‘But that’s his living room, isn’t it?’ She didn’t say how she knew this, that in the weeks prior to her confinement she’d sometimes lingered on the pavement across the street and noted the flickering of a TV screen or the closing of blinds in bright afternoon sunshine.
‘I haven’t got a clue what room it is,’ Joe muttered, ‘I don’t have a floor plan of his home. But he can use any one he likes, can’t he?’
Christy said nothing. Now that the begging had ceased, the effects of pleasure sounded perfectly conventional, whimpers and groans rather than screams, until the inevitable crescendo that made her flinch with embarrassment.
‘Stop being a pervert,’ Joe said, admirably easy-going given the circumstances. ‘Go back to sleep.’ And he moved away from her, right to the edge of his side of the bed, burrowing easily back into his own sleep and leaving her to fester. What had he just said, I know it’s been a while? He was right. Since they’d moved into the new house and he’d been promoted, there’d been less time, less energy. Was this … was this going to become an issue?
There was laughter now from next door, and the faint insistent beat of music. She reached for the radio alarm on the cabinet next to her, anything to return her mind to this room, this house, this life, but in pressing a series of wrong buttons she managed only to disable it. Heaving herself from bed, she tried to locate her iPod on the chest of drawers, her fingers prodding at objects in the dark. They rested on her wooden jewellery box, the lid half open thanks to a muddle of beads spilling over the sides. Remembering the hidden bangle, she extracted it and returned to bed with it in her hand. Lying there, hot and tangled in the damp sheet, she ran her fingers over the clasp, over and over, as if comfort, or even remedy, were to be found in it.
Back on her feet, she was seized by the first desire for action she’d felt in weeks – more than desire: compulsion, an irresistible sense of urgent mission. Obeying with single-minded zeal, she set about transferring the contents of their bedroom, item by item, to the room at the back, until at last the master bedroom stood empty and the modest spare at the rear had been reconstructed in its image. She was still very weak and it took most of the day to accomplish the switch.
‘What on earth have you done?’ Joe asked, when he came home – for the first time in a while before 10 p.m. – and found her slumped on the bed, curtains open to the lightless park, the low dark skies.
She beamed at him, excited. ‘I’ve moved things around. I thought we’d sleep in here now.’
Joe looked neither convinced nor impressed by this reconfiguration. ‘But the master bedroom’s got Amber Baby’s million-dollar en suite.’
‘You can still use it, if you prefer,’ she told him. ‘I thought I’d just use the main bathroom. It’s got a bigger shower. Anyway, I’ve moved all the toiletries and towels, so you don’t have to do anything.’
Still he gazed about the room, as if puzzling over an optical illusion. ‘How did you manage to move the bed on your own? It’s solid wood.’
‘I turned it on its side and inched it along the carpet.’ This had been the feat of which Christy was most proud; her muscles atrophied following her ten days in bed, she’d had to rest frequently during the bed’s voyage down the passageway. ‘You should have seen it, it was like towing a cruise ship through the Panama Canal,’ she added. It was a relief to have rediscovered her sense of fun, even if Joe appeared to be having trouble connecting with it.
For when he retraced her route he was genuinely displeased. ‘You’ve wrecked the walls, Christy, look at all these marks!’
‘No I haven’t. And if I have it will give me something to do to repaint them.’
‘Better not to have damaged them in the first place, don’t you think? I bet this paint is some high-end heritage stuff that costs a bomb. Maybe you could check in the shed to see if the Frasers left a pot.’ He squinted at her as if suddenly uncertain of her psychological health. ‘This is crazy,’ he said, at last. ‘I honestly don’t understand why you’ve done this. The bedroom at the front is easily the nicest and now it’s just going to be a useless empty space.’
‘I thought we could make it into an extra living room,’ Christy said. ‘I’ll put that armchair from downstairs by the window. This room is much cosier and it’s private, it overlooks the garden and the park. And there’s no traffic noise.’
‘There’s no traffic noise at the front either. We’re on a residential road with a speed bump every ten metres.’ He remained standing by the door, as if to step into the room would be to yield to her madness. ‘Seriously!’
Waiting for his exasperation to run its course, Christy wondered if he’d made the connection to the noise that had disturbed her, in which case he might reasonably point out that if Rob’s living room was at the front, then logically his bedroom must be at the back, right alongside where she’d now moved theirs. What was the sense in that when presumably the majority of his sexual activities took place in there? The answer was that at the rear they were separated by the twin cavities of staircase and landing on either side of the dividing wall, surely enough to deaden the most enthusiastic cries. And it worked both ways: she didn’t want him hearing them (though – here was that thought again – there had been precious little so far for him to have overheard).
‘Fine,’ Joe said at last. ‘If it makes you happy. It’s just somewhere to sleep.’ For him, he meant, passing through the room as he did between leaving the office in the late evening and returning to it first thing in the morning.
‘Yes, sleep – and other things,’ she said, in a new, lighter tone, and he looked at her with a marked absence of desire that was both dismaying and a relief. She had not changed out of her pyjamas for her removals antics, though he might have given her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she’d been in regular clothes for most of the day before getting ready for bed early. Neither was an especially alluring conclusion.
‘Are we eating anything tonight?’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Did you have a chance to go to the supermarket?’
‘No. I’ll go tomorrow. We can cobble something together for dinner.’ And she could see very well that it might look odd for her to have exhausted herself with furniture removals and yet overlooked their empty fridge. Did other partners at JR have meals cobbled together by a spouse dressed in greying pyjamas?
Possibly not.
To celebrate being back in the land of the living, she decided to go to the café in the park for the rare pleasure of decent coffee made by someone else and drunk in the company of fellow human beings as opposed to cushions. As she accessed the park by their private gate and looked back at the rear aspect of their house – high and solid, its windows shining – she felt her natural joie de vivre rise once more. It may have been by the skin of her teeth, but she still owned this house. She wondered if the astonishment of it would ever fade.
She chose a table with a view of the meadow, the long grass painted with pale feathery strokes, vivid yellow buttercups dotted atop; in the foreground rose a bank of papery dark orange poppies, shivering in the breeze. She felt as if she’d been released from a kidnapping. Seeing friends gathered at tables in twos and threes reminded her how keenly she missed colleagues, colleagues and friends, and she texted Ellen and two friends who’d gone to ground since having babies: ‘Missing you, come and see our new house!’
When one replied at once, promising a visit the following week, Christy felt her mood lift once more. It would have been better to have a proper house-warming, she thought, but the expense was prohibitive and in any case their abortive drinks party made her fear another shunning. Once was disappointing; twice might break her spirit.
She took out her book. She’d rediscovered in recent weeks the pleasure of reading, and had brought with her Rebecca from the library. However, she’d barely finished a page when she became aware of a familiar figure at the counter: Rob. Typical! She allowed herself a treat for the first time in weeks and here was her nemesis to spoil it. Cle
arly he was not quite the recluse she’d thought. She couldn’t hope to concentrate on her book now, only on him, monitoring his movements peripherally as he fished for change and nodded thanks for the coffee (like him, tall and unsweetened). Well, at least he was just getting takeout.
She had of course by now googled him. Stymied previously by her lack of basic information – ‘Rob’ and ‘Lime Park’ had unsurprisingly produced nothing – she found that the addition of a surname and an occupation to her keywords generated an image straight away. There he was, in clean-shaven form, but wearing the all-too-familiar arrogant sneer: Robert Whalen, freelance journalist. He appeared to be an education specialist, not what she had expected, but then you didn’t need a Blue Peter personality to write about the broader context of schooling. There were pieces in the broadsheets about school league tables and private tutors, a report on the recent NUT conference, a profile of a former education secretary who was making himself unpopular with the present one by being a cult hero of trainee teachers. His style was dry and precise, with very little allowance for humour. No surprise there, she thought.
He had no website and his social media accounts were restricted. Odd for a journalist; you’d have thought he’d want to be readily contactable.
All at once, so suddenly it caused her to start, he was approaching her table, stopping at the sight of her and moving past only with an audible exhalation of irritation. He was staying then, and this was his regular spot – well, tough luck, she thought, she had it today. About to return to her page, she was aware of him suddenly doubling back and bearing down on her a second time, standing over her without uttering a word, and, to her great confusion, joining her. Not even gesturing for permission, he simply placed his cup on the table, waiting for her to look up and acknowledge him. This she did unsmilingly, eyebrows raised. As silence stretched between them, a flush began to creep through her cheeks. He, however, was perfectly at ease, tilting himself backwards on the rear legs of his seat as if he had all the time in the world.
‘Can I help you?’ she said at last, and made a point of not closing her book.
He ignored her question to ask one of his own in the same mildly sinister undertone he’d used in the street: ‘So you don’t work either, I take it?’
‘“Either?”’ she repeated coldly, supposing he must mean Caroline and the other stay-at-home mums on Lime Park Road. ‘I was made redundant, if you must know. I’m job-hunting. I’ve been up for several positions, but …’ She stopped, not wanting to detail her losses to this man; her failings.
But he passed over this information in any case, utterly careless of her circumstances. There was another silence, strained on her part, openly provocative on his if his sneer was anything to go by. She reminded herself that it was he who had imposed himself on her; she was not duty-bound to lead the conversation.
His bruised eye appeared to have healed.
‘So you obviously know,’ he said presently, his gaze now so intense it was causing her stomach to knot.
‘Know what?’
‘You know exactly what.’
Her brain, yet to be restored to full capacity, struggled with this. Had he somehow sensed her that night she’d overheard him having sex? Might he even have heard that wild accusation she’d made to Joe that he had influenced Felicity’s and the Frasers’ decisions to sell up? In spite of her guilt and embarrassment, she felt a flare of triumph. So there was something to know; her new neighbours did have something to hide – at least this one did. She said nothing, but looked steadily back at him, seeing in his eyes a heightened sense of the previous belligerence: a malignant kind of pride, a resolute superiority.
At her failure to respond, his gaze narrowed. ‘Oh, come on, Christy.’ The way he said her name was deeply unpleasant, the way someone might identify a household pest before selecting the right poison to kill it, and she felt the last of her cool leave her.
‘Look, I don’t know what and I don’t want to know.’ She did want to know, of course she did, but she could not bear to have him staring at her a moment longer, dominating her.
‘I saw you with her friend,’ he said, as if she had not spoken.
‘Whose friend? You mean Felicity’s?’
Giving a mean little laugh, he brought the front legs of his seat back to the ground in a sudden motion that made her jump. ‘Well, if you really don’t know, then I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell you.’
‘Fine,’ Christy said, adding eventually and in as steadfast a tone as she could muster, ‘I don’t remember asking you to join me. Please leave me alone.’
‘With pleasure.’ He leaned in, clenching his takeaway cup so tightly she feared the lid would pop off and send an eruption of scalding coffee into her face. ‘But let me just say this: if I hear you’ve been spreading false information …’
‘About what?’ Christy gulped.
‘I repeat: if I hear you’ve been spreading false information, I will deal with it.’ He did not elaborate and the threat felt all the more menacing for being unspecified.
He got to his feet, apparently unperturbed by this exchange, and as he strolled away she thought, Who do you think you are? How dare you threaten me? What is your problem?
And, most pressingly: What do you not want me to know?
The following Monday, long after Joe had left for work and the postman had dropped his latest round of bills and statements she dared not open, she heard the rattle of the letter box a second time, followed by the soundlessness that denoted a flyer dropping to the doormat. Engrossed in her new daytime TV favourite – a property show in which neighbours purged one another’s junk, not a problem she suffered from – she forgot about it until she was leaving for the library later in the day. That was when she saw the folded paper on the doormat. Opening it, she gasped at the sight and smell of dried excrement, smears of which did not quite obscure a message, written in black ink in capitals.
SCUM. WE DON’T WANT YOUR TYPE IN LIME PARK. FUCK OFF BEFORE WE MAKE YOU.
Legs going soft, breath coming quickly, she dropped the note and made her way into the sitting room and onto the sofa. She’d known they hadn’t exactly made the best impression on their neighbours, but they didn’t deserve this vitriol. And anonymous, too. Then it dawned on her: it had to be from Rob. He was the only one who hated her, had as good as said he perceived her as some sort of threat to his privacy. And it made sense of what Richard Sellers had yelled up at the window: ‘Thanks for the letter, mate. Nice way to treat your friends!’ Did he make a habit of this then, delivering poison to his neighbours? What kind of a person smeared excrement on his correspondence? He must be unhinged. She’d been right to fear him – and Joe had been wrong.
She wanted to ring Joe and tell him so, but thought she might be sick if she stood up. In any case, there was no satisfaction in being right, not when it meant you were in danger.
Only when she advanced on wobbly legs to bolt the front door and saw the offending item still lying there on the doormat did she think to look at the other side of the paper. Retrieving it, careful not to touch the brown stains, she turned it over.
There was a name scribbled across the paper on the half that must have landed face down. The name was not hers or Joe’s. It was Rob’s.
Rob Whalen.
Not from him, then, but to him.
Evidently, it had been shoved through the wrong door. Had there been others like it that had gone through the right one? Her thoughts turned first to Felicity, who’d shared a front door with Rob and who’d left in a hurry, unable to bring herself to speak to him even to say goodbye. Had she too picked up notes like this? If so, they had to have been terrifying to an older woman living on her own.
Only then did she think of Rob himself. Much as she happened to dislike the man, this was one piece of mail she had no intention of forwarding.
Chapter 12
Amber, 2012
‘Tell me more about how you grew up,’ Rob said, one July afte
rnoon. Such was the emphasis on other aspects of our friendship, we had reached this juncture knowing almost nothing of each other’s early lives. Assuming, of course, I hadn’t shared my life story with him when we’d first met years ago. (It seemed unlikely.)
‘I’m not sure there’s much to tell,’ I said, not meeting his eye – owing to a lack of interest in the subject rather than any desire to conceal the truth. But there wasn’t a great deal to look at in his bedroom, with its workaday bachelor’s furnishings and near-absent decoration; by then I knew its corners and contours by heart, its tricks of light and shadow – everything but the view from the window, for I could not risk Felicity or another neighbour looking up from the garden and seeing me there. ‘It was a typical broken home, I suppose. Not much money, not much mercy.’
‘Mercy?’ He repeated the word with wonder. ‘That’s an interesting quality for a child to care about. Do you mean you were hurt? Physically?’
I looked at him then, searching for a trace of compassion in his face and grateful to find it. ‘Not me, no.’
‘Who then?’
‘My mother. By my father, and then by one of her next partners as well. She certainly knew how to pick ’em. I’ve had no contact with him for years. Jeremy’s never met him.’
‘How old were you when he left?’ Rob asked.
‘Seven or eight by the time he went for good. He came and went for years. He was an idiot, but violent, which made him a scary idiot. And he was very tall, so he seemed like an ogre to me.’ I flashed then to the old sensation of seeing him looming in the doorway; not fright so much as sadness that a good day had turned bad – again. ‘You know, it’s awful but when I think about him now I can’t think of a single thing to admire about him.’ I gazed at Rob, aware that my lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘No doubt that’s affected how I deal with men.’
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 15