Perfect Ten

by Jacqueline Ward

  ‘You all right, love?’

  I nod.

  ‘Yeah. Just had a nasty shock.’

  ‘Oh. Police not very tactful, are they? Don’t spare no feelings.’

  We turn into the street before my house and I get out there.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  I rush into the house and switch on my laptop. Emma. I have to find out about Emma. Find out what game Jack is playing. I’ve slipped up a little here, taken my eye off the ball. All this with Katy has mellowed me a little. Made me think I was on the winning straight.

  But he’s gone a step further. He’s framed me. Found a way to make it look like I’ve gone much, much too far. Harmed Emma Parsons. I push the flash drive home and open the PDFs right at the end. The first one is a picture of a blonde girl, young, wearing a fur coat. Then there are three more of Jack and her, taken in a booth. Both laughing. They look really happy. There are more but I need to find out about Emma.

  I can hardly wait to see if Emma Parson’s has a Facebook profile. I search Facebook for her but all the Emma Parsons are not her. So I look at Jack’s profile and go straight to his friends list. He knows lots of Emmas, so I type ‘Parsons’. Nothing. I type Emma and scroll down the list of women called Emma. I don’t have to scroll very far until I find her. Emma Atkinson. He fucking married her. He married her.

  I kind of know what she looks like from the pictures, but when her profile picture appears it looks familiar. I wonder who it reminds me of and then I realise. Me. She looks just like me. Long blonde hair. Tall and slim. She even dresses like me. Or like I did. Jeans and plain T-shirts. Short jackets.

  I look at her biography. I don’t believe it. She’s a psychologist. She trained at the same university as me. The one I work at. She’s a couple of years younger than me, but you’d never know it. I’m just beginning to think she’s a carbon fucking copy of me.

  I flick back through her photos and there are the standard ones of Jack and her. Holding hands. Drinking champagne. On holiday. In our bedroom. It still hurts me. He took all of them there. It must have been the danger of getting caught. I suddenly realise that I’m desensitised. I’m so used to it now that I’m searching for something worse than my grandma’s engagement ring. A baby. My wedding dress. How much worse could it get?

  There are a series of photographs at a rally. Jack with his arms around Emma’s waist. Her with a placard that I can’t read. These are the pictures in the journal. I push the flash drive into the laptop and scroll through the journal. Emma. Nine out of ten. Lies. He told Katy she was a ten. I magnify the second picture and read the placard.

  I LOVE FEMINISM.

  What is it about some women?

  I check again and Emma Parsons did the same training course as me. She trained as a research psychologist. Instead of working at a university, she set up on her own as a coach. So I know that she would have had the same grounding in feminism as me.

  She would have learned all about the way women are marginalised and seduced by misogyny. She would have studied Simone de Beauvoir and understood that feminism means choice. At first she would have been puzzled by that – how could that be right? How could you choose anything?

  Then she would have realised that you can’t. That the choice only applies to things outside the trap of patriarchy. I always used to think of it in terms of high heels. I could be independent, have my own income, but if I spend it on high heels to look good for men, then that’s not feminist choice. It’s conformity.

  These days I prefer to think of it in terms of husbands. Other people’s husbands. If you’re a feminist and you tell everybody and go to rallies, then sleep with someone else’s husband, then that’s not choice. It’s not feminism. It’s fucking someone else’s husband.

  So in many ways this is the worst of all. She’s one of us. Someone who is trained. The other women probably didn’t realise they were being used. They were just his puppets. But Emma is a real traitor. I Google her and, sure enough, she’s written papers on feminism. She’s lectured on it. She has deep knowledge about the camaraderie of feminism and even rallies other women to the cause, when all the time she’s poaching their husbands.

  I look at the pictures again. She’s got an ‘I love feminism’ T-shirt on. When I look more closely, so does Jack. So fucking false. He wound himself around the lives of the women he had affairs with, took them to the places they were interested in. All so he could get them into bed.

  This is beyond the pale and my blood is boiling. I Google Emma again but I can’t find any of her other social networking, any clues to where she is. She’ll be wary, in any case, warned by everyone. No doubt DS Percy would have called her and told her that whoever was posting on Facebook would be after her next. I finally see that she is working in Central Manchester. Her coaching practice takes place in a small office in the trendy Northern Quarter and there’s a picture of her recently, thinner and blonder than before.

  I start to make an appointment for tomorrow morning from a fake email address but then I remember that she’s missing and that I’m not chasing his women any more. I see that she parks in the multi-storey. She’s got a convertible and it’s decorated with eyelashes on the headlamps and lipstick on the bumper.

  I scroll through the rest of the photographs. Jack and Emma in our bedroom. Jack and Emma in her bedroom. At the zoo. With some of our friends. Of course. They all fucking knew really, didn’t they? I was a fool. We could have been out to dinner or at a barbeque with them the week after this. If anyone was in any doubt they certainly aren’t now.

  Part of the disadvantage I have is that I can’t even imagine what is going on with DS Percy. She appears to believe me, but then she starts to check up on me. She would have been round to see Jack now. Has he convinced her I’m insane just like he convinced everyone else? Have he and Emma planned this, to get rid of me once and for all – Emma reappearing and telling them that Caroline kidnapped her? Lorraine will have got in touch with all those women, asked them if they had any contact with me.

  I know Jack. He’ll have tried to win her round. He’ll have talked about me like I was mentally ill, tried to distract her from the journal. Anything to discredit me and to make himself look good. I don’t see any way that he could explain it away. And Lorraine is so strait-laced that she would be aghast at the contents.

  I scroll and scroll, there are a lot of pictures of Jack and Emma. They were stuck on top of each other in the journal and I remember I had to separate them carefully before scanning them. Some of them are graphic and some of them are blurred. I’m used to it now, the sight of him with someone else. It used to be my worst nightmare; I couldn’t imagine what I would do if I ever caught him.

  Tap, tap, tap through the pictures and then stop. There she is, in my wedding dress. Except it’s not my wedding dress. It’s a different wedding dress and she’s in a beautifully dressed room with a bouquet of daisies. Jack’s there too with two people I don’t know. I don’t recognise the room or the outside where someone has taken a photo of a photographer taking a photograph of the wedding party.

  The wedding party. It’s just dawning on me. The fucking wedding party. This is his wedding to Emma. I study the photographs and it’s difficult to judge if we were still together then. We definitely were earlier in this relationship. Even so, it took a year for the divorce to come through and, according to the pictures, they met in early spring and this was the summer.

  The next pictures in the series are Jack at the airport with Emma. A Just Married sticker is plastered on her case. That would have been around the time you left to work abroad. I go back to Facebook and scroll down Emma Atkinson’s profile. She’s posted a life event. Married. 21 August.

  I rush upstairs and get the decree absolute out of my document case. Dated 30 September the same year. He married her while we were still married. This is it. This is really it. Proof.

  This is what I’ve been waiting for. Legal proof that he thinks he is above the law. He really
is a psychopath. And I’m not. There is so much I can do with this, but first I need to find Emma. She’s just a pawn in Jack’s little game, potentially in danger, and I need to find her.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  I don’t know where to start. There are two possibilities: that Jack and Emma are trying to blame this on me or that he has done something to her. Either way, I’m holding all the cards now. I pick up my mobile and find his number. I’m suddenly scared and hot. Even speaking to him will be difficult.

  And what I have to tell him is the ultimate revenge, but also painful. He cared so little about me that he just went ahead and married someone else before we were even finally divorced. But it will save Emma, stop him doing whatever he’s doing to her. I have butterflies in my tummy and I wait a while, scanning the kitchen for alcohol. Then the phone suddenly rings in my hand and scares me to death.

  It’s an unknown number and I ready myself for someone flogging house insurance or asking me if I’ve had an accident in the last two years. Instead, it’s Emma.

  ‘Caroline, it’s Emma. Emma Atkinson.’

  ‘Where are you, Emma? Only the police—’

  She’s loud and angry.

  ‘Fuck the police. Turn around. I’m in your back garden.’

  She is. I see the glow of her mobile phone against the copper birch leaves and her pale face, solemn. Rover is barking loudly and trying to dig through the fence but she doesn’t notice. She is sitting beside the hole and the contents are spread around her. Oh my God. How the fuck has she found out about that? Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I open the back door and go outside and she stands up. She’s holding the credit cards, fanned out in her hand. Beside her is a large pile of photographs, the top one shows me in a hotel with a random male. I move towards her.

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  She steps back.

  ‘Oh yes, you do fucking understand. I’m your worst nightmare, Caroline. I’ve put up with this, the fucking photographs on Facebook, the Twitter hashtags, #teamfuckingCaro. But this is going too far now.’

  I sit down on the grass.

  ‘Yeah. Well. At least you know what he’s like now.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘He’s not, though. Not to me.’

  I can’t help but laugh. Poor deluded Emma.

  ‘Really? You’re special, are you? Only it looks like his behaviour is really getting to you.’

  She is fuming.

  ‘No. It’s your behaviour that’s getting to me. You’re the fucking crazy ex. You posted the pictures. You stirred all this up. Now you’re going to seal my fate.’

  Seal her fate? What the fuck does she mean? I haven’t done anything to Emma.

  ‘Oh, right. Is this something else Jack has made up about me? What I’m going to do? How mad I am?’

  ‘No. The way this is going, he’s going to get custody of your children.’ She steps closer to me now and I can see her properly. She’s my double. That’s why she looks so familiar. ‘The thing is, Caroline, I don’t want your brats. I want Jack. I want to move away from his crazy fucking mother and your kids. We’ve got an apartment, beautiful it is, but it’s not big enough for your kids as well.’ Of course. Villa Place. ‘I want us to have a life and you’re stopping us by … all this. He was planning to get legal custody of them.’

  It sinks in through the hurt and the pain very slowly. Pushing through the shell that’s formed around me over the past year, thick and thorny. We stare at each other and, for once, I’m at a loss for words. She doesn’t want Charlie and Laura. Emma’s not on a mission to discredit me. She’s not the enemy. I am. I’m her enemy. She’s on her own mission on an entirely separate trajectory. She’s got a mad look in her eye that I recognise. I used to have it 100 per cent of the time when I was chasing Jack’s exes around. Emma jumps up dramatically.

  ‘So, unless you’ve got a better idea, I’m going to have to tell the police about all this.’ She points at the contents of the hole and the photographs. ‘That’s where I’ve been. I had to get the photos out of Allan’s flat when he was arrested. Private investigator. Got too greedy, he did. Obviously I couldn’t tell Jack, so he reported it because he thought it was your doing. So it conveniently looked like I was missing. But this has to stop.’

  I can’t believe it. It was her, not Jack. It was her who nearly got me arrested.

  ‘So you’ve had me fucking followed?’

  ‘Yeah, I was building a case. I was going to blackmail you with it. Make you leave Jack alone. Make you take the kids back. Then all this happened with the journal and—’

  I intervene.

  ‘So you don’t mind about the contents of the journal? That he’s marked everyone out of ten? Taken pictures? Doesn’t that disturb you a bit? You know, as a feminist?’

  I can’t resist. The sarcastic note in my voice pisses her off even more.

  ‘He’s explained it all. It was just a photography project. Art. Anyway, that’s rich coming from you. You’ve systematically hunted down Jack’s exes and done … stuff.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m just defending myself. Looking after what’s mine. Most of them even apologised one way or another. Come on, Emma, you must have heard of retribution? That was my reason. But it’s over now because I’ve realised that actually it wasn’t their fault. It was his. He did it. And it wasn’t fucking art. That’s just another lie. What about you?’

  She stares at me.

  ‘You have to wade through the mud to find the gold.’

  I laugh loudly.

  ‘Jesus Christ. You don’t believe that, really, do you?’

  But she does. Like me, she’s conditioned. Here we are, two educated women, both experts in the nuances of the human condition, standing in a muddy back garden arguing over a man.

  ‘Look, I just want to be with my husband.’

  It’s like an echo from the depths of my marriage. I just want to be with my husband. As if that excuses everything.

  ‘So what’s that got to do with me? Be my guest. I don’t want him. Please, take him.’

  ‘Well, I want you to take those pictures down. It’s the past.’ I knew it. She is upset about them. ‘And I want the children to live with you. I encouraged Laura to go to her teacher. She cried for you every night. I told her to ask to see you.’ My temper flares at her manipulation of my daughter and frankly I can’t see how Jack will agree to this, but I hear her out. ‘So if you agree to this and promise to stop fucking with my life, I won’t tell the police about what you’ve done.’

  She thinks. There’s more.

  ‘Oh yes. That fucking simpering Katy. Obviously Jack’s going to want to see his kids at some point, so I want it all coordinated so it’s all on one day every two weeks or so.’

  She’s staring straight at me expectantly.

  ‘So how do you suggest I get the kids? You know exactly what’s happened. You know how he’s painted me. It’s not that easy.’

  She smiles.

  ‘Not my problem. You’ll find a way. But you have to tell me now. You have to tell me now.’ She’s kicking the stolen stuff into the hole and she gets her phone out. She throws the photographs into the hole, reaches into her pocket and brings out a Zippo lighter. ‘Come on, Caroline. My finger’s on the last nine.’

  She flicks the lighter and I see her phone light up with three nines. She’s fucking crazy. But haven’t I been here with Frances? Pam? Christine Dearden? What choice have I got? If I agree and she burns the photos she’s got less evidence, but I’m not naïve enough to think she hasn’t got digital copies. She appears to be as capable as I am, if not more. If I don’t find a way to get the kids back, I’m in real trouble. What fucking choice have I got?

  ‘OK. We’ve got the family review on Tuesday; I’ll do it. I’ll take down the Facebook accounts but I can’t do anything about the Twitter or anything people have shared. Yeah?’

  She stares at me. Her blonde hair is wild and snakes down her shoulders,
her eyes are blazing.

  ‘You loved him once. You know why I’m doing this.’

  I nod. Yes I do. But I also know how it ends up with men like Jack. It’s not about the woman they are with, it’s about them. Nothing anyone else can do will change them. There are certain things in life that you can’t tell someone. They have to experience it. One of them is that your children are capable of everything you are – a lesson Missy has yet to acknowledge. Another is that you can’t change someone. They have to acknowledge that they need to change, be willing to change and do the work themselves. Anything else is manipulation and facilitating. Emma takes her finger off the nine button and drops the lighter into the hole.

  The flames shoot high and there is a small explosion – probably the Chanel No 5. She jumps away and closer to me and I can see she’s crying. I go to hug her, but she pushes me away.

  ‘Fuck off. Just fuck off.’

  God, I know what place she is in. Untouchable. Brittle. Isolated. I also know that there’s not much I can do at this point to help her. She’ll go back to him and try to please him and she will until he finds someone different. The hole burns itself out and I go back into the house. Emma watches me, her face a little bit dirty from the smoke.

  ‘I’ll let you out the front.’

  She follows me through the house, staring at the boxes. This is how you’ll end up, I want to tell her, but I don’t waste my breath. She marches to the front door, still stroppy.

  ‘If you don’t get those kids away from me, I’ll go to the police. I’ve got photos of you going into that woman’s shop in Uppermill. Lots of you leathered in Premier Inns with various blokes. And I’ll post them on the internet and the university intranet and see how you like it.’