by Ese McGowan
Still watching, Alicia threw her head back as Adam whispered something remarkably funny in her ear, because it must have been as I have never seen anyone laugh like that before and I swear she looked directly at me looking down on them. She was devious, sinister. I mean she is. You’ll see. She pulled her arm around his shoulder and did that buddy hug thing that I knew damn well was nothing of the sort. Then she whispered something in his ear. His profile looked turned to a smile, a secret smile and then he stood up and moved out of my eyeline. I couldn’t see what he did to her but it was something.
I felt ashamed of myself. I shouldn’t have though. They should have felt ashamed but it was me with the feelings, harbouring them, nurturing them, breeding them. Watching them like a voyeur. Accusatorily as if they were doing something wrong. I felt like the outsider. They made me feel that way, right or wrong. But it was wrong. Two people at home together, who had some sort of history, enjoying themselves without me, without even thinking of me. Imagining a life where I didn’t exist. Extreme? Could be. This is how it feels though. This is how I felt. Once my home, my life and now pushed out to an uncomfortable peripheral position. She did that and she knew what she was doing. I think it was watching them out there then, on the deckchairs, that started me thinking how it wasn’t much of a surprise to Adam that she had moved in next door. They were in this together. And there was no together for me at all.
***
The chunky heavy wooden sound of the door closing caught my attention as I splashed my face with water in the bathroom. Somehow I had to gather myself up from the sudden drop into pathetic abandon. Try and be normal with Adam. Try not to come over all jealous and feed her with the medicine she needs to devour him, to suck him away from me. Don’t play into his hands. Don’t give him the excuse. See, I did try ever so hard to resist her manipulation. I wondered where on earth her husband Joel was. I wondered whether this was why he was so engaged in focussing on their interaction when they came over rather than engaging in any mode of talk with me. Was this what he had become used to? Her pursuit of other men? Was this their thing? Were they a bit kinky like that? Did he get his kicks watching his wife pluck another woman’s man from beneath, from under her eyes? Did he know him from before as well?
Maybe.
And why was he so hostile towards me because it was hostility? There existed not one iota of warmth in his voice towards me.
‘Erin?’ Adam was calling me from downstairs.’
‘Yeah, one minute,’ I replied.
‘What you doing up there?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied moving to make my descent down the stairs and over to him. My voice inescapably odd. Unbalanced. Changed. I couldn’t help it. It was like when you are terrified in a dream and unable to scream, mute in the face of animosity, fear.
Downstairs. Casual. Breathing normally now, trying to anyway. ‘You ok? Good day?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, not bad. Chilled. It was good, yeah.’
‘Shall we set a date?’ I didn’t plan on saying that. It came out of nowhere. The surge from a removal of confidence. My soul naked but it exposed his more.
‘A date?’ he screwed up his face. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’
‘Nowhere. I mean, we’ve been engaged for two years now. It’s not a weird question to ask, is it?’
‘What’s the rush?’
‘Rush? We’re hardly rushing Adam and you were in a rush last week.’
‘No. I wasn’t. I never have been. Why are you asking me this now?’
‘Don’t you want to get married anymore?’
‘Yeah, fucking hell.’ He was irritated. He did not want this conversation. ‘Why are you spoiling a good day? Shit I really don’t need this.’
‘Spoiling? Oh, yeah, and how was your day Erin? Anyone care about that?’ I was digging down, piling the soil over my head, burying my character, hiding, interring whatever was left of my happy self.
‘Oh, I’m so not going there with you. I hate it when you get like this and I’m definitely not talking about dates now. Who the hell would get excited about marrying someone when they act out like this?’
‘Why – you rather shack up with that next door?’ And that is exactly what I said. I remember it clearly. I had sudden boldness. His control of me had slipped while losing himself in her.
‘Oh right. Now I see.’
‘You see what?’
‘Don’t be jealous. It’s ugly.’
‘Jealous? Of her? You’ve got to be kidding me. I could never be jealous of that.’
‘That has a name,’ he said. He looked incensed, seriously. He was over the top at the mere mention of her, Alicia.
‘Alicia,’ I replied in a truculent tone.
‘What’s the problem Erin?’
‘The problem is I want to set a date but you’d rather hang out with prissy shit next door and—’
Adam left the room with a door slam before any more words could fall from my lips. Everything had changed. His face. His eyes. Us. And so rapidly. And what I find unfathomable, indecipherable and now unbelievable, is that he and Alicia had already met and nothing of consequence had occurred between them when they had, if that is to be believed. If there was such a magnetism between them then, why did they not entangle themselves together, on the film set, all that time ago? Why not then, why now? Why so brazenly in front of me? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s what she wanted. This is who Alicia Mason is.
And this is who Adam Konstantas is.
***
The whole of the rest of the week slugged along in muted fashion and this is where I get confused. Something really bad happened to me. They did something to me and they’ll tell it like I’m crazy. I’m not the crazy one here. You have to believe me.
Adam’s chilly demeanour towards me, pushed me out into the spare room to sleep and I didn’t even switch on the light all the while staying in there, that’s how aware of them I had become, how fearful of them watching me. I crept around inside anxious Alicia would hear how we had separated in the house and then marvel at it, the success of it all, her masterplan, and I didn’t want her to know her scheme had begun to work. I drove myself insane picturing him texting her while lying solitary under the covers in our bedroom, then imagining her naked body alongside him if he managed to sneak her into our house. And the room was a damn mess, the spare room. Depressingly so. Like our chaotic lives it mirrored the discord, the boxes of crap – the content of which I couldn’t even remember; piles of clothes crying out for moths to lunch on and a mustiness more familiar in a charity shop.
The alarm would fire shots into my brain at 6am each morning, and I can’t tell you precisely how many mornings that happened for. I think maybe two, more, many, jolting me upright from a fake sleep and the other mornings, maybe because of the parties next door, well I don’t remember anything about those mornings. Nothing whatsoever. My sleep was fake because there is no way I managed to sleep. My eyes would close yet a vibrating sensation settled into me, beneath my skin as my stomach twisted and turned. I felt toxic inside, in my flesh. Drugged.
How could Adam and I have plunged from happiness, a controlled happiness, a safe place, to distance in seconds, the very second she reminded him they knew each other? Because all of this was planned. All of this was decided long before I realised what was going on. Long before I could stop anything. Long before even me.
I hadn’t seen a sign of Joel since he had come over for drinks with Alicia. I wondered, in my dilapidated mental state if I had imagined him. And something about him unsettled me. I’ve told you that already and the more I thought about it the more I couldn’t release it from my mind. If he even existed. That’s what I wondered about then. Had I manifested him? I had nightmares about him but when I would wake I recalled nothing about them just that he was featured.
I would press my ear against the wall desperate to hear him. Desperate for a sign that their relationship was successful and harmonious hoping it would allay this
feeling of doom she had introduced me to. I wanted to hear his voice. I needed to. But I never heard a word from him, not a groan, not a huff. Nothing.
Tuesday night arrived and other than a conversation about whether I paid which bill, Adam and I hadn’t spoken to each other. I hadn’t eaten. I was trying to work in the spare room, avoiding the kitchen, not that I was hungry; I was thinning down and my appetite had all but faded. All I consumed at home was wine. He drank beer. We would even sit together in awkward silence driven down only by dull disengaging TV shows and then he’d skulk off to bed, grunt a goodnight and I would fail to respond.
The conversation would happen at some point. The one I didn’t want: Where are we going? This isn’t working.
That’s what I thought was happening but I was wrong.
The next day, at least I think it was, Wednesday maybe, I walked back from the Station, tired, melancholic even. I had become confused. The alarm that morning went off, I dressed and made my way to work, to catch the train but I had no money. No purse in my bag. And then I remembered the virus. That I was working from home. He had told me that. I walked back home. I closed the door and took off my coat. I hung it in the hall next to his and softly touched his jacket with my hand as if our relationship were dead. I was mourning the person who I could hear clattering around in the kitchen. I noticed a tiny note lying on the mat by the door. It was addressed, Erin x, in the tiniest writing possible.
I pushed it around with my foot. I didn’t want to open it, touch it as if it were tarnished with a disease, with the virus that everyone was obsessing about, you know, the one that’s here that was never going to be a problem in this country, one worse than that which had infiltrated my relationship, her.
‘Aren’t you going to open that?’ Adam was leaning against the kitchen door frame, casually eating an apple so at some point he must have been out shopping as we had had no food in the fridge last night. I didn’t understand what was going on. What day it was. How long I had been asleep before I set out to the station, mistakenly. Why he hadn’t asked me where I had gone to.
‘I don’t know who it’s from,’ I mumbled disgruntled that his voice sounded so positive on seeing the note lying there beside my timid foot.
‘So open it, then you’ll find out won’t you?’
‘It might have the virus.’
‘Don’t be an idiot.’
I picked it up from the floor. He made me feel like a troublesome child not wanting to open a present from a relative I barely knew who had, with this, made me feel awkward and embarrassed. It was half the size of a postcard. I peeled back the envelope, took out the note and unfolded it looking immediately at the signed name before the message. Alicia. And she had signed it with a love heart. Instantly I recoiled resenting the sentiment with every fibre of my being even though I knew it would be from her. It wasn’t a surprise. I didn’t want a damn love heart from her. I didn’t want anything from her. I wanted her gone, from my life, my mind, the world. I wished for her to disappear and for everyone around me to see who I saw she was, a devious, conniving, ill-willed person.
‘What does it say?’ he asked me, not, who is it from? The hackles on my neck made themselves known. And you know at this point, looking back I’m damn sure they thought they were giving me the virus. That would have been so easy for them, hoping to innocently kill me off.
I passed it to him sensing that he already knew the contents of the message.
‘Well, that’s nice isn’t it?’
I looked at him coldly. Did he truly believe I was buying this thinly veiled kindness? This disguise of whatever they had conjured up between them. Because there was nothing sincere about this note, whatever she tells you. It was a cover, so that after she had completed her final destruction of me she could turn to you and say how kind she had been and how crazy I had been. Don’t believe anything she says.
It read: Dear Erin, I’ve noticed we have gotten off to a bad start. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you. Really hope you’re ok. Alicia with the love heart beneath.
Why would I want her to help me? With what? With how to allow her to bed my fiancé who probably isn’t my fiancé anymore, he just doesn’t have the balls to tell me.
‘What’s the problem Erin?’ Adam asked me, again talking to me as if I were a child. He did that a lot.
‘Nothing,’ I replied sullenly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Texting her.’
‘You’ve got her number?’
‘Yeah. That a problem?’ he said. I was astonished at how rapidly his relationship with her had progressed.
‘No. Why are you texting her?’ I stopped myself from adding on a because you have to or a when did you beg her for her number, when you were in our bed?
‘Told her to come round later.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ he gave a thoroughly decent display of perplexity. Yes why on earth would we not want the wonderful Alicia to come over and join us in the falling apart of our relationship, to come over and bear witness to the depletion of my self-esteem? How bizarre of me to ask him. ‘Alicia’s a really cool girl, Erin. Give her a chance and stop being jealous of her.’
‘I’m not. Not asking Joel then?’
‘Nope.’ He looked like he might leave it there and refrain from another word, plunging me into further decay but changed his mind albeit not without a splash of conceit on his face. ‘He’s away.’
Of course he is. He wasn’t away. He was there the whole time.
***
That as much as I had managed to write before the slob policeman stormed onto the interview room and snatched my scrawl from beneath my hands and passed it over to Detective Miriam Sykes.
The collated pages of a wordsmith’s defence. Miriam, apparently has never read anything quite like this before from a possible suspect, at the very least a witness and she has dutifully entertained a tankful of crazy statements along the way. The inexplicable madness of it all, according to her, is that I have not finished there. I have asked for more paper and time. I have more to write. ‘It’s as if she’s oblivious to the existence of lawyers who would have coached her to say nothing, particularly not on a voluntary basis.’ I hear her say behind the door.
Or is it that she fears returning home? I do.
‘Leave her to it,’ Miriam tells her officer. ‘Let her run with it. It might deliver something other than bullshit because that’s all I’m hearing from her right now. Can you give me all the witness numbers you have taken?’
The officer, about to dash to it, bewildered by events thus far asks Detective Miriam Sykes, ‘How is this going to work?’
‘You mean interviewing the lot of them on the phone?’
‘I do.’
‘I have no idea. This is how you get away with murder. Do it under the cloud of a pandemic.’
But the murderer won’t get away with.
8
Mabel Ledbetter.
Mabel Ledbetter has been described as Erin Green’s best friend, according to some of the neighbours. She has called the police station unprompted, writes the reporting officer.
She is not my best friend. I have never liked her.
‘This is Detective Sykes,’ states Miriam, answering the call diverted to her.
‘Oh, great, yes I wanted to speak with you, about Erin Green.’
‘Mabel Ledbetter, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go ahead,’ says Miriam. This will be interesting. She’s anticipating someone with a gripe against me, and there are a few, it’s beginning to look like a crowd. She’s decided to give her free reign by the looks of things, and the questions will come later. You can tell she’s that kind of detective. Give them room to speak, leave a silence and they’ll sure fill the void. ‘You’re a friend of Erin’s?’
‘Erin, yeah, I’m friends with her, was, oh I don’t know anymore.’
You do know. We aren’t and never have been. You and I don’t get along.
‘She’s an acquaintance yes. I’ve worked with her for years and yeah she’s a pain. She causes trouble. She’s always falling out with everyone as I’m sure people have already told you. You still there?’
‘Yes. I’m listening,’ confirms Miriam. She isn’t going to get into who has said what. She doesn’t take part in suspects’ fishing exercises as this could well be one of those types of chat. She never took part in schoolyard gossip. That will not have changed.
‘She creates situations that aren’t there. She’s sensitive, like something happened to her, when she was a kid, who knows.’
Maybe you should mind your own business Mabel.
‘Are you saying she has mental health issues?’ asks Miriam, encouraging the diatribe.
‘Put it this way,’ rants Mabel, ‘You can look at her the wrong way, when she takes it the wrong way, when she’s in one of her moods. Then she stops speaking to you, avoids you and you’re supposed to know what the hell you’ve done wrong. She always says “they know what they did,” and stuff like that. It’s a bit draining. No one ever knows what they did.’
They do. You do.
‘Don’t they? Do you know what she did?’ asks Miriam.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think, who to believe. But it’s typical, all this –drama is always around her.’
‘And Adam? You know Adam, Adam Konstantas, her boyfriend?’
‘I know who he is, yes. But that was all over. She couldn’t accept it. Something had to give, with their relationship; they were noxiously gushing. They always looked comfortable together and at the same time, they didn’t. Almost putridly into each other like nothing fazed them, her more than him, definitely. It was never going to last. Whatever she might tell you. It looked all right on the surface, well, it was like that before Alicia came along. She’s ok, I guess, Alicia. She’s a strange person. She’s tries to be something she isn’t. She became close with Adam and we all thought way too close. But she was better suited to him than Erin.’
