Kind of Cruel (18 page)

Charlie was keeping a list of all the ways in which her quality of life was blighted by her sister Olivia’s affair with Chris Gibbs. Sometimes she forgot what number she was up to. The new addition that had just occurred to her – that she’d been unable to suggest she and Liv meet in the Brown Cow, her favourite pub in the world, in case Gibbs was in there – was either number twenty-six or twenty-seven.

Charlie could have gone upmarket with her choice of an alternative meeting place, or picked somewhere in the same league as the Brown Cow, but she’d plumped instead for the Web & Grub, a small, smelly internet café overlooking the Winstanley Estate that shared its premises with a minicab firm and served no hot food. The sum total of today’s bounty was five sandwiches standing in a forlorn line on the counter between the till and the home-made cardboard tip box: two tuna mayo and three cheese ploughmans, all in triangular plastic packets. Hot drinks were served in Styrofoam cups; for those who preferred something cold, there were bottles of water and cartons of orange juice and Ribena in a large humming fridge, the glass door of which was covered with greasy finger smears and half-peeled-off stickers. On the phone, Olivia hadn’t said a word about the choice of venue, which was how Charlie knew she’d taken the point: it was her fault that they were missing out on the Brown Cow’s spinach and asparagus crepe, its chorizo and red lentil casserole, its Sausage Alsacienne.

No booze at the Web & Grub either. A pint of strong lager would have helped Charlie get through this meeting, her and Liv’s first in months. Did she have time to nip to the offie next door, buy a can and drink it before Liv arrived?

Too late; here she was. As she walked over, she waved frantically and tearfully, as if from a rapidly departing ocean liner. The joyful expression on her face hardened something in Charlie. In her sister’s shoes, if their roles had been reversed, Charlie would have taken Liv’s forgiveness as an insult, found it more offensive than the months of silence.

Who the fuck are you to forgive me, when I did nothing wrong in the first place?

Charlie wondered how she could still be so angry, when the voice in her head was manifestly on Olivia’s side. She’d said nothing on the phone about forgiveness, deliberately. All she’d done was ask if she and Liv could meet.

Don’t tell her she’s lost weight and looks fantastic. She’ll know you know why that is. Might as well write ‘CHRIS GIBBS’ in capitals on the table between you.

Liv sat down, clutching her strange cow-skin handbag to her chest like body armour. Its stiff handles obstructed Charlie’s view of her face. Their curved shape brought bridges to mind: building them, burning them.

‘This feels so weird. I thought I might never see you again. Did you think that too?’ Liv gabbled. ‘No, course you didn’t. You knew you could talk to me whenever you wanted to. God, I’m actually shaking! For some reason this feels like a clandestine meeting. Must be the unsalubrious surroundings. Not that I’m complaining,’ she added quickly, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender, as if Charlie was aiming a gun at her heart.

Don’t say, ‘If you want to talk about unsalubrious . . .’

‘I’d have met you anywhere. I’d have met you in a caravan.’ Eyes wide, Liv stared at Charlie, gripping the handles of her bag with both hands. She shuddered.

Charlie nodded to indicate she’d got the message: Liv was desperate to make peace. She’d once told Charlie she hated caravans so much that even the word made her feel sick; she tried to avoid hearing it or saying it. At first Charlie had thought this was an affectation – she’d been on the same family holidays as Liv every year, in their parents’ mobile home, and suffered no adverse effects – but her sister’s consistency over decades had made her think again. As phobias went, it was a bizarre one. Charlie wondered what Ginny Saxon would have to say about it.

‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ she asked Liv.

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t think I’m hungry.’

‘Me neither. So let’s have lunch with no food.’ Liv giggled. ‘Like in
Dallas
. Remember how they used to sit down to enormous delicious meals, then have a huge row and all storm off?’

Don’t tell her she’s way too obvious, shamelessly invoking happy childhood memories. So you both loved
Dallas
; so what?

‘I don’t mean
we’re
going to have a huge row. Of course we aren’t.’ Liv looked terrified. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, I wouldn’t fall out with you even if you . . .’

Asked you to swear that you’ve shared bodily fluids with Chris Gibbs for the last time?

‘I can’t think of anything.’ Liv shrugged. ‘My mind’s gone blank. I’m too scared of you. You’d better do the talking.’ The hands went up again. ‘Not that I’m saying you’re scary. Shit, now I sound passive aggressive, like I’m saying one thing when I mean another. I’m honestly not.’

‘I’ve been seeing a hypnotherapist,’ Charlie announced. It was easier to come out with it while Liv was wittering. Except she wasn’t any more, which meant that the rest of what Charlie had to say, the follow-through, had the pressure of attentive silence to contend with. ‘Well, I’ve seen her once, but I’ll probably go again. It’s for my smoking. To help me give up. It seems to work for loads of people, so I thought I’d try it. It’s no big deal, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it, except . . .’

‘You wanted an excuse to get in touch with me?’ Liv suggested hopefully.

Charlie inhaled, held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, imagined it was nicotine. ‘Turns out I picked the wrong woman to go to for help,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t want to get into the details, but it seems there’s a connection, or possible connection, between my . . .’ Charlie couldn’t bring herself to say ‘therapist’. ‘Between this hypnotist woman and a case Simon’s on at the moment.’ Hypnotist, therapist – Charlie wasn’t sure which sounded worse.

‘Which case?’ said Liv. ‘Not Kat Allen?’

All the necessary defences shot up within seconds. No effort was required; Charlie barely felt a thing. She was getting better at this. Her soul, after years of practice, was accustomed to adopting the brace position.

Of course, Liv would know all about Katharine Allen’s murder, via Gibbs.
Kat
. As if she’d known her all her life. Liv being Liv, she saw no reason to keep quiet; why not ram home her invasion of Charlie’s world instead? People deflected attention from their own crippling selfishness in a variety of ways, Charlie had noticed. Liv’s way was to hide behind a mask of naïve childlike enthusiasm.

‘Simon had to be upfront at work about my connection with this . . . woman – Ginny, she’s called – and I didn’t want you hearing about it from anyone else.’

It wasn’t as hard as she’d feared it might be to parrot Simon’s words as if she believed them herself. Olivia didn’t need to know that Charlie loathed Simon at the moment, or that her loathing of him did nothing to diminish her love for him, which made her resent him even more.

He hadn’t needed to humiliate her by taking her notebook into work, where anyone who wanted to, including Gibbs, would be able to read her undignified, unsendable letters to Olivia. Charlie had begged him, in tears, to tear out and take in only the relevant page, the Kind of Cruel page. When that failed, she shifted the focus of her begging: couldn’t he see sense and spend five minutes or half an hour, or however long it took, constructing, with Charlie’s help, an acceptable lie that would allow him to tell his team everything they needed to know without endangering his job?

No, he couldn’t. Or, rather, he wouldn’t. ‘I’m sick of things being complicated,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some new information. Other people need to know it. I shouldn’t have to start second-guessing, planning, scheming, worrying how to protect my job, myself or anyone else. All that’s a waste of my energy. If anyone doesn’t like the truth, that’s their problem. Sometimes I don’t like it either, but there’s no point pretending we don’t all have to live with it.’

Charlie was better than most at facing the truth – she figured she must be, or else why did she feel miserable so much of the time? – but she’d have liked, if at all possible, to keep certain truths private: her visit to a hypnotherapist, the emotional letters she’d written in the naïve belief that no one but her would ever see them. Frantic, she’d blurted out a series of desperate suggestions she hadn’t had time to think through: Simon could give her a chance to talk to Ginny Saxon again, persuade her to ring the police, say nothing about Charlie, but claim to be worried by something sinister a client had said under hypnosis. A bit far-fetched, perhaps, but Charlie thought she could have persuaded Ginny to go along with it, in the interests of client confidentiality and helping to progress a murder case.

Simon hadn’t been willing to discuss it. ‘I’m going in, I’m taking the notebook, I’m telling it straight – that’s what
I’m
doing. Other people can tie themselves in knots if they want to, sack me if they want to, tell themselves I don’t give a shit about their feelings if they want to. None of that’s down to me.’

Later, it had occurred to Charlie that her plan wouldn’t have worked anyway. If Sam or Gibbs or Sellers had interviewed Amber Hewerdine, they would soon have found out about Ginny Saxon’s other client, the smoker with the notebook.

‘You invited me here to tell me you’re having hypnotherapy?’ said Liv. ‘Not because you’ve missed me, or you want to put the past behind us and go back to how things were, or . . .’ She stopped, looked down at the table. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to put words into your mouth.’

Charlie was busy trying to stop them spilling out.

Don’t say you’d love to go back to the way things were before she fell into bed with Gibbs.

Don’t point out that the past is somewhat larger than the unpleasant experiences she’d like to leave behind, that it also includes things she’s eager to hang on to – one in particular that she’s keen to have spill over into the present.

Don’t demand to know how she has the gall to use language – words with fixed meanings – in such a dishonest, self-serving way.

Charlie thought about Amber Hewerdine, her intolerance of anything that had even the faintest whiff of bullshit about it. Ginny Saxon must have had the afternoon from hell yesterday, with first Amber and then Charlie to contend with; surely most people who went to her for help were more gullible and asked fewer tricky questions.

Are you wishing Amber Hewerdine was your sister, a woman you’ve met twice and barely know? Pathetic.

‘I’m happy to talk to you about whatever you want,’ Liv said. ‘I just . . . assumed we were going to talk about me and Chris, that’s all.’

‘If you want to talk about Gibbs in the way you’d talk about any other boyfriend –
your
other boyfriend, for example – that’s fine by me. If you’d rather not mention him, also fine. What we’re not going to discuss, ever, is the rights and wrongs of anything – whether or not you’ve fucked me over, whether I’ve overreacted . . .’

‘The contentious stuff,’ Liv summarised.

Charlie nodded.

‘But . . .’

‘Problem?’

Liv sighed. ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it? How can we sort anything out if we don’t—’

‘Sorting out’s not going to be possible,’ Charlie said briskly, mentally flicking through the dozens of vicious accusations she might hurl at her sister, given the chance. ‘The only thing I can think of that might work is if we pretend everything’s normal and there was never an issue. I’m willing to try it if you are.’

Liv looked worried. ‘Can I ask something, just to clarify?’

‘Everything’s clear.’

‘Not to me it isn’t. You say I can talk about Chris as I would any other boyfriend, but you don’t really mean it, do you? How will you feel if I ring you in a complete state on the day his and Debbie’s twins are born?’

Maybe she hadn’t made herself clear after all. ‘How I would
feel
is irrelevant. That’s the part we wouldn’t talk about and you won’t ask about if you’ve got any sense. What I’d
say
is the same as I’d say if you were seeing a man I didn’t know whose wife had just given birth to twins: if it upsets you that much, end it, unless ending it would upset you more.’

‘I’ll feel too guilty to mention Chris’s name
ever
,’ Liv said moodily. ‘You know I will. How can I have a conversation and leave my feelings out of it? I’m not a robot.’

Charlie wanted to groan and rest her head on the table. Was she going to have to draw up a contract, complete with sub-clauses and restrictive covenants? ‘You can talk about your feelings all you like, as long as it’s not your feelings about me and
my
feelings.’

‘So, for the sake of argument . . .’

‘We won’t be having any arguments,’ Charlie said firmly.

‘. . . it’s okay for me to say, “I stayed up all night weeping because I have to marry Dom and I can’t marry Chris,” but not okay for me to ask if you’ve forgiven me or if you ever will?’

‘By George, she’s got it,’ Charlie quoted
My Fair Lady
, another favourite thing from her and Olivia’s childhood.

Liv shook her head, looked irritated. ‘All right, then. I agree to your ridiculous terms. God, you’ve only been married to Simon four months and already he’s got you talking as if feelings are some kind of disgusting waste product. Please, for your own good, don’t talk to me about it if you don’t want to, but please try and feel some emotion while you still can, before Simon roboticises you entirely. Because that’s what’s happening, Char.’ Liv’s voice shook. ‘He’s trying to turn you into a . . . a blank space, so that he can live with you without feeling threatened.’