Criss Cross

by Caron Allan

  ‘Cress, I don’t…’ she began, on seeing me there.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said and swept past her and into the sitting room.

  I found a couple of glasses and opened up the old champers and poured her out about half a pint.

  ‘Drink that up, Poppet, and you’ll feel fab in no time. I don’t suppose you’re eating properly?’

  She curled up on the sofa opposite me, her fingers gripped the glass the way I used to cling on to the satin edging of my pink blanky when I was three. I watched her, worried. She had huge dark circles under her eyes. What a bastard Huw is, to do this to her. She sipped some Bolly. Then a bit more, and in no time at all I was topping her up.

  ‘Do you think he’ll come back?’ she asked me later, her voice plaintive.

  I blustered a bit, after all what could one say to that without adding to the pain? I finally settled on answering her with a question of my own.

  ‘Would you want him to come back, after what he’s done to you?’

  ‘Yes!’ For a moment she sat up, all bright and perky, then all the energy went out of her again, and she sagged back. She made a helpless gesture. ‘No. I don’t know. If he did come back, would he stay? Would it be because he loved me or because it was more convenient to live at home? How would I know he wouldn’t do exactly the same thing in a few months or years? I’d never be able to trust him again.’

  She took a sip from her glass. I was about to murmur some kind of agreeing noise when she added,

  ‘Not that he will ever come back. He’s with her now. He loves her. I don’t mean anything to him anymore. He’s gone forever!’

  It seemed a bit pointless to contradict her—who knew what was going on in Huw’s mind? And besides, what if he really loves this Manddi with two Ds? I desperately wanted to comfort Monica, but I just couldn’t think of anything to say apart from how sorry I was and that it was all such a horrid mess.

  ‘Oh God, Cressida, what am I going to do? I can’t bear to live without him! I wish I was dead!’ She began to cry, not softly but with huge racking sobs, her thin chest heaving as she gulped for air and tried to talk, and her eyes and nose streaming, tears and saliva and stuff running down her face, onto her shirt, onto her hands, all dripping into her hair, and I could no longer understand the words she was gasping and spluttering through her fingers.

  I found some tissues in my bag and pushed them into her hand, scooching onto the sofa next to her and putting an arm around her shoulders. She collapsed against me and wept and wept. My own eyes prickled with tears, all I wanted was to make everything better for her, but however much I wanted to, I knew I just couldn’t take away her pain. I may have said this once or twice before, but men are such bastards!

  It was dark when she finally sat up, drank the last of the champagne and then went out to the cloakroom to wash her face. When she came back, it was with the embarrassment of the controlled person who has experienced a bout of abandonment. She apologised to me about twenty times and begged me not to tell anyone I had seen her so distraught, so messed up. Not to mention without her lash extensions.

  ‘I won’t, I wouldn’t,’ I assured her. ‘Are you sure you won’t come back with me for dinner? You need to eat, you know. And Mrs H is bound to have made something yummy for dinner.’

  ‘No, no, I’d rather not. Thank you, Darling, but I couldn’t face anyone, not even dear old Thomas. I’ve got a few easy things in the freezer, I’ll just nuke something and sit in front of the television and watch Britain’s Got A Top Talent Idol.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ I said, still a bit doubtful I should leave her. But actually she really did look much better now.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, and she smiled. ‘Go home, Cress! You’ve done your bit to bring me back from the brink. I’m fine now, really, I’m much better. Thank you for everything. Go home, Darling and I’ll call you tomorrow!’

  So I left. She waved off me from the door, and I felt sure she was calm and relaxed after her cathartic emotional storm.

  Of course I had to explain to Thomas why I was so late—it was quarter to nine by the time I got home. But anyway, when I promised not to tell anyone about Monica, obviously he wasn’t included, she would know that I was going to tell him. Mrs H had left us her excellent pheasant and claret ratatouille in the kitchen, so I popped that in the microwave, and whilst Thomas was choosing some wine I told him about poor Monica.

  He let out a long whistle as he wiped the bottle and carefully drew the cork.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘I can hardly believe she would give way to that extent. Not that I blame the poor kid, but, well, I mean, it’s only old Huw, isn’t it, I mean he’s not the sort of chap you’d think girls would get all hot and bothered about.’

  ‘Darling, he’s her husband! And he’s done something truly terrible! The poor woman is completely crushed. Anyone would be, under the circumstances.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, a bit uncertain. He swilled the wine around in a large glass jug.

  ‘Thomas, Darling, what are you doing?’

  ‘Letting it breathe a bit. Meant to open this earlier, but I forgot. Would you be like that?’

  ‘What? Distraught like Monica? Yes, Darling, I would, of course I would! You know how I adore you.’

  He smiled. And dropped a quick, distracted kiss on the tip of my nose.

  ‘Hmm. Most gratifying to hear, I shall make sure I never abandon you for my secretary. Of course, my secretary is about 90 and male but even so…’

  The microwaved pinged, and dinner was served.

  Wed 1 August—11.45pm

  This morning I drove into town and dropped by Huw’s office. It was an unpardonable breech of etiquette of course, but I didn’t think he’d make too much of a fuss, and at least he could rely on me to behave in a civilised manner. In any case he’d already shown that he himself had no sense of propriety whatsoever by turning up at a dinner with his mistress within two days of separating from his wife.

  I had hoped to be able to speak to Huw privately and to make him see reason and make him ditch his tart and go home to Monica and beg her forgiveness, but all that changed as soon as I reached the lobby. I was forced to put Plan B into operation.

  Manddi was there. I could see her through an open doorway, sitting in the outer office that protected Huw’s from visitors. So, a friendly smile firmly in place, I waved at her and I went in.

  Her mouth dropped open when she looked up from her game of computer solitaire and saw me. Her wad of gum fell out of her lipsticked mouth with a soft thump onto the desk leaving some tiny, tiny splash marks on the surface of the wood veneer.

  She was not exactly the image of a classically trained secretary. Three inches of black roots showed through her over-bleached hair, her low-cut blouse just barely remaining buttoned over the strain of her bust (at least that explained the double D!), a massive muffin-top hung over the top of her tight black trousers. My first reaction was God, she’s so common. My second reaction was God, she’s so common. I think I managed not to let her see how much I despised her. She smiled, so it must have been okay. Although she would probably have said ‘must of been’.

  ‘Hi. Dun I know you? Din I see you at that fing the uvver night?’

  ‘You did indeed. And I thought I’d pop in as I was in Town, and say how sorry I was not to have more chance to chat with you.’

  ‘Really?’ Probably she was remembering the Barbie incident as she sounded a little more surprised than was strictly polite, but never mind. I turned up the wattage on my smile.

  ‘Yes, really. Thomas and I are Huw’s oldest friends and so obviously we don’t want to lose touch just because he’s with someone else now.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, still surprised, but this time more accepting. She grinned, and nodded. ‘Cool.’

  ‘Perhaps we could have lunch together?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Well, whenever you have your lunch,’ I suggested. She looked a bit puzzled.
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  ‘I can have it whenever,’ said Manddi with two Ds. ‘But it’s only eleven o’clock.’

  ‘So shall I come back at about half past twelve?’ I said. She thought for a second.

  ‘Cool,’ she said, which I took to mean ‘That would be lovely, thank you, I’m looking forward to it.’ Choking back my irritation I gave her another huge smile and said,

  ‘Later, girlfriend.’

  ‘For sure,’ she said eagerly.

  She didn’t seem to realise I was being ironic.

  Well, I don’t mind admitting it was not only the lunch from hell, but the expensive lunch from hell. If I had somehow assumed she was an independent adult, she had clearly assumed I was her elderly Aunt come to buy her stuff.

  I paid. Though in hindsight, I suppose that didn’t matter, no one was likely to check. There was no difficulty getting her to talk—and talk—about herself and Huw. About what he said about her new tattoo, what he said about her new Facebook picture, in fact what he said about—well, almost everything she did or said or even thought of doing or saying. She talked about her time at secretarial college where she had only got through her course by the skin of her teeth, largely because her main priority had been to party as much as possible. She told me how she loved to meet up with her old pals, how she would often stay out late drinking, and get up late in the mornings, hungover.

  ‘But it don’ matter if I come in to work late, right, cos I’m bangin’ the boss so it’s cool,’ she explained. I nodded and smiled.

  ‘Cool.’

  She told me everything I wanted to know, didn’t seem to find any of my questions odd or too invasive, and when she went to the ladies’, I had no trouble acquiring her driving licence, even though I wouldn’t have been surprised if she hadn’t had one. Judging by the number of points on it, she wouldn’t have it for much longer.

  And when I walked her back to the office I had no difficulty getting her to give me one of the company’s business cards ‘so I could phone her for a chat’.

  Cool.

  I had made up my mind.

  I went straight home and ordered a rental car, using Manddi’s name and arranged to collect it later in the afternoon.

  I spent half an hour practising Manddi’s signature, and a further half an hour messing up my hair and face so that I looked reasonably similar to her licence photo (if you imagine someone viewing it through another person’s reading glasses in very poor light). I pulled on a top that was too small and a pair of Thomas’s track-suit bottoms.

  I had obviously done something right as the spotty young chap behind the counter at the car rental office didn’t do more than glance at either the photo or my signature. I walked out twirling the car keys on my forefinger with a sense of elation.

  He talked me through all the little dents and dings and drew my attention to how much petrol was in the tank, asking me to bring it back with approximately the same amount. Cool, I told him with a dazzling smile. He left me, and I put on my driving gloves.

  I was ready.

  At five minutes to five I was waiting in the rental car. I’d parked it a little way up the road from Huw’s office building. The road sloped quite steeply down towards the office block, and I had stopped near the top of the hill, with an excellent view of both the road and the entrance to the building’s lobby.

  I’d already rung up Manddi and pretended to be an old girlfriend from secretarial college keen to meet up for drinks. That had got her out of the way. I didn’t even need to disguise my voice. She had sounded a bit puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was (or rather, who I was pretending to be) but that hadn’t stopped her agreeing to get together at five o’clock at a pub five minutes’ walk from the office. I’d promised to drop her at her home afterwards. I couldn’t believe it worked. It’s no wonder people are always getting killed when they’re always so gullible and do stupid things like agreeing to meet up with complete strangers in bars.

  She left the building almost as soon as I arrived in position, teetering along on impossible heels and texting someone with both thumbs as she went. She looked happy.

  I settled down to wait. Worried that he might simply stay at the office until late enough to take Manddi home, or that she would come back almost immediately having found no one at the pub waiting for her, I was already half convinced I was going to have to come back another day and try something else. So imagine my relief when only a few minutes after Manddi had departed, Huw emerged from the building, briefcase in hand.

  I saw him stepping off the kerb, heading for the underground car park where he’d presumably left his top-of-the-range current-model BMW.

  I was actually going quite fast by the time I hit him. He, with the usual arrogance of the pedestrian these days, had assumed I would simply stop when I got to him, and he just stepped into the road and began to cross without actually bothering to check if it was safe. As I reached him, he was still ambling across the road and clearly wasn’t about to hurry himself. I think he may have even seen me, as he glanced around at the very last nanosecond with suddenly frightened awareness, and there was something—some little look on his face—no, not even on his face, it was just the strangest suggestion of a shade in his eyes, the little lines between his brows contracting. It was a look that said, ‘I always knew she hated me,’ followed by a sudden realisation of what was about to happen and a strong impression that he suddenly thought, ‘Oh shit!’

  But then he bumped up in the air and over the top of the car, I was doing quite a speed and of course, it’s downhill and on a slight bend at that point—not at all a good place to cross really, and I saw him in my mirror, almost in slow-motion, as his head whacked down on the boot and then he hit the tarmac behind me with a strange flomping sound I could hear even though the window was up and Michael Bublé was blaring out of the speakers.

  Huw bounced once more and lay still on his face on the road. There was a smeared streak of blood and tissue a foot long where he fell to earth. For a busy street in the evening rush-hour of the City it was amazing that there didn’t seem to be another soul around. Not too worried about being seen as I was in my Manddi disguise, I got out of the car and teetered back to him, stepping carefully round the blood that was beginning to seep and to thread its way through the minute grooves in the temporary road surface—I didn’t want to ruin my Jimmy Choos.

  There was a nasty second when I thought that he was still alive, but if he was, that moment passed quite quickly as I bent over him and saw that his half-open eyes already looked glassy. He was quite neat and tidy really, apart from that little stream of blood, and as he was lying on the scraped side of his face, he really didn’t look too bad, all things considered, but it was the angle of his head that revealed the truth of the matter.

  I hesitated for a second, wondering whether to try to find a pulse so I could be sure, but already a couple of elderly busybodies were coming out of a charity shop further down the street, so I just had to leap back into the car and drive off as fast as I could, zooming round the old dears on the zebra crossing. Glancing in the mirror, I could see a walking stick being waved furiously, and I heard a shout of outrage. Old people, I ask you! Surely anyone could see I was being Gangsta? Why did it surprise them that a cold-blooded murderer should also lack principles?

  From there it was only a twenty-minute drive to my next destination. I pulled the car off the road onto the drive of the semi-detached love-nest Huw had been sharing with Manddi. She wasn’t home yet from the pub. So I stood by the door and waited. After about another half an hour, she arrived, looking furious.

  She didn’t seem surprised to see me, didn’t bother with pleasantries, just started immediately shouting about how fucking useless people were, how she’d wasted so much fucking time waiting for people who didn’t show up and had to pay for her own fucking drinks and then even Huw hadn’t bothered to answer her texts and he wasn’t at the fucking office, though there had been a couple of cops further down the road,
not that she had any truck with cops after the way they banged up her dad when all he did was drive the poxy car, and then there I was in the tiny sitting room on the leatherette sofa before she even drew breath.

  Now there was a certain amount of time pressure, because I was expecting the police to turn up at any moment to announce the terrible news. And of course, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure that he was actually dead. Emergency medical treatment has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, and the local hospital enjoys an excellent reputation. What if they’d managed to pull him back from the brink? What if, even now, he was sitting in bed in hospital, giving a full statement to the police whilst gorgeous young nurses plied him with sweet tea and painkillers?

  I must have started to breath a bit heavily and look flustered, because suddenly taking a break from all the interesting things that she had said and thought and said again, Manddi put out a hand on my arm and in a really sweet voice, she said,

  ‘Hey, Crezz, are you cool, man, or what? You look like shit, innit?’

  Desperately reaching for something to tell her, I told her I thought Thomas was having it off with Mrs Hopkins, (it was the only thing I could think of—fortunately she hadn’t met Mrs H so that was okay) and said I thought I was having a panic attack, and that I wasn’t able to sleep because of the worry and what on earth was I going to do? She jumped up and clomped upstairs in her massive 70s style heels. A moment later and she was back with a little brown medicine bottle with a foreign label, she shook out a few little capsules and shoved some under my nose.

  ‘Take a couple of these. They’re well good, Crezz.’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked, hoping I sounded more curious than cautious. One must retain one’s cool at all times.

  ‘Just sleeping pills, innit. Nuffing dodgy. But they’re strong. Really strong. One of these and you’ll feel all relaxed and cool and that. But don’t take it till you get home, they work really quickly. I take ‘em all the time, just one to help me sleep, they’re brill, knock you out like a light in literally five minutes.’