The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

Last one there’s a rotten egg.’ But she is always ahead of me, pushing further on until, eventually, she moves almost out of sight. I see a flash of her red shoes, her red hair disappearing around the corner. I hear her feet ringing out on the pavement just in front of me. And then I realise I can’t hear them any more. It is silent. And I start to shout: ‘Ruth? Ruth?’ There is just the sound of my own voice returning to me.

      The panic begins then. And even though it is a dream, I can tell I have felt that particular sensation before. Because there’s more I need to ask her. There’s so much more to say.

      The way I’m moving is less like running now, more like drifting, floating above the ground like a helium balloon. And as I turn the final corner, right at the top of town, I come across her red shoes on the pavement. They have been left there placed parallel, as if on purpose, as if they were a sign.

      I wake gasping for air. The jolt of my waking stirs Carla. She murmurs something in her sleep, curves her body in a question mark around mine. It takes my eyes a few moments to adjust to the shadowed room. I lie in the dark, listening to Carla’s steady breathing, left with the sensation of the dream: that Ruth was just here; that she has only just gone. And, as always, at times like this – in the cold hours of night when I’ve woken with a jolt – the same old questions come flooding back. It’s as if they have been waiting for me.

      What was on her mind as she got into the water? And did she think of me as she fought for her life? How it might feel to carry on living in the world without her? But there’s always one question that’s louder than the others, more insistent: was my sister in the water on her own? Or was there someone with her? Someone who placed her shoes and bag on the ground so neatly. Someone who wanted her gone.

       Alice

      Alice puts the last of the previous evening’s plates in the dishwasher. After a broken night, she finally drifted to sleep at dawn, missing George as he scrambled out of bed to get to a morning radio interview. He hasn’t really paused since his career change in the way she hoped he might. He’s on his phone the whole time, only half there in the evenings or the weekends, always in another place while he’s in the room with her.

      She’s not much better. Often, the pair of them will sit together at the kitchen table at their laptops or side by side on the sofa tapping away on their own devices, which reminds her: she needs to email her newest client – the wife of one of George’s former colleagues. Alice frowns: George hadn’t been happy that she’d agreed to take on the case – a high-profile divorce between the Tory MP and his wife, a couple in their sixties who are separating after almost four decades of marriage. But she’s always got on well with the other woman, who, with her iron-straight bob and an unfussy, businesslike way of dressing, reminds Alice a little of herself.

      As she fetches a cloth and wipes down the kitchen table, she notices that the uneasy feeling from yesterday has persisted. The episode on the train has a dreamlike quality as she reflects back. She thinks again of Ruth shouting in George’s face. Was that the party where they’d first got together? He’s always quite foggy about it – all the booze, no doubt – but Alice had thought she could recall it pretty clearly. And yet she hadn’t remembered the girl before – perhaps that had been a different party …

      She’d wanted to impress George that night, for him to notice her. She’d dressed with him in mind. By that stage, of course, Christie had already snared Teddy – Alice smiles at the choice of the word ‘snared’ – but it’s one Christie, with her eye on Teddy’s castle in Scotland, might have used herself. Back then, the third-year boys had seemed like prizes to the freshers. She smirks at the thought now. Of course, George’s family has never had the sort of money that Teddy’s did – but certain doors would always be open to the Bells. George’s grandfather and his father were barristers. Perhaps that was why he’d ended up marrying a lawyer himself. They’re a family who make things happen – even his mother serves on the parish council in the Oxfordshire village where they live, where she held sway in her usual terrifying manner, no doubt. No wonder George became a politician.

      His parents had backed him all the way, down to helping him to find a cottage when he was MP for Witney. The papers had mocked him as a mummy’s boy, but George hadn’t been bothered – ‘Everyone accepts help from their family,’ he’d say to her in private. There had even been a photo or two of his mother picking fluff off his collar in public, straightening his tie, that sort of thing, but George shook it off in the way a less charismatic man might not.

      It’s not that George is cool – more that he genuinely doesn’t give two hoots about what people say. He could laugh off almost everything. Alice has the opposite problem, she thinks as she switches the kettle on: she cares too much about almost everything – her work, her clients, what people think. She’s learned over the years to care less, or hide it better, but the old worries that somehow she’s faked her way to success, that people might see through her, needle away at her. Her parents, both teachers, are very different from George’s. Her father, as the head of the Warwickshire state school she’d gone to, had an inner confidence, but he is a quiet person, self-contained. Alice catches him sometimes watching George as if trying to figure him out, while her mother, even after all these years, is jumpy around George’s family. She knocks things over, laughs too shrilly. Although she hates that she’s embarrassed by such things, Alice notices herself working extra-hard to smooth everything over when they’re all together – trying to overexplain or soften George’s quips, or to encourage her parents to relax more. Needless to say, George never sees any of this silent work going on, she thinks, with a flicker of anger.

      The whistle of the kettle breaks this line of thought. Alice makes a cup of tea and takes it to the kitchen table. She opens her laptop and checks her email. There’s one from Elizabeth Gregory, the politician’s wife, saying how pleased she is that Alice is representing her. Her husband is having an affair with a young researcher on his team. The pair of them shared an eye-roll at that at their last meeting. ‘It’s not just the cliché of it,’ her client had confided. She’d closed her eyes – ‘It makes me sad for something I’ve lost, too. Something the pair of us have lost that he’s trying to get back without me.’

      It was her sense of fairness that had drawn Alice to divorce law, that the quiet work of women should be recognised. Even in her own parents’ marriage there were inequalities. Her father could forge ahead with his career because her mother had looked after Alice and her sister. Often, her father had been home in time for bedtime stories, it’s true, but then that was the fun part of childcare – not the endless rounds of washing clothes, preparing meals, packing gym kits, remembering which child had which hobby on which days, driving around the countryside, and keeping their timetables and friendships and teachers in her head.

      ‘What makes me mad when I think of it now,’ Elizabeth had said, pausing to blow on her cup of coffee, ‘is the way he used to talk about me. If someone asked me a question about the children, he’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t deal with any of that. Ask my wife.’ The way he said it promoted me to the most important person in his life, but also made me, somehow, not important at all. How could I be absolutely crucial and yet as irrelevant to him as hired help? It’s hard to explain.’

      She hadn’t had to: Alice had seen it enough in other marriages; though, in truth, it had always been different in her own. In his favour, George never demands too much of her in the way of housework or ironing. Their cleaner, Mrs T, looks after all that. Alice organises the Ocado deliveries, remembers birthdays, writes thank-you notes. What does George do? ‘I bring the fun,’ he would say. Not to mention their house in Notting Hill, which his parents had helped with. Distasteful as it is to think about it, there are advantages to being married to George, there’s no doubt about it.

      Alice tries to remember more about the party where she’d seen Ruth, but not much more comes to her. She closes her eyes and tries again, recalls, on a separate occasion, walking into the college bar with her hand in George’s, and seeing Ruth and a friend of hers, Kat, exchange a glance, not a happy one, at the sight of them. They said a few words to each