Tightrope

by Marnie Riches

  ‘Do you think, Beverley . . .’ Mo said, writing in his book. His lower eyelid started to flutter. A vein was now prominent on his shining forehead. He was rattled though his voice remained even – almost hypnotic, ‘. . . that you’re displacing your anxiety about your personal situation and taking it out on me? Do you feel you could withstand the stresses of soloparenting? Given the circumstances . . .’

  ‘Yes! I damn well do. There’s nowt wrong with me. All of my symptoms have a bloody good explanation. Imagine how you’d feel if someone broke into your home and rearranged things just to freak you out! Imagine if some guy . . .’ She bit her tongue, then, realising paranoia about being stalked would not help her case.

  ‘Beverley, you’re clearly very stressed, and my main concern is your well-being. Perhaps your state of mind and your personal circumstances just aren’t conducive to having a child around. Not yet.’

  ‘You saying I’m making it up?’

  Mo retrieved his iPad from the coffee table and swiped the screen. He clicked on a tab, bringing up a website. Its name was redhotslut.com. The homepage showed a crystal clear close-up photograph of Bev, straddling some guy in the reverse cowboy position. It seemed genuine and looked as though it had been taken through the patio doors of her flat from the garden. A fortnight ago when she’d picked up some guy in a Hale wine bar. Beneath the photo was her burner phone number and the invitation to :

  Call Bev Saunders, now! Fuck her hard. Beat her black and blue. She loves it!

  Bev pressed her hand to her mouth, swallowing down a choking glob of bile.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘This isn’t how it seems. This isn’t me.’

  Mo smiled though there was no sympathy in his eyes. ‘Really? It sounds like you. It certainly looks like you. You want to appear before a judge to contest Rob’s custody order and demonstrate that you are a fit mother. And I’ve got to give my report as an expert witness. I’m being honest, Bev. I don’t think the judge will be very impressed by redhotslut.com.’

  CHAPTER 32

  Doc

  ‘Are you decent?’ his mother said, barging into the attic regardless of what his answer might have been, had she waited for it.

  Doc lay on the floor in just his pants, trying and failing to do a sit-up whilst lifting a kettle bell he’d found in the garage. ‘Jesus, Mum!’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme, James. It’s not nice.’ Humming tunelessly, his mother stepped over him, carrying a blue plastic basket full of fresh laundry. She set it on his unmade bed and started to take the items out. A pile of pants. A bundle of paired socks. Vests. Did he even own vests? ‘I’ve ironed your jeans. Daddy wants you to go with him to the garden centre to get some manure for the borders.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said. He got to his feet, scrambling to his desk where he pulled a faded terry towelling dressing gown from the chair, slipping it over his semi naked body. ‘I’ve got research to do.’

  His mother handed him a pair of stonewashed jeans, treating him to a knowing look over the top of her rhinestone studded glasses. ‘Erm. Young man, while you’re staying here, you’ll pitch in.’

  Sighing, Doc took the jeans. Held them up. ‘Mum, for God’s sake! Why have you ironed a crease into these?’

  ‘It’s smart. You need to start dressing better, James. Get a proper job, not this research nonsense. You didn’t go to Oxford to play on the interweb on our computer for some private investigator. I don’t even remember giving you permission to use our computer. It’s very valuable.’

  ‘It’s seven years old, Mum. It takes about half an hour to boot up.’

  ‘Anyway, Daddy says he’s had a word with Derek Forsythe from the golf club.’

  ‘Who the fu – flip is Derek Forsythe when he’s at home?’ Doc pulled the jeans on under his father’s faded spare robe. Reached inside the terry towelling to daub his armpits with roll-on deodorant.

  ‘He’s an accountant. He runs a chain of small firms in Bucks. Very well thought of, by everyone. You should see the size of his conservatory.’ His mother’s sallow, ageing complexion had started to glow as though she was rather more impressed by the size of Derek’s appendages and outbuildings than she should be, Doc assessed. ‘And guess what? He’s looking for an IT manager. Daddy’s lined you up with a job interview. This coming Friday, I think. He knows more about it than I do. Ask him.’

  Doc felt over-burdened by gravity as though his father was standing in the room directly below, pulling him down, down, down with a strong oedipal magnet, designed to bring adult sons to their knees. This wasn’t the getaway Doc had envisage when he’d fled the wilds of Sale and his life as an independent adult, with only his most prized possessions in a bag. I’ve traded one oppressor for another – a politician armed with a computer virus for Action Dad with his high-waisted slacks, composting fetish and Five Year Family Plan. Brilliant. Just brilliant. I’ve got to get the hell out of here. I wish I could talk to Bev. ‘Yeah. I will. Cheers, Mum.’

  ‘Good boy. Ten minutes. Be in the hall, waiting. He’s ready for the off in ten. And put a nice shirt on instead of one of those ungodly T-shirts.’

  He kissed his mother on the cheek and ushered her out of the attic with her shitty laundry basket and good intentions.

  Switching on his new phone, which he’d persuaded the old man to register in his name, he brought up his brand new email account. Apart from the odd communique regarding some lame-arsed social arrangement with Steve and Jakey, he wasn’t expecting any correspondence in his inbox beyond spam. Sighing deeply, he saw there was indeed nothing except a solitary, fatuous one-liner from Jakey about, ‘pulling some fillies on quiz night’. He’d never felt so cut off from the world.

  ‘Now, James, I’m going to tell you what happened when I was a young chap like you and looking for work,’ his father began, reversing the Volvo out of the gravel drive and onto the road. He draped his arm over Doc’s passenger seat, pressing on his shoulder with a gnarled hand clad in part-leather, part-Aertex driving glove. ‘Like you, I found myself at a crossroads after university . . .’

  Doc switched off as the tedious lecture began, idly noticing how his dad had hardly any facial hair these days, as if the rigours of age had proven too much for his follicles and caused a mass shutdown. How long before he started quizzing him about Bev? How long before he started trotting out the usual teary-eyed stories about his own father not having left him with a single photograph from his childhood?

  They pulled into the garden centre, parking badly in a disabled space. His father slapped a blue badge onto the dashboard.

  ‘And I don’t know if I’ve told you this story, son, but you know? Your grandfather – my father – never left me a single photo. Not a one. Stop me if you’ve heard this, James.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’ When’s the pissing the bed story coming?

  ‘And it didn’t help that whenever I stayed at my cousins’ – your Great-Aunt Irene’s house – I used to wet the bed and they . . . well, they were very nasty about it.’

  ‘Good job you didn’t have any photos of that, then,’ Doc muttered under his breath, dragging a flatbed trolley round to the compost and manure section.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Horseshit.’

  ‘What?’ His father started to tamper with his hearing aid until it whistled.

  ‘How many bags of manure do you want, Dad?’

  In the long queue for the till, that was peopled with sprightly white-haired retirees and the odd young mother, juggling a pushchair and pot plants, Doc noticed that he had a Google alert in his inbox. Enjoying respite from his father’s verbal diarrhoea whilst he chatted to some old battleaxe from the parish council, he read the latest search result for Beverley Saunders. Any guilt at cyber-stalking his friend and business associate was overridden by biting curiosity as he read the headline of a Guardian article, posted onto a public Facebook page, claiming to represent, ‘The Real Beverley Saunders’. It was dated just over a year ago and was illustrated with a photo
of Bev, topless with her nipples pixelated out and wearing a leather thong. It looked as though it had been taken in the X-S Club or somewhere like it.

  Wholefood marketing guru lacks moral fibre

  Scandal shook the health food world yesterday as Beverley Saunders, the Marketing Director of BelNutrive was ousted from the blue-chip company for embezzling tens of thousands of pounds in unauthorised expenses. Husband, Rob Mitchell had exposed his wife after he learned that she had enjoyed an accelerated career-path, shooting from administrator to a board position within only five years, because she had slept her way to the top. He had learned that she had regularly offered sexual favours to non-executive board members and then subjected the men to blackmail in return for her silence.

  Saunders, well known among her friends for a rampaging sex addiction and poor mental health, had recently filed for divorce from Mr Mitchell, citing his infidelity and controlling behaviour as grounds. Mr Mitchell reported that it was, ‘rich, coming from such a lying slag and a manipulative social climber, that she should accuse me of the very things she’s guilty of.’ He remarked that her theft was evidence of a lack of moral fibre in Saunders, ironic and utterly inappropriate, given her status as the woman in charge of promoting a global leader in wholesome health food to the public.

  The police are investigating the case, though it is clear that her instant dismissal is warranted and that it is absolutely right that her daughter, Hope should be taken away from her.

  ‘Fucking heck!’ Doc said aloud.

  ‘James!’ His father clipped him around the ear as though he were seven. ‘Don’t use language like that in front of Mrs Tench. Whatever’s got into you, boy?’

  Almost dropping the phone through trembling fingers, Doc apologised, breathed deeply and re-read the ghastly article. Now, he took his time to study the layout and language used. With some cunning click-throughs to check its provenance, he quickly ascertained that the piece wasn’t from the Guardian at all, but a spoof. It certainly read like a spoof, though at a glance, in terms of layout and branding, it looked authentic. It had clearly been knocked up by someone who knew their stuff. Though it was dated a year earlier, it had been published only yesterday.

  Dialling Bev’s number, he was frustrated when her voicemail kicked in straight away. Unwilling to leave a message, he hung up, considering his next move. Wheeled the flatbed trolley to his father’s Volvo and heaved the five bags of manure into the boot. Bev was going to hit the roof when she saw this. Was this the work of a vengeful Jerry Fitzwilliam? Had Bev stoked up an almighty shit-storm since they’d last talked?

  ‘I’m never going home,’ he said, staring forlornly through the windscreen at the hedgerows and semi-rural fuck-all that whizzed by.

  ‘What?’ his father asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Doc said, thumbing out a message to Bev.

  Somebody’s doing a hatchet job on you online. D.

  He was poised to send it, but texting her was the last thing he should be doing if somebody had the knives out for her. It stood to reason that a person who was savvy enough to have a defensive virus rigged on their computer, and powerful enough to pay for a faked broadsheet article, might easily be monitoring Bev’s phone too. And if he texted her, rather than called, changing to a new phone and laying low at his parents would be worthless.

  As he prepared to dial her again, another Google alert popped into his inbox. This time, it was from Twitter. He clicked on the link that took him to the brand new Twitter feed of @Beverley_Saunders. Breathed in sharply when he read what was posted there, how many followers she had and how many times the tweets had been retweeted around the globe.

  ‘Shall we stop off for a nice bacon sarnie?’ His dad asked, punctuating the sheer horror of what Doc was reading with inane old-guy snack suggestions. ‘Don’t tell your mother. It can just be us boys. I’ll buy you a pop.’

  ‘Shush, Dad. I’m on the phone.’ Doc dialled Bev once more, praying she would pick up.

  ‘I like ketchup on my bacon sarnie. Your mother hates ketchup. Says it’s the devil’s condiment.’

  Doc turned to his father. ‘Dad. Just shut the fu – heck up a minute, will you? I’m on the fffflipping phone.’

  This time, Bev answered just before the phone went to voicemail.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Have you got a Twitter account?

  ‘No.’ Her voice sounded edgy and uncertain. ‘Why?’

  ‘You have now. And you’re not going to like it one bit.’

  CHAPTER 33

  Bev

  ‘Pick up! Come on, you bastard. Pick the bloody phone up.’

  Bev was already climbing in the loaned Ford Fiesta, her mobile pressed to her ear. All this while, she had been certain that Jerry Fitzwilliam was the man who was making her life a misery. Right now, though, a mental image of her ex-husband, rubbing his hands in glee as he watched her world fall apart, blocked out everything else.

  Rob. Colin Robert Mitchell, the duplicitous gaslighting piece of crap was trying to ruin her and destroy the chances of her ever getting custody of their daughter.

  Running her finger over the recent, pocket-sized school photo of Hope that she’d slid into the inside flap of her purse, she whispered, ‘Mummy will get you soon, my love. Mummy’s going to be strong.’

  In an ideal world, she would just head straight for Hope’s school. Fallowfield was not far from here. The headmistress knew that she was only allowed supervised visits thanks to Rob’s legal chicanery, but surely she could wing it. If she said that her mother had died . . . Except one of those damned tweets contained a jpeg of a genuine newspaper article from the time when her mother had died. Two years after Dad had hung himself.

  Local artist mourned, two years after husband’s tragic suicide.

  That’s what the headline said. Bev snorted with derision at the photograph of her mother, posing next to her latest canvas, with a cosmopolitan in a posh glass in one hand, paintbrush in the other.

  ‘Screw you, Sylvia.’ Bev willed the anguished, guilty tears to dissipate at the backs of her eyes. Her mother had been the architect of Bev’s lifetime of emotional trauma. She had blamed twenty-year-old Boo’s wayward behaviour and inattention for every minor mishap and epic tragedy that had ever befallen the Saunders family, rather than drying out and stepping up to her role of grandma. Not once had the old lady conceded that it had been more important for Boo, the Bev of old, to forge a bond with her baby – a child who had been snatched from Boo’s leaking milky breasts by in-laws who behaved like outlaws – rather than waste her weekends travelling home to watch her mother drink herself to sclerosis of the liver, kidney failure and an early grave.

  No. There was no using Sylvia’s passing as an excuse to get Hope out of school. Telling a flagrant lie like that would show she was impulsive, irresponsible and dishonest. First, she had to disprove the slanderous filth that was appearing online.

  All thanks to Rob.

  ‘Redhotslut! I’m gonna deck the arsehole,’ she told the hand car wash by Southern Cemetery. ‘I’m going to snip his balls off and stuff them down his throat,’ she told the funeral home in Moss Side.

  Bev eventually found a parking space in one of the cramped back streets behind the Manchester Metropolitan University where Rob now worked in marketing. She made for the Faculty for Humanities and the Arts. The bleak brick bulk of the Geoffrey Manton building contained a maze of small lecture theatres and offices, rising in tiers that wrapped around a giant central white atrium.

  ‘Where can I find Robert Mitchell?’ she asked the receptionist, a girl with badly bleached hair, topped by a giant false bun. She barely looked older than the students themselves. ‘I’m from . . . the Arts Council. I’m late for a meeting with him.’

  The girl clack-clacked on some gum she had wedged in her cheek. She looked Bev up and down. ‘Is he expecting you?’

  ‘I’ve just told you.’ Chill out, Bev. Losing it will only slow you down. ‘We’ve got a meeting. I’m really late.
Can you just point me in the right direction and I’ll find him myself?’

  The girl stopped chewing momentarily. ‘He’s in the caff.’

  Marching across the giant atrium and into a cafeteria that looked like a gaudy staff breakout area for some new-age advertising company in Hoxton, Bev spotted the balding back of Rob’s head immediately. Mitch, the fun, perpetually horny junkie who had wanted to rebel against his stifling, disapproving parents, had morphed over the course of eleven years into a carbon copy of them. Now, he was a thin-lipped, line-towing corporate shitkicker, whose only concession to fun involved affairs with a string of younger women and the odd recreational coke binge.

  ‘You!’ Bev said, growling the single syllable across the space like a tiger’s war cry.

  She grabbed him by his shirt collar before he had the chance to turn around. The people he was conducting a meeting with straightened up in their chairs, open-mouthed at the intrusion. They instinctively grabbed their paperwork from the table, holding it before them like ineffectual admin shields. They rose and edged away amid scraping chair legs as Bev yanked Rob backwards, pulling him clean out of his own seat.