by Tina Seskis
“Shush, Caz,” said Dominic, and his voice was weary.
“No, I will not fucking shush Caz, you cunt. You abandoned me, you just left me in that fucking restaurant and didn’t come back for me, and I’m sat there waiting like a total prick, waiting to tell you I’m having your fucking baby.” And then she ran, stumbled, across the lawn and out through the side gate of the square, ignoring Dominic’s shocked appeals to come back.
Caroline was eventually picked up by a black cab outside a bar off Goodge Street, where people were laughing, drunk-bound, and although it was true they had heard some kind of explosion, were too busy shaking off the week to care what may be happening less than a mile away, or wonder why this dirty sobbing girl was staggering past them. The driver barely noticed her state either, it was par for the course for a Friday night, and he also was oblivious to the bomb – he didn’t listen to the news, it was too bloody miserable. As she sat alone in the back the space felt voluminous, empty, like she might fall into the middle of it without Dominic there to keep her safe. How the hell had the night turned out so dreadfully, from a cab ride full of promise to a return one stained with grief. She knew Dominic would never come back to her, not after this, it was all ruined – by the tragedy that had enveloped them, by her sickening behaviour, the look she’d seen in his eyes.
Caroline found she needed to tell someone else her news now, make it feel real – she was so disorientated, maybe she’d imagined the blue line after all. She tried her mother but the phone was engaged for ages. She cursed and called her father and it rang and rang until going to answer-machine. She’d dialled the next number before she'd had time to think. As her twin sister answered Caroline didn’t know what to say.
“Hi Caroline!” said Emily. “How nice to hear from you... Hello? Hello? Caz, are you there?”
“Yes,” sobbed Caroline. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh,” said Emily. She didn’t know whether this was a good or a bad thing, what to say. “Why are you crying, Caz?” she said gently.
“I got caught in the bomb and then I lost Dominic and he was about to propose and he didn’t even know about the baby then, and now I’ve called him a cunt. And, oh Emily I love him so much and I want us to have our baby and now I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him.”
Emily had never had a call like this from her sister, she’d never turned to her before, and she felt absurdly grateful. She thought fast. Tomorrow was Saturday, she had nothing on she couldn’t change, and besides she couldn’t bear hearing Caroline like this.
“I’ll come down, Caz,” she said. “I’ll get the first train in the morning.”
“Oh,” said Caroline. This wasn’t what she’d planned, she hadn’t wanted even to talk to Emily really.
“If you want me to,” Emily said.
Caroline paused and she must have still been traumatised, because she found herself saying, “All right then.”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” said Emily. “Bye, Caz, be strong, I love you.”
“I love you too Em,” said Caroline, and both girls hung up bemused, in shock, in tears.
Emily wasn’t sure whether to go after all. Would Caroline really want her there, she hadn’t seemed too keen when she’d offered: she usually rejected any attempts at friendship from her sister. Emily thought about calling before she set off, just to check, but was worried that might offend Caroline, as though Emily was trying to get out of it, and anyway the poor girl had been in a bomb, it must have been horrific. Emily had been devastated when she’d seen the news: she’d assumed Caroline was being melodramatic as usual, what with her boyfriend apparently proposing to her and the restaurant exploding and him disappearing like that, but the bomb part at least had been true. Her poor sister!
The train seemed to take forever, there were engineering works around Northampton, and when she finally arrived at Euston she followed the signs to the tube and tried to work out where to go. She didn’t know London at all well and hadn’t thought to ask Caroline, she just assumed Brick Lane would have its own station but now it seemed it didn’t. She was deep underground and couldn’t call her twin to check, and there were no guards to ask. She looked at the other people on the platform – there were two youths with backpacks, in baseball shirts and spanking white trainers who looked as lost as she did; a tiny old Asian lady in a beautiful orange sari teamed with black socks and sandals, who looked the other way as Emily went to speak to her; a sullen girl, dressed all in black with heavily-made up eyes, who’d probably been out all night. Emily’s only other option was a gorgeous-looking black boy, who wore gold in his ears and around his neck and when she plucked up the courage to ask him had a smile that made her want to take him home to meet her mum. She thanked him, blushing, and moved along the platform to study the map, to find out how to get to Aldgate East.
When Caroline opened the door Emily was horrified. Her eyes had blown up so badly that it looked like she’d been beaten up. She seemed angry to see Emily, and Emily thought maybe she shouldn’t have come after all. Caroline’s flat was eclectically trendy, all primary colours and weird objects and arty pornography. In the entrance hall three identical bowler hats hung in a line, above black and white stills of close-ups of monkeys, who looked pained, tortured, and Emily wondered if they’d even been taken in science labs. She didn’t like to ask, they made her feel uncomfortable.
Caroline just stood at the door, scowling. Emily brushed past into the tiny wonky kitchen and put the kettle on, while Caroline looked on numbly. She made the tea and stirred in two sugars for Caroline, it looked like she needed them, and as she put down the spoon she saw her twin crumple to the floor and start to keen, like an animal.
“Caz, come on love, it’ll be OK,” said Emily, bending down, putting her arms around her. As she helped Caroline up she saw a violent red smudge on the cold white tiles, like another bizarre work of art, and as she looked into what was left of Caroline’s eyes, behind the puffiness, she understood.
30
I get through the rest of this tortuous week with no further run-ins with Tiger. The creative presentation for the new seven seater car went brilliantly well – the clients quite amazingly loved our very ropy quintuplets idea – and my team seem fine with my new status: they actually seem to respect me, even if I don’t. I’m proud though that I’ve had no drugs since Monday lunchtime, and I’ve even managed to get Angel to swap vodka for tea this week, we’re both officially on a health kick. Maybe I’m finally turning a corner, am through with the excesses that helped me survive.
I have just one more milestone to get through now, and it’s the biggest one yet and it’s this afternoon and I don’t know how to cope, what to do, whether to embrace it or else push it away now that it’s here.
Here.
Simon has promised to take me out to lunch to celebrate my first week as Account Manager and I’ve said yes, so I’ll be with him throughout it, I can’t face it alone. I know Tiger will bag me for it but just this once I don’t care. Maybe I should have taken the day off, but what would I do on my own? How would I bear being inside my own skin? Being with Simon might help.
I check my watch. 11.07. Three hours seven minutes to go. The numbers are too concrete, I can’t escape them. I’m hot and heady, can’t concentrate. I feel my resolve drain like someone took the plug out, and I get up from my chair and head past Nathalie’s desk, round the back of Luke’s, towards those fabulous toilets. Inside my head I catch a glimpse of my husband and son, and then it's gone, but still I beg them to forgive me...
Simon takes me to a fancy restaurant down by Tower Bridge, and I think it’s around here somewhere that Angel said she used to live, before she had to hide out from her murderous boyfriend at Finsbury Park Palace. I suggested to Simon we just go somewhere near the agency, there are hundreds of options, but Simon seemed to sense something in me today and said it would be nice to get out down by the river, it’s a glorious day. I love Simon’s old-fashioned vocabulary – things are alw
ays glorious or super, or conversely woeful or calamitous. He’s a gentleman at heart, and maybe that’s why he hasn’t got the guts to up and leave his dreadful wife, it would be rather bad form. I know he’s a little bit in love with me these days and I admit that I do feel something for him, but although he never asks me why he somehow knows not to take it further.
We sit by the open window and the Thames breezes in, and a bow-tied man tinkles on the grand piano and the atmosphere is exclusive, understated. It’s lovely here, Simon was right. I forget myself for a while and we drink white wine and share a showy seafood platter, and when I check the time it's 1.45. Twenty nine minutes to go. To what? To a pointless anniversary on a doom-filled day. I can’t help thinking that exactly this time last year, I still had a wonderful husband, a delightful son, I was pregnant again. I was happy, sickeningly so, and since then I have let them all down, in their different ways. I remind myself that thinking like that doesn’t help anything and I say yes to a top-up of wine. I’ve done so well for so many months, I think I almost forgot that once I was Emily Coleman, but when it comes down to it I cannot forget this date. The more I’ve tried to forget it the more it has loomed, ominous and past-presenting. At least one good thing has come of this day though – I’ve given up drugs, yes, definitely, as of today. I feel proud of myself that earlier, at the agency, when I'd reached the toilets ready to snort my way into another little bit of forgetting, I'd thought of what day it is and of my darling little boy and what he would think of me, his mother, and I’d gone straight into one of those bright shiny cubicles and emptied the entire contents of the packet down the toilet, and flushed them away.
The pianist starts playing a song I’ve heard a thousand times but I can’t think what it is, and it bothers me. I wonder what Ben and Charlie are doing now and I chase that thought away too. I hear a voice and realise that Simon is speaking.
“Have you tried the crab yet – it’s rather delicious?” I look numbly at him and shake my head, my eyes desolate. He spots a weakness in me, an opening, and takes my hand.
“Why are you so sad, my darling Cat? You know you can talk to me. You can tell me anything – just as friends.” And he says it with such tenderness and truth I feel tempted, more than I’ve ever been, even more than on recent nights out with Angel, when I’ve been drunk and high and almost mad with the urge to tell her, I’ve held it in for too long now. I so desperately need to get through these next few minutes, maybe it would be better if I could talk about it at last, tell someone. I hesitate right on the edge of speech, as though forming the words might make it worse somehow, or better. It’s like I’m standing high on a diving board, my body clenched and flexed and buzzing. Can I? Or can’t I? I steady my nerves and step forward into the void.
31
Caroline breathed carefully into the phone, too lost, too damaged to think what to say. Dominic had taken two whole days to make this call, and in the meantime she’d lost their child. Both had been through traumas so great they no longer knew how to reach the other. Earlier that day Caroline had dug out the pregnancy test from the bathroom cabinet and the blue line was gone, and she'd begun to think she really had imagined it. She mourned the line, mourned the diamond in her glass, and she wondered where it was now, what had happened to it. But most of all she mourned her baby, what the line was meant to have become. In her other pregnancies the foetus had been a problem to dispose of, yet this one had been a miracle, a joining of herself with Dominic, a symbol of their love. But they both knew that love was gone and so was their baby, and nothing was going to bring either back. And the only other person who knew was Emily, and Caroline had never told her anything before. It felt strange that they’d become so close over this, although Caroline knew it was an anomaly, wouldn’t last. Emily had been fantastic though, Caroline had to hand it to her, calm and non-judgmental, even when she’d described her vile outburst amongst the carnage in Soho Square. “It was your hormones, the shock, everything all together Caz, what do you expect?” Emily had said as she held her hand, and Caroline had found the contact strangely comforting. Maybe she should stop being such a cow to her twin, it might be nice to have her as a friend for a change.
After Dominic hung up, saying he’d call again soon, Caroline sat immobile. He hadn’t even offered to come to see her, and she suspected he hadn’t believed her when she’d told him about the baby, how she’d lost it, it seemed too convenient somehow. He did call though, as he said he would, a few times more. They went out for dinner each time and although always apologetic he was never on time again. The dinners were awkward, excruciating. Caroline insisted he come home with her the first time, and they tried to have sex but it was embarrassing, humiliating, and he didn’t stay the night. Eventually Caroline couldn’t stand the pretence, this imprint of their once real relationship, and she ended it late one night, by text. Dominic didn’t object, and Caroline wondered again just what transformation had occurred in him the night of the bombing. Years later she heard through friends that he’d married someone called Martin, and that knowledge along with her lost baby haunted her forever.
32
I sit by the river and the sun is shining and I’ve decided to confide in Simon, so I start to open my mouth to say – what? That I’m not really Cat Brown, I’m Emily Coleman, that I’m a fake and a fraud and a deserter? Yes, why not, it might do me good to tell the truth at last. As the first words form I look down without thinking and there it is on my phone in all its digital unequivocalness:
14.14
May 7
I gag and scrape back my chair and run out of the restaurant as fast as I can. I hold the vomit in my mouth until I reach the river bank and then I spew, all over the railing, and it spatters back at me and I collapse to the floor into my own puke, and through my humiliation I wish for the millionth time I was dead.
I’m lying in bed at home in Shepherds Bush and although my clothes are gone my hair – or is it my mouth? – stinks of vomit. Angel is sat on a chair across the room watching telly, and as I stir she gets up and comes over to me. I feel ashamed, although I'm not quite sure why yet. I remember that Simon and – who? A waiter? A passing tourist? – helped me to my feet and staggered me along the river bank to where a taxi could pick us up. I wasn’t unconscious (nor was I last year), but I was in the same hysterical state and Simon, I now realise, must have called a doctor to give me something, the drug fug is unmistakeable. It must be hours later now and I think with a lurch of Tiger, the awards do, and I’m suddenly back in the present, not stuck in my recurring nightmare, and I wonder whether I’ve passed a milestone and really will get better at last.
“I’ve got to get up,” I say. “I’m meant to be at the Dorchester this evening.”
“Don’t be daft, babe,” says Angel. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.”
A whole year.
It’s as if I need to get up now, get on with the rest of my life, there’s no time to lose. It’s like I’ve moved beyond despair into – what? Acceptance? I’ll never have my old life back and although I knew it before I don’t think I felt it in my heart, even though I thought I did, if that makes any sense. I try to get out of bed but feel too groggy, and fall back onto the pillows. Angel pulls the duvet over me.
“You stay there, babe. I’m going to make you a nice cup of tea.” She squeezes my hand and leaves the room, shutting the door gently.
I wonder how Simon knew my address, I’ve never got round to giving it at work, they still have my Finsbury Park one. He must have looked on my phone and rung someone. I only have people from the agency and clients in my phone, and a few vague friends like Bev and Jerome from the house. And Angel. He must have thought that weird – hardly any friends, no Mum, no Dad. I’ve talked about Angel enough times and now I realise he must have been here at the flat earlier, they must have met each other, and I feel absurdly jealous.
Angel comes back in with a pink mug where the man gets naked if the drink is hot. I think she’s trying to
cheer me up and so I smile accommodatingly.
“You never told me Simon was such a looker,” says Angel.
“Oh,” I say. “D’you think so?” and I think again keep your hands off him, and I wonder what’s the matter with me.
“He was really worried about you, babe,” she continues. “Is he a tincy bit in love with you?”
“No,” I answer, too quickly.
“What happened anyway?” she says. “You turn up here drugged up to the eyeballs and covered in God knows what. I thought we were meant to be getting healthy this week.” Angel laughs nervously and I can tell she’s worried sick about me, and it makes me more determined to show her I’m OK, that I’m through the worst. My phone rings on the bedside table. Angel gets to it before me.
“It’s Simon,” she says. “Shall I answer?”
“Yes,” I say, meaning no, and for the first time I realise how dangerous it is to have a friend as beautiful as Angel.
“Hi Simon ... No, it’s Angel... Oh, I’m fine, thanks (giggle)... She’s just come round, she’s OK, I think... Yes... No (giggle) I’ve told her that’s madness... Oh. OK, that’s kind of you, I’ll ask her... Do you want to have a word with her?... Oh, OK, maybe see you later then, bye.”
“What was that all about?” I say. The only time I’ve been cross with Angel before is the day we went shopping and I found out she was a kleptomaniac, and I got over that pretty quickly.
“Simon says that if you feel better later you can always come down for a drink after the dinner. Apparently someone else can’t make it now – Luke I think he said – so he said if I wanted to come with you that would be fine.” She says it guilelessly, with no apparent agenda, and I feel ashamed at my jealousy. I have just two friends in the world and I don’t want them to find each other, how childish is that? Maybe it’s the drugs the doctor gave me, I really don’t feel quite right. It’s still May the 6th, I should be sad, sombre, but instead I feel mildly euphoric and groggy and paranoid all at the same time.