Every time she asked herself the questions, she found herself in another dead end. There was no way out.
Over those weeks, Ben never spoke again of what had happened to her, other than oblique references to ‘the incident’. Fliss didn’t tell Serena and neither, as far as she knew, did Ben. They were busy with their own lives, she supposed, although the lack of concern stung. But after so many years of lying and stealing and letting them down, what could she expect? She had finally achieved her fullest potential in the quality that came most naturally to her: being unlovable.
She was unable to sleep at night. Serena gave her some beta blockers and Fliss helped herself after that. There was also a well-stocked bar in Ben’s study, so she self-medicated quite successfully. She was careful to tread the narrow line between not being too drunk and not being too high. Once she heard back from the police, her path forward would be clear and sober. But nothing happened. And it dawned on her, during those mornings walking the Tipworth maze, that it never would. At some point over the last few years, Felicity had lost her right to belong.Any protection that her family might once have afforded her was gone. The institutions that had once existed to shield her, the great houses that had opened their doors to her, inviting her in for society balls and parties and polo matches, the systems that had worked in her favour, purely because of who she was and what her name represented, all of it had disappeared. Her degradation was complete. She was a nobody, banished outside the citadel walls. Andrew Jarvis had stolen the last of her. And her brother – her beloved little brother – had done nothing to stop it.
So Felicity did what she always did. She ran away. She took Serena’s black AmEx from her wallet and booked a flight to Bali. Business class so she got free booze. She left without saying goodbye or leaving a note. On the aeroplane, she drank until she blacked out. When she arrived at the airport in Denpasar, the humidity wrapped itself around her limbs like swaddling. She hitched a ride on the back of a moped to Canggu, the warm wind hitting her cheeks. That first night, she slept on the beach. When she woke, she felt clearer. She made the decision not to drink that day and she almost managed it until an Australian tourist offered to buy her a beer and then she spent the evening with him and his mates smoking weed on the beach until sunrise. Within a few days, she had a scattering of friends. They didn’t judge her or ask many questions. She was closest to Derek, who had moved to Bali from Jamaica a decade earlier and who worked with the boatmen offering trips across the bay to Uluwatu. Derek was tall and gentle. When he put his arm around her, it felt fraternal and nothing else. When he offered her a room to stay in, she accepted. He said she didn’t have to pay until she found her feet, which happened sooner than expected when a local yoga studio offered her a job – on reception at first, but when they discovered she had done her teacher training years before in Goa, they gave her a couple of classes a week. She enjoyed teaching. Hearing the sound of her voice taking the students from chair pose to side crow to a one-legged chaturanga reminded her she existed. She was a little rusty but it came back to her easilyenough – the flow of it, the delicate combination of ease and effort. Her students were mostly social media influencers and Western travellers like her. Their alignment was terrible, but Fliss didn’t mind. At the end of the class, they would thank her, and every tiny acknowledgement pushed her slightly closer to believing she mattered.
She was still drinking, but it was under control. No drugs. A tumbler of arak each morning – the local liquor, made from fermented white rice and palm sap, just to keep her sharp through the day. Every evening, she went to the beach with Derek and a group of friends and drank beer and watched the sun do its thing. Time passed easily enough.
‘I’m trying to get sober,’ she told Derek one evening. ‘My way.’
He nodded.
‘And you’re doing just fine,’ he said, patting her gently on the back.
‘Something happened to me, back home.’
Derek waited. She told him about her years of being the family disaster, about struggling to find anything she was good at, at her inability to be ‘normal’ and her eventual refuge in drugs and alcohol, but mostly alcohol. She told him about Andrew Jarvis raping her and about her brother Ben who didn’t care and about how no one – not even the police – had done anything and that it was this indifference that had been the cruellest part because it was final confirmation that it was her fault and always had been.
When she finished her story, Derek leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Every part of him was long and graceful and smooth as polished wood.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
Fliss’s shoulders relaxed. Those words were all she had been wanting to hear. The release of a bird from a cage.
At night, the memories still haunted her. She tried to avoid sleep because she had nightmares. Jarvis came to her in her unconscious moments: the weight of him, the stickiness, the jagged force. She couldn’t remember the pain, only that it had been so vicious that the expression of it now lay beyond mere words.
And maybe she could have made a life for herself in this way: nothappy, exactly, but functioning. Slowly stitching herself back together. But then, one day, she forgot to be cautious and the earth tilted and she let the shame back in.
It was coming up to her birthday. It shouldn’t have mattered because what was one more year? She was doing so well, wasn’t she? She was almost sober. But with this newfound clarity came clearer memories. Every time Fliss closed her eyes, it was as if an unknown hand was projecting the past onto a brightly lit cinema screen. And there Jarvis was, at the centre of it, beamed onto her mind’s eye.
The day before she turned fifty-four, she sat on the doorstep of their dirty courtyard, next to the offering of flowers and fruit left by the locals for some unspecified deity, and she drank a whole bottle of arak, wincing as she swallowed. Then she walked inside, dropping heavily onto her bed. She fell asleep to the whir of the fan above and she dreamed of a huge jaw, opening to reveal sharp teeth. The mouth grew wider and she strained her neck to try and see what creature it belonged to. She recognised Jarvis, the lower half of his face grotesquely distended, cheeks bulging, and then he morphed into a different face with brown eyes and curly hair and she saw it was Ben. He was going to eat her alive. He was going to chew her flesh and spit her bones out.
She woke with an acute fear hovering just above her chest and a voice, insistent and measured, telling her to kill herself. She tried to ignore it, to shake her head and rid herself of it, but it wouldn’t leave. The voice was perfectly clear. It came from within her and gave her no option. There was only one course of action. It was to end her life.
She stumbled to the kitchen and took out another bottle of arak. The alcohol tasted of cinnamon and petrol. When the bottle was empty, she reached for a notepad Derek left by the kettle for shopping lists, and she wrote:
‘I’m so sorry. Can’t do this anymore. I have to go. Thank you for being a friend.’
She felt quite calm. The way ahead was clear. Alcohol wouldn’t be enough, so she made her way down to the beach, sandals slipping onthe loose chips of rock left on the side of the road by workmen building new luxury hotels. A teenager squatting by the shuttered vegan café gave her some pills. Blue oblongs, scattered in the palm of her hand like maggots. She gave the teenager all that was left of her money.
On the beach, she swallowed the pills and then lay on the sand, feeling her stupid heart beating. Not long to wait now, the voice told her. Almost over. You’re doing the right thing. No one on this planet needs you or loves you. You are a burden. You are lost. Come. You belong in the nothingness, because nothing is what you are.
She kicked off her sandals and walked into the sea. She cried out as the waves slapped against her. She kept walking until the water rose up to her knees, her thighs and then her waist. The water drifted up to her chest and then her neck. She bent her head back, allowing the sea to slide over her hairline. The current rose up from beneath her, snaking its way around her limbs, dragging her down, underneath the surface where the moon spilled its pale fragments, down, down, down, below the silhouetted shoals of fish, down further towards the seabed, down into the depths of that giant void she’d imagined, the one where the pain stopped and she ceased to exist and where her thoughts disintegrated into granules of sand and shell and stone and where she returned to the blissful darkness her soul had always known.
XIII.
Serena
THEY ARE AT ANOTHER TEDIOUS EVENT. Serena has been dragged to an increasing number of them ever since Ben announced his intention to run for leader.
‘It’s good to be seen out and about,’ was all he ever said.
The reception is being held at the British Museum to mark the opening of an exhibition on female rage. A woman in a purple jumpsuit is giving an impassioned speech, claiming that anger is a tool for change. Serena listens as she drinks a tepid glass of sparkling water and tries not to be resentful. It’s so much easier for younger women, who grew up being able to express themselves. What if you’ve never been able to admit your anger? she wants to say. What if no one has ever cared enough to notice it burning away inside you? What if you’ve had to hide it all your life, whittling away the roughness of your resentments until you become a perfectly smooth stone? And what if that is the only way you know how to be?
She takes another sip of water and arranges her face in a bland smile. She wonders if anyone else feels like this? She doesn’t really trust any of her friends enough to ask. Not anymore. Not after the Violet business.
She thinks, then, of Fliss and feels an acute pang of loss. Serena misses her sister-in-law more than she ever thought she would, and in this late-flowering realisation, has understood that Fliss occupied a unique position in her life: Fliss was non-judgemental, even of things and people she couldn’t understand. She listened rather than fillingthe silence with more words. Serena wishes she could have told her this when Fliss was still alive; that she could have known it then and done more to help her.
