36. Crow
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CROW
“Patricia! Patricia, we know you’re in there. Open the door!”
I bang again on Patricia’s front door. The paint is peeling away at the edges, and the doorbell doesn’t seem to work.
Looking through the letter box, I can see the stairs that lead straight up to the flat Goldie used to live in with her aunt, the carpet scuffed and torn.
There is a coatrack with a raincoat and a leather jacket half obscuring my vision, but I can see the light is on upstairs.
And in any case it doesn’t matter, Wren saw her running away, followed her back to this street opposite our old school.
It’s Saturday, so the school is locked up and closed, but it still feels weird being here again.
Parts of the school are exactly as I remember them, even down to the drooping football languishing on the veranda roof outside the visitor entrance.
But other parts are different: fresh paint, new doors, even a whole new building, the Portakabins finally gone.
Where we used to sit and hang out, where we sprayed that graffiti, is no more.
The last time I was here in the end was to pick up my A level results, the three A’s I had so desperately wanted my entire life, the culmination of my fourteen years of education.
I always imagined I’d be the happiest I had ever been, that nothing could ever be as great as that moment.
But in reality, it was hollow. I shuffled along in a socially distanced line, picked up the envelope from the gloved hands of an admin member of staff I didn’t even recognize, and opened them at home alone because celebrations and gatherings were not allowed.
Miss White wasn’t there to tell me how proud she was.
Wren and Cuckoo and Starling had their own allotted time slots to pick up their results, so I didn’t see them.
And Goldie was, of course, never going to see what she ended up with.
So when I opened that brown envelope, my fingers weren’t even trembling.
And actually, I didn’t get the grades I was after at first. But after a change of mind, another errant decision that altered the trajectory of our lives again, I got what my teachers wanted for me.
The three A grades were delivered home. And I still felt nothing, barely a flicker of joy.
Was that it? Everything I had cared so much about?
With Goldie dead, printed letters on a piece of paper became so much smaller.
Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. About the life she had lived.
We never really came to Goldie’s flat, even though she lived so close to school.
The most we did was hang around outside while she went up to fetch something or get changed.
On the extremely rare occasion we were allowed in, it was because Patricia wasn’t there, or if one of us was desperate for the loo.
The narrow stairs led straight up to the living room, the blue velvet sofa Goldie told me only cost twenty pounds from the used furniture shop down the road backed onto the small wall separating the two areas.
The kitchen was in the same room, cramped and impossible for more than one person at a time to maneuver, and the bathroom led off from it.
Then there was the box room, half Goldie’s bedroom, half Patricia’s office, which wasn’t able to fit more than two of us.
Patricia’s bedroom door was always closed, so I never saw inside.
There was the garden around the back, which they shared with Agatha, the downstairs neighbor who has been twitching her curtains as we bang on Patricia’s door.
It always felt awkward before too, like Agatha could intrude any minute.
I certainly knew the feeling when Chelsea still lived beneath my flat.
Most often, we went to Wren’s or Starling’s.
It just made sense. It’s odd being here, when Goldie meant so much to us, and hardly knowing a thing about where she lived beyond the most basic of descriptions.
This was where she slept, where she spent most of her time.
And since her death, we have never been back.
As if to prove a point, Goldie appears from behind me, leaning against her front door with a small smile, arms folded.
“Not now,” I tell her, as always.
She smiles wider, as usual refusing to speak to me.
“What?” Wren says, startling me. For a moment I had forgotten she was there too. “What do you mean?”
I wonder if Wren ever sees her. Does Cuckoo or Starling? Or is it just me that’s being haunted?
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“She’s not answering,” Wren says, and it takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Patricia, not Goldie. “What do we do?”
Goldie raises her eyebrow at me, challenging me with a look I don’t understand. And then she shrugs, walks away, vanishes before I turn to try and follow where she’s going.
I can never follow her.
I turn back to the door, crouch down to the letter box, open it, and speak through it.
This time, my voice isn’t raised. I am calm.
“Patricia, I’m sorry for banging on the door like that.
We just want to talk. Please? For Goldie?
We just want to know what’s going on. Why you ran away when you saw Wren. That’s all.”
There is no response. I close the letter box, stand up. There is nothing else we can do.
“We’ll come back,” Wren says. “With Cuckoo and Starling. She’ll have to talk to us then.”
Yes, Cuckoo and Starling to the rescue where I’ve failed.
We are about to turn away when we hear the rattling of a key inside the lock, and the front door opens.
Seven years have hardened her, and she was hard enough to begin with.
Her lips are puckered and dry, the victim of too many cigarettes, yellow staining the edges of her mouth and her teeth.
She’s lost a lot of weight and it shows in her skin, which positions itself weirdly on her face as if it’s not sure where it’s meant to be.
Her cold eyes widen at the sight of me, just as I’m sure my eyes are widening in shock at her.
Patricia.
Goldie’s aunt, the woman she hated. The woman who hated her.
“Come in,” she says, her voice gruff and deeper than I remember.
We follow her up the stairs, Wren closing the door behind us.
It’s exactly like before, blue velvet sofa still backed up against the low wall.
Patricia directs Wren and me to sit on it while she perches on a brown leather pouf.
There’s a coffee table between us, but it still feels too close for comfort, especially with the way she’s staring at us.
I look around, try and create some distance by leaning back, but it’s no use.
There is a bookshelf next to the television, filled with books.
“You like reading?” I ask, as a way to fill the silence.
“I used to,” Patricia says gruffly. “I did English at Cambridge, much good it did me.”
A vague memory pops into my head of Goldie talking about Patricia to me.
It was after I was rejected from Cambridge and discovered Wren had made it in.
Goldie told me not to worry, that Cambridge wasn’t the be-all and end-all, and when that didn’t work, she told me that Patricia had gone to Cambridge, and look where she ended up. That degree hadn’t mattered at all.
I didn’t believe her, thought she was making it up to make me feel better. How could Patricia, that horrible woman, have gone there?
Now, I frown at the bookshelf in Patricia’s living room.
It is filled with books, yes, but there are no photographs of Goldie alongside them, and none anywhere else either, nothing to suggest Goldie was ever here at all.
I try and look past Patricia to see if Goldie’s room has its door open, but the door is firmly closed.
Did she throw all of Goldie’s things away? Has she kept anything at all?
“You’ve grown up,” Patricia says. “Both of you. I imagine the other two have as well. You called her Goldie, you know, when you called through the door. What did you call yourselves again?”
“Crow,” I whisper. “And this is Wren.”
“Crow and Wren.” She rubs her jaw. “Where’s the sparky one? Always had something to say.”
She means Cuckoo. “It’s just us two.”
“But you are all together again, aren’t you?”
This makes me shiver. “What do you mean?”
“I saw you. Couldn’t believe it, actually. I almost thought . . .” She barks out a laugh. “I almost thought I’d see her with you, that she really had just run away after all these years.”
“What do you mean, you saw us?” Wren asks. “That’s too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? You just happened to see us when we haven’t been together in years?”
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you all,” Patricia says. “I thought if I kept an eye on what you were doing, maybe one of you would lead me to . . . well, no matter. The question is, why haven’t you been together in years?”
“We drifted apart,” I reply quickly. “University. It happens.”
“After your friend disappeared? You didn’t want to keep in touch to figure out what happened? Keep each other informed of news?”
Shit. She has turned this around on us. This was meant to be us interrogating her, not the other way around.
“It was too traumatic,” Wren mumbles. “And if something really big happened, there was some important news, of course we’d come together again.”
“Like you have now, you mean?”
Worse than shit. Fuck.
She’s smart. Dangerously so.
We have to be very careful.
What are we doing here? The thought comes to me in a panic.
Wren saw her, and then she called me, and we came to her flat as quickly as possible because .
. . what? We thought she was suspicious?
So what are we doing here then, rushing in without a plan?
This isn’t like me. I should have considered all the details, all the possibilities of coming here.
We’ve advertised ourselves now, exposed ourselves. And Patricia has clearly been watching.
Have we made a terrible mistake?