Her comment hits home harder than it should. No matter how close to friendship we get, there is always part of Belinda that only sees me as a prissy fairy princess. As Baby Spice. I don’t help dissuade her of that opinion when I feel tears swim in my eyes.
‘It was my birthday,’ I say quietly, swiping away tears that are making me angry with myself. ‘The day it happened. He’d always sent me the cards, and the gum, and that’s the first year he didn’t. I don’t know what happened to him in that year, but the day he got arrested was my birthday.’
I can’t quite escape the suspicion that on that particular day, he might have been in a worse mood than usual. Nearer to breaking point – near enough that some random arsehole abusing a helpless creature would have pushed him over the edge. Reminded him, perhaps, of when he was a helpless creature, being abused.
Belinda’s expression flitters between sympathy and annoyance. She clears up our plates, and replies: ‘Right. Well, there’s nothing you can do about that now. All we can do is keep moving forward – assuming that’s still what you want to do? If so, I’m due to speak to Liam again. He was trying to find out what happened to Joe after that, beyond Pinefirth. He might still be in there, for all we know – or he could have emigrated to Siberia. And I’m sorry, OK? I shouldn’t have snapped. You’re not even that prissy any more.’
I nod, and breathe deeply, and regain the control that for a nanosecond I felt slipping through my fingers.
‘Yes. I want to keep going. And I’m sorry too.’
‘Would it help if I apologise as well?’ pipes in Michael. ‘I’m sure I’ve probably done something wrong …’
‘I’m sure you have,’ she says as she leaves the room. ‘I’ll compile a list for you.’
We fill in the time while she talks to Liam again by having a mindless conversation about the merits of The Greatest Showman, which he’d watched the night before when he couldn’t sleep. It’s trivial and silly and exactly what I need to calm down – and I suspect that Michael, who is a lot more intuitive than he appears on the surface, knows that. He glimpsed my inner panic, and he is helping me deal with it.
‘It is an amazing film,’ he says, sighing into his coffee, ‘but I also kind of hate it, you know? I mean, those songs! They’re so emotionally manipulative – they make me feel way too much! Plus, there’s the whole Hugh Jackman diminishing returns theory, and the detrimental effect that has on the rest of humanity.’
‘The what?’ I ask, smiling. He is good at distracting me, I have to admit. I’ve even eaten half a croissant.
‘It’s a thing, honest. So, working on the assumption that there’s only so much talent to go around in the multiverse, Hugh Jackman has taken way too much for one person. Hugh Jackman is the reason that other people – maybe up to a thousand of them, at latest estimates – are ugly, can’t act, can’t sing, and look terrible in vest tops. See? Science.’
I am, miraculously, actually laughing when Belinda walks back into the room. Sadly, one look at her face chokes off a baby giggle part-way to birth.
She sits down next to us, her eyes serious. My mind immediately starts to imagine what she’s found out. That Joe is still in jail. That he’s emigrated to Siberia. That he’s dead.
‘What is it?’ I say straight away. ‘You look terrible. He’s not dead, is he?’
She pulls a face, and mutters something to stall me while she gulps down coffee, grimacing when she realises it’s cold.
‘Not as far as I know, Jess. But I have some information. Liam, in an unexpected display of actual police work, found out quite a bit. Useful stuff. Surprising stuff. Just … stuff.’
‘Right. Well, are you going to tell us what stuff it is, or are we supposed to guess?’
I sound shrill as I say this, which is probably because I feel shrill.
‘He’s not in prison,’ she says in response. ‘He was kept in on remand for a while because he wouldn’t cooperate with the police, refused to make a statement, refused to even get a lawyer. Stubborn idiot seems to have gone the whole name, rank and serial number routine. In the end, though, the police couldn’t make a case – they never tracked down Mr Kennedy, the casually racist dog abuser, so he couldn’t press charges. Plus none of the witnesses really wanted to push it forward. The charges were dropped.’
This, I think, sounds like good news – so I am still confused about the sombre set of Belinda’s face. I am pulsing with the need to shake it out of her, to grab her shoulders and rattle her until the information she is hiding tumbles from her mouth, but I restrain myself. It wouldn’t be polite, and Belinda could definitely destroy me in what the police report might call an ‘altercation’.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ says Michael. Belinda ignores him, and fixes her gaze on me.
‘Liam also found out the home address he was released to,’ she adds.
I nod, but stay silent. There is something coming, and it’s something she thinks I’m not going to like.
‘It’s OK,’ I say after a few beats pass. ‘I can take it. Baby Spice is long gone.’
‘All right. Joe was released from custody, free to go, at the end of October 2009. He was collected from Pinefirth by his wife.’
Chapter 30
I need to escape. I need to be alone, and I need to walk.
I leave Belinda and Michael behind, and stride along the neat London streets, past grand Georgian terraces and shoddily converted flats; past wrought-iron railings and pocket parks and Japanese fast-food restaurants and pizza joints and off-licences and Polish delicatessens and blue plaques on ivy-coated walls.
I barely notice as I overtake tourists dragging suitcases on wheels and commuters heading for the Tube; as I dodge cyclists and the honking horns of black cab drivers and the congested river of traffic trickling its way down Baker Street.
I walk because I need to. If I stay still, I will start to dissolve, like the Wicked Witch of the West beneath a barrel of rainwater.
I feel separated from the world around me in a way that I recognise as familiar, familiar in the same way that an old school friend is when you bump into them on the street – one who you never really liked, but have such a long history with that you end up agreeing to go for a drink and a catch-up, fully intending to cancel at the last minute.
I am wrapped in a cloud of distance, far from the madding crowd, in a bubble of my mind’s own making. I feel my body responding to the tension; the clenches and cramps and twitches that signify a build-up of anguish. I try to let it run its course, and refuse to let it fool me into thinking that I am apart from the physical realm.
I run my hand along a brick wall as I walk, letting my skin scrape on the bumps and lumps of the mortar and masonry, reminding myself that I am real. I smear a tiny speck of blood on my jeans, and remind myself that I will also heal.
I stop after a while, and stand still in the middle of a crowded pavement, people flowing around me as though I am a rock and they are the rapids. I am pushed, and shoved, and called a few names – I have committed the cardinal London sin of holding up busy people in their busy lives.
I listen to the car horns, and the occasional roar of an engine, and the distant sound of the Underground trains rumbling, and the mock gunshot effect of a backfire. I jump slightly at that, and force myself to identify it, to deal with the aftermath. To breathe.