by Rosie Fiore
I got Frances to school and Jonah to nursery, and then I went for a walk through the park. It was a blustery, slightly ominous day and I wrapped my cardigan tightly around myself. Things had got complicated, it seemed. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe what happened last night exposed the situation for what it is – I’ve somehow got myself drawn into a very unsatisfactory relationship.
I don’t love Sam. I’m attracted to him, I like him (most of the time, not so much last night), and I feel dreadfully sorry for him and the girls for what they’ve gone through. But he doesn’t make my heart sing. If circumstances were different and we were just two single people who were dating, I could see us gradually beginning to see less of each other and then drifting apart. But the situation we’re in is so much more complex than that. There are four little lives entwined with ours, and I like to think that, if nothing else, I’ve at least offered some kindness and stability to Miranda and Marguerite when they’ve needed it. If Sam and I split up, where would that leave them? Not to mention my own kids, who have become fond of the girls. And even though Sam isn’t around my children all that much, Jonah in particular is enthralled by him. He has no memory of his own dad, and he loves having a guy to climb on and roar at and run up and down the garden with. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve kind of liked how our lives have become busier and more fun. Our little household has sometimes seemed small and quiet, but with Sam and all the kids, weekends in particular are lively, in a nicely chaotic sort of way.
All of that’s great, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to take on Sam’s deeper problems. It has gradually become clear to me that he has issues with alcohol. He doesn’t drink every day, but when he does, he drinks a lot, and he lies about it. He’ll bring a bottle of spirits to my house but keep it in his bag so I won’t notice how much and how often he refills his glass. He never misses an opportunity for a beer – any time after about eleven in the morning is fair game for a drink. I’ve always worked in bars and restaurants, and you learn to spot the drinkers – not just people who sometimes get rat-arsed but people for whom the need for alcohol never goes way. For those people, it’s like a constant low hum in them that they can’t ignore. Sam is one of those.
And then there’s his anger. The years of pub work mean that I also know a lot about male anger in all its variations – slow-burning resentment, belligerent yelling, and the kind of anger that comes from nowhere and lashes out in sudden violence. Sam’s anger is well-hidden, kept deep down and only emerges when he’s had a lot to drink. It comes out in the odd bitter, hate-filled comment directed at a politician or a celebrity, or, if he’s very unguarded, in the way he says Helen’s name if she comes up in conversation. So far, he hasn’t yelled at me, except for his drunken outburst when he came in last night and accused me and Tim of God only knows what. But I suspect it might just be a matter of time.
But most of all, I can’t forget what Tim said, about Sam being a taker. He clearly needs so much help. He’s charming, and always grateful, so everything I do for him hasn’t felt like a chore. But when I think about it, there’s no payback. I don’t expect quid pro quos, just the occasional offer to look after all four kids and give me a break. Some help around the house. The odd basket of groceries. But Sam has manoeuvred me into a position where I’m willingly his dogsbody and, up until now, I haven’t resented it. I’m not quite sure how that has happened.
As I see it, I have three options. I could break it off with Sam, with all the heartache and difficulty that would cause. It would put the kids in an awkward position, and I’d still have to see him every day at school. I could leave things the way they are, and weather whatever storms come my way. That’s unbelievably risky, and a route that promises lots of heartache. Or the third option: I could roll up my sleeves, confront Sam and do my best to help him sort his life out. Everything he’s been doing seems to me to be a cry for help, the waving arms of a man drowning and unable to help himself. I could stand by and watch him sink, or I could throw him a life preserver and try to pull him to shore.
Sam
Much later, long after I got the girls to bed, I sat on the sofa in the darkened living room and stared at the TV. A film was playing with the sound muted – I had no idea what it was, but Daniel Craig was snarling and sweaty and running around with a big gun, so I assumed it was a James Bond film. I don’t think I’d have gained much more from the plot if I’d seen it from the beginning with the sound up. As it was, the bright colours, flashes of explosion and staccato editing made the perfect backdrop to my fractured train of thought.
I was no closer to knowing what I should do about my relationship with Lara. ‘Wait and see’ was about the best solution I could come up with. We needed to have a proper talk, that was for sure, and for the girls’ sake, I’d rather things didn’t get too acrimonious. I needed to apologize for my behaviour the night before. That I could do. I had behaved badly, and turning up at her house, late and drunk and raving, without having contacted her all night, was clearly unacceptable. The difficulty was that I could apologize, but I couldn’t explain. I’d have to make up something about work stress and hope that she accepted that.
Because obviously, I couldn’t tell her about looking for Helen. I couldn’t tell anyone, because anyone sane, especially those who love me, would tell me not to do it. They’d say, quite rightly, that Helen went of her own accord and took great pains not to be found. When I found her by accident, she ran away. I should let her go.
It’s not as if I need her to grant permission for the divorce, and the house (thank God) is in my name, not our joint names. I’ve read about couples whose financial affairs were tangled and one party went missing. Being missing isn’t a legal status – the person isn’t dead, they’re just not there. So if you need their permission to access a bank account, or sign papers or something and you don’t know where they are, you’re screwed. Accounts get frozen, and people end up destitute. I might be poorer than I used to be, but at least I’m not absolutely screwed.
So why couldn’t I let this go? I wished I could, but I know myself, and I know that when I begin to obsess about something, I need to see it through. I sighed, and thought again about ringing Tim. I needed to talk about this with someone who would understand, who really got the situation. But Tim was out of the question. Lara might be blameless where last night was concerned, but I had been Tim’s brother for long enough to know that his motives for being on Lara’s sofa late at night might not have been squeaky clean. He wasn’t the right person to take this to.
And then it dawned on me. I glanced at my watch. It was 1 a.m., so ten in the morning on Saturday in Brisbane. She might be out shopping or something, but it was worth a try. I pulled my laptop towards me, opened Skype and hit ‘Call’.
Judy answered after a few rings. She had her hair scraped back and a baseball cap on, and she gave me a broad smile.
‘Good timing, Sam,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I was about to head off to the bottom of the garden to battle the jungle and I’d never have heard your call.’
‘I don’t want to keep you,’ I said.
‘Not at all! Lovely to chat to you. Although I can barely see you. Are you sitting there in the dark?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The girls are asleep, and I don’t want to disturb them.’
She nodded. ‘So how’re things?’
There was no point in messing around with small talk. ‘I saw Helen,’ I said baldly. ‘She was on the Tube. She’s changed her appearance – cut her hair short and dyed it blonde, gained weight. . .’
‘But you’re sure it was her?’ said Judy. ‘Stupid question. She was your wife. Of course you’re sure.’
‘Is my wife,’ I said, and I sounded angrier than I meant to. ‘She still is my wife.’
Judy looked as if she was about to say something, but she just nodded.
‘I watched her for a while and when I was sure it was her, I went to talk to her. She got off at Canary Wharf, and I caught her.’
‘Caught her?’
‘I called her name, and I grabbed her hand.’ Judy winced. ‘I didn’t hurt her,’ I said quickly. ‘She looked at me, and then she broke away and jumped back on the train and disappeared.’
Judy sat back in her chair. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Well, there’s a turn-up. So she stayed in London.’
‘So it would seem. But I don’t know where she went. She was getting off at Canary Wharf when I caught her, so she could have been changing trains there, or she might work there. I went back to look for her but—’
‘You went back?’
‘This morning. But of course there are thousands of offices and thousands of routes that go from Canary Wharf. There’s no way of knowing where she went. So I was wondering if you had any idea where she might have gone?’
‘Me?’ Judy looked flabbergasted. ‘How would I know? I haven’t seen her for years, Sam. She disappeared on me too.’
‘I know, but you know her, and—’
‘I think you know as well as I do that no one actually knows Helen. Not really.’
I was forced to concede she was right.
‘I never finished telling you the story about Lawrence,’ she said.
‘I want to hear it,’ I interrupted, but right now I need to find Helen and—’
‘And what?’ For the first time in all of our conversations, Judy sounded angry. ‘Make her talk to you, make her come back?’ She leaned on the word ‘make’, with a kind of bitter sarcasm. I was stung.
‘I don’t know who you think I am, Judy, but I’m not Lawrence. I don’t want to force her to do anything. I just want to talk to her.’
‘I’m only going to say this once, Sam. I don’t know where she is, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. She knows where you are. And if she wants to talk to you, she’ll contact you.’
We stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Then Judy spoke. ‘You can hate me if you like, but let me tell you the end of the story about Lawrence, and then maybe you’ll understand a little of where I’m coming from.’
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
‘After Helen came out of hospital, she went back to Lawrence. We all begged her not to, but she said he was so sorry for what he had done and he was prepared to consider therapy. I loved that – “prepared to consider”. Not actually going to go. He never did, by the way.’
She shook her head. ‘Anyway, she went home, and the first thing he did was make her give up her job. He didn’t want her going back to work with scars and shaming him, he said. And after that, step by step, he isolated her completely. He told her that our parents and I hated him, so he didn’t want her to see them. He cut her off from all her friends. Because she wasn’t working, he had control of the money and he wouldn’t let her have any – he did all the shopping and drove to work so she wouldn’t have the car. And most of all, he told her she was shitty and worthless all the time, so she didn’t have the strength or the pride to leave.’
I couldn’t imagine it. Not Helen. Helen, who was proud and brave and confident. Who wasn’t afraid of anything. Was it possible that Judy was exaggerating?
‘What happened?’ I said. ‘How did she get out?’
‘I didn’t give up on her that time. The one thing she had was a phone. Lawrence wanted her to have it so he could text her and call her fifty times a day and keep tabs on her while he was at work. But it meant I could call her too. And I did. I also used to go round there in the day when he wasn’t there. As fast as he was feeding her propaganda about how useless she was, I was feeding her words of strength, and making plans for her escape. But I knew I needed to wait till she was ready.’
Judy sat forward in her chair and bowed a little, so I was looking at the top of her head. She folded her arms tightly, as if she was hugging herself. ‘One Monday afternoon, I was round at Helen’s. I’d brought my laptop so I could show her a website about a women’s sanctuary she could go to, where they would help her to get back on her feet. Lawrence must have parked down the road and walked so we wouldn’t be alerted by the sound of the car. He was in the flat before we realized what was going on.
‘He started out being charming but in a terrifyingly quiet way. He said it was nice to see me. But then he asked me why I was there, wasn’t I supposed to be at work? Why hadn’t I come round after work, when he would be home too? I made up something about passing by and popping in.
‘“Interesting that you brought your computer, just to pop in,” he said. And he casually went over to my laptop and looked at the screen. We hadn’t had time to close down the web page we’d been looking at. He read it all, standing very still, and then he picked up the laptop and threw it against the wall. Then he walked up to me – I was leaning against the kitchen counter – and lifted me off my feet by my throat. He was big, and very strong. He said some things, ugly, threatening things, but I don’t know what. I was mainly clawing at his fingers and trying to breathe. Helen threw herself at him and tried to pull him off me, but he batted her aside without even looking at her.
‘She always said that lying on the floor, looking at him holding me up, my eyes starting to bug, listening to him snarl filth in my face, was the moment she woke up. “It was like I’d been asleep for years,” she said. She crawled across the floor and grabbed her phone. She dialled 000 and I heard her say, “Police. My husband is trying to kill my sister.” I was on the verge of blacking out, but I remember thinking that her voice sounded strong and clear, not anxious at all. Lawrence hesitated for a second before he let me fall to the floor and went for Helen, but that gave her enough time to blurt out the address. As he roared, she skimmed the phone away from her and it came to rest under the kitchen table. He kicked her everywhere he could reach. She curled up into a ball, using her hands to protect her face and I remember thinking that she’d done that before. She knew what to do.
‘I screamed at him to stop, and tried pulling on his arm, but he was like a possessed. . . I don’t know. Like an enraged bear. I ran to the front door and yanked it open and started yelling for help. It was a weekday afternoon, so I didn’t expect the building to be full of burly men or anything. But I figured if there were witnesses, he would be less likely to kill Helen and me.
‘We were lucky. The cops weren’t busy, and Helen’s trick of skimming the phone away meant the line was open and the operator could hear our screams and the thuds of Lawrence’s kicks. A car pulled up outside within a few minutes, and two of the biggest bloody police officers you ever saw rushed into the building. I directed them to the apartment and they pulled Lawrence off Helen.’
Judy took a pause. She shook her head. It was an awful story and I could see the memory was as fresh as if it had been yesterday.
‘They locked him up, but we knew he wouldn’t be gone for long. Helen had to go to hospital for concussion, but while she was in, I fetched all her clothes and things from the flat, and we moved her to a women’s refuge. Not the one we had been looking at – we thought Lawrence might come searching for her there. Another one.’
‘And then?’ I asked.
Judy smiled. ‘She wasn’t lying when she said she woke up. She started to help other women in the shelter as soon as she arrived – with job skills, writing their CVs, that sort of thing. She campaigned to raise money and awareness. She begged for her old job back, and she moved into a shared apartment on the far side of the city. She changed her name too.’
I fought the urge to ask ‘To what?’ Instead, I said, ‘And Lawrence?’
‘Helen was given a protection order, but he didn’t go to jail. When the case was over, he disappeared. His family thought he’d gone to Perth or something, but they didn’t know for sure. That kind of worked in Helen’s favour, because once she proved she’d made a reasonable attempt to find him, she was able to initiate a divorce without his consent.’
I smiled grimly. It was the same process I’d been going through here to divorce Helen.
‘So she was doing brilliantly. Mu
m and Dad and I were all so happy. We’d got our Hellie back. She was doing well at work too.’
Judy stopped suddenly, and her face darkened. ‘This last bit. . . Sorry, Sam. It’s hard.’
‘Take your time,’ I said.
‘Lawrence discovered that Helen had divorced him. He couldn’t find her. . .’ she said haltingly. ‘She took a lot of care to disappear and cover her tracks. But he found me.’
‘He found you?’
‘You’ll forgive me if I spare you the details.’ She tried to smile, but failed. ‘He’s in prison now – they couldn’t get attempted murder to stick, so he got done for grievous bodily harm.’
‘Jesus, Judy.’
‘I survived,’ she said briskly. ‘I’m still here. I’ll never be a concert pianist, but that’s okay. I’m tone deaf anyway.’
My confusion must have shown on my face. ‘Of course. . . We haven’t actually met, so you don’t know,’ she said, and she held up her left hand, the palm facing the screen. Her index finger ended at the first knuckle joint.
‘He told me I’d lose one finger an hour until I told him where Helen was. He used an axe. I don’t think he counted on how much blood there’d be. I think he got scared I’d bleed to death. So he ran away, and I managed to get free and call for an ambulance.’
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I said. ‘So sorry.’
‘As I say, I lived. But as for Helen. . . Well, the guilt was too much, I think. She stayed for the trial and testified against him. And then outside the court after he was sentenced, she kissed me and Mum and Dad and said she was going home to her flat for a few hours and would come round later for dinner.’
‘And you never saw her again?’
‘No. We got one email, saying she’d gone to Europe and wasn’t coming back and that she was sorry. Then she shut down the email account, so all our messages bounced back. We were heartbroken, of course, but over time we’ve become – kind of – proud of her. Proud of her for seizing the chance to start again.’
