This is Me

by Shari Low

  Everyone waited for her reaction and, bearing in mind she was in the middle of a hormonal swirl, it was a risky move.

  She paused, contemplated, processed, then, ‘Can we do it today?’ she asked the registrar. ‘I just need to go and collect my grandad, but then we’d be good to go.’

  The other three’s cheers were rapidly stifled by the bureaucratic response.

  Mrs Chirpy regarded them with something close to disdain. ‘Of course not. You have to register bans. There’s a process.’

  ‘And how long does this process take?’ Sam asked patiently.

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘OK then,’ he replied, brimming with happiness, his arm around his new fiancée, squeezing her tight. ‘Then we’d like to book in for three weeks today.’

  ‘Really?’ the woman asked. There was a hint of a smile around her mouth now. Maybe this was something a bit unusual and unexpected to brighten up her day and thaw out her frostiness.

  ‘Really,’ Claire repeated, very definitely, absolutely sure that this was exactly what she wanted and, if truth be told, a little disappointed that they couldn’t do it today. Big fancy weddings with posh cars, a meringue frock and monogrammed napkins gave her the kind of anxiety that made her want to jump on a bus and flee the scene. She wanted to marry Sam. That was all that mattered. Whether their wedding cost a hundred quid or ten thousand, all she cared about was that she would wake up the next morning and be his wife. She’d be happy to do it right here with the five people she loved most in the world by her side. Sam. Doug. Jeanna. Max. And they’d have nipped to Fred’s house to collect him. They were her family, blood relatives or not, and the people she could count on, the ones who had never wavered in their support – apart from Jeanna’s repeated assertions that she was a daft cow for not abiding by the instructions on the contraception pills. The digs had completely stopped the minute she’d clapped eyes on Max, and even cynical and bitchy Jeanna had blinked back the tears as she instantly fell in love with him.

  Two arms came around her shoulders and she realised they belonged to Doug. ‘Congratulations, sis.’

  ‘This is way too mushy for me. I need a drink,’ Jeanna hissed, but she couldn’t help the beaming grin that had overtaken her face. Claire knew she was delighted for her – it just wasn’t Jeanna’s style to be giddy with delight in times of romantic events.

  ‘OK. Hang on…’ The registrar went off and came back with a big, slightly battered diary, then proceeded to flick through the pages. ‘We can fit you in on the eighteenth.’

  ‘I’m free that day,’ Claire said, looking up at her new fiancé. ‘You free?’

  ‘Think I can make it,’ Sam confirmed, laughing.

  Three weeks later, the four of them stood back in the same building, on the floor above, accompanied by slightly more people than would have been there if they’d done it on the day they left the hospital. There was still Doug, Jeanna, and a sleeping Max in his car seat, but they’d been joined by Sam’s parents, Tom and Sandie, his three brothers, Doug’s girlfriend, Fiona, and, of course, her grandad, Fred. Her mum and dad were going on holiday that day and had declined the invitation. That was fine by Claire. Fred walked her up the aisle, his craggy face glowing with pride as he told her she was beautiful. According to Sam, her grandad wasn’t wrong. When she met him at the top of the aisle, in a long white floaty dress that she’d run up from a spare bolt of satin backed crêpe on her gran’s old Singer machine, and a pair of white Reebok trainers and a tiara she’d borrowed from the college drama department’s costume store, he’d whispered that she’d never looked more stunning.

  An elderly registrar with a florid face and a booming voice conducted the ceremony. They promised to care for each other, to protect each other, to honour and love each other, to the exclusion of all others, until the end of time.

  And when Sam took her face in his hands and kissed her, she knew, without a speck of doubt, that she would spend the rest of her life with him.

  She would never have believed that, just a few years later, she would discover she was wrong.

  Eighteen

  Denise – 2019

  Denise peered at the piece of paper in her hand for the longest time, like she was staring at some kind of abstract image, trying desperately to make sense of it.

  £106,000 overdrawn.

  This didn’t make any sense at all. It had to be a mistake.

  The intense thudding in her chest began to make her feel light headed, so she leant against the wall. Stared a little longer.

  Nope, she still didn’t understand. They couldn’t be overdrawn. It just wasn’t possible. Ray had been grafting his socks off over the last few years, sometimes having to work away on jobs for a fortnight at a time, constantly telling her that this was a last blast to get the money in before he started winding down to retirement.

  No. They’d got it wrong. He was always saying that the folk at the bank were incompetents. This just proved it. That said, she had to get it rectified, but how did she even begin to do that?

  Heart still pounding, she made her way into the room Ray had converted into an office many years before, furnishing it with an antique mahogany director’s desk and leather chair, matching sideboard and display cabinet and an eye wateringly expensive reclining lounger that faced a sixty-five inch LCD HD state of the art TV with surround sound on the opposite wall. It was his man cave. His place of work and solitude. The only time she ever came in here was to run round it with a Dyson, so just being in the room felt strange.

  Denise pulled out the huge black chair that was tucked under the desk and sat in it. The smell of the leather, the smell of him, combined with the panic to make her stomach twist.

  Why was this happening to her? Why? How could he leave her? How was she meant to deal with all this stuff on her own?

  Her fist slammed on the top of the desk, the noise startling her. He didn’t like her to swear, but for fuck’s sake! This was a living nightmare.

  Fingers trembling, she switched on the computer and watched as the screen burst to life. Password. No idea. She tried a few of the obvious ones – his date of birth, the football team he supported, a dozen more, but nothing let her in. She even tried her name and her birthday, and felt a physical stab of pain when neither worked. Damn it. Why would he even have a password on there? He knew that she would never pry or have any reason to switch his computer on. Until now.

  Frustrated, she sat back, unsure of what to do next. First things first. She pulled out her phone and checked the app for the one account that she had access to – £360 in there. OK. That was normal. Ray always transferred cash into that account at the beginning of every month, and any ad hoc bills, expenses and money she needed came out of there.

  If she couldn’t get on to the bank accounts online, then she’d have to search for the paper statements for the other two accounts – his personal and the business ones.

  Leaning down to her right, she tried to open the bottom drawer. Locked.

  Her nerve endings bristled like spikes across the outside of her skin. Why would he lock it? None of this was making any sense at all.

  She pulled open the middle drawer that spanned both pedestals and searched it for the key. Nothing. She tipped the pen holder out. Nothing there either. The other drawers drew a blank too.

  She slumped back in the chair, her eyes roaming the room. He didn’t have it on him when he… he… The flashback to the frantic ambulance ride to the hospital with her dying husband next to her made her wince. She forced herself back to the present. The key wasn’t on him, so it must be here. She just wasn’t looking in the right place.

  Scanning the room again, from left to right, her gaze stopped on the display cabinet. In the centre was a brass trophy cup, one of his most prized possessions. He’d won it when he was twenty-one and the star striker for the local football team. He’d loved being one of the lads and had played football every Sunday until the business got busy and he started working weekends.
The vision of him walking in the door with the trophy over thirty-five years ago was one that she would never forget.

  The realisation dawned. Slowly, she rose up, crossed the room, felt inside the cold of the brass cup and wrapped her fingers around the key that lay inside. She told herself he left it there because he knew she’d look there. Yes, that must be it.

  Hands still shaking, she inserted it in the bottom right hand drawer and slid it open. She flicked through the files that were suspended on two steel rods down either side of the drawer. Quotes, instruction manuals, correspondence, invoices and, right at the back, she saw the familiar logo of their bank.

  Pulling out the cardboard folder, she let it fall open on the desk, revealing a sheaf of statements about an inch thick. Without even looking, she knew they’d be organised in date order. Ray didn’t do sloppy organisation.

  Taking a deep breath, fearful but anxious to get whatever she needed to sort out the issue with the bank, she scanned the statement on the top. It was for last month. Company name: RH Construction. Transactions in. Transactions out. Balance £104,500. Overdrawn.

  The oxygen was sucked right out of the room.

  So there had been an issue last month too that Ray had missed? That wasn’t like him.

  She checked the one below. The month before. £103,250. Overdrawn.

  This couldn’t be right.

  But, hang on, this was the business account, not his personal one. Perhaps this was down to some kind of financial juggling that minimised tax or was of some other kind of benefit to a small company. God knows, his mood was utterly foul every time he had to send money to the VAT department or HMRC.

  Back in the drawer, she flicked through the files again, until she spotted another sheaf of statements that had been tucked into a second banking folder, behind the business one. He obviously had one for the company and one for personal accounts.

  Pulling it out, she tried to steady her breathing. This was all going to be OK. There was a simple explanation. If there were problems, he would have told her. They’d always been a team, told each other everything, shared good and bad. There was nothing to worry about here. Nothing at all.

  Opening the folder, she saw that, once again, the statements were in date order, the most recent at the top. This time, it was his name at the top of the page. Ray Harrow. Her husband. Her lover. Her best friend.

  Transactions In. Transactions Out. Balance £636.00.

  Her gaze remained on the numbers, trying to work out if the full stop was in the wrong place, if she was reading it incorrectly.

  No.

  £636.00.

  That was all he had in his personal account.

  The net effect of Ray Harrow’s financial situation, the result of a lifetime of work for them both, was that he’d died leaving them with less than a thousand pounds in savings and over one hundred thousand pounds in debt. That just couldn’t be right. Ray would never do that. He was successful. Sharp. Brilliant. He’d never leave her destitute. He… The thoughts dried up as a long, slow howl filled the room. It took her a dazed moment to realise it was coming from her. Arms around her stomach, she buckled over, trying desperately to make her lungs work.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  For a long minute she stayed like that, collapsed in two, head on knees, rocking back and forward.

  This couldn’t be happening. Where had all the money gone?

  Sure, they lived a nice life, took great holidays, bought quality clothes, but other than that they had minimal expenses. If any work needed doing in the house, Ray did it himself or brought in the guys he worked with. They hadn’t had a mortgage for decades, because after Ray’s grandad had died, they’d taken over his mortgage payments and cleared it off in a few years. Denise clearly remembered heading off to Marbella for a week to celebrate the fact that they were barely out of their twenties and they were already mortgage free.

  Bolts of confusion were ricocheting around in her mind. She forced herself to sit upright, tried desperately to regain some kind of composure.

  The answers to all her questions had to be in this paperwork. She just had to find them.

  OK, start at the beginning.

  Her eyes went back to the pile of documents.

  Company name. Transactions In. Transactions out.

  She picked up a highlighter from the desk and began to mark up every outgoing payment.

  If the money had disappeared, this would tell her where it had gone to.

  Nineteen

  Denise – 1984

  The wail was so loud it could shatter windows. In the kitchen, Denise put the iron up on its side on the ironing board and trudged through into the living room to see what the problem was now. She immediately saw the issue, even before four year old Doug gave her the update.

  ‘She. Switched. Off. Music!’ he yelled, his little face red with outrage as he pointed at Claire.

  ‘Didn’t,’ Claire replied petulantly, her thumbs hooked into the straps on her little dungarees. Jenny had bought them for her granddaughter, and when Claire grew out of them Denise would give them to her mum for her wee sister, Donna, who was born just two months after Claire. It was strange having a little sister sixteen years younger than her, but Denise only saw her every second Saturday when she took the kids to visit Agnes and Fred, so she’d never really built up a relationship with her. Nothing unusual there. None of her family were particularly close. Agnes was permanently irritated, while Fred wasn’t the kind of man to express his feelings. A hug on her birthday and at Christmas was about as far as it went. He absolutely doted on the kids though. He was like a completely different man, interested in them and full of the joys when they were around. That was the only reason she went back time after time, because he played with them for hours and gave her a break.

  Bedlam was still breaking out in the living room.

  ‘Did!’ Doug argued. He’d come along only ten months after Claire and he’d been making his voice heard ever since.

  ‘I didn’t.’ Claire shouted back.

  Dear God, they could go on like this all day.

  Denise left the room without even trying to intervene. She knew exactly what had happened. The radio had run out of batteries again – and it would just have to stay silent because she didn’t have the money to buy new ones until Ray got paid next week.

  Back in the kitchen, she ironed the last of the name tags onto Claire’s new school shirts. First day tomorrow. Ray had even – because his mother strongly suggested it – told his work he had a dentist’s appointment so he could come with her on her first day. He’d lose an hour’s pay, and God knows they needed it, but her mother-in-law had insisted that this was one of the milestones that shouldn’t be missed.

  She glanced up at the clock on the kitchen wall. Six o’clock. Jenny would be back home soon from her shift at the supermarket – it was time and a half on a Sunday, so she took it whenever she could. The shop wasn’t open, but she restocked the shelves and did some cleaning to get it ready for Monday morning. Ray was out playing football for his team and his dad had gone along to watch. It was their regular routine every weekend. On a Saturday they’d go and watch whatever teams were playing locally, then head to the pub for a few pints, and on a Sunday, Ray would play for his pub team and his dad would go along to support them. Over the summer, she’d enjoyed having him home at weekends, but she could see he was chomping at the bit to get back to playing. Today was the first game of the new season and when he was heading out he’d looked happier than he had in weeks.

  ‘You’ve got to remember he’s still a young lad,’ his mum would say, if Denise ever dared to give the impression that she resented him leaving. It wasn’t that she minded, not really. It was just that… well, she missed him when he wasn’t around. There weren’t many other people in her life. The last close friend she’d had was Alice, and look how that ended. Last she heard, Alice had got some secretarial job in Glasgow and moved into a flat with a couple of other girls in
the west end. Not that Denise would ever have done that. Alice had been pretty smart at school, but Denise didn’t have the same grades. Typing and home economics were her best subjects, but she’d left to have Claire before she’d sat her exams. Probably just as well.

  Anyway, she could see now that even if Alice hadn’t lied to her face, they’d have nothing in common. Her former pal was twenty-one, single, working and no doubt out to have fun. Denise was also twenty-one, but she was a married mother of two, who lived with her husband’s parents and couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out to a bar or gone shopping for new clothes. None of that was a priority any more.

  No, the only people in her life now were Ray, the children, his parents, and those visits back to her family every fortnight. And sometimes she felt that neither the relationship with his parents or hers was real, because she was always watching what she was saying. She would never say anything negative about Ray or his family to her mother, because Agnes would pounce on it and milk it for all it was worth. Or worse, threaten to march round and sort them out. And on the other hand, she never discussed her own family with the Harrows, because she didn’t want them to think badly of the people she came from. It felt like she was absolutely stuck in the middle. Not that she was complaining. Like Agnes said, she’d made her bed.

  Besides, it was worth it to have Ray in her life. It was difficult to explain, but it was like when he walked into a room, she immediately felt alive. He made her laugh, he was sexy, he was the one with the ideas and big plans. They were going to get a house of their own soon, he promised. He was planning to leave the power plant and he was going to set up on his own, doing commercial and domestic electrical work. He was going to be someone, do something with his life. Denise had no doubt he’d achieve that – and he’d give them a great life in the process.

  They just had to be patient, put up with the current situation for a while longer, and it would all come good, he said, as long as they didn’t have any more bloody kids. Denise didn’t argue on that one. They were already falling over each other and the thought of starting all over again with nappies and bottles… Nope, it wasn’t for her. She’d come to realise that she wanted to be out with Ray, not stuck in the house with her life passing her by. Claire and Doug had both been accidents, both of them conceived because Ray was too horny or drunk to wait until they had a condom, but she wasn’t going to get caught out again. She was on the pill now and she made sure she took it religiously. Jenny kept telling her that motherhood was the greatest experience in life. Denise would never admit it, but she sometimes wondered why she didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t exactly bringing her boundless joy.