I watched him carefully. Erratic in his behavior—overly loving one minute, distant the next. He disappeared at peculiar hours. His phone went straight to voicemail. He smelt odd, not of perfume, nothing so romantic, but of fried food and washing aired on radiators. One Saturday, when I didn’t go to Yeovil as I had planned, he was edgy, irritable with Millie. He took a phone call in the garden.
Later he fiddled with his bike, said it needed parts.
The girls at the swings look across at me. I straighten up, run on as far as the entrance to the closed-up café.
He didn’t even take the car. How stupid did he think I was? He crossed onto the common and I followed him. They met not far from here. I saw them walk toward each other and not kiss, not touch, just meet. They wandered toward the cricket pitch. The accidental brushing of their fingers. Over by the tennis courts, protected by the trees, I watched him turn, walk backward, pull her into his chest with both hands. They were a patchwork of color in the wilderness. Stillness and movement. A rearrangement of clothes.
There is a picnic table outside the café and I sit down on the bench, put my head between my knees. I fight the nausea in the back of my throat. I didn’t know, until today, how they first met. So she came for an interview. To be my daughter—our daughter’s—nanny. She has been in my house. She met Millie. The betrayal just goes on and on. Sexual jealousy is agony, but this is the real pain, so sharp you don’t know what to do with it. Philip was my best friend. He knew my every secret. And yet he conspired against me in a way no one ever had. My mother let me down, but she was in the grasp of something bigger than her, an illness. But Philip did this to me of his own free will. He knew what he was doing. It was—is—unbearable. I rock back and forth. I trusted him, and he betrayed me. No one is really who you think they are. Everybody has different sides. Nobody cares enough to keep you safe.
I bring my head up, lean back against the wooden struts. I watch the car lights glide along Trinity Road, then across the cricket pitch, the silver-gray buttresses of Wandsworth Prison beyond.
I force myself to my feet and start running, properly now, try to pound it all out, along the bowling green, up the steps, past the tennis court hut. I want to clear my head, but I can’t. I’ve stirred the pool.
I was pitiful, wasn’t I, back then? Waiting, watching, pathetically hoping if I were kind and loving and cheerful, it would go away. I told myself a scene would make things worse. Under siege, Philip becomes entrenched. When I wanted another child, and he didn’t, the more I wept, the firmer he became. In this crisis, I kept quiet. In my head, I took sanctuary in cliché: “a fling,” “a bit on the side”: phrases pert with insignificance and brevity. I would have done anything to keep him. The thought of life without him was unimaginable. It had to go away. But it didn’t—it went on and on. At Christmas, he took long walks to “clear his head.” We needed milk at funny hours. Once or twice I followed, hovered outside her grotty flat, feeling sordid, grubby, ruined by it.
I have to think it through. I have to keep going, to be sure. The week of Millie’s birthday. I don’t know whether he went to see Ania, or whether he was just distracted by the thought of her, but he forgot. He didn’t come home. Millie blew her candles out without him. Marta and I sang and she opened her presents and I pretended everything was fine—“Busy old Dad.” Our wedding anniversary. At the back of my mind, I kept thinking, “we just need time away, the two of us.” Not just sex, but companionship, breakfast in bed, ordinary Sunday chat. I booked the hotel, sorted the lingerie, planned the date night to discuss it. He wouldn’t come. “Take a rain check, Gabs,” he said, so casual, so dismissive, as if he had stopped noticing me at all.
Despair, then. I feel it even now. Thinking about him and worrying about him for so many months, losing touch with what’s real and what isn’t. Blaming myself. If only I did things differently. If only . . . I was worn down by the fear of him leaving. I didn’t know who I would be without him. I presented this front—this capable working mother. What a lie. I’m laughing now, into the bushes, the net of trees; the sound echoes over the railway cutting to the path on the other side. I stop abruptly. I’m going mad. I’ve already gone mad.
That night. Images I have buried, black and murky, rise to the surface.
I had screwed up my courage, practiced in my head. I tried out phases, fought cliché (what he “owed” me; what I was “worth”). I would be calm and gentle. I wouldn’t rage. I waited. I cried. I put on his gray hoodie for the smell of him against my skin. I tried to remember what it was like when we were close. I had forgotten to be natural, how to be myself. I fantasized about him collapsing in remorse, tears, and love. I had a drink. And another. I waited. When he rang from Nobu, I was rolled tight with tension; one blow and I would break.
He wasn’t coming home. All for nothing. I ran out of the house. I tore along here that night, battering the path, arms tilted and askew, my head hot. I hammered on her door, stood there, crazed and out of breath. Why did I go? To beg? To fight? I can’t remember. Every time I try, I can’t. All I can remember is the sight of her, standing there, with her tatty fingernails and her dyed hair, her cheap little Topshop trousers. She looked a bit like me, it’s true. Not a sinister resemblance, a deeply banal one. She was just his “type.” She said I “looked upset” and made me tea. I couldn’t even touch it. She didn’t taunt. She was sweetly apologetic, the natural condescension of the young. She told me she was sorry, but that it was too late. Phil was going to give up his job, move away, start afresh.
Phil.
“Philip doesn’t like the country,” I told her. “He won’t go.”
“He doesn’t care where he is,” she said, with a shake of her head. “As long as we’re together. Phil wants to start a family.”
“Philip doesn’t need to start a family. He’s already got one.”
She smiled secretively. “And a baby on the way.”
A baby. Another baby.
“Philip doesn’t want another baby,” I said. I was speaking too fast, shouting. “He doesn’t want to spread himself too thin.” His words in my mouth; what had I been reduced to?
“He wants this one,” she said. She smoothed her hands over her flat belly. “Come! Look what he bought.”
I followed her into the bedroom. It was hot in there. I couldn’t breathe, and I was fighting not to cry, not in front of her. I was standing in the doorway, in my running gear, thinking about the baby, fiddling with my heat-tech top, fiddling and fiddling. It was rising in my chest, the sobbing. I was sort of panting, twisting one foot behind my leg, gasping for air, fiddling with the string in the hood of Philip’s top, knotting and unknotting, and she bent to pick something up from her bed. A triangle of thong above her trousers. And when she turned, I saw she was caressing her face with a stuffed rabbit.
It was like Millie’s pink rabbit, only newer.
Her expression—childlike, trusting, a woman who has always been nurtured and loved—bored into my head. And the inanity of Philip giving his mistress the same stuffed toy as his daughter. And in that moment the drawstring came loose, one side unknotted, and I had slipped it out before I even realized. It was in my hands in a single stroke, and I had moved forward and it was wound round her neck. Her fingers clutched at her own throat, grappling and digging, but I just stood there. She flailed, twisted, thrashed, and writhed. It seemed to make it worse. I held her off her feet. How light some women are. The dying, as I told Clara, are more frightening than the dead. It didn’t take long—only a few minutes before her body went still and I laid her down on the pink laced duvet.
I catch my foot on a stump of root and almost fall, face forward, arms flailing. I steady just in time. I’m sobbing now. I didn’t mean to kill her. I am not a bad person, though I know I have become one: I do see that. I have killed a woman. It was a chain of events. I just wanted a family of my own. It’s all I ever wanted. Does that sound self-pitying? I’m sorry.
I’m muttering now. “I’
m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Afterward, when I realized what I had done, I didn’t know what to do. I howled and paced the flat. I kept going back to the body in case I was wrong, in case she was alive. I dug my nails into my hands. I scratched my own arms—Perivale noticed that. I had this feeling that I could stop time, put back the clock, that it wasn’t real, and then it kept dawning over and over again that it had happened, there was nothing I could do. Even now, sometimes, I wake in the morning and there’s a moment before the reality of what I have done hits me. I’ll have that forever, I suppose. I hope I do. That moment of innocence is the sweetest part of my day.
I should have rung the police. I was going to. I took out my phone. And then I put it back. I thought about Millie, and a different sort of adrenaline took over. I started thinking, my thoughts racing. Would it look like a break-in, a robbery gone wrong? I paced the flat again. Was there anything to place me here? I hadn’t drunk the tea: good. Had I touched anything else? Perhaps her neck. I went to the kitchen and used a tea towel to open the cupboard. I found the bleach and sprayed her with it. I tried not to look at her face, the bulge of her eyes and tongue. A glass of water, spilt. Her necklace was lying on the floor. It must have broken in the struggle. I put it in my pocket, along with the drawstring from the hoodie, sticky from her neck. I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare. I had to act fast. I had to keep moving.
What else? What else? An hour went by, or two, or three: I lost track. All I could think of was DNA; had pictures in my head from CSI Miami, microscopic close-ups of the double helix. I must have left something, a fragment of skin, a drop of saliva. I wish I had known more about it: how long it survives, what it survives on. Would it matter if I had? My DNA wasn’t on record, but once they found out about Philip—because they would, he would come forward as soon as he heard—once the affair was in the open, I would be a suspect. And then if my DNA was on the body . . . ?
And then suddenly an idea grew to move her out onto the common, where I could “find” her myself. That would explain my DNA. And it was better: a random mugging or a psychopathic murder. I had to hurry. I made myself look at her body again. I wasn’t sure I could touch it, let alone lift it. She was light, slim, a few cells growing inside her, not a baby, not a baby, no, not a baby. I tried hoisting her over my shoulder, but a body . . . they don’t talk about a dead weight for nothing. I lay her back down, her T-shirt caught under her armpit. I caught sight of the cherry tattoo on her lower back.
I thought hard, scanned the flat. If there was a pram or a buggy or a . . . and then my eyes fell on the wardrobe. Something on top of it: a hold-all, an enormous squishy suitcase on wheels. I pulled it down, and zipped it open. I picked her body up off the bed again, cradled her, and then forced her in, her arms folded, her knees bent back. I threw the bottle of bleach in there, too. I could close it almost, but not to the top. A bit of her hair got caught in the zip.
It was a quiet night, light drizzle, some big match on the television. I took the narrow chestnut path from the flats to the common; a two-hundred-meter dash, the suitcase bumping, scraping. I sobbed the whole way. It’s a path people avoid at night, too dark, too spooky. And no one was out: luck, serendipity: so much of this has been about that. It must have taken three minutes to get there, the longest three minutes of my life. When I got to the trees, I had meant to lie her down gently, but in the end, in my haste, after I had torn loose the strands in the zip, I yanked her out of the case by her hair. I just left her there, on the ground, under some saplings, only a few feet from where I had seen them kiss.
I shiver and run on, past the wooded copse, back to the bowling green. I’ve run round this part three times this evening now. I’m stuck, entangled. I don’t seem to be able to get free. I reach the little cabin where the skanky black and white cat used to live. I sit on the step. I’m still sobbing. I wish I could stop. I’m crying for her, and a bit for him, but mainly—and I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong—for me.
You think you know about these things from detective books and TV dramas. It is both easier and harder. The line between living and dying, in contemplation, such an unimaginable cavern, infinite in its width and depth, is just a delicate thread in the end. It snaps like cotton. The knotting is harder. You make it up as you go. It’s the little things that catch you out.
I blow my nose on the corner of my top and try to think clearly. I’ve made mistakes, I know. I’m close to being caught. I have been all along. I go through it again. I do it all the time. I need to be cautious, but caution slips into paranoia before you know it. Her phone: I threw its components—the battery and the casing and the SIM card, along with the bottle of bleach—into separate Dumpsters. (That’s this area for you: two “refits” on every street.) For the suitcase, I chose a Dumpster piled so high with rubble, it would have been taken away the next day. The chain, I took home; I don’t know why. Murderers often collect keepsakes. I’ve read about that. I’m just following type. But I hid it well. A house has a hundred hiding places when it comes down to it, toothcomb or no toothcomb (how self-aggrandizing, the clichés of the job). A bag of frozen peas early on, and then later in the back of Philip’s drawer—I liked the idea of him crushing it a little more every time he opened it—but the running machine is better. No prints—I wore Marta’s latex gloves; they will just think it was Philip who wiped it clean. The Nautilus was clever. It’s the sort of place men would choose, the sort of place men would look. It’s easier to find there, and they will—tonight, or tomorrow morning.
A train rattles along the railway in the cutting down behind the shrubs. It vibrates up my vertebrae, under my skin.
I still had the drawstring from the hoodie, the murder weapon, when I got home. I scrunched it in my hands, tried to make it go away. I thought of flushing it down the loo. In the end, my hands shaking so hard I stabbed myself a million tiny times, I rethreaded it back into the hoodie. I knotted it onto a safety pin and inched it along, and then when it was all the way through I undid the knots and stretched out the neck so the drawstring disappeared into the seam. I put both his hoodie and the running trousers I had been wearing in the laundry. My own matching running top was already in there. Marta would wash and iron them by the following lunchtime—I knew that. It was a risk, but to wash them sooner would alert suspicion.
Philip came home and got into bed and I made sure our bodies didn’t touch. I had to force my limbs not to twitch, my mouth not to howl, my eyes not to open. I waited until it was nearly light, and then I took my running gear and Philip’s hoodie out of the dirty clothes basket, got dressed, and left the house.
The shock of seeing her again, lying in the copse where I had left her, was beyond words. The savagery of my own actions, the finality of it, the sickening spectacle of her body; it was physical, my horror. I think a part of me thought she wouldn’t be there, that I had dreamed it, that it was some nauseating fantasy in my head. But I had to check, and there she was, lifeless. I had done this. She was barefoot. Her bra had come unpinged—the bra Philip gave her, though I didn’t know that then. She looked so vulnerable. I forgot she was Philip’s lover for a moment. She was just a young girl, someone’s daughter, with the rest of her life brutally cut off.
The police came, Morrow and Perivale. Let’s face it, I’m an actress by trade, not a journalist, but the shock, the desperate sadness, it wasn’t faked. I managed to ask the questions I thought I should ask and the ones to which I wanted answers (the rash on her face). I went to work, got through the day. It was when Perivale came later that I began to make mistakes. I panicked. I gave him my running top, not Philip’s, the one I had been wearing, in case they found the string, but it bothered me. What if the fabric was slightly different? I knew I’d touched the body, but in my terror I couldn’t remember what I had done. Or what the right thing to say was. I overthought it for a moment, tried to think what a woman, a witness, in my position would remember, what she would say. The seconds ticked and it became too l
ate to say anything.
I got the words out later, “unburied” the memory. It shouldn’t have mattered, but something in the delay triggered Perivale’s suspicion, a tiny thing, a mishandling of information, with exponential consequences. Or was it me? Was it my manner? I have tried so hard all along to react appropriately in every circumstance, funneling the dread and foreboding I felt so much of the time, the blind fear, into the sort of shock and outrage an innocent person might project. All that evidence he trotted out, the photographs laid out like trophies. How hard my brain had to work. The soil: I should have swept Ania’s floor, that was stupid. The cuttings: how peculiar of Ania to have squirreled them away—keepsakes of her own. The clothes: I was baffled by them. It didn’t occur to me that Philip would have rifled so creepily through my wardrobe. The secondhand shop, Marta, and her eBay: both seemed plausible explanations. Reminders of her pregnancy were like a blow to the head. And then Perivale produced the credit card receipt. Philip had used mine by mistake: that was obvious. But what possible explanation could I come up with? Did Perivale see the agony in my eyes, behind the flippant comments, the off-key jokes? Was that what it was?
Damp from the step has seeped into my tracksuit bottoms. I shift along the bench. I feel like lying facedown. Other people’s emotion, other people’s suffering, it’s gotten to be too much. Christa’s sadness, Tolek’s anger. Someone dies and it isn’t over. The misery goes on and on.
The weekend he couldn’t get hold of her, when I knew she was dead, and he didn’t, how twitchy he was, how desperate. The lunch with his parents: I might have been in hell, but I kept it together, just as I kept smiling, kept my face on, at work. I loathed him for ignoring his father, his self-indulgence. I remember thinking, I’m glad she’s dead. The day he found out was different, the phone conversation in which he could hardly speak. When I saw him in his office that night, staring blankly at his screen, the anger went, consumed by remorse and pity. I had to force myself just to stand there, not to wrap him in my arms.
Under Your Skin: A Novel Page 28