“Bella?”

He sounded almost scared. She shook her head, just too tired to even begin.

“Bella – would you please just talk to me? What’s going on?”

She said nothing, simply walked out of the kitchen and paused briefly in the hallway, before beginning to climb the stairs. Her footsteps sounded dully on the boards of the staircase. She could sense Jake standing behind her, in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at her disappearing back in perplexity.

“Bella – come on – “

She was sitting on the edge of the bed when he came into the room. Bella held the cigar box on her lap. Her fingers shook very slightly, jittering against the wooden sides of the box. The photograph lay face down on the bed beside her. She said nothing, watching Jake’s face begin to move from incomprehension to annoyance.

“Bella – would you mind telling me what the fuck is going on? Are you still feeling ill? What’s going on?”

Bella took another deep breath. With one hand she picked up the photograph, with the other, she held up the newspaper clipping. The room was utterly silent, save for the faint sound of their breathing.

“Who’s Candice Stanton?” she said.

Part Two

Chapter Eighteen

It was Veronica’s fault. It was her idea to go to the party. She was the one who started talking to the girl in the first place. Why her? Why had she picked her? What sort of malign fate had directed Veronica to catch her eye? What malicious god had decreed that this particular girl had to be sitting next to her in that darkened room? For that girl to want to talk to her? If it had been anyone else, anyone else in the entire party, in the club beforehand, in the bar before that, it wouldn’t have happened. Jake was sure of that. Which meant it was the girl’s fault too. If she hadn’t been so… so easy; so quick to join in with their suggestions, so reckless in her total, wanton disregard for their opinion. If she hadn’t been so touchy afterwards, so angry, so bitchy. So humiliated. If she hadn’t been so ugly. It was her fault, as much as anyone’s.

And it was Carl’s fault. He’d bought the drugs. He’d started it, he’d started the whole thing; it was his idea, those games they’d played. He was the one who’d turned on her afterwards, who’d said those things to her, who’d prompted her sudden, vicious attack. He’d pushed her. It was Carl’s fault.

But it wasn’t my fault. Every time Jake told himself that, he squeezed his eyes shut. It wasn’t my fault. It was the only way he could cope with what had happened, the only way to get through the long terrible days and nights afterwards. The nights were the worst. It wasn’t my fault. He found himself mouthing it like a mantra at those moments of sheer, black terror that enveloped him at four o’clock in the morning, repeating it to himself silently, hearing the syllables fall into place. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. The more he said it, the easier it became to believe and that was good, that was just the way it should be. It was the only way he was going to survive.

Sometimes, though, it didn’t work. He would lie in bed, clutching the duvet in two rigid hands, staring big-eyed at the ceiling. I’m going to hell. Nothing worked then, not crunching sleeping pills, not pacing the room until he wore himself out. A couple of times he’d gone down on his knees, buried his face in the bedclothes and screamed, as loudly as he could. If the others had heard him, they’d never mentioned it.

They never would. They never talked about it. Jake didn’t know if this made him feel better or worse. On one hand, he could pretend – they could all pretend – that it had never happened and the longer they went on not talking about it, the easier it became to believe the lie. As the weeks went by and the grass grew in the back garden, and there was nothing else in the newspapers, there were occasional moments of normality, as if it really had never happened. He remembered when Veronica had laughed again, for the first time since it happened and that one little thing seemed to heal something in them all. They began to do things together again, although not drinking in bars, not parties, never that. Instead, they would go for a walk on the Heath, or see a film together, something light and frothy. Nothing violent, nothing gory. They made meals together in the kitchen, listening to Classic FM on the stereo, not disco. Never Motown. They watched DVDs in the living room, and drank wine, and didn’t talk.

But on the other hand, it made things worse. He had no one to talk to, simply because they never talked about it. There was no one he could tell about the terrible dreams, the duvet-muffled screams, the mornings when he just lay under the covers and cried. Their web of silence bound them together. Occasionally the three of them would be in the kitchen, or the front room; the room fogged with cigarette smoke, warm, cosy, a silent conspiracy of three. He could feel it, the remembrance and the thought of it, trembling there in the room, waiting to be spoken. Once he’d taken a deep breath and thought, now, now I’m going to say it. Before he could properly open his mouth, Carl had jumped up and snapped on the overhead light, breaking the illusion of dim-hued intimacy. Jake’s held breath had been expelled in a rush and the smoke in the room had writhed and coiled before it. That was the closest they’d got to mentioning it again. Perhaps, thought Jake, he’d just imagined that the two of them had been thinking the same thing. Perhaps – and this was a terrible thought, worse than any of the dreams put together – perhaps they really had forgotten about it. Perhaps they’d been able to put it behind them and it was only when they looked at him, at his wasted face, at the dark smudges beneath his eyes, that they thought of it again. Jake always felt a little more of his sanity break away at this point. The idea that they might have shrugged off the events of that night as easily as a bad dream made Jake feel – what? He couldn’t put into words how that made him feel. Things got too bad for screaming then – he’d roll back and forth on the bed, curled like a foetus, digging his nails into his palms and whimpering. He was beginning to recognise the onset of those type of thoughts. His synapses fired along the same pathways, always; Veronica’s fault, her fault, Carl’s fault, his fault, not talking, the two of them forgetting, only he able to remember and to suffer – he knew the pathway now and how to damn it, divert it, head it off. When he got to the two of them forgetting, he would take a knife or a razor or something domestic but sharp, and make a neat, surgical cut in his skin. He cut skin that was hidden to public view, on his stomach or inner thighs. At the breaking of the skin and the first sight of blood, he would sigh with a relief that was almost orgasmic. But it only ever worked for so long and sometimes the fresh cuts were adjacent to a scabbed and slowly healing scar.

*

It was Veronica who had started things off, even before that night. Jake had seen her first. He could even remember his second thought on first glimpsing her, across the crowded kitchen at a party. Fateful parties… his life seemed filled with them. His second thought had been – don’t let Carl speak to her before I can. His first, of course, had been fucking hell.

For Veronica was beautiful. She had the face of a nineteen forties movie star; her features perfectly regular, her skin like flesh-toned cream. She wore her hair like her namesake Veronica Lake, hanging over one eye in a long, shining, blonde curtain. She dressed in a corresponding style. Immaculate trench coats slung across her shoulders or belted tightly around her narrow waist; pencil skirts with gossamer thin stockings and high-heeled round-toed shoes; satin pyjamas; black, draped dresses that slide artlessly around her sharp corners. She was thin, obviously, that went without saying, with high pointed breasts and a child’s delicate pelvis. Jake couldn’t remember ever having seen her wearing jeans – no, she had – just once. She’d borrowed a pair from Carl; they’d swamped her but then she’d had no choice. There was nothing in her wardrobe suitable for digging in the garden.