NINA
It’s getting late and the wind and rain have started rattling the windows. I close the curtains and pull down the blinds to keep myself hidden. Even as an adult, storms make me uncomfortable. And tonight, I’m already unsettled as I continue to process the news about Jon’s death.
I’m doing everything to delay the inevitable clicking on my phone’s news alert and reading more than just the headline. It’s as if learning the whole story will make the truth all the more real. At present, they are just words on the Internet and we all know how much the Internet lies. So for a moment, I try and convince myself this is fake news. It doesn’t work.
I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I direct the electric toothbrush along my bottom row of teeth, before pausing it and pulling out my lip. I examine my tattoo for the second time this week.Lolita, it reads. I recall visiting the library and borrowing Jon’s favourite book by Vladimir Nabokov, to understand why Jon chose the nickname for me. I was flattered when I understood how much the protagonist was imprisoned by his love for that girl. Nobody can ever convince me that Jon wasn’t driven by the same passion for me.
There are a handful of memories I’ve been able to piece together from back then, such as the night I got the tattoo. It was at a house party and Jon was keen that I got something permanent to show how much I loved him. He was insistent it was the word Lolita because it would mean something to both of us. I eagerly agreed.
It was in a bathroom not dissimilar to the one I’m in now, when I sat on the lid of a closed toilet, listening to the gentle tap of excess Indian ink against the jar as one of his friends prepared to pierce my skin. It didn’t hurt – the pills Jon gave me made my body tingle and it was like I was lying on my back and floating in a warm ocean with the sun shining down on me. Minutes later when he was finished, several hands connected with mine as his friends high-fived me, telling me I was a ‘cool bird’ for having it done. Then I rinsed the blood and sour-tasting ink from my mouth with a bottle of vodka, and it stung like hell. I spat it into the sink and examined my branding in the mirror as I’m doing now. Jon’s face radiated with pride. I’d proved my commitment to him as he’d asked me to.
I asked him to get one inside his lip saying Heathcliff, my favourite-ever Emily Brontë character, but he shook his head, laughed and never offered a reason why he refused. And that’s where the memory ends. Like so many others, it’s just another snapshot of a time past and never bettered.
I finish cleaning my teeth, sit on the rim of the bath with the phone in my hand and take a deep breath. I can’t put it off any longer, so I click the email link to the news story.
‘Convicted killer Jon Hunter dies after an 18-month battle with leukaemia,’ the story begins. ‘Hunter, 46, was convicted and jailed for life 23 years ago for the murder of his girlfriend. She was found ...’
‘No!’ I hiss. Seeing her name infuriates me so I stop reading because I know the lies the article is about to repeat. I glimpse two photographs of Jon used to illustrate the story. One is of the man I loved, performing onstage where he belonged. The second was taken by a fellow inmate and sold to the papers. Jon’s hair is still long but now it’s white, along with his beard. Even in such a grainy image I can tell the light has long been extinguished from his eyes. I guess being locked up in one room for so many years can do that to you. I’m already beginning to see it happen with Maggie and she’s only been upstairs for a fraction of Jon’s time.
I scroll further down without reading any more until I reach a photograph ofthat girl. She’s sitting on a beach, wearing a blue bikini, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses is balanced on the tip of her nose. She is smiling like she doesn’t have a care in the world, because I suppose she didn’t. The resemblance between us back then is uncanny.
I hold the phone to my chest and rack my brain, trying my hardest to remember her, but I still don’t think our paths crossed. She didn’t hang around with the band, I didn’t meet her at any gigs or parties and I know for a fact that she wasn’t Jon’s girlfriend like the papers said becauseIwas. Ask anyone who hung around us at that time and they’ll tell you that we were besotted with one another. So it frustrates the hell out of me when they keep referring to them as a couple.
An unwelcome thought creeps into my head.Or perhaps I just don’t want to remember her?Perhaps they did have a relationship that I didn’t know about and she’s one of the missing pieces of my history?I shake my head until the suggestion dissolves. ‘No,’ I say aloud. It simply isn’t possible. My memory might be vague but I’m not stupid.
Jon wasn’t my first partner and I certainly wasn’t his, but he was the first man I ever loved. He was also the last. Imagine that, living a life without love for all these intervening years. I don’t need anyone to tell me how pathetic that sounds.
He’d known soon after the first night we slept together that I was fourteen, even when I’d tried to convince him I was eighteen. He was twenty-two and I hadn’t wanted to scare him off by admitting the truth. When Saffron opened her big jealous mouth and gave it away – to try and split us up, I assume – I could have slapped her. However, her truth had the opposite effect and Jon admitted it excited him knowing that what we were doing was forbidden. ‘I like my bananas green,’ he’d said with a grin.
He made me promise not to tell anyone at school about us – no easy feat when you’re a teenage girl who wants everyone else to be envious of your relationship with the singer of the hottest band in town. But Jon warned me that if it ever came out, he would deny it for the sake of his career, then he’d dump me. Boasting wasn’t worth the risk.
Sometimes when Jon and I met in town after school, he’d sulk if I’d changed out of my uniform in the bus station toilets first. He preferred me to keep it on. I don’t think we would’ve got away with our relationship in this day and age. They’d accuse him of grooming me and would throw around words like paedophile or child molester. But he wasn’t any such thing. Unless you were in our relationship, you couldn’t possibly understand what we meant to one another. He loved me, he looked after me, and he wanted what was best for me. He was my boyfriend, my best friend and my father all rolled into one. And I’ve never since allowed anyone to make me feel as special as Jon did.
It was false accusations that ruined Jon’s life when I was facing my own battles. There are so many blanks and Maggie is to blame for all of them. If she hadn’t done what she did to me, I could have defended him. I could have told the world he wasn’t capable of doing the awful things he was jailed for. It’s because of her that he has died in prison and half his life was wasted. As a result, so was mine. I might not be behind bars, but I might as well be.
His loss burns like I’d only been with him this morning. I notice that I’m no longer clutching the phone to my chest. Instead, my hands are pressed against my stomach. And I’m rubbing it gently and remembering my second pregnancy. I’m remembering the child I had with Jon.
CHAPTER 16
MAGGIE
Hearing Hunter’s name come from my daughter’s mouth has left me flustered and unable to sleep. Now as I lie in the darkness of my room, my fingers anxiously kneading bunched-up ripples of duvet, I keep replaying the sound of him laughing at me the first time we came into contact.
Tonight, the news of his death has come so out of the blue that I didn’t have time to rehearse a suitable reaction. I’m not a vindictive woman but I hope his end was a long, drawn-out, agonising affair. I’m relieved that after all this time, the three of us no longer share the same space on earth. We are free of him and he’s incapable of hurting Nina again. It’s over. Perhaps now, there’s a chance she can try to push past whatever memories she keeps of him and reclaim normality amid the chaos she’s created. Well, as much normality as there can be when you keep your mother chained up like a Russian circus bear.
Her eyes drilled through me as she conveyed Hunter’s fate, trying to identify falseness in the ignorance I was feigning as to the depth of my memory of him. Of course I remembered Jon Hunter as clear as day. A lifetime could pass and I’d never forget a parasite like him. Yet for some reason, I am struggling to picture his face with clarity, which doesn’t make sense because I have spent two decades following his story. For three weeks, I sat in the Crown Court public gallery, in the furthest seat away from him in the dock, listening to the evidence against him, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me under my wig and differently made-up face. Each time his eyes scanned the courtroom, they didn’t hover over me any longer than anyone else.
Despite the severity of his charges, he retained the same arrogance he had displayed during our confrontation well over a year earlier. Later, when a jury found him guilty of murder, it was all I could do to stop myself from sprinting across the room and hugging each member, one by one. Instead, I wept silent jubilant tears. My daughter was finally safe from that predator.
Then, as Hunter was led from the court and into a van to transfer him to a prison in Durham, I watched as his family and fans protested his innocence while the relatives of his victim cried for their lost sister and daughter. I felt their pain. He had tried to take my daughter away from me too, but I had snatched her back from under his nose. I had won, but I have paid for it with twenty-three years of guilt.
So why can I remember everything about him but his face? I’m overcome by an urge to see him one more time. I turn on the bedside lamps, take a deep breath and remove Nina’s memory box from under my bed. I purposefully skipped past this the last time I looked inside it, but now I don’t. Here is Hunter, pictured with his band on a flyer for a performance. I check the date – it was one of their last. Now his grey eyes, thin red lips and pale skin marry with my memories of him to form a complete picture of the times our paths crossed.
Over the following years, I read about each appeal and was relieved by each rejection. Although I admit to being surprised by his refusal to admit his guilt and earn an earlier parole. It meant that he languished behind bars longer than he had to. Perhaps beneath the snake’s surface lay a backbone after all. The irony that he ended his days incarcerated is not lost on me. We have both been punished for the same crime – for loving Nina.
Hunter’s conviction came at a time when she was only just beginning her journey back to me. I had kept her out of harm’s way and under my protective eye for the best part of two years before she discovered the truth. I remember the conversation as clear as day.
‘Why didn’t you tell me what happened to Jon Hunter?’ she had asked tentatively over supper. Her delivery was cautious, as if she were unsure whether to bring his name up.
