I hadn’t yet removed the spyware or the malware – there was no sign that Sophia or her dad suspected a thing, and until there was, I could continue to observe, from a distance, and make sure there were no nasty complications lurking or more golden opportunities in the offing. It was unlikely. But it paid to have fingers in more than one pie.
I hadn’t checked in on her for a few days, which was remiss by my standards; if nothing else, I had to be ready to trigger the auto-delete on my malware, a big red button on the left side of my screen which would remove any hint of me from the Bitch’s laptop, and take most of her hard drive with it. I was all but untraceable even with everything still in place – GCHQ might get me, or the NSA, but I didn’t think anyone would be calling in GCHQ or the NSA for seven and a half grand. But I was cautious by nature, and I’d taught myself to be even more cautious than my genes and upbringing had made me. Caution kept me in the game. I made sure I was logged out of all my profiles – no need to play George until I had to play George – and clicked on her Facebook profile.
There was news.
William Nichols was dead.
6: 18:20-20:50
I HAD MYSELF ready to go out in fifteen minutes. The characters I played might have had strikingly different personalities and histories, but when I played them for real, they all had to start in the same place, and that place was me. Belinda dressed to stand out, because with Belinda, everything was on the surface; her clothes were a defence. I threw on some lipstick and mascara, and picked out a denim skirt with a gigantic gold belt, which I teamed with a grey hoodie and a pair of boots that showed off my legs. I’d be cold, but Belinda wasn’t the type to care about a little cold.
From a distance the grey hoodie might have seemed dull, by Belinda’s standards, but up close you’d see the lettering and the logo – Marcus Schiff – and you’d know you were in the presence of design genius. You wouldn’t know it was a fake. Even Marcus Schiff wouldn’t know it was a fake.
I only had the fifteen minutes, because getting Simon fed had taken close to an hour. He wasn’t hungry, which wasn’t like him, but he insisted nothing hurt and he didn’t feel sick, so I had to assume it was just one of those things, even though every time I blinked I saw him lying pale and motionless, his face bathed in blue and white light, heard hushed, serious murmurs and my own panicked voice above them. Then I’d blink again and he was there in front of me, just tired, nothing more, his hands filled with Jorlon and Flinka and their vengeful enemies, and I’d look down at my own hands and realise they were shaking and I could taste something sharp and metallic at the back of my throat. I gave up on the food with a few spoons of baked beans and half a slice of toast in him. He made no comment about my appearance when I returned in my changed clothes, but then, he was only four.
At least Lena showed the proper appreciation when I took Simon upstairs. She’d agreed to watch him for a couple of hours – her usual routine at Simon’s bedtime was to set him down in front of the TV and let him fall asleep watching one of his Star Wars DVDs. I’d carry him downstairs later, and he wouldn’t know a thing about it until he woke in his own bed next morning. Simon seemed better already, smiling and chattering without pause or sense. There was no sign of Michal – I silently berated myself again for fearing him, groundlessly, but I couldn’t help it – and Lena reached out and traced the lettering on the hoodie and said the word Schiff, breathed it, really, and I thought the evening was off to a good start and would probably continue that way.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Belinda was an alcoholic. She wasn’t proud of it, she’d taken a long time to admit it to herself, and good-time-girl that she was, she spent more time in the ditch than she did on the wagon. But she was trying, at least, and every time she recounted another tale of woe, of willpower crumbling at the offer of a Jack Daniels and coke from a handsome man, her fellow alcoholics gave nothing but kindness and support.
I hated Belinda. She reminded me too much of the parents I’d left behind. I hated Belinda even when I was playing her. And for all their kindness and support, I struggled to feel much more than contempt for those fellow alcoholics.
Coming from the darkness outside, the harsh, unforgiving lighting in the church hall took a little getting used to. I stood, squinting, at the entrance, breathing slowly and forcing Belinda into my body and mind, a count of five as I imagined my limbs and organs suddenly hers. I smiled and it felt like Belinda’s smile. I blinked, and the eyes that reopened were Belinda’s. The legs that took me across the hall to an empty seat were hers, too. There had been talk of replacing the chairs, of getting something more appropriate for adult behinds than the rejected school stock we endured every session, but it hadn’t happened. It was more than a little incongruous, I thought, the horrors that slipped out from time to time among the tired, boozy tales: the fights and the sexual assaults, the failed marriages and the lost jobs, the accidental deaths, the tortured lives, while we listened and nodded, perched on bright red plastic with chipped metal bars to support it, squeezing ourselves into spaces we’d outgrown decades ago. But being comfortable, I supposed, wasn’t really the point.
The meeting was busier than it had been for the last couple of weeks, and for a moment I wondered why, and then I spotted them. The mums. The dads. The ones who’d been away with their families over half-term, putting on a face, fighting off all that rum on the beach and prosecco in the hotel restaurant. They were home now, and if it had been hard on holiday, it was a hell of a lot harder now they’d been thrown back into their everyday awful lives.
I hadn’t yet picked one to focus on, and I’d been coming to these meetings for close to a year. There were so many possibilities. For all that they liked to keep their meeting lives apart from their real lives, they were pathetically easy to befriend, pathetically grateful for the glamour Belinda cast their way. I had my eye on a number of the current crop. I was looking into the single ones for now, or at least the ones without kids. Whatever the alcoholics might have done, their families were probably suffering enough already.
I knew all about that.
I’d thought at first that Belinda would be a difficult act. I didn’t drink, not in real life; I’d been drunk on precisely two occasions and regretted it both times, in bed next morning, head pounding and guts writhing. But lying about alcohol turned out to be the same as lying about everything else, and I had my parents as role models. Every verbal twist, every sob story, every exaggeration and lie and tearful confession was adapted from something I remembered. I’d spent years trying to forget it all. Good thing I’d failed.
Margaret had the floor. We’d been through the preliminaries, and she was up there now with her big puffy face and a dress a decade too small for her and make-up that looked like it had been applied by a toddler. She was telling everyone how proud she was that she’d managed a big night out – a hen night for her sister or her future sister-in-law or someone vaguely related to her, I wasn’t paying enough attention to be sure which. Everyone else had been drinking, and she hadn’t, and she beamed as she listed the drinks by name, as she described the colours and the smell and the little bubbles floating to the surface. She beamed as she recalled dancing on the table with the bride-to-be and enjoying it despite being stone cold sober. She beamed as she told us how they’d been escorted out of that bar and how some of the girls had drunk too much and fallen down in the street. I looked around the room and watched them all watching her, smiling along with her, spellbound, and I marvelled that they couldn’t see the truth behind that beam, the pain, the certainty that within the next month Margaret would be standing up there with a very different look on her face and telling a very different story.