I do my shift, still feeling nauseated and headachy, but if anyone notices my quietness, no one comments. I was always good at mental math so that side of barmaiding comes easily, but the banter with the customers does not. Fortunately, Bettina can talk for two and I rely on her this evening, as I often used to on you. The customers are all regulars and have the same courtesy toward me as the staff, not asking me questions or commenting on what is happening. Tact is catching.
By the time I get home, it’s late and, physically wrung out by the day, I long to sleep. Fortunately, only three stalwart reporters remain. Maybe they’re freelancers in need of cash. No longer part of a pack, they don’t shout out questions or force lenses in my face. Instead, it’s more of a cocktail-party scenario, where they are at least conscious that I may not want to talk to them.
“Miss Hemming?”
Yesterday it was “Beatrice,” and I resented the false intimacy. (Or “Arabella” from those who’d been too sloppy to do their homework.) The woman reporter continues, at a polite distance. “Can I ask you some questions?” It’s the reporter I heard outside the kitchen window on Sunday evening talking on her mobile.
“Wouldn’t you rather be at home reading bedtime stories?”
She is visibly startled.
“I was eavesdropping.”
“My son’s with his aunt tonight. And, unfortunately, I don’t get paid for reading bedtime stories. Is there anything you’d like people to know about your sister?”
“She’d bought her baby finger paints.”
I’m not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren’t just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably, the reporter wants something else. She waits.
I try to summarize you into a sentence. I think of your qualities, but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: “Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun loving, seeks…” I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humor but in your case that’s entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons, I wobble perilously close to an obituary, and you’re too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. “Is it true she was expelled from school?”
“Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.”
He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many subclauses can a single sentence hold?
“Miss Hemming?”
I meet her eye. “She should be here. Now. Alive.”
My six-word summary of you.
I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You’re right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave, made Leo so ill that he couldn’t bear to look at him, made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone else. So I knew that rationally Dad had his reasons. But he had children and so I thought there were no reasons. (Yes, had, because two of his children were dead and the third was no longer a child.)
You believed him when he said he’d be back. I was five years older but no wiser, and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I’m not so sure of that now.
Outside your window I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles, blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I’ve fed her, I fill a watering can and go out the kitchen door.
“This is your backyard?” I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn’t meant “backyard” in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. “It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”
You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You’ve always been passionate about gardening, haven’t you? I remember when you were tiny you’d trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening apron. But I never liked it. It wasn’t the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered, it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn’t change or die the following day.
But since staying in your flat, I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I’ve watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I’m not absolutely sure why—maybe because I think it matters to you, maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn’t nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I’m afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?
“It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”
I’ll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.
5
Wednesday
I arrive at the Crown Prosecution Service offices and notice Miss Crush Secretary staring at me. Actually, scrutinizing seems more accurate. I sense that she is assessing me as a rival. Mr. Wright hurries in, briefcase in one hand, newspaper in the other. He smiles at me openly and warmly; he hasn’t yet made the switch from home life to office. Now I know that Miss Crush Secretary is definitely assessing me as a rival because when Mr. Wright smiles at me, her look becomes openly hostile. Mr. Wright is oblivious. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Come through.” Mentally he’s still knotting his tie. I follow him into his office and he closes the door. I feel his secretary’s eyes on the other side, still watching him.
“Were you all right last night?” he asks. “I know this must be harrowing.”
Before you died, the adjectives about my life were second league: stressful, upsetting, distressing; at the worst, deeply sad. Now I have the big-gun words—harrowing, traumatic, devastating—as part of my thesaurus of self.
“We’d got to your finding someone in Tess’s bedroom?”
“Yes.”
His mental tie is knotted now, and we resume business. He reads me back my own words, “‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
The man turned. Despite the freezing flat, his forehead had a film of sweat. There was a moment before he spoke. His Italian accent was, intentionally or not, flirtatious. “My name is Emilio Codi. I’m sorry if I startled you.” But I’d known immediately who he was. Did I sense threat because of the circumstances—because I suspected him of killing you—or would I have found him threatening even if that wasn’t the case? Because unlike you, I find Latinate sexuality—that brash masculinity of hard jawline and swarthy physique—menacing rather than attractive.