The Second Wife

by Rebecca Fleet

  ALEX

  SEPTEMBER 2017

  The blue curtains are pulled round the little cubicle where Jade’s bed stands, and as I approach I can hear muffled sobbing, an unsteady, relentless sound. Jade is lying awkwardly on her side, her face turned and pressed into the pillow. Her shoulders are shaking with the effort of repressing her misery, and I’m briefly pulled back to that time nine years ago—the five-year-old crying for her mother. I don’t remember having seen her quite like this since those days.

  Sitting down beside the bed, I reach across and gently place the flat of my hand on the back of her neck, stroking it. There’s no jolt of surprise. She knows I’m there, but it takes at least another minute for her to lift her face from the pillow and glance in my direction, her eyes red and sore from crying. I can tell from her expression that she can’t quite make up her mind whether she wants to pull me close or push me away. It’s a conflict I’ve seen played out in her so many times this past year or so, since the explosion of hormones that has hit her. I move my hand down to her shoulder and squeeze it lightly, trying to transmit a signal. “Sweetheart,” I say, “what’s wrong?”

  She is silent, frowning ferociously, trying not to start crying again. “Is it the fire?” I try. “Or something to do with what we were talking about last time? About the man?” I’m guiltily aware of having done exactly what I didn’t want to do—of having pushed her too fast, tried to get her to relive things that she isn’t yet ready for.

  Jade shakes her head, her breath expelling in a long, shaky sigh. “You wouldn’t get it,” she says eventually. “You’d say I’m being stupid, so there’s no point.”

  “I wouldn’t.” I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever dismissed her feelings like that, or if this is just casual teenage assumption. I don’t think I’ve ever called her stupid. “Whatever it is, it’s obviously important to you. And that makes it important to me.”

  Jade rolls her eyes faintly, but I can tell she’s thawing. “You say that,” she says, “but . . .” All of a sudden she breaks off, her eyes darting to where her mobile is briskly vibrating on her bedside table. She makes a lunge for it, but she’s forgotten her injuries, and she stops herself with a wince of pain. By the time she’s collected herself and reached across more cautiously, I’ve had time to look at the lit-up screen and see the start of the message that is revealed. The name at the top is Jaxon, and the message beneath is in almost indecipherable text speak: Alrite babe im sorry I no u wuldnt lie 2 me I just scared ur goin . . . I can’t read the rest of the message, but it’s enough.

  “Jade,” I say steadily, “who on earth is this messaging you?”

  She moves restlessly and frowns again, and for a moment I think she’s going to swing toward defiance, but in the end she just droops her head down to her chest and rubs her eyes. She doesn’t have the stomach for a fight.

  “Just this boy,” she says, trying to sound offhand and failing miserably. “We’ve been chatting for a few weeks online and, well, you know. We were going to meet up. But when I told him about the fire and that I was in the hospital he didn’t believe me—he thought I was lying because I didn’t want to meet him after all.”

  I wait, wondering if there’s going to be an explosive twist in the tale, but it seems she’s finished. I can barely credit a few unkind words from a boy she barely knows with the power to trigger the outburst I’ve just witnessed, but I force myself to remember how it is for her, at her age—how these early infatuations can swell and suffocate everything else out. But I thought we had another couple of years, at least. “Jade,” I say again, struggling to keep my voice level. “You’re fourteen. Fourteen. I know that’s not a baby, but it’s also far too young to be talking to strangers on social media and agreeing to meet up with them. I mean—you don’t even know anything about this boy. Only what he’s told you. You don’t even know what he looks like. I know you think you do,” I continue, raising my voice as she opens her mouth to contradict me, “but in reality, you have no idea. Anyone can take a photo of a good-looking teenage boy off the internet. He could be . . .”

  I stop, unsure of how much I want to say. I’ve always found it difficult, trying to tread this line between instilling confidence and paranoia. I don’t want my daughter to be a shrinking violet, jumping at her own shadow, and there’s some sentimental part of me that still hates the idea of sullying her innocent acceptance of the world as a warm and cozy place, though some might say that that ship sailed awhile ago. But safety trumps sentiment. The thought of some sixty-year-old pervert squinting lasciviously at a screen and messaging my daughter is enough to make up my mind. “He could be anyone,” I say decisively.

  “You don’t understand,” she says. Her lips part as if she might say more, but in the end she just shoots me a sideways glance that looks thoughtful, a little calculating even.

  “I think I do,” I say, “and I don’t like it. I don’t know anything about this boy. Maybe, if he wanted to meet me . . .”

  “You?” she asks, her eyes round and aghast. “That’s—that’s not—I can’t invite a boy to meet my dad for our first date.”

  “Well, in that case, you should probably stop messaging him entirely.” I glance at the phone again, now in her hand, but she’s angled the screen protectively away from me. “I mean, for God’s sake. Jaxon? It’s the sort of name a middle-aged man would choose because he thought it sounded cool. I’m pretty sure it’s fake.”

  “Dad,” Jade mutters under her breath, shaking her head. I can’t tell if I’ve rattled her or not. “No one does that.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not true.” For an instant, I’m tempted to say what I’m really thinking. Natalie, sitting huddled opposite me on the rocks, her lips moving into the shape of that new and unfamiliar name. Rachel. It hits as if for the first time, sending a tremor of unreality shooting down my spine. How different is this, really? How much difference does it make that I’m married to this woman, sharing my life with her, if the bedrock deception is the same?

  But of course it’s all a question of motive. “I mean it,” I say firmly. “It just isn’t safe, particularly in light of what you told me this morning.” I pause, thinking about the unpleasant resonance in what I’ve just said. My daughter has told me that there’s a strange man hanging around, someone she’s seen several times. And now there’s this “boy” worming his way into her messages, trying to get close. Is this just the way things are now—potential danger curling out like smoke from every corner? Or is this more than coincidence?

  Jade raises her eyes to mine, and I can see that she’s got there at the same time as I have. “Dad, you’re wrong about this, I promise,” she says. “And besides, that wouldn’t make any sense! That man’s never really come anywhere near me, not until the other night. If he wanted to talk to me then he could just do it. Why would he waste his time trying to meet up with me when he already knows who I am and where I live?”

  “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “I suppose, if he wanted to catch you off guard . . .” I stop myself. Speculating about potential gruesome scenarios is only going to frighten her. “You need to be sensible about this, Jade,” I say.

  “I am sensible,” she says a little grumpily.

  “So take it slowly. Stop messaging this boy for a bit, and give what I’ve said some thought. OK? Will you?” I take a breath, aware I’m pressing the button on the teenage urge to kick back and defy. But she’s sucking on her lower lip, her eyes flicking back and forth as she thinks, and after a few seconds she shrugs and nods.

  “’Kay,” she says. As monosyllables go, it’s about as comforting as I’m going to get right now. She frowns, and for a moment I think she’s going to say something else, but in the end she just reaches her arms out silently, dropping her gaze from mine as if she’s almost ashamed to be asking for this comfort. I put my own arms around her and hug her to me tightly, hoping that applying this pressure will som
ehow transmit the complex cocktail of emotions inside me: love, protectiveness, warning, chastisement, and all the rest.

  * * *

  • • •

  NATALIE AND I have dinner downstairs at the hotel restaurant, and drink a couple of bottles of wine between us in the bar afterward, faster than we usually do. In another situation, I would look at my wife in the flattering candlelight across the table, the shadows playing over the inscrutable angles of her face, and be thinking about nothing but what I saw. I might even slip my hand to her knee and let it ride up under the silk fabric of her skirt, suggest we go back to the room for an early night. As it is, she’s the one who suggests it, and I can see from the sudden droop of her eyelids that it’s only sleep she’s considering.

  I follow her silently back up the stairs and lie down on the bed, watching her strip off her clothes in front of the half-open window with the lights from the pier shining dimly through the glass and illuminating her outline. I can smell the perfume she often wears, the one that always makes me think of cut grass and rain. If I closed my eyes and she came to me in the dark, I’d know her by that scent. Not just by the pure smell of it—I’ve come across it in shops before and it’s never been the same—but by the way it reacts with her skin. It’s this kind of thing that tricks you and makes you think you know someone, I think suddenly. It’s easy to confuse familiarity with knowledge.

  When she’s drifted into sleep beside me, I try to do the same, but I can’t relax. It strikes me that what I want more right now is to be alone. It’s not that I don’t want to be close to her, exactly. More that I want to feel like I have a choice.

  It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I start thinking about going to the house. It’s not a pleasant place to spend time right now, but nonetheless there’s a kind of homing instinct boomeranging me back. And I’m also thinking of my laptop. I’ll need it to keep an eye on things at work from afar, but it could be useful for more than that. My conversations with Natalie have been frustrating in the extreme. She’s told me almost nothing about what happened in her past, but I have a nasty feeling that it was something big. If she won’t tell me anything more for now, then I can at least try to use the very little I’ve got to find out more online. It’s more than simple curiosity—it concerns me and Jade, too. It’s not right for Natalie to keep me at arm’s length, no matter how difficult it is for her.

  I know from experience that I could spend hours lying here, fighting this disconnect between the exhausted heaviness of my limbs and the swift weightless whirring of my thoughts. Nothing good will come of it. I could walk to the house in thirty minutes, and be back here in an hour or so. Once I’ve made up my mind I climb out of bed and dress again quietly in the dark. Slipping one of the room keys into my pocket, I go softly to the door and ease it open, a shaft of light from the hallway filtering through. Natalie stirs, her lips moving lazily in an inaudible whisper, but then she settles back against the pillow and is still again, and I leave the room and close the door silently behind me. I hurry down the stairs to the ground floor, then step out to the street. I feel a fleeting stab of guilt as I consider the possibility of Natalie waking up while I’m gone, but I remember the screwed-up note she left me yesterday; she didn’t seem to care too much if I worried about her absence.

  Minutes later I’m descending the hill and the house comes into view. I’m struck again by the starkness of its blackened walls, a Halloween nightmare against the orange gleam of the streetlights. I duck under the red-and-white tape, and I register how cool and empty the air inside is, now that it’s abandoned. I flick the hallway switch on instinct, feeling stupid an instant later.

  Instead, I pull my mobile from my pocket and activate the flashlight, moving forward into the lounge. The tiny beam of light bounces dimly off the walls, throwing the room’s cracks and crevices temporarily into relief. It reminds me of something, and it takes me a few moments to realize that it’s straight out of a TV drama: the police entering a crime scene, scanning and excavating, uncovering some hideously mutilated corpse.

  “Get a grip, you prat,” I say out loud. Now that I am here, the homing instinct that seemed so strong when I was lying in the room at the hotel seems misplaced. This isn’t home any more—it’s a grotesque parody, incapable of offering the kind of comfort I need.

  I go to our bedroom, in search of my laptop, and sure enough I find it tucked under the foot of the bed. Sitting cross-legged, I hold my breath as I press the power button, and exhale in relief when it sparks to life. I click on the browser icon at the base of the screen. The wi-fi here doesn’t work any longer, but when I open the available connections I see the login for the pub down the road, for which I’m still in range, so I click connect and open up the search engine. I start off vaguely, hopelessly. I enter the names Rachel and Sadie, along with the word “sisters,” which yields nothing but a few amateur porn sites. I add the name of the man in the photograph that Natalie let slip, trying a few different spellings: Cas, Kaz, Kas. Still there’s nothing. I scroll through pages of search results, my eyes starting to glaze over, the words fuzzing on the screen.

  And then I remember another detail. A nightclub, Natalie had said. She had told me that the man ran a local club—although I realize that I have no idea where “local” might be, and it’s partly this that is making this task so difficult. Something is nagging at the back of my mind, and I pull the photo from my pocket, angling it up to the light of the screen. There’s a mirror running along the length of the wall behind the bar where Kas and Sadie are sitting, and reflected in it I can see a logo, painted across the opposite wall. The letters are blurred and in mirror image, but I can just about make them out: Kaspar’s.

  Galvanized, I search again. At first it seems there’s nothing new, but as I’m scanning another interminable page of results, I see a YouTube link. The name of the video is “Promo—Blackout Club (ex-Kaspar’s).”

  I click on the link and play the video. It’s a pretty standard club promotion piece: shots of a darkly spotlit dance floor against a thumping beat, gyrating scantily clad dancers, rows of gleaming bottles behind the bar, and overblown slogans flashing in luminous letters: YOUR NEXT BIG NIGHT OUT. CAMDEN’S NUMBER ONE DESTINATION. The description beneath the video reads, “7 days a week—R&B, house, underground trance nights—on the site of infamous 90’s club Kaspar’s.” I read it a couple of times, trying to wrench some significance from it, but although I feel I’m getting closer to something, it doesn’t actually take me much further forward.

  Scrolling down, I see that there are ninety-eight comments beneath the video. Most of them are inane, half-baked verdicts on the club: “bangin,” “had sick night there Friday,” “fuckin shite dont bother.” But toward the bottom there’s a comment written about eighteen months ago from a user called LeonR: anyone know what happened to KK??

  A little message below tells me that there are five replies. Quickly, I click to display them.

  Jaz: still banged up mate

  LeonR: where he at?

  Jaz: belmarsh i think

  DJW: he aint getting out anytime soon mate lol. Those were the days tho the club was quality back then

  LeonR: thx

  Once again, it doesn’t prove anything. Natalie didn’t tell me Kas’s surname, but there’s a sudden tightness in my throat, a slipperiness on my palms that tells me I’m on the right track. Returning to the search engine, I type in “Kaspar’s Camden.” There’s surprisingly little—a defunct website that now simply states the domain name is up for sale, a couple of old and inconsequential forum comments—but I find a short, cryptic article announcing the club’s closure in the year 2000 on behalf of the club’s owner, Kaspar Kashani.

  KK. There’s no photograph, but it all fits. If what I’ve seen on the YouTube link is right, then Kas is in prison, and it sounds as if he’s been there for a long time. I have no idea if Natalie knows this, or if it’s linked in any w
ay to her own past. I could ask, but something tells me that she might shut up like a clam, and I’m not sure I want to risk pushing her too fast.

  Something brings me out of my reverie then, snaps my attention away from the lit-up screen to the darkness of the room around me. I’m on red alert. Listening. There are always noises in an old house: pipes whistling, floorboards expanding and contracting. The house talking to itself, we used to call it. But crouching here in the dark with the wreckage of a half-destroyed home around me, the cutesy turn of phrase doesn’t feel so appropriate anymore.

  I listen harder, straining my ears. There’s a creaking, yes, but it doesn’t sound like the familiar, internal readjustment of the foundation. It’s slower, more deliberate. Like footsteps across the floor below, not seeking to advertise themselves, but not tiptoeing either. An unhurried patrol, back and forth and back again.

  As silently as I can, I close the laptop, tuck it under my arm, and stand up. I creep toward the bedroom doorway, still trying to determine exactly what it is I’m hearing. There’s a buzzing in my ears, the start-up of panic, and it makes it even harder to be sure. For a full ten seconds it seems there’s nothing. I begin to relax, already chastising myself, and then it comes again: another beat of pressure, like a tap or a knock against floorboards, and then a slow scrape that could be the sound of something being dragged across a table or shelf. A few seconds later, a muffled clatter, as if some light object might have fallen to the floor.

  Drawing in breath painfully, I’m acutely aware of just how stupid I’ve been—coming to an unsecured house after dark, a place that I already know has been under threat. It occurs to me that if I died here tonight, my last coherent thought would be that I was a fucking fool. Peering down into the chasm of the hallway below, I try to think. If I stay here, then whoever is downstairs is likely to come up eventually, and then I’ll be trapped without an escape route. And the best-case scenario—the most likely one—is that this is some common or garden burglar, or even a squatter, looking for a sheltered place to spend the night. If that’s the case, then they’ll be easily scared off, and I have the advantage of surprise.