by Jo Jakeman
As I leaned back against the sofa and stretched my arms above my head, my ribs popped gently and my back cracked.
Thud.
We snapped our heads toward the window. The sound was loud and close by. The shutters were closed, so I couldn’t immediately see what had caused the noise.
I leaped to my feet and crossed steadily to the window. I listened. Nothing. I pushed the slats open, peering one eye, then two. There were two cars on the driveway, Ruby’s and Naomi’s. At first I couldn’t see what was wrong, what might have caused the sound. Naomi pulled the shutters open further.
“Shit, Ruby! Your car,” she said.
On the hood of her car was a brick. Her windscreen was a concave of spiderwebs where a solid sheet of glass should have been. The streetlights were dim but the light over the front porch cast a spotlight onto the damage.
“Childish,” I muttered. I thought Ruby was still in the room with us until I heard the front door open. “Ruby! Don’t go out there.”
I went after her, cautiously, knowing that Phillip wasn’t far away. Naomi peered over hedges for signs of Phillip but saw nothing. I hadn’t expected Phillip to carry out childish acts of vandalism. I was flustered and skittish. It unnerved me that he was still close by.
Ruby sniffed back tears. I put my arm loosely around her shoulders, still looking all about me. I could feel his eyes on us.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s just a car. We can get that fixed on Monday morning.”
She stroked the roof of the car gently at first and then slammed the heel of her hand down on it.
“Why would he do this to me?” she cried. “I’ve only ever tried to help him.”
Before I could answer her, Naomi said, “You seen this?”
Under the wiper blades there was a white piece of paper. She slid it from beneath the blade and I saw it was ripped from the back of an envelope. I’d been too intent on watching out for Phillip to notice it before. In a hand we all recognized—though it was bolder and messier than usual—it said, Bitches get what’s coming to them.
There was no sign of Phillip, but his presence hung heavily in the air. I was glad of the note. At least now Ruby couldn’t convince herself that this was the random act of a bored delinquent. This was Phillip’s way of telling us it wasn’t over yet.
The curtains at Mary’s house twitched, dropped, and swayed to stillness.
“Go inside,” I said to Naomi and Ruby. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“No,” said Ruby. “We should stick together.”
“Fine, but wait here.” I ran across the road and knocked on Mary’s door.
“Mary? Do you have a minute?”
The door opened quickly.
“Shh! He’s asleep!” She motioned up the stairs behind her.
I didn’t know if she meant the shift-working boyfriend or one of her children.
“Did you see what happened?” I asked.
“It wasn’t me who did it.”
“I know. I wondered whether you’d seen anything.”
“Saw a bloke hanging around on his phone about ten minutes ago.”
“Did you see who it was?” I asked.
She looked away, uncertain. “It’s dark,” she said. “I couldn’t say for sure.”
I lowered my voice. “There’s a note in his handwriting. You wouldn’t be getting anyone into trouble by confirming what we already know.”
She nodded just slightly.
“So it was him? Phillip?”
She nodded again.
“And if I went to the police, you’d be able to confirm that, yeah?”
Mary looked at the floor and ran her tongue over her lips.
She nodded. “Okay.”
I waited for her to look up so that she could see the sincerity in my eyes. “Thank you, Mary. I appreciate it.”
I started back down her driveway and then stopped. “Did you see where he went?”
“Sorry. No.”
I jogged back over the road. Naomi and Ruby were waiting for me by the car.
“Did she see anything?” Ruby asked.
“Not the actual brick throwing, but yeah, she saw Phillip.”
I looked back at the damage the brick had done. The red paintwork on the car hood was scratched where the brick had bounced onto it. The color underneath was darker. Around the windscreen the paint had bubbled with rust. I touched it and a chunk as big as a fifty-pence piece flaked in my fingers. The darker paint was obvious underneath.
“Have you had this car resprayed, Ruby?”
“What? Yes. And I suppose I can do it again, but it’s such a pain and—well, it’s hardly the point, is it?”
“What color was it before?” I asked.
My heart was beating faster now than when we’d heard the brick hitting glass.
“It was blue. Why does that matter? I’ll just have the red touched up. No need to do the whole thing.”
Ruby used to drive a blue car. If she realized the significance of what she’d just said, she didn’t show it. My mind worked slowly, but I pictured Ruby behind the wheel of the car that had hit me, imagined Phillip finding out and Ruby promising to do anything for him if he didn’t report her. Surely not even Phillip would cover for the person who’d killed our unborn child.
CHAPTER 24
10 days before the funeral
Naomi took photos of the car, the brick, and the letter. I noted the date and time in the back of my planner along with Mary’s name under the column marked “witness.” I watched Ruby move around muttering about her dogs and her car, but all I could do was question if she could really have been so jealous of me that she would have driven straight at me.
I rubbed my eyes. If I were to outthink Phillip, I couldn’t get distracted. Still, I looked at Ruby with a wariness that wasn’t there before. I poured us all a glass of wine and we took it into the yard under a starless sky. I locked the back gate and deadlocked the front door. Naomi sat next to Ruby on the bench while she smoked her cigarette. Naomi talked of her childhood and how she’d always dreamed of finding her mum. She wanted to meet her just one time. To see if they looked alike, to ask who her dad was, to see whether they had the same habits.
She knew it shouldn’t matter, but she wanted to see someone who was related to her. Just once. Her grandparents refused to talk about her mum and she never even asked whether they had any theories about her dad. It was as though her parents had never existed. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that Nan had found her under a gooseberry bush.
I nodded, though I was only half listening. Ruby sympathized. She was without family too. Her parents had died when she was young. They were elderly and she had been a surprise baby when her mother was fifty-two. By the time she was twenty, both of her parents had passed away, followed the next year by her only sister, who’d taken off to Thailand for a diving holiday and was never seen again. Her death was ruled accidental and the diving company shown to have no liability.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” I said.
Naomi snorted.
“Which bit?” she asked. “The bit where he slapped cuffs on Ruby, kicked you in the face, or the bit where he tried to strangle me to death?” She took the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit another one.
“I mean the three of us being here. Look at us! We’re completely different. Phillip would never have thought in a million years that we would be here together. I’m still legally married to him and we share a child, so I can’t get him out of my life. You, Naomi, are his girlfriend—”
“Not anymore, I’m not,” she said.
“Still . . . the one that confuses me is you, Ruby. Why do you still hang around Phillip? You’re free to go and never see him again, and yet here you are. What does he have over you?”
I watched her falter and squirm.
I wondered whether I could ever forgive her if she confessed to driving the car that night.
“Nothing,” she said with a nervous laugh. “He has nothing over me. We have history, we’ve seen each other through dark times, that’s all. We’ve been there for each other when no one else was.” She scratched her chin. “But going back to your point . . .”
No, I thought, you’re steering me away from it.
“. . . we are rather different, aren’t we? The way we look, our ages, our personalities. He doesn’t really have a type.”
“And I thought I were the dumb one,” Naomi said.
“You’re not . . .” Ruby began.
“Obviously! I mean, me without a dad and my mum sodding off when I were one day old. I know Imogen’s mum’s still about, but her dad died when she were young, right? Ruby, you had no family when you met Phil either, did yuh? I’m going out on a limb here but what’s the betting that you weren’t the type to have a gang of mates you could call on either? He’s got a type all right.”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette.
“He saw us coming. Singled us out, didn’t he? He goes for women who have nowhere to go and no one to turn to. He preys on vulnerable girls.”
“I take offense at being called vulnerable,” said Ruby.
“I take offense at being called a girl,” I said.
We sat in silence, all of us searching for a reason why that wasn’t true and coming up empty-handed and empty-hearted. Realizing what, perhaps, we had always known in our hearts: that Phillip’s relationships with us had been driven by a love for himself and a desire for control.
“Do you really think he would be that calculating?” Ruby asked.
Naomi scoffed. “You don’t?”
She was right, of course. I’d not had many friends growing up. I was inoffensive enough so that no one picked on me and insignificant enough so that no one invited me to parties. I was one of those girls who sat one row back in class, quietly listening and getting on with things. Taking on board everything that was going on around her but never quite being part of it. Rachel was the closest thing I had to a friend, and I didn’t even know if she had dreams for her future or nightmares about her past.
“For what it’s worth,” said Ruby, “I don’t think that means he didn’t love us, in his own way. It says more about him not loving himself enough—”
“Chuffin’ ’eck, Ruby! I’ve never met a man who loves himself more. You can stuff your psychobabble. There’s no one he loves more than number one.”
“I’d love to disagree with you,” she said. “But perhaps you’re right.”
The silence was brittle. Our easy conversation from earlier was stunted.
“Sorry,” Naomi said. “Sorry. Shouldn’t’ve said that. In a way, it’s nice that you still try and see the best in him. But I’ve had enough of that crap.”
Naomi swiveled in her seat to face Ruby. “Can I ask you something? What was he like when you were married to him?”
Ruby looked surprised by the question. “I don’t know. I suppose it wasn’t so bad. I tried my best to protect him, but the smallest things—a perceived slight, me taking too long at the shops, or smiling at another man—was enough to send him into a tailspin. I got tired of mothering him, though. I don’t know whether it was the age difference or because he’d never had to look after himself.
“He only physically hurt me once. He hated my work colleagues, and when I wouldn’t give up my job he tried to get me sacked. We had a huge row about it. I still don’t know whether he meant to hurt me, but we were in the kitchen. He went to slam the door in my face, but my fingers were in the doorjamb. Broke every one of them across the tips. I would have forgiven him straightaway if he’d apologized, but he tried to tell me it was my fault for goading him. The next day I moved into a hotel and then from there went to Africa.”
“You did what?” Naomi seemed impressed.
“I was angrier back then. I went to work for UNICEF, and it was five years before I saw Pip again.”
“Good on you, duck.”
“I don’t know.” Ruby looked at her hands. “I felt quite guilty. Pip said he’d have counseling, take time off work. He told me he wanted to work things out. I wonder whether I should have given him a second chance. I loved my time in Africa. I’d finally found my calling, and I really thought that the time alone would do Pip good. I tried to persuade him to come out and join me, but he never was one for foreign countries. When he wrote to me, he sounded like a broken man. His letters showed he’d done a lot of thinking, a lot of growing up. I fell in love with him all over again. And of course, I’d changed by then too. I’d learned to forgive.
“We’d been together for thirteen years, and even though I hadn’t seen him for almost half of that time, I still wore my wedding ring and used my married name. I came back to give our marriage another chance, but by that time he had already met you, Imogen—which was something he’d neglected to mention in his letters.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. “You must have been furious.” I was thinking about the accident again.
“Goodness, no. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen in Africa and the atrocities that people manage to forgive each other for, I could never be angry over him finding love when I hadn’t been there to give it to him. We shouldn’t be apologizing to each other, darling. We were all spun a line by Pip and we took the bait. He caused this hurt. Now that I think about it, I was wrong about Pip’s type, though. I know what he saw in us. We’re all bloody fabulous.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Naomi.
“Me too.”
We raised our glasses into the air and drank deeply. My head was spinning and it wasn’t the wine.
“What now?” Naomi asked.
As if waiting for its cue, the doorbell shrilled from within the house. Curious rather than fearful, we went inside. A man who threw bricks through windows was unlikely to have the courtesy to ring the bell.
Naomi said she’d get it, but we both went with her to the door. She had her hand on the lock and waited for me to nod before she opened it a crack. A tall young man stood on the other side of the doorstep. He had a blue baseball cap perched on top of a mass of curls and he was sliding two pizza boxes out of a red bag.
“What’s this?” asked Naomi.
The delivery boy looked at the boxes, then back at Naomi like it should be obvious. She opened the door a little wider.
“Pizza?” he said, though he wasn’t sounding sure of himself.
“We’ve not ordered anything.”
He looked at the paper attached to the uppermost box and then leaned backward to look at the number by the side of the door, and then slowly back to the paper.
“Number twenty-eight?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Rochester?”
“Yes,” all three of us said in unison.
He looked back to the paper like he was trying to work out a particularly tricky math equation.
“This is your pizza,” he said finally.
“We’ve not ordered any bloody pizza.”
“Number twenty-eight?” he asked again.
“Yes,” repeated Naomi, “twenty-eight, and yes, it’s Rochester, but we’ve not ordered any pizza.”
“It says here you have,” he said. He was young and his voice was quavering. I started to feel sorry for him. It wasn’t in his job description to deliver threats to suspicious women. Because that’s surely what it was: a threat. Phillip letting us know that he could get to us whenever he wanted.
“Silly me,” said Ruby, pushing to the front with purse in hand. “I forgot I’d ordered it. How much do we owe you?”
Naomi shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen. I watched the street. It had to be Phillip. He was watching us. Laughing at us. He was there. I could feel him. W
e eyed the pizzas warily as if Phillip himself had sneaked into the house.
“I don’t get it. Why send pizza?” I asked.
“Who cares?” Naomi said. “He’s trying to mess with our heads, but the joke’s on him because we got to eat, right? And I’m not eating any more of that bloody hummus. You’ve got nothing else in the house ’cept tins of palm hearts and jars of chutney.”
I took a slice of cheese and tomato and went to the window. I’d switched all the lights off in the front room so I could open the shutters and look out onto the night. The street was empty. The sun had long since deserted its post, leaving a night watchman moon as lookout. What’s going through your mind, Phillip?
A blue van pulled up outside the house, blocking the end of the drive. A man in overalls began to walk toward the house.
“Ruby? Nay? We’ve got company.”
I put the crust of my pizza on the window ledge and headed into the hallway. This time I was the one who answered the door, with Ruby and Naomi standing behind. The smiling man pointed at his jacket at the prominently placed gas company logo. He pulled a lanyard out of his overalls to show me his picture and his name in bold capitals.
“Gas board, love. Reports of a gas leak. That right?”
“No, not from us. Perhaps one of the neighbors?” I went to close the door.
“Hold on.” He looked at the black device in his hand and checked something before asking, “You didn’t call the emergency number?”
“No, sorry.”
“Rochester?”
“Yes, that’s me, but I’m afraid I didn’t make the call. There’s been some . . . nuisance calls. An ex.”
I almost smiled. Phillip was playing into my hands. He was hoping to scare us, but instead he was proving himself worthy of a restraining order.
“And you’ve not noticed the small of gas?”
“No, sorry.”
He laughed. “God, don’t apologize, love. And your ex is doing this, you think? What a prat!”