by Alice Feeney
I play on the first machine for so long that my finger starts to feel sore from pressing the buttons, but then three lemons appear in a row and lots of money comes out the bottom, just like John said it would. He says the machine works best during the day if we empty all the money out of it at night, so perhaps that’s why I have to play it. When I win, it makes a big crashing sound that seems to go on forever. I jump off the black leather stool and slide it across to Pac-Man, before climbing back up again. I play ten times so that my name, the new one, fills the leaderboard.
Then I hear Maggie’s EastEnders program starting up in the flat, and she shouts down the stairs, “Dinner is ready in five minutes and you need to clean the hamster cage out first, like I told you.”
I had forgotten about Cheeks. He does the same thing every day: eats, sleeps, and runs in circles. I don’t know why Maggie hates him so much, but I’m hoping her TV program will cheer her up a little bit. I can smell the Deep Fat Fryer, so I know we’re having chips. We have chips all the time now, with everything. Eggs and chips, sausage and chips, burgers and chips, cheese and chips. On Sundays we have chips with Bisto gravy on top, that’s my favorite! I like eating chips every day, but I just got to Level 5 for the first time on Pac-Man, so I ignore Maggie for a little while.
When I hear the EastEnders music again, I realize that her program must have finished. I was so busy playing on the machine that I forgot all about going upstairs for my dinner. I hope Maggie isn’t mad with me. I run up the stairs and into the kitchen; the Deep Fat Fryer is still on, so maybe I’m not too late.
“There you are.” Maggie stands in the doorway. Her face looks strange, I don’t think I like it. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Really? Because I called you half an hour ago and you ignored me.”
She steps forward and I take a step back.
“Dinner has all gone, I’m afraid. No chips for you tonight, Baby Girl. I’m cooking something else now. Something special. You want to see?”
I don’t think that I do.
I turn and try to leave the kitchen, but she grabs me, lifts me up with one hand, and opens the lid of the fryer with the other.
The oil is hot and I can see something bubbling on top.
I scream when I see what it is.
I start to cry and try to look away, but she holds my chin with her hand, forcing me to watch.
Then she whispers in my ear, “Poor Cheeks. Never mind, I’m sure he’s running in circles somewhere in hamster heaven. You don’t need anyone except me, Aimee. It’s a lesson you really should have learned by now. Next time I tell you to do something, I suggest you do it.”
Thirty-six
London, 2017
People say we can be anyone we want to be in life.
That’s a lie.
The truth is, we can be anyone we believe we can be. There’s a big difference.
If I believe I am Aimee Sinclair, then I am.
If I believe I am an actress, then I am.
If I believe I am loved, then I am.
Destroy the belief, destroy the reality it gave birth to.
I’m starting to think maybe my marriage was little more than a lie. I find myself wandering around central London with no memory of how I got here. For a moment, I consider the possibility that the amnesia diagnosis all those years ago was correct, and that I’ve been kidding myself all this time, thinking that I could remember everything that has ever happened to me, and everything that I’ve done, but then I manage to shake the thought. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.
I walk and I think and I try and fail to make sense of everything that has happened over the past few days. I don’t know where to go, or who to turn to, and the realization that there is nobody I feel that I can trust at all makes everything seem even worse than it already is.
Ben can’t be dead, because I don’t believe it.
The unspoken thoughts rattle around inside my head, bouncing off the walls of my mind, looking for a way out. But there is no way out. Not this time. I think about the tide of hate I’ve had to swim against for the last few months. I think about what Ben did to me that night, and I think about my gun not being where I normally keep it, hidden beneath our bed. For the first time since this whole nightmare began, I sincerely start to doubt myself and accept that my grip on reality seems a little less firm than it used to.
Surely I’d know if my husband was really dead?
Surely I would have felt something?
Maybe not.
I feel as if I’ve been put in slow motion, and when I look around at all the people rushing by, everyone seems to be in such a desperate hurry. Most of them are too busy staring at their phones to be able to see where they are going, or where they have been. I find myself standing outside the TBN office where Ben works, without remembering the journey here. The sight of the place takes me back in time, to when we first got together. We used to meet here all the time when we started dating.
We were virtual strangers when we met online.
We were emotional strangers after almost two years of marriage.
I could never do that now—use my real name and picture on a dating website—but back then, nobody knew who I was, not really. My name meant very little to anyone, including me. Ben made the first move. He sent me a message, we exchanged a few emails, and I agreed to meet in real life. Everything was practically perfect until a few months after our wedding. Then we lived happily never after.
Ben loves his job. He’s away almost as often as I am, traveling to any corner of the world that we deem to be more troubled than our own. The news is like an addiction for him, whereas I rarely pay any attention to it nowadays. If something bad had really happened, if he wasn’t able to go to work, then his employer would know; I’ve never known him to be off sick for a single day. All I have to do is prove that my husband is still alive, and that he is the one trying to hurt me, not the other way around. He’s trying to damage my reputation and destroy my career because he knows that’s all I have left and that, without it, I am nothing.
I force myself to walk through the revolving doors and approach the reception desk. I wait for the woman staring at her screen to look up, then I open my mouth, but the question seems too afraid to come out. The receptionist’s skin is a perfect black canvas, painted with critical eyes and an unsmiling mouth. Her hair is as restrained as her welcome, thick black strands pulled into a ponytail so tight, it results in an unnecessary face-lift. The lanyard around her neck displays a name badge reading JOY. From what I’ve seen of her so far, this seems a little ironic. My prolonged silence causes Joy to look at me as though I might be dangerously dim. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps I am.
“Can I speak to Ben Bailey please?” I manage at last.
Her eyes, which had narrowed, widen, before a frown makes itself at home on her face. “Can I take your name?”
I don’t want to give her my name, I’d rather keep it to myself. I never give it willingly to anyone anymore.
“I’m his wife,” I settle on eventually.
She raises a drawn-on eyebrow in my general direction, then taps something on her keyboard. The name wife seems to satisfy the system for now. “Take a seat over there.”
I move to the red sofa where she wants me to wait. She doesn’t pick up the phone on her desk until I sit down, and she watches me the whole time while saying words I can’t hear.
I sit. People come and go. I watch the silver-colored lifts behind reception swallow some inside the building and spit others back out. Joy looks at and speaks in the same frosty fashion to everyone who approaches her desk, as though her thermostat is broken. The temperature of her tone is unchanging, and I think that it’s sad how some people are predisposed to coldness.
When the shape of a young man pops out of the lift and walks in my direction, I presume his outstretched hand is on its way to greet someone else, until I remember that I’m the only person still waiting
. His twentysomething-year-old hair is too long, just like his gangly limbs, which jut out at peculiar angles beneath his shiny suit. He smells of aftershave and breath mints and youth.
“Hello, I believe you were asking for Ben Bailey?” His deep, upper-class voice doesn’t match his appearance. I nod and let him shake my hand. “I’m afraid Ben hasn’t worked here for over two years now. I said the same thing to the police yesterday. Did you tell reception that you were his wife?”
I can’t seem to form words just now, I’m too busy processing his, so I just nod again.
“How strange.” He takes in my appearance as though seeing me for the first time. His features adopt the familiar expression people wear when they can’t pinpoint how they know my face. He stumbles on, his sentences tripping over themselves in their eagerness to be heard. “I mean, Ben was the kind of guy who kept himself to himself, never came to the pub after work or anything like that. I didn’t really know him, none of us did. I’m sorry I can’t help. Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“You’re saying that Ben Bailey hasn’t worked here for two years?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
People are walking in and out of the building, the lift doors are opening and closing, the boy in front of me is still speaking, but I can’t hear a thing. Someone has turned the sound of my world off, and maybe that’s okay, because I don’t think I want to listen anymore. It’s true that I don’t think I’d asked him about his work for a while, we only ever seemed to talk about mine. But surely, losing your job is something most people would tell their partner? My mind is finally asking all the right questions, but it’s too late, and besides, I should already know the answers.
“Why did he leave?” It is a quiet question, but the young man hears me, and I hear his reply.
“He was fired. Gross misconduct. He didn’t take it too well at the time, I’m afraid.”
Thirty-seven
Essex, 1988
It’s a Saturday and I am sitting in the back room of the shop counting the coins and putting them into clear plastic bags. I check I’ve counted right with the red plastic coin shelf. I like to start with the ten-pence coins, stacking them all up until they reach the mark that says five pounds. Then I put them in the bag, it’s easy. Just as I’m folding over the top of the last bag, to stop the coins from falling out, I think I see a shadow move across the little window, but I must have imagined it, because Maggie and John are both in the shop, and it sounds awful busy.
Saturday is always the busiest day; people seem to really like placing bets at the weekend, I’m not sure why. Maybe they think it’s lucky or something. I think maybe I’m too young to understand why yelling at horses racing on a TV screen is fun. I get fed up listening to the sound of all the customers shouting, and smelling the stink of their cigarettes. The smoke creeps all the way to the back room from the shop, then hides in my nose so I have to smell it all day.
When I get bored, I play with the new Speak & Spell machine that Maggie gave me. It’s a little orange computer with a keyboard that I can carry around, and she says it will help me do well at school, if I’m allowed to go in September. I turn the Speak & Spell on, it plays a little tune, then it speaks to me in a funny robot voice. I think maybe that’s why I like it so much; nobody else has spoken to me all day.
“Spell promises,” it says, and then it reads out each letter as I type them onto the screen.
“L I E S.”
“That is incorrect. Spell promises.”
“P R O M I S E S.”
“Correct. Spell mother.”
“N O T M A G G I E.”
“That is incorrect. Spell mother.”
“M O T H E R.”
“Correct. Now spell home.”
“N O T H E R E.”
I see the shadow again, and this time I push my chair up against the window and look outside, but I can’t see anything except our car, and that doesn’t tend to move by itself. Sometimes it doesn’t move at all, and John has to push it down the little hill out of the backyard and onto the road, while Maggie sits in the front pressing the pedals with her feet and turning the key. I just sit in the back and watch. I’ve learned that they both get more cranky with me and each other if I say something when the car won’t start.
I look through the bars on the windows. All of our windows have bars, even upstairs. Maggie says it’s because bad men once climbed up on the roof. I’m still looking out through the bars, daydreaming probably—Maggie says I’m always doing that—when a face appears right in front of me. If the glass weren’t there, our noses would almost touch.
“Hello, little girl,” says the man in the window. He sounds like John, not Maggie. “I’ve lost my dog, can you help me? I saw him run up inside your backyard, but now I can’t find him.”
Our back gates are always locked, always. They are taller than John, with bits of wire and broken glass on top. I don’t know how the man’s dog could have jumped over them.
“Have you seen him? He’s a tiny little white fluffy thing, real cute, I’m sure he’d let you rub his belly if you help me find him.”
I do like dogs. I climb down off the chair and look up at the back door. It has so many bolts and chains and a great big lock, but I know where the keys are. Then I remember what Maggie said about never opening the back door, ever. So I decide I should ask her what to do. I walk through the phone room and stand behind the stripy-colored curtain that hides the back of the shop from the front. A fan is on because the shop is too hot today, and the colors blow around like plastic hair in the wind.
“Mum,” I whisper.
She’s serving a customer who is standing on the other side of the glass, and she doesn’t answer. The customer looks old and mean; he has a pipe in his mouth and looks like he needs a bath.
“Mum,” I whisper again.
She does a sideways look in my direction. “Not now, Baby Girl, can’t you see I’m busy?” She serves the next customer. He is too white and too tall, as if somebody flattened him out with a rolling pin, then hid him away from the sun for a long time.
I walk back to my little room, wondering what I should do, hoping that maybe the man will have found his dog and gone away by now. But when I stand on the chair and look out, he’s still there.
“I’m so worried about my dog. Won’t you be a good little girl? Why don’t you come outside and help me find him?” he says in a sad voice, which makes me feel awful bad.
“I don’t think I’m allowed.”
His face looks even sadder than his words sound. “It’s okay.” His face moves quite close to the glass again, so that I lean back a little, even though I know he can’t touch me. “I understand. It’s a shame you can’t help me though, he’s such a good dog, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. You don’t want anything bad to happen to him, do you?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t, I can tell you’re a good girl. So, if it’s not too much trouble, can I use your phone, so that I can call the police and they can help me find him?”
We have plenty of phones. We’ve got a whole room full of them, for when people want to place bets without coming to the shop, but it feels as if I need to have a think. Maggie says the police do not care about people like us, so people like us don’t care about the police and must never talk to them. But Cagney and Lacey on the TV are the police too, and I like them a lot, so maybe some police are okay? If this man is a bad man, he wouldn’t want to call the police because they would throw him in jail. I feel confused and I’m still not sure what to do, so I decide to ask Maggie, again.
I walk back to the stripy curtain and peek through the gaps, twisting one of the long red bits of plastic around my finger. Maggie still looks awful busy, and so does John.
“What is it, Pipsqueak?” he asks, counting some ten-pound notes out on the counter. I watch as he slides the bundle underneath to the waiting hands I can see on the other side. That means a customer won a bet. John hates it
when they win.
“I don’t know what to do about something.”
He turns to me and shakes his head. “Can’t you see how busy your mum and I are? You’re old enough to make some decisions for yourself, Squirt. Time to grow up. Who’s next for the two-forty?” he says to the men lined up behind the glass.
I take the keys from the hook next to the phones, then push my chair up against the back door, unlocking one bolt at a time, from top to bottom, before turning the key.
The door pushes open a bit from the other side, and I can see the man’s boot. “You forgot the chain.”
I unhook it and he comes in, smiling and closing the door.
“Good girl,” he whispers. “Now, where’s the safe?”
“I don’t think your dog is in there.”
He laughs, then pushes me out of the way. I hear the race start in the shop and it’s so loud. I think I might have made a mistake.
“Who the fuck are you?” asks John, standing in the doorway behind us.
The man grabs me and I see the knife in his hand. He points it at my neck and lifts me off the floor so that my legs are dangling.
“Put her down,” John says in his normal voice, as though he isn’t scared at all. But I am scared and I wet myself, my pee running down my legs, stopping at my socks, then dripping down onto the stone floor.
“I want the contents of the safe, right now, or I’ll slit her fuckin’ throat.”
I start to cry. I can hear the race still going on out front. The voice of the man on the TV seems to get louder and louder inside my ears: “Rhyme ’n’ Reason is still in the lead, closely followed by Little Prayer on the inside, Dark Knight bringing up the rear…”
Maggie appears behind John. She looks at my face, then at the man who is holding me. Her face doesn’t change, but her eyes do.
“You can have the money, I don’t care about that, we have insurance. Just don’t hurt our little girl,” says John.
“Don’t play games with me,” says the bad man, I know that’s what he is now. I feel him press the tip of the knife against my neck.