Everything You Do Is Wrong

by Amanda Coe

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

'Do You Know This Girl?' Harmony's teenage craving for drama is answered when a body is discovered by her aunt Mel on Evensand beach. But the naked, lifeless young woman turns out - problematically - to be alive. Unable to speak or remember where she came from, the woman is named Storm by her nurses. Surrounded by doctors, psychiatrists and policemen, Storm remains provocatively silent. Harmony is desperate to fill in the gaps in Storm's story, while the responsibility Mel feels for the woman she rescued begins to skew the course of her own settled life. Their efforts to solve the mystery clash with the efforts of rookie constable Mason, assigned to the case and determined to help this damsel he feels to be very much in distress. Will any of them be able to find out who Storm really is? And what if the distress belongs to everyone but her? Everything You Do Is Wrong is a compelling exploration of how this enigma sets a family's good and bad intentions crashing into each other, with unforgettable consequences.

Release date: October 19, 2017

Publisher: Fleet

Print pages: 255

Sample

 

Since Harmony Ansholm knew, and mourned, that in all her fifteen years nothing had ever happened in Evensand, the first big storm of the winter was like a trailer for a blockbuster that would never make it to a screen near you. But it still stirred her that morning as she looked up from her trudge through graphs, to see the weightless peach and lemon shells of takeaway cartons chase each other up the pavement below the library and past the evergreens planted in a line outside, their needles beginning to ripple, showing silvery undersides. By eleven o’clock, the tiny agitation of the Edwardian window frames had amplified into an assault on concentration, and the street light outside, with which her eyeline was oddly level, the Quiet Room being on the library’s first floor, started a stately, weighted nod on its pole. Seen so close, the wedge-shaped head of the light was an improbably massive thing. You didn’t think of that, from the ground. If it fell, it would do as much damage as a falling tree. Harmony, imagining metal smashing through the glass, slid her files up the table and repositioned herself in the next chair along, closer to the door. Nothing would happen, but you may as well be on the safe side, or what was the point of an imagination?

The Quiet Room took up half the library’s upper floor, and today Harmony was one of three occupants, apart from the invigilating librarian reading the Daily Mail at the desk by the door. He sat straight, head cocked critically to the print, running his thumb down the edge of each page before he turned it, as though he was conducting research, not reading. He was, though: Harmony had seen him at the sudoku. As usual, her own brain had fogged shortly after she took out the maths sheet. It was impossible. Declan said not, but it was. She tried to focus on the questions, for his sake, but the sight of how many lay ahead, becoming denser and more difficult the closer you got to the bottom of the page, like a forest you were bound to get lost in, made even the basic numbers of the first problem fall away from meaning like leaves shaken from a branch.

The windows shuddered acoustically. Did Declan like music, she wondered? Probably. Not that she’d even have heard of the kinds of bands he would be into. Reaching under the table, Harmony inched out the two-finger KitKat she’d stowed in her bag for lunch. She was starving. A hundred and six calories. She could still have the apple she’d brought at actual lunchtime for a mere fifty-two calories. The trick was writing it all down. Besides, if she was hungry her concentration would be even worse.

The weather’s percussion usefully disguised her cautious tearing of the wrapper. Mum had never bought KitKats, because Nestlé and baby formula for African women; also sugar. Now Harmony had a multipack stashed in her bedroom. A guilty pleasure, which was a phrase Mum had hated about as much as she hated Nestlé. Feigning attention to her maths, Harmony broke off furtive morsels under the table and passed them to her mouth. Tiny shavings of chocolate and wafer sprinkled the white paper of the worksheet, smudging into brown blots as she brushed them away. The numbers were impossible.

The skitter of ball bearings hitting glass made everyone look up, as a gust of wind flung a slack handful of hail across the window. The storm was starting in earnest. Harmony felt a lift of excitement. It was a Declan day, after all.

‘No food in the library.’ The librarian was staring straight at her.

Framed against the pane, Harmony absorbed the judgement of the other, older library dwellers. In a rich blush of humiliation, and willing herself not to chew, she released the last of the second finger – the best bit, with the thick little rim of chocolate at the end – back into her bag. The librarian returned to his Daily Mail. Wanker.

‘I’m diabetic,’ she announced in a demitone, unsure if she wanted anyone to listen. ‘Blood sugar?’

By the time she left the Quiet Room, after forcing herself to sit for five minutes so that her exit would look unforced and incidental, the rain was pelting in fat, squalling drops. As soon as you stepped outside you could hear the sea, although the library was at the back of the 1960s precinct, streets away from Evensand’s so-called promenade. Harmony battled the freezing wind channelling through the torso of her parka to zip herself up, spitting away the fronds of hair that whipped into her face. The roar of the sea felt like a roar in your blood.

She could be diabetic, for all anyone knew. She’d never had an actual test for diabetes. Maybe that was why she got so bloody hungry. Once out of view of the library, where she would never be able to work again, she scrabbled in her bag and shoved the linty end of the KitKat in her mouth.

When she reached the end of Court Street, the boiling sea was blackboard grey, dashing dirty foam across the small stretch of shops that ended in the Co-op. The first proper storm of the year, no doubt about it. Shoppers were running urgently to their cars, and, as Harmony watched, the transparent cover a mother was trying to fix to her toddler’s pushchair flapped free and took off like a kite above the trolley park. The little boy raised his arms and spread his stubby fingers into stars, in unflustered exultation at its flight. It felt as though anything might happen, even though Harmony knew it wouldn’t.

 

At home, the radio in the kitchen declaimed a severe weather warning. If the weather was very severe by four, Declan might cancel. Harmony didn’t know what she would do if that happened; if he didn’t happen. Their lesson was the peg on which she hung the meaning of her week. The rain and wind were bad, but the radio was saying it wouldn’t get properly worse, properly severe, until the night. And if Declan didn’t come, she reassured herself, he wouldn’t get his twenty pounds, and surely he needed the money.

Harmony suspected some sort of arrangement with Mel about Declan’s fee. It was quite likely on the down low, since Stu had a general policy of refusing help from his sister. He called it charity – like Perks in The Railway Children, as Mum had once pointed out, forcing him to accept a bag of Mel and Ian’s unwanted clothes that would have otherwise gone to Oxfam. Harmony, along with Mum, wasn’t so proud. Unlike her cousins, she never got any extras. Not until Declan.

Whatever the arrangement, and Stu’s possible ignorance of it, twenty quid was twenty quid. More than once Mum had resorted to raiding the treasure-chest money box Harmony had been given when she was a little kid to make up Declan’s cash to the full twenty. But today, as for many months, Stu had left it all on the kitchen table: two fives and a lot of shrapnel. Harmony sorted this into more respectful piles of related coins. Although there weren’t any coppers, which would be an insult, there were still a few marginally embarrassing five pences. She scavenged tens from the depleted treasure chest and exchanged them. During this, Harmony ate the apple she’d intended for her lunch, which was woolly and disappointing, followed by a slice of peanut butter on toast. Protein was good. At her age, you needed it for growth, if in fact she was still growing. She spooned more peanut butter from the jar, then, after she’d put the spoon in the sink to stop herself eating more, continued to scoop gouts of it out with her finger. From the nutritional information on the label she calculated that she’d eaten about five hundred calories’ worth, not including the toast. There was no point after that, so she put two more slices of bread in the toaster. During her final instalment of toast, Harmony tried to watch a YouTuber she liked, another guilty pleasure unsanctioned in Mum’s day. But the internet was down, probably because of the storm.

 

It had been Mel’s idea, to get her a tutor. Declan was coaching Mel’s youngest, Eddy, through the entrance exam for St Benedict’s, the private school his brother Aidan attended and which his eldest brother Joe had left the previous summer. When Mum agreed that Harmony could think of going ‘somewhere’ for sixth form – the ‘somewhere’ meaning nowhere they had to pay – Mel had pointed out, deflatingly, that she wouldn’t get in anywhere at all without GCSEs. Then, more helpfully, she had suggested Declan to tutor Harmony through her maths. Nebbing, as usual, according to Stu. Stu didn’t have much time for school. The one time Mum had dragged him to parents’ evening at Severn Oak he became clammy and silent, like someone trapped in a lift. But since he wasn’t her actual parent, he didn’t have any real say over her education, and Mum had been surprisingly keen on the tutor idea, despite her own customary dislike of Mel’s interference. Harmony had been keen herself, even before she met Declan in the flesh. The flesh.

Upstairs for a wee, she got caught by the bathroom mirror. Her fringe had become far too long, apparently overnight. Holding the puff of hair back out of the way, Harmony gave herself over to such prolonged scrutiny that her reflection gradually became as bizarre as an over-repeated word: face, face, face, face, face, face, face, face… Why had she never realised that her forehead was so grotesque, both abnormally high and oddly bulging? Plus, spots. As she was combing the fringe back down a violent bang came from downstairs, at the back of the house. Her first thought was that someone was trying to break in, because it was far too early to be Stu forgetting his keys, and then with a bigger gut lurch she thought she might have got the time wrong, or Declan was early, but when she inched through the dining area, where they never dined, to get a view of the back garden, all Harmony could see was an upended plastic garden chair on the empty flower bed that stretched beneath the window, white against the black earth. The chair wasn’t theirs: if they ever wanted to sit in the garden they just took normal chairs outside. The noise must have come from the wind seizing the chair from next door’s garden and hurling it at the window.

Harmony marvelled at the weather’s malevolence. It wouldn’t take much, she saw, for the panels of their sagging, ancient fence to give way. It had happened before, as evinced by the contrast of the new panel in the middle, orange and unweathered. Of course, it had had some help.

Best not to think about that. The point was, the sea couldn’t reach them, even in a storm this bad, even if the fence broke. Although the house stood in the last row before the beach, with the road intervening it was too far for the sea to reach, however furious. Only the wind could do them damage. And she hadn’t missed Declan, thank God.

Despite the storm, he was exactly on time. He always was. Harmony wondered if he waited outside, checking his phone until the two zeros of 4:00 appeared. Numbers were his thing, after all. She was already on the other side of the door, watching the numbers on her own phone. She answered the bell so promptly that he jumped, his finger lifted to the button. In turn, she got the usual slight shock from seeing him really as opposed to the Declan she made up for herself in the rest of the week. In her mind he was a bit ginger, but now, chivvied by the wind into their narrow hall, he wasn’t. His hair was matt brown; not even chestnut highlights. Still gorgeous. He brought his smell, too, gels and sprays sharpened by the astringent, salty cold.

‘Weather!’ Declan said, dealing with his coat. It was a grey North Face, nothing special.

‘There was a warning, on the radio.’

His smell made Harmony think of him in the shower, which made her blush. Also usual. For the whole hour of their lesson, she was aware of the skin on her face flaming. Mum had always made him a cup of tea, but Harmony found the idea of offering and making Declan a drink herself both too weird, in that it underlined Aurora’s absence, and too embarrassing, in that it drew attention to herself, so she’d been telling him for months the kettle was broken. As he got the workbooks out of his backpack and slapped them on the table, Harmony switched on the lamp. The wind was wuthering against the window like a crap trick-or-treater.

‘So, how did you get on? Any problems?’

They sat. Declan, his pencil poised by the first question, glanced over at her worksheet. He swivelled the page to get a better look, although even with it upside down, he must have been able to see the multiple rubbings out. By some miracle, she’d got it right.

‘Excellent stuff.’ His pencil jumped to the next question. He swiped his mouth and chin, concentrating on her graph. She wondered how often he had to shave.

‘So, talk me through this – why have you plotted x as five here?’

Harmony tried to focus on the pencilled blob she had speculated on earlier. As ever, the monolithic need to concentrate blocked her concentration. Declan sighed. The storm made its noises. She grabbed at the smudged number on the line below the graph, just above his adorably bitten fingernails.

‘Because of the cube of fifteen? Sorry.’

‘Nothing to apologise for. It’s right.’

He smiled at her. White teeth, one at the bottom set a tiny bit crooked, the two incisors slightly proud of the rest. She could have identified him from his dental records. Oh God, she loved him so much.

‘Cube root,’ he said.

‘Cube root.’

But the right answer was a fluke. As always he was very patient with her, though she could see the effort it cost him from the way he jammed his hand up into his hair and tugged harder at it each time she failed to understand his explanation.

‘Slow down,’ he said. ‘Don’t panic. It’s all there in the numbers – you’re panicking.’

It wasn’t just panic, though, was it? It was him, the real smell of him, the freckles on his cheekbones, the peaty brown of his eyes. How old was he, anyway? When he started, Mum had said twenty-four, tops.

‘Harmony.’

Harmony tried again, dutifully transcribing numbers as Declan spoke. Suddenly the edge of understanding appeared and she grabbed at it, paddling frantically, before the current of him could pull it away. It was just numbers, beautiful and simple. Two lines. Equals.

‘X fourteen, y twelve.’

‘Perfect.’

Declan sat back, smoothing his tormented hair back into place. His forehead, unlike her own, was normally sized and unblemished. Harmony twiddled her fringe down past her eyebrows as he checked the time on his phone. She knew he had Eddy as his next lesson, and that it would be more than his life was worth to be late for Mel. Beyond the hoop of lamplight that encircled them, the dark had thickened. During the blank week, when she gorged on the possibility of their lessons, this was the moment when she declared her love.

But instead he made her do a timed worksheet on what they’d just covered.

‘You know the drill.’

Ten minutes. Declan set the timer on his phone and leaned back, his gaze set above her head at the black, uncurtained view to the back fence and the sea beyond, twiddling his pencil as an analogue to the digital milliseconds she could see flickering past out of the corner of her eye. The storm screamed to be let in.

‘So noisy…’

‘Concentrate.’

He wasn’t even looking at her. Probably, with the lamp on, he could only see himself bounced back from the streaming window. There would be five minutes of him left after the worksheet. As Harmony sneaked another look, she saw Declan’s expression change. Before she could turn to share his view there was human tapping at the glass, a thinner, animal skittering of paws.

‘Harmony!’

It was Mel, cowled by the hood of her anorak, Toothpaste leaping up so that his muzzle slobbered a streak on the pane before she tugged him down by his lead. They must have come from the beach. She didn’t wait for Harmony to open the back door but crunched round to the front and was trying the handle there before Harmony reached it herself.

‘Just a sec —’

The wind wrenched the door away the moment she released the latch, smashing it against the radiator. Mel would have charged past with similar force, but Toothpaste’s delight at seeing Harmony brought her up short. She shrieked at the dog to sit.

In her whole life Harmony had never seen Mel in such a state. She was in her dance-teaching kit, Lycra over greyhound legs and the usual puffa’ed and zipped accoutrements, but it was as though a stranger had taken possession of her face, its angles flayed red by the storm and snaked with wet hair. Her eyes were huge and sightless with shock. She didn’t even seem to see Declan there, at the entrance to the living room, as she shook her iPhone at Harmony.

‘Bloody thing! I can’t get reception! Toothpaste!’

Mel yanked the lead. Aidan, or Eddy? Fighting the suck of panic, Harmony turned to the landline balanced on the radiator, but the dock was empty. She or Stu had left it somewhere, and wherever it was it would probably be out of charge. Harmony pushed Toothpaste’s wet, freezing muzzle away from her crotch but Declan was too engrossed by Mel to notice. Before she could go to look for the phone, Declan had stepped forward, offering his mobile.

‘Hi, Mrs Bale.’

Mel stopped short, squinting down at his handset.

‘Is it still 999 for mobiles?’

Please don’t let it be Eddy or Aidan. Let it be Uncle Ian.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Declan, but Mel was already dialling. The phone connected. Mel swiped the dewdrop from her nose, already more herself at the contact with authority. She was trembling, though, in strange, convulsive jerks, as though she was having some sort of fit rather than suffering from cold.

‘Ambulance – hang on, yes, ambulance. Shit. Police, maybe? Listen —’

The unlatched front door crashed back against the wall, reasserting disaster. Reaching to secure it properly, Harmony saw a splintered wedge gouged out of the laminate by the edge of the radiator. Mel hadn’t reacted to the noise. She lowered her voice, as though what she had to say wasn’t fit for Harmony to hear. Her chattering teeth made her words come out in oddly clustered spasms, like ice cubes fused into clumps.

‘Yes, it’s. A body. A girl. A dead. Body on Evensand. Beach.’

It was the first time Declan had ever looked at Harmony properly, and her at him, as though they were two humans. Hours later, in bed, as the weather continued to assault the house, Harmony savoured the reciprocity of that moment of shock. His eyes, yellow-green-brown, those eyelashes, had looked properly into hers. That had to be the start of something, surely.

‘Dead, yes. By Brazen Point, the golf. Club end, she’s. Naked.’

For once, the storm had made good on its promise.

 

Mason was on lates. His shift had barely started when they got the call, just after five. He and Soccolo were parked up on the road to Brazen Point, waiting for their takeaway brews to reach a drinkable temperature as they argued about the transfer window, so they were at the scene in minutes. They were flagged down near the entrance to the golf club by the woman who’d rung 999. A Mrs Melanie Bale, local dog walker, though she’d ditched the dog by the time they got there, he had no idea where. They left the patrol car at the gate and floundered with her down to the beach, screaming to be heard over the waves and wind. The ambulance had been dispatched at the same time as them but had further to come, from Whitby. Mason’s hand shook with adrenalin as he tracked the slender, staggering figure ahead of him with his torch. The woman wheeled a few metres from the sea’s spewing edge, trying to get her bearings. From behind her, Dan’s wavering beam illuminated sectioned patches of empty beach and roiling sea, hazed by the icy rain that was driving itself into his eyes and mouth.

‘Maybe – washed – sea!’

He followed as the woman slithered up the bank of gravel, closer to the bottom of the cliff. Soccolo laboured behind them, cursing the world, while Mason aimed the torch low at the woman’s scrabbling legs, trying to help her find her way. He reared, bucking the light up at the cliff face, then braced the torch back to where it had shone. The edge of the projection had caught part of what they were looking for: a foot, he saw. No shoe, or sock. When he swept the torch further it revealed the whole of a body. A girl. She was fetal, bare and lifeless. What skin became.

‘Chuffing —’

Soccolo caught up with them. He was already removing his coat to throw it over the body. Mason thought about his partner disturbing the scene at the same time as wishing he’d done it himself.

The ambulance drove as far as it could on to the beach, no messing. Its headlights created a pool of light for them to work from, bringing colour to the monochrome as the paramedics brought their bustling routine to urge the body back to life. Mason recognised the drill from the few RTAs he’d attended: a checklist of vital signs and chest-pressing and oxygen before they got the girl into the ambulance. At his first RTA – two idiot little twoccers who had run a stolen Audi into a tree – he had thought all this was hope of life, until Soccolo had disabused him: it was stats, not having too many deaths on their data sheet. The paramedics would never call it. Let the doctors do it, back in A & E. Their allotment of death was more generous than that allowed the ambulance crew.

It still looked like hope, though, the way everyone teamed up against the adversity of the weather. The square young woman doing chest compressions had to kneel on the edges of the silver insulation blanket they’d covered the girl with to stop it flying away in the gale. Every screamed word was swallowed by the storm. Soccolo, reunited with his coat, cannily escorted the woman who had made the 999 call back to the golf club and the warmth of their car. He would offer Mrs Bale a lift home, leaving Mason to be taken in the ambulance. Got to love Soccolo, he played all the angles.

Left alone to watch the paramedics work, Mason havered. The question of when a medical matter became a police matter, if there was crossover like this, was tricky. Once the girl was called as life extinct, the howling beach would be a crime scene. How was he meant to secure it on his own? The paramedics stretchered her into the ambulance, strapped up to the oxygen tank. Mason climbed in after them. He watched the gelid mask all the way from Evensand to Whitby, unclouded by any breath. The atmosphere in the back, though solemn and exhausted, was matter-of-fact. They’d given up. Over to him, then.

But in A & E – overstretched, due to the storm but when wasn’t A & E overstretched – the harassed triage nurse optimistically dispatched them up to the acute assessment ward. Mason saw once they reached it that it wasn’t just the empty beds that had triggered her decision. The other occupants of the ward were all elderly; variously demented, dehydrated and dying. One more body would inconvenience no one. Mason loitered in the corridor. A curtain had been pulled around the bed, preventing him seeing anything beyond backstage distortions of the flimsy material that implied some concerted, continuing degree of effort. The paramedics were long gone. This was the hospital team, with their own boxes to tick.

Just as Mason had decided to call the station, Soccolo arrived, coffee on his breath. He was unimpressed to hear how little progress had been made, but then the day Soccolo was impressed by anything, pigs would be seen flying in formation over Brazen Point.

‘Got spannered, decided to go for a chuffing paddle, end of story.’ Soccolo dropped heavily into a chair that faced the nurses’ station, not displeased that this was the indoor turn their shift had taken. Soccolo hated being out in the car nearly as much as he hated having to get out of it to do some policing.

It was bound to be different for him. He was an old hand, in tasting distance of his pension. Dan, not yet a year out of training, was trying to tamp down his excitement. A murder investigation. So far, none of his working life had corresponded t. . .