by Celina Grace
Some of the boxes were labelled clearly, some were blank. I worked my way through a pile of crates which held books and some of Mike’s old vinyl records. I found a box of bed linen which I’d almost forgotten we had and put it in the airing cupboard, ready for our guest bedroom, if that ever got finished. All the while the rain poured down outside, in a rather soothing way.
By this time, I’d unpacked most of the clearly labelled boxes. There were a few small unlabelled ones and one large one, tightly taped up. I didn’t recognise the large one, it must have been one of the ones from Mike’s attic which he’d brought to our rental flat, and put straight up in the attic again without unpacking it. Should I leave it for him to unpack? Knowing Mike, that could take months… After a moment’s hesitation, I ripped away the packing tape and folded the cardboard flaps back.
I lifted out some old school text books – why on Earth had he kept those? – and some letters. There was a framed photograph underneath the paperwork, which I brought out next. It was a picture of a much younger Mike in cricket whites, posing with a cricket bat as if just about to hit a six and grinning broadly. I smiled. Then I frowned. There was something about the picture that made a little finger of uneasiness worm its way into my stomach. I couldn’t have said exactly what it was at first. The more I looked at the picture, the more unnerved I felt. I stared at the picture until my eyes felt sore… and then I realised what it was that made me so uneasy.
It was the cricket bat. At the top of the bat was a red splodge that looked like blood. But it wasn’t blood, was it? I remembered Mia telling me with a laugh. That’s nail polish, I accidentally spilt some on it one time. My ex-husband went mad.
My ex-husband went mad.
Mike was Mia’s ex-husband. I heard myself tell myself that as I stared at the picture, frozen with shock. Then almost immediately I told myself I was wrong. Surely I was wrong? It had to be a coincidence. Mike had given the bat to a charity shop, or a car boot sale, or something, and Mia must have bought it. But how could that be right when she’d told me herself that it used to belong to her ex-husband?
I put the picture down – in fact, I virtually dropped it – and raised shaking hands to my head. I could hear the blood thudding in my ears. Mike was Mia’s ex-husband. My husband had been married to our next door neighbour. No, I had to be wrong, I just had to be. Why would the two of them not have told me? Why would they have withheld that utterly crucial piece of information? I had to be wrong.
I got up, staggered to our bedroom and fell on the bed, burying my head in the pillows. My heart was thumping so fast that, for one terrifying second, I thought it would burst. Then I got up and ran back to the little bedroom. I upturned the open box and everything within fell out onto the floor. There were more photos, not framed this time, but falling out of a plastic wallet. I picked one up. A picture of a suburban garden. I dropped it and picked another and heard myself make a sound, somewhere between a retch and groan. Mike and Mia, standing side by side against a stone parapet, grinning broadly and squinting into the sun.
I dropped the photograph as if it were red hot. I had to be wrong, I had to be. Was I going mad? Was I actually hallucinating the entire thing? I shut my eyes and pinched the skin of my forearm as hard as I could, gasping with the pain. Then I opened my eyes and saw the red marks on my skin. I wasn’t dreaming this. This was real.
My husband had once been married to my next-door neighbour. And they had lied to me about it.
I thought about that, as much as I could with a brain that felt as if it were melting. All right, so they hadn’t directly lied, but surely not mentioning it was the most whopping case of lying by omission that I’d ever experienced? Why would they not have told me?
Because he knew how you would react, said a nasty little voice inside my head.
I jumped up again, as if in protest. No, I was not going to make this all my fault. Mike had lied to me; Mia had lied to me. How had she even ended up living next to us? I couldn’t swallow that as coincidence. They must have planned it. But why? What did they have to gain by such deception?
I scrabbled through the rest of the photographs. Most were holiday snaps and Mia appeared in nearly all of them. She and Mike looked happy in the pictures where they appeared together. The shock was still paramount in my emotional state, but now I became aware of something else – anger. How dare they? How dare they lie to me about something so important?
Think, Beatrice. Think. What was I going to do? Confront Mike? Confront Mia? Call a divorce lawyer? Post on a relationship forum? What?
I sat back on my haunches, surrounded by the detritus of Mike’s former life. I tried to think back on all the evenings we’d shared with Mia, when the two of them had been together in the same room. I tried to recall any significant glances between them, any whispers when I was out of the room, anything at all. There was nothing that came to mind, but then I hadn’t been looking for anything suspicious, had I? I’d been glad that we’d all got on, that I had a friend, that – if I’d thought that far – that I’d had a husband I could trust.
That thought wrenched another groan from me. Why had they lied to me? Was it from altruism, the fact of us living next to one another pure coincidence; that, when they realised the fact, they didn’t want to upset me? I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even believe in the coincidence of Mia innocently moving next door to Mike and me. Had they planned it?
I got up, shakily. I couldn’t just sit here on the carpet, conjecturing all the things that might or might not have happened. I checked my watch – Mike wasn’t due back for a couple of hours. I wanted to be armed with the truth when I finally confronted him, so he wouldn’t be able to confuse me or trick me into believing any more lies. I had to get hold of something that would let me know what had been going on. I knew Mike would have his phone with him, so that was out, but there was always his laptop…
I found it on the little card table that had been set up as a desk in the currently empty second bedroom and opened it with shaking hands. I had never used it before – I had my own laptop, a PC and Mike’s was a Mac. For a moment, I regarded the screen, baffled. It was a touchscreen and I prodded various symbols here and there, trying to find the one that led to his email account. After five increasingly frustrated minutes, I fetched my own laptop, opened YouTube and searched for videos on ‘how to use a Mac’. After a few minutes’ viewing, I turned back to Mike’s laptop, managing to find the email icon, and clicked on it. Heart thumping, I scrolled through Mike’s inbox. It wasn’t password protected or anything like that, and although I was glad, I was also conscious of another spurt of anger. Did he have nothing to hide or did he just think I was too stupid to ever find anything suspicious? I looked through the emails in his inbox but there was nothing I could see that could conceivably have come from Mia. I checked his ‘sent’ file and the deleted file. Nothing there either. Baulked, I sat back in the chair, chewing my nails. Was I making too much of a big deal of this? Perhaps he and Mia really had thought that discretion about the past was the best option and they had done it for the best of reasons, so as not to hurt me. I bit my lip and sat forward again, clicking through the various sub-folders in Mike’s email account. Bills. Tax. Client work. House stuff. There was nothing untoward in any of them.
I found what I was looking for, in one right at the bottom of the list. Misc. By the time I opened that one, I was almost feeling that I was the one in the wrong. Then I clicked on Misc. and realised that I hadn’t been wrong, not at all.
I started from the top and read my way through the hundreds of emails exchanged between [email protected] and between [email protected]. I didn’t recognise Mike’s email address – sexgod, indeed! – it must have been one he’d set up especially to communicate with his lover. His lover… the thought made something sour rise in the back of my mouth.
From reading, it seemed that they’d found each other on Facebook, about eighteen months ago. How original. I did a q
uick calculation and worked out that they must have first made contact right in the middle of Mum’s final stages of illness. I felt that welcome surge of anger again. There I’d been, in possibly one of the most stressful, upsetting episodes of my life, and what had my husband been doing? Contacting his ex-wife on Facebook and – reading on a bit – graduating from ‘how are you doing?’ messages to emails that quickly became pornographic. I felt increasingly sick as I read on, but something within me wouldn’t let me slam the computer shut. The two of them had apparently met up in person some three months after the messages had first started. I groped in my memory and found some foggy remembrance of a business trip that Mike had had to go on, just an overnight stay. I’d been upset because it had been only a couple of weeks after Mum died and I hadn’t really been coping. I clenched my teeth in rage as the true story of his ‘business trip’ became clear. From reading on, it was obvious that they’d managed to meet up fairly often – a snatched hour at lunchtime here and there, the odd night out when Mike could conceivably claim to be entertaining clients, one other weekend away which I realised was the weekend last October when Mike had said he needed to visit his parents and felt it would be a good idea for me to have some time to myself for a change.
I became aware then of the pain in my left palm. While my right hand had been clutching the mouse and scrolling through this litany of betrayal, my left hand had been clenched so tight that my fingernails had cut tiny red half-moons into my palm. I flexed that hand and dismissed the pain – it was so miniscule compared to the emotional agony I was now experiencing.
I read on. It became obvious that they had planned the purchase of our adjoining houses. Mia had already bought number fifteen but hadn’t moved into it. She’d told Mike that number thirteen was still available and that we’d better be quick to buy it as it was one of the only ones left. I clenched my left hand again, oblivious to the pain. I remembered my desperation to buy number thirteen, how I’d almost pleaded with Mike to buy it. How he and Mia must have laughed at me, agent to my own humiliation. I closed my eyes, remembering how I’d sent Mike back with Mia, that night that she’d told us about her house being haunted. How could I have been so stupid, so blind?
I was feeling really sick now, as if something large, heavy and poisonous was sat in my stomach. But still I kept reading, filling my brain with all their words of mockery and lechery and insult. What made it almost worse that I was barely mentioned in the emails, I hardly had a mention but when I was actually written about it was always as an object of derision, of mockery.
I clicked on the next email, titled New Plan. I read it.
I wouldn’t have said, before reading that particular email, that I could have had a worse surprise. I was already so bludgeoned by shock that I would have told anyone then, in the unlikely event of anyone asking, that I couldn’t have been shocked any further. I was wrong.
In the email, from Mike to Mia, he’d answered a moan of hers in the previous email, about only being able to afford the cheapest type of hotel for their latest assignation. Mike had replied I know, sweetheart but what can I say? Be patient. Once the silly fat cow’s dead, it’ll be The Ritz and The Savoy all the way for us, darling.
Once the silly fat cow’s dead…
I read that once, I read it twice and then I jumped up and rushed to the bathroom. I was horribly sick, the kind of vomiting that leaves you weak and gasping, eyes running with tears, sides aching from the spasms. I hung over the toilet bowl for a few minutes afterwards, unable to gather the strength to get to my feet. Then I shakily flushed the toilet, staggered upwards and to the sink to rinse my mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like a spectre of myself, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked. Then I wobbled my way out of the bathroom and back to the laptop, collapsing into the chair in front of it as my legs buckled.
The emails unrolled before me, a catalogue of horror.
Mia: So how we going to do it?
Mike: Got to be convincing. Suicide. Balanced of her mind disturbed and all that.
Mia: Okay, so how?
Mike: She keeps seeing things, right? So how about we disturb her mind a bit more?
Mia: Ooh, spooky! Let me do some, it’ll be fun. I’ll tell her I’ve been seeing things too.
Mike: Nice one, sweetheart. Tell her things have been moving around. You can do that when we’re out, I’ll get you a key.
Mia: You’re so bad ;)
Mike: You love it ;)
I read on. At one point, I was sure I was going to be sick again, but I managed to control myself. I read about how they recorded themselves whispering and how Mia would hold the phone running the recording against the air vent in her bedroom. Tested it out, sound transmits just fine, Mike had written in an email and Mia had made a joke in reply: funny I never hear you two shagging isn’t it?! I felt rage move through me in a giant, sweeping, poisonous wave, but read on. I couldn’t find anything they’d written about the shadow at the top of the stairs, but there were reams of emails left to read, perhaps there was something in those. How had they managed to make that shadow appear?
After another ten minutes, I had to stop. My head felt as if it would burst with all the hideous knowledge I’d gained. My heart was thumping so hard it actually hurt and I had a moment’s fear that I would have a heart attack, just from the sheer stress and shock. Wouldn’t Mia and Mike love that, all their dirty work done for them? I stood up, clutching at the edge of the desk as the room rocked, taking a few deep breaths, trying to slow my racing heart and calm myself down a little.
It was then I heard the click of the front door, the rustle of footsteps in the corridor below, Mike’s cheerful ”Hello?”
I froze. For a second, incredibly, I felt shame, as if I were the one in the wrong. Then reality returned and I swung around slowly to watch the open doorway.
“Hello?” called Mike. I could hear him coming up the stairs, the creak of each footfall. “Are you home?”
He sounded so normal, so cheerful that, despite myself, I found myself wondering. Had I hallucinated the past couple of hours? I swung back quickly to look at the screen of the laptop and saw, with something like relief, all those awful words that he and Mia had written. I hadn’t imagined it, after all.
Mike came into view through the open doorway. He was shrugging off his jacket.
“Hi,” he said when he saw me. Then something in my stillness and my expression must have got through to him because he suddenly looked wary.
“What’s wrong?”
I heard myself give a bark of a laugh that was half a sob. What was wrong? Just about everything in my life was wrong. Where could I start?
The revelation of his betrayal was so enormous that, for a second, I couldn’t think of what to say. What could I say that would adequately express how I was feeling?
I wanted him to feel what I felt. I wanted him to see just how terribly he’d behaved. I wanted him to feel afraid, just as I was afraid.
“What’s wrong?” asked Mike again, cautiously. I said nothing but stepped a little to one side so he could see past me. I saw his gaze go to the lit computer screen and then watched as his face drained of colour.
“Yes,” I said, as coolly and calmly as I could. “I know everything there is to know about your sordid little secret.”
Mike said nothing for a moment. His face, after its momentary collapse, had become quite blank. I wondered if he and Mia had planned for this moment. Had they prepared for the fact that I might actually find out? What kind of excuse would he come up with?
“It’s not what you think,” he said at last and then I did laugh, a great big bitter shout of laughter.
“It’s not what I think,” I said. “So how do you explain all those emails then? Just a big joke?”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “That’s - all it was. Don’t – don’t go getting all upset, now.”
I could see him thinking feverishly, which is probably why his words were so stilted. I should have been afraid
– after all, he had nothing left to lose now, did he? – but I was so angry, so full to the brim with white-hot rage, that there was no room left for fear. I took a step towards him and he stepped backwards, back into the corridor.
“You’re a lying, cheating adulterer,” I said. “I’m going to the police with that laptop. You and your little girlfriend are going to regret the day you ever met up.”
“Now, Bea,” pleaded Mike. He was slowly walking backwards, his hands up in a pleading conciliatory gesture. “Don’t do anything stupid. We can work this out, you know, it doesn’t have to be the end of everything. We can work it out.”
I barely heard him over the thunder of blood in my ears. I kept walking towards him, slow remorseless step by slow remorseless step. He, just as slowly, kept backing away.
I was panting so much it was hard to speak. My voice wobbled, as if someone had hold of me by the shoulders, shaking me hard. “It’s not so much the affair,” I said, finally coming to a stop. Mike stood facing me at the top of the stairs, still with his hands out in a half pleading, half-warding-off gesture. “It’s the other stuff. You and Mia being so sadistic. So cruel. I didn’t think you had it in you. Did you get some kind of kick out of torturing me?” I swallowed, heard my dry throat click. “You emotionally abusive bastard.” I could feel the hate swelling through me, coasting the waves of my blood as it pumped through my heart and out again, a surge of welcome anger.
Mike looked at me and his face changed. His eyes glittered and, for a second, I saw something beneath the mask of his ordinary face that made me shiver. It was like looking at an alien reproduction of my husband, a replica, a bloodless imitation of the real thing. But perhaps this had always been the real him, after all?