Abby
Abby
Abby sits at the kitchen table, drinking a third glass of wine even though it is only five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Her eyelids feel as though they are lined with sandpaper, the lack of sleep pressing down on her like a weight she cannot shift.
For the past three nights, she has lain awake in bed, recalling the messages and photos she saw on Clio’s phone. Every time she closes her eyes, there they are: the hideous, doctored pictures Clio created. The lens through which Abby views her family has shifted, a different filter put in place: instead of conventional sibling rivalry, there is now something darker, more sinister. Something dangerous. An intensity of hatred that has, in one fell swoop, shattered any illusion of a normal sisterly relationship.
Gulping her wine, she thinks about all the photos she has seen of Clio in inappropriate settings: keeping company with young men in the early hours of the morning when she should be asleep; in bars she is not yet legally old enough to frequent; drinking, vaping, sitting behind the wheel of a car. She cannot – even after three days’ procrastination – decide whether to confront Clio about it. It is not possible, she knows, without betraying the fact that she has snooped through her daughter’s phone. Part of her wonders whether she is being oversensitive, whether Clio’s behaviour is normal; just because Isla never acted like this doesn’t mean it’s not on the spectrum of typical teenage exploits. Part of her fears that if she asks Clio – however gently – she will only succeed in pushing her further away. Their relationship is already on such tentative ground, she does not dare risk alienating her even more.
Last night, Clio said she was staying at Freya’s again, and it took all Abby’s self-control not to lock the doors, demand she stay at home, wrap her in cotton wool and never let her out of her sight. But she suspected it would be counterproductive, feared it would drive an even deeper wedge between them. And, if she is being honest with herself, she couldn’t face the conflict that would ensue. Clio has become so forthright, so headstrong, so strident in every interaction that Abby doesn’t have the emotional fortitude to go into battle with her. Later, or tomorrow, or the next day, she will find an opportunity to check Clio’s phone again – even if she has to wait until Clio is asleep – and scour the latest photos and messages. She can only hope she will find no new evidence of misdemeanours. Hope that what she has seen is nothing more than an anomaly, a temporary blip: Clio acting out against her grief.
And yet, even as she rationalises it to herself, she cannot ignore the fact that the real reason she has failed to confront Clio thus far is because she is scared of what the truth may be.
Mostly, she wishes that Stuart were alive, that they could decide together what to do for the best. That she wasn’t wading through the quagmire of solo parenting and feeling wrong-footed at every turn.
Draining her wine glass, she recalls the grainy photos on Clio’s phone of Isla and Callum arguing the night Isla was killed. Abby has not passed the information on to the police. They already know Isla and Callum were rowing that night. They need no further evidence, seem to have little inclination to pursue Callum as a suspect despite his criminal history, despite the CCTV footage they purportedly have of him running near the scene of the crime. Equally, they have failed to identify the married man by whom Isla had been manipulated, seem to have no leads in that direction either. She knows she cannot rely on the police to find her daughter’s killer.
The front door clicks, and Abby calls out instinctively. ‘Clio, is that you?’
‘Yep.’
‘I’m in the kitchen.’
There is a moment’s hesitation, and Abby can sense it, like a change in atmospheric pressure before a storm: Clio’s reticence to speak to her, her desire to go straight to her room, to avoid her mother altogether.
Rising out of her chair, Abby does not leave it to chance. By the time she has exited the kitchen and made it into the hallway, Clio is already halfway up the stairs.
‘Did you have a good time last night?’
‘Yeah, it was fine.’
‘Were you just at Freya’s?’
Clio picks at a knot in the wood on the banister, and Abby resists the urge to tell her to stop. ‘We went over to Alice’s for a bit.’
‘And Freya’s mum didn’t mind you staying over again?’
Clio glowers at her. ‘What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?’ She turns around and begins trudging up the stairs. ‘I’m going to my room.’
Abby watches her go, knowing she could have handled the conversation better. She reassures herself that later – when Clio is asleep – she can check her phone and find out if her daughter is telling the truth.
The thought of Clio’s phone makes Abby think of Isla’s mobile, demolished in the crash the night she was killed. All that information – all that potential evidence – wiped out in a single moment. The possible discovery of the man who seduced her daughter destroyed forever.
Over the past twelve days, Abby has continued to hunt through Isla’s bedroom, trying to uncover the name of the man who exploited her daughter, but she has failed to unearth anything. Every night, she lies awake, imagining that man’s unsavoury hands groping her daughter’s innocent body, and there are times when she thinks she will drive herself mad, not being able to put a face to the monstrous image in her head. Not being able to confront him, accuse him, insist the police investigate him.
Heading upstairs to Isla’s bedroom, she sits down at her desk, opens her daughter’s laptop, clicks on the icon that will take her into Isla’s photo roll in the cloud for the umpteenth time.
Scrolling through the pictures, her heart cramps at the sight of her daughter, and she no longer knows whether what she is doing is an act of remembrance, a means of detective work, or simply self-harm.
Her eyes skim over photos she has looked at countless times in the five weeks since her daughter’s death. Scrolling down the sidebar, she notices that one of the folders, ‘Albums’, has an expansion arrow at the bottom that she hasn’t registered before. Clicking on it, a whole new collection of folders appears. Abby is aware of a flicker of hope that perhaps, finally, she may find what she is looking for. But just as quickly, she tells herself not to get excited, that she has been here many times already, with the belief that she is on the cusp of a discovery, only to be disappointed yet again.
Most of the albums have self-explanatory labels and thumbnails to match – ‘Swimming’, ‘School’, ‘DofE’, ‘Reading Festival’. But one has an intriguing name – ‘Mine’ – and a thumbnail photograph Abby has never seen before: Isla holding a martini glass up to the camera in a bar that does not look the kind of place she frequented; most of Isla’s socialising was done at friends’ houses, not in bars or pubs or clubs. She was not that kind of teen.
Clicking open the album, a flurry of images line up on the screen like auditioning chorus girls. As they do, Abby has the sense of having taken a wrong turn, lost her bearings.
She studies the sequence of photographs, unable to make sense of them. Neurons in her brain fire in multiple directions, trying to create a sensible narrative from what she is seeing. Trying to reach a logical conclusion. But she cannot collate the images into a comprehensible story.
In front of her are dozens of selfies of Isla with Andrew. Isla with her arm around Andrew’s neck, grinning into the camera. Isla poking her tongue out at Andrew. Isla, head turned, smiling beatifically at him.
Dates, times, events cycle back through Abby’s memory as she tries to recall what family events the photos might have been taken at. There have been countless get-togethers between the two families over the years: birthdays, anniversaries, barbecues, lunches. And yet, looking at these photos, Abby cannot determine their locations, cannot decipher when and where they might have been taken.
Scrolling further, a thought sidles into Abby’s head, a thought so grotesque, so abominable, she tries to swat it away. But as she skims through photographs of her seventeen-year-old daughter with the husband of her best friend, she is aware of an encroaching sense of disquiet: an awareness that she holds Pandora’s jar in her hands and is slowly turning the lid.
And then, there it is, the picture she has spent the past few seconds dreading. A photo that causes every fibre of her being to burn with fury. An image she knows she will spend the rest of her life wishing she had never seen.
Isla in bed – a bed Abby does not recognise – the duvet tucked beneath her bare arms, hair dishevelled, smiling into the camera. Next to her, bare-chested, one arm outstretched where he is holding the camera aloft, the other draped proprietorially around the naked shoulder of Abby’s teenage daughter, is a forty-eight-year-old man with whom Abby has been friends for almost two decades.
A voice in her head screams with disbelief, with fury, with unbridled revulsion, telling her she has to do something, confront someone, pummel Andrew with her fists until she has hammered the truth out of him. But the scream strangles in her throat and she cannot seem to make a sound. Her fingers, as if of their own volition, scroll back up the page, back to the beginning, to photos she glossed over because there appeared to be no image of her daughter in them.
Expanding the first, it is a booking from an executive car company, to collect Isla from a street in Marylebone in mid-August. Wracking her brain, Abby combs through her memory, tries to recall why Isla might have been in town that day, but her mind is awash with debris and she cannot swim past it.
She opens another image – a screenshot of a WhatsApp message – reads the words, her head suddenly light, vertiginous, as though her brain is being starved of oxygen.
She reads it again, hoping she has got it wrong, that she is putting two and two together and making five. But it is there, in glaring, unapologetic text, and Abby knows, in that instant, it is knowledge that will plague her for as long as she lives.
It is a screenshot of a WhatsApp thread between Isla and Andrew, with an appointment for a clinic in Marylebone, an appointment dated mid-August, just weeks before Isla died. But it is the message Andrew has sent to accompany the booking that sends Abby’s world spinning out of control.
Here are the details of the appointment. I’ve booked it in your name, but I’ve paid for it, obviously. It’s a very well-regarded clinic and they’ll take exceptional care of you. I know how hard this is, and I’m so sorry you’re having to go through it. But I think we both know that a termination really is the only option. You’ll be okay, I promise. I love you. xx
Abby’s stomach lurches and she rushes to the bathroom, retches into the toilet bowl, expels the half-bottle of white wine she has drunk, her throat burning with acid, and with pure, unadulterated fury. All this time she has been desperate to know the identity of the married man who seduced her daughter, but now that she does, she wishes with all her heart that she could unknow it, that she could unlearn every last, sordid scrap of information. Her heart pulses with grief that her seventeen-year-old daughter underwent an abortion by herself, that she did not feel able to confide in Abby, that she endured that experience without Abby by her side. Her body shakes with rage that Andrew put Isla in such a terrible, invidious position, that he so flagrantly abused the trust Abby has placed in him all these years. She thinks about the fortnight in August when Isla suddenly took a break from swimming, when she went to bed for a couple of days complaining of a tummy bug and then shoulder pain, Abby bringing her hot-water bottles and cups of chamomile tea, ignorant of the fact that her daughter had just terminated a pregnancy. Unaware that Isla had gone through that experience alone, all to protect the identity of a man whom Abby should have been able to trust with her children’s lives.
All those lies. All that subterfuge. All the emotional pain her daughter suffered because of the actions of that grotesque human being she has spent the past eighteen years believing to be one of her closest friends.
Again and again Abby’s stomach heaves, and each time the same thought surges through her mind: he will not get away with this. She will not let him get away with it.