Even though the dance had now begun, even though the music had started and the dancers were slowly uncoiling from the poses in which they had been frozen, Jess had Georgia’s undivided attention.
‘Listen,’ Georgia said. ‘I don’t know what this is but if it’s part of the performance I think it’s in very bad taste. And if it isn’t . . .’
She took a step towards Jess but Jess anticipated her attempt to reach up and flip her mask off, to find out who she was talking to. And as Georgia’s hand came up, Jess caught her arm by the wrist, and she gripped it, and she turned it, just a little, like you would at school but harder, much harder, her fingers digging into the soft part of Georgia’s forearm, and she kept twisting it.
Inside Georgia’s mask she heard a gasp, a sharp inhalation of breath.
‘The twelfth of December, 2001. Does that date mean anything to you?’
Georgia’s eyes narrowed in her mask’s eye-slits. She thought or pretended to think for a moment. Then she shook her head.
Two weeks before Christmas. That was when it had happened. They had been at her aunt’s house for the afternoon, down the road in the next village. It was only a fifteen-minute drive at that time of night. Jess had been wrangling with them about whether or not she could have another mince pie when they got home, whether or not she could stay up for a bit and help decorate the tree with them.
‘Try harder,’ said Jess. ‘Have a think.’
She did not turn Georgia’s wrist again, but she slightly increased the pressure from her fingers for a minute, to show she was not teasing, to make it clear this was not part of the performance, that she did not care if there were bruises on Georgia’s lily-white arm in the morning or how much it would cost and how much time it would take to digitally remove them for whatever film she was shooting now or next.
‘I was in Tahiti,’ Georgia said, eventually, somewhat hesitantly, after some consideration, after some further application of pressure. Then with greater confidence, more firmly: ‘That Christmas, 2001, I was filming in Tahiti.’
‘You were in a black four-by-four, travelling too fast, driven by your husband. On a dark country road, on a dark night.’
And the joke was, the awful joke was, if they had just come forward and told the truth this would probably all be in the past now. They would have hired the kind of lawyers only people like the Cranes could afford and the prosecution would have settled for whatever lesser charge they thought they could actually get to stick and after a few years no one would even bring up the crash any more. Or how much he’d had to drink that night. Or whatever drugs he surely had in his system. Or that he had fled the scene.
Georgia shook her head again, faking ignorance. ‘I was on the other side of the world,’ she said, spacing her words carefully, emphasizing each syllable. ‘We were shooting all through the holidays, I remember because the crew kept blocking off the beach to film and they kept getting complaints. We had a big Christmas lunch at the hotel, a New Year’s Eve party. And we didn’t wrap – you can check this, this information is out there – until, I don’t know, the tenth, the eleventh of January. And Jackson was making a film too, over here, down in Pinewood.’ Was it Jess’s imagination or was there a slight quiver in her voice, when she got to that last part?
‘You’re a liar.’ Of course, Jess had checked Georgia’s whereabouts that night, just as she had checked Jackson’s. But she also knew what she had seen – had always known what she had seen. And now she had the memory stick too.
The music was getting so loud that even as close as they were, Jess needed to shout in her mask to be heard, and as they spoke the twirling dancers flung themselves, flung each other around the room.
Georgia tried to shake her wrist free of Jess’s grasp. Instead, Jess tightened it. Then Georgia did shout, did call out for help, continued trying to shake her arm free and pull away. But over the music – those shrieking fiddles, the stamping of feet – her cries were barely audible even from where Jess was standing, and nobody could see Georgia’s expression behind her mask. And still the music grew louder, and still faster spun the dancers. And their expressions were still frozen, their grins as rictus-set as the grins on the faces of the masks surrounding the dancefloor.