by Sue Watson
I try not to think too much – it hurts my head – so I go back into Mum mode, head back down into the kitchen and try to make things nice for the boys by offering second helpings and sprinkles for the pancakes. No one asks where Dad is and I don’t want to pass my worry onto them, so we eat and tell jokes and the boys regale me with stories of Alex in their class who does the loudest and most ‘awesome’ belches – I imagine his mother is very proud. The belching stories are enlightening, and disgusting, but not distracting enough to stop my mind wandering back to Simon’s whereabouts.
By mid-morning the pancakes are a memory, Sophie’s appeared and the four of us are playing Monopoly. I join in with gusto, but have to feign excitement when I buy Park Lane and Mayfair and put hotels on them. I just keep wondering where Simon is and what he’s up to and if he’s got Caroline back in his clutches or he’s with David working out the divorce. The doctor and the lawyer – two heads together, plotting some drugged-up, straitjacket life for the woman who won’t leave.
I will leave, but on my terms with my children, and that includes Sophie because I’m sure if she was given the choice she’d want to be with me and her half-brothers.
I roll the dice and end up in jail, which is good because I have to miss a turn and that gives me the opportunity to think.
Sometimes we shape our partners into what we think we want them to be – and for me the revelation was seeing how Caroline had clearly changed so much in a matter of months. Just like I had. Simon married a free-spirited, vulnerable girl who was bright and fun, and he was fascinated. Like a child watching an exotic fish in a garden pond, he wanted to catch her and keep her. But in doing so he turned me into someone else. I always thought the person I’d become was my fault: my flaws, my mistakes, my madness – the terrible death of our baby. But seeing Caroline, the once strong, independent career girl, standing in her kitchen shivering, shadows and tears in her eyes, a dark bruise on her wrist, made me realise – it was never my fault. I didn’t have to spend all that time being punished, because I hadn’t done anything wrong – I was the perfect specimen to be seduced into Simon’s warped idea of love.
Whatever I may have imagined in the past, I know Simon doesn’t want me around any more. He and I both want an end to this marriage now, but he doesn’t want to lose the house or his kids any more than I do. He also knows that the worst thing he could do is stop me having the children – and being an emotional sadist, that will be top of his list.
He could be at the clinic now, explaining how erratic my behaviour is, that he’s worried for the children’s safety, and signing papers for me to be taken in, like last time, when he said we were going on a date, but he took me to a clinic.
After everything that’s happened in the past forty-eight hours, I’m so worried at the prospect of being committed again that I barely register when Charlie lands on my property, owing apparently ‘millions’.
‘Mum, Mum… I landed – and I’m not paying,’ he’s shouting.
I tune back in to my beautiful family, demanding this money in full, threatening to tickle him until he pays up and instructing Alfie and Sophie to hold him down. It makes a nice change for Alfie to be the one winning over Charlie and I go in for the tickle. It makes me think about the power struggle between me and Simon;
I always win, Marianne. Not this time, Simon, I won’t give my children up under any circumstances.
Charlie’s now screeching with laughter which makes us all laugh and as he tries to escape we grab him in a rugby tackle, all rolling around the floor, hysterical… Then we hear the front door open. The kids go quiet and Simon walks into the kitchen.
He looks dreadful, like he’s had no sleep, and for a moment I almost feel sorry for him. He seems to have the worries of the world on his shoulders.
Sophie looks horrified, and Charlie asks shyly if he’s going to join us in a game of Monopoly, but he just shakes his head. No one needs to say anything, but we all know Monopoly is over and Sophie immediately disappears to her room. The boys aren’t so sensitive and Charlie sees this as the perfect opportunity to take Alfie in a brutal headlock and slam him onto the floor. I don’t think this is unconnected to Simon’s arrival. Charlie always seems to become aggressive and shows off around his father. I can’t help but feel that without Simon in his life he would be a calmer child.
‘Boys, boys… Charlie, that’s enough! Just calm down,’ I say and suggest they watch TV for a while in the sitting room. They look at Simon, waiting for permission; he’s the only member of the household that can sign this off. Pompous, controlling prick. For a second I think he’s going to object just to wind me up, but he eventually finds the strength to nod and, roaring their approval, they leave.
‘Where have you been?’ I ask him after a few minutes’ silence. He isn’t going to volunteer his whereabouts.
‘Nowhere.’
‘All night?’
‘Marianne, when is this going to stop – this constant questioning?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, then hate myself for my default position of apologising. ‘I don’t care where you’ve been, but I just want to know what’s happening.’
‘I just drove around. I went to see a friend, we drank too much and I stayed over at their place.’
‘Caroline?’ I ask, remembering the sadness, the defeat in her eyes and feeling weirdly protective of her.
‘No, not Caroline.’
‘Who then?’
‘I really don’t believe after everything that it’s any business of yours. I can spend the night with whom I choose.’
Why do you keep lying Simon, even when it doesn’t matter?
I don’t care where he stayed, and I don’t have the energy to fight. ‘I went to see her yesterday,’ I say, looking at his face for a reaction. ‘We had a talk. She told me you deleted your email account and she confirmed it’s your baby.’
‘Okay, well, you win.’ He says this like he’s given up – his heart isn’t even in the lie any more.
‘Christ, Simon, it’s not about winning, it’s about you lying, trying to destroy me.’
‘It isn’t unusual to lie to your wife about an affair,’ he says pompously.
‘No, but to deny it and imply your wife is insane is unusual, to say the least.’
‘Do you blame me? Your obsessions, irrational behaviour, the ups and downs – if I’d told you about Caroline, you’d have slashed your wrists.’
‘How could you…’ He always knows where to hurt me. I once told him that I’m haunted by the vision of my mother’s body, the red-stained towel, the slits lengthways up her arms from her wrists. White towels, pale flesh, red blood. He always conjured it for me.
‘I’ve had enough of this, enough of you. It’s impossible to have a conversation with you,’ he hisses, already walking through the kitchen away from me. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’
Unfortunately, what he does next will impact on all of us, but I have no idea what his move will be. My instinct is to take the kids and leave but where could I go with no money? And if I did try and run away with the children I’d be playing straight into Simon’s hands. He’s hoping I will react (because I always have) and this will justify him keeping the kids, having me locked up. So for now I just have to be patient and wait, but for what I don’t know.
While Simon takes himself off to bed to sleep off last night, there’s no such luxury for me. Being the mum of two six-year-old boys, I don’t have time to ponder my own life, and when I hear the latest argument becoming physical between them, I decide to take them to the swimming baths. I need to get out of the house and so do they.
I sit in the humidity, watching the boys like a hawk as they flail around in the pool, splashing each other and everyone else around them. I almost fall asleep – the warmth and the residue of medication still in my system makes me drowsy – but I manage to stay awake and get us back home.
By mid-afternoon, I can barely keep my eyes open. After a snack, I allow the boys a
n hour on their iPads, while I take a much-needed nap on the sofa, grateful there’s no sign of Simon and the toxic atmosphere he brings with him.
I wake with a start, and discover it’s 6 p.m. and I’ve been asleep for more than three hours. I’m so out of it, I find it hard to come round and immediately call the boys, who aren’t in the sitting room where I left them. I open the French windows, calling them over and over, and it’s only when I run back in to grab my phone to call the police I see a note on the worktop. It’s from Simon and says he’s taken the kids to the cinema. He’s never taken them to the cinema in their lives. It’s not something he’d do – I hope this isn’t his revenge, and he’s decided to leave and take them with him?
With my mind going into overdrive, I text him, and immediately get a message back, which is unusual for Simon, and he says they will be home in half an hour. I am calmer but still a mess and only manage to anchor myself when I put the kettle on and turn on the TV. I’m sipping my tea and feeling edgy, hoping his considerately quick response wasn’t just a ruse to appease me while he takes them out of the country. I think I’m being irrational and overanxious, so take a tablet and sit down and try to concentrate on the news. Sometimes it helps just to be distracted by something outside my own little world.
I stare at the screen – stories of real turmoil, wars, terrorism, murder – but still my personal turmoil intrudes, pushing its way through. Even if I managed to get custody of the children (which would be touch-and-go given Emily and my mental health record, not to mention my police one), Simon would make things very difficult for me. He’d probably sell the house, the kids would be taken out of yet another school, there’d be no money for extra-curricular activities, no more lovely holidays. In truth, I haven’t always found holidays to be pleasurable. Simon usually manages to find something wrong with the way I’ve packed the kids’ clothes, the type of sun cream I’ve bought, the way I look in a bikini. But the kids have a great time, I make sure of that – and despite the ups and downs, there have been golden moments as a family.
There was the time when we hired a boat in Greece. Simon said he was the captain – the boys were only three and beside themselves with joy and Sophie screamed with terror and delight when Simon put his foot down. ‘Faster, Daddy, faster,’ she’d yelled. Later we found a little restaurant on the beach and ate freshly caught fish with chunks of lemon as we watched the sun go down over the sea. Alfie was asleep on my knee and Charlie on Simon’s and I remember looking over at my husband and baby and feeling nothing but love.
Life wasn’t always this perfect at home, behind closed doors, but the difference between then and now is that I had hope. I honestly thought if I was well Simon would love me and treat me better – but it was naïve of me. I believed that if we could string together these good times like fairy lights through our life, then I could endure the rest – the cruelty, the way he likes to torment and control me. I thought that was love, but he simply brainwashed me, like he has Caroline, transforming us into spectres of our real selves.
I think of the photo on her Instagram – smiling with those shiny lips, short, choppy blonde hair, clutching a wine glass – but the picture isn’t in my head, it’s on my TV screen in in my kitchen. I know it’s the pills, but I can’t keep going under like this. I thought I was over my obsession with Caroline. But it is her… or at least it’s the same photo I’ve seen a thousand times online. The wallpaper, huge green fronds on navy blue, and the forearm of bangles, the glass of wine…
I turn up the volume and walk towards the screen, never taking my eyes off it as she comes closer. It seems so real. Perhaps I’m not seeing things; perhaps she’s suddenly become famous overnight? Has she carried out a pioneering operation and saved a child’s life? Then my head clears and I hear it.
‘… Police are treating her death as suspicious and asking for any witnesses to contact them.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
I am hallucinating, aren’t I? The bright blonde star of her own Instagram. The woman I’ve fixated on for weeks. The woman I feel like I know so well we could be friends. Except we’re not. In the photo, she’s beautiful, happy, vibrant and alive.
But now she’s dead.
I hold my breath, and try to swallow, but my mouth’s too dry. A reporter is standing outside the cottage.
I was there only yesterday.
I can’t take it in – there’s an interview now with the neighbour, the one I saw peeping from behind the twitching lace curtain, she’s saying what a lovely girl Caroline was, but she didn’t even know her.
Vultures.
The news is over, but I’m still staring at the screen, where two people are doing the Argentine tango and apparently ‘the results are in’. No wonder I’m going mad. I’m surprised more people aren’t mad, the way they switch so quickly from real-life murder to ballroom dancing. As the woman kicks and swirls and the man plays matador, I am seriously questioning myself. Time slips away and suddenly Simon’s back with the kids.
Was I the last person to see Caroline alive?
I can’t articulate what I know. It would make it too real and I need to think about it, come to terms with it in my own head before I say it out loud. Caroline has been murdered. I immediately go into my default mum mode where I feel safe and prepare food, ask the boys about their film, which apparently was ‘sick’ and involved ‘awesome’ Smurfs, who, according to Alfie, discover ‘the biggest secret in Smurf history!’
‘Wow,’ I keep saying, sometimes followed by ‘and then what happened?’ But I’m not listening. Simon wandered off into the sitting room as soon as they came home – he clearly didn’t engage with the film in quite the same way. Does he know?
After I’ve fed and bathed the boys and read several stories on autopilot, I go back downstairs and into the kitchen. Sophie’s in there and I pick up one of the boys’ iPads, for once genuinely hoping this was all in my mind. I’m frightened of finding this piece of news, but equally of not finding it. If it’s there, Caroline’s dead, if it isn’t I’m mad.
I log on and ask Google, and within seconds she appears in the news stream, sparkly, smiley Caroline, the one before Simon, clutching her wine glass and smiling at me.
‘Sophie.’ I have to think how to ask this – I don’t want to freak her out. ‘Can you tell me: is this the woman who was here the other evening?’
Sophie looks up and comes over to me, looks down at the article, and when her hand goes over her mouth, I know I’m not imagining this.
‘Caroline Harker,’ she says, her eyes filled with horror. ‘Shit Mum, what happened?’
I press play and we watch the news coverage, horrified yet mesmerised. As if the body they’re putting in the ambulance now isn’t someone we know. But it is… it’s someone we know very well. ‘I think she was stabbed,’ I say, reading the copy and feeling a chill run through me. How many times had I wished that woman dead? I’d imagined her twisted body in car wrecks, at the bottom of car parks, smashed, her beautiful face unrecognisable. But that was just my state of mind back then. I was upset, a little overwrought, it was all a dark and horrible fantasy. I’d never do anything like that. Would I?
Sophie’s phone tinkles and she’s soon back in her own world of texts and teenage angst, Caroline almost forgotten as she wanders off upstairs, her face glued to her phone.
Knowing there is no doubt, that I haven’t imagined or misunderstood what happened, I rush in to Simon, who doesn’t even look up.
‘There’s something you must see.’ I thrust the iPad at him, but before he can refuse, he looks up at me, the expression on my face compelling him to look at the screen.
‘Christ,’ he says as he takes it from me, slowly sitting up, his face ashen. Then he turns on the TV news channel, and is now scrolling his phone at the same time. ‘Oh God, what happened? This is terrible… terrible.’ I think he might cry. I think I might.
‘We need to call the police. We have to tell them,’ I say.
‘T
ell them what?’ He’s surprised at this.
‘That we know her – they are asking for witnesses. This wasn’t suicide Simon, someone killed her, she’s been stabbed… She was at our house two nights ago. I was at hers yesterday.’
He seems to straighten up, compose himself, and says very calmly, ‘Which is exactly why we shouldn’t be calling the police.’
‘What?’
‘You had a confrontation with her in front of witnesses in your own kitchen. And then you were over there yesterday… and now she’s… Well, this happens. You can see how it looks. You were probably the last one to see her?’
‘Yes, which means I should tell the police…’
‘You’re not listening. You accused her of being pregnant with your husband’s baby.’
‘I know, but that doesn’t make me a murderer. I went round there yesterday and we talked, that was all… I even took her a gift. We made up. Simon, whoever killed her must have gone there after me.’
‘But who…’
I wait a moment, and then I say exactly what’s on my mind. What’s the point in holding back now?
‘You?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous – why would I do her any harm? She’s…’
‘Carrying your baby? We don’t have to pretend I’m imagining it any more. That’s where you were last night. You were with her, weren’t you?’
‘No, no I wasn’t… Oh my God…’ He drops the iPad onto the floor. I’m standing over him as he looks up at me from the chair. His eyes are strange and dark; I’ve never seen him like this before. ‘Marianne. When she told you… about the baby, that it was mine… did you… hurt her?’