It is as if I have stepped through a tear between two worlds. After the silence, the sea seems to roar at me from below. The grass is so green and unexpected that its proximity to the salty water is impossible to take in. Crumpled beside a large rock to my right is a little girl. She is wearing white pyjamas sprinkled with pink fairies, and her feet are bare and bleeding. She is a metre and a half from the cliff edge.
She isn’t moving. I stifle a cry, smacking my hand against my mouth, and twist myself into a change of direction, towards her. There is the sound of a pop, from deep inside my own body. I hurtle downwards, breaking my fall with both hands. I lift my leg. My foot is dangling, as if whatever internal strings that attached it to the rest of me have broken. It ignores the signals my brain is sending to try to operate it. My ankle is tingling as if the worst case of pins and needles I’ve ever had has been multiplied a million-fold.
It happened in a heartbeat, a fluke because I turned too fast, at the wrong angle at the worst possible time. I have to bite down hard not to scream, because I don’t want to startle Alice. Did she see how close she was to the edge, and know enough to pull back from it?
I cannot walk. I consider standing on one foot, to hop, but it is too difficult when my head is about to explode. Instead, I drag my body across the grass as if I were a serpent, barely noticing as I scrape my legs on fragments of rocks. By the time I reach Alice I am breathing so heavily I cannot discern anything when I put my ear to her chest. After a minute, when I have finally stopped panting, I am certain that she is breathing too.
All my life, I have dreamed of the dead coming back. Matilda in the book. My parents, in the world I go to when I sleep. And now it has happened. I pull her onto my lap. She is my true miracle. My own child, returned to me. I bend over her, putting my lips to her cheek, which is startlingly cool, despite the hot sun. As carefully as I can, I examine her.
Other than her feet, there are no cuts, but when I push up her torn pyjama bottoms I can see that there are several new bruises on her legs, ranging from red to blue, and an older green one too. Her anaemia has been diagnosed, and these livid blotches are identical to the ones that covered me after she was born. How did Zac miss this? Was he too distracted? Or did her condition deteriorate precipitously over the past few days, when he saw little of her?
I can’t be sure if she is asleep, or if she has somehow fallen and hit her head on that rock. I can’t see any sign that she has. I remember that the anaemia made it so hard to do anything but sleep, as if I were in a kind of coma I couldn’t wake from, but I’d thought then it was an escape from a life I couldn’t bear to be conscious in. She is so light, as I cradle her in my arms, and terrifyingly pale. But for the bruises, she is nearly as white as the background colour of her pyjamas. I hold her hand in mine. The palm is pale, too, and icy cold like her cheek. Her nail beds and lips have the faintest tint of pink. I reach into my pocket for my phone. As Eliza said, there is no signal.
Again I bend my ear to her chest. She is breathing, but not peacefully. I study her some more. The skin at the base of her neck is inflating and deflating, instead of her stomach, and she is wheezing. I pull up her pyjama top. The skin over her ribs is drawing in when she inhales, making them look prominent to a degree that cannot be right.
Keeping Alice in one arm and draped over my lap, I use my other arm, and the one foot that is still working, to slide backwards and away from the cliff and closer to help. Beyond the point where the grass ends and the world drops, the sea is endlessly before me, dazzling and interminable and blue. I cannot let myself calculate how long it will take me to get Alice to the house this way. I have barely moved us a couple metres, and want to cry in relief when there is a crashing noise that makes me look over my shoulder to see Eliza burst through the gorse.
She falls on her knees beside us, weeping. ‘Thank God you’ve found her.’ She is touching Alice’s hair.
‘I can’t wake her,’ I say. ‘I can’t see any cuts other than on her feet, but she’s struggling with her breathing and she has several new bruises. She’s very pale. She’s too cold.’
Eliza shifts to look. ‘Oh my God.’
‘I can’t walk, Eliza – I’ve done something – I don’t know what – my foot’s dangling, so I can’t help.’
She puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re in pain – I’m sorry. I’ve called 999 but it’s going to take them a while. The house is so remote. Then they’ll have to find us out here.’
What I say next is against my every impulse, because I never want to let Alice go. But I do say it. ‘Carry her. Run. If the paramedics aren’t in sight, then throw her in the car and drive to the nearest hospital or doctor’s surgery.’
Eliza nods. ‘Okay. I’ll make sure to send them for you.’ She bends to take Alice, her face so close I worry that Alice’s breathing will be impeded. With that thought, something catches in the corner of my foggy brain. It cuts through my terror for Alice and the pain that is throbbing through the place above my heel so acutely it seems to pierce my skull too. Exhaustion made me fail to see it earlier.
‘Eliza?’ My left hand is ready to protect Alice.
Eliza straightens and looks up, a question on her face.
‘How did you know Jane was smothered?’ My right hand is ready to move.
The skin around Eliza’s eyes blanches. ‘What?’
‘You couldn’t have known that.’ I am bracing myself, my stomach muscles tightening, preparing to balance from this sitting position if I need to strike at Eliza.
‘I don’t understand. I don’t know what you mean.’ But I can see from the way she is biting her lip that she does.
She moves to take Alice from my lap and I try to push her away, but my movements are feeble and I am finding it more difficult than I imagined to keep myself from tipping.
Almost immediately, she straightens up. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Holly?’
She has used my real name for the first time. I do not like my name in her voice. My answer is to bend forwards, using as much of my upper body as I can to shield Alice.
‘Give her to me.’ Eliza’s jaw is clenched. ‘If you make me wrestle you for her, all three of us might end up going over. It will be your fault if something happens to her.’
I gather Alice in more tightly, trying to bundle her into a concentrated mass. ‘It’s the judgement of Solomon. I would never do anything to put her in danger. You’re not her real mother.’
Her hand flies to her mouth. ‘Oh, Holly. Oh no.’ She looks so deeply horrified and shocked. ‘You think Alice is yours.’
Alice makes a small whimper. A strand of copper hair has stuck to her cheek. I smooth it away. ‘I know she is. You know it too.’
And then the world lurches. Or rather, I do, because Eliza digs a hand into each of my shoulders, pushing my upper body from my child’s with every atom of force she has and not stopping until my head smashes into the edge of a rock and I am flat on my back. I am too dazed to prevent Eliza from snatching up Alice, who is sprawled across my chest.
Eliza stands, holding Alice against her as if she were burping a baby, and looks down at me. ‘She’s not yours.’
It is too hard to focus on the two of them. My head is too heavy to raise from the grass. I try to make my brain tell my body to move, but all of the signals seem to have short-circuited. My eyes drift away. They drift up, to the sky. The sky is full of stars, even though it is bleached blue. The sun is a huge orange ball in a child’s picture. I decide that staying here is the best thing I can do. I am too tired. I cannot fight any more. And if Alice isn’t mine, what is there left to fight for? Now, I will let the grass grow above me. I will let the soil swallow me. I will become part of the huge burial ground that is the earth. The plague pit is here too. It is everywhere. It has been waiting to pull me in. I am finally ready to let it.
The back of my head is sticky and wet as it rolls to the side, where I can see Eliza. Tenderly, she puts Alice down, then tears off the grey sweatshirt she has tied around her own waist, which she makes a pillow of and places beneath Alice’s floppy head. Alice is so, so far away. Our time together was too short, but I am ready to let go, at last.
I am six metres from the cliff edge. My eyes fall shut, and I can hear a shuffling noise. When I open them again, Eliza is sitting on the ground beside me. Her feet are braced against my hips, her knees bent. She is crying. ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to hurt you, Holly. But I can’t do anything else. You know what I’ve done.’
When she straightens her knees, the movement slides me a few centimetres. She is like an accordion, contracting and expanding her legs, shuffling forwards, her feet moving up and down the side of my body to continue to manoeuvre me closer to the edge, but stopping again and again, crying all the while. I am too limp, and my head is hurting so much, as if it is filling with blood, and growing so heavy with the weight of all that liquid.
Eliza is becoming more and more breathless, by my side. ‘I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ She looks up at the sky, seeming to talk to it. ‘Help me. Tell me what to do.’ She pulls her feet away from me and curls into a ball. ‘I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t.’
She is hugging her knees and rocking. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know about your baby,’ she says, ‘and I’m so sorry. I know you don’t believe she died, but she did. Oh God. Oh God Oh God. You’re one of the few people who would understand.’
My head is making me so dizzy, and so tired, and I must be careful not to give any dangerous things away, because my judgement is all gone. Maxine would know what to say and do. Maxine knows everything, and she is always right. What was the term she used? Confirmation bias. The truth was unfolding right in front of my eyes, but I twisted the evidence to tell the story I wanted instead of the one that happened.
‘Why?’ That is a good word, and one Maxine might use, too.
‘I couldn’t love Alice any more than I do. I can’t lose her now. Not because of you.’
I snatch another glimpse of Alice, who is curled like a kitten, and my friends from the plague pit loosen their grip. I hear them whispering from below. Not yet, they say. You cannot come to us yet. You must stay among the living for now.
Eliza’s pupils have shrunk. ‘You see I have no choice, don’t you? Please say yes.’
‘No,’ I say.
Her eyes are circles of white, with a small dark dot in each. ‘Do you understand what Jane and I did, Holly? Do you know about Zac going to Moldova?’
I don’t want it to be true, but I do remember. That medical conference Zac went to a couple months before he made me pregnant. Did he meet Jane there? It would have been a relatively safe place for her. Like Montenegro, it doesn’t extradite as easily as EU countries. That must have been when Zac and Jane conceived Alice. ‘Yes.’
I glimpse a spider moving through the grass. I think of how a spider carries her silken egg sac beneath her belly. What determination must a spider have to drag something so much bigger than she is? If she can do that, I can do this. I force my head into movement once more, to watch Eliza, to convey sympathy. ‘You loved Jane.’ There is a hammer in my skull.
‘I did.’ Eliza begins to sob. ‘She knew I couldn’t have a child.’
‘She loved you too.’
‘Yes. Yes, she did. She was going through so much herself with her marriage. And the IRS. I wanted to die when I found out I couldn’t have a baby, but Jane helped me through.’
It is as if I have a kaleidoscope behind my eyes, and each time I manage to alight on a distinct picture, it dissolves into mess. But I see the pact Eliza and Jane must have made, with Eliza faking a pregnancy and Jane hiding her own. They had to trust each other. They each had so much to lose.
Eliza hits the top of her left wrist with the fingers of her right hand, again and again, a series of sharp smacks that seem to be slapping away inside my own head. ‘Jane didn’t want Zac to have Alice when she found out he was expecting a baby with you.’
I remember a trip Zac made when I was ten weeks pregnant. That was to the Ukraine, another country that is a lighter touch than most when it comes to extradition, especially when Jane had her brother’s help with altering databases and interfering with surveillance measures. Did Zac meet Jane there to break the news about me and our baby? Was that when she decided to keep Alice a secret from him, and give her baby away? She must have been starting to show by then, a couple months ahead of me, but she was so slight – she could have covered it up.
I realise Eliza must have been wearing a prosthetic bump when she met Zac in that London hotel. She deliberately led him to think she’d been abandoned by her partner. Zac had no clue that he had two babies on the way, then. I’m struggling to make my brain compute this new reality – Zac had told me the truth about Eliza and Alice. He’d just omitted the pact Eliza and Jane had made, which he’d discovered when Eliza turned up on his doorstep with Alice.
‘You’re my friend, Eliza.’ I try again to flex my bad foot, testing, but it does absolutely nothing.
‘Don’t. Don’t say that.’ She covers her eyes with her hands and sobs. ‘You’re the reason Zac made us move to Bath.’
When Eliza brought Alice to the hospital that first time, she must have guessed who I was before I’d even started to mop up her spilled coffee.
She is clenching and unclenching her jaw. ‘It’s your fault. It’s your fault Jane went there. It’s your fault she’s dead. I wouldn’t have had to do it if it weren’t for you. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. And now I have to do this too.’
‘You don’t.’
‘Zac didn’t know I knew.’ She is shaking her head, her eyes tightly shut. She sounds like a child chanting a nursery rhyme. ‘Not about you. He didn’t know I knew.’
When he came back early from his Edinburgh trip, Eliza wasn’t pretending to be terrified he’d find me there. The terror was real. But it wasn’t because she lived in fear of him. It was because she didn’t want him to discover the extent of what she knew about me. Perhaps Eliza is the best spy of us all.
I try again to lift my head, and I manage an inch or two, but it thwacks back onto the ground, rattling my brain against my skull. I drag my eyes to Alice. She hasn’t moved.
‘I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t I don’t I don’t. Oh God. I don’t.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I do. Zac would want to be with you. I’d lose Alice.’
‘Not to me.’ I see how terrifying it must have been for Eliza, imagining having to share Alice with a woman Zac loved more than her, though she couldn’t let herself see that there was zero chance of my ever wanting to be that woman.
She shakes her head again. ‘No. No no no no no. I was right. I was so angry when I phoned you on Monday and you said Zac’s name. You were expecting his call. You two were already talking behind my back, weren’t you?’
I remember Zac saying he didn’t leave the robin in front of my front door. He must have been telling the truth about that, too. It must have been Eliza, wanting me to hate him. She’d made a point of telling me Zac had been in Bath before he travelled to Edinburgh later that same day. She’d wanted me to realise he’d had the opportunity to leave me the robin.
She digs her shoe into my hip and the pain shakes me and shakes me and shakes me some more, jetting up into my head and down to my ankle. But it wakes me too.
‘We weren’t,’ I say. ‘I’m your friend.’
‘You aren’t. You avoided giving me your number until two days ago. But I know how to defeat a phone passcode. I’ve broken into Zac’s so many times.’
I try to think when she could have done this. I must have left my phone in my bag when I pretended to go to the loo so I could snoop around her house. That was how she got my number and dialled it while I waited in front of Maxine’s house in Cheltenham.
I am grappling to remember something important I wanted to ask her. ‘Frederick.’
She looks genuinely confused. ‘Who’s Frederick?’
‘My head.’ My brain is like a sheet of glass, spiderwebbing before it shatters.
‘For the best? Is that what you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘I did. I made the best decision I could. I’d always loved Zac. And he was Alice’s father. I was able to give him his child. That was the right thing to do, once you were gone. I told him what Jane and I had done – he immediately understood why.’
Something pings for me, and I work hard to form another thought through the haze. The thought is that Eliza doesn’t know about Frederick. Jane told her some of the truth, but probably only the IRS part of it. She didn’t talk about her brother and what he did, or what she and Zac helped him to do. Eliza doesn’t know the real reason Jane was in hiding.
‘Family. You gave. Alice.’ My words are no longer coming in the right order.
‘Zac was still in mourning for you and your baby – he was so lost.’ A shadow passes over her face. ‘I wanted my marriage with Zac to be a real marriage.’ What she says next comes out strangled. ‘We were one hundred per cent together when it came to Alice, but he wouldn’t even sleep with me – he said it wouldn’t be fair. That was the deal.’
She lied that he hurt her. She pretended to fear him.
‘No better way to get a man to love you forever than to run away from him.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘I was too late to that lesson, but you and Jane were born knowing it.’
At last, I understand why Jane took such a huge risk in returning to the UK. It was her longing for Alice. She couldn’t live with the choice she’d made.
‘I don’t. You. Blame.’
‘Jane can’t just change her mind like that and ask for Alice, can she?’
‘No.’ This is an easy word.
‘She wanted to take them both. My child and my husband.’ She flutters her hands. ‘It was too much. All in one day. You that morning. Her that night. I followed him there, you see.’ Eliza takes a shuddering breath and I picture what happened. Zac slipping out of Jane’s house, then Eliza sneaking in.
Eliza gulps. ‘Zac wouldn’t touch me, but he’d left her smiling in her sleep. I hadn’t planned to do it, but that smile … I thought she wouldn’t wake, you see, but it was so hard.’ I recall the red mark on Eliza’s cheek. She’d said Alice did it. But it must have been Jane, fighting back. Eliza’s voice goes flat. ‘I left the pillow on her face, so I didn’t have to look.’
The pillow was gone by the time I arrived, and nobody mentioned it until yesterday. Was its removal part of the forensic processes? Or had Maxine wanted to make sure I saw Jane, that I had no choice but to look? Had Maxine known that by forcing me to see, I would care all the more about what had happened to her? That I wouldn’t be able to let it go?
I wanted you invested in what happened to Jane. That was what Maxine said on Monday when I asked why she’d let me follow her to Cheltenham.
‘I tried to make her arms and legs pretty.’ Eliza is like a child seeking praise. ‘I covered her – Zac had left her naked – I didn’t want others to see that.’ She looks behind her, then up, into a sky that is so blue it makes my eyes hurt. ‘They’ll be here soon, from when I called 999. You need to go away, Holly, before they arrive.’
I cannot walk, and my head has broken into pieces, but I manage to slip a hand into the pocket of my dress. I concentrate with every shred of brain I have left, as if trying to levitate an impossible object. The force of my mind, my body, my fingers, all going in one direction.
Eliza moves closer, and raises herself, so just her shins are on the grass, her profile to the cliff edge. She is still near my feet, but there are two of her, and I cannot decide which one is the real Eliza because my eyes are playing tricks on me.
‘If you don’t leave, they’ll take Alice away. You’ll tell them what I did to Jane. You want to help me, don’t you?’
‘No tell.’
‘But you will.’ The two Elizas smile, though their smiles are so sad as they squeeze my bad foot, making me cry out, but showing me that the Eliza who is touching me is the real one, and the double by her side is the spectre. ‘Please. Can you roll? You’ll feel such peace. You’ll be with your baby. Can you do it yourself, so I don’t have to? I don’t want to do it, but I will. Please don’t make me. Not again.’
Milly’s talisman, the skimming stone she painted with the miniature portrait of me and my baby, is in my palm. I have kept it close every day, since I ran away. My eyes are on Eliza’s forehead. All in one movement, I throw. Blood snakes down her temple. Her eyes are open, and roll back like a doll’s, so the whites show, and she wobbles, as if in slow motion, before she crashes straight onto her face, lying alongside me.
The only way to get to Alice is to drag myself there. First, I have to climb over Eliza, and my own grunts and pain make it impossible for me to check for any signs that she is breathing. Milly’s stone is on the grass beside her. A part of me wonders if I should throw it off the cliff, but I don’t. I slip it back in my pocket. Somewhere far away, I have the thought that Eliza is probably dead, and I should try to be certain, in case there is something I can do for her, but it is more important to help Alice so I just leave Eliza where she fell.
I don’t know how long it takes, but I need to pause often, because each movement I make jabs me in the head. When I finally reach Alice, I manage to curve an arm around her, and my good leg, because I must somehow hold her where she is, and I don’t think I can keep awake much longer to do that.
The sea is no longer roaring. The sea loves me. It has always loved me. There is the sound of shouts and crunching feet, of my name and Alice’s and Eliza’s. But I am so, so tired, and cannot answer. I haven’t been this tired since my pregnancy, with this special kind of tiredness that is blissful to surrender to. I listen to the song of the sea, inhaling and exhaling, slapping forward at the rocks before it is sucked back, lulling me to sleep.