The Marriage Trap: A completely addictive psychological thriller

by Sheryl Browne

  Shit. I curse silently as my key jams in the lock. They’re still on me, right behind me, still shouting, making my head spin. ‘Think of the victims, Mrs Connolly,’ one of them bellows. ‘How would you feel?’

  I don’t know how I feel! I want to turn around and scream. My husband is cheating on me. My father is accused of things I can’t bear to contemplate. My mother’s not here, and I need her. I need something tangible to hold on to, and there’s nothing! How would you feel?

  Pulling my key from the lock, I stuff it back in and wiggle it, and finally the front door gives. Stumbling into the hall, I slam the door behind me and stand still for a moment, trying to take stock. It’s quiet. No clangs of baking trays and pans from the kitchen. No radio drifting from inside.

  It’s as still as the grave, Sarah whispers.

  ‘Dad!’ I yell, panic twisting my stomach. ‘Dad! Where are you?’

  Gathering my courage, I head down the long hall and through the kitchen towards the utility – and the pulse of tension in my throat tightens. The washing machine is on. Dad doesn’t use the washing machine. He’s never used the washing machine. I’m not sure he knows how to. But it’s not this incomprehensible oddity that causes my heart to palpitate like a trapped bird in my chest. It’s the next load, waiting on the floor in front of the machine. The dark crimson stain on the duvet cover. The spatters of blood on the floor.

  ‘Mum!’ Whirling around, I retrace my steps. My eyes glued to the floor, I notice a steady trail of rich red droplets – splat, splat, splat – along the hall carpet and continuing on up the stairs. I pause at the foot, my mouth dry, my thoughts a chaotic jumble.

  Clutching hold of the banister, I heave myself up and charge to my parents’ room, where I hesitate, and then, terror climbing my chest, I shove the door open – and freeze.

  My father is on the floor. On his hands and knees on the floor. A bowl to his side, a brush in his hand, he’s scrubbing at a stain on the cream carpet. Bewildered, I look from him to the candy-pink froth forming on top of it. ‘Dad?’ I murmur, my voice small and tremulous.

  He pauses, brings the brush around again and then pulls himself up. Sitting back on his haunches, he wipes an arm across his forehead and then turns his gaze towards me.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask, my voice emerging a dry croak.

  My father’s gaze lingers, searching my face as if he doesn’t know me. He looks older, smaller somehow, his eyes rheumy and uncertain.

  ‘Dad! What’s happened?’ I yell. The house, too silent, even with the low rumble of voices and car doors slamming outside, seems to close in on me.

  Dad’s expression changes as I step towards him, hardening to the aggravated, impatient look I’ve so often seen him wear – when dealing with ‘imbeciles’.

  When Sarah challenged him on that long-ago summer’s day, talking back to him, disrespecting him, he’d worn that look then. My stomach churns, as I hear it over again, Sarah’s shrill shrieking, the sharp slap. The soft thud. Silence.

  Oh, dear God. Did my mother challenge him? He would undoubtedly have been trying to lie his way out of this latest soul-crushing debacle. ‘Dad, talk to me. Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Gone,’ he says, and goes back to his cleaning.

  ‘Gone where?’ I shout, louder, careless of who might hear. ‘How? They would have seen her. The reporters.’ If my mum was injured, they wouldn’t have failed to notice. They would have been baying like dogs over a bone, gleefully relaying that information to me, trying to extract information from me. Through my rising terror, I realise this fact.

  Pausing again, he studies me curiously, clearly registers my incomprehension. ‘She called a taxi to pick her up at the park entrance,’ he says, his tone flat.

  I scan his face. Liar. The word ricochets around my head.

  ‘Do you honestly think she would have left by the front door?’ he asks me. ‘Run the gauntlet of that pack of wolves out there?’ Sighing in despair, he looks away and continues to try to clean the stain from the carpet.

  I stare hard at him, trying to digest. ‘Was she hurt?’ I ask him, forcing the words past the dry lump in my throat. Don’t lie to me. Please don’t lie to me.

  Straightening up, he looks again in my direction. ‘You really do have a low opinion of me, don’t you, Karla?’ he says quietly, his expression a combination of hurt and regret.

  I don’t answer. There’s no way to answer.

  ‘You’re referring to this, I assume?’ He nods down at the stain on the carpet. ‘I lost my temper,’ he admits, causing my chest to constrict. ‘After she’d left.’ Breathing in hard, he indicates the tall free-standing mirror. ‘Fucking gutter press,’ he utters. ‘She wouldn’t have gone if not for them.’

  My gaze shoots towards the mirror. In the shattered glass I see several fractured images of my father. I turn my gaze back to him as he raises the hand that holds the brush. It’s bleeding, my stultified mind registers. He has a bandage wrapped haphazardly around it, soggy and wet with a mixture of water and blood.

  He smashed the mirror. In his anger and frustration, he lashed out and punched it. This makes sense. This is something my father would do. Giddy with relief, I close my eyes, suck air deep into my lungs and start breathing again. Still, though, through the clearing fog in my head, the ceaseless voice resonates. Liar.

  FORTY-FOUR

  KARLA

  I have no one to call. No one I can talk to. No one left in my life who wants me. I don’t know, any more, whether I was responsible for driving Jason away or whether he would have gone anyway. But should I have done nothing? Just watched him go? Allowed him to destroy my life? Our children’s?

  It’s you who’s destroying their lives. Sarah pipes up. That’s why he’s stealing them.

  They don’t want me. I ignore her persistent voice in my head and continue on into the nightclub, where I will be able to block all of this out. The low thud of the bass coming through the huge sound system reverberates through my chest cavity as soon as I enter. An aphrodisiac, resonating through my entire body and down my spine, it heightens my senses. At one time, back when I was single and carefree, the music would have whetted my desire – not to sleep with the first reasonable-looking man I saw, but to live, to love, to experience all that life had to offer. Now, it allows me to disappear.

  It’s an art I have perfected. When I was at acting school, I seized on one golden rule that we were told we needed to follow in order to succeed: to beware of personal issues, which would be highly corrosive to our creativity. Personal issues shouldn’t creep into any rehearsal or casting, we were instructed as eager new students. I got that. When a personal issue took over, you were no longer telling the character’s story. ‘Introducing personal issues into a scene will take you out of the moment,’ our tutor informed us. ‘We need to cast them aside.’

  So that’s what I did. What I do still. If my emotions threaten to engulf me, I switch them off. I become someone else. I smile when I want to cry. I turn my attention to the children, to my husband, or to my job. To whatever crisis that might need dealing with. I handle things efficiently, mostly, and calmly. Or at least I used to… when my children wanted me. When I had a husband who wanted me. I’m not sure the housing association wants me back either.

  Attempting to quash the grief that kicks in ferociously, I refocus, reminding myself why I’m here: to detach from the pain. My husband is leaving me, walking away from all that we have together, as if it means nothing. As if I mean nothing. My mother has gone. I’ve no idea where, or when she will be back. If she will come back. I’m a grown woman, I shouldn’t need her, but I do. So badly. My father… I don’t think he ever cared for me. How could he?

  Do I care for him? Yes, for the man I once imagined he was. But he only ever existed in my mind. Banishing thoughts of him, which immediately invoke a new wave of impotent anger, I squeeze through the mass of gyrating bodies that seem to move in slow motion under the strobe lights. The usual overabundance of beer
and perfume assaults my senses, and tonight I feel at ease with that, as if I belong. I don’t need alcohol; I’ve had plenty. I can already feel the little rushes of exhilaration as I move to the music, my physical senses, touch and smell, becoming keener. The music is louder, sharper within me. I am more aware of the moment. Soon my inhibitions will loosen. I will be free of the hurt. Does Jason know how deep my hurt runs? The uncertainty I now have about who I am, my sexuality?

  He does. He would have known as soon, as he contemplated leaving me, what that would do to me, but he didn’t care enough to stay. This is my unpalatable reality. I am unloved, unlovable. Unwanted, unless by a stranger. The ache in my heart grows unbearably heavy as I move closer to the man whose Tinder profile I swiped right on. My ‘date’ for tonight. He’s younger than me, but he doesn’t seem concerned about that. And I think I’m past caring about anything anymore. We exchange meaningful eye contact, but we don’t speak. We can’t compete with the music, and words are superfluous anyway. We both know why we’re here. I feel the heat of his gaze travelling over me as I turn around. I’m aware, as I raise my hands in the air, gyrating my pelvis to the pulsating rhythm, that my short dress is creeping higher, revealing the bare flesh of my thighs above leather boots. I know it’s a come-on. I don’t protest as he pulls me suddenly towards him, my back pressed close to his body, his hands anchoring my hips hard to him.

  He searches my face as I twist around, his eyes communicating his question. He finds his answer in mine. He grasps my hand, leading me away from the dance floor. This is okay. This is what I want: someone to want me, whoever ‘me’ is.

  Who are you? I ask the painted-on face that stares back at me through the over-sink mirror as he thrusts into me. This person who is not me, but another part of me. I’m not embarrassed at being taken like this. I want it – to go back to basics, to see love for what it really is: a lie. A primal need to fuck, that’s all, dressed up to mean something. It means nothing. My marriage, what I thought Jason and I had, all lies. My father, who was supposed to care for me… a liar, a misogynist, a cheat. My mother, disappeared. I understand, to a degree, why she would need to separate herself from all that’s happening – this is the same urge that drives me: the need to not be here, in this life. But to not contact me, talk to me. Does she truly care, the only person I thought I could depend on?

  And me, I am nothing. I watch a tear spill down my face. Someone who is worth nothing.

  But you are. Sarah. Her voice is frightened. An urgent whisper.

  Am I? Another tear falls silently. I don’t believe her. How can I?

  FORTY-FIVE

  JASON

  Where in God’s name was she? Ending the call as Karla’s phone went to voicemail, Jason tried to bury the dark thoughts rattling around in his head, as they did every time she stayed out. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t stop her. All he could do was wait and pray she was safe.

  Checking on Josh, he lifted the iPad from his bed, carefully removed his son’s glasses from his face and then reached to flick off the bedside light. Josh had taken to leaving it on at night lately. Up until recently, he’d claimed he was ‘too big’ for night lights. Four foot six being a little short of the average height for a ten-year-old, he wasn’t actually that big. Right now, he looked exactly like what he was: a vulnerable, confused child.

  Swallowing back his guilt at the part he’d played in turning his children’s worlds upside down, Jason tucked the duvet around Josh and then headed back to the landing. Aware of his son’s propensity to see shadows in corners if he did wake in the small hours, he left the door open a fraction then went to check on Holly.

  Her lamp was also on, he realised, as he noticed the light spilling from under her door. He eased the door open and peered around it, and his heart sank. She’d fallen asleep with her earphones in. They would both be exhausted in the morning.

  What the bloody hell was Karla thinking, he thought angrily – and then pulled himself up sharply. He had no right to be angry. No business judging her. He might not have left physically, but emotionally he had, as Karla had pointedly reminded him. It was none of his business where she went or who with, she’d said before she’d gone out that night. In fact, she’d added, it would probably solve a few of his problems if she were found dead. Those words were ringing loud in his head now. It was almost two in the morning. Jason hoped she was only out dancing, ‘setting her spirit free’, as she called it. It was something she’d done regularly when they’d first met. She hadn’t done enough of it since she’d become, in her own words, a ‘boring wife and a mother’. In fact, they hadn’t done much of anything together since the children had been born. Was that her fault, she’d challenged him? The weeks had turned into months and the years had slipped by, him working all hours, Karla working too, and doing the stuff he wasn’t around to help with in between. Jason had never thought of her as boring. He’d thought of her as incredible: juggling her job and the kids far better than he ever could; supporting him when he made one bad business decision after another. He would never forgive himself if anything happened to her.

  Trying to still the fear gnawing at the pit of his stomach, he went across to Holly to ease her earphones from her ears, careful not to get them tangled in her hair, which she’d spent an hour trying, and failing, to coax into a bun earlier. Placing them alongside her phone on her bedside table, he noted the bottle of nail polish. A pot of body glitter stuff she’d been given for her birthday was there too. Right next to that was a unicorn pendant, the sort eleven-year-old girls wear. Her bedroom was a stark reminder that she was approaching a fundamental milestone in her life. She was growing fast from a child into a young woman. The leopard print leggings and bare-shoulder crop top thrown on her wicker chair was evidence of that. It seemed like only yesterday he was holding her hand while she tested out her first pair of roller skates. She’d worn her long, blonde hair in a simple ponytail then, her cheeks always flushed with the excitement of childhood. Now she was getting into cool hairstyles and make-up – ‘sculpting her cheeks’, she’d told him when he’d caught her in front of the mirror.

  He’d noticed that Karla had taken her make-up bag with her when she’d gone out, so clearly it was a night on the town she had lined up. He just wished she had mentioned if she was intending to stay out the whole night. Jason closed his eyes and prayed again that she was safe.

  He switched off Holly’s light and pulled her door quietly to, and then, checking his watch, wondered what to do. He badly wanted to touch base with Jessie, but she would be at work, halfway through her night shift.

  Jason debated for a second and then, hoping he wouldn’t catch her at a bad time, he texted her. He’d barely pressed send when his phone rang. Jessie. He swore she had a sixth sense. She seemed to know him better than he did himself, sometimes. But then, she could probably guess things weren’t great here if he was texting her in the middle of the night.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ Jessie sighed apologetically. ‘I’ve barely had time to draw breath. I think every club-goer in the vicinity of Carlow has descended on accident and emergency tonight. I’m up to my armpits in it, I swear, but I’ll spare you the details.’

  Listening to the light, melodic lilt of her voice, Jason couldn’t help smiling. He loved her Irish accent. It always seemed to lift him.

  ‘Are you not sleeping?’ she asked him.

  ‘Not yet, no. Karla’s out, and I, er…’ He stopped. Did Jessie really want to hear all this?

  ‘You’re worried about her,’ she finished intuitively. ‘It’s okay, Jason. You can talk about her, you know? She’s the mother of your children. I’d hardly expect you not to be worrying about where she is.’

  ‘I wish she’d bloody well remember she had children.’ Jason sighed despondently.

  ‘You’re angry with her?’

  ‘A bit,’ he admitted. ‘More with myself, to be honest. The marriage is over, but…
I could have handled things better.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any good way to handle the breakdown of a marriage,’ Jessie offered sympathetically.

  Jason pulled in a breath. ‘No,’ he acknowledged, with another heavy sigh.

  ‘She’ll be back,’ Jessie assured him. ‘She’s proving she has a life without you, that’s all.’

  Jason supposed she was right. It was what kind of life that was worrying him. Karla’s life had been her kids. This. Him. And he’d screwed it up. ‘You’d better go,’ he said, remembering Jessie was busy. ‘Attend to the needs of your club-goers.’

  ‘Oh joy,’ Jessie said, sounding not very joyous. ‘I’d better get back, I suppose, before I’m for the high jump. Meanwhile, you go to bed. Lie down, at least, or you’ll be fit for nothing in the morning. Just imagine I’m giving you a nice slow massage, and if your imagination runs away with you, I’ll talk dirty to you tomorrow.’

  Jason laughed. ‘You’re incorrigible, do you know that?’

  ‘And you can’t get enough of me, I know. Uh-oh, clinical lead on the warpath – gotta go. Sleep! That’s an order. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

  ‘Night, Jessie,’ Jason said softly, his emotions ricocheting between relief and guilt. Talking to her kept him sane, but also reminded him that Karla had no one to confide in – unless things had developed with the guy he’d seen her with. Had they? Try as he might not to let it, Jason’s gut twisted at that thought. Where the hell was she?