She smoothed the ditsy flowered fabric of the dress down over her thighs and scrunched her fingers through her hair. Grayson would have liked the first outfit better, the sex kitten look, not this fake ’50s housewife image.
God, it had been ages since she last thought of Grayson. Maybe other women wondered where their exes were more often. She supposed maybe it was because she didn’t have to wonder. She knew exactly where he was. He was in prison, probably for the rest of his life. And unless something had changed in the last two decades, an unrepentant killer.
‘Erykah, tilt your head this way. Erykah, over here.’
Photographers hadn’t changed at all since the last time she was faced with a bank of flashbulbs. Ordering you to look this way and that way, parroting your name over and over, pushing for a reaction.
Grayson had been her first boyfriend. He was ten years older, already with something of a fearsome reputation, but loyal to friends and family. He was the first to look past the gangly nerd in glasses and see – well, a gangly nerd who cleaned up nicely. And was good with sums. Which, given his ambitions, was exactly what he was looking for. ‘My diamond in the rough,’ he used to say. And she made the effort to look more like the kind of woman he wanted her to be. Not that it was all one sided. He took a subscription to the Financial Times, he said, to impress her.
He always had money. She knew where it came from; his source of income was common knowledge in their neighbourhood. But Grayson assured her he was more than some go-nowhere street dealer. Some said he had big connections down the hill in Brixton, others claimed it was further afield, Manchester, even. He promised he was going to do her proud, cash out and go straight. Get into the real world of business. Invest in property. He talked about their future life together as he drove her from Harrods to Harvey Nicks to Selfridges in his 5 Series Beemer. ‘Nothing’s too good for my Rikki,’ he would say, and squeeze the top of her thigh. ‘You ask, and it’s yours.’
‘Don’t you see, Rikki,’ Rainbow would hiss as she watched Erykah get ready for a date, ‘he’s with you because he can control you. Why would a man like that be interested in a girl your age? Why would he be interested in a girl like you at all?’
Erykah hated her for that. Hated her mother for reducing her to an ugly duckling, to a little girl. She would show her mum, she would show them all they were wrong about him.
Rainbow put her hands on her shoulders and turned her daughter towards her. There were tears in her eyes, although that might have been the watery, unfocused look she had sometimes when she was deep in withdrawal. ‘Rikki, honey,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made,’ she said. ‘I look at you and I see a girl who doesn’t know yet that the world is not going to give someone like you a lot of second chances.’
Erykah shrugged her off. What was she talking about? She got good marks, worked hard. She had never even tried drugs, and she and Grayson always used protection. She and her mother were nothing alike. She knew that with the certainty only a teenage girl knows.
It was Grayson who took her under his wing. When she was with him she saw less of the things she hated about herself. When she looked in a mirror her skinny arms and legs didn’t bother her so much. Her frizzy hair, her eyes too close together, they no longer seemed so bad. He was the one who told her, no, she was long like a model and she should dress like one. She should style her hair so it fell in ringlets, emphasise her eyes with make-up. And he was right.
‘Come here, baby, come here.’ She would lean in and let him rub a moistened finger along her forehead, smooth her baby hairs into place. His big hands framed her jaw. He looked her over and nodded, satisfied with what he saw. When Erykah was accepted at university to study computer science, it was Grayson who bragged to all his friends and family. His girl was going to have a degree. Rainbow barely seemed to register what was happening by that point, wrapped in the layers of her worsening addiction.
‘Maybe someday you gonna figure out how to hack a bank and make me a millionaire,’ he had said.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
Her perfectly straight response made him laugh. ‘My baby’s smart and beautiful.’ She ducked her head and felt a flutter in her chest. No one had ever called her beautiful before.
A couple of years passed. She went to university. Still Grayson was no closer to leaving dealing like he promised. It was the money, he said. A little bit more, that was all he needed. She got impatient. How much before it was going to be enough?
‘But we earned this, Rikki,’ he would say, rolling down the tinted car windows so she could feel the thick, hot air of the city waft through, rustling the heaps of shopping bags in the back seat. He paid for her driving lessons, so that he could give her a new car someday. ‘And this is only the beginning.’
It wasn’t the beginning of anything good. But they had no way of knowing it then.
What Grayson never understood was that, for Erykah, it wasn’t about the money. She loved him with that heart-rending puppy love that only happens the first time. She believed he was a good person, not the heartless criminal everyone else painted him as. And when he was torn from her life she thought – really thought – she might die.
Numb with grief through the trial, she did all she could do: told the court what had happened on that rainy night outside the stranger’s house in Hampstead. Told them what she knew and when she knew it. When she was on the stand she could see him from the corner of her eye. He nodded gently as her words unfurled into the rapt courtroom. It bothered her not to be able to talk directly to him – to explain that she’d had no choice. Did he know? Did he hate her for it?
‘Let’s get you two on the sofa now,’ Champagne glasses were pressed into Erykah and Rab’s hands and they were shepherded back towards the photographers. The cameras clicked away as Erykah draped an arm around Rab. Now this was a part she had practiced to perfection.
On the outside, anyway. It was a long time before Erykah had stopped feeling like a fraud in her Molesey life. Virginia Woolf was wrong. A woman doesn’t need a room of her own. What she needs is a credit card of her own.
‘A second honeymoon? Well, I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question,’ Erykah answered questions from the pre-approved list the lottery company had supplied to reporters. A buzz as her phone vibrated again. She looked at the screen and switched it off. It was time to play the part of happy and loving wife for now. And she could act, boy could she act. The brush of the lips with a man she hadn’t kissed in years; her hand linked with his while they listened to the press ask the same three questions over and over again . . .
Rab wasn’t handling it as well. He flinched at any direct question that came his way, his eyes darting from person to person like a prisoner facing the Inquisition. It irritated Erykah. With all the money they had won surely he would be feeling a sense of relief? It was enough to pay off his debts nearly twenty times over. If she had been in his shoes, she would have been howling at the moon with sheer delight.
She smelled the tang of anxiety in his sweat as they settled on the sofa and another journo vied for their attention, asking about holidays, homes and yachts. ‘I think we should give it all to charity,’ Rab mumbled.
Erykah elbowed him in the ribs and her smile didn’t budge an inch. ‘My husband has a wicked sense of humour,’ she said. ‘Obviously we’ll give some of it to charity. But this opens up all kinds of opportunities for us, doesn’t it, darling?’
The reporter nodded, jotting notes on a pad of paper. ‘With your husband being one of the many who lost their jobs in the recession—’
‘Exactly,’ Erykah said, and rubbed Rab’s knee. Her smile felt as if it was going to split her face in half, a parody of interest and affection. ‘We know how lucky we’ve been.’
The reporter nodded. Keeping Rab’s unemployment status a secret from the press hadn’t been possible. But, if anythi
ng, it sweetened the tale for the papers. Rich people becoming even richer are hardly news – middle-class couple falls on hard times, then lands a windfall? That’s the stuff tabloid dreams are made of.
Eventually the questions dried up and the press started packing their cameras away. Erykah excused herself and went upstairs. Her bag still sat in the corner of the bedroom where she had left it, a dense hole drawing her gaze in each time she came in to hang up new clothes or check her make-up. She looked away. Now was not the time.
Erykah turned the brushed steel handle of the bathroom and locked herself in the en-suite. She scrolled through the missed calls and messages. Six of them were from Nicole. Shit.
She dialled back, heart thumping. She started to walk the bathroom floor. The phone rang and rang. Please don’t pick up. Please don’t pick up. What was the point? There was nothing she could say to make the situation better. The black bag wasn’t the only thing she was trying to avoid. Erykah had bottled it. She felt like a coward. She was about to hang up when Nicole finally answered.
‘It’s me,’ Erykah said. She felt dumb for saying it; of course Nicole would know who had phoned.
A long sigh. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I can’t talk,’ Erykah said. Her heels clicked on the polished limestone floor as she paced the short distance over and over. She tried not to think about Valentine’s night. Had Nicole been sitting at the farmhouse table in the cottage waiting, before finally blowing out the candles and going to bed alone? Had she drunk the wine she’d bought, reading and rereading Erykah’s terse final text Can’t come – talk later ?
‘I saw a picture of you on the news.’ A pause. ‘Are you coming to training tonight?’
Erykah’s stomach churned. Why wasn’t Nicole yelling at her? Or even asking where they stood? Nicole’s even, flat American accent made it worse somehow, made Erykah feel more guilty for standing her up. ‘Probably not tonight. I’m sorry.’
‘Mmm.’ Nicole did not sound surprised. ‘Your husband looks different from how I pictured him.’
‘Does that matter?’ Erykah said. Nicole had been the one to always shut down discussion of her married life in the past.
‘No, not really,’ Nicole said. Erykah thought she could hear an echo, like she was taking the call in the club changing rooms. ‘So where does this leave us?’
‘Leave us? Nothing’s changed. God, Nic. It’s only money.’
‘Only money, yeah,’ Nicole said. Another extended pause. ‘You looked happy.’
Erykah glanced in the mirror and watched as her lips drooped into an involuntary frown. ‘It’s just a photo,’ she said. ‘Nothing has changed between him and me. Not really.’ She sounded surer than she felt. ‘Don’t make me feel guilty about being married, you knew this from the start,’ Erykah added, and instantly regretted saying it.
Nicole did not rise to the bait. ‘I hope you make it to training tomorrow.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Erykah said.
‘Don’t you always,’ Nicole said.
Erykah hung up. It was unfair to make her feel bad for something that was out of her control. She should never have rung back. These were the kinds of conversations best had face-to-face, not over the phone. Why get so bent out of shape over a photo? Couldn’t Nicole tell it was all fake? But she also imagined how she would feel if Nicole was splashed all over the news laughing and hugging someone else. She would feel like dirt.
Rab tapped on the toilet door. ‘They’ve gone. The reporters are gone now,’ he said.
Erykah slipped the phone away, unlocked the door and poked her head out. ‘Well, that was a hell of a day,’ she said. They went back down to the sitting room where the prop pillows had been left behind. Rab slumped on the sofa like a marionette with its strings cut. Erykah switched on the radio.
‘Please, don’t,’ Rab said. ‘The last thing I can take right now is more – more news voices.’
‘Fine.’ Erykah turned it over to a classical music station. The jazz-tinted flutes and slithering piano of Ravel spread into the corners of the room. She hated Ravel. His music sounded to her as bland as the walls and furnishings, a poor imitation of the passionate music it aped, a highly mannered pastiche of a living, breathing thing.
‘There are more of them coming tomorrow afternoon, you know,’ she said. ‘And we haven’t had the investment advisors from the lottery company yet.’
Rab nodded, but his eyes were unfocused and his mind was clearly elsewhere.
‘You can do this.’ She sat next to him on the sofa and crossed her legs. ‘Today went well. Really well. A few days, a few photos. And then it’s tomorrow’s chip paper.’
It was the exact phrase he had said to her once, a long time ago, when she’d felt as though her life was spinning out of control as it was plastered all over the headlines. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but she couldn’t think of anything else to offer. ‘And then we can talk about what to do next.’
He nodded again but said nothing. It had been years since she’d felt that he was trying. She had married him because she needed someone who made her feel safe but as soon as the ring went on, it was as though he stopped caring.
Maybe if she had been a better person, he would have behaved differently. Maybe if she had been more like his ideal. He used to talk fondly about the kind of girls he had known when he was at university, blonde medical students who loved skiing and fishing, the ones who had ‘turned down better men than me.’ But if that was what he’d wanted, why had he chosen her? And would girls like those have accepted his terrible memory and lack of effort, like the time he brought her back a half-eaten bar of white chocolate after a business jaunt in Mayrhofen?
No, she mused, probably not. They probably would have gone with him, and expertly plied the off-piste itineraries, charmed his clients, worn cosy socks and known what après-ski was.
When they argued, he would berate her for not being a better person. There was a Good Erykah, he would tell her, and when she was that person she was amazing, but he couldn’t deal with Bad Erykah. The one who let her past and her choices weigh her down like a diving vest.
It was strange to her, his preoccupation with a ghostly, better version of herself. He talked about Good Erykah as if she was a common acquaintance of theirs, some kind of role model. Did that person even exist? He couldn’t seem to accept that she had faults, and she wondered what sort of vision of her he had built up in his head before becoming disappointed with the real person he married.
And by that time she had no one else to rely on. Not her mum, not Grayson. No one but herself.
‘What do you think the stories will be like,’ he said. ‘Will they find out. You know, about your . . .’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Depends how curious the journalists get, I guess. As far as I know it’s not on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find out if they want to.’
She remembered, with bitterness, how she had been told to leave the university after the trial. Jump before you’re pushed – wasn’t that what the Dean had said?
And then trying to find work in IT, which was a joke. When she’d started as a student she had found that she already knew things a lot of the others on the course didn’t. Little skills like setting up networks and TCP/IP protocols. She taught herself a lot of skills on top of the degree courses: database admin, web design.
With websites starting to catch on, there were still more jobs than there were people with the know-how. Not having a piece of paper should not have been an issue, people with fewer qualifications than she had were walking straight into good careers. But for some reason she wasn’t as lucky. She suspected it was because too many people still recognised her. It was never openly discussed, just a feeling she got. A mood. She lost count of the number of interviews where a panel of white men sitting behind a table told her she was great but ‘not quite
what we’re looking for’.
Rab had been sympathetic the first few times she failed to get a job. After that, he started saying it must be something she was doing, an attitude she was giving off that made them reject her. He told her she needed to work harder. Pull up her bootstraps. Screw her courage to the sticking place. Go once more unto the breach. And all the other empty lines he offered in place of understanding.
So she threw herself into training for GB squad selection. Trying to worm her way back into that world. But her moment had passed, if it ever even existed. She did well in the five kilometre trials, but struggled against bigger women in the shorter distances. One coach suggested she try to diet down to lightweight, but on her almost six-foot frame, that was a disaster. By the time Erykah was able to admit to herself that she didn’t stand a chance against the younger rowers coming through, she was already old enough to be in the veteran squad.
‘You’re ashamed?’ she said to Rab.
He shrugged. ‘Curious what angle this will take.’
Erykah pursed her lips. They had made no secret of Rab’s employment status to the press, so it wasn’t as if his past was sparkling white either. And she could wave off her indiscretions as the actions of a young woman. His affairs over the years, or whatever else the press didn’t yet know about her husband – and she included herself in that circle of ignorance – those would be tougher to explain away when they came out of the woodwork. That’s what always happened when people won the lottery, right? Folks from your past came out of nowhere with their arms wide open, hoping for a piece of the windfall.
She wondered if she might hear from Rainbow. It had been years, and she had no idea if her mother was alive or dead. She hoped she wasn’t dead. But she didn’t fancy a family reunion, either. Not after Rainbow had sold stories to the press during Grayson’s trial. There were a lot of things her mum had done over the years, a lot she could overlook and sometimes even forgive, but that, for Erykah, had been the final straw.
The Turning Tide Page 7