Nicci French - Until it's Over

Astrid was the last obstacle. Once she was dead I’d be free. And it wouldn’t be so hard. There wasn’t much to it. The trick was learning that there was no trick.

Killing the first time was like losing my virginity. I had broken through. I had stepped into a new world of adulthood and I expected people to be able to see it in me, a new glow in the eyes, a sense of power. But they couldn’t and that was good too. It was like losing my virginity in other ways as well: a messy, almost farcical fumbling, a struggle on a sofa, a sort of embarrassment and disbelief. A stickiness. She was called Jenny. The first I had sex with, I mean; not the first I killed. She was fifteen, she was folded up against me, half dressed, her cheek stained. Suddenly she felt heavy. I remember wishing that she would just go away. Which she couldn’t, because it was at her parents’ house. And it was like that with the killing as well, because after it had happened, after the spasm, after the thrill and the intimacy, my main thought was: Is that it? Is that all? Is it as easy as that?

I looked at Jenny, lying against me, one breast exposed, nuzzling into me. It was the first time for her as well. Really, she was the one who had started it, squeezing my hand at a party, even giving me a Valentine, inviting me to the house when her mum was out. I saw now that she really cared, cared about what had happened, cared about me. Now she leaned over to me and kissed my cheek and I was really quite fascinated. This was going to be the story of her first time, maybe even of her first love, and I had felt nothing at all. While it was taking its course, I had felt we were like two actors playing a scene and playing it badly. And then I realized that Jenny didn’t know she was an actress. She thought it was real.

It’s like the cat we had when I was little. We only had a postage stamp of a garden, with the railway embankment behind it. But when he wasn’t asleep, he spent his whole life out there, staring into a bush. I never saw him catch anything but we’d find the evidence under the kitchen table. Small birds without heads, a mole, the bottom half of a rat. He was a pathetic pet cat fed from a tin, he had been bred for hundreds of years just to be a sort of fluffy toy, but somewhere, deep down, he still thought he was a lion prowling through the jungle.

Sometimes, when I was growing up, I wanted to shout at people: ‘You don’t think any of this is real, do you?’ I hardly ever did, though, hardly more than just once. I was eleven years old and in my first year of secondary school. Some of us were sitting at the back of the class during a boring maths lesson and a boy called Daniel Benton was sticking the sharp end of a compass into his arm. Paul Leigh said he could make himself bleed and he pushed the point into his forearm. We leaned over and saw a little red full stop on his white skin.

I laughed and Paul Leigh whispered furiously at me that I wouldn’t dare do that. Immediately I felt a sense of power. ‘Give me the compass, then,’ I said. ‘Give me it and I’ll show you.’

It was a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated show. Things quickly got hazy but I remember someone started to cry and a desk got knocked over and there was a bustle and I was dragged out of the room, leaving a red smear behind me.

When you do something like that, you don’t even get into trouble. It’s too big. It doesn’t fit into the system of punishments. After the nurse and the day in Casualty, I was summoned to see my form teacher and the headmaster at the same time. They talked to me in subdued, sympathetic voices. When I came out of the office, my mum was sitting on the bench, crying. I hugged her while looking over her shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t be spotted by anybody I knew.

In the end, I was sent to see a doctor. He wore a sweater and had a room with brightly coloured posters on the wall and toys on the floor. He got me to look at pictures and talk about them, and then he asked me about my life. I was only eleven but I think I saw quickly what the rules were. He wasn’t a real doctor – he didn’t want to help me or to make me better. He wanted to test me to see if I’d give myself away, to show that I wasn’t like the others. It was like the bit in science-fiction films where you have someone who might be an android or might be a human being and you’ve got to ask them questions to see if you can tell the difference. That’s what he was doing with me. In the pictures there were two people or three people, and he wanted me to talk about the relationship between them. It was obvious that I was meant to see them as nice and normal. So I said about the first one that it looked like a mother and a child and that maybe she had just collected him from school. He asked where I thought the father was and I said he was probably at work. I looked at the doctor and he smiled and nodded.

What is strange, when I look back, is that I clearly knew what not to say to the doctor. I told him that the stuff with the compass had been a mistake. I didn’t know what had come over me. That wasn’t a total lie. It had been a mistake. For once, I had let the mask slip. I had done something real. I had broken through the pretend game that everyone was playing and showed them blood and bone and they hadn’t liked what they saw.

The doctor asked me about my father. He’d probably read my school file. I could see that the point was to seem sad but not too sad, to miss my father but not miss him too much. I said it had been a long time ago. That seemed good enough. One of the photographs showed a small child with a cat. He asked me if I had a cat. Even at that age, I knew what he was trying to get me to say. He wanted to know if I was cruel to my cat. I wasn’t, but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have told him. I just told him the truth, which was that I once had a cat and that I used to look after him and feed him and sometimes he would come and sleep on my bed. Then he changed the subject and starting asking me about other things, like hobbies and whether I had friends. I could see his interest gradually fading. He was looking for something juicy and I had to make sure he didn’t find anything. I needed to be normal and boring.

I was always good at hiding, especially from my mum – though as time went on I could never be quite sure what she saw and what she didn’t. Sometimes I thought she was stupid: a big-boned, slow-moving woman with a large lap, thick hair coarse and pale like straw, a round face and a soft voice that had a kind of drawl to it because she came from Somerset. But there were other times when I’d look at her and see in those grey eyes an expression that gave me an itchy, uncomfortable feeling, as if, all of a sudden, my clothes were too tight.

She was called Mary. She had left school when she met my dad and she had me before she was twenty, so she must have been young, really, but I always thought of her as old. Old and boring. So it was a shock when I heard Jerry Barker telling a mate of his outside the newsagent that she was a bit of all right. I remember that like yesterday: a bit of all right. I tried to see her through Jerry’s eyes, but it was no good. She was on the big side, she never wore makeup or had her hair done nicely, and she wore these clothes that hid her, like a tent. From what people said, my dad hadn’t been much of a catch, but she couldn’t even keep him for long. It was just her and me, day after day and week after week, and the dreary years went by. She worked at the florist’s during the day and at night she did other people’s ironing. She cooked meals with her coat still on but sat down with me to eat and tried to ask me about my day. I always told her what she wanted to hear, and then I could turn on the TV and pretend she wasn’t there, looking at me with her pale eyes. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she’d ask, in that soft voice of hers. And I’d always say, ‘I’m not thinking about anything at all, Mum,’ though I was, of course – I was thinking she had a face like a fish; I was thinking I’d like her to shut the fuck up and leave me in peace. She had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I could hear it when I lay in bed. Cough-cough-cough from downstairs where she was ironing; cough-cough-cough upstairs, in the little room opposite my bigger one.