23. Wren
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WREN
I don’t need tactics to keep calm anymore. I am changed, I am better, I am a whole new person. It’s this I am thinking of, this very thought, when Goldie screams.
And then I hear a sickening thud, like rocks into dust.
We stagger to the edge of the roof, one slip away from further chaos.
Down, down below, we see Goldie crumpled in a heap on the ground.
She is lying there and she isn’t moving.
Time slows to a standstill. I always read that in books, and the idea that time can do anything except continue as it always does makes me roll my eyes.
Stupid, made-up story stuff. Or in films, when they use slow motion or freeze-frames.
Real life isn’t like that. Time is time.
We killed a man and time didn’t change. We cheered and the earth kept spinning.
I am wrong. There is slow motion around me as my brain tries to compute what I am looking at.
It travels backward too. Goldie is next to me, drinking her can of cider and downing it while we all cheer.
I am telling everyone that I am not going to Cambridge.
We are dancing across the roof. Stupid, reckless, but we’re invincible, aren’t we?
We’re young, and young people don’t get hurt.
And then time rattles back into the present, emphasizing the agonizing slowness of our movements.
Crow, stumbling backward, seeking the comfort of the balcony railing.
Cuckoo, dropping her cider and its contents exploding upward, spilling across the roof.
Starling is shaking her head, mouthing something, but if it’s silent or spoken I cannot tell, because time seems to have messed with my hearing too.
There is a buzz, a vibration, and it’s all I can process.
Even my tinnitus is gone, replaced by this thrum.
I look down at Goldie and half expect her to reverse too, come flying back up and land beside us. She is a freeze-frame that never ends.
The normal flow of time returns as harshly as it vanished, and sound is violently in my ears again, the gasps and choking breaths of my friends, the awful, ever-present silence of the rest of the world.
They have no idea what has happened. That Goldie was dancing only seconds ago and now she’ll never dance again.
“Goldie?” Cuckoo is the first to speak. “Goldie?”
“She isn’t moving,” Crow says. “She isn’t moving!”
Can we only speak in echoes?
Cuckoo runs for the balcony, hitching herself over and disappearing into the attic.
For once, I don’t wait for the others to follow; I’m right behind her.
My palms are slippery with sweat, and my foot stumbles and misses the edge of the balcony on the first try, and my heart lifts, and I think I’m going to end up like Goldie.
But somehow we make it, all of us, over the balcony and into the attic and then down and outside to the safety of the ground below, and Goldie is there in front of us, and we can’t take a step farther, each of us rooted to the spot.
“Goldie,” Starling says again. And then, voice strained, “Please.”
“No,” Cuckoo whispers. “This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.”
She walks over to Goldie carefully, as if a sudden action might startle her.
“Don’t move her!” Starling shouts as Cuckoo reaches out. “She can’t—you can’t . . .”
“What?” Cuckoo says. “This is Goldie. She needs our help.” She touches her neck for a pulse. “I can’t feel anything. I don’t even know if this is the right place.”
We murdered Hugo Fletcher, and we didn’t check for a pulse. We didn’t want any sign of one. If we were witches, we’d have danced a circle around him and sang out curses.
Here is our friend, and we are suddenly lost.
Goldie’s eyes are wide open, unblinking, her mouth a silent scream.
“She is dead,” I say, because Cuckoo can’t seem to. My voice is detached from the rest of me, which seems to be melting on the spot. I realize that’s because my knees are buckling, and I collapse to the ground, the old gravel path scratching against my legs.
“What happened?” Cuckoo says. “Did anyone see?”
I can still feel the alcohol in my throat and belly, the fuzziness in my head that is rapidly sobering, but my brain is out of sync, processing things on a delay. We’re all drunk. I look at Crow swaying, Starling’s glazed eyes, Cuckoo and her trembling hands.
Starling is thinking the same. “We were drunk. Goldie must have slipped. Fallen.”
“And there’s no chance?” Cuckoo whispers. Her question is directed at me, I realize, and I shake my head, even though she is the one at Goldie’s neck.
We all come, a parade of fingers checking for a pulse, an action we have seen in films and television and read about in books but never had to do for real.
Would Goldie have reacted better than us?
Would she have brought us together, as she always did, and we’d have some semblance of sanity?
Am I thinking of her in the past tense already?
Cuckoo takes her phone out of her pocket.
Starling gasps when she sees it. “Why do you have that? We’re meant to leave our phones at home!”
“I have it switched off. I’m turning it on.”
“You can’t!” She snatches the phone from her hands before she can do anything.
“Starling, give that back! I’m calling an ambulance.”
“If you call an ambulance, they’ll know we were here.”
“What?”
“The paramedics! Everyone. The police will be involved. We’ll get into trouble.”
“Who cares? Goldie is dead. We need to report it.”
“Now hold on.” Starling is tentative, eyes darting between us all. “No one knows we’re out here, right? No one has told anyone?”
“Goldie’s aunt,” I say.
“But Goldie didn’t say that any of us were involved,” Starling murmurs. “Or where exactly she was going.”
“What’s your point?” Cuckoo asks impatiently.
“No one knows we’re here,” Starling says. “As far as everyone is concerned, we’re tucked up in bed, fast asleep.”
“Wait,” Cuckoo says. “Just what are you implying?”
I know what Starling is implying. I bite my lip so hard I taste iron in my mouth.
Cuckoo turns to Crow. “Crow, you’re not on board with this, right?”
“Maybe we should think about what Goldie would want,” Crow mumbles. “I don’t know if it’s such a bad idea.”
“What?” Cuckoo whispers. “How can you say that? Goldie is our friend.”
“And we have to think about our futures,” Crow says. “You were the one convincing me of this before! You know I’m right.”
Cuckoo’s eyes darken. “I can’t believe this.”
Hugo Fletcher hangs between us, a stubborn ghost.
“Do you want the police to find out?” Starling says. “Would Goldie want that?”
“Think about your future, Cuckoo,” I say. “What you need to protect. That’s what we all need to do. Protect each other.”
“We didn’t protect Goldie,” Cuckoo says, but she backs down at last. “And if we don’t call the police, what do we do right now?”
Another silence. Cuckoo knows the answer—she wants one of us to say it.
I surprise myself. “We have to bury her. She has to go missing, just like Hugo.”
“Yes,” Starling says.
“The fucking spades,” Cuckoo says. “Goldie herself pointed them out, that first time we broke into the basement. We’re going to have to use them.”
“Where should we . . .” Crow’s words trail off.
Starling is our expert, her true crime knowledge coming in clutch again. “At the back, between the trees. No one has disturbed this house in decades, but if they did, they hopefully wouldn’t be pulling up the trees anyway. She has to go there.”
A flash of lightning reminds us there was once a storm. Our faces illuminate, the shadows dancing across them turning them into something frightful. Monstrous.
Are we monsters?
I remember these are the girls who told Stacey Fulham to fuck off when she tried picking on me, who let me copy their homework when Mum and Dad were going through their tough time, who send me funny videos and messages to read at night because they know I won’t be sleeping.
They saved up together for my last birthday to buy me a Death Note notebook, and it’s still sitting pristine and untouched in my room because I dare not write some rubbish in there and spoil it.
These are the girls who have brought me out of my comfort zone, who have dared me to do stupid and brilliant things.
These are the girls who helped Cuckoo get revenge for her mother so she could see justice at last.
It is Cuckoo who checks Goldie for her phone, whispering something we can’t hear to her. Goldie’s phone is in her pocket, but mercifully switched off.
“She didn’t listen,” Starling says. “She brought hers too.”
“It’s better this way,” I say. “We can . . . get rid of it.”
“We need to destroy it,” Starling says.
Cuckoo thrusts the phone at her. “Then you do it. Wren, help me with the shovels.”
When I was a kid, I’d invent characters in times of stress.
When my parents argued long into the night, I’d pretend I was Wendy, flying away with Peter Pan to a land no parents ever walked.
When I was crossing a busy street, I became the road safety hedgehog and danced along quite happily.
Now, I can’t conjure up anyone. I am Wren.
I am shaking. I take a rusty shovel in my hands, and I dig a hole to put my best friend into.
“Her bracelet?” I whisper. Her pride and joy. It seems wrong, so wrong that this beautiful gift should be in the dirt.
But then, it is so wrong that Goldie is there too.
“She would want it with her,” Cuckoo says. “Nobody touch it.”
And so the bracelet stays.
“We go home, we don’t say anything,” Starling says, when the dreadful deed is done. We are all out of breath, we are sweating, we are dirty. “When Goldie is . . . When she is reported missing, we act shocked. Like it’s the first we’re hearing of it.”
“She’d want us not to get in trouble,” Crow says, more to herself than to the rest of us.
“This has to be part of the pact,” Starling says. She raises her pinkie. “We never breathe a word about this either.”
Crow raises her pinkie. “Agreed.”
“Agreed,” Cuckoo says, reluctantly, her finger joining theirs. She is crying again. Funny to think, before all of this, I never saw her cry.
They turn to me, waiting for me to say it. They are Starling, Cuckoo, and Crow, but they’re changed. Their features are sharper. They are teeth and claws.
“Agreed,” I say, and I link my finger, and we are at once complete and incomplete. Four where we should be five. We are teeth and claws.
We leave as silently as the streets. Dawn is breaking, and the birds are oddly silent. The temperature is warm, the sky clear and pink. Someone, somewhere, is breathing in the fresh air, thinking what a beautiful day this will be.
When I reach my bedroom, I catch sight of the gnome I stole from the garden we destroyed together, arrogant and smirking, and throw it out the window, watching it smash into smithereens on the ground below.