by J. C. Grey
‘I know exactly what they’re like,’ Marc says. ‘I received their first blackmail letter two weeks before our wedding day.’
March this year …
There is a thin film of high drifting cloud above a pale blue sky. I sit on the balcony and drift with it, weightless, thoughtless, empty. A mug of coffee sits next to me, going cold.
A hand touches my shoulder and I look up into Marc’s red-rimmed eyes. I feel remote, helpless to do anything for him, as though we are on different planes, he and I. Will and James, for all their ridiculousness, seem to know to listen when he wants to talk, to distract when he doesn’t. I have no idea how to help him, let alone myself.
‘I’m going for a run, sweetie. I won’t be long.’ I see he is dressed in his running gear and know he is trying to find the threads of his old life and hang on to them until the world stabilises. ‘Do you want anything?’
I shake my head and turn my gaze back to the clouds. Thinking he has gone, I drift again. Then I realise he hasn’t gone after all and is sitting opposite, hands clasped loosely between his knees, head bowed. Or perhaps he has been and returned. Don’t know, don’t care.
‘This is hell on earth isn’t it?’ His voice shakes. ‘Having to organise a funeral for …’ He can’t go on. After a minute or two, he wipes his eyes. ‘I didn’t know … burial or cremation. Both seem inconceivable. But I need somewhere to go … to be with them. So it’s a burial. One coffin. Friday. I have to be there and so do you.’
The final sentence is uttered in a firmer voice than the rest, as though he is shoring up both of us, and offering no alternative.
But when Friday comes, I exit the shower dressed in leggings and long T-shirt, my feet bare and hair loose. And I return to my spot on the balcony to stare at the sky and not think and not feel.
Marc emerges in a dark suit I’ve never seen, and an orange-and-purple tie that reminds me of those two stupid stuffed toys we bought. I suppose he thinks there should be colour as well as dark. Where are they now, those alien-dogs? Still in the nursery, I suppose. When Sylvie was here the other day, she hesitantly proposed ‘restoring the spare room’—that was the way she put it. I didn’t much care but Marc refused. I suppose he wants to do it himself and tear himself up just a little more. His choice.
‘Em, I’ve put out a dress that Claire chose for you. We need to leave in ten minutes.’
From the look in his eyes, I know he is already defeated. I will not be there. I feel a brief surge of something like gratitude for my background, my lack of exposure to doing the right thing. I have no compunction to even try, whereas Marc has no option and it is killing him.
‘Okay, Em,’ he says a few minutes later. ‘I’ll tell them how much we were looking forward to meeting them. How much we love them.’ He picks up something from the table, two small but perfectly formed arrangements of orange roses, purple iris and white lilies. They match his tie.
He can say what he likes. They won’t hear you, I want to say. They are dead and no sweet words, no pretty flowers, no doing the right thing will change that.
As he walks away, he glances back and our eyes briefly meet and I can see in them that he already knows that nothing he can do will change any of it. But he does it anyway. It makes no sense to me.
The door clicks quietly shut and I am left alone to drift with the big sky. The humidity has returned, and bilious grey clouds are threatening a cataclysmic storm. I imagine it reaching into the depths of the balcony and lifting me up, up and whirling me away. At one point, I stand at the rail—it is the only thing separating me and the storm. I drag the coffee table close to the rail and climb up on it. My arms are raised. Come and take me, storm. Carry me away!
I close my eyes and step onto the rail. It would be so easy to let go. I like easy. Hard is too hard.
Something reaches through the wind and rain and thunder. I open my eyes and look down three floors to the ground where Marc is staring up and screaming at me, his mouth a dark O of horror. And then I can’t see him anymore.
Present day, night
The clock in the foyer chimes midnight.
I think that between twelve and one there is a no man’s land of time—a period that belongs not to the day just gone or the day to come, but to the dark. The natural time for all that we most dread to emerge from the shadows, whether that is the monster under the bed or the monster in our minds.
I bring the waxy candles in their tall brass sticks into the kitchen where I light them and place them on the table, between us. With the overhead light off, and the flames flickering, everything we are is here in the pool of light cast over the table.
‘What are you thinking?’ Marc asks softly.
‘That candlelight is probably our best friend right now.’ Marc looks pretty ragged and my hair is coming loose from its knot.
‘Are you cold?’ he asks, and I realise I am still in my light robe and the night is freezing. He comes around to where I sit and lays his warm coat over my shoulders.
‘I thought it was the prenup,’ I tell him when he is back in his seat.
He frowns slightly. ‘Thought what was the prenup? We didn’t get one.’
‘I know. I thought that was the problem, that in the final days before our wedding you were regretting we hadn’t gone ahead with one. But it wasn’t that at all, was it? It was him, Marlon.’
Marc nods.
‘What did he want? Money, I suppose.’ I feel tainted by association.
‘One hundred thousand or he’d sell the story of your background to the media.’
‘You didn’t pay him, I hope.’
‘I met him and convinced him his plan would be most unwise.’ There is an edge of menace in his tone that is most un-Marc-like.
‘You met him?’ In what world did the Marc McAllisters and Darryl Marlons ever meet? ‘When? Where? Don’t tell me you invited him to the apartment.’
‘No. I went to Lithgow, to the house you grew up in. He and Jaclyn still live there. They have very little.’
I think they are lucky to have that.
‘And after that—after he sent you that letter—why didn’t you have me investigated?’
‘I still hoped you would confide in me once we were married and you felt more secure. And I didn’t need a private investigator to tell me what Marlon was.’
‘You kept that very quiet.’ I think of the strain on his face in those days before our wedding, and feel a queasy combination of guilt and gratitude that he didn’t tell me.
‘As did you,’ Marc fires back. ‘Tell me, if you’d known your stepfather had tried to blackmail me, would you have gone ahead with the wedding?’
‘No, of course not.’ I’m not sure but I hope I would have had the guts to walk away. ‘I just don’t understand why you did.’
He looks at me. ‘Don’t you know, Em?’
I look down at the table. ‘Yes.’
‘I wanted to marry you, desperately. And to stay married to you. Marlon terrified me—not him but what he could do to us. I think it was partly why I wanted a baby so soon, to tie you to me.’
When I look up into his eyes, I can see the truth in them, yet I haven’t the heart to blame him when my actions are mostly at fault for bringing us to this point. Any questions about my background earlier in our relationship, I had deflected with a practised wave or casual comment, giving the impression there was nothing to say on the subject, all the time suspecting that it was only a matter of time before its ugly influence began to spread.
I do not want to think of my stepfather’s narrow, weasel face and my mother’s bloated one but I can’t help a decades-old image forming in my mind of slurred words, unfocused eyes and manic laughter, of slaps, pinches and bizarre threats. A hard-edged warning from someone like Marc might have stalled them for a while, but not forever.
‘I know it didn’t stop them,’ I admit miserably. ‘I saw an email from him on your laptop in January but I tried to put it out of my mind, to pretend it wasn
’t happening.’
‘Your pregnancy was public by then and I think Marlon thought it would make me more vulnerable, that it would be enough to make me pay up to keep him quiet. So he tried again.’ A grim smile flits across Marc’s face. ‘I had the company’s lawyers draw up something to the effect that if he and Jaclyn wanted to get clean, they should approach a facility that I sponsor, but that we were fully aware of his criminal history and that further attempts at blackmail would be referred to police.’
‘Oh God, no wonder Yvette hates me,’ I groan.
‘She doesn’t know about the blackmail. No one does, apart from me and my legal people. Unless Marlon or your mother told anyone.’
‘Don’t call her that.’
Marc nods. ‘Jaclyn.’
‘Anything since?’
‘No. I guess …’ He shakes his head but I already know what he is thinking.
‘I suppose after … after we separated, they thought there was no point.’
‘I’m guessing so.’ Marc nods.
‘You must be glad about that.’
‘Em, I’d rather deal with Marlon every week than for us to have gone through what we did.’
‘You’re a good man,’ I tell him.
‘Do you love me?’ he asks.
There it is, the heart of the matter. The candlelight flickers as he poses the question in the simplest of terms. The box of painful secrets has somehow extricated itself from the locked room and sits unopened in my hands. I don’t want this conversation but he deserves no less than the truth.
‘I don’t think I’m capable of loving someone else. Not the way you love me.’
‘I think you loved the girls with everything in you.’
Wildly, I shake my head. ‘No, no. It’s not true. I didn’t want them.’
Marc smiles. ‘You didn’t want to want them, and I can understand why. But that’s not quite the same thing as not wanting them. If you hadn’t loved them, I don’t think you would have reacted the way you have to their deaths.’
Even though my head screams no, my fingers are untying the ribbons that secure the box. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop my secrets spilling out. In my mind I am back on the balcony, stepping off …
‘I thought they died because I didn’t want them enough, didn’t love them enough.’
The words hang between us. I can see the shock on Marc’s face. Everything I am, the bit of me that is missing, is laid bare. ‘I thought they died because of me.’
Twenty-one
March this year …
The storm has me in its embrace. I am being lifted up, whirled away from the nightmare, free at last.
But suddenly, at the last moment, hard arms are around me, wrenching me back. Marc’s voice is screaming incoherently, his face a pale mask, and we are huddled on the ground, soaked, the wind whipping us as though angry at being thwarted.
Will and James stand at the door to the balcony, asking panicked questions. Will is on the phone to emergency services until Marc tells him I am all right. The boys are hesitant to go, but eventually they are convinced and leave us alone. With them gone, there is only the sound of the storm and our shallow, urgent breathing.
Marc pulls us into the corner of the balcony where we are protected from the wind if not the rain. I turn my face into his shoulder and hear his heart beating near my ear, still too fast.
‘I didn’t mean—’ I stutter.
‘I won’t let you go.’ It is a warning and a promise.
The shock of it has shaken me from the stupor I have inhabited these last days, and I have to try to explain. ‘Marc, I’m sorry. It wasn’t … I wasn’t thinking.’
‘It’s okay, sweetie.’
It’s clearly not. I think of him, of what an appalling day it has been for him—two dead babies to bury and a wife driven to jump from the third floor.
‘How bad was it?’
He knows what I mean and his hand tightens in my hair. ‘Worse than anything I imagined. James and Will had to hold me up.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for.’
But there is. I should have been there, not for them but for him. ‘Yes. Marc—’
He interrupts, speaking quickly as though speed will get us through this faster. ‘Listen, now that it’s over, I was thinking we could go away for a few weeks. The States, maybe. New York. Claire says she needs someone to research emerging fashion trends. Could be a job for you. Or perhaps the Seychelles. We can just swim and lie on the beach.’
‘Not yet. In a few weeks, perhaps.’ I can’t imagine getting on a plane with all those staring, wondering faces.
‘Whenever you’re ready. I need to make arrangements at work, in any case.’
It occurs to me he hasn’t been in the office for days, not since it happened. He has been with me every second, until today. It’s true he was preparing to loosen the reins, but I imagine not quite this abruptly.
‘You should go back to work on Monday, Marc.’
‘No rush.’ Our fingers entwine. ‘It’s only been eight days.’
As he speaks, I know that we are both thinking the same thing, that while our world has spun tragically off course, the wider world is unchanged, still turning on its axis.
Marc, though, can get back. It will be a struggle, but he has his work and his family and, most of all, his will. He will make it back to the real world. I may not.
Present day, early morning
The words hang there between us, still trembling in the air for long moments after they have been spoken.
I thought they died because of me.
I am expecting Marc to react with astonishment followed quickly by denial; his fury catches me by surprise. He stands up suddenly, hands on the table, and leans in, eyes flashing dangerously.
‘That’s just fucking stupid, Em. The most fucking self-indulgent, fucking stupid thing I ever heard. It was nothing to do with you or me, or the doctors or anyone. They were wrigglers and the cord got trapped around their necks. Their oxygen supply was cut and they died. It was as simple as that.’
It is true, brutal but true. And effective as nothing else could be at snapping me out of my self-pity. And he’s not finished yet.
‘I love you, Em, but I hate the way you make everything about you—even something like this. It was a terrible, terrible thing and it still is. If we’d been able to share it, talk about it, it might have been just that bit more bearable. But you decided to make a martyr of yourself, and turned a tragedy into our own private hell.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’ I give him a wounded look.
‘Fuck sorry!’ He throws his arms up in the air before planting them back on the table. ‘You know what? I’m sick of apologies, of excuses. It’s time to grow up, Em, and think about the people who love you. Or you can keep living life on the surface, never delving too deep, never digging in. Run when it all gets too tough. But if you do … shit!’
‘No, go on,’ I tell him. ‘If I do, what?’
He backs off a little but stays standing, his arms folded across his chest. ‘I’m not about to make ultimatums.’
‘Sounded like it to me.’ I’m standing too and we are facing off, the fight we should have had all along. ‘You knew what I was and you thought you could change me from a silly, shallow girl into what? Someone like you? Smart and clever and thoughtful and charming? A high achiever with impeccable connections? Someone your mother would approve of?’
‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous.’
‘So it’s fine for you to tell me what you think, but when I speak my mind I’m ridiculous?’
‘No, of course not!’ His hands are back on the table, as are mine, our faces centimetres apart, glaring at each other. ‘I just want a partnership of equals, not to feel like I’m having to be the grown-up for us both.’
‘Is that right?’ I smile coldly at him. ‘You know what? I don’t believe you. I think you like being the boss in our relationship. You enjo
y the ego boost of being the one to look after helpless, incompetent little Em!’
His eyes narrow. ‘Maybe you see yourself as helpless and incompetent. I don’t. I think it suits you to think that.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that you don’t ever have to commit to making things work. To work at making things work. You can just throw up your hands when it gets hard and say “sorry, but I told you I was a lost cause”.’
‘Like our marriage, you mean?’ I throw back at him. ‘Stupid to commit to something that was obviously a mistake from the very start.’
‘If you felt that, why did you go ahead with it?’ he asks.
‘Because you—’ I stop, aware I’m venturing onto thin ice. Marc’s gentlemanly side has been throttled by his anger.
‘Because I made you? Convinced you? Cajoled you? Did I drag you down the aisle?’
‘No, although you can be pretty pushy when you want something. But that’s not why I married you.’
‘So why did you marry me?’
‘Because I wanted to, even though I knew it was a bad idea.’
‘So you married me knowing it would fail.’ He presses fingers to the bridge of his nose.
‘Well I was right, wasn’t I? Look at us now. Not exactly glowing with married bliss, are we?’
‘Sounds like an “I told you so” in there.’
‘Well, I did. I warned you it was a mistake.’
‘Which conveniently excuses you from all responsibility for making our marriage work.’
‘You’re saying it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy?’ I am enraged. ‘That I deliberately sabotaged our marriage just to prove myself right?’
‘Well, didn’t you?’
I am mute with anger, but also with the dawning realisation that there is some truth to what he says, maybe more than some. But there are two sides to this, and neither is innocent.
‘Yes. You’re probably right. But instead of calling me out on it, you just worked even harder to prop it up. Because you thought you were so invincible you could make our marriage work on your own.’