The Housewarming: A completely unputdownable psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by S. E. Lynes

  Ava

  Fred is moaning, a soft ack-ack. My eyes hurt, my head, my back. I reckon I have about a minute’s more rest. Babies know when you haven’t slept. They know like Darth Vader knows and they punish you.

  His cries become more insistent. I haul myself out of bed and lift him from his crib. My limbs are heavy, my eyelids made of stone. I have a memory of birds singing but I can’t remember if this is from falling asleep or waking. But no matter how empty the tank, the sight of my son fills me with relief as it does every morning. I have come to associate love with relief. He is alive, thank God. Today he is alive and I can see him, hear him, hold him, smell him, feel his warmth. He has made it through the night. He is breathing. That’s what the relief – the love – is, even now.

  Beside me, the bed is empty.

  I remember.

  My marriage is over. My now ex-husband is in the spare room.

  I cradle Fred to me and weep into his soft hair. I have no idea what to do, what happens next. The only person I want to talk to, to confide in about this terrible thing, is Matt, but he’s not mine, not anymore.

  I take Fred with me to the bathroom and hold him to me even while I pee. In the bathroom mirror, my face is a shock. My eyelids are swollen, pink and shiny as boils. I look like I did the morning after that day. No sleep. Hours of crying. This is what despair looks like: it is ugly. It doesn’t smell great. It retains water.

  Downstairs, Fred over my shoulder, I make myself a strong cup of tea. My blood pressure is low, I can tell from the dizzy feeling, the stars that circled when I first stood up out of the bed. I didn’t eat more than a handful of crisps last night. Drank too much. I nibble a biscuit and feel the revival of sugar hitting blood. On the sofa in the living room, I sit and feed Fred. The front of our house faces east, so I like to feed him here and watch the sun come up: learning, or relearning, to extract joy from small things.

  Is that what I will continue to do now? How does this work? How bad do things have to be before mindfulness is as much use, to coin one of my mother’s phrases, as a chocolate fireguard?

  I wonder what Barbara will say to this fresh development, how she will guide me through the loss of my husband, my soulmate, my best friend, a year after my daughter.

  Try to slow things down. Is that what she will say? Try to savour simple pleasures. Charge your batteries with moments of pleasure, no matter how small, as best you can. Think only about what’s happening now. Really, will that be enough?

  After twenty minutes, Fred lolls back, milk-drunk, dopey. I lay him on his sheepskin on the floor and cross over to the record player. Neil returns to my mind. How can he not? His intensity. His tortured face. Our foreheads touching in the deserted street. His solidity. His compassion.

  I flick through the vinyl records, aware of how surreal it feels to do this. This, this now, is something I already know: the human ability to go forward with the most mundane rituals, the making of tea in the midst of a bombed-out house.

  The other day I returned to the piano for the first time. Easy pieces for my rusty fingers. The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, the hooked-on classics everyone knows. It soothed me. I have to believe it will soothe me again. Today, on the day I wake up newly single, I am going to listen to a record. There is almost a sense of occasion, as if putting on the radio will not do. It’s a long time since I have actively listened to music. I gave that up along with the teaching, the evenings out, coffee with friends, eating for pleasure, happiness. What began as a postponement has become all I can’t face.

  Perhaps this new crisis will send these pleasures rushing back. Perhaps, now, utterly alone, there will be a kind of numb and necessary psychopathy that will allow me to simply keep calm and carry on.

  Matt always said I needed time. Time will heal. But it won’t, that’s my private opinion. And even if I did need time, I needed truth more. I still need it. There is still so much truth untold. The only difference between yesterday and today is the knowledge of a lie I hadn’t even known about. So I am no further forward, not really. Matt’s betrayal is a shock that will take me years to process; I know that. But it hasn’t been a shadow – how can it have been? I had no idea. It is a new shadow, I suppose, and now I must sit in an even darker room, on my own, listening to this restless, hanging, dissonant devil’s chord, waiting for a resolving note that no one seems able to play. No wonder it was associated with evil back in the eighteenth century, I think as I slide Kate Bush from her sleeve and decide, no, not quite. No wonder it was banned. The unresolved is an eternal drip torture.

  I thought this was why Matt chose to believe that our baby girl had drowned, when in fact it was his way of processing guilt: to move on, to grieve. He has needed to end the cadence. I get that, I really do. I don’t need to see the dark web to know what goes on there, don’t even need to think about it. Matt’s way of not thinking about it has been to choose death over it. It is easier to mourn the loss of our baby, to believe that her death was an accident. He knew that I had closed the door, had kept her safe, that he had opened that door, made her unsafe. So yes, it has been easier for him to think that her last waking thought would have been as vague and fleeting and full of benign joy as the falling itself, a brief moment of excitement about meeting the ducks she so loved before impact, the end, nothing.

  Fast water. Such a small mass.

  I need to choose a record. I’m supposed to be soothing myself, as I’ve been advised to do. God knows, I’m going to have to learn to do it myself.

  Max Richter’s From Sleep.

  I slide it back into the stack. There is self-soothing and there is consciously choosing to make yourself fall apart.

  Ditto Chopin’s Prelude in E minor.

  Ditto Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

  Ditto The Carpenters.

  Ditto Björk’s Vespertine.

  Hum.

  Billie Holiday: a greatest hits collection that Matt gave me early in our relationship. I guess this will count as mine when we split our assets. Blue as low cloud but cathartic – sadness, yes, sorrow, absolutely, but with that crackling lacing of grit.

  I guess we’ll have to sell the house. We can’t afford two properties.

  I put the needle to the disc.

  I wonder how we’ll split custody?

  Billie Holiday sings. Feeding Fred, I watch the sun rise. The music doesn’t suit my mood perfectly, but it slows the running thoughts in my head. Last night feels like a puzzle I can’t work out, like there is no puzzle, like a puzzle again. I am a puzzle. I am a mess. Less of a mess than I was but a mess nonetheless. Stop it. Listen to the music, Ava. Close your eyes. Listen. Be in the moment. That mellow bluesy wash. That phrasing. When all else fails, there is music. There is the sun that rises, there is Fred, there is tea, there is the soft sofa cushion beneath me. There is me.

  I should return to teaching. Sod should. No, this is a good should. Maybe just a couple of kids after school, once a week, to start. Focusing on the children might help me escape from myself. I was deputy head of a primary school before Abi came along, responsible for the school choir, for playing the piano in assemblies and for school plays. I missed it, when I was first at home with Abi. I went back part-time, planned to build back up to full-time again before… that day. Afterwards, I could not imagine ever going back – to anything. Now, I think I could start. I could build up. Whatever has happened, wherever Abi is, I am on my own now. Fred needs me.

  But even as I reason it in my mind, I am aware that this is a swing of the metronome, the weight slid to the top of the pendulum, the slowest possible beat. And as this awareness grows, so the pendulum swings back.

  I have lost Matt. My love. My lover. My best friend.

  Tears fall easily. I leave Fred dozing and sated on his sheepskin on the floor. I don’t want to, know I shouldn’t, but I check that the front door is locked, twice, before going upstairs to get dressed. It is almost eight. I push
open the spare-room door a crack. Matt is snoring, his mouth open, his chin dark with stubble. The bedroom stinks of stale alcohol, sour sweat and rank breath. The pain of what he has done returns to my chest. The trampled boundaries I cannot rebuild. I can’t forgive him. I cannot.

  But still, from the bathroom, I fetch paracetamol and a glass of water, which I take back to the spare room and leave on the bedside table.

  Needing to keep moving, I wash my face, pull back my hair into a ponytail. I find jeans and a T-shirt on the back of a chair and put them on, grab clean socks from the drawer.

  Downstairs, I try to notice how fresh the milk is, how nutty the muesli, how unctuous the yoghurt, how wonderful the word ‘unctuous’ sounds in my head. I do notice these things, notice myself noticing, know that it’s myself outside myself, looking on, the I becoming the her. It doesn’t work. A decaf coffee, made with the machine: smell the aroma, admire the burnt-caramel-coloured crema, the patterns the milk froth makes in the espresso. Yes, yes, Ava, well done.

  It doesn’t work. I can’t imagine it ever will.

  I take my coffee through to the living room. On the sofa, I sit still and tip my face to the sun. Feel the sun. Close my eyes to the warmth of the sun. No social media, no distractions, no life outside the present moment. I no longer go on my iPhone. I no longer have one, only a cheap mobile for emergency calls and texts. I am used to being alone now. Like this, utterly alone. I have no friends anymore. I had cut out most of the white noise. Now I have cut out all of it.

  This will be easier. This will be my choice. No woman is an island. Wanna bet?

  At 9 a.m., I pack Fred into the pram. One blanket should be enough on this, the first day of September. And Mr Sloth, of course.

  It was Matt’s idea to give Mr Sloth to Fred.

  ‘Isn’t that morbid?’ I asked at the time, appalled. Now, of course, a darker shadow falls over it. It feels manipulative. Abusive.

  ‘It could be a gift,’ he said. ‘From his older sister. It’ll remind us to talk to him about Abi from the start. That way he’ll absorb the knowledge over time and accept it without trauma.’

  I no longer trust his reasons. I never wanted to keep the sloth. I should have burned it like I wanted to, along with this pram.

  I put Mr Sloth on top of the pram. At the front door, I breathe deeply and place my hand on the catch. One glance in the hall mirror has me digging out my sunglasses. I look like I’ve gone ten rounds in the boxing ring.

  Sunglasses on. You can do this, Ava. You’ve faced your neighbours once, you can do it again. Besides, it’s early for a Sunday. There will be no one about.

  Both feet barely on the front path and my stomach heats with anxiety at the noise of a door slamming shut. To my relief, it is only Jen emerging from her house, her two girls with her.

  ‘Ava,’ she calls and waves. She too is wearing sunglasses. Hers are large, expensive. ‘A bit worse for wear this morning, I can tell you.’ She laughs – she has an infectious, deep cackle I wish I could match.

  I push the pram to the end of their drive. ‘Thanks so much for last night,’ I manage. ‘I really had a lovely time. Much better than I thought, if you know what I mean. Thank you. Hi, girls.’

  They smile, both reaching for their mother, one hand each.

  ‘Sorry I left without saying goodbye,’ I add.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she says, waving it off. ‘Don’t even give it a second thought. Leaving when you did was a good move though. We got rid of the last guests at four in the morning.’

  ‘Four? Oh my God. Who?’

  ‘Louise – you know Louise Parker? And Pete from over the road, and your friend Bella.’

  ‘Bella stayed till four in the morning?’

  Jen nods. ‘She was… she was well oiled, let’s say.’

  ‘Bloody hell. I bet Neil will have something to say about that.’

  ‘I think he might have tried to retrieve her at about one, but she was having none of it.’

  ‘Oh no. Did they fall out?’

  Jen shakes her head. ‘Bit of a drunken argument on the front step, I think, but she didn’t seem upset or anything when she came back. Pete walked her home. He’s such a gent.’

  We smile. I wonder if she detects any strangeness in me. Because I feel very strange.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ The words are out before I’ve reflected on the wisdom of saying them.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s about Abi actually.’

  She frowns. The merest glance towards her girls.

  ‘It’s nothing really,’ I say. ‘I was just wondering when you left that morning? Sorry, I mean the morning Abi…’

  Behind her, Johnnie emerges from the house; the garage door lifts and he ducks inside. ‘Erm,’ Jen says, her brow furrowing. ‘It will have been eight-ish. Why?’

  ‘No real reason. I was wondering if you saw Matt at all, on his bike?’ I want to say more, to add that he was coming back for his raincoat, but I don’t dare.

  ‘No, sorry. I thought he came back a bit later? Didn’t he have a puncture that day?’

  I nod, too quickly, too many times. ‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

  The Porsche comes purring out, Johnnie, in shades, at the wheel. He stops and gets out. He’s dressed in black again, although he has changed to a short-sleeved linen shirt, loose long linen shorts and designer flip-flops. A sheen of sweat lies slick on his forehead, but other than that, he looks the definition of unruffled.

  ‘Ava,’ he says, picking up Cosima and opening the back door of the car.

  ‘Johnnie. Hello.’ I avert my eyes but feel the kick just the same – that easy scooping motion, how he will love the weight of her, how he will not even notice how much he loves that weight, how good it feels to scoop his child into his arms like that. My eyes prick; I am glad of my sunglasses, glad of Jasmine shouting hello now: hello, hello, hello. I match her radiant smile with my own ragged attempt. I focus hard on the beam of her happy expression. ‘Hello again, Jasmine.’

  ‘Hello again, Jasmine,’ she says, smiling. ‘Hello again, Jasmine.’

  Unsure of how to relate to her, I smile back, pick up Mr Sloth and wiggle him. The impossibility of looking anywhere near Cosima makes my chest tight. A line of sweat runs down from each armpit. Johnnie is clipping her into her car seat, chatting to her. Her high child’s voice reaches me like a thousand knives.

  ‘Mr Sloth!’ Jasmine is striding towards me, her expression one of pure joy. ‘Mr Sloth, Mr Sloth!’ She reaches out with both hands.

  ‘Jasmine,’ Johnnie calls out to her. ‘That’s not yours. That’s the baby’s toy, Jasmine.’

  ‘Baby’s toy, Jasmine,’ she says. ‘Baby’s toy, Jasmine, baby’s toy, Jasmine. Mr Sloth.’

  ‘Mr Sloth is Fred’s,’ I say. ‘But you can say hello.’ I keep smiling, half wondering whether to give the toy to Jasmine, get rid of it. I can’t bear it, I realise. I can’t bear the sight of this toy.

  Jasmine flaps both her hands.

  ‘Pockets,’ she says. She pulls out the front pocket of her baggy shorts. ‘Mr Sloth pockets.’

  My hair follicles tingle. I have no idea why. A buried, uneasy feeling returns, the same feeling I had when Jasmine recognised Neil at the party. I realise why only now. Neil said he never met Jen’s kids. Or maybe that he didn’t know them. Either way, clearly this is not true.

  Jasmine is gesticulating, pulling at her pocket one moment and reaching for the toy the next.

  ‘Mr Sloth,’ she says. ‘Mr Sloth pockets, Mr Sloth pockets.’ She flaps her hands wildly, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

  ‘Come on now, Jazzy,’ Johnnie says with a chuckle. ‘Into the car now, come on.’

  But Jasmine is far too delighted by the toy and I, unsure of how to act, give it to her. It can’t do any harm to let her have a moment’s pleasure. It’s a Sunday; there’s no rush.

  ‘Ah, now what do you say?’ Johnnie says. He is so good with her, so patient. Kind. And yet…

/>   ‘Do you say, do you say, do you say.’ Jasmine stuffs the toy into her pocket, her face opening. She takes it out again, then, with an expression of such undiluted mischief it makes me laugh, puts it back in her pocket before taking it out once more and coyly giving it back. ‘Mr Sloth pockets,’ she says again, more quietly now. ‘Mr Sloth pockets, pockets.’ Her expression shifts, becomes earnest. ‘Pockets.’ She looks around, as if searching for something or someone. ‘Pockets? Pockets?’

  ‘Do you mean Neil?’ I ask her. ‘Is that who you mean?’

  ‘Pockets,’ the girl replies, smiling widely. ‘Pockets.’

  ‘Jasmine.’ Johnnie takes hold of her shoulders and steers her towards the car. ‘Come on now, darling – time to go. Say goodbye to Ava. Say goodbye, Ava.’ He looks at me, his head a little to one side. ‘We head to the park early to avoid the crowds, you know?’

  ‘Say goodbye, Ava,’ Jasmine repeats before I have time to answer. ‘Say goodbye, Ava, say goodbye, Ava.’

  ‘Bye, Jasmine,’ I say and place Mr Sloth back on top of the pram. ‘And thanks again for the party,’ I call after them. ‘I had a lovely time. Really lovely.’

  Jennifer blows me a kiss. ‘See you in the week,’ she says. ‘Well, next weekend, I should imagine. Why don’t you come to me for coffee – maybe late Sunday morning? We can have a debrief.’

  And what a debrief that will be.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Thanks, I will. Eleven-ish?’

  She gives me a thumbs up before ducking into the car.

  Johnnie starts the engine.

  Head down, I hurry past before they pull away. I am at the end of the road before I notice the tears coursing down my cheeks, my heart hammering in my chest.

  Twenty-Six

  Matt

  Light leaks in from between the shutters, lower, brighter, warmer than it should be – it is late, later than he has woken up in a very long time. They don’t have shutters. Yes, they do. In the spare room. Oh God. He sits up. His head bangs.