Chapter Twenty Six

The Sticks Bar was small and dark. I had found the shabby, anonymous looking street fairly easily but had walked the length of the road twice, up and back, before I found the bar. A discarded newspaper blew against my legs and I had to stop and disentangle myself before walking on. I don’t mind waiting in bars by myself but I always have to gather my courage to actually enter them. I suppose it’s the fear of not knowing what’s behind the door.

The walls were painted dark red, and with the low ceiling and dim lighting, it felt like stepping into a cave. I walked as nonchalantly as I could to the bar and waited to be served, glancing about me as discreetly as possible. I was looking for a flash of blonde hair in the gloom. There were few people there but I still stood for five minutes at the bar, feeling utterly invisible, before the barman deigned to notice me.

Drink in hand, I made my way slowly around the bar, peering through the gloom for a sight of Jessica. I couldn’t find her. I made my way to a table for two at the back of the room, sat down and leant my head against the dark red wall. I kept my eyes shut for a minute, trying to breathe deeply and not think of much. Then, a little calmer, I opened them.

Jessica sat opposite me. I suppose I must have been getting used to her sudden appearances and disappearances – I hardly jumped at all. The merest squeak came from my mouth, quickly muffled.

“Hi,” I said, voice hardly shaking at all.

“Been waiting long?”

“Not long,” I said, rather tightly. “Not long in one way.”

“I know exactly how you feel, Maudie, believe me.”

She had an odd way about her tonight, a kind of suppressed glee. She kept buttoning herself down; I could see her doing it. I was reminded, unwillingly, of the last night I’d ever seen her, before her reappearance – when she stood in the kitchen of the cottage in Cornwall, her eyes gleaming in the naked light of the kitchen lightbulb. I heard her ten year old voice as clearly as I could hear her now: Tonight, we’ll do it tonight. The ritual. What in God’s name had she conjured up?

Her blonde hair was twisted up tonight, in a messy coil on the back of her head. She wore her long black coat and, underneath, a purple velvet shirt. There was a heavy, silver ring on one of her long fingers and she wore the necklace that I’d bought her. It shimmered against the pale skin of her throat.

Jessica took a big mouthful of her drink – I could see it distending her cheeks.

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“At the beginning, of course.”

“But which one?”

“For God’s sake,” I said. “You tell me.” I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded like a stranger, a cold, censorious stranger.

Her manner changed. Before she had been wild, fey, fidgeting about in her seat and turning her glass around and around, inking wet rings of condensation on the table top. Now she sagged. I could see the slowly welling gleam of tears in her eyes.

“Begin after Cornwall,” I said, more gently.

She looked down at the table and a tear fell. I was pierced by the memory of sitting opposite Becca and telling her the same story. Now here was the second half, Jessica’s second half.

“Cornwall,” said Jessica, slowly. I couldn’t read her voice – it sounded purposefully flat, as if she was trying not to betray any emotion whatsoever. I knew how she felt.

“Cornwall...” I prompted.

She glanced up at me with a flash of anger. “Alright,” she said. “Give me a chance. I’ll tell it in my own time.”

“Okay,” I said, chastened. We both looked at our drinks. I noticed her nails were bitten, the nail polish on them chipped and flaking.

“Cornwall,” she said, once more. Then she took a deep breath, steadying herself for the plunge.

*

“I think I was about fifteen when I first realised something was wrong. Really wrong, I mean, not just the wrong kind of thing for a teenage girl. Before that, I’d had problems, you know, but I didn’t really connect anything with anything. I just thought my – my situation was a bit fucked up. Which it was, of course – Christ, so much more than I could have imagined. But I didn’t know. I didn’t even know I suspected. I think there was just a sense of – of things being – off kilter. As if you’re looking at the world through different coloured glasses to the rest of the people.

“You know that old chestnut about trying to describe a colour to a blind person? I mean, how do you describe blue to a person who’s never seen the sky, or the sea, or – or cornflowers, or anything like that? You know what I mean? All I knew was that something was wrong, something underneath, but I didn’t know if I was right. God, it drove me mad. Imagine being fifteen, and stuck in a house with – wait, I’m getting beyond myself.

“I was fifteen, or so I was told. I lived in this very sterile, new-built flat, apartment, with my aunt. She said she was my aunt, but she looked nothing like me, nothing – she had dark wavy hair that was always a bit greasy and was going grey... she used to get it covered up with dye sometimes, but most of the time she didn’t bother. And she had olive skin and dark brown eyes. I mean, I know genetics can do funny things but you know, Maudie, what I look like. What we look like. We used to pretend we were sisters, do you remember?

“The flat was like a hotel, one of those totally anonymous chain hotels; all beige carpet and magnolia walls and some god-awful landscape painting on one wall. In a mock-gold frame. I saw a lot of those hotels later on in life... but I’ll come to that later. It had four bedrooms so was pretty big, and every so often some other kids stayed over. My aunt – Tracey, her name was – said she was fostering them, short-term, you know, for the council. They were always girls, normally about twelve, maybe a little bit older. Tracey told me that they’d been through horrible situations and they were emotionally damaged, and because of that, they might tell a lot of lies. So I wasn’t to take anything they said to me very seriously. But they never said much – they just stayed in their rooms and watched TV. They never stayed long. I think the most time any of them were there was about a week. They used to creep me out a bit, to be honest, they were so silent. I used to run into them in the kitchen when I was getting something to eat, and they’d just look at me with these big eyes, all in silence.

“It’s hard to explain just how weird things were. For a start, I had no memory of anything before my time at the flat. I don’t even remember arriving at the flat. Do you see what I mean? Well, put it this way, have you ever had a general anaesthetic? It’s not like falling asleep and waking up. There’s no sense of time having passed. It’s like a slice out of time, you’re conscious one minute, the next you’re not, then you come back to life and in between is nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what my life was like. There was me, in the flat with Tracey, and the weird kids, and before that, nothing. Not a single thing.

“Of course, I knew that wasn’t normal. I didn’t go to school so I had no – what’s the word? – no frame of reference, but I knew that most people didn’t just pop into being aged fifteen. So I asked Tracey, and guess what she told me? I’d been in a car accident, a bad one. It had killed my parents. I’d survived, but I’d gone into a coma, a long one, six months or something, and only now was I really recovering.

“When she told me that, I sort of accepted it. I mean, I couldn’t remember anything anyway, nothing. And I used to get these really bad headaches, migraines, I suppose, which fitted in with the car crash story, and I had weird digestion, lots of stomach bugs and urine infections, nice stuff like that. But I didn’t have any scars on me.