If You Knew Her

by Emily Elgar

  My eyes don’t open again until after dark. My head is resting slightly to the left, so I can just see the bottom right corner of Cassie’s bed and a section of floor, made shiny by the light next to Cassie’s bed. It must be late; Paula often opens the curtains between Cassie and me around midnight as it’s easier for her to keep an eye on us that way. I’m counting along with my breath, in, out, in, out trying to trick my mind to sleep, to slip away to my dream again, to the outside sun and Lucy’s little hand in my own, when I hear the ward door swoosh open. Thinking it’s a nurse I go back to my breath. But then I realise something’s missing. Whoever just came in isn’t bustling around like the nurses always do. In fact, they’re moving so quietly I can only just make out the lightest tap and squeal as they walk down the hard rubber floor. They pause at the end of the ward, before they start moving again and a shadow comes to hover in my view, a head, stretched long and weird by the light behind it.

  Maybe it’s a doc from another ward.

  The figure moves to the foot of Cassie’s bed. I can only see him from the hips down. He’s wearing jeans; they bag around his legs like extra skin. He keeps his weight to his left, slightly wonky, nurturing his right. He moves gingerly towards her and out of my view.

  I’ve never seen a doc in jeans, not here.

  All I can see now is his shadow flickering in and out of my view, like a trapped flame. He’s moving, he’s doing something to Cassie and I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything but I imagine him pulling the tube out of her head, Cassie’s blood spraying the ceiling bright poppy-crimson, my screams echoing, useless around my body. I long to turn away, to disappear in a puff of smoke, but this is it, this is what I must endure for being so fucking pointless, forced to watch but not quite see, whatever cruel thing he’s doing to her, to them, prone and vulnerable on the sacrificial slab.

  A phlegmy splutter from either Ellen or George and suddenly the shadow stops flickering. From behind her curtain Ellen shrieks, ‘No!’, like an angry gull. ‘Not that!’

  Ellen!

  My heart seems to find itself again, slotting back into a rhythm as the shadow takes on form and the jeans flash back in my view.

  Again, shout again, Ellen!

  An alarm, from George, starts tunelessly screeching in a minor key. I will one of my machines to join the panic, to help get him far, far away from her. He moves too quickly; there’s a tuneless clatter as he clumsily kicks a stainless steel trolley. My heart monitor starts beeping. We sound like an angry flock of birds, screeching at the intruder. It’s too noisy and my heart is still flapping like a dying fish in my chest, so I can’t hear him leave, but I imagine him, trying to move quickly, dragging his leg as though he’s been shot, away from the ward.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Paula bustles onto the ward. I imagine her shaking her head at the disturbed tray, and hear the wheels whine as she rolls it back to its place near Cassie.

  She tends to the other patient before coming to me last. She dabs my eyes with saline and finally lifts my head up. My eyes leap on Cassie. She’s still there; she’s still alive. But she doesn’t look serene any more. Her facial muscles aren’t relaxed; they’re twisted, her mouth round, petrified in a noiseless scream and the truth hits me, clean as though I’d cut myself on the sharpness of the realisation, that even here, Cassie and her baby aren’t safe.

  9

  Cassie

  ‘Must be left here,’ Cassie says, squinting down at the mess of lines on the map and looking up quickly, and down again, trying to spot some correlation between the bushy little lane they’re bouncing down in Jonny’s van and the capillary-like lines on the map that is spread out across her legs, her bare feet resting on the glove compartment in front of her. She feels Jonny turn to look at her, before he turns back to the road, still smiling.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ she asks.

  Jonny’s smile broadens behind his sunglasses as he says, ‘You’ve got absolutely no idea where we are, do you? There is no left here.’

  Cassie drops her head again, frowning down at the map as if it lied to her.

  ‘Jesus!’ she exclaims. ‘Why call it Brighton when it’s clearly the arse end of nowhere?’

  ‘Good point, although I’m not sure the “Arse End Food and Drink Festival” would draw huge crowds.’

  Cassie laughs. The boxes of jam slide in the back as Jonny swings the van, a sharp right down another small lane, hedgerows swaying with May flowers.

  ‘All of these lanes look identical,’ Cassie complains.

  ‘Let’s just go with our gut, can’t be far away,’ Jonny says as Cassie leans back on the headrest and turns to look at Jonny. He’s in his denim cut-offs again. He threw his flip-flops in the back of the van before he started driving barefoot; even those flimsy things were too restrictive for him. His arms are already a burnt-caramel colour, the hair on them as light as spiders’ webs, a slightly darker patch of hair pokes up from the front of his faded T-shirt.

  The world goes lightly with Jonny. He says it’s because he spent too long in a suit, rushing through his life like it was something he had to endure. Now, it’s as though he’s come to an agreement with the world; I accept you if you accept me. Jonny says people always over-complicated everything. Cassie thinks of Jack. He hadn’t slept well again last night; he was out of bed and hunched over his spreadsheets just like the last few nights, the glow from his computer screen highlighting his face sickly and anaemic. He says issues at work are too complicated to explain, so he just turns back to his computer, and doesn’t even try. She hasn’t seen him like this before; his stress has a grandeur, an importance that Cassie doesn’t know how to penetrate.

  She talked to Jonny about it, on a ‘research trip’ to a chilli farm. Jonny had pulled his sunglasses off his face, nestled the arms behind his ears and looked straight at Cassie as he’d said, ‘Well, it seems to me you have a choice, Cas. You can either confront him and say you need to work together to change things.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or you accept that this is a part of him for now and bring him a whisky when he can’t sleep.’

  Jonny makes everything sound so simple. Problem is, though, that somewhere in the journey between leaving Jonny and going home to Jack, Jonny’s quiet logic seemed to twist and tangle, like a thin chain necklace, so even when she had used Jonny’s words to explain to Jack how she felt, she’d sounded facile, childish. Jack had just frowned at her, rubbed his temples and turned back to his spreadsheets, and she’d apologised for bringing it up and had left him to his work. It wasn’t like that with Jonny, though; he seemed to understand without her having to explain.

  ‘Ah ha!’ Jonny sits up in the driver’s seat. ‘Do you see what I see?’

  Ahead of them, there’s the small Lego-like block of the racecourse building, and a plastic sign telling them they had, finally, arrived at BRIGHTON FOOD AND DRINK FESTIVAL.

  Cassie picks up the map from her legs, exposing her thighs, and without bothering to concertina the map back into its folds, she throws it into the back, knowing Jonny won’t care, and he grins as she throws her arms into the air, victorious, and says, ‘We made it! Arse End Festival!’

  They pull into a small field to find a space to park. There aren’t any close to the entrance so they have to drive further into the car park. Cassie spots a familiar pink scarf and silvery bob. She tells Jonny to slow down as she sees Charlotte walking across the car park towards the festival entrance.

  ‘Charlotte!’ Cassie calls out of the window. ‘You’re here early!’

  Charlotte looks around her, uncertain whether she did just hear her name or not, before she sees Cassie waving from the van. Charlotte holds the tablecloth she’s sewn for Cassie a little tighter as she walks towards them.

  ‘Oh, hi, Cas,’ she says, her eyes glancing over her daughter-in-law’s bare legs, her feet still resting on the dashboard. ‘I got a lift with Maggie – you know, the hairdresser? She’s helping on a cake stall. Her
e, I’ve got your tablecloth.’ She raises the red-and-blue striped cloth she finished seaming last night. Cassie slowly lowers her legs.

  ‘Charlotte, you’re amazing,’ Cassie says, lifting her bottom to tug her denim skirt back over her legs. She feels a shock, warmth, as Jonny’s eyes flick down to her thighs again and bounce straight back up to meet Charlotte’s gaze.

  Jonny leans forward in his seat, hands on the steering wheel, past Cassie and calls out brightly, ‘Hi, Charlotte, we’ll just park up and be right with you.’

  Charlotte nods and takes a step back. As she watches the van pull forward, her thumbnail flicks against the fabric in her arms, and she feels the skin on her eyelid start to pulse, an old tic. It hasn’t done that in years, and she feels a familiar queasiness in her lower stomach as she watches the van bounce across the field. She knows what it means immediately; she’s worried for her son.

  Jonny hauls most of the boxes inside to the two trestle tables in the far corner of the main vestibule, while Cassie registers with the organisers and starts setting out her display. They know their roles now; this is the fourth event for Farm Jams, and Jonny’s been by Cassie’s side helping for each one. Cassie’s careful to balance some of her newer, bolder inventions like chilli chocolate spread and elderflower preserve with old favourites like raspberry jam and apricot. She positions the hand-labelled pots on the table in their kiln jars like tiny, sweet soldiers.

  Over the last couple of weeks Cassie has gone from eating mouthfuls of jam with a spoon straight from the jar to feeling like she’d puke at the thought of even smelling any jam. She must have overdone it, like listening to one song too many times. She’ll get Jonny to open the taster pots today.

  Cassie thought Charlotte was going to offer to help set up, but she hasn’t seen her since Charlotte handed Cassie the tablecloth in the car park and said she was going to see if Maggie needed help.

  Cassie looks around the space. People are slowly starting to trickle in, but there’s no sign of Charlotte. She heard a rumour that representatives from Flavour Awards were going to be coming today, incognito. Charlotte wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye, would she? Cassie had hoped Charlotte would report back to Jack, tell him how good the stall looks, how hard Cassie’s worked to make it look professional but still keeping the cottage, home-made feel.

  ‘Right, that’s the last one.’ Jonny, back in his flip-flops, shuffles towards Cassie with another cardboard box. He lowers it carefully on the floor behind the trestle table and wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist.

  She briefly touches his back, feels his muscles move under her hands. She doesn’t say thank you; he knows she’s grateful, just like he’s grateful to Cassie.

  He swigs from his bottle of water. Cassie took a sip from the same bottle earlier and almost spat it out, the water had a salty, chalky taste like clay. Jonny must have dropped an Alka Seltzer in it before leaving home.

  He’d been on the phone last night to Lorna, his wife in London. He always drinks too much when he talks to Lorna. Cassie knows things have been worse for Jonny since Cassie answered Jonny’s home phone while he was out walking Dennis two days ago. Lorna went mental on the phone, called Cassie a bitch and a marriage wrecker before Cassie hung up and left the phone off the hook so Lorna couldn’t call back. Cassie had been left shaken, but Jonny held her, reminded her that Lorna’s unwell. He said it wasn’t Cassie’s fault as he poured her a glass of wine.

  ‘You didn’t see Charlotte anywhere, did you?’ she asks Jonny.

  ‘Not since we arrived,’ Jonny says, looking either side of them, as though he expects Charlotte to be hiding near them.

  ‘OK.’ Cassie walks around their stall. ‘I just realised I left the flyers in the van. Can I have the keys?’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Jonny says.

  ‘No, no, I’ll go, I want some air, I’m feeling sick again.’

  Jonny throws Cassie the keys and grins at her. ‘Great catch,’ he says with a wink, as her hands close around the keys in mid-air.

  Outside Cassie checks Maggie’s stall and the ladies’ toilet, before she looks in the pop-up coffee shop. Her mother-in-law is seated on one of the rickety-looking tables, her hand clasped around a polystyrene cup. Her eyes are cloudy, like she’s lost somewhere in her memory. She only looks up, slightly startled, when Cassie puts her hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Charlotte, I’ve been looking for you! You OK?’

  ‘Oh, Cas, sorry. I just wanted to have a quick sit down.’

  ‘OK, well, I’ve just got to nip to the van quickly,’ Cassie says. ‘You won’t leave without coming to see our stall, will you?’

  Charlotte picks up her cup, drains the last of her coffee and says, ‘I’m finished anyway, I’ll come with you now.’ Charlotte stands and the two women walk side by side back to the van. The grass is flattened, tattooed with tread from tyres. A mood Cassie hasn’t met before hangs around Charlotte today like a fog; she doesn’t know how to lift it, so it’s a relief when Charlotte speaks first.

  ‘What’s the latest on Jonny and his wife? Jack said she’s still in London?’

  Cassie turns to look at Charlotte, but her mother-in-law keeps her eyes fixed forward. Cassie can’t read her expression under her sunglasses.

  ‘She’s not very well. It became impossible for them to live together any more, so that was a big part of Jonny’s decision to move down here.’

  ‘What do you mean? Surely if she’s not well she needs her husband more than ever?’

  Cassie looks at her mother-in-law. Sometimes she can be quite unsubtle.

  ‘This is confidential, but she’s mentally unwell, Charlotte. She became violent towards Jonny, started stalking one of his female colleagues at work before she was sectioned.’

  ‘Why? Was he having an affair with his colleague?’ Charlotte asks, a clipped coolness in her voice.

  Cassie frowns; Charlotte’s usually so astute.

  ‘Charlotte, I really don’t think now …’ Cassie was about to defend Jonny, but Charlotte has suddenly stopped walking.

  Cassie walks back a couple of paces to stand opposite her.

  ‘Don’t be so naive, Cassie.’ The older woman pulls her sunglasses off her face like they’re burning her suddenly. ‘Either he lied to his wife or he didn’t.’

  Cassie realises she’s never heard her gentle mother-in-law angry before.

  ‘Where is all this coming from, Charlotte?’ Cassie shakes her head, she’s only ever seen Charlotte’s eye swell with happy tears. ‘You seem really upset.’

  Charlotte raises her eyes to something in the distance, over Cassie’s shoulder; she squints as her eyelid starts pounding again.

  ‘Cassie, look, I’m going to tell you something, because I trust you and because I think you should know so you can maybe understand my concerns about Jonny.’

  Cassie feels the fog lift slightly between them. Charlotte trusts her. She’s OK. She nods and waits for her mother-in-law to keep talking. Charlotte’s shoulders drop slightly, as if finally giving in to an invisible weight.

  ‘After Mike died, a woman came to our house. She told me she’d been Mike’s lover. That they were together on and off for years. She came because, after he died, she found out she wasn’t the only one, that Mike had been having affairs with other women.’

  Charlotte pauses, her lips purse, pulling together as if they’ve been sewn by invisible thread. She breathes out before she starts talking again. It sounds sore.

  ‘She told me because she knew now how it felt to be the other woman, how it felt to be lied to for so long. She thought she was doing the right thing.’ Charlotte shakes her head, a laugh dry and mirthless sticks in her throat like a shard of glass.

  ‘The truth is, I think I knew already. Some deep, fundamental part of me knew he wasn’t fully mine.’ Silence swells around them.

  ‘Does Jack …’

  Charlotte’s eyes finally lock on to Cassie’s face.

  ‘Jack doesn’t know a
thing about it. I hated that woman for making me lie to Jack even more than I hated her for what she did with my husband. Jack had already lost his dad … had found him dead, for god’s sake. He wanted to believe his dad was a hero. I wanted to keep his memory perfect; I saw no reason to take that away from him. I stand by that, Cas. I don’t think it would have helped anyone for him to know then and it certainly won’t help him to know now.’

  A couple of tears finally breach down Charlotte’s face. Cassie puts her hand on her shoulder and, feeling no resistance there, pulls her mother-in-law towards her. She’s glad Charlotte lets her wrap her arms around her. She hopes she can feel the love, the admiration Cassie feels for her. Cassie holds her. Charlotte releases her arms first and searches up her sleeve for a tissue, which she dabs underneath her eyes.

  Cassie wants to know why Charlotte’s telling her all this, why now in a grass car park on a Friday morning. She wants to know, but she doesn’t want to ask. So instead she takes hold of Charlotte’s hand, the tissue bunching between their palms and she says what she had planned to say to Jack.

  ‘Charlotte, you know, because Jack’s been working so hard, Jonny’s been helping me with the jam. We’ve become friends, that’s a … I …’ but she can’t finish what she was going to say, because suddenly the car park has started spinning and she reaches out for her mother-in-law to steady her. She hears Charlotte says, ‘Cassie, Cas? What’s happening?’, before the wave of nausea subsides and she’s left with a crippling exhaustion so complete that it makes her knees buckle and she thinks she could collapse and fall asleep right here in the middle of the car park if Charlotte wasn’t holding her up.

  She wishes she could tell her mother-in-law to get Jonny, but she knows that would just make everything worse. So instead Charlotte helps Cassie into the passenger seat of Jonny’s van.

  Charlotte’s about to sit behind the wheel next to her when Cassie says, ‘Charlotte, sorry to ask, but would you mind going to help Jonny? I’ll be fine in a few minutes, but I just don’t want him to be left on his own.’ A strong wave of nausea undulates from her stomach again; she feels her forehead prick with sweat.