by Anna Maxted
But it was the violation of her home that devastated her, cruel others penetrating where they had no right, taking what didn’t belong to them, what someone else had earned and valued. I gritted my teeth. Whoever this was in my kitchen, my home, my sanctuary – his stealing days were over. I tiptoed to my umbrella – oh it’s gorgeous, clear plastic, dome shaped, with a pink rim and handle – the kind of umbrella I ought to have had when I was four years old. I picked it up, holding it like a spear – shuffle, clatter – and crept into the kitchen, my mouth a hard cold line.
Gloria, my cleaner, squealed and dropped a plate.
‘God, Gloria, I am so sorry.’
Gloria leant against the cupboard and flapped a hand in front of her face.
‘I thought you were a burglar,’ I added, unnecessarily. ‘I forgot you were coming. I’m so sorry, I would have tidied.’
She shook her head. I wondered if she’d actually been struck dumb with fear. This was an unwelcome thought, what with the inevitable lawsuit. ‘Sit down, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
I think I was forming statements that didn’t need answers.
Gloria sat down. She’s a tiny little thing, and I clean the house before she arrives. I’m not comfortable with the idea of servants. Issy says that’s a bourgeois misconception, not understanding that most people, working class or otherwise – if one has to shoe them into a class at all – would rather have a job than no job. It’s true that Gloria certainly wouldn’t thank me for refusing to employ her. She’s funding herself through a law degree. Still, every Monday morning before leaving for work, I scrub the bath and toilet, stack the dishwasher, and remove all debris from the floor. All Gloria really has to do is vacuum and spray. She tells me off for it.
This was the first time I’d forgotten. She must have got a fright. Nick had left the spare room in a state.
I switched on the kettle and sat down too. I was panting.
‘I think you scared yourself more than me,’ said Gloria.
I laughed. Not because what she said was funny – it wasn’t, it appeared to be true – but because I was relieved not to have stripped her of the use of her voice. ‘Yeah.’
Gloria frowned at me. ‘You look dead white, like all the blood’s gone out of you. You sit. I’ll make the tea.’
‘No, no, Gloria, please—’
‘Sit!’
Like an obedient dog, I sat.
‘Nick’s moved out,’ I said. I felt I owed her an explanation. For the elaborate mess in the spare room, and for nearly spearing her through with my pink umbrella. ‘I’m not used to being in the house by myself.’
Gloria turned from the side, a sympathetic look on her face. ‘He’s moved out? For good? But you two, you seemed, I thought . . . Well. What a pity. Leave his voice on the answermachine though. It’s safer. And are your locks good? I’d start setting the alarm at night. And—’
Gloria saw the look on my face and changed track. ‘So that’s why the place is spotless. No wonder you’ve got thistle knickers, Holly. I am sorry.’
I smiled, although I didn’t feel like it. If you’re paranoid, the last thing you need is other people’s paranoia. Or to be called Thistle Knickers. Gloria comes out with some odd phrases, most of which she makes up on the spot. As well as training to be a solicitor, she claims to be psychic. She once told me she was exhausted because she’d had hardly any sleep the previous night. I was about to make a facetious comment about a man – obviously – when she announced that she’d been woken by angels, calling to her, ‘Gloria-aaaaa, Gloria-aaaa!’
I’m not good at humouring people. I’d like to, but I can’t. I tried to reply, in a non-judgmental tone, ‘Really? Gosh, how amazing,’ but my reflex thought was, ‘You’re going mad’. I managed to compromise with, ‘Oh.’ And I knew I looked disbelieving. She never mentioned it again. I never saw how the two worlds – legal and spirit – married up in her head. But I don’t suppose it matters, as long as she keeps them separate. She’s a lovely woman, if a bit volatile. The only person I trust (apart from Nick) to take care of Emily in my absence.
‘Why don’t you get a friend to sleep over?’ said Gloria, placing a mug of tea on the table.
I sat up straighter. ‘That is a good idea. That’s a really good idea. I’ll ring Rachel.’
Gloria smiled. She has a lovely smile. It shuts her eyes completely. That doesn’t sound like an asset, but it is. It’s wonderful to see someone smile with their whole face. ‘Sorry about the plate,’ she said. ‘I’ll replace it.’
‘Pah,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got plates coming out of my ears.’
Gloria giggled.
I took my cup of tea, went into the lounge to ring Rachel. It meant telling her about Nick, but I needed to tell someone. I needed to talk to someone. The sick feeling at the base of my throat wouldn’t go away. I was, forgive me for talking like a 1930s paperback detective, uneasy. I knew something, yet I didn’t know what. As long as I skated along the surface of my composure, I was fine. There was more underneath, I knew, but it was dark and cold and deathly and I refused to go there.
I can only compare it to flying back from Singapore on a Jumbo a few years back and reading an article about Concorde – look ma, no fatalities! And I thought, there’s going to be an accident. Two months later, there was. Unlike Gloria, I have no aspirations to be psychic, so I didn’t put it down to that. Nick put it down to me being an atheist flier – I flew but I didn’t believe in it. He said I was convinced that every plane would crash because of my poor knowledge of aerodynamics. True. And yet, there was more to it than that, a pebble of dread in my gut, lodged there to warn me of what?
‘Babes?’ said Rachel, picking up after one ring. ‘I was going to call you. Where are you? Home? Shall I pop round? Stay over? Top idea. We’ll have a midnight feast. It’ll be like school. You provide the food, I’ll bring a, er, torch. Can’t wait, I’ve got so much to tell you, I’ve been a frightfully bad girl. I’ll see you in an hour. Be good till then! Ciao.’
Rachel enters a room with a clatter. She doesn’t give a damn. She’s been known to describe herself as ‘one of those rich women with a fat bum and a Hermes handbag’. I could tell Gloria wasn’t impressed. When I introduced them, Rachel’s extended hand was limp. Gloria yawned in her face and thundered upstairs. I said to Rachel, ‘You could have tried to be friendly.’
Rachel’s nose wrinkled. ‘Holly. I know you’d like to teach the world to sing. But you shouldn’t get too pally with staff.’
‘Stop. Now. You’re ridiculous. A Victorian throwback.’
‘True.’ Rachel smiled at me, and swung the Hermes bag onto a chair. She treats herself to a new bag every month. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Miu Miu. They change in size, shade and shape. Only the price tag remains a three-zero constant. She tucked her hair behind her ears and unwound a green silk shawl from her neck. She should be ungainly but she has a feline grace. I think it’s a result of her superiority complex. The shawl slithered off her shoulders and my mouth fell open.
‘What is that?’
Rachel snorted. ‘That, babes, is what’s known in the trade as a love bite. Foul, I know. I wouldn’t have thought it was his style but there you go, can I help it if I turn men into animals?’
I stuck my cold cup of tea in the microwave (another bad habit, caught from Nick, I’m surprised I don’t fart to the tune of ‘God Save The Queen’ and hoard copies of What Hi-Fi?) and stuck the kettle on for Rachel’s Earl Grey. ‘What man, who is he, do I know him, and is that infectious because it looks like the Plague?’
Rachel laughed. I laughed too. Her laugh is infectious, it sounds like a gallon of dirty water being sucked out of a drain. It made the Austrian ambassador giggle, if you can believe that. I’m sure it helps her get work. And before you jump to conclusions, Rachel is a party organiser. If you’ve ever planned a wedding (I haven’t but was a bystander to the great calamitous fuss that went into planning Issy’s) you’ll know that party organising is
the opposite of a breeze. But to Rachel, it’s second nature. She knows places and people, she has an instinct for what will work, and when. She is a massive snob about what she calls ‘nouvy’ (nouveau riche) food, and her caterers will never serve you dried up squidges of orange goo on soggy biscuit. Cold poached salmon is outlawed unless requested. As for music, whether you want garage, rock, rap, classical or karaoke, Rachel is on kissy kissy terms with whoever’s best. Even though I’m not a party person, I love Rachel’s parties and so do the glittery crowds who throw and go to glamourpuss events every week.
Rachel inspected the peely red varnish on her nails. ‘Actually, you do know him. But I’m sworn to secrecy. For now, anyway. I know, I know, I can’t bear it. But he made me promise not to tell. Yet. He’s . . . attached.’
‘What? Girlfriend? Engaged? Married?’
‘Marriedish.’
‘Whaddya mean, marriedish! Rachel! He’s married!’
‘Yes, alright, he is but he doesn’t want to be.’
‘He said that, did he? What else did he say, his wife doesn’t understand him?’
‘She doesn’t, as a matter of fact!’
‘Oh come on, Rach.’
I couldn’t think who it could be. Just about the only married guy I could think of was Issy’s husband Frank, and he adored his wife. Even when she was at her most infuriating, he found Issy charming. He’s handsome in what I secretly think is a boring way, very wing commander. Rachel’s type. But no. Frank adored his daughter too, always fussing around Eden in public, a doting dad, the Athena poster a clear example in his head. It couldn’t be him.
Anyway, I didn’t know why I was acting so pious. I’d just cheated on my fiancé. Ex-fiancé. Except, it wasn’t like that. At the time I didn’t have a choice. Isn’t that what they all say? I hadn’t felt right since that night with Stuart. But surely, it was just bad sex. Don’t we all feel a bit grim after bad sex? Yes, he’d been mauly and rough and – key Cosmo word – inconsiderate. And he’d scared me rigid. But that was pretty much it, no? I wasn’t sure of anything. I wished I could talk to Rachel. I would talk to Rachel. A woman of the world, who better?
‘Babes. I will tell you who he is. But not yet. Although I’ll say this, he’s a demon in the sack. Filthy as buggery. Snah ha ha ha!’
I got the picture, whether I wanted to or not. (And let’s not be coy, I wanted to, I’m interested in my friends’ sex lives, what they do, how often they do it, I think anyone who isn’t is weird.)
‘Okay, fine, Rach, I won’t ask you. But I don’t approve and I’m dying to know and you must tell me as soon as you can. Promise?’
Rachel promised. We sat at the kitchen table, she snapping digestive biscuits in half – personally I require a little more entertainment from my biscuits – me, popping Maltesers at speed to try to make them taste. We talked about work for a while, how one particular American socialite (awful, awful, to be described as a socialite, worse, surely, than being described as a housewife) had a tantrum because she presumed Rachel would be able to get Prince Edward to attend her fortieth birthday. (Rachel said she could have got Prince Edward to attend her fortieth birthday, she just hadn’t wanted to ruin it.)
Then, I said, ‘Rach. Can I ask you something?’
‘Course, babes, go ahead.’
‘It’s just, there’s this friend of mine. I know her from the agency. She’s seen this guy, once or twice. And the last time, they went out, and you know, early on in the evening she was quite flirty, kissed him and all that, and, I mean, she’d dressed up and everything. Nothing revealing, but . . . nice—’
Just then, Gloria marched back into the kitchen, and I wondered if I should stop, but it would have seemed odd. So I carried on. ‘She made an effort. Anyway, he came back to hers, she didn’t invite him, but she sort of did and—’
Rachel interrupted, her eyelids droopy with boredom. ‘And he got the wrong end of the stick and she said no and he got heavy and so she gave in and let him have his wicked way and now she’s blaming him because she feels like a whore?’
A Malteser stuck in my throat. ‘Well, not exactly.’
‘Well, what then?’
The words were drumming against the inside of my skull and giving me a headache, it wasn’t like that, I’m sure it wasn’t like that, oh please don’t make it like that. But I had no idea how to say what it was like.
I tried to whisper so Gloria wouldn’t hear, but for some reason – bloody-mindedness, probably – she’d decided that now would be an excellent time to polish the kitchen table.
‘It was nastier. She, she really didn’t want to. She said that. She tried to get him off her. But it was like he was deaf. He forced her, Rach. She gave in because she had to.’
‘Babes, if she didn’t want to, what was she doing kissing him, glamming herself up, having him back to hers? What’s the poor chap meant to think? Come on, be fair! She either wants it or she doesn’t. She probably said no in a yessy kind of way, and he picked up on that. Gave in because she had to! Why, did he have a gun? She can’t change her mind halfway through then cry r—fuck!’
Rachel never finished her sentence because Gloria gave the table a violent swipe with the duster, knocked over Rachel’s Chelsea FC cup and smashed it, spilling scalding hot tea into the speaker’s designer skirted lap. But it didn’t matter. I’d got the gist.
Chapter 10
WHEN I WAS a little girl, I believed, like most little girls, that a monster lived under my bed. Needing the toilet in the night was a traumatic event. I’d do my best to banish the urge. I’d squirm and close my eyes and try to fall asleep – but my unconscious was relentless in its determination to get the message from bladder to brain. I’d dream about toilet queues and broken toilets and engaged toilets and nearly going but being whisked from the seat at the last second, then I’d wake, more desperate than ever.
Finally, heart booming, I’d scramble onto my orange bedspread and wobble to my feet. Then, I’d take an enormous great leap into the centre of the room – as far from spindly grabbing hands as I could launch myself – and race for the door. Afterwards I’d repeat the process in reverse, scrambling for the safety of my sheets, sweating.
Well, there I was, twenty-nine years old, and the weekend just gone filled with monsters. The house was crammed with them. It creaked, rattled, shook, and I shook inside it. It was more than just missing Nick. I felt like a mollusc without a shell, soft, weak and exposed. I racked up a hefty electricity bill. I even dug around the wardrobe and found my old night-light from when I was a kid. It’s a china rendition of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, dotted with little holes so that when you switch on the bulb, it twinkles like a fairytale castle should. I armed myself against evil. Because I knew it existed.
I’m not like some people, so arrogant they don’t believe in ghosts. People who make a big noise about not believing in ghosts are asking for trouble. (Which, may I say, doesn’t preclude me from being dubious about Gloria’s angels. How does she know what they are?) Claw and I used to sneak into the school storeroom and play the ouija board with friends. The more we did it, the more smoothly and fluently the glass moved. We spoke to a girl killed by the IRA. But what freaked me was a spirit that said one of us would have a child, Sarah, with special powers. We all sneered, saying now we knew, we’d never call our kids Sarah. It spelt out Y O U W I L L F O R G E T. S C H O O L G I R L F U N.
I never forgot. And that weekend, all my ghosts and monsters had come back to haunt me. They lurked everywhere, under beds and sofas to snatch at my ankles, tapping at windows with bony fingers. It wasn’t only the phone ringing – everything unnerved me. When Emily scratched at the door to go out, I nearly leapt from my skin.
When Nick and I first viewed our house, I asked him if he thought it contained any ghouls. The estate agent wouldn’t have told me, obviously. I wished Claudia was still in the business. (She was an estate agent for a year but got sick of lying to people. She was sacked for telling buyers, ‘Don’t bo
ther, don’t even view it, it’s crap.’) But Nick walked around and said, ‘There’s nothing here.’ He has a feel for the aura of a building. I don’t. I couldn’t even swear to it that I have an aura.
I couldn’t believe that Nick had been gone just three days. A fine example of an independent woman I was. I held a kitchen knife in one hand while I cleaned my teeth. As for the kitchen, I could hardly bear to set foot in it. Still, nothing new there. I was scared of something, but what? I was beginning to suspect that what had occurred with Stuart wasn’t good. But I couldn’t put a name to it. I’d erased the non-gentlemanly bits, though they had a habit of appearing like old graffiti on a steamed-up window. Had he . . . taken advantage?
No. I am a survivor. I am not prey.
So when Rachel said what she said, I wasn’t angry with her. Her words made me blush. Yet I didn’t wholly associate them with me. It was as if Stuart had done what he did – to? with? – some other girl. Holly (this is the only time I’ll talk about myself in the third person) had splintered off from that other girl, like a snake shedding its old skin. Rachel’s verdict reassured me. She didn’t believe what this other girl had said and that was fine by me. I didn’t want to believe it either. It was so unlikely anyway. Men like Stuart, charming, handsome, clever, intelligent men, with careers, didn’t do things like that.
My mind refused to let me revisit that night, which was probably very sensible of it, but it also refused to let in much else. What remained was a blurred sense of disappointment. It was like buying a packet of salt and vinegar crisps which doesn’t contain sufficient flavourings and a wide enough selection of E numbers to take the skin off the inside of your mouth, and stuffing them in faster and faster, hoping for that delicious soreness kick, knowing it will never come – the feeling of missing was similar, but so very much worse.
I looked at Rachel and I wished I had her life. There was certainty in it. Funny, I’d been content with my existence, once. Now it was not positive. This numbness had crept up on me, and to my alarm, I found it comforting. Used to bouncing around wanting to achieve everything, I was frightened by this lethargy. These last few days I had had to fight to get out of bed.