by Alex Lake
It had become part of how they operated and who they were, so Sarah took it for granted, but it had been Ben’s idea. Holding a sleeping, tiny Miles he had looked at his wife and told her all he wanted for his son was for him to be happy.
And to be happy he needs to feel loved, and secure. Until he’s older – much older – we’re all he has, Ben said. And I want him to know we’re there for him.
Sarah had agreed, then asked why he was thinking like that.
My parents used to argue, he said. I don’t know if it was more than other parents or not, but I used to hear it and lie in bed – I must have been about eight at the time – convinced they were going to divorce. And, not knowing anything about how those things worked, I thought I’d have to choose who I lived with. I agonized over it. Tortured myself. How could I choose? How could I let one of them down? So I don’t want my kids to go through the same thing. If they see us argue, we have to make up right there and then, so they see there’s nothing wrong.
And they had, ever since. This time, Sarah looked at Miles and smiled.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’re not fighting. Not in the way you think. We have some important stuff to work out, that’s all.’
He looked at them for a while, then nodded. ‘OK,’ he said, and closed the door.
The hug – enforced by the arrival of Miles – had broken the spell. The argument had been building into a wall that forced them apart, put each of them into their own box, but it had fallen away when they came together physically.
Sarah relaxed; she would explain to Ben why this was a mistake and they would move on.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I know this is hard to believe – forged letters and weird books – but I didn’t do it. I promise, Ben. If I had, and this was a cry for help, now is when I’d admit it, and we could face it together. But it isn’t. And for future reference, if ever I am in desperate need, then I’ll come right out and tell you.’
‘But it’s your handwriting, Sarah,’ he said. ‘It’s so hard to believe someone forged it. I mean, I know your handwriting, and this is it.’
‘So you don’t trust me?’ she said, anger and disbelief growing. ‘You think I’m lying?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Ben said, softly.
‘Let me help you figure it out,’ Sarah said. ‘There’s one thing your theory doesn’t account for.’
‘Which is?’
‘The drone.’
‘Quadcopter.’
‘Right. Whatever. Quadcopter. But here’s the thing – how could I have been flying it? All the rest of the stuff I could have done – although it’s totally insane to think I did – but not that. I wouldn’t even know where to start with one of those.’ She kissed him on the mouth. ‘And here’s another thing. The most important thing: I’m telling you the truth. I’m your wife. I don’t lie to you. I won’t lie to you.’
He looked up at her. She was startled to see tears in his eyes.
‘You promise?’ he said. ‘You promise you won’t lie to me?’
‘I promise,’ she said.
36
On Friday night Sarah was flicking through the options on Netflix when Ben put his head around the door.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.
Sarah glanced up. ‘It’s only nine o’clock,’ she said. ‘You want to watch a mindless TV show?’
‘No. I’m tired. I need an early night.’
It had been that way between them since the argument: polite, courteous, but cagey. Sarah wanted it to stop, wanted them to go back to their easy-going, intimate relationship. She wanted to hold her arms out and hug him and have him hug her back and then reassure her he loved her and for her to reply that she loved him and it was all going to be OK, and then maybe kiss and have urgent, frantic sex. But she didn’t. Marriages – theirs, at any rate – didn’t work like that. Walls went up, arguments lingered, noses were cut off to spite faces. For some reason it was easier to cling to your pride, even when you didn’t really want to, than to let it go and be the one who initiated the make-up.
‘Good night,’ Sarah said. ‘Sleep well.’ She turned back to the television and listened to him pad up the stairs.
A few minutes after midnight she followed him. She’d stayed up late, binge-watching a ten-year-old family comedy show. Despite the lack of sleep in the last few days she felt wired and alert, and knew there was no way she would be able to switch off until she was totally exhausted.
When she got in bed, she realized Ben was still awake.
He pretended he wasn’t, though.
It was pointless of him – she knew what his sleeping body looked like. She had lain beside it often enough. There was a stillness, a depth, that a waking person could not simulate. Doctors had a test to see whether someone was truly unconscious: they would lift an arm and drop it. Someone who was faking it – and people did, for all kinds of reasons – could not, however hard they tried, let an arm fall like it did when its owner was asleep. There was always some resistance, some muscular engagement.
But if he wanted to pretend, she’d let him.
She lay beside him, also not sleeping, listening to the creaks the house made and wondering if they were the footsteps of an intruder.
She’d never been a very relaxed person; she’d always had a heightened sense of the threats out there in the world. When they went camping in the woods she imagined bears behind every tree, even if they were in an established campsite with many other campers; if she went swimming in the ocean she spent most of the time wondering what was below, and she was never far from interpreting some shadow as a shark and setting off, arms whirling, for the safety of the beach.
She was the same at night. Often she awoke in the small hours, convinced she had heard a noise, terrified someone was there, creeping about, ax in hand. It could take hours for her to calm down and go back to sleep unless she went downstairs and checked every door and window. Ben did not suffer from the same fears. He slept soundly, swam fearlessly, camped with abandon.
She reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. He was hot to the touch.
‘Ben?’ she said.
After a pause he shifted and turned to her. He opened one eye.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re still awake?’
He nodded. ‘Couldn’t nod off.’
‘Everything OK?’
‘So-so,’ he said. ‘But then you know that.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,’ she said. ‘I can’t relax. I can’t get all this stuff out of my head.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I keep trying to think of what I – we – can do, but I come up blank.’
Sarah slid her hand lower until it rested on his hip. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘There is some evidence that having sex produces a hormone which helps with relaxation and sleep.’
‘Really? Or are you making that up so you can get in my pants?’ Ben said.
‘I’m a doctor,’ Sarah said. ‘That would be unethical.’
‘How much evidence for the existence of this hormone?’ Ben said.
‘Some. Not enough.’ She pressed herself up against him. ‘I think we need to do an experiment.’
The next morning, Ben woke late. When he came downstairs, Sarah smiled at him.
‘Miles and Faye have karate,’ she said. ‘But I’ll take all three of them. You have a morning off.’
‘You sure? I’m happy to stay with Kim.’
‘It’s fine. She can come. She’ll have a good time.’
Miles and Faye went to karate lessons on Saturday mornings at a local martial arts center, Riverland. It was the first session back after a two-week summer break.
The center was a few miles away, in a rural setting by a small river. Sarah watched as the instructors led the kids – dressed in black karate uniforms – over a series of obstacles and stations where they performed martial arts exercises. She had been skeptical at first, but the training was largely focused on draw
ing lessons from nature and on building physical strength and balance, not, as she had first thought, on learning how to fight.
When it was finished, Miles and Faye ran up to her.
‘Have you got any snacks?’ Miles said. He asked with an unusual intensity; Sarah recognized it as a sign he was running low on energy. At work a few weeks ago someone had described themselves as ‘hangry’, a new word which was a combination of ‘hungry’ and ‘angry’ and which was perfect for Miles when he did not eat.
And she had neglected to bring snacks.
‘I don’t,’ she said, and saw the ‘hanger’ flash in his eyes. ‘But why don’t we go to the Little Cat Café and get a treat.’
‘Yay!’ Faye said. ‘Can I get a blueberry muffin?’
‘Sure,’ Sarah said. ‘You all can. Let’s go.’
‘Look,’ Miles said, as they walked from the car to the Little Cat Café, ‘Daddy’s here.’
‘Where?’ Sarah said.
‘Inside,’ Miles replied. ‘His bike’s there.’
Ben had an old green (British Racing Green, he called it) Raleigh racing bike that he had bought when he was a student in London. It was scratched and beaten, but he refused to replace it, although for what he paid to maintain it – the parts were hard to find – he could have bought a decent new bike every few years.
‘Oh,’ Sarah said. ‘Great! You can tell him about karate.’
She bent down to pick up Kim; she was a handful at the best of times, but having her running about while Sarah tried to order promised to be quite a pain. It was going to be useful to be able to hand her to Ben.
She saw him immediately, sitting on a stool at the bar along the rear wall. He was facing the other way, but she knew the back of his head as well as she did the front. After nearly ten years of marriage it was easy to pick out your husband or wife in a crowd – hair, gait, clothes: there was rarely a new perspective on your partner.
It took her a moment to realize he was not alone. He was talking to someone, nodding vigorously as he listened.
The someone was also familiar.
It was Rachel Little.
Sarah pulled a chair out from under a table. ‘Sit here, Faye,’ she said. ‘Miles, you join her. Stay there until I get back.’
She set off across the café. It was busy, full of late breakfasters and early brunchers, and she had to push through the people lining up to place their orders.
And then she was no more than a few feet from Ben and Rachel. She was slightly behind Rachel, out of her eyeline, and Ben was too absorbed in their conversation to notice her.
‘There is a thing,’ Rachel said, ‘called dissociative fugue—’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ Ben said. ‘But go on. I’m not an expert.’
‘When it happens, people can do all kinds of things – go on long trips, have detailed conversations, commit crimes – which they don’t remember at all. They can have no memory of them. It’s often,’ she continued, ‘linked to people taking a new identity.’
‘In this case, it would be her own identity,’ Ben said. ‘Which—’
Before he could finish, Kim noticed who was speaking.
‘Dada!’ she shouted, and reached for him. ‘Dada!’
Ben’s head snapped round like he’d heard a pistol shot. He paled.
‘Kim,’ he said. ‘Sarah.’
Sarah stared at him. She handed Kim to him. Without her daughter to hold she realized she was shaking.
He’d been talking about her. Asking for advice about her. Talking about dissociative fugue. She was a doctor – which was more than Rachel Little could say – and she knew what it was.
And what it meant. It meant he thought she was doing all of this while in some kind of fugue state. And he was sharing it with Rachel fucking Little.
She wasn’t sure exactly how she felt: betrayal, shock, confusion were all mixed in, but there was no doubt about one thing.
She was angry.
‘Your kids are sitting over there,’ she said, straining to keep from shouting, her eyes locked on his. ‘You can bring them home.’
‘Sarah,’ Rachel said. ‘Let’s—’
‘Shut up!’ Sarah said. A few heads turned to see what was going on. ‘Not another word!’
She looked back at Ben and took the keys from her pocket. ‘You’ll need these,’ she said, and threw them at him.
37
She is facing the end now. The walls are closing in.
The past is coming back to haunt her. Actions cannot be denied; consequences are real. Consequences are inevitable.
The price must be paid.
And her price is that everybody she knows will doubt her. Will turn away from her.
Until eventually she will start to doubt herself. After all, there is only one explanation for all this.
At least, that is what she – and others – will conclude.
And they will go on believing it, for the rest of their lives.
The only one who will find out the real reason is her. But it will not help her at all.
38
The bike had fallen over.
He’ll be pissed at that, Sarah thought. Not the scratch – there are already plenty of those – but the fact someone knocked it over and didn’t pick it up.
She lowered the seat and climbed on; it was unlocked. He never locked it; Barrow wasn’t the kind of town where people stole bikes, according to Ben, and in any case, who’d want his? All they’d be getting was a constant repair bill.
She rode – it really was a very uncomfortable bike – along the river path. The river, once one of the most polluted in North America, victim of the tanneries and paper mills which used to line its banks, now shone under the summer sun. Cormorants bobbed on the surface, white pines and firs framed the shore.
Sarah saw none of it. All she saw was the image of Ben facing Rachel, listening intently, absorbed in what she was saying.
Absorbed in her bullshit theory about Sarah suffering from dissociative fugue, episodes in which she entered a different state, became, almost, a different person, a person who did things and thought things and said things Sarah had no memory of.
It was not Sarah’s area of medical specialty, but it was a well-recognized phenomenon. It was the idea behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s book The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and now it was Ben’s explanation – prompted by that bitch Rachel Little – for the Fake Sarah Havenant.
Except in this case there was no Mr Hyde. This was The Strange Case of Sarah Havenant and Sarah Havenant.
The problem was, it was all rubbish. She was not having dissociative fugue, not doing all this stuff and then not remembering it. She would have doubted herself, she really would, but for one thing: she knew it wasn’t true, because she had seen the quadcopter. She remembered it. If this was fugue, then she would have no memory of it, but she did. And that one fact allowed her to cling to her sanity. Whoever was behind this had made a mistake, so fuck them.
And fuck Ben and fuck Rachel Little.
She stopped and got off the bike.
She was so angry at him. She couldn’t believe he had done it – arranged a secret meeting with Rachel Little to talk about her, about his own wife. What else was he lying about? Was he fucking Rachel?
Sarah doubted it, but she wasn’t sure. If he could betray her like this, then why not like that?
The bastard.
She looked at the river. It flowed on below the bike path. It got very deep, very close to the banks, apparently.
Good. Then they would never find this.
She picked up Ben’s bike and hurled it over the railings. She knew she shouldn’t do this, it wasn’t good for the river, but she felt the river gods would allow her this one small trespass on their territory.
There was a loud splash, and then the bike was gone.
When she got home the car was in the driveway. She heard Miles’s voice coming from the backyard so she opened the gate and walked around the s
ide of the house.
He was standing by a hole in the flowerbed, a small metal beach shovel in his hand. Next to him, Faye was holding a hose which was spraying water into the hole. Kim was on the other side of the hole in only her diaper.
‘OK,’ Miles said. ‘Kim, you get in the swimming pool.’
Kim grinned as though someone had offered her a lifetime’s supply of chocolate, and stepped into the watery hole, like a tiny and very cute hippopotamus wallowing in its mud.
‘Erm,’ Sarah said. ‘Miles and Faye, are you sure that’s a good idea?’
Kim glowered at her. ‘Go away, Mommy,’ she said.
So her baby didn’t want rescuing after all. It was the lot of the third child; anything to get some attention.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But make sure you wash off before you come in the house.’
Miles’s eyes widened at the thought of a parentally sanctioned hosing down of his sisters. ‘Cool, Mom,’ he said. ‘We will.’
Inside the kitchen, Ben was standing at the counter, looking at his phone. Sarah was pretty sure he wasn’t really reading it. He was finding something to do while he waited for her.
He looked up, and put the phone in his pocket. Sarah stared at him. It was odd how the way you saw someone could change so quickly. Normally he appeared to her as a soft-edged, warm person; now he was different; harder, somehow and more real.
He didn’t look, she noticed, apologetic.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How did you get back? Did you take the bike?’
She nodded.
‘Where is it?’
She felt her anger – already at a dangerously high level – mount further. ‘You want to talk about your bike?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not. I’m sorry.’
‘We can,’ she said. ‘It’s in the river, since you’re so concerned.’
‘The river?’ he said. ‘What river?’
‘The big wet one downtown.’