Guilty Parties Read online

  I started to drink my orangeade. He snatched the glass off me.

  ‘Who? Name names.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ve got them on camera.’

  ‘So they don’t need me to tell.’

  ‘Holly Gill, Emma Wilson, Lucy O’Hara …?’

  He should have been a detective. He should have been something. Then he wouldn’t have been here. Spending his life at the kitchen table in a puff of smoke. Offering me his scraggy old books. I wanted something new. Mine. I kept remembering that time I’d spread his books on the carpet, and he’d said, These were the ones. The ones I liberated.

  ‘What about you? You used to liberate books.’

  ‘That was then. This is now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Liberated. The word’s … gone from the language. And … it was different. We thought we were on the edge of something, something better. We thought the world was going to be a better place. New … social arrangements.’

  He bashed a teabag round the cup.

  ‘You could be expelled.’

  I cared and I didn’t care. I cared when I got caught. I cared in the car. I cared when I saw Mum’s and Dad’s stupid pathetic faces. But now, I was only sorry I was an unsuccessful liberator. I was only sorry it was just books. I hated him for ever liberating books. I hated him for stopping.

  He squeezed the teabags. I passed him the milk.

  ‘You make a statement. You’ve got no choice now. You were caught red-handed.’

  Cliché. I didn’t say it, but I looked it.

  ‘You tell her what you told me. And … if they were your friends they wouldn’t have left you. You’re an idiot.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  ‘I know one when I see one.’

  It should have been, like heightened experience. Like, this is happening to me. This is happening to me, now.

  But it wasn’t. This rhyme kept coming back to me. Dad had pinned it on the back of the kitchen door and now I didn’t just know it, I Knew It. The look of it, the curly scrawl of it.

  The law condemns the man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common,

  But lets the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.

  ‘You shouldn’t steal from bookshops,’ he said. ‘Like you shouldn’t steal from … You shouldn’t steal from bookshops.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I was wrong. You’re supposed to be smarter.’

  ‘Says who? And anyway … if I’d come home with a diamond ring that would have been all right, would it?’

  ‘No! Are you determined to throw your chances away?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to have chances. I’m not supposed to do well. I’m supposed to play truant. I’m supposed to fail.’

  ‘What?’

  Mum came in, looking to see what had happened to the tea. She made me carry the cup of tea to the policewoman. As if that was gonna make some difference. As if she’s gonna say, Oh thanks for the tea. It’s such a good cup of tea that we’ll leave it at that, shall we?

  The copper took a sip from the tea. It was too strong for her. She said, ‘Right, Rachel. I’ll take your statement now.’

  They both looked at me. They all looked at me. Waiting.

  ‘I needed books for school. I needed Jude the Obscure, Twelfth Night and that anthology. I needed to be able to read them. Learn them.’

  It was supposed to be my statement, but Mum butted in, saying how I’d always been a reader and they’d never had the money for electronic stuff and computer games. That I was in the junior library, and how upset I was that time I got butter on Haddock ‘n’ Chips.

  The policewoman waited till Mum had finished.

  ‘And had you planned this, Rachel? You and your friends. Or was it spur of the moment? You had £2.50 on you.’

  ‘I knew what they cost. I’d already checked the price. I didn’t have enough money.’

  ‘So you planned it?’

  I said, ‘It was premeditated.’

  Dad looked as if he was gonna do his jungle act. Mum put her head in her hands. Visual cliché.

  ‘Premeditated, between you? You and the other girls?’

  I suddenly thought that maybe I should use all sorts of words that I could later claim weren’t my vocabulary and then I could say the statement was fabricated. Or maybe I could just leave the country. I said nothing.

  ‘Will you tell me who the other girls were? Are they girls from your school? Your class?’

  ‘What other girls?’

  Mum said, ‘Rachel!’

  ‘Have you taken other things … before?’

  We’d planned to. Often enough. We’d planned to form a ring: clothes, jewellery, credit cards. We’d sometimes imagine what we’d do if someone approached us like you saw on telly. I mean people usually thieved it to support a habit. If you didn’t have a habit, you could be quids in.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why today? Why these books?’

  ‘Couldn’t afford them. Needed them.’

  She stopped writing. ‘It’s unusual,’ she said. ‘Teenagers don’t usually steal books. Not even university students steal books.’

  ‘I want a good education,’ I said. I glared at Dad.

  She wrote that down. Was she going to write everything down? Like the jurors in Alice in Wonderland?

  ‘You’re refusing to name the other girls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to add to this statement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They all waited. Actually, there wasn’t, but then I had to think of something.

  I said, ‘Education is something they can’t take away from you. That’s why they don’t want us to have it.’

  I thought Dad was smiling, but he was crying. Like really crying.

  DEADLINE

  N.J. Cooper

  N. J. Cooper is an ex-publisher and former chair of the CWA. She writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio. As Natasha Cooper, she has written many novels, including the Willow King series and the Trish Maguire novels. Four more recent books feature the forensic psychologist Karen Taylor.

  You think I’d be angry, wouldn’t you? Or terrified? But I wasn’t. Even I was surprised that the only sentence in my mind when they told me was: I thought so.

  I hadn’t exactly felt ill, but I had known something was wrong. At first, when I realised my jeans didn’t feel so snug and I got on the scales and saw I’d lost nearly a stone, I was pleased. Who wouldn’t be? But over the next few months, as I forgot what hunger felt like and realised how tired simply leaving the house made me, I knew.

  It’s not as though there was no guide. My mother had had it and so had hers, which made it more or less inevitable for me. It’s one of those that creeps up on you unawares until it’s got so big that it starts to press on other bits, and only then does it hurt enough to make you understand there’s something wrong. At first I thought it was wind. Then I knew. But you still have to go through all the hoops – tests, and more tests – before it becomes real and public. Ovarian cancer.

  I was luckier than my mum; she was only 56 when it got her. I’m past 70; not much past and it’s not exactly your business how much past. In every other way I’m incredibly lucky. I’ve had a fantastic career, doing precisely what I wanted; I had a kind and funny husband for forty years before his heart attack (and mercifully that was instant so he didn’t have the long slow slide into death we all dread), and two gorgeous daughters. They’re well away into their own lives, as they should be, and know nothing about this.

  I’ve written formal letters to the police and the coroner, explaining everything, but this is a fuller version for anyone who needs to read it.

  I had to watch my poor mother stagger through four awful years, full of chemo and radio, only to feel the tumo
ur come back, so that she had to have more treatment, feel it come back again, and be faced with yet more treatment before they gave her the verdict: nothing more we can do. Why did she have to go through so much misery and pain and exhaustion when the ending was inevitable?

  I don’t want that. I don’t want to go to Switzerland either. Why should I? It’s inhumane that a sentient adult, who has had control of every other aspect of her life, should not be allowed to deal with this in whatever way she chooses.

  Again I’m luckier than lots of people. My mobility isn’t impaired. Nor my mind. I can find out how much of what to take, open my own bottles as I choose and mash things up and swallow the resulting brew on my own. I don’t need any help.

  But I’ve discovered I do want to have company when I do it. Without friends, it might be like standing in an empty desert, with howling winds and sand blowing into my eyes. I just don’t know. So I’m not going to risk it.

  There’s peace afterwards. I do know that. Once my brain has shut down – been shut down by the mashed-up brew I’ll make – I know there’ll be nothing: no more pain; no fear; none of the terrors invented by the powerful to keep the powerless at bay.

  All that will be left of the person who is me will be memories in other people’s brains. And that’s the only monument I want: good memories for my family and friends; not memories of me ill, muddled up with their own anxieties about whether they did enough for me.

  But in the actual moment of swallowing and then waiting for the brew to work, I think I may need my beloved friends around me. Hence the party.

  One of the most comforting things I’ve found is re-reading John Buchan’s Sick Heart River, in which Sir Edward Leithen, another lawyer funnily enough, faces up to what’s coming to him and thinks that he wants to die on his feet, ‘as Vespasian said an emperor should’. I’ve always liked that and now I’m ill too I like it still more, even though it’s a bit sexist. Vespasian’s thought, I mean. If a man should die on his feet, why shouldn’t a woman?

  You may be thinking that it’s got to my brain already and I’m rambling unnecessarily, but it hasn’t. I just want you to understand exactly why I’m doing it like this, why I’m not giving any of my friends any warning. I don’t want them trying to persuade me out of it and I don’t want them to be found guilty of any kind of complicity. That’s in the letters to the police and the coroner too. My beloved friends won’t know anything about it until it’s too late.

  I’ve always liked planning parties, and this is just a slightly different kind of party. There’ll be CCTV cameras throughout the house so that when the police investigate, as they’re supposed to, they’ll see me doing it all on my own.

  So, back to the arrangements. The party’s going to be pretty lavish, with all the kind of things I’ve most liked in my life. After all, what’s the point of spending a vast amount of money on a funeral, when I won’t be there to enjoy it? My instructions are perfectly clear: my body will go to a school of anatomy, and that’s it. No service of any kind and no gravestone or plaque or anything like that. The celebration of my life will take place while I still have possession of it and can order things as I want them to be. And I hope my daughters will forgive me for not letting them come. It’s only to protect them.

  We’ll have had our own goodbyes in advance: they just won’t know at the time that they’re goodbyes. But when it’s all over they’ll understand, my Georgie and Josie.

  So, the arrangements for the party: the flowers are going to be my favourite, old-fashioned, mix of pink-scented roses, pink and white peonies of the blousiest kind, and regale lilies, which is why it has to take place in June. I was glad to have a deadline. Deadlines have always helped me when I’ve had any kind of fear about anything. They make me concentrate on what I can control; not on what I can’t. There’ll be huge great Chinese bowlfuls of flowers all over the house, and hang the expense!

  The drinks will be what the caterers call a full bar, along with champagne because so many people still like it. I’m having the fizz sent up from my favourite wine merchant in Monmouth, who has a particularly delicious apple-y kind. I hope it’ll be sunny so that we can spill out, as they say, on to the terrace. The canapés are being provided by the daughter of an old friend, who has a wonderfully imaginative mixture of hot and cold, meat, fish, veg and sweet stuff, and who is sensible enough not to get in a frenzy when she understands what I’ve done. I’ve picked her most expensive range and paid everything in advance so that she won’t have to wait until probate’s been granted. You have to think of practicalities like that when people are self-employed.

  My speech is almost ready. All that’s left is a final check to make sure I’ve hit the right note of celebration, explanation and apology, and gratitude for them being there.

  An apology is necessary because in a way it’s quite a shocking thing to be doing. I do see that. Inviting all the friends you love most and then killing yourself in their company is pretty extreme. I’m not sure quite how long the twenty pills (that’s what I’ve been told will be enough) will take to work, which means that the timing of my speech will be quite tricky: late enough to ensure there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me; but not so late that my speech is affected. I mean my ability to speak, obviously, not the piece I’m writing now. I don’t want any officious medical bod to whisk me off to hospital to have my stomach pumped – if that’s what they do these days.

  I think I can trust my friends. They have all been carefully picked. And because there will be about sixty of them, I don’t see how any one of them could be found guilty of complicity in my death. I wish I knew the current DPP. Inviting her would be a good way of ensuring safety.

  So the plans are in place and I’ve exhumed my most ravishing evening dress from years ago. Who’d have thought one spin-off from this horrible disease would be that I could get back into the astonishing dress my mother had made for me from a Dior toile the year I was seventeen. The hairdresser is going to come here, and she’ll bring a make-up artist with her. I need to look what I am: a fully functioning, celebratory human being. I dread looking like a clown, but they’ve promised the make-up will be discreet. And the dress definitely is. My mama would never have allowed anything that wasn’t, even once I was seventeen.

  And I must remember to wait for my share of the lovely champagne until after I’ve said my piece. Then, of course, it won’t matter how much I have, for the first and last time in my life. I can’t wait.

  There’s no peace. Noise is all around. My throat aches like buggery and my eyes are gluey. My joints are tight and sore, all of them, as though someone’s been hitting them with a mallet.

  If I were a sentimentalist, I might think this was hell and I’d been wrong all along, that this is the punishment for self-slaughter. But I know it isn’t. As soon as I can control my temper I’ll open my gluey eyes and find out what they’ve done to me.

  Smells assault my brain. How many of them are real and how many the products of my own disordered mind? Have I done damage that can’t be undone?

  That would be punishment, real punishment, to have been brought back no longer able to do what must be done.

  Fury ices me inside. People always talk of fury as being hot. Not mine. I feel as though steel rods have been driven through me and are acting like the element in a deep freeze. I have to know who and where and what and why.

  Forcing my sticky eyelids apart is difficult, and even when the lids are open my eyes aren’t good at seeing. Have I made myself blind as well? Oh, God forbid!

  That was a manner of speaking only. No more than that. No supernatural being is here, tormenting me with fears and hopes and dreams of punishment. This is my mind doing it to itself.

  A shape quivers at the end of my bed. I know it’s a bed now, and a hospital one, with the usual tears in the thin white cellular blanket. I know those blankets all too well. Behind the quivering figure is someone in scrubs. Nurse or doctor or health-care assistant. You can’t tell any more
, and that may be a good thing.

  I roll my head to the side and see a drip bag, hung on a pedestal, with its nasty yellowish plastic tube wiggling down towards my arm. There’s a bubble in it, but that kind of air-in-the-vein promise is a chimera. I once asked a nurse if it would kill me and she just laughed, before flicking the big bubble into lots of tiny ones. No hope there then.

  My head rolls back so that it’s straight again. My eyes are working now. There’s Josie, my younger daughter, clinging to the end of the bed. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her lips look swollen, as though she’s been biting them.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, or rather croak.

  ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I couldn’t … if I’d known … How …?’

  ‘What couldn’t you do, Jo?’ Less croaky now and full of gentleness stiffened by confidence. I know my gorgeous Jo wouldn’t have been cruel enough to do this to me.

  ‘I couldn’t stop them. By the time they rang me and I realised what had been going on, it was too late. They’d pumped you and dripped you.’ Tears fill her eyes and spill over. ‘I know why you didn’t tell us, but if you had I could’ve protected you from this.’

  My mouth smiles. I didn’t plan it, but the joy of seeing my Jo being herself was enough to flood me with endorphins and make me grin from here to eternity. My eternity anyway.

  ‘But then I couldn’t have protected you, Josie-Jo. And that would have mattered more than any of this.’

  ‘I know.’ She wipes the back of her hand against her eyes and smiles back at me. She’s tough that girl and I’ll always love her for it.

  ‘Who was it?’ I say in a conversational kind of way, but my Jo isn’t deceived.

  ‘The way you set it up meant collective guilt for all sixty of your best friends. Can’t you look at this the same way and blame them all?’

  I think for a moment and know the smile has quite gone from my mouth.

  ‘No. But whoever it was has given me something to live for.’

  Jo, my Josie-Jo, my clever, gorgeous, lovely daughter, who knows me better than anyone else has ever known me because we’re so alike, laughs.