I waited in Mum’s room, too scared of making a noise to even move.
I would have known that voice anywhere. Ben Mae. I could make him out clearly as they came down the hall, but the moment they closed the living room door all I could hear was low, muffled and intermittent, and I could hardly catch a word.
Siggy breathed static in my head, watching me. She knew exactly what had happened last night, but she would never tell me. All I could do was imagine, and that was the worst part: the inability to differentiate between mine and hers. Between real memory and my own terrified imagination doing its best to fill in the gaps.
When I lost Jodie, I told the police the same story every time they asked, the story that Mum and I had gone over and over. What I saw that last night before she disappeared. Jodie got into Cox’s car. It was red. They were fighting. That was the last time I saw her.
I’d rehearsed it so many times by the time I told the police, I’d almost believed it was true.
Dr Charles Cox had been in his mid-forties when they’d got together. She was seventeen. It wasn’t illegal, as Jodie reminded me almost every time we talked about him, even though it was never me who complained about the age gap. What I was bothered by was the fact that he was dating her mother. But even that was something I could overlook, under the circumstances. The fact was that, apart from my own mum, Jodie was the only friend I’d ever had.
Our friendship lasted four months. From the day I met her to the day she died: 121 days. It was a Tuesday, the first time we met. I’d seen her around before, but she went to the big comprehensive the other side of Hove and wasn’t around much. But that Tuesday morning in April, colder than she was dressed for and drizzly to boot, she was there in the stairwell outside our flat like she was waiting for me. Legs draped widthways across the step, smoking. I tried to go past her and when she didn’t move I turned to go back the way I’d come, backing away from confrontation like I always did. But then she held out the cigarette. Hand-rolled, lipstick on the filter.
‘You’re the home-school kid.’
I nodded.
‘Missing your GCSEs?’
My GCSEs, if I was going to take them, would have been two years off, but I didn’t correct her. Looking at her I knew she had to be sixteen, seventeen at least. If I told her my real age, she’d have been up and out of there. So I just folded my arms, affecting nonchalance, and said, ‘Whatever.’
She smiled, blew the smoke in a thin, elegant stream from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just you and your mum in there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Your dad turn out to be a bastard, like mine?’
I shrugged, but the answer was an indisputable yes: he’d only been with Mum a few months when she found out she was pregnant, and promptly disappeared when she told him the happy news. The news that he’d died of an overdose found its way to her a week before I was born. I used to ask her about him, what he was like, but I learned to accept her reluctance in the end. From the shadow that came over her face whenever I mentioned him, I guessed bastard didn’t even come close. But somehow, I’d never quite given up hope that she was wrong: that whoever told her he was dead had made a mistake. I still found myself checking the eyes of every man I saw who could, conceivably, have been the right age to be my dad, looking for the mismatched irises that Mum said I’d inherited from him.
Jodie waved the cigarette again, offering.
‘No thanks,’ I said, almost inaudibly.
She looked at it and shrugged, then tossed it into the void at the middle of the stairwell. I gasped, leaned over the railings to see if there was anyone down there, and she laughed.
‘Fuck ’em,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Going for a walk. The pier. Coming?’
She was on a suspension from school – one fucking joint and they reckon you’re Amy Winehouse, she said – and things were brittle with her mum. Jodie drank, she smoked, she did drugs occasionally. After she disappeared there were even claims that she’d sold sex, though I’d never heard that from her. For all these reasons, I kept my friendship with her from Mum. Although I knew it was an unthinkable betrayal, lying by omission over and over: having a secret was the most delicious liberation, too. Jodie and I saw each other nearly every day, always at hers, always arranged the day before, to coincide with Mum being out.
Everything was easy with Jodie. I was happy. I’d never had a friend like her, someone I could truly be myself with. So, despite the promises I’d made to Mum, despite her warnings, eventually I told her about Siggy.
I told her everything. All of it. Not just the fugues but about the dreams that repeated until I knew every thread and wisp of them: the long, low building, just flashes of it; being trapped, a fire; the little boy bleeding on the ground; the cell-deep of the man in a uniform. These dreams – nightmares – were so vivid, their details so constant even in my waking thoughts that they felt like memories.
I explained to her about the panic attacks: terrors that would burst out fully formed, whose triggers I could pin down no more easily than puffs of smoke. Over the years, Mum had helped me understand that these fears lodged in my mind weren’t mine but Siggy’s, and that was a distinction that helped me make sense of them. And even though it couldn’t have made sense to her in the way I wanted it to, Jodie had listened.
The next day, she took me to see her mum’s boyfriend. Dr Cox. Charles.
I didn’t want to go, of course. I refused all the way along the prom to his office in east Brighton. ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ I insisted.
‘Oh yeah? How do you know? You psychic, too?’
‘No,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’ve done psychotherapy before.’
‘When?’ She clunked her jaw, trying to perfect her smoke rings.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was a kid. Little.’
‘Can’t have been great if you don’t remember it.’
‘Well yeah,’ I said, making an effort the way I tried to back then to give as good as I got. ‘Obviously, it wasn’t great, because it didn’t work, did it?’
She pulled on my sleeve, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s gooood,’ she wheedled. ‘You’ll like him. Come on. It’s got to be worth trying again.’
We found a way of me going to sessions with him, and she came along. I ran with the lie I’d told Jodie about my age because it meant that Dr Cox would see me without parental permission. He waived his usual fee too, claiming I was an interesting case, though we all knew it was really because I was Jodie’s friend. To start, she’d sit in and listen, not saying anything. No one, not Mum, not Cox, not even Matt, ever listened to me like Jodie did. Like she was storing it all away, cataloguing it, fitting the pieces of my fragmented pasts together. I believed she would solve it.
Maybe she would have done.
There was a click from the living room door, and the voices were clear again. Right outside the bedroom where I was hiding, crouching like a shamed dog. I mouth-breathed, absolutely silent, quiet enough to hear Ben Mae’s deep breath before he said, ‘What happened before …’
What happened before. I pressed my hands against my temples, and Siggy grinned.
Don’t think about it, I told myself.
The only images I have in my head of the night my friend died are Mum’s, just hand-me-down mental pictures appropriated from her description. The problem was that these appropriated visual details are lodged so close to my own memories – of the endless summer before it and the black-hole horror of the months after – that I sometimes feel that it was me who was there, not just Siggy. But that would mean the lines between her and me had started to blur, and if that could happen …
Just