Path of Needles (2 page)

‘Angie,’ she said. ‘My name’s Angie.’

‘Nice to meet you, Angie. I’m Matt.’

Angie felt the muscles in her face relax and she took a
deep breath. ‘It is a good tune,’ she said, and he held up his paper cup and touched it to hers before taking a deep draught. An impulse took her and she opened her mouth and started to form the words that would take the two of them somewhere else, put a real drink in their hands, if only for a little while, then he was speaking and the impulse curled and died. She could taste it, already a stale, dead thing.

‘Here we go,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘The big moment.’

The music died away and Angie could feel her heartbeat again rather than the steady
duh-duh-duh
of the music. She was vaguely disappointed; she wondered if she would ever again feel the fluttering inside that meant a new man, wondered if her husband still got that with his bit of fluff. She scowled as an older teacher stepped onto the stage and up to the microphone.

He cleared his throat and the room hushed. He had a bald patch that shone damply under the spotlights and he touched his hand to it before bringing it to the microphone. Angie wrinkled her nose, thinking of someone else coming along and taking hold of the damp, cold metal.

Two smiling girls in low-cut dresses stepped onto the stage and flanked the teacher. Their waists were tiny, tight, never stretched by fat before being punished by hours in the gym. They were smiling. One of them held an envelope and the other held a velvet cushion that appeared deeply purple in the dim light. On the cushion was a crown.

Angie already knew what was going to happen; it was potent in the air, latent in Chrissie’s clenched hands. Her daughter stood at the front of the crowd, her posture loose and effortless, smiling a casual smile that belied the tension in her fists.

The teacher flicked the microphone, ignoring the dead sound that echoed around the room, and cleared his throat again. He muttered something, how
delightful
it was they could all be there, how
beautiful
everyone looked, but how there could be
only one queen
of the spring dance.

One smiling girl passed him the envelope. The other glanced at the crown.

He opened the envelope, the paper sticking to his clammy hands, and gave another
cough-cough
of embarrassment. ‘A popular choice,’ he said, looking around. ‘Our new queen is Chrissie Farrell.’

Applause erupted, and there were shouts, the occasional low jeer drowned out by the rest. Angie smiled, or thought she did, but there was sorrow in it too:
so long ago
. She felt a hand on her arm: the teacher, and he was smiling at her. She couldn’t remember his name.

He nodded up towards the stage and his eyes remained there as he spoke. ‘Isn’t that your daughter? Come on, you can go closer.’

And of course that was what Angie wanted; what mother would not? She looked up and saw that Chrissie was beautiful, and pride came at last. Her eyes stung. Was she crying? She allowed herself to be led to the edge of the
stage and stood there clapping as Chrissie received her crown, displaying her even white teeth. Her skin was smooth as buttercream.

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ the teacher said, clapping, still at Angie’s shoulder, easy in his louche posture and his untidy hair.

Angie frowned, and that was when everything turned to white. She winced, then the dark rushed back. She looked at Chrissie and saw yellow afterimages dancing about her daughter’s face and when they cleared she saw Chrissie hadn’t flinched at all, had taken the camera flash as her due. Mr— What was his name? He was still clapping, and as he did, his eyes flicked up and down her daughter’s body.

Later, when the photographs were printed and Chrissie thrust the picture into her hands, Angie saw what it had caught: the crease between her eyes accentuated by her expression, the dry-looking skin, her narrowed eyes appearing almost sly. All she could think was:
I thought I had been smiling
. In the picture she wasn’t smiling, wasn’t the image of the proud, happy parent that she should have been. She looked envious; she looked unhappy. She looked old.

Angie turned to the teacher, meaning to ask him for that drink after all – not for tonight, Chrissie might want her around, but another time maybe – and found an empty space at her side. The teacher was standing by a group of girls, bending so that one of them could whisper in his ear. He was smiling.

‘Mum.’

It was Chrissie. Her daughter looked shorter than she had on the stage, and not merely because of the platform: she seemed somehow diminished, just Chrissie, her daughter, once more, the crown on her head a cheap plastic thing. Angie smiled back – a real smile – and reached out to put her arms around her.

Chrissie took a step away, wobbling on her heels, and held something up to ward off her mother: the photograph. ‘There’s a bunch of people going to Kirsty’s after,’ she said. ‘I might be late.’

‘Chrissie, we spoke about this.’

‘Mum, don’t
start
.’

Angie shut her mouth so abruptly she heard her lips snap together, and the smile turned to a scowl. ‘Chrissie, I came here tonight because of you – and now you want to go off and—’

Chrissie rolled her eyes and pushed the photograph at Angie; she had to take it or let it fall to the floor.

‘I
have
to, Mum.
Everyone
is. Stop treating me like a kid, okay? Take the picture home, will you?’ Chrissie leaned forward, kissed her mother lightly on the cheek and was gone, with only a flash of vibrant coral dress as she vanished among the others.

Angie held the photograph tight against her breasts. It was a long time before she held it out and looked at it properly, and she didn’t like what she saw, not at all. She glanced around her. The DJ was playing another tune she
didn’t know and the dance floor was becoming crowded. A couple filed past her, so close the girl’s dress swept Angie’s legs. The teacher with the untidy hair seemed to have gone.

She wound her way back to the refreshments table, the picture tucked under her arm, and poured another cup of punch. She couldn’t see her daughter but the photographer was still there, in one corner, and girls were lining up for him, giggling. She could hear a printer whirring beneath the interminable thud of the music. Angie headed over there. There would be other pictures of Chrissie among the rest –
and of you
, a voice whispered in her mind; another picture to show she wasn’t the way she appeared in the image she held.

It’s a photograph. It only shows the truth.

She shook her head to clear her mind and went up to the table, spread with images of young girls: girls in red dresses, black dresses, pink dresses, their hair worn high or spilling around their shoulders. Their smiles were all the same.

‘Can I take that?’

A picture was pulled from Angie’s hand. She was in the way, as ever, cramping their style. She recognised the self-pity in her thoughts, decided she didn’t care. Then she heard something that made her stop and listen:

‘Cosgrove, yeah, you’re not kidding!’

‘Fit as anything. You seen his hair?’ A squeal of laughter.

Cosgrove
. That was him, the cool teacher.

‘Single an’ all.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’

There was a break in the words – they had moved on or lowered their voices – then:

‘Shagging Whatshername in Beaver’s group.’ There was a high giggle that made Angie think of glass.
Beaver
: didn’t Chrissie call her form tutor Beaver? Mrs Beavers, her name was.

Shagging Whatshername in Beaver’s group.

‘Dirty bastard.’ This time both voices joined in the loud, shrill laughter that went on for a long time until suddenly the camera flashed, turning everything white once more, making colours garish and faces pale: bringing everything into the light, if only for a moment.

Shagging whatshername in Beaver’s group.

No
, Angie thought,
it didn’t have to be Chrissie, of course, it didn’t
. There were other girls in the class, and other groups; there was always other gossip. It didn’t even have to be true. The man might not be sleeping with anybody, much less a pupil. He surely wouldn’t risk so much for so stupid, so flighty a thing. And then she remembered the way the teacher had looked at her daughter, his eyes flicking up and down her body, the way he’d moved away from Angie without a word. The way he had bent so that a girl could whisper in his ear, so close he must surely have felt her warm breath on his neck.

No
.

If she didn’t trust a man such as Cosgrove, she had to
trust Chrissie. The girl wouldn’t be so stupid, wouldn’t waste herself that way. Of course it wasn’t Chrissie they’d been talking about; she should think better of her daughter. Chrissie could walk into a room and own it with her million-watt smile.
Her daughter
.

‘Do you want your picture taking?’

Angie looked up, startled, and shook her head. No, she didn’t want her picture taking; she didn’t even want to be here any longer. She stepped back and allowed someone to take her place. She glanced around the room again. It was all going off exactly the way it should. There was no need for her to be here, not now. There were more than enough adults, and it wasn’t as if Chrissie would notice. Angie was already taking out her mobile phone to call a taxi as she slipped out of the door.

*

If only she hadn’t started to drink after the dance, she would have called Chrissie last night. It wouldn’t have helped, of course – the girl would have recognised the number and ignored the call – but it would have made Angie feel better. Of course, she had realised before too long that her daughter wasn’t coming home. She should be angry, she supposed, but it was difficult to feel anything except lethargy. She could call her now, but she wasn’t ready, couldn’t bring herself to face Chrissie’s antagonism. Chrissie had been with her friend Kirsty, she’d said. She never listened to her mother when she was with her friends.

Angie sighed. At least it was her day off; she could
always go back to bed. She’d hear the door bang when Chrissie walked in – she always slammed it – so she could wait until then to rouse the energy for the argument that was no doubt their due.

Angie pushed away the half-eaten cereal. She had a sudden, vivid image of the teacher, Mr Cosgrove: a close-up of his face, the features pleasantly grizzled like some fast-living rock star, and that made her think of the giggling girls. She pushed the thought away. Chrissie would never get mixed up with someone like that; why the hell should it have been her they were talking about? Not everything had to revolve around her daughter, like – like a crowd around a stage.

She heard a sound at the door and waited for the metallic skitter of Chrissie’s key in the lock. Instead she heard the slap of the letterbox, and a moment later the dull thud of something hitting the carpet.

At first Angie didn’t move; she just stared down into the mush that had been her breakfast, then she pushed herself up from her stool and went to see what it was.

*

A brown-paper parcel was sitting on the carpet. It rested at a thirty-degree angle to the door, facing away from her, and there was something wrong with it.
It should be fastened with string
, Angie thought. It was that kind of parcel, carefully wrapped, carefully folded. She didn’t know what it was about it that was off, somehow – and then she walked closer, and she did: her name and address were printed
neatly in black marker, but there were no stamps. It could be from one of her neighbours, perhaps – but then why write her address? Angie shook her head. She was being silly, the result of her hangover; she was looking a gift horse in the mouth.

She picked up the parcel, feeling the dry, clean paper. How long was it since she’d had a parcel wrapped in brown paper? It was nice, a pleasantly old-fashioned thing to do. She shook it and heard something shift inside, kept looking at it as she turned and walked back into the kitchen. She collected the scissors and snipped along a fold, opening the new edges and the slit tape, smoothing out the paper. There was a light grain in it, a diagonal pattern which felt nice under her fingers. She opened the scissors, slipped the blade under the top of the wrapping and slid it down the length of the parcel.

There was a box inside, new and unmarked, not yet reused the way Angie recycled old packaging, taping new addresses on top of the old. The box was pale tan with black elasticised strips around it. As Angie slipped off the bands she thought she caught a faint smell, as if the wrapping had been stored somewhere musty.

She lifted the shallow lid, revealing a spill of white tissue paper, and smiled in spite of everything, the evening she’d had, the headache, the queasiness that lingered in her stomach.
Good things come in small packages
, she thought,
and even better ones in tissue paper
, wrapped in layers and layers of it, crinkly like—

—
like the lines around your eyes
.

Angie pulled a face.

There was a smooth object inside the box, her fingers had touched it: glass. She pulled out sheets of tissue paper and laid them carefully on the breakfast table. She could see the glass now, and it was crimson, the stuff inside it at any rate. She saw it had leaked a little in transit, a dark, almost brown splodge clinging to the last of the tissue, sticking layers of it together. Angie pulled it free with a hiss of frustration and saw what was in the box.

It was a bottle, old and heavily ridged:
Ridged for poison
, Angie thought. Whatever it was filled with was dark, clotting, the same stuff that had leaked on to the paper. She saw there was some of it on her fingers too, and she pulled her hand away. There was a smell, and she couldn’t think how she hadn’t noticed it before because it was
strong
, this scent, cloying and tainted and
strong
. She wanted it away from her nostrils, out of her house, and she moved to push the box away and her eyes flicked upwards and she saw why the bottle had leaked; she saw the thing that had been used to stopper it, and she opened her mouth and froze. She
heard
the scream, though, she was sure of it; she heard it inside her head, and it went on and on, over and over. She knew it would never stop, that scream;
had
never stopped—