Lisa was sweating.
A fresh breeze was blowing in from the open balcony door, but her daughter looked as if she were standing in a spotlight. Her body was reacting to the flame of insanity simmering deep inside her. A fine trickle of sweat ran down her cheek and collected above the collar of her T-shirt.
‘I’ve tried to get Tom back,’ she told her mother. ‘I’ve called him, emailed him, bombarded him via Facebook and WhatsApp. I turned up to one of his consultation hours after he dumped me overnight. I even got him back into bed once.’
Lisa’s wistful smile at the end unsettled Julia as much as what she’d said.
‘Are you talking about the time when I… had a relationship with Tom?’
Her daughter’s smile gave way to a stony face. ‘But it didn’t mean anything to Tom any more. He said the sex was better with me, but he could only imagine having a relationship with you.’
Jesus Christ! Julia closed her eyes for a while.
Lisa’s faked suicide. Her resurrection. The hatred in her voice.
She wasn’t sure how much more she was capable of taking. Julia looked at her daughter’s hand gripping the screwdriver tightly, observed the reflection of the slowly setting sun on the silver metal and asked Lisa softly, ‘What are you going to do now, darling?’
‘Get Tom back.’
Lisa virtually spat these words at her bare feet. If it hadn’t occurred to her earlier, now Julia was having doubts about who she was talking to.
The girl before her, with that haunted look and those quivering lips, was no longer her daughter. In all senses of the word Lisa was disconnected.
Julia had once read that, besides grief, lovesickness could inflict the worst emotional wounds. Evidently including those that didn’t heal on their own.
‘Lisa, if someone’s to blame for your heartache, it’s Tom. He should never…’
‘Blah, blah, blah… Don’t talk crap. So now you want to pin it on him, do you?’
Julia just wanted to shout ‘Yes!’ and – had that fucker been here – grab him by the balls and throw him overboard. But as Tom Schiwy was as far away as a clear thought was from Lisa’s mind, she just shook her head. ‘No, it’s not just his fault,’ she said to placate her.
She was no psychologist, but she knew that something inside her daughter had broken that could not be stuck back together with logic.
‘So you admit that you deserved my plan?’ Lisa asked triumphantly.
‘What plan?’
‘The one I worked out with Querky.’ A dark cloud veiled Lisa’s expression. It looked as if she’d just been visited by a nasty thought.
‘Did you steal the envelope from the safe?’ she asked with menace.
‘What?’ Julia didn’t understand anything. Her daughter might just as well have been whistling. ‘What are you talking about?’
Lisa flicked her hand dismissively, as if what she’d said wasn’t important any more. ‘I told Querky that you forced me to go on the game,’ she laughed grubbily.
Boom!
Another hand grenade of madness lobbed in her direction by her daughter. And her aim was getting better.
‘What? For Christ’s sake, why?’ Julia asked.
‘Because she wouldn’t have helped me otherwise. She only looks after children who’ve been raped and abused. So I fibbed to Querky. To prove I was being forced to have sex with strange men against my will I sent her the video.’
Julia blinked. In the split second that her eyes were closed, scraps of memories flashed in her mind, in which she saw the back of her daughter’s head in the lap of a groaning man who now had a name: Tom!
‘The video in which I did him the favour of playing you.’
‘Me?’
‘A whore.’
In her mind’s eye Julia saw Lisa take the money.
Okay. Stop. Enough. It couldn’t go on like this.
She took a step towards Lisa. Now there were only a couple of arm lengths between Julia and her daughter. ‘Look at me, Lisa. I know I’ve made mistakes. I wasn’t there for you when your father left us. I didn’t look after you enough when you hit puberty. And, yes, I had a relationship with your teacher. But I ended it.’
‘You’re lying.’ Lisa gave her the finger.
‘No, it’s the truth, darling. Without me knowing what was going on between the two of you…’
‘Is. What is going on between the two of us!’
‘Fine, fine, fine!’ Julia raised both hands to calm her down. ‘Without knowing what is going on between the two of you I noticed that Tom…’
‘Don’t you dare speak his name again!’
‘… wasn’t the right man for me.’
‘Ha!’ Lisa sneered at her. The sweat was now dripping from her eyebrows too. ‘So you think you’re better, do you? Was he just a disposable item for you?’
Julia closed her eyes. This wasn’t getting anywhere. She might as well have begged the sea to stop swooshing. She turned angry. Not at Lisa, who was manifestly no longer in control of her senses and in urgent need of professional help. But at Tom, who’d abused his position of authority as a teacher, destroyed the sensitive heart of an adolescent teenager and also deceived her. Her unbridled anger surfaced so quickly that she could no longer control what she was saying. ‘Okay, fine. I’m the guilty one!’ she barked at Lisa. ‘I pinched Tom off you. I deserved being given the biggest fright of my life. But none of that is going to bring that filthy bastard back, who only used you…’
‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaa…’
Emitting a sound reminiscent of a war cry, Lisa leaped forwards with the screwdriver, as if out of her mind.
And stabbed.