Home Truths

by Tina Seskis

  It was a dreary day, the air inert and sagging with unshed rain. Eleanor jutted her jaw forward and blew upwards, so her fringe lifted off her forehead. She guessed that the situation might become volatile, but Alex owed both women an explanation, and she was goddamn sure he was going to give it to her.

  The ding-dong of the doorbell was much deeper and richer than theirs. She could hear the sound linger through the house. When there was no answer she tried again. She pushed the heavy brass letterbox and peered through into a light-filled hall with a herringbone wood floor, a pale-grey rug runner. A lemon-yellow bunch of roses was on a table next to the stairs, and she couldn’t help but notice how exquisite they were.

  ‘Alex!’ she yelled. ‘Are you in there?’

  85

  ALEX

  Her voice was like a sliver of silver, tail flicking, arrowhead poisoned, coming at him through the letterbox, piercing his heart. How the fuck had she found him? It seemed impossible. He’d always been so careful to leave no clues. He longed to open the door and beg her forgiveness, but that wasn’t an option now. Then again, if he didn’t answer, maybe she’d call the police – and that would definitely be a whole lot worse.

  Alex was pacing the kitchen, hyperventilating. His breath was sticking in his chest and he needed to man up, handle this. He had to think quickly, but the stress and panic were taking their toll. Maybe he could simply palm Eleanor off for now, give him enough time to sort everything out. Perhaps it would be possible. He went over to the radio, switched it on, turned the volume up. He forced himself to breathe air deep into the furthest reaches of his capillary network, count to ten. Everything was falling apart. He’d thought he was so clever, with all the tools he’d had at his disposal, and yet somehow Christie had rumbled him. And now so had Eleanor.

  Alex wiped his eyes. He smoothed down his sideburns. Eleanor. The girl with the golden hair, who had dared him to dream. He had loved her so much once. He turned around and the whole world felt over-bright, brittle. His legs felt as if he’d been shot in both knees. As he made his way to answer the door he was still conflicted, utterly bewildered, uncertain which way he should play it. He would let his instincts decide for now. He had no other choice.

  86

  ELEANOR

  Alex had opened the door politely, invited her in and offered to make her a coffee, and she’d let him, in this other woman’s house. In this other life. It had felt like the only thing for her to do in this weird parallel universe – and would at least give him a chance to explain himself.

  So now Eleanor and Alex were sitting in someone else’s smart, pin-neat kitchen with marble worktops and high-end appliances, and Alex was sitting between her and the door and somehow Eleanor knew she couldn’t make any mistakes. She had never seen her husband like this before. She could smell the whisky breath from here, and yet she’d never known him to really drink spirits before. It was as if he were a different man, and perhaps he was.

  ‘What’s going on, Alex?’ She said it gingerly, as if she were talking to Mason when he was three, after a bust-up with his big sister.

  ‘It’s part of my job,’ Alex said evenly. ‘I didn’t want you to have to find out.’

  ‘What’s part of your job? Living with another woman?’

  ‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Eleanor,’ he said, ‘but I’m not allowed to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Alex,’ said Eleanor. Her eyes flashed dangerously. ‘You might think I’m dumb, but I’m not that dumb.’

  Alex’s own eyes were veiled now, and again she felt as if she didn’t even know him. She could feel his turmoil seething under the surface and it reminded her of the day on the Heath when she’d told him about Rufus. It had enraged him. Her husband never had liked surprises.

  ‘Where is she?’ she said.

  ‘Where’s who?’

  ‘Who d’you think?’

  Alex looked sucker-punched then, as if Eleanor had landed a blow. She was glad of it.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘She’s gone out.’

  ‘Well, maybe I can wait for her to come back, so we can all talk about this.’

  ‘If you like,’ Alex said. He folded his arms across his chest and sat back balefully, as if daring her. Just at that moment Eleanor heard the faintest of noises, and although she wasn’t even sure what it was, she made sure not to acknowledge she’d heard it. Instead she leant forward and put her head in her arms on the table.

  ‘It’s just that this has all come as such a shock,’ she said. And then she started to cry.

  ‘I know, princess,’ Alex said. ‘I can explain everything, though.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. She lifted her head and gave him a wan little smile through her tears. As he smiled back, the relief on his face was almost endearing.

  Eleanor wiped her nose, took a sip of her coffee and wondered what he would say, just how incredible the story would be. She listened intently, showed him she was prepared to give him a chance. And so, eventually, he opened up and told her about the special unit he was in, and how it was to do with some white British-born jihadist suspects, and how he would be sacked if anyone knew that she’d blown his cover, and so she really mustn’t say anything to anyone. Eleanor nodded silently, until at last there was a pause and he waited expectantly, as if he wanted her to comment.

  Eleanor opened her mouth to speak, still unsure what to say. His explanation was plausible at least. She had heard of police officers who’d gone undercover and formed relationships with women to gather intelligence. But wasn’t that deeply unethical? And hadn’t that practice been clamped down on years before? And besides, what the hell was that noise she’d heard from upstairs? There was more to this situation than Alex’s bullshit story about police work, she was sure of it. A more dangerous truth.

  Eleanor leant forward, clutched her stomach and stood up abruptly.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Alex, I’m sorry, I don’t feel too well.’ There was extreme panic in her voice now. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  87

  ALEX

  His feeling was one of dissociation, as if he were no longer Piers, and yet he wasn’t Alex either. It was a strange, nausea-inducing sensation, as if he were neither here nor there, neither this nor that. As if he were stuck in the middle of nowhere, trapped in an elegant house in Hertfordshire, with one ‘wife’ upstairs and the other holed up in the downstairs toilet. While he waited for Eleanor, his thoughts were dragging him places he’d never wanted to go, asking questions it seemed there were no answers to. Where had this all started? What could he have done differently? How had his perfectly laid plans gone so awry? He stifled a groan. Maybe it was karma.

  Eventually Alex’s mind tracked back, to where he knew the truth lay, to when he’d been a frightened, bewildered little boy who constantly wondered what he’d done wrong, where the next attack was coming from. It had been his older brother who’d finally told him why their father was always angry with him, and to be fair it had been a hard burden for them both to bear. It had sounded so melodramatic, but even then Alex had known that what Paul had told him must be true. What man wouldn’t secretly begrudge the child who’d killed the woman he loved through the very act of being born? Who wouldn’t blame, if only self-consciously, the baby who’d got stuck, and had caused the mother to haemorrhage to death?

  As Alex heard Eleanor retching on the other side of the door, he wondered what on earth was wrong with her. He was worried about her, in truth, about how she was coping with the shock of it all, but at least her sudden illness had given him a few minutes to try to get his head straight, calm himself down. Two bombshells in two days. Christie appearing at his house in London had been the true Wizard of Oz moment, the instant the curtain had first slipped, threatened to reveal the machinations behind the fantasy. But now Eleanor’s arrival here was floo
ring him all over again. At least she’d seemed to believe his cover story, even if she was clearly far from happy about it. And yet that didn’t really matter. The important thing was to keep her onside.

  As Alex paced up and down his late brother’s hallway, while Eleanor did God knows what in the toilet, his mind took another whirl around the dismal distant past. Bleached-out, jumpy scenes fitted and started, of him as little more than a toddler, being shouted at by a big scary man with rage in his heart. Alex whimpering and cowering, amplifying his father’s vitriol to the point of explosion. His older brother looking on, mute, helpless. Complicit. But that was Paul through and through. He always had made sure he saved his own skin, had never tried to protect Alex. Christ, he’d even stood by and watched as his father had Alex taken away, had never once tried to contact him afterwards.

  Alex glanced up the soft silver stairs and imagined his brother’s body hanging from the loft hatch. At first he’d felt sorry for Paul when the solicitors had written to him and told him what had happened. But after the funeral he’d felt hatred, a hatred that had never gone away since. His desire for revenge had been immense. Grandiose. It had affected his mind.

  All was quiet in the downstairs toilet now. What the hell was she doing in there? She couldn’t be on her phone. He’d made sure he’d taken it from her as she’d rushed past him, telling her he was worried she’d drop it. Perhaps she’d passed out.

  ‘Eleanor!’ he called eventually. Fearfully even. ‘Are you all right in there?’

  88

  ELEANOR

  Three fingers had been enough. Eleanor had stuck them so far down her throat the gagging was entirely genuine. As she coughed and spluttered the last of the vomit out, she could tell Alex was outside the door. She could feel his presence. She stood quietly for a long, long while, trying to sharpen her mind, prepare herself, but for quite what she still wasn’t sure. Bad feelings danced inside her, twirled around possibilities too horrific to contemplate, returned to the banal, bopped back again. She was almost certain she’d heard a woman’s stifled scream from upstairs, but maybe she was wrong after all. Common-or-garden cheat or psychopathic madman? Which was it?

  ‘Eleanor,’ she heard her husband say at last. ‘Are you all right in there?’

  ‘Not really, Al,’ she said, through the door. ‘Would you get me some water, please?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. She heard his footsteps moving away across the wooden floor, towards the kitchen. She flushed the toilet, and then opened the door as quietly as she could. He didn’t hear her, thank God, and at least Plan B had worked. She might not have been able to call the police, as she’d intended, but she still had a chance to rescue the situation. Hopefully rescue the woman.

  Eleanor exited the downstairs toilet, silently closing the door behind her. She glanced anxiously around her, and then legged it soundlessly up the stairs.

  89

  ALEX

  Paul’s ghost lived on in this fucking house and it seemed to be sending Alex insane. It had felt pretty good living in his brother’s old home when he’d been able to be ‘Piers’. But now he’d been outed as Alex, it was as if his brother were still here, ghoulishly hanging around, presiding over Alex’s downfall. Again. Like how he had when Alex had been taken into care, as a delinquent and fractious twelve-year-old.

  As Alex stuck a glass under the filtered-water dispenser, he thought of the father who’d abandoned him; the older brother who’d watched him being thrown to the dogs; the widow who’d known about his existence, and yet had sat and simpered at Paul’s funeral as Alex’s father had said that he might not have a son now, but that he would always have a daughter in Christie. As if he, Alex, had never even existed. Been airbrushed out of history. Fucking hypocrites. Alex had made the journey north to Paul’s funeral with forgiveness in his heart (after all, Paul had left him something, a rather nice something in fact, in his will) but the slap had been too brutal. He’d expected it of his father, of course, but there was something about Christie’s smug conspiratorial look at the funeral that had broken him. And then soon afterwards, when Eleanor had suddenly announced that she’d seen an ex-boyfriend he hadn’t even known existed, it had just about sent him crazy with jealousy.

  Alex took the glass and made his way back to the downstairs toilet, still brooding about how he hadn’t meant it to be like this. He wasn’t meant to ever have been discovered. He’d planned on it being a long, slow process of devastation. An undiscoverable one, but one that would have caused everyone involved sufficient compensatory pain – after all, Christie’s misery would be his father’s misery too. Yet surely there was a way still. There had to be. He knocked on the toilet door.

  ‘Eleanor,’ he said.

  Silence.

  ‘Eleanor!’

  Still nothing. She was annoying him now. He tried the handle and the door swung mutely open.

  Where the fuck had she gone?

  90

  ELEANOR

  She’d been right about the noises. Eleanor found the source of the stifled, anguished screams in the second bedroom she tried. The woman was a little older than her, with wavy fair hair, and she was wearing a black shirt-dress, which matched the tape on her wrists and ankles, although the tape on her mouth was red, like some kind of grotesque lipstick. Eleanor knew she had so little time. She ran over and pulled the tape off the woman’s mouth, struggled to undo the tape on her ankles.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Eleanor whispered. ‘I’m here now.’

  The woman stared at her, the look in her eyes one of extreme trauma.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Eleanor. What’s your name, honey?’

  ‘Christie.’

  ‘It’s OK, Christie, you’ll be OK. You’re safe now.’

  The woman nodded mutely, but Eleanor was blagging. She knew neither of them was safe, yet she also knew she mustn’t panic this woman. It would perhaps have been more prudent for Eleanor to have run away, knocked at a neighbour’s door and begged for help, but it had been too risky for whoever else was in the house. Eleanor hadn’t known how long it might take the police to get here, and she’d seen the madness in Alex’s eyes, had been unsure of his ability to keep a lid on the situation. All sorts of unpalatable scenarios might have played out.

  By the time Eleanor heard the inevitable pounding on the stairs, in sync with the heartbeat roar in her head, she’d just about managed to get the tape off Christie’s ankles. She stood up, ready to face him. Only hours ago she’d thought her husband was a hero. And now . . . she had no idea who he was, or what he might yet do.

  When Alex burst through the bedroom door the sight of him was even more appalling than Eleanor had imagined. His eyes were blue and brutish. A vein in his forehead was pulsing. It was as if his brain had shut off, was refusing to acknowledge what his body was doing. Bestial, Eleanor thought. It was the only word for it. And so when Christie shrieked, it was hideous and yet hardly surprising, and Eleanor even found herself wondering whether that was the same grotesque noise Christie had made when she’d found her husband, hanging from the loft. The knife Alex held in his hand was one of those kitchen cleavers with a wide rectangular blade, and even from here Eleanor could see that it was wickedly sharp, and he must have got it from Christie’s smart designer kitchen. Eleanor imagined it being able to slice through skin, crunch through bones.

  And so when Eleanor moved her body in front of Christie, it was a purely instinctive thing. There had been absolutely no desire to provoke him, but provoke him she clearly had. He leapt towards the two women, the knife glinting brightly.

  ‘Get the fuck away from her, Eleanor,’ he said.

  91

  ALEX

  He stood there, brandishing the cleaver, wondering how it had come to this. It was as if his bursting towards them had now rendered them all immobile. Eleanor had ignored his order to move out of the way, and Christie was cowering behind her, and his posture was villainous, like a comedy baddie. Christie’s face was
scarlet from where the tape had been ripped off and even though it made him feel a teeny bit sorry for her, she only had herself to blame. He’d managed to coax her back to the house easily enough, but she’d ended up making such a screeching fuss last night that he’d had no choice but to bind her arms and legs, tape up her mouth, just until he could work out what to do with her. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to physically hurt her, but he’d needed to keep her from phoning someone, attracting attention from the neighbours, stop her blabbing. But now what could he do with her? He wasn’t sure. Eleanor’s unexpected arrival had scuppered everything.

  ‘Alex,’ Eleanor said. Her voice was silky, with that same cutesy lilt he’d always loved. ‘Put the knife down, honey. We can fix this. We all just need to calm down.’

  ‘No, Eleanor. You don’t understand. Get out of the way.’

  ‘No, honey.’

  ‘This isn’t what was meant to have happened.’ He could hear that his voice was snivelly, as though his nose were filled with snot.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ Eleanor said. ‘But it has, and we can fix it, Alex. Let’s not make this situation impossible to get out of.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ Alex said, sobbing now.

  ‘It’s OK, Alex. I love you. We can fix this together.’

  Alex stared at Eleanor, contemplated putting the knife down at last, but then he saw the terror deep in her eyes and he knew that she was lying. She didn’t love him. He’d lost her. She loved someone else. It was that last thought that finally unhinged him. He made a sudden move towards the bed, pushed Eleanor to the floor, grabbed Christie by the throat.

  The screaming appeared to start a nanosecond too late, and it sounded like a pig on the way to the abattoir. He saw Eleanor lying, winded, on the carpet, blonde hair fanned out, legs sprawling, but the pictures and words were out of sync, like a badly dubbed movie, as if his eyes couldn’t process what they were seeing in real time.