by Beth Thomas
He’d smiled at me and touched my neck with his fingertips. ‘There are all sorts of reasons, sugarpuff. What if one of your parents got ill, or worse? You’d want to be near them, wouldn’t you? Or what if one of us changes jobs, or we decide to leave the area one day? Just the process of buying a house is expensive, let alone making the mortgage payments each month. There’s a kind of tax you have to pay when you buy property, called stamp duty. And then there are the solicitors’ fees. They do something called conveyancing, which is a legal process that transfers ownership of the property.’
I’d frowned. Sometimes I worry that I don’t know as much as I think I do. ‘Is that the same thing as the legal expenses? Or something else?’
He’d laughed out a huff of air. ‘No, it’s the same thing. But that just demonstrates how I’m the expert when it comes to this kind of thing. Aren’t I? I mean, that’s the business I’m in; of course I’ll have a better idea about what’s best than you do.’ I must have looked a bit … something when he said that because he stepped nearer and gave me a quick hug. ‘It’s nothing against you, sweetness. Not your fault, it’s not your line of business, you can’t be expected to be knowledgeable on the subject. But I am, and I know all about the pitfalls and hidden expenses of buying somewhere.’ He pushed his lips out. ‘You don’t really want to get saddled with all sorts of hideous, enormous bills we can’t pay, do you?’
I had to agree that he was the expert. Well, I didn’t have to agree. I did agree.
‘And there are some really gorgeous places available to rent right now,’ he’d gone on. ‘Look at all these, within our price range.’ He’d presented me then with five or six properties’ details that he’d apparently picked up somewhere in readiness. ‘What do you think of the Maple Avenue one? I really love it. Move in there with me?’
He was right, Maple Avenue is beautiful. Lined, as the name suggests, with what I can only assume are maple trees, pavements wide enough for a bit of grass, and a nice car on every driveway. As Matt pulls onto our drive, I stare up at the gleaming white uPVC windows, the gorgeous colourful shrubs in the front garden and the neat little path leading up to the glossy door, and all I can think is where the arse did that slippery serpent hide the safe? I want to excise it, like a tumour. I wish at this moment that I could see an x-ray of the house and scrutinise its revealed skeleton without the hindrance of walls and furniture and carpets to hide things. Where in that structure would I find a small, grey metal box? I picture it, cradled in the rib-cage of the roof rafters; tucked behind the chimney breast-bone; snuggled into the bosom of the hearth; or even, it occurs to me, languishing under the pristine lawn. The garden was always strictly Adam’s domain, like the accounting, and, well, the rest of the house, and he himself had laid the turf out there. Oh Christ, I’ve got some work ahead of me.
I get out of the car, then turn back and realise that Matt is still sitting in the driver’s seat. Of course; this was only a lift. I acknowledge to myself that subconsciously I was hoping – no, expecting – him to come in and help me search. He smiles at me and shrugs.
‘Take care then, Grace. Don’t forget, if you need anything else …’
‘Well, actually Matt, there is something.’
He’s out of the car faster than I can say ‘loose end’.
Inside, the house smells a bit sour and musty, like old vinegar, and our noses crinkle as we enter. It’s only been empty for two days, but it already smells abandoned. Or is that just me? Ha ha. There are two or three letters on the mat so I grab them and shove them in my handbag, then go and open the back door to let some fresh air in. While I’m there I stare miserably at the lawn. It hadn’t even occurred to me before now that Adam could well have buried his safe in the garden. It’s not a huge lawn, but I really do not want to dig the whole thing up looking for something that might not even be there.
‘Penny for them?’ Matt’s deep voice says in my ear, making me jump and spin round, heart thudding. He’s standing so close to me, my face practically collides with his chest. ‘Oh, God, sorry,’ he says, taking a step back. ‘Didn’t mean to make you …’ He tails off and looks suddenly sheepish. ‘Crap. I’ve done it again, haven’t I?’
I put my hand on my chest and smile. ‘You’re very good at it, I’ll give you that.’
He nods appreciatively. ‘Thanks. I studied Making Vulnerable People Feel Worse at uni.’
It makes me laugh. ‘Really? That sounds fascinating. I bet you got a First?’
‘Sadly not. Two one.’ He looks down.
I laugh again. ‘I’m surprised, you seem to be a natural. What went wrong?’
He looks up and grins. ‘Yeah, I was disappointed. I think it was the final practical exam. I was a bit sensitive in the role play to a woman whose cat had been run over.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yeah. Let my tutors down, let my family down, let myself down.’
It’s so lovely to feel myself smiling. I didn’t realise Matt could be such good company. Mind you, Ginge and I used to avoid him as much as we could at school. Although that wasn’t easy: he was always popping up unexpectedly wherever we went. ‘Never mind,’ I reassure him, rubbing his arm, ‘I’m actually in a bit of bother right now, so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to get some practice in.’
‘Excellent, that’s good to know.’ We smile at each other, then after a second or two he looks down at his arm and we both notice that my hand is still there. I snatch it back and move quickly towards the kettle.
‘Do you fancy a cuppa while I tell you why we’re here?’
‘I’ll just have a glass of water, please.’
It only takes a few minutes to explain about the bedside cabinet and the key, and the locksmith and the safe. It takes a bit longer to explain why I haven’t told the police. And even longer to explain why I’m not going to. Yet, anyway.
‘I want to do this myself,’ I tell him, trying to clarify what I’m not sure I understand. ‘I suppose it feels like something I could do to … Not get my life back exactly. But maybe to …’ I shrug, floundering.
‘To prove to yourself that you aren’t completely useless?’ He fills in for me.
I flinch. ‘Well, I don’t think I’d have put it quite like that exactly.’
He closes his eyes briefly, then looks at me. ‘Oh God. They should probably lock me away, stop me from doing any more damage.’
I smile. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re about right, actually. I want to feel competent again. It’s been a while.’
His face straightens out as he looks at me and becomes more serious. ‘Really?’
I nod. ‘Sadly.’
His expression is quite intense, his eyes never leaving mine. It’s a bit odd, how he’s looking at me. No one’s looked at me like that since … Well, ever, actually. Is this standard, or is there some hidden meaning behind it? I’m just starting to feel uncomfortable when he turns his head and peers out at the garden.
I take a tiny step away, trying to make my movements unnoticeable while at the same time extending the space between us. That almost felt like, I don’t know, that Matt might have been trying to … I want to say ‘kiss me’ but that’s completely ridiculous. Why on earth would he want to do that? With me? I know very well how bloody lucky I was to end up with Adam – my family have pointed that out to me relentlessly ever since we met (not that I needed them to; was very much aware of the mismatch myself already) – so it’s pretty unlikely that another great, charismatic bloke would look twice at me. It doesn’t matter anyway because whatever it did mean, I’m still married, regardless of the whereabouts of the other half of that equation, and I still love the absent fuck. At least, I feel something. I’m no longer sure it’s love, but it’s close and either way it’s commitment. A meaningless encounter with Greg from the bar is one thing, but this would mean something; this is Ginger’s baby brother, the irritating little twerp in black eyeliner who was always at the next table in the coffee shop, or buying a drink at t
he bar we were in. Although he certainly does not look like a little twerp any more. As we stand together in the kitchen, I’m very conscious again of how big he’s got now. Broad and tall, like a … I don’t know, one of those huge trees you see on nature programmes. Redwoods? An image comes into my head from a long ago geography textbook of three people leaning comfortably against a vast expanse of tree trunk, like a building behind them. Matt really looks like the sort of tree trunk someone could comfortably lean on. And right now, I really need to lean.
‘Are you OK, Gracie?’ he says softly, bending slightly to make eye contact.
I’m staring at his chest, so I blink and pretend that I’d zoned out. ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry, just thinking about everything, you know? Shall we crack on?’
It makes more sense for us to split up and search two rooms at the same time, but we go together up to the bedroom, which is weird (although only for me, I’m sure).
‘Well, you certainly did a good job there,’ he says appreciatively, eyeing the splattered mess of the disembowelled bedside table. ‘It looks like furniture zombies have been feasting on it.’
‘Furniture zombies?’
He nods. ‘Yeah, you know, old cabinets and sideboards that have been cast aside and roam the land, undead, looking for solid wood stuff to feast on?’
I nod slowly. ‘Of course.’
He grins. ‘Right. So. Where shall we start?’
I hesitate for about three seconds, then yank open the wardrobe aggressively and stare hard at the contents. In my head I’m shouting ‘I’M LOOKING IN YOUR PRECIOUS WARDROBE, ADAM!’ as if he might hear me somehow; but of course with someone else here, I keep decorously silent.
Immediately, the sharp tang of shiny black leather and shoe polish reaches me, and Adam is almost here again, standing somewhere just out of sight. For a fraction of a second, I am banjaxed by a stunning feeling of amazement mixed with the colossal relief of discovery, as if he’s been hiding in the wardrobe for a week, and is about to say, ‘OK, your turn.’ My eyes instantly fill with tears. But the thought disappears almost as soon as it arrives. Ridiculous.
‘Shall I go and look downstairs?’ Matt asks gently behind me. I realise that it’s been a few seconds since I flung the wardrobe doors open, and since then I’ve been standing completely stationary, just staring. He probably thinks I’m overwhelmed by sadness at the sight of all my husband’s clothes lined up neatly like this. He probably thinks that I’m experiencing a fierce jolt of love and longing while I take in the colour scheme of Adam’s clothes arrangement. He probably thinks my yearning for my beloved has never been stronger, and I need to be alone with the suits for a moment.
‘The arse has put his suits in colour order.’ I turn my head and look at him over my shoulder.
‘I noticed.’
The suits are black at one end and grow lighter from left to right, culminating in a row of crisp, white shirts. ‘What a prick.’
Matt inhales sharply through his nose, as if he’s shocked by such language. In turn, I’m shocked by his shockedness. Quickly he clears his throat and coughs a little, probably pretending that his inadvertent expression of disapproval was just a tickle. ‘Are they always like this?’
I shrug. ‘No idea.’ I turn back to look at the very annoying suits again.
‘How come?’
‘I’ve never looked in here before.’
‘You’ve never …?’
I shake my head. ‘I wasn’t supposed to look, so I didn’t.’
‘You’re kidding?’
I turn back to face him again. ‘No, seriously. He said he didn’t really want me interfering in his things.’ I think back to that conversation again. ‘No, it wasn’t about me interfering. I said I wouldn’t touch anything and I’m pretty sure he believed me.’
‘So why …?’
‘I don’t really know. He was just very particular about his things. He told me it was only his things in here, he didn’t want me going in, so I didn’t. Like he said, it was only his clothes, why would I even want to look?’
He frowns. ‘I don’t get it. You said downstairs that you got into the habit of trying out the locked drawer in his bedside table every time you were in the house on your own.’
‘Yes.’
‘So why that, but not this? This one wasn’t even locked, you could easily have opened it, had a look, and closed it again.’
I think about that for a moment, then shrug. ‘I suppose it was for that very reason: because it wasn’t locked. I knew what was in here. It was just clothes, Adam had said as much, and it was likely to be the truth because it is, after all, a wardrobe. With no lock on it. What else would be in there? But a locked drawer – it’s slightly different, isn’t it? I mean, you could literally hide anything in there. I wanted to know …’
‘What?’
I’ve almost told him the thing that’s bothered me more than anything else about being married to Adam, the thing I have never told anyone, not even Ginger. I look into his face, so familiar and yet so strange. It’s a kind face, open, friendly. But more than that, it’s a policeman’s face. And I’m not sure whether that means I can trust him, or is a reason for me not to.
‘What is it, Gracie?’
I close my eyes briefly. I gotta trust someone. And I’m already so tired of coping with this on my own. ‘I wanted to know whether or not he was keeping a gun in there.’
There’s a short silence while Matt absorbs this new bit of information. When I look up at him again, he’s frowning. ‘What made you think he might have a gun?’
I shake my head. ‘Oh, God, no concrete reason, nothing definite, nothing you police would like. I know you all get a bit obsessed with that kind of thing, don’t you? Always wanting to see it, or someone else to see it, to know it exists.’
He smiles. ‘That kind of thing, as you call it, is known as evidence. And it’s kind of crucial these days. We’re not allowed to go on “hunches” any more.’
I smile back. ‘Yeah, I thought you would say that.’
‘You haven’t answered the question, though. Why did you think he might have a gun?’
I breathe in deeply and release it. ‘What you have to understand is that my life with him was littered with inconsistencies.’
‘Such as?’
‘Um, let me think. Well, he never talked about his past, or his family, or anything about himself before we met. He didn’t ever use the landline phone. I wasn’t supposed to open any post. Ever.’
He’s nodding, but still frowning. ‘Nothing completely out of the ordinary there. Most women would assume he was having an affair. Not that he was walking about with an illegal, unlicensed weapon.’
‘Yeah, I know, it’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? I don’t know, there were just so many odd things about him – there were sometimes huge gaps in his day that he couldn’t explain.’
He nods. ‘Affair.’
I look at him and begin to feel ridiculous. These things have been pressing at the sides of my subconscious almost since Adam and I met, but I’ve refused to see them. Now, it seems unfathomable that I could live with someone, be married to him, without demanding to know what the hell was going on. ‘But … he would go out in the morning and then be unreachable on the phone and not in his office or anywhere I could find him, sometimes for four or five hours. He would always say he was with a client, or looking at a property somewhere. And it was a black spot, so he …’
‘… didn’t have any signal,’ Matt finishes for me, nodding again. ‘Yeah, that all sounds very familiar. Exactly the kind of thing someone would say if they were having an affair.’
I think about it for a moment. ‘I suppose you’re right. I’ve never thought that, though. It’s possible, but it just didn’t occur to me. Maybe I’m just too naïve.’
He smiles kindly. ‘You’re not naïve. You’re just very trusting. It’s a good thing.’
‘Trusting? I’ve spent all this time wondering if there was a gun in that
drawer, and all it turns out to be is a key!’
‘Yeah, but maybe it was easier for you to focus on the ridiculous possibility of it being a gun in there, rather than face up to the much more likely explanation of him being unfaithful. You avoided the affair by thinking about a gun, which you knew was actually ridiculous and very unlikely. So in the end you were able to dismiss the inconsistencies altogether. Or maybe not dismiss them, but avoid thinking about them. In any realistic sense, anyway.’
It seems a bit unlikely, but I nod politely anyway. ‘Maybe.’ I look back at the suits. ‘You know what I want to do?’
‘No. What?’
‘This.’ I seize a handful of suits and pull them down off the rail, then throw them all in a pile on the floor, next to the smashed cabinet. It’s incredibly satisfying, so I do it again, and again, until all the suits are in a jumbled mess on the floor. The shirts follow, and once everything that was hanging is in a heap, I wade into the pile and kick and stamp savagely, messing and crumpling everything as much as possible. I might have grunted a bit while I was doing that. ‘You’re very untidy, aren’t you?’ Adam’s voice says from three years ago, but this time I ignore it.
Now that the wardrobe is clear, I can see that Adam’s shoes are all beautifully arranged on the floor – black ones nicely placed below where the darkest suits were, leading up to grey below the grey, and flip-flops separate at the end. I bend over and grab armfuls of shoes, then turn and toss them carelessly across the room, one at a time to begin with, but then I launch four or five at once, with a primal noise that sounds as if I should be tossing a caber, not a crepe sole. Saliva may have gone with them.
‘Hey, hey,’ Matt eventually says, putting his hand on my arm. I jump as he does so, and stop mid-throw.
It’s a bit like coming out of a trance, and I’m suddenly very conscious of the fact that I probably have spittle around my mouth. I drop the shoes I’m holding and look at him shame-facedly. ‘Oops.’ Quickly, I wipe my face. He’s looking right at me, but I tell myself maybe he didn’t notice.
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Shall we take a break there?’