Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  She pushes through the front door, hastily shutting it behind her. Mona circles Greg’s legs as he emerges from the kitchen.

  ‘Nice walk?’ he asks her.

  She forces a smile and a nod, moves past him to hang the lead on its hook, hears her voice emerging from her throat to say: ‘I bumped into that young woman who’s just moved in down the street – Leah. She was locked out of the flat, panicking because of the little boy alone inside. Then I remembered about the key that was hidden outside when we lived there. Well, it was still under that rock.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes! A little rusty, but it still works.’

  ‘You’d think they’d have had the locks changed since.’

  ‘I know. But she got in. And she was very grateful. Poor thing, worrying herself sick over the child. And all the time he was fast asleep in his room!’

  It’s amazing to her how normal she sounds. As if nothing had happened.

  ‘Did you go inside?’ Greg asks, something strained in his voice.

  ‘Just for a minute. I didn’t stay. She was a bit flustered.’

  He stands there, as if waiting for something.

  ‘Think I’ll have a shower,’ she says then. ‘I’m all hot and sticky.’

  Greg says, ‘Okey-dokey,’ and she can feel him watching her as she runs up the stairs.

  In the bathroom, she stands with her back to the tiled wall, listens to the slam of the fridge door downstairs in the kitchen, Mona’s cheerful yelp as Greg fixes her dinner. She thinks of what just happened, remembers the words she spoke to that woman. ‘I feel it my duty to tell you, dear …’ God, had she really said that? The look in her eyes, the way they had widened with horror and then disbelief. ‘It can’t be true,’ Leah had actually said, and a tremble of unexpected anger had quivered under Hilary’s skin.

  ‘Look it up, if you don’t believe me,’ she had countered, flashing a smile to take any malice from the words.

  Wife-killer, she had called him, still thinking of how he had looked at her, how he had hastily withdrawn into his house.

  Quickly, she sheds her clothes, and turns the shower to full power. It is as if a rash has broken out all over her body, as if it has wormed its way beneath the layers of skin. She feels the itch communicating itself through her flesh and bones. The jets on her face sting. She keeps her eyes closed and stands perfectly still, enduring it.

  And as she stands there, her thoughts leave her body and travel back. Back to the heat of another summer.

  ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

  She had stayed when they put her dog to sleep. In a room at the vet’s – not the usual surgery. A small room, with just an examining couch for the dog and a chair for the owner. She had stroked Bella’s soft muzzle and wondered how many animals’ lives had been extinguished in this room. How many other people’s hearts had been broken there?

  Charlotte had insisted upon it. Hilary remembers the shrill vehemence of the woman, the wild flight of her fury.

  ‘Your bloody dog tried to savage my son!’

  Still Hilary had resisted. It was a little nip. A mild tussle in the garden. The boy had been driving poor Bella crazy with a stick. She had held on for as long as she could.

  ‘That child’s arm,’ Greg eventually said, driven to exasperation. ‘We have no choice, Hilary. She must be put down.’

  After two days of fighting it, refusing to have the dog destroyed, finally she had succumbed. She recalls now how Bella’s heavy head had lowered to the black rubber surface of the table, her features more droopy, her eyes more mournful than Hilary could ever remember them being. A low whinnying sound emerged from the dog’s throat, and Hilary put her arms around the warm body, rested her face against Bella’s velvet ears, and something ruptured deep inside her.

  Afterwards, she felt numb. Greg made the arrangements with the vet for disposal while Hilary sat in the car and waited. He was kind to her on the journey home, speaking words of sympathy and reassurance but it all washed over her. She was miles away, unreachable. And when the car pulled up at the kerb, and she got out, the first thing she heard was Charlotte Woodbury laughing.

  Hilary stood stock still in the street and looked up. An upstairs window in the Woodburys’ house was open. She could see Charlotte up there, standing with the phone held to her face, the other hand clutching a lit cigarette, talking and laughing as if nothing had happened. As if only two days before she hadn’t stood on Hilary’s doorstep, shaking with rage, thrusting her little boy’s bleeding arm forwards, spouting accusations, demanding that the dog be destroyed.

  Hilary might have got over it, if it hadn’t been for that laughter.

  That was a Saturday, and when Monday morning came around, she rang the school and informed them that her dog had died so she wouldn’t be coming in. She read the headmistress’s disapproval in the brief pause before she responded, but Hilary didn’t care. She had gone beyond that. The depression that came over her was worse than anything she had experienced before. Years later, she would pay for a therapist to tell her that the grief suppressed with each miscarriage had come gushing upwards at the death of her beloved pet. But at the time all she could do was walk around the rooms of the basement flat, feeling something clawing at her insides, the dreadful injustice of it, the senseless waste. It was a silent internal kind of grief, one she couldn’t communicate to or share with Greg, who was at a loss as to how he could help her.

  Then one day, late into the week after Bella’s death, Hilary stood at the French windows, watching the Woodbury kids outside in the garden. An inflatable paddling pool had been filled with water, and the little boy and girl were in their swimming costumes, kicking water at each other and squealing with delight. Nearby, their father stood with a garden hose, laughing and spraying them as they jumped and splashed. The way the sun hit the water, the obvious joy of the children – it was such a perfect scene. Love and summer. Happiness and innocence. It rose up at Hilary, like a rebuke, and the thing that had ruptured inside her flew to the surface. She let out a scream full of wildness and rage and despair, bent double with the force of all that emotion.

  The children didn’t hear. They kept on laughing and playing. But their father looked around. She saw his face, the smile falling away, replaced by something more thoughtful and grave.

  She had drawn away and lain down on the couch, sobbing so loudly she almost didn’t hear the tapping at the door.

  ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

  There he was, standing beyond the French windows. His low voice, his gentle eyes.

  Caustic words backed up inside her, questions snapping about his bitch of a wife, and whether she was sorry too. But there was something so simple and plain about his presence there, something genuine in his offer of sympathy, that those bitter feelings slid away. She turned from him, leaving the door open for him to follow, and went to the kitchen.

  It was dark and cool back there, shadows cast by the house and the trees outside.

  ‘It was a hard thing to ask of you,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry.’

  Outside, the children’s voices continued to rise. Hilary wondered, vaguely, who was watching them while their father was with her. She brushed the tears from her cheek and turned to him.

  ‘Did you ever have a pet?’ she asked, and he shook his head. Immediately, she felt embarrassed, looked down at her bare feet, the dirty lino beneath them. ‘You must think I’m mad,’ she said.

  ‘I know what it is to love,’ was his reply.

  She met his gaze and had to chew her lip to stop the tears returning. A shriek from outside drew their gaze to the window for an instant, and when she looked back he was staring at her again. It was peculiar, being there with him. She felt calmer than she had all week.

  ‘I can’t have children,’ she told him. It seemed appropriate to share this information. The childish voices in the garden were voluble, a chattering stream, as if they were right there outside the window. She needed to impart this
information so he would understand just what Bella had meant to her. So that he would comprehend the depth of her loss.

  She could see from the expression crossing his face that he did.

  ‘Oh, Hilary,’ he said, and a jolt went through her to hear him say her name. A pleasurable ripple beneath her skin.

  She smiled at him. He would go back to the children he’d left unattended and she would feel – because of his visit – a little better.

  But he crossed the room to her and touched his lips to hers.

  His mouth felt smooth and dry. She didn’t draw away, didn’t express surprise or indignation. Instead she felt compelled to wait, and when she felt his mouth opening to hers, his hands moving to her hips, something leapt inside her, the thump of her heart, as if it had suddenly been brought to life. Outside the children screamed and the sun beat down, but there in the kitchen it was quiet and still, every fibre of her being concentrated on the touch of his hand, the press of his body against hers, this contact at once intimate and strange. She knew it was wrong. She knew she didn’t want it to stop.

  She forgot about Greg. She forgot about the children outside. She even forgot about the grief that had been ravaging her. All of it fell away as he leant into her, the kiss going on and on, like a long, slow, cool drink of water on a hot, hot day. Nothing else mattered. They knew so little about each other beyond the bitter skirmish with his wife. And yet it was as if, in that moment, they were one person.

  In her whole life, nothing has rent her heart as much as what happened that summer.

  And now he is back. She thinks of him leaning over the railings, looking down at them, the flash of recognition when his eyes had locked on hers. The sudden dizziness she had felt at being in his orbit once more, after all these years …

  ‘Why? What did he do?’ Leah had asked, and Hilary had watched her eyes widening with horror as she had told her of his crime.

  White-faced and silent, she had stared in amazement, and Hilary had felt a sharp twinge of guilt.

  Now she pushes it away. It’s important that she remains patient. She will not lose control again. If she holds on a little longer, if she sticks to the plan, nothing will come between them.

  Hilary stands under the shower, allowing these thoughts and memories to pour down through her until the hot water cools and eventually turns cold.

  JULY

  * * *

  12

  Leah

  Leah waits in the car. She wishes Jake would hurry, feeling conspicuous and uneasy out here on her own.

  The window is rolled down but there’s no air wafting through. Heat shimmers over the bonnet, making the vista beyond it wavy and blurred. There hasn’t been rain for weeks, and the grass of the field, around which the housing estate sprawls, is tawny and bald. A gang of boys shoot past on bicycles, their wheels kicking up dust. They peer through the window at her and hoot with laughter.

  Leah shifts in her seat, and watches them pass. The cotton of her skirt sticks to the underside of her legs. In a garden a few doors down, two women are sunbathing, rolls of fat beneath their bikini-tops, cans of Budweiser in their hands. She glances at the white uPVC door that had shut behind Jake, the house swallowing him. Net curtains obscure the windows. Paint blisters on the walls outside. In the small garden, there’s a set of miniature goalposts, two bins stuffed so full the lids won’t close. It’s hard for her to imagine that Jake once lived here. There was a time when he called that house his home. A place where he built a whole other life without her – Jake and Jenna, fresh from their summer romance, scrabbling to adapt to the news of a baby on the way. Leah looks at the bins, imagines she can smell the refuse from here. Putrefaction. Filth. Her stomach turns.

  Her sensitivity to smells and tastes has grown stronger with each week. Looking down at her waistline beneath the seatbelt, she pinches the band of thickened flesh between her thumb and index finger. It astonishes her, the rapid advance of her pregnancy, changes discernible on an almost daily basis. That morning, she had been woken by the press of her bladder, as if she had downed a few pints before retiring for the night. And several times in the office that week she had felt so overcome with weariness that she might have lain down on the floor beneath her desk and fallen fast asleep.

  She hasn’t told anyone yet about the baby. None of the girls in the office know, or her old school friends, with whom she has kept in touch sporadically. Definitely not her parents – she cannot begin to think how she will handle that conversation. Briefly, Leah wonders whether Jake is telling Jenna. Perhaps that is the reason he is taking so long. But she knows he won’t. They have agreed to keep it a secret, just between the two of them, at least until the first trimester has passed. Thinking of Jake alone in there with his ex inspires some anxiety within her, even though she knows there is nothing to be fearful of. On the calendar of her phone she has marked in the date of her first hospital appointment – less than four weeks from now. A date she leans towards, impatient, excited. But, until then, she is reliant on websites for information, loitering in chatrooms, pitting her own symptoms against the experiences of others.

  The sun is getting high in the sky and, while she waits for Jake, she takes out her phone, looking to google the latest symptom. Is it normal to feel this level of exhaustion so early in her pregnancy? And the weight she is putting on – surely it’s not possible for her to start showing yet. But when she opens the browser on her phone, she’s confronted with the results of a previous search – Anton’s full name slotted in the search engine. In the early hours of the morning, when she couldn’t sleep, her thoughts had turned once again to what Hilary had told her. The occupant of the house upstairs, his troubled history. Her thumb hovers over the screen.

  She can still feel it – the shock of that word: killer. The sour plunge it brought about in her tummy. Sitting in the car, turning the word over in her head, she thinks of Anton, the soft timbre of his voice, the gentleness of his expression, and tries to marry this image of him with her recently acquired knowledge of his violent history. It seems incongruous. For the past two weeks, she has kept returning to the facts, trying to parse them to make sense of what she’s learnt, but still she can’t quite believe it. Two weeks of careful avoidance, the attendant guilt deepening every time she hears the creak of a floorboard overhead or catches the scent of cigarette smoke on the air through the open French windows.

  In the evenings, sometimes, she can hear him out there in the garden, waiting for her. And yesterday a letter was pushed under the door.

  There are many different versions of the truth. Just because something is reported doesn’t make it fact. Remember our conversation about Agamemnon and Iphigenia? Was she sacrificed for the sacred deer or did she change into a goddess? Different accounts, different outcomes. What matters is what you choose to believe. I did not do that of which I am accused …

  Her head hurts thinking about it. She looks at the list of Google results, the lives of all the other Anton Woodburys scattered around the world. Tentatively she scrolls down the page until she finds him. She selects a result, clicks on it.

  EVENING HERALD

  25 MAY 2000

  Behind Façade of Happy Marriage Was Violence and Betrayal

  To the casual observer, Anton Woodbury and his wife Charlotte had it all.

  He was 41, a successful businessman, and she was six years his junior, attractive and sociable. They lived with their two young children in a plush Victorian terraced house in Dublin’s upmarket Dún Laoghaire.

  Neighbours included former Attorney General N______, and the acclaimed theatre director D________.

  But the social life, the material success and veneer of happiness were merely a façade concealing a ‘shell marriage’, full of bitter recriminations, infidelities and violent rows.

  In the early hours of 2 August last year, it also turned into a recipe for murder.

  Leah reads on, riveted, and as she reads, the brightness of her disbelief begins to cloud, as
the details emerge in print before her eyes: the marriage gone awry, the terrible revenge, all of it enacted in the rooms above her home. Her thoughts go to that afternoon when he had brought her upstairs. She remembers the hallowed sense of reverence she had felt, seated at that piano, the smooth coolness of the keys beneath her fingertips. Hard now to think of those rooms, knowing the dark history held within them. A woman met a violent death there. Another image comes to her: she is standing at the bottom of the stairs, pushing her weight against the door, hammering and calling to Matthew to open it. And when she glanced back up the stairs, there was Anton looking down. His expression was lost to her – he was a silhouette against the sunlit hall beyond. But for just a second or two she had sensed it – some dark hesitation within him – and in that moment, she had felt afraid.

  The door to the house opens. Leah switches off the screen of her phone, puts it away. She watches Matthew come out, Jake behind him carrying his bag. Jenna stands on the doorstep, watching them leave. She is small, with short-cropped hair, but there is nothing boyish about her. Leah does a quick appraisal: white T-shirt, denim cut-offs, tennis shoes, tanned limbs. It’s easy to see why Jake had fallen for her. An involuntary spasm of envy passes through Leah, of which she feels immediately ashamed.

  She raises her hand to wave, but Jenna is already withdrawing back into the house. The white plastic door closes firmly. Leah sits there, feeling the missed opportunity. Perhaps she should have gone inside with Jake.

  ‘Hey there!’ she says to Matthew, craning around to smile at him as he climbs into the back seat.

  ‘Hiya.’ He looks flushed, anxious to get going.