She reaches for her phone, charging on the bedside table, and discovers both that it is 10.15 a.m. and that Amber Heath has been taken to hospital following a suicide attempt. She is in intensive care. Her family have asked for privacy. None of her friends have gone on the record. Calls to her agent have not been returned.
Becky tries to read everything, but nobody has more information.
Twitter has anger – raging calls for Matthew to face justice, as well as plenty of comments along the lines of ‘she lied, she got busted’ – but no new information.
Maisie stirs and opens her eyes.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You’re really white.’
‘No, I don’t feel great,’ says Becky. ‘I think I’ve got a bug or something.’
‘I’ll go and get Dad.’
‘No. Go and have breakfast with him. Have a nice time.’
‘What about Dungeness?’ says Maisie.
‘You and Adam might have to go without me.’ She is craving having the room to herself. So that she can pace, or throw up, or curl into a ball or cut, cut, cut at her legs.
Maisie leaves and, under the covers, Becky thinks of Amber wired up to machines, one that has pumped her stomach and another that helps her breathe.
Would Amber have ended up like this if Becky had spoken up about what she saw?
Becky is to blame, surely she is to blame. All she can think about is that night in the playground, those moments before Adam came for her, and how she had thumped her legs, how she had stopped short of thumping her stomach as blame ran so hot through her blood she thought her soul would melt. Her fault for ending up that way.
Now she cries, and she tears at her scalp and hair, wanting to tear out chunks, to disfigure herself, make herself bald and ugly and naked. Claws at her legs and arms like a cat defending its life from a predator. What about Amber’s family? What of the sickness and blame sitting inside Amber’s mother, that she raised her daughter all wrong – in a way that made her so vulnerable to damage?
Amber should not be the person to die. This is not her fault.
Amber is Medea is Becky is Medea: but the goal was revenge, not death.
Becky cannot bear to be with herself any more. Clambers out of bed and pulls every miniature out of the fridge. She lines them up on the bed and unscrews the tiny top off one, then tips the stinging stuff down her throat, swallowing and gagging. She looks at the others but doesn’t touch another, she already feels so sick.
She lies on her back on soft maroon carpet and thinks of Maisie and Adam in Dungeness: how these beloved people will be stepping between the vast makeshift shacks and daffodil-yellow wooden houses, over the pebbles – perhaps discussing whether Becky is all right, if she’s really all right. She can see the lighthouse and the waves and the cut-out shapes of cacti in her mind’s eye, all set against the grey backwash of a sky that’s lost its sun, clouds assembling, tumbleweeds spinning. And in the far distance the nuclear power plant dominating, all white and peppermint-green matrices gated up in thin metal. A black burnt-out house frame against the horizon. Pylons holding out their arms, offering nothing: these will surely remind Adam of the place they were both raised, a trigger to tell Maisie how hard it was for her mother then, how dreadful it was to feel so alone with something so new and yet so precious.
Perhaps Adam will think of last night, and regret it.
They have only been gone an hour, promising to come back for her as soon as she starts to feel right. She has declined their offer of going straight back to London. There will be paparazzi on her doorstep again, won’t there? Maisie will want to know what Becky thinks about the news but she is not ready for that.
Colours mix and the staid lines of the room blur around her. She needs to get to the bathroom.
She vomits into the toilet bowl, straining her insides like she wants them to come unstitched from her, lungs and heart streaming out blood before their tubes and flesh splash into the water beneath.
There is one thought she cannot bury.
If you are the woman who saw me, you can call the police direct if you don’t want to speak to David. Please, just don’t say nothing.
The eyes are the windows to the soul, she tells herself, as she looks in the mirror and washes her mouth out.
Her thoughts swim back and back, heart thrashing in her chest, a sick rush back in time, but she digs her fingernails into the present – don’t take me there, please don’t take me there – by running the cold tap again and sticking her mouth under it. Rinsing and spitting. She pushes the bathroom door closed, there isn’t a lock. Notices that perhaps she is sore down there and pushes her underwear down to around her knees, sits heavily on the toilet, cradling her head on her hand, arm resting on her thigh, and sees the crotch of her pants – lace, a bold magenta – stiff now. Feels around her pubic hair and yes, it is there too. Like glue.
And she is being sick again, even before she knows it, all across the marble floor, losing the strength she needs to stop what is now certainly happening – God, no, she remembers nothing after her eyes rolled back, lying back into the coats with Scott and he said I’m so fucked Becky, I’m so fucked, are you? And she was too gone to say anything at all, she was just thudding with drugs like she was underwater, pummelled, pinned under by the waves. Waking up, nothing, nobody who can tell her who—
Chapter 23
Hampstead, London
14 September 2003, the morning after the party
She is lying down, is all
