Olivia is someone else’s sister, someone else’s daughter. Perhaps I should back off, as Jules told me to. And yet I can’t. As the others are streaming into the marquee I find myself walking in the other direction, towards the Folly.
‘Olivia?’ I call, once I’ve stepped inside. There’s no answer. My voice is echoed back to me by the stone walls. The Folly seems so silent and dark and empty now. It’s hard to believe that there’s anyone else in here. I know where Olivia’s room is, the door that leads off the dining room – I’ll try that first, I decide. I knock on the door.
‘Olivia?’
‘Yeah?’ I think I hear a small voice from inside. I take it as my cue to push open the door. Olivia’s sitting there on the bed, a towel wrapped around her shoulders.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, without looking up at me. ‘I’m coming back to the marquee in a minute. I’ve just got to change first. I’m fine.’ The second time doesn’t make it sound any more convincing.
‘You don’t really seem fine,’ I say. She shrugs but doesn’t say anything.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I know it’s not my business. I know we hardly know each other. But when we talked yesterday, I got the sense that you’ve been going through some pretty major stuff … I imagine it must be hard to put on a happy face over all that.’
Olivia remains silent, not looking at me.
‘So,’ I say, ‘I guess I wanted to ask – what were you doing in the water?’
Olivia shrugs again. ‘I dunno,’ she says. A pause. ‘I – it all got a bit much. The wedding, all the people. Saying I must be so happy for Jules. Asking me how I was doing. About uni—’ She trails off, looks at her hands. I see how the nails are bitten down as a child’s, the cuticles red
and raw-looking against the pale skin. ‘I just wanted to get away from all of it.’
Jules had made out that it was all a stunt, that Olivia was being a drama queen. I suspect it was the opposite. I think she was trying to disappear.
‘Can I tell you something?’ I ask her. She doesn’t say no, so I go on.
‘You know how I mentioned my sister Alice, last night?’ ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I … I suppose you remind me of her a little bit. I hope you don’t mind me saying that. I promise it’s a compliment. She was the first one in our family to go to university. She got the best GCSEs, straight A’s for her A-levels.’
‘I’m not all that clever,’ Olivia mumbles.
‘Yeah? I think you’re cleverer than you like to let on. You did English Lit at Exeter. That’s a good course, isn’t it?’
She shrugs.
‘Alice wanted to work in politics,’ I say. ‘She knew that she had to have an impeccable record and to get the right grades for it. She got them, of course, she was accepted into one of the UK’s top universities. And then in her first year, after she’d realised that she was easily knocking off Firsts for every essay she turned in, she relaxed a bit and got her first boyfriend. We all found it quite funny, me and Mum and Dad, because she was suddenly so into him.’
Alice told me all about this new guy when she came home for the Christmas holidays. She’d met him at the Reeling Society, which was some posh club she’d joined because they had a fancy ball at the end of term. I remember thinking she brought the same intensity to this new relationship as she brought to her studies. ‘He’s dead fit, Han,’ she told me. ‘And everyone fancies him. I can’t believe he’d even look at me.’ She told me, swearing me to secrecy, that they’d slept together. He was the first boy she’d ever slept with. She told me that she felt so close to him, that she hadn’t realised it could be like that. But I remember she qualified this, said it was probably the hormones and all the socio- cultural idealisation of young love. My beautiful, brainy sister, trying to rationalise away her feelings … classic Alice.
‘But then she started going off him,’ I tell Olivia.
Olivia raises her eyebrows. ‘She got the ick?’ She seems a bit more engaged now.
‘I think so. By the Easter holiday she’d stopped talking about him so much. When I asked her she told me that she realised he wasn’t quite the guy she thought he was. And that she’d spent too much time wrapped up in him, that she really needed to get her head down and focus on her studies. She’d got a low 2.1 in an essay she’d handed in and that had been her wake-up call.’
‘Jeez,’ Olivia says, rolling her eyes. ‘She sounds like a massive geek.’ And then she catches herself. ‘Sorry.’
I smile. ‘I told her exactly the same thing. But that was Alice, all over. Anyway, she wanted to make sure that she did the decent thing by him, told him in person.’ That was Alice all over too.
‘How did he take it?’ Olivia asks.
‘It didn’t go that well,’ I say. ‘He was pretty horrible about it all, said he wouldn’t let her humiliate him. That she would pay for it.’ I remember that because I remember wondering what he could possibly do. How do you make someone ‘pay’ for a break-up?
‘She didn’t tell me what he did, to get her back,’ I tell Olivia. ‘She didn’t tell me or Mum or Dad. She was too ashamed.’
‘But you found out?’
‘Later,’ I say. ‘I found out later. He’d taken this video of her.’
A video of Alice had been uploaded to the university’s intranet. It was a video she had let him take, after the fancy Reeling Society ball. It was taken down from the server the second the university found out about it. But by then the news had spread, the damage was done. Other versions of it had been saved on computers around campus. It was posted to Facebook. It was taken down. It was posted again.
‘So, like … revenge porn?’ Olivia asks.
I nod. ‘That’s what we’d call it now. But then it was this, you know, more innocent time. Now you’re warned to be careful, aren’t you?
Everyone knows that if you let someone take photos or a video of you it could end up on the internet.’
‘I guess,’ Olivia says. ‘But people forget. In the moment. Or you know, if you really like someone and they ask you. So I suppose everyone at uni saw it, right?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But the worst part is we didn’t know at the time, she didn’t tell us. She was too ashamed. I think maybe she thought it would spoil our image of her. She’d always been so perfect, though of course that wasn’t why we loved her.’
The fact that she didn’t even tell me. That’s the part that still hurts so much.
‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘I think it’s too difficult to tell the people closest to you. The ones you love. Does that sound familiar?’
Olivia nods.
‘So. I want you to know: you can tell me. Yeah? Because here’s the thing. It’s always better to get it out in the open – even if it seems shameful, even if you feel like people won’t understand. I wish Alice had been able to talk to me about it. I think she might have got some perspective she couldn’t see herself.’
Olivia looks up at me, then away. It comes out as little more than a whisper. ‘Yeah.’
And then the tinny sound of an announcement comes from the direction of the marquee. ‘Ladies and gents’ – it’s Charlie’s voice, I realise, he must be doing his MC bit – ‘please take your seats for the wedding breakfast.’
I don’t have time to tell Olivia the rest – and perhaps that’s for the best. So I don’t tell her how the whole thing was like a huge stain upon Alice’s life, on her person – like it was tattooed there. None of us had realised quite how fragile Alice was. She had always seemed so capable, so in control: getting all those amazing grades, playing on the sports teams, getting her place at university, never missing a trick. But underneath that, fuelling all this success, was a tangled mass of anxiety that none of us saw until it was too late. She couldn’t cope with the shame of it all. She realised she would never – could never – work in politics as she had dreamed. It wasn’t just that she didn’t have her BA, because she’d dropped out. There was a video of her giving some guy a blowjob – and more – on the internet, now. It was indelible.
So I didn’t tell Olivia how one June, two months after she came home from uni, Alice took a cocktail of painkillers and pretty much anything else she could find from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom while my mum was collecting me from netball practice. How, seventeen years ago this month, my beautiful, clever sister killed herself.
