“Anything.”
“Rehab. It doesn’t work for me. I need to do this at home. Here.”
“OK, I’ll research it, I’ll help you. Whatever it takes.”
“I can’t…I can’t do it with you. I have to do it without you. I want you to live somewhere else while I get this done. I’m asking you, begging you: Can you leave me alone, here? To save my life. Just give me a month or so to do this. Please.”
He seemed sincere, but what he was saying had to be a sick joke. “So, wait a minute. You fuck her and I’m the one moving out?”
“It wouldn’t be like that.”
“What would it be like, then?”
“It would be you, giving me half a chance to save my life.”
“Save your life. Without me. With her.”
“This isn’t about Lily. What’s happened, I think it’s just made me realize I need to do something about my life. What happened on Saturday, it shouldn’t have happened—”
“But it did and I don’t know why I need to move out because of it. No, Iain, no way.”
“Please. I am begging you. I want to change. I need to get better.”
“But you’re not even sick!”
“I’m not right. We’re not right.” I shook my head. “You. You’re not right either. I think you know that, deep, deep down.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I was doing all right until she came along.”
“I don’t mean the depression, I’m talking about before; the secrets you’ve been trying to bury all these years. Even if you won’t face up to them, I’ve started to put some things together. Give me some time and space to get better, and let’s see if we can get past them.”
“No. I’m not going to do that. We’re going to work through this together.”
He went quiet.
“Sometimes I look at you and I wonder: Does she know what’s real anymore? It’s like you live in a parallel universe. Do you know what’s true and what’s not? You think Lily’s the troll? You think she’s out to get you? It’s not right, despite what I did on Saturday. It’s not her fault.”
“Why are you on her side? I’ll never understand why you can’t be on my side. I don’t understand why you think she’s right, not me.”
“But you haven’t been on my side, Katherine. You let me get to this.”
“Wherever you think you are, it is on you. My crimes here? To provide for us. To put up with a world of work bullshit for you. For us. And now, you’re punishing me for it, going on about ‘secrets.’ What the fuck, Iain? No. I am not going anywhere. And neither are you. That is who we are and until she came along, that was fine.”
He looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. Such a darkness in his eyes. He didn’t look like Iain anymore. In all our years together I’d never once felt fear. Now I did, and it was raw and hot, pulsating inside me. He seemed to have crossed an invisible threshold into somewhere new and diabolical. I was terrified about what that new version of Iain might say next.
“Nothing to do with you is right.”
“Stop it. I don’t like how you’re looking at me. I don’t know you when you’re like this!” I fell to my knees on the carpet next to his feet and put my hands on his thighs, my heart breaking as I sensed him flinch at my touch. Iain, recoiling from me, not opening himself to me. How far he’d gone already, how I wanted to reel him back. “Please, listen to me, let’s just try and put what happened this weekend behind us. I’ll help you cut back on the booze. Give up, even. I’ll give up with you. This is me we’re talking about. I can do anything I put my mind to, you know that.”
“Oh I do.” He hooked a finger under my chin to bring my face up to meet his. “Who are you, Katherine Ross? Do you really want me to start talking about what happened the year your mum died, or are you going to get the fuck out of here and let me get my shit together? Your choice.”
His eyes were shadows. I stopped breathing for a second before the breaths came quickly. The truth: a shark’s fin of truth, barely under the water line, on the verge of slicing through the still surface. I didn’t want him to say the words I thought were in his throat. What he thought he knew.
“I don’t know what—”
“Katherine.”
Eyes like shadows, the feel of his finger under my chin, a foreign sensation.
“OK.” I shuffled away from him, still on the floor. I looked at my hands. “You’re wrong, but…I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll go for you.”
He watched me, waited. After a moment, I could see him nodding from the corner of my eye. By the time I made myself look at him again, some normality had trickled back into his face.
“OK…OK, good. Thank you. Where will you go? I don’t, you know, want to—”
“Want to put me out on the streets?” I tried to laugh, tried to normalize what had just passed between us. “No, don’t worry about me; there’s loads of people I need to reconnect with who’ll put me up. Could be like my own social life rehab?” He nodded to himself. He couldn’t look at me. He felt sorry for me. Iain of all people and after he’d made me fear him. I wanted to know if there was any bit of my old Iain in there somewhere. “This is probably just what we need. Could be really good for me, for us. I understand that, I really do.”
He got up and started walking slowly toward the door, leaving me on the floor. I turned to watch him leave. He looked at the empty wall, a grimy rectangular void where the film poster had been, but chose not to say anything.
“Where will you go now? With her? Did you stay with her on Saturday night?” I asked, pulling myself off the ground.
“No…No. This is about me sorting myself out. She was staying at some posh manor house place. I went back to the B&B. You were gone. I tried to sober up.” He looked right at me. “Did a bit of reading, as it goes…Anyway, I’m staying at The Rose and Crown tonight. I’ll come back here tomorrow if you’re still all right with it.” I went to hold him, but stopped myself. I knew I stunk of sex with someone else.
“Kathy?”
“Yes?”
“We need to not be in contact with each other while I’m doing this. No phone calls. No texts, no emails. Nothing. I have to do this without you.”
“So you can be with her while my back’s turned?”
He looked down to the floor. “Katherine. I have got to get on top of the drink. If we’re still talking to each other, I can’t trust myself to not reach out to you, to not call us back to where we are now, and I don’t want to do that. Do you understand? Just give me four weeks, OK?”
He still loved me. He didn’t want me to see him go through detox, but he couldn’t trust himself not to want me back in the flat. “I totally understand. A month. OK.”
“I’m going to go now.”
“OK. If you think that’s the right thing to do.”
“And hey, maybe don’t go finishing that on your own.” He gestured back at the bottle of wine on the coffee table. “Looks like you’ve had a fair bit already. Who were you with?”
“Just Asif.”
“Asif. Right.” He looked toward the ceiling and nodded.
“I saw the whole thing, you know? Her on you? I saw it all.”
“Lily said she thought she saw you.”
“Thought she saw me? Oh, she saw me all right.”
He pushed his fingers hard into his eyes. “I’m going to go now.”
He started walking out the door and down the communal stairs; I watched the back of my partner disappearing into the shared hallway below. He’d nearly turned the corner to the next flight when I called out to him, “Whatever you were going to say…” He stopped without turning around. “What you were going to say before, about what happened that year, whatever you think I am, or I’ve done, it isn’t what you think.”
He turned and looked up the stairs back
at me. “OK, Katherine.”
And with that, Iain left. I closed the door and put the deadlock on behind him.
* * *
—
I THREW MY THINGS into my Samsonite, but ended up transferring the whole lot into bin liners, because I’d be able to cram more into my Mini that way. My life. In rubbish bags. If you saw me in that moment, hauling my bulging plastic cargo down the stairs and slinging them into my car, would you have been happy? But I hadn’t sunk low enough for you. No. Not yet.
I woke early, and, looking around the mess of the flat, decided to get out of there, my boots crunching on smashed possessions as I left, thinking, Let him clean up. He’s made this mess.
I went to the Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green. I could afford to stay there for a couple of weeks maybe, but booked just two nights to start with, hoping against hope Iain would come to his senses. If he didn’t, I could see I was going to have to make some hard choices. Driving east that day, it felt like my life had been all about hard choices. Sacrifices. Being backed into a corner. Being forced to come out fighting, fists up, doing things I didn’t want to do, being a person I never wanted to be. My life has rarely delivered me the luxury of the happy path.
When I got to Bethnal Green, the first thing I did was go for a swim. In the pool, my mind turned to work. Gemma had to be on the back foot now, surely, with all her niece had done to one of her senior employees. Against all odds, given how weak I should have felt, I found myself powering through the water, earning admiring glances from the only other person in the pool, some City-boy type. If you need to know one thing about me, Lily, it’s that I dig deep. Resilience. The one thing your lot are widely known to lack in abundance.
Patting myself down with towels I didn’t have to wash myself, I felt surprisingly rested; positive, even. Asif had texted me the night before, telling me how much he’d enjoyed himself and asking when was the best time for us to have our review. I would have just stayed with him, if he didn’t still live with his mum.
I’d decided to head in late. What was Gemma going to do, sack me? She wouldn’t dare.
Just as I was about to board a bus to Borough around ten, my phone rang. Your aunt. “You’re going to get an email shortly. You need to read it and afterward, do not attempt to contact myself, Lily, or anyone else who works at Leadership Media. That’s all I can say at this stage.”
Gemma hung up.
I shook as I waited for that email. It was probably less than a minute, but I felt my whole life get sucked into those seconds.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Notice of suspension
Dear Katherine Ross,
We have been in receipt of a number of allegations in relation to your conduct and persistent financial impropriety, including unauthorized spending on your Leadership Media credit card.
These alleged incidents constitute gross misconduct. If any or all are proved this would constitute grounds for instant dismissal. However, we want to ensure you are treated fairly, so will establish the facts by means of an investigation before pursuing any further permanent action.
Without prejudgment, however, take this email as notification of your suspension without pay until further notice as we complete our investigation. This is in line with the refreshed terms of employment you signed under the new ownership of Leadership Media.
You will be contacted in due course. In this period, you are requested to not attempt to contact, solicit, or respond to contact from any employee of Leadership Media.
Of course, I called Gemma immediately.
“You have been given very specific instructions not to—”
“This is complete bollocks, Gemma. You haven’t even given me that credit card yet. What else are you and she fabricating about me?”
A pause. “I’m hanging up now. Don’t attempt to contact me again.”
I went back to the hotel lobby and thought about calling Iain a thousand times. I wondered if you’d have told him about my dismissal. But why would you? He might feel sorry for me, invite me back home. Eventually, I gave in and dialed his number. He needed to know he’d made me homeless and you’d made me effectively jobless.
But he had blocked me.
The caller was “not available.” I’m guessing that was your idea. Clever. You knew you’d have to pull out all the stops to keep him away from me. You knew he would always need me because you didn’t know how to let Iain be Iain. I, however, did.
Persistent financial impropriety. I knew you must have set me up and I needed to establish my lines of defense in addition to never even seeing the card I was supposed to have been using for “unauthorized spending.” A list quickly took shape:
Failure to defend me against the distress of an internet troll: They hadn’t maintained a safe environment for me.
Age discrimination/nepotism: I was being managed out of my role by a younger, cheaper replacement, who happened to be the boss’s niece.
Unfair treatment in light of my mental health: What decent employer tries to sack someone suffering health issues and offers such little support?
I would not go quietly. Not now that I had nothing to lose.
No word from Iain. Nothing for four days. I thought about going back to the flat, but I knew that wouldn’t do me any good. Too needy. Too dependent. Too not-me. I recognized I’d have to play the longer game and play it by his rules. Fine, I’d give him his month. There was no word from you, though that was much more predictable. Of course I thought about calling you, especially when I’d had a drink. But you would surely be anticipating my call. Not giving in and doing so, that was old me, fighting Katherine, showing you how much stronger I was than your expectations.
And no word from work either since the email. Sliding toward my credit limits, I had no choice but to check out of the hotel after four nights. I needed to start conserving what little I had. I called the mortgage company and asked for a “payment holiday” (something that sounds jolly and really isn’t). Iain paid our bills out of his Holloway rent, so I didn’t have to worry about that. My life, out here on my own, it was going to cost if I wasn’t careful. I made a new plan. I showered in my gym while I waited for my canceled membership to expire, and necked sleeping pills and crashed in my car. That’s what I’d do for as long as it took for Iain to scratch the itch of sobriety, get bored, and start missing me. Wait for the shark to sink back to the deep.
I wonder, did my strength surprise you, Lily? Snowflake, the things I have done in the past, the ways in which I have dug deep you would never believe. As a child, I was half-starved by my mother. Today, you would call it neglect, but back in the seventies and eighties, it was discipline; it was what toughened us up, made us fit for the fight. You lot have absolutely no idea what people my age went through with our parents, even the good ones. Mine was not a good one, but she did make me strong when the going gets tough. I may have been weak those last two years, but I’m at my best in a crisis. I reckoned I could go for weeks like this. And as you know, I did. Living cheap. On the edge of what’s tolerable. And in a way you could never understand, this is my comfort zone. I decided I would start to write again. Hard as nails and cool as fuck when the shit hits the fan. That’s who he loved. Iain would eventually hear about what I was going through, and he’d see the real me, the old me.
But it was never easy.
Especially not that first night when I drove for two hours, trying to find somewhere both secluded and legal or, failing that, anywhere I’d have a fighting chance of being able to park long enough to get some sleep. It changed my view of familiar streets and neighborhoods. I settled for a deliveries entrance off Church Street. I got there just as the pills kicked in.
Every piece
of me hurt when I woke before the sun rose. I wondered again, Why hadn’t I tried harder to give Iain what he wanted? Who knows, building a family with him, maybe I would have been happy too. No, in my heart, I knew Iain and I would open new realms of misery were we to start a family. When we got back together, we’d come to our senses together, find a new peace. Maybe even a sober peace. We’d help each other write again; discover the next phase, think about our careers, maybe even think about leaving London if we thought that’s what we needed to reset.
My first manuscript: I would bring that out of the darkness, let him read it, or an abridged version anyway; make him understand my childhood and the choices I’d been forced to make. If I gave him a chance, he would understand.
I tried to maintain some kind of control. In those wilds of sleep deprivation and deep anxiety, I found a rhythm I could live with. I usually woke before five, parked up near the gym, and waited for it to open. I cycled, swam, steamed, had a discreet nap, maybe, nursed a coffee in Costa on Stoke Newington High Street (avoiding the family-run places on Church Street where I assumed I’d be more likely to be moved on). Then it would be off to the library if it was raining, or if it was sunny, I’d drive to Highgate for a stroll and a sit in Waterlow Park or somewhere else I knew I’d have little chance of seeing you or Iain while he got whatever he thought he was doing out of his system. Shop sushi eaten while I sat on my jacket. Another nap in my car with my sunglasses on, book in my lap. Another coffee. Drive. Then, it would be time to find a place to park for the night, or get near to it until it was quiet enough to park there. Gin. Bottle of wine in a pub, maybe a salad. Sleeping pills. Car. Sleep. Horrific dream about my mother, blood, the farm. Repeat. I survived this way for three weeks without cracking.
I kept imagining how you’d present your lies to Gemma. How far you’d go to look blameless. You’d fucked my partner and your aunt knew it. Pieces were starting to not so much fall into place, but drop away; become eliminated from my inquiries. I knew there could never have been a grand plan with Gemma to simply unseat me. If there was, it wouldn’t have involved you screwing a forty-nine-year old jobless boozer. That was all your idea. Gemma was not “in on it.” She wanted to be in the center of your world, but she was outside what you really wanted when you asked her to buy out Leadership, wasn’t she? You were using her life for your own ends too. Using people like that, it’s just what you do, your nature.
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