Page 84 of Pictures of Him

I know better than anyone his inability to resist a final taunt, the last word his holy grail. And yet. The match is struck.

‘You knew how much I loved her. You of all people.And all these years you’ve said nothing; you let me think Catherine left me for Sam.’

‘The reason we didn’t tell you is because we knew how you’d react. It was a mistake, that’s all, a stupid drunken mistake.’

There it is again, the expert needle that is this word ‘we’. Jack and Catherine. Imprinted on my brain.

‘Catherine would never have had sex with you if you hadn’t forced yourself on her.’

‘Believe that if it makes you feel better. But she and I know the truth.’

Fury is weightless. I cannot feel my body as I walk around the coffee table so that I am facing him, my back to the blazing fire. He does look afraid as I step towards him, no thought of what I’ll do, just violence in my veins.

‘Calm down, for fuck’s sake,’ he says.

I raise my hands, an instinct to hurt. I grab the tops of his arms, squeezing so hard he shouts out.

‘Why do you need to be me so much? Everything I’ve had you’ve wanted for yourself. Even Catherine. You took her because she was mine. Because you couldn’t bear me to love someone more than you.’

In those blue eyes fury, but also mortification.

Yes, you twisted bastard, I know exactly who you are.

He shoves me hard in the chest and I lose my grip, arms flailing as I try to steady myself. He pushes me again, a violent thrust with the flat of his hand, and this time I’m flying through the air, flying backwards, and my head strikes the beam above the fireplace, a piercing, a splintering and just one moment of sharp, sharp pain, while Mick sings of the tears that we’ll cry and the living that we’ll do after we die.

Fifteen years earlier

You wrote one more letter; it arrived a week or so after my mother had died. I’d stayed on for a few days after the funeral, but the house without her in it was cold and dismal and I couldn’t wait to get away. I returned to Bristol and spent the remainder of that year hidden away in the little terraced house I shared with Liv and Sam in St Paul’s. When I remember that time, I always think, poor Sam, Sam who had two fully working parents, who was only twenty and was mad about football and astronomy and mixing up weird fizzing concoctions in the chemistry lab. His only mistake was to love a girl who was crippled by loss.

I was alone in the house when your letter arrived, and from the moment I saw the envelope with my name and address in your sloping, looped handwriting my heart began to pulse. I’d lived without you for almost a year by then, I was getting used to you not being in my life, yet I ripped open that envelope with hands that shook.

Inside, a drawing of a flower, a peony, a close-up of its bloom, the petals packed tight like the leaves of a cabbage. Peonies were my mother’s favourite; her coffin had beencovered head to foot in a hundred pale pink ones. No better symbol to pierce my heart. But that wasn’t the thing that made me cry; it was that you’d remembered me telling you she loved them.

Catherine,

I am so sorry that you’ve lost your mother. I remember how much you loved her. Whenever you talked about her you smiled, did you know that? I spoke to her once on the phone when we were going to Paris and I needed your passport. Her voice was light and warm and full of laughter, just like yours. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘A day trip to Paris. Now that sounds interesting.’

People like her don’t just disappear, I hope you can believe that.

It’s like that song, the one you used to love: there’s still plenty of living to be done after you’ve died.

Lucian

Four months before: Catherine

Sam is a better man than I deserve. I say that a lot and it’s true. For it’s Sam who has urged me to make this journey to your house as the light starts to drift from the sky; it’s Sam who made me see the one thing I’ve always refused to accept.

‘You were drunk, Catherine. That doesn’t make you responsible for what happened. You woke up and found Jack having sex with you. Most people would call that rape.’

This word ‘rape’ falls all the way through me. Rape. An act of violence. A crime. When I told Liv about the night with Jack, I knew full well that it wasn’t what I’d wanted; I could picture my nineteen-year-old self lying motionless on your bed, awash with tears my tormentor kissed away.

Yet Jack was so clever. Quick to manipulate my panic and confusion, my half-formed memories and hung-over brain. He convinced me that not only was I complicit in the betrayal of you, I was the initiator. How I have hated myself for that.

‘I didn’t say no,’ I told Sam, for this was my greatest shame.

‘And you didn’t say yes. Call it non-consensual if you want, it boils down to the same thing.’

‘I was so ashamed. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone. I felt I deserved it because I’d got so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing. If I hadn’t been so drunk, I would never have allowed it to happen.’

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