I’m struck by how old Dee looks, all of a sudden. Pale and beaten. The flesh around her neck already sagging. Her eyes puffy with that thin, shiny skin that people get when they’re past their best.
He chose this, over me?
There is a bang from somewhere else in the ship and a sudden lurch, and the strip light overhead flickers and goes out.
I don’t care. I navigate on my phone to my video folders, click into the right one, bring the volume up, so we can both hear it. I sit, pushing in close to her, close enough to smell the blood oozing from the wound on her head. The screen the only point of light.
‘Let’s have a look, shall we? Here.’ I tap the white ‘Play’ triangle and the still image moves. I had to drop the resolution to get the whole file on my phone, but it’s clear enough.
She lets out a broken moan and stiffens.
‘Oh, yeah, you recognise this, don’t you? No, don’t look away. You’ll want to see it.’
But Dee scrunches her eyes tight. I reach out and rest the tip of my finger on the smashed mess of her ankle.
‘Watch,’ I tell her.
And she does.
It starts on a wet street, rain, the orange of street lights. Georgian buildings in a suburb of Bath. Shot from the other side of the street, the angle low because the camera was concealed inside Dee’s shoulder bag, the lens glued against a tiny hole in the side. The top corners of the shot are rounded off, where the vinyl of the bag obscured it. Even so, it’s cinematic. I can’t take that away from her – she certainly knows how to take a good shot.
A white car sits, engine off, outside a handsome town house. It is night. Inside the car is a man behind the wheel, looking down. His face lit blue by an unseen screen.
Beside me now, Dee’s breathing slows.
Leo Adeyemi. The most beautiful man I’ve ever met.
The shot shifts jerkily across the road, dipping in time with the sound of footsteps. Dee’s footsteps. For a second as she moves off the kerb, another car is visible – just the headlights and a few inches of the bonnet of a red Honda.
My car. Not that she would have known, then.
She crosses the road. A hand emerges to the right of frame, takes the passenger-door handle, pulls. The interior light comes on – the man has been sitting there for a while, though she didn’t know that, either. He turns, and although the shot loses his face almost immediately, there is a moment when you can see his eyes. Wet. Harrowed.
The sound of the street shuts off suddenly as the door is closed. She settles the bag on her lap, turned towards him.
Hey, she says. And Dee, this six-months-older version of the same woman, whimpers beside me.
Off-camera, her voice is easy, relaxed. She starts to ask him about his day, then about the adult piano student he was teaching on Tuesdays – the student who happened to be me. It takes her a while to respond to the fact that he’s not answering. Hey, she says after a pause. Then again. Hey, what’s up? Worried now. What’s going on?
He shows her the phone he’s holding. The writing is illegible in the shot, but I know what it says. It’s an email, and I know every word. There is a pause as she reads. The only sound is the rain on the roof.
Is it true? He asks. What she’s saying. Tell me.
It is not his usual voice. It is not the voice Leo used with me in our evening lessons after he’d finished his school day: encouraging and calm and joyful. It’s not how he sounded when I met him for coffee, the one time he agreed to meet me outside the lessons. That time was different – he was so careful with every word, making sure he said the things that he knew he was supposed to say. That he couldn’t continue the lessons, if that was the way I felt about him. That it would be best for me to find another teacher for a while, though I knew that, deep down, he was only saying it because he felt he had to. Even then, I knew that what he was really asking me to do was prove myself to him. It would only be a matter of time.
The silence breaks.
Leo, look, she says. It was … I was going to tell you. It started off as work, but this is – oh God – what they’re saying there, it’s not like that.
No? It isn’t? What is it like then? Explain it to me. Are you doing an investigation about me? Is that part true?
They start talking over each other now. She starts to answer – it’s not only you, it’s – but he interrupts her.
I know all the lines. Under my breath, I mouth every word.
I took the money from those parents because of my mum. Do you understand? Those students would have passed those assessments anyway. And now my career is over. It’s all gone! Because of you. Please, don’t.
The shot shifts as she leans over, tries to touch his arm.
He flings her off. Don’t. You have ruined my life. Do you understand that, Sophie? Or whatever the hell your name really is—
Dee. It’s Dee.
He laughs, but it’s a horrible thing to hear. I don’t care. You’re a liar, that’s what you are. I cared about you. You made me think it was real. But it was nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. It’s not like that. I love—
He shouts over her now. Don’t! You don’t. Get out. I don’t want to see your face ever again. You understand? Get out!
There’s movement, a scuffle. The door opens, the distant noise of a police car somewhere. She protests, but the door slams and then the shot drops, the bag in the footwell now, angled upwards. Just the edge of him rotated awkwardly in the bottom of the frame. He fumbles the phone back into the cradle beside the wheel. He sobs. A hollow, awful, desperate sound.
Beside me, Dee holds her breath, and I know why. Beyond this, every moment of his life is new for her.
The engine starts. Beyond the driver’s side window, the scene changes. Beneath the rumble of the car and the windscreen wipers working at full speed against the rain, you can hear him crying.
The things you see when you watch it the first time are not the same as the things you see on the tenth watch, or the twentieth, or the hundredth. But what I see is that he is not wearing a seatbelt. That his sweater is ruched at the back, so that it shows half an inch of flesh. That on the fingers of the left hand, which rests on the wheel – fingers that can play the lower half of a Prokofiev concerto with such delicious dexterity that you would watch them and never want them to stop – are nails that are bitten to the quick.
I see it all. I see every detail because I loved him. He was all I thought of. I was his guardian angel, watching him, making sure he was safe, showing him the truth when he was deceived.
On the deck above us now there are noises, something mechanical. Shouts in Finnish. Dee struggles, tries to get up.
‘No,’ I tell her, pulling her down.
‘We have to go,’ she says, her voice an ugly scrape, every word an effort.
‘Not yet. You’re going to see this.’
Three loud blasts of the ship’s horn sound.
‘We have … to go,’ Dee says in a whisper.
So I make good on the threat. When I grasp her ankle, there is both a softness and a sharpness to it that are not meant to be there. The sound she makes is not even human.
On the screen, the street lights space out.
When Leo drove away, I followed him. He didn’t know, not until later. But I was there, watching over him even in his last minutes. We drove out together away from the city, in the relentless rain. As I drove I grabbed my phone and rang his number. All I wanted was to talk to him. To tell him I was there for him, right behind him. It rang and rang, went to voicemail.
I got closer. We were doing fifty, then sixty, along the mirror-wet, unlit road. I wanted him to slow down – I was crying, shouting his name at the back of his head on the headrest. And he couldn’t hear me, of course he couldn’t, but he must have seen me. So I drew up tighter, matched his speed. I felt the pull of him, urging me forward, until our bumpers were almost touching.
I flashed my headlights. He swerved a little, and my heart jumped – he knew it was me. I remember taking my hands from the wheel and wiping the tears away because I thought he was slowing down. That maybe this was the start of everything: me and him, together. I rang the number again, let it ring and ring.
That’s when it all changed. Suddenly he was accelerating faster than I could match. I flashed again, sounded my horn – did he not know it was me, after all? I cried out as he streaked away from me.
And then he swerved, the smallest jolt to the right. Overcorrected to the left. Too much.
The car lights lifted, arcing upwards. I braked hard, watching, open-mouthed. One side of his car lifting impossibly, before coming down again on the side. And, like that, it skidded further and further away, the scream of metal against road until it struck a tree. Wheels spinning sideways against the empty air.
I got out of my car and I ran to him.