To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  Things have been better lately between Terry and Dominic – a fact that she can see makes her son’s shoulders almost rigid with anticipation, because calm sometimes means that something is brewing. Increasingly over the past weeks, Terry has been talking, or preaching, sitting them all down for lectures: about the devious Tory government, or the history of class exploitation, the way the working classes are mollified, the way that bankers are still getting away with everything. He spends hours talking about the idiot poshos who live on their street, rubbing privilege in their faces. He quotes documentaries he’s watched, and YouTube commentators, pulling together disparate ideas like a manic professor. And as Dominic listens, Simone watches him preparing, steeling himself, like the saucepan he once lifted. But the harder the steel, the harder it is for her to read him. Dominic is scared, she can see that. But there’s something else too – anger, madness? Sometimes she wonders what her son is capable of.

  Now, she wonders, if the TV was quieter, whether behind Dominic’s closed door she might hear the sound of paper scratched by pen.

  She will not knock. Her father taught her early on that knocking was not allowed, certainly not when he was working, his tiny study a place of reverence; but she would know he was there by the unceasing caress of that scratching sound. Lost in a haze of smoke and thought, she listens harder now for Dominic, until a few moments later, Terry’s voice cuts in.

  “Oy oy Dom,” he shouts. “Fancy a kick around?”

  Within seconds, the bedroom door flies open, homework and scratching pens abandoned, and Dominic returns to the living room with a ball under his arm. It is a prized possession, a match ball from a Chelsea game, won in a raffle. “Is Mum coming?” he asks.

  Nobody has said anything, but Simone has still not left the flat. The bruise by her mouth is fading but its placement atop her lip, and its particular shade of green-black, now renders it as unfortunate facial hair. She looks like her father. Dominic casts his eyes anxiously towards her. He feels guilty she thinks – for his pre-teen moods, for not looking after her, for not protecting her this time with a saucepan. She knows that she should tell him it wasn’t his fault, that it’s not his job to look after her. But it feels so good to be looked after by somebody.

  “I’ll come,” she nods, and now a new expression flashes across Dominic’s face – pleasure, relief, indifference? He is a strange one, her son; so hard to read.

  Terry carries Jasmine on his shoulders and holds Simone’s hand. Dominic dribbles the ball just ahead of them, looking back every now and then to smile, or maybe to check that she is smiling. If it wasn’t for their clothes – which are neither chic nor authentically vintage enough – they could very nearly blend in with other Primrose families. There, descending the steps from a pink-fronted house is a pre-schooler and her father, holding a frisbee. On the other side of the road skips a nine or ten-year-old bedecked in full ballet regalia, the mother laden with bags behind her. Passing them in the other direction, holding the hands of twin sons, is a comedian Simone recognises from TV. Terry nudges her as he notices this too, and she nods with just the right amount of excitement and derision. Just before the park, they stop at the convenience store and Terry goes in for a pack of beers.

  “For my lady,” he pronounces as they settle onto a patch of green on the far slope of the hill.

  She sits on the grass, hiking up her cargo trousers to reveal skinny white calves. Jasmine is in a summer dress and her skin shines luminous in the sunlight, a culmination of her parents’ pasty complexions. It occurs to Simone that she has neglected sunscreen, but it’s almost four-thirty and the walk back to the house is too long to return for it. Dominic’s alright in a t-shirt and shorts, and his deeper complexion.

  “Flashing the flesh,” Terry says, raising his eyebrows teasingly at Simone’s exposed legs, then nodding approvingly at the low cut of her vest top.

  Simone grins responsively back at him, shaking her bare shoulders.

  Terry flickers his eyebrows at her again and a knot of pleasure pulses through her, then he jogs a little way off with Dominic. “Nice one mate,” he calls as Dominic kicks the ball in a solid straight line. “Now try this.” He shows off some fancy footwork, then pats the ball back to Dominic who attempts to copy. Simone watches. Terry is handy at sports and his confidence stretches here – playing, displaying, inhabiting territory he knows well. As the ball travels back and forth between them, there is a broadening in Dominic’s frame too, an almost touchable expansion of self. Simone sips on her beer. If only the whole world could be a football pitch, or a boxing ring. If only Dominic could live fenced safely within the edges. If only Terry could always know how capable he is, and not feel the need to prove it.

  He slept on her couch for almost three weeks before they got together. Terry was twenty-four, fresh out of a relationship that had ended with the kind of drama that saw his clothes cut to shreds and his flat burnt to nothing, but he must have done worse to his ex since he never did anything about it, besides calling her a crazy bitch. Although Simone didn’t know him properly, he was a friend of a friend, and somebody who, right from when she was first with Noah, she had noticed. They weren’t in the same crowd back then and Noah didn’t like him – Terry was part of a group where everybody was on drugs, hard ones, properly, and they were in and out of jail, and lacking in the aspirations that Noah and his cohort held up like the bible. But he was at parties sometimes. It wasn’t so much his looks that took her, it was the intensity of the eyes, the lean boxing bravado, the tightly coiled energy, the attitude that told her and everybody else, that he knew the score, he had things sorted. Often, she had heard him talking about politics: the appropriation of power by the capitalists; the criminality of tax dodgers; the way that immigration was alright for Them with their Polish builders and Romanian cleaners, but they weren’t the ones who ran out of school places and waited for months on the NHS. He’d been passionate and articulate, she’d noticed. Fiercely intelligent. Most of the time, she’d been too drunk or monged to follow the argument properly, but just hearing him talk lifted her eyes enough to see him. And the sheer fact of her noticing said a great deal, since with Noah’s arm around her, it was rare for her to notice anyone.

  When, years later, she heard that Terry needed a room, she without hesitation offered her sofa.

  When he said he needed an alibi, she agreed to provide one.

  When he turned on her in the street on the way to the courthouse, throwing her against the wall and pressing hard on her throat while he demanded she promise again that she would testify, she understood that he was scared, and vulnerable. And needed her.

  After that, it seemed granted that he would see away boyfriends who weren’t good enough, and instruct her on how to better keep charge of her six-year-old son, and take over the benefit money, and sort things. It was repayment. Thanks. When he moved himself into her bed one evening, it seemed inevitable. And she was glad. Glad not to have to think for a bit, not to have to decide, glad somebody else was so sure. Glad that this man who was passionate and athletic and political, and also damaged and in need, had chosen her.

  As they walk home, hot, sweaty, drunk, Terry slips his hand into the back of her trousers. His fingers play at the top of her bum. She loops her own arm around his waist. Dominic holds Jasmine’s shoulders. Every now and then he steers her away from the road, letting his sister carry his prized ball in front of her. Behind them, she and Terry sing. They are loud and people on the street look at them, an old lady even sticking her head out of her kitchen window to see. But Simone throws her head back. Let them look. None of them have this kind of passion. They prance around in their fancy yoga gear and drink their organic almond milk cappuccinos, but this is what they’re all reaching for really – this, what she has: a family, and freedom, and a man erotic and besotted enough to need to feel her bum on the street.

  Simone sings louder.

  People judge, but they don’t know.

  Terry is intellige
nt. He sees their weaknesses.

  He sees her. And he needs her.

  Using a stick, he drums against neighbours’ railings. He does this the entire length of their street. Until, as they reach their door, Veronica cycles towards them.

  Her hair is shiny and perfect, despite the heat and the bike. As she dismounts, she waves to Simone, and Simone sees her visibly looking, taking in Terry, waiting for an introduction perhaps, but Terry averts his eyes. He has turned towards the door and is hastily finding his key. Not caring? Not daring? Simone follows suit. She doesn’t look back, and the next instant, Dominic has Jasmine in his arms, and they are all inside, and Veronica is left, Simone supposes, still looking, while Simone and Terry begin again to sing.

  Sarah

  Sarah did not tell her counsellor about Veronica. It was only their third session. Besides, what would she tell? A feeling? A sense of trepidation? Perhaps if she could have predicted the way the summer would end, she’d have spilled out everything, but instead she spent that Thursday’s session talking about pressures at work, and concerns for her parents, and only when gently, and then not so gently, pushed, Eliza. She stopped in after that at her parents’, where she talked about the children, and their upcoming summer holiday, and then slipped off into Eliza’s old room. It wasn’t therefore until the over-ground journey back to West Hampstead, that she allowed herself to think about the dinner she’d been dreading, and was now only hours away. And how she would entice Veronica to add to her collection.

  A warm summer rain splattered against the train’s windows, regulating her shallow breaths. She concentrated on it hard. Drip, drip, drip.

  It was already spitting when they woke up the morning after the midnight swim – late at ten o’clock. Sarah’s mother had been ‘up and at ’em’ for hours, and Eliza, wrapped theatrically in a blanket at the breakfast table, had long finished her cereal, the remnants clinging like shrivelled leaves to the side of the bowl. She lifted her eyes from her book when the two of them slunk sleepily in and begrudgingly said ‘morning’ when Veronica greeted her.

  “What are you going to do today, Eliza?” Veronica asked, but at this extended interruption, Eliza rolled her eyes.

  “Not go swimming,” she answered.

  “Not do anything probably,” Sarah goaded.

  “Get me a drink,” Eliza said, as Sarah opened the door to the fridge.

  “Get it yourself.”

  Eliza rolled her eyes again. “You’re right there. You’re such a little brat.”

  “You’re such a bitch.”

  “Ugh,” Eliza sighed with exaggerated condescension.

  “Oh, that’s an excellent use of the vernacular.”

  Eliza stood up, flicking her beautiful dark hair over her shoulder and picking up her book. “I’m having an ‘evening-in’ on Saturday,” she announced. “There’s gonna be ten of us, including the boys. So can you make plans to not be here, brat?”

  “Like I really want to spend time with you anyway,” Sarah called as Eliza swept out of the room. But her throat was gripped by a tight, constricting sensation, somewhere between rage and heartbreak. She and Eliza had always shared parties. Secrets. Lives. “She’s such a bitch,” Sarah said to Veronica.

  “I know. She thinks she’s amazing. She’s not even that stunning. What a bitch.”

  Suddenly, Sarah rounded on her friend, her pulse loud in her throat. “Don’t say that about my sister.”

  Heavily, Veronica put down her juice, but she didn’t respond.

  Aware of her hypocrisy, Sarah too said nothing more.

  Quietly, they poured their cereal and sat staring out at the rain, the steady rhythm of water on pane ticking minutes away. Veronica moved the letter-shaped cereal flakes around her bowl.

  Finally, after enough minutes had passed for the tension to ease, Sarah casually asked, “What shall we do today? Shall we try to get my mum to take us bowling or something?”

  But they both already knew where they would spend their day. They had known it even before the rain had excluded outdoor things. And before Eliza had quashed the morning’s sense of triumph and conspiracy. Veronica tapped her spoon meaningfully on her bowl. On the side of it she had collected three letters: T C R.

  At first, they made a gesture towards asking questions. Sarah had thought some up while she was brushing her teeth and Veronica too seemed to have stockpiled some good ones. They went back and forth: “If you had to kiss one of the male teachers at school, who would it be?” “What do you think is better, your legs, your bum or your boobs? And which is the worst?” “Who do you like best out of your parents?” “Do you wish your family was as rich as mine?” “Have you ever cheated on a test?” “Have you ever masturbated?” For a while they got stuck on ‘To save your family’s life…’ questions: “To save your family’s life, would you… chop off the tip of your finger, or all of your hair? Would you smear your whole body in honey for a day, or for five minutes go in a cage full of spiders? Would you go to school naked, or lay on the floor in the middle of assembly and let everyone in the year wee on you?” They squealed and winced at their own disgustingness, at the grossness of what their imaginations could conjure, and they pretended to weigh each fantasy carefully. But the game was not in truth a test of their loyalty – it quickly became clear that Sarah would do absolutely anything for her family, even for Eliza, and whether Veronica felt this way or not (Sarah suspected she didn’t), it was the line she stuck by, too. No, the test was not of their answers but of the questions, of their stomach for depravity, their repertoire of it, their boldness in speaking it aloud.

  Before lunch, however, they ran out of questions, and so returned to dares. They did this as though by accident, but of course it was what they had been building to all along. TCR dictated talk, and so they had humoured each other in a kind of childish foreplay. But the excitement of the dare…

  Veronica

  George had actually managed to make it home from the office a full hour before Sarah and David were due to arrive and was now upstairs showering. Veronica could hear the slight gurgling of pipes and the creak of bathroom tiles, but otherwise, there was near serenity. In relative terms, the neighbours had been barely audible all week. Typical, Veronica thought, just as she had determined to make Dominic her project. Still, there was a relief to it. Veronica had finally seen the woman on the street, looking nowhere near as oppressed as she had been imagining, and though there remained the daily yobbish sing-along at unsociable hours, and the wrenching taunt of a crying child, there had not been a repeat of those first frightening sounds of aggression. Veronica still felt an irritating stab of anxiety every time she approached the house, but having now seen the man for herself – not exactly a pipsqueak, but certainly no match for George – and having noticed the way he averted his eyes from her own, she found that she was far less nervous than she had been. Veronica felt almost solid in her dinner preparations.

  She sat at the table, carefully lain with the newly unpacked wedding china, and surveyed her efforts. In the oven was the most elegant of her signature dishes – a sticky teriyaki salmon – to which she would add an assortment of salads and a vast platter of rosemary-roasted vegetables. In the fridge were nestling two different desserts that she had purchased from the bakery on the high street, but would claim as her own. A white wine was chilling, a red opened on the counter to breathe, a whiskey ready on the sideboard. And following a Sunday spent welcoming a group of friends to their new abode, she and George were well practised in their spiel as tour guides; only when they’d presented the two spare bedrooms and somebody had joked about the need to fill them, had either of their facades faltered.

  Veronica’s hands started now towards her belly, but she redirected them to the arrangement of candles on the table. It had never been clear to her why they had decided to keep the miscarriage secret. At eleven weeks, they had not yet told anybody about the pregnancy, so she supposed nobody would miss something that never was. Except that it
was, to Veronica, or at least it had been. Sometimes she suspected that not even George understood this fully. But perhaps he was right in what he’d said that day, the only time they’d ever talked about it: it was simply not meant to be. Still, she had seen her belly thickening – no bump but a tender shifting of shape. She had felt her breasts enlarging, and nausea threatening. She had eliminated her intake of alcohol and sushi and undercooked eggs. She had followed the pregnancy app on her phone to see when the baby was the size of a poppy seed, or a pea or a fig. She had prematurely glanced through a book of names. She had in fact thought every minute of every one of those seventy-seven days about that not-meant-to-be being. So by the time the bleeding began – unstoppable, despite George’s practicality; unstoppable, despite her resolve; unstoppable, gushing between her legs – it wasn’t only the ill-formed foetus that they were losing, it was the dream of what that foetus would have become, the imagined future of what they would have become together. All of it bled away from them, and in its wake followed their relationship, as they knew it anyway – their openness, their trust, condemned the moment they stumbled into failure.

  The first week after the loss, Veronica had burst into tears in her yoga class, right in the middle of Upward-Facing Dog. The instructor had moved quietly over to her, a healing hand on her back.