The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Why?’ I repeated.

  A part of me – a frail, feminine part – longed for him to say it was because he wanted more, he needed all of me and couldn’t bear to have me on this limited basis a moment longer; everyone in Lime Park Road had fallen in love with me, that’s what he’d said, and now he wanted to be allowed to too. But I knew that wasn’t it. I knew he had been the one to end every relationship he’d ever been in; he burned for only so long before the light cut out.

  I thought I’d been extraordinary, but I’d been only ordinary in a new way.

  ‘Pippa?’ I said, ice in my voice.

  ‘Partly, yeah.’ He told me that the lease on her flat would be up at the end of the month and he was going to ask her to move in with him.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ I said scornfully.

  He by contrast just grinned, patient, affable, supine – as if this was no different from our standard pillow talk, wicked little fripperies to make one another gasp and giggle. It was as if the night in the tree house had meant nothing to him. ‘Because I think it’s crazy for her to pay extortionate rent for some pit when I’ve got a big place like this.’

  ‘But it can’t just be about splitting costs.’ Petulance was spilling from me in spite of myself. ‘You must be serious about her to ask her to move in with you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe I am serious, or would like to try to be. Everyone else seems to like the arrangement, even you.’

  Even you. They were the words that broke my heart in the end, the implication that I was irrefutably the least in need of traditional love of any creature of his acquaintance. And I had no one to blame but myself. I’d sold myself to him as one kind of lover and I’d done it so convincingly he would never be able to think of me as any other kind. Worse, he no longer wanted to think of me at all.

  ‘You said you missed me,’ I said. ‘When you were in Morocco. You gave me the bangle.’

  He looked at me then in an unfamiliar way: incredulous, contemptuous, pitying. ‘The bangle is meaningless,’ he said.

  I fingered the clasp at my wrist. ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘Come on, you don’t seriously want to carry on, do you? We should quit while we’re ahead, don’t you think? It’s only a matter of time before Felicity suspects. She probably already does.’

  Bloody Felicity. Though the works had finished months ago, still I took her my cakes and little gifts; they were my tithe, my admission of guilt. ‘What if we had somewhere else to meet?’

  ‘Not worth it.’

  Though it was true that I couldn’t fund the expense of a flat or a regular hotel room without Jeremy noticing, I didn’t care for the way he put it: Not worth it. He wasn’t even dignifying us with a complete sentence.

  ‘What?’ He was growing testy, his fuse shortening. ‘Look, we’ve had a great run, but I’m not going to be your little toy for the entire duration of your marriage.’

  ‘Who said that’s what I want?’ Escaping his effrontery, his sheer arrogance, I slid from the bed and from his reach (not that he was reaching) and began gathering up my clothes, fumbling with my underwear.

  ‘Are you sure about that? Me at your beck and call every time Jeremy’s away or ill or boring you or not showering you with enough diamonds?’ He wasn’t even looking at me as he insulted me, but had turned to his phone, as if weary of the banality of my emotions. I imagined him tapping out a message to Pippa – ‘Which day can you move in?’, or, as he had once to me, so simply, so electrifyingly, ‘When?’

  Now that the loose end of me was tied up, any day worked for him.

  Sensing the heat of my glower, he glanced up, brow puckered in exasperation. ‘Look, you must see that you can’t keep on doing this stuff in plain sight, coming round here twice a week dressed like a whore.’ He paused, his sneer making it clear it was not only how I dressed that had earned me this label. ‘And the other week, when Jeremy was ill – what was that all about?’

  ‘You tell me! You’re the one who made us do it in the living room. If you ask me, you get off on the idea that he might hear us.’

  He ignored my desperate use of the present tense. ‘What’s next? In your bedroom while he’s in the shower? In the kitchen while he’s mowing the lawn? On the garden swing while he’s checking the oil in his car?’

  ‘These are all fantasies of yours, clearly,’ I said coldly, but my face was aflame, my temperature so feverish I was starting to shiver in the centrally heated room. Dressed now, I let my fingers fiddle helplessly with my buttons, anything to stop them from reaching to slap him, to tear his hair, to damage him physically. He had never goaded me like this before.

  And nor had he finished, continuing now as if uninterrupted, the words dripping crueller and crueller: ‘Hey, I know, check us both into your tree-house hotel and divide your time between the two rooms, see if either of us notices you’re not actually there when we’re not fucking you. Invite him to join us in the hot tub and watch? Ask him what the worst thing is he’s ever done and –?’

  ‘Stop!’ I’d raised my voice to a yell and we stared at each other, startled. There was something sadistic in his expression and I wondered what was in mine, something that was drawing the brutality from him: pain, fear, some weakness in me he did not care to protect, only to expose and belittle.

  ‘Calm down, Miss Amber,’ he said, and the nickname, the change in tone from bullying to playful, altered something in me.

  ‘I haven’t heard you complain before,’ I said, smiling. Nothing but instinct propelling me, I lowered myself onto the mattress right at his feet, blinking, pouting, appealing to him with my eyes and lips.

  ‘I’m not complaining now.’ He echoed the adjustment, the spite in his face fading. ‘That’s not what this is, don’t get me wrong. I’m just calling time, like we said we would. No arguments. No emotions. Don’t go back on that when you were the one to insist on it in the first place. You practically had me swearing on the Bible, you were such a control freak, remember?’

  I remembered very clearly, just as I did the animal hunger that had obliterated all moral concerns, all common sense. It wasn’t the same now, certainly, it had mutated, twisted, but it was just as powerful – on my part. It terrified me to think it might no longer be fed.

  ‘I’m not going back on it,’ I said. ‘You’ve misunderstood. It’s fine. I get it.’

  With my apparent compliance, he begrudged me a half-smile. ‘OK, good, so let’s avoid each other for a little while, then be normal neighbours, right? We’ve always been completely natural with each other outside of here, we’ll just continue doing that.’

  I thought how utterly wrong that sounded – to me we’d been natural inside his flat, unnatural outside. ‘I notice you waited till afterwards to tell me,’ I said in a dreary voice, causing him to look up, puzzled more by the tone than the question. He’d assumed, of course, that I would still have slept with him even if he had told me before; he’d assumed this was pure convenience, pure pleasure, of itself and nothing besides. He was beginning to find me extremely tedious.

  ‘What difference does it make? Jesus,’ he muttered, turning back to his phone.

  ‘What did you say?’ And with a full turn of the wheel, self-pity erupted into fury; I was far more incensed than when he’d called me ugly names: to hear so plainly, so callously, that there was no difference as far as he was concerned, when for me there was all the difference in the world. Here was the final evidence that I had let myself down, betrayed myself, and somehow that meant a far worse betrayal of Jeremy than the technical one.

  He tossed me a pitiless glance. ‘Come on, don’t go getting all bunny boiler on me. I know you’ve got form in that department.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Now he looked at me properly, enjoying his moment of power. ‘I know all about your employment tribunal. What a farce that was, eh?’

  I glowered at him. ‘I’ve never mentioned any tribunal to you.’

  ‘No, but you tol
d Felicity, didn’t you? That was a mistake. “Inappropriate sexual misconduct”, my arse. I can’t think of a single person in the world less likely to be a victim of that.’

  ‘Neither of you know anything about it,’ I said. I refused to have my bluff called like this. ‘There were no press there and witness statements aren’t made public after the event.’

  ‘No, but journalists have ways of getting around that. You can’t expect me not to want to dig into something like that?’

  ‘I expect you to mind your own business,’ I said coldly. ‘For your information, I was unfairly dismissed and that’s all there is to it.’

  He smirked. ‘I have no doubt that’s what you like to think, but that’s not what the panel decided, was it? Didn’t they decide that you had harassed him? Matt, wasn’t it? The one who tried to blackmail you? Poor sucker. You wouldn’t leave him alone when he’d had enough. What was the phrase the judge used about your behaviour? “Statistically uncommon”, that’s right, “but no less damaging for it.”’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re quoting this nonsense,’ I sneered. ‘You obviously have nothing better to do with your time.’

  He continued as if I had not spoken: ‘You were the woman, you were the subordinate, and you still managed to fuck him up so badly he had a Prozac prescription by the time you’d finished with him. And there were some pretty nasty emails to his new girlfriend, as I remember, Lesley something or other. Didn’t you get some IT dope to help you send them anonymously? You were lucky they didn’t go to the police.’

  ‘He was lucky I didn’t go to the police,’ I snapped. ‘Blackmail is a crime.’

  ‘Yes, it’s interesting you didn’t tell the silver fox about that,’ Rob said in mock puzzlement. ‘Didn’t want to risk his being tempted to look beyond the rose-tinted surface of Amber Baby, eh? Because he doesn’t know everything, does he? He doesn’t have a clue how psychotic you get if someone has the audacity to reject you.’ He sniggered, waggling his phone at me. ‘Well, I can tell you now that if you try any of your revenge crap on me I’ll forward it straight to him. He’ll be the judge of any tribunal we have.’

  Under his goading eyes, my skin burned red with humiliation. I could feel my own body heat pouring from me. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight back then,’ I said, finally. ‘You know what I was like, all the drugs and everything. You met me yourself.’

  He gave a malicious little chuckle. ‘You didn’t believe that, did you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just said that for a laugh.’

  I stared, astounded, disgraced. ‘But why?’

  He shrugged. ‘I wanted to see how fucked up you really used to be. When you didn’t remember but clearly accepted it as true, well, I knew the answer: very fucked up. I’m sorry, but the evidence just keeps on coming, Amber Baby.’

  ‘Evidence of what?’ I said, swallowing. Tears wobbled on my lower lids.

  With exaggerated ennui, he peered at his phone, as if even the sight of a keypad held more interest than anything I had to say. ‘That you’re not quite right in the head,’ he sighed.

  ‘Shut up.’ I lunged towards him and snatched the phone from his fingers, hurled it against the wall, not even watching as it smashed and fell to the floor, only scowling into his face, seeing his anger resurface and bloom deeper and hotter than before, challenging him to start this scene again and give me the outcome I wanted.

  ‘I hate you,’ I said, trembling.

  I love you, a voice replied, but it was not the one I wanted to hear; only my own, inside my head, the words incarcerated there forever.

  He said nothing. His mouth made vile movements, a bully’s gathering saliva to spit at an object of repugnance, a victim. In his eyes there pooled pure savagery.

  And then he sprang.

  In a deft and practised ambush, he was now on top of me, pinning me under him on the bed, I clothed, he still naked, the bedding catching and pulling between us.

  ‘Is this how you broke up with her?’ I snarled. It was my turn now and I was going to take every last drop of relish in my power to incense him, to contaminate his airwaves with my vitriol.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl in college you told me about. Is this why she did what she did – to teach you a lesson for being so heartless? Did you dump her for the same reason? Because you got bored?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid whore.’ His words were hard with anger, exciting me.

  ‘Go on,’ I taunted him, ‘do it. Do it one last time. Make it hurt so I remember you properly. You have my permission – I know that’s important to you.’

  ‘You’re sick, do you know that?’

  But he liked it. He liked it as much as I did. Breaking one hand free, I reached between our bodies to slide off my underwear and guide him inside me. Then my hand returned to its pair, seeking his, urging him to tighten his grip, to bind his fingers tighter around my wrists.

  ‘Come on, get on with it. I’m waiting.’

  As he started to grind he had his full weight on me so I could hardly breathe, hardly move, but only whimper with the pleasure of it, the pain of it – there would be blood later, I knew – murmuring in his ear, begging him not to stop, never to stop. As he came, I hissed ‘I hate you’ once more, twice more, over and over until he commanded me to stop and rolled away from me in exhaustion and disgust.

  ‘Jesus,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know what it is with you. You’ve got a serious problem.’

  I sat up, my body sore and used but still craving contact with his. I pawed his hair, kissed his shoulders, rubbed myself against him like an animal. ‘The only problem I have is to get you to come to your senses …’ I smiled, purring now, pleased with myself, as pleased as I’d been on the day we met – and as confident of success. ‘Come on, you know you’d miss me too much if I never came back, admit it.’

  He spun, incredulous, freeing himself from my touch. He was breathing heavily, the skin of his chest red from the friction of me. ‘Listen to me, will you: I’m not going to change my mind and we are not going to see each other again. Not like this.’

  ‘Well, I don’t accept that,’ I murmured, advancing once more. ‘You know you can do whatever you like with me, I don’t care about Pippa or anyone else who comes along, I just want to –’

  ‘Stop touching me!’ He shook me off a second time, springing unsteadily to his feet. ‘I think you should get out of here. I can’t bear to look at you any more.’

  Hearing him, understanding at last, I could only stare at him, emptied of my soul, utterly laid to waste. ‘If that’s what you want,’ I said, choking.

  ‘It is. So stop making such a song and dance of it. Put your knickers on and go. Please.’

  Humiliated, degraded, I did as he said. As I left, I was already crying tears of rage. ‘You will never lay a finger on me again as long as you live!’ I told him, shrieking. All those months of immaculate control, not a syllable breathed to anyone, and now I had none left.

  ‘I have no desire to,’ Rob said, his voice cold and hateful, and he kicked the door shut behind me, not even sparing me a last glance.

  He never looked at me again.

  I blundered down the stairs sobbing, noticing Felicity at her open door but waving off her concern, dashing for the refuge of my own home, my perfectly feathered nest with all the space in the world for the chicks that refused to come.

  ‘Amber, stop, is something wrong … ?’

  But I ignored her. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of the time she’d found me on the doorstep, ringing his doorbell over and over, desperate and demented, an addict.

  She’d taken me into her flat on that occasion and made me a cup of tea, brought me a little packet of tissues and watched me mop my face. Only when I’d subdued the worst of the hysteria did she say anything worth listening to.

  ‘If you play with fire, you only end up having to cry enough tears to put it out.’

  ‘Wha
t is that, some sort of Chinese proverb?’ I’d asked. I was rallying by then, ready to excuse my distress with some fabrication or other, to give no more away than I already had.

  ‘You could call it a Lime Park proverb,’ Felicity replied.

  I laughed it off. I laughed so sweetly she couldn’t help but laugh along with me, coming to the conclusion, I suppose, that I could take care of myself. I was a big girl. But she made me finish my tea, look her in the eye, promise I was going to be all right.

  Such a friendly street, Lime Park Road. So many doors held open in welcome, so much advice ready to be dispensed.

  I prefer it here, in the forgotten little neighbourhood where our road links two suburbs, where we’re never quite sure which side of the line we live on.

  Where people keep themselves to themselves.

  Chapter 34

  Amber, October 2013

  It hasn’t been easy being a born survivor.

  When I left Rob’s flat that terrible afternoon in January, I thought I would never recover, I thought his brutality was so unendurable I might have to kill myself. On and on I wept, thrashing and convulsing, like a baby torn from her mother, and though I had stopped before Jeremy left for his business trip – it was futile and self-destructive, it upset him and debased me – I had continued to want to weep. I had continued to want to die.

  But then I discovered I was pregnant and the miracle of life being what I now know it is – a force capable of overriding crisis, of resetting time – I was cured at a stroke. It was as if nothing bad had ever happened to me and never would.

  Until Jeremy came home from the airport and dropped his bomb. The house might have been split in two with its destructive force, the whole world burned black and airless. It was deadly – almost.

  I was raped: I ejected the words like vomit, the only ones that could have won me a reprieve. I think he recognized it as the solution as instinctively as I did; any other explanation and we would have been adrift, whereas this course, unedifying though it was, was charted.