The Last Thing I Remember Read online

  Kelly, just calm down.

  ‘I just wanted to –’

  ‘Get the fuck off me –’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you. Langlands. The Detective Inspector. He’s coming. Here.’

  ‘And? What the fuck does that mean?’

  ‘He called. Really early this morning.’

  Langlands is coming for her.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he asked if you were here. Asked if I knew if you were coming. I said I didn’t know.’

  ‘And what’s he gonna do? Tell the fucking school? Put me in prison for bunking off to see my sick friend? Do I give a fuck? No! Watch my lips. I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK. Not about him, not about you, not about your fucking common fucking involuntary reflex fucking response, not about ticking fucking boxes on your fucking forms. Guess what, Beth, I’m not even fucking lying. Do you get that?’

  ‘He thinks . . . he thinks you had something to do with all this.’

  ‘Oh, right. Brilliant. Inspector Gadget strikes again. So now he’s gonna pin it all on a schoolgirl, is he?’

  Shut up, Kelly. Shut up.

  ‘Kelly. You’re not really what you pretend to be, are you?’

  ‘Look, Nurse Hodder. I think you’ve done enough, don’t you? You’re the one who’s been pretending. Pretending to be my BEST PAL and snitching the entire time to that scum policeman. What do you think? That I killed Adam? Really? A fourteen-year-old?’

  ‘No, of course not, Kelly. I don’t think that. At least, I don’t think I think that . . . I don’t know . . .’

  She’s crying. Beth is crying.

  ‘Listen, Kelly, if I were you, I would go. Get out of here now. You can’t do anything more for Sarah right now. Go to school.’

  ‘I’ve been to school. Already. This morning. Seven a.m. To the locker room. Pink padlock. Pink fucking padlock. Fucking bat. Fucking locker. Fucking credit cards. Cash. IDs. Driving licences. All in the fucking locker, right? I can’t go back there. Not now. If she finds that bat, Wino will work it all out. Two My Little fucking Pony blondes. She’ll kill me.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who’ll kill you? Kelly, you’re scaring me . . .’

  I can see Adam. I can see him. He’s waiting outside the community centre. Where he always is. It’s late. It’s dark. He’s leaning over, one hand on his knee, the other propped up on the lamp post. He’s vomiting onto the pavement. As usual. As he does every week when I leave the centre after the mediation counselling. The mediation counselling he wouldn’t come to.

  ‘Kathryn Cowell will kill me.’

  ‘Why would she kill you? You should tell Langlands. Kelly, you have to tell the police everything. If you don’t, you’re going to get into more trouble.’

  I’m wearing latex gloves. I am staring at my hands in the dark and I have latex gloves on. And now there’s a bat in my hand. It was hidden in the bushes by the bus shelter. And now it’s in my hot and sweaty hands in the hot and sweaty gloves. And Adam is looking up the street. Trying to focus.

  ‘Sarah is my best friend, my only friend. I can’t do this without her. Sarah. Sarah! Wake the fuck up.’

  And then he turns and looks right at me. Right in my eyes. And he’s trying to focus. And he smiles. He sees the bat in my hand and he smiles. Like he knows I’m a coward and that I can’t do what I’d planned to do. Because I’m nothing. No one. Just a dolly that he can manipulate. Just someone he can fuck whenever he feels like it. Because it is his conjugal right. That’s what he always says. Conjugal right. CONJUGAL RIGHT. And I take a step forward. CONJUGAL RIGHT. And another step. CONJUGAL RIGHT. And I break into a run. And I stretch out my arm, and my arm is at full stretch and I arch out the bat in a circular motion and . . . CONJUGAL RIGHT. There’s a hollow heavy thud as the bat meets his temple – square on, right where the skull is at its flattest. Right where the victim is at his most vulnerable. Temple blow. He takes a step towards the lamp post. He pushes himself up. Trying to focus. Staring at me. And his legs buckle. And he crumples up. Forehead first. Cheek resting on the pavement. His soft cheek. Cold pavement. Grit. The cheek I used to kiss. A bubble of spit and sick and blood slides along his mouth. His soft mouth, I used to kiss. The bubble grows bigger. And pops. Pop. And it turns into a sticky drip of blood, a channel of blood that mixes into a small pool of rainwater on the ground. There’s a pink-and-yellow lolly wrapper next to his hair. The hair I used to stroke. His eyes stare at me. Then cross. Then close. There’s a girl standing next to him. A schoolgirl. Plain. In the shadows behind the bus shelter. She has gloves on too. Latex gloves like mine. She stares at the broken body on the pavement encircled by a pool of blood that’s seeping along the gaps between the paving slabs. Then she calmly walks over and takes the bat out of my hand. And she turns quickly and leaps up to the bench and throws the bat onto the roof of the bus shelter. It clatters on the corrugated iron.

  Then, fragile blood-bubbling silence.

  ‘Excuse me, Nurse Hodder.’

  She pulls the gloves off me. And puts them in her pocket. Then she takes out Adam’s wallet and takes his card and ID and cash. And she takes my bag and opens my purse and takes my cards too. Then she throws the bag on the ground.

  ‘C’mon, Sarah. C’mon. Don’t fucking lose it now.’

  She keeps telling me to trust her. To fall back. To do the trust fall. I can’t move. I can’t think. Kelly. What do I do? I spread out my arms. Wide. And wait for the friends to catch me. I can hear them laughing in my head. ‘Come on, Sarah – you can trust us.’ But there are no friends there. Kelly whispers to me to fall back. ‘Just fall back. Stick to the plan, Sarah. It has to look right,’ she says. I am falling. Falling back. No hands to catch me.

  ‘Excuse me, Nurse Hodder. Excuse me, Nurse Hodder. There’s a call about Kelly.’

  Kelly.

  ‘Lisa, can you just take a message for me? I just need to –’

  ‘They said it was important. It’s Kelly’s mum.’

  ‘Lisa, for once in your life can you handle it? Can’t you see that I need some time here –’

  ‘You go, Beth. Fuck off. Go on.’

  Kelly.

  ‘She said the police are at the school. There’s been some kind of riot. That’s what she said to say. She said they arrested someone. A few people. Someone got stabbed.’

  ‘Lisa, for Christ’s sake, can you tell them –’

  ‘They’ve arrested a girl. Some girl. She had a bat in her locker. With blood on it. And the cards. And the cash.’

  ‘Beth. That’s Kathryn. They’ve arrested Kathryn. They got her.’

  Kelly. Kelly.

  ‘It’s all over. Beth? Is it really?’

  Kelly. I’m here.

  ‘THANK YOU.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘SARAH!’

  ‘Did she just say something?’

  They both stop suddenly.

  ‘Sarah, did you just say something? Say it again. Sarah? You’re in hospital. Can you hear me?’

  ‘THANK YOU.’

  ‘Beth, she said thank you. Sarah just said thank you.’

  Beth is laughing. They’re both laughing hard. I can see them. They are crying too. Kelly is shoving her face into mine.

  ‘I heard her, Kelly. I heard her.’

  ‘Say it again, Sarah.’

  ‘THANK YOU.’

  ‘Sarah. Focus your eyes now, Sarah. That’s it. You’re doing it. You’re in hospital. But you know that, don’t you, Sarah? You know you’re back. Kelly, see if you can get hold of her mum and dad. Get Mr Malin here. C’mon, move!’

  ‘You fucking move, Beth. I’m just stopping here talking to my friend.’

  ‘Hey, Kelly, what do you think she said thank you for?’

  ‘I dunno, Beth. Probably she was talking to you.’

  About the Author

  Deborah Bee studied fashion journalism at Central St Martins. She has worked at various magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Times and th
e Guardian as a writer, a fashion editor and later an editor. Currently, she is a director of creative marketing in luxury retail.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Twenty7 Books

  Twenty7 Books

  80-81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE

  www.twenty7books.co.uk

  Copyright © Deborah Bee, 2016

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The right of Deborah Bee to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7857-7019-7

  This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd

  Twenty7 Books is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company

  www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk