Before We Met(71)
‘What?’ She heard outrage in her voice. ‘No. No, Mark. He did it. He was the one who . . .’
‘I let him. I’m the responsible one, remember? I’d known him my whole life. It wasn’t just that look that should have alerted me; it had been building for a long time. It’s always like that with Nick: you get a period of relative calm – relative,’ Mark put his hands up, qualifying, ‘and then he either gets bored or something in him comes to a head and then it’s . . . a crisis. In the weeks before it happened, there had been plenty of signs, if only I’d bothered to pay attention. He’d been turning up later and later to work, hungover as a dog; he’d missed a key meeting with his biggest client; and then there was the evening he hit on another client’s wife at a restaurant, groped her in the corridor – you know about that?’
She nodded.
‘And it wasn’t just work. He was taking stupid personal risks, too. He’d bought this huge bike, a Yamaha, and one night we’d all been out and he phoned me the next morning from Scotland – he’d got home at two in the morning and decided it would be fun to go to Edinburgh. He’d been smashed off his face but somehow he’d managed to get there alive – bloody miracle. Anyway, I should have known – no, I did know – that he was heading for some kind of . . . event.’
‘There’s still no way it’s your fault.’
‘But I think it is. There was this one moment that night. I stood there in the club after they’d gone and I thought about that look – I’m going to fuck you up – and I thought about how gullible Patty was, how keen she was to prove to him that she was fun, up for anything, and I just decided stuff them, stuff them both, they were on their own. I knew she was wrecked, I’d been with her all night – I should have rung her and made sure she was all right. Actually, I should have gone after them, but I was so angry, so furious, that I didn’t. I left her to Nick’s tender mercies. And look how tender they were.’
He hung his head, hiding his face. Silence rushed in around them, the deadening silence that Hannah had only ever felt in the house before when she was alone. She looked at his rounded shoulders, the curve of his back, and the word defeated came into her mind.
‘You know,’ he said, puncturing the silence, ‘I wanted something bad to happen to Nick. I wanted him punished for all the crap I had to put up with: his shitty, cruel behaviour; his manipulation of our mother; the fact that she spoiled him, not me; because he got all the attention and the toys and the money and the cars. I wanted him to suffer for the fact that our parents seemed to think I was born to be his caretaker. I had to dance on the fucking moon if I wanted to drag their eyes away from him even for a minute. So I wanted Nick to be taught a lesson in a way he wouldn’t forget.’
‘Ten years in prison,’ she said quietly.
‘I got what I wanted, didn’t I? But look at the price, Hannah. Look at the damage. Patty died – she died that night. Twenty-five, and they dug a hole in the ground and buried her. If I hadn’t let anger and my stupid, stupid bloody pride stop me going after them, she’d still be alive.’
When Hannah came back, he hadn’t moved. She must have been gone for seven or eight minutes, she thought, sitting on the closed lid of the downstairs loo while she tried to think, listening to the blood pounding in her ears, but Mark was exactly where she’d left him, hunched over the table, face buried in his hands. She was almost back to her position by the counter before he raised his head to look at her. On his face there was no expectation or request for forgiveness, just uncertainty, the frank acknowledgement that he had no idea how things would play out between them. It startled her that Mark could look so tentative and she felt a rush of tenderness towards him that she quickly fought down. He must have seen it because he reached for her hand. ‘Han . . .’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ She moved back behind the counter, putting it between them. ‘What I want to know now,’ she said, ‘is where my savings fit into this.’
He closed his eyes and his shoulders seemed to drop another inch. Proud, confident Mark withering in front of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. If I—’
‘Don’t,’ she said again, putting her hand up. Until she had answers, an explanation that made total sense, she wanted nothing but the facts. ‘Just tell me why.’
‘I owe Nick money.’
‘What?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You owe him money?’