Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

‘Sorry about that.’ She starts to hunt for her dressing gown, which she finds in a crumpled heap in the corner by her sink. ‘Where are you from?’

‘London,’ says Kat. ‘How about you?’

‘Haverfordwest.’ Ruth’s mouth shapes itself around the consonants.

‘I know that place.’

Ruth laughs. ‘Everyone says that.’

‘I went there when I was eight and it rained.’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth, lighting a cigarette. ‘Everyone says that, too.’

‘What were you like as a kid?’ asks Kat. ‘I bet you looked like Anne of Green Gables.’

‘Ha! I did,’ says Ruth. ‘With the same temper.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ says Kat politely.

‘I guess you haven’t known me very long,’ says Ruth, trying to blow smoke rings. ‘I broke my sister’s arm once when we were little.’

‘What for?’

‘I thought she was cheating. At Grandmother’s Footsteps.’

‘Well, it sounds as though she deserved it,’ Kat laughs.

‘No,’ says Ruth, suddenly serious. She grinds her cigarette out, gets up to deal with her dress in the sink. ‘It was the most terrible thing I’ve done. She screamed and screamed. It was awful; I couldn’t make her stop. My mother said: “What have you done to your sister?” She shook me so hard, and all the time Naomi’s face was scrunched up and muddy from where I’d pushed her over. And I was still angry with her for screaming so loud. For bringing my mum over. I didn’t know whether to comfort her or push her over again.’ She pauses to hang the dress up on a coat hanger. ‘So I ran away and hid for hours in our treehouse.’

‘Ah.’ Kat isn’t sure how to respond to this story. ‘You were just a little girl.’

‘Sure,’ says Ruth dismissively. ‘But, you know, the worst thing is: I actually meant to hurt her. And then it was so dreadful when I did.’ She sighs. ‘She was such a good little girl, as if she felt she had to make up for all my naughtiness.’ She is quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t feel about anyone in the universe like I do my sister. Have you got siblings?’

‘No.’ Kat thinks of her mum’s quiet flat with just the cats for company. ‘But I have a couple of younger cousins.’

‘So you know what it’s like then?’ says Ruth, not unkindly.

Kat nods, but she isn’t sure that she does. Not really. ‘Why did you choose St Anthony’s?’ she asks.

‘I like places on the edge of the world,’ says Ruth, gesturing theatrically. ‘All the universities I applied to – St Andrews, Edinburgh, Exeter – were near the sea. I grew up on the coast. Being by water always makes things better.’ She takes a breath. ‘How about you?’

Kat takes a gulp of Tia Maria. ‘Mainly to get away from my mother.’

Ruth looks at her for a moment and then roars with laughter, leaning over to clink her mug to Kat’s. ‘Amen to that. I mean, I love my mum, but …’

‘I know,’ says Kat darkly.

‘My mum gets sad,’ says Ruth, getting up to put on some music. ‘We grew up in a hotel and there were days when she wouldn’t want to serve the customers. Not that I blame her for that. Or days when she wouldn’t leave her bedroom, where she would sit at the window for hours and look at the sea.’

‘Yes, my mum’s depressive too,’ says Kat. She hates thinking about her mother, especially these days: the way the antidepressants had bloated her, taken off her edges.

‘My mum’s father – my grandfather – walked into the sea one day and never came back,’ Ruth says matter-of-factly as Kate Bush begins to sing. ‘My sister and I nearly got lost at sea once, too,’ she adds, swaying slowly to the music. ‘But that was just an accident. A riptide pulled us out. It was really frightening: one minute we were standing to our waists in water. Then it was to our shoulders,’ she gestures, making a performance of it. ‘And then the sand seemed to slip away completely. Waves kept coming so hard that we could barely catch our breath between them.’

Kat frowns. ‘It sounds pretty hairy.’

‘I thought, “This is it,”’ says Ruth. ‘That we were going to die together like in Mill on the Floss .’ She leaves a dramatic pause. ‘But thanks to a couple of dog walkers, we didn’t, in the end,’ she concludes cheerfully. ‘After that, our father made sure we had swimming lessons. Really good ones, with one of the lifeboat guys who …’ She is interrupted by a dull gonglike clang of metal hitting metal outside.

‘What the hell was that?’ Kat asks.

‘Someone out in Cathedral Square,’ says Ruth, gesturing with her cigarette towards a tiny window above her bed. ‘Some people find it hilarious to fuck about with the anchor out there.’ She climbs up on her bed and looks out of the window. ‘Hey, Kat, look at this.’

Kat climbs up the ladder and sits next to Ruth with her nose pressed up against the cold glass. ‘What is it?’

‘Down there.’ Ruth taps her finger against the pane, and Kat sees George and Dan lumbering back to college, each with an arm slung around a girl.

‘Hmm,’ Kat says and pulls away from the window. She sits cross-legged on the bed. ‘Maybe not your Big Love …’

‘No,’ Ruth smiles but her voice sounds flat. ‘Maybe not him.’ She glances to where her dress is dripping by the sink.

‘I can’t believe you went swimming in October,’ says Kat sternly. ‘It’s actually really dangerous.’ Everyone knew how the town had almost been wiped out by the sea in the great storm of eighteen-something. ‘It’s actually called St Anthony’s because of all the fishermen who were lost here,’ she adds.

‘I know that,’ says Ruth chirpily. ‘There’s a rhyme: St Anthony, St Anthony, bring what I’ve lost back to me.’

‘I’m just saying,’ says Kat. ‘Be careful. It’s dangerous.’

‘Don’t worry,’ grins Ruth. ‘It won’t happen again.’

Where we were from, people disappeared into the water from time to time. Once it was someone we knew – a man who used to drink at the hotel bar. I was around thirteen, Ruth fifteen. The wind was particularly wild that afternoon, filling our raincoats and puffing them up like balloons. As we headed back home along the clifftops, the hum of the search helicopter began to follow us and eventually we caught sight of it, hovering like a fly, skating the gorse bushes as it moved. When it passed we could see the face of a man squatting by the open door.

‘Maybe they’ve come for us,’ one of us joked weakly. But we both knew that the world felt slightly different from how it had that morning.

Later, men in fluorescent jackets appeared at the hotel with their walkie-talkies crackling. Our mother was asked to interrupt service to find out if anyone had seen anything. She had taken off her apron and washed her hands to make the announcement.

Speaking carefully, slowly, she said: ‘A man has gone missing. He left home this morning with his wife’s dogs: two collies. He told his wife that he’d be gone for an hour. The three of them haven’t been seen since.’

‘The dogs wouldn’t have left him, if he’d fallen.’ That was the general conclusion. He might have left his wife, but the dogs wouldn’t have left him. People knew about such things where we grew up.