Saturday 9th December 2023
Alice
Alice watches her brother and her ex-best friend through the bright square of Chrissy’s kitchen window. The police have disappeared and Chrissy and Peter are absorbed in conversation. Alice wishes she could lip-read. What have they got to say to one another? It was always her and Chrissy, before: the confiding, the closeness. Peter was just … around. And since Robbie’s death, Alice and Peter have become the united ones, with Chrissy on the other side of a dark, uncrossable trench.
Now she sees Chrissy pushing her hands into her hair and Peter stepping near to her, reaching out as if he wants to touch her. Something stirs in Alice’s core, almost like humiliation. Why is this so hard to watch?
Go in there. Find out what’s going on.
Just as she’s trying to unfreeze her feet from the ground, she sees Chrissy turn to face the window. Her head slumps forward, her hair cascading over her face, but then she straightens up and looks directly at Alice. Alice stops breathing as Chrissy keeps looking at her through the window, her expression inscrutable.
Then the detectives re-enter the kitchen and the spell is broken. Alice exhales, her breath a white mist in the air. Peter glances towards her but a stubborn fury prickles over her, stopping her from meeting his eye.
She keeps watching as Chrissy leaves the room with the police and Peter is left alone in the kitchen. He paces, clearly agitated. Alice keeps replaying it: the way he stepped towards Chrissy, the way she recoiled as if his proximity was painful. A different kind of painful from what she’d expect in this situation. Is she reading too much into it, or is she out here in the cold and the dark in more ways than one?
Suddenly, the front door of the cottage flies open and Chrissy bursts out. Alice jumps back, even though she’s still several metres away. Chrissy stands with her hands against her cheeks, her eyes wide and shining. Then she leans forward and vomits into a large plant pot.
Alice stares. Chrissy straightens slowly and Alice can make out tear tracks on her cheeks. Her burning instinct is to run towards her, comfort her, but she shuts it down. There is something agonisingly familiar about the look on Chrissy’s face, though. The way her body stoops forward like it’s trying to curl in on itself.
Grief. Alice knows it when she sees it.
A hard ball of dread forms in her gut. She takes two tiny steps forward, and her mouth opens but nothing comes out. The movement is enough to make Chrissy turn in her direction. Curls are matted to the sides of her face and her upper body is shaking.
‘Looks like you got what you wanted, Alice,’ she says, her words ringing across the garden.
Alice flinches. The raw anger in Chrissy’s voice is familiar, too. She’s spoken that way herself, many times in the last two years.
‘How do you know what I want?’ she retorts, but her own tone comes out meek and subdued.
Chrissy starts crying more violently, leaning forward as if to be sick again. Alice remembers vomiting in the pub toilet after she saw the initials in the wall. She thinks of how much weight Chrissy lost after Ethan’s death because she couldn’t keep anything down. And she herself after Robbie’s.
‘Chrissy,’ comes Peter’s voice from the house. He runs out of the front door, his eyes flickering to Alice but hardly seeming to see her. ‘What’s happened? Is it Leo?’
He looks just as wretched. Alice watches him intently, as he fixates on Chrissy.
‘They’ve found a body,’ Chrissy sobs.
Peter’s face contorts. ‘Leo’s?’
‘They don’t know yet. A man. They think he died in the fire. And they … they …’ Chrissy doubles right over with her hands on her knees. ‘They found a coat, too, nearby. The coat Leo was wearing when he came out of prison.’
‘Fuck,’ Peter says, his hand shooting up to his mouth. ‘Oh, fuck.’
Alice is still frozen, several paces away, watching them as if she’s on the other side of a screen. Chrissy’s tears are tapping into a dark place inside her. Peter’s stricken face is scattering her thoughts.
‘We don’t know anything for sure yet,’ Peter says, touching Chrissy’s shoulder. ‘We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’
We? Alice’s head feels thick. The dark garden swims, the lit cottage swaying in the background. ‘Peter,’ she says, fighting to keep it together. ‘Tell me what’s going on. I mean, really. All of it. Please.’
He looks at her through a sheen of tears. Close to Chrissy, distanced from her. Consoling Robbie’s killer’s mum. Crying, it seems, over the killer himself.
‘He’s my son, Alice,’ he says in a broken voice. ‘Leo is my son.’