‘No,’ Emma says, and settles herself back on the couch, ‘it was different with Chloe. People knew who she was. They wanted to talk about her. Figure out what went wrong and make sure it could never happen again. This –’ she points the rim of her mug at the screen, ‘this is a mystery. People aren’t sad: they think it’s exciting. It’s stirring everyone up.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I say, and she interrupts me.
‘But they’ll have those forensic people working overtime. We’ll know how he died, what time of day, who did it – everything. Then all this will fade away. In three days’ time, they’ll get back on with the memorial and everyone will forget about this,’ she sniffs, as if she is daring me to disagree with her. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’
Now it is my turn to stand quickly and head into the bathroom. The bitter coffee on a stomach already tipping and churning with cheap wine is suddenly too much, and I sit on the edge of the bath with my head between my knees. I think of clear cool water, fountains and lagoons and undersea springs. Hydrothermal vents and the frozen, secret sea inside Triton. The tiles in the bathroom are spotted with soap, and I stare at them and try to hear the sea moving, all kinds of other, restful, calming things, and clamp my teeth together so hard I can hear my jaw creaking.
A matter of time.
I lean over to the toilet, flip the lid and vomit quietly and efficiently until I am empty and sober. When I come back, Emma has fallen asleep.
Chapter 27
Nothing new happens. Terry abandons the phone-in and the programme repeats itself. Replays of the original reconstruction footage, as if the tape is on a loop. It feels like it did at the time: all the repeated warnings about curfews and walking in pairs. The school uniforms look false and dated and I realise even the most exciting things become boring if they are repeated often enough.
I wonder if Melanie and Dawn are watching themselves – cringing at the way the white dimpled fat of their thighs strains against a tight band of school skirt as they sit on that bench. They must have been freezing. I wonder how many times they had to film it – how many takes until it was exactly what the police were after? They make token mentions of Chloe now and again but her parents have long gone home and that decorated spade has been bagged up and taken away. When Emma wakes, she stares at the screen as if it’s all new to her.
‘Do you remember all those interviews we had?’ she says, and I do. I sit on my couch with her and I remember the upstairs classroom. The waiting, the way we looked at the flowers at the front of the school and talked about the different kinds – the ones we liked the best, even – as if we were at a garden centre. I remember that spider plant, and Emma’s too-tight school socks.
The police interviews went on for three weeks, and during that time we were allowed into staff sitting rooms and drank tea from teachers’ mugs and saw secret places inside the school – smoky lounges behind doors I thought were only cupboards or boiler rooms, rows of pegs with coats and umbrellas, and the sight – tender and thrilling – of Shanks’s lunchtime sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil with folded hospital corners, dangling from a peg in a tattered carrier bag.
‘They were interviewing loads of people,’ I say, which was only half true.
One morning with Shanks and the whole form until they established who were her real friends. Then the focus on me and Emma – as if we were criminals. I remember the look on Emma’s face when they asked us to hand in any photographs we had of Chloe. We looked at each other, hostile and questioning, and I knew something was up and she knew something was up and the policewoman interviewing us pushed the tape recorder towards us very gently with her finger, and asked us about Carl.
No one wanted it to be suicide. No one wanted the City to be the sort of place where fourteen-year-old girls who came from good, semi-detached homes south of the river actually drowned themselves. They wanted to get someone for it. Terry wanted them to get someone for it – he’d have probably tried to pin Chloe’s death on Wilson if he could have bent time and made the dates fit.
‘I only met him a few times,’ I said. ‘Chloe only went out with him since the autumn.’
‘Since Halloween,’ Emma chipped in. I nodded. It sounded about right.
‘Do you know what she thought of him, what their relationship was like?’
Emma didn’t say anything. We were in the staff room, and I followed her gaze up to the high rectangular windows – slices of grey sky and rivulets of rain.
‘She loved him,’ I said, ‘better than anyone else. Better than family and friends. She told me once he was her soul mate. He bought her a charm bracelet.’
There was a short silence, then, far away, the muffled echo of the bell and the thuds and shouts as the morning classes were released into the corridors. The policewoman – I think her name was Alison – turned away and leaned over the back of her chair. We waited. We were getting used to waiting. She rustled gently inside a cardboard box and a moment later she turned back to us and put a bag on the table. A zip-lock plastic bag with a row of numbers and letters written on it with red marker pen. The last three numbers were smudged – someone had handled the bag before the writing dried. Beside me, Emma laughed – a sudden, choking sound.
‘Yes, that’s the bracelet,’ she said. ‘He bought her that.’
Alison stared at her for a second, then swished the bag over towards me. I nodded without looking.
‘So he loved her. He bought her presents. She was happy?’ I was sitting so close to Emma I could hear the clicking noise in the back of her throat. She said nothing.
‘Yes,’ I nodded again, ‘very happy. She had Carl, she had her friends.’
‘They were romantic with each other,’ Emma added. ‘She liked holding hands.’
‘And how was she when her mother stopped her from seeing Carl? What was she like then?’
‘Angry,’ Emma said. ‘Chloe wanted to do what she liked.’
I glanced at Emma. It wasn’t as if we were lying.
‘She made herself ill she was so worked up about it,’ I added. ‘Her mum told me she wasn’t eating. Asked me to keep an eye on her.’
‘She’d been looking forward to Valentine’s Day,’ Emma said.
Yes, we knew what we were doing. Saying something until it became true and the whole City believed it. Even better, we convinced ourselves. I have not been troubled by sleepless nights these past ten years. My reasons are clear enough. I don’t know about Emma’s.
‘Thanks, girls,’ Alison said, ‘that’s enough for now. We’ll let you get back to your classes.’ She opened the door and the next time they interviewed us, we were in separate rooms.
‘It can’t have been legal,’ Emma says, ‘all that questioning. Were your parents there?’
I shook my head. ‘Barbara didn’t even know what day it was.’
‘They never asked my dad either,’ she says. ‘There was a letter went back, saying that the police were coming to the school to collect background information. Stuff about her timetable, who her friends were, what kind of person she was. Nothing about interviews. And they taped us,’ Emma says. ‘Not on, really. They wouldn’t be allowed to do that now.’
‘It was out of order,’ I say, and in this way we comfort each other until the adverts finish and Terry comes back. He never got us on air. His researchers and a troop of other journalists tailed us for two years – until I ran away – but he never got us. I imagine him lying awake at night, burning with the indignation of it. Would we have talked to Fiona?
It is getting light outside but still the coverage of what has happened this evening does not stop. For a dizzy, queasy minute I imagine this footage spinning on a loop for years and years and years. Chloe and Carl, our city’s Romeo and Juliet. They will carry on with the memorials and the flowers and the special music until Terry thinks we’ve all learned the lesson and made sure nothing so senseless and tragic could ever happen here again.