46

Kat

‘Deadly serious, Scarlett.’ Kat can barely hear her PA over the wind. Fifty-five minutes after returning from the Heaps’ cottage – a lifetime ago – she’s sitting on the stone porch step, her mother’s ragged nineties scarf scrunched in her lap, her phone pressed against her ear. ‘Someone needs to resign if Spring’s to survive. Sorry, the line … I’ve just sent the email … What? It’s been leaked?’ Kat tries to imagine the unleashed chaos. But she’s already moving away, her margins reforming. ‘No, you’re not fired, Scarlett. Ha. And don’t take any shit from anyone else, okay? … Right back at you. Bye.’

She drags a finger over the phone screen, ablaze with notifications, until it goes black. Kat’s not sure who she’ll be without Spring. But she wants to find out. Resting her chin on her knees, she fixes thoughtfully on Jonah and Lauren, standing by The Drop, silhouetted against a giant silver moon.

Oh, Lauren. Even when they were young, she had a different range to her daily experience in the way a bee can see a prismatic spectrum of colour humans can’t. And this holds true now.

So, Lauren’s kept a hallucinatory Gemma alive in her mind all these years? Kat’s not shocked, not really. The rest of the family has also spun fantasy narratives. What else is Flora’s perfect marriage and – hard to admit it – Spring, a house of cards she’s stacked higher and higher, as if the bull market hadn’t already ended. As for Dad. He doesn’t seem to live in real time either. At Dixie’s funeral he’d sobbed as if they’d been together weeks, not decades, earlier. The sketch he’d snatched from Kat’s hand clearly had a raw emotional power undiluted by the passing years – and one he’d rather bury than understand.

Unlike the rest of them, Lauren’s climbed right into the void and shone a torch into its shadows. By writing to Gemma, she’s kept that summer’s dark, pulpy heart beating, while Kat’s refused to look it in the eye – as she struggled to meet Viv’s earlier, and occasionally Lauren’s too. She’s not sure which approach is the greater dissemble. All she does know is that in the Heaps’ cottage, there she was, not thrusting forward, congratulating herself on how far she’d come, but slam-dunked back to where she’d started. Forced to acknowledge that the past lives on, like the wrong tense in a Word document, constantly underlined, needing to be addressed. And she never has. They never have. Damn it.

Holding the scarf in her fist, Kat strides, head bent, into the wind, to The Drop. Lauren and Jonah, a few metres along, the other side of the hawthorn, are still so absorbed in conversation they don’t seem to notice.

Kat peers down at the rocks, wet coal-black beneath, the waves smashing and grinding against them, shattering into mercury drops. She holds the scarf between forefinger and thumb, watching the tattered silk writhe in the wind then soar over the edge, carrying with it the shame and secrets of her childhood, sucked into the vast roaring night.

Back in the house, she sits at the bottom of the staircase, all the stories locked inside it, and licks the salt off her lips with the tip of her tongue. She feels different. Lighter. Sharper. For the first time since she returned to Rock Point, she sees it, allows herself to go there. Grandpa’s limp foot on the bottom step; his yellow sock and hairless ankle; the spatter of blood on the wainscoting; the gore on the flagstones.

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Angie bursts out of the living room, and her smile falls. ‘Sorry, I was hoping it was Charlie. I’m worried, Kat. He’s still bunkered up in the bedroom,’ she says, in a hushed voice. ‘Just lying on the bed, a million miles away, staring at the ceiling. Has been since we got back. I can’t reach him. I mean, I know it’s been a heavy day, but … it’s like there’s something else. I don’t know. He won’t talk to me.’ She wrings her hands. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’

Seeing Viv and Pete again has tossed everything up in the air. Everyone has landed in different places, no one the same person they were at lunch. ‘He’s processing, I think.’ But what exactly, Kat’s less sure.

‘I guess.’ Angie looks unconvinced. ‘And are you okay? I heard you missed your flight. That’s a bummer.’

‘Oh, I reckon I was destined to miss it.’ There she goes, sounding like Lauren. Irrational. Even Angie is looking at her strangely. ‘Grandpa was lying just there.’ She points to the flagstones under her trainers. Angie blanches. ‘It looked gruesome,’ she adds. ‘And I was wondering why Dad didn’t stay with him, wait for his ambulance.’

‘Well, Gemma was a kid.’

‘Yeah.’ Kat stares at the spot on the floor, lost in thought.

‘May I?’ Angie’s leatherette trousers squeak as she lowers beside Kat. ‘Look, about that day,’ she says abruptly. ‘I shouldn’t have bolted. It was a shitty thing to do.’

‘Yep.’ In running away, Angie had proved she was Monster.

‘When I saw Lauren and Gemma in the aviary, you know, from the studio window, I thought they were messing about. Well, I wasn’t really thinking at all, to be honest. But then all hell broke loose and I – I panicked. Thought I’d be blamed. You know, my fault for ignoring the girls, doing what I was doing with Charlie. I should have raised the alarm. I desperately wish –’ Angie stops, nervously fiddles with her engagement ring, and her mohair sleeve tickles the back of Kat’s hand. A moment passes. ‘Kat, I knew the police were coming, and I was totally paranoid about the police that summer. Been in a bit of a tight spot in London. Fallen in with a bad crowd. That’s why I came down to Cornwall in the first place. To lie low.’ She takes a breath. ‘Nothing to do with the eclipse.’

‘I think you came here to meet Dad. You knew his name. His work.’

‘Well, that was a factor. Charlie was a bit of a god back then,’ she acknowledges, with a shrug. ‘I was an unemployed ex-art student, looking for a way out … That’s not a crime, is it?’ She knocks her knees together, apart again. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have seduced him.’

‘Oh, no.’ Kat rolls her eyes. When will the middle-aged get it? ‘Dad had the power. He was in his late forties. You were in your mid-twenties, being paid to look after his daughters! Gross.’ She doesn’t even feel disloyal for saying it.

‘Always liked an older guy.’ Angie picks a bit of fuzz off her jumper.

‘You do realize ’ninety-nine was the year the Tate exhibited Tracey Emin’s My Bed? Mum took me to see it.’ Kat remembers saying, provocatively loudly, ‘It’s like your bedroom after a bender, Mum.’ Blythe had turned on her Manolos and pretended not to hear. ‘And there was Dad behaving like a cheesy, iffy Austin Powers walk-on. He’d get cancelled today. Seriously.’

‘Whoa. Not fair,’ Angie protests.

‘Isn’t it?’ Kat thinks of all the other women who’ve slipped through their father’s sheets – and studio – over the years. Not least Dixie. ‘Look. You weren’t the first, Angie,’ she says, as kindly as she can manage.

‘Oh, bloody hell, I know that.’ Angie’s nostrils flare: Kat’s struck a weak spot. ‘Still. Those life studies he squirrelled away tell quite the story, don’t they?’

Kat sits bolt upright, the hairs on her arms prickling. Hang on, hang on. Her brain grabs at a new possibility, a pattern in the jumble of confusing Dad data. An asterism in a seemingly random crackle of stars.