Guilt: The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018

‘Mmm delicious, lager and garlic – what’s wrong with that?’ you announce.

So hopelessly undomesticated, and yet I can’t berate you. Sometimes your incompetency, your vulnerability, make me love you more than ever – my unidentical twin sister, who I feel so responsible for. Your eyes smile into mine and we both start to laugh. You lift your arms in the air in surrender.

‘All right. All right. See what you mean. I’ll go.’

You are gone a long time. So long I begin to worry. Mother and I, we always worry when you move off radar. You’ve been living with Mother for years, doing a filing job in our hometown. It has taken over ten years since leaving school for you to find the confidence to apply for a degree course. Now you’ve moved to Bristol, a mature photography student at UWE, it’s my turn to look out for you. And I need to look out for you. Because you’re a cutter.

And twice you have cut too deep.

Once, a very long time ago when we were at school. I still remember that winter afternoon so clearly. Walking to meet you from your netball session, after my hockey had finished. A perfect winter afternoon. Sunny, with a nip in the air. The sort of afternoon that fooled for a second, making me believe I was walking through a ski resort. But something was wrong. People were staring at me. Whispers on the wind.

‘Zara. Zara Cunningham.’

‘They called the ambulance and the police.’

The PE teacher told me what had happened.

‘Your sister slit her wrists.’

A slow creeping numbness seeped through me.

‘The PE assistant found her unconscious covered in blood. This afternoon, just before netball.’

‘Is she all right?’ I asked with a tremor in my voice.

The PE teacher put her hand on my shoulder. ‘We found her in time. I am sure she’ll have regained consciousness by now.’

In time. Regained consciousness. The PE teacher’s words jumped in my mind. Zara, I wanted to know how you could do this to yourself. How could you try to take your own life? You whose life always seemed so much more interesting, so much more carefree than mine.

But it wasn’t like that, was it? You hadn’t tried to kill yourself. Cutting seems to give you some sort of euphoria.

‘I cut to take the pain away,’ you told me later. ‘And to stop the panic attacks.’

‘What pain?’ I asked. ‘How can more pain take pain away?’ I paused. ‘And what panic attacks?’

The second time you cut too deep by mistake was only six months ago. Just when Mother and I thought that maybe at thirty years old, after so many years of antidepressants and CBT, maybe you had stopped doing it. A phone call to Harrison Goddard to inform me. Just as I was tidying my desk, about to go for lunch. Mother’s voice on the line, riddled with panic, only just recognisable.

‘Come quickly Miranda. She’s slit her wrists again. Deeper this time. The paramedic said it’s touch and go whether she’ll survive.’

I left work immediately. I drove up the motorway to our hometown, the world passing me in a blur. When I arrived at the hospital I scrambled out of the car and allowed the place’s sprawling bowels to swallow me up. I felt as if I was floating. The hospital seemed to move around me. People being triaged. The reception desk protected by an armoury of glass, with only a thin slit for conversation. The receptionist was busy. Tapping a computer keyboard with her long blue tapered fingernails. No time to look up. The phone on her desk rang. She picked up, frowning as she listened.

‘OK, OK. Will do.’

She put the phone down. At last she looked up and noticed me. ‘Can I help?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for my sister, Zara Cunningham. She was admitted earlier. My mother is with her.’

Blue fingernails stabbed at the computer keyboard again. ‘She’s in Critical Care. I’ll get a nurse to take you to her. Wait by the door to A&E.’

‘Thanks.’

I stood by the door, as requested. Bracing myself to wait for a long time. But no sooner had I arrived than a plump, blonde nurse wearing a pink uniform was putting her head around the door asking me whether I was Ms Cunningham. No sooner had I said yes than I was escorted into the unknown depths of A&E.

‘I’ll take you to find your mother,’ the nurse said.

‘Can’t I see Zara?’ I asked.

‘Not right now.’

The panic that had been simmering inside me for hours became volcanic. ‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘A team of doctors are assessing her at the moment.’

A team of doctors assessing my sister who’s slit her wrists. A team of doctors assessing my sister, who was laughing and joking with me on the phone the previous evening. Just under twenty-four hours ago. The nurse and I walked past cubicles containing people in distress. A man lying on his back with a protruding stomach, his mouth covered by an oxygen mask. A young child giving a bloodcurdling scream. A woman with a black eye and a bloodied nose.

Through A&E.

Right and right again. Along a corridor with windows to a small garden with pebbles, ferns, and rubbery plants. The pink nurse stopped by a soap dispenser at the entrance to Critical Care. I washed my hands with something that looked like cuckoo spit. And then finally she led me to a small seated area where my mother was waiting.

My mother, but not my mother. A woman wearing a facial expression that my mother never wears. She stood up. She walked towards me. She held me against her. Holding me so tight as if she wanted to engulf me. She felt like my mother. She smelt like my mother. Of love. Of despair.

Deborah Cunningham of Heathfield Close, Tidebury, Lancs.

Heathfield Close, an oxbow lake of modern housing, at the right end of town. Wide pavements. Leafy streets. Divorced from my father when we were toddlers. He moved to the States. We never saw him again. Mother working her socks off as a teacher, to support us. Always responsible for us alone.

‘How is she?’ I ask.

‘No news yet.’

‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, anything?’ the nurse asks.

‘My daughter back,’ Mother said.

‘We’re doing our best.’

The nurse evaporated, I don’t know where. Mother turned on the small TV mounted on the wall in the corner. But I did not watch it, figures just moved about on the screen in front of me, and I thought of you, Zara. Of holding you, touching you. Asking you why you had done this again after so much help, so much therapy. You always said you cut to feel better. But was it true? Or did you really want to kill yourself?

The previous time this happened, so many years ago, you denied that suicide was your motive. But it is hard for someone who doesn’t understand cutting to really grasp the significance of its euphoria.

This time, the second time, somehow, I don’t know how, Mother and I managed to contain ourselves, as hours and hours passed. I felt as if I was sitting in a vacuum. My life had stopped and I would only feel better if I got you back. At last a doctor was walking towards us, stethoscope around his neck. We did not stand up to greet him or walk towards him. We did not have the strength. We sat and watched him approach, transfixed, waiting for news. He stood in front of us, a half smile in his ice-blue eyes.

‘Zara is stable. She has regained consciousness. All the neurological tests are positive.’

Stable. Positive. Neurological. Words tumbled in my head and for the first time in hours I stopped having to concentrate to breathe.

My stomach tightens with worry. What are you doing now, Zara? Why have you been gone so long?

You finally return to my flat after your trip to Tesco, over an hour later, looking flustered.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask, unable to disguise the anxiety in my tone, as you waltz through the door, placing two microwaveable boxes of chicken tikka masala on the kitchen table and sighing noisily. You are wearing your Doc Marten boots and a floral skirt with a creamy background that always looks a bit grubby. I do not like your nasal piercing. I do not like the way you have sliced into your hair, just on one side, above your ear, with a razor. I don’t think it suits a woman of your age.

‘I’ve met someone,’ you say.

The word someone hovers in the air. A word of importance. You are always meeting people, laughing with them, talking to them, dating them. But never someone. Not until now.

‘Someone?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Sebastian Templeton. I met him in Tesco. Just now!’ You are trying to look nonchalant, but not managing. ‘He’s moving to Bristol from London. He’s got an interview at your firm.’ A deep, overegged sigh. ‘He’s really handsome.’

All your boyfriends are handsome. Nothing unusual about that. Not that their looks help them keep your attention. None of them ever last more than a few months.

‘He has a lovely voice,’ you continue.

‘A posh southerner perhaps?’ I ask.

‘Give me a chance to find out where he comes from. All I know so far is that his eyes are electric.’

Instead of eating the chicken tikka ready meal you have just bought, you inform me that you are going out to a restaurant with him. One of the expensive ones on the front. A restaurant that reeks of interior design. Plated food, pretty enough to be used as wallpaper. Edible flowers. Colour coordinated. You spruce yourself up by putting on an extra layer of make-up, run your fingers through your already carefully tousled hair, and leave.

3

Sebastian

Jude, I was sitting on the bench outside Tesco when I first saw Zara. She walked past with a jaunty step like you used to have; shiny-eyed, as if she was about to do something far more interesting than visit Tesco. Feeling sociable after the E I had taken, I followed her in. With her tousled hair and creamy skin, she reminds me of you. There is an edginess about her that makes me feel invigorated, as if, after all my problems, one day I will feel alive again. One day my life will work out.

‘Have you eaten here before?’ Zara asks, as I sit opposite her at Chez Luigi’s.

‘Once or twice, on special occasions,’ I reply.

‘So being here with me is special?’ she asks, flicking her hair from her face. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘I don’t usually pick people up in supermarkets.’

‘Neither do I,’ she replies.

‘When I met you in the supermarket, you said you were a twin,’ I remind her. ‘Are you identical?’

‘No.’ She pouts a little. ‘I can assure you that I am one hundred per cent individual.’

Zara Cunningham. Not defined by being a twin. Zany. Interesting. Button nose. Perfect cheekbones. So spontaneous, so free flowing. Someone I so want to fuck.

4

Miranda

The chicken tikka meal you brought back from Tesco tastes weird: a mix of canned tomatoes, anchovy paste, ground coriander and additives. After I have forced myself to finish it, I download the latest series of Game of Thrones from Amazon – my latest addiction. This evening, its strange world engulfs me as usual, then spews me out, as my favourite character dies. She is decapitated, which distresses me. There is something about decapitation that seems so much more brutal than other sudden deaths.

I am contemplating why this is when you float through the front door at midnight humming to yourself, looking ethereal and strange. You seem overfriendly, elated, holding me against you and hugging me before you go to bed, as if I am long lost, and you haven’t seen me for years, not just a few hours.

And the next morning, over orange juice and Dorset Cereal, your Sebastian Templeton monologue starts.

Sebastian. Sebastian. Sebastian. A eulogy to a modern-day god.

‘He’s from Bristol,’ you say as we sit cramped together at our veneer table. ‘Attended Bristol Grammar School and then went to Cambridge to study maths. Stellar CV. Like yours. His parents are doctors. His dad’s a consultant in obs and gynae. His mother’s in community medicine. A lot of medical women do that. Go into community medicine because it’s more nine to five, easier if you have children, or so Sebastian says.’ Silence for a second as you take a spoonful of muesli and sip your orange juice. ‘He’s so empathetic because he’s so close to his mother.’

Zara, you talk about Sebastian all the time. I know more about him than anyone else in Bristol, even though you’ve only known him for five minutes and I’ve lived here for years. He doesn’t drive a car because of its effects on the environment. His chest size is forty-four. He votes for the Green Party. He supports Chelsea FC. He isn’t religious. He isn’t superstitious. An Aidan Turner lookalike. A dark-eyed cavalier of a man, whose hairy arms turn you on. His favourite film is Love Actually, which always makes him cry. Thirty-two years old.

He knows how to find the G-spot and tells you you are the first person he has ever been in love with. He told you he loves you, two days after he met you. A real romantic – big time. You love him back. You know I will appreciate him when I meet him. What’s not to like, about a man like that?

THE PRESENT

5

Her mother is visiting her at the custody suite, allowed to see her in the visit area. Waiting, surrounded by grey sterility. Shell-shocked by what has happened. By what she has done. Exhausted by her long drive from the Lancashire coast.

She is being escorted to the visiting area, along the corridor, not knowing at first that her mother is here. She hasn’t been told. She assumes she’s being interviewed again. When the door is opened and she is brought in, the sight of her diminished mother greets her. She inhales sharply and struggles for breath.

Mother and surviving daughter are standing opposite one another, eyes locked. Her mother sees a bedraggled young woman standing in front of her, panda-eyed from lack of sleep, hair tangled, hands trembling. She smells her other daughter’s blood. Her daughter sees the earthy fragility of her mother’s grief. The damage it has done. Grief more virulent than disease.

Her mother steps towards her. They clamp together. At first, touch replaces words. For a while neither can speak. The more her mother holds her, the more the screaming in her head begins to decrease. Then, slowly, slowly, pushing back the tears, she tells her mother what happened. What her sister did.

The day of the bail application arrives. She is escorted from her cell by a police officer with friendly eyes and a sympathetic smile. The sympathy cuts into her. She shrugs it away, too emotionally closed down to cope with it. She pulls her eyes away from the officer as they step out into the yard and he hands her to the guard.

For the first time in days, fresh air assaults her face. She inhales greedily, drinking it like champagne, but before she is satiated, she is shunted into the van – a cattle van. Or at least that is what it looks like. The sort that takes sheep and bullocks to be slaughtered. The sort she has seen so many times rattling up and down the motorway, making her think how awful it must be to be inside.

Inside such a thing now, in her own pen, which has a seat and a high window. All she can see through the window is sky. She looks up intently. A mackerel sky. Pale blue. White feathers. Beautiful white feathers. She would like to be up there with them, flying and floating, inhaling fresh air. The van sets off, jostling her from side to side. Making her feel sick. Look at the horizon, look at the distance, she tells herself. Her mind rotates towards the feathers in the sky, but still she feels sick. She feels sick as she remembers.

The van finally judders to a halt in a car park at the back of the crown court. Now her experience becomes surreal. She cannot believe it is happening to her. She feels as if it is happening to someone else and she is looking down upon it from above. Someone else being cuffed to a middle-aged guard with grey hair and dandruff. Being taken in a small lift to a holding cell beneath the court. Sitting on a wooden slatted bench, head in her hands, waiting to be called into court. Someone else turning her mind in on itself to close it down and allow time to pass in a mist.

After a while, the grey middle-aged guard is standing in front of her again. ‘You’ve got a legal visit. Your brief.’

She is ushered along a winding corridor, through two metal gates, and escorted into a legal visit room. A man is sitting waiting for her. A man who looks about her age. He stands up when she enters the room. He has golden amber eyes and auburn hair with a wave in it that caresses the top of his shoulders. The shoulders of a rugby player. Smiling at her with a wide dimpled smile. He moves around the plastic table he was sitting at to stand in front of her.

‘Hi, I’m Theo Gregson, your brief.’ His voice is strong and deep.

He takes her hand in his and squeezes it lightly. Her eyes are caught in his. He doesn’t look like a barrister. He looks like the front man in a sexually pumped-up rock band. Springy and virile. About to go on stage to play a riff.

He removes his hand from hers.‘Let’s sit down and talk about the bail application.’

He sits back down at the other side of the table; she sits opposite him. He pushes his hair back from his eyes.

‘I’ve read the papers so far. Bail isn’t normally granted for the defendant in a murder trial, but you have made it quite clear from the moment the police arrived that you acted in self-defence so I am going to give it a go.’

She looks into his amber eyes.

‘Thanks.’

Time has melted away. She is sitting in the dock, behind a wall of glass, next to a rotund guard with a red face. She looks across at her mother in the front row of the public gallery, head turned anxiously towards her. She smiles at her across the courtroom. A whisper of a smile, tangled by grief. Her mother is wearing her best black trouser suit and a baggy frilly blouse, which disguises her love handles. Her heart shreds as she looks at her, eyes stinging with tears.

She searches the courtroom for Sebastian. He is not here.

The lawyers are sitting at the rows of wooden workbenches in the middle of the court. Richard Mimms and the rock star brief, heads together in deep discussion. Her heart leaps for a second. Are they really going to get her out? Then the heavy leaden feeling in her stomach expands and takes over. Wherever she goes from now on her sister won’t be there. Will going home help? Will her memories of her sister assuage the guilt or make it worse?

In the distance of her mind, she sees lawyers on the other side of the court. A tall thin brief, talking to a small pretty Asian woman with a neat face. Lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service. Must be. She can’t bear to look at them. She looks at the floor. At her feet, clad in the sensible flat pumps her mother brought into the custody suite for her to wear. Then she raises her head to check for Sebastian again. He still isn’t there.

The guard nudges her. The court is rising for the judge’s entrance. A judge with a leonine face, wearing blood-red robes. He enters slowly, gracefully, like a swan or a king. He bows to the court and they sit. He asks her barrister to present his case.

Theo Gregson stands. Bull-like shoulders. Strong hair escaping beneath his wig, making his wig balance awkwardly on his head, like a small hat. He coughs a little before he speaks. The judge is watching him like a hawk.

‘I request bail for my client, the defendant, a responsible citizen. No previous brush with the law of any kind. She has stabbed and killed her sister in self-defence. She made that point quite clear from the initial point of contact with the emergency services. She presents no flight risk or danger to the public.’ He pauses. ‘I request bail in these circumstances as my client’s emotional vulnerability after losing her sister means she should be at home, not in prison.’

‘Thank you, Mr Gregson,’ the judge says. His voice is long-vowelled. Almost ecclesiastical.

Mr Gregson sits down.

‘Have the Crown Prosecution Service any comments on this?’ the judge asks.

A barrister from the other side of the benches stands up. The one she noticed earlier with a long thin back.

‘We oppose bail. She is so emotionally vulnerable that she has stabbed and killed her sister. We believe it is safer for all concerned, including the defendant herself, if she remains in custody.’

The judge frowns for a second.

‘Bail denied.’

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