The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  No, I knew exactly where I would be at eight A.M. this Sunday: mashing more banana with the radio on. It was everything that dancing girl had resisted for so long, but the woman ten years her elder had never found the prospect more comforting as she turned the corner onto a pavement that bustled with angular twentysomethings sporting jarring hair dye and bleached denim.

  The bar my husband had told me to find him in hadn’t even existed last time I’d had a night out; it was younger than Lila. That was what the places near us traded in and thrived on: newness and obscurity, lean and bare-bricked dens run by lean and knowing young men and women. The whitewashed shop fronts of brands long gone had been wiped clean by ectomorphs with piercings who felt passionate about coffee and spirits, the walls inside a froth of layers that revealed the building’s previous identities.

  The peel of paint and wallpaper beneath reminded me of my stretch marks. I wondered whether, if a hipster set up shop in my body, they’d be able to find the real me underneath all the incarnations of myself I had built up on top.

  I know what you did.

  The unbidden thought made me recoil and remove my hand from the door before I had pushed it.

  Don’t be so stupid. You’re not some ancient crone. Until very recently, you were fashion editor of a glossy magazine. Now fucking go in.

  Nick was waiting for me at the bar, two misty tumblers decorated with sprigs of rosemary in front of him. He knew I loved the smell; Lila had almost been a Rosemary. I laid a hand on his arm and he turned his face, careworn and apprehensive, to me and beamed.

  “You’re here.” He leaned in to kiss me, slipped an arm around my waist, then gestured around him: unencumbered people sipping beers and chatting. “Remember this?!”

  I did—just. A sense memory, like a touch on skin felt long after contact, or music that can be summoned though it hasn’t been played for years. Just as I knew all the songs on the tape Winnie had left for me without hearing them aloud.

  I recognized the scene but had no sense of my own involvement in it. I dropped my bag onto the stool next to my husband and went to the loo, where I repeated to myself a mantra that I wouldn’t spoil the evening.

  When I returned, I blurted out what was uppermost in my mind and felt my eyes fill with warm water.

  “Moff gave Maggie a column.” I sat and sipped from the cool glass. “I’m gutted. I can’t help it. I know I should be pleased for her, but I just feel sick.”

  Nick put an arm around me. “That’s annoying,” he said, but he didn’t sound annoyed. “You’d be a great columnist. But Maggie will write this one thing every month—the rest of the time she’ll be freelancing. You’ll be there every day, ’Go, right in the thick of it. It’s still your dream job, remember? Nothing’s changed.”

  “They think she’s better at it than me,” I muttered. “They like her more. She’s prettier, nicer.”

  “Margot, don’t.” Nick was instantly cold. “You have to stop this. It’s bad for your health—Maggie is none of those things. She’s just getting on with the job you are on leave from. When you go back, it’ll be yours again, and hopefully all this resentment will go. It needs to go, because she’s looking like a permanent feature now that it’s going so well with Tim….”

  He studied the sprig in the top of his drink, pulling it out from between the ice cubes and driving it back down again.

  “I don’t know where this obsession with Maggie has come from.” He paused. “Actually, I can guess. Look, I wasn’t going to mention this tonight but seeing as we’re talking…I know about Winnie.”

  I felt very cold and heard his voice as though he were much farther away from me than the barstool next to mine. I played with the brass hardware on my handbag.

  “Charles told me he saw you at the house on Saturday.” Nick spread his hands, a taut gesture of bafflement. “I thought you’d booked into a spin class. You seemed so excited about it. What were you doing round at theirs? Spying on them?”

  I stopped breathing. My insides decontracted at what Nick thought he knew. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, I had thought Winnie had told him everything. Like she’d threatened to do so many times. Like the many evenings over the years she’d spent pretending she might until I cried and pleaded and bargained with her not to.

  Yes, I had gone to Winnie’s house on the weekend. I didn’t want to speak to her, hadn’t been planning on ringing the doorbell. I felt drawn to the house where the woman who occupied so much of my mind was, wanted to see from outside whether anything was different, whether it showed the scars of the grief within. Maybe to catch sight of its occupants and remind myself they were just ordinary people, rather than the angry, vindictive caricature that occupied my mind so relentlessly.

  What Nick didn’t know—apart from all the rest—was that it had taken all my willpower not to go round there every day since the moment Winnie’s message had ended our friendship. Part of me wished I had: Saturday had been a stupid, pointless exercise that had failed to make me feel any better, and I’d wasted six months plucking up the courage to do it. I had stood in the drizzle, obscured (at least I thought) by the wheelie bins at the end of their drive for five minutes before realizing that the drab house had no solace to offer, to either me or the couple trapped inside it.

  “You’re in touch with Charles?” I replied. The betrayal was piercing.

  Why? When Winnie disappeared on me and you know how much it upset me? And why didn’t you tell me?

  “He just messaged me when he saw you round there—I think he was worried, to be honest. It’s pretty weird behavior. What were you hoping to achieve?”

  I sighed and pulled out my phone. “Nothing, I don’t know. It was a stupid idea. Let’s go to the restaurant, shall we? I’m just going to call Maggie and check everything’s okay at home.”

  But as my hands started to flick around the screen to locate Maggie’s details, Nick reached out and stopped me, eyes earnest and loving once more.

  “Everything’s fine, ’Go. Stop fretting. Maggie will be eating chips and watching TV.”

  She would. The woman liked nothing more than throwing herself onto the fat cushions on our sofa and exclaiming at how much more comfortable it was than hers. She’d have the fringed organic wool cushion clutched over her tummy the way she’d done the other Sunday after brunch. I briefly felt something not far off affection for my replacement, before Nick’s next sentence snuffed it out.

  “Besides, she told me she had a friend who lives nearby who’s going to come round and keep her company.”

  11

  MAGGIE

  If anything, Margot’s bed was too comfortable. Maggie opened her eyes to find the room had lost its daylight. She sat up on the bed and rubbed her temples. For some reason, she thought of Winnie. Did she wake up every day with Jack’s death at the front of her mind?

  Maggie had known grief and bereavement, but never of the magnitude that Winnie had been through. Maggie had lost grandparents, elderly relatives, her parents’ lifelong friends. This was the natural order of things: a sadness, often an intense sense of loss, but one that was smoothed over by time passing and the hard logic of age and inevitability.

  At university, a girl on her corridor had died in a car crash in their first term, a month after leaving the home she had spent eighteen safe years in. Lindsay Deeds: friendly but not someone Maggie had been close to. Had she lived, Maggie doubted whether she’d still recall her name or remember her in such startling detail, from side parting to straight, pearly teeth. This is how death out of sequence asserts itself on the brain, and it was the closest Maggie had come to the way life can cheat the young.

  No wonder Winnie and her husband were finding it so hard to make sense of each other. She hoped they could find the next steps together; Maggie had seen on Winnie’s face as she had spoken in the pub how much she relied on Charles.
Maggie knew, from hard experience and years of loneliness spent looking over at couples at neighboring tables, walking hand in hand, leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders on the tube, that love like that doesn’t come round very often—or at all, for some people.

  She would help her new friend through it in whatever way she could.

  Shivering in the cool evening air of the master bedroom, she hopped down from the firm mattress and poked her head around the door to Lila’s room, where the baby lay snoring softly. Satisfied, she made to go downstairs, to make sure the monitor was on and in view of the settee, and wait for Winnie to arrive.

  12

  MARGOT

  “A friend?” I repeated to Nick through the roar of blood in my head as the invisible band of pressure constricted around my temples again.

  No no no.

  Winnie.

  The selfie she had sent of herself with Lila; the fact she and Maggie were now Facebook friends; the mixtape left outside our front door. They all pointed to one thing: Winnie was getting closer to home. My home.

  Winnie, who had been there so many times, on so many happy occasions. Winnie, who had been in our house the day we collected the keys to it, drinking cheap fizz from a plastic cup in a room that was all moth-eaten old carpet and damp spots on the walls and nothing else. Who had been in our house when I had revealed I was pregnant too, hugging her oldest friend over the mound of her own burgeoning belly.

  Winnie, who had been in our house and was now always in my head, because she had been there that day all those years ago and because each of us relied on the other to keep it a secret.

  She had broken that bond, though, when Jack died, when she’d disappeared and resurfaced, hostile and hurt. I knew this Winnie—the one that lashed out, the one that loathed—and I was scared of her. Once I had feared for myself, but now all I could think of was Lila.

  Lila, my Lila. At home with Maggie, who had laid me low at work already, and now invited Winnie to wreak whatever it was she had planned.

  “I have to go back.” I stood up, shrugged my coat on, and set the bells above the door jangling discordantly as I yanked it open and stepped through.

  The pavement was as busy as my mind, and I notched up my speed from a walk into a trot. It was the fastest I had moved since my first trimester, when nausea and breathlessness had stopped my going for the regular runs I took in the leaf-strewn park I now ambled through most days with Lila and the buggy. I cursed myself for not trying harder to get my fitness back.

  You can’t protect your child, because you didn’t put the effort in.

  I had to slow to a brisk walk again when the pace became too much, and felt that in trying to hurry my feet along I somehow tangled my legs into an even slower rhythm. As I went, I tapped at my phone repeatedly, in case Maggie had posted anything more to Facebook or Instagram since I had left home. Nothing.

  I remembered how my phone had fostered the resentment I felt for my replacement in the early weeks of Lila’s life and small hours of the night, memorizing the web addresses of her various social feeds to offer up for scrutiny when I was feeling at my most weak and most absorbent.

  I traveled as if in one of my dreams, sticky footed and unsure what I was heading into or what I expected to find there.

  Winnie would never hurt Lila.

  But I had thought Winnie would never hurt me either. And what had my life since Helen been but a sequence of threats and intimidation—gently, subtly, but nevertheless constantly—meted out by Winnie?

  I had reached the corner by the pub now, where the road broadened into a village green and the swings I visited so regularly hung still and unoccupied in the dusk. Home was five minutes away.

  The phone in my hand buzzed into life with Nick’s number, and I saw in the digits the comfort of his face and the strength of his arms around me as though they were formed in lines of code.

  “Margot, what the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at me when I picked up.

  “It’s Winnie!” I cried raggedly. “Winnie is with Maggie! Maggie left the photo of…of Jack, dead. On the computer. Winnie asked her to. And now Winnie is in our house!”

  There was a silence down the line. An in-breath, a false start—and then:

  “Margot, that was me,” said Nick, eventually, in a voice that was cold, hard, and almost unrecognizable as his. “I left that photo on the screen.”

  13

  MAGGIE

  Maggie couldn’t help putting her head round the door of that unlandscaped spare room one more time. She was drawn to the mess inside that showed Margot was human.

  The carrier bags were still heaped in untidy piles, the floorboards beneath barely visible. On the imposing wooden desk, to one side of the giant screen, lay a stack of Nick’s paperwork. The bulging folders and document wallets trailed handwritten notes and Post-its from between their covers.

  Maggie closed the door and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  On one of her previous visits, while searching out the crockery to lay the table, she had discovered a whole cupboard in Margot’s kitchen that was given over to small, decorative bowls. Marbled, hand-shaped, some ridged and off-kilter, others finished with painted designs and gilt curlicues, they had become, in Maggie’s mind, emblematic of the difference between the two women’s lives. She and Cath ate their crisps straight out of the bag; Margot’s snacks had a veritable wardrobe to choose from.

  Maggie couldn’t decide whether she’d rather break one or take one home with her.

  She fished a chunky midsized glass vessel from the back of the cupboard, emptied some peanuts into it, and carried it through to the sitting room, where she switched on the TV and settled herself on a sofa so well stacked with cushions she felt like a maharajah. The Sultan of Suburbia: That would make a good caption for a selfie. Scrap that—it would make a great column.

  Maggie smiled to herself as she remembered her latest achievement.

  Between the patter of the sitcom she was only half watching and the hypnotic pull of the various social feeds she dragged to refresh on her phone every five minutes, Maggie was only distantly aware of the noise of footsteps along the path outside the front door.

  The peal of the doorbell drew her mind back into Margot’s house, back to Lila asleep upstairs rolling over every so often on the grainy screen of the baby monitor, and she checked the time on her phone: just over an hour since Margot had left.

  “Winnie!” Maggie exclaimed to the empty room.

  14

  MARGOT

  I hadn’t felt fear like it since school. Since Helen plunged.

  Helen, with her insistence that things had to change. Her notion that we were boring before she arrived to take us out of ourselves, when actually what we had been was happy.

  I had been happy with Nick too—but not recently, I realized with a jolt.

  Now my mind played and replayed scenes between us, glitchily and from different angles. Nick comforting me after Jack’s death; my trying and failing to find a way into the conversation between him, Maggie, and Tim that my tired mother-brain was struggling to follow; my husband’s face, closed and exasperated, as I tried to explain to him how anxious I was.

  There was a word people had started using, online and in the office, just before I left to have Lila. I had had to Google it the other day when I came across it in an article I was reading because I couldn’t remember what it meant. The old me would have known.

  Gaslight (verb): to manipulate (someone; usually a spouse) by psychological means into doubting their own sanity; usage: “In the first episode, she is being gaslighted by her husband.”

  I remembered that word now, and my lip began to wobble, my jaw to tremble uncontrollably.

  Nick had been the one to bring the parcel of smashed, rejected things from Winnie into the house—things I assumed she had broken i
n her rage at me, but he could just as easily have done it before I’d had a chance to see inside. Nick was in touch with Charles and hadn’t told me. Nick had insisted on Tim and Maggie’s coming round so often, even though he knew how it made me feel—he was usually the one that turned the talk to things I hadn’t had a chance to catch up on, in fact. Most of all, Nick had watched me become more and more uneasy about my job and about the abuse I’d been receiving online—had that been him too?

  Whenever I had gone to him, Nick had told me time and again that I was overreacting.

  Was it all in my head? And had Nick put it there?

  The notion made me cry out. There were tears on my face. My heart ached and my head spun.

  “Margot, are you there?” Nick’s voice was tinny from the phone I’d forgotten I was gripping. It was all I could do to croak my presence into the handset.

  “Look,” he continued, exasperated, “Charles emailed me a couple of weeks ago. It’s nearly a year since…He asked me to design something with the photos they have of Jack. I must have left it on the screen without closing it down properly. I’m so sorry, I know how that photo made you feel.”

  He paused. “It was me,” Nick said, “not Maggie. No great conspiracy, no secret plan.”

  I stopped where I was, stock-still in the street. I had just mapped in my own head a complex itinerary of deceit masterminded by the man I was married to, the person I loved most in the world—bar Lila, who took pole position mainly because she was half Nick anyway.