I took his hand and we walked into the living room together.
‘He’s not the only headhunter in the City, is he?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you sign up with a few more?’
I bit the inside of my cheek, keeping my face in neutral.
‘I met David for a coffee afterwards. He said the same thing. It’s all about headcounts and hiring freezes at the moment. Everyone says the market should pick up in the next quarter, though. That’s not too bad.’
The next quarter meant three more months of mortgage payments, a new term’s school fees for Sofia and Ahmed, and three months of bills.
Tom went to change and I started to pace the room. I wiped my hands on the front of my jeans. My chest was tight and I rubbed it, trying to ease the burning. We didn’t have enough money for three months.
‘I have to tell him. I have to tell him!’
The words ricocheted inside my skull. I had to do it. The sooner the better. Once he knew, we could take steps to manage the situation. We could borrow money from the bank, maybe, and use credit cards if we didn’t have cash. We could prepare ourselves. I had to do it.
I gave him some tea when he came down. He sat down on the sofa and I stood by the window, looking out at the garden, watching the birds at the far end, sitting on the garden chairs that were still wet from the rain. I couldn’t face him when I told him. I waited a few minutes, getting myself ready. I scrolled through my phone, pretending to read an email. My lips were dry. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t string the words together. I didn’t even know which words to use. I knew that once I started speaking, my marriage would be over.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the last time. Six years ago, just after Alex was born, I’d got into some trouble with money. In a way, it had also been Tom’s fault – to start with, anyway. He had a habit of checking every item on our monthly credit card bill before he paid it off. He’d go down the list, reading every single payment out loud, whether it was a TFL charge for the tube, or a particularly large grocery bill if we were entertaining. When he came across something he didn’t recognise, he’d ask me about it. I knew that he was just ‘being a banker’, and looking out for fraudulent transactions, but I hated it. It triggered memories of the endless arguments Ami and Baba had about money when I was growing up. The soundtrack to my childhood.
Ami grew up on a ten-bedroom, five-acre estate in Lahore, and her wealthy parents, who owned several factories, had objected to her marrying Baba, who was still a graduate student, from a modest background. After their wedding they had moved to London as Baba had a scholarship to study at UCL. Ami’s past had not prepared her for the tiny flat in South London, which was all Baba could afford when Farrah and I were young, or life on the salary of a junior, and then middle manager in an engineering firm. Ami’s ‘essentials’ were Baba’s ‘frivolities’ and this argument swirled, circular and never-ending in our house.
Despite vowing never to be like my parents, somehow, I’d ended up in the same place. For Tom, money was utility and security. For me, it was a solution to all sorts of problems. We had never found a middle ground.
When Tom used to ask me about the credit card bill it felt as if he was asking me to justify every purchase. He said he was only keeping track of our spending, as I couldn’t be bothered. I started to call him controlling. He called me irresponsible. It had felt like déjà vu. It was my childhood nightmare all over again. We never fought about anything else.
One day, when I was offered a store card in my name only, I signed on the dotted line. I’d needed to buy a new dress for Tom’s work summer party. I was still overweight after Alex and these parties always made me nervous. It felt wonderful to spend the money without having to give an explanation, the way it used to feel when I had my own salary going into my account. It wasn’t that Tom would have stopped me buying the dress, but he would have passed comment or judgement. For me, that was almost worse.
I used the card again a few times: clothes for Sofia, toys for Ahmed and Alex, some make-up, a couple of lamps and some bed linen. I spent a few hundred pounds. Then I stopped and cut the card up so I was not tempted further.
When the bills came, I tore them up and threw them away. I knew I’d need to pay them eventually, but I thought that it could wait a few months, even a couple of years. There was an initial interest-free period, though I didn’t check exactly how long that was for. I didn’t want to know. I pushed it all to the back of my mind, and then got so caught up in the daily whirl of the children and Ami being ill, that I lost track of time. I didn’t know when the invoices turned into final demands, or legal notices, because I never opened the letters. Tom found out when he answered the phone to a debt recovery agency one evening, who told him they’d be sending their ‘colleagues’ to collect property unless the debt was repaid within twenty-four hours. With interest, the bill had spiralled into thousands. He’d paid them off, but he had been livid. Seeing how mortified I was, and that I was still suffering from that sleep-deprived exhaustion of having a new baby, while also looking after Ami, who was recovering from gall bladder surgery, he’d forgiven me. I’d blurted out how much I hated the way he questioned me and explained why. He had agreed to stop and I had agreed not to overspend. I had sworn it would never happen again. But it had. This time, he was in no position to bail me out. Nor would he forgive me, I knew that.
I decided not to say anything. We still had money for a few weeks; he’d only just started his job search – something was bound to turn up.
Over the next few days, he heard the same message repeated, over and over again: no one was hiring at the moment, not at his level. Contacts that he’d emailed and friends who’d snatched a few minutes to meet him for a drink, all told him it could take weeks, if not months, before the market picked up.
He came home after yet another networking meeting in the City.
‘No luck, I’m afraid. Back to square one.’
He walked past me without saying anything more. He took his laptop and sat down on the sofa, not loosening his tie, or taking off his jacket. He fixed his eyes on the screen, and remained at the same spot until the children came home. At one point, I wedged myself between him and the laptop, pushing it aside. I put my hands on either side of his face. His eyes looked trapped and helpless in an intricate cobweb of lines. The flecks of grey in his temples, which I loved to stroke when we lay in bed, suddenly made him seem older. I bent down to kiss him. His lips didn’t move. He glanced up at me once, with a flicker of a smile, then put his hands around my waist and moved me aside. His eyes went straight back to the screen.
I went to the kitchen. I grasped the edge of the butler sink and took a deep breath. The blossom tree outside the window had exploded into bubble-gum pink. There was nothing I could do to make Tom feel better.
Tom had asked me to transfer the money for next month’s mortgage and bills from the emergency fund into the current account. He wanted to see the bank statements too, so he could manage that account himself going forwards. I told him I couldn’t remember where I’d kept the papers, but promised to look for them. In the meantime, I’d make the transfer myself, since I had a card for that account, but Tom’s had been kept safely with the statements.
‘Make sure you transfer the money before May 30th, OK? The redundancy money will be finished by then and all the bills will be due.’
Something fluttered in my throat. I checked the calendar on my phone.
We had six weeks till May 30th. That was when all our money would be gone. We’d miss the mortgage payments. We would be bankrupt. We would lose everything.
My breathing was fast and shallow. I tried to take a proper gulp of air into my lungs, but it got stuck in my throat.
I put the phone face down on the counter, and threw a dish towel over it. I started preparing after-school snacks for the children on auto pilot. I washed grapes – green for Sofia and Ahmed, black for Alex – and took out bananas and satsumas. Ami had given me a box of fresh jalebis fo
r the children when I’d popped in to see her yesterday. I placed the sticky sweets on a plate, then tore off three pieces of kitchen towel and folded them into triangles. I arranged everything on the table. When there was nothing else left to do, I sat down and let my head sink into my hands. I closed my eyes.
A time bomb started to tick in my head.
Four
Six weeks to May 30th
Tom was meeting another headhunter the next day. Six weeks was plenty of time for first and second interviews. He could have a new job within a month. It was possible. But what if it didn’t happen before our deadline?
Dead. Line.
The words thumped along with my heartbeat as I lay in bed, until my mind grew numb and darkness swallowed me up into a restless oblivion. My eyes snapped open at six, an hour before the alarm. Purple crescents dented my palms and I rubbed them gently with my thumb. I sat up, suddenly alert. An idea had slipped into my mind while I was half asleep.
There was a way to fix this. I didn’t need to find seventy-five thousand pounds. I just needed to find a job. If there was enough money coming in each month to cover our bills until Tom was working again, he need never find out what I’d done. I’d tell him we should use my salary and leave our savings intact. I knew he’d agree. ‘Never touch savings if you can help it.’ It was Tom’s mantra.
The only problem was that I hadn’t had a job for fifteen years. I didn’t even have a CV.
I was meeting Sam and Naila for coffee that morning. Sam had gone back to work recently after ten years at home with her kids – she’d know what to do.
I waited in the warm cocoon of a Wimbledon Village coffee shop, watching a constant stream of women enter the café with their regulation size-six bottoms, carrying enormous designer bags in butter-soft leather with discreet logos. These women in their thirties and forties had better skin than the twenty-something baristas serving them coffee.
I looked at the mound of shredded tissues lying in front of me and pushed it aside. I’d decided not to tell my friends about the emergency fund. What would they think of me if they knew what I had done?
My story was that I was ready to go back to work; the children were older and I was bored.
I spotted Sam rushing into the café. She always looked as if she was late for an appointment, although she was usually early. Even her clothes looked thrown on. She alternated between identikit shift dresses in navy or black, worn with ballet pumps for the office, or skinny jeans and trainers with jumpers she had owned for years.
She started talking before she sat down, unrolling the long red scarf from around her neck and waving to the waitress at the same time.
‘I just came from Mum’s so I haven’t had any coffee yet!’
‘Did you manage to find a carer?’
Her mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
‘Yes, but it’s not really a long-term solution. I want to make a little granny annexe, but James is working all hours on some mega case, so I haven’t talked to him yet.’
Naila arrived and we all hugged.
‘I love your outfit, Naila,’ said Sam.
Naila was wearing a white cotton salwar kameez with pink embroidery and a matching pink dupatta.
‘Thanks,’ said Naila. ‘I’m going for lunch at a Pakistani friend’s house later. She has a lot of older “aunties” coming too, so I thought I’d go trad.’
As soon as our coffees came, I plunged in.
‘Guess what? I’ve decided to go back to work,’ I said.
I smiled as if I was talking about a weekend away with Tom.
‘How come?’ they said together.
‘I think it’s time I expanded my horizons beyond the school’s charity ball circuit,’ I laughed.
‘Good! I don’t know how you put up with all that rubbish anyways,’ Naila said. ‘I can’t believe you had a class Botox party!’
Naila was always shocked by the extravagant extra-curricular activities of the mothers at my children’s schools.
‘I was at work, so I got out of it. It’s not really my thing, as you can see,’ said Sam.
She frowned, then smiled, pointing to various parts of her face, to demonstrate her lack of cosmetic paralysis. Sam’s daughter was at the same school as Sofia, Brookwood High.
I smiled.
‘Sam, can you please help me write a CV? Actually, could we please do it now? I want to start applying today.’
‘What’s the hurry?’ said Sam.
She took a hairband from her wrist and tied her blonde curls into a messy ponytail.
I looked at the tables on either side, to make sure there was no one I knew, then leaned forwards to whisper.
‘Tom’s lost his job.’
Sam’s hand went up to her mouth.
‘That’s terrible! When did this happen?’
‘Just last week. Please, please don’t tell anyone, not even your husbands. Tom wants to get used to the idea himself first.’
‘Of course; it’s no one’s business anyway,’ said Sam.
‘I don’t think you should tell anyone at all, not even when Tom gets used to it,’ said Naila. ‘Do you remember when Rani’s husband lost his job? People just stopped inviting them over for dinner. Everyone still talks about it even though he’s been back at work for ages.’
I didn’t want to tell anyone either. I didn’t need to be gossip fodder for some people, or the object of pity for others.
‘Is Tom all right? Are you?’ said Naila.
I dug my nails into my hands to stop the sudden tears gathering in my eyes.
‘He’s OK, a little shocked of course. I’m just so angry. He hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s so unfair.’
‘Try not to worry, Faiza. I’m sure he’ll find something else soon,’ said Sam. She paused a second, looking down and brushing away a non-existent crumb from the table. When she spoke again, it was more slowly, as if weighing each word.
‘At least banks give good packages,’ she said.
Sam and I could talk about anything, but there was one topic that we never discussed: money. I knew Sam had sex with James for the first time, in his office, that her father had cheated on her mother with her mother’s younger sister, and that one of her twelve-year-old twins was in therapy for still wetting his bed. I was the first person she called when she found a lump in her breast. She knew about Ahmed’s anxiety, the hiccups in my marriage I would never tell anyone else about, my frustration at my sister not helping to look after our parents, and the racism I came across on the tube or, more subtly, at dinner parties.
But we never discussed how much our husbands earned, what our houses were worth, how much we had in savings or what we paid the cleaner or the taxman.
I cleared my throat.
‘Actually, the packages aren’t that great these days.’
Sam knew Tom didn’t earn the sort of bonuses that her husband James accumulated year on year. James was a partner at a Magic Circle law firm, something he told you when he introduced himself for the first time, as if it were an extension of his name.
‘They’re still better than for most people, Faiza. I don’t know what we’d do if Tariq lost his job. IT doesn’t pay like banking,’ said Naila, not suffering any such qualms as Sam.
I wanted to tell them we were broke, but then I’d have to tell them why. The words vibrated on my lips, like an itch I needed to scratch. What if I just vomited out the truth, so that it lay exposed on the table in front of us? These were my closest friends.
Naila and I had met as teenagers, forced to attend Urdu lessons every Saturday in Worcester Park. We’d sit at the back, reading Cosmos hidden inside our text books, bonding over the strange, uncharted dual-culture life we were creating for ourselves. I met Sam when our boys were at nursery nine years ago. She was kind, calm and a free spirit who didn’t care what people thought about her. We’d met for coffee and power walks on the Common almost every week since. Now Sofia and Sam's daughter Sienna were in the sam
e class too.
The fact that I loved these two so dearly, though, was also what stopped me from telling them. What I’d done was so selfish and reckless that it was bound to change the way they looked at me. The easiest thing would be to just say nothing. I wouldn’t have to feel ashamed and they wouldn’t have to worry about how to react.
I nodded.
‘Yes, nothing to worry about on the money front, thankfully. Not for now, anyway. I just think it will be so much easier to get used to working again while Tom is still home with the kids. That’s why I’m in such a hurry.’
‘What do you want to do?’ said Sam.
‘I worked in the City before I had Sofia, at UBS.’
Sam shook her head.
‘That won’t be easy. Not after such a long break.’
I chewed my lip.
‘Let’s do your CV first, then you can look at your options,’ she said.
She went into action mode, jotting down points in her red notebook, which she’d pulled out of her enormous blue tote. We all chipped in with suggestions.
Naila’s neat, dark bob leaned across the table, her gold hoop earrings shaking. She always frowned a little when she listened, as if she wanted to catch each word. I loved that about her. Sam was brisk and business-like, which always made me feel calmer.
‘I remember Lingo Bear!’ said Naila.
The largest section on my CV was ‘CEO Lingo Bear UK’. In reality, all I had to show for being the CEO was a teddy bear graveyard: twenty cardboard boxes crammed into the garden shed.
The bears recited pre-recorded phrases in Mandarin and Russian when their paws were pressed. I knew parents who took their bumps to French films and spoke to their uterine- darlings in a second language to give them a head start. The idea of teddy bears propped up in cots and high chairs, reciting formative phrases in Mandarin, was bound to be a hit. I planned to get bears that spoke Urdu too because Ami and her friends were always complaining that their grandchildren didn’t speak Urdu. The possibilities were endless.
They sold well, but then I started to receive irate emails demanding refunds. After a few days of use, the only thing they recited was a high-pitched squeak. But at least it padded out my CV.
Would I Lie to You? Page 3