She wants to flee, but what if it’s him, dying? An olive caught in the throat. An allergy he hasn’t told her about (not that, she’d know). And in the end, she has to check. Of course she does.
She pads quietly around the wood-burning fireplace that part divides the room. Another noise – this time male and urgent. And, horrified, Becky realizes that she is in proximity to sex.
There is movement. On the floor, on the rug that softens the sofa grouping, their bodies mostly hidden by the furniture. Becky cranes her neck a little. She sees a woman’s head, and Matthew on top of her, and the woman is not his wife, cannot be unless Antonia has gone blonde. She notices a tall-heeled foot, black shoe with a red sole, sliding off the rug, onto the flagstone, like a calf’s leg slipping outward as it takes a first step.
The woman says something to the man. Her arm goes up – pushing him or reaching for him? He catches her by the wrist and moves that arm back onto the rug – and his breathing, his grunting, deepens. The woman’s face contorts. Perhaps close to orgasm. Perhaps uncomfortable.
The woman turns her head and looks straight at Becky. And opens her mouth, as if about to speak – or call out – or warn him – or—
Chapter 2
That night in bed, restless under her covers, Becky goes from hot to cold, aggravated by the duvet’s shortness, its longness and finally its mere existence. Window up, window down, she cannot seem to find a simple point of balance between sweating and shivering. She lies on her front, her back, curled up, stretched out, grasping and un-grasping her wrist.
Matthew Kingsman. Oxford man. Family man. Film man. There is a waterlogged feeling in her. Perhaps it is disappointment, though that would be irrational. Matthew is a free agent in a free country. He can do as he pleases, and it is no business of hers.
She tells herself she has been naïve: that people do this all the time. Flings, dalliances, affairs, trust-bending, trust-breaking. There are of course open marriages whose openness isn’t advertised to one and all. People have sex with people they shouldn’t, all the time, particularly in her industry where everyone is looking at themselves, and if not at themselves then at each other, in the mirror or through a camera or on screen. Bodies attractive enough to sell tickets win easy lays, quick fucks, promotions. She gets it. It shouldn’t be news to her. She needs to loosen the fuck up.
Successful people are boundary-benders, boundary-breakers, and maybe it is Becky who should be taking a lesson from this rather than sitting here in judgement. She has so much to learn. She aches under the weight of it, aches at how childish she still is.
All these thoughts ricochet off the sides of her, like a ball in a pinball machine.
She considers for the hundredth time how, with the kitchen lights behind her, she must only have been a silhouette. How she turned and ran so quickly and quietly that perhaps if they were drunk she’ll be remembered as something that couldn’t have happened. A shadow in the corner of the eye, with nothing there on second glance. She was never there. If he asked – and why would he ever ask? – she would look blankly back and deny everything.
It is none of her business how two people have sex. Some people like to dress up. Some people play rough, hold each other down and tie each other up by the wrists, silence and hurt each other. She knows all that. She’s not completely naïve.
At five in the morning, and with just two hours left before it’s time to wake Maisie for school, Becky admits defeat and leaves her bed, padding quietly to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Maisie will sleep through the kettle whistle, through the smell of coffee, through all of it. Maisie rarely dreams. She sleeps like a child whose days are straightforward, which is precisely how Becky has laboured to arrange them.
Becky breathes in her home and the smell of washing powder and the ghost of last night’s chilli and tries to calm the thud-crack in her heart. She looks around her small kitchen and at all the boundaries that surround her in her old East London maisonette; at the low ceilings and narrow rooms, at the double-glazed, triple-locked door that leads out onto a paved patio. At the window grills that slide across and meet in the middle. At the moose-headed coat hook in the hallway that holds her black lycra running top and the pair of creased and dusty wide-legged trousers she’d once worn for weekly self-defence classes at the local gym.
At first, what she learnt there made her feel safer than any triple-locked door. She enjoyed making a fist in a boxing glove so her wrists didn’t snap and her tendons didn’t bruise, and how to deliver a punch with speed and precision. She had felt reassured and emboldened by the tight wrap of the gloves around her wrists and how they made her arms feel bionic, almost not her own. She had enjoyed the feeling of strength return to her body.
But she abandoned the lessons when she began using her new-found skills in unconstructive ways. There wasn’t a local gym class on earth that would teach her the skills she needed to defend her against herself.
Becky tries not to panic about how much she has to do, how she will manage a day’s work, a flight to Cannes and a couple more hours’ peppiness for all those new people who will need impressing. All on no sleep whatsoever? Back in her bedroom she lightly folds a dress and rolls up a cotton shirt and two T-shirts. Fills her washbag. Pulls out pants and socks and assembles it all in a pleasing jigsaw inside her carry-on suitcase: two carbon-scented copies of the Medea script at its base.
She makes notes on her Cannes meetings, banishing thoughts of that silken hair spilling out onto the kitchen floor, coming up with six ways to pitch her idea to six different kinds of people.
But she knows what she really wants to do and she knows that it is destructive so she fights it, at first holding her own hand lightly, reassuringly, like a friend. And then when the feeling does not subside, gripping her hand tightly, before grasping at the thin skin and raised veins of her own wrist, holding it tight, as if pulling herself back from a fight. She has agreed, in therapy, that standing up to this instinct is a good thing. Succeeding means she has taken her power back, or something like that; but without sleep all those rules are dissolving at their margins, her desires pushing away old decisions.
Surely if she just does more, the instinct will leave? She clears the washing basket. Cleans surfaces that already gleam. Lays out an array of jams and breakfast cereals despite the fact she never eats breakfast and her daughter’s favourites are firmly established and unflinching.
She means to make a cup of tea next, but somehow before the kettle boils she has opened Scott’s Twitter page and she is already on her way to losing the fight.
Becky has two Twitter accounts: one that is her. And one that isn’t.
The one that isn’t Becky is Melanie. Melanie has a line drawing of a face in the photo caption, all thick and twisty like the pen hasn’t been taken off the page. ‘Melanie Hasn’t Tweeted Yet’ but Melanie follows a few people – thirty-seven corporate accounts like BBC News, Sky News, Popbitch, and another dozen or so famous people, including a TV presenter who crossed the Gobi Desert on foot and whose dinner-party speciality is puffer fish. Then there are forty or so ‘ordinary people’, people who maybe said something funny once or do something unusual or are vocally for or against some issue or other. And she doesn’t check on anything they have to say, because all of them – the corporations, the celebrities, the nobodies – are padding to disguise the fact that Melanie is following Scott.
She knows it’s overkill, but Becky dreads the slip of a fingertip, an accidental ‘like’ or retweet of a Scott comment, anything that might tip him off that Becky Shawcross is monitoring him. Safer not to look directly at him.
Scott has changed his main picture again.
Now Scott is in fancy dress, dressed as Elvis in a maroon button-down shirt, the collar of a leather jacket pulled high around his neck and his hair styled like a whip of black treacle.
It’s not a picture she has seen before.
Perhaps he has been to a party.
She logs into Facebook
, via another fake profile account. He friended her without asking questions. He already had 762 friends. Why not welcome another one? Somebody has tagged him at this party. Elvis lives! A grinning friend of his has slung an arm around Scott’s neck. Scott is pouting for the camera in aviators. Not for the first time, he has chosen a costume that allows him to wear sunglasses. He likes to hide his eyes, those giveaway windows to the soul.
She scrolls back through his timeline. She’s seen it all before, a thousand times. His whole life is in her head, or at least those parts that she can get at from the safety of her own flat.
Last year Scott purchased a large indoor fish tank. His colleagues appreciated the cupcakes he bought them one afternoon in Soho. He celebrated the birthday of his oldest house plant and 152 people put hearts by it.
Recently drank espresso Martinis with an old friend who’d flown over from Australia. You’d think he was Australian, with a name like Scott, but he’s English. Like Becky, he was brought up in Hounslow, where the roof tiles vibrate under the flight paths.
And there’s one picture of him that kills her every time now. Taken a year or so ago, it’s like he’s staring right back at her, without the usual sunglasses hiding his eyes, without a care in the world. Without remorse. You don’t get that icy-blue finish to the eyes without going into a shop and buying coloured contact lenses, without swaggering in there, your veins running cold with vanity. In the picture, he’s got an expensive haircut with bits of white blond at the ends. Becky reckons the colour is officially ‘ash blond’. Successful, good-looking, like a boy band member, his hair dipped in ash dye – the ashes of other people. Not a crack in that gorgeous fucking life of his.
She surrenders to it, the scanning and watching distracts her from her twitching hands, from thoughts of the kitchen floor. She’ll read him until Maisie stirs, she knows that now, so she scrolls to champagne glasses intertwined and fizzing. She surfs his flat, job, and the people who love him best (a sister in Belgium, some nieces and nephews). No sign of a significant other; that’s something, at least.
How easily he lives.
But she is breathing quickly now, the energy inside whipping itself into a hot storm with nowhere to go because it’s not enough to see him live his life. It never is. And yet, she has a daughter who relies on her. Everything she wants must be measured against that.
Enough, she tells herself. And so she dresses in jogging bottoms and threads the laces of her running shoes with trembling hands and closes the door behind her with a double then a triple lock. Silently, so as not to wake Maisie, a crackle of worry across her chest about leaving her, but knowing that there are two people to look after. Another edict from another therapist. Self-care. Making time for her.
Becky takes three quick steps, ordering everything inside herself to be quiet, and soon enough she has slipped into a good, quick pace and is running through the streets, heels slamming hard on concrete, landing so as to feel those shockwaves snake up sharp through fibula and tibia. And then, when her chest and muscles ache, she adjusts her gait to save her shin-splints and instead let lungs and thighs scream.
She runs down an alley – she’d never dream of taking it at night and even now, with just the weak morning daylight, she holds her breath in her chest and her keys in her hand like a dagger. Once she’s out the other end, she races for the park where round and round and round she will go, pushing herself faster on each lap.
She lets herself have one lap – only one – where she lets Scott fuck her before she cuts his throat.
Then she is so full of shame. It drums in her ears and leaks out of her tear ducts and flecks her mouth with spittle.
She stops running. Finds a tree. Stands with her back to the rough-edged bark and now she cannot stop what she does next. She curls her hand into a fighter’s fist, making sure her thumb stays on the outside of her second and third knuckles, exactly as she was taught. Then, at the thought of Scott’s flashing smile and icy eyes, at the thought of that woman’s hair shining so bright and gold, her arm stretched so long and thin across the rug, her wrist held, she pummels her thigh. Softly at first, like a drum. And soon enough she is thumping her leg, much harder this time, and imagining all her thoughts, all her feelings, being knocked out of her with every beat, like an old-fashioned washer woman pummelling the dirt out of fabric. Nice and clean, washed away and forgotten.
Soon her leg hurts so much she cannot thump it any more. Underneath her jogging bottoms she knows it will be pink where the flesh has been hammered, and that there will be a yellowish tea-wash stain behind that and that soon the pink patch will go purple and black before it too goes yellow tea-wash. She hammers and punches on the same spot because she is trying to stop something but it is a race she is losing and however much she tries to hold it back, she can’t: her mind ribbons out like it is being released into the wind, sharp claws at each ribbon’s end, thoughts and memories all searching for something, a clue and jigsaw piece, something to make her whole again.
Chapter 3
Hounslow, London
13 September 2003
Becky loves Saturdays. No school all day, and then another day just like it to collapse into after this one’s spent.
Today her parents have gone out to the garden centre and left her in peace to enjoy the high-pitched presenters of Saturday morning television as they leap about in front of butter-yellow and sugar-pink backdrops. When Becky is old enough to do this kind of thing, when it is her turn to interview people, it will be in her contract that she gets to choose the colour of the sofa – hot pink to offset her lime-green leggings, thank you! She will ideally graduate quickly from children’s television into a kind of late teatime, primetime Saturday slot just after the family game shows. And as a presenter she will have a habit of asking tough and yet elegantly emotional questions like, ‘But in the last analysis, how does that actually make you feel?’ Perhaps while reaching out a warm hand in genuine concern. It will sort of be her thing, so that after a while her guests expect it and people will talk about how she was the refreshing opposite of all the old men who do their chat shows.
Becky has a box full of diagrams of the set she will inhabit, drawing each one like a bedroom with four walls. It doesn’t occur to her that you need to put the cameras somewhere, so one wall has to be imaginary. She sees no trickery, no special effects. Just a bright, bubblegum reality that is kind enough to welcome her in, whenever she turns on the television.
Charred burgers and relish for lunch today, the classic Saturday meal in the Shawcross household, complete with Dad complaining about broken tongs and Mum saying he should bloody well do something about it then.
Becky goes to the local pool. In the changing room she watches other women’s bodies as they get in or out of their costumes. As she walks to the water, she is a catwalk model with all eyes on her. When she dives down, she is a dolphin or a jet-ski or a shark. When she returns home later that afternoon the house smells of hot dogs and frying onions: the conciliatory dish her mum offers her dad after a hard day’s arguing.
She calls out from the hallway. ‘It stinks in this house. Will someone please open the window? All my clothes are going to smell of gross oil and onions.’ Then she runs up the steps to her bedroom, two at a time, in a bid to rescue her party outfit.
Downstairs her mum begins a fresh diatribe on her favourite subject, which is ‘being blamed for bloody everything in this house’.
Becky stands at the mirror of her wardrobe in her underwear, wanting to look more sophisticated than she does in these baggy pink cotton knickers bought in bulk by her mum every Christmas. She needs to investigate alternative options. She hates the idea of a G-string, the notion that somehow you are a block of cheddar perpetually on the verge of being halved by a cheese wire. And then there’s the sheer hassle she’d get if she actually bought something nice (comfortable cut, bold-coloured lace) and her mother found them in the washing basket. The torrent of questions that would follow! Who was she th
inking of impressing with a pair like that? Who the bloody hell did she think she was? Which boy exactly had she impressed so far? And the crowning glory: what precautions was she taking, and did she know that even condoms can’t prevent pubic lice from spreading?
Becky lays her outfit out on the bed and her make-up on her side table, so that everything is ready. She loves decorating herself: all that nipping and tucking and flaring and wedging, like taking a sharpened pencil and rubber to your outline and adjusting it accordingly.
She holds up a fluorescent-pink vest top with a spaghetti strap which, because it was bought at a flea market lacking a changing room, is too big and needs adjusting so the lace trim of her bra is not on display. She wreathes strings of beads and trails fake pearls about her neck until she is satisfied with how good the concentric circles look against a plain pink background. Then she takes her jeans – tight, low-slung, the fashion – and pours herself into them, ramming the zip closed twice before it stays put.
The next bit takes the longest. She outlines and flicks and smudges and colours in cheeks and eyes until she looks a picture: the best, most sophisticated version of herself, she thinks.
Just before she leaves, she stands a few feet away from the threshold of the kitchen rubbing moisturizer into arms that are dry and chlorinated from the pool, watching as her mum lays out a fresh cloth on the table.
Her dad turns to her and laughs, then says, ‘You look like you’ve fallen in the dressing-up box.’
Becky wants to say, Don’t be a dick, but she won’t risk being sent to her room and having her plans cancelled. Instead she settles for a sarcastic smile and a mumbled, ‘You’re not exactly setting Milan on fire with those Union Jack socks.’
They’re not the kind of parents who insist on collecting their child from a party at a set time. They don’t suggest it and Becky doesn’t ask them to. That’s one good thing about them. She’ll be home when she’s home.
Blurred Lines: The most timely and gripping psychological thriller of 2020 Page 2
