The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  When they knock on the door and we let them in, Laura always exclaims how cute our basement flat is, with the plants that make it almost impossible to navigate down the stairs and the herbs that line our kitchen windowsill. We laugh about those plants, the most obvious emblem of my faddishness. She has painted them, before. A beautiful portrait of a child among the flowers, a rare, non-feminist portrait of hers.

  “Jonty’s got mismatched shoes on,” Laura says as soon as she is inside.

  Reuben and I look down. He’s wearing two Converse trainers, but they’re different colors. We laugh, and I’m grateful for the distraction, the normality. It’s the first time we’ve all got together since it happened. It might even be the first time I’ve laughed.

  “They may as well be the same shoes,” Jonty says good-naturedly.

  Reuben exhales, a tiny laugh. “They’re different,” he says. “They’re different shoes.”

  Laura’s dressed unusually, for her. Gone are her normal clothes, the long, flowing trousers that look more like maxi skirts. She’s wearing dark, skinny jeans that look expensive, a silk, draped top. A blazer. Her hair is different. Less spiked. Less harsh.

  I look at the ship window in our kitchen. It’s misty outside, and Jonty and Laura have let a chill in with them. I reach to trace a finger down it. It is as though my sand timer is running out twice as quickly as everybody else’s. Or I have half as much sand. I wonder if, afterward, I will remember all these lovely things about my life, or if I will be forever changed, unable to enjoy things, to dream. I think, too, of Sadiq, ready to make his imminent statement about me that might change my life. I think of Imran, lying motionless somewhere. There’s an awkward silence as I touch the window, which Reuben—unusually—breaks. He is looking at Jonty with a disbelieving expression, one he has regarded me with, over and over.

  “Didn’t they look different as you were tying your laces?” he says.

  Jonty just shrugs and laughs. “I was distracted by my beautiful, glittery perfume bottles,” he says, and Reuben laughs, too.

  Laura rolls her eyes. “Very intricate work, painting perfume bottles with glitter,” she says.

  “I thought that was just for Christmas.”

  “Perfume is not just for Christmas,” Jonty says seriously.

  Laura seems distant, and I nudge her elbow. We struggle to find friend time when we’re together with the boys. I wish it was acceptable to go on a walk with her, or to have half an hour in separate rooms. There are always things I want to say to her in private.

  “You all right?” I say quietly.

  “Even the laces are different,” Reuben is saying. He can’t leave it alone.

  “I don’t tie the laces. Just stuff my feet in,” Jonty says.

  Reuben smiles at him indulgently, like he is a child, then leads him to the fridge to show him the beer.

  Laura perches on one of the bar stools at our kitchen counter. I sit on the other, looking at her. She reaches and picks up the retro saltshaker I bought from Tiger last month and pours a tiny pile into her hand. I stare at it. I’m forever looking for omens these days. I can’t help but stare at the white crystalline pile in her palm.

  “You’re not working any longer,” she says, sounding strangely formal.

  “Well, no,” I say, blinking. “They wouldn’t let me . . .”

  “Maybe when the trial’s over?” she says.

  I nod, although I am thinking, Long after that.

  She pours the salt onto the countertop. I frown, though I don’t mind. Reuben would.

  “Your stuff has got me thinking. We’re thirty.”

  I try not to bristle at that. My crime has got her thinking. The loss of my job. My imminent incarceration. It’s changed things for everybody, not just me.

  But of course it has. Whether or not it’s more important to me, it’s still important to her, to Reuben, to Wilf. The human mind is so reliably self-involved. Or, at least, mine is. I can’t imagine the life crisis I would have had if it had been Laura who was being tried for causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

  I look at her, shifting the salt into tiny piles, wearing her clothes that look expensive.

  “I had an interview today,” she says. “For a grad scheme.”

  “Why?” I say. “You’re not a grad.”

  “No, but I . . .”

  “What?”

  “I dunno, Jo. It’s time to stop arsing around, isn’t it? I want a career. I do. Before I want a baby. That’s . . .”

  “What?” I say, my voice sounding shrill.

  It’s as though everybody who used to be around me is prepping, moving on, while my life’s on hold.

  “Babies,” I say. “I want them, too.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do,” I say, sounding bruised and prickly all at once. “But I don’t have the luxury of making it happen.”

  “Well, no,” Laura says. “Not right now.”

  We lapse into silence, and then she says, “Marketing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in marketing. At a bank.”

  “Marketing what?”

  “The bank.”

  “Sounds pointless.”

  “It’ll be good for me. To join the real world.”

  “The rat race,” I say spitefully, even though I do not really mean it.

  I am only jealous. Of her direction, but also the luxury of choice. To join a graduate scheme. To not have a planetary problem looming so large that the rest of life merely orbits around it, waiting for the trial, waiting for the outcome. To be able to choose to have a child this year, next year, the year after.

  “It’ll be good for us. Jonty is going to get one, too. We might sell the boat.”

  “Jonty can’t even put a pair of shoes on,” I say, and it’s meant to be teasing, an emblem of their chaotic lifestyle with their barge that drifts along the Thames, as directionless as they are, and the motley crew of people who stay for a few weeks at a time and then move on. But it comes out as shrill, judgmental, like I am clinging on to a past Laura that she wants to leave behind.

  “Yeah, well. It’s not too late to learn,” she says, looking at me kindly. Perhaps with pity.

  “Are you painting?” I say, thinking of her beautiful, photograph-like paintings. They always make a feminist point, a political point. The most recent set are painted tabloid newspapers, with all the photos of men in suits as women, and with page three as men.

  “No,” she says.

  She’s had her nails done. Straightened her hair. She looks totally different. And so while we’ve been making the same jokes, telling each other the same stories about our jobs, she’s been getting ready, behind the scenes, like a determined understudy. My life is ruined, and hers is just beginning. Soon she’ll have all those things, all those proper things. Pensions, cars, a secretary. She would think that was selling out, but I never did. I just couldn’t find the Thing I wanted to do.

  “You stressed—about it all?” she says, as though it all is merely a pressing deadline or an impending redundancy, not the reality that my life is being shaken up like the salt in the retro shaker in front of us.

  “Yes,” I say shortly. “No. I don’t know.”

  Seated opposite each other, talking over the counter, with the rainy dark world outside the round window, I feel like we’re in a café or at a bar. Reuben and Jonty go and sit on the sofa in our tiny living room. I can hear the tread of their shoes on the wooden floor behind us.

  Laura dabs at the salt with the pad of her index finger.

  “It’s just—I don’t know. It’s time to grow up, isn’t it?” she says. She looks excited. “It took me ages to realize. Years later than everyone else. But I want a proper career. I want to look forward to work—to use my brain. Which isn’t useless.”

  �
�No,” I say, wondering whether she thinks mine is.

  I can hear Reuben and Jonty talking. They’re saying something about July. “Yeah, sure,” I hear Reuben say, his tone the exact one he uses when he’s agreeing to something that he’ll later cancel.

  Laura’s hands are knotted together. She is always worrying, always analyzing. No wonder she wants a career. She is nothing like me, drifting, daydreaming, from one location on the library bus to the next.

  “It’s the sixteenth,” Jonty is saying behind me.

  I tune into their conversation instead. It’s easier to listen to them than to think of my best friend changing her life because of something I have done. Our flat is so small that I can hear every word.

  “Is that a Saturday?” Reuben says, sounding less reluctant. His tone is strange, and I cock my head, intent now.

  “Mm, yeah,” Jonty says.

  Laura looks lost in thought, dabbing her finger into the salt pile, over and over again, the grains making tiny pockmarks on her skin.

  “It’ll be just me, probably. If it’s July,” Reuben says.

  “Oh, right,” Jonty says, sounding taken aback.

  I frown.

  There’s a pause. Laura and I don’t speak, and neither do Reuben and Jonty.

  And then I hear Jonty again. “Oh yeah. Of course,” he says. “Sorry.”

  And it’s not the words, or the look I imagine Reuben gave him, which preceded his realization. No. It’s the tone. The tone people only speak in when they’re talking about my crime. My misdemeanor. As though I’ve been put on the sex offenders’ register or gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. Something shameful. And isn’t it?

  “Sorry, mate,” Jonty adds softly again.

  Laura doesn’t say anything then. I keep staring hard at her, knowing she heard my husband talk of my imminent incarceration as though it’s a certainty, but she doesn’t look up. I scrape all the salt into the palm of my hand and feel its weight, then throw it, with my right hand, over my left shoulder. For luck. To get rid of the devil, waiting patiently behind me.

  * * *

  —

  Jonty was asking about their boat-party thing this summer,” Reuben says conversationally after they have left.

  I remember their last summer party. Reuben had sent me a very Reuben-like text, across the boat from me, as a very boring woman talked to me about the alternative voting system. You all right there, or do you need rescuing? it said. Rescue me, I replied, and he came over and said, “Sorry, my wife looks very bored.”

  “Yes,” I say. I start scrubbing at the work surface, not looking at him.

  Reuben is leaning against the kitchen counter and shifts away, looking curiously at what I’m doing. I hardly ever clean.

  “I haven’t RSVP’d for you.” He says it simply.

  He moves to the doorframe and leans against it. I can feel his gaze on me. I turn and squeeze water out of the sponge.

  “Okay,” I say brightly.

  I should ask him why not—because I really can’t understand it. At the very least, I should turn around and look at him. Maybe then I would see it in his facial expression: the answer—what he thinks. Is it about prison? Or something else? Not wanting to speak for me when my life is a shambles?

  “Jo.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He comes over to me, plucks the sponge out of my hand, and tosses it in the sink.

  “What would happen?” he says simply.

  We both know what he means, but I pretend not to.

  “What would happen if what?” I say.

  His expression darkens. He looks thin. Has he lost weight? He’s always been slender, but I can see his collarbones behind his T-shirt, jutting out ever so slightly. I have gained weight, eating as though they will starve me in prison.

  “You know what,” he says quietly.

  “No, I don’t,” I say, taking the theoretical stance: I might not; therefore, I don’t. It almost seems irrelevant that I do. Why do I do these things?

  “What will happen if you get sent down?” he says softly. “I want to discuss it so . . . if it happens. We don’t have to discuss it then, in the court. We have time now. Alone. Together.”

  The words shock me. Sent down. They’re so colloquial. So inappropriate.

  “You heard Sarah. Mistake and self-defense.”

  Reuben scrunches up his nose, makes a kind of moue with his mouth. As if to say, That won’t work. But he can’t mean that. Surely not.

  He’s never done denial. Not like I have. Ripped-up, hidden car-parking fines simply don’t exist for me, but he doesn’t think that way. He confronts issues head-on, like this. Calmly, not hysterically, not the way I eventually tackle things I’ve been avoiding for years, taking deep, dramatic breaths and pulling a fine that’s become a court summons out from under the bed and looking at it in horror.

  But I can’t do it. It feels like facing an oncoming train.

  “I can’t talk to you about the rent as you’re being led away,” he says. “We need to . . . to strategize.”

  “Strategize. We’re not at a conference,” I say, but actually all I am thinking is, Led away.

  Will I be led away? I can’t handle it. He thinks I might be, like an animal to the slaughterhouse, and what’s the difference, really? I am still staring down at the counter, not looking at him. I miss his arms around me and the way we used to list our favorite things about the other while in bed. I miss the way Reuben’s face would curve into a reluctant smile as I got him chatting. I miss it all. I miss our movie nights. That time we watched Kind Hearts and Coronets (number ninety) and Reuben turned to me halfway through and said, “I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on, have you?”

  “There are articles. Online. Have you seen?” he says.

  “No,” I say sharply.

  “Defending you. Feminist articles. You know?”

  “I don’t look,” I say, and raise my head.

  The briefest of expressions flickers across his face like poor reception on an old television. It’s not annoyance, exactly, more recognition. Of course you don’t, it says.

  I grab the sponge again and recommence scrubbing.

  “Okay, well, if you want to discuss it, let me know . . .” he says.

  And it’s a tone I’ve not heard before. Not directed at me, anyway. I have heard it said down the phone, when clients call at weekends. Difficult clients. Clients who are making poor choices.

  I glance up at him, and he’s staring at me, like a well-meaning counselor or head teacher who knows a student’s done something and won’t confess.

  I scrub harder, at stains on the work surface that aren’t really there, hoping I can erase them entirely.

  19

  CONCEAL

  It’s late January before I can get a set of keys with nobody seeing. Somebody left theirs in the kitchen, by the tea machine, and I swipe them, quickly.

  After that, it’s easy.

  I text Reuben and tell him I’m seeing Laura, and after Ed drops me home, I walk back to the library, the bitter January air hurting my lungs. It’s after eight, and there won’t be anybody there, but I look left and right before letting myself in. I look up, too, checking for CCTV. At least I have learned something.

  I slide the key into the lock. Attached to the set of keys is a pink pompom dirtied on its ends, the fur turned gray.

  The alarm goes off, but I silence it with the four-digit code I’ve watched Ed put in so often—everyone knows it, even the admin assistant—and then it is noiseless, and I am alone inside.

  Everything looks eerily different at night. Like an abandoned hospital or jail. The office desks are cast in a strange glow from the streetlamps outside, and the cupboard creaks as I slide the key in and open it.

  The lost property basket is almost full, and I get my items out and
add them, right at the bottom. It takes twice as long as it should because of my bad hand.

  I can’t bear to put the clothes and shoes in a random skip, in someone else’s rubbish. It may be crazy, but I want to know where they are. And to be able to check that they are still here—that they haven’t been found. That my beautiful shoes are here, and their tread cannot be traced back to me. Nobody I worked with ever saw them. They’ll never know they’re mine.

  I leave shortly after, hurrying across the car park, my head bowed just in case.

  * * *

  —

  Reuben appears in the hallway as I arrive through the door in my old trench coat I took out to wear home with me.

  “I’ve lost my coat,” I say preemptively. I am the worst liar in the world.

  “You’ve lost your coat?” Reuben says.

  His tone is a blend of incredulity and judgment. I know it well.

  “Yeah, I . . .” I try to think, but I can’t. “I have no idea. It was here, and then it wasn’t.”

  “Did you have it this morning?”

  “No,” I say. “Have you seen it?” I add, which must seem strange. It should have been the first question I asked.

  Oh God. I am an amateur. They are going to find me.

  “Oh—but it’s your thirty coat,” he says. “I’ll check the car.” He opens the door and strides out onto the street where the car is parked.

  I stand at the door, still shivering in the dark, watching him. Our security light has gone on. I look up at it. It is strung with dirty cobwebs.

  I look at Reuben rooting through the car, picking up Sainsbury’s reusable bags, sweet wrappers, and my Wellington boots. He hardly ever uses the car, and so it’s filled with my crap.

  He closes the boot, turns to me, and frowns, looking baffled. “I don’t understand how you could have lost a coat,” he says, walking back toward me.

  I cringe, not looking at him. This is the sort of thing that drives Reuben mad. Not just my messiness, my disorder, but the illogicality of it. Why didn’t I just say I left it when I was out with Laura? Come home without one? I should have thought more carefully. But there’s no room in my head, not for these things. Getting away with murder is all I can think of.