War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Sick. I feel sick.

  My stomach churns as I survey the dark plum paint sprayed over the butter-yellow-and-gray Persian rug that I fell in love with all those years ago in Paris. When Simon and I rang the bell of the antiques shop where it was displayed in the window, the man who came to the door told us off, I remember.

  “I was sleeping,” he said, as if it was beyond selfish of us to come to his door in the middle of the afternoon wanting to spend thousands of pounds on one of his carpets. Now, looking at the bleeding gashes of paint crisscrossing the rug, a blade of pain slices through me, clean and sharp. It cost us a fortune to get that carpet home. I remember being breathless with excitement the day it arrived and watching Simon unroll it in the empty living room.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” I crowed, dancing around the edges of the room to survey the new acquisition from every angle. “I told you it’d be perfect.”

  A house full of valuable objects that have turned out to be worthless. I thought I was building a home, piece by expensive piece, but it turns out that it was no different from that antiques shop in Paris—a big empty space filled with beautiful things.

  And now ruined.

  I’m looking at the paint daubed on the walls, drying darker than on the carpet, like an old scab. I recognize the color, of course. Didn’t I spend weeks scouring the paint charts of southwest London until I found just the right shade, and then further weeks bulldozing Simon into dropping his objections? Someone has been in the garage, where the old tins of excess paint are stored on shelves in case touch-ups are required. I imagine him, this intruder, standing in front of the piled-up cans, weighing up which will inflict the most damage.

  How dare he! Suddenly, it’s as if my anger might drown me. But now I sense something—not so much a noise as a presence.

  He is still here! My mouth is dry; the noise of my own swallowing deafens me.

  If I crane forward a little, I can see my handbag across the hall, but reaching it means exposing myself to view from the upper landing.

  My heart thumps wildly in my chest; my pulse is charging. Fear burns a path up through my throat and out of my mouth, becoming a presence so tangible, I’m sure the intruder must sense it.

  What’s the alternative? Wait here in terror until he leaves? But what if he comes back in here to survey his handiwork? What if—oh, dear God—there’s more than one of them?

  My breathing sounds so loud. I must keep calm. But panic is snapping at my ankles like an angry dog.

  Simon, Simon, Simon.

  Click! The sound of a key in the front door, and Josh bursts into the hallway. No! Quiet! Shhhhh!

  “All right, Mum?” His booming voice is thunderous in the still house. He glances over but seems not to notice that his mother is plastered to the wall of the living room as if stuck fast with Velcro.

  “There’s someone here, Josh.” My whisper reverberates thunderously through the expectant house. I mean it as a warning, but Josh seems to take it as a call to action.

  “No!” I exclaim uselessly, watching his feet in their enormous, high-top trainers pound up the stairs and along the landing at the top. “I didn’t mean—”

  My boy, my boy, my boy. I hear the thud of his footsteps on the upstairs carpet, each thud producing an echoing lurch in my stomach.

  Then: “Oh, shit...”

  He sounds neither angry nor frightened.

  Still frozen, I wait for a reaction from the intruder—shouting, arguing, shooting (God forbid). But there is none. Slowly I peel myself off the wall, hearing Josh speak again.

  “What the fuck?”

  I climb the stairs, my legs wobbly, as if I’m using them for the first time after a lengthy illness.

  Josh is framed in the second doorway along the corridor, Felix’s old bedroom. He looks like a freakishly tall child, standing there so awkwardly, shifting his weight from side to side.

  “What the fuck have you done?” he repeats, but his voice is still curiously free from anger.

  I don’t understand. What is happening now?

  Coming up behind Josh, I peer through the open doorway. The air is full of white flakes, and I have the strangest feeling of looking into a snow globe. No, not flakes, feathers. The air is full of tiny white feathers, seemingly suspended in space. And at the center of the feathers, doggedly chopping up Felix’s duck-down duvet with an enormous pair of secateurs that usually live in the garage, is Sadie. What the fuck, indeed.

  Sadie is muttering to herself.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she is saying, her shiny head bent intently over her task. Chop, chop, chop. “Doesn’t matter a fuck.”

  Her voice is thick and lumpy, and there’s a nearly empty bottle of vodka on the floor next to her. She’s drunk, that young girl—totally, paralytically, disgustingly drunk!

  Now there’s a rush of something in my ears. Anger, relief, alarm. My legs are shaking properly now that the adrenaline is fading. I need to sit down.

  Josh crosses the room and crouches down next to the girl, putting an arm around her shoulders. He’s so gentle, my boy, as if she’s a small child.

  “It’s okay,” he murmurs, easing the secateurs from Sadie’s hands and casting them aside. “It’s okay now.”

  “No, it’s bloody well not okay!” My voice comes back to me now, bursting with pent-up fury and fear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I’m looking down at the girl’s bowed head. “Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve done?”

  Josh’s eyes are pleading. “Mum! Calm down!”

  “Calm down? Go downstairs and take a look at the kitchen and the living room, then tell me to calm down!”

  The girl is looking at me now, black rings of mascara smudged around her green eyes. Simon’s eyes.

  “S’okay,” she tells me. As if she’s trying to reassure me! “Doesn’t matter.” The nerve of her!

  “I’m calling the police.”

  I turn around to go back downstairs for my phone, but Josh cuts me off on the landing.

  “No, Mum.” His hand grips the top of my arm so I have to stop.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Josh. She’s caused thousands and thousands of pounds’ worth of damage. Do you really expect me to do nothing? How did she get in anyway? You left the alarm off again, didn’t you? What about the insurance?”

  Josh’s face is hardening now like plaster. “Who gives a fuck about the insurance?”

  Oh, really! This is too much!

  He’s looking at me now, carefully. “She’s probably got her reasons,” he says.

  Fury shoots through me. “Yes—jealousy, pettiness, spite...”

  Josh’s fingers tighten on my arm. “Felix,” he says. And his boy-man’s voice is croaky.

  I don’t understand.

  So now Josh tells me about coming home a couple of days ago and seeing coats hanging over the banister. Felix’s pork-pie hat, the one he always wears that I can’t abide. Then Sadie, coming down the stairs, her face burning, refusing to meet his eyes.

  “I was just using the bathroom,” she told Josh, though of course, he was too smart to believe that.

  And Felix appearing on the upstairs landing in just a pair of jeans. Bare chest, bare feet. Whistling. Sadie snatching up her coat and picking up Felix’s keys from the hall table at the same time. How angry he was later when he couldn’t find them, turning the place upside down.

  “Gotta go,” Sadie told Josh. Looking ashamed, Josh explains. Looking like she wanted to cry.

  “So you see...” he says now. But I don’t. I don’t see anything. Felix is twenty-six. He’s a man. He has a girlfriend, a life. I can see how Josh might get the wrong idea, and how an impressionable sixteen-year-old might have misconstrued things, but I don’t see anything else. I don’t see why this is happe
ning to me. Why is there a strange, broken girl in my son’s bedroom? Why is my house in tatters? Why is my life out of control? What has happened to all the people I love? To Simon? To Josh? Why is my baby boy standing in front of me with the world-weary face of an adult who has seen too much?

  I’m so tired of it all, tired of thinking about it.

  “Even so,” I say to Josh, not looking at him, “there have to be consequences.”

  He lets go of my arm.

  “Whatever,” he says, holding his hands up and turning away.

  I continue along the landing, but halfway down the stairs I stop. How heavy my legs feel. I’m too exhausted to go on. I sink down on the step behind me and rest my head against the newel post. That’s better. The varnished wood feels reassuringly solid against my skin.

  From the bedroom above I can hear Josh’s low voice murmuring soothingly, and now—horrible—the lowing sound of a young girl keening to herself.

  What a mess. What an ugly, tragic mess.

  I heave myself to my feet and carry on down the stairs, my legs leaden. Retrieving my mobile from my bag, I call up a number.

  “Hello?” says Lottie.

  “Your daughter is here,” I say. “She needs you.”

  Once I know Lottie is on her way, I hover in the doorway of Josh’s room, where he has installed Sadie after half dragging, half carrying her from the wreckage of Felix’s room. She lies curled up in his bed in the fetal position, moaning faintly. There’s a bucket on the floor by her head, freshly washed out. Her hair is plastered to her head with sweat, and flecks of vomit lodge in the strands around her mouth. Her skin is clammy like sweaty cheese, and there’s a long ladder in the left leg of her black tights. Her clothes are splattered with specks of paint and sick. The room stinks of the nasty things bodies do that no one likes to think about.

  Josh sits on the end of the bed with his back against the wall, watching her.

  “You don’t have to stay in here,” I tell him. “She’s not your responsibility.”

  He looks up at me and shrugs.

  “Josh,” I say, weighing up my words. “There’s nothing between you...? What I mean is, you do know she’s your sister?”

  He nods.

  “I know,” he says. “And that makes her my responsibility.”

  An overwhelming rush of love sweeps over me now.

  Such a good person, my son. Such a kind person.

  “Even when,” he adds, eyeing the sick bucket and the clammy figure in the bed, “she kind of stinks.”

  In my own room, I take out my phone. I don’t want to do this. Please, God, don’t let me have to do this.

  “Felix?” I say. “I need to talk to you.”

  LOTTIE

  For a second, I sit in my car gazing up at the house. What on earth is Sadie doing here? So far from home.

  Selina comes to the door. Her face gives nothing away—the advantages of all that Botox!

  “Before you go upstairs,” she says, “I’ll show you your daughter’s handiwork.”

  I follow her, obediently, even though I just want to see my baby and take her home.

  Oh, my God! The destruction is immense. The living room is graffitied with shocking-red paint. The kitchen looks like a bomb site. Selina watches my face carefully, monitoring my reactions. I think my obvious shock gratifies her, because she starts to lead the way upstairs now. Halfway up I pause in front of a framed photo of Simon and Selina and their children. They’re in the garden with lots of other people, all dressed up to the nines, and there’s a big cake in front of Simon with 50 written on it in red icing. The air goes out of my stomach as I remember the huge fiftieth party I organized for him at a beach club in Dubai, with all our friends, an Abba tribute band and silliness and dancing. Two parties, two wives, two lives. How? How? How? Was there something inside him, some switch, that made him able to pass from one life to the other without ever forgetting who he was? I’m about to ask Selina what she thinks, but stop myself. What’s the point now? We’ll never know. Instead, I follow her upstairs to the second doorway off the landing and look into a wrecked room where feathers and red paint clot together, making it look like the scene of a brutal cockfight.

  “Obviously, it’s going to take a lot of money to put right,” I say, finally, because I have to say something.

  “Ha! You don’t know the half of it,” she barks. “Just the living-room carpet alone—”

  “I’m very sorry,” I interrupt, wanting her to stop. “She’s never done anything like this before.”

  “I should bloody well hope not!”

  We move away now and into another room.

  Oh, Sadie!

  I hurl myself down next to the bed.

  “Sadie? Poppet?”

  There’s a movement at the end of the bed, and I’m suddenly aware that Josh is here, too. I don’t care. Let him be embarrassed.

  Sadie opens one eye then closes it again.

  “Don’t need you,” she slurs. “Goway.”

  She does, though. She does need me. I’m all she has.

  I stroke her forehead, pushing back the damp hair from her face. There’s a clump of something nasty by her ear. I won’t look, just carry on stroking.

  There, there. That’s right. There, there.

  I’m here now. I’m here.

  SELINA

  For a moment or two, I continue watching from the doorway. Then I turn on my heel, throwing my hands up in disgust. I give up! Downstairs in the living room, I sink onto one of the mink sofas, which has, miraculously, escaped the carnage, and put my head in my hands. I have no idea anymore what I should think.

  In my mind I run through the phone call with Felix. He was in a restaurant, he said, having a work meeting. (At nine-thirty at night?) He really couldn’t talk.

  “It’s important,” I said. “It’s about Sadie.”

  I told him what had happened. And what Josh had told me.

  “I need to know,” I said. “Did you...? Have you...?”

  Felix’s outrage spluttered down the phone like something living. “Do you really think...?” he said. “With my half sister? That’s sick!”

  Sitting on the sofa now, I rub my eyes, trying to clear my mind.

  Felix is right, of course. I should never even have mentioned it to him. It’s been so hard for the children, all of this. No wonder they’re all making approaches toward one another, trying to work all this out. I remember what Flora said, about meeting up with Sadie in a patisserie. That’s what it’ll be, this thing with Sadie and Felix. Just trying to suss each other out, trying to negotiate these strange new relationships.

  And it would make sense, wouldn’t it, for a young girl—so impressionable at that age—who has just lost her father to become fixated on her father’s adult son?

  That poor girl.

  The flash of sympathy takes me by surprise.

  Now I can hear noises on the stairs. I go out into the hallway and see that Josh and Lottie are bringing Sadie down, one on each side of her. The girl’s head droops forward; her face is bloodless. There’s a tiny feather matted into her hair at the back. I think of what she’s done to my house and the damage I’ll never be able to fully put right. So senseless! I’m glad she’s going home. It’s for the best.

  I hold the front door open, and they make their way outside to where Lottie’s car is parked practically on top of the wheelie bin.

  They lie her down on the backseat. That’s it. Wait! I run up and fetch a blanket and the bucket to put in with her. There. Better safe than sorry.

  But we’re all sorry. And none of us is safe.

  LOTTIE

  Driving home, I get lost and end up driving around Hyde Park Corner several times. But I don’t panic, just keep on driving round until I pick the m
ost likely exit. That’s the one. Sorted. See? Nobody died. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

  Pulling up outside our flat, I manage to park only a short jump away from the curb and open the back door. Sadie is lying across the seat, wrapped in a blanket, with that bloody bucket on the floor next to her.

  “Sadie? Poppet?”

  At first, she’s unresponsive when I try to shake her awake, then hostile. Finally, she allows herself to be led indoors. I take her into her room, and she climbs into bed in all her clothes. That’s okay. At least she’s safe. Smelly but safe.

  I don’t bring up the subject of the break-in or the vandalism. I don’t ask her what she was doing in Barnes. I don’t mention Selina or Simon or Josh. I don’t have a clue what just happened tonight. All I know is that an awful lot has been going on in my sixteen-year-old daughter’s life.

  And I haven’t been aware of any of it.

  Part Five

  ACCEPTANCE

  25

  SELINA

  There are people hanging around by the bicycle racks outside the main hospital entrance, either singly or in small groups, all wearing pajamas and slippers or hospital-issue gowns, and smoking cigarettes. Some have plaster casts on their arms or legs, a couple are pushing drips in front of them. One is in a wheelchair with a metal brace drilled into his head. They look at me when I hurry past as if I’m the odd one, in my coat and my tights and my suede knee-high boots.

  What am I doing here?

  I’ve been asking myself the same question again and again during the interminable drive to Archway. Bloody roadworks. Bloody Olympics. All these months and years of misery so London can present itself all shiny and new, a poor girl wearing a designer dress she can ill afford and hoping her tatty bag and shoes won’t give her away.

  The phone call took me by surprise, that’s the truth of it. I didn’t have time to think about how to react. Such a shock. I wasn’t thinking straight.

  “Is that Selina Busfield?” A woman’s voice. A stranger.