I went into my bedroom and pulled out the bottom drawer of my bedside table, opening the notebook at the bottom and sliding out another sketch he had done, of me. An ink drawing of me looking down at him, my hair in shining Raphaelite curls around my face, an intent gleam in my eyes and a hard-bitten lip. He’d used just one wash of colour, high pink on the cheekbones. I could feel my face burning with that same colour. Oh, god, I couldn’t bear it. How could he? What did he want? What was wrong with him that he would sleep with us both? Draw us both? I took the drawings down into the kitchen and I burnt them in the sink and rinsed away the black ashes, the bitter stench of smoke stinging my eyes.
I couldn’t believe Vivian had just left it in her book. She was so secretive by nature that I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t squirrelled it away somewhere I wouldn’t find it. I used to obsessively rifle through all her things, check her phone, insist on social media passwords, but I’d relented somewhat the past few years. Everything had been so normal. There were no odd antics, no uncontrolled raging and screaming. I had put her previous behaviour down to the trauma of going through an early puberty and losing her grandmother. The accident with Lexie had come so soon after my mother’s death that it all seemed inextricably bound up together, and gave me a reason to excuse her horrific actions, her little red hands. She was only nine, a confused, emotionally conflicted little girl who had just lost her nan. She lashed out. It wasn’t her fault.
And it had genuinely been fine since we moved to the village and started afresh: she’d made friends, clearly she’d been experimenting with her sexuality – she was growing up – just like I did. I felt sick suddenly at what I was doing. What was wrong with me? Why was I blaming Vivian? She’d done nothing at all to warrant this. Nothing. She was a victim in some sick game Alex was playing. She – like her idiot, idiot mother – had been taken in by a budding psychopath. I couldn’t understand what his game plan was: did he get kicks out of hurting people like this? Trying to wreck families? I was an adult; I could step back and understand my own horrible behaviour – that’s what six months of authorities-mandated family and solo therapy will do for you – but this would crush Vi. A boy she might think she was in love with, possibly sleeping with, carrying on with her own mother? Fuck.
A dark thought writhed in my head – was he involved in Molly’s disappearance somehow, Tristan’s accident? If betrayal as bad as this came so easily, what else might he be capable of?
I thought of all the strange questions he had asked me about Viv that I had blithely answered; the way he had turned up only when she was out. He must have been watching us, watching the house. Had I felt his eyes on us? Was he the reason I had felt a dark cloud of threat hanging over us in past days? Who was he? Where had he come from? He had fooled me so entirely that I felt ill.
I decided to head out into the garden for half an hour before Vivian got back; I needed the respite that the small industrious insect sounds and the scents of the flowers gave me. I was not overjoyed to realise that I’d been neglecting it like I’d been neglecting Vivian. The earth was scorched, almost powdery in its dryness. Leaves were coarse, parchment-like – they would crumble if I touched them. My flowers had drooped and the colours had faded like they do in old photographs, a garden in sepia tones. It was all turning to dust in front of me.
Vivian
I’m not sure that was one of my better ideas. I don’t think I have ever been so hot and sweaty in my life. Alex’s hands are shaking as he does up his shorts, and we are both gasping for air. My knee hurts from banging it on the handbrake. I manage to clamber back into the passenger seat, tug my skirt back down, and we both sit for a while, breathing heavily. There was something missing this time – he was distracted, it wasn’t as intense or good as the first time. He couldn’t finish. He wasn’t here, he was somewhere else, not with me.
I’m trying to think of something to say when I see Alex’s wallet on the dashboard, and I reach out to grab it.
‘What’s your licence photo like, then? Does it make you look like a convict?’
Before I can pick it up he swipes it, rising up off the seat to stuff it in his back pocket. ‘Don’t.’
‘What? Is it that bad?’ I try to laugh it off, brushing away the discomfort I’m feeling at his behaviour.
‘We should have gone back to the woods,’ he says, sweeping his hair back off his forehead, craning his neck and back into a stretch. I watch the muscles in his arms tense and relax and tense again. ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t want to.’
‘I just didn’t.’
‘You don’t have to be so weird about it. I just liked it there.’
‘I’m not being weird about it! I just don’t have time, and it’s not an everyday sort of place, okay? Leave it alone!’ My voice is too sharp, needle-like in the tight atmosphere we’ve created in
