I wheeled Mark up the driveway, his new jacket slung over the back of the chair and my handbag dangling from one of the handles, and I then had to stop and leave him outside the front door while I went in to hunt for somebody to help me get him up the three wide but steep stairs leading to the entrance.
Everyone was in the back garden, with the inevitable game of volleyball under way. Gavin and Adrian and their two older sons were playing, together with two other men who I didn’t know, but who could have been cut from the same mould as the Caine brothers. Cropped hair, a halfcentimetre of designer stubble, beefy build now starting to run to fat, shirt buttons open to show off hairy chests.
‘Hi there!’ Bee-Bee, resplendent in tight white pants and a bodyhugging pink jersey, sashayed up carrying a tray on which raw steaks and sausages were piled high, on their way to the ritual charring. She stopped, looking puzzled as she stared past me. ‘Where’s Mark?’
‘Outside. I need someone to help me get him up the stairs.’
‘Oh.’ She turned towards the volleyball game.
‘Gaaa-viiin,’ she called, but, busy running and leaping and grunting as he pounded the ball over the net and out of reach of Adrian’s eightyear-old son, he didn’t acknowledge his wife.
‘Gaaa-aaav!’ she called again.
About to serve, he looked over, annoyed.
‘What is it?’
‘We need help getting Mark’s chair inside.’
‘Oh. ok. Hi, Emma. Game’s almost finished. Hang ten.’ He treated me to a tight smile. ‘Just gotta’ destroy these guys quickly, ok?’
I turned around without saying anything, listening to the thumps and the shouts and a disappointed yell from one of their friends, ‘Faggot! Man, that was a faggot move!’ And then I walked back through the warm, tiled house to the open front door and the wheelchair outside, and waited there for Gavin to come.
Once Gavin had pushed the wheelchair up the stairs, through the living room and the kitchen and out to the back entertainment area, everyone greeted Mark. They grabbed his arm in welcome and gave him friendly but gentle punches on the shoulder.
‘Hey, man.’
‘Hey, bro’. How you doing? Happy birthday.’
Nobody except me had bought him a present.
Once we were safely seated, they then proceeded to ignore us. The men returned to their game and the women to talking about their cars and their children, while Mark and I sat in silence in the space allocated to us on the outskirts of the entertainment area. Mark was ok in his wheelchair, but the back legs of my chair kept sinking into the soft lawn.
I decided to go and get us a drink, which meant navigating my way around the seated group and past the volleyball game.
‘They’re all the same,’Tamlyn was saying to Bee-Bee as I passed by; a conversation about the failings of the domestic workers who did all their cleaning and cooking. ‘Always asking for money. It makes me ill some times.’
‘I know, I know. They’re all the same,’ Bee-Bee echoed.
I wanted to snap out something vicious in response to this. To ask what the worker’s basic salary was, and whether Tamlyn and her husband would like to try to live on what she earned.
I didn’t, though; but the conversation did distract my attention from the game on my left, and of course, as I walked past, the ball came flying in my direction, pursued by the biggest and beefiest of Gavin’s friends. He slammed into me and knocked me flying.
I sprawled onto the ground to the accompaniment of shouts from the players, my shoulder hitting the lawn first and my palms slipping over the wet grass.
Typical. Fucking typical.
I climbed to my feet, managing an artificial laugh as I refused his offer of a hand up, my body unhurt but my dignity severely dented. I brushed dirt from my legs and straightened my jacket, shook some wet grass clippings out of my hair and set off, more warily this time, towards the kitchen.
The fridge was plastered with a medley of colourful photographs. Kids, friends, cars. Photos of Bee-Bee and Gavin sitting by the pool; on a gamedrive somewhere; dressed up to go out for a special occasion. It was odd, but from the photos I would have thought them to be nicer people than they were. The smiling stills didn’t give much away. They didn’t show Gavin’s enormous ego, towering sky high from a cramped and narrow base, or Bee-Bee’s cold-hearted materialism, or their selfishness and selfcentredness.
Gavin had made good. He’d fulfilled the modern-day dream of becoming wealthy, but in the process he’d developed a tunnel vision that prevented him from seeing anything except himself first, his wife and kids second, and his money third.
I grabbed a Coke for Mark and a sparkling water for myself, and scrabbled through the cupboards until I unearthed a plastic cup, which would be easier for Mark to drink from.
I helped him to drink and dribble half the Coke and, an hour later, after thick grey smoke and accusing cries indicated that the meat had reached the inevitable state of ‘extremely well done’, I put some food on a plate and collected all the available table napkins that I could see. Feeding Mark was a messy business. I cut up some of the blackened steak into tiny cubes and gave them to him on a fork. I tried him with potato salad but he spat it out so I fed him some charred sausage instead.
Voices, laughter and music swirled around us. A party we were not part of. A gathering I couldn’t wait to leave.
‘I’m going to take Mark inside,’ I said to nobody in particular, after I’d struggled to get his jacket on. The afternoon was turning to evening. A cold wind was beginning to blow, and trapped immobile in his wheelchair Mark would get cold far sooner than the rest of us.
I manoeuvred his wheelchair onto the patio tiles and through the door. What was the time anyway, I wondered. Hopefully it was nearly six o’clock and the bus would soon be here for him.
I put my hand down to my pocket to check the time on my cellphone and that was when I realised with an icy shock that the phone wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there.
My heart rate accelerated to warp speed as I stood in the kitchen, rooted to the spot by the awful implications of what it would mean if my phone fell into the wrong hands. Just one call from a client and my secret would be out.
My mind raced, hope and despair crashing over each other like waves.
Maybe I’d put it in my bag … no, I knew I hadn’t, and a frantic rummage through confirmed this.
Perhaps I’d left it in the car … not possible, because I’d already been standing in the road when I’d taken the bus driver’s number.
Oh, God, it must have fallen out of my pocket when I was knocked over during the volleyball game. That was the only possible, logical solution. It was lying on the grass somewhere, hopefully undamaged, although probably trampled into the damp ground by somebody’s designer trainers. All I had to do was go back and look, and if necessary ask someone to call the number to help me locate it.
But as I turned to go, I heard Bee-Bee’s voice trilling from the entertainment area.
‘Eee-maaaa! Eee-maaaa!’
She came teetering into the kitchen, holding out in front of her, in her French-manicured fingers, my precious missing cellphone.
The relief I felt on seeing it was instant and shattering. Also, as it happened, premature.
‘Call for you!’ she announced, before handing it over.
I took it, my heart suddenly racing.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello?’ But the connection was dead.
‘Not there?’ she asked. ‘Oh, well, I’m sure he’ll ring back.’
I frowned across at her, suspicion suddenly looming.
‘You actually spoke to the caller?’
‘Well, of course,’ she said, rather impatiently. ‘I mean, I heard it ringing near my feet and I didn’t know who it belonged to. I answered and someone asked for Emma.’
For Emma. Not for the mistress. So I’d been lucky then – it must have been Simon calling. But why had he rung off?
‘I
didn’t know where you’d gone at first,’ Bee-Bee continued, ‘but then we worked out you were inside with Mark, so I came to find you.’
‘You told the caller where I was?’
A cold hand closed implacably around my heart. I stared down again at the phone’s blank screen as I took in the enormity of this disaster.
‘Yes. I told him to hold on, you were with your husband somewhere, I just had to find you.’
Christ …
With shaking hands I navigated the recent calls menu – it confirmed what I had dreaded most.
Just two minutes ago, Simon had called.
Bee-Bee must have seen my face because her own expression changed. The way she was looking at me she reminded me of a little girl who’d discovered a sweet shop had unexpectedly materialised around her.
‘Was that your boyfriend? Do you have a boyfriend, Emma?’
‘It was the transport man for Mark calling,’ I snapped, but I couldn’t meet her gaze for risk of giving away the lie. I wished she would go. Disappear. Leave the room instead of blocking the doorway while staring at me in fascination as if I was the latest character to come back from the dead on Days of our Lives.
Oh, the mess I had made. I needed to implement some damage control, and urgently, just as soon as I was out of range of my sister-in-law’s curiosity radar.
‘The van will be here in ten minutes,’ I told her, inwardly erupting with anxiety and the awfulness of what had transpired, because what I had done was unforgivable and right now, Simon would be loathing me for it.
He would have the same cold, panicked feeling in his stomach as I did, together with a sense of utter betrayal, feeling as if the world had tilted on its axis, jerking him away from everything he’d believed was real.
Right now, if I were him, I’d be frantically Googling ‘Emma Caine’ with hands that felt cold, hoping for a miracle but knowing deep down that his worst fears would be confirmed.
And they would. If you searched online, using some fairly basic information, you’d find my name, as well as evidence that I had indeed been married in St Luke’s Presbyterian Church – a big wedding that I’d never wanted but which had, unfortunately, been part of the deal. Mark and I had said our vows in front of God and man. There were probably even photos of me, wearing that unflattering sour-cream-coloured dress, grimacing in a stressed fashion at the camera and holding my new husband’s hand.
I was not going to look at Bee-Bee. I was not. I turned my gaze to the fridge door and breathed deeply, trying to control the panic I felt.
And that was when the photo caught my eye. I’d seen it when I’d looked earlier but I hadn’t really noticed it, not one picture among all the others.
It was a close-up head and shoulders snapshot of two women – Bee-Bee and a blonde who could have been her clone. Arm in arm, their heads were tilted towards each other and their vivid make-up and glamorous up-dos made me think they were heading off somewhere special.
But it was the blonde’s necklace that caught my attention.
A single strand of gleaming pearls. And, near the back of her neck but just visible thanks to the angle of the shot, I saw a fish-shaped golden clasp that I thought I recognised.
‘Are you sure you don’t have a …’ Bee-Bee asked again, but I interrupted her.
‘Who is she?’ I asked in a small voice, pointing to the woman in the photo. At that stage, in my shocked state, all I felt was confusion.
And then I saw Bee-Bee do an absolutely classic double-take, and it was her flustered reaction, more than the familiar glimpse of the pearls I’d just seen, that confirmed my suspicions.
‘Um – er …’ She blinked, rapidly and fast. Her gaze darted around the room, but for once Gaaa-viiin was not even without shouting distance.
‘She’s just someone I know from school,’ she finished, developing an absorbing interest in the kitchen surface below her twining hands.
‘Really?’ My voice was unsteady. ‘I do believe we have a mutual friend.’
‘Oh, maybe you’ve met somewhere …’
‘Bee-Bee, she’s wearing my pearls.’
My sister-in-law would have been a terrible poker player. Her mouth opened and closed as if desperately trying to voice the lie her brain hadn’t yet been able to fabricate.
‘It’s not what you think, Emma.’ She offered a wobbly smile.
‘You make me sick,’ I spat. ‘The lot of you. I’m going home. Make sure Mark’s outside, ready to travel, when his transport comes at six, and that you have the cash to pay the driver.’
I unhooked my bag from the back of the wheelchair. Swinging it over my shoulder I marched past her, just about shoving her out of the way as I headed for the door, and freedom.
My house was a half-hour drive from Gavin’s but when I got home, I couldn’t remember a minute of the journey, or what route I’d taken to get there. All I knew was that I was finally pulling into the driveway, my one-and-a-half headlights cutting through the growing darkness, sickened by the disaster that had had occurred.
I let myself in under the watchful gaze of Sparkle and Cat Four. Bob the Cat was inside, asleep on the couch. He jumped off rather stiffly when he saw me and shambled over to greet me.
Then I took my cellphone out and dialled Simon’s number, not knowing what I should say, hoping that when he answered I would be able to stammer out a reasonably coherent explanation.
But he didn’t answer.
I sat at the dining-room table with my elbows propped on its wooden surface and the phone pressed against my ear and listened to it ring and ring and ring.
I left a short message: ‘Please call me. I need to explain.’
Then I walked around the house, picking things up and putting them down again, opening the fridge and closing it, with a dreadful chill in the pit of my stomach that grew worse and worse as the minutes passed, and then the hours. I went upstairs and took the box with the artificial pearls out of my bedroom cupboard and opened it and looked at the necklace again. I could not understand how I could ever have confused it with the real one, and I wondered exactly when Mark had substituted the fake and when his betrayal had happened.
I knew I shouldn’t call Simon again but I did, at nine that night, just before I got into bed. Again, the phone rang to voicemail but this time I did not leave a message.
I lay in bed listening to the clock tick the minutes away, the occasional noise of a passing car, the far-off snorting of one of the horses.
I was filled with despair.
Chapter 33
Simon didn’t call the next day, or the day after that, and my anguish slowly congealed into a terrible resignation.
I had lost him, and in the most awful way possible, through being exposed for the fraud that I was. Through a breach of trust.
I should have told him the truth of my situation long before that Sunday. He might have understood if I had explained it properly. But I had been too fearful that he wouldn’t, and so I had done nothing, leaving him to find out for himself in the worst imaginable way.
I thought of phoning him again but decided it was pointless. He knew I had called. Then I considered more desperate measures – tracking him down at his home, giving a false name, getting him on the phone or else arriving at his work to confront him.
In the end I did none of those. The bald truth was that I was a paid dominatrix with whom he’d enjoyed a few brief sessions – and by pursuing him further I would be breaching not only trust but client confidentiality as well.
I could not do it.
The sense of loss I felt at his silence was ripping my heart apart, but I had no choice but to endure the pain, given that it was entirely of my own making.
For the next two weeks, I focused on my work as much as was possible. I made some adjustments to the website. I put everything I had into the sessions with my clients, even though every time I walked into the dungeon I thought of Simon, and what we had shared there, and about the twisted path down which it h
ad led us.
On Monday morning, I got a phone call that surprised me.
‘Mistress?’ The voice was smoky and well spoken and somehow familiar. ‘I am in the area. Could I come and see you?’
I was so surprised by the caller’s voice that I thought I must have been mistaken about his identity. But sure enough, when the black Prado eased its way through the gate, the person who eased himself out of the driver’s seat was indeed the man I’d thought he was.
Tugging at the cuffs of his perfectly tailored suit jacket, Mr Mashaba strode confidently up to my dungeon entrance.
‘Good to see you again.’ He greeted me warmly, enveloping my hand in his as we gave each other the traditional African handshake.
‘What brings you out this way?’ I asked.
‘I had a meeting at the conference centre down the road, and realised I was driving back right past your office.’
It was the first time that the humble folly had been called an office.
‘You know,’ Mashaba continued, fiddling with his Rolex and looking down at his cufflinks rather than straight across at me, ‘after I left you the last time I was shocked by what happened. Shocked and baffled and amused. But more and more, as I think about what you do, I am intrigued.’
‘Is that so?’ I asked, rather taken aback.
‘I would like to try it again, only I must confess that I am not able to handle a lot of pain. But the idea of a powerful woman ordering me around … performing tasks for her … maybe being told off for my mistakes … I don’t know why, but I am starting to feel I need it.’
For the first time in what felt like eons I wanted to smile.
I couldn’t, of course. Instead I gave him a stern look and said, ‘Well, we can arrange something that will fulfil your needs, I am sure. But we will start very slowly.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘And you have to understand, Mr Mashaba, that my word is law. I will not push you past your limits, but you will be forced to do what I tell you to. Even if that includes a light spanking. Because, sometimes, that is what I like to do.’
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