Saturday 9th December 2023
Alice
Alice strides through the woods, shoving branches aside with her cold, numb hands. She can hear a rushing sound but doesn’t know if it’s the river, deeper within the trees, or just the hiss of shock in her ears. She fled as soon as Peter said the words ‘Leo is my son’, yelling at him not to follow her. Now she has never felt so alone, so unconvinced he was even planning to.
The woods are like a dark, frozen maze, rather than the place where she walks Beech every morning, where she used to bring Robbie for picnics and hide-and-seek. Noises seem distorted, thrown about among the trunks, and the patches of frost on the ground glint like fragments of glass. When her foot skids and she stumbles over a tree root, she lets herself fall. Then lies panting, winded, staring up at the starless sky.
Twenty years of her life, completely reframed.
She imagines herself getting flatter and thinner until she is part of the forest floor. Then she wouldn’t have to try anymore. Wouldn’t have to be angry or in pain, or wrap her head around the secret her brother and best friend have kept from her. She wouldn’t have to confront all her ugly little emotions: jealousy, exclusion, embarrassment. How stupid she must’ve been not to have realised. To have assumed she and Peter were fighting the same fight. He let her rant and rage about Leo, let her express the darkest, nastiest feelings towards him … and all this time, she was talking about Peter’s son. She is ashamed of herself but she is furious, furious with her brother for allowing that to happen. And somewhere in the chaos of it all, she is desperately sad for Robbie. He looked up to Peter like a dad, while his real son was living just around the corner.
Leo is my nephew.
My nephew killed my son.
Peter’s son killed his nephew.
Whichever way she puts it, it feels like a sick joke the universe has played.
‘Alice!’ she hears somewhere in the distance, then feels the tremor of footsteps in the ground she’s still lying on.
It’s Peter’s voice. She doesn’t want to talk to him but she can’t move. Everything that has been keeping her functioning seems to be seeping into the cold earth. Maybe when he reaches her, she will just be bones.
‘Alice?’ The footsteps come closer. As far as she can tell, it’s just him, and that’s something at least. She can’t face both of them, now that she knows they are a ‘them’.
She remembers that Leo is suspected dead and a wave of something else goes right through her. A son and a nephew, both gone. Even from her place of self-loathing and self-pity, it’s too awful to contemplate.
‘Alice! Are you okay?’ Peter rushes towards her and then he’s crouching beside her, rubbing her left hand between both of his. ‘You’re bloody freezing! Are you hurt?’
There are lots of answers she could give, she thinks, but she shakes her head. Feeling ridiculous now, she moves her feet and fingers to bring back some sensation, then slowly sits up. Peter takes off his hat and puts it on her. It’s warm from his head and too big, sinking comfortingly over her eyes. After a second, though, she rips it off and hands it angrily back to him, letting the cold resettle in her scalp.
‘I’m sorry, Al,’ he says, looking sadly at the hat. ‘You … you must be pretty shocked.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Before … and after …’ She can’t decide which hurts more. Chrissy and Peter keeping this secret while they were all close, or Peter keeping it after Leo killed Robbie.
‘It was a one-night stand,’ he says, bundling the hat into his pocket. ‘We didn’t want Ethan or Marianne to ever find out. Even when … especially when Chrissy realised she was pregnant. She wanted Ethan to believe Leo was his—’
‘But Ethan was a monster,’ Alice breaks in, unable to contain herself. She feels another rush of baffling emotion: a different kind of anger towards Peter, justified or not, for letting Chrissy stay with Ethan rather than whisking her and their baby away.
She knows it isn’t that simple but she wishes it could’ve been. There’s another life there, somehow, which they all could’ve had.
‘I didn’t realise what Ethan was like until much later,’ Peter says, bowing his head. ‘But Chrissy was insistent he should never know. She wanted to make it work with him.’
Alice thinks back to that time. Chrissy was at her happiest when she was pregnant. Hopeful for the future, hopeful that life would be different. It’s agony to think about it, now.
‘So, we just never spoke of it …’ Peter shifts around, struggling to get comfortable on the ground. Eventually, he stands up, and holds out a hand to help Alice to her feet too. She takes it reluctantly. When they’re standing face to face, he puts his hands on her arms, makes her look at him, and she feels as if he’s tricked her again.
She can’t get her head round how he managed it, all these years. Socialising with Chrissy and Leo. Marianne there, too. Never giving anything away, even though it must’ve been on his mind constantly.
Watching Leo grow up alongside Robbie.
Watching him attack him and kill him and get sent down for manslaughter.
‘How the fuck did you keep that to yourself?’ she says, pulling out of his arms.
Peter flinches and steps back. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how either of us did it. I think, for the most part, I was just glad I got to see Leo. I hated the fact he was being brought up by that bastard … especially as I came to realise how much of a bastard he really was …’ Veins protrude from his neck like tree roots. ‘But … at least I was in his life. And I did what I could to feel closer to him. I even kept a scrapbook …’ He pauses, as if remembering something, and looks off into the trees with a sudden, deep frown between his brows.
Alice fends off a barrage of images. Peter and Chrissy together. Where? How? She doesn’t want to know, yet her brain keeps suggesting different possibilities, different scenes. She sees Leo’s face but can’t bear to analyse it for resemblances to her brother. She sees Ethan’s fake smiles and private sneers and his lifeless, staring eyes.
‘After Ethan died …’ she chokes out. ‘Even then, you didn’t …’
‘I couldn’t tell Marianne,’ Peter says. ‘I did, eventually. That was why we split up. Why we’ve got so much to work through now, on top of everything else. But for years I was too scared to tell her—’
‘But you could’ve told me!’ Alice says, shoving her hand into his chest. ‘Why were you both too cowardly to tell me?’
He staggers and grabs a tree trunk to keep from losing his balance. She must’ve shoved him harder than she thought. He looks at her steadily and there is anger in his face, now. She’s crossed a line but she won’t be the one to apologise.
‘I think you know why, Alice,’ he says crisply, and she stares back at him in confusion.
They both startle as his phone buzzes in his pocket. Peter doesn’t move for a moment, his eyes still fixed on Alice, then he sighs and pulls out the insistently ringing phone.
‘Hello?’ he says into it, sounding as weary as Alice feels. ‘Yeah, it’s Peter …’
She takes the opportunity to wipe under her eyes and brush the dirt off her coat. What now? What next? The idea of returning to the village, of talking to the police, to Chrissy, finding out about the body … It makes her want to lie on the ground again and never get up.
Peter talks in one-word sentences into his phone. Yes and no and nearby and okay. When he hangs up, he draws in a breath that seems to come up from his boots.
‘I need to go back,’ he says. ‘The police know about my scrapbook. I’ve got no idea how. I … I got rid of it …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I chucked it in the skip at the back of the Raven. I was worried it would look weird if the police found it in my house. It was full of cuttings about Leo, even about his conviction and everything, so I panicked that it would look like I …’ He sighs and presses his temples. ‘Now I’ve got some explaining to do.’
‘Just tell them the truth,’ Alice says, shaking her head. ‘Like you should’ve done from the start.’
He looks at her piercingly. ‘You’re one to talk, sis.’
‘I have never lied to you!’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘No! You know me, Peter. You’re the only one who does, anymore. And I thought I knew you—’
‘No, Al,’ he breaks in, holding up a hand. ‘I don’t know you. I don’t understand the person you are, now, if I’m honest. I don’t think anybody does … and I think that’s the way you like it.’
‘Fuck you,’ she yells, and goes for him again, but this time he catches her wrists, stops her from hitting him.
‘Alice!’ he says. ‘Please!’ His voice cracks and she sees it again, the same stricken look he wore outside Chrissy’s house. It pulls her up short, makes her deflate in his arms. It’s a look she knows. The look of a parent who thinks their child might be dead.
Alice steps away, eyes hot with tears. Peter is breathing hard too, and just as deflated, his head hanging forward with his hand over his face.
‘I can only hope it isn’t him, Alice,’ he says, half-muffled by his palm. ‘The body in the barn. I know you might …’ He stops and she stares at him again, wondering if he’s really going to say it out loud, going to suggest that she might wish Leo dead. His eyes meet hers, then cast down. ‘I know you understand,’ he says instead. ‘This is a mess, a fucking awful mess, but I know, deep down, that you understand how I’m feeling.’
The worst feeling in the world, Alice thinks. But she doesn’t trust herself to say it out loud and not start howling.