Sisters and Lies Page 15

  ‘I just want you to tell me if …’

  If what? I felt like saying. Why this sudden interest in my well-being? Where had that been when he was a teenager? When he’d tortured me like an insect. ‘The truth is, I’m not long out of a massive relationship,’ I lied. ‘I’m not used to being with another man.’

  Donnagh’s eyes were soft and understanding. ‘Eve, we don’t have to do anything.’

  He sounded so sincere.

  ‘That room you booked …’ I whispered, the tremor in my voice audible. Donnagh didn’t respond, so I asked again: ‘Donnagh, the room. Did you book it here – in this hotel, I mean?’

  Slowly he lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, breathing deeply. ‘Shall we go, then?’

  ‘Are you sure, Eve? I don’t want you to feel pressured.’

  Oh, for God’s sake, I wanted to scream. Quit the fake concern. I know what you’re like. What you’re really like.

  But, of course, I didn’t say any of that. Instead I said, ‘I’ll be fine.’

  31.

  The room Donnagh had booked was a five-star wonder – all chrome lighting, deep-pile carpets and a huge, cushion-strewn bed. But I barely had time to register any of it. My heart was beating so rapidly, it felt like it might explode.

  ‘Is it okay if I do this?’

  Carefully, Donnagh slid my jacket off my shoulders and threw it onto a chair. Then he took my face in his hands and planted the lightest of kisses on my lips.

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured.

  The next embrace was longer, more searching. There was no denying he was a skilled seducer.

  As we kissed, harder and deeper, I felt his erection against my leg. ‘Can you give me a minute?’ I said. ‘I just want to freshen up.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, breathing deeply.

  In the marbled bathroom, I bent my arms over the washbasin and took deep breaths. This was it. Now.

  This was the moment.

  I’d had a plan all along, you see. Pretend to Donnagh that I was some delicate, damaged thing. Next get him into the room, bamboozle him with my sexy underwear.

  Then …

  Well, that was the surprise bit.

  That was when the fireworks were really going to happen.

  I began to remove my dress. The cocaine was wearing off far too soon and I realized with despair that I didn’t have any more. I’d just have to get through without it.

  ‘Be strong, Evie,’ I whispered into the air. ‘You can do this.’

  And so, finally, I stood there. In my new sexy suspenders and towering stilettos. I noticed there was a ladder in my stocking. But there was nothing I could do about that. I’d just have to get on with it.

  Wing it.

  I should be going now. Yet I remained in front of the mirror, transfixed by my own image. Who was this woman? The one with the fake tan and the fake boobs and the fake nose.

  ‘Eve, you okay in there?’

  Donnagh was calling, and I knew I had to go out there.

  There was just this one last thing to do and then I would be free of him. Free of him and all he represented to me.

  ‘Coming,’ I said, in the breeziest voice I could muster.

  It was show-time.

  ‘Holy Mother,’ Donnagh said, when I stepped out, wearing nothing but my underwear.

  ‘You like?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ he said, easing himself onto his side for a better look. ‘Here, let me touch.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You’ll have to do what I say first.’

  ‘Okay, whatever you want.’

  ‘Take off your clothes.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘It is.’

  He took off everything, including his boxer shorts, revealing a huge hard-on. ‘That’s for you,’ he said, nodding at it. ‘Does it frighten you?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’ve seen bigger.’

  Donnagh smiled. ‘Have you now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  To be honest, I hadn’t. I was overcome with sheer panic. His nakedness. His penis. The stupid ladder in my stocking.

  The thought I can’t do this streaked through my mind.

  It was too frightening.

  Too huge.

  But another voice encouraged me onward. Do this for the Evie of twelve years ago. Do this for her.

  I thought back to that Evie. To my teenage self.

  The reality was that, even though I had hated Donnagh, I had also kind of loved him. Well, certainly lusted after him. I would have done anything back then to have him desire me like this. Validate me.

  ‘Let me touch you,’ he said, reaching out his hand, trying to draw near to me, his face taut with desire.

  ‘How much do you want me?’ I whispered.

  ‘Very much,’ he said. The smirk had gone off his face and now he looked like a man who’d stumbled across an oasis in the desert but was not allowed to drink from it.

  I inched closer to him, bending down so my right breast was within touching distance. He placed his hand on the soft silk of my bra, sighing as he did so. ‘Please, Eve. Let me …’

  He didn’t say what he wanted me to let him do. Now was the time. Now was the do or die.

  I’d prepared a speech.

  The cunning surprise.

  In it I would reveal who I was. Who I really was. Remind him of the things he had done to me as a kid. How he’d hurt me. Humiliated me. But look at me now, how pretty I’d become, and, more importantly, look at him. Pathetically begging me to have sex, drooling over me like some sex-starved teenager. Who was the victor now? Who was the real winner?

  In my fantasy, this was the point at which I would put my dress back on, cast him one final lingering look, say, ‘Never call me again,’ then leave him, with his wilting erection, staring after me.

  It was going to be perfect.

  ‘Eve.’ Donnagh was straining towards me. ‘Please.’

  This was it, my moment. I looked at his face and tried to remember my lines. But nothing came out. There was a pause, which seemed to last for ever. The silence in the room stretched out, like a dark winter’s evening.

  ‘Eve?’

  Still nothing.

  ‘Okay then,’ Donnagh said suddenly. ‘If you’re going to be like that about it …’

  Quick as a flash he grabbed me around the waist, then flipped me down on the bed. He leaned over me, smiling because he was back in control.

  My breathing accelerated. This was not how it was supposed to be. What about my speech? What about escaping out of the room?

  Donnagh was staring down at me, running a finger along my collarbone. ‘Do you think you can tease me like that without repercussions?’

  I didn’t say anything. He carefully unhooked my bra – a skill he’d clearly mastered through practice – and cast it to one side.

  I was naked on top and so was he. I could feel my nipples harden as they brushed against his chest hair. Now was the time to go. Forget the speech. Forget my victory. I just needed to get out. To escape. Before this got really serious.

  Except, for some reason, I couldn’t.

  Something was stopping me. And it wasn’t just that I was pinned to the bed. It was something else. Something more visceral. The truth was, I liked how Donnagh was watching me, how I could sense his desire. It made me feel powerful and in control and sexy – almost as if I wanted him too.

  ‘Donnagh …’ I made one last effort to extricate myself, but he silenced me with a kiss.

  A vision of my teenage self floated into my brain once more. It had been so long ago and I was so different now. Could this be another type of victory?

  Donnagh looked down at me, his face serious. ‘Do you want this, Eve?’ he said, forcing my chin up with his hand. I tried to wriggle free but he held firm. ‘Do you?’

  Plan A had failed. And now we were on to Plan B. Could I go through with it?

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a s
urge of desire coursing through me.

  He pushed me back against the bed, smiling. ‘That was all you needed to say.’

  32.

  Rachel: day nine, 6.30 a.m.

  I scrabbled for a knife in the cutlery drawer and found one. The steel glinted in the sunlight and I found myself thinking strange things – that it looked sharp enough to kill a man, that it would be easy to use as a weapon.

  Seconds later I was using it to cut my way through each envelope, the blade slicing through the paper like an oar through water. I found myself trembling. A part of me felt sick that I was invading Evie’s personal space. Yes, it seemed important to know as much about my sister as I could in the lead-up to the crash, but at the same time this was loathsome: I was about to read correspondence that had never been meant for me.

  Another voice told me to keep going, though, that I must harden myself against feelings like this and get to the truth of my sister’s life. Of her double-life.

  Disappointingly, most of it was junk – with a few bank statements thrown in for good measure. It seemed Evie was overdrawn: between credit cards and her current account she owed about two thousand pounds to the bank. But was that enough to make her want to drive her car into a wall? It seemed unlikely. And nothing about her payments seemed odd. There was a standing order to a gym, a few transactions with high-street retailers.

  Only one thing caught my eye: a £160 payment to a shop called La Petite Mort. Wasn’t that the French term for ‘orgasm’? The little death. I thought of Evie lying in hospital now, caught in her own little death. Had her crash been connected with this payment? With kinky sex?

  I took out my new phone and googled shops in the London area with the same title. One result immediately jumped out – a shop in Soho describing itself as a ‘provocateur’s emporium’. A sex shop.

  My heart was racing. Did Evie really frequent places like that? And, if so, what was she buying and for whom? There’d been a lot in the media recently about the rise in BDSM practices but I’d never thought Evie might be into any of that. She seemed far too fragile and body-conscious. But then again, what did I know? Perhaps those were the very traits that drew a person to that world.

  I walked to the sink to get a glass of water, noticing that my hands were quivering. I should stop this whole stupid enterprise right now. Where did I think it was going to get me?

  I walked back to the table, ready to put the bundle of letters away, when I spotted something I’d previously overlooked: a small colourful postcard jutting out slightly from the side. I picked it up and examined it – taking in the painting of two little girls wearing bonnets on the front – then read the blurb on the reverse: Two Children, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh.

  I stared at it for a second, my curiosity rising. Van Gogh was Evie’s favourite painter. She absolutely worshipped him.

  The sender had kept the message short, and had addressed it to Eveline Darcy not Eve Durant: Eveline, do you still love me? Dx

  I flipped the postcard back and forth a few times, confused by its contents.

  D: was that short for Donnagh? And, if so, how did he know Evie’s real name? Why was he asking her if she loved him? Had the bastard been lying to me all along?

  I pounced on him before he left for work. ‘Did you send this from Paris?’ I said, waving the postcard in front of his face.

  Donnagh flicked it over a few times. ‘Never seen it before in my life.’

  ‘Come on, Donnagh, I’m not thick. It’s signed D.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you’re called Donnagh. You and Evie went to Paris on a mini-break.’

  ‘Um, okay, Poirot. But, on a point of information, why would I be sending a postcard to someone I was already in the company of? Plus, my handwriting looks nothing like that.’ To prove his point, he grabbed a pen off the table and copied the line onto a piece of paper in front of me. I examined it carefully, but had to admit the two scripts bore no similarity.

  ‘In any case, Evie and I weren’t at that point yet.’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘The love point.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  He peered closer at the card. ‘And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but this postcard was posted from Calais. I’ve never even been to Calais.’

  It was like someone had poked me with a cattle prod. ‘Calais?’

  ‘Yeah, why? Does that address mean something to you?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘As for the D, I’ve no idea who that could be.’

  Except I did.

  Dad.

  Our father had abandoned us when I was five and Evie was three. We’d been too young for it to register as a major trauma – although Evie possibly felt differently. All I knew was that, for a while, he was there and then he wasn’t. At some point Mammy explained he wasn’t coming back.

  We’d been so young we’d hardly questioned it, and in any case, our mother’s love seemed large enough to cover both roles. As long as we had her, nothing else mattered.

  As we grew older, she didn’t talk very much about him. We knew he was a fisherman from Calais, that he’d had to go home for reasons too complicated to go into, and that, no, we couldn’t contact him. He wouldn’t want it.

  I was okay with that. You couldn’t force someone to love you. If he didn’t want anything to do with us, fine. I didn’t want anything to do with him either.

  But Evie had never been quite as willing as me to give up on the dream. As a teenager, she’d won a scholarship to France as part of her Junior Cert exam and had hatched a plan to track him down. She’d unearthed an ancient address for him, purloined from our mother’s diary, and had begged me to be part of her grand excursion.

  Naturally I thought the whole thing was ludicrous – for a start the address was years out of date and I doubted her host family would allow her to go. But a week into her scholarship, she’d rung me to say her family were fine about letting her out for the day as long as she had an adult, meaning me, with her. So, really, what choice did I have? Off we went.

  Of course, I’d never expected to find our father, and was really just going along with things to humour Evie. It might finally help her to heal a little, help her to let him go.

  However, when we got to the appointed place, a man answering to the name of Jean Durant opened the front door. He didn’t recognize us immediately and for a few seconds we just stood there, waiting for the penny to drop.

  ‘Merde!’ he exclaimed, when it dawned on him who we were. He threw a panicked look in the direction of his sitting room, then banged the door shut and bundled us off to a bar.

  ‘It is better if things stay the way they are,’ he said, as he sat nursing a small beer. His face was deeply lined, and there were streaks of silver running through his black hair.

  ‘But we’re your daughters,’ Evie whispered, over her glass of orange juice. ‘You have an obligation to us.’

  Our dad dropped his head. ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘But what?’ I snapped. ‘Too much bother, are we?’

  Evie threw me a filthy look. I could tell she was still clinging to the notion that our father loved us and was afraid that my snarling might somehow scare him off.

  ‘Perhaps we could get to know each other. Catch up on all the time we’ve missed out on.’ She was leaning across the table now, towards our father, the words coming out in a tumble.

  A look of mounting panic spread across his face. ‘Eveline, you don’t understand. It is not as easy as that.’

  Evie was openly crying. ‘Why not?’

  He looked at her then, with a tortured, almost animalistic stare, and in that moment I noticed his eyes were the exact same colour as mine, deepest brown.

  I stood up, dragging Evie with me. ‘Come on, Evie. This is a waste of time.’

  ‘Please, Rachel. One more minute. This can’t be it.’

  I pulled harder on her sleeve, irritated. What had she been expecting? T
hat our father would dramatically declare how much he loved us? That he’d been wrong to leave us? That it would end in a fluffy group hug?

  ‘All I want to know is why you left us,’ Evie continued. ‘If you just tell me that, then I promise I’ll leave you in peace and never contact you again.’

  ‘Eveline,’ he began, ‘I wish I could explain it. There is no …’ Then he stopped completely and just stared at us for a while. ‘It is better if we do not talk about these things.’

  ‘Better for whom?’ Evie shouted, her voice loud now. ‘Don’t we deserve to know the truth of why you abandoned us? The real reason?’

  The owner of the bar was scowling at us now.

  ‘Evie,’ I whispered, ‘come on, sweetheart. He’s not worth it. Let’s just go home.’

  But she shook me off and moved closer to him. ‘Stop being a coward for once in your life and tell us the truth. The secret.’

  ‘There is no secret,’ he muttered.

  ‘There is!’ she shouted. ‘I know there is!’

  The owner was walking towards us now, all gesticulating hands and a torrent of loud, aggressive French.

  ‘Come on, hon. Leave it. We’re not getting anywhere.’

  I finally got Evie to move, but somewhere between the clamour of moving chairs and bodies and the tirade of outraged French, our father disappeared. No goodbye. No ‘I’m sorry’. Almost like a magic trick, as if he’d been whisked away in a puff of black smoke.

  ‘What was all that about a secret?’ I asked Evie on the walk back to the railway station, but she remained silent and shook her head – her way of saying, ‘Leave it.’

  So I did, and I tried not to think about our father any more, encouraging Evie to do likewise.

  ‘We have Mammy,’ I said, ‘and she’s better than two parents.’

  ‘She is,’ Evie agreed. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I lost her.’

  ‘You won’t lose her,’ I said, and at the time I truly believed it. We had paid our dues to the gods in the form of one parent. There was no way they were going to take another from us.

  But I was wrong.

  Cataclysmically wrong.

  Because they did.