But I would. And Jodi was bound to notice, and say something that sounded innocuous, but which I would brood over for days after. ‘Will they need lunch?’
‘It’s after two, I don’t think they’ll expect it. Cup of tea, bit of cake on the lawn, how about it? I’ll hold the fort while you pop out.’
‘But . . .’
‘Ali.’ Mike spun me around, hands on my shoulders, forcing eye contact. ‘Look, there’s no point in doing this if you don’t enjoy it. Is there? So come on, love, take a chill pill, as Cassie would say.’
‘She’d rather die than say something so naff.’
‘Yes, because “naff” is such cutting-edge slang.’
I felt a small ease of the knot in my stomach as we drew apart, our hands moving to tidy and wipe and organise in a well-practised dance. He was right. They were our friends, they wouldn’t expect perfection. It would all be fine.
Outside, I heard the sound of a car on gravel. She was here.
Chapter Two
‘So what happened with—’
‘My awful boss? Still awful. Last week he said we’ll all have to reapply for our own jobs!’
‘No way, that’s outrageous. I’m sure that’s illegal, isn’t it, Mike? Mike?’
He shook his head, like a dog clearing itself of rain. ‘What are you on now? I can’t keep up. I’d need to record the conversation and play it back at normal speed.’
People had always said that about Karen and me, falling away from our chatter, puzzled at how we leapt from topic to topic like monkeys in trees, sometimes returning to a conversation we’d left pinned an hour ago, always seamless. I smiled at her over the table, thinking how young she looked in her tight jeans and vest top, identical to Cassie’s. I was wearing a flowery Joules dress. Frumpy. Mum-like, even though it was Karen who’d been a mother first, at just twenty-five.
Karen rolled her eyes at Mike. ‘We’ve got a lot to say to each other, that’s all.’ Now she lived in Birmingham and we were in Kent, I didn’t see her as often as I’d like, and sometimes the need to talk to her built up inside me like a pressure hose, only to explode when we finally met. And I had to leave in – I checked my watch – five minutes. Bollocks.
‘It’s beautiful here, guys. You’re so lucky.’ Karen gazed round at the garden. What the estate agent called mature and developed, which had made Mike snicker, it was the main reason I’d lobbied so hard for this place. The back of the house, a late-Victorian red-brick, faced right into the woods, and the access lane from the front only went past three other houses. It was like being in the country, except the shops of Bishopsdean were only ten minutes away if you cut through the woods. Today, the garden was full of lavender and wild garlic and birds hidden in the trees, little statues poking out from nooks, their faces crumbled by rain. I averted my eyes from the pile of garden waste behind the shed – Andrej, our gardener, had cancelled on us the week before. Family emergency in Krakow. Never mind that. It was amazing that we had a gardener at all. We were lucky. We’d been here only six months and I still had odd moments of shivering pleasure, thinking – I live here. This is mine.
‘Do you do all this, Mikey?’ Karen asked, lifting a macaron to her hot-pink lips.
I laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right. Mike hasn’t been near a lawnmower since 1998. Andrej does it – totally dreamy Polish guy.’
‘I would if I had time,’ Mike said sadly. ‘But when would I get that?’
‘Still keeping you busy then?’
‘You’ve no idea.’ Mike’s law firm had been bought out by Americans earlier in the year, and they expected him in the office late for New York calls and early for Japan. Most days he didn’t get off his commuter train until nine.
Karen turned to me. ‘Well, maybe Ali can keep you now she’s doing so well. Saw you in Good Housekeeping this month! Very cool.’
‘Oh, thanks.’ A piece on sexting and checking your teenager’s phone. I said I’d never look at Cassie’s, because it would destroy the trust between us. There’d been a lot of comments online, some calling me deluded and a bad mother. I told myself any buzz was good.
‘How did Cass feel about it, being in the magazine?’
I looked over to where Cassie and Jake swayed in the swing seat, side by side. Her long bare legs were hooked over the side. Jake had come dressed all in black. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black trainers. Black curtains of hair over his face. It was hard to picture the sweet little boy he’d been, so anxious to please, always grabbing me round my legs when I looked after him while Karen was at work. But that was years ago, when we lived within streets of each other in London. Now, we were so far apart. When he’d arrived, I’d gone to hug him and he’d dodged me, and I scolded myself for how bad it felt. Jake was seventeen, with no dad, and clearly in the throes of teenage angst. He’d come out of it. ‘Oh, she didn’t mind. She knows it’s an important issue.’ The truth was, I’d been afraid to ask what she thought. These days, she was opaque to me – unreadable.
‘We taped you off Channel 4 too. Well, with the box, you know. You really stood up to that little toerag.’
‘Someone has to. It’s disgusting, the way he talks. Rape jokes, in 2018!’
‘Here she goes,’ said Mike. ‘Isn’t there something to be said for free speech, especially in comedy? We don’t live in Soviet Russia.’
‘She’s done really well,’ said Karen gently. ‘Don’t be a dick about it, Mikey. Leave that devil’s advocate shtick to Callum.’
‘I know, I know. We’re very proud of her.’ He squeezed my leg under the table. ‘She’s turned that charity around as well. They were going to close the refuge before Ali joined the board.’
‘Oh bugger, that reminds me. I have to go – sorry, Kar. I did say I had this meeting?’ I was sure I had, so I didn’t know why she’d arrived so early.
She flapped her hands at me. ‘Go, go. We’ll be fine here.’
‘You’re sure?’ I stood up, but something held me at the chipped wooden table, the wrought-iron chairs we’d picked up in an antiques yard, the plate of pastel-coloured cakes and the floral-printed cups and teapot. It was moments like this I’d pictured when I imagined having a proper house, not the cramped terrace we’d been bulging out of for the past ten years. Crockery. Nice furniture. Friends to admire it all. And of course Karen, my best friend for twenty-five years. I knew that if I didn’t go, I could sit and talk to her until it got dark, and the children went unfed, the work forgotten.
‘I think we can manage.’ Mike leaned forward and poured more tea for Karen out of the vintage china pot. It leaked, but it was such a pretty colour, yellow with blue flowers on it. For a moment, I considered cancelling, speaking to Vix on the phone instead, but this was a big deal. It was my job, albeit unpaid, and if I didn’t do it, I’d just be a housewife who dabbled in journalism between dentist appointments and Sainsbury’s trips.
‘You know it’s important, or I wouldn’t . . . I’m sorry.’
She put her sunglasses – cheap off-brand ones that all the same made her look like a film star – down over her nose and flipped her long dark hair, the same length as when we were students, over her shoulder. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine. We were early anyway. Jakey just wanted to see Cass.’
I looked over at them again. Deep in conversation, the way Karen and I used to be, sitting in a coffee shop for four or five hours and never stopping. ‘We should get them together more often.’ But it was such a trek to Birmingham, and also, it was Birmingham. I invited Karen down all the time but she always pleaded work. I suspected she sometimes couldn’t afford the fare. ‘Does Jake have a girlfriend, anything like that?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing. I’m hoping he’s one of those boys that blossom at uni. Like you, Mikey.’
‘Cheek! I was born blossoming.’
‘Cassie has this boyfriend,’ I said. ‘Aaron. I’m not sure about him. His mother is the most God-awful snob.’
‘Should get on with Jodi then,’ Karen smiled,
and I smiled too, feeling guilt mingle with relief as our feet once again found the common ground between us. She was still my best friend, even if we didn’t see each other much, even if our lives had diverged. Even if I had this house now, which also gave me prickles of guilt now I saw it through her eyes, the lavishness of all this space, the Victorian brickwork and stained glass. Despite all that, time hadn’t come between us. And I was proud of that, of keeping our friendship, of saving it from that odd cooling we’d had in the months after university. When the six of us had brushed against something dark, and come away intact.
I turned at the door and looked out. Karen and Mike, leaning across the table to each other, laughing about something, and in the swing seat, his daughter and her son, so wrapped up in each other they didn’t even notice me leave. Hindsight is deadly. If I’d known then what was already happening, what would so soon engulf us, I might have taken a few more moments to stand there in the sun, and drink in all the things I was about to lose. But I didn’t, and so I left.
Chapter Three
‘Tell me one more time what happened.’
Despite the problem that had brought me to the police station on such a sunny day, I sort of liked myself in this role. Ali Morris, Chair of Bishopsdean Women’s Refuge. A title, a purpose, after years of just being Mum, Mrs Morris, Mike’s wife.
Vix, the charity’s Director, had met me at the station, in a room they let us use at moments such as this, which happened more often than you’d like to think. She was a slight woman of no more than thirty, with cropped black hair and dark-rimmed glasses. The kind of person you’d expect to find living in Berlin or somewhere, not Bishopsdean. I’d never asked what her story was, because in this kind of organisation they’re rarely easy to tell, or hear. We’d gone over and over the incident, figuring out what to do in response.
‘He came to the refuge about three last night. Julie swears she didn’t tell him where it was but I’m not sure I believe her. He broke the kitchen window and got in, found Julie in her room with the kids, got her by the throat against the wall.’
‘The kids saw?’
Vix just nodded. ‘One of the other women pressed the alarm and the police came. He had a knife. He – I think he was planning to use it.’
Whatever way we spun it, it was bad. ‘You’ve got a press statement drafted?’
She nodded again, sliding over a piece of paper. Vix used to work in PR, so she was good at this type of thing. I thought, sometimes, privately, she wasn’t so good at the empathy side of it all. She had a tendency to stick to rules, never allowing for the grey areas. The fact that the women usually loved the men they were fleeing from. I understood that, so I tried to make up for her.
The statement hit all the right notes. Always risky running a women’s refuge, isolated incident, police response praised, restraining order filed. ‘So what do you think?’
‘I think it’s a one-off. The police say they’ll request a tag for him this time.’
So it was decided: we wouldn’t be moving the refuge. It was a big decision, and costly as hell, but I felt uneasy all the same. If Paul Dean had found it, maybe other men would too. The other men the women there were hiding from. It was my call, ultimately, my responsibility. I nodded. ‘Let’s table a discussion for the next board meeting. Can I see Julie?’
‘Don’t you have that big reunion thing this weekend?’ We were standing up, Vix straightening her grey shift dress. I felt bloated and mumsy in my florals. Unprofessional. I should have changed.
‘Just two minutes? Please.’
Julie was in another room, a nicer one with a sofa and a toy-box. Her two kids played on the floor with the resignation of children who have learned to wait around in official spaces. The older one was pretending to read a picture book to the baby. ‘Julie. I’m Ali, the Chair of the charity. I’m so sorry for what happened.’ I saw Vix flash me a look – perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, perhaps that suggested we’d done something wrong.
Julie had been crying, her make-up clumped round her eyes. ‘I can’t go back there. It’s not safe.’
‘I know. We’ll see about getting you to a refuge in another town.’
‘I swear to God I never told him. Maybe he asked Kaylee or something, worked it out.’
I could see from Vix’s carefully blank look that she highly doubted a three-year-old would let an address slip, but I just nodded. ‘We’ll get this sorted, Julie. God, you poor thing.’ On impulse, and feeling Vix’s disapproval, I gave Julie a hug, feeling the bones of her spine under her hoody, smelling her – stale fags and fear. She flinched, and I saw the ring of bruises on her throat, a necklace of hurt. There were memories surfacing in my head – wearing a polo neck on the hottest day of summer, rubbing panstick on to tender skin – but I pushed them away.
‘You shoot off, Ali,’ said Vix, following me to the door. ‘I’m sure you have cooking to finish.’ A little pointed, or did I imagine it? I was over-sensitive about having been out of work for so long, I knew. Sometimes I saw slights that weren’t there.
So I went, back to my tagine and candles, leaving Julie and her kids to cope as best they could with the fact that their father, her husband, had tried to hurt her. In the car, heading back through town in the sunshine, tense again as I worried about the weekend – we hadn’t been together, the six of us, for over twenty years – I caught myself and remembered to feel grateful. This wasn’t my life any more – spending a hot Saturday in the stale air of a police station, dependent on professional kindness. I’d worked hard so it wouldn’t be, and if I could help women like Julie get away from it too, it eased some of my feelings of guilt. As I drove back home, I was trying to be thankful for my life. It was mine, whether I deserved it or not.
Chapter Four
When I reached the house, I could see there was already a people-carrier in the drive behind Mike’s BMW. Callum and Jodi were just arriving, unpacking cases and raffia bags with flowers and Tupperware poking out of them. I parked my Kia and dashed out. ‘Sorry! Sorry, work emergency. I’m here now.’
Callum was also wearing shorts and a polo shirt, though they were Ralph Lauren. ‘Work?’ He stretched out his arms and I hugged him, feeling his solidity and strength. ‘You’ve gone and got yourself a Saturday job, Al? What does Mike think about that? Mike who appears to be wearing some kind of orange jersey? Gone colour blind, mate?’
I saw Mike was annoyed. ‘It’s red, you divvy. Speaking of colour blind.’
I steered the conversation back. ‘It’s not work as such. You know I’m on the board of that charity.’ Although I was working too, as a journalist, so I didn’t know why I was downplaying it. And what business was it of Mike’s?
Jodi nudged him. She was so enormous under her maternity smock (some kind of homespun broderie anglaise thing I thought was from The White Company, in shocking contrast to the tailored suits she normally wore) I could hardly reach her, so we air-kissed. She looked tired and pale, her limp fair hair scraped back. ‘You do know, Cal. We watched her on the news, remember?’
‘Of course. You ate that kid for breakfast.’
‘That “kid” is almost thirty, and a rape apologist,’ I retorted. Mike caught my eye. This was just Callum’s way. His ‘top bantz’ hadn’t changed since our university days, and working in corporate law seemed to make him worse. I reminded myself of his many kindnesses, the countless times he’d bought me drinks at college, waving away payment, knowing I was usually short. The thoughtful presents on every one of the kids’ birthdays, that I had at first mistakenly thought were Jodi’s work. ‘Come in, come in. We’re going to be a bit squashed up, I’m afraid.’
I felt a small pang at the way Jodi was standing, her hand on the curve of her back. So many years since that had been me. She said, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine. I’m so tired at the minute I drop right off. Finally I get what you and Karen were always on about! Where is she?’
‘Getting changed,’ Mike said, taking one of the bags. ‘What have y
ou brought us, Jod?’
‘Just a few bits. You know how it is, nesting like crazy, getting ready for this bub.’ The ‘bub’ set my teeth on edge, as did the fact she’d turned up with her own food – did she not trust me to cook? – but I reminded myself it had taken them fifteen long years and three ruinous IVF cycles, just to get to this point.
‘You look great,’ I told her. ‘Glowing and all those clichés.’
‘By the size of her, she must be having triplets,’ said Callum, but he slid his arm around her, protective. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Mikey-boy. What’s it worth – half a mill?’
We moved into the kitchen, cool and dark after the dazzling weight of the sun. ‘Place up the lane went for 800k last year,’ said Mike, and I saw the pleasure it gave him, to be able to speak those words so casually. He’d worked hard for this life too – all those late nights, coming in exhausted, not seeing the kids from one end of the week to the other.
‘Jesus,’ said Callum. ‘And here we are stuck in a semi in Pimlico. Ah, Cassie my dear, hello.’ Cassie had sloped in from the living room, and I wished fleetingly I’d thought to speak to her about what she was wearing. ‘Looking more like your mum every year. Thank God you didn’t inherit your old dad’s looks, eh?’
‘Hi Callum,’ she said nonchalantly. She’d dropped the ‘uncle’, I noticed. ‘Hi Jodi. Wow! When are you due?’
‘A month, or so they say. I don’t think I can get any bigger.’ Jodi gave a small laugh.
Mike already had the fridge open. ‘Beer, Cal? Jodi – I guess no wine for you?’
‘Just water, please,’ she said, in an exhausted way.
‘Can I have some wine?’ said Cassie, in a languid manner that suggested she drank all the time. For all I knew, she did.
Mike met my eyes for a moment. He shrugged; always more easy-going than me. I was too tired to have the discussion. ‘One glass.’
Mike poured one out for her. ‘Drink it slowly, Cass. If you like that, and you’re sensible, maybe one day I’ll let you taste the really special stuff I have hidden far away from your Uncle Callum’s greedy grasp.’ She smiled at him, her shoulders relaxing into his arm. If I’d said that about being sensible, she’d have flounced out of the room.
What You Did Page 2