The cubicle door rattles and shakes as someone pounds their fist against the other side.
‘Emma. Is that you? Are you in there?’
‘Kim?’ I mumble, looking up from staring at my knickers around my ankles.
‘Yeah. Jesus, missus,’ Kim growls. ‘Where have you been? You’ve been in the loo forever.’
‘Coming … coming …’
I wobble on the seat as I pee. The alcohol coursing through my veins messes with my dexterity, and I make zipping my jeans back up seem as complicated as rocket science. I finally open the door and stumble out.
‘Liz and Ruth are totally pissed off, by the way. They think you’ve been ignoring them all night,’ Kim moans.
I toss my head to one side and throw my handbag over my shoulder as I make my way to the sink. I splash water everywhere, much to the disgust of everyone else.
‘What? No, I haven’t.’ I snort.
Kim’s face sours before she looks at the ground. ‘Umm, Emma. They have a point. You’ve been in here nearly an hour. I was getting worried. I barely know Liz, so I can only make small talk without you for so long, you know.’
I blush. Kim must have asked Liz along to cheer me up, and I didn’t even notice or care. I look in the mirror. Christ. I’m unsightly. Mascara is smudged around my eyes and runs down my cheeks like a really tiny rally car with mucky tyres has run a full circuit on my face. My cheeks are red and puffy, and my foundation sits too heavy in the lines around my nose and eyes.
‘I can’t believe he’s gone, Kim,’ I say, gagging on some snot.
Kim raises a confused eyebrow. ‘David?’
I shake my head, but the movement makes me unstable, and I fall over, cracking my back off the sink ledge on the way down.
Everyone stares and Kim’s cheeks flush as she shakes her head. ‘You okay?’ she whispers, stretching her arm out for me to take her hand.
I stay in the position I’ve landed in on the ground and laugh and cry at the same time. ‘I just can’t believe it, you know?’
‘Emma, get up.’
My shoulders round and slouch towards my knees.
‘Okay, seriously, Emma. This is embarrassing. And I’m pretty sure you’re sitting in a puddle of piss.’
I reach my arm up and grab the sink overhang behind me. I scramble to stand. I’m not embarrassed, but I should be. I would be if I wasn’t too drunk to see straight. David would freak if he saw me like this. He worries when I drink myself stupid.
‘Danny’s dead, Kim. He’s dead.’
‘I know. I know. But getting yourself worked up over it isn’t going to change anything. It’s just the drink, you know. I think you’ve had enough. Maybe we should go. The DJ is on the last set anyway. It’ll be easier to get a taxi if we leave now.’
‘They say he jumped.’
‘Yeah, Emma. I heard. Crazy.’
‘Jumped. Fucking jumped. Who does that?’
‘A lot of people feel they’ve no other option. He wasn’t right in the head. Poor man,’ Kim says as she drapes her arm over my shoulder and leads me towards the door. ‘C’mon. I’ll stay at your place with you tonight, yeah?’
I nod and walk. ‘He was good to me, Kim. So good to me.’
Kim turns her head towards me and kisses my forehead. ‘I know.’
‘I don’t think he jumped.’ I throw my arms out to each side.
‘Okay. Okay.’
Kim leads me back into the busy body of the club. She has one arm draped over my shoulder. She kept the other arm free and stretched out in front like an arrow navigating our way through the throngs of people in front and all around us. People are dancing on the dancefloor. People are drinking at the bar, and couples are kissing the face off each other in the booths and in the corners. And I want to be somewhere else. I shouldn’t have come out.
I stop walking as we near Ruth and Liz’s table. ‘He didn’t jump, Kim. He didn’t fucking jump. He wouldn’t.’ I take a deep breath and exhale like my lungs have just vomited. ‘He. Was. Pushed.’
‘Oh, Emma, come on.’ Kim groans, her wilting patience obvious in her tone. ‘That’s just the drink talking. You’re being silly now.’
‘Kim. You don’t understand. But I do. I know the truth.’
Kim unwraps her arm from around my shoulder and grabs my hand in hers, charging ahead of me to drag me to the table. She presses on my shoulder and forces me to sit. There’s a glass of water waiting on the table in front of me.
‘Drink this,’ Kim barks.
My friends gather up their coats and their handbags. Kim drapes my coat over my shoulders and passes me my bag, but she takes it back again almost instantly.
‘I’ll hang on to this,’ she says, linking her arm around mine and helping me up. ‘Let’s go, Emma. It’s time to go home.’
Despite leaving the club an hour before closing, we still end up having to wait for ages on the side of the street for a taxi. It’s painfully cold, and I quickly stuff my arms into my coat and pull it so tight around me my ribs protest. Liz and Ruth pop into the chipper and come back with a greasy takeaway for us all. I wolf my chips down, and Kim passes me half her burger.
‘I skipped dinner,’ I explain, noticing the look of disgust on all their faces.
‘Skipped dinner all week?’ Ruth jokes.
‘Here,’ Kim says, laughing as she passes me my handbag. ‘Your phone is beeping like crazy in there. It must be David.’
I gulp down the last mouthful of burger and rummage in my bag for my phone. A taxi finally pulls up, and Kim has to actually grab me by the sleeve of my jacket to get my attention.
‘C’mon. You can sext your hubby from the backseat,’ Kim teases.
Kim, Liz, and Ruth chat as we make our way out of the city. Their giddy voices are way too loud for the confined space of the car, and it all just resonates as a noisy blur in my head. Maybe they try to involve me in the conversation, I don’t know. Their words just wash over me. I can’t take my eyes off my phone screen. My notifications are buzzing wildly. I scroll through five or six recent text messages. Reading the same ones over and over. Trying to make sense of them.
The taxi pulls into a large estate on the outskirts of the city and comes to a stop. Liz and Ruth lean from the backseat into the front and take turns giving Kim a hug.
‘Great night, Kim,’ Liz gushes. ‘Thanks for asking me along.’
‘Totally was a great night,’ Ruth adds. ‘We have to do it more often.’
‘See you at work on Monday, Emma,’ Liz says, and I’m vaguely aware of her arms around my neck.
I’m about to say good night when I’m distracted by another incoming text.
‘Okay then,’ Liz snorts. ‘Don’t say good night. Whatever.’
‘She just drank too much, as usual. Ignore her,’ Ruth groans.
‘Girls, seriously. Can we be a bit more sensitive? Please?’ I can hear the strain in Kim’s voice as she tries to protect me.
‘No, actually, we can’t be. We only came out tonight because you said Emma needed cheering up. But sure, she spent the whole night on her bloody phone. I could have stayed in and watched Game of Thrones. I missed this week’s episode, and I want to know what the hell happened,’ Liz barks, and I look up to find her glaring at me red faced.
‘I know you lost your friend from the train station, Emma,’ Liz continues. ‘But seriously, how well did you even know the old guy? You’re kind of overreacting. It’s a bit weird, to be honest.’
‘Okay, girls. Good night, then,’ Kim says, extra breezy.
Her efforts are sweet, but she needn’t bother. I suppose I am a bit weird. Ruth and Liz don’t know about what I did years ago. They don’t know how much Danny helped me. So I can understand them thinking our relationship is unusual. I would too in their shoes. To them, Danny was just the chatty old guy down at the station. To me, he was like a father.
Ruth and Liz leave some money with Kim to split the cost of the taxi and hop out. The driver pulls back o
nto the main road before they even make it inside the house.
Kim spins around in the front seat awkwardly and faces me. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s wrong? You haven’t said a word since we got into the taxi. Has David said something to upset you? You’ve been glued to your phone, and I can hear it beeping every two seconds. Are you two having a row or something?’
I shake my head. I wish we were having a fight. That I could understand.
‘Look.’ I pass Kim my phone. ‘It’s the photo we sent David earlier.’
‘Yeah … and …’
‘Someone has sent it back to me.’
‘Okay?’
‘From a number I don’t recognise.’
Kim pulls the phone closer to her face. ‘That’s weird. Did David send the picture on to someone?’
I shrug. ‘There’s more. Read what it says below the picture.’
‘Not missing much. Not a great photo.’ Kim reads out loud. ‘Cheeky bastard. Who is this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If this is David’s idea of a joke, it’s really not funny,’ Kim complains. ‘What’s he playing at?’
‘David wouldn’t send me something like that. He wouldn’t say these things.’
Kim’s eyes widen. ‘There’s more?’
‘Yeah. Read all the messages in my inbox.’
Kim falls silent. Her eyes move back and forth across the screen as she reads the cryptic texts I’ve been receiving from the same number for the last half an hour. It started with my picture being sent back to me and escalated into this stranger asking me how well I know my husband.
‘I don’t know whether to reply or not,’ I mumble, breaking the silence.
‘Do,’ Kim says, passing me back my phone. ‘Text back and tell this asshole to piss off.’
‘But I don’t know who it is.’
‘It’s obviously someone David knows. How else would they get the picture?’
I shake my head. ‘I told you. David wouldn’t show my photo to someone else. Especially not people from work. Maybe we sent it to the wrong number. Some weirdo out there is just having a laugh. I’m going to ignore it.’
‘Take the next left,’ Kim says, pointing as she directs the taxi driver into my estate before turning her attention back to me. ‘Yeah, okay. I think you’re right, Emma,’ she continues. ‘It’s probably just a freak with too much time on their hands. Jesus, good thing it wasn’t a naked photo. We could have given some old fella a heart attack.’
I cringe. ‘Ugh, God. Could you imagine? Yuck.’
‘Third house on the right,’ Kim tells the driver, tapping her finger against the window.
My phone vibrates in my hand as it rings, and I yelp. Kim can’t hold back a throaty laugh.
‘David?’ she asks, catching her breath between snorty giggles.
‘No. It’s another number I don’t know.’
Kim groans. ‘Here,’ she says, unbuckling her seat belt and turning around in the passenger’s seat to face me completely. ‘Gimme it?’
Kim stretches her arm out to me and opens her hand. I pass her my phone. She turns it off and hands it back to me. ‘There. All better. Now, no one can bother you.’
I smile at the simplicity of Kim’s solution.
‘C’mon,’ Kim says, spinning back around. ‘We’re home.’
We pay the driver and hurry into the house out of the cold. I don’t tell Kim about the final message I received. The one I deleted straight away. The photo of David and Amber out to dinner with their arms wrapped around each other.
Chapter Seven
DAVID
I wake to a ferocious banging noise pounding against my skull from the inside out. What the hell did I drink last night? The banging continues. I rub my eyes, and it takes me longer than it should to realise someone is knocking on my hotel bedroom door. I throw back the duvet and hop out of bed. I’m a little taken aback to discover I’m naked. I always sleep in boxers when I’m away from home. I toss the sheets around the bed, looking for my underwear and pants, and I find them on the far side of the bed.
The banging on the door stops. But the banging inside my head doesn’t. Christ! This is the worst headache I’ve ever had. I rummage around some more, trying to find my shirt. I’m desperate to climb back into bed and close my eyes, but we’re supposed to be taking the guys from Boston to see Kilkenny Castle this morning. And I have a vague memory of Amber saying something about us all meeting for breakfast downstairs before we head out for the day. The thought of food right now makes me want to throw my guts up, but I know breakfast wasn’t just a polite platitude. It’s expected. This is not how I should be spending my morning. I really wanted to be there for Emma this weekend because I know Danny’s death is hitting her harder than she’s letting on. Maybe Emma’s right; no job is worth this much sacrifice. I decide to take a few euro out of our savings account to buy her something nice. I’ll stop by the shops on my way home tomorrow. Roses and some jewellery would be good.
Moments later, I find my shirt tangled in a ball under the bedside table. There’s no chance I’ll get another day out of it, but I shake it out anyway. Lacy, black silk knickers fly out one of the sleeves. My jaw drops, and I hold my breath. It must have been up my sleeve all day yesterday. I hope no one noticed. God, how embarrassing. I pick up the lacy culprit and drop it almost immediately. It’s not one of Emma’s. She hardly every wears frilly stuff, and when she does, they’re never that skimpy. Who the hell owns them? And more importantly, how did they get inside my shirt?
I close my eyes and replay last night. My brain physically hurts as I sieve through my hazy thoughts. I remember dinner. I sat between Amber and one of the guys from Boston. We talked mostly about work. Some of the Boston guys spoke about their families. I think I mentioned I was married. Amber didn’t reveal anything personal. She never does. I get the impression she has demons in that closet, so I never push her to talk about any of it.
I remember moving to the resident’s bar. I constantly had a gin and tonic in my hand. Every time I drained one, it was replaced with another. I don’t even know who was giving them to me, maybe Amber. She must have been charging them to the company. I should have asked. I’ve no idea how many I had. Ten, at least. And that’s before I lost count. Christ, no wonder my head feels this bad.
I grab a quick shower, brush my teeth, and gag as the taste of minty toothpaste makes my stomach churn. I pull some clean clothes out of my bag and get dressed. Waking up naked is still unsettling me as I cast my eyes back to the lacy knickers I’ve discarded on the ground. I’d never do anything to hurt Emma, I think. I’m not sure if I’m telling or asking myself.
I check my watch; it’s almost nine a.m., so I’ll be a few minutes late for breakfast. I should text Amber. I glance around the hotel room, searching for my phone, and my hand flies of its own accord to slap my forehead as I remember losing it last night. Somewhere between the restaurant and the bar. Dammit. Emma will kill me. It’s new. I spent half a week’s wages on it, and I insisted that I didn’t need insurance. I’ll check with reception later. Hopefully, someone has handed it in.
I remember some middle-age man in the bar loaned me his phone last night to call Emma, but she didn’t answer. I think I tried her again later from Amber’s phone. Maybe I sent her a text. I’d better find an old payphone today and give her a call. I’ll be in the bad books otherwise. I hope she had a good night with the girls last night and had a few drinks. Enough drinks that she won’t have been concentrating on her phone. Danny’s death is affecting her badly, and the rumours about suicide are really hurting her. She’s suffering so much right now, and I really don’t want her to worry that I’m ignoring her. I hope today doesn’t drag on. I could have a word with Amber and try to escape early. It would be a nice surprise for Emma if I could make it home tonight. I’m sure the rest of the team could handle tomorrow without me.
Chapter Eight
EMMA
I roll my tongue past my t
eeth and poke it out between my lips. My throat is parched. It edges on painful, like I’ve stayed up all night licking the carpet and my tongue is covered in fluff. I open my mouth wide and sigh as I toss and turn, but I close my lips again quickly as my rancid morning breath stings my eyes. I try not to think about how thirsty I am. I don’t want to go downstairs to get some water. Once I get up, I’ll never be able to go back to sleep, and I’m too exhausted to face the day just yet. I open my eyes. My bedroom is dark, and I guess it’s still early. I’ve had a restless night so far tonight; too many dreams pinched my brain. I roll over and wrap my arm around my husband.
‘Thanks, doll. But you’re not my usual type.’ Kim laughs.
I rub my eyes and remember last night. The club, my friends, the drink. And I remember that David isn’t here.
‘Sorry. Sorry. My bad.’ I blush. ‘Go back to sleep.’
I’ve no memory of Kim and me going to bed last night. I don’t remember suggesting we share my bed, but I must have at some point. The ache in my temples reminds me that we polished off a bottle of wine between us downstairs in the kitchen after we got home. Kim was reluctant to open it. I cringe, realising she only drank a couple of glasses to prevent me from polishing the bottle off solo.
‘Coffee?’ Kim asks, throwing back the duvet to swing her legs out of bed.
I glance towards the window. The curtains are drawn, and not even a hint of light peeks through the material.
‘Ugh, what time is it?’ I croak, rubbing my eyes.
‘Almost eight.’
‘Oh, c’mon, Kim. It’s Sunday. Why are you getting up so early?’
‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ Kim chants as she makes her way towards the bedroom door.
‘Early to bed?’ I echo. ‘It must have been after three a.m. before we went to sleep.’
‘Actually, it was closer to four.’ Kim laughs. ‘I couldn’t get you to stop talking … or drinking.’ Her laughter dies. ‘Anyway, coffee, yeah? I’ll make it.’
See Me Not: A gripping psychological thriller with a heartbreaking twist. Page 3