by Lucy Dawson
“Be right up!” I shouted and adjusted the phone so it was back to the screensaver. I put it back on the table and ran upstairs. Then I slowed down again as I remembered I was supposed to be ill.
He was making the bed as I went into our room. I walked round to the other side and grabbed the opposite corners. In a practiced routine we smoothed the duvet together, then he plumped the pillows and I got the cushions from the floor. We moved in silence until I broke it.
“Hadn’t you better call work?”
He frowned and looked puzzled. “Why?”
“You said you had a message that someone had called for you?”
“And?”
“Don’t you want to find out who?”
He started to gather up underwear from the drawers that I had pulled it out of earlier. “No, the message told me who it was that called.”
“Oh, I see—who was it then?”
He straightened up and looked at me. “A bloke about his conversion. Why the questions?”
Bloke about a conversion…bitch called Liz, more like. How dare she ask him if he was all right?
“Just interested…making conversation.” As I spoke, I realized that in order for her to have been asking if he was all right, he must have already told her about the breakin. That’s how close they were…she was looking out for him…she knew what was going on in his life. It was definitely not just some one-off shag.
“Hey! Sweetheart!” Pete snapped my attention back. “I said we’ve just got time to go and buy some new frames for the pictures, and I think all they really broke in the kitchen was some cups and plates. Thank God they didn’t do the TV, eh? You well enough to come into town or shall I go on my own?”
What, and have you call Liz the second you leave? I thought quickly. No chance.
“I’ll come. Maybe we could go to the cinema afterward, watch something fun. I’d like to get out of the house. I just don’t want to think about anything for a couple of hours.” There was no way he’d be able to get messages or anything in the cinema.
He looked a little surprised but said okay, if that was what I wanted. I sorted Gloria out with water and some food and watched her leap about excitedly, thinking she was getting a walk. I didn’t want to be near her—she just made me think of Liz.
Pete wandered back in and patted his pockets like he’d forgotten something. “Oh! Wallet and phone,” he said absently, making for the door again.
“Leave them!” I interjected quickly. “My treat for the cinema and I’ll get the other stuff too. Anyway, you don’t need the mobile, you’ll have to have it switched off anyway at the cinema.”
He couldn’t argue with that, it would have looked obvious. So he just smiled a slightly tight smile and said, “Come on then! Let’s get you medicinal ice cream and popcorn.”
And off we went, just like any other normal, happy couple.
The trip was sadly not a success. I tried to hold his hand in the cinema and he pulled it away to rummage for some pick-and-mix and didn’t put it back in mine afterward. I tried to lean my head on his shoulder but the armrest got in the way and it felt awkward. I knew I was reading into everything with far more significance than it probably held for him, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted a sign—any sign—that he still loved me and not her.
In the car on the way back, he was very quiet and withdrawn. Totally different to how he had been earlier, as if he was deep in thought. He was barely monosyllabic and the harder I seemed to try, the more absent he became.
I kept looking at him, wondering what he was thinking, if she’d called him while we’d been out. I was silently devastated when he didn’t automatically curl his fingers around mine and hold my hand when I rested it on his lap as he drove. He just left it sitting forlornly on his knee and I felt pathetically needy, hating myself for willing him to pick up my hand. I had to tell myself he needed two hands to change gear and hold the wheel, that it didn’t mean anything. Forty-eight hours earlier, I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d put his hand on my knee.
Then I tried to ignore the fact that he didn’t seem to notice I was only just managing to hold it together next to him, and focused on looking out of the windscreen instead, like I used to when I was much younger and car sick. “Just stare straight ahead,” my mum would say. “Don’t look left or right, just straight in front of you, and keep breathing. No, darling, we can’t stop just yet. Let’s get home before it gets dark. Just keep breathing, in and out. Good girl.”
When we got home I was tired and wanted to go straight to bed, but I knew that was probably what he wanted me to do so he could text or call her. It had seemed a good idea, getting him to myself for a few hours, but it had achieved nothing, merely delayed everything.
I couldn’t leave him alone downstairs. We sat silently watching TV. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do, but neither of us felt like doing it. When I started to fall asleep on the sofa, he woke me up with a little nudge and gently told me to go to bed.
“Will you come too?” I rubbed my eyes sleepily.
In a bit, he said firmly, he just wasn’t quite tired enough and Gloria needed a wee.
I had no choice. I trailed upstairs and got into our cold, big bed. I sat hunched up, clutching my knees to my chest, craning to see if I could hear talking or not. I barely noticed when my own mobile rumbled on the bedside table next to me. It was a text from Clare:
Whatcha doin? R U watchin Ghost? Is on TV now. P Swayze with no top on. Woof. Call me—haven’t spoken to you forever.
Then I noticed I had another text, this one from Lottie:
Hi hon. Soz you feel rough. Must be bad to have to get Pete to call, unless you’re pulling a fast one? Bitch if you are. Spanky in well bad mood. See you tom. Xxx
I barely registered them as I put the phone back on the table. I managed another five minutes before I crept noiselessly downstairs again and waited for a second behind the closed sitting-room door, listening. I couldn’t hear anything, so I opened the door.
Pete jumped and looked up, startled. I wasn’t looking at him though—his phone was beside him on the sofa. It hadn’t been there when I’d left.
“You all right?” he said.
I couldn’t help myself. I shook my head and, to my disgust, up came the tears again. I opened my mouth to say, “I can’t do this. I can’t act like I don’t know.” I wanted to say it, but I couldn’t get it out.
He jumped up and said, “Hey! Hey! It’s not that bad!”
“Not that bad! Not that bad?!” I exploded at him. “My whole fucking life has been ripped apart. I don’t know what to do, I don’t feel safe…I don’t know where to put myself…” My voice was heaving with jumbled words and hiccups.
He clutched me to him and said, “Shh! I’m here. You are safe. I’m such a dickhead! Of course you don’t want to be upstairs on your own! And you’re ill, too. I’m so sorry. I’ll come to bed now.”
He reached for his phone and switched it off. Then he flung it on to the sofa.
I watched it sitting there dead and still as he rocked me again for what felt like the hundredth time—and a tiny flicker of spirit sparked somewhere in me.
Fuck you, Liz, he’s coming to bed with me, I thought savagely as I looked at the lifeless mobile, no merrily twinkling lights or buzzing exciting messages. That thought made me feel a little calmer as I allowed him to lead me upstairs like an invalid.
We talked for a bit about the mess everywhere and he stroked my hair softly, which, oddly, made me feel not soothed at all, although I did a happy little sigh anyway.
“Is that nice?” he asked, smiling at me. I nodded gratefully and then felt disgusted with myself for being so limp and useless, so I lay there, tried not to think at all and just closed my eyes. I tried just to enjoy him stroking me. It didn’t last long though, he drifted off pretty quickly.
Not that it really mattered anyway. All I could think about was his phone lying downstairs on the sofa and what he’d sent her and wh
at she’d sent him. I waited until I was sure he was asleep and then I quietly slipped out of bed.
NINE
Silently picking up his mobile, I took it into the downstairs loo, locking the door behind me and switching it on. I started to scroll through his messages, but before I had the chance to look for her, she came to me. The phone rumbled in my hand as three new texts delivered. Three! The first one said:
Where r u? all ok? Xx
Fine thanks, you whore.
The next one was:
Please text me bk—crap show—could do with chat.
The bitch. What a stupid, selfish, self-obsessed little bitch. As far as she knew his house had been wrecked. Bit more important than her shit show.
Then the last one said:
Know it doesn’t help, but am thinking about you right now. Xxx
Oh, she had no right to be thinking about him, texting him, doing anything! I felt insane with anger.
But then, to my horror, the phone buzzed in my hand again. New message:
Hey! You’re still up! Left phone on, it woke me up as mssge delivered! Bn worried. Know you had to be at home but don’t forget me! U know I need u too! x
That had almost made me roar out loud with rage. The sheer force of the anger the words unleashed in me was frightening. I’d started to fumble with the keypad, trying to call her back to tell her to get out of my life and to leave my boyfriend alone, but I was so angry my fingers couldn’t hit the right buttons. She had no right to need him—he wasn’t hers to need.
The phone rumbled again.
OK, guess you’re asleep. Call me in morning when you are free. xx
I’d stared furiously at the phone. Five messages in the inbox. Five! Fucking obsessive.
Then it had occurred to me that they were five messages he was going to know I’d seen. I couldn’t just switch it off and go back to bed…but I couldn’t just delete them either, she’d have a delivery report to show him. It would be impossible to explain away five texts. One was coverable, but five…
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I had no choice but to break the phone.
I deleted his inbox—all of it. I checked his sent mail, nothing there at all. Switching it off, I crept into the kitchen and turned on the light. Gloria had sat up and eyed me with interest, pleased to see that I’d come to play. I got her half-opened tin of food out of the fridge and dipped Pete’s phone in it. Then I held it out to Gloria.
She looked at it, sniffed it and then curiously touched the tip of her tongue to it.
“Don’t lick it, you prat, chew it,” I hissed at her.
I had to wiggle it around a bit before she got the idea, but finally there were some evident tooth marks and a cracked screen. Before she cut herself I took it away, rinsed the food off and dried it carefully. I removed the back and dropped the SIM card in Gloria’s water bowl. Then I pulled it out again because I wasn’t really sure if it could still work having been dipped in water, so to be on the safe side I pocketed the card, put the battery under the blanket in Gloria’s basket and the actual phone by it. She sniffed it once or twice and then ignored it. Which was good because I didn’t want her to chew it once I was back in bed and die or anything.
After I washed my hands, I eased exhaustedly back into bed beside Pete. My head ached dully with tiredness and my eyes hurt from my earlier crying but the satisfaction of knowing he wouldn’t be calling her in the morning was immense. I imagined her pouting sulkily by the phone, kicking her chair and twisting her hair…five fucking texts…and “crap show could do with a chat,” as if her bloody play was important—who gave a shit? I shivered with anger. I’d outwitted her. I didn’t have to just roll over, I wasn’t just helplessly stuck. I could fight.
But then I saw myself in my mind’s eye, pathetically crouched next to Gloria’s basket in the dead of night in my dark kitchen, desperately trying to make her leave teeth marks on the phone screen. How was that fighting? That was just mad. What had this person done to my life? She had me creeping round my own house…I was a grown woman! I had a good job, nice friends, a family whom I loved. Was I really going to be forced into behaving like a lunatic who was losing control? I had to have faced—and beaten—worse in my life than this girl, surely?
It was then, with a sickening thud, that I suddenly thought of Katie.
And, for the first time ever, I wondered if all those years ago she had been telling me the truth.
TEN
The first time I met Katie properly was at a First Holy Communion class when we were five years old. She was perched on the edge of Sister Ann’s stiff sofa cushions in a sitting room that smelled faintly of boiled cabbage. She was wearing a deep-blue pinafore dress with a red roll neck under it, and her feet couldn’t quite touch the ground. She had her Silver Book clutched tightly to her chest and a small, furry, neon-pink pencil case next to her. Just by looking at her I knew that in that pencil case there was going to be a full selection of neat, non-chewed felt-tip pens with the right lids on them. And none of them would be dried up.
I also noticed, with admiration and envy, her earrings glinting. I wasn’t allowed my ears pierced as my mum said it was common on little girls and that I had to wait until I was twelve.
I must have been staring, because finally Katie said to me, “You’re at my school, aren’t you, in Mrs. Piper’s class? I’m in Mrs. Tundal’s. I read up to page seventeen of the Silver Book already, the bit on loving your neighbor. How far did you get?”
I teased her about that for years later. So typically Katie; competitive from the word go.
Despite that first meeting, we didn’t really spend much time together at primary school. Different classes back then were different worlds, we just occasionally went round to each other’s houses for tea.
It all changed when we went to secondary school. We stuck together nervously on our first day because we sort of knew each other, her in her pristine long white socks and slip-on shoes, me in the brown T-bar monstrosities from Jones the Bootmaker that my mother had insisted on making me wear because my feet rolled in. I looked like I was wearing a giant shit on each foot. But Katie stuck by me and even stood up for me when I got teased about the shoes and my A-line skirt and tight cardigan.
“She can’t help it,” Katie would say, her pencil skirt pulled tight as she stuck one hip out defiantly, baggy cardigan slipping off her shoulder, “her mum makes her. It’s not her fault.”
I got teased mercilessly about those bloody shoes. I was sent to deliver a message to a teacher who was teaching a sixth-form class and the whole room fell silent when I walked shyly in.
“Oh my God!” cried a girl with spiky hair and electric-blue eyeshadow. “What has that first year got on her feet?” Twenty pairs of eyes swiveled to look at me and then the whole room fell about laughing. I felt my face flush bright red and I tripped slightly in my haste as I stumbled out of the room. “She can’t even stand up in them!” someone else shouted as I desperately tried to close the door behind me. I cried for hours in the loos afterward with Katie patiently holding out tissues. “They’re all stupid,” she said helpfully. “Ignore them. I could help you look better…if you like.”
“You know, you could be pretty,” she said in her bedroom several days later. We were sitting on her bed, ready to commence my makeover. “You look a bit like her,” she went on, pointing to a girl dressed in a tartan puffball skirt in the latest Jackie we were flicking through. It had been a satisfying day of messing around with Katie’s mum’s hundred bottles of different-colored nail varnishes and going through her jewelry box, followed by us recording ourselves doing a pretend radio show on Katie’s cassette player, before Katie had decided it was time to get down to business. “You’ve got nice hair, but it’s too long,” she said knowledgeably. “You should get it cut, and maybe perm it.” She looked at my dead-straight, thick brown hair thoughtfully. “That would be cool.”
“My mum wouldn’t let me,” I protested.
“How comes your mum is so strict?” Katie said, reaching for her makeup bag and pulling me to the edge of the bed. “I’m going to do your eyes first. Browns or blues?”
“Blues, please. She’s not strict really. Although I wish she’d let me go to the cinema with you and watch Ghost!”
“Yeah, it was good. Keep still.”
“Mum said it wasn’t suitable. Oww!”
“Hmm. I think these eyelash curlers need a new rubber bit—did I pinch the skin?”
“A little bit.” I winced, my eyes watering. “Okay—I’m all right now.”
“So do you think it’s cos you don’t have a dad?”
I kept very still. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly.
“Mum says your dad lives in another country now with new children.”
I didn’t say anything, I just sat there silently hating Katie’s mum more than I thought possible.
“I wish my dad would go and live in another country,” Katie sighed. “He’s grumpy, fat and we never get to watch what we want on TV. I think you’re lucky.” She smiled at me. I smiled back and suddenly it was all okay again. “So,” she said, reaching for the frosted-pink lipstick, “if you had to choose between New Kids on the Block Joey or Jordan Knight, which would it be?”
In the second year, Katie continued my conversion from geek to Little Miss Popular by taking me to Freeman Hardy Willis and helping me choose a pair of white plastic slip-on shoes which I proudly changed into at the end of my road every day. My poor mum never was any the wiser and remained utterly confused as to why my feet continued to roll in.
It was Katie who showed me how to roll my skirt up. It was Katie who eventually persuaded my mum to let me have my waist-long hair cut to shoulder length and Katie who held my hand when I finally got my ears pierced. Katie who I made up a dance routine to Madonna’s “Vogue” with—that I can probably still do. Katie who used to wait outside McDonald’s for me so we could hang around town aimlessly every Saturday. Katie who I went to my first disco with. Katie who told me about her first kiss in lurid detail, Katie who I made laugh so much once she was actually sick. Katie who held my hand when I puked everywhere after first getting drunk on Taboo. Katie who I went on holiday to Ibiza with after our A-levels. Katie who helped me choose my uni course and Katie who broke my heart twice over by purposefully going to bed with my then boyfriend Dan.