‘Cos look,’ he says in a whisper, pointing to Mum’s bishop. The boy draws a line across his throat and laughs.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah.’
He picks up my piece and moves it to a different square.
‘You can’t do that,’ I say. ‘It’s cheating.’
‘She didn’t see,’ he says cockily as I put the piece back where I had it. ‘Everyone cheats,’ he says, just as Mum joins us again. Her cheeks are flushed.
No, I think. No, they don’t, but the boy runs off to his parents who are calling him back.
‘Your go, Mum,’ I say as she studies the giant board. She decides on a simple pawn move, as if she doesn’t know what else to do.
For some reason I don’t say anything about the killing she could have made. I hate myself for it, but then I’m well practised at keeping quiet.
‘Although, thinking about it,’ Mum says with a faraway look in her eyes, ‘I’m not sure my life is anything like a game of chess. I don’t feel I’ve been making my own moves at all. Not for a very long time.’
And I know exactly what she means as on my next go I’m able to topple her bishop.
‘But it’s not even close to seven o’clock,’ I say as we head back to the hotel. She leads me into the bar, telling me she has to take our empty glasses back. I know she’s been drinking more these last few months.
Though the drinking that goes on at university actually makes Mum’s few glasses of wine each night seem lightweight. Before I went, she and Dad lectured me about alcohol, drugs, sex, all the kinds of things parents get hung up over. I convinced them I’d never touch drugs and wouldn’t get wasted on booze. The rest I left to their imagination, which probably isn’t the cleverest thing I’ve ever done. It’s all about reassurance with parents, making them think the best when they’re hardwired to believe the worst.
‘What shall we do now?’ I say, looking around the deserted bar as she stands there expectantly. ‘There’s no one here to mingle with.’ I say it in a silly way, hoping it will make her smile.
‘Susan definitely said guests gather for drinks,’ she says for the third time.
She seems nervous, distracted, as if she’s searching for something, her eyes darting around the old panelled room. Even though it’s still light outside, the bar is dim and sombre, filled with the musty smell of log fires lingering from the winter, though it’s brightened by vases of daffodils dotted around the room.
‘How about a walk down to the village?’ I suggest. ‘Or I could show you the spa area.’ Anything but another drink. I want her to last the evening without crying or falling asleep by nine o’clock.
Mum glances at her watch just as my phone vibrates again. I stare at the screen. The sight of his name makes me tense up. I shove my phone back in my pocket without reading the message. I wish he’d just take no for an answer and get on with his life. Let me get on with mine. What’s left of it.
That was pretty much what I told him last time I saw him. He’d hounded me for days after I broke up with him – after that terrible evening in his room. Yet another reason to screw up my eyes, block my ears, hoping it will all just go away.
‘Or we could stay here and wait?’ Mum suggests, planting herself on a velvet-topped bar stool. ‘See if anyone turns up.’
Then her face lights up as the bartender comes out from a back room.
‘May I have a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, please?’ she says, watching as he pours. Resignedly I sit down beside her and ask for a bag of nuts. I’m starving.
‘Who’s texting?’ Mum says, trying to sound interested.
For a moment I consider telling her. She and Dad pretty much guessed I had a boyfriend last term, figured out that things had got into a mess when I came back from uni early before Christmas. It didn’t take a mind-reader.
But it’s no easier to tell her now than it was then.
Harder, in fact.
I fully intended on going back for the last week or so of term after I’d got my head round things, got some answers and decided what to do, but then it all kicked off with Dad, and since then everything’s been horrid. Even more horrid.
‘Just someone from uni,’ I say. I ask for some water. The nuts are salty.
‘A boy?’
‘Yeah, actually.’
Keeping it all inside is hard work. Then I’m thinking of James whoever-he-was in the pub last week. It was risky and stupid, but it felt good to get some stuff off my chest, even though it’s left me paranoid.
Mum gives a slightly boozy wink. ‘That’s nice, love.’
No. No, it’s not nice at all, I want to tell her, but don’t get the chance as someone comes up behind us, interrupting the moment, making Mum shudder and gasp as a friendly hand comes down on her shoulder. As she turns round, I see her eyes close briefly, a look of pathetic hope pulling at her features as she prays it’s Dad standing there, about to cradle her in his arms.
Forgive and forget . . .
But of course it’s not. It’s Susan, smiling, eyeing each of us in turn.
‘How are you both settling in?’ she asks.
Then she tells us about a local craft fair we might be interested in as she mindlessly toys with a pen between her strong, slender fingers.
I’m not really listening to what she’s saying and have to force my eyes off the pen, telling myself that it doesn’t mean anything, that they’re as common as salt, a dime a dozen. All I know is that I have to get Mum away before she makes the connection as well. If I don’t, it will ruin the evening for sure.
Gina
‘Susan,’ I say as lightly as I can manage. ‘You surprised me.’
Air escapes my lungs, punctured by disappointment as she comes up behind me.
It’s not Rick.
I take another breath, catching Hannah’s eye. I can immediately see that she knows exactly what I was thinking.
I have these little fantasies. Bucketloads of them, actually. And as time’s gone on, they’ve increased in number. To begin with they were mostly aimed at me – fantasies that involved me not waking up, perhaps dying mysteriously in the night from a broken heart so I wouldn’t have to deal with things any more.
Or I dream up scenarios where I get diagnosed with an incurable disease, an illness that takes me swiftly so Hannah doesn’t have to witness my demise. Other times I pray I’ll get hit by a bus or a train, me stepping out not-so-carelessly into its path, reaching out for the hand of my son as he welcomes me over.
But as the weeks have turned into months, as I realise that, unlike Rick, I’m here to stay, the stories in my head have turned into fantasies of his return. He comes home in many guises and ways – from delivery men, to customers at work, to patients in hospital who have lost their memories.
That last one is perhaps my favourite – wrapping everything up in a neat parcel of forgiveness. A terrible accident, Rick was saved and taken to hospital, remaining in a coma for months. With no ID and an admin error, the police didn’t make the link. He somehow slipped through the net of identification and, when he woke, his memory was fuzzy and he didn’t know who or where he was.
I’m always drenched in sweat when I wake from this particular dream. However hard I try, there’s always a piece of the puzzle – of Rick – missing, leaving a gaping hole in the middle. And in the dream, when I’m rekindling his memory, teaching him who he is again, I watch myself telling him lies, piecing him back together just the way I want him.
‘Mrs Forrester?’
‘Mum . . .’ comes the unmistakable tone of my daughter. A mother always reacts to the sound of her own child.
‘Sorry, love, I was miles away.’ I take a sip of my drink, trying to seem unfazed. Susan is standing beside me, her eyebrows raised, her lips poised in a ready-to-go smile.
‘Will you be dining at the hotel tonight?’ she asks. ‘We only have one table left if you want it.’
I look at Hannah. Do we want it? I wish I knew. Since Rick went, even the most trivial of
decisions pass me by, rendering me stuck in a place of a thousand impossible choices.
‘We’d love to eat here tonight,’ Hannah says right on cue. I’m so glad she’s here.
‘Perfect,’ Susan replies, jotting down a note on her pad.
I look at her hands – strong and lean, capable hands, but something doesn’t feel right. Something that begins the swell of nausea inside me as I watch her write. I have no idea what it is.
‘May I have a glass of water, please?’ I say to the barman. I take a few sips, thinking how stupid I am to have had wine in the afternoon. I can already feel a headache blooming behind my forehead. But it’s more than that. Hannah is talking to Susan about dogs now, something about Labradors and gundogs . . . and my eyes are drawn back to Susan’s hands as she clicks her pen on and off, occasionally allowing the nib to wander across the paper in an idle doodle. The room blurs around the edges.
Susan laughs loudly and Hannah follows suit, covering her face briefly at the funny story they’ve just shared.
‘That must have been sooo embarrassing,’ Hannah says in that incredulous way of hers, the same way I’ve heard her talking to her friends. But rarely to me.
‘It was,’ Susan replies, her smile broad and white. ‘But thankfully they didn’t hold it against me.’ The laughter subsides and the pair turn to me. I have no idea what they were talking about, just that I don’t feel right, that something has made me uneasy and I don’t know what.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, sweeping my hair from my face. Cooper’s soft body leans against my ankles, grounding me. ‘Your blouse, Susan. It’s so pretty.’ I only compliment her so as not to sound awkward, even though it has the opposite effect.
And it’s not the blouse I actually meant to comment on, it was something else. I just don’t know what.
‘Thank you,’ she says, beaming. ‘My husband bought it for me. Not bad, eh, for a man who loathes shopping.’ Her chin lifts a little, exposing her long neck, her angular jaw.
‘Between you and me,’ she says, leaning closer, ‘I think it was a gift of guilt. His work trip had run over . . . again . . . and he picked this up for me so I couldn’t possibly get mad at him.’ She looks down at the fabric, running her fingers across the sleeve. ‘It’s from Dubai,’ she adds, almost proudly, as if she’s tempting me to ask what he does for a living.
I don’t, because talking about other people’s husbands isn’t high up on my list of achievable tasks right now. Paula, my counsellor, said that will come in time. That I mustn’t rush it. That I must be kind to myself and take everything slowly. As it is, I feel as though I’m wading through treacle from the moment I wake to the moment I go to sleep. I don’t think I could function any slower, more cautiously, more detached, if I tried.
‘Well, it really suits you,’ I say. Tiny birds are printed at all angles and in all colours, spattered on her body as if she’s been caught up in a flock.
But suddenly it seems wrong, almost distasteful, as does everything about her, even though logically I know it’s not. She’s stylish and kind and friendly. What is it, then, that pulls at me so? Why can’t I relax and enjoy chatting with her?
And then I realise what it is that’s been nagging at me. But by the time I’ve thought of the right words, Susan has told us that she’ll see us later and has walked off.
‘Hannah . . .’ I whisper, grabbing her arm. ‘Did you see it?’ My eyes feel as if they’re going to burst out of my head. Across the room, I watch Susan speaking to one of the staff before she leaves.
‘See what?’
‘The pen Susan was holding.’
Hannah shrugs and shakes her head casually. There’s a flash of colour on her cheeks, but it’s quickly gone.
‘No. What about it?’ she says, fussing Cooper.
I take another sip of wine, knowing what she’ll say if I mention it – that I’m mad, that I’m doing ‘that thing’ again where I’m reading something into nothing. That everywhere I look, if I really want to, I’ll see bits of Rick, as if he’s been blown into a million pieces and I’ve been left behind to gather them all up.
And I’ve told myself that I will. Even if it takes the rest of my life, I will piece him back together.
‘It was nice, that’s all,’ I say, trying to backtrack. I daren’t look at Hannah, don’t want to read her expression.
But I can’t help wondering if she noticed it too. Susan was holding a silver filigree pen, similar, if not identical, to the one I gave to Rick a couple of anniversaries ago.
And it’s our anniversary on Monday.
It’s a sign, I feel sure.
Lower Buckley is a classic Cotswold village – all toffee-and-biscuit-coloured stone cottages, a willow-fringed green with a heart-shaped pond, and a dozen ducks that come waddling up to us the moment they see us approaching.
‘Hold him,’ I say to Hannah, but Cooper is too old and lazy to pay much attention to the noisy birds. His tail swings in a wide arc, nearly knocking into one of them as they surround us. We go over to the bench and sit down, some of the ducks following on, convinced we have food for them. The sun sweeps low through the willow fronds that are already coming into leaf, but there’s a nip in the air now evening approaches. The last couple of days have been unseasonably mild, but it’s set to change. I pull my jacket around me.
‘Imagine living here,’ Hannah says wistfully. ‘You’d feel like a strawberry cream, wouldn’t you?’
I’m not sure what she means, but smile anyway. Her imagination has always taken her places, though less so in recent years. Perhaps that’s to do with the losses she’s suffered, and suddenly I feel so selfish, so wretched and wrapped up in my own grief that I’ve failed to pay attention to what my daughter must be going through.
‘Chocolate box cottages,’ she says as if I’m stupid, turning round, trailing her gaze up and down the street. There’s no one about, not even a car passing through, and we only saw one other person on our walk down here before dinner. She gives a little laugh.
‘Apparently the pub further down has a restaurant attached that’s owned by a celebrity chef,’ I say. ‘Though I can’t remember who.’
I did a quick search of the area before we came, keen to find activities to fill the gaps between the treatments Rick had booked – mainly so I didn’t have too much thinking time. Dangerous time, I once said to Paula as she listened to me talk for an hour solid. She understood what I meant.
‘I wouldn’t want to live here, though,’ Hannah continues. ‘It’s far too quiet.’
‘I would,’ I reply, surprising myself.
At that moment, I realise there’s nothing I want to do more than pack a small suitcase and leave our house behind, contents and all. If I can’t have it with Rick in it, I don’t want it at all. So much has happened since we moved there, good and heart-wrenchingly terrible, but with Rick beside me we somehow made it through from one day to the next. We were a team, working through things together, as if one of us somehow managed to balance out the other’s grief, knowing instinctively when to be strong.
‘That’s natural,’ I say. ‘You’re young and still need the buzz of a city and friends close by. When you get to my age, you’ll be after different things. Just you wait until babies come along.’ I wink, thinking she’ll shove me in the ribs, or make a growling noise that says she’s not even thinking about such things yet, but she doesn’t. She just keeps on staring up the street.
‘Let’s save some bread from breakfast and bring it for the ducks,’ I say, but still Hannah doesn’t look round.
I pat Cooper and press my face against his neck, breathing in his pleasant scent, knowing that all I’m trying to do is catch a whiff of Rick.
Gina
The first time I saw Paula Nicholls, I instantly liked her. She made me feel as if I wasn’t coming apart at the seams quite as much as I believed. She was worth the money for that alone – an hour of feeling as near to normal as I was probabl
y ever going to get.
But my concern was, as I walked into her office for the first time a couple of months ago, that she wouldn’t like me. I’d lost my husband, after all. Been very careless. The family liaison officer allocated by PC Lane was the one to recommend counselling support and while she couldn’t refer me to a specific therapist, she said there were one or two close to where I lived who had done work with victims of crime before.
Was I a victim of crime? I wondered as I waited, slightly early, for my appointment. If so, I had no idea what the crime was. Or perhaps it was a crime-in-waiting, an impending, looming event – a crime that may never actually happen, but would instead shroud my life with foreboding and dread, driving me mad from fear and anticipation, forcing me to live the rest of my days constantly cowering.
Rick had been missing only two weeks when I picked up the phone to make an appointment with Paula, but I didn’t get to see her until early January. Her office was in a shared building alongside other therapists ranging from a reiki practitioner to a chiropractor and a child psychologist. There was a small waiting room with a laminated sign – Please enter – stuck to it leading off the main entrance hall of the Georgian building. The beige carpet was a little stained, and the magnolia walls rather grubby and chipped, but the place exuded an air of safety and comfort, which was what I needed more than anything.
But even then, as I reported to the receptionist, lowering myself into one of three matching velour chairs, I was tempted to leave. Paula wasn’t going to bring Rick back, and while I’d never seen a counsellor before, I had a friend who’d had therapy a couple of years ago. She’d recounted how stuff had been unearthed that she hadn’t even realised was buried. I didn’t want anything unearthing. Far from it. I’d always tackled things head-on with Rick by my side and wasn’t sure how I’d cope alone if anything terrifying was exhumed.
I waited for Paula to call me through, trying to convince myself that her job wasn’t to judge, that ultimately I was paying her to sit there and be pleasant whatever she thought of me. That she wouldn’t pin the blame on me for my husband vanishing without a trace. That it couldn’t possibly be my fault.
In Too Deep Page 6