by Jonathan Lee
Perhaps this is why she’s picked a place she was once happy: in order to challenge herself, to be certain she is not blind to the consequences.
The shuffling drop of water is a rehearsal for some greater gesture. Damp wind catches her collar and the air it brings is new, full of turning earth and wet wood, the very same scent that wafted around Centre Court that day. Odd thoughts of crows wearing acrobats’ tights are washed away by a pronounced rush of rain tapping on leaves, slipping through sleeves, running the rivulets of trees. Ever since her teens she’s made these wanton rhymes in her head, a weakness for learning lyrics to Pearl Jam or Nirvana, little poems where the sounds mattered more than the meanings. You supplied the meanings yourself, so they fitted the exact love-struck predicament you were in, and there was something consoling about wearing headphones, lying in the dark of your den, your field of vision reduced to the size of a fist, rain touching the window as it touches her skin now, more insistent every second. The sky cries like a sulky child and she feels a sluggish frustration in her veins, clotting into anger.
Anger. Good. Anger will keep you focused, a pinball in your system. Show the Heath who’s boss. Show the sky you’re serious.
She will get this right.
She will make the call. Planned to take more pills first but worried now the rain will get the BlackBerry wet. Dropped it in a glass of wine once – sex with Dennis or was it Peter? – SIM card didn’t fare well. After the gym she put her desk phone on voicemail and shut her office door. The plan is to call that phone, leave a message saying here I am. When it gets past five and they realise she’s not going to be there to make the speech Barbara will check Joy’s office and see the red light on the phone and listen and tell the police and it could, should, will avoid some poor unsuspecting woman, looking for her cat on a crisp sunny Saturday, finding Joy here all soaked and blue. Later, in her desk drawer, the police will discover a second identical tub of pills, together with a printed Internet receipt, and with the suicide note these pieces of the evidential puzzle will help them rule out foul play straight away. Couldn’t stand the thought of some tawdry investigation dragging on, facts unravelling in her absence.
Joy makes the call. It rings once. She prepares to hear her own voice. To hear your own voice on a machine: one of life’s many small tortures. It rings twice. It shouldn’t ring twice. It should go to voicemail. It rings three times. It really shouldn’t –
‘Joy?’
What the fuck?
‘Hello? Joy? Is that you? It’s your number, but I can’t hear so well.’
‘Barbara?’
‘Joy, I don’t know what you’re doing there, it sounds like you’re in a hot tub or something, but wow am I glad to have you on the phone.’
‘Barbara, I…I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Well I’ve got to tell you that sits kind of strange when it’s you that called me.’
‘I didn’t call you! I called me!’
‘Well it seems double strange to interrupt yourself but there you go. I didn’t go to law school or get fancy grades. So this chicken man’s been phoning me. Everything urgent and so on and complaining your phone goes straight to voicemail. So I check and he’s right so I call-forward it straight to mine while you’re in your hot tub or whatever and then he calls you and it comes through to me and still I’ve got nothing to say except I’m not sure where you are.’
A fearless squirrel with perfectly alive eyes seems to have taken an interest in her tub of pills, advancing across the picnic spot she and her sister used to love. Bad squirrel! She shoos it away, tries to reimagine her nephew there crouching in a square of sun, digging with a twig, same long lashes as his mum, weird how traits like that pass on, a kind of budget immortality, saying ‘Auntie, is there colouring books for my birthday?’ Wants to remember but doesn’t want to remember. Hurts her to think about it – his fifth birthday, colouring books unwrapped – physically hurts her like the memory is a living thing clawing at her head. Leaning over him to see the picture of the tree. Reading him the instruction Colour It Green. The outline of the smiling woman. Text underneath saying Colour Her Happy. Handing him the green crayon, handing him the pink; checking he knew leaves were green, checking he knew lips were pink.
She unsticks a wet curl of fringe from her forehead and says, ‘Tell him to email me or I’ll call him later.’
‘He said it’s urgent, Joy. Those protesters keep leafleting about his company. The whatschacall.’
‘Meat Musketeers.’
‘The Meat Musketeers keep leafleting the street. He said there’s this new leaflet out and he wants to injunct or something. He emailed me the leaflet. It says they genetically alter the birds for bigger thighs and breasts. Sounds good to me, it means more meat, none of my concern, but it says they mess up the birds so the bones can’t support the weight so they’re all mangled all the time until they die. It says chickens are put in cages the size of this leaflet. It’s an A4 leaflet. What kind of name is Meat Musketeers? Then it talks about the slaughterhouse and the way fully conscious birds are hung upside down on an assembly line, it says assembly line, and that the millions of birds that don’t get killed by the hit-and-miss mechanical blade die in boiling hot water and are called redskins.’
‘OK.’
‘He wants to know whether that’s defamation slander or a libellous what-have-you. I don’t know if it’s relevant but there’s lots of fonts and colours on the leaflet and miniature designs bordering the page. There are cracked shells with words like immoral, addictive and poisonous on them and little chickens emerging. There is a pair of hands cupping stuff about Third World starvation. Also I’ve picked up your dry-cleaning and put it in your office.’
‘Christ.’ She has been through this. It is raining. To be defamatory it needs to be false. It needs to be untrue. The client knows this. Rainwater is streaming down her fingers and face and the squirrel has taken shelter somewhere behind her. ‘Tell him it’s possible we could get them on the mention of it being “poisonous”. They may have gone too far on that. And ask him about whether it’s really “millions” that aren’t killed by the blade. That sounds high. Tell him to check up some statistics with his farm managers. And ask Peter to get a trainee to look up the legal definition of “poison”. In fact get Peter to call the client. Make sure Peter’s up to speed, tell him I’m relying on him.’
Relying on Peter! What a joke!
‘Joy, this client’s excitable. My hip hurts. Also the trainee’s gone to the doctor’s and left me with this document from the document review he said you should see. Are you sure you don’t want to come back to the office for a minute and –’
‘No. I can’t. I simply can’t. And, Barbara?’
‘Joy?’
‘I’m sorry. Really I am. There’s money in my desk drawer for the dry-cleaning.’
Fuck the woman looking for Brambles. She doesn’t care who finds her. Doesn’t even care if her sister finds her. Teach the vindictive bitch a lesson. Forgiveness. Where was the forgiveness? How can one mistake in a life cock up the whole canvas? She takes another pill. Some rain has got in the tub. The ground is getting muddy and a puddle – no, a swamp – has formed by her left knee. She shivers. She wants to stop thinking about chickens. This is not the life that is supposed to flash before her eyes. Redskins. She takes one more pill but it’s soggy and bitter and she retches and retches until the last three pills maybe four come burning up her throat and make a broken yellow yolk in the rainwater.
She is trying so hard to get it right but tears are stirring deep in her ducts and she feels herself failing even at this. She tries to think happy thoughts. She remembers Dennis asking her to marry him along Regent’s Canal, his knee unwittingly picking a puddle. She was accidentally pregnant, desperate to make a change, and genuinely relieved and touched that someone who knew how careless she could be wanted to spend their adult
life with her. She might not have loved him before, but in that moment, when she said ‘Yes, I love you’, she meant every word. Some feelings are like this – they become true when you say them. She wanted to be his wife, take his name, wipe her identity, start again.
Cages the size of this leaflet. Bones can’t support the weight. Birds all mangled all the time.
She sent people an email saying she was engaged. Her university friends wrote Joy, congratulations!!! Her school friends wrote Joy, where has this come from? One of her friends wrote Joy, you sneaky sausage, and attached a picture of two chipolatas on a plate.
The chipolata friend had introduced her to Dennis. They went on a few dates, and then there was the tennis match and everything after. She tried to stop him visiting, but he kept visiting. He chased a journalist down the street. He went with her to see scientists and psychics. She was in love with her best friend’s husband, but where was he now, why wasn’t he making tea in her kitchen and leaving plates of stew steaming under sixty-watt bulbs? Dennis did stews; Christine did cakes; Peter stayed away. He stayed away for the first couple of months after her nephew went missing and for this brief period she could not imagine ever speaking to him again, let alone sleeping with him, but she had a religious attachment to self-destruction, it seemed, to the risky moments you had to fight for, the seconds so sneakily stolen they became precious. She read somewhere that approaching orgasm most of a woman’s brain shuts down – the emotional parts, the fear centres, they go blank on the scan – and if she was ever taken to trial she’d cite this in her defence.
Her attraction to Peter pre-dated Hanger’s and Dennis and her friendship with Christine. She recognised him immediately on the first day of their induction at the firm, knew he was the boy she’d kissed at a drunken law-school party the previous summer – tall, offhand, tanned – the one she’d hoped would call but didn’t. She spotted him despite the all-transforming suit, felt her heart trip a little, and within a minute he’d slipped through a clump of tastefully dressed trainees and was standing before her, the only one who’d chosen beer over wine, strangely nervous in this setting, tilting forward on his toes.
‘Hi Peter,’ she said. ‘How’s things?’
He looked thrilled that she’d remembered his name.
‘All the better for seeing you,’ he said.
‘You look the same.’
‘Do I?’
‘You look exactly the same.’
No one knew they’d kissed before and that secret was the seed from which, over the years, so many bigger lies branched.
In the middle of all these lies Dennis remained dependable. She loved thoughtful docile Dennis. The appetite for risk was within her, but so too was the need for someone safe and kind. He brought her things when she got depressed: flowers, crackers, perspective. His sentences were full of the outside world. He had secretless eyes and an upright nose. He was conceited but not really. He was serious but not really. There was a quiet compassion in the way he moved. There was warmth and hesitancy in his voice. He carried no storage space for past pains. He wore corduroy with tennis shoes like her father used to do. He liked the Eagles, he really did. He wasn’t interested in stock-market trends or the biscuits they give you at Goldman Sachs. He wanted her deep in his big dusky bones. He knew things about books she’d forgotten she loved. He felt like someone she’d known since school. Her school friends said Joy, where has this come from? – but he was honourable and alive, a mystical jumble of quirks and qualities that appeared in her life at just the right time, and from where else, exactly, can a relationship come?
Has it stopped raining?
It has stopped raining.
Reaching out once more for the pill tub she remembers the last few years as a ten-second segment of time: marriage, pregnancy, infidelity. The long cold slide into loneliness.
She listens to the leftover drip of leaves. She looks at the goosebumps on her hands. Cold has blanched the cigarette burn, made it bland as the paling sky. She thinks of her nephew and stares into the clearing and – God! Go away! – the squirrel is sniffing around the yolk of sick and as her body contorts the tub between her legs topples and pills spill into the mud. She thrusts a hand forward. The fabric of her jacket rips. The rodent darts ninety degrees up a tree. Pain spins through her nerves. Tablets sullied, sinking, cased in dirt and only one or two still clean and whole and in the confusion her phone starts ringing and trying to stab it dead she hits speakerphone and into the dark damp wood Barbara’s voice stutters obscurely into life:
‘JOY WILL YOUR HOT TUB BE FINISHED BY FIVE BECAUSE IF NOT I REALLY NEED TO KNOW.’
Peter
SO I’VE remembered a weird thing about that Friday: some kleptomaniac stole the firm’s brand-new pet reptile.
The day of Joy’s suicide attempt was, with a touch of gruesome irony, the firm’s Make Law Fun Day. Once a year, to coincide nicely in the PR calendar with its partnership promotion announcements, Hanger’s buses in a load of underprivileged kids from all over the country and makes them sit through aspiration-raising talks about life in the Square Mile. Journalists come and take snaps and it tends to bury a few of the usual stories re 80 per cent of new partners being public schoolboys. The ‘Life in Law’ session I was due to put on for these rat-tailed little snotbags that Friday afternoon tenuously pertained to tropical wildlife; I was to entertain them with anecdotes about a recent Madagascan case and its associated environmental issues. Thus Mental Brian decided that what the session needed was, you guessed it Doctor Odd, some tropical wildlife. A visual aid, as he kept saying.
After giving up hope of purchasing our first choice of beast – a genuine Madagascan chameleon – I had Jessica source a small lizard. She installed it in the towel room by the gym. Hot, dry, perfect. But when we went down there to pick it up in good time for our talk, and also so that we could photograph it sitting on Barry ‘No Relation’ White’s forearm, which bears an incredibly intricate tattoo of a snarled tree branch he attributes to a night spent in Utah, we found someone had stolen the thing. Well, that’s what we discovered the second time we went to get it. The first time, Jess and I got a bit distracted talking about some billable issue and forgot about the lizard entirely. When we came back a few minutes later the cage was still there, locked, but with not so much as a kiwi fruit inside. Photographing it on Barry’s arm now seemed like a distant dream.
Point is, there are clandestine lizard thieves among us. And from that simple observation you can, I suggest, extrapolate a wider truth. The truth is that every single person in our office has something – however plain, however puzzling – to hide. In any office, secrets are like electricity, the strange currencies that keep the lights bright, but it’s especially true in the City.
Let me take you back to my induction day at Hanger’s. The famous eye-lock moment in the movies. I think I knew, secretly, instantly, that I had to have her. I was chatting to one of the other new trainees, exchanging perfunctory polite-nesses while keeping a finger or two on my down-tilted chin, a way of embedding sincerity in the choreography of our exchange, when I saw these fatally pretty legs and rushed – mid-sentence – to be with them.
Hi Peter, Joy said. How are things?
And of course I knew instantly that she must be attracted to me. She’d clearly studied the little photo bios that HR had handed out. How else would she know my name? She even made a comment about how I looked the same. Interesting tactic, I thought to myself. Not even trying to disguise that she’d been pawing at my picture, comparing it to the real-life me. Later on it turned out we’d met before, in hazy circumstances, but the point is the attraction was intense and we both felt it instantly. Too intense, too concentrated, to squander in the diluting context of an actual relationship. No, what we felt wouldn’t have fitted in a homely old boyfriend—girlfriend scenario, not at all. Secrets: they’re the thing we live for. Two people are in a perfectly happy m
arriage, supporting each other, making each other Lemsip when winter kicks in. What more could they want, I hear you cry. The answer? Something else. Secrets. Lies. Risks. Small breaks from the known. They have to be small, mind you. On special occasions I love to have a bath – nothing better than sinking into the heat, letting the water swallow me up. But if I had one every day? Baths would become routine, like showers.
Christine was always my Lemsip provider, my daily shower. Which isn’t to say that I don’t love her. I love her very much. When she gets back from this silly space-to-think sojourn at her parents’ place, or answers one of my bloody phone calls, I’ll tell her that and I’ll mean it. But even in the love-filled moments in your life, the ecstatic headline moments, there lurk secret desires for something different. In fact, especially in those moments.
I’ll give you an example: my wedding.
The big day. Christine was desperate to have a big day and I gave it to her. Big days don’t come cheap. I spent a fucking fortune. You plan a wedding and you find that even the flowers come in two-grand increments: a couple of thousand for the cheapest, four thousand for the middling ones, six thousand for the wall-to-wall full-colour floral floor and table displays with reinforced stems that wouldn’t even wilt if Alan Allan (aka ‘Alan Squared’) caught them with his Human Fire Hose party piece. Some prissy-mouthed harlot takes you on a tour of the venue and says in her Surrey sing-song voice that it’s really just a question of what you can afford for your special day. I went for the six thou option. Of course I did. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted to celebrate our elevation into the bouquet-buying classes. And she was happy, walking up the aisle. I could see it: her happiness was undisguised. Which made me happy, because I loved her. But part of my happiness – a quarter, say, or a fifth – was derived from somewhere other than her, from glimpsing the gorgeous Joy off to the side, nervously twirling her order of service in the second row. Part of my joy was Joy. She was not marriage material – no, Joy Stephens was too impulsive and unpredictable for that, liable to crack a plate over my head at a moment’s notice, the skittering defiance that women from well-to-do backgrounds have, daring to be damned – but I still felt…privileged, if that’s the word, to have a secret connection with her. It was my wedding day. One hundred people staring as I said my vows. A grin on my face, happy as could be. And no one else there, not even Joy, knew that part of my happiness was down to the affair. I was secretly suffused with her, my lover, the way something gets suffused by colour, or water, or light. Joy Stephens’s presence at my wedding amplified my happiness. Strange? Perhaps. But true. She was part of me, forbidden and true. This is not heartlessness. This is a statement of the way people, moments, can become a hidden part of who you are.