Abby
Abby
Abby checks the time on her watch. Three-thirty. About an hour until Clio will be home. Today, Abby promises herself, Clio will not return from school to find her in Isla’s bedroom, as she had last Friday. Today, Abby will be in the kitchen, doing whatever normal things parents do when their children arrive home from school. In the three days since Abby forgot about the Collingswood Art Prize – a competition in which Clio came second, despite the top prizes usually going to sixth formers – Clio has been sullen, angry, withdrawn – even more so than usual – and Abby knows she needs to make amends.
An hour. That is all she has left in Isla’s bedroom, where she now seems to spend most of her days.
She is overcome by an urge to look at photos Isla has taken over the years. Isla’s phone was destroyed in the hit-and-run, but all her pictures will be backed up in the cloud. Sitting down at Isla’s desk where her daughter’s laptop has remained untouched for over three weeks, she lifts the lid, types in the password that Isla was always happy to share with her, is greeted by the sight of Isla’s laughing face: her wallpaper photo, taken at Reading Festival the summer before last, in which Isla is sandwiched between Meera and Yasmin, their arms flung around one another’s shoulders, sun flaring above their heads like the illuminating halos of angels.
Grief wrenches in Abby’s chest. There will be no more festivals for Isla: no more dancing, no more long summer nights with her friends.
Clicking the Photos icon, she scrolls through the tranche of pictures, slips back through the days, weeks, months as though in possession of a time machine: photos documenting almost every day of the past few years. Isla standing at the poolside before a meet, swim cap curtailing her long, blonde hair, goggles strapped across her forehead. Isla at school, messing around with friends. Isla on her Silver Duke of Edinburgh expedition to Snowdonia two years before she died.
It is overwhelming, suddenly, all these visual reminders of the exuberant life her daughter is no longer leading.
Closing the Photos gallery, Abby experiences a renewed sense of fury that Isla’s killer is still at large. Three weeks and three days since Isla was killed, and the police have achieved nothing in their search for the driver: a motorist who left Isla for dead, like a piece of roadkill, did not even take the trouble to call an ambulance. Every time she phones the detective in charge of the case, he tells her they are doing all they can, surveying CCTV footage, making enquiries, but Abby finds this hard to believe. It seems incomprehensible to her that in this day and age – with surveillance cameras on every street corner, in shops, on office buildings – they have been unable to unearth a single clue. And even if the perpetrator is caught, the very worst they might face is a prison sentence; that is negligible compared to the life sentence of grief that awaits Abby.
Turning back to Isla’s laptop, Abby’s eyes rest on the Gmail icon, and she feels herself hesitate. It is a world to which she has never, rightly, had access. Even now, a part of her feels it would be an invasion of Isla’s privacy. But something inside her yearns for a new connection with her daughter, something that will bring her closer to Isla.
For a few seconds, her hand hovers over the trackpad, unsure what to do next. And then she watches as she makes contact with the aluminium base, feels the click beneath her fingers.
Opening Gmail, she finds ninety-eight unread emails. Her eyes scan through them, and she sees they are mostly junk or circulars: clothing sales, concert promotions, newsletters from swimming associations.
Scrolling back in time, familiar names begin to appear: Yasmin, Meera, Kit, Jules. Friends Isla has known since she was eleven, longer in some cases. Abby does not open any of the messages, has no desire to inveigle her way into the private correspondence of seventeen-year-olds.
On the navigation bar, she sees a number of named folders: ‘School’, ‘Swimming’, ‘Uni Applications’. At the sight of the third folder, Abby is aware of her breath catching in her throat: Isla’s unfulfilled future laid out so starkly before her.
Beneath the university folder is another labelled ‘WSE’, an acronym Abby does not recognise. Curiosity gets the better of her and she clicks on the folder, sees a string of emails from an address without a name, simply a collection of random letters and numbers: [email protected]. None of the emails have a subject heading, and before Abby has time to consider what she is doing, she opens the email at the top of the list.
As her eyes scan the contents, her heart rate begins to accelerate.
She reads the email twice, closes it, opens the next, reads that one too. Closing and opening, she reads one message after the next – another and another and another – each one a variation on the same theme. Her head spins, the muscles in her throat constricting until it does not seem feasible that sufficient air can pass through.
Because every message is from the same anonymous account. Every message is an iteration of the same appalling accusation.
You’re a whore, you know that, don’t you?
Is he paying you for it? Is that why you’ve been fucking him for weeks now? Or do you actually get off on shagging men twice your age?
You know he’s only doing it because you offered it to him on a plate. You’re literally nothing more than somewhere for him to put his dick. Slut.
How about I tell his wife? Or your mum? Or everyone at your school? What do you think people’s reaction would be? Wouldn’t be Little Miss Perfect then, would you?
He’ll get bored of you, you know that. And then you’ll be nothing but a tragic little slag who let an old man fuck her.
Have you got No Shame ? You go around pretending to be so perfect when all you are is a dirty little whore.
What kind of 17 yr old sucks off a married man old enough to be her dad?
The vile messages go on and on – a dozen or more – and Abby reads them with a vertiginous sense of disgust. She tries to grab hold of her thoughts but it is like clutching at air.
She does not understand why anyone would send messages like this to her daughter: such hideous, revolting messages. She does not understand why anyone would make such outlandish claims. Isla was not that type of teenager.
She reads the messages again, studies the email address for any clue as to the sender’s identity, but her head is fuzzy, she cannot think straight, cannot decipher the code if there is one.
She notices that some of the messages have a reply arrow next to them, and she clicks on the sender’s email address, copies it, goes into Isla’s sent items and pastes the address into the search box.
A stream of responses appears, and Abby starts with the most recent.
It’s over. I told you already. Now just leave me alone. Please.
A sinkhole seems to open up beneath Abby, and she feels herself tumbling into it with no idea how deep it is, no clue what might await her at the bottom. She clicks on the next reply and then the next, travelling back in time with each new message, her heart thudding, hands shaking.
It’s over. Happy? Now Stop Messaging Me .
Please don’t tell anyone. Please. It’s not what you think.
Please just keep it to yourself. We didn’t mean for it to happen. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.
Stop emailing me. If you carry on, I’ll go to the police.
Whatever you think, you’ve got it all wrong.
Do you get off on sending abusive messages to young women?
Who are you? You know only cowards send anonymous messages?
Abby hears an involuntary cry emerge from her lips as her brain scrambles to make sense of what she is reading.
It is not possible. It is just not possible. Isla would never have done something like this. It was not in her character.
And yet... here are responses from her daughter’s email account all but admitting to the charges of which she has been accused. All but admitting to having an affair with an older man. A married man. A man old enough to be her father. A man Abby cannot bear to imagine without hatred filling her lungs.
Thoughts hurtle through her mind, as she tries to imagine who it might be, where Isla might have met him. Whether it was through swimming, or school – not a teacher, surely? Abby wracks her brain trying to think of any Collingswood staff who have ever given her cause for concern, can think of no one – or someone she has met on an evening out with friends. Speculations rampage in her head and she cannot think straight – cannot fix upon a viable face, a likely name, a realistic suspect – feels as though the conjectures will drive her mad.
Checking the dates of the emails, she sees that the first was sent less than three months ago, the last one just a few weeks before Isla died.
According to these emails, three months ago Isla had already been sleeping with a married man for ‘weeks’. Since before the summer holidays began, when Abby thought Isla was busy with friends, with school, with swimming: with being a normal seventeen-year-old girl.
Nausea rises into the back of her throat. It is as though she is being forced to watch a movie she has seen a thousand times before but this time with a perverse alteration to the narrative. She is being made to view her daughter through a shifting prism, portraying her in a different, disorienting light.
And yet, suddenly, it all makes sense: Isla ending her relationship with Callum when she had seemed so besotted with him just weeks before. At the time, Abby had been relieved, had silently thanked the universe for making Isla come to her senses. Now, all too late, she realises she should have been careful what she wished for. It had never occurred to her that perhaps Isla finished with Callum because she’d met someone else. But the dates line up, and it is the only reasonable explanation. Isla must have ended things with Callum because some predatory, married man – a man whose identity Abby will uncover and, when she does, she will not be held responsible for her actions – somehow coerced her daughter – her beautiful, innocent, inexperienced daughter – to involve herself in a relationship with him.
Abby’s eyes skim the computer screen, over the anonymous emails and Isla’s responses.
And then another thought slips into Abby’s head, quietly at first as if unsure it wants to be seen, before it begins to shout, loudly, demanding to be heard.
Someone was sending abusive messages to Isla: anonymous emails, threatening to expose her. If someone was malicious enough, angry enough, sinister enough to send those vile messages – to still be sending them just weeks before Isla was killed – what else might they have been capable of?
Where might they have been – what might they have been doing – the night Isla was killed?