The Girl I Used to Be

by Mary Torjussen

  He groaned. “It’s still early! Why are you going in now? The office doesn’t open until nine.”

  “I’ve got things I need to do,” I said. “I couldn’t get back to the office last night, so I have to get things ready for the meeting.”

  He’d lost interest already.

  Rory shot into our bedroom just before I left and I gave him a huge hug. “Your drink’s here, sweetheart, and you can have that banana if you can’t wait for breakfast. Dad’s still dozing. Don’t let him sleep too long, will you?” I winked at him. “But don’t torture him!”

  He laughed and I could see he was trying to think up punishments for a sleepy dad. “Can I go on your iPad?”

  “Just for half an hour,” I warned, and set the alarm on it. “When the alarm goes off, it’s time for breakfast.”

  I closed down Facebook and deleted my history. The last thing I needed was Rory looking at voyeur sites or photos of me when I was young and drunk. He found the game he wanted to play, then opened his carton and accidentally spilled some of his juice down Joe’s back.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHEN I REACHED the office at eight A.M., Rachel was waiting for me at her desk. Her face was pale and I wondered if she’d had as little sleep as I’d had that night. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hands shook on her mug of coffee.

  She saw me looking at her and flushed. “I know, I look awful.”

  “You’re fine,” I said. “Tell people you have hay fever.”

  “In August?”

  “Or a cold, then.”

  I picked up the coffee she’d made for me and sat down next to her.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said. She looked dreadful, as though she’d been awake all night. “Last night.” She swallowed hard. “Last night I didn’t say anything to David, obviously.”

  So his name was David.

  I waited.

  “We watched a film on Netflix and he had a few beers.” She grimaced. “With whiskey chasers.”

  “Does he drink too much?”

  She nodded. “He does sometimes. There’s always an excuse, you know? He’s celebrating something or someone’s annoyed him . . .”

  I wondered what excuse he had for drinking the nights he was terrorizing me. Was that a time for celebration?

  “Anyway, last night he was annoyed because I wouldn’t have a drink. I was frightened of telling him I knew what had happened, so I wouldn’t even have one.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Anyway, I went to bed before him. I had a shower, said I was tired. He was on his iPad and stayed up for a while. I don’t know what he was doing.”

  My heart sank. We’ll probably find out in the next day or two.

  “Anyway, so I went to bed and fell asleep quite quickly.” She looked away from me and started to fiddle with a pen on her desk. “Have you ever woken up suddenly when you hear something that you wouldn’t pay any attention to when you were awake?” I sat quietly, waiting for her to go on. “I used to have an alarm clock that made a tiny sound—a little click—a second before the alarm went off. I would always wake up when I heard it.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Last night I woke up like that. I jumped awake but I didn’t know why. It was really hot when I went to bed and when I woke up David was getting into bed. He pulled the quilt up over us; I must have kicked it off.” Her face was red now. “I wear a T-shirt to bed—one of David’s. It comes down to here.” She gestured to her thighs. “When I woke up it was pulled up around my waist. I didn’t think anything of it; I never sleep well when it’s really hot, so I thought I must have been kicking around.”

  I sat very still, suddenly terrified of what she’d say.

  “The thing is, Gemma . . .” She stopped, then looked at the clock and started again, speaking faster this time. “I started to think about why I’d woken up. I couldn’t go back to sleep afterward; I never can if I wake up really quickly like that. And as I was lying there I was trying to think what had woken me. I hadn’t heard David in the bathroom; I can sleep through anything, normally, so even if he’d had a shower it wouldn’t disturb me.”

  “Maybe you heard your bedroom door open?”

  “It wasn’t closed. We never close it. No, it wasn’t that.”

  “The bathroom door?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t that, either. It doesn’t click shut. And we leave the hall light on overnight, so it wasn’t as though I heard him switch that off, either.”

  Outside the window a bus stopped and I saw Sophie get off and cross the road to go into the corner shop. She’d be here any minute. I could hardly complain about her being early, but I knew we needed more time.

  “Sophie will be here in a minute,” I said urgently. “What do you think it was?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I think he was taking photos of me,” she said. “While I was asleep. I heard the click and that’s what woke me. And he got into bed. He’s got one of those lamps that charges up a phone. He plugged his phone into that, then kissed me good night and went to sleep.” She looked really miserable. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Has he ever taken photos of you before?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing like that.” There was a pause, and she said, “Or at least not as far as I know. How would I know, though?”

  FIFTY-TWO

  RACHEL

  SOPHIE CAME UP to us then and I had to busy myself with the voice mail messages and e-mails, and get ready for the morning meeting. It was hard to concentrate and I could tell from the expression on Gemma’s face that she was finding it equally difficult. Brian was back at work and I noticed she passed on the keys from the apartments we’d viewed the day before, asking him to take them back to Bill later that day. My face smarted at the memory of that conversation.

  I could tell that Gemma wanted to speak to me. She kept looking over and checking where Sophie was, as though she was going to come over to talk to me if she got the chance. I kept my eyes averted. I couldn’t focus on work and think of everything we’d talked about. I needed to keep my mind off David’s activities last night, but now that I’d seen the voyeur site I was terrified that photos of me would end up there. I desperately wanted to check it at work, and I think that was when I realized what it had been like for Gemma. She’d said that she’d been obsessive about checking it every day, looking at the new pictures that appeared there hourly, trying to work out if she was on there. I felt sick at the thought of David doing that to either of us, and I had to force myself to be friendly to him when he sent his regular texts.

  Eventually Gemma sent me an e-mail.

  Are you feeling OK? Do you need to go home?

  I gave a quick look around the office. A young couple was looking at the details of some first-time-buyer properties; otherwise only Sophie was there and she was preoccupied with the coffee machine.

  No, I don’t want to go home. He’s working from home today and I’ll end up saying something to him.

  Sophie clattered in, bringing drinks for all of us and the biscuit tin.

  “What were those apartments like yesterday?” she asked me.

  I didn’t dare meet Gemma’s eye. “They were great, yeah.”

  “Ask Brian to take you next time he goes,” Gemma told Sophie. “Have a good look around before we get tenants in.”

  As soon as Sophie was back at her desk, Gemma sent me another message.

  You need to say something. Those photos could be anywhere.

  Instantly my face became hot. I know.

  The clients came over to speak to Gemma then, and I heard them ask whether they could view a house that evening. She called the vendors to arrange it, and then when they’d left the office she took her purse from her bag. “Sophie, would you do me a huge favor? It’s Lucy
’s daughter’s birthday next week. Would you pop out and get her a card and a present? Oh and some wrapping paper, too.”

  Sophie looked delighted. Time out of the office and shopping with someone else’s money! She took the money and was gone before Gemma could change her mind.

  As soon as the office was empty, Gemma pulled up a chair next to my desk.

  “We need to go to the police.” She spoke in a low voice, even though nobody was around. “He took those photos of me and now he’s taken photos of you. He could be sending them anywhere. It’s illegal; you know it is. We need to do something. We need to stop him.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you know it’ll get into the press, don’t you? It’s the sort of thing they love. Especially with him doing it to both of us. I read about a court case a while ago where a man was filming his wife at home and it was all over the newspapers. Aren’t you worried about that?”

  “Of course I am. Legally they can’t print our names, but it doesn’t stop people talking. They kept my name out of the paper before, but it didn’t make much difference. Everyone knew about it before too long. It was awful.”

  I couldn’t help it. I snapped, “What do you think it was like for us? At least you’re still alive.”

  She stood up, her face pale and strained. She leaned over and whispered, “You think there wasn’t a cost to me, too? I was raped!” Her voice shook. “And now your husband is abusing me.”

  I watched as she went back to her desk and put the files and stationery into her drawer. She locked the drawer and logged out of her computer. I couldn’t take my eyes off her; she didn’t give me a second glance.

  Without another word to me, she walked out of the office.

  FIFTY-THREE

  GEMMA

  Tuesday, August 15

  I DROVE ROUND aimlessly for a while, too shaken to go home. I parked the car in the car park overlooking the River Dee and paid for an hour so that I could sit and think.

  I felt the bite of Rachel’s words more than she probably expected. She loved her brother, clearly, and when he died she was only young. No matter what I thought of him, the idea of her seeing the police arrive at their house at New Year’s with such terrible news was truly awful. I didn’t hear about it until a few weeks later. My parents had read about it in the local newspapers, but they didn’t tell me, and by then, just months after leaving school, I wasn’t really in touch with anyone anymore. We were all away at different universities and it was too easy to slip away from the group. I’d refused to go home that Christmas and so we all went to my grandparents’ in Staffordshire instead. I went back to London from there.

  I do remember the shock of hearing about Alex’s death, though. I’d been invited to Lauren’s nineteenth birthday party at her place in Nottingham, where she was studying English. Her birthday was at the end of January and I hadn’t seen her since we’d started university the previous September, so I got the train from London and went to stay with her for the weekend.

  As soon as I saw her, I knew something had happened. Her eyes were red and swollen, and at first I thought she and Tom had broken up. She linked her arm through mine, just as she used to when we walked to school, and we walked out of the station and into the cold night and she told me then that Alex had died.

  I was really shocked at my reaction. I couldn’t stop sobbing and she was trying to tell me it wasn’t my fault and I knew it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, but it felt like one big burden on top of the rest of it. I think what got to me was that I’d suddenly remembered him as the boy who dressed up as a girl for the school play. There was a moment where he was so clearly enjoying himself and everyone had laughed. I remember leaning forward to watch him, loving his confidence and the way his smile lit up his face when the audience laughed with him.

  Rachel was probably at the school that night. It was odd to think we shared that experience, so many years before we met. I pictured her as an eleven-year-old girl, and in that instant I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen the resemblance between her and Alex. They had different coloring, and he was six feet tall and built for the rugby pitch, which had made his acting debut even funnier. Now when I thought about it, I remember seeing him in the middle of our summer exams, looking as though he was really trying hard to think of the right way to say something in his essay, and I knew I’d seen that look on Rachel’s face at work.

  I winced. I wish I hadn’t thought of that resemblance now. It would make it so hard to see her again.

  Suddenly I felt overwhelmed. I couldn’t go on like this, working with someone who hated me. Being destroyed by her husband. I picked up my phone.

  “Mum? Can we come up and stay with you for a few days?”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  GEMMA

  I WENT BACK to the office then and luckily Sophie was there, so I focused on work and avoided speaking to Rachel on my own. I knew I’d have to talk to her again about David, to persuade her to go to the police, but I couldn’t summon up the courage to do it just then. I sent them both home ten minutes before closing time and phoned Lucy to tell her that I wasn’t feeling well and that I would be taking some time off. She was great, offering to work every day for the next week.

  “I’ll ask my mum to take Maisie to school and back,” she said. “She won’t mind. I can be there nine to five.”

  “I’ll drop the keys off at your house on my way home,” I said. “All my appointments are in the diary. But, Lucy, you’re in charge, okay?”

  “Not Rachel? You said you were promoting her.”

  “You’re in charge,” I said again. “I’ll let the others know.”

  She was quiet, then said, “Is something the matter?”

  My eyes filled with tears and I started to speak, but I couldn’t go on.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Talk to me about it when you get back. And don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on everything. I’m really glad of the work, and if you need to stay off a bit longer, then that’s fine.”

  * * *

  * * *

  WITHIN A COUPLE of hours I was driving to my parents’ house with Rory. Joe hadn’t been keen on coming up and offered to do some work in the living room and kitchen while we were away.

  “There’s no point us all going,” he said. “It’s not like I’d have much to do there. I might as well stay behind and get some jobs done in the house. It’s impossible to do anything like that while Rory’s around. I could paint the kitchen if you like? Freshen it up a bit.”

  Part of me wanted him to come with me, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk properly to my mum with him there. And I needed to. There was too much for me to deal with now.

  It’s only about thirty miles from my house to my mum’s, but we tend to meet up in Chester to do some shopping and then she comes back to my house for dinner, rather than us going to visit them. It had been the same since I left home at eighteen. Every month my parents would come down to London for the day. My room there had been so small it was impossible for us to stay in it together, so we’d walk for miles, talking about my course and my new friends, and my mum and dad would talk about their jobs and the holidays they planned. We never spoke about what had happened.

  That day, traveling up with Rory for company in the car, I found myself yearning to be back home, as I still saw it, despite everything.

  Rory had been delighted to be visiting them with me.

  “Just you and me, Mum?” he’d asked. “No Dad?”

  “Daddy will stay behind and do some painting.”

  Rory had looked bemused, and I guessed he was thinking of Joe using his watercolors.

  We’d packed our bags and set off on our little trip. He was excited to be sleeping in my old bedroom and chatted constantly throughout the journey, telling me all the things he was going to do with his grandparents. I felt guilty then that he didn’t see them more often; they
’d been really excited to have us visit, too, though I knew my mum had been concerned when I called her.

  “Everything’s okay with you and Joe?” she’d asked nervously. “You’d tell me if there was a problem, wouldn’t you?”

  I pictured myself telling her everything that had happened. She would have had a heart attack before I’d finished.

  “Everything’s fine,” I’d said instead, but she didn’t seem convinced.

  We parked in their driveway and Rory jumped out, eager to ring their doorbell. This was the game they always had to play, to be amazed we were there.

  As soon as my mum opened the door and shouted, “Grandad, we’ve got surprise visitors!” Rory ran through the house to find him. I must have been looking a real state because my mum took one look at me and hugged me tightly.

  We went into the house to find my dad. The game was that he would hide in the house and Rory would have to find him. Although my dad was over six feet tall, this took longer than you might think.

  Eventually, after finding him in the garden shed, where he was actually oblivious to our arrival, Rory and I sat at the patio table while my mum brought us some dinner and my dad made drinks.

  It was so peaceful sitting there with them. The garden was enclosed and private, giving an aura of safety and security that I badly needed. Rory chattered away to them about all the things he and Joe had got up to in Ireland and I was able to sit back and relax.

  “You’ve been working too hard,” said my mum. “You’ll stay for a few days?”

  “I’m having a week off,” I said. “I’m going to sort something out with Lucy, too.” I hadn’t even thought of that until now. “I’m going to ask her to work every weekday for a while, just for a few hours, so that I can get some time off.”

  “When did you last have a day off work?”

  “I had a day off when Joe and Rory came back from Ireland.”