What Goes Around: A chilling psychological thriller (31 page)

‘I didn’t.’

He holds a magazine up in front of his face because he daren’t meet my eye. I grab it from his hand and toss it across the room. ‘We don’t own one another, David. I have friends through work and you need to make some friends through school, friends your own age who you can have fun with.’

His eyes meet mine for a guilty second and then his gaze shifts to the curtains. ‘But I like being with you. We don’t need anyone else. We’re good together.’

‘Do not come into my bedroom uninvited again,’ I tell him. ‘Consider yourself warned.’

That’s not the end of it. The very next day he gets his own back. I come home from work to find Gareth sitting in the front room. The sight of him brings a blast of memory and I relive what I did – my expert, practised hands on my mother’s neck, the sound of it breaking, her dropping to the ground, lifeless as a grotesque mannequin.

I flex and extend my fingers. I breathe. I stare at Gareth, who is watching my reaction and feeding off it. David is slumped in the seat opposite him. His spine has crumbled. And he is crying.

‘Leila Mae, how wonderful to see you again so soon,’ Gareth says, and then he treats me to his ghoulish smile. ‘Your mother is dead,’ he announces, still smiling. ‘I thought you should know.’

So we’re playing that game, are we?
‘Did you kill her?’ I say and David gasps. ‘Have you taken her body down to the cellar? Are you planning on dissecting her too?’

‘Leila!’ David shouts, stricken. ‘Stop it! Fuck! Mum is dead!’ He sobs into his hand. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘You leaving is what killed her, Leila Mae.’ He stands up and comes towards me. ‘You and David Francis going off like that. How did you expect her to survive such a betrayal?’

‘Get out.’ I hold the door open for him. ‘Go on. Fuck off!’

‘You need me, little girl.’

‘I’ve never needed you. You’re a pathetic creep,’ I say quietly. ‘Now fuck off.’

‘I’ll keep your secret,’ he whispers. ‘Leila Mae—’

I find the courage to push him hard and then I slam the door behind him and slide down the back of it because my legs aren’t going to hold me up.

‘How did Gareth find us?’ I say to David.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You told him?’

‘I didn’t.’ It’s a feeble denial and I want to slap him and slap him and keep slapping him but he’s already surrendered to a prolonged bout of sobbing, appearing to be genuinely upset that our mother is dead. If I attack him now, he’ll only sink further into misery and I don’t want to have to deal with that. I know how he gets when he’s pushed to the brink.

‘Mum’s been dead for years, David,’ I say. ‘Get a fucking grip.’ I find my emergency bottle of vodka that I’ve stashed in the back of the freezer. I sit on the sofa opposite David and swallow mouthful after frozen mouthful. ‘Don’t cry for her, David,’ I say. ‘She’s not worth it. She hasn’t been worth it for years.’ If I close my eyes I can conjure up the sight of her face when she first met Mal and he would lift her up in the air and carry her upstairs, her arms tight around his neck, her smile wide and warm as sunshine.

‘She did love us though, Leila.’ He crawls across the carpet to lay his head on my knee. ‘She did, didn’t she?’

‘Once, perhaps, maybe.’ I stroke his hair. ‘A long time ago.’ Coming home from the hospital with David, kneeling down to show him to me, her eyes tired but shining with happiness. Look Leila Mae, she whispered. Look what we have. A baby to look after. Aren’t we the two luckiest girls in the whole world?

More vodka, more memories: dancing in the kitchen, sledging downhill, giggling, shrieking, baking chocolate chip cookies and eating them all in her bed as she read me Dr Seuss. All of life’s sugar packed into my first six years.

I drag myself to bed, bumping into walls on the way. David follows me into my bedroom. ‘I can’t sleep alone, Leila. Please don’t make me.’ He reaches out his arms like a child wanting to be hugged. ‘Not tonight.’

I throw back the duvet cover and he comes into the bed, snuggling into my back. I close my eyes and my head spins. I open them again and feel David spoon behind me. It begins like this, with cuddling and comfort. I’m aware of his erection but I’m not shocked by it and I don’t shy away from it. My mind has disengaged and so I respond to his advances with an instinctive willingness that is beyond reason – no part of me says
Stop! This is David, your brother. He shouldn’t be touching you like this. You should be repulsed.

I don’t think anything. I simply feel, letting go to the desire of a man’s body in synch with mine, and then I fall asleep.

When I wake, winter sunlight floods the room with a shimmering, honey glow. David is lying beside me, wide awake and staring at me. I have a feeling he’s been staring at me for some time. ‘You look beautiful when you’re asleep,’ he says. He touches my breast, tentative at first, then confident. I assumed he was a virgin before last night but I must have been wrong because he’s surprisingly adept and knowing.

I stop his hand before he can push his fingers inside me. ‘No.’ I say. ‘No.’

Up to now I’ve been part-sister, part-mother and now, briefly, we have crossed a line and become lovers, but in the sober daylight I won’t repeat it.

I find David a flatmate and I move back down south. He accuses me of abandoning him and I accuse him of taking advantage of me. I swear I’ll have nothing more to do with him but even as I say it, I know I won’t be able to make it true because we are pillars in each other’s lives, the only allies to the dysfunction of our upbringing, and that makes him like a limb that I struggle to sever.

When I discover I’m pregnant, I plead with myself to have an abortion but I can’t go through with it, because while I’m perfectly happy to kill a part of myself, I can’t kill a part of David.

I don’t tell him I’m pregnant. And when my son is born, I love him with a devotion that encompasses hope and courage and all things holy. Alexander. Baby Alex has all the smiles, all the potential, all the beauty of David and me. But none of the crazy.

I make one mistake. I am swimming in a sea of maternal hormones and I feel elated, weepy, lonely, proud. I call David. I tell him about Alex. I tell him that he is the father and he travels down to see us at once. Within ten hours he is standing by my bedside, ready to be a parent to Alex, ready for us to be a couple.

I’m actually a mother now. I’m not a sister playing at being a mother – I am a real, bona fide mother. David is a young man. He doesn’t need my protection any more. He’s six foot tall. He’s handsome. He can read and write. He can confidently make love to a woman. He cooks; he can do his own washing.

‘We need to make a pact, David,’ I tell him. ‘For the sake of our baby. We have to promise each other that we will stay apart. That we will allow one another to live separate lives.’

‘What do you mean?’ He slumps, disappointment written through his body language.

‘We have to put the baby first and that means that he needs the best chance of a normal life.’

‘Not a brother and sister for parents?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But no one needs to know!’

‘People find out, David. People always find out.’

He’s not buying this. ‘Look at Gareth!’ he says. ‘No one has ever found out about him. We can keep a secret, Leila Mae. We can do that.’

It takes me over a week to persuade him to leave us. Every time I falter I focus on my baby’s face and know he deserves the best this world has to offer him. I will not collapse. I will not shirk my responsibilities as a mother. I will be a tiger protecting my cub.

‘It’s time for you to go, David,’ I say.

His lip trembles, his eyes fill.

I turn away.

I turn away from him and look towards my baby who has just fed and is flushed pink and contented. David’s face recedes to the corner of my vision and then it fades out of shot altogether.

I bank on David forgetting about Alex and me. I’m optimistic that he’ll meet a girl and move on. His sister with her fatherless baby will be a mild embarrassment to him and so we might see each other once in a blue moon, but no more than that because why would we want to? All we do is remind each other of things we’d rather forget.

It’s four days since I heard from Francis. I’m starting to hope he’s given up and I feel the beginnings of relief lighten my step. The good times I had with him were short-lived and have been completely eclipsed by his lying. I still can’t quite believe it and I am horrified and ashamed that I was so easily fooled. The whole romance was clearly too good to be true but I blindly went along with it anyway, imagining I was due some good luck and what could be better than the fizz and flight of a love affair?

Lesson learned.

I’ve begun to practise my exposure therapy again and it’s tough. I spend an hour sitting on the sofa resisting the urge that tells me I have to pull the plugs from the sockets – I have to do it NOW or else the house will go on fire and Ben will die and I will die, firstly coughing and choking on the smoke and then the heat will build and our lungs will smoulder and there will be the smell of scorching, blistering flesh and then our bodies will be black, charred misshapen heaps of carbon.

And there will have been screaming. I will have heard the sound of my son screaming for his life. That, in fact, will be the last thing I hear as I die – Ben in total, appalling anguish.

I sit through all of these thoughts. The sights, the sounds, the smells – I feel as if they are real, and halfway through the hour my senses are exploding with panic-alarm bells, but I don’t move. Somehow I manage to sit it out and the fear recedes and fades and then I’m just a woman, on a sofa, in a developed country where centuries of civilisation has meant decades of checks and balances to keep us all safe.

When I stand up I feel shaky but proud. I did it. It was tough but I didn’t give in. This will be my life for the next few weeks and it will be hard work, but it means I’ll be able to improve my mental health and resume a fuller life. Fingers crossed.

Ben gets out of bed at about ten o’clock and I make him some breakfast, then join him at the table with a coffee. ‘You okay, Mum?’ he asks. ‘You look quite tired.’

‘Well …’ This is as good a time as any. ‘Francis and I are not seeing each other anymore.’

‘Oh, okay.’ He takes a forkful of scrambled egg. ‘Was it you or him?’

‘Turns out he was lying to me.’

‘Shit. What … is he married or something?’

It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him that Francis is really David, Leila’s brother, when my mobile rings. It’s Hamish’s secretary to say that Hamish has asked to see me today.

‘Good news, I hope?’ I say to her.

‘I know that Hamish received a letter from your husband’s solicitor this morning. I’m not sure what it says but I can tell you that he came out of his office whistling just now.’

‘Could be good news on the horizon,’ I tell Ben when I’ve finished the call. ‘I’m going up town now to see what Dad’s solicitor has said.’ I kiss him on the top of his head. ‘Will you be home for tea?’

‘Depends how late the football goes on for. And Mum?’ I look back at him. ‘Don’t let the Francis thing get you down.’

‘I won’t, darling. Thank you.’

Twenty minutes later I’m in Hamish’s office and he gets straight to the point. ‘Ellen, we’ve had word from Tom’s solicitor.’ He smiles. ‘He’s willing to do a turnaround on the house.’

It’s what I’ve been expecting but still I can barely believe it and my eyes fill with tears. ‘Thank you, Hamish. Thank you so much.’

‘It’s great news, Ellen.’ He gives my hand a vigorous shake. ‘Great news. I don’t know exactly what’s happened there but apparently Tom’s circumstances have changed and he’s now willing to move out.’ He gives me the details of the deal, all of which sound financially manageable. ‘Your father’s house is on the market?’

‘Yes, and there’s already been a lot of interest.’

‘Good. I need to thrash out some of the finer points with Tom’s solicitor but I expect to have a deal on the table for you within the next couple of weeks.’

Maybanks will be mine again. I repeat this to myself several times and so I’m almost skipping as I leave the office to walk down Hanover Street to my dad’s. It’s late morning and the day is crisp and bright; a fresh wind has whipped the sky into a swirl of blue and white: a typical Edinburgh day minus the rain.

Leila was as good as her word; she really is leaving Tom, and I’ll move back into my home. Life is looking up, up, up, and I’m in the mood to celebrate. When I arrive at my dad’s, I say, ‘Where’s that bottle of champagne you’ve been keeping for Christmas?’

‘Hiding in the back of the fridge,’ he says. He’s on his hands and knees again, clearing out moss between the stones in the pathway. ‘Why?’

‘Tom’s done a U-turn on the house. He’s willing to move out!’

‘Well!’ My dad rocks back on his heels. ‘My flabber is well and truly gasted!’ He gets to his feet and puts his arm through mine, swinging me around as he sings, ‘Step we gaily on we go, heel for heel and toe for toe, arm in arm and row on row, all for Mairi’s wedding.’

We reel and clap our way around the garden and into the kitchen until we’re out of breath and we collapse on the sofa laughing. ‘Who would have thought Tom would give in so easily?’ my dad says. ‘Not me, that’s for sure.’

‘I think … well …’

‘Catch your breath,’ my dad says.

It’s not a lack of breath that makes me hesitate. I can’t find the right words because I don’t know how to begin to tell him about what’s been going on.

‘Let’s crack open that bottle.’ He staggers off to the fridge. ‘That’s set the joints complaining!’ I hear the clink of glasses and then he’s back in front of me. He hands me a glass, bubbly overflowing down the side, then holds up his own, saying, ‘A toast.’ He pauses. ‘To my daughter, Ellen, who’s made me prouder than any man deserves to be.’

‘Cheers, Dad.’ We clink glasses and make plans for when we’re back in Maybanks. ‘You should begin by living in the house and then we can convert the annexe when we have the time and money.’

‘I don’t want to be getting in your way.’