Chapter 19 Tuesday 18 June 2024 Sally
Sally
The Lamberts’ burner phones arrive at Corinne’s Lake District house just before midday, brought to the door by a man who gives them to her with a discreet nod, then walks away without a single word being exchanged.
Soon afterward, something else happens without the involvement of words: Sally comes to understand that Corinne Sullivan is Ree and Toby’s new favorite person.
Now, at her large kitchen table (carved from just one tree previously in the garden outside, Corinne told them as they sat down), they are both staring at her wide-eyed, as if she contains magic.
Hot tub cinemas, miraculous phone deliveries—not only in the middle of nowhere but before breakfast, which is imminent now that the youngsters have surfaced…
No one else Ree and Tobes know could lay on all of this.
Sally worries that everything is dangerously out of control.
Who is the man who brought the phones? And who are the two silent, pleasant-but-blank-faced young women cooking sausages and bacon a mere twenty or so feet away?
Their agreement with Corinne, clearly, is that all three of them will pretend they aren’t there, and Sally feels she has no choice but to go along with this charade, though it feels extremely odd to her.
How many people are there, she wonders, who slip in and out of Corinne’s life, performing various services for her?
How many more will turn up today, or tomorrow?
Anyone who sees the Lamberts here will be in a position, if anything reaches the news about a Welsh terrier and his family in flight from the law, to make a call and report them to the authorities, even knowing what that might mean for Champ.
At one time Sally would have imagined most people were far too decent to inform on their relatives, friends, and neighbors to that useless joke that calls itself a police force despite not giving a toss about justice anymore.
(Mark says this all the time, so Sally is inclined to believe him, especially after she was treated like a criminal for glancing at her phone while stuck in a traffic jam.) Now she believes most people would betray even their nearest and dearest in order to comply with the latest nonsensical rule.
During the COVID lockdowns, Sally’s friend Oonagh got a visit from some killjoys in blue after her next-door neighbor called the police on her.
All Oonagh had done was have her lonely, elderly mother round for lunch; no one else was affected.
Sally is convinced (Mark says this often too) that the majority of people have lost all their moral marbles and get angrier about people eating cake in their offices and sitting on park benches with their brothers than they do about an excrescence of evil like the Gavey family trying to get innocent dogs killed.
This isn’t happening only in England, either.
Didn’t Mark say that in Canada, the president or prime minister, whatever his name is, has started confiscating the pets of any lorry drivers who disagree with him?
And isn’t that same chap also encouraging all Canadians who are a bit fed up to kill themselves?
Sally has laughed at Mark in the past when he’s said these crazy-sounding things, but now she’s thinking he’s probably right.
She’s never felt more suspicious of supposedly trustworthy institutions in her life.
She can’t help eyeing Corinne’s sausage-and-egg coordinators at the far end of the kitchen and wondering exactly how willing they might prove, if the price were right, to usher groups of dispirited Canadians into rooms reserved for the opposite of Enjollification—or, more to the point, to inform on poor Champy.
The more delighted her children seem by Corinne’s every utterance and deed, the more afraid Sally feels. There’s a danger, surely, in assuming too much about someone who’s all movies and hot tubs from the word go. What if Corinne…
No. Don’t doubt the only person who’s made a significant positive difference since this nightmare began. Don’t do that, Sally.
The kitchen helpers have started to transport heaped breakfast plates across the room.
Pushing Ree’s phone away from him, Mark says, “Can we please log off from Tess Gavey’s wound before we eat?
We’ve all seen it now, from all angles.” His and Sally’s phones are still in their boxes; Ree and Tobes leaped on theirs as soon as Corinne handed them over, and they’d set them up within minutes.
Since they and Corinne-under-a-false-name all follow Tess Gavey on Instagram, Sally has already seen Tess’s mangled, bloody, bruised forearm on three separate devices.
“Log off?” Toby shakes his head in disgust.
“The idea that Champ would ever do that to anyone,” says Ree. “I mean…she’s going to be scarred for life, right, Mum?”
“Oh, yes,” says Corinne, before thanking the blank-faced servers and telling them they won’t be needed for the next hour. She turns back to Ree. “Let that be our first consolation: Tess will be hideously disfigured for the rest of her life.”
“Corinne—” Sally starts to say.
“Oh, shut up, Mum!” says Ree cheerfully, and Sally feels churlish for disapproving of the joke that cheered her up. “Tess is already disfigured—by her personality. She’s a sociopath.”
“True,” Tobes confirms.
“You’ve never mentioned this before,” says Sally, pressing one tine of her fork into a baked bean. She doesn’t fancy eating anything, though it smells good and is glossier and better presented than any breakfast she’s ever cooked herself.
“From the minute she turned up at college, she decided she hated me. And she let me know it at every opportunity,” says Ree.
“She’d take photos of all the girls, then crop me out of every single one.
I’d get three-quarters of the way through a sentence and then she’d interrupt—like turn away and say something to someone else.
Then she’d turn back to me and go, ‘Sorry, Ree, what were you saying?’ Oh, and she’d do the stupid eye-contact thing too: look at everyone else and be ever so engrossed and attentive, and no one would notice that she’d not looked in my direction once, despite being part of the same group as me for hours sometimes. ”
“That’s bullying,” says Sally. “You should have told me.”
“Why? I told her instead,” says Ree. “I said, ‘I can see through every single bit of your crap’—and within hours of me saying that very publicly, Tess had no friends. Hasn’t had any since, either. She sits on her own every break, every lunchtime.”
“Everyone took your side?” Corinne asks.
“Yeah, but, like, not in a heartwarming or inspiring way.”
“What do you mean?” says Sally.
“The girls took my side for one reason only, same reason Tess targeted me as her social-ostracism victim in the first place. Unfortunately, I can’t say what that reason is without sounding like I love myself and think I’m the shit, so…” Ree shrugs.
“You’re prettier and cleverer,” says Tobes.
“Aw, cheers, bruv.” Ree leans over to try to give him a hug but fails because the table is too big.
“No one in my year cares about clever, but…yeah, I’m better-looking and I’m more confident.
Especially because, soon after moving to Swaffham Tilney, Tess’s looks just…
I mean, this sounds nasty, but I’m just trying to be descriptive—something terrible happened to her face.
When she first arrived, she looked sort of okay-ish—”
“Like, maybe a seven,” says Tobes. “No, a six. But Ree’s right. Her face changed shape. It was the weirdest thing. And sometimes she stinks too. I’d say she’s no higher than a four now.”
Mark shoots a horrified look at Sally—Is this our son, rating humans out of ten based on their looks?
—but, in her present mood, Sally is willing to let it pass.
Champ’s safety has been threatened, thanks to Tess’s slanderous dishonesty, so forgive Sally for hoping the lying cow is soon further demoted to a two after her face takes on an even more suboptimal shape—maybe that of a giraffe, or a sewing machine.
“Being Lesley Gavey’s daughter, with all that entails, would be enough to change the shape of anyone’s face,” she mutters.
“Once Tess was crying and I felt sorry for her, so I sidled over and asked her what was wrong,” Ree says.
“She started yelling at me about how the oceans were going to die from being full of too much plastic, and I didn’t even care, and only she cared.
After that, I thought, ‘Yeah, someone else can help you out next time you’re upset, weirdo. ’”
“Show me Lesley’s Facebook page,” says Sally. “Unless…are you sure it’s not traceable to me if I look at the internet on your phone?”
Ree groans. Tobes covers his face with his hands.
Corinne picks up her phone and is about to hand it to Sally, when there’s a small beep. She reads a message, frowning, then closes her eyes for a second. “Shit.”
“What?” Panic rears up inside Sally. “Have the police found out we’re here?”
“No. Sal, relax. And eat something.” Corinne looks at her sternly. “You ate nothing last night. Wasting away isn’t going to help anything—and it’s also against the ethos of Champ, who, I’ve noticed, does a little dance of joy every time anyone puts food out for him.”
This is true. Sally knows Champ would want her to eat. Maybe a few beans and a bit of bacon. Is it okay for Corinne to be calling her “Sal” just because she’s heard Mark do so?
“But…are you sure it’s…?” She points to the phone.
“It’s nothing, really. Nothing to do with you or Champ.
Just a headache for me.” Corinne mumbles something sneery, tapping away at the screen with her thumbs.
“There, take that, you arse,” she tells the absent headache-creator.
“Typically I have to deal with about fifteen a day at least—cretins sticking their oars in and messing up things that are working perfectly well.”