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‘Lydia, why do I need to stay away from Trevethan?’
‘We’re all to blame for your mother’s death. Me, Frances, Mina, Tristan. Dot. We fucked up your whole life. Let me make things right.’
‘I’m not sure that’s possible.’
‘No, of course not. But – oh God. I shouldn’t have told them Rose was missing. Now I have to speak to them and who knows how long they’ll be here and I’ve already… Georgia, I haven’t thought this through. What am I doing?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I don’t want you involved. I don’t want you suffering any more for the things they’ve done.’
‘Trevethan is my house. It’s my mum on that tape. I’m involved. What have you done?’
I heard her ragged breathing. ‘It’s… I’m hosting a little reunion. I think it’s time we all watched that tape and faced up to our transgressions.’
‘Transgressions?’
‘Except, I don’t know how long the police are going to be here.’
‘Lydia, just tell them everything. Give them the tape.’
‘Prison isn’t enough. Tristan will still sit on his throne of din’t-do-nuffin’ and Frances and her Goddamn mother will think they did the right thing, protecting their golden boy, and they’ll never see – never understand – how this awful, stupid, insane lie they told has twisted everything. They – we – killed your mother. And now Frances offers her own daughter up to her bullies every day, and Tristan’s kids are like – they’re learning how to get away with murder just by smiling those smiles, and they’re just as much to blame for Jenna’s mental… her desperation. They destroyed our lives, Georgia.’
‘They destroyed your life?’
‘The guilt, Georgia.’
88
NOW
The door handle came off. Tristan keeps hurling himself at it, but it only opens in and the whole frame is starting to splinter.
I check my watch: seven forty. Would my parents have called the police? Would they have dared?
What if Jenna and Rose are dead, but Tristan is pretending they’re alive to use them as leverage?
We should have made him let us speak to them, hear their voices.
The door-frame gives a loud crack and Tristan growls like a dog and keeps going.
I look at the spools of brown tape tangled across the floor. Light doesn’t destroy VCR tape, does it? And Georgia will have copies, digital copies in a million places, and he’ll never get them.
He knows that, doesn’t he?
I watch as he runs for the hundredth time towards the door, one shoulder forward. He’s thrown himself so hard, so many times, he must’ve broken something.
He knows it’s all over. He knows there’s no more hiding.
And then I see in a flash the moments that have been locked away for so long, the moments that I can only keep at bay with the sharp, high pain of a knife.
I freeze in the corridor outside Miss Smith’s class, certain I hear footsteps, then hurry on and push through, my hot fingers on the brass plate.
And there she is, lying on the floor before her desk, swollen and raw. He didn’t push her, causing her to fall and knock her head, like he’d said. It wasn’t a split-second act of self-defence that went sideways. Her eyes are hidden behind purple pouches. Handprints round her throat stand out like they’ve been pressed on with red paint.
He beat her and kept going. He kept going until he thought she was dead.
89
