by AnonYMous
The girls had told me that Lori had come to Sydney to stay with Mum and Dad and, unusually for her, had taken them to lunch at a spot overlooking the ocean. After lunch she had dashed across the road to get her wallet from the car and as she waited to cross the road back to the restaurant, a vehicle had appeared from nowhere, crushing her before racing off again. Mum had travelled with her in the ambulance to hospital and had not left her bedside since. ‘She’s hardly stopped crying since it happened, either,’ said Eve sadly.
I ended the call and gave in, briefly, to tears before plugging in my laptop to retrieve the emails from both Amanda and Larissa. They both subscribed to gmail, which was going to make my work easier, and I had both their home addresses for the subscription details.
I tackled Larissa’s new identity first. Her email address was [email protected]. It was easy to set up a new account for her as [email protected]. At first sight you wouldn’t notice the extra 8.
Amanda’s email address was [email protected]—I didn’t waste time thinking about what Freud would have said about that. I wasn’t sure how I could change it imperceptibly, but eventually I decided on [email protected]—I never noticed the underscore in people’s email addresses and I hoped that she would be similarly unobservant.
Then I ordered a double espresso and logged into Larissa’s new email account. I hit compose and typed in Amanda’s real email address. In the subject, I wrote simply, ‘Will’.
I had decided to keep these first emails short. All I needed to do at this stage was to make each aware of the other’s presence in Will’s life.
‘Stay away from Will,’ I wrote without preamble, on Larissa’s behalf. ‘I am his girlfriend. He is in love with me and we are planning to marry. He says you mean nothing to him.’
Then it was time for Amanda to contact Larissa. From Amanda’s new email account, I sent almost exactly the same words to Larissa’s real address. ‘I don’t know who you are but stay away from Will. I am his fiancée. He says you are a nothing.’
As my flight to Sydney was called, I pressed the send button. They would receive the emails while I was in the air and I was sure that, by the time I disembarked, both women would be in frantic contact with each other. Except, really, with me.
En route from the airport to hospital, Zara and Eve filled me in on Lori’s condition. She was still in a coma but they were sure she was aware of their presence. At times when they made desperate little jokes to her about Dad’s notorious ineptitude in the kitchen, a strange sound would erupt from her throat. ‘She’s trying to laugh,’ a nurse had told them.
The intensive care unit broke their two-person rule just this once and let us all sit at her bedside, stroking her hair, holding her withered hands, talking to her brightly of her beloved garden, which we told her she would soon be tending again. We used a damp cottonwool bud to soothe her dry lips and we arranged the blanket delicately over her shattered limbs. Our unhappiness filled the room, and we took it in turns to go back into the corridor and sob out our heartbreak.
As Sydney’s brief sunset gave way to night, Eve and Mum stayed with Lori until Dad arrived, while Zara dropped me back at our parents’ house. She was quiet as we got into the car but in the dark, staring straight ahead, she said suddenly, ‘I think Sergei and I are in danger.’
I gasped. ‘Not Caitt?’
Zara had been suspicious of Caitt for months, wary of the way she had targeted Sergei with overt flirting, and dinner invitations whenever Zara was away. She had often worried aloud to Eve and me about the possessiveness Caitt had started to show towards the handsome, gregarious Russian who had been part of our family for so many years.
I understood her concern. When Sergei and I had gone to the gym during a previous, happier visit to Sydney early last year, Caitt had walked in and, even before we were introduced, I had recoiled from the air of malevolence that surrounded her like a cloud of overly pungent perfume.
Now Zara could only nod miserably. ‘He says he wants to experience passion again,’ she said. ‘And he says he won’t experience it with me.’
I was stunned by the cruelty of his words, the harshness with which he was spurning my sister, whose fragile beauty had once been such a powerful draw for him. The song is wrong, I thought sadly as she dropped me off with a hug. It’s not love that’s all around, it’s betrayal and madness.
Back at my parents’ house I chopped up some apple for the lorikeets as Mum did faithfully every day and opened my rivals’ emails. Both were obviously in shock.
Amanda had emailed ‘Larissa’. ‘Who on earth are you? Where did you get my email address? Will couldn’t possibly have another girlfriend, he’s completely faithful.’
Larissa was more emotional. ‘I don’t believe you. Will loves me completely, we will be together as soon as he can divorce his horrible wife. Who are you, anyway?’
Eve texted to say that she was on her way home with Mum and Dad and would pick up Thai takeaway. I asked for a tofu stir-fry and turned back to my computer.
First I responded to Amanda. ‘I want to say that I am Will’s only love,’ Larissa’s cypher wrote. ‘He told me that infidelity was a sin because you steal your lover’s trust. But now I get this email from you. I wonder if his wife was right—that he is unfaithful to everyone.’
I copied the same email into Amanda’s answer to Larissa. It wouldn’t hurt for them both to receive the same message, or to believe that the other was in contact with me.
I shut down the laptop as the others came in. Mum was stooped with pain and fear, and Dad’s eyes were hollow. As we picked our way through the food, Eve and I tried to reassure our parents that Lori, their first born, was still young and strong, that it wasn’t her time to leave us yet.
But we couldn’t fool them. They have seen too many of their friends die; they know too well the savage vulnerability of our physical selves, regardless of our spirits’ strength. ‘We need a miracle,’ Dad said hopelessly as they went to bed.
Eve and I poured ourselves a glass of wine and sat out on the deck. Zara had told her about Sergei and Caitt and we cursed the woman who had inveigled her way into our sister’s life, only to try to destroy it. I told her briefly about Slutski and we wondered at the strange parallel of nationality—that my husband was having an affair with a Russian while Zara’s Russian husband was also breaking her heart. Was there something in the psyche of the Steppes that put passion above fidelity?
We decided in the end it was nothing more than a coincidence of fate. We loved Sergei, who was like a brother to us and, despite everything, we didn’t want to taint him by comparing him with Larissa. Besides, Eve pointed out, her own husband had been unfaithful with another Australian woman and that hadn’t made us query the Aussie psyche.
Eve had only recently discovered Henry’s affairs but even as we compared our scars, I saw something in her eyes slam shut, like shutters closing against the coming storm.
It was midnight by the time we went to bed, 1 p.m. in London, 3 p.m. in Gümüşlük. I checked my emails to see if the girls had got theirs. They had responded immediately and in more detail than their first, shocked correspondence to each other.
Amanda wrote, ‘He said something similar to me about lying being a sin. He said it was from his favourite book, The Kite Runner. It’s part of what made me love him—his love of books and art and European cinema instead of that Hollywood rubbish.
‘I’m not just his fiancée but his lawyer, and I’m handling his divorce. We will get his wife’s house once she’s forced to sell it.
‘Will says you don’t mean anything to him, he toyed with you in Turkey when he was bored and lonely but he wishes you would leave him alone. I’m not saying I believe him, I’m not sure what I believe any more. By the way, he calls you Natasha. Is that your real name?’
I laughed when I read this last sentence. Once, we had fallen into conversation with a young waiter from Northern Cyprus who was genially contemptuous of a table of Russian women at the far
end of the restaurant, telling us they were ‘nasty little Natashas’. When we asked him what he meant, he explained that ‘Natasha’ was the Cypriot nickname for the Russian prostitutes who swarmed around the casinos and nightclubs of Kyrenia, taken from the alias they invariably chose for themselves. So that was what Will had meant when he named the file of Larissa’s emails ‘Nat’ on his office computer.
Despite myself, I felt an uncomfortable pang of sympathy; the name showed the depth of his contempt for her, and indicated that there might still be time to expel her from our lives and try to put the fragments of our marriage back together again. But it had all gone too far to be mended. And anyway, I reminded myself, at heart Will held all women in contempt—otherwise he would not be such a skilled seducer.
I opened Larissa’s email. ‘I’m shocked at your email but I’m not really surprised,’ she wrote to Amanda. ‘I want to believe Will loves me but after he told me he’d left his wife, she came to Gümüşlük with him. I met her. She said that she taught him that line about trust and theft and that he had never read The Kite Runner. I fell in love with him because he loved all the same things I did . . . art, Russian movies, he even loves my little canary. He said he wanted a canary of his own but his wife refused to have one. Now I don’t know what is true. Maybe he isn’t really divorcing Lili? Maybe he isn’t supporting Luke, her son?’
Clever girl, I thought. You’re beginning to catch on.
I wanted to email both women and tell them, yes, yes, he is lying to you about everything—about movies, about canaries, about trust and infidelity. And, most importantly, about Luke.
I wanted to tell them—Will hates European cinema, and books don’t even figure in his life. He confided in me that he got away with reading nothing by memorising book reviews in the Sunday Times and regurgitating snippets at salient moments during dinner parties. ‘Life’s too short to read,’ he had shocked me once by saying.
Yet here he was, convincing these women he was an art connoisseur, a voracious reader and, most hilarious of all, a bird lover. Once again Will was deceiving all around him, dressing himself in my clothes to reel them in. I wondered what they would do if they realised that, rather than falling in love with the real Will, they had fallen in love with a version of the wife they both so loathed.
I decided that the women’s own emails were more powerful than anything I could write, so I simply cut and pasted Larissa’s email into her cypher’s address and sent it to Amanda, then did the same with Amanda’s message.
The girls were beginning to do my work for me.
Eve and I got up at 5.30 and ran together down the beach to the lighthouse on the hill. There was a mobile coffee bar opening as we ran back past the incoming tide and we grabbed one each, sitting on the sand to catch our breath as we watched the surfers riding the waves like apocalyptic horsemen.
‘I think Lori is going to live,’ said Eve suddenly. ‘I think she will live and we will all get through this. There has to be a reason that we are all having our hearts broken at the same time as Lori’s had her body shattered, but we will all survive it.’
Eve, Zara and I spent the rest of the day at hospital, taking it in turns to join Mum at Lori’s bedside, brushing her steel-grey hair, applying makeup to bring some colour to her faded cheeks, chatting to her of the inconsequentialities we would once never have bothered her with. She had come out of the coma the night before and seemed gently overwhelmed to see us all sitting around her, realising that Eve and I must have flown in from our distant lives because of her. The knowledge that it was love that brought us here lent her a softness that we had never seen before and, as she gripped each of our hands in turn and brought them to her cheek, we all hoped that, dreadful though the accident had been, it would be the catalyst to bring her back to us.
But our joy at her return to consciousness was tempered. At least the coma had kept her oblivious to the awful injuries she had suffered and now she was facing weeks of pain and crushing humiliation as catheter changes and intimate bed baths became her daily routine.
So, while the doctors worked to mend her body, we worked on saving her dignity. Why is it that, as soon as someone is put into hospital, it is just accepted that their self-respect should be locked away in their bedside cupboard, along with their dentures, spectacles and wash-bag? Every time an orderly came into Lori’s little cubicle, her eyes would fall and the despair in them would trickle down her cheeks like tears. So, when they hoisted her onto a trolley to be wheeled away for blood tests and scans, we would make sure her night-gown was not rucked up around her thighs and the blankets were arranged to shield her from those she would pass in the corridor.
That evening, as Dad took over at our sister’s bedside, I went back to my emails and found a whole trove as the women began to unlock their Pandora’s boxes.
First their emails to each other.
Amanda: ‘She told him that quote from The Kite Runner? It makes sense in a way: it was the only thing he seemed to remember from the book although he showed me a copy that he said he carried everywhere. (Aha! So that was where my book had gone.)
‘This is very confusing,’ she had continued. ‘I wonder if the stuff he came up with about European movies and art also came from her . . . Maybe he’s lying to us both, the way he has been lying to Lili for all this time. But I can assure you he’s divorcing her. I should know. I’m his lawyer.’
She had added, ‘Who’s Luke?’
Larissa wrote in her email, ‘I don’t believe he calls me Natasha. That is a Cypriot word for prostitutes. He would not be so cruel. He told me he only slept with you because it was cheaper than legal fees and he needed you to get the house in England for us.’
Once more, I decided that their emails stood on their own . . . with just a little tweak.
In Amanda’s reply to Larissa, I added the true line that, ‘Will hates canaries! He once told me that the only good thing about cats was that they ate canaries.’
To Larissa’s missive, I added a very untrue line: ‘But I’m beginning to think that of the three of us, the only one he really loves is his wife.’
Then I opened the other emails the spy software had sent from Will’s computer, in which the women had demanded answers from the man betraying them. Amanda was full of rage at the deception of which she was now certain she had been a victim. Larissa was sadder, more pliable, willing herself to believe his denials.
His emails to them both were carbon copies of the rebuttals with which he had showered me when I first found out about Larissa. To each he described the other as a nothing, a silly aberration caused only by loneliness. He repeated his mantra of making a ‘silly mistake’, and swore that he loved them and them alone. ‘Let’s try to make it work again,’ he had wheedled them both, just as he was still wheedling me.
I checked the timeline on his emails; he had sent them only minutes ago and I knew that they would soon be winging their way back to my inbox, sent by the women to each other.
That night we had one of the wild Australian tempests that I missed in the English winter’s prison yard of grey. Sheet and forked lightning took over the sky, vying for prominence like fighting cocks.
I went out to the living room so I could see the sky’s whole panoply while I worked on my own storm. As I had expected, Larissa and Amanda forwarded Will’s emails to each other as proof of the other’s non-status; dutifully I passed them on.
I kept a close eye on Will’s emails then, waiting for the women’s fury to be unleashed but . . . nothing. So I called the SIM card in the powerboard back in the Kent study and his voice came over as if he was in the same room.
For a minute I thought he was talking to me, so familiar were his words. ‘. . . All this obsessiveness over something that isn’t true,’ he was saying, in that viciously kind voice. I wondered which mistress had called him first. ‘Why are you like this? It’s not normal and it’s very debilitating,’ he added and I knew what was coming next. ‘You may need help.’
>
I was amazed at his ability to keep lying, even when faced with proof of his deception. I listened as he talked Larissa down, persuading her that he really did love her, that Luke really was my child and that her unhappiness was her own fault for believing a lie he insisted Amanda was perpetuating. Eventually he hung up.
But almost immediately the phone rang again, with an obviously enraged Amanda on the line. This time his increasingly tired lines—‘You need help’ and ‘I-love-you-let’s-make-it-work’—fell on closed ears, so he played his ace card.
‘Anyway,’ he said coldly, ‘going on about fidelity doesn’t come too well from someone who is screwing my best friend.’
There was a silence, and I wondered what she was saying. Was she playing his game of say-it-wasn’t-me? But then I heard Will say ‘Hello? Hello?’ and I knew she’d hung up on him.
Thank you, Will, I thought. You’ve just slashed her tendon. If I’m quick, I can finish her off. And you.
By now it was 1.20 a.m. in Sydney and early afternoon in London.
I worded my email to Amanda carefully. ‘Larissa Slovo has told me that you are planning to take possession, illegally, of my house in Kent in order to pass it to my husband. She has also forwarded me your email detailing how both the local estate agent and your husband will help you do this. I am about to pass the email to the Law Society.’
I knew this would get her. She would be overtaken with the fear of being found out by the legal profession’s regulatory body, of being debarred, ruined. I doubted she would question whether Larissa had really gotten into Will’s computer and found their emails, or if the two of us were now in cahoots.