by Tamar Cohen
I was wondering if we could meet for a chat, said her message. The one I ignored. Once again, I’m flushed through with guilt.
“I’ve been trying to talk to you,” says Petra.
“I know. I’m so sorry, dear. I’ve been distracted. You know how it’s been...”
I’ve been distracted? For goodness’ sake, how lame I sound! But Petra nods. She even has the grace to look concerned. Simon was right—she is a nice girl. Why haven’t I realized that until now? I wish she didn’t look so unhappy, though. I’m so tired. Too tired to hear whatever it is she wants to say.
“It’s about Felix,” she says, her cheeks flushing slightly. Three years we’ve known each other, Petra and I, but intimacy feels as awkward as if we were strangers making small talk in a lift. “Have you noticed anything strange lately, about his behavior?”
I think about Felix, and how thin he’s become.
“He’s not...anorexic, is he?” I ask.
Well, you hear of such things, men suffering eating disorders. But Petra seems to find the idea funny.
“No,” she says, giggling in a way that seems not to contain any mirth at all. “He’s—”
“Ah, there you are.”
Felix appears in the kitchen. Surprisingly, while the rest of us seem to have wilted as the day has progressed, Felix appears brighter and more alert, as if his earlier graveside collapse has invigorated him somehow. He slings an arm around Petra, and I instinctively glance away. Oh, to have that again, the casual arm around the shoulders.
“You’re needed,” says Felix. “Flora is trying to force us to watch The Only Way is Orange.”
“Essex,” Petra says in a voice that’s impossible to read. “The Only Way is Essex. It’s a reality TV show.”
“Exactly,” says Felix, steering her out of the kitchen. “So you must come and outvote her.”
“But I was just talking to your mum...”
“You go,” I tell her, as Felix eyes us both with curiosity. “We’ll finish our chat later.”
For a moment after they’ve gone, I am charged with guilt. I should have listened, should have asked more. I know there’s a conversation coming that I’m not going to like. Something about Felix. Not anorexia, then, but something.
In the back of my head, I register that my phone is ringing. I close my eyes, only opening them again when it stops. Glancing at the screen, I see it was Maggie Ronaldson calling. There’s a message: Greg’s conscious and talking about what happened to him. It’s really important you call me as soon as you get this.
But I can’t face calling her now. I will, just not now. There’s also a message from Lottie, asking me to call her back urgently. She sounds very stressed. I definitely can’t deal with that neurotic woman today.
Just let me have tonight. Please. This one last evening to empty my mind and lose myself in the luxury of thinking of nothing. I’ll have this tea—herbal, I think—then run a bath. I’ll light candles that smell like new beginnings and close my eyes and think of pine trees in the rain and fields of fresh flowers.
I will not think about Simon and the secrets that multiplied inside him like tumors.
I will not think about Greg.
I will not think about poor dead Walter or my wrecked house or my children who, though grown, nevertheless wind themselves like bindweed around my tired heart. Everyone reaches a tipping point, don’t they? And this, I suspect, is mine.
LOTTIE
The discovery that it’s Sadie who’s behind all the spam Selina’s been receiving has sent my anxiety levels rocketing. I can hear the music blaring out from her room, but I can’t face another confrontation with her so soon after this morning’s breakfast scene. Equally, I’m too restless to stay in bed. My stomach feels tight, and I keep stroking my bump to try to soothe myself. My daughter is so lost. How have I allowed it to happen? After a night without sleep, my nerves are on edge, and as I go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong, something amiss.
Filling the kettle, I glance around. The same mess as always. This morning’s breakfast things still out on the table, next to a teetering pile of laundry waiting to be sorted. Sadie’s English books dumped on a chair from when she emptied her schoolbag two days ago. But something is different. I can feel it.
Taking out a tea bag from the tin inside the cupboard, I look around again, my eye finally falling on the back door, which, now I look closer, seems to be fractionally ajar. Well, how weird. I don’t remember...
The scream comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Fear surges through me, white-hot. Sadie. I must protect Sadie. I start toward her room at the same time as the hall cupboard bursts open.
SELINA
The phone is ringing. That’s what’s woken me. I feel so groggy, I can’t tell if my eyes are open or shut. Shut, I think. Everything is dark. I shouldn’t have taken that sleeping pill.
“Mrs. Busfield? This is Detective Inspector Bowles.”
The sense of déjà vu combines with the sleeping-pill grogginess, plunging me into the deepest confusion. Is this real, or have I somehow gone back in time?
“Is your son there, Mrs. Busfield?”
“Josh? I’m not sure, I—”
“Not Josh. Your oldest son. Felix.”
I’m trying my best to follow, but my thoughts are flabby and gelatinous, impossible to wade through. Why Felix?
“He’s not here,” I manage eventually. “He went home. What’s the matter? Why do you want him?” My voice sounds thick and floury.
“I’ve been watching the CCTV again, Mrs. Busfield.” The policeman sounds excited, as if he’s about to tell me the punchline of the most enormous joke. “You know, all this time we’ve been scrutinizing your husband and his companion on that footage, together with the people immediately behind and in front of them. Well, earlier on my attention was caught by a woman who was coming toward your husband. She was wearing one of those shapeless padded coats, you know the kind I mean, and I found myself wondering why women wear those things.” The policeman seems to be too excited by his own cleverness to pay much attention to what he’s saying. “So I kept the footage rolling even after your husband and his companion exited the screen on the right, following her as she disappeared into the darkness at the end of the street. And that’s when I saw it. Just a flash, mind, before the screen closed off into darkness as the lab technicians cut it short like they’d been told to.”
I’m not following at all. I don’t understand why he’s telling me this.
“Saw what?” I break in, rudely.
“A figure coming toward the camera, still a bit of a distant blur, mind—but wearing a very distinctive pork-pie hat.”
“Felix!”
LOTTIE
“Chris!”
My cry seems to have its own echo, and my hands shoot over to cover my belly, instinctively protecting it. But I’ve seen the expression on Chris Griffiths’ face, and I know there’s nothing I can do to stop him doing whatever he’s been hiding in the cupboard to do. I just want to keep him from Sadie, that’s all. I just want her to be safe.
I close my eyes, but the anticipated attack never comes. Instead, I feel a blast of freezing air from behind me, so shockingly unexpected that for a second I think I must have been shot.
“Chris!”
Two things strike me immediately about this second cry. First, that it’s calmer than the first, and second, that it isn’t coming from me.
Opening my eyes, I see Chris’s wife, Karen, who has just come in through the back door, has intercepted her husband and is standing between him and me.
Chris stops, his breath coming out in sobs, his expression confused.
“Karen?” he says, and his voice, just a few moments ago twisted into that inhuman
scream, now sounds almost childlike. For a split second no one speaks, and then Chris’s face caves in on itself like flour.
“It’s all right,” says Karen, putting her arms around her husband’s heaving shoulders. “It’s okay.”
Standing in my kitchen, my heart pounding painfully against my rib cage, I feel like a voyeur, as if I’m witnessing something that ought to be private.
“He hasn’t been taking his medication.” Karen doesn’t turn around, so it takes a while to realize she’s talking to me. “Normally, we’re very happy. He never even thinks about you.”
I remember the noises in the night, the sense of things having been moved around in my bedroom, the footsteps outside, and I feel sick.
“I don’t understand,” I say. But now it’s coming back to me. Those first months after Simon and I got together, we were so happy in our little bubble—except for my ex-boyfriend, Chris.
I can’t accept it’s over. I won’t accept it’s over.
In vain, I attempted to explain that for me it had never really begun.
It’s all about money, isn’t it? Because he’s a flash git and I’m not!
An avalanche of dreadful self-penned songs followed, recorded onto cassettes and arriving hand-delivered through my letterbox or warbled down the phone in late-night calls, anthems to heartbreak. Then, when he passed into the angry stage, furious letters replaced the songs, words scratched across the paper in red Biro. All those weeks where sleep was punctuated by bitter, incoherent phone calls until Simon finally snapped and tore the phone out of the wall. That awful scene where Chris arrived on the doorstep of my old flat in the early hours and curled up in a ball under the dining table, refusing to move.
Some kind of a breakdown. Historic mental-health issues.
“I hadn’t been taking my medication,” said his brief letter of explanation—the last time I heard from him. “I’m completely fine now.”
Then nothing...until that phone call about Simon.
Egg leaking out between my fingers. Egg pooling on the floor.
“I’ve come here a few times,” says Chris now, and his voice is totally flat. “To make sure you were safe.”
So that was him? The footsteps on the path outside, the breathing in the night.
Not Simon at all. Not Simon looking out for us.
Anger surges through me. How dare he? Coming here to my home, lurking in the shadows, making me believe in ghosts.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I yell. “Breaking in, trashing the place. It was you!”
He looks at his wife, looks at me, looks away again.
“Sorry ’bout that,” he mumbles. As if it was a slight error—a misunderstanding over meeting times, dry cleaning he forgot to pick up.
“It’s just that the funeral brought it all back,” he says, and I notice his eyes for the first time tonight. Dead fish eyes. “And all that...unpleasantness with the other family. You should have listened to me—about Simon Busfield. I did try to warn you.”
I don’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s like a horrible dream.
“Did you know he’d been following me?” I ask Karen Griffiths, who remains locked in a swaying embrace with her husband in the middle of my kitchen.
She shakes her head. “I only noticed tonight that he’d stopped taking his lithium,” she says. “That’s why I came after him. He wouldn’t... He’s not dangerous.”
Hunched over, with his face buried in her neck, Chris gives out a low moan. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” says Karen. “You’re not in any trouble.”
“No trouble?” I shout. “Do you have any idea what he’s put me through? I should call the police. He scared me to death. Not to mention all the damage...”
My words trail off as I remember the damage my own daughter caused not much more than twenty-four hours ago.
“Please don’t. I’ll make sure he takes his meds from now on. He’s always fine when he’s doing that.” Karen is talking to me, but all her attention is focused on him, and I’m hit by a shocking realization.
She loves him!
This quiet, plain, uncommunicative woman is totally in love with her husband, even though he’s clearly barking mad.
Who’d have thought it? For a few moments I watch them, trying to make sense of it all.
What on earth is this thing called love that makes people hide themselves away in cupboards? Love is about wanting more, Simon said once. Wanting more of someone, more for someone, more life, more love. More everything. But watching Karen Griffiths standing in the home of her husband’s ex-girlfriend, wearing her oversize fleece with a rugby shirt underneath it, the collar turned stiffly up, in her ludicrous red shoes, loving her man, it occurs to me that maybe we got it wrong, Simon and I. Maybe love isn’t about excess, after all. Maybe all the time I’ve been lying in my bed, weeping and thrashing about and wanting to die, real love was quietly and sensibly dressing itself in its husband’s fleece and following him to another woman’s house, watching over him and waiting for the moment to step in and take him home.
My anger is draining out of me, and now I’m thinking about Sadie, still in her room playing her music. Can she really not have heard anything?
I slip out of the kitchen and along the hallway to Sadie’s room, where something with a lot of drum and bass is making the door shake. Out of habit I look at my watch—eleven-fifteen. The neighbors will be getting cross.
“Yeah?” she says, looking up, startled, as I come in. “What’s the matter?”
I look down at my daughter, lying in bed, writing in her secret notebook with a pink felt pen, and I’m flooded with love and relief. I make a silent promise to take better care of her. I know I can’t protect her from the Felixes of the future, but I can at least show her that when you’re let down, it’s possible to get up again and to keep getting up, even when everything in you feels you’ll never get up again.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
When the worst that can happen has already happened, what can you do but start again?
SELINA
My phone is still in my hand. I stare at it, willing it to make sense of what the policeman just told me, but my pharmaceutically dulled thoughts are sinking like sediment to the bottom of my mind. I lean back against the pillows and shut my eyes.
All of a sudden, I’m awake again, conscious of warmth in the bed next to me.
“Simon?”
His arms around me, comforting. His words soft and soothing. It’s all right. Everything’s all right now.
I start to drift off to sleep, but something is nagging at me, something not right...
“Felix?”
I turn to face him.
His eyes are wide and staring. “Don’t be frightened, Madre. It’s only me.”
I sit up in bed, shock chasing away the sleeping pill’s lingering effects, but Felix puts his hand on my shoulder, firmly pushing me back down.
“What?” I say wildly. “What’s happened?”
That maddening smile. “Chillax, Madre. Nothing’s the matter.” There’s something disturbing about the way he’s looking at me, and his limbs seem to be moving of their own accord, jerky and persistent, softly thudding against the mattress.
“The police rang me,” I say. “They said you were there, Felix, on the night your dad died. What’s going on?” Too late, I think about Petra and her face when she asked if I’d noticed anything different about Felix.
“Please tell me this isn’t anything to do with Sadie?” My voice is sour with disgust. “You know she’s a child, Felix. Not to mention your sister.”
“Don’t fret,” he says, as if I’m a baby. “You know what sixteen-year-old girls are like. They make stuff up.”
&
nbsp; But I’m looking at him in disbelief, thinking about the marks on Petra’s arm at Christmas—how unhappy would you have to be to do that?
“No wonder Petra looks so terrible,” I say. “No wonder she’s doing such horrible things to herself.”
Felix lets out a loud, high-pitched giggle. “Oh, yes, I forgot,” he says. “The self-harming.”
Now something nasty and bitter is coming into my mouth as a horrible thought forms. He wouldn’t... He couldn’t...
“She didn’t make those marks on her arm, did she, Felix? It was you.”
Again the grin, but his face is so thin and sunken in the semidarkness, it is more like a grimace.
“You see, the thing is, Madre, things aren’t too great.” One of his arms is around me, like a clamp, but I can feel his other hand drumming against his leg.
Oh, Felix. Oh, my boy. What have you done?
“Let me sit up now, Felix. You’re scaring me.”
“Oh, we mustn’t have that.” His voice is mocking as always, but lacking its usual lightness, grating in my ears like fingernails down a blackboard.
“He wasn’t worthy, Madre. You could have done so much better.”
What’s he talking about now? The sudden change of subject takes me by surprise. He isn’t worth it. A connection stirs in the back of my still-sluggish mind.
“Don’t say that, Felix. Whatever he did, he was your father.”
Again, that horrible squealing giggle.
“Not him,” he splutters. “The other one. Greg Ronaldson.”
And now a scream rises in my throat like bile.
“What are you saying, Felix? What do you know about Greg? What have you done?”
The memories crowd into my head now like ants, and I bat them off, one after the other. Felix as a toddler biting his little playmate on the arm—Wasn’t me—and me believing him because of his wide, outraged eyes, despite the raised red welt on the other boy’s plump skin. Then at four or five, coming out of Flora’s nursery. Baby sleeping, he said, but something in his smile gave him away, and I flew in to find a pillow dropped in Flora’s cot, all but smothering her tiny head. And then in secondary school, the allegations of bullying from that awful American boy.