by Natasha Bell
“She said they’d talked about it,” Ollie said. “About the guilt of wanting something more but also being happy with what they had. Fran had this theory.”
Marc looked up, but Ollie had stopped talking. “What theory?”
“It’s nothing, I shouldn’t have said anything.” Ollie stood up. “Do you want another beer? Anything to eat?”
Marc tried to catch his eye, but Ollie looked away. “What theory?”
Ollie sat back down and buried his head in his hands. “Jesus, it’s not important now, is it?”
Marc exhaled. “Tell me.”
“We argued about it. It wasn’t the only thing, but it contributed. It made me see a side of Fran I didn’t like. And she was furious that I didn’t believe her.”
“Didn’t believe her about what?”
Ollie groaned. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“Ollie, I do! If this is important, you have to tell me.”
Ollie finally made eye contact. “Fran thinks Alex was going to leave you.”
The room swallowed the words and they sat quietly for a moment. There were questions Marc wanted to ask, but no words formed in his mind. Ollie heard them through the silence and carried on. “She thinks she was going to do it soon. They’d been talking for a while, apparently. I didn’t even know they were close, especially after that thing with Emma’s ears—” Ollie hesitated.
Marc set his empty bottle on the coffee table, cleared his throat. “What exactly did Fran say?”
“She said that behind her smiles and your brilliant parties, Alex was just as unhappy as her. That they both agreed they were stuck, trapped by an ‘inherently patriarchal system.’ ”
Marc blinked at Ollie’s gestured quotation marks. He almost laughed at the idea of me using that phrase. It would have had to be in jest, surely.
“I told Fran to buy a fucking magazine,” Ollie said, growing animated. “You know, all the headlines are about ‘having it all’ and ‘striking the balance.’ I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation in the twenty-first century. I mean, Fran has her career, she had her family too, what more could she want? She said she was still made to feel guilty. That’s why she understood Alex. She told me a woman could only feel truly understood by another woman. It sounded like the bloody seventies: ‘Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.’ Fran raised her eyebrows when I said that and I laughed. I thought she was telling me she’d met a woman. ‘Not me,’ she said and I asked if she meant Alex. She said she didn’t know, but that she wouldn’t be surprised. I thought she was mad, just being cruel because we were fighting. But she insisted that she thought Alex was planning to leave.”
Marc bowed his head and shielded his face with his hand. He searched for words to shout or tears to cry. Neither came.
“Fran wanted to tell the police,” Ollie said, more softly now. “I didn’t believe her, but I drove with her to the station. They took her statement. She came out furious.”
Beneath his fingers and his flopped-down hair, behind his limp tongue and dry eyes, a realization penetrated Marc’s frozen thoughts. DI Jones and Nicola had heard all this, had told him nothing. “It was her,” Marc said, looking up. “She was the one who told them we were unhappy. I couldn’t figure out who would have said it. DI Jones turned up treating me like a suspect. But Fran knew us. You knew us, Ollie. You were meant to be our friends.”
Ollie swallowed, looking everywhere except at Marc. “For what it’s worth, they didn’t believe her. She said they grilled her, asked her to remember the exact words of their conversations, asked if she had any more evidence, any names or specifics. They told her they’d take it ‘under consideration,’ but she felt they’d been patronizing her. I could see why.”
He waited for Marc to say something. When he didn’t, Ollie continued: “I thought that was the end of it, but she wouldn’t let it go. She wanted to tell you. I told her she couldn’t put you through that, not without proof. I tried to reason with her, argue it from her perspective. I told her it wasn’t important now, if someone—” Ollie hesitated. His cheek twitched. “You know, whatever happened at the river, well, it didn’t matter what she was thinking about doing before, did it? If I was in your position, the last thing I would want to hear was some crazy conspiracy about my wife not being happy.”
Marc looked up at his friend. Ollie had leant back in his chair and crossed his left ankle over his right knee. He looked almost relaxed. It must have been a relief to have this off his chest. When Marc spoke, it was slow and controlled: “You can’t possibly imagine what you’d want in my position.”
Ollie stiffened. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting to his feet as Marc stood and reached for his coat. “I was trying to protect you.”
Marc didn’t respond. He walked into the hall and out of the house in silence. Thoughts wriggled around his brain as he started the car and pulled on to the road. He felt numb. Fran’s version of me as unhappy didn’t match his knowledge of the weeks and months before my disappearance. He knew me better than she did, better than anyone. We were best friends. Even if he belonged to the enemy sex. But doubt was creeping in.
* * *
I’m naked when he comes today.
“What are you doing?” he says, standing by the door. He actually looks uncomfortable. I’ve made him feel uncomfortable.
I look him in the eye. “This is how you want me, isn’t it? Baring all.”
“Put some clothes on,” he says, turning his head.
I don’t move.
“I said put some clothes on.” His voice has an edge that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.
“Now you’re prudish?” I say with a smile. “You want to know everything, don’t you? Well, this is everything.”
“I’m going to count to ten,” he says. “One—”
“Here,” I say, spreading my legs, thinking of Annie Sprinkle offering the audience a speculum and a flashlight to examine her cunt in her Public Cervix Announcement performance. “Take a good look, get your magnifying glass out. You want to know my secrets? They’re all in here.”
He’s only at six, but he turns and unlocks the door. I listen to the key on the other side and his footsteps fading away. I close my legs. I’m shaking and my heart is thudding in my ears, but for the first time in forever I almost feel like laughing.
2009
4/8/09
Al,
I thought of you the other day. I wandered into Tiffany’s just to play at feeling like the sort of woman who shops there. I was looking at all the shiny things and there in the center of one of the cases was this little silver pendant in the shape of a tiny paper plane. I thought how perfectly saccharine it would be if Marc had seen it rather than me and bought it to encase your throat in the iconography of your love.
I’m alone, Al. Is that funny? I always have been, but it’s like it’s just hit me. No one will ever walk into Tiffany’s and see a pendant that represents the purity of what they feel for me. I don’t know if I can stand it much longer. I walk down busy streets and I want to scream. Everyone is just out of reach. And I know I’ll never be able to change that. I’ll never be able to connect.
It’s not about sex. I could have my petites morts if I wanted. It’s about possibility. It’s about the freedom to be who I want to be. About sharing that freedom with someone who understands. I’m making a silly amount of money now, getting more commissions than I can handle, but it feels pointless when I’m this isolated.
Every decision we make ties us in tighter and tighter knots. I live for praise and I bury myself beneath criticism. Yet the more successful my work is and the more important and real I become, the more confined I feel. Once upon a time I could have been anyone. Now I am Amelia Heldt. In the eyes of everyone I don’t know, I am someone. Some One. Just one.
I have this idea
for a piece about loneliness and identity. About the layers that we wrap around ourselves and secretly wish the person we love would peel away. Do you think all secrets hope eventually to be discovered? I think the loneliest thing in the world might be to never be known.
But I’ve made my choices, haven’t I? I’m living this one life and there’s no going back. For either of us. We must make do with what we have, find our joys where we can, count our blessings. But I can’t help dreaming of another way. Imagine a world where our identities weren’t so set.
I don’t know if the piece will go anywhere. I guess I’m still working out whether I can go anywhere.
Am x
MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2009
I don’t suppose it’s top of many people’s wish lists for their thirty-third birthday to be sitting on a soggy bath mat bathing a poorly three-year-old, but in a weird way it wasn’t so bad. Lizzie had caught the bug first, then on the very day she managed to keep down a bowl of plain pasta, Charlotte had spewed down both the front and back of Marc’s shirt. We’d had more than a week of vomit and here I was waving good-bye to another year of my life propping Char up in the bath while I tried to get it out of her hair.
Charlotte looked at me. “Mummy smile,” she said and I did.
“This is a pretty good birthday, isn’t it?” I said, rinsing off the remaining suds.
Charlotte nodded. Then her little body shuddered in my hands and I knew what was coming, but still wasn’t fast enough to prepare for the puke that shot over the side of the tub and onto my jeans and the liquid brown that emerged from her other end.
“Christ,” I shouted as Charlotte began to yell.
Marc hurried in, observed the two of us and began to laugh.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I know. It just—” He held his hand over his mouth to stop himself laughing more. “Here,” he said, crouching down by the tub to take Char from me. “I’ve got this. You get cleaned up and go see what Lizzie’s up to.”
I relinquished the still screaming Charlotte to his control and climbed to my feet. “Thanks,” I said.
“Happy birthday!” he said with a grin that I couldn’t help but return.
I pulled my clothes off and left them in a pile, then climbed the stairs to our en suite. Washed and dressed for the second time that morning, I found Lizzie playing with her dolls in her room. “Can I play too?”
She scooted her little bum over to make space for me.
“What’s the story today?” I said.
“Barbie and Ken are getting married,” she said.
“Again? I thought they did that yesterday.”
Lizzie looked at me, her mouth a straight line. It had been more than a month now since Marc’s cousin’s wedding, but it was still all Lizzie could talk about.
“Sorry,” I said. Lizzie’s behavior had been improving and I had no intention of rocking the tantrum boat today. “Okay. Where are they going on their honeymoon?”
“New York,” she said.
“Oh great, they’re going to have so much fun.”
“And then they’re going to have a baby and Ken’s going to go to work and they’re going to live happily ever after.”
“Is Barbie going to go to work too?” I said.
“Nope. She has to stay home so the baby doesn’t get lonely.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a stab of guilt. Marc would tell me to leave it. Even now she was at school most of the time, Lizzie hated that both Marc and I went to work. If I had to mark essays in the evenings or at the weekends, she’d bang on the office door until I thought my brain might explode. When I came out to go to the bathroom, she’d wrap her arms around my ankle and force me to drag her along the carpet.
I took a breath and picked up two dolls with straight blond hair. “Are these the wedding guests?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said.
I rummaged in her Tupperware of clothes and stretched dresses on their pointy limbs. I stood them on their tiny toes, bending their arms around each other’s waists. “Okay,” I said. “They’re ready to go to the wedding.”
“They need dates,” Lizzie said.
“Can’t they be each other’s dates?”
Lizzie gave me that look again, like I was the stupidest person she’d met. She twisted her torso and reached for two bears from her bed. “Here, they can go with Podge and Ted.”
I looked at my dressed-up dolls and the fat, naked bears. I held one of the dolls up to my ear and nodded while Lizzie watched me. “Savannah says she wants to go with Michelle,” I said. “She says Podge and Ted would rather go together as well. They say love is love and shouldn’t be dictated by convention or prejudice.”
I watched my daughter as she tried to make sense of this. Her mouth was set in that frighteningly straight line and now her eyebrows creased together. Her nostrils flared and then she opened her lips and screamed, “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
“Elizabeth,” I said in my first warning voice.
“No, no, no, no, no! Why do you have to ruin everything?” She swept her arms over the carpet, knocking all of the dolls and bears over, destroying her scene. “I never want to play with you again!”
“Right,” I said, dropping Savannah and getting to my feet. “You need a time-out.”
“I don’t care,” Lizzie said, her face red. “I hate you!”
“I’m going to shut this door and leave you to think about what you just said. You’ve got ten minutes and when I come back I want an apology.”
I made it out of the door before my first tears fell. Marc was on the landing. Charlotte, clean and snuggled in new pajamas, sat on his hip sucking her thumb. “What happened?” he said.
I shook my head, unable to speak, too mortified to admit I’d fucked it up again.
September
Seven Months Gone
It will come as no surprise to some that Lizzie fell in with a difficult crowd at the beginning of her first term at secondary school. It did, however, come as a surprise to my husband, and it was weeks before he noticed. If it wasn’t for Paula, he might not have. She caught up with him in Langwith one afternoon and asked if he still had her Marina Abramović book.
“Shit,” he said, embarrassed to have hung on to it for so long. “I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.”
But that night he couldn’t find it. He turned the office upside down and wracked his brain to remember where he’d left it. It was nowhere. The next day he sheepishly apologized to Paula and ordered her a new copy. A week later, though, he took a hot chocolate up to Lizzie and there it was, on the floor by her bed, tossed beside magazines and nail polish.
“I just borrowed it!” she said as he picked it up. “Hannah wanted me to show it to her.”
Confused by her defensiveness and worried some of the content might not be entirely appropriate for Year 7 lunch breaks, Marc lowered himself on to the edge of her bed and asked why Hannah had wanted to see it.
“I told her about the star and she said it was cool.” Lizzie looked away from him.
“What star?” he said.
Reluctantly, she took the book and turned to a still from the performance The Lips of Thomas. My husband digested the image of Abramović’s bloodied belly.
“Do you understand the context of this, sweetie?” he said.
“Pain makes her feel better?”
“I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said, terrified of pushing our daughter out of reach. “There’s a lot of symbolism and texture to this performance; it’s about much more than whipping and cutting herself. I can understand that you might want to read this book because Mummy likes performance art, but I’m confused why Hannah was interested in this.”
“It’s nothing to do with Mum,” she said.
He took
a breath. “Can you tell me what it is to do with?”
Our daughter spoke into her lap. “If you really must know, Hannah wanted to do one herself. There you go, are you happy? Now she’s never going to want to be my friend.”
“Do what herself?”
Lizzie shrugged.
Working on instinct now, Marc took her shoulders and made her face him. “This is serious, darling. You need to tell me what’s going on.”
She blinked at him, trying to maintain an attitude of defiance but struggling with her natural instinct. Thank God for that instinct. In those seconds he imagined the next decade spent impotently on the other side of a slammed door, frantic for an insolent, monosyllabic, drug-taking, nose-piercing, tattooed teenager. But finally she melted and he had our beautiful, wonderful, kind and sensible daughter before him once more. She told him Hannah and Katy tried cutting their upper arms over the summer. They’d shown her in the girls’ toilets, smug at the secret they’d kept from parents and teachers. They’d told Lizzie the scars meant they were true friends forever, never to be separated. Trying to impress them, Lizzie had described the book she’d found in our living room, told them her mum had been “into” that kind of thing. “So cool,” Marc could almost hear them uttering in the empty bathroom. Lizzie had taken the book to school the next day and immediately been afforded guest privileges in their little gang.
“I need to ring Hannah’s mum, you know that, don’t you?”
Lizzie nodded.
“And I have to ask,” he said, willing his voice not to crack. “You’re not—I mean, you haven’t hurt yourself, have you?”
Lizzie shook her head silently and folded into his arms.
“Thank God. Promise me, baby, promise me you’ll come to me. Promise you won’t ever do anything like that.”
“I promise,” she said into his jumper. Marc clutched the flesh we’d made, his lungs ready to burst.
* * *
