by Jane Fallon
Do I think Michelle would be happier without him? In the long term, once she knows what he’s capable of, absolutely. In the short term she’d be devastated. I can’t even imagine. But she’d get over it. Eventually. I think.
Three things I do know for certain, though:
Patrick hasn’t ended the relationship, however much he protests that he has.
Michelle is never going to have the blissful nuclear family she’s always dreamed about while she’s with him.
None of this is any of my business.
It can’t hurt to find out who SHE is, though. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. I can make the bomb and then decide later whether or not to detonate it.
I need help, though. There is no way I can do this on my own.
My phone buzzes into life right on cue. Bea.
‘Hi.’
‘Did you need me? I got a missed call.’
‘Oh, shit, sorry. I’d forgotten you were on a date. I just wanted a chat. It can wait.’
It doesn’t sound as if she’s in a bar. I can’t hear any background noise at all.
‘He had some kind of family emergency. Had to rush off. I’m home already.’
‘Is everything OK?’
‘It’s fine. He has a sister who sounds like a bit of a head case. She rang him in a state about something or other. I told him to go over and see her. No big deal. How about you? Weren’t you going out?’
‘Oh. Yes. I just had a quick one with Michelle. I’m home, too.’
‘So … now we’ve established we’re a pair of lamos who are home from our nights out at a quarter to eight, what were you calling for?’
I don’t want to go into it over the phone.
‘Like I said, it can wait. It’s nothing.’
‘Oh no,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that tone of voice. Something’s up. Have I done something to piss you off?’
‘No! God, you and your witchy senses! Not at all! It’s just … look maybe we could go for a quick drink after work tomorrow or something. I’ll tell you then.’ I know I’m not going to be able to go through with this stone cold sober, so confiding in her in the office is out of the question.
‘Tell you what. It’s still early. Why don’t I grab a bottle of wine, jump into a cab and come over to yours?’
I think about it. Now I know that I am going to tell her the whole story I have a kind of now or never feeling. But I don’t want her to think she has to schlep halfway across London just because I’ve dangled the ‘I need to talk to you about something’ carrot in front of her.
‘You don’t want to do that. Honestly, it can wait. Don’t worry.’
But she’s adamant. ‘I’m dying of suspense here. What’s your address again?’
37
Bea
I’m gagging to know what happened. Patrick hasn’t called and, of course, according to the Ben Rules, I can’t phone him.
I’d been pacing around my flat imagining all kinds of worst-case scenarios for a good twenty minutes when I noticed that Tamsin had called. The signal in my place is so bad that nine times out of ten calls go straight to voicemail without even ringing. Unless you happen to be up in Sarah’s bedroom and hanging out of the window, that is. Which is where I went to call Tamsin back. Luckily Sarah’s used to it. She just carried on watching something on her computer, giant headphones covering her ears, while I leaned precariously over the rooftops of North London and phoned my boss.
Tamsin is a terrible actress. I can always tell when something’s bothering her, so it must have seemed perfectly feasible to her that I had supposedly spotted an edge in her voice that made me want to run over there and keep her company. I thought it might seem odd, me offering to go to her flat. I’ve never been there before. She once sent me round to the place where she used to live to feed her dog. It was a bit of a tip, to be honest. But then I’ve never offered to go out at eight o’clock at night, when I am already happily in my PJs, to meet her before either. I was banking on her being so discombobulated that she’d accept, though.
Not that I think I’m going to glean much from her. Obviously I can’t ask and I doubt she is going to spill. But it beats sitting around hoping Patrick will phone and tell me what happened. She might let something slip, however small, that’ll give me a clue. And if all else fails I’ll get to have a look at her new place.
She gives me a hug when I arrive, which is a bit disconcerting to say the least. I hope this doesn’t mean we have to start doing it every morning. Dahling! Mwah! Mwah! From the outside her house is impressive. A big, red-brick terrace towering up over four floors. I know she only lives in part of it – Flat 3, she told me on the phone – but as there isn’t a kebab shop downstairs and I know she doesn’t have two annoying flatmates cluttering up the place, this already feels like a palace to me.
Inside it’s smaller than I expect. That’s not to say it isn’t gorgeous. High ceilings and shiny real wood floors. A big bay window at the front. It smells a bit of dog, if I’m being honest. I like dogs, but I’m not a huge fan of their body odour. Ron runs over to greet me. I have no idea if he remembers that we’ve met before, but he’s sweet and friendly so I lean down and scruff his head.
‘Lovely flat,’ I say, handing over the wine I picked up at the offie on the corner of my road.
‘Thanks,’ Tamsin says. ‘Sorry it’s such a mess.’
I don’t contradict her. It is. It makes my place look like Kim and Aggie have been round. Mind you, I should have expected it. Her office is a toxic waste sanctuary.
She shoves a load of crap onto the floor to clear a space on the sofa for me, pours me a big glass of wine and fills up her own. She’s obviously had a glass or two already, but then so have I.
‘So,’ I say, ‘What’s up?’
I expect her to tell me some half-arsed sob story about feeling bad for having lied to Michelle to cover up for Patrick, or even, maybe, to tell me she’s just had an unpleasant encounter with the man in question. Without going into too much detail, I imagine.
But nothing has prepared me for what comes out of her mouth.
‘You slept with Patrick Mitchell?’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. A wave of nausea hits me. I need to know everything. When. Where. What the fuck he thought he was doing. I have to be careful not to give myself away, though. Not to let her see that this news isn’t just a shock, it’s like a body blow.
‘No. I didn’t sleep with him. Not exactly. We just …’
She leaves the words hanging there. I want to shake her. Just what? What the hell does ‘We just …’ mean on the scale of sexual contact?
I wait for what seems like an age. She says nothing, just looks at me. I breathe in slowly.
‘You just …?’
‘We just fooled around a bit. A lot. Jesus, Bea, you really can’t tell anyone this. Ever.’
‘As if.’ I need details. ‘Fooled around. That doesn’t sound so awful. What? You just kissed him or something?’ Stop it, Bea. Stop making it so obvious.
She lets out a cross between a sigh and a moan. ‘More than that. Quite a lot more, but not everything. Shit. I’m so ashamed of myself. You’ve got no idea what I’ve been feeling like all these weeks.’
I move an imaginary cursor along an imaginary line that is labelled ‘Fooled around’ at one end and ‘Everything’ at the other. It hovers somewhere around ‘Oral’. This is not comforting.
‘When … I mean …?’
Tamsin puts her head into her hands. I try to remember how I wo
uld be behaving if she hadn’t just basically told me she’d had sex with my boyfriend. I would probably be trying to make her feel better.
‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think. These things happen …’
‘It is. It is as bad as I think. It was a stupid mistake, but that doesn’t make it any better. That’s why … don’t you see? That’s why I’ve been covering up for him and everything. Because he has something over me.’
‘Shit,’ I say, hoping it sounds like I give a flying fuck about how she’s feeling. ‘Tell me everything.’
So now I know that five nights after he first slept with me Patrick had sex with Tamsin. Sanctimonious Tamsin who was so outraged by the betrayal of her best friend that she practically forced me to go and seduce that best friend’s husband. Self-fucking-righteous Tamsin who couldn’t bear to stand by and watch while Patrick cheated on Michelle. Holier-than-thou Tamsin who was so horrified by hearing that her best friend’s husband had cheated on her that she cheated on her with him herself. The word hypocrite doesn’t even come close.
Patrick told me he had put on an act to convince her of his innocence. He told me he cried. What he’d failed to add is that he sealed the deal by sticking his dick in her mouth.
‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Tamsin tells me now, almost tearful herself. I am unmoved. ‘Well, I do. We were both a bit drunk and he was so upset and then the next thing I knew he was kissing me. I should have just pushed him away.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I say, trying to keep the judgement out of my voice.
‘I did. Eventually. I don’t know. I really don’t. I guess I must have wanted it too.’
‘So it was just a kiss …?’ Jesus, I can’t let it go.
‘No … no.’
‘But you pushed him away in the end. He would have carried on?’
‘I came to my senses, yes. But way too much had happened by then.’
I have to know. ‘And he would have carried on?’ I say again.
She looks as if she’s thinking about it for a moment. ‘Yes. I don’t know how long for, though. We’ve never actually talked about it since.’
‘So … how far did you go? I’m guessing pretty far …’
She sighs. ‘I can’t talk about it … you’ll have to use your imagination.’
Oh no. She is not getting away with that. ‘I bet you’re overreacting. You’re beating yourself up but it’s nowhere near as bad as you think.’
‘No, it really is. You’ll just have to trust me on that.’
I reach over and fill both our glasses up again. I want details, and pouring drink down her might help.
‘So then what?’
‘Then we both agreed it had been a horrible mistake and it would never happen again and that Michelle must never find out. I actually felt bad for him, Bea, can you believe that? He seemed as horrified by what we’d done as I was.’
‘Wow! This is … I mean, you were so outraged when you thought he was playing around …’
‘You don’t have to remind me. I feel terrible. I know it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘So …’ I say, and this is the question I really want answered. ‘Has it happened again since?’
She looks at me like I’ve just suggested we get down on the floor and try it ourselves. ‘Of course not! Christ. Once was bad enough.’
‘He hasn’t tried again?’
‘No. He hasn’t tried again.’
That’s something. She tells me she’d thought they had put it behind them. Agreed it had been a mistake of the worst order and that it could never benefit Michelle to find out.
‘All I could think about was her and what I’d done to her,’ she says, looking at me, watery-eyed, and I think, Yes, of course, I’m sure you weren’t thinking about yourself at all.
I make sympathetic noises and try to get my emotions under control. ‘So, how did it get from that to you agreeing to cover up for him?’
‘I … I sent him a text. I know, I know. It was a stupid thing to do. But I couldn’t get hold of him the next day and I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page. He kept it.’
Ah, so now I get it. Patrick didn’t so much sweet talk as blackmail. I almost laugh.
‘God. What a bastard,’ I say and – maybe not for the reasons she thinks – I mean it. ‘So, is that it forever? He has that over you so you’re going to keep on bailing him out.’
If I wasn’t so angry with Patrick I would probably be admiring the way he has pulled this off. It’s the world’s best alibi.
‘Not exactly,’ she says now, stopping my thought process in its tracks.
She tells me some story about wiping the text from his phone. I can tell that although tonight’s events have obviously rattled her, she is feeling a bit proud of herself for this. I’m gagging to ask her what went down this evening, but I know I have to wait my time.
‘Nice,’ I say. ‘So now you’ve got the upper hand?’
‘I don’t know.’ She takes a long sip of her wine and then she tells me about finding Ben’s messages and turning up at the hotel tonight to try to catch him out. I feel a shiver down my back as I realize how close I came to being discovered. Patrick, it seems, sought her out in the bar and more or less accused her of following him.
‘Or at least that’s what it felt like,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if he’s worked out I’ve deleted that text yet, but either way he knows I’m not going to lie down and let him walk all over me any more.’
A thought strikes me. ‘Why were you there, though? Why do you care about who it is he’s seeing?’
‘Because I’ve decided he’s not going to get away with it.’
Everything goes in and out of focus. The feeling you get when you wake up after a big night out and you know you’re in for a rough day. ‘I thought you wanted to protect Michelle? I thought your main priority was making sure she never found out what he was like.’
‘It was. But that was when I thought he really loved her. When I thought he was having a bit of an out-of-character mid-life crisis …’
And before you thought he might tell her about you and him, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.
‘Now I know he’s an irredeemable bastard, though. And it’s better she finds this out now than a few years down the line.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, but is this really anything to do with you? I mean … I know she’s your friend … what I’m saying is it could rebound on you. You could come off worse.’
Tamsin exhales loudly. ‘Shit, I don’t know. Am I doing the wrong thing?’
Half of me screams, ‘Yes.’ I don’t want to be found out. I can’t even imagine how it would be if Tamsin discovered it was me that Patrick was seeing. Me who was the big bad threat to her friend’s happiness. But another part – a tiny but surprisingly gobby part – can’t help but think that if Michelle found out what Patrick was really like then that would surely signal the death of their marriage. And I’m starting to think that I would quite like him to be single. Well, not single because, obviously, he is seeing me. But single on paper. Unencumbered by a wife. Free to make his relationship with me official.
I check myself quickly. Of course I can’t hope for that to happen. It would make my relationship with Tamsin – my boss – untenable. I doubt she’d have grounds to sack me, but imagine how impossible she could make my working life. I could look for another job, but I’m sure her references would lack a certain amount of enthusiasm. ‘Bea works hard – if working hard means she will try to seduce your marr
ied friends, that is.’ ‘Bea is a bit of a slag, so don’t leave her alone with your husband whatever you do.’ ‘Bea is a massive skank – end of.’
On reflection I think it’s best if I can help ensure Patrick and his saintly wife stay together. At least for now.
‘I might need you to help me,’ she says now. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do next.’
‘Of course,’ I say, not meaning it for a second. ‘Anything.’
38
Bea
Obviously I tried to phone Patrick the second I got out of there. Fuck the Ben Rules.
I had accepted Tamsin’s offer of a cab without argument. It was getting pretty late and I wasn’t really in the mood for pissed-up tube-goers making their way home from fun nights out. My night out could not have been described as fun. Revealing, yes. Shocking, yes. Fun, no. Not exactly.
It clicked straight to voicemail. He obviously had it turned off. Probably tucked up in bed with Michelle by now, hand curved tenderly around her waist. The loving, considerate husband. I didn’t leave a message. I’m not that stupid.
Five minutes later I was grateful he hadn’t answered. If I’d blurted out exactly what was bothering me, ignoring his protestations of ‘Can I call you back in a bit, mate?’ then I would probably never have heard from him again. I would have overstepped the mark from something that was unthreatening to something that was decidedly dangerous. I would have made myself a liability.
I’m going to have to play this carefully. I can’t storm in there all accusing and demanding. Mind you, I’m not going to let him get away with it either. At the very least I intend to tell him what I know. To see what he has to say for himself.
I tried not to think about them together. Tried to remind myself that he had only just met me when it happened. But the idea of it made me feel like throwing up.
Ali was up when I got in. She started in on some interminable story about how her ex had called her phone by mistake, but they’d ended up having a long and soul-searching conversation. Something like that. I struggled to even feign interest. I think she said they were meeting up next week. I have no doubt she’ll tell me the whole story again when I see her tonight. Ali has that tendency. If she has something to tell you, once is never enough. I’ll catch it on the replay.