by Jessica Moor
‘The best thing for Peony is to have a healthy, happy mum.’
Lynne knew she was a fraud, being in the refuge. She could feel the other women looking at her, judging her, could hear her own breathy accent grating like an out-of-tune flute in an orchestra. They all knew, she was sure, that Frank hadn’t hit her, not really. Not like they’d been hit.
‘He was physical,’ she’d tried to explain to Katie the day she arrived at the refuge. ‘But that’s just the sort of man he is.’
A marathon runner, a weekend rugby player. Not sensual, exactly, but always giving the impression that he enjoyed her immensely. And of course that intensity had to come with its opposite. There was always something profoundly physical in his anger.
Lynne believed that everyone’s good qualities were the flip side of their bad qualities. Anger was the darker twin of passion; paranoia the double of protectiveness.
One of her therapists had told her that – she couldn’t remember which.
The only time he’d ever so much as bruised her was when she was pregnant with Peony. He’d seen her drinking a glass of white wine through the kitchen window (she’d kept the bottle hidden, knowing that she was in the wrong with a baby on the way) and followed her into the bedroom and held her down by the wrists.
She apologized, and the truth was he was right. It was bad for the baby, and she’d done it anyway. She had always been selfish.
He forgave her and she cried, and they made love and then went to sleep. The next morning, the bruises on her wrists were stark. More crying – look what you made me do.
Then more forgiveness. More sex. More sleep.
* * *
• • •
There was a cold going around the refuge – Sonia’s two had been sniffling all week – and Lynne was convinced that Peony had picked it up from that playroom. She could feel her very skin itching just from sitting there. Lynne imagined the cheap plastic of the toys leaching into and staining Peony’s little hands. As her daughter’s small pink tongue traced any remainder of mucus from her upper lip, Lynne felt her thoughts slipping along the path to disaster, a path worn smooth by frequent traversing.
She saw Peony coughing wetly, her cold turning into a chest infection that her delicate organs, like little buds, wouldn’t be able to shift.
She saw herself in the children’s wing of the local hospital, her baby’s lungs wracked with pneumonia.
She saw a miniature coffin. One of those gravestones shaped like a teddy bear.
She saw Frank. Such a handsome man. He wouldn’t cry at the funeral; he never cried, except when he was asking forgiveness.
You killed our daughter.
Then –
I forgive you, darling. I’ll always forgive you.
She knew she ought to be down on the floor. Ought to be talking to Peony. Ought to be making eye contact, building vocabulary, fine-motor skills. But she was so tired.
Lynne didn’t sleep here. She had learned to sleep well when she had been with Frank, and now there was only one way she could sleep – pressed against the solidness of him, his head resting on her neck, her heart pounding so hard it felt as if it wanted to burrow right out of her body and into his.
So instead she sat on the sofa, watching, nursing the cold feeling behind her breastbone.
* * *
• • •
‘I think he’s found me,’ Lynne had said softly, looking out over the water. It had been two days before Katie’s death. They always walked to the bridge together when they had a session.
‘I don’t know if . . .’ Lynne had gestured outdoors on the first day she’d had something called a ‘key-work meeting’ with Katie. ‘I’d like Peony to have some fresh air. While it’s not raining.’
It had been Katie’s suggestion to go to the bridge. It had become a ritual of theirs. An odd ritual to have, since Lynne had come to the refuge at the beginning of November, and there had been scarcely a day of decent weather the whole time she’d been there. But it became the one part of their week where she was guaranteed to go outdoors, and to walk, with Katie, cups of tea in their hands and Peony toddling between them, to the bridge and back.
Lynne generally didn’t feel safe going outside – she’d never told Katie, but she felt that perhaps the girl understood nonetheless.
But that day was different. Normally the mere presence of a person whose job it was to understand her made her feel a little less like the old cottages of Widringham were going to fall down on her. Or else that she would cut all ties with everything and float off into the blue sky. That was why she liked going to the bridge with Katie. She wanted to see the view, to watch the bold sweep of the swift river, but she didn’t want to be there alone or, worse still, there with just Peony.
That would be too dangerous.
That day, the edges of the world felt fuzzy.
‘I think I saw a man,’ she said to Katie quietly. She expected Katie to dismiss it the way she wanted it to be dismissed, but instead Katie looked up sharply.
‘What man?’ she said. Lynne felt that perhaps it was her turn to do the reassuring.
The word ‘man’ was loaded in the refuge, because men never passed the threshold. The dishwasher needed fixing, but the idea of ‘getting a man’ in to do it never crossed anyone’s lips. Instead they reverted to the passive voice. It needed to be fixed. Consequently, it never was. The postman never came to the door – everything was sent to a PO box in the next village, but everyone would hold their breath if they heard a flyer coming through the letter box. Val treated the man who came to read the gas meter like a prisoner of war.
‘What man?’ Katie said again. Then her voice changed slightly, although Lynne couldn’t have said exactly how.
‘Do you think you saw Frank, Lynne?’
‘I’m always seeing Frank,’ Lynne said. ‘I just . . . it probably wasn’t him. He was too short, I think. Or too tall. Too slim, maybe. Definitely younger. I think his hair was different. But he was looking at the refuge. From a car. He was sitting down. I couldn’t see much of him. But he was just . . .’
‘Was it Frank’s car?’
‘No.’ You’re hysterical, Lynne. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
Frank wouldn’t have been caught dead in such a small car.
‘I suppose . . . I suppose I thought he might have hired it or . . .’ Or I’m a fucking fantasist.
‘Was there anything specific that you noticed about him?’
‘No. Just a man. Looking at the refuge. I couldn’t see his face.’
‘You think Frank’s found you? He’s following you?’
* * *
• • •
Lynne could believe that of Frank.
He was persistent – that was what had been so charming about him at first. She didn’t remember the first time he’d asked her to go for a drink. He’d been so much older than her, so much her senior in the organization. She’d probably shaken her head automatically and more or less run away.
Managing professional relationships. She’d never been much good at that sort of thing.
It had become a little joke of theirs – or his – she wasn’t sure. A Post-it note on a file – Let me take you out. Flirty emails. An aside in a presentation about Lynne’s gorgeous legs or killer smile.
Then, one day in the lift, he’d said, ‘All right, Lynne, you’ve had your fun, but the joke’s over.’
He’d kissed her, roughly, pressing her against the wall.
She had been able to feel her pounding heart in every cell, felt the cracking chasm in her chest. Sweat pooled in the underwiring of her bra and the backs of her knees.
They went for drinks. He ordered for her. It was exciting – or, at least, that was what the thrum of her heart seemed to suggest. By the time he led her from the bar and across the street to a hotel – the hotel room somehow already booked and paid
for – she knew what was going to happen, even if she didn’t remember deciding that it was what she wanted.
In retrospect, she wasn’t sure why they went to the hotel. It wasn’t as if Frank had a wife. In the months that followed they had sex in the toilets, in the locked photocopier room. Frank’s office. He’d never been a boyfriend. He went from boss to lover to husband and she couldn’t exactly say how the transitions took place.
She couldn’t recall when it was that they agreed she’d leave her job either, yet the resignation letter had materialized on Frank’s desk. She didn’t really remember writing it, but it hardly mattered. It was a joint decision.
He told her he accepted her resignation, and then kissed her hard.
* * *
• • •
Katie was still looking at her intently. Was there anything stranger than the idea that someone was being paid to listen to her? That she could take her time, without having to dash into the nearest possible excuse?
Lynne realized that she hadn’t answered the question. Did she think Frank had found her? It was hard to know what she thought. She wasn’t in the habit of asking herself.
‘Not Frank. Not exactly. Frank would make more of a fuss. But I’m sure I saw this car. I’m sure I saw something.’
There were whispers. Maybe Lynne had been the first to say something – maybe she’d been the one to mention the side gate to Val – she wasn’t actually sure. But now the fear lived independently of any one of them, sliding along the corridors and prickling at the backs of their necks. Nobody ever put everything together and said it out loud, but there had been little nods, little tightenings. They cut through Val’s bulldozer utterances about something called ‘safeguarding’.
The side gate had been found unlocked and a little ajar one morning. Nobody admitted to having used it the previous day. In a normal home, that would have just been one of those funny things, but a refuge isn’t the same as a home.
‘I’m sure it was nothing, but I’ll mention it to Val anyway. She can decide whether it’s worth flagging to the police or if we’ll just keep a close eye on it.’
Katie reached out and squeezed Lynne’s hand.
‘I don’t think he’s found you, Lynne.’
‘He doesn’t need to find me,’ Lynne replied.
Katie didn’t say anything. Lynne sighed.
‘He does love me a lot, you see.’
‘Control can feel like love,’ Katie said.
‘I don’t know if I ever understood the difference.’
‘I think . . . I think we’re taught that there isn’t a difference. Especially . . .’ Katie gave an apologetic little smile. ‘Maybe . . . especially as women.’
Lynne felt something inside her pucker. She wasn’t the drum-banging type.
‘It’s the nature-versus-nurture thing, isn’t it?’ she said lightly. She wasn’t keen to come down on the side of either.
Katie fiddled with the zip on the cuff of her coat, pulling it back and forth with a rhythmic click click click.
‘Maybe,’ she said.
Lynne didn’t dare lean on the bridge itself. It would be straying too close to the edge of something unnameable.
The two of them watched as Peony flung twigs on to the frozen surface from the edge of the bridge then dashed to the other side. She kept doing it for a long time, always seeming to expect the next attempt to turn out differently.
* * *
• • •
It was too cold in the garden and too warm in the house. The air had that kind of density that festered colds, dried out faces and lips, sent volleys of static across the surfaces of cheap fabrics. The sliding doors into the garden always gave a gentle sort of scream as they moved along their runners.
‘Didn’t know you smoked, Lynne.’
Lynne glanced down at the cigarette between her fingers, its thin line of smoke rising away from her then flickering into nothing.
‘I don’t,’ she said, glancing quickly at Sonia then averting her eyes just as quickly. It was true. She didn’t identify as a smoker, not exactly. She had once, when it had seemed to fit the image of who she was trying to be. She had started as a way of ingratiating herself with her boss during those brief breaks, shivering on the concrete planes of the City. She’d stopped when Frank told her that he hated the smell of it on her.
So she didn’t smoke. But she was having a cigarette now. She admitted that.
Her lips were so chapped they burned as she puckered them around the damp shaft of the cigarette. Her foot started tapping of its own accord, skidding off the wet paving stones.
‘I don’t either,’ Sonia said. She raised an expectant eyebrow at the packet in Lynne’s hand and took a cigarette, without smiling. ‘Not since the boys.’
‘You don’t want them to see you.’
‘No. Though with some of the stuff they’ve seen, it can hardly do any more harm.’ Sonia laughed, then coughed. ‘Oof. I’ve gone all soft. Lungs can’t take it.’
‘How’re you?’ Lynne had largely given up asking people here how they were, assuming that they didn’t want to answer the question any more than she did. But tonight it came automatically, to fill the space between them.
Sonia shrugged.
‘Got my court date coming up. With him.’
‘I’m sure they’ll . . . that he’ll get what’s coming.’
Sonia frowned. ‘What?’
‘That he’ll be . . . you know, punished.’
Sonia blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘It’s a custody hearing. Family court.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m not putting my boys’ dad in prison.’
‘Of course not.’
‘They don’t need that.’
‘No.’
Lynne put the cigarette back between her lips, forcing her to unclench her jaw.
‘Well, in that case. It’ll be fine. Val will give you the right advice.’
Sonia tapped her ash. ‘Val’s a joke.’
Lynne didn’t say anything.
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. Her heart’s in the right place. But with all this stuff going on with Katie? Police crawling all over? People are too busy covering their own arses at times like these. You can forget about getting any help out of Val, I reckon. I have.’
Sonia flicked her ash.
‘She does her best,’ Lynne said.
‘I know that. But she doesn’t really get it. It’s all just an idea to Val. It’s a shame about Katie.’
The words were said casually, but one amplified itself. Shame. Shame. Shame.
‘I can’t believe . . . I can’t believe she killed herself.’
Lynne wasn’t sure what she meant by that. That she didn’t believe that Katie had killed herself, or that she did?
‘I can,’ Sonia said quietly. ‘I can see why someone would do that. It’s different when you’ve got kids. You just can’t let yourself even think about it.’
‘Yes,’ Lynne said. She wasn’t sure that she understood exactly what Sonia meant, but the word ‘shame’ was still lying limply between them on the wet patio.
‘She got it, Katie did,’ Sonia said. She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. ‘Don’t know what it is – was – about her, but she got it. That the hitting isn’t the worst part.’
Lynne nodded. Sonia kept looking at her. For just a second too long. The heat from the tip of her cigarette was starting to nip at Lynne’s fingers.
‘Too fucking cold up north,’ Sonia said. The f-word seemed to crack out of nowhere, and Lynne winced automatically then recovered herself quickly enough to give a little knowing smile, a nod. Sonia patted Lynne on the arm.
Lynne knew not to flinch, but she wasn’t used to being touched so cavalierly. In her mind, no one touched her but Frank. Certainly no man, and women weren’t necessarily
any safer. The nature of the touch mattered less than the fact of it.
‘I’ve never got used to it,’ she said. ‘We moved up – oh, just before Peony was born. It seemed like a better place than London to raise a child. Cleaner air. You know.’
9.
Then
Those evenings and weekends with Jamie give Katie a sense of shape to her week, something to think about while she stands packed on to the commuter trains, someone to call in her lunch break as she hovers on the comfortless, swarming street outside her office in the City. Nobody wants to be single in London. Friends live too far away to fill any void; the cattle effect of the daily train, two hours round, makes her ache to have her personhood caressed.
The first time he calls her ‘my girlfriend’ she feels like she’s being lassoed, drawn into his side so that his arm can encircle her waist. But there’s no denying that she acts like his girlfriend and does the things that a girlfriend would do, so it becomes true.
He starts to buy her jewellery. Blue topaz. White gold. A silver pendant shaped like a leaf. That’s for their one-month anniversary – the month after their fifth date.
He buys things for her birthday, for their two-month anniversary, for ‘just because’. She gets the impression he thinks less about whether she’ll like the gifts than how they’ll look on her, but that feels like a silly distinction to make out loud. Nobody has ever bought her jewellery before.
* * *
• • •
Him meeting her friends turns into a bit of a fuss.
He’s very keen to meet them properly – he says that being in the same club doesn’t count, and she can’t really argue with that. He wants to meet them as soon as possible.
‘They’re important to you, so I want them to see that you’re important to me,’ he says.
So she invites him to their next set of girls’ drinks. It isn’t such a controversial move – there’s often one boyfriend or another tagging along these days. The evenings have become more like a homage to the times they used to have together in that pub than the real thing – the wine-smoothed, blissfully easy conversations of the sixth form.