Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  I look at the cords of his veins rising along his forearms.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and he glances across. The lack of any real feeling in my voice alerts him.

  ‘Wednesday,’ he goes on. ‘Aren’t you excited?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I dry the frother, return it to its stand, then cross to the fridge to get the milk.

  ‘I’ve contacted a few different movers for estimates. One of them came back and said they could fit us in next week. It’s more expensive than the others but it’s worth it, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m surprised you were able to get anyone to move us at such short notice.’ I’m careful to keep my voice neutral, my movements steady as I insert a pod into the Nespresso machine, turn it on.

  ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

  I can hear him opening the cupboard where we keep the treats and rummaging for biscuits. I keep my back turned, my attention trained on the coffee filling the cup. I don’t want him to see my face, the furious calculations going on inside my head.

  ‘We’ll need to get a move on with the packing,’ he tells me.

  I hand him his coffee, then turn back to release the used pod from the machine and insert a new one.

  ‘I’ve ordered some boxes. Do you think you could take care of most of it? I’ll help of course,’ he adds quickly, no doubt reading the stiffening in my back as annoyance. ‘It’s just that I’ve to head back to Berlin to do the handover. Do you think you could manage on your own?’

  I take my coffee from the machine, turn and lean back against the counter. I try to feel the reassuring press of the wooden surface against my lower back, the warmth of the mug in my hands. Some part of me strains to find again the warmth and affection of this morning, but I can’t. A cold film of ice has formed over my heart after hearing Mark’s words of warning.

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘But you’ll have to give me a phone number for the company,’ I say casually. I take a sip of my coffee, then add, ‘I hate sending emails with my phone, and there’s something up with my laptop. I’m having someone in the IT department at work take a look at it for me.’

  I’m watching him now, trying to gauge his reaction.

  ‘Oh? Yes, no problem. I’ll text you the details so you’ll have them on your phone.’

  ‘You didn’t notice anything wrong with my laptop?’ I intended to be subtle about asking, but the knot of nerves in my stomach causes the words to be blurted out somehow. I watch him carefully, catch the brief narrowing of his eyes, the ghost of a frown crossing his brow.

  ‘No-o-o.’ He draws the word out slowly, questioningly.

  I say quickly, ‘It’s just I thought you used it a few weeks ago. When you were booking flights.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The guarded look remains on his face, as he tells me, ‘I didn’t notice anything, though. Can it be fixed?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Well. Good.’

  He pops a biscuit whole into his mouth, and stands there for a moment, chewing. Neither of us speak. He swallows and looks up at me with a brightening glance.

  ‘I’m getting excited about it now – the new house. The new old house,’ he corrects himself with amusement.

  And then he crosses the kitchen towards me and, still holding his mug in one hand, he wraps his free arm around me and draws me into an embrace. I am so shocked by this sudden display of affection that I can’t react. The proximity of his flesh, the musky smell of his aftershave, the slightly gritty sweep of his cheek against mine, all feel like an assault on my senses. Slowly, tentatively, my free arm snakes around his back, so that I am returning the hug, barely.

  ‘It’s going to be good for us,’ he tells me, words said softly into my ear. ‘I can feel it.’

  And then he draws back and for a horrified instant, I’m sure he’s going to kiss me. But he just smiles and turns, taking his coffee with him.

  A few seconds later, the door to his study closes. The breath slowly releases from my lungs. I throw the dregs of my coffee down the plughole, and lean against the sink.

  He is in the flat all the time. When I return from the school run, he is already at his desk, tying up loose ends before he goes to Berlin, before the move. I busy myself with packing, attempting ruthlessness when it comes to throwing things out, but it’s hard. My brain is preoccupied, skittering over the past few weeks, parsing previous conversations for evidence, some hidden clue, scouring for a memory that will reveal his culpability.

  One thing keeps surfacing. Our conversation after my night in the police station. When he told me he wouldn’t countenance a paternity test.

  Mabel is mine, and I won’t allow that to be corrupted by the ravings of some creep who is now, thankfully, deceased.

  The way he had spoken those words – there was acid in his tone, a cold poison I had not heard before.

  As I work through the contents of these rooms with bubble wrap and tape, I think of the text messages I have received since Finn’s death. I am desperately trying to remember where Jeff was when each text came through. All that time, he knew about the affair and didn’t tell me. Suspicion worms through my brain like a virus. For I cannot remember an occasion when he was there with me, blameless, innocent.

  When did it start, this feeling of distrust? Part of me despises myself for the suspicions creeping around my mind, but I cannot seem to escape them. I try to recall if the distrust was there, the night I went out and got caught up in an act of terrorism. The things I told Amy – were they fuelled by that same distrust? I know that when I married him, I believed I could tell him anything. I just can’t be sure when this rot set in.

  I wrap and pack and label and sort, going through the motions mechanically. I am, I suppose, grateful for a distraction, an occupation. But the one thing I cannot do is imagine unwrapping these things in our new home. I cannot picture myself in that house, finding new places for our belongings, hanging pictures, arranging furniture, choosing paint colours. I cannot imagine anything normal happening between us. I cannot imagine living with him under the shadow of this growing distrust.

  It is Sunday night. I am in bed before he is. I lie on my side with the duvet pulled up to my chin and my eyes closed, listening to him moving from wardrobe to bathroom and back again. He is packing his bag for his final journey to Berlin before finishing up on the project. I have been counting down the days, and it has been difficult playing at normality, trying to suppress my desire for his absence.

  He zips up his suitcase and rolls it over to the top of the stairs. A minute later, I feel the mattress sag beneath his weight as he draws back the covers and climbs into bed next to me. The light goes off and he lies still and sighs. Silence enters the space around us. He seems to be waiting. He knows I am not asleep.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, half-whispering. ‘Has Olivia been in touch?’

  ‘No.’ I don’t elaborate.

  He’s well aware of his daughter’s continuing sulk with me, no doubt exacerbated by my recent brush with notoriety.

  ‘I’ll email her,’ he says in a mollifying tone, as if trying to make up for all those occasions he took her side over mine. ‘Tell her if she hasn’t come for her stuff by the time I’m back from Berlin, we’re throwing it out.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He’s half-turned to me – I’ve got my back to him but I can feel him watching me. It’s weeks since we’ve had sex, and since the night of my confession we have hardly had any physical contact at all. This lacuna in our relationship becomes amplified now in the dark and silence of our bedroom, his departure the next morning pressing the matter.

  ‘Did you get your laptop back?’ he asks.

  My eyes open. It was said so casually, but I feel how loaded the question is.

  ‘No. Not yet.’ I am whispering too. I can hear the blood in my ears pounding into the pillow.

  ‘We’ll have to FaceTime through your phone, then,’ he says softly. ‘While I’m aw
ay.’

  And then I feel his hand on my hip. It sits there, poised for my reaction. In my head, I am scrambling for a response. He is my husband. We have a child together – a life. His hand on my hip is moving slowly now, tracing a line up into the dip of my waist, ascending now to my ribcage. This tentative approach of his is something I should be welcoming. After the dreadful wound I have inflicted with my infidelity, I should be rising to his touch – I should be spinning around and flattening my lips against his, thinking: Thank God! Thank God, he forgives me! But all I can think of is the bugging device. The spyware on my laptop. The suspicion has jumped to life inside me – my husband is spying on me.

  His hand moves down to find the hem of my T-shirt, and then I feel his touch directly on my skin, stroking my belly, his body moving in so close that I can feel the brush of his erection against my thigh, and a wave of anxiety surges up through me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, my voice a mumble that masks my panic.

  He pauses, his hand suspended somewhere near my breast.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, and I half-turn my head, enough so I can see his face caught in the meagre moonlight thrown through the gap in the curtains.

  ‘I’m just so tired. All that packing.’

  It’s a pathetic excuse – nowhere near enough to explain my rebuff of him, not now, after all I’ve done. He waits, neither of us moving, and I can feel the cogs of his brain working, confusion and suspicion dancing inside his head. His mouth is open as if to say something, but I can see his hesitation hardening into withdrawal. He moves his hand away, retreats to his side of the bed. Disappointment rises from him like a bad odour, the tension thickening the air. Of course, I could be wrong to suspect him, and that bothers me too. A big part of me hates myself right now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jeff.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says, gamely mustering a tone of nonchalance.

  He turns over so that we lie with our backs to each other, both of us mulling over our own troubled thoughts, a dark unseen river of distrust and suspicion running between us, bisecting our bed.

  Jeff leaves the next morning shortly after dropping Mabel at school. I don’t offer to walk him to the Tube, even though I have nothing better to do. He pecks me on the lips, the strain of his hurt and disappointment from the previous night tacit within that dismissive goodbye kiss. And then the apartment door closes and I hear, from beyond it, the ping of the elevator, followed by the gentle whoosh of the doors closing. Only then do I breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

  Peace comes over me, even though it’s only temporary. The blessing of silence, that sense of finally being alone. I stand here, breathing it in, feeling the tightness in my temples begin to abate, and I think: Now I can do it. Now I can achieve some clarity, properly investigate my suspicions.

  Most of the contents of our sitting room have been packed into boxes – bookshelves denuded, walls laid bare. Mabel’s toys and clothes have been edited back to a few chosen gems. In our bedroom, we have emptied our wardrobes of those clothes we don’t often wear; the kitchen has been hulled to the bare essentials. The only rooms that remain as yet untouched are Olivia’s bedroom and Jeff’s study.

  I pause at the entrance and stare at his desk. An old partners’ desk anchoring the rest of the room to it, a quiet shambles of paperwork, a few towers of books, a shelf of potted plants all lush and green and well tended. A patriarchal space, some might call it – the desk, the masculine palate, the hushed, cloistered atmosphere. But it has been part of our deal, this space, an unwritten clause in our marriage contract. He has taken on the role of principal carer, electing to stay at home, and this space has been his retreat. Somewhere the continuum of his work can endure, even at a low level during the early hectic years of parenting. And now it is flourishing again. This contract in Berlin has given rise to a new vigour within him, and it has caused him to spend increasing amounts of time in this room.

  It’s there, at the front of my mind, the pulse of suspicion, pushing me further into the room. I sit at the chair, swish gently from side to side for a moment, before I lean forward and turn on his computer. I look briefly through a stack of opened mail while I wait for the computer to power up. Correctly guessing his password – Mabel2012 – I gain access and double-click on the Internet icon. I search the browser history, not really sure what it is I hope to find. When I type ‘spyware’ into the search engine it throws up hits before I’ve even typed past spy.

  I sit back for a moment, chewing my lip.

  Next, I click on Google Calendar, trawling back through dates and times, trying to mentally match up any gaps and spaces with the occasions when I received a text over the past few weeks. When I track down the morning of 13th November – the morning Finn was murdered – there’s a blank in the diary. I know Jeff flew in from Berlin at the weekend but I cannot for the life of me remember when.

  Next, I begin looking through the drawers, not sure what it is that I hope to find. Or what I fear I’ll discover. The top drawer contains stationery, as well as some opened letters, bills mainly. The second drawer yields more of the same. In the bottom drawer, I come across photographs of Jeff and Claire together. Albums that chart the progress of their lives from the initial meeting at university, right through their courtship to marriage on the lawn behind Claire’s family home in Kent – pictures of a smiling, youthful bride and groom caught in the eternal sunshine of that day. There’s something about the hopefulness of their expressions that pulls at my heart, neither of them knowing the pain of illness and death that was to come far too soon.

  I put the album back in the drawer, heaviness bearing down on my conscience. I can’t help feeling sad. For the past few days I have eyed my husband with suspicion, thinking the very worst of him, believing him to be capable of spying on me. Believing him to be capable of far, far worse. I rest my elbows on the desk and close my eyes, tiredness washing over me in a heavy wave. When I open them again, they fall on the corner of a scrap of paper half-hidden beneath the base of the lamp. Instinctively, my fingers reach out.

  A phone number. My eyes pass over the digits scribbled on the small white slip. Instantly, it calls to mind Jeff’s words: She’d been down in the basement, doing some laundry, and a slip of paper had fallen out from the clothes. It had a phone number on it.

  Suspicion stirs again, but this time it’s different. I take out my own phone, carefully type in the digits. No sooner have I typed in the last number, then those three familiar letters appear. My hand is clammy as I press ‘call’ and put it to my ear.

  It rings. The pain is back in my temples as I wait.

  It rings twice, three times and then the ringtone stops and someone picks up. I hold my breath. All this time, whenever I have dialled this number, it has never been answered. Each time, it has rung out until the line goes dead. But now I find I am listening to street noises, the distant sound of voices, none of them discernible, bustling footsteps and music. I hold myself very still, hardly daring to breathe. And there, very faintly, comes the sound of someone breathing.

  My heart is beating hard and fast. I’m so close now to the person who has been watching me from the shadows, the person who may have killed Finn.

  ‘Hello?’ I whisper, and I am leaning forward now, elbows on the desk.

  I feel the intensity in the silence, the strangeness of knowing there is someone at the other end listening, someone who doesn’t wish to be heard. And I don’t know what instinct prompts me, what propels the thought into my head, but I say:

  ‘Amy?’

  It feels like my breath has grown small and is buried deep down inside me. Everything within me is straining for the answer.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  I drop the phone in fright.

  Jeff stands in the doorway, his face leeched of colour. He’s in his heavy overcoat, and there’s a look of perplexed anger on his face.

  ‘I … I was going to …’ I begin.

  He takes a step for
ward into the room, casts his eyes past me to the computer awake on the desk, all the drawers open.

  ‘You’re snooping? You’re spying on me?’

  I open my mouth to say something, but then I stop. When he came into the room and startled me, I had instantly sprung to my feet. But now, knowing how badly in the wrong I am, I slump wearily back against the desk and close my mouth, defeated by it all.

  There is pain in the depths of his eyes, a profound disappointment. The silence that follows ripples with unspoken arguments and accusations because there’s no point to them any more. My betrayal of him is complete.

  He steps past me, around to the side of the desk. His hand goes to the slide of papers, and after a brief shuffle there, he finds what it is he has come home for.

  ‘My passport,’ he declares in a broken tone, and I close my eyes briefly, hearing the tremor of quiet fury in his voice.

  I don’t say I’m sorry. It seems that I have apologized repeatedly for my behaviour, my indiscretions and failures, over the past few weeks until I have worn the word out. It no longer holds any meaning for us.

  He stands there, and when I open my eyes, I look at the passport and see that his hand is shaking. I think he’s going to demand an explanation from me, but he doesn’t. He simply slips the passport inside his jacket pocket and then silently walks past me, the front door clicking shut seconds later. Besides, I have no explanations any more. I have allowed my life to spiral so far out of control that explanations can no longer be relied upon or trusted. Slippery as fish, they evade me, and I have worn myself out from chasing them.

  25.

  Amy

  The girl says, ‘Staying for Christmas?’

  I look up from the cash I’ve just counted out for her – a disorderly pile of tens and fives, the notes weighted down by a fat two-pound coin.

  ‘It’s just that we’re taking bookings already for the holidays,’ she explains. ‘So, if you want to reserve a bed, we’ll need a deposit.’