Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

  She listens from the study for the sound of Kate’s footsteps and the click of the front door as the lodger leaves the house. Jake, as ever, has gone to work hours before either of them, so there is no one to ask Marisa what she’s doing as she runs down the stairs and into the street. She spots Kate about 200 metres away, walking briskly towards Vauxhall tube. She waits until Kate gets to the end of the road, turning right through the council estate housing, and then she follows, walking briskly but not too quickly. She trails her across the pedestrian crossing on Fentiman Road and into Vauxhall Park where Kate cuts across the grass. There are building works going on around the children’s playground. Bulldozers hulk over the tarmac like dinosaurs.

  At the exit from the park, Kate stops and checks her shoe. Marisa, several paces back, also comes to a halt. She pulls her hat further down over her ears. She is breathing heavily. Excitement twists in her chest. She hasn’t felt this energised in weeks.

  They get on the same tube but in different carriages. Marisa sits near the glass so that she can watch where Kate gets off. The intersecting window has been pulled down and she faces the breeze, grateful for its coolness under the warmth of her beanie.

  After four stops, Kate stands and holds on to a railing as the tube shudders into the station platform. Oxford Circus. Marisa steps onto the platform, zig-zagging in and out of the crowds, keeping sight of Kate’s bobbing head in the melee. Kate’s hair is shiny and freshly cut and she has tucked it behind one ear and it stays there, obediently, as if advertising itself to be particularly good hair.

  Beneath the beanie, Marisa’s forehead is sweating, her hair sticking to her scalp and frizzing at the ends. She hasn’t showered for a couple of days. Kate’s neatness seems an affront.

  Marisa stands to the right on the escalator, hunkering down behind a meaty-shouldered man in a high-vis jacket. Kate is standing a few steps ahead of her, but then she decides to walk the rest of the escalator, her hair swishing side to side, reliable as a metronome. Marisa can’t risk walking too. She’ll be noticed immediately if Kate decides to turn around.

  Instead, she stays on the escalator, feet planted wide because she notices now that she feels dizzy and off balance. She reaches out a hand, trying and failing to find something solid to cling on to.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  The woman behind her, a grandmotherly type carrying a rumpled Sainsbury’s bag, is looking at her with concern.

  ‘Yes, fine, thank you so much.’

  ‘You want to be careful. I remember that stage.’

  The woman points at Marisa’s stomach and when she looks down, she realises the pregnancy has started to show. Her jacket has flapped open and her tummy protrudes from the gap: a tiny, swelling mound.

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll feel better in the second trimester.’

  Marisa tries to smile. They’re at the top of the escalator now and the woman seems intent on making conversation.

  ‘Thank you, I should …’ She gestures towards the ticket barriers.

  ‘I used to be a midwife, you see.’

  Marisa nods.

  ‘Oh, how interesting! Well, anyway …’

  By the time she has shaken the woman off, Kate is nowhere to be seen. When Marisa emerges into the light of Oxford Circus, she squints and feels a leap of apprehension when she sees the familiar outline of Kate’s trench coat. She has crossed the road onto the other side of Regent Street. Marisa surges forwards, pushing people out of her way to make the crossing before the traffic lights change – ‘Oi, watch it!’ she hears one man shout angrily – but it’s no good. She watches from the kerb as the red turns to green and the cars and buses start streaming past. People crowd around her, jostling for space, and she sees Kate disappear into the busy London morning.

  The next few days follow a similar pattern. She gets a little bit further each time. On the third day, she trails Kate to an office block in Soho that has tinted glass and a reception area with a neon sign that spells out ‘Do What You Love’ in aggressively bright blue. By the following week, she has taken to spending the morning sitting in the cafe opposite, a healthy fast-food place that serves baked eggs in cardboard pots and small tubs of hummus. Their straws are paper, ringed red and white like candy canes. She checks her phone, sends the odd email. When she gets bored, she takes out a notebook and starts to write: observations, thoughts, anxieties. She finds the process cathartic. At midday, she waits to see if Kate will come out for lunch, but she never does, and by mid-afternoon, Marisa makes her way back home, dejected.

  Her work suffers. A backlog of uncompleted commissions piles up. Jake tells her she seems ‘distracted’ and asks if anything is wrong.

  ‘Not at all,’ Marisa says. ‘Just, you know. Pregnant.’

  The pregnancy becomes her excuse for everything: for early nights to avoid three-way conversations; for not having sex with Jake; for no longer cooking his favourite meals because raw food makes her feel nauseous. In this way, she effectively removes herself from the discomfiting atmosphere of the house when Kate is in it. Jake has been attentive ever since the incident in the kitchen, and she notices that he stands at the opposite end of the room from Kate when she is nearby, giving Marisa frequent reassuring smiles. Kate, by contrast, is quiet and calm in the evenings, reading her book or watching television with the volume turned down.

  ‘Is it OK if I watch something?’ she will say, settling herself into the kitchen sofa area and Marisa shrugs.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I guess I just thought … you know … you might prefer to watch something else,’ Kate will reply, biting the edge of a thumbnail.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK then,’ Kate will say, and there is always something passive-aggressive in her tone, as if it’s Marisa being the unreasonable one.

  She watches the interactions between Jake and Kate with morbid fascination. She tells herself she doesn’t want to find any further evidence of their closeness and yet, at the same time, she is compelled to do so. She wants her suspicions proved right, while at the same time knowing that this will undo her. It will smash everything she has ever wanted apart. It will destroy the only relationship she has ever been able to trust. But she keeps returning to it, a freshly formed scab that she starts to pick at with the tip of her fingernail, worrying the edges as if to test the strength of the rust-dried platelets, the web of fragile new skin.

  Perhaps I truly did imagine it, she tells herself. After all, it was dark, and she had just woken up. She is making a fuss out of nothing, winding herself up because of all the pregnancy hormones running amok inside her. Her insecurities are heightened. That’s all it is. Of course there’s nothing going on between Jake and Kate.

  But then again. There was the incident with the music – the two of them dancing like teenagers just one floor beneath where she was working. There was Kate’s easy intimacy with Jake, that strange possessiveness she’d had from her first moments in the house, the way she assumed this place was hers and had taken up space in it, leaving her belongings scattered around different rooms. She sees Kate brush the back of Jake’s hand as she walks past him in the corridor. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as Kate squeezes his arm when he brings her a cup of tea. They think she doesn’t notice but she does. Marisa lets them believe she doesn’t suspect. She allows time to pass until she can work out what to do next. She watches. She takes notes. It feels as if she is putting together a case and that, one day, she will be called upon to present it.

  At night, she stays up while Jake and Kate go to bed. She says she wants to get ahead with work before the baby comes, but instead she sits at her desk and writes furiously in her notebook. ‘I think he’s having an affair with Kate,’ she writes, over and over again on a single page until the paper is dense with scrawling and she feels better for having stated it so plainly. The idea, in its transference, has lost s
ome of its power to hurt her.

  During the third week of trailing Kate to work, there is an unexpected burst of sunshine. By the time she gets to Oxford Circus, Marisa is so hot that she takes off her beanie, sweeping back her hair so that it sits smooth against her scalp. She unbuttons the army jacket and ties it around her waist. Kate, as usual, has got off the tube before her. Marisa watches her walk up the escalator. She waits on the side as usual because she knows, by now, that this gives her just enough time to catch sight of Kate before she leaves the station.

  At the top of the escalator, Marisa steps onto the concourse. She walks towards the barriers, fumbling in her bag for her phone when someone grabs her by the arm, twisting it with such force that she spins on her heel and yelps with pain.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ she says, trying to shake herself free. When she lifts her head, she sees Kate, inches away from her face.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ Kate is saying, her mouth so close that Marisa feels spittle against her cheeks. Her breath is warm and smells of coffee. ‘Why the fuck are you following me?’

  Marisa is too shocked to think. She has become so used to her routine that she has forgotten to justify it to herself, let alone Kate. She has nothing to say to her, no way to explain.

  ‘I want you to stop, do you understand?’ Kate’s eyes are blazing, the skin around her lips puckered with anger. Kate is still gripping her arm, fingers pressing into the tender flesh above her wrist so tightly that Marisa imagines bruises beginning to form: pink then bluish then purple indentations.

  ‘It’s enough.’

  Acid rises in Marisa’s throat. She could see now how easy it would be to make it seem that she was the one overstepping boundaries rather than Kate. It was another trap, and there was no way out of it.

  ‘Yes, OK, yes,’ Marisa says quietly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re lucky I haven’t called the police.’

  ‘Please don’t do that.’

  Kate lets her hand drop. Marisa shakes her arm, letting the blood back in. When she looks back up, she sees that Kate’s face has softened. Her eyelids are powdered dark brown with shadow at the corners and she has perfectly applied kohl and mascara that is smooth of any clumps. Kate isn’t wearing lipstick. This morning, Marisa slicked her mouth with gloss and now strands of her hair are sticking to it. In comparison to Kate’s distilled, distant elegance, Marisa feels stupid and lumpen. The baby is heavy in her belly, twisting her own self out of shape.

  ‘Please don’t tell Jake,’ Marisa whispers, blinking back tears she had not known were there. Her voice constricts. She sounds whispering and pathetic.

  Kate sighs. Behind her, a uniformed man collecting for a military charity rattles his collection tin. The sound jangles, indistinguishable from the noise in Marisa’s head.

  ‘I won’t,’ Kate says, belting up her coat. She brushes down the coat fabric with the palm of each hand, as if ridding herself of dust. As if ridding herself of me, thinks Marisa. ‘I wouldn’t want to bother him with it.’

  Marisa bites her cheek until she tastes blood. Tears are replaced with fire in her veins. Fury draws itself back within her, a tightening sling ready to slam its shot into target. She nods, then turns and goes back down the escalator, unsure whether her anger or her humiliation will win out.

  But by the time she gets onto the tube, she knows. Anger.

  Anger always wins.

  11

  She doesn’t sleep that night. Again. The traffic noises, which she had never noticed before, have grown louder. She begins to think that sleep is an affectation, that she can function perfectly well without it. She wonders why she wasted all that time unconscious under the duvet when she could have been busy doing other stuff. Imagine the paintings she would have produced, the commissions she could have completed. She might have written a children’s book of her own. Her work might have been exhibited in the world’s best galleries. There would be champagne toasts to her on white-walled private view evenings where the chatter would be polite and murmured and she would glide easily past other people’s glances, knowing that they were talking about her and looking at her and marvelling at her talent and her success.

  ‘See,’ she would have said to her mother, standing in front of an abstract work of splattered reds and oranges, dripping across the canvas like butcher’s blood. ‘I am someone.’

  She spends the early hours at her desk in the study, waiting for the sun to rise over the garden so that the council estate stairwell would cast its morning shadow over the grass. She takes out a sheet of paper and tapes it down, but instead of painting as she had meant to, Marisa scrawls words across it in black Sharpie. She wants to experiment with a different form. She wants to use typography in her pictures, in the same way as she once saw an American conceptual artist cut out red and white strips of text and stick them across greyscale photographs of women with their eyes closed, of empty houses on dilapidated streets, of rough seas and glowering skies and prostitutes in urban doorways.

  She remembers her father had a girlfriend once – the first of many. It was a couple of years after her mother and sister had left and just before she was sent to boarding school. He brought her home late one night, when he must have thought Marisa was asleep. But she heard the car drawing up outside, the slam of the driver’s door and then the passenger’s, and then she heard the key in the lock, the clink of glasses in the kitchen and eventually the whispered footsteps leading upstairs, tracing a path across the landing.

  The smell of cigarette smoke. Her father’s gentle cough. His stumble as he reached the bedroom, which told her he was drunk.

  She heard them through the thin bedroom wall. An unfamiliar female giggle, bubbling and muffled from the other side of the plaster, and then her father’s steady bassline chuckle. What could the woman have said to make him laugh like that, Marisa thought, and why couldn’t she do the same? Why was he always so sad with Marisa, when he could be this happy with someone else?

  From underneath her duvet, she heard sighing and kissing, followed by the shuffling of bedsheets, the creak of a headboard, the low groans of adults trying to be quiet and failing, and then a high-pitched shriek and Marisa’s father shushing the shrieker, telling her he had a child next door and then more adult laughter.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she told herself, ‘it’s just a dream,’ and in this way, even though she knew it wasn’t a dream, Marisa managed to fall into an approximation of sleep. She was good at telling herself stories, and in the stories things always worked out better than in real life. The next morning, she got dressed in her school uniform and went downstairs for breakfast. Her father was sitting as usual at the pine table, the well-worn wood ringed with imprints of long-ago mugs, and he turned to her as she entered.

  ‘Marisa,’ he said, his voice formal. ‘Good morning, darling.’

  He was wearing a shirt and tie and a knitted cardigan waistcoat and it was this – the effort he had made to appear normal – that alerted her to the other presence in the kitchen. Marisa’s gaze turned towards the other end of the room and came to settle on an aggressively thin woman sitting on the red armchair by the radiator. She had fine dark hair, piled high on her head and held in place with a velvet scrunchie. Her face was angular, the skin pulled taut against prominent bones, and her mouth was masked with red lipstick. She was wearing a white silky blouse, with a bobbled bouclé jacket over the top – it was one of those jackets that looked like a cheap imitation of a designer item and the neckline was fraying, stray navy threads spreading across the woman’s collarbone like weeds.

  She was clasping a coffee in long pale fingers, hunched over the cup as if seeking out the weak plume of steam for warmth. Her head looked too big for the rest of her; her body as if it might shatter at any moment. The way she was sitting – legs crossed, spine curved, head jutting outwards – seemed braced for impact.

  ‘Hello, lovey,’
the woman said.

  ‘Marisa,’ her father said. He was standing now and the napkin that had been on his lap slid to the floor. ‘This is … um … well, this is my … friend, Jacqueline.’

  ‘Jackie, please!’ she said with a whoop of last night’s laughter. The white coffee cup was blotted with her lipstick. It was a coffee cup Marisa’s mother had used and it had a picture of a lion on the front. Marisa had not drunk from it since her mother had left. It had been preserved in the cupboard like a museum piece, waiting for the return of its rightful owner. Her father had never mentioned anything but she noticed that he, too, refused to take it out.

  ‘Hello,’ Marisa said, dipping her eyes so she didn’t have to look too long.

  Jackie put down her cup and moved towards her, opening her thin arms widely and Marisa realised, to her horror, that the woman was expecting physical contact.

  ‘I’m a hugger,’ Jackie said, emitting a throaty smoker’s laugh. ‘Come here, darling.’

  There was no escape. It felt like hugging a rotary clothesline.

  ‘There, there,’ Jackie was saying, patting Marisa’s back. ‘I’ll be seeing a lot more of you, I should think.’

  With her head pressed against the cloying patchouli scent of Jackie’s clavicle, Marisa had the strangest sensation that the woman was winking at her father. She pulled away from the embrace and sat down at the table, cheeks burning. Her father had stayed standing. His face was slack. He seemed uncomprehending, as if the world had begun spinning at a speed he could no longer understand.