Say You're Sorry(98)

Tash and Emily were near the bungee trampoline. They’d been riding the roller and were laughing how their dresses would flip up every time the cars went upside down.

It was only nine o’clock and the fair didn’t stop until midnight. We walked arm in arm between the sideshows. Tash was in her element, batting her eyelids and tossing her hair. Boys and grown men were looking at her, some like puppies, others like predators.

Soon after nine Emily got a phone call about her mum being taken to hospital. It wasn’t the first time. We were getting used to Mrs. Martinez being sick. I remember wishing my mum would get carted off to hospital, which makes me feel guilty now.

Tash slipped her hand down her pants and pulled out a small pillbox, pulling my hand until we were behind one of the tents.

“I only have one. We’ll have to share.”

She popped it in her mouth, slipped her arm through mine and kissed me, pressing her tongue hard against mine until the pill crumbled and dissolved like aspirin. She pulled away giggling. My cheeks were burning.

“I think you liked that,” she said, teasing me. Already I could feel the E filling me up with chemical joy. I could taste the music, which was fizzing in my brain like lemon sherbet.

She took my hand again.

“Let’s go swimming.”

“But the pool’s closed.”

“I know how we can get in.”

She was talking about the leisure center. Tash was pulling at my arm, dragging me with her. The idea of going swimming with her brought a flutter of happiness inside me. There were some drunken teenagers talking to the police near the park entrance. Tash steered me around them and we ran all the way to the leisure center.

It was a hot night, full of insect sounds and the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine. Every one of my senses seemed to be heightened. I could have run faster than ever before. I could have run all the night and into next week.

The only thing that seemed strange was my voice. I didn’t sound like me.

“We have to get out of this place,” said Tash, with the exhausted affectation of a bored housewife. “It’s so small and mean and…”

“Boring?”

“If we don’t escape, we’ll go mad with boredom. We’ll be trapped. We’ll get married and pregnant and buy a house and be stuck here for fifty years like our parents.”

She twirled onto the street with her arms outstretched, shouting, “We’re going to be free!” and spinning round and round before collapsing drunkenly onto the grass, dizzy and laughing uncontrollably.

The leisure center has two small outdoor pools and a larger one indoors beneath a domed roof where pool lights shone blue and painted patterns on the interior walls.

We walked around the outside, following the wire security fence. Someone had parked a builder’s skip behind the administration block, next to one of the brick pylons.

Tash climbed onto the skip.

“You’ll have to give me a leg-up.” She flipped the hem of her dress, showing me her thong. “No peeking.”

I cupped my hands together and she stepped into my palms. Then she shimmied upwards onto the brick pillar where she posed like a sea captain, staring into the distance.

“I see water.”

“What about me?”

“Follow the fence. I’ll let you through the gate.”

It was dark and I cracked my shin against a bike rack, cursing and hopping on one foot, rubbing the other. I called out to Tash. She didn’t answer.

I peered through the fence, wondering where she’d gone. Then I spied her near the gate, her short dress hanging loosely from her shoulders, her hair askew. Through the drugs and dark, she looked like a mermaid who had shed her tail and learned to walk.

She was looking over her shoulder and then she began to run, kicking up her feet like a newborn foal. At first I thought she was running away from me, but then I realized that she was running in my direction. She didn’t slow down. She smacked into the wire fence headlong and fell backwards. Up again, she tried to climb, but couldn’t get traction. Not strong enough.

“Run, Piper,” she said. “Run!”





36




Drury gazes from his office window at the gray winter day, the eve of Christmas Eve. A wind has sprung up but the clouds seem too solid to move. Concrete. Summer might never come again.

“It’s not Victor McBain,” I say.

The DCI doesn’t seem to be listening. After a long pause, he turns to me and gives himself a heave as though shifting a heavy load from one shoulder to the other.

“What changed your mind?”

“On the night of the blizzard he was with a woman at a hotel. He doesn’t want to implicate her.”

“We need a name.”