Chapter Forty-Eight
Lady Phoebe
I only realise that I’ve been crying when Connie sits down on the floor next to me, wrapping me in his arms and wiping my cheeks.
“He didn’t do this,” he tells me.
I sneak a look up at him, trying my best to avoid Arthur because I just can’t see him like this again. I don’t have it in me.
“He obviously did.”
“No,” Connie shakes his head, stands up, starts pacing. “He didn’t.”
“What are you talking about?” I stand up, sobbing. “Can’t you see that?” I gesture to the table, my voice raising. “Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?” My chest is rising and falling, the disappointment so thick and heavy, I’m not sure how or if I’ll ever get over this.
Connie ignores me, storms over to the table, dips his finger into one of the lines and sucks it off. After a second he turns to me, still shaking his head. “That isn’t cocaine, Phoebs.”
I throw my arms out. “Well what the fuck is it?”
He moves his tongue around his mouth. “I’m not sure but it ain’t coke and he,” he points over to Arthur, “Didn’t do this willingly.”
“Why are you sticking up for him?” I ask quietly. “Have you been covering for him this whole time?”
He cocks his head. “You think he’s been using this whole time?”
“I don’t know, has he?”
He looks at me. Almost a sneer. “Get fucking real, Phoebs.”
I turn around, giving him my back as I quietly sob to myself. It’s different. It is so fucking different now. Should I have told him? If I did, would he have done this? Why tonight? Did I say something? Did someone else? Did something happen that I don’t know about? Why after nearly four years?
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why would he fucking do this to me?
And I say ‘me’ and not ‘himself’ because if there’s one thing you should know about Arthur it’s that he doesn’t care about himself. It wouldn’t affect him. But it would affect me and he knows that.
I wonder if I’ll have to go back to mourning him—if this is the start of the beginning all over again.
It’s hard mourning someone who isn’t actually dead.
People can die in all different kinds of ways but to most it's simple, you die and that’s it.
For me, when Arthur came back, it’s like he was resurrected.
I haven’t been so full of feeling since he came back.
I felt like I forgave him too quickly. And then I hated myself for thinking that and then also him for making me think that.
I was screaming, three feet tall, waving my little hand, begging for everyone to come to this funeral that only I was attending.
I mean, everyone got an invite to be there but they tucked it away, lived in the very real presence where he was alive.
Nobody else properly mourned him, I don’t think.
And now I wonder if I’ll have to do that all over again.
Connie turns around suddenly, holding up a ripped brown box. “This wasn’t him,” he tells me again as if the more he says, the more likely I am to believe him.
“What does a box have anything to do with it?”
“Look!” He holds it up. “Got his fucking name on it, Phoebs. We don’t know much about drug dealers but what we do know is that they don’t deliver via fucking Royal Mail.”
I sniff, wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “They might.”
He scoffs, throws the box across the room at me. “Don’t be fucking dim, Phoebs.”
I catch the box as it hits my chest softly, his name and address are scrawled across the front in black pen. Nothing else. Just that.
I sigh—begrudgingly—and look at Connie, for the first time, maybe believing him. “So what does this mean?”
He pushes his hands through his hair, huffs, pulls his phone out of his pocket. “I don’t know.”
My eyes catch a brief glance at Arthur slumped on the sofa and it makes my stomach turn for a million different reasons so when Connie starts ringing someone on his phone, I go down the hall and into Arthur’s room.
I sit on his bed, not really thinking, if you can believe it.
My head just feels empty, like a big black void of nothingness.
Perhaps because there’s too much to think about.
I’m not sure where to start. I should think about it, though?
Maybe I just don’t really care anymore. What’s another bad thing, you know?
They seem to be coming at me in abundance these days.
I do think that I should’ve gone back with him. He wasn’t lying about his headache. He had that look in his eye. A bit tired, worn, red. He did truly need to lie down. So why did he do this?
I don’t much like ‘why’s?’ It’s so incomplete and unsatisfying. I prefer ‘definitely’s’ and ‘absolute’s’ because you know what you’re getting.
A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. Connie runs down the hall, opens it and then I hear George and Albie’s voices. I don’t really want to come out of his room. This whole scene is way too familiar and I suddenly remember Digby and how this never happened with him.
The door barges open, Albie bursting through. He nods his chin at me. “You need to come with us.”
I sit up, blink over at him. “Excuse me?”
“Pack a bag—you need to come.”
And that’s all he says before walking out and closing the door behind him. I don’t have my things here so I just get up and numbly walk back into the living area.
“What’s going on?”
George looks up at me from his perch next to Arthur. “We’re going to take you to the hotel.”
I frown, look to Connie. “Why?”
“Because it isn’t fucking safe here!” George shouts, blowing out a breath and dragging his hand down his face.
He points down at Arthur while looking at me.
“He didn’t do this, alright? That sorry sod he killed?
Yeah, his sister’s been sent into some kind of psychosis.
” He shakes his head. “This,” he waves his arms about.
“Is all her. The flowers, the book, the drugs, the picture—all fucking her, mate.”
“Oh.” My voice is barely above a whisper but it suddenly all feels very serious and that I should follow them to the hotel because actually my life might be in danger.
That’s a really scary thought, actually. Have you ever been in that position? When you know you might be seriously hurt or killed? It’s only ever been something I’ve seen in films or books or TV shows.
The boys haul Arthur up from the sofa and drag him outside as Connie holds the lift for them.
I feel like someone has reached into my brain, snatched all my thoughts and held them above me in a flimsy net.
They’re bound to drop but right now they’re not there, so I follow them into the lift, down into George’s car and all the way over to the hotel.
I’m not sure if I even blink or breathe on the way over.
All I know is that I feel very sick and very unsure.
Life is inconvenient a lot of the time, but when it’s this inconvenient and at a time like this, it’s near impossible to work through.
Life is also a lot unfair but I wonder what I must’ve done for it to be this unfair.
This is the kind of stuff that happens to people who have committed crimes—truly, to the bone, bad people.
All I’ve ever done is maybe commit a few crimes against myself.
Maybe I don’t deserve whatever good will possibly come my way now.
Maybe all the hatred I’ve given to myself has been unfair and actually this is just the way my life was meant to go.
I won’t ever know the answer because this is happening now, in real time and you can’t stop time or slow it down to make it right.
You just have to use the time you have left to make it right—which can be hard because how much time do we have left? Minutes, hours, days, years?
When we arrive in the car park of the hotel, the boys help Arthur into a suite where he starts to come alive a bit. I stand in the entryway, hearing him muttering nonsense as Connie and George help him into bed.
Albie walks over to me, nudges my arm. “You okay?”
I think I nod.
“He’ll be alright. He won’t go back to rehab or anything—we should be grateful it wasn’t H, that really would’ve set him back.”
I nod again (maybe I do?).
“We’ll keep you both here for a day or two until we know that she’s locked up or at least out of the bastarding country.”
He takes me under his arm, holds me to his side as I say nothing. My stomach feels hollow, which is weird because how can it feel so empty when there’s stuff inside of it all the time? There’s stuff inside of it right now but it doesn’t feel like that.
George and Connie come over to me, say more stuff about Arthur but I’m not listening. I’m concentrating on the contents of my stomach. George tells me that there’ll be someone outside all night and that we’re more secure here then we would be in a HMP prison.
When they leave us, I go straight to sleep, next to Arthur, obviously because when have I ever left him alone? Never. Not even when I was with someone else and really should’ve left him alone.
He wakes up several times in the night to throw up and eventually, doesn’t come back to bed. I lay on my side, watching him nodding off by the toilet. He sees me. Of course he does. But we both don’t say anything.
We’ve never been much good at talking, him and I.