by Tamar Cohen
“What are you scared of?” I ask him, noting how the dis-appointment is tinged also with fear.
“There have been a couple of strange texts,” he says, giggling abruptly, as if what he is about to say will sound ridiculous. “Quite threatening ones, actually.”
I’m floundering, struggling to make sense of this new, unfamiliar world, where right and wrong seem to dance around like the reflections of the sun on a dark wood floor, impossible to pin down.
“They didn’t give much away, just said they were ‘friends’ of Simon’s. They want their money, Selina.”
“Have you called the pol—”
Greg raises a hand to cut me off midsentence, and as he does so, he slides the mask back on.
“Let’s not talk about this boring stuff,” he says. “Let’s talk about you and me and nice things.”
We both know it’s just a line. There is no him and me. The nice things, if indeed that’s what they were, are in the past. Yet still he feels he must play on, spinning his lines, even though neither of us believes them anymore. It occurs to me that Greg Ronaldson probably doesn’t know a different way, that this—the easy flattery, the hand on the thigh—is the only form of interaction he has.
“Shall I get us a bottle of wine?” he asks, while behind him the violinist contorts her body and tosses her hair.
“I don’t think so,” I say, getting up to leave, my wineglass untouched on the table.
Now I’m pushing out through the swing doors and moving to the riverside. Despite the rain there’s a man busking with a guitar, his fingers swaddled in fingerless gloves, singing a maudlin song about how everyone he knows goes away in the end. He’s right, of course. Everyone does go away in the end. And then what does it count for? All the hard work and the emotional investment, all the early mornings and long nights, the tears, the boredom, the dashes to the late-night pharmacy when the other one is ill, the disillusionment, the compromises, the endless negotiations. “I’ve settled for you,” said the woman in Felix’s film. Maybe in the end we all settle, just to be left with nothing.
I leave the throngs of tourists behind on the brightly lit embankment and pick my way through the puddles round the back to the road that runs behind the Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery, where I’ve parked my car. It’s semi-deserted and feels desolate and gloomy after the buzz of the riverbank. Hurrying toward my Fiat, I notice a pale shape on the windscreen. Fuck. Just what I need. A parking ticket. Getting closer, I notice it’s actually a piece of paper that has been carefully placed under one of the wipers. A flyer, then. That’s a relief. It’s very cold, and I can’t wait to get home.
But it isn’t a flyer. The paper, I see when I take it out, is a lined page, smooth and heavy and slightly creamy and glistening with rain. It looks as if it has been torn from a notebook—it’s neatly folded, the crease needle-sharp. I glance around. There’s no one here. Just the odd deserted car and the shadows of the bins lining the pavement on the far side—London lurking in the dark, as it does sometimes.
When I open it up, the writing inside is also neat and perfectly centered. Using blue ink now starting to blur in the rain, someone has written: he isn’t worth it in completely even capital letters.
Someone. Here. Watching. Following.
I stand by the car, reading over and over. As if repetition might unlock some clue.
Heart thumping. Pulse racing.
Was it always this dark here? The hulking backs of buildings are windowless, with sacks of rubbish crouching in the shadows.
A couple comes lurching out of the darkness, arguing.
“You never organize anything,” the woman complains, her voice shrill in the still, damp air. “If it was left to you, we’d have no social life at all.”
“Good,” says the man. “Our social life is shit.”
As they pass, they glare at me, as if I’m a voyeur who has chosen to listen in to their squabble rather than have it foisted on me. I fumble in my bag for my keys, and they resume their argument.
“If it’s that shit, you should just stay home,” the woman says.
In the car, I lock the doors.
“Shit,” I say to myself out loud, just to hear the sound of my own voice. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Now that I’m safely locked inside my car, I start to doubt. There must be some mistake, surely. I must have misinterpreted the note. I switch on the inside light and take out the paper again then smooth it out on my lap. The same blue writing. The same vaguely threatening words.
Someone watched me park my car. Someone followed me inside. Did they see Greg’s hand on my knee? Did they hear what we said?
Driving west through London, I can feel the note burning through the denim of my jeans. I turn on the radio to mask the pounding of my own blood in my ears. There’s a program on Radio Four about Love Poetry. Not Valentine’s yet, surely?
“I gave myself to him like a present,” a woman reads in a soft, West Country accent. “And afterward, he said ‘Did you keep the receipt?’”
It doesn’t sound very romantic to me. But then, what do I know about romance?
Next up is a man who sounds as if he is reading a sermon rather than a poem.
“I carry my phone in my breast pocket, set to vibrate,” he intones solemnly. “When you call, it feels like my heart is humming.”
How does it feel, I wonder, being that much in love? I try to imagine it, but I can’t. It was never that way between Simon and me. Maybe I just don’t have the gene for love. Not love like that. An image flashes into my head of Lottie, sitting on the edge of her bed, feeding pills into her mouth now that she’s alone. Is that what true love is? Feeling like you can’t exist because the other person doesn’t exist, that you cannot possibly remain without them? I try to think of a time when I felt like that about Simon, but nothing comes. Even at the beginning, I was very much me, and he was very much him. We complemented each other, but we didn’t feed off each other in that way. So maybe we did “settle,” like the couple in Felix’s film. Sometimes when I look back on our married life together it seems like one compromise after another—I picture them all lined up in a row like squares on a board game.
But what’s the alternative? That destructive, overpowering force that sweeps everything in front of it and makes a grown woman eat sleeping pills like Tic Tac mints? I’m better off as I am. I’m tired of feelings, tired of passion. I long for peace, I long for order, for lists and diaries and on-screen reminders. No more notes on cars, no more seedy hotel rooms, no more feeling like everything is galloping away from my control. Whoever left that note is exactly right. He isn’t worth it.
23
LOTTIE
Sadie’s fury is like a physical force field around her as she sits next to me in the car. We are headed home from parent-teacher night at her school, and she hasn’t spoken a word since we left.
I focus on the road and on remembering how to drive. Clutch, Shift, Second—no, that’s Fourth! Simon was always the one who drove. I’d never in a million years have ventured out on the roads in Dubai. You take your life in your hands there just traveling in a car, let alone driving one. And in London, I’ve never really needed one. We bought this one, a secondhand VW Golf, just for Simon to get around in whenever he was here, though even he didn’t use it much. But now that I’m knocked up, I’m trying to get used to being behind the wheel again.
“It could save your life, hon,” Jules told me. “Who knows when you might have to make an emergency dash to hospital.”
Looking on the bright side as ever! What’s the worst thing that could happen?
It’s fair to say the parents’ evening didn’t go well.
“We have some, um, concerns about Sadie,” said her form tutor, also her English teacher, who looked as though he wasn’t old enough to shave, let alone
discuss the finer points of The Merchant of Venice or Wuthering Heights or any of the other texts I’ve only just discovered they’re supposed to be covering. Why didn’t she tell me she needed to buy the books? How embarrassing to find out she’s been coming to class completely unequipped. She ought to have said!
We were in the dining hall, which was rammed with plastic tables where teachers sat, frozen with fear, behind cardboard name signs, like exhibits in a zoo, while parents queued and jostled and pushed and tried not to look like they were eavesdropping on each other’s consultations.
Sadie glared down at her lap, not meeting anyone’s eyes. She was still angry because I wouldn’t change my dress before we came out. “I’m sorry if I embarrass you, but it’s an academic review, not a fashion show,” I said, not wanting her to see I was hurt by her criticism of my clothes. What’s wrong with this dress, for God’s sake? I glance down at it now—deep red, with a black panel up the middle, stretching over the gentle curve of my belly.
“Obviously, we understand things have been very tough for her—for you both, of course,” continued the teacher, his chubby face (still spotted with acne, just how young is he?) flushing deep pink. His baby-soft hands plucked at the ring binder in front of him.
I didn’t want to talk about how tough things have been. Not here, not with him.
“Concerns?” I queried.
He looked uncomfortable. “Sadie’s academic work has suffered, but then that’s only to be expected.” Nice of him to acknowledge her father dying might have had an effect. “But it’s the, um, attendance issues that are worrying us most of all.”
Attendance issues. What attendance issues?
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Sadie leaves for school every morning at eight o’clock. She doesn’t get home until tea time, sometimes later if she’s gone to the library.”
I glanced at Sadie. Her eyes were burning into the table, her mouth set. Oh, God.
“I’m afraid, Mrs. Busfield, that several of Sadie’s teachers have complained about her missing lessons.”
Breathe, breathe. That’s it. Nice and slow.
“Sadie,” I said, trying not to choke, trying to remain calm and reasonable. “Can you explain?”
She looked at me, then shrugged and looked away.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like going,” she said.
Sadie’s parents’ evenings have always been fraught. At her little international school in Dubai, she had a reputation among the staff for being stubborn—unteachable, that one French teacher said. “Sadie, she listen only to ’er own ’eart,” the woman told us. “She believe no one else ’ave anything she can learn from.” Simon was delighted, of course. Afterward he slipped Sadie some cash as a reward.
But now it’s just me, I don’t want to have to deal with exasperated teachers. I want things to be easy, straightforward. Sitting there in the school dining room, I gazed at my daughter—so closed off, so uncompromising—and I felt the beginning of a surge of anger.
“But where have you been going?” My voice grew ominously shriller. “You’ve been meeting up with that boy, haven’t you? The one you and Gabi were talking about.”
That image came back into my head—Sadie’s head bent over a toilet seat—and I fought a surge of nausea.
“It’s none of your business what I do! You made this mess. You and Dad and that woman. You’re pathetic! What right do you have to tell me how to live my life when you’ve made such a fuck-up of your own?”
Oh, that was a shock! To see how much vitriol there was in her. I knew she was upset. Of course I did—how could she be anything else with all that’s happened to her? My poor girl. But such anger! Directed at me! How am I to cope with a new baby when my old baby is running wild, and there’s nothing I can do about it?
I tried to breathe, to keep control, but the tears came from nowhere, as they so often do these days. All those haywire hormones. It’s only to be expected. And suddenly I was sobbing at this boy-teacher’s table in the middle of the dining hall while all around us, other parents and teenagers gawped and whispered, and teachers at other tables exchanged raised-eyebrow looks and tried to remember what they’d been saying.
“Please don’t get upset, Mrs. Busfield.” That poor teacher, his hand hovering uncertainly in the air between us, unsure whether to risk a touch to the arm, not yet used to dealing with emotional women. Emotional pregnant women. “I’m sure Sadie will find her way,” he added lamely.
And Sadie, face burning, stood up so abruptly her whole chair tipped backward, clattering onto the tiled floor, and stormed out. I followed her out without a word, a tissue clamped to my face.
“I’m sorry,” I try now, as we wait at a red light, and I attempt to find the balance between clutch and accelerator. I must have said sorry a million times already, but she’s refusing to talk.
I’ve embarrassed her, I know, in front of all those people. It’s so hard being a teenager, and even more so when you’ve spent most of your life in a different country. Trying to make new friends, learning a new way of speaking, trying to understand how things work. And now this. A dead father. A suicidal mother. A home at risk of repossession. A new family who isn’t really your family. A world built on lies.
No wonder she skips biology and history. No wonder she looks at me like I’m the enemy. I’ve let her down. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve taken my eye off the ball. I’ve been self-absorbed. I’ve fallen apart. I’ve failed her. I’ve been blind. I’ve been selfish.
And now I’ve stalled.
As I park the car on the road outside our house (three attempts at backing into that space and still a good foot from the curb. How embarrassing.), Sadie is out the door before I’ve even switched off the engine. Getting out, I notice for the first time that the bump of my belly is pushing out under my dress. It has been very discreet up until now, as if it knew it wasn’t really wanted and was trying to make itself scarce. But now it’s unavoidable.
“Mum. Muuuuuum!”
Talk about extremes—one moment she’s mute, and now my daughter’s yelling her head off!
“Coming,” I say, starting to feel uneasy. Why is she screaming?
“Mum!”
I’m rushing now, unsure what’s happening. I don’t like the panic in my daughter’s voice. My heart is hammering; my palms are sweaty. When I arrive in the communal hallway, the door to our flat is wide and obscenely open. I can sense immediately that something is wrong. There’s a change in the smell of the place, an alertness in the air, a sense of things disturbed. I push through past the stairwell and into our hallway.
Sadie is standing in the doorway of the living room.
“Someone’s been here,” she says, and her voice is small and achingly young.
The place is trashed. Books all over the rug, cushions ripped and leaking entrails of white foam, a family photograph of Simon, Sadie and me lying on the floor, glass smashed.
My breath won’t come. Breathe, breathe. I rush to my bedroom for my inhaler, but stop just inside the door. Carnage here, too. Drawers pulled open, all my things—my knickers, for Christ’s sake—spilled out onto the carpet, the wardrobe door open, Simon’s clothes in a multicolored heap...ripped up. All of them. His favorite suit, the slightly tweedy one with the faint purple thread, lying in pieces on the floor. Dismembered.
Grab the inhaler from next to the bed, quick. At least that’s untouched. Press and gulp, press and gulp. Breathe, breathe.
Someone has been in here, going through my house, through my private things, running grubby fingers over silk and lace and the things I wear next to my skin.
Sadie appears next to me, her lovely green eyes frozen with fright.
I must pull myself together. I must be strong for her. I’m all that she has now.
There is only me.
SELINA
It has to be a coincidence.
I won’t let myself think of what else it could mean, won’t add two and two together to make five, pondering the significance of the note on my windscreen last week, and now this.
“In pieces on the floor!” Lottie is saying on the other end of the phone. I haven’t spoken to her since the dismal failure of Christmas (well, really, what did we expect?), and she sounds like a clockwork toy that has been wound up just a little too far. “Simon’s favorite suit. You know, the tweedy one?”
I recognize it from her description, the one he had made for a wedding weekend in Scotland years ago, but can’t remember the last time I saw it. How ridiculous I’ve been, I see now, assuming he’d stashed it in his wardrobe in Dubai. Tweed! In that heat! And now it’s lying in pieces on her bedroom floor.
“I don’t understand,” she wails. “Who would have done that?”
Should I tell her? About the note? I don’t want to scare-monger, but at the same time...
I tell her. I don’t go into details about Greg, of course. There are some things she doesn’t need to know—we’re not friends, after all, far from it. But I tell her about the note anyway, and the way I felt watched.
“Me, too!” she shrieks.
The sudden, awkward solidarity jars.
She describes hearing footsteps and breathing noises. She’s clearly highly strung, a touch neurotic, even, but still...
“Do you see him?” she wants to know now. “Do you see Simon? I see him everywhere. Lying on the sofa, pouring himself a glass of wine in the kitchen, on the hammock in the garden.”
Oh, so she is mad, after all, inventing things that aren’t there. Ghosts in her imagination, whispering in her sleep.
I don’t believe in ghosts. I think they’re cheap solace for people who aren’t strong enough to face reality. Of course, I’ve lost people in the past—my dad twelve years ago, an old friend who died quietly from ovarian cancer, insisting to the end it was a nasty bout of flu. I loved them both, but I’ve never felt compelled to wonder where they are. And though I once thought I saw Simon queuing in the local deli, deep down I knew it wasn’t really him, just some other fair-haired, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man buying focaccia wrapped in greasy brown paper on a Saturday morning.