Paula Hawkins - Into the Water

When we got to the church there were already a lot of people milling around – that made me feel a bit better. I saw Mr Townsend and I think he saw me, but he didn’t come over and say anything. He was just standing there, looking around, and then he stopped and watched as Lena and her aunt walked over the bridge. Lena looked really grown up, different to how she normally is. Still pretty. As she walked past us she saw me and she gave me a sad smile. I wanted to go over and give her a hug, but Mum was holding on to my hand really tightly so I couldn’t pull away.

I needn’t have worried about Mum laughing. When we got into the church she started crying, sobbing so loudly that other people turned around and looked. I wasn’t sure whether that made things better or worse.

Lena

THIS MORNING, I felt happy. I was lying in bed, covers thrown back. I could feel the heat of the day building and I knew it was going to be beautiful, and I could hear Mum singing. Then I woke up.

On the back of my bedroom door hung the dress I was planning to wear. It’s Mum’s, from Lanvin. She’d never in a million years let me wear it, but today I didn’t think she’d mind. It hadn’t been dry-cleaned since she wore it last, so it still smelled of her. When I put it on it was like having her skin against mine.

I washed and dried my hair, then tied it back. I usually wear it down, but Mum liked it up. Totes sophis , she’d say in the way she did when she wanted me to roll my eyes at her. I wanted to go into her room to look for her bracelet – I knew it would be in there somewhere – but I couldn’t do it.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to go into her room since she died. The last time I was in there was last Sunday afternoon. I was bored and feeling sad about Katie, so I went into her room to look for some weed. I couldn’t find any in the bedside table so I started looking through her coat pockets in the wardrobe, because sometimes she keeps stuff in there. I wasn’t expecting her home. When Mum caught me, she didn’t look pissed off, she just looked sort of sad.

‘You can’t tell me off,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for shit in your room . So you can’t get pissed off with me. That would make you a total hypocrite.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that would make me a grown-up.’

‘Same thing,’ I said, and she laughed.

‘Yeah, maybe, but the fact is that I’m allowed to smoke weed and drink alcohol and you are not. Why are you looking to get wasted in the middle of a Sunday afternoon anyway? On your own? Kind of sad, isn’t it?’ Then she went on, ‘Why don’t you go for a swim or something? Call a friend?’

I lost it with her, because it sounded like she was saying the kind of thing that Tanya and Ellie and all those bitches say about me – that I’m sad, that I’m a loser, that I’ve got no friends now the only person who ever liked me topped herself. I started yelling, ‘What fucking friend? I don’t have any, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what happened to my best friend?’

She went really quiet and held her hands up, the way she does – did – when she doesn’t want a fight. But I didn’t back off, I just wouldn’t back off. I was yelling about how she was never around, how she just left me alone all the time, how she was so distant it seemed like she didn’t even want me around at all. She was shaking her head, saying, ‘That isn’t true, that isn’t true.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted, but there are some things going on that I can’t explain. There’s something I need to do, and I can’t explain how difficult it is.’

I was cold with her. ‘You don’t need to do anything, Mum. I swear you promised me you’d keep your mouth shut. So you don’t have to do anything. Jesus, haven’t you done enough already?’

‘Lenie,’ she was saying, ‘Lenie, please. You don’t know everything . I’m the parent here, you have to trust me.’

I said some shitty things then, about how she’d never been much of a parent, what kind of parent has dope lying around the house and brings men home at night so that I can hear? I told her that if it had been the other way round, if it had been me who’d been in trouble like Katie was, Louise would have known what to do, she’d have been the parent and she’d have done something and she’d have helped. And it was all bullshit, of course, because I was the one who didn’t want Mum to say anything, and she pointed that out and then she said that in any case she had tried to help. And then I just started screaming at her, telling her everything was her fault, that if she went and blabbed to anyone I would leave and never speak to her again. I said it over and over, You’ve done enough damage . The last thing I ever said to her was that it was her fault Katie was dead.

Jules

IT WAS HOT, the day of your funeral, heat shimmering over the water, the light too bright, the air too close, heavy with moisture. Lena and I walked to the church. She started out a few paces in front of me and the distance between us stretched; I’m no good in heels, she is a natural. She looked very elegant, very beautiful, much older than her fifteen years, in a black crêpe dress with a keyhole on the bodice. We walked in silence, the river snaking muddily past us, sullen and quiet. The warm air smelled of decay.

I felt afraid, as we turned the corner on the approach to the bridge, of who might be at the church. I was afraid that no one would turn up at all and that Lena and I would be forced to sit alone with nothing but you between us.

I kept my head down, I watched the road, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to stumble on the uneven tarmac. My shirt (black and synthetic with a pussy bow at the throat, wrong for the weather) clung to my lower back. My eyes began to water. No matter , I thought, if my mascara runs. People will think I’ve been crying .

Lena still hasn’t cried. Or at least she hasn’t cried in front of me. Sometimes I think I hear her sobbing in the night, but she comes to breakfast clear-eyed and insouciant. She slips in and out of the house without a word. I hear her talking in a low voice in her room, but she ignores me, she shrinks from me when I approach, she snarls at my questions, she shuns my attention. She wants nothing to do with me. (I remember you coming into my room after Mum died, you wanted to talk, I sent you away. Is this the same? Is she doing the same thing? I can’t tell.)

As we approached the churchyard I noticed a woman sitting on a bench by the side of the road, who smiled at me with rotted teeth. I thought I could hear someone laughing, but it was just you, in my head.

Some of the women you wrote about are buried in that churchyard, some of your troublesome women. Were all of you troublesome? Libby was, of course. At fourteen years of age she seduced a thirty-four-year-old man, enticed him away from his loving wife and infant child. Aided by her aunt, the hag May Seeton, and the numerous devils that they conjured, Libby cajoled poor blameless Matthew into any number of unnatural acts. Troublesome indeed. Mary Marsh was said to have performed abortions. Anne Ward was a killer. But what about you, Nel? What had you done? Who were you troubling?

Libby is buried in the churchyard. You knew where she lay, her and the others, you showed me the stones, scraped away the moss so that we could read the words. You kept some of it – the moss, I mean – and you snuck into my room and put some under my pillow, then you told me that Libby had left it there. At night she walked the river bank, you told me; if you listened hard enough, you could hear her calling for her aunt, for May, to come and rescue her. But May never comes: she can’t. She isn’t in the graveyard. After they extracted her confession they hanged her in the town square; her body is buried in the woods outside the churchyard walls, nails driven through her legs so that she’ll never rise again.