She presses the on button and swipes at the screen to unlock it, but sees that, of course, it is protected with a pin code.
She sighs and stares at the screen. One-three-zero-nine, she types – Cliff’s birthday. Wrong Password. Two-zero-one-zero – Luke’s birthday. Wrong password. Zero-seven-one-two – her birthday. Wrong password.
She wonders if there’s a limit to the number of attempts. She doesn’t want the phone to get somehow stuck, she doesn’t want to have to explain that.
And then, suddenly, she’s sure she knows what the code is. Two-zero-two-four she types – Cliff’s pin number for his Visa card. The phone unlocks with a click.
What to look for though?
She’s no iPhone expert – she’s not even much of a fan of technology in general, but she manages to find the recent calls list: Tristan, Jill, Aïsha, Luke, Dave (Cliff’s business partner), Jenny (his aged secretary), Brian (squash), herself (wife). Nothing to see here.
Next she finds his email account, and decides that that’s probably what Tristan meant – he probably knew about Cliff’s emails to James. But the phone only holds a few day’s messages. There’s nothing revealing there either. She finds the contact list and scrolls through it. There are plenty of names she doesn’t know there, but they’re probably just clients. How would she know?
She sighs and clicks the phone off. She’s just about to stand, when it crosses her mind that she can use the phone to call Tristan and ask him. She types in the pin code again and calls him, but it goes straight to voicemail. He’s probably driving.
She ends the call and hits the home button. She is debating whether to phone Jill when a little yellow icon catches her eye. Grindr.
She frowns. Wasn’t Grindr the gay dating app that Tristan was using the other day in the bar? She clicks on it and the screen fills with the same little thumbnail photos and the phone chirrups to signal that it has new messages. She glances nervously at the toilet door, then switches the phone to silent mode before, with a sick feeling in her stomach, continuing.
Messages are showing from three people. The first is a face-shot of Tristan. She clicks on it.
WILDEMAN: Cliff?
WILDEMAN: Cliff? Is that you?
WILDEMAN: WTF are you doing on Grindr?
She’s not sure she understands entirely how the program works, but there don’t appear to be any replies.
She returns to the main screen and clicks on the second icon, a balding guy with a full beard.
ACTIF83: SLT. A/P?
She has no idea what that means, but again, she can see no reply.
Finally she clicks on the third conversation. A photo of Jean-Jacques from the bar appears.
HOLIDAYGUY: You speak english?
MECDUSUD: Pics?
HOLIDAYGUY: Sorry, no pics.
MECDUSUD: Why?
HOLIDAYGUY: Married.
MECDUSUD: Tristan ? Blageur !
HOLIDAYGUY: Not Tristan. Clive.
MECDUSUD: Sorry. Hello Clive.
HOLIDAYGUY: Hello.
MECDUSUD: Top or bottom?
HOLIDAYGUY: Both. Either. I’m free for one hour, now.
MECDUSUD: Send me a pic and we meet.
Hannah scrolls the screen up and then down, but no further messages appear.
“God,” she murmurs. She feels numb.
Perhaps Cliff lent Tristan her phone, she reasons. She had taken Tristan’s phone that day at the hospital, hadn’t she? But no. That makes no sense. She returns to the previous dialogue. It is clearly Tristan talking to Cliff.
She feels shocked, yet strangely unsurprised, like when Amy Winehouse died. Someone tells you Amy Winehouse is dead, and you’re shocked, but part of you thinks, “Of course she is,” as if you already knew. And that’s how she feels now. Shocked, but somehow... A wave of nausea sweeps over her, so she puts the phone down on the edge of the sink and jumps up. She opens the lid to the toilet bowl and vomits, efficiently, into the pan.
After half an hour of staring at the bathroom tiles, Hannah washes her face, unlocks the door, and steps outside.
“I was beginning to think you’d got lost in there,” Cliff offers.
Hannah ignores his feeble attempt at humour, and saying, “Here!” she throws him the phone.
“Jesus! Careful!” Cliff exclaims as he scrambles to catch it. “It’s made of glass. That cost five hundred pounds”
“Only, I don’t care, Cliff,” Hannah says, her voice as hard as marble.
“No? Oh, OK.”
Hannah walks over to the French windows and looks outside. The rain has slowed now, but the sky is still a deep, devilish grey. “So is there something you want to tell me?” she asks.
“Erm, no,” Cliff says. “No, I don’t think so.”
Hannah laughs bitterly. “Oh, I think there is,” she says.
“To do with James?” Cliff asks. “To do with the letters?”
“I know about the letters,” Hannah says. “I think we’ve covered that particular lie.” She sounds harsh and bitchy, she knows that, but she can’t seem to manage any other tone.
“It’s only because I loved you,” Cliff says. “Love you.”
“What is it they call that?” Hannah asks, turning, briefly to look at him. “A Freudian slip, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Cliff says. “That’s not what it was.”
“So is there something you want to tell me?” Hannah repeats, in exactly the same, hard voice as before.
“No,” Cliff says. “Unless, what, do you want me to tell you I lo–”
“Maybe holiday guy has something to tell me then,” Hannah says, interrupting that particularly nauseating declaration.
“Holiday guy?”
“Yes, holiday guy,” Hannah says.
“I’m sorry, Hannah, but I don’t...”
“Stop bullshitting me,” Hannah says, her voice rising almost to a shout. “I know, Cliff.”
“You know what?”
“About Grindr.”
Hannah looks back out of the window and waits for Cliff to reply.
When he fails to do so, she turns to look back at him.
He is sitting on the sofa staring at her. His face is pink and his eyes are wide and watery. He looks like a child caught out, a child on the verge of tears.
“So?” Hannah asks.
Cliff shrugs.
“Are you gay, Cliff?” she asks, as gently as she can manage, which sadly isn’t very.
He matches her stare, then very slowly shakes his head. “I...” he says.
“Yes?”
“I just wanted to look,” he says. “When Tristan said about it, I just wanted to look.”
“Because?”
“Because... I don’t know. I just wanted to look.”
Hannah holds her hand out for the phone, and because Cliff thinks initially that she is going to delete the app and then, a second later, that she is going to smash the phone – either of which strike him as getting off lightly – he hands it over.
Instead, Hannah returns to the dialogue screen, and reads, “Top or bottom?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you top or bottom, Cliff? Or both perhaps. Both apparently.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Cliff says.
“I’m free now for one hour,” Hannah reads. “How about that, Cliff?” she asks, raising her eyebrows and performing a sharp perfunctory nod. “Doesn’t that mean anything either?”
She tosses the phone back to him again, and he stares at the screen, strokes the side of it, and then switches it off. When he glances up at her, his expression is so wretched that she can’t bear to look at him.
“When was that anyway?” she asks.
“When was what?”
“When were you free for an hour?”
“I wasn’t really...” Cliff says.
“God, was it when I was at the hospital? Is that it?”
Cliff stands, slips the phone into his pocket, the
n moves towards her. “Hannah,” he says.
“Just... just stay away from me Cliff,” she says, slapping away his hand which was reaching out to touch her arm. “You disgust me.”
She pushes past him and walks to the kitchen, but when she gets there, she has no idea why. It feels no better here than the lounge, in fact it’s worse. It’s a room with only one exit, and Cliff has followed her and is now standing blocking the doorway.
“Hannah, I’m not, you know...” he says. “You’re getting this all out of proportion.”
“You’re not what, Cliff?” she asks, turning to look out of the window again, anything to avoid his gaze.
“I’m not, you know, like Tristan,” he says.
“You’re not like Tristan.”
“No. No it was just once or twice. When I was younger. At the beginning. But it all stopped. I promise, it all stopped when we got married.”
Hannah spins back to face him now. “When we got married?” she cries.
“Before.”
“You were gay, even back then?”
“No,” Cliff says, his voice pleading now. “No I stopped, like I said. I’m not gay.”
“But you were with other... you were with men... when we were together?”
“It was when we split up, Hannah. And it never happened again.”
“Until now.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Cliff says. “It was just fantasy. I gave it all up to be with you.”
Hannah buries her face in her hands for a moment, takes a deep breath, then lowers them again. “Well, I had fantasies too, Cliff,” she says. “And I gave them all up for you. Actually, I didn’t even give them up. You took them from me.”
Cliff launches himself towards her. “You’re getting this all out of proportion Han’,” he says.
“No! Stay away from me Cliff,” Hannah shrieks, raising her hand. She feels sick. She’s scared she’s going to vomit again. “You revolt me Cliff. You disgust me. Just stay away.”
As she pushes past him, he pleads, “Don’t say that, Hannah. It’s not, I’m not... it’s not like you think. I’m not gay.”
She pauses and looks back at him. “I don’t care what you are, Cliff,” she says.
“What do you mean, you don’t care?”
“This isn’t about you being gay. It’s not about that at all. It’s about you being a bloody liar. It’s about you being a compulsive liar.”
She pushes into Aïsha’s bedroom and locks the door behind her, then stands with her back against the door, breathing heavily.
After a minute, she hears the front door slam, and then, her strength suddenly exhausted, she slides down to her knees and begins to sob.
Once her tears have subsided, Hannah climbs onto the bed and pulls a pillow to her stomach. Only once she is hugging it, does she remember that James has been sleeping in this bed, that James has been using this pillow. She sniffs it but can’t find any detectable scent.
For hours, she lies on her side like this, simply staring out of the window, watching as the rain fades, then stops, and then, eventually, the first tentative glimpses of sun appear.
As the weather starts to clear, so do her thoughts. The problem is that of course Cliff is gay. Well, perhaps he’s not gay per se, perhaps he’s bisexual or metrosexual or whatever they call it. He did, after all, manage fifteen years of fairly regular performances with her, and that’s not, from what she has been told, something that guys like Tristan can manage.
But her biggest shock today is her lack of surprise at the concept that Cliff isn’t entirely heterosexual either. She has never once, not in fifteen years, had that thought before, but now that it’s out there, well, of course! She has never caught Cliff looking at other women, not once surprised him a little drunk in a party flirting with another woman. One of his greatest qualities has been that she has never once felt jealous or threatened.
But she has seen him look at men. She always assumed that these discreet glances were him eyeing up rivals, but as she thinks about it now, she can see him peering over his book at the pool guy or hiding behind the book as he pretends not to listen to Tristan’s latest conquests, excusing himself from the table whenever the discussion got too intimate, or worse, involved him in some way. That one can spend half a lifetime trying to do the right thing only to find out that it was entirely the wrong thing for everyone concerned is more irony than she can bear.
Then again, if what Cliff has wanted all of these years is a guy, then why would he have gone to such absurd lengths to keep her away from James?
As the sun regains its full force outside, even this starts to make sense to her. She feels strangely centred, unusually calm, and, a unique experience, suddenly wise. For something about her life, something that has forever escaped her is starting to make sense. From the desire she felt for James to the repetitive and increasingly rare sex she has had with Cliff; from their stiflingly “normal” existence – a perfect cover if ever there was one – to Cliff’s exaggerated insensitivity towards her moods, towards anything remotely feminine whether it be film, or book, or television... Even his dislike for anything gay-themed, his discomfort around Tristan, and yes, even his desperation to beat his brother for her affections, it has all been cover. It has all been a textbook performance of heterosexuality.
She’s just toying with the idea of getting up again, when Cliff knocks on the door.
“Hannah? It’s Jill for you. On the phone,” he calls.
She climbs from the bed, and opens the door just enough to take the phone from him, then closes and locks it again.
“Jill?”
“Hi. I’ve been worried sick about you. Is everything OK?”
“Yes,” Hannah says. “It’s all been pretty dramatic but everything’s fine now. How’s Luke?”
“He’s fine. We just had pizza, and you know how Luke likes pizza. Do you want to talk to him?”
“In a minute, Jill. I need to ask you something first.”
“Fire away.”
“I need to ask you a huge favour.”
“Right.”
“Can you look after the kids for a while.”
“Sure. For how long?”
“Until the end of the holiday maybe.”
“What? Till next Saturday?!”
“Yes.”
There’s a pause, during which Hannah hears Jill take a sharp intake of breath. “I don’t know, Han’,” she says. “They’re quite a handful, and what if I...”
“Jill!” Hannah interrupts. “How many times have I saved your bacon?”
“I know,” Jill says, “It’s just...”
“Jill! How many times?”
“You’re right. It’s just that...”
“And how often have I asked you for a favour? Seriously. How often?”
“Virtually never, I guess.”
“So just do this for me, will you?”
Jill tuts. “Where are you going anyway?”
“I don’t know. But I need some time alone. If I stay here, I swear I’ll explode.”
“Are you going away with...”
“Not in front of Luke, Jill.”
“Sorry. Are you going away with you know who? Is he still there?”
“No, he’s gone.”
“But what if I want to spend some time with Pascal?” Jill says.
“He’s there with you now, isn’t he?”
“Well, yes, but...”
“So.”
“Can we come back to the villa tomorrow, or do you want us to stay away?”
“No, you can come back. Cliff’s here.”
“But that’s going to be awkward, isn’t it?”
“Not really. You can leave the kids with him while you go off and do whatever you do with Pascal.”
“I guess,” Jill says. “So you’re not going away with James?”
“Jill, not in front of the kids, for God’s sake.”
“Oops. Sorry. But are you?”
�
�I have no idea to be honest.”
“But you might be.”
“Like I said, I have no idea. But I’ll phone you tomorrow, OK?”
“OK, I guess. Shall I put Luke on?”
“Sure.”
“Luke? It’s your Mum....”
“Mum?”
“Hi sweetie, are you OK?”
“Fine. We had pizza. And tomorrow we’re going swimming in the sea.”
“Good. Well, just be careful, OK?”
“The hotel’s all blue.”
“Right.”
“Are you OK Mum?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“You’re not still arguing with Dad then?”
“No. That’s all dealt with now, just like you and Aïsha.”
“We’re still arguing a bit.”
“That’s fine too. Just make sure it doesn’t go on too long.”
“OK.”
“When you get back tomorrow, I won’t be there, but Dad will.”
“OK.”
“I’m going to see some tourist things before we go home. Boring things you wouldn’t like.”
“OK.”
“But I’ll be back in a few days, OK?”
“Sure.”
“Night Luke.”
“Night Mum.”
The conversation over, Hannah sits and stares at the phone. She thinks about Luke, wonders what will happen to him, how he’ll react if...
But then she stops herself. These what-if equations have kept her life static since adolescence. And if life proves one thing, it’s that the best laid plans don’t necessarily lead to the best results. Luke will be fine. Whatever happens, she trusts herself to make sure of it.
She dashes to the bathroom and locks herself in. She showers and fixes her makeup – her eyes are still a bit red, but otherwise she looks OK – then nervously returns to their bedroom. Cliff, thankfully, is elsewhere.
She dresses in clean clothes, throws two further changes of clothes into her smallest bag along with her purse and her passport, then carries the bag out to the lounge.
“Here,” she says, and when Cliff looks up she tosses him the phone.
“Jesus, don’t do that!” Cliff protests, once he has caught the phone for the third time.
“OK, I won’t,” Hannah says with meaning.
The Half-Life Of Hannah (Hannah series Book 1) Page 25