It Could Have Been Her(82)

“Tiny?”

“Yeah. He’s small. Really small. Like under five six. Maybe closer to five three.”

“Oh, right, I had no idea.”

“Yeah, thought it was a kid at first.” She shudders again.

“And he didn’t hurt you?”

“No, he didn’t hurt me. He was just a pervy, freaky little weirdo.”





chapter sixty-five


STUART, NOW

I stride away from the pub, hard and fast, pulling Hugo in my wake. I’m shaking. I can feel the corners of the world closing in on me, this weird world I’ve found myself in with these strange women in this strange house, here at the very farthest ends of everything.

The woman, Jane: while I’ve been sitting in Thornwood drinking tea, she’s been out there asking every fucker every fucking thing, and any minute now she’ll take it to the police, and then what? What happens next?

I fumble with the front-door key as I try to fit it in the lock. I manage to get it open and then I drop my shopping on the kitchen table and call out, “Anyone here?”

I need another drink, but it’s not time for another drink, not yet. I only finished that pint a few minutes ago and I have to leave at least half an hour between each drink. But God, I want one now, right now. I stare at Jessamine’s wine in the fridge, her two bottles, chilling, ready for the afternoon onslaught to begin. She would murder me with her bare hands if I touched it. But I could take a slug of her rum and top it up with water. I pull it toward me and unscrew the top, pour a double measure into a teacup, add the water to the bottle, screw the lid back on; by the time she gets to the rum she’ll be too drunk to notice anyway. The rum goes down like medicine and immediately I feel the anxiety start to lift. I want another one, but that’s it. I can’t. It’s probably for the best, because the way I’m feeling right now, I could drink myself into a nightmare that I would never wake up from. I put some fresh water down for Hugo and then I climb the stairs, slowly, so slowly, putting it off, putting it off.



* * *



Jessamine is out cold, as always. She looks old, these days, at least ten years older than her thirty-nine years. I shake her awake gently. Sometimes when I come to her in here I think she may be dead; my chest constricts, and my heart races and I can’t breathe until I see the rise and fall of her chest.

She grumbles and groans, turns away from me.

“Jess,” I whisper urgently in her ear. “Jessamine. Wake up. Something’s happened.”

“What?” she mumbles.

“I spoke to her. You know, the woman who brought Hugo back? She’s been watching us, stalking us. She knows so much about us, Jess. About everything. You have to wake up and talk to me.”

She stirs. “What time is it?”

“It’s quarter to one.”

“God.” She rubs her hands across her face, then slowly pulls herself up to sitting.

“She’s going to go to the police, Jess. She knows about Claire Connolly. She knows about you. She knows about Jasper. She knows everything. We need to do something. We need to fix this. Talk to me. Jess. Tell me what to do.”

As I say these words I hear the creak of the old door. I turn and see a face in the crack, pale fingers curled around the edge.

“Is that you?” I ask.

I see the head nod.

“Come in then,” I say. “Come in.”





chapter sixty-six


As evening comes to Covent Garden, Dexter unscrews the top from a bottle of wine and pours Jane a large glass, then himself a small one. “I’ve got a dance class in the morning,” he says, passing her the glass. “Need to keep myself fresh.”

“Well, I have to go to the police tomorrow morning, so I should probably keep myself fresh too, but fuck it, frankly. Anything that can take the edge off the thought of that tiny masked clown pulling a scarf out of a young woman’s ear in a park with a hard-on. Jesus Christ.” She lifts her glass to Dexter’s. “Cheers,” she says. “And thank you for being there with me today. Thank you for being such a perfect boy and making this all feel so much less dreadful. I love you.”

She feels a surge of emotion pass through her system. Tears fill her eyes; her throat tightens. What is it about all of this that’s bringing her into such a heightened state of emotion? But the moment she asks herself the question, she already has the answer. Every step she takes down the path of the Blacks’ life, she takes another step down her own, heading closer and closer toward the core of it all, and she’s not sure she can bear it. The neglect; the black terror of being a child living in a house with addicts; the blurred lines of uncertainty and fear; the weak, bleeding boundaries between the adult and the child; the helplessness and despair. She feels it because she knows it, because she lived it.

Brave face, red lipstick, big smile, big laugh, big earrings, big bright beautiful Jane Trevally; she feels she’s as much a 2D slapped-on persona as Jasper’s hideous Patch the Clown.

“You OK?” asks Dexter.

She nods and turns on the smile. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just—it’s all a lot, isn’t it? This whole thing. And soon it’ll be out of my hands. I’ll be heading back to the crusty old money pit, you know, until someone has to cart me off in the back of a pickup truck to the morgue.”