One of them pushes open the door, and my bowels turn to liquid. I dart a glance at Reuben, who hasn’t noticed them. At least he will know now. Why I am the way I am. Once again, I find myself thinking how amazing it is that he doesn’t know, that he doesn’t notice my gaze on the police officers, unable to look away. That he can’t tell that every thought is taken up with the crime; the memories of it, burying the evidence, breaking into the library’s offices. I feel as though I have been branded, right across my skin, like a farm animal, but nobody knows. Nobody in the world.
They walk to the bar. One meets my eyes momentarily. They speak to the man at the bar, then leave again. They are talking about me. I am sure of it.
“You know what I mean,” Reuben says quietly.
I don’t answer him. Can’t answer him. I’m staring at the police as they leave, thinking, I have been so foolish with those stupid clothes. It’s too late to go and get them. But of course my colleagues will recognize my coat and scarf. I should have been brave enough to hide them somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Buried. I wanted them close, but the sense of security it gave me was false. And of course they will see me, imminently, on the CCTV. I haven’t heard anything further from Ed, but surely it’s only a matter of time.
And then Wilf is back, and Reuben looks away, but under the lights, his eyes look glassy.
26
REVEAL
Reuben is unbuttoning his shirt. He’s been in court. I don’t know why—he observes client confidentiality fastidiously, so I would never ask. I am wearing jeans and a jumper and wondering whether this will be the last time I wear this particular combination. I am forever doing things like this these days.
I am counting down the weeks to my trial.
The light from the hallway illuminates a slice of the bedroom where he stands, as if he is an actor about to give a soliloquy on a stage. The rest is in darkness.
It’s been weeks since I have looked properly at his body, but something makes me look now, my eyes roving over him. I sometimes used to pretend Reuben and I were just friends, or new colleagues, or on our first date, and try to see him through fresh eyes. I do it now. Perhaps he’s somebody I can see through an open window on a summer night, undressing. I feel a bloom in my chest, as though I’ve been struck by Cupid’s arrow, as I look.
He catches me staring; his green eyes are raised to me. “You all right?” he says softly.
I nod, saying nothing. I close the bedroom door softly. The light from the hallway is shut off, extinguished, and we are in darkness. Reuben discards his shirt like it is a sheet blowing in a summer wind.
“I’ve seen the stuff online,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, his voice short. He continues to undo his trousers, sliding them off and standing in front of me in his boxers in the darkness. I can only make his legs out because they’re so pale. He says nothing more.
“What do you think?” I say.
“About . . .”
“About us advancing the defense of mistake. The feminism.”
“It was a mistake,” he says, his tone perfectly walking a tightrope between a question and a statement.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course it was.”
“Well,” he says, reaching behind me for a T-shirt.
I catch his scent. It’s changed, but my brain, my body, they remember how it used to be, as if I have been prescribed nostalgia. Tobacco, from when he used to smoke. His deodorant. Mints. He brushes past me, grabbing a pair of loose-fitting jeans, and pulls the fly up, his back to me. He smells of different deodorant now. No cigarettes.
I wait.
He speaks, eventually. “Isn’t that kind of worse?” he says.
The long-sleeved T-shirt doesn’t sit well on his frame. It hangs, looking skewed. I have always loved that about Reuben—that he looks scruffy even when he’s dressed up; that he will often leave his shirt untucked; that as soon as he forgets to shave he looks like a hippie. But tonight he looks strange.
“What?”
“That it was a mistake.”
I frown, confused. “Worse than what?”
“You mixed them up.”
“Yes.”
“You know what?” Reuben says. “Actually, forget it.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?” I say.
Everything since that night is bubbling away, heating up to a high boil. That I was harassed, in a bar, by a man who felt like I was his property. That I wasn’t merely acting on one night’s vulnerability, but against the background of every walk home alone I’ve ever taken, every time a builder has yelled something profane at me, every time a man has stood too close to me on the Tube.
“Well,” he says, and then, to my astonishment, he turns around and points at me. “Why did you think they were the same?” he says.
“I . . .” I say.
What was it, exactly? The fear. The assumption. The assumption that came from a stupid pair of identical red trainers. Seeing a shadow leaving the bar, as I did, and panicking. That’s all. That’s all it was.
“They were. I don’t know. Alike.”
“I work for an Islamic charity,” he says simply.
I have no idea what he means, until I do. I feel my body curl inward in shame, as though his words are things he’s throwing at me, and I can keep them out by shrinking. And then I feel it. The first real spark of anger at my husband. Not because of his accusation, but because of how he’s doing it. The indirectness. The passive aggression. I have no right of reply, because he hasn’t said what he means. He’s never usually like this. It is one of the many reasons I chose him: because I’d never have to guess how things were between us. Reuben has never not let me know where we stand.
“No . . . no,” I say, instead of saying all the above. I can’t stand up for myself. I don’t deserve it.
If I were more like Reuben, I would be indignant. Don’t be ridiculous, he can say of people who hold negative opinions of him. He will shrug them off, like a rain-soaked coat, and get on with his day. And, likewise, he will blink mildly at praise but not let it go to his ego. For me, it is as though he has taken my very sense of self and poked his pointing finger right through it.
“Do you actually even know how it’s been for me?” he says, wrenching open the door to our bedroom so hard that it swings wide and hits the wall.
I blink as the light floods in. We bought the copper lamp that’s dangling above him in IKEA, thinking ourselves very trendy. Only, it hangs too low and swings dangerously. Shabby chic just looks shabby when you live in a shithole, Reuben said sadly the day we hung it up.
Yep, I had said, and I’d loved to walk past it, would smile at it looking huge and orange and tacky. Now, I want him to look at me, to look at it, the way we always do when we’re both in the hallway together. One of us would say, Does it seem bright in here to you? Or, Is it me or does it feel a bit industrial-chic in here? But he doesn’t; he avoids my eyes.
“What?” I say, my heart jolting just like it did when Sadiq grabbed my hand in the club.
“It’s been a fucking nightmare. And I know, I know, I know that it’s worse for you . . .” he says, as though reading my mind, “but it’s shit. It’s shit for me. And you’ve not asked.”
I say nothing, shocked at his upright body language, the door still vibrating after it banged against the wall, his accusatory, wide stare.
“You haven’t even asked,” he adds sadly.
It’s true, I think, swallowing hard, the hole in my chest opening up as though it is a cavity. In my own trauma, I have ignored Reuben’s.
“Tell me . . .” I say.
“I’ll tell you. I’m ridiculed at work. Or people ignore it entirely. They’re embarrassed for me. Because of what you’ve done . . .”
I hear the ellipses. His tone isn’t harsh. I
t’s sad, drawn out. The drawl I used to love so much. No. Not used to: still do.
“I . . .” I say, gesturing stupidly, my hands flapping by my sides like a child’s. “I don’t know what to say,” I add. “It’s hard for me. It’s hard for everyone. I know.” I raise my eyes to meet his, even though it embarrasses me. “I’m sorry. It’s shit luck, and I’m sorry.”
His jaw is clenched, the way it is when he’s building flat-pack furniture and doesn’t understand the instruction manuals.
“I work for the Muslim community,” he repeats.
“You said that.”
He looks away, toward the door, running a hand through his spiked-up hair. I should have said, I knew what you meant by that, but I don’t. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for the man whose gaze didn’t leave mine as he slid my wedding bracelet onto my wrist to accuse me of being a racist.
“It’s not just that,” he says, sidestepping it, too. “I feel . . .”
“What?”
“I feel irrelevant,” he says simply.
The hollow feeling is back in my chest.
“Reuben will be fine. Reuben’s always fine,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling like his problems are heaping on top of mine, like a teetering tower.
“I can’t cope with this,” he says simply.
I blink, stunned. It’s not a sentence I’ve ever known him to utter. He can cope with anything. Is always calm, measured, capable. I’ve never known him to become incensed by life, only by injustice.
“Do you think about him?” he says, shooting me a look.
“Yes. He’s got a bloody brain injury. He doesn’t know what drinks he likes,” I say. It was the most important detail to me, and yet here, under the beam of my husband’s inexplicable criticism, it sounds trite. Like I don’t care, like I am trivializing his problems.
“Because of you,” Reuben adds.
“Yes, because of me.”
“Did he bleed?”
“No.”
“How hard did you push him?”
“Hard enough, Reuben,” I say softly.
“I could cope with it, you know. When you would hide congestion charges and overdue bills.”
“Could cope with what?” I say.
“You. And your avoidance.” He spreads his arms wide in the bedroom, like an eagle squaring up to its prey. “But now it’s—don’t you see? You won’t let me discuss it.”
“Then discuss it.”
“How did it make you feel?” he asks.
“Horrendous. I regret it every day,” I say. I sound crackly, like my voice is being played on a gramophone.
“You’ve never said.” He looks at me through narrowed green eyes, like I am a curious specimen to him, a mystery. Like meeting someone with whom you get along well and then finding out that they believe in the death penalty, or live in a yurt. “Throughout all of this . . . you’ve never, ever said.”
“Well, I do think about him. All the time. I regret it. All the time. But I’m—I’m being charged. So my focus is . . . in defense of myself.”
I don’t add that I didn’t want to worry him, that I didn’t want to moan all the time or make our entire life together about my trial. My crime. I should add it, but I don’t. He should know, I find myself thinking. Doesn’t he know me to be good? Why is he presuming my silence is to do with a lack of remorse and not the land mine that’s been detonated in the middle of my life?
“You had so much going for you, Jo,” he says, sounding sad, mournful. His voice is full of broken glass, and he’s not looking at me. His wedding bracelet slides down his arm. The red hairs have tangled around it, and they catch the hall light, shining a strawberry blond.
“I didn’t have anything going for me,” I say. “A third-class degree. No career. All I had was you.”
He doesn’t dispute the past tense.
“You need to bloody well get over that,” he says. “So what if you got a third? You were twenty-one. Plenty of people stuff up their life at twenty-one. Look at my young people.”
I swallow. I can still remember the moment when I found out my grade. There seemed to me to be an ocean of difference between a 2:2 and a third. A whole universe. Nobody got thirds. Plenty of people got 2:2s. A third was a joke. The worst possible mark other than a fail. I went out, told Wilf and my parents the next day, when my hair smelled of smoke and my breath of wine. None of them said the kind thing, that it was still a degree, and a degree from Oxford. That I still mattered to them.
Nobody, that is, until Reuben.
“I know,” I say quietly. He’s said this to me a hundred times before. “But it was all that . . . potential.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, waving the arm with the bracelet again. “Your school plays and your A-stars and your prizes for the best math score.”
“Yeah, those,” I say, moving backward, hurt by his words, his dismissive tone. As though my achievements are nothing at all. And, anyway, aren’t they? They’re relics. They could be uncovered by archeologists, they’re so irrelevant. Literally covered in dust in my parents’ attic: the A-level results transcript I was so proud of, the reams of naturally gifted written on my school reports. They all turned to nothing. They didn’t materialize, like hundreds of seeds that failed to sprout, to grow.
“What about the Jo of now?” he says. “The one who can finish any crossword, even the cryptic one, before anyone else in the room? The one who remembers verbatim every single conversation she has?”
As he lists my attributes, I dismiss them in my mind, like pop-ups that need to be closed. Crosswords aren’t a talent. Wouldn’t it be better if I had one interest? I’m just a hobbyist. I’m a hobbyist at life. And as for my memory, a good memory isn’t intellect. It’s innate, like having a big nose or long eyelashes.
I think about what I actually do enjoy.
I love waking up on a Saturday morning when I have nothing—at all—to do, and making a coffee with whole milk and brown sugar, and taking it back to bed. I liked, at university, the feeling of leaving a lecture or seminar as it was just getting dark, and I would skip the library and go home and cook and have a bath and do nothing. I liked the first change of song as I stood in Oxford’s dingy clubs, hearing the new beat and feeling like the night could go on forever. I liked the first smell of the cut grass during school days because it signaled that summer was coming. I like the first sip of a white-wine spritzer in early May. I like the feeling of leaving a shop with a posh bag full of lovely shopping, the string handle cutting into my hand.
I grimace now, but what do all these things have in common? It’s that they are nothing. I like doing nothing. I am a loser. A woman without a Thing by which to define herself. A woman who, when faced with a dissertation due in at nine o’clock the next morning, simply turned off her computer at midnight, had ten hours’ sleep, and conceded a fail. And now, here I am, my trial upon us—mere weeks away—and I’m doing the same thing. Avoiding. Ignoring. Wishing it wasn’t happening.
“Or the way you add up everything as we go around Sainsbury’s. No calculator needed. Or the way you understand everybody’s motivation, just like that. You’ve got them worked out in a sentence because of their shoes or their facial expression. You could do anything.”
His words lift me, as though I am rising steadily in a hot-air balloon. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I still can do anything. Maybe this crime wasn’t inevitable because I’m a shitty, flawed person. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“But you chose to do this, instead,” he says, cutting the strings of my balloon.
It’s not the word I notice—chose—though I note it. No. It’s this casual gesture he makes. He gestures at me, palm up, like a parent might to a child’s messy room, or an angry road user might to another driver. He thinks it is something I have done rather than something that happened to me. T
o him, I am not unlucky.
I don’t say anything more. It’s better not to. To distract, to avoid, to suppress. I don’t want to know what he thinks. Not really.
He looks as though he’s going to speak again. I can tell only because of how well I know him. He stops, opens his mouth, extends a hand to me. He has something to tell me.
His eyes meet mine.
But then he pauses, and it’s as though I’m watching him rewind. He turns away from me. Whatever it was, he’s kept it inside.
27
CONCEAL
Reuben persuades me out on the first day of spring. That’s the line he used. The first day of spring. “It’s good to go out and enjoy ourselves,” he added, looking self-conscious as he peeled a potato. He passed one to me to do, but I declined; my hand still doesn’t work.
I haven’t been back to the library’s offices at night. I’ve decided to wait it out. It’s too dangerous. I can’t break in again. It was illegal, what I did. I’m permitted into the library by day, as an employee. But stealing keys and going in at night—even though it’s the same building, the one I’m paid to go in—is a crime. No. I can’t do it again. The wavering is endless. My dithering over the right things to do. But I have to wait it out.
We go to a pub one street across from ours, called the Lemon Grove. The walk there is paved with nostalgia from when we first moved into our Hammersmith flat, not long after we married, and went through a phase of going out every evening for a nightcap. We’d take cards and play Newmarket. The barman would shush us, sometimes, when we laughed too loudly and too long.
The pub is old, with a TV in the corner. It’s very Reuben. The opposite to the kind of place Wilf would take me—the wine bars with modern art and stags mounted on the walls. This is simple: warm and cozy, lit with candles in the windows. The windows overlook a courtyard, not the street, and so I can’t look for the police. The relief is immediate. Nobody can see me in here. Lawson can’t see me in here.
The Choice Page 20
