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Better? Isn’t it true, Frances, that it has only been ‘better’ – the imaginary lawyer puts bunny ears around the word with her fingers – because your mother learned to follow the rules meticulously?
I pull my car away from the hedge arcing over the narrow lane.
And when do you think things started to go so badly for you, Frances?
The corpse of a badger, red-raw, flashes out from under Tristan’s car. I don’t have time to swerve and I wince as I bump over it.
I remember the Monday after that terrible afternoon, I had a headache and couldn’t go to school. Tristan was back from hospital, nursing his cheek in his locked room. That was the first time I hurt myself.
Mother found me in the bathroom, cutting up my arms. Father locked me in the coal room until I felt more sensible.
‘What’s this all about, Frances?’ he asked afterwards, as I sat, crying, at the kitchen table.
‘What was on the tape?’ I asked. I knew no one had watched it, but I wanted, desperately, to know if they were asking themselves the question I was shredding myself apart to avoid: was Tristan lying about what was on it?.
‘What tape?’ Father asked.
My mother, washing up behind him, went still, and no more was ever said about it.
Why did I ask my family about the tape when I could’ve watched it myself? When I knew already?
Because your parents would never answer that question, so you could go on pretending.
My brother is a rapist. My brother is a murderer.
She had died, hadn’t she? Miss Smith had died and the paramedics had brought her back to life.
How had all of it happened? We’d made up all those stories and rumours about her, and then what? Had Tristan let himself believe them? How?
Isn’t it true, Frances, that believing the lies you tell yourself is a skill the Beaufort-Bradleys learn from birth?
Rapist. Murderer.
Suddenly the imaginary lawyer becomes my father and he sneers at me. ‘He was seventeen, Frances. Don’t go slinging around names like that for something he did when he was a boy.’
But still he should’ve paid for it. At seventeen you bear some responsibility.
We fly past the lane to PES and part of me hopes the police will see us, but they must be parked inside the gates – are people still out searching? – and then we’re passing between the incongruous run of terraced houses then back out into the fields then turning and speeding up the rutted track I know so well, even though I’ve not been back since the day Georgia found me crying in the orchard.
God, I loved the summers here.
Georgia joined PES in year eight, halfway through the year, and it was like we knew there was something inside us that matched right away. I already had my friends, Mina and Lydia, but Georgia was so different and I wanted her for myself. I knew that either we would become best friends or everyone else would tear her apart.
Because she wasn’t even a scholarship kid. She was there because her mother was a teacher. She was so smart, and without even meaning to she’d just say something, the truth, that could take your feet out from under you.
Which would either be her claim to fame or her downfall, depending on who she offended, and who she had on her side.
Back then, I had wanted the truth. I hadn’t been able to let myself see it, but I had been desperate to find some way of letting it in. And talking to Georgia about my family was the first time I’d ever got close.
I had told her things about them, and I realise now that it must have seemed I understood what I was saying. But my words came from somewhere deep within and got out without passing through my head.
I’m so lost in my thoughts I have to slam on my brakes to stop myself from careering into Tristan’s car. He has stopped at the cattle grid and I realise it’s because we’ve caught up with another car: Lydia’s.
We all get out and look at each other, but no words are exchanged. We know she got the same message as us. The air is cool and sweet. We climb back in our cars, and as we approach the gates I feel as though I’ve been plunged deep into the cold, dark sea. I can keep swimming, but I’ll never get to the surface before the air in my lungs runs out.
There is the big, red-brick house with its slate roof and green gutters, now slumped and rotting. That strange, twisted harp sculpture makes me feel like a teenager again, and even though I’m nowhere near it, I feel like its rusting strings are about to flail out and scratch me.
And suddenly, we’re at the front door of Georgia’s house, pushing, tumbling in – and there, on the stairs, is a trail of blood.
