He is my most favorite person in the entire universe.
I think often, recently, of the babies we will have. They will have his beautiful bright red locks, his pale eyelashes, his green eyes. People on the street will smile at me and my ginger family.
“What happened?” he murmurs into my hair. “The man from the bar?”
I nod, once, against his chest.
“Awful,” he says, rubbing his hands up and down my back.
I swallow stomach acid that’s sloshing around my mouth and turn my head to the side to look around the kitchen. As I thought it would be, it’s immaculate. I can see the soil in our many plants—it was one of my recent fads, to set up a kitchen garden—is wet. He’s watered them. He’s washed up, too. He’ll no doubt have done some work, watched a film. He is calm, organized. I piss away my evenings, spent shambolically on BuzzFeed and looking up old school friends and thinking I ought to preheat the oven but don’t want to move, and then it is eleven o’clock at night and I haven’t eaten.
“Have a good night?” I manage to say, though every few seconds the wave of sweating begins again and I can almost feel my pupils dilate and my hands shake.
“Sure,” he says, looking down at me briefly.
“What did you do?”
“Load of box ticking,” he says. “Form filling for my client.”
Reuben is one of those people with too many jobs. He’s a social worker for an Islamic charity. He is starting to assist his MP at her drop-in centers, especially where gang culture is concerned. He’s a social work expert, occasionally appears in court and tells lawyers what social workers should have done, whether they did the right things. He doesn’t sleep much, and there is forever something on his horizon. He is fastidiously organized, writing up case notes late at night and filing them immediately. He never seems to wane in his enthusiasm. He can never not be bothered. He never puts things off.
He releases me, and a peculiar sensation comes over me, as though these are my final moments in this world: a world of these First World problems. Writing up case notes and tidying the kitchen. I’m wrong, of course, I tell myself. Everything’s the same. I’ve avoided changing my world by avoiding making that call. I step back toward Reuben, riding on a wave of relief, and he immediately raises his arm, as he always does. I step underneath it, and it seamlessly falls around my shoulders.
“Be all right,” he says to me. It’s one of his phrases. “You’ll be all right” got shortened, a couple’s language we often speak.
I nod, tears in my eyes, which he wipes away.
His hand slides down my back, inside my coat. My back is damp with sweat, but he doesn’t say anything. He never would.
He pours me a glass of red, and I sip it in my right hand, my left hanging limply. It’s becoming stiff and feels strange. I’ll enjoy tonight, our wine together. I’ll try to dispel the shakes, the dread. And then tomorrow—tomorrow I will face it.
Reuben goes to sit down in the living room. It’s in the same room as our kitchen.
I look out of the window. Our neighbor is outside. She’s one hundred and two years old. Her seventy-year-old daughter comes to visit her, bringing her teenage dogs. Everyone is old in that flat, Reuben and I joke. Edith’s face appears beyond our plants, and I make out her features before raising my hand in a wave. An alibi, I think uselessly to myself. I’m glad she’s a night owl.
Reuben comes into the kitchen again and picks up a piece of paper from the kitchen counter, his body just brushing mine.
I’m remembering again. The feel of Sadiq’s body against my gloved hands. The way he tumbled so easily, like a domino, falling after the gentlest of flicks.
“Edith behaving herself?” Reuben says to me, throwing me a look.
I once told him I pretended Edith was a robot, that nobody could be that old. That she was a government experiment. He laughed so hard his face went bright red, and he said, “Never change, Jojo.”
“Yes,” I say woodenly.
And then I’m remembering before that. The feel of his hand in mine in the bar. His penis against my leg. It’s not fair.
“Got time for number seventy-eight?” Reuben says, gesturing to the list on our blackboard.
Written in red chalk, it’s the top one hundred movies of all time, according to some worthy poll. We are rubbish with films—a rite of passage we both somehow missed during our teens. I was too busy overachieving—studying and amateur dramatics and ballet and clarinet—and Reuben was becoming Reuben, learning. He’s the most well-read man I’ve ever known. Can give you chapter and verse on Lacan, Marx, Kant. He was adopted as a baby into a very scholarly family who ran a pub. His entire childhood was spent reading books in the rooms above the bar. Even now, when we go to visit them in Norfolk, they talk about economics, politics. The bar is littered with paperbacks they’re halfway through.
And so now we’re watching the films together. A few a week. We just watched number seventy-nine, and I see that the next one is The Exorcist. When we started, Reuben bought a blanket that we always get out now, and snuggle under it. Every now and then, while we’re watching, he will pause the film and say, “Are you listening?” and we’ll laugh when I am not.
A siren goes off in the distance. I can hear it getting closer and closer. Reuben is looking at me. I can’t look back. I can’t speak until I know whether or not it’s for me. It gets louder and louder, and I expect it to cut off. There’ll be two strapping policemen getting out, wearing heavy boots and carrying batons. They will ring the doorbell. Any second. Any second now.
Only, the siren continues again, into the distance, getting quieter and quieter, orbiting away from me. It’s not for me. This time.
I gulp and look at the wintry blackness of the window. Is this how it’s going to be now? Will my London—the London Reuben and I love so much—become a kind of waiting room for my . . . for my what? My capture? I shake my head. I can’t think of it.
“I’m not really up for The Exorcist,” I say with what I hope is a gentle laugh.
“We said we’d do them in order,” Reuben, a stickler for rules, says. He turns away from me and indicates the board.
He’s standing at the end of our long, narrow kitchen, and the way the light catches him reminds me of our wedding day. Reuben was half in shadow at the end of the aisle. I’d spent so long imagining our wedding day—the planning and organization almost killed me—that when it finally arrived, I spent the entire day pretending it was somebody else’s and that I was simply a guest, instead. I could enjoy it better that way.
I remember the kiss he gave me. Our first as husband and wife. Perhaps he was just embarrassed to be kissing me in front of a handful of people. Or preoccupied with the life commitment he had just made. Or maybe he thought I pulled away first. But I remember that kiss. It was dry, formal. Not like his usual kisses. I’ve never asked him why. But I’ve always remembered it.
“Okay,” Reuben says, leaving the room with his wine. I hear him go into the bedroom.
I stare at the kitchen counter after he’s gone. Something is folded neatly in half in the letter rack. I pick it up, trying to distract myself from the seismic swirl of thoughts just off stage left in my brain. It’s an application form. I frown, looking at it. It’s my handwriting. I pull it out, unfolding it. It’s my application for a creative writing course. How could I have forgotten? I hold it up to the light. It’s like a relic from my life Before. It had seemed like the answer, last Tuesday, when I printed it out and filled it in and then forgot to post it. Reuben’s attached a stamp to it, neatly, with a paper clip. It’s exactly the sort of thing he does: hands-off, but helpful.
He arrives back in the room, and I leave the letter on the side and join him on the sofa. “Thanks for the stamp,” I say. “But I’m not sure creative writing is the Thing.”
Reuben nods, putting down the paper he’s read
ing, and looks at me. “You don’t need a Thing,” he says.
“No?”
“I got halfway through the sudoku,” he says to me. He flicks the paper to the back and shows me.
I look down at it. “That’s an eight and that’s a two,” I say.
“Too smart for your own good, Murphy,” he says. “Coming to bed? Bring the wine. We won’t be able to do this when baby Oliva’s here.” He, too, has been talking more and more about babies. Soon, we keep saying, wanting to enjoy the last of each other, like we are on a decadent night out we’re not quite ready to finish yet.
“Yeah,” I say. I can see Sadiq again, in my mind, lying facedown on the ground. I’ll go to bed with Reuben, reading my book while he spoons into me, and in the morning, I will tell him.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” Reuben says as I climb into bed beside him.
“Tell you what?” I mutter, not looking at him. Instead, I am eyeing the blinds, waiting for them to flash blue as the police arrive. I am looking at my phone, waiting for it to ring.
Nothing happens. I can’t believe I am going to bed. I’m really doing it. Really not going back.
“You know . . .” Reuben says.
I instigated the game, but he is fully on board now. It’s become a thing we do seamlessly, like locking up. Like brushing our teeth.
“No,” I say.
Reuben looks at me in surprise. “We’ve not missed a day,” he says.
“I just can’t,” I say. “I can’t think of anything.”
Reuben’s expression darkens, but he doesn’t say anything more.
* * *
—
Ten minutes later, I open the drinks cupboard with my good hand in our tiny kitchen and find another bottle of wine. I’ll just have a few glasses. To take the edge off. And, I think darkly, to try to forget. I hope drunken amnesia might be a kind of blur across the night, obscuring everything, right back to the moment when I pushed Sadiq.
My hand is shaking as I plunge a corkscrew into the bottle, steadying it between my knees, unable to use my injured hand, stabbing the cork through the heart.
* * *
—
I dream of Sadiq, while dozing on and off, and during the night he appears, standing in the doorway, a black, death-like figure, a foot nearer to me every time I blink.
By the third blink, he is right in front of me, his face to mine, his hands held up like they were in the selfie we took, but bloodied, red rivulets running down them.
When I next wake up, it’s light outside. Reuben is sleeping peacefully, on his side, facing away from me.
I don’t remember immediately. It takes an effort, like waking up in a strange bed and having to piece together, for a few seconds, where I am.
Bad dreams. I recall the bad dreams first. A man in the corner of the room. His bloodied hands up close to mine. His breath on my face.
But no.
Not all of this is a dream.
A dark cloak of fear draws around me. I feel the blood seep from my face. It was real.
It was real.
My left hand is clutching at the duvet, and it throbs as I flex it. And then I recoil. Those hands. Those hands that pushed that man. That body and mind that left. That hand that got twisted in the road, in my haste to flee the scene. The scene. I’m walking across the bedroom, still half asleep, and into the bathroom. I want to look at myself. To see myself. To check I am real and not changed, and to piece myself together.
In the mirror, I trace a finger down my cheek. It’s almost imperceptible—barely there, but I can see it. A dried bit of white stuff: salt, a crust. In an oblong shape on my cheek. A dried tear. I’ve been crying in my sleep.
I gulp. I have to tell Reuben.
I peer out of the bathroom. My head turns toward him, like a flower to the sun. The morning light has caught his features, making them rosier than usual. I can’t stop looking at him. His beard shines auburn. His eyes are closed. Soon, those beautiful eyes will look at me differently.
4
REVEAL
I am shivering as a female police officer approaches. She’s heavily made-up, which surprises me. I wonder what she looks like beneath the thick layer of foundation, slightly too pale for her, and underneath her coarse, spiky lashes, the blue eye shadow.
I draw my coat further around me.
“Joanna,” she says to me.
I look up at her. She will surely realize it was a mistake. An accident. Not intentional. Woman to woman, we can work it out. I look closely at her. I wonder what sort of bedroom she stands in as she applies her makeup. Minimalist? Or maybe one full of curated pieces? I wonder what led her to the police and if she finds it difficult as a woman. I wish we could talk about this, that we’d met incidentally, at a hen party or a christening.
“Joanna Oliva. Yes,” I say, my eyes still running over her features.
She lets out a sigh, a short, sharp exhalation through her nostrils. And then she shifts her weight. She’s bored. I am just another case in a long line of night shifts. How peculiar that two people would perceive the same event so differently.
The man—not-Sadiq—is coughing in the recovery position as the paramedics are working on him. Relief floods through my arms and legs like liquid happiness. He’s okay. And so I’ll be okay.
I look back at the police officer. She’s still staring at me. The relief opens my mouth for me and pulls the words out. “We were in there,” I say, pointing in the direction of the bar with my thumb. “Well—actually, we weren’t. But I thought it was him when I pushed him.” It’s garbled. I’m babbling. But I trust her, this woman with the blue eye shadow and the professional job. She is here to help me.
She holds up a hand, like a mime. Her nails are long and pointed, painted a strange matte that doesn’t catch the streetlights. I bet she does them herself, has bought the UV light machine and makes a bit of money on the side. Maybe she’s obsessed with nail art and puts her designs on Pinterest. I could never manage that. I am so messy. I paint the edges of my fingers, too, and just hope it’ll wipe clean.
The gesture cuts me off. My next words die in my throat.
“Okay, Joanna, I need to stop you there,” the police officer says, her hand still held up in front of her. She points back to Sadiq—no, not-Sadiq—on the towpath. The ambulance crew are lifting him up, on a stretcher, a bag over his face like a blown-up rubber glove that one of the men is squeezing. He’s not conscious. That much is clear. There are vehicles everywhere, parked on the road above us. An ambulance. A first responder in a green-and-yellow car. And the police. All for me. For us.
“Joanna Oliva, I am arresting you on suspicion of assault contrary to section eighteen of the Offenses Against the Person Act 1861.”
“What?” I say, flabbergasted.
“You do not have to say anything,” she is saying to me.
The words are familiar, but it takes me a moment to place them. It’s not a hymn or a song lyric or a phrase. No. It’s a caution. The caution. All the crime dramas I’ve ever watched—The Bill while my mother was ironing, The Bridge, after which I applied to be a police community support officer and then didn’t attend the interview—blur together in my mind as I realize what’s happening. I am being cautioned. Arrested. Me.
I could make a dash for it. Down the canal. I start to plot a route. Past this woman, down the towpath, along the canal, up those steps. Back into central London. Into any number of alleys and nooks and crannies. Any bars or the toothpaste aisle of a Tesco Express or a phone box decorated with prostitutes’ business cards so the sides are made opaque. I could go. Now. It must be the drink talking; I always did get the beer fear. I shake my head, but my vision blurs as I do so, my surroundings moving like liquid.
She’s still speaking. “But it may harm your defense if you do not mention, when questioned . . .”
The funny thing about your life changing in a moment is that you are the same person after the change. I, Joanna Oliva, wife of Reuben Oliva, still wonder how long it took her to memorize the caution and whether or not she felt a frisson of power the first time she said it to somebody. My main thoughts are still what Reuben will think of me, and whether or not he will look at me differently, even though it is trivial against the backdrop of what I have done, like a cancer patient worrying about losing their hair in the face of a life-threatening disease.
“. . . something which you later rely on in court . . .”
The night seems to become colder around me, and I draw my coat sleeves down over my hands, even though the action strains and pulls at the fabric.
“. . . anything you do say may be given in evidence . . .”
And with those words, I begin the process of no longer being myself. I’ve gone through the veil, to the underworld. I’m not myself anymore. I’m not Joanna. I can’t go home and sit in bed with Reuben and play our end-of-the-night game.
“Do you understand,” the woman is saying to me, “what I’ve said?”
I nod because I don’t know what else to do. And they load not-Sadiq into the ambulance and close the doors with soft clicks in the night.
“You’ll come to the station,” she says. It’s not a request.
“Of course,” I say, wanting to please her, momentarily distracted by the glint of her wedding ring.
Reuben and I didn’t choose rings, in the end. He thought they were clichéd, which made me laugh. Laura was impressed. She loved the unconventionality of our wedding.
The policewoman searches me then. She gestures and, just like airport security, pats me down. “Do you have anything on you that might cause danger to you or others?” she asks.
The Choice Page 4
