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I snort.
‘People aren’t evil,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe that. You aren’t evil.’
‘Tristan isn’t evil?’
She studies my face. ‘I don’t know. But there are reasons for the way he is.’
I make an effort not to roll my eyes.
Frances goes to the canteen counter. She’s slimmer now. I can see her shoulder blades through her jumper.
I can’t remember exactly how long Tristan got, but it turned out my mum was just the first of his many victims. Once the story spread, women started to come out of the woodwork: a girl he dated at uni, a waitress, a personal trainer, an intern who got him fired from his big job in the city. And Mina, of course.
Mina had a suspended sentence. She did some community service followed by some pieces in women’s magazines. She said that, all along, Tristan had thought he was the one who’d put my mother into a coma. The police had shown him a picture of my mother in her hospital bed, beaten to a pulp, and he’d thought he must have blacked out after he’d knocked her over, that he must have continued to attack her in a fugue state.
Mina thought that raping someone and getting away with it would always have set Tristan on a dark path. But that his mother, in allowing him to think he was capable of such savagery and not even be touched by the memory of it, had made him feel invincible.
Mina had tried to explain the glamour of Don back in his school days; how she had allowed herself to ignore what he’d tried to do to me, and avoid suspecting what he’d done to my mother.
I’m not sure anyone was convinced. But that’s how these things always are: inconceivable to anyone who isn’t on the inside.
He denied all of it.
He denied any single one of us had said no and meant it.
And he denied knowing about Theo running around cleaning up after him, handing over hush money, and, in at least one instance, murdering someone who wanted to talk: that reporter, Brenda Rogers.
Maybe it’s better this way. I’ve made peace with prison. I know I deserve it. The people who believe they shouldn’t be here – they’re the ones trapped in torment.
Frances comes back with tepid tea in two yellow plastic cups.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you start bullying me?’
She looks away.
‘Frances?’
‘My father, he’s very religious.’
‘I know. Prayers for breakfast, prayers for lunch, prayers up your hoo-haa and no swearing on God’s earth.’
She laughs, but it turns from amusement to pain. ‘It’s so stupid,’ she says.
I nod. ‘Agreed.’
‘His parents were born-again Christians, and they’d… gone off the deep end a bit. They were very strict. There were things they thought were…’ She shakes her head. ‘He was brought up thinking certain things were wrong.’
‘Certain things are wrong,’ I say.
She nods. ‘But some things they thought were wrong are just natural.’
‘Frances, what are we talking about?’
‘Do you remember that day, there was a party and all the parents were there and we went to that derelict barn, and Tristan and I went back for snacks? And you found me in the orchard?’
