Heart-Shaped Bruise Read Free Page B

a
fleet
, but four doesn’t sound as impressive, I suppose) so people think I’ma proper princess. And yeah, it’s true, I did go to a £30,000-a-year boarding school and we had a villa in Puerto Banus and I drove a Mercedes and wore dresses made of kitten hair and I had a baby unicorn.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all true.
    But I was also born on a council estate.
    ‘So when did you move to Godalming?’ she asked.
    I sat back and smiled. She knows I live in Godalming. She’s not that naïve.
    ‘When I was three,’ I told her. ‘When Mum left.’
    ‘Where did she go?’
    I tensed. As sweet as Lily is, there’s a line and her toes were on it. ‘I dunno.’
    ‘What? She just left and never came back?’
    I had to stop because it was like Lily had my heart in her hand and she was squeezing it hard enough to leave a bruise.
    So I stood up and she watched me carefully as I stubbed my cigarette out. She probably had a dozen more questions, but she pressed her lips together and for once, she didn’t follow me when I walked away.

I haven’t said a word to Doctor Gilyard since she wouldn’t read me Juliet’s letter. It’s become a battle of wills now. I don’t even know what I’m fighting for any more; I just know that giving in first feels too much like breaking.
    ‘I’d like to go back to the day you found Juliet,’ she said this morning, like that was actually going to happen. Like I was just going to say,
Okay, Doctor G
, and spill my guts.
    I snorted and crossed my arms.
    ‘You didn’t do anything, did you, Emily? You followed her to London in August, so why wait until you both started college in September to speak to her?’
    She waited for me to respond, but I looked away.
    Doctor Gilyard’s office is almost bare. There are only a few bits of furniture – the chairs we sit on, the coffee table betweenthem, a bookshelf, a desk and swivel chair, but that’s it. No plant in the corner of the room, no framed diplomas, no paintings of calm country scenes.
    It’s an empty, hopeless room, but if I have to ignore her, there are still half a dozen things I can distract myself with. A ring on the coffee table. A loose thread on my chair. Recently I’ve been focusing on a crack in the wall. It’s nothing, just a thin line in the plaster that looks like someone’s brushed past the wall with a pencil, but I’ve been staring at it for weeks. It’s bigger than it was when I first noticed it, I’m sure of it. I’ve convinced myself that if I keep staring at it, it’ll get bigger, and if it does, a crack will become a gap and a gap will become a hole and I’ll be through.
    ‘Why didn’t you confront her, if that’s what you went there to do?’ she persisted.
    When I didn’t respond, I heard her scribble something in her notebook.
    ‘I went back to Juliet’s interview transcripts yesterday. She says that she doesn’t remember seeing you before you met that morning at the college, is that right?’
    Juliet doesn’t remember seeing me because I made sure I wasn’t seen. For a month we moved around each other. I followed her everywhere; across bridges, down escalators. I trailed behind her at the supermarket, watching as she sniffed peaches and read the backs of cereal boxes. Once, I even sat in the row behind hers at the cinema. I can’t remember what film it was, I just remember looking at her – looking and looking – waiting for her to do something, to laugh, to cry, to fall asleep. Anything. Itwas as if my life had become a reaction to hers. If she had run out of the cinema that afternoon, I would have run after her. If she had stayed and watched another film, I would have stayed and watched her.
    By then, I knew her routine. Every morning she bought a green tea from the café on the high street and drank it in the bookshop next door, sitting on the floor of the poetry section with her back against the wall. She would emerge an hour later with a half-read paperback between her fingers, then head