Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Amy asks me now. ‘When you gave her a bath at the weekend?’

  ‘I didn’t give her her bath,’ I say slowly. Something is coming over me.

  ‘Then who did?’

  A beat of anxiety.

  Olivia.

  I walk Amy back down to Reception, my arms folded tightly over my chest as if I’m cold, which I am. The chill I felt in the editing suite hasn’t left me.

  ‘Thank you for talking to me about this,’ I tell Amy, as we stand by the glass doors.

  ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble,’ she says. ‘But I’m just worried about Mabel.’

  ‘I know. And I appreciate that.’

  ‘What will you do?’ she asks.

  I run a hand over my face. I know that what I must do will change things. By solving one problem I’m creating another. But nothing comes before Mabel and her safety. Nothing. And just as I acknowledge that thought, it is chased by another: I failed to notice there was a problem with my own daughter. It had to be pointed out to me by her minder. And the knowledge of this raises questions about my own fitness as a parent. Have I been looking the other way? So caught up in my own affair that I have neglected to notice real distress in my beloved child? The thought crushes me, and at the same time galvanizes something inside me.

  I need to sort my life out. Simplify things. Set things straight.

  Perhaps she reads the flurry of thoughts in my head, the charging emotions at play, for she leans into me suddenly, her arms going around me, and I allow her to pull me into a hug. She holds me there for a moment, and I feel the press of her against me, the urgency of her hug.

  ‘I’m here for you,’ she whispers. ‘Let me help you.’

  The words, while well intentioned, feel clumsy, and I’m awkward in her embrace. When I draw back from her, I have to battle the distaste I feel at the sudden physical display. But more than that, a resolve is forming inside me. My unforgivable preoccupation with Finn has blinded me to my little girl’s trauma. I feel ashamed of my actions, and determined to change. For I believe there is still time to turn things around. To fix this.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her, my voice firm. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

  14.

  Amy

  How much do they realize I can actually hear?

  That’s what I’m wondering as I sit in my bedroom by the door, my ear pressed against it. If I was to open it just a crack I’d hear it all, but I dare not do that. Things are tricky enough as it is.

  It’s almost two hours into the fight. A lot of it is done. Olivia has left, in a storm of bitter accusation and tears. I guess it was pretty ugly, what went down between them, despite Cara’s cagey diplomacy. No matter how carefully she put it, you couldn’t get away from the starkness of the accusation. Jeff was incredulous, Olivia incensed, spluttering in her denials. She insisted that Mabel be hauled out to give testimony, something Cara railed against. She was overruled in the end, Jeff caving in to Olivia’s wishes. I was pretty nervous then, straining to hear what the little kid was saying, whether she’d spill her guts and drop me in the shit. Moments before they brought her out, I took her to one side and warned her.

  ‘Remember what you stole. Don’t make me tell the police.’

  It seemed to do the trick. She didn’t give them anything.

  Now she’s back in her bedroom, and I’ve given her my laptop and headphones and plugged her into a Disney movie as my way of saying sorry. It’s hard to know how much of this she understands. She’s only five, after all. But then, just as I was retreating back through our shared bathroom to my own bedroom, I’d caught her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t think I could see her, but there it was – a quick flash of her little tongue sticking out at me. Pretty stupid, but it unsettled me.

  I put it out of my mind and concentrate my attention on what’s going on in the kitchen.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Cara says. ‘You’re never even here these days, so why should you care?’

  ‘I’m away working!’ he shouts in reply. ‘You make it sound like I’m on holiday!’

  ‘You didn’t have to take that job.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud – you were the one who guilted me into it!’

  ‘Guilted you –’

  ‘Yes! Jesus Christ, if I’d had to listen to you making the point one more time of how we relied on your salary –’

  ‘That’s not fair –’

  ‘You’ve no idea, have you? The way you play the martyr. The overworked, unappreciated wife. How I’m supposed to fall on bended knee out of sheer gratitude at the way you juggle work and motherhood. Saint Cara of the kitchen sink! No wonder I snapped up the opportunity once Ingrid suggested it. Work of my own – money that was mine, that I didn’t have to feel guilty about.’

  ‘Don’t you dare throw this back at me! I never stopped you looking for a job. It suited you well enough, having me go out the door every morning so you could lock yourself in your little man-cave and play at writing your books.’

  ‘That’s fucking low, Cara, even by your standards,’ he remarks, then, on a rising note of frustration, he shouts, ‘Jesus, your phone? Seriously?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  But he snaps back, ‘You’re always checking it these days. Who the hell are you expecting to hear from?’

  ‘No one,’ she mutters, then adds in a catty tone, ‘Here, it’s off. Happy now?’

  There is a pause then, and I flatten my ear closer to the door, wonder what they are doing. All the bustling about the kitchen has stopped. Are they standing facing each other, finally exhausted? Is she crying, hugging herself by the kitchen sink, while he sits fuming, watching her?

  When Jeff speaks again, his tone is calmer, conciliatory even. ‘I didn’t mean what I said. I know you have never tried to make me feel bad about not being the breadwinner. But I have felt, sometimes, that you’re not particularly proud of me. You love me and you need me. But to a certain degree, everything I do is domestic. I know I accused you of wanting gratitude, but I suppose I envied you a little – that you could excel at a demanding job and still come home in the evenings and have Mabel fawn all over you. It’s silly to say it, but I felt that even though I was the parent who was present for her most of the time, it was you she really wanted. You she preferred.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I know but –’

  ‘Every little kid does that. They always rush at the parent who comes in the door. Mabel loves you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The pitch of the row has fallen away completely. What’s left is something quiet and wistful and almost tender. It makes me edgy. All the anger and retribution that stormed through here has fallen away. It’s worn them out. They’re spent.

  ‘I thought, for a moment,’ he admits, sounding almost bashful, ‘that you were going to add that you love me too.’

  There’s a soft clink, a glass being put down on the table, perhaps.

  ‘I do love you, Jeff,’ she says quietly, and I feel my cheeks grow hot, anxiety billowing out inside me. It lasts only a second or two, until she adds, ‘But something is broken between us. It’s been broken for a very long while. Surely, you must feel it too?’

  He doesn’t answer at first, and I strain to listen.

  ‘How do we fix it?’ he asks, and there’s hopelessness in his tone. He knows it, as surely as I do.

  ‘Let’s go sit down,’ she says, in a tired voice full of resignation.

  And I listen as they leave the kitchen, cross the hall, and retreat to the living room. They’re too far away, their voices too low, for me to hear. But in the quiet of my bedroom, I know. The sombre turn their voices had taken, the warm glow inside me. I know, without having to listen, that they’re sitting down quietly, like reasonable grown-ups, admitting to each other, quietly, sadly but unmistakably – and a little thrill goes through me at the thought – that it’s over between them. What is broken cannot be fixed.

/>   Jeff goes back to Berlin the next day. Nothing is said, but everything is different. I can tell by the change in Cara – a quietness that has come over her like sorrow, an unwillingness to talk. When she comes in the door now in the evenings, her face is drawn and I see her having to dig deep for the energy when Mabel launches her little body at her mother, mustering a smile, a sense of cheer, even though she’s not feeling it.

  I keep wanting her to confide in me, but she responds by closing herself off, making herself remote. Connie was the same. Whenever she’d have a row with Ray, her boyfriend, coming home red-eyed and thin-lipped, she’d never open up about it, no matter how much I begged. Kept it all locked down deep inside, guarding her grievances tight like treasure. But I don’t want to think about Connie, and certainly not about the rows she had with Ray. Not while her voice is silent in my head.

  Instead, I think of my mom the morning that she left. How she came into my room and sat on my bed in the darkness, not really saying anything, just stroking my hair and saying, ‘Hush, baby, it’s okay,’ which confused me because she was the one that was crying, not me. I couldn’t make out her eyes in the darkness but she had that sinusy note in her voice that she got whenever she was upset. It wasn’t even dawn, and I figured she’d had a late one, and that when she got up off my bed it was to go back to her room. The whole thing was like an episode in a dream, and I think I must have drifted back to sleep then, so I didn’t hear the car pulling away down the dust track to the road. The first real inkling I had was when the light drifted through the curtains and found my face. I woke up and heard Elaine downstairs, crying at the kitchen table, having found the note.

  Cara doesn’t cry. Or if she does, then I don’t hear it. She keeps the sorrow at bay by keeping busy. In the evenings, after Mabel’s asleep, she spends time going through her things – clothes, old papers, boxes of memories. ‘So much junk,’ she says under her breath. A spring clean, even though it’s October. A declutter. I guess it’s therapeutic. I wouldn’t know – I’ve never been one to hoard, preferring to travel light. Jeff spends the weekend in Berlin, and neither of us remark on it.

  It’s a Thursday evening and I’m prepping the dinner, a hunk of bloodied beef that I’m slicing into thin strips for a stroganoff, when she stops at the doorway to speak to me. There’s a bag stuffed with clothes resting against the side of her leg, the plastic handles cutting lines in her hands. Stuff she’s throwing out, or donating to Oxfam. She’s hauling it outside to take down to the lobby.

  ‘Listen, Amy, you should probably know – I’ve an estate agent coming to view the apartment tomorrow, to get an estimate. It would be better if you and Mabel could make yourselves scarce before she comes.’

  ‘You’re selling the apartment?’ I ask, shock in my voice. For some reason, I had assumed that even after Jeff eventually packs up and leaves for good, Cara and Mabel and I would remain here. That this would still be our home.

  ‘Yes. It’s been on the cards for years, and now, under the circumstances, we feel it’s the best thing to do. But Mabel doesn’t know yet, so could you please keep it to yourself? I imagine it will take some time to arrange, and I don’t want her getting upset about it.’

  Under the circumstances. The phrase sticks in my head. The meaningful way she’d said it. Excitement bubbles up inside me.

  ‘You’re getting a divorce.’ It’s a statement, not a question.

  Cara’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. ‘A divorce? Whatever gave you that idea?’

  The brightness of her laughter leaves me cold.

  Confused, I stammer, ‘But why else would you sell? When you said “under the circumstances”, I thought –’

  ‘I meant what happened recently. With Olivia.’ She lowers her voice as she says the name.

  She sees the stricken look on my face and puts down the bag of clothes. I turn from her, fix my attention on the meat, slicing carefully.

  ‘I know there’s been a bit of upheaval lately – Jeff being away so much has required an adjustment – but everything is fine between us. And selling this place is something we have talked about on and off over the years. This apartment has always felt more like Claire’s home than mine. We think it would be good for us to get someplace bigger – a house, maybe, with our own garden. Bedrooms for Mabel and Olivia –’

  ‘For Olivia?’ I cannot keep the disgust from my tone.

  She picks up on it. Do I imagine that she flinches?

  ‘Of course, for Olivia,’ she says in a patient tone, like I’m a child she’s explaining it to. ‘She’s not my favourite person right now, but she’s still Jeff’s daughter.’ Then, as if in an aside, she adds quietly, ‘Besides, I’d prefer she had her own room, rather than having her share with Mabel.’

  I almost laugh out loud at the craziness of her optimism. How could she be so blind?

  ‘There’ll be a room for you too, of course,’ she adds, coyly, like she’s dangling a treat in front of me. Despite my disappointment over the non-divorce, I feel a giddy kick of gladness that’s doused out almost immediately, when she adds, ‘Or for any future minder or nanny we might have.’

  My temper flares inside me. She deserves her unhappy marriage, her piss-weak husband, the crummy leftovers of a dead woman. Thinking all that is needed is a new house, thinking that will change everything, make Olivia forgive her, turn her marriage all new and shiny, with no cracks in it, erase her own betrayals.

  At the door, she picks up her bag of clothes, and lingers for a few seconds, as if thinking about saying something more. I don’t say anything and neither does she, and then I’m alone again with the metallic smell of the meat hitting my nostrils, filling it with a cloying odour of something faintly rotten.

  Getting through the next couple of weeks is a struggle. It feels like there’s a stone in my heart, like it’s not pumping the blood around properly. I’m sluggish and drained, so that even the smallest task is an effort. I walk like a cow, heavy-jointed and slow.

  The estate agent comes and I take Mabel to the cinema to see some totally forgettable kids’ movie. There’s a trailer for Paddington 2 and I’m vaguely aware of the deep chuckle of her laughter at the bear’s antics, but I don’t laugh. The ice-cream-coloured version of London shown onscreen is so phoney it makes me depressed. All that schmaltz, that fake goodwill, makes me nauseous.

  Afterwards, Mabel’s tired and difficult, and a surge of fury comes through me out of nowhere and I nearly yank her arm from its socket, dragging her to the station. On the Tube, I’m sweating and remorseful, Mabel pale-faced and silent. I have to be careful now that Olivia’s not around. No telltale marks, no bruising.

  The apartment goes up for sale, signalling an end for me. I can feel it. So I’m not even all that shocked when I’m going through Cara’s emails and I come across one she’s sent to the nursery school, looking for a recommendation for a new live-in nanny. She requests their discretion in the matter, and this is the part that makes my blood boil. The secrecy of it. After all the secrets I’ve kept for her! This is how she repays me? It dawns on me then, the deal they’ve made – Cara and Jeff. He has agreed to sell the apartment in exchange for her letting me go. The obviousness of it takes my breath away. I’ve noticed a change in the way he talks to me lately. Before, he’d been polite and cheerful, although brief, but now that brevity is marked by a new curtness, like he can’t stand to be in the same room as me. I worry that he suspects I might be behind Olivia’s fall from grace, and that maybe Cara has used me as a pawn in their trade-off so she can finally be free of the dead wife’s home.

  Once I’ve made the connection, I sink even lower, wallowing in thoughts of my own misery, my own self-loathing. It’s my fault this has happened, just by being me. It’s not hard to trace back the pattern of rejection, all the way to my mother hightailing it in the early hours, abandoning me to Elaine’s goodwill.

  I lie awake at night, and listen to Connie. She’s back with me again, perched by my bedside, mean and mocking.
/>
  What the hell did you think would happen, Keener? That you’d stay with them for ever? That they’d fucking adopt you?

  I turn over in my bed, and as I do so, I hear the change in her voice as the penny drops, the mocking laughter that follows.

  Oh no. You didn’t! That’s what you wanted? How was that ever going to happen – you and her?

  The gale of her gusty laughter pollutes my dreams.

  A few days later, I drop Mabel at nursery, then linger for a while in a coffee shop, making my latte stretch until the waitress comes over and starts scrubbing the table next to me in a hostile kind of way and I know I’ve outstayed my welcome. Part of me knows I should be doing something, looking for a job – who knows, maybe go back to the States? That thought lasts hardly a minute before I remember that I can’t go back. Certainly not to the state of Pennsylvania anyway.

  I am on my way back home, a light drizzle dusting my hair and the sleeves of my jacket, when I turn the corner on to the road outside the apartment block and see a man standing under a tree. Straight away, I notice something odd about him. He’s standing there with his hands in the pockets of his parka, his eyes fixed on the building. I guess he could be waiting for someone, but surely he’d wait by the doors, or on the little paved square where there are wooden benches surrounded by plant pots? The drizzle is thickening, coming down harder, and still he stands there, making no effort to seek shelter. There’s something furtive about him, a tension running through his shoulders, the way his weight shifts from one foot to the other. I stare at him as I walk past, wanting to see his face. I’m thinking maybe he’s a prospective buyer, checking the place out, but then I see who he is and know this is something else.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I ask, turning back to address him.

  He gapes at me. It takes him a second to speak.

  ‘Uh, no thanks.’

  ‘Are you waiting on someone?’

  ‘Sort of.’ He gives a brief wheeze of a laugh but it’s not meant for me. His eyes are back on the building and there’s a bleary look to them, like he’s been awake all night. Even from this distance I can catch the stale whiff of booze on his breath.