The Friend

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘Harmon—’ I begin, but before I even get to the ‘y’ of her name, she has jumped up and stomped her way upstairs. Once at the top, she stomps to her bedroom and slams the door so loudly that part of the house shakes.

  ‘Thank you, Gareth,’ I mutter. ‘Thank you very, very much.’

  SUNDAY

  Anaya

  11:45 a.m.

  Do you fancy coming to the gym with me later? Give yourself a proper workout? A xx

  11:50 a.m.

  Depends … is this really a trip to the gym or a euphemism for doing something other than working out? Cece x

  11:51 a.m.

  No, it’s a euphemism for going to the gym. Are you coming? A xx

  11:52 a.m.

  Yeah, sure, why not? Cece x

  Cece

  10:30 p.m. With an arm that feels like it has tripled in weight, I tug back the covers and go to climb in. I am a fit woman. But a tiny bit of time at the gym earlier today has turned me into a wreck. It was fifty minutes. Fifty whole minutes with Anaya. I collapse onto the bed and starfish. Except I’m not starfishing. Not at all. But I can feel the mattress underneath me, moving and shifting so it can comfort and hold me, caress away those aches that Anaya’s idea put there. She texted and asked if I fancied going to the gym. After yesterday’s Gareth debacle, I thought pumping iron was just what I needed to get my head straight. Harmony was barely talking to me, Sol was talking less to me than that, so it was only really Ore and Oscar who noticed when I said I was going to the gym.

  While I was there with Anaya, I got the impression that she hadn’t told the others she was meeting up with me and she wanted to tell me something important. She didn’t, but she wanted to.

  I have to get up, I have to go and brush my teeth. I have to get up, I have to go and brush my teeth. If I say it many, many times it will, of course, happen. My body will magically move itself to the bathroom and I will find my toothbrush in my hand, moving up and down, foaming away the bacteria in my mouth. But, you know, right now, that bacteria doesn’t seem so important. Staying flat and still is the best option for me right now.

  Sol comes into the bedroom, wearing nothing but his dark blue jogging bottoms, his body like a smooth, dark sculpture. Under his arm he has his little black laptop; his glasses are perched on the top of his head.

  ‘Please get into the bed carefully, OK?’ I tell him. ‘No unnecessary jiggling about – my body cannot handle it.’

  ‘Oh, poor you,’ he coos. Gently he pulls back the covers and then jumps in, causing me to bounce up and down, enough to jangle every aching muscle.

  I stare at the ceiling, trying not to glower. Three months ago, that would have been funny; six months ago that would have been expected and he would have been quick to kiss away every little ache. In this timeline, the way we are right now, I know he’s done it to annoy me.

  ‘Was that a very nice thing to do?’ I say to him.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. Sorry.’ His apology is so throwaway, so dismissive, I don’t know why he bothered. I turn my head to look at him and he is pulling a pillow onto his lap before he settles his laptop on top of it. Carefully, he takes his gold-framed glasses from on top of his head and pushes them onto his face. He flips his laptop lid open and edges it back and forth until he finds the right angle. A familiar feeling of irritation undulates in my chest. I hate it when he does that and I hate it even more when he does it to my computer. Usually that irritation flits across my mind and doesn’t even really register. Nowadays, like everything we do, it causes deep, long-lasting ripples. The edges of those ripples wash up on the beach of resentment that has been building up inside my chest, and leaves behind another deposit of something that is damaging to our relationship. I have many, many resentment deposits sitting in my chest. They seem to be added to almost daily at the moment. The other day, it was hourly.

  He turns his head to me, and suddenly we’re staring at each other. I can see it there in his eyes, clear and present on his face: the same type of resentment that I feel towards him.

  Can we just be friends? I want to say. Can’t we just get over ourselves and be friends? That’s what was always so different about us – we were friends first, so let’s go back to that and hope our relationship gets better.

  But he speaks first: ‘So, Harmony tells me that her biological father turned up yesterday, gave her his number, got all googly-eyed at her, and you went for a cosy chat down the road with him out of sight of the house so she couldn’t hear what you were talking about but she was pretty sure he was trying to rekindle things with you.’ He is rather nonchalant in his delivery, although that’s probably not what he is feeling inside. ‘Anything you want to tell me?’

  I return my gaze to the ceiling. ‘That our daughter is really, really pissed off with me?’ I say.

  Not the only one, I can almost hear Sol reply.

  Ignoring the aches, I slide myself upright until we are almost level in the bed, then I turn to look at him. ‘That is not what happened,’ I say to him.

  ‘Is that why you agreed to move here?’ Sol asks. ‘Because you knew he was here and you wanted him to meet Harmony?’

  ‘No. Look, Sol, he isn’t Harmony’s father, all right? I told you, her father was …’ I glance at our bedroom door, see that it is slightly open. She’ll be somewhere, listening. That’s why she dressed it up as something more than what it was when she told Sol, why she hasn’t said a word to me about it but has been frosty. She wants us to argue, for us to shout at each other so she can find out what she didn’t yesterday. My daughter is devious … and possibly a bit too much like me for my liking.

  I throw back the covers, go to the door and shut it properly. Back in the bed, I use the remote to flick on the TV and wait patiently for the screen to burst into life. Then I quickly flick through the on-screen guide until I spot a shoot ’em up movie that will be loud enough to mask our voices, especially if we start to raise them. Once the room is sound-obscured I put the remote down between us and pull my legs up to my chest. The backs of my legs, the muscles I used the most when I was doing squats earlier, protest, but I feel a bit better sitting like this, a bit more protected from the onslaught of the row we’re about to have.

  Sol hasn’t moved the whole time; he has sat in the same position waiting for me to explain myself.

  ‘I told you,’ I start again, my voice low enough for him to hear, difficult for anyone else to hear especially when things are getting blown up on screen, ‘Harmony’s father was a very brief fling with a very unsuitable person. It wasn’t exactly a mistake, but it wasn’t my finest hour.’

  The first time I told Sol this, said he could only kiss me if he listened to the story and decided if he could handle it, I added in more unflattering details than I did with Gareth yesterday, because I wanted him to know everything all at once so he could decide whether to walk away. I suppose I was testing him, too. Trying to see if he could handle living with a black woman who was once almost a police officer. Trying to see if he could handle the fact I’d gone home with a stranger and had unprotected sex with him because he reminded me of someone else. Trying to see if he understood that I wasn’t perfect and I’d made some pretty heinous mistakes. Sol asked several weeks later if I was going to tell Harmony the truth about her father and I told him that if she asked, I’d tell her in age-appropriate language. But she never asked. Never even hinted once that she was curious about not having a father before Sol.

  ‘I told you all this. I told you about what he was like. I doubt he could ever get himself together enough to turn up here. That’s if he hasn’t overdosed years ago. It wasn’t him that turned up.’

  ‘Who was it then?’ Sol asks after a long, silent look.

  ‘The ex before Harmony’s father.’

  ‘The one who Harmony’s father reminded you of?’

  ‘Yes, him.’

  ‘So he tracked you down for kicks?’ Sol says. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks that Gareth is Harmony’s father. Ac
tually, he thinks I’m a liar.

  ‘No!’ I reply. ‘He wants my help with something to do with his work and yes, he’s still a police officer. I told him no, but he’d decided, after hearing – not from me, I hasten to add – that I had a fifteen-year-old daughter that she must be his. So, he turned up, pretending to try and coax me to help him but really to see if Harmony looks like him. Which she doesn’t, because she’s not his daughter, as I said to him – biologically and emotionally, she is nothing to do with him. All right? Or do I have to start talking in Portuguese to get you to understand?’

  ‘I don’t speak Portuguese.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I’ll try if it’ll get you to believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you,’ he says quickly. He knows the damage that him practically calling me a liar will do.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ I reply.

  He virtually called me a liar, when he is the one with the honesty problem at the moment. I have caught my husband out in many, many ‘little’ lies over the past few weeks – about where he is, how late he’s working, when he actually makes it into the office at the weekend and not some ‘team bonding’ trip away day. But I have not wanted to accept that our luscious, comfortable peninsula of honesty has been eroded quite severely by the waters of mistrust and lies. I have not wanted to admit that our marriage has gone way beyond us simply resenting each other over silly, solvable things, that we have drifted way past being snappy and unreasonable, and we’re now rapidly heading towards those places of no return, where no matter what we do, we will never completely erase the bad behaviour we have visited upon each other. My husband has become a liar and I have turned a blind eye to it because I do not want my life to change.

  ‘You didn’t believe me at all. You thought I was lying.’

  Sol swallows. His face has lost its superior air; he is now scared, in reality, that I am going to mention where our relationship is currently drifting. Once that has been named, exposed by being talked about, there is no going back.

  One of the reasons why I was so good at my job was that I didn’t take things at face value. My job, which I rarely talked about, was – in a convoluted way – supervising data entry like I originally told Gareth. Like I told anyone who asked. I used to supervise the people who entered data about staff in the company – which has many, many branches all over the world – but I also used to supervise the data that staff entered themselves be it emails or text messages or expenses claims. In other words, I was an internal corporate watchdog, who had the freedom to check everything people did on work computers and in work time. Yes, it’s not the sort of job you win friends from having, but there it is, I did it and I was good at it. Mainly because I knew when to keep my mouth shut and I didn’t let the power go to my head. (They went through a lot of people in my position before I joined the company because that amount of power goes to people’s heads really, really quickly.)

  Most people don’t realise that my former position even exists and are often – very vocally – outraged when they discover such work does exist. But they don’t realise that it’s all there in the fine print of the contract they sign. Of course, when you have a job, especially one you really, really want, you’re not going to turn it down because your company says it has the power to read anything and everything you do on their computers, or logged into their Wi-Fi or on the time in the office they pay you for. You’re going to sign on the dotted line safe in the knowledge that no company has the time to read your emails and no one will care if you’re arranging to meet your buddy who works for a rival company for drinks a few times, because, seriously, who is going to sit there and read the hundreds of thousands of emails sent every day? Who’s going to bother trawling through all the hundreds of lines that lead to you having an affair with someone in accounting? Who’s going to bother reading all those words to find out where you’ve bragged that the extra-expensive meal you claimed on your last trip wasn’t really for you but to get someone into bed? Me. I read them. I deciphered them. I created a pattern. I worked out what it is you shouldn’t be doing. And, as I said, I was good at what I did. At finding the corporate spies, the people who were intentionally and often unintentionally leaking vital secrets. I was excellent at seeing who was about to jump and take valuable information with them. I excelled at finding out those who were taking the piss when it came to expenses and corporate kickbacks. Like I said, I was never going to win any popularity competitions doing what I did. But I was good at it because I never took anything at face value. And I was good at spotting patterns.

  Whether we realise it or not, we live in patterns. And our most deliberate actions – lying or hiding things or trying to deceive – follow even more pronounced patterns. The way you get dressed, make breakfast, the order you shower your body in, drive down a particular street, get on a certain train and aim for the same seat … Patterns, patterns, patterns. Loose, changeable, malleable patterns that are thrown off and altered, negatively and positively, by the chaos theory that is life. When people lie and hide things, their patterns become far more set because they can’t afford for chaos to ruin things. Lies and deception need an even keel, because the smallest changes will reveal all.

  I can see when certain patterns become more pronounced, when people start to send emails to the same person more or less at the same time every day or every week. When they change one little thing about their morning routine. When they suddenly start to wear more expensive clothes or visit the gym more or see certain people less. Legitimate, ordinary, chaos-influenced change always goes back to a familiar pattern. Less innocent patterns intensify.

  Sol’s lies are intensifying. This is what I used to see all the time – the intensification of lies, the concentration of deception. The inevitable.

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me all this? Why did I have to hear it from Harmony, with her spin?’ Sol says to my silence. ‘All of this could have been avoided.’

  I finally look at my husband with the eyes I once used to look at the emails and travel expenses and phone bills of people under scrutiny. I never thought I’d be doing this, not with Sol. The most straight-up guy ever to walk the Earth. He became dad to my little girl, father of my two sons, the perfect life partner I never thought I’d meet. And now he has become a man with too many entrenched, intense patterns that are too obvious for even me, the woman who loves him, to ignore.

  Carefully, I turn away from him, slide my aching body down until it is flat and staring at the ceiling. Before I roll onto my side, away from him as we now always sleep, I use the remote to turn off the television and toss it onto my bedside table.

  ‘I hope it’s worth it,’ I tell him, quietly.

  I push my head into the soft folds of the pillow: a part of me wants to smother myself rather than say this. But I have to. I have to give him fair warning because if I’ve said it and he does it anyway, then I know we’ve gone too far away from who we were together to rescue it. If I keep silent, I’ll always wonder, had I voiced my concerns when I first noticed the change in patterns in my husband, whether I could have stopped it all coming to an end.

  ‘I really hope it’s worth it, Sol, cos when I find out what or who it is and how far it’s gone, it will be the end of us.’

  Thankfully, he doesn’t insult me by pretending he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Instead, he focuses his attention on his laptop, on going back to a familiar, legitimate pattern.

  MONDAY

  Cece

  5:30 a.m. Harmony is raging. Absolutely furious.

  I’ve not seen her so enraged, not since she was a toddler and had maybe a handful of truly epic tantrums. In general she is even-tempered, stoic, sensible; it seems that someone has injected her with that mythical teenager serum overnight and she absolutely hates me, positively detests this house, totally resents this family. I heard her stomping down here fifteen minutes ago and taking that bit too long to switch off the alarm, knowing it would wake me.

  She has either ignore
d my questions or replied with little more than a grunt, and is now chewing a wasp instead of cereal. I sit down opposite her, flick off the violent movie she has put on. When she reaches for the remote across the table, a sneer on her beautiful lips, I slide it out of reach.

  ‘Use your words, Harmony,’ I say to her.

  ‘Don’t have any,’ she replies.

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ I say calmly. ‘I think you have a lot to say to me. Just use your words – tell me everything you want to say.’

  ‘I have nothing to say to you.’ She delivers this with the optimum mix of anger, contempt and disdain; the perfect sneer to accompany it. That’s how I sounded in my head when I was her age and I was staging my private, mental rebellion. I would never have said that to my parents, but in my head, that’s how I sounded.

  ‘All right, I’ll say stuff to you. That man was not your biological father. If you wanted to know that, all you had to do was ask. You did not need to twist things when you told your dad.’

  ‘He so was my father,’ she spits at me. ‘If he wasn’t you wouldn’t have been acting so shifty. Everything about that meeting was well suss.’ She uses her hands to emphasise her disgust at me. ‘If he wasn’t, you wouldn’t have acted the way you did.’

  ‘All right, look, he and I did have a relationship, once. We were both a lot younger—’

  ‘What, like sixteen years younger?’ she interrupts.

  ‘Yes, it was around that time. But I broke up with him months before I met your father.’

  ‘So why did he turn up here, looking at me like I was his long-lost daughter?’

  ‘Because he, like you, like your dad, thinks he knows better than me when I got pregnant.’ I reach my hands across the table. ‘Yes, it’d be all neat and tidy and easy if Gareth was your biological father. I wouldn’t mind so much. He’s a decent enough guy – now. Back then he let me down in a pretty spectacular way. But he’s not your father.’ Harmony doesn’t move her hands towards mine, but she doesn’t take them away – that’s a huge leap forwards from when I walked in here a few minutes ago. ‘I’m sure he’d like to be. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be your father? You’re amazing, but it’s not him.’