Keep Your Friends Close: A gripping psychological thriller full of shocking twists you won’t see coming
encouraged her, and Louie found she was at her most productive in the vacuum Karin left behind. Where this might lead, she wasn’t entirely sure. Selling paintings was a tough way to scratch out a living and, even when the odd commission came her way, she could only afford to treat herself to new canvases and more paint with the proceeds. Karin had left a small amount of money in their joint account to cover a few months’ rent on the bedsit. Louie had blown that in one go, drinking and smoking it away as a kind of protest.
She continued with her shifts at The Midland, arranging for her wages to be paid into her business account instead of the joint one. Of course, she hoped Karin had enough money to live on and that she had found another job, wherever she was, but Louie didn’t want to be subsidizing her relationship with someone else, if that was what was going on.
On her days off, Louie didn’t eat or sleep properly. She just painted, took walks on the beach and thought of Karin.
The invitation to exhibit had given her a new and much-needed focus. It had come out of the blue. Someone had seen her display of portraits on the walls of the Royal Lancaster Infirmary and subsequently got in touch. So at least she now had something to aim for while waiting for Karin to come home. As the exhibition date got closer it became increasingly difficult to move around the bedsit without banging into something. The paintings had taken up enough space as canvases, but in their bulky frames that she made herself from driftwood found on local beaches, they took up even more.
The thought that Karin would not see the exhibition, however, made her achievement seem empty.
She was everywhere.
Only yesterday Louie had come across another of her hairs. It was hanging from the light fitting in the bathroom of all places. Long, twisting and red. She didn’t think there would be any more. Not now. But there it was, glinting in the sunshine streaming through the window. Louie put it with the others.
Her shift at The Midland started at three thirty on a Friday. When Louie stepped out of her block onto the street, in her black trousers and one of Karin’s long-sleeved white shirts, she immediately broke into a sweat. Walking down Albert Road the seagulls laughed mockingly from above. The smell of fish and chips and last night’s beer slops filled her lungs as she turned onto Marine Road West. They had walked this route together many times and Karin was everywhere on the outside too.
Louie thought she could hear her voice. A burst of laughter carried along by the wind. She was even in the cracks in the pavement. They had once spent hours searching for an earring because it was a special gift from her dad. Louie could still identify which crack it had slipped down, and picture the smile on Karin’s face when she said she had found it.
A coach was pulling in up ahead, the next batch of hens and stags arriving into town. Coming towards her was a procession of old cars, tooting their horns as they passed the sign for ‘Vintage Evening of Tunes from a Bygone Era’ at the Winter Gardens. Morecambe was a curious mix of the best and worst of English seaside; like many other resorts, in pursuit of its former glory. Apart from the resplendent Midland hotel and the continuing restoration of the Winter Gardens it was still waiting for the rest of the town to catch up.
But Morecambe was in Louie’s blood. She was born, bred and bullied here and had a fondness for it which she had never been able to shake off, nor did she want to. From a young age she had found her own way of coping with the physical pain others chose to inflict on her – for whatever reason; they must have had one – simply by inflicting greater pain on herself. Burning, cutting, striking, jumping, falling, kicking. Thereby raising her tolerance to pain in general.
The first painting she ever did was in her own blood taken from the wounds given to her by her tormentors. It was of a young girl walking across the waves. The girl was red, the waves were red, the sky was red; everything was red and bloody. It gave Louie back control.
Karin paused to look out of the window on their way to the restaurant. The beach, the pier, the sea, they all brought back a rawness in her and made her feel panicky again. She blamed her mother for the way things turned out. If it wasn’t for her total failure at being a mother then she would have stayed on at school, finished her studies, maybe even gone to university. Instead she unravelled, finding herself washed up on the beach in Morecambe, a wreckage of a human being with no one in the world she could to turn to.
Until Louie showed up.
Whether or not her mother had deliberately set out to hurt Karin, the pain still cut deep, even now. Losing her dad was bad enough, but then for her to remarry just a few weeks after he died was truly unforgiveable. How did she expect Karin to feel? The way she had done it, too, in secret, and to someone Karin had never even met. It was cruel and disrespectful, an insult to her dad’s memory.
Nothing was ever Karin’s business. Not the small stuff, not the big stuff. She was even the last to know that her father had died. What mother does that? Waits four days to tell her daughter that her dad has passed away? Four days. ‘It was better to wait until after your exams, Karin. Those are important.’
What?
More important than her dad dying?
Karin was sixteen, nearly seventeen. So perhaps she should have been used to it by then, built up some resilience having been wrenched from the family home at the age of eight and packed off to boarding school. Despite complaining repeatedly of being miserable and homesick, her feelings were never taken into account. She was always out of sight, out of mind. No wonder she lost control.
On those occasions when she was allowed home, Karin began to pick up on a strange atmosphere between her parents, something in the way they interacted. And something that made her keen to know why her mother had remarried so soon after he died. She refused to tell Karin of course. But Karin did get her answer. In many ways she was relieved to be rid of her mother. If Birgitta felt that Karin had ruined her life, then she totally deserved it. In that case they had ruined each other’s. But still, there was a gaping hole where her mother ought to have been. That was the hole that Louie had filled.
If Louie still worked here, she was likely to be in the Rotunda Bar. Karin kept her head bowed, just in case, as they were being led through to the restaurant.
‘Is this okay for you, sir?’ the waitress asked, showing them to a sea-view table.
‘Perfect,’ Aaron replied.
Karin felt the waitress studying her, hovering with the menus as she waited for them to sit down. She looped her bag over the chair, avoiding eye contact even when she was handed the menu.
‘You look familiar,’ said the waitress.
‘Erm. Yes, I used to work here,’ Karin replied, having no option then but to look up. ‘I left about a year and a half ago.’
‘Thought so. Think I’d just started then. You were front of house, weren’t you?’
‘A bit of everything actually. It was only temporary.’
‘So where are you now?’
‘I work for a charity.’
‘Oh. Still round here though?’
‘No. I moved away.’
The waitress nodded, picking up the vibe. She smiled and said she would leave them to decide and someone would be over shortly to get their drinks order.
‘Very enigmatic answers,’ Aaron commented.
It was in those nervous glances which followed – first at Aaron, trying to reassure him all was well, and then at the waitress as she walked away – that Karin caught a glimpse. Her blood ran cold, yet she could feel herself overheating again. If it was Louie then her hair was longer, in a messy topknot, and she was carrying a tray of empty