Complicit

by Unknown

  ‘This isn’t some crappy song,’ I said. ‘You hit me.’

  ‘You’re right to hate me.’

  ‘Hate you? Just fuck off. Now.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Now.’

  Hayden lowered himself onto the sofa and put his head in his hands, rocking backwards and forwards slightly.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. I went over and stood beside him.

  ‘Please please please please please,’ he was whimpering.

  ‘Enough now.’

  And I laid my hand very lightly on the top of his head.

  He became abruptly silent, then leaned forward and buried his face in my stomach, putting his arms around me as he wept with renewed force. The sobs that were convulsing him shook through me as well. At last he stopped and lifted his face. It was wet, gleaming, terribly beautiful. ‘Does it hurt much?’ he whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He touched my cheek with two fingers. ‘Christ, Bonnie.’

  He led me to the bathroom. A bruise was flowering on my left cheekbone; I could see it darkening as I watched. My nose throbbed and I could taste blood in my mouth. Hayden soaked cotton wool in warm water and dabbed at the injury very carefully, biting his lip when I gasped at the stinging pain.

  ‘Now we’ve got to put a cold compress on it,’ he said. ‘To stop the swelling.’

  ‘I can do that for myself.’

  But I let him sit me down in my dank little kitchen and rummage in the freezer compartment of the fridge. He snapped several chunks of ice from their bendy plastic tray and wrapped them in a rather grubby tea-towel, which he held to my cheek. His eyes were puffy and his face still stained with tears.

  ‘Something awful came over me,’ he said.

  ‘You felt humiliated by me,’ I said. ‘That’s what came over you. I didn’t praise you enough, or act like one of your groupies, or say that you were a genius.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘It’s this horrible roaring blank and then I was standing there looking at you with your bruised cheek.’

  ‘Very convenient. It wasn’t really you.’

  ‘No. No. I know. It was me. Something in me. That’s what’s so scary.’

  If Hayden had made any excuse at all or tried to explain it, tried to convince me that there was some kind of rationality behind the burst of violence and rage, I would have pushed him out of the door and never seen him again. Or that’s what I tell myself, because I can’t bear to think it might not be true. But he didn’t. He sat beside me holding the ice cubes against my skin, looking so defeated, and it was as if I had seen someone that no one else ever had. Could it really be that this was the moment at which I properly fell for Hayden, when he had lashed out at me and then wept?

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said, after a while. It was true. All at once I felt hollow inside.

  Hayden took away the compress. ‘How about if I get us something? A curry? There’s an Indian down the road.’

  ‘Sure.’ There was a pause as he stood uncertainly beside me. ‘My wallet’s in my bag.’ I gestured towards the satchel by the sofa.

  Later, we sat together and ate ravenously out of the tin-foil containers, not speaking. Then I had a shower, standing under the nozzle and letting the tepid water stream over my bruised face and tired body. When I came back into the living room in my dressing-gown, Hayden was fast asleep, a tiny rumbling snore escaping from his half-open mouth. He seemed entirely at rest. I watched him for a long time, and I don’t know what I was thinking or what I was feeling. It was as if I was under water, moving slowly through an unfamiliar element, and the world I knew was far away.

  I went into my bedroom, pulled my sleeping-bag out of the cupboard and unzipped it, laying it over him where he slept and making sure the zip wasn’t against his skin. Then I went back to my own room, shut the door firmly and climbed into my bed. My face throbbed and I felt utterly drained and depleted. Yet several times in the night I woke, thinking of Hayden on the other side of the wall, sleeping like a helpless baby. And in the early morning I went to him and took him in my arms to comfort him for having hurt me.

  After

  ‘You’re not dressed properly for this, Bonnie. You can’t demolish a kitchen in your pyjamas.’

  I had forgotten that Sally was coming round to help me with the flat this morning. She stood in the doorway, dressed for the part in tatty old jeans with split knees and an oversized T-shirt that had a picture of a bear on the front. Her hair was tied up in a scarf.

  ‘I’ll get dressed,’ I said, trying to hide my dismay at seeing her. ‘After coffee – you want coffee, right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m so tired I could fall asleep standing up.’

  ‘Is Lola not sleeping?’

  ‘Yes. And stuff. You know when you lie in bed and thoughts churn round and round in your head?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘What have you been fretting about?’

  ‘Oh, life,’ she said vaguely. ‘Small-hours panics.’

  At any other time I would have encouraged her to tell me about them, but not now, not this morning. ‘Is Richard looking after Lola?’

  ‘As if,’ said Sally. ‘My mum’s got her for a few hours. It’ll give her a chance to get to know her granddaughter. It’s the first time she’s spent real time with her.’

  ‘You should be off having fun, going to an exhibition, drinking coffee. I mean, really drinking coffee, in a café, not working like this.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong, Bonnie. This is just what I need. I can spend a morning being a normal person, not having to feed her or try to get her to go to sleep or, when she’s finally gone to sleep, lean over her to hear that she’s still breathing. Did I tell you I still do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nobody ever warned me about motherhood. They told me about how awful childbirth was, but not about what it’s like to love your baby so much that you’re their prisoner. This is a great relief for me. Just being normal. I’ll go and make that coffee while you’re getting dressed.’

  As I rooted through a bin-bag for something old to wear, I already felt weary and fragile. I’d been having trouble keeping down any food, especially since the satchel had been delivered, and felt permanently queasy, my legs reedy and weak. I went into the kitchen where Sally was making coffee, and tried to smile at her while I endured the sensation that I was having an internal haemorrhage.

  ‘This is so good for me,’ she said, as she handed me the mug, and I felt ashamed of my impulse to throw her out of the house and slam the door behind her. She’d been so hospitable to the band as well. I told myself to be polite, to make an effort, to say something nice.

  I needn’t have bothered because I didn’t have much of a chance to say anything at all. Sally was behaving like someone who had been released after years of solitary confinement, as she often did when we spent any time alone together, away from her sleep-deprived, child-clogged routines. She talked and talked and talked. She talked about the frustrations of her home life, of course, which seemed sharper than normal – not just the usual anxiety about being a stay-at-home mother while Richard worked, which had unbalanced their relationship in a way that she hadn’t expected – but now with something close to panic or even a kind of fear, I thought. I asked her why she didn’t go back to work, return their marriage to the equality it had had before, but she shook her head violently. ‘That’s not it,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What don’t I understand?’

  ‘This isn’t about not working. It’s about – about not being me. Anyway, I don’t want to leave Lola. It would be like ripping my heart out.’

  ‘But you’re always wanting to leave her!’

  ‘No. Not like that. Just – you know, moments of flight.’

  ‘Are things getting worse between you and Richard?’ I asked. I was trying to behave in the way I would have done a few weeks ago; I was trying to remember how to be myself, the self I seemed to have temporarily mislaid in all
the madness and horror. ‘You can always tell me.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. She seemed about to say more, but visibly stopped herself and started marching around the flat, interrogating me about my plans for redecoration. Apart from ripping out old kitchen units, which I had no idea how to do, painting and putting up a few shelves, I didn’t have any, but that was fine because all of a sudden Sally had lots, most of them not particularly helpful. She wandered around commenting on cracks in the plaster, rapping on walls. I didn’t mind now. I didn’t feel like talking or even thinking, and it was restful to sip my milky coffee and let my mind go blank while Sally had ideas that I wouldn’t be able to carry out in a million years. The milky coffee tasted like some sort of baby food but it was warm and probably had useful vitamins and minerals in it.

  When Sally briskly announced that we had better get on, I was almost disappointed. ‘So what do we start with?’ she said.

  ‘Painting this wall,’ I said. ‘That’s really all I had in mind for today. One wall would make me feel better.’

  Sally looked at it doubtfully. ‘Doesn’t it need an undercoat?’

  ‘My idea was that we just keep painting until we can’t see any of the colour underneath.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, you ought to fill that big crack.’ She ran her fingernail down it.

  ‘The paint will fill it in,’ I said. ‘A bit. This is only temporary. If I ever have any money, I’ll do it properly. In fact, if I ever have any money, I’ll move.’

  ‘You’ll meet someone soon,’ said Sally, out of the blue, her words sliding under my guard like a knife between my ribs. ‘I predict it. You’ll meet someone and fall in love again.’ She added, a bit wistfully, ‘Men adore you.’

  I stared at her, stricken, and couldn’t speak.

  ‘Oh, Bonnie, don’t look at me like that! I didn’t mean anything,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I managed.

  ‘Me and my big mouth.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Is it because of Amos?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Come here. Hang on, give me your mug – you’re spilling the dregs.’

  As she took it from me, Sally suddenly looked at me, apparently surprised and confused at the same time. Our eyes met, and she blushed a deep crimson. She went back into the kitchen with the mugs, and I heard the tap running. It didn’t take long to wash two mugs, but it gave me time to collect my feelings. In my one attempt at professionalism, I spread an old sheet under the wall we were going to paint. Not that the carpet deserved much protection: it might have looked better with splashes of paint on it. I took the sheet away again. When Sally came back she seemed distracted.

  ‘I’ve got these brushes,’ I said, aiming for cheerfulness. ‘You can have the big one or the little one.’

  She didn’t hear me.

  ‘I said –’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This sounds stupid. I couldn’t help noticing your neck.’

  I flinched. I had almost forgotten about the bruise, which had faded to a dirty yellow now, and was a bit puffy. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a single good reason why I would have a bruise on my neck. ‘An accident.’

  ‘No. It’s not that,’ she said, and blinked several times. ‘I don’t mean to sound rude, but you wouldn’t mind telling me where you got that necklace, would you?’

  Twisting uncomfortably, I peered down at it. Why on earth had I put it on? My mind went fuzzy. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just picked it up somewhere.’

  ‘Would you mind if I looked at it more closely?’

  ‘Is there a problem?’ I heard myself say. What was up? Had I made some sort of mistake?

  ‘No, no, not at all. I’d just like to look at it.’

  ‘If you want,’ I said, and unclipped it. I gave it to her, draped over my palm. She took it and examined it closely.

  ‘You think it’s worth something?’ I said, making a feeble attempt at a joke.

  ‘This is a bit embarrassing,’ said Sally, ‘but I think it’s mine.’

  The air seemed suddenly cold. ‘You think?’

  ‘I mean I’m sure it is. It was a present when we were on holiday in Turkey. From Richard.’

  I tried to force my brain to think. It was like starting a rusted-up machine. The necklace had come in the satchel from Liza’s flat. How could it possibly belong to Sally?

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘They can sometimes look alike.’

  ‘It’s the one I always wear,’ said Sally. She held it up. ‘There’s a new clasp here, where the old one broke. I got it replaced. It doesn’t quite match.’ There was a silence as we looked at each other. What was going on? Was Sally accusing me of having stolen her necklace? No. She was as hesitant as I was. And when she spoke her words came in a rush: ‘It’s an easy thing to do,’ she said. ‘It must have happened when you were rehearsing. I must have taken it off – to do the cleaning or something like that. It gets caught. You know how it is. And you just saw it and put it on automatically, the way you do.’

  That was all rubbish. You don’t put on other people’s necklaces by mistake in the middle of a music rehearsal. She was making excuses for me. Almost apologizing to me. And, anyway, I knew I hadn’t picked it up at her house.

  ‘It’s the sort of mistake anybody could make,’ she said, almost babbling. ‘You pick up the wrong thing, put it on automatically. I was wondering what had happened to it. Richard would have found it really strange if he’d seen you wearing it. That would have been funny.’

  Her expression showed that she didn’t find it funny at all. Now I knew. Sally had left the necklace at Liza’s flat. Sally and Hayden. I looked at her. Her cheeks were red. She knew. And now she also knew that I knew. She must do. And what else did she know about me? What did she suspect about me? What did she suspect about Hayden? What did she think had become of him?

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘What a stupid thing to do. I must have picked it up without thinking. You need to watch me. Next thing I’ll be forgetting my own head. Ha ha. Lucky you saw it. Well, let’s do some painting.’

  I prised the lid off the tin of paint with a screwdriver. It looked like white, or sort of white, but the colour was called ‘String’. We started slapping it on. Sally seemed to have lost her eagerness to talk.

  Sally and Hayden. Hayden and Sally. Was it possible to be jealous of a dead man, to feel retrospectively betrayed by someone whose body I’d just got rid of? After all, it wasn’t as if I’d had any illusions about him. If there was music being played, he would join in. If food was put in front of him, he’d eat it with a hunger that was never satisfied. And it was the same with women. A desperate woman, lonely, neglected, bored. He would make her feel better, special again, alive again. He would run his hands over her body and tell her she was beautiful, and she would become beautiful. I tried not to picture them in bed together, naked bodies entangled, his familiar smell. The way he smiled, a smile that started slowly and seemed to spread over his entire face, warming it. For a moment I stopped, dripping paintbrush in hand, ambushed by the loss I felt.

  I went back to my task, slapping almost-white paint over the dreary beige surface. When had it happened? Where had I been when it was going on? Was it when I was at that music festival? It must have been, yes – but had he moved into Liza’s flat by then? I couldn’t remember. My brain was clogged with sludge. What deceptions had been necessary? I tried to remember what, if anything, Sally had said to me about Hayden or Hayden to me about Sally. Anyway, this was stupidly, wickedly wrong – what right did I have to feel betrayed? What right on so many levels?

  And what did Sally know? Did she know about us? She must, unless she was forcing herself not to.

  There was something satisfying about the glutinous texture of the paint, the squelching sound as I pushed the brush into it and twirled it so that it didn’t drip. I would almost have liked to push my hands into the tin and smear the paint onto the walls.

&nbs
p; Hayden with Sally and Hayden with me. But, of course, throbbing behind all those questions there was something else, something much more important, the ocean under the rippling waves. The necklace had been left in Liza’s flat. It must have been on the bedside table. Perhaps it was like a superstition: before committing adultery, Sally might have thought it appropriate to remove the necklace her husband had bought her. The feel of it on her neck while she was wrapped around Hayden might have put her off. So it was lying on the bedside table where somebody had seen it and thought it was mine and sent it to me. What for? Was it a warning? A kind of statement? I know you’ve been there. I know you left something of yourself there. You can’t escape. Nobody escapes.

  Meanwhile Sally and I were beside each other painting. It was grotesque. I made myself break the silence. ‘How’s it going?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure this is going to cover the colour underneath,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll do.’

  Before

  Neal arrived with a bottle of white wine, cold, with little drops of condensation on it, and with a smile so eager and confident it was like a knife being pushed into me. I looked at him standing on the doorstep, his hair brushed into uncharacteristic neatness. He was wearing a lovely linen shirt that he must have ironed before he left his house.

  ‘Hello, Neal,’ I said. I felt like a murderer, waiting to deal the fatal blow.

  ‘What happened?’

  I touched my fingers lightly to my swollen cheek. ‘I fell over.’

  ‘You look like you’ve been in a boxing ring.’

  ‘It looks worse than it feels,’ I said untruthfully.

  ‘Where did you fall?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I said. I hadn’t prepared the follow-up line. I tried to think of something plausible. ‘In the bathroom. Standing on the rim of the bath trying to reach something off the top shelf. My foot slipped and I just crashed down. I hit my face on the edge.’

  ‘Ouch,’ Neal said sympathetically. ‘When?’