‘Wow, that sounds like a big dinner,’ I say.
‘Not really. It’s real food, Nan says. She says that we need to eat real food sometimes because you’re—’ He turns away from the phone suddenly. ‘Nan! NAN! What did you say Mum was? A health fantastic?’ I hear my mother-in-law in the background, dying of mortification. She’ll be standing in the kitchen doorway, tea towel in hand, waving her hand frantically, shaking her head, her white hair bouncing wildly, trying to convey to him that he shouldn’t be telling me that. Those words of dismissive condemnation were not meant for my ears. I have no sympathy: she’s known Con all his life, she knows he’s a veritable tape recorder. ‘Nan said you were a health fantastic,’ he says, having not persuaded his nan to repeat what she said.
‘I think you mean fanatic,’ I say.
‘Yes!’ My whole chest expands when I hear my little boy smile. ‘She said you were always feeding us rabbit food because you were a health fan—’
‘Fanatic,’ I supply.
‘Is that true? Do you always feed us rabbit food? I thought we were supposed to eat lots of vegetables and fruit every day. Is that what rabbits eat? Cos I want to eat horse food if we have to eat like an animal. My teacher at school says you have to eat lots of fruit and vegetables to be healthy. Are you doing something wrong if you’re not giving us real food like Nan does?’
‘No, I’m just giving you different food to your nan, that’s all.’
‘Oh, OK. Are we coming home tomorrow?’ he asks.
‘Yes, sweetheart,’ I reply.
‘OK. Goodnight, Mum. I have to go to bed now. I have to see if I have the sea horse dream again. The horse swam all the way to Australia! And I was on its back. And I didn’t get wet. I want to have that dream again, so I have to go to bed.’
‘OK, gorgeous. Love you, big kiss and cuddle goodnight.’
‘OK, bye.’
And then he’s gone. They’re both gone. My mother-in-law doesn’t bother to speak to me again, I just have the chilling brrr that is the dialling tone.
I know tears are falling down my cheeks, but if I give in, if I have a proper cry now, I will not move from this spot. I will sit here and cry the night away. And that would antagonise Evan further. It’s important I do not do that. If I want him to take me back, if I want to rescue our marriage, I have to do whatever he wants me to. Because if our marriage fails and Evan goes for full custody of the kids, I doubt any court in the land would award them to me with my history. In fact, they may even question the wisdom of anything other than the most basic access. I have to fix my marriage. I love my husband, and I do not want my relationship with my children to become little more than the phone conversations we just had.
I am sitting in the centre of a bed in a hotel near Brighton seafront. It is comfortable enough, the décor is dated but clean and in good repair. It isn’t too pricey – I have to be careful with costs because I don’t know how long I’ll be staying and I’m not sure how Evan will react to me putting it on the joint account.
I sit in the dark, my legs pulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped around them and my head resting on my knees. I am staring at the bundle of silk beside me on the bed. It’s my red silk shirt, wrapped around the sharp knives from my kitchen. Evan wouldn’t hide them every night like he should, so I had to take them.
He’s going to be so mad if he wants cheese on toast for breakfast tomorrow. But if he would put them out of harm’s way like he should, then I wouldn’t have been forced to steal them.
I hide the knives because of him, of course. Sometimes it seems everything I do for safety is because of him.
January, 1987
‘If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you,’ he whispered, his eyes narrow, slitted peepholes to the venom in his soul. He held a small all-purpose kitchen knife with a serrated edge and black wooden handle against the smooth piece of skin at the centre of my throat, so close I was too scared to swallow in case it caused the knife to peel back my skin. ‘I’ll slice your throat wide open. No one else will ever have you. Do you hear me?’
I did my best to nod without moving my neck or throat. I could not manage it and I felt the cool touch of the blade on my skin. ‘Yes,’ I managed to push out through my stiff, scared lips.
‘Good.’ He whipped the knife away suddenly and was laughing, his big, booming laugh. ‘I’m only messing with you!’ he said while tossing the knife on to the kitchen table. ‘I’m only joking. Oh, God, Serena, you know I could never hurt you. Never in a million years would I ever do anything to hurt you,’ he continued as he played with one of my plaits, twirling it around his little finger. ‘Darling, I love you. I could never, ever hurt you.’
We both knew that wasn’t true. And we both knew he wasn’t joking about the knife. He was messing with me, but he wasn’t joking. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was paint on a smile, force out a laugh and let him put his arms around me. Even nowadays he was still sometimes lovely to me. Those times were precious. Those times were what made the rest of it bearable. And now I knew he had a back-up plan for the times when it wasn’t bearable. The times when I thought about escape. He had found a way to make sure I would never leave him.
For five days, I have been visiting my children.
I make them breakfast, I take them to school. After work I go to my home and make them dinner. I supervise homework and baths and story time and long-winded goodnights. I would clean the kitchen before I leave but my husband does it while I am upstairs – he does not want me there any longer than necessary, I suspect. He has spoken to me very little. In fact, only once – on that first night I came over. ‘The knives,’ he said sotto voce as the children changed out of their uniforms. ‘You took the freaking knives. Are you mad?’ Con’s arrival prevented my answer, which we both knew would have been: ‘Probably.’
‘You’re getting divorced, aren’t you?’ Vee says as I perch myself on her pink-duvet covered bed on that fifth night.
Am I? a part of me wonders. Does she know something I don’t?
‘Am I?’ I ask her.
She blusters while shrugging her shoulders, ‘Yeah, it’s obvious. One person moves out and then they get divorced.’
‘No one’s moved out,’ I say confidently, even though each day I have been taking a few more things with me. These things have moved beyond necessities and comforters, now they’re sliding into everyday items that I’d normally do without on holidays or short stays away from home. When I was packing I wasn’t sure what to take, having never had to pack before for my husband throwing me out for an unspecified amount of time. I’d already taken the large bottle of body moisturiser to use at the hotel. And a normal-size tube of toothpaste. My pack of cotton wool, my large face moisturiser and face wash had come with me yesterday. Today I was planning on taking a couple of towels and my dressing gown. The longer Evan didn’t initiate conversation, the more things I found I needed to bring.
‘But you’re not living here any more, Mum,’ Verity points out. ‘I know cos I see you leave at night and come back in the morning wearing something different. Even Conrad knows. He saw you weren’t in the big bed the other day.’
If Conrad knows, I’m surprised he hasn’t said something. Or has he, silently? He’s been clingy and ever so slightly babyish at night recently. Not wanting to let me go when I hug him goodnight, constantly asking me questions that are designed to prolong the night-night process, climbing out of bed to get things to show me. Of course he knows. Of course they both know. You can’t create the atmosphere that Evan and I have and not expect the kids to know. They’re children, not stupid.
‘OK, I’m not staying here at the moment.’
‘When are you coming back?’
I’m loathe to say, ‘When your father will talk to me’ because it will sound like the start of divorce to them. Especially to Verity. And we’re not there, we’re nowhere near there.
‘Not yet, anyway,’ whispers that little voice of my conscience.
I don’t even bother to argue with it, I just ignore it. ‘Like your oh-so wonderful husband is doing to you,’ it adds smugly.
‘I don’t know, Vee,’ I say. ‘I just . . . it’s complicated. Your father and I just have a few things to work out.’
‘See?’ she says, tugging the covers right up under her chin. ‘That’s what parents do. Eliza James’s parents did the same thing. Except her dad moved out cos her mum caught him kissing someone else. I think it was a man but Eliza won’t say. But her mum said they were “working a few things out” and her dad never came home and they got divorced. That’s what parents do. They say it’s complicated and then they get divorced.’
‘Really? How many parents have you had then? Because you seem very experienced in all this,’ I say, silently wishing she’d stop using the ‘D’ word in such a familiar, comfortable manner. The way Vee speaks, it seems we’re halfway to the courts already.
‘Ha ha, Mum,’ Vee says. I watch her stare intently at the poster on her wardrobe door, as if seeking comfort and understanding in it. Where most girls her age would have a band member or band or movie star, she has the periodic table. She likes the look of it, she said. The pretty colours and straight lines and orderliness are lovely to her. That is her excuse – the real reason is that my daughter is a big girly swot. Just like I was. She is just better at hiding it. ‘Did you kiss someone else?’
‘Much as I love you, sweetheart, you shouldn’t be asking me questions like that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it crosses the line. It’s not the sort of thing you should ask me, as your mum, and it’s not the sort of thing I should answer.’
‘Why?’
I remember wanting to ban that word from her vocabulary when she was a toddler. Every child goes through the ‘Why?’ stage, but Verity’s was relentless. Even the ubiquitous, ‘Because it is’ was not good enough for her. ‘But why?’ she’d persist until Evan and I were ready to pull our hair out. We were each constantly throwing each other to the wolves of Verity’s whys, finding ways to get out of the questioning, and it was almost always me who had to do the extra research to find the answer.
‘Look, Vee, love, if I did answer that question and you didn’t get the answer you wanted, it would just upset you. You’d start to worry on a whole new level to the one you’re worrying on right now, and that’s not for you to do. Not until you’re an adult and married and can at least stay up past nine o’clock on a school night. Do you see what I mean?’
She shrugs her shoulders; they are small compared to adult shoulders but they seem to be carrying a heavy burden right now. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I love your father so much. I would never do anything to intentionally hurt him. And kissing someone else would be doing something to intentionally hurt him.’ Her body relaxes a little at that. Poor kid, she actually thought I’d been cheating. If I had kissed someone else, maybe Evan would have got over it a lot quicker. Maybe I’d be able to know when I could put our family back together again. ‘But, Vee, we have a lot of things to work out, your father and I. It is complicated, not the stuff for you or Con to worry about. It might take time, but we’ll get there. And whatever we decide, it’ll be the best for all concerned – especially you and Con. OK?’
She shrugs.
‘Shrug is not an answer,’ I say and launch myself at her, tickling her. She struggles and giggles and kicks, but I feel her relax as we play and that’s what I want – for her to relax.
I stay with her until she is asleep, and think about how I was going to search her room. I didn’t, I couldn’t in the end. I had to trust her, and I had to watch her. The second she started to show any signs of being any different, the moment I felt something shift in her, I would take her room apart looking for clues. Then I would take her school locker apart looking for clues. I would do anything, but first she had to give me a good reason. Until then, I had to trust she wasn’t like me, she wasn’t stupid.
As her eyes slip shut for the final time, I kiss her forehead, stroke my hand over her headscarf, before I leave her to dream the night away.
Downstairs, instead of shrugging on my coat and texting Evan a goodnight – which he never replies to – before I leave, I go into the living room. This surprises him because he jumps up out of his seat and turns towards me for the first time in a week.
‘Yeah?’ he asks, burying his hands in his pockets and planting his feet hip-width apart. ‘What do you want?’
‘We have to talk,’ I say.
He shakes his head. ‘No, we don’t.’
Is this really my husband? The most reasonable man in the world? Really? ‘Yeah, we do. The kids think we’re getting divorced.’
‘Right,’ he says.
Mild panic flutters inside my stomach: he didn’t dismiss the idea, but at least he didn’t confirm it.
‘We need to talk about what to tell them. How to reassure them.’
‘OK, we’ll talk about what to tell the kids, but it might not be reassuring to them. I’ll meet you in your car.’
‘Fine,’ I say. For someone so reasonable, who is loved in his profession for his empathy, Evan is very good at quietly torturing me.
‘So, what do we say to them?’ I ask. I have to keep things on topic, anything that deviates from that will obviously antagonise him.
‘I don’t know. Probably not that their mother is a coldhearted killer who kisses girls. Nor that she got herself pregnant so she could con some poor sap, me, into marrying her and giving her a new name.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say quietly, fixing my line of sight on the house, keeping an eye on it in case a light goes on in one of the upstairs bedrooms. ‘I should have told you.’
‘Yeah, you should have.’
I do not know what else he wants. He clearly doesn’t want me to explain, he doesn’t want me to be around him, he does not seem to want my apologies. I do not know what else he wants me to do, how I’m supposed to fix this if he doesn’t want it to be fixed, if he cannot step outside of his hurt and anger and rage for a few moments and give me a clue.
‘What should we tell the kids?’ I repeat. ‘I’ve already said that there are some things we need to work out, but we can’t keep saying that for ever. We need some idea of what to tell them about what is going to happen next.’ I need to know what is going to happen next.
‘If you’re angling to come back, don’t bother. I’m still too angry to even . . . Just don’t bother.’
‘OK, you decide what to tell them and they can tell me.’
‘Yeah, maybe that’s for the best,’ he says.
‘No, that’s not for the best, but it’s the best that’s going to happen right now.’
A dull click is followed by a rush of air as Evan opens the passenger door.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I tell him, still staring at the house. Still not able to turn around and look at him. The heat of his anger might burn the skin on my face. It’s been a week and he is still angry. It seems to be getting worse, not better. That’s probably because he is fanning the flames by reading old newspaper and news reports rather than talking to me. Rather than getting the truth from the person who was there, he is winding himself up with the half-truths and outright lies. This is what I didn’t want to happen.
‘Right,’ Evan states and shuts the door.
He would be loving seeing Evan and me in pieces. He would laugh and say this is what he meant every time he held a knife up to my throat: if I can’t have you, no one else will either.
poppy
‘Poppy, it’s good to see you.’
‘You too,’ I force out through gritted teeth hidden behind a fake, close-lipped smile. It is not good to see Mr Fitch, my parole officer. Although technically I have to have regular meetings with this man if he deems it necessary, since he got me the job with Raymond he hasn’t deemed it necessary. In fact, the last time I sat here in his tiny office – which is so stuffed and lined with files and books and paper, paper, paper,
I wonder how he breathes – he said we could ‘play it by ear’. ‘If you have any problems call me. But otherwise, I’m pleased with your progress so we can play it by ear.’
I didn’t think for a moment he would be calling me in for ‘a chat’. Or, as he called it, ‘just a quick catch up, to see where you are with everything’.
I know that parole officers only call you in ‘for a quick catchup’ when there is a problem. And I suspect the ‘problem’ lives in Preston Park. If she reported me to the Old Bill for stalking, I would have been arrested and sent straight back to prison to serve the rest of my sentence, so she must have just found out Fitchy’s name and asked him to warn me off. Which would be a monumentally stupid move on her part. I will ruin her if she has grassed on me. I will ruin her and I will ruin her family. Sod clearing my name slowly and carefully, if I’m going down, I’ll take her down with me.
‘How are you getting on? Raymond tells me you’ve been great for his business. Which is good; it’s nice to hear something so positive about a parolee. Especially an ex-lifer like yourself. It’s usually a struggle for them to adjust to the outside world.’
I nod at him as I’m expected to do. I cannot say anything because it’d be either: ‘It’s a breeze,’ or, ‘Yeah, my life is pretty much ruined since my parents hate having me around, I still haven’t had the guts to call my siblings, I fell in love with a man who wasn’t really my boyfriend and I’m no closer to getting the person who actually committed “my” crime to confess.’ I doubt he’d want to hear either of these things. Better to just nod and find out what he wants.
He sighs suddenly, a dramatic sigh, the signal to something grave being discussed. I am ready, though. I’m fully armed with explanations for turning up at Serena’s, meeting her for coffee twice now, even for knowing so much about her life. I can deflect, divert or lie my way out of anything he throws at me.