‘It was his idea to get married, actually,’ I say.
‘Oh, purlease,’ Mez begins again. ‘He only did it so that he was the one holding the shotgun rather than having it aimed at him – I think he rightly guessed that it was more likely to go off in one of our hands.’
‘And we’d all be pleading “accidental discharge, guv”,’ Faye says.
‘Because the first one got our sister up the duff, the second discharge was more deadly,’ Mez adds.
‘Sorry, m’lud, we didn’t mean to kill him, it was an accident!’ Faye says. Time stands still and we all stop breathing, trying to pretend she didn’t say that. It’s happened many, many times over the years. A harmless joke that reminds us . . .
Faye clears her throat, and opens her mouth to apologise, I think, then she changes her mind and closes her mouth again. She draws her long, slender legs up into the chair, and adjusts her glasses on her face before she returns to the magazine article in front of her. Every so often she’ll reach up and brush a lock of her long, sweeping fringe aside, like she does when she’s in deep thought or is nervous.
Mez is now focused on one part of the ‘dress’. She’s pinning and re-pinning the wide hem without looking up, and without ‘accidentally’ jabbing me. The pins have multicoloured heads on them that look like tiny ball-bearings against the shimmering pearlescent of her nail polish.
One of us is breathing very loudly. As if she is running a race. As if at any moment she is going to run out of oxygen. I try to focus on the dress. My dress. My wedding dress. At my last wedding I wore a cream skirt and jacket over a white blouse. This version of the dress is floor-length, with minimal fullness, gently flowing out from the wide waist, a deep V at the chest with long sleeves. It’s going to be a triumph, the best thing Mez has made yet.
The loud breather is still struggling for breath, struggling to get air into her lungs and not freak out.
‘She’s coming out soon,’ I say. I do not to need to use her name, they know who I mean. ‘She might already be out, actually.’
Faye and Mez both sigh at the same time, both have the same inflection in that sigh: relief, exasperation, disbelief. Even after all this time, still disbelief.
‘I know,’ Faye says, still skulking behind her magazine.
‘We saw it in the paper,’ Mez says.
I bite the skin on the inside of my lip; my breathing isn’t as loud as it was, but it is not calm, either.
‘Do you think she’ll try to contact you?’ Faye asks.
I shrug, more in despair than ignorance. ‘I don’t know. I hope not. God, I hope not, but I don’t know.’
‘You haven’t heard from her in all this time?’
‘No. I’ve moved a lot, and it’s not as if we were ever friends.’
‘I’m sure she won’t,’ Mez reassures with a tone that suggests she isn’t that convinced about what she is saying.
My anxiety about her release is not exactly well hidden. I cannot sleep, I find it hard to eat, and every little thing seems to bring me back to that time: the dress in the wedding shop, being stopped by the police, the talk I had with Verity. Evan thinks it’s wedding nerves that have stopped me sleeping through the night; have me waking up at the crack of dawn to go and sit in the kitchen, watching the world get brighter and brighter after the darkness; and have me hiding the dinner knives as well as the sharp ones.
‘I take it you still haven’t told his nibs?’ Faye asks.
‘It never seems to be the right time.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Fays scoffs.
‘Stop being a bitch, Fez,’ Mez jumps in. ‘It’s not like it’s something you just bring up, is it? “Oh, by the way, honey, I was once tried for murder, and I didn’t go to prison, but the girl I was tried with got life. And there was lots of bullcrap written about me in the papers for weeks. Oh, and could you pick up a pint of milk on your way home?” I mean, come on!’
‘I’m not saying it’d be easy, but he is going to being seriously pissed off when he finds out. Wouldn’t you be? After all this time, finding out something like that about him?’ Neither Mez nor I can disagree with that. ‘It’s not exactly the best way to start a marriage. Not the first time, and definitely not the second time,’ Faye says.
‘What would you know about marriage?’ Mez says, effectively sticking a knife in Faye’s back. Faye wants to get married but Harry, who she has been with for nearly as long as I have been with Evan, doesn’t see the need for it. They’ve been together so long, he says, that it’d be a pointless exercise, a waste of money. God knows what he’s said about Evan and me doing it twice; God knows how much it must hurt Faye that Evan and me are doing it twice.
‘Enough to know that your marriage isn’t as strong as you make out if you’re not telling your husband such a major thing about your life, or if your husband likes to holiday without you and the kids at least once a year.’ I wince on Mez’s behalf as Faye plunges the knife into her back.
This is why it’s not good to talk about those times. It always ends up in an argument, in a slanging match that reiterates in all our minds that we haven’t forgotten the pain of then, and we’re still living with the scars now. We haven’t forgotten, we haven’t healed, we’ve simply carried on with day-to-day life.
‘Just because we don’t live in each other’s pockets, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with our relationship,’ Mez snaps. ‘But that’s something you wouldn’t know about, isn’t it? I mean, how is Harry? I’m surprised he hasn’t been on the phone asking when you’ll be back to cook his tea.’
‘Ha! Shows what you know,’ Faye spits, ‘Harry does all the cooking.’
‘That’s because he hasn’t got a wife to do it for him.’
‘I’m sure that’s what Adrian tells the women he meets when he jets off to paradise without you.’
‘All right, stop now!’ I say. ‘Stop. I don’t want Evan and the kids walking into this.’
‘She started it!’ Mez screeches.
Faye and I both stare at her with our mouths open.
‘Did you, a forty-two-year-old mother of four really, really just say that?’ I ask.
‘No!’ Mez replies, obviously embarrassed. ‘It was my evil twin.’
‘You loon,’ Faye says. She sighs, and tosses her magazine aside, aiming for the coffee table, hitting the floor instead and not seeming to notice. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but . . .’
‘“But” doesn’t make an apology, it makes an excuse of your behaviour,’ I cut in, repeating what Mum used to say to us when we fell out as children.
Faye smiles. ‘OK, I’m sorry. Full stop. I’m sorry for saying those things.’
‘Me too,’ Medina says.
‘Me three,’ I add, even though I didn’t technically say anything. I was sorry for the rest of it, though, for causing all of this.
‘Excuse me,’ Medina says and scrambles to her feet. She grabs her bag and, pausing to rub her knees, she hobbles and walks out of the room. Faye leans over and scoops up her magazine and seems to engross herself in the article straightaway. I stand, immobile and almost non-human, like a mannequin as I wait for Mez to return.
Superficially, that was just a sisterly spat that has passed as quickly as it started; realistically that was another vicious reminder that we never fought like that before all the stuff with me and the courts and the press and the murder.
No one outside of our family unit – no one who would look at us in court, who would read about us in the papers – would ever guess that away from prying eyes, we were systematically tearing ourselves apart. Away from the outside world, everyone in our family started to fall to pieces, and never really recovered. Even though our times together are always fun and laughter-filled, the closeness we once shared is gone. In its place is guilt, regret, the ability to say the nastiest things and, for the longest minute on earth, mean every word of them.
August, 1986
‘I swear to God, Serena, if you don’t stop moping around
this supermarket, I’m going to scream,’ Faye said.
This was all her fault. I was meant to be at his house, spending the better part of the school holiday with him before I started sixth form college, but Faye had come back early from her holiday with her Loughborough uni mates and had come home. Which was wonderful because Medina had gone to France, and I’d been missing them both. Having one back was almost as good as having them both here. I’d just been about to get ready to go out when Faye offered to do the weekly shopping down at the Co-op and said to Mum, ‘Serena’ll come to help.’ Then she turned to me saying, ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’
‘I–I–I’m meeting someone,’ I’d stuttered.
‘You can call them and cancel, can’t you?’ Faye had said.
I gave her a one-shouldered shrug. I could cancel if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to see him. The way he had been talking lately, and the way he was looking at me . . . I was convinced he was going to tell me he loved me. It’d been almost eight months and he hadn’t said it yet, but he was getting close. And when he said it, all the other worries – tiny little worries really – would melt away. He wouldn’t shout at me sometimes, he wouldn’t question me obsessively about the boys from my school we saw in the street or park. Things would be better between us. Not that they weren’t great, super, as they were. They’d just be that extra bit great, that teensy bit more super.
‘Come on, just ring them,’ she’d encouraged, heading for the corridor. ‘And if there’s a problem, I’ll speak to them and say that I hardly get to see my little sister so I’m demanding quality time together now.’
There was no way she could talk to him. We were still – rightly – keeping it a secret. He’d explained that even though he’d stopped being my teacher people would still have a problem with us. They’d go looking for dirt on him and Marlene, the ex-wife, would happily give it to them. All made up of course but, as he said, mud sticks. It would destroy his chances of getting supply teacher work as well when term started.
‘It’s all right, I’ll call and cancel,’ I’d said reluctantly. He would not be happy. He was looking forward to seeing me as much as I was looking forward to seeing him and this would upset him, and I didn’t like upsetting him. It was just easier and nicer between us if I didn’t upset him. Because when he got upset, it was my fault what happened next. It had to be. He wasn’t like that normally, was he? So it must be down to me.
When I’d called, he’d listened in silence to my explanation as to why I couldn’t make it. It was the sort of silence that put me on edge, knowing he was not happy and therefore . . . After I finished explaining, saying over and over again that I had no choice and that if I didn’t go with her she’d get suspicious, he hung up without saying a word. A streak of terror tore through me, settling in my stomach as a pool of sicky-fear. He only ever hung up when he was extremely annoyed. I’d closed my eyes for a moment before I resettled the phone in its stand. I did not think about what was going to happen the next time I saw him. I couldn’t think about what would happen the next time I saw him.
As I shopped, I couldn’t think about it but the pool of sickness, of fear and dark dread, was getting slowly and slowly bigger, a drip-dripping of anxiety that could not be plugged. Faye was wrong, I wasn’t moping. I was wishing that this hadn’t come up, and I could be with him and everything could be OK between us. I felt awful then, wishing away time with my sister. Wishing away time with one of my best friends.
‘Oh, I get it!’ Faye said, throwing a can of tomatoes into the trolley. ‘It wasn’t a friend, it was a boyfriend.’
I said nothing, just examined Mum’s list, searching for what was next.
‘I take it Mum and Dad don’t know about him?’ she said, not moving. She’d folded her arms across her chest, rested her weight on her left hip and was raising her eyebrows above her glasses. When I did not reply, she continued: ‘Of course they don’t. You haven’t been shipped off back to Ghana, have you? Who is he then?’
‘Just a boy I know,’ I mumbled into my chest.
‘Hence the lip gloss, the long plait extensions and slightly smarter dressing. Does Mez know you’ve been “borrowing” her clothes?’
‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘And you mustn’t tell her, either.’
‘I might not,’ she replied, ‘if you tell me about him.’
‘He’s just a boy I know,’ I replied. Mez would exact many levels of revenge upon me if she knew I had been dipping into her wardrobe so that I looked nice for him.
‘Is he older than you?’ Faye asked.
I nodded. I couldn’t tell her how much older – that he was technically old enough to be my father, but only on paper. In reality, in those moments we were together, he was nothing like my father. There was absolutely nothing dad-like about him.
‘How much older?’ she asked.
‘Only a couple of years, eighteen months.’
‘Serena!’ she said, as if in pain.
‘What?’ I replied. ‘He doesn’t seem like it. He seems my age.’
‘Is he at college or starting college?’
‘No, he works.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, Sez, he sounds a bit too grown-up for you.’
‘He’s not, I promise you he’s not.’
‘Look, I want to meet him.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t.’
‘Serena, you’re not going to introduce him to Mum and Dad, so I want to meet him instead. I want to make sure he’s OK.’
‘He is. I promise he is. If you meet him now, you might scare him and he might dump me. Please. I just, I don’t want anything to go wrong. He’s really nice to me and everything. I . . . I love him. I really do. If he ever stops being nice to me, I’ll finish it. I promise. Please don’t make me let you meet him. Please.’
‘OK,’ she finally agreed. ‘But I’m going to keep an eye on you, and the moment I suspect you’re not happy, I’m going to tell Mum and Dad, or make you introduce me.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said. Relief cascaded through me, almost washing away the sicky fear. But, after the relief, came . . . a feeling that sat like a heavy, cumbersome stone upon my heart.
I had changed. I had become a different person. Was this what being a woman, being a grown-up, was about? You lied to the people who loved you? You lied to the people you loved for the good of someone else? I had lied to Faye. I had never done that to either of my sisters before, and I had lied to her for him. I had given up that part of myself for him. And he’d never know. But I would know, I’d always know that now there was no going back. I could never tell them the truth about our relationship, not all of it. I’d always known that, but doing this, lying about it, meant it was definite. I was finally adult enough to see that there was no way out.
‘Are you OK, Fez?’ I ask.
She has been sitting with her feet under her and her eyes scanning the same article for a while. In fact, I don’t recall seeing her turn a page even once since she got here. Out of the three of us, she has always been the most sensible, the most level-headed, but she never reacts like this to our falling outs. Even if we have said near-unforgivable things, while Mez will keep up an indignant exterior and I will desperately think of new ways to apologise for him, Faye will be forging ahead, trying to get back to normal as soon as possible. Not in this instance. There is something sorrowful wrapped around her, and it is keeping her apart from us. It’s not simply the row: she arrived with it clinging to her shoulders like the first fall of snow.
My oldest sister sighs, then looks up from her magazine. ‘Not really, no,’ she says. That, I was not expecting. I was expecting the usual ‘fine’ you get when you ask someone how they are, or even to hear some of it after a little prodding – I was not expecting an outright ‘no’.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask, gathering handfuls of the white calico in my hands and bobbing down at her feet, so I feel more like her sister and less like the Queen. I want her to know that I am so
meone she can rely on and trust to listen to her problem.
‘I want a baby, Sez,’ she says, looking me in the eye. ‘I know it’s not cool and everything to say that and that I should be grateful for what I’ve got, but I want a baby.’ Every one of her forty-two years seems ingrained into her smooth, mahogany skin, while her eyes are misty and swim with sadness behind her glasses. ‘It’s worse at big family events or birthdays and stuff, and for me both are coming up in the next four months.’ The corners of her mouth move downwards. ‘I never thought I wouldn’t have kids. I never expected to have them, but I suppose I just thought it would happen when the time was right. And it’s not going to happen. I’ve run out of time. At my age, it’s now or never time and it’s going to be never. And . . .’ She presses the palm of her hand over the centre of her chest, pressing down on her heart, as if to stem the pain glugging out, ‘it hurts.’
‘Have you talked to Harry about this? Does he know this is what you want?’ Despite how much we rib Harry for renaming us the Witches of Ipswich when none of us have even been there, he’s a good man. Solid. Dependable. The kind of man you’d want your daughter to marry. I’m sure if he knew how much she wanted this, he’d think about it again. He’d have to, or lose her.
‘Yes, I’ve talked to him and neither of us have changed what we want. He doesn’t see the point in ruining things by getting married and having kids. He doesn’t see the point in settling down.’ What, apart from being a forty-two-year-old marketing executive with the most gorgeous woman on earth as your partner and the potential mother of your kids? Apart from that, no, there aren’t that many reasons – or even any reasons – to settle down. ‘To him, we’re fine as we are.’ She takes her glasses off and presses her fingers in the corners of her eyes. ‘That old saying about the milk and the cow, you know: “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free”? I’ve lived it.’ Her laugh is a bitter, sour sound that falls like lead on my ears and makes my heart turn over and over in my chest. I do not want someone l love to be ‘laughing’ like that, nor to be feeling like this.