Friend Request

by Laura Marshall

  I should know better than anyone that things aren’t always what they seem. It’s like when someone tells a story about something that happened when you were there, and it’s not at all how you remember it. It might be they’re telling it a certain way for effect, to make people laugh, or to impress someone. But sometimes that’s simply how they remember it. For them, it’s the truth. That’s when it becomes hard for you to know whether what you remember is the truth, or whether it’s just your version of it.

  I realise I’ve been trying to hold on to the idea of Sam as a decent person because he’s Henry’s father, but Sam has lied to me before, and lied well. Even after I found that text from Catherine on his phone he continued to lie, until it just wasn’t possible any more and he left me to be with her. All the lies, the betrayals, the many ways in which he hurt me crowd in on me, stifling me. The times he held me down and it became more than a game, the times he put his hands to my throat playing out a fantasy that wasn’t mine.

  I wrap my arms around myself, although it’s warm in the car. I’ve spent so long sitting in darkness, lying not only to others but to myself too. But the door is open now. Just a crack, but it’s open. And the light is streaming in.

  Chapter 37

  2016

  As Sam parks outside my flat, reversing into the tiniest of spaces, all I can think of is getting away from him. My mind is veering from one thing to another and I can’t think about what to do next, what I’m going to do about this strange new reality that I find myself facing. I concentrate on getting Henry into bed, on how that is going to feel, that moment when I lock the door behind me and we’re safe, and I can think.

  As soon as the handbrake is on, I’m unbuckling my seatbelt and opening the door.

  ‘Thanks very much. I’ll just grab Henry and get him into bed, and we’ll speak soon, OK?’ My voice sounds high and tinny, completely unlike my normal voice.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll bring him in. He’s so heavy when he’s asleep.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I squeak. I clear my throat. ‘It’s fine,’ I repeat, lower and calmer. ‘I can manage.’

  ‘I know you can, but I’d like to help you.’

  Before I can reply, Sam is out of the car and unstrapping Henry. He lifts him swiftly out of the seat. Henry’s eyes half-open and then close again, his head heavy on Sam’s shoulder. Sam shifts him onto one hip and heads up the garden path without speaking. I have no choice but to follow, rummaging in my bag for the key.

  I open the door and stand aside to let Sam and Henry in. For a few wild seconds, I think about running, shouting for help – surely Sam wouldn’t hurt Henry – but it seems ridiculous and anyway, where would I go? I don’t know any of the neighbours. And as I look at Henry’s sleeping face over Sam’s back, I know that it was never really an option. Everything I thought I knew has shifted, like coming into your bedroom to find that someone has moved everything very slightly out of its normal place. I can’t leave Henry alone with Sam; I don’t know what he is capable of. I follow them in and close the front door behind me.

  Sam goes straight into Henry’s room and puts him on the bed. Carefully he takes off his shoes and school uniform and eases him under the duvet dressed just in his Thomas the Tank Engine pants. Something about the way he does it makes me wonder if I’ve got this all wrong. Surely the person who knows that there’s no point putting pyjamas on our son because he’ll only wake in the night and take them off, can’t be the person who has done… I’m not even sure what it is he’s done. I can’t articulate it to myself, even inside my own head.

  Sam comes out, leaving the door open a crack as we always do.

  ‘I think we need a drink after all that, don’t you?’

  Before I’ve had a chance to answer, he heads straight down the hall to the kitchen and opens the fridge, taking a half-drunk bottle of white wine out of the door. I follow him into the room.

  ‘Look, Sam, I’m tired. Can we maybe do this another time?’ Just leave, please leave.

  He takes two glasses from the top cupboard. I vow to completely reorganise the kitchen tomorrow if… if… my mind tries to finish that sentence but I close it down.

  ‘I don’t want a drink. Please, Sam, I just want to go to sleep. Let’s do this another time.’

  I step forward boldly and take the glasses out of his hand and put them on the kitchen worktop.

  ‘It’s late. I’m exhausted. Please?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘OK, if that’s what you want.’

  I follow him back down the hall, hardly daring to hope that it’s nearly over, that he hasn’t realised he’s slipped up mentioning Nathan. A minute more and I’ll be locking the door behind him, and then I will be able to think.

  He puts his hand on the Yale handle, poised to push it down.

  Come on, I will him silently. Open the door.

  His hand stops. He turns to look at me. Just open the door.

  ‘I can’t, Louise.’ His voice breaks, and on the door handle I can see his fingers shaking.

  ‘What do you mean? Can’t what?’ Breathe, just breathe.

  ‘I can’t leave. Not yet. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can.’ I try to control the rise in my voice, to disguise the fear, the panic.

  ‘No, it’s no good.’ With a dart of pain that surprises me, I see there are tears in his eyes. In fifteen years together I never once saw him cry. He looks down. ‘You know, don’t you? Because of what I said in the car, about Nathan Drinkwater?’

  I look down too, at the whorls and knots in the oak floorboards that we chose together, the dust gathering in the corners by the door mat.

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ My voice is a rasp, constricted by the muscles in my throat, which are seizing up, barely leaving room for the air to flow in and out.

  ‘You do, I can see it in your eyes. I told you at the reunion that I’d never heard of Nathan Drinkwater, and now you know I was lying. You’re frightened of me. You know.’ He’s not angry. In fact I’ve never seen him look so desperately sad, and the love and despair on his face screw the knot inside me even tighter. I sway slightly, my head spinning.

  He reaches out to touch me but I jerk my arm away. His face falls.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he says. ‘Let me explain.’

  He doesn’t wait for an answer, but walks back to the kitchen, his tread heavy and slow, reluctant. I hesitate outside Henry’s room, his nightlight glowing through the crack where Sam left the door ajar. I gently pull it closed and follow Sam down the hall on legs that will barely carry me.

  Sam has taken the wine bottle from where he left it on the worktop and is sitting at the table pouring two glasses. He gestures for me to sit down next to him, so I do, my body heavy, filled with lead.

  ‘Remember when we first got together, Louise?’ he says, twisting the stem of his wine glass. ‘We were so happy, weren’t we?’

  I would agree with him no matter what he said, but this one is easy. Yes, we were happy. For the first time in my life, I was with someone who knew what I had done and still loved me. It lessened the burden of guilt somehow. When he kissed me outside that pub in Clapham, I felt lighter than I had done in years.

  ‘It was such a relief to be with you. You loved me so completely, so… innocently.’ It seems a strange choice of word considering the things we had done together. He must have seen something of this on my face, because he insists, ‘It was innocent, Louise. Or maybe pure is a better word. The things we did together, we did out of love. You wanted it as much as I did, didn’t you? I never forced you, did I?’

  He is almost pleading. I shake my head. No, he never forced me. Or perhaps more accurately, I never said no. A shiver runs through me, revulsion laced queasily with the remnants of desire. At first it had been liberating to be released from the confines of the vanilla sex I’d had with previous boyfriends. There was something about the letting go, the relinquishing of control, that excited me, freed me. But there were times, especially aft
er Henry was born, where things went further than I was comfortable with. I thought it was because I’d become a mother, that I’d changed. But I didn’t say. I never said because I could feel him slipping away from me by then and I didn’t want to give him a reason to leave.

  ‘I didn’t want to hurt Sophie, I swear.’ Sam turns the wine glass around and around in his hand, the liquid slopping about dangerously.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I say, tasting bile. Oh God, what did he do?

  ‘I just wanted her to be quiet, to stop saying those things, things that someone else might have overheard. But she wouldn’t shut up, she just kept on saying it, saying she’d seen me with Maria at the leavers’ party, asking me what happened, if Maria had said anything, if I said anything to her. I kept telling Sophie it was nothing, nothing happened, that I left Maria in the woods, that she was fine the last time I saw her.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean you left Maria in the woods? When?’

  He doesn’t answer, just twists the wine glass even more furiously.

  ‘Sam?’ My need to know is overriding the fear I feel. Am I on the brink of finding out the answer to the question that has been clawing at me since I was sixteen years old? ‘Is this something to do with Matt?’ I think of Matt’s eyes boring into mine at the reunion, his insistence that we should all keep quiet. A wild hope surges in me that what Sam is about to tell me is that he has been covering up for Matt all these years.

  ‘Matt? No, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s just worried that it’ll come out that he supplied the E.’ My heart sinks. ‘It was hard,’ he goes on, placing his glass carefully on the table. ‘Seeing you still so torn up about it, all those years later. Knowing that with just a few words I could put an end to your guilt, your shame. But also knowing that it would mean the end of you and me. The end of us.’

  I stare at him, wanting yet not wanting him to continue. He takes my hands in his, enfolding them, his thumbs circling my palms over and over. He puts his face in my hands, so that I can’t see his eyes as he speaks, the words rushing out, unstoppable, his hot breath on my hands.

  ‘You didn’t kill Maria, Louise. I did.’

  Chapter 38

  Louise doesn’t talk to anyone about the details of her and Sam’s sex life. She is too ashamed of her response to being dominated, pinned down, helpless. She did tell Polly a bit when things got bad after Henry was born, but even she doesn’t know the full story.

  When Louise was a teenager, and into her early twenties too, it was all the rage to talk to your girlfriends about the intimate details of your sex life – the mechanics, the quirks, the sounds, the things that went wrong. Nothing was off limits. But then something happened. Around the time she and Sam got together, her friends started to think about getting married, and actually to do so, and she found that those conversations tailed off. Was it because they had made their choice, and couldn’t admit to anything that was less than perfect? Not so easy to laugh at the sexual foibles of someone you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with. Not so funny any more.

  The conversations where she might have been able to bring up her own sex life dwindled away, and she didn’t want to be the one to introduce the topic. She would have liked to have had someone to confide in, to check how far from the norm their sex life was, especially in the last couple of years when things got really out of hand. She reads obsessively on the subject, googling BDSM and rape fantasies, reassured when she sees studies that say this falls within the ‘normal range’ of fantasies, horrified when she reads articles linking it to real sexual violence.

  Things got worse the second time Sam was passed over for promotion, and then again after Henry was born. He thought that motherhood would level things out, that he would become the important one. But Louise’s business went from strength to strength and he was left behind. But of course she could never leave him behind. Not him, the only one who knew her. If only Louise had known what he had done, how very different things might have been. Who might she have become without a lifetime spent building a wall around her to make sure no one could get in? Of standing on cliffs or bridges wondering what it would be like to just give in, to step forward and not have to be any more?

  Sam always felt the need to prove himself, to prove that he was still the dominant force in her life. He should have known that he didn’t have to prove anything to her because she loved him so completely, had always loved him since the days when she watched him flirting with Sophie Hannigan in the school cafeteria. Louise had always thought there was nothing he could do that would make her stop loving him. Nothing at all.

  Chapter 39

  2016

  I am totally rigid, my stomach drawn in so tight that it’s holding the rest of my body together. I could be made of glass, hard and smooth and cold to the touch. One move could shatter me. I keep perfectly still on my chair, hyper-aware that Henry is asleep only metres away.

  ‘What happened?’ I don’t sound like me, my voice thin, barely denting the silence that fills the kitchen, this room where we spent so many nights talking, eating, laughing. Carefully, I pull my hands from his and place them, trembling, in my lap.

  ‘Do you remember that night, Louise?’

  Of course I remember. He knows I do.

  ‘I was good, wasn’t I?’ He sounds like Henry, seeking my approval. ‘To start with? I had you alone in that classroom and I could have pushed you much further, but I knew you were scared so I stopped. I was good. You remember, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Urgent hands on green satin, his fingers digging into my flesh harder and harder, his tongue in my mouth, everything hot and blurred. And then me, alone in a classroom, my back against the cold wall, cursing myself for my inexperience, my frigidity.

  ‘You wanted me, but you were scared. You didn’t deserve to be forced, Louise. Later on you enjoyed our games as much as I did, didn’t you?’ The pleading tone is back and I nod, the reflex to make him feel better still strong in me. ‘But you weren’t ready, not then.’

  I remember how humiliated I felt when he left me in the classroom, and I am surprised to feel a pang of sympathy for my teenage self. I’ve never felt sympathy for her before, only guilt and disgust and shame.

  ‘But Maria, she was different. I’d heard the stories about her, we all had. The things she had done. I didn’t need to feel bad about doing anything to her, because there was nothing she hadn’t done before.’

  I want to tell him they were all lies, those stories, made up by someone else who had thought he could take what he wanted from Maria Weston, but I am frightened of him now, so I say nothing. If I let him talk, help him to believe that whatever he did wasn’t his fault, maybe he will go.

  ‘I saw her leaving the hall, stumbling and clutching at the doorframe for support, putting a hand to her mouth. I followed her down the back path towards the woods. She was panicking, didn’t know what was happening to her, needed to get away. I wanted to make sure she was OK. After all, I knew what she had taken and she didn’t. I was looking out for her.’ He turns his anxious face to me.

  I try to look reassuring. I nod; yes, you were looking out for her.

  ‘Just before she got to the woods, I saw her trip and fall so I called out. She turned, and I ran to catch up, asked her if she was OK. That was what Sophie saw. She’d been watching Maria too, following her, to see if she was coming up on the E.’

  ‘Sophie saw her that night? She never said.’ I think of Sophie when I went to see her at her flat, laughing about the friend request. What, the girl who drowned? Her studied unconcern must have masked a fear and guilt that matched mine.

  ‘I didn’t know either, not until she called me after you’d been to see her at her flat.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell the police, at the time?’

  ‘She was like you, wasn’t she?’ says Sam. ‘So scared of what you had done, of what would happen if anyone found out. She just thought it was better to say nothing at all.
That was all Sophie had seen, after all. Me and Maria, walking down to the woods. When we spoke on the phone before the reunion, I thought I’d persuaded her that it was nothing, that she should forget it. But then at the reunion, she kept going on and on about it. She was frightened, rattled by the Facebook messages; she wouldn’t leave it alone. I think she really thought there was a chance Maria was still alive, and that I knew something about it. She was drunk, and her voice was getting louder and louder. People were starting to look round, to wonder what we were talking about. She was going to cause a scene. I had to get her out of there.’

  ‘Where…’ The words stick in my throat. I breathe deeply and try again. ‘Where did you go?’