The Choice

by Gillian McAllister

  “Canary Wharf?” I say. I cannot imagine a place less like Laura.

  “We have grown up,” she says, sitting down heavily on the sofa.

  The sofa that turns into my bed when I stay. When I stayed. I look sadly around the boat. Soon it’ll be sold.

  “The agency . . .” she says.

  I remember she finished her graduate scheme and got a job in advertising. Switched from marketing. From the woman who used to read her tarot cards every night.

  “It’s in the City,” she says. “Jonty’s in at The Times. He knows someone . . .”

  “Right,” I say faintly.

  And suddenly, being in the spring sunshine and visiting my best friend’s boat and being free to grab a cup of coffee on the way and faff about with my Oyster card in the Tube station seems to mean absolutely nothing. I don’t have a job. I have a criminal record for serious assault. I don’t know where the plates are kept in my own house, would have to think twice about what my postcode is.

  “I can’t imagine you in Canary Wharf,” I say, all the while thinking, I have no right to comment at all. I’m like an imposter. I don’t know these people.

  I feel a familiar sort of panic rising. I used to feel it late at night in my cell, when I knew nobody would come for me. And now, here, free, surrounded by people I love, I feel it again. The sun outside seems to fade and the freedom feels like an illusion. What if I . . . what if it happens again? I find myself thinking. What if I reoffend? The statistics are against me. I know it’s irrational—Alan would tell me it’s just the primitive part of my brain, trying to protect me from every eventual outcome—but it feels real, to me.

  “Which agency?” I say, trying to distract myself.

  “In business development,” she says, instead of answering me. “Suits and boots for us. Canary Wharf flat. Then suburbs. Babies.” She lifts her phone up and responds to a text.

  “God,” I say, looking away from her. “Are you still . . .”

  “Painting?” she says.

  Her paintings were always so beautiful. She had such flair. Was a true artist; would go into a painting hole sometimes, for weeks at a time. I left her to it, going for drinks with her when she emerged.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not really,” she says. “It wasn’t . . . I don’t know. It wasn’t making me happy. I was just trying to get somewhere with it. I read something that says you should give up gracefully things not meant for you, and I thought . . . I don’t know. With everything that happened to you,” she says as the kettle starts whistling, “I just thought . . . I should stop messing around. You know? You had two years taken away and I want to just—get going. With life.”

  “Sure,” I say easily, while reeling.

  She picks up her beeping phone again. Her body language is cagey, which makes me look even more closely. Eventually, I stop and just ask her.

  “Who’s the texter?” I say.

  “Tab.”

  “Tab?”

  “Tabitha. She’s one of Jonty’s friends. We met on the boat, last summer.”

  “Your boat party,” I say.

  “Yep. She’s nice. You’d like her. She’s a teacher.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Kent. Commutes in.”

  “A commuter,” I say. “I guess you don’t do many Friday drinks with her.”

  “We do different stuff.”

  “Like what?” I ask, telling myself that it’s okay. It’s been two years. Of course she’s found other friends.

  “We sit in her garden,” she says. “It’s massive. Suburbia’s kind of appealing, actually.”

  “You’re moving to Canary Wharf.”

  “Yeah. We probably will move out, one day. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why everyone does these things. Because they make sense.”

  I scrutinize her face. She still has the same squinty eyes, attractive color in her cheeks requiring no blusher. But inside is different. It must be, for her to say those things. We once sat on the steps on the way down to Gordon’s bar, drinking red wine and looking down into the crammed, candlelit cellar below. “London’s oldest bar,” Laura had said, and we had agreed then never to leave, never to be miserable on the 07:04 to Paddington like everybody else. “Why would I move away from all this?” I had said, gesturing down into the bar and behind us, at the buzz of London on a warm Friday night.

  “Well, I won’t,” I say now.

  Laura shrugs, grabs a storage box, and passes it to Jonty, who disappears off the boat. Her phone goes again, and she taps out a response.

  “We should go out. Together,” I say, gesturing to her phone. “I’d love to meet her.”

  Laura hesitates, just barely, then continues texting. “She doesn’t know you,” she says after a few seconds, still looking down.

  I see, I am thinking. This is why you didn’t visit much. I had thought our friendship was merely on hold, nothing worse. But I see now.

  I swallow hard, not looking at her. It will be natural, Alan told me, for people to have moved on. I look at Laura and try to be compassionate. I couldn’t be a friend to her, not while I was inside. And so she’s found another. Someone else she will text all day long, like she used to do with me, even though I am back. I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun, trying to enjoy the feel of it, of the London air around me. I’m no longer in my own dead suburbia at Bronzefield, and I should appreciate that.

  “What does she teach, anyway?”

  “Tab?”

  “Yes.”

  “Law,” Laura says quietly.

  My head snaps up, and I see it now. Her avoidant gaze. The wrinkled brow. She is embarrassed for me and ashamed of me, all at once.

  I go and sit down in a shadowy corner of the boat, behind a stack of three unmarked boxes, and think. I’m responsible for my friend giving up her art and joining the rat race. I’m responsible for my friend finding a new friend. A replacement. I look up at the wooden ceiling of the boat, smelling the matches and the tea and the wood, and wonder if the effects of my mistake will ever wear off. They might never stop spreading, like a drop of contaminated water that poisons people for miles around.

  * * *

  —

  I deactivated my Facebook account in the run-up to the trial. I didn’t want the press looking at it, going through my photos, my updates. The privacy settings were a quagmire, too confusing to navigate, and so it went. Giving up Facebook would have been a real punishment at one point in my life, but it was just collateral damage at that time.

  I log on again now and reactivate it. Facebook lets me straight away. It seems it lives forever, waiting like a faithful guard dog for you to log back in.

  I’ve not had access for two years and have forgotten how to use it. Either that, or it has changed. My wall has gone, replaced by a strange timeline. I try to locate the things I want to look at. My relationship status. Married to Reuben Oliva, who still looks like a grayed-out ghost. I hide a smile. Some things don’t change.

  I look for Laura’s profile and see she’s changed it from the intermittent photos of her art, her projects, funny, arty, angular shots of her and Jonty, or a zoomed-in photograph of her blunt fringe, to something more benign, more corporate. Just her, standing on her own at—a wedding, perhaps? I dig deeper into the photographs. Yes. It was a friend’s wedding. She’d been terminally single at university, always clinging too tightly to boyfriends, forever having a “life-changing weekend” with a new man who never stuck around. And now here she is on my Facebook newsfeed looking stunning and grown-up, with a jowly, handsome man at her side.

  Facebook is no longer just my friends’ updates. People now seem to like loads of brands, which in turn post witty updates. It’s different to how it was. It’s in one of these updates that I see a pub in Dalston is doing a tarot night. It is exactly up Laura’
s street, and so I tag her, in the way I have seen people starting to do. I can see she’s online—a little green blob next to her name—but she doesn’t reply. After a few minutes, she logs off.

  Just as I’m about to log off and close the laptop, I see my own relationship change. In one blink, it goes from married to Reuben Oliva to married. Confused, I click Reuben’s name. He’s still there. I don’t understand this new Facebook. I will have to ask him later.

  I close the laptop. It’s too much. Like I have missed the middle three series of Lost, or something. Only it’s not Lost. It’s my life.

  I go and find the white T-shirt, taking it out of the washing basket. Already it smells musty and damp, but I can still smell the prison smell on it. I breathe deeply, trying to ignore myself, my thoughts. The realization that—maybe just a little bit—I miss it.

  * * *

  —

  I haven’t told anybody this,” Wilf says, speaking quietly.

  We’re in a Bill’s, off Covent Garden. He’s fiddling with the cap of his beer. We’ve just ordered burgers. Minnie is joining us for afters. Maybe pudding, she texted Wilf. It’ll be strange to meet her, finally.

  “What?” I say.

  The restaurant is bizarre. It’s so loud. So jovial. I was overwhelmed by the menu, that I could order anything I liked whatsoever, and so Wilf helped me choose. My phone has been beeping constantly, with updates from my friends from Bronzefield. Wilf’s eyebrows rise in curiosity until I turn it onto its front.

  “No . . . let me see,” he says.

  I extend my hand toward him, embarrassed, passing him the phone. It’s lit up with about forty messages.

  “Rose, Fi, Yosh, and me,” I say.

  He looks at me. His eyes look bulbous. They always did. I used to call him Goggle-eyes. He’d laugh and call me Jojo.

  He’s still staring at me, and I say, “You want to know what they did, don’t you?”

  His face creases into a smile. “Yes,” he says.

  I show him the group. Fi is talking about recruitment consultants needing paperwork she doesn’t have. Yosh has told her to ask her probation officer. I see Wilf trying to hide his surprise that I’m now part of this world.

  I shrug. “They were nice to me,” I say.

  “I see.”

  “It was a category A, so brace yourself.”

  “I know,” Wilf says. “I had to take my shoes off in case I was carrying anything in for you. So what did they do?”

  “Fi killed her boyfriend. In a road traffic accident. First offense. She was—only just—over the limit. He died, she survived, she got done for dangerous driving. Two years. She’s totally and utterly fucked-up by it.”

  “Two years. Jesus,” Wilf says.

  I’m surprised by his surprise.

  “What use is that?” he says.

  “She’ll never do it again. That’s for sure. Whether or not she went to prison,” I say.

  “How far over the limit?”

  “She’d had two glasses of wine. She’s—she’s small. And she just . . .” I stop before I say it, then say it anyway. “She’s just not a very good driver. That’s the heart of it. It was raining. Bloody rain,” I add with a faint smile, “and she just lost control. So. There you are.”

  “Jesus,” Wilf says again.

  He’s waiting for the others. I can see it. I don’t begrudge him. It’s normal. Everyone does it. They might ask you about your day, what your weekend plans are, but as soon as they know you’ve been in prison, it’s all they want to know. You are reduced to a crime. In my case, a most violent one.

  “Rose hit someone with a glass bottle—another woman. Yosh stole money from HSBC, in her job. Her husband had been made redundant, so she hacked in . . .”

  Wilf blinks. He’s wearing a green T-shirt that makes his eyes look browner. As he reaches to sip his beer the sleeves ride up his biceps and I see a faint tan.

  My phone lights up on the table again. It will get better, Yosh says, then sends a row of kisses. Wilf’s eyes stray to the message, then back to mine again. These are my new friends. They are more like me now—on the inside—than Laura and Jonty. Perhaps they’re more like me than Laura and Jonty ever were.

  We lapse into silence. Our burgers arrive. I think of Imran, as I do often. I wonder what he’s doing. I remember the carers and the memory loss and the personality changes. I shouldn’t be here, sitting in Bill’s, feeling fine, I think. I raise my drink to my lips, but on the way, I say a toast to him. To Imran. I’m sorry.

  It’s a few minutes before Wilf speaks.

  “When I was at uni,” he says, speaking in an even lower tone, blotting the droplets of water that have come off the bottom of his beer bottle with a napkin, “I had a girlfriend.”

  I think back. We overlapped by a year. His final year of Cambridge was my first year at Oxford. I went to see him, five or six times, maybe, at Cambridge. Mum and Dad wanted me to get used to “that sort of environment.” And, besides, I wanted to see. I meet his eyes and feel something. Wistfulness, maybe. Nostalgia. That was right before he changed, that final visit, at Christmastime. After that, he began setting up businesses, selling on products for friends. Tuition. The work—the homework—came easily to him. He ran the London marathon right before his finals began. Started sneering at how passive I was, letting life fall into my lap rather than going out and grasping it.

  But there was never a girlfriend. Not even a sniff of one, a shared smile, a woman slipping out of his room before I got there. I had often wondered why. He’d had one two-week relationship, in the final year of his A-levels, with a geeky woman who liked role-playing games. She was a slightly dowdy woman who had turned out to be sexually adventurous, and he’d made me laugh about it over Christmas dinner.

  “Did you?” I say, thinking hard. Perhaps he did. I didn’t know everything about his life while he was at Cambridge.

  “Yeah. Beth,” he says. His face clouds as he says it, his golden eyebrows drawing together. He pulls his lips inward, creating dimples on either side of his mouth.

  “What happened?”

  He inhales deeply, then blows the air out through his nose, like a smoker. “She died,” he says. “She died,” he says again.

  “What? When?”

  “We’d been together two months. Stupid, really. I’m not anything. Not a widower. There’s no word for it. But it wasn’t . . . a fling. I loved her,” he says.

  “We never knew,” I say softly, wondering if he suffered as I did, with loneliness, with guilt, with that hollow feeling. Different but the same.

  “I was . . . I don’t know. It didn’t feel legitimate, somehow,” he says. “I was there. She had sudden adult death syndrome. Died in her sleep. I woke up spooning her. Spooning her body.” He gulps.

  I nod quickly, my eyes wet. My poor brother, alone at university, barely an adult. No wonder he changed. No wonder he changed so much, so quickly.

  He meets my eyes. “It didn’t feel legitimate,” he says, “to mourn. So I did other stuff. Lists. Felt insanely jealous of you when you met Reuben. That you had all those friends. I was always rubbish with people, and the one person who had loved me was taken.”

  It wasn’t just that we had both suffered. The grief we’d both felt, me causing it and him suffering from it. It was something else, too: It was his comment on legitimacy that had me nodding. For the court proceedings, and for the entire time in prison, I hadn’t felt that Sadiq had been a legitimate threat. That, somehow, it was my fault. And much of it was: my overreaction, my recklessness, my failure to check that it was him. My unreasonable force. But there was something in that illegitimacy. I understood it. Feeling like I wasn’t a real victim, even though, until the point where I overreacted, I had been. Real life was complicated.

  “It was legitimate,” I say simply, reaching to take my brother’s hand acro
ss the table, no prison guards watching.

  He grasps it gratefully. “It didn’t feel it,” he says. “I’d known her for less than sixty days. We met on a night out—she was brand-new to me. I didn’t know of her at all until that night—and then we were an item, but I didn’t tell anyone. It was the end of winter when we first met. Just after you visited.” He gestures out of the plate-glass window, down to Covent Garden below, then sips his beer. “She died after Easter. Do you remember? The one where I didn’t come home?”

  I nod again. “Yeah.”

  We’d wondered what he was doing, the Easter of his second year. He didn’t come home, said he was working in a bar in Cambridge. But then, that summer, he arrived home as usual, as though he’d never left.

  “She died on the Easter Monday.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “That that happened to you.”

  I meet his eyes, and he nods, once.

  “You can buy a sack of organic potatoes from here and take them home,” Wilf says, reaching across and pointing to an item in a side box on the menu.

  “No, thanks,” I say with a faint smile.

  He smiles, too. “I wanted to tell you,” he says, “but instead I was . . . I don’t know. Barbed. With you.”

  “We were jealous of each other.”

  “I was certainly jealous of you,” he says. “You seemed to have it all.”

  “What? You have—you got a first. From Cambridge. And you have four London properties. And your job . . .”

  He looks at me, not saying anything, his round eyes just staring. Suddenly, I can hear myself. What would I rather have? Reuben and the people in my life—or money and a degree? It’s easy. I’ve never looked at it that way before.

  “God,” I say. “I had no idea.”

  “I know. Why would you?” he says. “But it well and truly messed me up. And Minnie is now . . . the first woman, since.”

  “At all?”

  “No,” he says, making a sort of equivocal gesture. “There have been girls. But they never stayed over. I just—I don’t know. I just thought . . . I just thought they’d die, I suppose. How messed up is that? If they stayed with me. It’s like an incorrect thought went into my mind—that I caused it, somehow. And even though I know it’s not true, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t get it out of my head.”