by S. E. Lynes
This lava will spill out of every orifice, Samantha thinks. It will cool and calcify into bitter black rock. That’s no future. For herself, for Emily. There are good men in the world.
‘And as for equality.’ Jenny throws up her hands. ‘What equality? Look at the fucking pay gap …’
I will be bitter, Samantha thinks. I will be lonely. I will be alone.
‘I don’t care if I never meet another man again. I’m done. I’m fucking done.’ With a shake of her head and an emphatic swig of her latte, which must by now have gone cold, Jenny finally finishes.
Samantha edges her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’ She turns to Aisha. ‘I feel terrible for what you’ve both been through.’
And Lottie. Lottie too. And, she knows without a doubt, others, many others, at the hands of Peter Bridges and those like him.
‘Yeah, well.’ Jenny’s voice is still a little shaky. ‘It’s not you who should be sorry. We just thought we should warn you. As I said, women need to stick together. We need to share our stories.’
Samantha stands up. ‘I have to get back. Emily needs her tea and I need to think.’
‘All right, babe.’ Aisha rubs her arm, smiles that wide, warm smile of hers while Jenny calls an Uber, tells Samantha they can settle up next time.
‘What will you do?’ Aisha asks, hugging Samantha outside the café.
Samantha shrugs. ‘I appreciate your honesty, I really do. I think Peter’s behaved appallingly, no doubt about that, but I think it was out of fear. He has a family now and I don’t think he’d do anything to jeopardise that.’ She sounds like a robot. ‘I really am sorry he treated you guys so badly, but it looks like you’ve both found a lovely friendship on the back of it.’
Aisha smiles a little doubtfully. ‘Hey, listen, you’ve got every right to do what you want to do. Jenny and me were just trying to make sure you had the facts.’
Jenny, however, is staring at Samantha, eyes round, jaw slack with incredulity. Samantha averts her gaze.
‘I have Emily to think about.’ Ignoring Aisha’s move to help her, Emily tucked awkwardly under one arm, Samantha folds the buggy with some difficulty and lets the driver throw it into the boot. She ducks into the back seat of the cab, away from the perceptive glare of the two women.
The taxi pulls away. Samantha waves goodbye. Once they turn the corner, she sinks back in her seat and lets out a long, shaky breath. Peter drugs women. She can’t believe it. She doesn’t believe it. But of course, she can. She does. Just as she believes that he will have done, is probably doing, the same to her. It makes complete sense, down in her gut. And of course, since she moved in, she has never seen him open and pour their wine. Go and sit down, he has said. Or, Hey, go and light the fire. Take the weight off, relax, I’ll bring it through … She doesn’t have to spy on him; every word Jenny and Aisha have said is like a dark mirror – she doesn’t need to look into it to know she will see herself and all that she knows. She remembers her mother, immediately after things came out, face streaked with black mascara, balled-up tissue clutched in her fingers. Thing is, Sam, I knew, she said. I knew but I didn’t know, do you know what I mean? Samantha nodded, said she understood. But she didn’t. Not really.
Now she does.
She is with Peter because he made her feel safe. But as the cab pulls up outside their beautiful home, with its thick walls, its security system and all its locks, safe is the opposite of how she feels.
Once inside, she checks her phone. There is a text message from Peter asking if she’s OK and a voicemail. She listens closely.
‘Hey, Samantha, it’s Sally here. Thanks for your message. Yes, that’s my scarf, and yes, you’re right, Peter would never have remembered. If you could give it to him, that would be great, as Livvy’ll kill me if she finds out I’ve lost it.’ A chuckle. ‘Thanks again.’
Samantha gasps, almost laughs. Peter did go to the conference with Sally. He did give her a lift home and that was Sally’s scarf.
Oh, but where does that leave her? Where the hell does that leave her?
Emily begins to grumble. Their child. Their flesh and blood. If she’s been wrong about the cheating, wrong about the poems, it’s possible she’s wrong about the drugs. Peter might have changed for real. She, Samantha, might be more than his last port in the storm. His past stinks, yes it does. But she might be his redemption.
She lifts Emily out of the pram and holds her tight.
‘Hey there, lovely girl,’ she says. ‘I think your daddy has changed his ways, yes he has, yes he has. He’s been rotten, but we’ve fixed him, you and me. Shall we give him a second chance, shall we, eh?’
In all the stress of the first raw months of motherhood, the sudden and cataclysmic change in her life, her first professional job, those awful poems, the whole business with Lottie, she has lost her way. Peter is the love of her life. He is flawed, very flawed, but no amount of white noise can alter that love. He might have used all his lines on her, but only because he knew they would work. Yes, he has behaved badly, but like he told her, it was a long time ago, he wasn’t that much older than Lottie and she was of legal age by the time things became serious between them. He didn’t know, could never have imagined the hurt he caused that young girl.
‘If you see the good in people,’ her mother always told her, ‘they will see it in themselves.’
Everyone deserves a second chance. Samantha takes out her phone, pulls up her father’s number and composes a text:
Heard you and Rhianna are expecting. Congratulations. See you next time I’m back. X
The evening is better than any she and Peter have had in a long time. Peter gets home earlier than usual. He has been worried about her, he says, and wanted to make sure she was OK. Samantha puts Emily to bed at seven, keen to re-establish her routine. A little after seven, Peter hands her a glass of dark red wine. On the stove, tomatoes simmer in a deep frying pan. She can smell garlic, chillies, olive oil. He really is a wonderful cook.
‘Chianti Classico, 1996,’ he says. ‘I thought we should open something special to celebrate having our little girl back safe.’
She smiles at him, brings the glass to her nose. Inhales but can’t smell anything suspicious. But then, if she’s used to it, she wouldn’t smell anything unusual. She shouldn’t be thinking like this. Hopefully, with time, she’ll learn not to. And she won’t mention that the wine is the same age as her.
‘Look at you,’ he teases. ‘Nose to the glass. Very good.’ He holds his own glass by the stem, takes a large mouthful. ‘Actually, we should have a toast.’ He really is all smiles this evening, like a man from whom a heavy weight has been lifted.
‘Here’s to us,’ he says. ‘A little prosaic but no less profound for that. To you and me, to putting what is past behind us and embracing what the future has in store. Cheers, my darling.’
‘Cheers.’ She drinks, only a little, tries to discern a bitter note. But he wouldn’t do that, not to the mother of his child, not while she’s still breastfeeding. She averts her gaze. She was, she realises, staring at his hair.
After dinner, they watch a French film with subtitles, set immediately after the Second World War. She longs to chill out in front of a comedy or a box set, but Peter tells her it’s good for her post-baby brain to watch challenging films, to read only the best literary fiction, that she must not let herself fall into bad habits: inane TV, pacy books, women’s magazines. She agrees with him about the magazines; they are, as Marcia says, propagandist tosh, but she makes a mental note to buy a Kindle, then she can read what she likes.
In bed, he is his usual mix of tender yet insistent. He hardly ever misses a night, which can be exhausting and a little stressful. It isn’t that he forces her, no. Just that she knows that if she doesn’t respond, he will continue until she relents. She is so tired by evening and it is better, quicker, easier to comply – that way she can sleep sooner rather than later.
‘That was ter
rific,’ he says, lying back.
She is not sure who or what he means, since she has done little more than lie there. He rubs the hair on his chest as if to give himself a congratulatory massage, before rolling over to face her and teasing into his fingers the white-gold necklace he bought for her when Emily was born. He commissioned the piece from a jeweller in Strawberry Hill. On the fine chain is a tiny pair of hand-made white-gold bootees, which is what he is holding now between his thumb and forefinger.
‘So, now that this horrible ordeal is over,’ he says, ‘how about getting married?’
She cannot meet his eye. His past is in the past, yes, but it bothers her like a stain she can’t remove. That he is not, as she suspected, unfaithful is a big thing. But as the hours have worn on, her certainty about his new-found moral compass has waned. The question of the hidden drugs and whether he is giving them to her without her consent is still, she realises, live. Trust does not rebuild in one flashing epiphany. But rebuild it she must. Peter is, after all, the father of her child.
She gives him the warmest smile she can. ‘Ask me again. I’ll say yes eventually.’
To her surprise, he doesn’t sulk or pick a fight or accuse her of not loving him as much as he loves her, but instead laughs and kisses her on the nose.
‘You play so hard to get,’ he says. ‘I love it. But I will wear you down.’
And I you, she thinks. And I you.
Thirty
It is Monday morning. Three weeks later. Samantha is standing in the kitchen, the handwritten letter she has collected from the doormat open in her trembling hands.
Dear Samantha,
You know by now that my name is Charlotte not Suzanne and that it was me that took your beautiful baby girl. By now little Emily is hopefully back safe in your arms and your life has returned to normal. I know I don’t have any right to ask you for any of your time but if you can read this letter just once I would really appreciate it.
Samantha gasps, rests one hand on the counter. From upstairs comes the rumble of water flowing through the pipes. Peter has gone for a shower after his morning run. She reads on.
First off, I am so sorry for what I did and I hope one day you can forgive me. I am not well. I haven’t been well for a long time but that’s no excuse.
As I say, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I didn’t mean to do what I did, but I just did it and no one else did it but me – trust me, I do know that. When I saw you at the nursery with Emily and you let me hold her, I thought you were so nice, but by then I think I was already on a terrible path.
Anyway, I’m sorry I wrote the horrible poems as well. I didn’t know you at all then; all I knew was what I saw on Facebook, which is that you were with Pete and you had a baby together. You looked so pretty and happy, and I suppose I let jealousy get the better of me. I’ve been following Pete for a few years. I did run away to London once a long time ago to find him, but when I got to Euston everything was too big. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, so I just turned around and came home.
I’ve done all sorts but I got a job in an estate agent’s in town, just doing filing and that at first, but eventually they let me show a house because someone was off sick and I must have been all right at it because in the end I became an estate agent proper – in fact I have won the Nash and Watson Regional Agent award eight years running. Anyway, so I got a desk and then one day in the office I googled him and there he was. He was on LinkedIn and I recognised him straight away. He hasn’t changed that much. Then I found him on his university profile and then on Facebook.
Then last year he tagged you in a post and I looked at your page and that’s how I found out you had a baby, and that made me feel like killing someone. I didn’t, don’t worry! Then you posted that you were going to teach the course at Richmond College and you posted a link to it. I pretended I lived in your house so that I could enrol, but you might know that already. That was wrong too. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know what I was planning to do, to be honest. If I’m honest, I’d say I wanted to see what you were like, see what he went for in the end type of thing, but then I wrote that mean poem and then I wrote more. I was trying to mess with your head and get to Pete that way. But I know Pete is too clever for me. I never had a chance against him. I know that. I never had a chance. It was easier to mess with his wife.
The kitchen walls swing away and back.
‘Holy shit,’ Samantha whispers.
This is surreal; it’s all surreal. Above, the rumbling water stops. The squeak of the shower door.
She reads on, lips pressed tight.
But I’ve got all ahead of myself, sorry. Pete was my history teacher at school. When he first touched me, I was fourteen. It was after school and I was helping him tidy up and he put his hand on my face very gently and said, ‘Thanks for collecting the books, Lottie.’ My name, like that. He was very handsome and all the girls were in love with him at our school. I was so proud he’d chosen me. After that, I stayed after school regularly and helped him, and we started kissing and a bit more in the stationery cupboard. He took me out to an Italian restaurant in Liverpool for my fifteenth and made me promise to keep it a secret, which I did.
He took me to other restaurants, then to hotels. I went to a girls’ school so we didn’t know many lads, and the ones that went to the disco weren’t anybody I was interested in, not when there was Pete. I’d only ever been to Burger King and a Harvester before I met him, and I’d never been in a hotel. Pete had a Ford Fiesta and he had his own flat. That sounds silly but he did, and all the girls thought he was the business. He had money and he knew where to go and what to do. He knew everything. He was so clever and he was so funny – he was hilarious. We started having full-on proper sex the night of my fifteenth birthday even though we’d done everything else by then. Sorry to say it like that. I wanted to wait but he said it was all right and he would look after me as long as I didn’t tell anyone. He was nice about it. He wouldn’t wear He told me he would do the withdrawal method, not to worry, he knew what he was doing. I trusted him because he was older. He told me he loved me and that we would get married once I turned sixteen. He said that on my birthday he would go and see my dad and ask. I believed him, every word.
A sickness has started up in Samantha’s belly, a heavy brick of a feeling. Her forehead is damp.
Anyway, this is what I really want to tell you and it’s something I’ve never told a soul. I’m only telling you because I want to try and make you understand why I did that terrible thing, writing the poems and taking your lovely baby. I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I just want you to understand something about me because I feel so terrible.
The thing is that I fell pregnant. I was fifteen and I was scared stiff, but I thought it would be OK because Peter had always said we would get married when I was sixteen. But he told me to have an abortion. He was really angry. He shouted at me and told me I was stupid and a slag, and I thought he was going to punch me. It was horrible. I remember it like it was last week. I could not believe it. It was like all my dreams getting flushed away down the toilet, but I still thought he loved me and that we’d be together once I left school. He organised everything and he took me there and drove me to the corner of our road after, and he told me if I told anyone he would kill me.
I didn’t want an abortion. I just really hated the idea of it, and I’ve always wanted kids. I wanted to have like three or four. I thought he loved me and we would be a family. But he made me get rid of her. He told me if I didn’t, he would never marry me and we would never have a family together. So I did it. And I didn’t tell anyone, only myself, and to myself I said I’d had a real baby and I called her Joanne. I still call her that – I call her Jo for short – and I talk to her most days, take her to view the houses and that. I know I’ve taken this fantasy too far but it was all I had. She’d be not too much younger than you now. Funny that, isn’t it? Only, then I got really sick. I had a fever and I wa
s rushed to hospital and I had to tell the doctors what I’d done in the end otherwise who knows what would have happened? They told my parents because I was still a child when he got me pregnant, legally. I didn’t think I was, but I know now that I was. I really was. I was a stupid child.
My parents were devastated. I nearly died of the shame. My dad was going to kill Pete with his bare hands but I begged him not to. My school was a Catholic school, St Catherine’s. My parents had a meeting with the headmaster and they made Pete resign. No one wanted any scandal. It would have reflected badly on the school and my parents, what with gossip and that. We moved to Ormskirk soon after and by then my GCSEs were a waste of time. I left school with a few Cs and that was it, but I’m not stupid. I just couldn’t concentrate. Pete went away. No one knew what had happened. I got better slowly and then years later I did get married, but we found out that I was infertile because of the infection. I suppose that’s when my depression really started. My husband couldn’t cope and we got divorced.
I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me, Miss; I’m just trying to explain. I did some mean things, but I think you’re really nice and every time I think about what I did, I feel terrible. I’m returning the key to your house. I took it when Pete and me stayed there one time when his dad was on holiday. I’m sorry for sneaking in. That was wrong as well. It’s a beautiful house. It’s a palace really. I sell houses myself, I think I said that, and once I get better I’m hoping to go back to it. As I say, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me; I just want you to understand because maybe then you’ll feel better about everything and you’ll know it will never happen again.
Pete isn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t ready to have a family back then. He doesn’t know what happened after he left. I wanted him to know but now I don’t anymore. What’s the point? I’m glad you’re happy together now. I know I will never be a mum but I can tell you’re a lovely one and that is a nice thing for me to think about.
