Page 113

Tears stream down Bee’s face. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she moans. ‘This is all my fault. He was kind to me. He was kind to me and I fell for it. I didn’t know what he was.’
Lucy shakes her head. Bee isn’t to blame for anything.
She sees movement from the stern – someone climbingout of the hatch – and knows who it’s going to be before he appears.
Katharsis. Purification through tragedy.
Only a student of philosophy or art would choose the Greek spelling of that word. Lucy didn’t make the connection when she read it on the text – not surprising, considering it was a nineteen-year delve into her past – but it must have nudged her subconscious. Becausesomethinghad pulled her attention to that spot on the wall where one of her artworks had been replaced.
On to the deck of theCetusclimbs Tommo. He’s wearing an oddly reverent expression. His leather jacket flaps open, revealing the legend on his T-shirt:BADASS UNICORN. In one hand, Tommo carries a six-foot metal boathook.
Lucy studies him, trying to reconcile the image with the person she knew at art college, but there’s barely any resemblance. Little wonder she didn’t twig when Bee introduced him at Billie’s party. Nor any time this past week, while her brain was shot to pieces. Clear now, too, why Daniel had so much trouble identifying him; her husband hasn’t visited the Drift Net in months. And the only other time his path could have crossed Tommo’s for certain was at Billie’s eighteenth, five weeks ago. That night, the house had been packed with guests. And Daniel had been distracted both by the implosion of his business and his fight with Nick.
Tommo hasn’t aged well: body run to fat, soft belly hanging over his jeans. The once-hard angles of his face have entirely disappeared. Except for a patch of eczema on his throat, there’s a greasy look to his skin.
This guy, he’s the Devil. Satan, Lucifer, whichever name you want to use.
Daniel’s words, back at the prison. Nothing hyperbolic about them. Tommo’s puppy-dog persona disguises something monstrous.
Staring at him, Lucy casts her mind back. Tommo’s not his name, of course – it’s Lucian.
She fell into his sphere during her first week at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was eighteen, new to London, anxious to shrug off her provincial naivety, desperate to be accepted by her peers. Lucian was a mouth on a stick, an endlessly pontificating self-aggrandizer. He lived to shock, to subvert. He worshipped everything anathematic, went out of his way to offend. In Lucy’s entire life, she hadn’t met anyone like him. He was dangerous and exhilarating andnew. Never was she physically attracted. And yet within a few days she was sleeping with him. Lucian’s background, she soon learned, was one of unimaginable privilege. His budget, for a single month in London, approached her funds for a year.
Lucy made other friends that first month. Her social circle swelled. But no one else in her undergraduate crowd seemed as mesmerized by Lucian Terrell. She witnessed, admittedly, his interactions with their peers; his barely concealed contempt. On more than one occasion she, too, became the target of his scorn. And yet when Lucian wasn’t mocking her new friends or attacking her for some opinion he considered bourgeois, he could be disarmingly charismatic. He’d make her feel like the most interesting person he’d met.
The semester progressed. The work of creation gathered pace. The students threw themselves into their art: sometimes haphazardly, always joyfully, increasingly obsessively. They experimented, they failed, they learned.And through the process they grew. Lucy found herself amazed by the quality of the work she saw developing around her. From everyone, that is, except Lucian.
The self-importance of his art made it juvenile. The harder it tried to shock, the more anodyne it became. Not that Lucy cared much by then. Within a few weeks she’d met someone new. And while she never cheated on Lucian, she dropped him like a stone. When the new relationship ended, Lucian came back to her with a gift, a portrait of her in old age. It was a freakishly horrible painting – everything bad about his art distilled into a single image. Worst of all – and much to her chagrin afterwards – she slept with him as a thank-you.
Following Billie’s birth, Lucian once more sought her out. Supportive at first, his behaviour rapidly deteriorated. At that point Lucy gave up on London completely. She swapped her bedsit for a trailer in Spain’s Tabernas Desert. And never thought of Lucian Terrell again.
‘Strange,’ Lucian says, walking along the side deck. ‘Everything’s been leading to this moment. And now it’s here, I’m hesitant to face it.’
He stops between Bee and Fin. ‘First off, let’s bury Tommo, shall we? Put him over the side, out of his misery. Honestly, Lucy, I cannot tell you how much I despised him.’
When he lays a hand on Bee’s shoulder, she moans at his touch. ‘This one liked him, though, didn’t you? Although that, in itself, is an indictment.’
Lucy breathes steadily – in through her nose, out through her mouth – as if the slightest sharp movement could destabilize theCetus. She tries not to look at Fin. Instead she listens, intently, to the water slapping the hulls ofboth boats. ‘Lucian,’ she says, ‘I haven’t seen you once in eighteen years and then—’
‘She bought me this crazy T-shirt,’ he says. ‘BADASS UNICORN. Gross, no? I mean, whodoesthat?’
He blinks, and every trace of humanity drains from his expression. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he says. ‘Ithasn’tbeen once in eighteen years.’
When you left London, I counted myself blessed. You’ll never know how difficult I found the months after you spilled that lizard from your belly. I loved you and yet I hated you. I wanted to help you and also punish you. The conflict was tearing me apart.
But the relief didn’t last long. I couldn’t sleep for asking myself why you’d left. Especially after all my support. No one else came to that hospital the day you gave birth. No one else offered to drive you home, or buy you food, or point out the manifold ways in which you’d ruined your life.
Despite the pain, I told myself to forgive you. And then I looked you up.
But you’d gone, Lucy. Vanished off the face of the Earth. I tracked you to a ferry port in northern France, but from there the trail went cold. Even the specialist I hired couldn’t smoke you out.
After six months passed, I stopped caring as much. A few more years and I gave up completely. There were other women by then. None of them had the dark Lucy magic, but at least they hadn’t busted themselves open with a worm.
Then, last year, I was at a gallery opening in Mayfair. An underwhelming night, until I fell into conversation with an arts journo. She started gushing about this place she’d visited out west, which combined art and music and good food and drink.
I wanted to take her home so I nodded along and made nice noises, and before I could protest she whipped out her phone and googled it. And suddenly there YOU were, the lead feature of a Sunday newspaper lifestyle piece this journo had written.
My God, Lucy. Most people knocking forty don’t look anything like their teenage selves. But you did. There you were,standing on a driftwood stage in an emerald dress and cowboy boots. Older, yes, but wiser – and ten times more beautiful for it.