The Sisters (30 page)

Nia is waiting for me at Waterloo station by WHSmith as arranged, nervously jigging about in her too-large navy duffle coat so that she looks about twelve years old. As I edge through the crowd, it strikes me that this is the first time I’ve been back to London since I was discharged from the psychiatric ward over eighteen months ago. Her face lights up when she sees me and she rushes over, pulling me into a hug.

‘Oh, Abi, thank goodness,’ she says. I always forget how dinky Nia is, she barely reaches my shoulders. ‘Are you okay? You don’t look well,’ she says as she takes my arm and leads me towards the tube.

I nod, assuring her I’m still in shock, but I’m disorientated by all the people, the noise, the smells. This used to be my life, yet it feels so alien to me now.

The tube is packed even though it’s gone seven and we have to stand as the train hurtles along the Northern line, veering around bends at a terrifying speed; a miasma of damp clothes and bad breath hangs in the air, even though a window is open. My face is too close to some stranger’s armpit. I’m concentrating hard on not becoming panicky and claustrophobic, while Nia, sensing my discomfort, chatters on about her day in the office, a pitch that she had to do to land a new client. Eventually the train stops at East Finchley and we stumble off, but before I can even get my breath back we are whisked along the platform, up the numerous steps and around winding corridors until we reach the street. I take in lungfuls of fresh air, the rain on my tongue.

‘Muswell Hill is about a fifteen-minute walk from here, so let’s catch the bus,’ says Nia as she takes my hand and leads me to the bus stop. My holdall is digging into my shoulder and my mouth is dry, but I summon up the energy to drag myself on to the bus and then five minutes later to drag myself off of it and down two leafy streets to Nia’s flat. It’s on the top floor of a Victorian red-brick house. ‘It’s only a one-bedroom, but I have a sofa bed in the living room,’ she says as she turns the key in the front door. It reminds me of the flat I had in Bath before I moved in with Beatrice and Ben. There are even two bicycles pushed up against the wall in the communal hallway and letters and flyers littering the welcome mat. She picks them up and flicks through them before shoving them through the letter box of the downstairs flat. ‘They’re never in,’ she tells me. I follow her up two flights of stairs to the top floor. Her flat is small and cosy, with a living room that leads directly on to an open-plan kitchen separated by a kind of breakfast bar. I dump my bag and flop exhausted on to the brown linen sofa while Nia puts the kettle on. She takes my holdall into her bedroom, telling me I can have her bed tonight. I want to cry with gratitude.

‘Here,’ she hands me a cup of tea and joins me on the sofa. ‘You look done in.’

‘Thanks, Nia,’ I whisper. I can sense the beginnings of a sore throat. I take a sip and rest my head against the back of the sofa. ‘So, how is it, living in North London?’

‘It’s okay,’ she smiles as she cradles her cup. ‘I miss you though. I miss our Balham days. It’s lovely here, but …’ She lets the rest of her sentence hang between us and I understand, perhaps for the first time, that her life too has drastically changed since Lucy died.

I glance around the living room, at the magnolia woodchip walls, at the drab curtains at the window, at the melamine kitchen cupboards that someone has attempted to paint red, at the fat armchair with its multicoloured patchwork throw that I bet Nia’s mum knitted, and the place reminds me of a well-worn but comfortable dressing gown. A bit shabby, but cosy, warm, real. It’s a far cry from Beatrice and Ben’s huge, five-storeyed Georgian town house with its artwork and artefacts and pretensions.

And as the rain hammers ferociously on to the roof and rattles the rotting window frames, as I snuggle down on to the unfashionable sofa, drinking tea from a chipped mug with Nia by my side, my oldest friend, the person who I trust implicitly, I know where I would rather be.

Ben has tried to ring me eleven times and he’s left two voice messages. I perch on the edge of Nia’s bed with the phone pressed to my ear and listen as his familiar Scottish voice pleads with me to contact him, that he’s worried about me, that he can explain everything if only I would ring him. I so want to believe him, but I’m not convinced that he won’t spout more lies. How can there ever be a reasonable explanation as to why he hid my letters and Beatrice’s bracelet in the boot of his car, and sat back and watched as we accused each other? What about the other stuff? The bird, the photograph, the sinister Facebook messages, the flowers …? And this woman – Morag. Is she his mother? And if she is, why did he tell me she was dead? I want to gag when I think of it all, the lies, the manipulation.

I lie awake most of the night listening to the wind shaking the little attic window and staring at the brown edges of a water stain on the ceiling. When I do eventually fall asleep I dream of Ben who morphs into Beatrice who morphs into Lucy. When I wake up I’m more exhausted than I was before I went to bed.

The next morning Nia stands over a frying pan, sizzling on the hob. She always was the first one up, the most organized out of all of us. Seeing her standing there, in her familiar flannel pyjamas and sheepskin slippers, I have a flashback to the past, to the house we all shared in Balham. I half expect Lucy to emerge from the bathroom with a distracted look on her face as she hurries to find her keys, her phone, her overlarge satchel, late for the doctors’ practice as usual.

Nia turns to see me standing there. ‘Are you okay?’ she says. She places two plates of bacon and eggs on the breakfast bar with the expertise of a waitress, thanks to the three years working at Sam’s Café in Cardiff to fund university. ‘I know you probably haven’t got much appetite, but try and eat something,’ she says as she slides on to one of the leather-topped bar stools. ‘You’re looking too thin.’

I’ve missed her forthrightness. What you see is what you get with Nia, no mind games, no saying one thing when she means another. For perhaps the first time, I appreciate how easy she is to live with, and how I took that for granted.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’

Her cheeks turn pink and she looks shamefaced. ‘I rang in sick. I didn’t want to leave you on your own. You’ve had a shock.’

‘Nia, you didn’t have to. But thanks.’ I sit next to her and, for her benefit, try to swallow the eggs that taste of rubber. ‘Ben keeps trying to ring me,’ I say as I push the food around my plate.

‘What are you going to do?’ Her brown eyes are full of concern.

I sigh and put down my knife and fork. I’ve hardly touched my food, but Nia does a great job of pretending not to notice. ‘I honestly can’t get my head around all of this.’

‘I can imagine,’ she says, taking a swig of coffee.

‘Why would he do all this? Why would he hide the letters, the bracelet? Does that mean he sent the flowers too? Oh God, Nia.’ My heart races. ‘And who is Morag? How can she be Ben’s mum?’

Nia shakes her head. ‘I don’t understand it either.’

‘I’ve been such an idiot. I moved in with them when I hardly knew them, got involved in their lives, fell in love.’

‘You were vulnerable and they preyed on that,’ she says, her eyes narrowing in anger. ‘It actually makes me fucking angry.’ She slams her mug down and regards me thoughtfully. ‘You know, I can’t help but think that Ben must be some kind of sociopath. Maybe he gets his kicks out of scaring vulnerable women.’

Did I really get Ben so wrong? Caring, dependable, funny, sexy. How can he be a sociopath? I can’t believe that he would do this to me. The version of Ben that I have in my head is shifting, moulding into someone else entirely different, yet I can’t quite believe in this new, warped Ben.

‘Have I made a terrible mistake, Nia? There must be an explanation for all that stuff in his boot …’ I push my plate away, my stomach is in knots.

‘Abi,’ she says with a warning tone. ‘How can there be a mistake?’

‘Maybe someone else put those things there to turn me against him? There are other people in the house. What about Cass? I found that weird photograph of us, I think she’s in love with Beatrice.’

‘If that’s the case, then surely she wouldn’t want to split you and Ben up?’

‘Maybe she sees how upset Beatrice is because Ben is moving out to be with me, and she wants to stop it from happening, so this is her attempt to split us up?’ I jump up from my stool and begin pacing the room, hope giving me a renewed energy. ‘That sounds plausible, doesn’t it?’

Nia shrugs as she tucks into her breakfast. ‘Not especially, no,’ she mumbles through a mouthful of egg. ‘Firstly, your letters disappeared months ago and so did the bracelet. Why would she have taken them so long ago? She couldn’t have known then that Ben was thinking about moving in with you?’

The hope seeps out of me.

‘Also,’ she continues relentlessly, not realizing that every word she speaks is as if I’m being stabbed in the chest, ‘what’s all this about his mother? He’s obviously lying to you about that. He got in a car with them yesterday, remember?’

I clutch my chest. ‘What if they kidnapped him?’

‘Abi.’ She glares at me. ‘He got in the car willingly. You saw him.’

I cover my face with my hands and groan, sinking on to the sofa. ‘He must be a sociopath, because you know what?’ I lift my head to look at her. ‘I thought he loved me. Especially at the end, he told me that we should get our own place. Move away from that house. He was willing to leave Beatrice, his own possessive twin sister, for me.’

Nia is silent as she consumes the rest of her bacon, but I can see the cogs in her brain ticking over, I know her so well. When she’s finished she places her knife and fork together neatly on the plate and comes and sits next to me on the sofa, handing me my mug of coffee. I take a sip but it’s lukewarm.

‘I know twins have a special bond. But isn’t it a bit weird that they still live together when they are well into their thirties?’

I frown and bend over to put the mug on the threadbare carpet. ‘I lived with Lucy.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But you were the same sex, you were best friends as well.’

‘So are they, I suppose.’

‘I think they’ve got a weird relationship.’

I turn to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. She’s so possessive of him. It’s almost as though …’ She shakes her head.

‘What, Nia? What are you trying to tell me?’

She shakes her head. ‘Ignore me … I’m an only child, I don’t understand what it’s like to have a sibling, let alone a twin.’

‘You think she’s got some sort of hold over him?’ I’ve thought it before, of course, especially since meeting up with Jodie.

Nia nods, although I’m not entirely sure that was what she was going to say.

While Nia is in the shower I can’t help but check my phone. Three more missed calls from Ben, and another message begging me to call him. My fingers waver over his name, haunted by the sound of despair in his voice. One press of a button and I will be speaking to him, he will give me a simple explanation that explains everything and I can go home and we can get on with our lives. I hesitate, and before I can help myself, I press down on his name. The phone barely rings before he picks it up. He sounds breathless, panicked. ‘Abi? Abi? Is that you?’

‘Yes …’ I say quietly. I close my eyes at the sound of his voice.

‘Thank God, I’ve been so worried. So has Beatrice. She said she thought you were having some kind of breakdown. Where are you?’

Some kind of breakdown.
Suddenly I know what he’s going to say, what excuse he will use.
It’s so easy to explain everything away by blaming me, huh, Ben? Everything is always my fault, my imagination, my crazy, fucked-up, paranoid mind. Not this time, Ben. You can’t use that excuse on me ever again.

‘Abi? Abi? Are you still there?’

I put the phone down.

Chapter Thirty

I spend two days holed up in Nia’s flat. Ben doesn’t give up trying to call me, even though I never answer. At first his voicemail messages are cajoling, pleading, begging, eventually becoming urgent, angry, asking why I refuse to speak to him, why I’ve left him, how can I do this to him?

How could you do this to me, Ben?

At first I’m afraid that he will ring my parents to hassle them, cause them even more worry, so I call them to explain where I am, but it’s not until I replace the receiver that I remember that Ben has never met my parents, he doesn’t even know where they live. He hardly knows anything about me, and it turns out I know even less about him. We lived in a cocoon – me and him in that trust-funded Georgian house with his twin sister and her weird friends. We weren’t living in the real world at all.

On Friday lunchtime the intercom to the flat buzzes. I’m folding up the sofa bed and I wonder idly if Nia has come home for lunch and forgotten her keys. I move to the window and push aside the dingy curtain to make sure. The buzzer sounds again, more urgent this time. From the little window up in the eaves I can just make out the corner of somebody’s muscular shoulder on the pathway below, sandy hair that brushes the collar of a tanned leather jacket, and I know it’s definitely not Nia.