‘I watched all those TV shows on my own and I got over you.’
‘You got over me?’
His truth is so painful that I close my eyes against it. If I could go back, and not call 999, and walk away instead, I would. Oh, in this moment, I would.
‘I mourned you. I didn’t do anything. I stayed inside all the time. Work put me on … you know. Back office duties. I had nowhere to go and I didn’t want to see anybody.’ He shifts out of the way as another couple moves past us. His body jostles mine. ‘I wasn’t wearing black. There wasn’t a funeral. But there was grief.’
‘Well, now I’m back – from the dead. And aren’t you pleased?’
‘No, Jo,’ he says, shaking his head sadly.
And then I realize what his expression is. It’s pity. He pities me.
‘No,’ he says again.
The woman is still singing loudly on the makeshift stage, a blues number, but we don’t have to shout now. Over here, as our marriage ends, the volume’s on low.
‘They don’t tell you, but grief has a lot of anger. Sometimes people are angry that people die … that they left them.’
‘You’re angry.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Reuben says softly. ‘I’m so, so fucking angry with you, Jo.’
My head snaps back, reeling, as though I’ve been slapped. And haven’t I? No, worse than slapped. Diced up. Skinned. The top of my head sliced open and my insides taken out.
‘You were so stupid,’ he says. As I begin to protest, he holds a hand up. ‘I think of that night sometimes. If you hadn’t made that mistake. How different things would be. We’d probably have babies. Different house. We were so happy, Jo. Even that night – just an ordinary Friday – I was looking forward to you coming home. I always did. With your daft schemes to buy a smallholding or open a juice bar. And now it’s … it’s all wrong. It feels wrong. You being home. It’s too …’
‘But you’ll get used to me again,’ I say. ‘I’ll get used to it all again. I’ll still come up with stupid schemes, if you want.’
‘But you’re different now.’
‘No.’
‘And you … you seriously injured someone. You went to trial.’
‘Yes. You can’t forgive that? A mistake? Is being right and good so much more important than me? And loving me?’ The anger comes as his betrayal really hits me. How could he? How could he? I would have told the police absolutely anything for Reuben. Anything at all. I would have lied for him. I would have buried a body with him. I would have given him an alibi.
I realize as I stand and stare at my husband that I hardly know him at all. His honesty – his goodness – trumps everything. Even me.
Reuben shrugs then. And for all his words and all his judgement and all those nights he spent alone, peeling – emotionally – away from me as I counted down the days in prison, it seems shocking it ends like this. With a shrug. A lazy, contemptuous shrug. As though he doesn’t know, doesn’t care to find out.
He moves out two days later.
Two days after that, his father dies.
39
Conceal
There is only one eventual destination on my list as my train pulls into London Marylebone but I put it off. I guess some of my habits might subsist for longer than they should. Procrastinating. Faffing around. Stopping to take a photograph of the light that streams in through the entrance of Marylebone, even though nobody will ever see it. I have always loved that view. The trees. The openness. Almost like it’s the edge of London, and London truly begins just beyond it. Come in, that square of light beckons.
I take a walk along the river on my way to the exhibition, even though it leaves me breathless and tired. It’s like coming home. I had forgotten how much I love London. I had forgotten its exact character, like being reunited with an old friend and seeing anew their mannerisms.
It’s boiling and my skin prickles with the heat. We’re four weeks into a heatwave and everybody is already bored of it, complaining about not being able to sleep and that hardly anywhere has air con. People have stopped Instagramming the sky and the trees, and have started taking photographs of the bad things instead. The parched grass by the sides of the roads. The dried-up canals, boats’ bodies exposed like corpses. I don’t like looking at them. It’s like seeing somebody with their clothes off, seeing the bottom of the river bed.
I can’t be in London and not think of Reuben. They are interrelated. I try to stop myself thinking of him so often, at the moment. Somebody cycles past. A father and daughter are finger-painting down at the river’s edge together – there’s a spare paintbrush in a jar of cloudy water on the ground by the steps up to Tower Bridge, its end hardened with blue paint. I can smell that chalky smell. I have always loved it.
First right. Second left, down a cool, dark alley. I don’t think I will ever forget that night, two Decembers ago, when walking down an alleyway, but it doesn’t chill me like it previously has. I stand still in the shade for a second and look. Nobody’s coming. I know that now. But, somehow, it’s no longer about that. The guilty don’t only worry about getting found out. Here I am, two years on. I have almost certainly got away with it, and yet there is no relief. Because it was not really the paranoia that I was struggling with: it was the guilt. They were two sides of the same object, but they were different. And one was not chased away by evidence, by facts, by reassurance. It was there – my chest animal – because I have killed a man. And it will always be there, forever. I accept its weight, now, and don’t fight it. It’s here to stay.
Three people pass me on my way down the side street. The world is full of people. Everyone knows that. But this world I’m in has one fewer. Because of me.
I reach a door that has the laminated card on it, its green string yellowed at the edges, push it open, and go inside. Outside is so bright that my eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the blueish darkness.
The floor is unpolished wood and there are paintings hung around the walls. For a moment I think that I’m accidentally in somebody’s house and I start, my whole body shaking – this bothers me more than most. I have invaded too much. I have taken something that wasn’t mine, in Imran, already. But as my eyes adjust, I see the paintings and the little placards and know I’m in the right place.
I saw it on Facebook. It popped up, a mutual friend having liked the event in my newsfeed. Laura. Her paintings. Her first exhibition.
One of the paintings portrays a set of people going through the tube barriers. It’s almost photographically real. The tube maps on the back wall, the man selling flowers just inside the station. The people’s coats and umbrellas. There are autumn leaves and puddles at their feet, dashed white as they catch the overhead lights. It’s clear they’re supposed to be commuting. But all the people are in the same position, like zombies going through the barriers. Drones on a commute.
I can’t resist reading the plaque. By Laura Cohen. My Laura. My eyes fill with tears. All those years of striving. All those tries and fails. Of all the people in the world who try to do something artistic, and all those people who never, ever get there; who never finish paintings, and who never get taken on. She made it.
I take in each one in turn now. They’re a slant on corporate life, I see. They’re almost funny. A woman at her desk with all of the Mondays to Fridays crossed out on a calendar. The clock a huge hourglass, suspended above her. A man, sitting in a kitchen with ‘home’ written above the door, saving up in a jar labelled Deposit. It’s a satire on modern life. Her breakthrough work. It’s not what I thought it would be, but isn’t that always the way? I thought she’d sell her feminist paintings, the one where a woman walked down the street with forty pairs of eyes on her, the men looking away from what they were doing. All with the same photographic, portrait-like quality. I always thought she’d sell those. But this was it: the work that broke her through.
I linger there for an hour, looking and looking. Searching for hidden things in the paintings. A barge boat, or s
omeone who has my lip-shape or body language or unruly hair. But there are none. There’s no evidence of me, in the exhibition of the person who used to be my closest friend.
Of course not. I left her; I left all of them.
Just as I leave now, in an alcove on its own, there’s a painting I didn’t see before. I peer closely at it. The insert says it’s the painting that captured the art dealer’s attention.
And there they are. A woman, lying on her front in her bed, the green WhatsApp display clearly visible. Laura’s caught the sheen of an iPhone just perfectly. I would have believed it was a phone, superimposed right there on to the portrait. The canvas is split, a bed in a different room set out in the other half of the frame. There is another iPhone, and another woman, but she is transparent. I look at it curiously, wanting to trace a finger over it but not daring to. I can see the pink bedsheets through her transparent body.
I stare at it for a few more moments, until I understand it.
It’s ghosting.
I ghosted her.
She painted it.
And that’s what got her her break.
There’s a photograph of her, underneath the insert. I lean closer to it and squint.
Her short hair is decorated with a green, jewel-toned scarf, tied in a bow at her crown. She’s wrinkling her nose as she grins widely at the camera, a glass of something in her hand. Her arms are almost completely covered with tattoos. She looks like an artist, but still Laura.
Next to her there’s a selection of photos from the launch, arranged around a press cutting. They’re recent, the glass frame they’ve been placed into shiny and new-looking.
There’s Jonty, looking just the same, in braces and a trilby hat, looking twenty-one as he grins at the camera. There’s Jonty’s sister – God, what was her name again? Laura always said she was stuffy, conservative. Emma, maybe?
And there, in amongst the crowd, is a face I didn’t expect to see: Reuben’s.
He’s there, in a shot of the room, but right next to Laura. My first response is flattered: that I meant so much to him that he maintained my friendships after I left him. The second is suspicion. Not of anything romantic, but imagining that the two of them might’ve met up, tried to figure out what really went wrong with me, presuming Ed didn’t tell them. They’d hypothesize in our local pub, together, just the two of them.
I swallow. My throat feels heavy and full, like somebody has rolled a tennis ball down it.
I look again at the transparent woman. It’s done in acrylics, I think, and so cleverly. The paint is there, but not there, all at the same time. I look at her transparent body, her half-there clothes. Her form that doesn’t leave a dent on the bed, nor cast a shadow. The details. She’s not me, and yet she represents me, see-through with guilt, all at once.
This was my price, I think. Reuben. Laura. Wilf. The accident. I’ve lost things. That is my atonement, I think naively. That was my prison sentence. I think of Ayesha and I think of Imran, dying alone, friendless, in that puddle.
Take them, I tell the universe. Have them, and make me pay.
It is a fair price.
It is a just price.
But it is not enough.
As the evening falls, I catch the DLR to the City. I am not ready to see the man I most want to. Not yet. The man who could always make me laugh with a mere shake of his head as I arrived home from Hobbycraft with an entire Make Your Own Wicker Furniture kit.
But for now I want to connect with Wilf. To see him. To see what he’s up to.
I arrive in the City and go to his work first. It’s a Friday night, but he’s far more likely to be there than anywhere else. He works on the ninth floor, he once told me, and I’ve remembered. I stare up at it. I’m tired from all the walking. It’s the most exercise I’ve done in years. My hand aches. It’s dusk, still warm, and the street lights are popping on. The sky is fading to a blue so pale it almost stays white. The building’s dark against the stark sky, except for one window. On the ninth floor. I stare up at it. Second from the left. Fourth from the right. Lit up, like a lighthouse in the spring sky. I stare and stare, hoping for a glimpse of him, wondering what we might do together if he looked down and saw me here, for the first time in two years.
‘We lost our way a bit. Me and Wilf,’ I told Reuben on the stairs at that party where we met, when I made him talk, when the words began flowing out of us like gently spooling yarn.
‘Why?’ Reuben had asked.
‘There’s no reason,’ I said.
I think Reuben understood. Nothing serious happened with Wilf, and that made it worse. We were just too different for the flower bed we sprang from to bind us together.
What would we do if things had been different? If, maybe, I hadn’t failed at university, or if we had, somehow, found our way back to one another? I could have turned up in his office, spun round on the chair, ordered takeaway for him, helped him with whatever it was he was doing. Or, maybe, we’d walk. Towards the river. In between two tower blocks, navigating their ground-floor car parks, lit up in the gloom, and down to the docks where it almost feels like the seaside, where it smells of fish and the river laps gently. We wouldn’t be able to talk about the things we used to talk about. What if there was a Narnia entrance at the back of our huge airing cupboard? What if we could fly, and it was just that no human had yet found the magic combination of moves? But we could talk about our parents and the things they used to say to us. The way Dad had told me he expected eleven A-stars from me, seriously, over Christmas dinner, and Wilf had guffawed. ‘I got one A, and I coped,’ he had told me. I could have asked him if he felt it, too: the weight of their disappointment. Their neglect, even though we went to Cape Town for the summer, even though we went for walks in meadows and for meals by candlelight at castles in the winter. I could ask him if he felt it, too: the neglect that sat behind it all, like a disturbing backdrop. Or if it was just me.
We could do something, here in London, while we have that conversation as adults. Something as brother and sister. Something as allies. Something as free adults who can do whatever they like in the world – go and eat overpriced candyfloss by the river or go on the London Eye or do absolutely anything at all.
At my eighteenth birthday, it was Wilf who ensured I had a good time. Not with drink or friends, but taking me into the garden just after midnight on the anniversary of the day I was born, and releasing a pink balloon into the sky with me. I remember that more than anything, too. What changed between us? I’ll never know. And so, because I’ve stopped avoiding things, started facing up to things, I sigh, then get out my mobile and call him. His phone rings, then, after four, goes straight to voicemail. It’s not a natural cut-off. He’s pressed the red button. I can tell. He must still have my number. It’s been over two years since we last spoke, but he must still have it.
I try him again. For old time’s sake. To give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, I think hopefully as it rings out, we could just do nothing. Nothing at all. Go to his. Go to a bar. Eat chips by the river for the last time. Or share two beers, like we did the night before he went to university, in the old barn, sitting on the hay bales in the rafters.
The light in the window doesn’t change. I stand, staring up at it for a few more minutes. I no longer avoid things, but I can’t force them, either. I can’t make him answer.
Never mind, I think to myself. The last time Wilf and I said anything meaningful to each other was when we were eighteen and twenty. It wasn’t meant to be.
My eyes are damp from staring up at the window and I tell myself it’s because of the hot breeze, because I am staring at the bright light shining in the darkness.
His phone cuts to voicemail again and I hang up. I walk away, looking backwards, once, twice, at the light still hanging, suspended, in a glass box in the dark. It stays on. I never see him emerge. And he doesn’t call me back.
40
Reveal
‘Well, you seem very together,’ the tr
ainer says to me.
He’s called Simon, and he’s of that benign posh look; curls on the top of his forehead like a toddler’s, rosy cheeks. I am sure he likes fine wines and the races and doesn’t worry too much.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘I’m … I’m having a hard time adjusting after I’m out.’
I don’t feel embarrassed, as I usually would. It’s a centre for counsellors to train who have been somewhere tough themselves. I don’t know what Simon’s backstory is, but his colleague Emmett used to be homeless. There’s an abstaining alcoholic and someone who was brought up in care following abuse. And then there’s me. A woman who has to think very hard about how to operate the Oyster card top-up machines. I say as much to Simon.
‘Yes,’ he says, leaning forward, his tanned arms on his knees. ‘But isn’t that an example of being totally normal? Not adjusting after prison?’
‘I … maybe,’ I say, struggling to know.
‘I think that’s an example of being good. Not bad,’ he says. ‘You’d be mad if you could adjust to that.’
‘I think of Imran, too. All the time. About his injuries, and how he is, these days.’
‘Also normal. You care about him – because you’re a human being,’ he says, with a smile.
‘I know he won’t have recovered,’ I say. ‘But I hope he’s … I don’t know. I just hope.’
‘I know …’
He pauses for a second, then runs down a tick sheet as we decide on the next steps.
‘So you did the diploma in prison?’ he says.
I nod.
It took a year to get them to offer it to me. The old Joanna – as I have come to think of her – would have done nothing about that. Would have watched box sets and read books and ignored it, then been periodically disappointed on birthdays and when ringing in the New Year that nothing had changed. But this Joanna is different. Somehow, when society had decided I was worthless, I decided quite the opposite, and went after what I wanted. It was only me and one other woman – Dani – in the workshop room getting that diploma in counselling. But it was worth it.
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