by Lisa Jewell
She peered through the gaps in the wooden fencing, watching the vague outlines of Tom and Nicola moving about their kitchen, her stomach churning with guilt, with lust – with jealousy.
There was a fresh bunch of 50p daffodils on her mum’s grave.
She rested her own flowers next to her father’s flowers and then stood. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said. ‘I see Dad’s been again. He’s a sneaky one, isn’t he?’
She breathed in sharply against the tears that came at the thought of her estranged father – the loss of both of her parents in under a year – and then out again, her breath emerging as a cloud of icy smoke.
‘So, Mum, I’m fucking everything up. I mean really, really fucking it up. Worse than anything I’ve done before. Worse than the vodka incident. Worse than the running-away thing when I was sixteen. Worse than Robbie Miller. Worse than the thing with the moped. Just so, so bad. It’s that man again, Tom Fitzwilliam. We had another … encounter.’ Her voice caught on the words and she gulped back her tears. ‘Last night. While Alfie was sitting in our bedroom waiting for me to help him celebrate something really important …’ She checked over her shoulder, then whispered, ‘… he asked me to touch him. Again. And I did. And then we sort of … we clinched. Is that even a word? I don’t know. But we didn’t kiss. So I don’t know what you’d call it. But it was amazing and bizarre and one of the most intense things that has ever happened to me. And now, I don’t know – I don’t know who I am any more. I’ve been trying to forget about it, but I can’t. It’s all I can think about. He’s all I can think about. I feel a bit mad, Mum, I feel like I’m getting obsessed. Like …’ She paused and turned her eyes to the ice-blue sky. ‘Like I might be about to do something really, really stupid. And knowing I’m going to do it isn’t going to stop it happening. I feel like I’m one step away from the abyss and just I wish so much that you were here, Mum, I wish you were here to pull me back.’
III
44
20 March
Bess didn’t come into school on Monday.
Jenna felt a growing sense of alarm as the day wore on. She approached Ruby awkwardly in the home room at lunchtime. ‘Where’s Bess?’ she asked. ‘Is she sick?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t think so.’
‘Do you think she’s OK?’
‘Yeah. I’m sure she’s OK. She’s probably just bunking off.’
Jenna said, ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘What’s going on with you two, anyway?’
‘Hasn’t she said?’
‘No,’ Ruby replied. ‘Just said it was something personal. Between you and her.’
Jenna was surprised. She’d assumed Bess would have told everyone everything. Discretion was not one of her key attributes.
‘Are you going to sort it out?’ Ruby asked. ‘Because it’s really doing our heads in.’
Jenna shrugged. ‘I hope so,’ she said.
Bess did come in the next day. She looked tired and unapproachable. Jenna watched her across the sports field during triple PE that afternoon. She was fidgety and edgy, looking like she had somewhere else she needed to be. She saw her go up to the assistant coach after a few minutes and say something to her. She saw the teacher look at her intently for a moment before nodding tersely and gesturing with her head towards the school. Bess grabbed her hoodie and her water bottle and walked quickly into the building.
Jenna jogged over to the assistant coach. ‘Miss, my tampon’s leaking. I need to change it really badly.’
The teacher grimaced at her. ‘Isn’t that something you should have dealt with before triple PE?’
‘Yes, miss. I know. But I only changed it an hour ago. I thought it would be OK?’
‘Go on then,’ the teacher muttered. ‘And be quick.’
She ran as fast as she could towards the doors and flung them open. She peered into the girls’ changing rooms but they were empty. Then she tried the girls’ toilets located a few metres up the corridor towards the main hallway. They appeared at first to be empty, and she was about to leave, but then she heard a shuffling sound from one of the cubicles and peered down to spy a pair of child-sized feet in pink Adidas trainers.
‘Bess,’ she hissed. ‘Are you OK?’
The shuffling sound stopped and there was a beat of silence before Bess called out, ‘Who is that?’
‘It’s me, you twat. What are you doing?’
‘What do you think I’m doing?
‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You looked all weird out there. Thought you might be ill.’
‘Yes,’ Bess replied, after another beat of silence. ‘I’m not feeling good. Feeling a bit sick.’
‘Do you want me to get someone? Shall I get the nurse?’
‘Are you literally stupid?’
Jenna sighed. ‘Can you come out then? So I can see you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, FFS, Bess. Just come out. This is daft.’
There was a protracted silence and then she heard the lock slide back and Bess stood before her looking extra small and very wan.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Bess.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’ She paused. Then, ‘I think I might be pregnant.’
The room spun around Jenna’s head for a moment. Her eyes closed and when she opened them Bess was still standing in front of her and still, she assumed, possibly pregnant. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, ridiculously.
Bess was a virgin. They were both virgins. Neither of them had the slightest interest in sex, in being penetrated by boys, in doing that. Both of them thought they would lose their virginity when they were eighteen. It was what they’d said. For years. Jenna felt something slipping away from her, a sad sense of loss, of having been in the wrong place all along. She felt like an idiot.
‘I don’t know what I mean,’ said Bess. ‘Just that I’m two weeks late. I feel bloated. My boobs.’ She cupped them tenderly and peered down at them. ‘They’re so sore.’
‘But …’ Jenna started. ‘I don’t get it. You haven’t even got a boyfriend.’
‘A boyfriend?’
Jenna stared at her, desperately. ‘Bess,’ she said. ‘Who have you had sex with?’
‘No one,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have sex with anyone. It’s an immaculate conception. OK?’
‘Bess! For fuck’s sake! Talk to me!’
‘I can’t. OK? I just can’t. And anyway, I’m probably not pregnant. It’s probably just PMT. My period will start tomorrow. Probably.’
‘Meet me after school,’ said Jenna. ‘We’ll go to Boots. Get you a test. Yes?’
Bess nodded. Then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I’m busy.’
‘Busy doing what?’
‘Nothing, all right?’
Jenna sighed. ‘OK, then, I’ll buy you one and bring it in tomorrow. We’ll do the test at breaktime. Yes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Bess. ‘OK.’ There was a brief silence and then she said, ‘I’m sorry. For what I said about your mum. You’re not like your mum.’
Jenna smiled and pulled her friend towards her for a hug. She felt Bess wince and pull away.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Bess. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you. I’m fine.’
‘Shall we go back to class?’
‘Yeah. OK.’
They left the toilets together, hand in hand.
45
21 March
The previous Saturday had proved to be one of the worst Joey could remember at Whackadoo. They’d had thirteen separate birthday parties booked in and then it had started to rain at about ten o’clock and of course by lunchtime the place had been filled to capacity and everyone seemed to be in a bad mood; two separate fights had broken out, one between a group of ten-year-old boys, the other between two fathers in their forties.
The police had been called to deal with the latter and then there had been a blockage in the boys’ toilets that remained unreported for over an hour by which time the floor was swimming in wet toilet paper and faeces. And then a young girl on her first day in the job had accidentally knocked over a table in a party room, laying to waste a birthday cake that looked like it had cost around a hundred pounds and upturning thirty cups of blackcurrant squash. The whole day had been a firefighting exercise: every time one situation had been dealt with, another flared up. Yet still her encounter with Tom the night before had played on a loop in Joey’s thoughts and each and every time she felt a jolt of shock, of horror, of guilt, of shame – and of bone-grinding desire.
The day had passed and she’d emerged, soiled and shabby, into the damp evening air half expecting to see him standing there with that terrible look of desperate longing on his face. But, of course, he was not there. He was not there as she sat on the bus back to Melville. He was not there when she got off the bus. Neither was he there as she walked past the very spot where it happened the night before. He wasn’t there when she stood at her front door for an inordinate amount of time looking for her keys, pretending to read a text message. She went through an entire Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night and Monday without a glimmer of his presence.
On Tuesday morning Alfie had said, ‘Are you OK, babe?’ and rubbed her feet. And she’d wanted to cry because she was so far from OK and really, when she thought about it, she’d never been OK. Not ever. But she’d said, ‘I’m fine. Just tired.’ And he’d said, ‘You know you can talk to me, don’t you? About anything?’ And she’d nodded and sucked back her tears and stroked his hair and thought about all the lovely girls she passed in the street every day who would be better for Alfie than she was.
And then later that day Alfie got a call from a woman in the village. She’d heard from Nicola that she’d just had her place done up by a really good decorator and would he be able to come to her house and quote on a job for her. ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ he’d said. ‘I want to take some new photos of the work at Nicola’s to show her and the camera on my phone’s shit.’
She’d said yes absent-mindedly. And then, as she put the phone down, a thought came to her. She’d called him straight back and said, ‘I’ll take the photos. I’m much better at taking photos than you. Leave it with me. I’ll go after work.’
The boy opened the door. He’d had all his hair shaved off and looked strangely raw and animal. There was a tiny frisson of embarrassment in the moment. He blushed and almost tripped over his own feet as he moved backwards to let Joey in.
‘Door!’ he shouted crossly over his shoulder down the hallway. ‘The door!’
Then Nicola appeared. Joey had not seen Nicola for quite some time. Last time she’d seen her she’d been in her usual costume of shiny Lycra and fleece and baseball cap, rosy-cheeked and smiling, light on her feet as though she could just take off spontaneously. Now she was in jeans and a jumper and worn-out socks, her hair tied back in a bunch, her skin dull and blotchy. She looked equally as alarmed as her son to see her standing there.
‘Hi!’ she said. ‘I’m Joey. Alfie’s wife. I live a couple of doors down? With Jack and Rebecca?’
Nicola managed a smile. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Yes. I’ve heard lots about you from Alfie. What can I do for you?’
Joey brought her phone out of her pocket. ‘Alfie’s going to quote on another job tomorrow. He wanted to show the new client some pictures of his previous work. He’s a bit crap with a camera so I offered to take them for him.’ She passed the phone from one hand to the other, her smile still stapled in place. ‘Is that OK?’
Nicola closed her eyes and opened them slowly. Then she shook her head and smiled again and said, ‘Yes, sure. Of course! You’ll have to excuse some of the mess. We’re not exactly minimal around here. But sure, yes, come in.’
Freddie moved aside and let her through. She felt sure he sniffed the air as she passed.
‘Where should I start?’ Joey asked brightly.
‘Well,’ said Nicola, smoothing down her jumper with her hands. ‘He did all this’ – she gestured around the hallway – ‘and the kitchen and the front room and the stairway. All the way up to the landing.’
Joey’s gaze followed Nicola’s hand as it gestured upwards. She felt breathless suddenly with the audacity of what she was doing. She had crossed the breach into Tom’s house. Made it beyond the hallowed portal into a world that Joey had only been able to imagine, a world that contained Tom’s things and Tom’s child and Tom’s wife and Tom’s breath and dander and shed hairs and dried sweat. The trousers she’d gripped inside her hand were in here somewhere, buried in a laundry basket or clipped to a wooden hanger in a cupboard full of Tom’s clothes and jumpers and big, serious shoes. The swinging lanyard was pooled on a tabletop, the wayward ties tamed in a drawer. He dreamed in here and drank in here and ate in here and grew older in here.
‘Would you mind’, she asked Nicola, ‘if I turned on a light or two?’
The Fitzwilliams’ house wasn’t as Joey had pictured it. Alfie had told her it was a shithole, but she hadn’t envisaged it to be quite so much of a shithole. Even with Alfie’s perfect, immaculate paintwork, it felt unloved, unwelcoming. There were no paintings hanging on the walls, no colour, most of the lights were switched off. It was also cold.
‘Gosh, no. Please do. And can I get you anything? A cup of tea or something?’
Nicola was not what she’d imagined either. She’d pictured her as a proper Melville housewife, whipping up a kitchen supper with ingredients from the deli in the village, chopping the stalks off expensive flowers to arrange in heavy glass vases, chatting with a friend over a dewy bottle of half-drunk wine around a kitchen island, an open laptop glowing blue with a half-completed Ocado order. She’d imagined Nicola as a proper grown-up woman, but she seemed more like a young nanny not sure how to deal with a visitor in her employer’s absence, too scared to switch on lights or open cupboards or turn up the heating; not properly formed, not quite right.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘no, thank you. I’m fine. I won’t be long.’
Nicola disappeared for a moment and left Joey to it. She switched on an overhead light that gave out a cruel yellow glare and took a few photos. But without the softening effects of flowers or gentle lightbulbs or table lamps her pictures looked institutional, uninspiring, bleak.
She popped her head into the kitchen. Nicola jumped slightly. ‘Please,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘come in. Please. He did the walls in here, obviously, and he also repainted the dressers and all the shelving in here.’
She moved out of Joey’s way to allow her to take the photos.
‘So,’ she said, ‘Alfie tells me you met at a tacky all-inclusive resort on Ibiza?’
‘Yes,’ Joey replied, somewhat surprised. She hadn’t imagined Alfie and Nicola chatting much. ‘Although I wouldn’t say it was tacky. It was four-star. It was quite nice actually.’
‘Oh,’ said Nicola vaguely. ‘Well. It sounded tacky, the way he described it. And I suppose I can’t quite picture it. I’ve never holidayed abroad.’
Joey started at this pronouncement. ‘Really?’
Nicola nodded. ‘It’s Tom’s job, you see. It’s all-consuming. It’s everything. It always has been.’
Joey nodded, as if that was an acceptable explanation for a thirty-something-year-old woman not to have been on holiday abroad.
‘If we do go away, we tend to stick close to home. So that Tom can get back easily if there’s an emergency.’
‘Did you not go abroad on your holidays when you were younger? Before you met Tom?’
‘Ha, well, there wasn’t really much being younger before I met Tom. So no, I’ve never been abroad on holiday. Not properly.’
Joey nodded. She was desperate to ask Nicola how old she was but couldn’t think of a discreet opening.
‘He’s madly in love with you, you know.’
Joey stopped, statue-still, and caught her breath. A blast of adrenaline shot through her. She turned and looked at Nicola. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Alfie,’ said Nicola. ‘He adores you.’
‘Ah.’ Joey’s insides turned liquid and her head fizzed with relief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Alfie. Yes. I know. He’s a sweetheart.’
‘He really is,’ she said. ‘And ever so good-looking. You’re a very lucky girl.’
Joey blanched and crossed the kitchen to take some photos of the French doors on to the back garden. There was a bench here with a pile of old newspapers hanging off it; washing drying on a radiator: underpants scrunched into small stiff twists of fabric, a tired drooping bra, a pair of jeans that looked as though they could stand up by themselves. A cold breeze whistled through an open window.
‘Here. Let me get out of your way,’ said Nicola.
Joey noticed a grimace as Nicola got off her chair and walked to the other side of the room, a slight limp. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Nicola. ‘I’m just taking a break from running and my body doesn’t like it. My muscles get all, you know, gnarly.’
‘You should do some stretches.’
‘I do try to remember, but it’s all or nothing for me when it comes to exercise. Once I get out of the routine, it all goes to pot.’
‘What made you stop running?’
Nicola stood leaning against the hob of a five-ring burner. It was covered with pans, piled into one another, then layered over with baking trays. The sink was full of old washing up. The dishwasher stood with its door open, half empty. A school timetable two terms out of date was pinned to a small cork board by the door.
‘Oh. I just go through phases. You know.’
‘Can I?’ Joey gestured towards the front room.
‘Yes,’ said Nicola. ‘Sure.’
Nicola followed Joey and stood in the doorway watching her as she photographed another load of magnolia walls and shiny white woodwork. There was a faded blue sofa in here, an old piano against the wall, a chrome floor lamp, a small gilt-framed mirror above a fake stone fireplace, a high-backed chair in the window that looked as though it should be in an old people’s home.