skinned knuckles. He had run away, seemingly unharmed, but still, an unsettled, preoccupied feeling persisted in my guts. Maybe Mark was right when he said that collecting violent crimes in a file was making me paranoid. But the clip file was something I had to do. I had to build a body of evidence. I couldn’t talk to him or anyone about that and I couldn’t talk about the memory losses either. Maybe I should confide in Lisa. But I’d have to leave out the part about worrying whether or not I was attacking people. There’s a limit to how many sandwiches short of a picnic you can admit to being before you’re no longer welcome on the day out, if you know what I mean.
But Ihadn’tmurdered young Jo and I hadn’t attacked that chap, of that I was almost certain.And I certainly hadn’t had violence or the intention to commit violence on my mind.To commit murder, to attack someone, you have to really want to, don’t you? You have to be so full of anger, rage, hate that you get to a point of not caring. And whether a victim dies or not only depends on how good you are at the murdering, doesn’t it? What your skill set is, whether your luck is in that night, whether you get the right weather conditions, privacy, lighting, tools, protective clothing, what have you. Whether you wanted to do it badly enough.
I hadn’t wanted to kill Jo and I hadn’t wanted to kill or harm that man. I had been disgusted by him, that was all – a revulsion that had soon given way to pity. If I was avoiding my reflection in the black French windows of my kitchen, it was only because I didn’t want to bear witness to my own beaten appearance, my slack-shouldered confusion now that my rage had subsided. If it was true that no one saw me, it was equally true that I didn’t see myself.
‘Mum?’
Katie was staring at me as if I was sitting there naked belting out a one-woman chorus of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. She was wearing her Dalmatian onesie, her hair was in rollers and she had one eye done out in green eyeshadow, the other in blue. She filled the kettle at the sink without looking at it, only broke her stare to put it back on its electrical pad and flick it on.
You’d only see that kettle if it broke, I thought but didn’t say. But she was looking right at me again, so then I thought: maybeI’mbroke.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s the matter withme. I was talking to you. I was trying to tell you something actually, and you were just staring into space. As usual.’
Ah, so Iwasbroken. I wasn’t giving her my full attention.Beep beep, malfunction, malfunction. Request error report.
‘Sorry, love,’ I said. ‘Just a bit tired, that’s all.’
She rolled her eyes and muttered what sounded likeno change there then,turned back to the cupboard and pulled down a mug. Just the one.
‘I’ll have a tea if you’re making,’ I said.
She sighed – she can be quite the luvvie when she wants to be, can Katie – and fetched another mug down.
‘Can you pass the milk then?’ she said, like it was the principle of the thing.
