Marcus.
poppy
Now
My hangover is brutal. Earned and deserved. I must have put away at least twice as much as Bella, if not three times. Every time I thought about what had happened, what I’d found, what it could mean, I had to take another large drink.
The net result was that Bella and I both fell asleep sitting on the floor of Logan’s flat, one of us having put on a CD of Christmas songs at some point. Winning. Totally and utterly winning at everything, as Alain would say.
At another undefined point of the night, I came round and managed to coax Bella into Logan’s bed. We’d both slept there until six a.m. when I called us a taxi to take us to our respective homes.
I’d been aware enough to be quiet as I crawled into bed beside Alain. He was awake and hadn’t said anything – he just stared at me with his lips a grim, flat line and his eyes dark mirrors of reproach, then got up to take care of our child. He even let her come in and say goodbye and managed to make it seem normal that I had slept out and hadn’t called.
‘Eat something,’ was all he said while Betina was putting on her shoes in the corridor.
Now I am sitting at the table with my laptop, my hangover and my new-found sense of terror. What if I can’t get into this USB drive? What if I can get in and I find something awful?
The first few password attempts don’t work. And I don’t know how many more times I’ll be allowed before it locks me out permanently.
Think, Poppy, think.
I massage my temples, tap my fingernails on my teeth, jiggle my legs until my bottom feels less numb.
Think, Poppy, think.
I can’t think. I can’t think at all. My brain has been dulled by alcohol, by shock, by battling thoughts of still loving Marcus and so still being in the thrall of that monster.
Well I know what I’d be trying, Tina tells me.
‘What’s that then?’ I ask. I’ll take help from anyone right now.
What’s he been doing all this for? Sorry, WHO has he been doing all this for?
‘Me?’
Exactly!
‘You think it could be my date of birth or something?’
Maybe. Or how about the day that your life, his life, your family’s life changed for ever ?
‘The day I was found guilty? He can’t have remembered that date. Not to use it as a password? Could he?’
Tina shrugs her ethereal shoulders. What have you got to lose ?
I stare at the keyboard. Stare at the screen. Is it really that simple? Would he really use that as a passcode?
My fingers still hesitate. I always hesitate when I’m about to do something associated with that time, when it’s a moment that will drag me back to that hell called my past. Then I push through. Remember Logan lying in that bed, powerless and close to death. Recall my parents, every day sitting by his bedside as more and more of their strength drains away. Recollect Bella, devastated by the state of her best friend. I conjure up all of these things to force myself to find out what was really going on.
Tina is right. It is the date I was sent to prison.
And I am right, this white plastic rectangle does hold some of my brother’s secrets.
It’s hiding pictures of Logan next to Serena as she was thirty years ago. This younger, prettier version of my ‘rival’ smiles in every picture she is with Logan.
Snap: their heads are close together, and he is holding the phone up for a selfie.
Snap: she is laughing so much she can’t look at the camera while he takes the picture.
Snap: they’re sharing a peck while he takes the photo.
Snap: someone has taken a shot of their hands intertwined.
Snap: she’s smiling at him over the top of a coffee mug.
Snap: she’s on the seafront, in front of the bandstand, and he’s made some kind of error so you only see half of her face. And even then, even with one eye, half her nose, half her lips, she looks stunning.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
There are hundreds of pictures. Hundreds! He is obsessed with her. And the way she looks at him in some of the photos, it’s clear she loves him, too.
I think this is what I needed to see. It’s not easy, especially not when Verity Gillmare is almost identical to Serena Gorringe, but they were in love. It wasn’t . . . I don’t know . . . at its core it wasn’t wrong, I suppose. She wasn’t using him, he wasn’t in her thrall. He wasn’t using her, he wasn’t abusing her.
The only other folder on the drive is also password-protected. I try many more combinations of the date I went to prison, but none of them work. Then I have an idea. The day his life and my life changed again – the date I came out of prison.
Bingo!
There’s a Word document called ‘Untitled.47’. I open it and immediately see that it is a diary. It runs to a couple of hundred pages.
It doesn’t take me long to see that the horror I thought I had been searching for, thought I had prepared for, was so much worse than I could ever have imagined.
serena
October, 1987
‘Do you know when I first noticed you, Serena?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I replied. Straight away. He didn’t like to be kept waiting, didn’t understand that sometimes I needed to think about the answer to a question.
‘You were walking down the corridor and you looked so lost. But determined as well. You were all these contradictions at once. It was the lost thing that caught my attention, though. It made me want to take care of you. I really wanted to take care of you for ever.’
He looked down at me, a croissant shape on the floor, my arms wrapped around my stomach, trying to hold myself together until the pain ebbed away. ‘Let’s make up,’ he said, bending down to hoist me up into his arms as though he wasn’t the one who put me on the floor. ‘Come on, baby, let’s make up.’
Now
It was him.
I was sure it was him. And he looked exactly the same. Exactly the same. As though he hadn’t aged a day, as though he had crawled his way out of the past, out of wherever you go when you die to come back and oversee the long, slow destruction of my family. When he died, he would have been mid-thirties; if he had lived, he would be mid-sixties now. The man outside the court was not mid-sixties. He looked how he used to.
How he was when I developed a crush on him. Dark hair slightly wild to show how young he really was, strong cheekbones smoothed over by his pale-but-healthy-looking skin; eyes that were striking and stood out. I couldn’t tear my eyes away earlier. I kept staring and gawking until Faye and Medina’s arms slipped away and they had to shake me slightly and Fez told me that we’d been called.
Even then I didn’t want to tear my eyes away; I wanted to go closer, see if my eyes were playing tricks on me without my glasses and with the distance. I shook myself out of it, slotted my game face into place and followed my sisters back into the waiting room to collect the others before we filed into the court to see if Verity would be able to come home finally.
‘For pity’s sake, Serena!’ Faye says in my kitchen. She’s obviously been calling me for a while, and I have been standing in front of the stove replaying what I saw earlier. Was it an apparition? Was it my eyes playing tricks on me? Was it . . . ?