by Janet Preece
Julie looked at him in disgust, really seeing him for the first time, knowing full well why he’d had no sleep and the real cause of his exhaustion. Still, it had put a smile on his face, and that meant she didn’t have to oblige. He’d be ‘too tired’ for a while now, then he’d likely have to go on a ‘work trip’ for his next fix. She didn’t know why it had taken her so long to realise something wasn’t right in their relationship.
When she was a teenager, that was all friends talked about, but somehow, once married, sex was taboo. Nobody talked about what was normal anymore, so how was she to know? Don’t share the marital bed – the unspoken rule.
Well, fuck you, Dan, for sharing ours.
How could he keep up the pretence? Why would he? If he wanted someone else, he could have just left rather than wasting his time and hers.
Life is short, you’ve got to grab it with both hands! Those were her aunt’s words when she’d first met Dan. Well, Slut would find out just how short life could be – she’d be begging for an end by the time Julie finished with her.
In hindsight, Julie realised her aunt had only been trying to fill her mother’s shoes, jumping in with her religious opinions because she knew Julie was vulnerable. She remembered her aunt warning her to not go around ‘acting like a man’, ‘doing like the other girls’, ‘spreading it around,’ every time they spoke it was the same thing. Oh how she wished she hadn’t followed that advice. If only she’d met a few other guys, she would have had more experience and been able to make better judgements. She should have known better, learned from her parents’ mistakes, but she just hadn’t been strong enough. She was broken, and Dan had offered to make her whole. Julie wondered what influence her actions would have on her own children, how they would remember her. Would they blame her for their choices?
She reached down and picked up Dan’s mobile, entered the generic pin he’d never thought to change. It was the same one he used on every device in the house. Surely, if he was up to something, he would be more protective of his phone? Perhaps he’d become complacent over the years, cocky in his arrogance, enjoying the thrill of hiding in plain sight.
She clicked into the app store and pressed ‘Upload’ on the stalker app, sent her own phone an invitation and synced the two. Sorted. She hid the file inside another app folder, knowing he was too trusting to ever suspect Julie of messing with it.
‘Hurry up, Dan, the kids need to brush their teeth before school!’
‘Okay, I’m nearly done.’
She picked his phone up again to look through his messages, but there was nothing glaringly obvious. A few women’s names: Anna, Sarah, Rachel, Abigail. They were all people she knew, friends of the family, but there was no unusual correspondence. Very odd. Surely, they would communicate? Who goes without texting their partner nowadays? Dan even texted her daily – usually something to do with dinner, or some excuse to say why he wouldn’t be joining them.
The other mobile number! He must have two phones!
She listened at the bathroom door. The shower was still running, so she picked up her own phone and rang the number, making sure to withhold her own. It rang, but she couldn’t hear it in the house, not even a vibration.
Maybe it’s not his.
The answerphone clicked in: Sorry, I can’t take your call at the moment, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you. It was an automated voice, nothing to implicate Dan. She would have to do further digging.
‘Dad, hurry up! We’re going to be late!’ William pounded on the bathroom door.
‘Stop banging! Do you know how much that door costs if you break it?’ Dan called.
Oh, for God’s sake, here we go again. Just leave already so the kids can leave. So I can leave. Forever.
Julie fantasised again about leaving her life, about the enjoyable future looming in the distance, just beyond her reach.
First, she needed to find out more about Slut.
She picked up her phone to make an appointment with Kate. Maybe the life coach could point her in the right direction. Maybe she’d agree to meet up with her outside the office today for a coffee meeting – Starbucks at the cinema complex where it had happened; her guilty pleasure. There were no toilets there, so that would be Julie’s excuse to head into the cinema, feel the tingle, relive the moment. She would enjoy leaning against the cool white tiles, rubbing her fingers into the cracks left behind from that fateful day, drawing slowly over the stained grouting, knowing. Would Kate find herself drawn to that cubicle too, if she knew what had happened there?
Julie set up the appointment, disappointed Kate’s secretary insisted it take place at the office.
‘Tommy, get down those stairs now! We’re late – hurry up!’
He came running down, cursing and blaming his dad for hogging the bathroom as he pushed his feet into muddy black school shoes, not bothering to untie the laces. As they left the house, she pulled the door to, but the open back windows made for an almighty bang, surprising her, and making Tommy jump. She smiled as she thought of how Dan would be seething, blaming Tommy. If challenged, Julie would quite happily take the blame and face a confrontation. She was ready.
Fuck you, Dan. Let’s slam all the doors until they come right off their hinges, and then we’ll see who’s really to blame for what lies between us.
Chapter Eighteen
‘I want you to hypnotise me.’
Julie sat relaxed and confident on the sofa in Kate’s office. She’d walked in with her list of topics she would like to discuss and how she would like to approach each one. She was no longer the wilted wall flower, lifeless and desperate for sustenance, but instead the Venus flytrap, exquisitely beautiful yet dangerously deceptive, ready to catch her prey.
‘Yes, I want you to take me into a state of total relaxation, so you can delve in and pull out some specific information for me,’ Julie said without waiting for a response. ‘I want to know where I’ve seen this necklace before. I recognise it from a picture on my laptop, but it’s not mine, so whose is it?’
‘Have you thought of asking your husband?’ Kate asked.
‘No.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a simpler way to start? To ask if he bought it?’
Julie stood up, walked over to Kate and met her eye-to-eye as she spoke. ‘He’s having an affair. It’s been going on for years, and he’s been showering her with expensive jewellery for at least six months. I want to know who it is. I want to confront her, tell her to take him, because I don’t want to be in a loveless marriage anymore.’
Kate’s reply was emotionless. ‘Okay, I see. I’m sorry for your loss.’
Julie laughed out loud at her response. The woman seemed devoid of empathy yet, talking about Dan as if he was dead, well, that was kind of fitting.
‘Well, I have to tell you,’ Kate continued, ‘hypnosis doesn’t really work that way in real life. I could relax you and focus your mind, but I doubt you’ll remember exactly where you saw the necklace. If you already know, somewhere in your subconscious, the shock when you discovered your husband’s affair would have likely been enough to make you recall it. I think we should bring the focus back to you. How have you been developing? You seem to be more confident in your decision-making, which is a tick in my box.’
‘So, you’re refusing to hypnotise me?’ Julie finally interrupted, eyeing Kate with suspicion as she noticed for the first time she was squirming uncomfortably. ‘Or is it that you don’t know how?’
Kate watched in surprise as Julie opened her bag, threw down some money and reached for her coat. If the woman wouldn’t hypnotise her, then she no longer needed to waste her time in this stuffy office.
She turned just before leaving and reached back for Kate’s umbrella. ‘I need it more than you,’ she said as she slammed the door behind her.
Outside, Julie enjoyed the brisk air as snowflakes sil
ently fell onto her nose, her cheeks, her eyelashes, tingling as they collided with her skin. She thought about putting the umbrella up but instead chose to indulge in the rarity of London snow. It felt so clean and refreshing. She didn’t know why she’d snatched the umbrella – maybe just to see if she could get away with it. Every action had a reaction, but what would Kate’s reaction be? Would there be consequences? Only for the person who tried to prise her new weapon from her hand. Come on, crazies, come and get me and see where I shove it, she thought with a grin.
It was still early in the day, so she decided to go for a stroll. As the wind blew, Julie let her coat fall open, let the icy whether chill her until her body trembled. Maybe time for a quick cinema visit, if only to use the toilet. Focus the mind, she thought.
◆ ◆ ◆
Christmas came and went, leaving behind a trail of credit-card debt to match the messy mountain of unwanted gifts stacked up around the house, in the corners where they had been abandoned on Christmas Day. How long would they have to keep them before they could successfully regift without feeling guilty or being found out? Julie thought Christmas was supposed to be a time for families to bond, mainly over food, but for the housewife, it was more about bonding with the oven, the hob, the dishwasher if you were lucky enough to have one. She preferred to hand-wash the dishes when Dan’s family joined them, giving her more time to herself not having to make conversation. On the plus side, with the school holidays came an obvious decline in the piles of laundry since the kids lounged around in pyjamas all day, slobbing out and refusing to dress unless visitors were due. Sleep, play, eat, repeat – for everyone but Julie.
She was trying hard to give Dan the benefit of the doubt, having found nothing substantial to incriminate him. In the beginning, it had been an effort to hide her emotions, a permeating sense of sadness constantly there, but the holiday season had kept her so busy she soon managed to mask it under the pretence of exhaustion. She could make him happy, be enough for him; if only so that the children wouldn’t have to endure a childhood listening to arguing, separation, divorce, neglect. She knew it all too well. If they could keep civil, that would be enough. She would be enough.
Every time he ‘popped out’, she tracked him. Every time he ‘went to work’, she tracked him, but the results reaffirmed his innocence. Checking her phone again, there he was, the usual journey to work which ended in the last twenty minutes of the journey without reception – him falling off the map. Even his office had no mobile reception being down in the basement and next door to the underground station, how convenient that he forgot to sink to his Wi-Fi unless he wanted her. Frustrating.
So, if Slut did exist, maybe she was meeting him at work – or somewhere in no-mans-land where he fell off the radar. She wouldn’t be surprised if he purposely turned his phone off on the train so that she couldn’t interrupt them. It sickened her, and frustrated her not knowing his whereabouts. There was no way he knew about the stalker-app or he would have confronted her. Any excuse for a shouting match, for a reason to stay out for the night.
Was the affair with someone he worked with? She couldn’t imagine him going for any of the women she’d met back when she was invited to the last Christmas party – but that was years ago. Back then the company was more lucrative, Dan had explained, the reason recent years they’d had to cancel their plus-ones. Had he been lying? Was he taking her? How humiliating that would be if everyone knew, if everyone was laughing at her behind her back, watching him with a girl half his age employed to fulfil his extra needs.
Julie felt sick.
As the days passed, she tried to block out her thoughts, told herself she was being selfish thinking about leaving, that she had to stay for the kids – but on the other hand, if she could get away, how simple her life could be. Alone. She was in constant turmoil with no one to talk to, didn’t want to admit that her husband was having an affair – didn’t want to voice it out loud as if somehow that would make it more real.
One moment she was ready to walk out, kidnap, murder, release her demons and escape; the next, she wished for nothing more than to settle down by the fire with a hot chocolate, get Dan’s tea and tuck the kids into bed. They were so innocent in their sleep, so lovingly innocent.
Amrita’s death was no longer so prominent in the papers, and Julie’s life was easier now. Dan had loosened the reigns a bit and allowed her out of the house again. She continued to track the investigation, but nothing new sprung up on her daily search. It all felt like a dream. She started to question her own sanity: Was she really involved?
‘Why don’t you take the kids away in the New Year, stay with your mum for a bit? I’ve got lots of work trips coming up anyway, and it would keep you out of mischief for a while,’ Dan said over Christmas dinner. ‘In fact, really sorry, but after we finish eating, I’m going to have to pop out. There’s a mountain of paperwork piled up at the office to be cleared by the weekend.’
Julie was gutted. Christmas Day was a time for family, not for swanning off to God knows where under the pretence of work. How could he think her so gullible?
She looked up at his pale face, watched him gormlessly stare back. He was no doubt willing her to kick off so he could storm out and blame her. That was part of Christmas too, the family argument. It was tradition. The kids couldn’t care less – they barely acknowledged the conversation, lost in their thoughts of how to escape the dinner table and get back to their gaming consoles. Julie didn’t even know if she cared anymore. What was the point in trying if he wasn’t going to meet her halfway?
As Dan got up from the table, he scraped his chair noisily along the floor, making Julie twitch with irritation. Tuck the fucking chair in, she screamed silently, imagining how she’d smash the dinner plate against his skull. He’s not worth the clean-up.
‘But what about desert?’ Julie pleaded in a last-ditch attempt to stop him from leaving, knowing he couldn’t resist chocolate.
Dan hesitated, then shook his head as he grabbed his coat and headed for the door. ‘Don’t wait up!’
She stared unblinking after he closed the door silently, melting away into the winter night. She wished she was the one having an affair as her thoughts were interrupted by the scurry of feet, the kids running off to their rooms, leaving her alone; totally alone.
He must be going to her. Maybe she’s prepared him another meal? I bet he won’t refuse her when she offers dessert.
If this was what life was, Julie welcomed the end. She wasn’t going to accept this treatment anymore. She thought about the drawer of treats under Tommy’s bed, wondered when she’d next get the chance for a rest. She wanted to be happy; she deserved it, but if she couldn’t be, then… The relief was palpable as she finally decided it was time to take the next step.
Chapter Nineteen
Come on, Julie! She was starting to annoy herself.
New Year’s Eve was a re-run of Christmas day, sat home alone, dozing by the fire while the kids ignored her and Dan snuck out. Her guess, he was out with Slut again, either that or he was just looking for an excuse to be away from his wife. It was all just too exhausting to think about, far better to sleep away the stresses of what might be happening, put away the dreams of what could have been. Sleep was the only release and it got her through the holiday season. Before she knew it, January had turned into February and the winter had started to thaw, she wasn’t brave enough to take the plunge, to confront him.
The kids were ratty and Dan was absent much of the time, so there was no change there. Julie needed help. Maybe a friend, but who could she trust? She surfed through her Facebook page, willing there to be at least one person who was real, more than a smiling pout over a gourmet banquet. As she scrolled, she realised how long it had been since she’d last met up with friends. She sent a quick message to find out if there was an imminent book club meeting and went to brush her teeth. Maybe Rachel could spare her a few minutes?
She wasn’t the best at responding promptly – although she always seemed to have her phone in hand when they were together.
Since Dan was out, Julie thought she’d relax and have a quick bath before bed to wash the food smells from her hair. She was loathed to put her jeans in the wash after only two days as it meant adding to the stockpile of washing, but they stunk of café, having taken the brunt of the spitting hob fat from that night’s dinner sausages.
She looked in the mirror and saw the Julie of old, fighting its way to the forefront through the masked front she presented to the world: mother and wife. Nothing more. There was no twinkle, no excitement, only a bland existence in a dreamless world. Gone was the vivification that had fleetingly empowered her after the cinema incident. Gone was the raging anger on discovering Dan’s affair and her need for revenge. Julie had resigned herself to the daily slog of life and given up the fight.
Being undermined daily had left her with low self-esteem. There were dark circles under her eyes – so dark she could see the veins pulsing beneath them like black lines drawn onto the delicate skin beneath. Her upper lids sagged down, and as she pulled them upwards and backwards, trying to imagine herself a younger, fresher model, straining to look past her reflection for something more. A spirit? A message? An omen? A clue as to her future or past? But nothing came. She longed to see Amrita looking back at her once more, but there had been no further visits since that night. Where was she now? What had it meant? Julie no longer felt scared, only tired, and desperate for something to happen.
After she finished brushing her teeth, she put her toothbrush on charge, having noticed the battery flashing as she brushed. She wondered who would charge her kid’s toothbrushes if she wasn’t there. Who would even bother to pick up their toothbrush, and who would wipe the muck from the sink that dried to the bowl after each of them had been in to take their turn? It only takes a rinse, but no, too much effort for any of them. She had failed to raise them as decent human beings. She felt the tears trickling down her cheeks at the thought of them grown up neglected, their own wives fighting for freedom from the selfish men they had chosen in a moment of weakness.
