Her eyes are open, she’s staring up at me, but I don’t think that she can see me. I’m not sure if it’s the reflection of the clouds, but her brown eyes are milky.
The screech of tyres and a bumper collided with her thigh. She tumbled on to the tarmac, the paper spinning from her hand, white pages flapping and dancing in the road.
A man caught her arm. ‘Jesus Christ, are you OK?’
Tugging her arm from his grasp, she nodded, her body transmitting a message of pain to her brain as she struggled to her feet. Her right thigh ached from the bumper and she felt as if her left side had been dragged down a cheese grater.
‘The paper. I need my paper.’
She knew that he must think she was mad as she scrabbled to collect the spilled pages, grabbed the couple he collected from his outstretched hand. He was still watching her as she limped to the side of the road. Others had stopped too, to watch the skinny crazy in the jogging outfit who’d just charged headlong into the road without even looking.
Screaming. I can hear screaming. I think it’s someone else, but the noise is so loud, so constant, like an animal in pain, and I realize that the noise is coming from me. It is me who is screaming.
15
The nausea had risen from Jessie’s stomach to her throat. Lowering the window to allow cool air to rush over her face, she swung off the motorway at the next exit, reached a roundabout and turned off to join a country road. A hundred metres down, she bumped two wheels on to the grassy verge, shoved the door open, and projectile-vomited on to the tarmac. Stumbling to the verge, she vomited again, coffee-saturated bile filling her nose and mouth. She gagged and coughed, trying to clear her clogged airways, hating how the vulnerability of vomiting catapulted her straight back to childhood, wanting, for an acute second, her mother for the first time in as long as she could remember.
She hadn’t been taking care of herself, she knew: not eating properly, downing coffee in the mornings to keep her mind focused on her patients, mainlining wine in the evenings, to take her mind off them. Stupid, self-destructive behaviour. Yet more stupidity to add to her burgeoning list. Resting her forehead on the cool metal roof of her car, she waited for the storm in her stomach to subside, remembering that she hadn’t bought any water, that she’d have to live with a bile-coated tongue until the next service station.
As she straightened, her mobile rang, her mother’s name flashing on its face, as if her fleeting desire for maternal comfort had travelled instantaneously the forty miles north-east to the sixties house in the quiet cul-de-sac in Wimbledon where she had grown up, where her mother still lived with Richard, her new partner, whom Jessie had met once and thankfully liked very much. He was just what her mother needed; everything her father hadn’t been. Caring, solid, reliable. Not a self-obsessed wanker.
‘Mum,’ she croaked.
Her throat ached and the taste in her mouth was revolting.
‘Are you OK, darling? You sound a bit bunged-up.’
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she croaked again, ducking and wiping her mouth on the hem of her pale blue summer dress.
‘How are you, Mum?’
‘I’m good, darling.’
Their relationship still formal, too much left unsaid for it to be anything but. She wanted to get moving, get to the Witterings and find Carolynn. Encourage her to make contact with Marilyn without having a showdown as to why she’d repeatedly lied in their sessions, the duplicity that had been her and Jessie’s professional relationship for the past five weeks.
‘What do you want, Mum? I’m sorry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
Even over the sound of her own rasping breath, Jessie heard the change in her mother’s, quicker, lighter, betraying agitation. She’d hardly spoken – she couldn’t possibly have offended her mum in only two sentences.
‘I was calling to say that Richard and I are looking forward to seeing you later.’
Later? Her mind still blank.
‘And his daughter is coming too, so you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s lovely. A little older than you, with two daughters, four and six, but they’re very sweet little girls. I’m sure you’ll get on wonderfully.’ The last sentence said as a plea. ‘They’re going to be our flower girls. I’ve booked a table for us all in the Fox and Grapes at twelve for lunch and the fitting is at two.’
Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Now she remembered exactly why, a few weeks ago, she’d blocked out today in her diary. Blocked it out with a quick slash of her biro, late for a meeting, meaning to write lunch with her mum and Richard and the appointment with the bridesmaid’s dress fitter in later, forgetting of course.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum, but something’s come up at work. I need to see one of my patients urgently.’
No reply, just that light, choppy breathing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, feeling another upswell of sickness. ‘But it’s an emergency. I have to see her.’
‘I’ll rearrange …’
‘Yes,’ she managed.
‘When? The wedding’s next Saturday. They do need time to make any alterations.’
She couldn’t ruin her mother’s wedding, but she couldn’t think beyond today, beyond Carolynn, beyond two little dead girls.
‘Monday, Mum.’ It was Friday now. She’d be done by tomorrow. Monday was safe. ‘Monday, first thing. I’m sorry, I have to go.’
Jamming her finger on the red telephone symbol, she spun around and vomited again, pebble-dashing her sandals and bare legs with steaming yellow bile.
16
The woman on page five of the Daily Mail looked sleek and stylish, her hair cut into a glossy long blonde bob – a lob it was called back when she wore it; God knows if it’s still called that – dark brown eyes holding the camera’s lens with a flirtatious confidence, the contrast between blonde
