by Ali Knight
‘A dog . . . I don’t know, it seems strange. Oh, Paul, please tell me the truth—’
‘Wait a minute.’ He’s whispering intently. ‘Are you saying you think I killed someone?’
‘Paul, please, I can help you—’
‘You’re fucking mental!’
‘You kept saying “her”, I killed “her”!’ I am an inch away from his face, my voice low and insistent.
‘You think I could do that? Do you?’
‘Sshh.’ We both look at the back of the driver’s head. ‘You had blood on your hands—’
‘You’re out of your fucking mind!’ He’s hissing the words at me, his mouth is almost pressed to my ear.
I burst into tears, hours of pent-up anger and stress releasing. ‘Oh God, Paul, please let me help you. I’m your wife, you can tell me anything and everything.’ I am hanging on his lapels, searching his face for a sign or a clue.
He pushes me away and looks out of the window. ‘Nothing happened, Kate.’ His voice is flat and cold. There is a tone of menace that I have never heard from my husband before. ‘Drop it. It’s boring.’ When the taxi stops outside our house I swallow my tears and we walk stiff-backed and separately up the path.
10
Paul leaves for work the next morning after implanting a dry kiss on my cheek and I spend the day with weird and obsessive thoughts. I go to school to pick up Ava, leaving Josh there for band practice. I smile wanly at about fifty mothers and one dad, glad that no one actually tries to talk to me; nothing of any note could be drawn out of me today.
‘Come on, Kate, chop-chop, Ava can have the maracas today, Phoebe can take the tambourine.’ Sarah claps a hand on my back in an ironic hurry-up gesture as we walk our daughters across the playground. It’s music-group day, an after-school activity for Nursery and Year One children, which is really an excuse for mothers to gossip and gripe, down hot drinks and pass an hour. Sarah works part-time as a parliamentary researcher, switching from one set of children to another, she always says.
I really, really don’t want to go, but I find it hard to say no. I fall over in a storm, if you know what I mean. I fix a smile to my face as we corral our children down the street. Behind my eyes a tension headache starts to throb.
Ten minutes later I am sat cross-legged on a living-room floor as twelve children slam and bash a selection of loud things together, making no attempt to keep up with the energetic Spanish guitarist. Sarah is on one side of me, Cassidy, who in an act of selfless generosity has given her house over to this weekly mayhem, is on the other. I am slowly shifting forwards across the carpet as Becca’s dog, a low, sausagy thing with a very long tongue, is trying to lick me. Becca hasn’t noticed, or maybe she has but can’t be bothered to do anything about it. She’s too tired by early motherhood most of the time to do anything much but moan. She’s sprawled on the sofa, fighting to get out from under a wriggling two-year-old. Becca is really Rebecca, but she dropped the first two letters. Maybe she was too tired to pick them up. I glumly grind out one rhyme after another until the session ends.
‘Thank God for that,’ says Sarah in a low voice as she stretches her legs. ‘That’s my guilt gone for the day.’ I make a noise that shows I know what she means. ‘You OK? You look a bit peaky.’ I see her kind eyes quizzing me, ready to offer consolation and support.
I smile blankly at her. ‘What happens if you run over a dog? I mean, is there a procedure you should follow?’
She shrugs. ‘Call the RSPCA?’
Our conversation drifts over to Becca and she jolts to vertical with indignation. ‘Run over a dog? Pray – that’s what I’d do. I mean it, I would grieve for Maxie.’
I catch Sarah’s eye as a long tongue coarsened by Pedigree Chum rasps my chin, only just missing my bottom lip. It’s time to stand.
‘Why do you ask?’ Sarah says, pulling plastic from Phoebe’s vice-like grip.
‘I heard that a dog was found near the car park by the bridge.’
Becca grimaces and deflates back on to cushions. ‘That poor mite.’
We pick up triangles and xylophones, congratulations rain down on the guitarist. But the words I’m desperate to hear, the ‘it was so-and-so’s dog’, don’t come. No one knows. In this small, gossipy neighborhood no one’s heard a thing.
We talk about school and some committees Sarah’s on; she mentions something about the council and a pressure group. ‘The Belgians should have given you the Congo, you’d have made a better job of it than they did,’ I say.
Ava pushes the buttons on the TV and it springs to life. I hear the theme tune to the news as Ava trails out into the corridor. I should turn it off, but I’m too lazy to move. ‘Oh leave it,’ says Sarah, ‘they’ve had their fun.’
We watch a government scandal, punctuated by screams from upstairs. A report from Iran I only half catch as we say goodbye to the guitarist and I gratefully take an offered cup of tea. ‘Mummy!’ Ava’s shrieks drive me into the corridor. She’s trying to grab a scooter being held by another child. When I step back into the living room a photo of a smiling blonde fills the screen, but is blocked a moment later by Maxie’s whirring feet as he’s scooped up by Becca. I snatch a glimpse of policemen in white crime suits, catch talk of a neighbouring area, that this woman was a filmmaker, she has been stabbed—
Sarah switches channels. Something escapes from my throat as I grab the remote from her and jab furiously, but precious seconds have been lost. By the time I get back to the original channel the report has ended. I am suddenly aware that the room is quiet and five mothers have rustled to attention.
I retreat to the only place of refuge: the toilet. I feel so sick I have to open the window. I do not know when this . . . I cannot say the word, even to myself. I do not know when this thing happened. This is a big city and an area just a few miles away must mean hundreds of thousands of people between me and it. Between us and it. But her face. Tears prick my eyes and I have to lean over the sink as I fear I might retch. I know her. Not well, but we have met. She worked on Inside-Out and, more importantly, she conceived the format for Crime Time. Paul introduced us. Paul bought her idea and fought to get it produced; Paul had many meetings with her. Paul talked about her a lot. Melody this and Melody that. Paul said she was a rising star, a woman to watch, a name to remember. Melody Graham. Paul knew her very well.
Melody Graham, your star is extinguished.
I never noticed before, but her features, now that I see them disembodied on a screen, bear a striking resemblance to a face that has chased me into an uncomfortable sleep on countless nights as I stewed over the remains of a relationship I could never prise apart. I rest my forehead against the chilly china of the washbasin because Melody looks like Eloide, my husband’s first wife.
My fascination with Eloide was instant. Jessie and I had been invited by Pug to a party in a big old house and as we barged through to the kitchen I caught my sleeve on the button of Eloide’s designer coat. I made a few lame jokes about being stuck on her, she said she was reeling me in. And she was in a way; she was much more sophisticated and glamorous than me and I thought her achingly cool. She wrote lifestyle articles for a fashion magazine, her mother was French, she bought clothes in Paris, some part of her dad’s family were underworld, so the rumours went. Finally meeting her helped me put Paul out of my mind for a while. My fantasies that he felt something for me were just that: fantasies. She had perfect skin with pores no bigger than pinpricks and soft blonde hair that bounced when she moved – I liked secretly gazing at someone so beautiful, it was my way of studying half of the golden couple that seemed at the time to prove to us unfocused and dithering twenty-somethings that young love really could last for ever.
How wrong we all were.
Their end was messy, painful and protracted. I lost far more friends than Paul did – I felt lucky I wasn’t stoned by some of my former girlfriends. I’m over all that now, but I didn’t emerge unscathed. An open wound still nags at me, never having en
ough time to scab over. Paul insisted he remain friends with Eloide, and ten years later she’s still squarely in his – and therefore my – life. Her job is going to parties and writing about them for a thick and glossy fashion magazine and getting photographed arm in arm with this celebrity or that. She has the perfect job, if you like stuff like that. She has a little black book to die for, if that’s your definition of success. Paul and her have lunch in restaurants that ordinary people could never get a table at; they occasionally drink cocktails at bars where Madonna or Robert de Niro or both might be.
She and I meet only at larger social occasions where her tap-tapping stilettos and taut figure are like a knife plunged into the heart of my self-esteem. Eloide lives with a football agent now in a cutting-edge modernist house in south London. Well, I’m not sure one actually does anything so mundane as live in a house like that, they probably reside, inhabit, or dwell. Despite our years together, despite our growing family, despite everything Paul and I share, a gnawing doubt about what their relationship is eats away at me, and the years don’t relax jealousy’s teeth on my innards.
I tell Paul none of this. My envy bubbles away silently inside my calm exterior, a pressure cooker released only in diatribes to Jessie or my sister. I won, but sometimes I feel like I lost. That might sound harsh, mean even, but I’m as competitive as the next woman, partial victories don’t bring satisfaction and there are moments when I’m certain I catch him wondering what he has given up for me. Whether in a French village or packed tightly on a city street, if a girl with long blonde hair and boyish hips walks by Paul turns his head and stares. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, if I called him on it he would genuinely raise those dark eyebrows and protest his innocence, saying, ‘Kate, are you having a laugh?’ That his love of a particular physical type has been ingrained and shaped by Eloide has never crossed his mind.
Friends! For someone so successful and popular Paul is very naive about the depth of human emotions. There is no way on earth I could stay mates with Paul if he left me for another woman. No. Way. At. All.
I used to find it endearing when politicians or film stars would have affairs with people who looked just like their wives, but ten years younger. It telegraphed to me how much they must have liked the first version. But now I’m left wondering. Is Melody part of a chain of which I, with my darker hair, frecklier skin and sturdy legs, am the aberration?
‘You OK?’ shouts Cassidy, knocking on the door. ‘Thought maybe I was serving up salmonella digestives.’
I make some comment or other, splash water on my face. In five minutes I can go, retreat to the safety and privacy of my own house.
Back in the living room mothers mill about, chomping through carbohydrates. Becca is talking about her child’s skin infection. ‘So I have to take a pin and try and pop—’
‘Oh, save it for Oprah.’ Cassidy holds her hand up in front of her face, disgust rippling over it. ‘So how’s Paul? I saw him on telly the other day. He was being very controversial!’
‘Oh . . . you know him. He’s good, yeah, good.’ I nod earnestly as their eyes track me. When Paul sold the company a change took place in my friends and neighbours. Subtle but noticeable, like the day you finally fully recover from a cold. We were invited out more, I wasn’t ignored at the school gate, Becca came round in make-up. Success has a mesmerising smell and Paul has intoxicated them.
‘Tell us about Lori-Anne’s divorce,’ Sarah says to Cassidy, and they all eagerly lean in to hear more.
‘Oh my God!’ Cassidy replies, splaying fingers for emphasis. Lori-Anne is a friend of Cassidy’s I’ve never met. She’s doing divorce the big, brash, expensive Californian way and we cannot get enough of it. I used to love hearing of other people’s infidelities, the implosion of their domestic fortresses. They were horror stories that didn’t affect me starring people I didn’t know. How I would laugh when some husband or other announced he was leaving for the twenty-two-year-old who ‘really understood him’. These tales were passing entertainments, a way of giving thanks that Paul and I were not like that. Until now. Money and success are a toxic combination. I look around the room and instead of seeing flesh-and-blood allies and mothers with all their glorious and likeable faults and obsessions, I see rivals, competition that’s queuing up to undo me and replace me. I’ll be the second wife Paul stepped over on his way to the very top, discarded for a younger, blonder, brasher model. ‘He won’t move out! Lawyer’s advice, of course.’
Sarah shakes her head. ‘Where’s the lover?’
‘Living in the pool house! Lori-Anne’s started using the phrase in that Michael Douglas film where his wife explains that she wants a divorce and says, “Every morning I wake up and I hate your guts.”’
‘That’s a term of endearment in our house,’ says Sarah, smiling.
‘I know that film!’ says Becca. ‘Doesn’t she try and run him over?’
‘You got it, but Lori-Anne hasn’t! She says if she could find where he’s parked her off-roader she’d crush him with it! Believe me, if you don’t want to run your husband over in an SUV, you’ve still got a marriage,’ says Cassidy.
‘Earth calling Kate, earth calling Kate.’ Becca is clicking her fingers in my face, just like my mother used to do. I don’t like Becca.
‘Men leave if they’ve got enough money that it doesn’t matter. That’s why successful men often have several wives,’ says Sarah. Becca nods and looks at me as if I should pay attention.
‘I tell you, if Mike did that to me I’d act out that scene from Psycho,’ says Cassidy, shaking her head with conviction.
Becca mimes a stabbing motion at me and starts laughing. It takes all of my large reserves of self-control not to punch her in the face.
11
When I finally get home I put Ava in front of a video and Josh on the computer and read eighteen articles on the internet about Melody’s murder. She was twenty-six, she was regarded as very talented and she lived at home. She was strangled and fatally stabbed in the heart in a quiet, wooded area a few miles away. There is a quote from her aunt, her parents are too upset to talk to reporters. I try to phone Paul, but his number’s engaged; Sergei’s directs me straight to his messaging service. The news will have swamped Forwood TV like a storm surge. I blow up her picture until her features are large pixellated squares. If I could climb into her image I would. She looks less like Eloide now but the blonde hair is the same shade, her mouth a similar shape. The police are appealing for witnesses and anyone who saw her on her bike, which was found abandoned near by. They are looking for a dark-coloured car seen in the area.
The car. I am out the front door in a moment, beeping myself into the car, colour: Prestige Blue, if I remember correctly. I sit in the driver’s seat with my hands on the wheel, suddenly feeling self-conscious. All my neighbours can see me. The pedals are too far away for me to touch, Paul’s legs are longer than mine. I do not know what I am doing or what I’m looking for. I check the steering wheel, the door handles and the indicators for blood, but find nothing. A search under the seats produces a shrivelled apple core and a page torn from a comic.
I’m almost disappointed. In the police dramas on the telly they seem to miraculously discover a victim’s earring at every turn, as if women drop them wherever they go. I want to laugh as I imagine finding a pair of dirty knickers with ‘Monday’ printed on them.
I walk around to the front of the car and look closely at the bumper. Surprise surprise, there’s no imprint of a flailing woman emblazoned across it. The man next door appears and we do the neighbourly wave thing and I pretend that I’m inspecting my plants. The street is quiet and content; this should be the reality of my life, but even late-afternoon sunlight cannot cleanse me of my gothic thoughts. Have I confused familiarity with intimacy? Is my husband, in fact, unknown to me?
I’m standing on the pavement looking back at my house when I see it. A cold slap of understanding hits me in the heart. Paul and I bought this wreck and lovin
gly renovated it; transforming it from a warren of bedsits into a stylish and cherished family home. The large front garden was a Sahara of broken and weedy cement, which we replaced with a granite-tiled parking space and lots of plantings. When our neighbours oohed and aahed, we would admit that we made a mistake: the parking area is too small. The space between our garden walls is very narrow and you need your wits about you to reverse the car in. I home in on the wing mirrors, standing out proudly from the bodywork. You really need to be paying attention to get in there. Paul parked here that night and neither of us has used the car since. His manoeuvring was inch perfect.
Our conversation comes back to me with a clarity that stops my breath. ‘How much have you had to drink?’ He stumbled but didn’t answer, letting my imagination fill in the blanks. I think Paul was sober; cold, calculatingly sober. Did he pretend to pass out in front of me?
I take the stairs two at a time, a new determination upon me. Paul is messy, his personality type brilliant but chaotic. We have had many rows about this over the years, our friends have been both entertained and bored by my tales of his legendary untidiness: coat thrown down in the hallway; shoes left like tripwire by the stairs; I once found the deeds to the house in a pile of paper he’d left to be burned on our fire. But all those years of running around after him are paying off now – I know where everything is. I sort through the washing basket, nothing. I check every pair of his trousers, examine the soles of his shoes, get excited when I find his work bag, but a forensic examination of it reveals nothing but pay slips, a contract, some plasters and an old pack of chewing gum. I pick up his black wool coat; the weather was warm today and he took his mac. I check it for hairs, blood, stains, a life I’m not party to. I smell it. Nothing. I think very hard about that night when he came back. There’s something that I can’t put my finger on, some detail that’s missing. A ray of sun splits the light cloud outside and floods the living room. That night was chilly, it felt like we were still in the grip of winter. Paul feels the cold. I can’t find his scarf.
