A suburban Birmingham home
“Alright, Pooh Bear,” she says, on the doorstep. The “r” is slightly rolled, the “t” is sharp as a pin prick. I’m back in Brum, no doubt. I depress an involuntary shudder.
However well my mother claimed Talia was doing as an estate agent all those years ago, she clearly wasn’t doing well now. Once a pretty girl, with a turned-up nose and a sweet, chipmunk-like grin, now she’s gaunt. Chipmunk cheeks chiselled out. Her hair is pulled back off her makeup-less face and the sore pink of picked spots sets a path across her pallid cheeks. But she clearly still remembered the name my mother called me when she played round my house, and then even later at the school gate. She and Sophia had mocked me with it. Mocked me and my slightly round tummy in my school uniform. Paigey Poo, it quickly became. Pooey Paige. Stupid, but still cruel.
“I tracked the IP address of the email.”
She nods. “Well, I suppose you had to work out it was me at some point.”
I nod too. She lingers on the door and I shiver, exposed outside this squat, square, pebbledashed house, built within a finger’s length of the other in this overcrowded estate. Clapped-out cars in overgrown front gardens, children’s toys discarded there so long they were becoming a part of the soil.
“Well, want to come in, then?”
She sighs, her words full of frost and distaste, as though I’m the imposition here.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Behind Talia, a narrow corridor with threadbare carpet stairs is adorned with sad, plasticky tinsel, sellotaped to the wall, now a memorial to Christmas, two days behind us. She leads me to a kitchen bathed with sallow light through an open back door. Cigarette smoke leaks from a fag recently dispatched on the doorstep. It’s stale here, through and through.
Talia was my old school friend, till she wasn’t. It had been a difficult time for me at school, because of girls like Talia. Pretty, popular ones. I’ve always felt a twinge of pain when I’ve thought back to those times. Talia, or Tee-Tee, or Lia, as I called her at the time, has changed beyond recognition before my eyes. Formerly a high-school babe in a rolled-over skirt, butterfly clips in her honey hair, this woman in an aged, once-white tracksuit in front of me is an anaemic husk of the girl I remembered — like a tick has buried into her, sucking her life force away. Thin, dry lips, rough skin with spots both spent, crusting, and fresh, red and shiny, dappling her chin. She scratches at her flaking scalp, white under hair straining in a tight ponytail. I wonder, do I look different to her too? Sat either side of a table that has turned since our youth, I am the pretty one, with my deep-conditioned hair, my expensive makeup, my designer clothes.
Talia’s blue eyes are filmy, yellow round the irises. Cigarette stained, maybe. Colourless and emotionless. I wait, in nauseous head-spin, for something to happen. She gestures to a chair, one of two opposite a tiny kitchen table. I sit in a cold, hard chair furthest away from the open door, letting in the cold air, so I’m wedged between the table and a washing machine that is whirring. Talia doesn’t notice the cold, even though her thin fingers with yellowing nails are mottled in various shades of red and blue.
“Nice of you to visit,” she says, with mocking smile and laughing intonation; it rises at the end like mine used to.
She smiles, exposing teeth the same ashy colour as the whites of her eyes, and it’s horrible. She sits down opposite me.
“Talia, what is going on, why are you emailing me like this?”
“Hark at that,” she says, pulling another cigarette from the packet on the table and lighting it. She doesn’t ask me if I mind. I guess we aren’t dealing in pleasantries here. “You don’t sound Brummie at all anymore. Wouldn’t even know you were from here.”
I shrug, unsure what to say.
“Not got much to say to your old school friend?” She laughs again, putting the cigarette in one side of her mouth and dragging on it, eyes fixed on me.
“Why are you emailing me all this shit?” I ask, the stress and worry clear in my voice.
She laughs. Chuckles, skinny shoulders in a men’s grey hoodie bouncing.
“Ah man,” she says, wiping her eyes. “It was funny.” Fun-nay.
It was a game, like the bullying games at school. I was that fifteen-year-old all over again. A powerless plaything, a stray kitten being kicked by thugs. This is like a nightmare. I’m so cold deep down to my marrow, and not simply because the back door is letting in the December climate.
“Well,” she goes on in her speech like a Bond villain. “At first, anyway.”
The way she’s looking at me, like a street fox eyeing a caged canary through a window. “But then I saw the story in the papers a few days later. Doing a documentary, are we?”
It gets even colder.
“About a friend that died?” She flicks ash from the end of her cigarette into an empty plastic Coke bottle on the table. Some of it misses and floats down into the waxy, cheap tablecloth. She licks her front teeth, eyes on me, and then leans back in her chair. “Interesting.”
There’s that word again.
“You know,” she says, after a deep inhale. “It’s been sixteen years since she died?”
We lock eyes. She taps her cigarette again.
“I know.” My voice is so thin. It’s a lie. I didn’t know. In fact, I’d pushed it to the very back of my mind. That school business all those years ago. I’d moved on, and never looked back except by accident, even then closing my eyes and keeping it out. Now, in the shock of remembering, I can feel my face flushing.
“You didn’t have a clue, did you? God, you are self-involved. Well, you should know.” Tap tap on the top of the Coke bottle, more flakes of ash in the air. “You killed her.”
I blink. Shake my head. My hands are shaking too, from more than the cold.
“You made Sophia kill herself,” Talia says.
“I did not make her kill herself.”
“Oh, but you did.”
She sings it, confident and sadistic.
“I did not. I had nothing to do with what happened. It was tragic. I was as devastated as anyone else.”
Talia scoffs.
“What does this have to do,” I say, “with you harassing me? All that what happened with Sophia—”
Jesus, I’m slipping back into the dialect.
“Which was horrific and tragic—”
Talia rolls her eyes.
“Is in the past. So why are you emailing me now? It’s a crime, you know. It’s called electronic harassment. I could go to the police.”
“You know, I think about it every year, on the anniversary. Go to her grave. And this year it just got me thinking, sixteen years. Her whole life span again. And it seemed suddenly so short to me. Things change over that period of time. I got a new perspective. It made me realise even more so what you’d done. And I looked at your Instagram, and your life. One you don’t deserve, and I don’t know why but I just wanted to mess with you. So I sent the first email. It was a surprise to see your name in the news a few days later. A documentary about that Zanna.”
She toked on her cigarette and itched at the side of her neck.
“A pretty lucky coincidence, I thought. I rang the documentary company. Thought they might want my intel, for a little bit of cash, like.”
So it was her, the caller the young employee of the producers had mentioned.
“Didn’t seem to want to listen to me. Maybe it’s the accent. Maybe they don’t think a person like me has anything of value to say. Maybe they think I’m mad. But I’m not mad. Am I, Paige? I know what you are.”
I swallow. “Maybe you ought to listen to them. If they think you are being unreasonable, I imagine the police will think you are too, when I go to them about this ridiculous harassment.”
“You see, Paige,” she draws out my name like parents and school friends used to do. “I don’t think you will go to the police. Because if you were going to, you’d have done it already.”
When I don’t respond, she smiles.
“I’m betting you’ve got some more skeletons in your closet. That would be just like you, Paige. Maybe something to do with your pal Zanna?”
Again, I say nothing. She laughs.
“When you replied to my email, asking for — who was it — a Gianna? I knew there were something more. Oh Paige, what have you done now?”
I’m not debating this with her. So, I get to the point.
“What do you want?”
“I need money,” she says. Mon-ay. “You’ve got some.”
I shake my head, but she interrupts me before I reply that I don’t, in fact, have much money at all. I have negative money, in fact. Who’d have thought we had something in common. Our key difference, I suspect, unsettlingly, is that Talia has much less to lose than I do.
“Don’t fuck around with me, Paige. Look at your designer bag, look at your hair.”
“Don’t you work at the estate agent?” I ask, curious, more than anything. How do things change so much for someone?
She shakes her head.
“I can’t work. I’ve got chronic illness,” she says.
“What illness?”
She’s glacial and hostile, pursing her lips. “A chronic one.”
She pauses. Then, “How ’bout this. You give me five grand, and I won’t go to the papers about Sophia, or this visit, for that matter. How’s it going to look when they print that you had another girl die, linked to you? And that you came here to talk it all through? I think the papers will be rather interested in that, after the big documentary and all that. And what might that provoke? Think the police would be interested to know you took those emails seriously? Thought they were about your pal Zanna? Came all the way here, instead of reporting them? Oh, they’ll know you had something to hide. And then they won’t be paying you to post pictures of shit anymore.”
My stomach sinks. If I’d not been so concerned with tracking down the sender of the email, I wouldn’t be here, giving justification to its accusation. Eyeing the heavy ashtray on the table between us, I imagine grasping it, its cool heft in my hand, bringing it down on Talia’s flaky scalp until it’s a bloody scalp. It’d bring colour to this kitchen. But no. I’m not the violent type. I’m not a murderer. I’m not about to start now.
A pregnant pause between us, and then, at this moment, a baby begins to cry upstairs. It’s then I notice the baby bottle by the sink, near to where an empty pack of a fags, a lighter and a quarter bottle of vodka linger on the counter by the kitchen door.
Talia’s “new perspective”? A baby. A child to look after, a child, like Sophia was.
Talia sighs and rubs her eyes, the sleeves of her too-big hoodie falling down, and she stretches. It’s obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t put the pieces together before. No wonder Talia needs money. How different our lives have become. Can I say I wouldn’t do the same?