The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  Mutinous tuts and mutterings from the sycophants.

  “…then some other term will need to be coined for him. For you.” She looked into her husband’s eyes, excluding, in that moment, the rest of the company. “I can honestly say that, without your example, I would be nothing and no one. Your art is the linchpin of our lives. It is beautiful and inspiring and important and I thank God for it and for you, every day.”

  There was a respectful silence, and then another ripple of obsequious applause, which seemed to remind Lou where she was.

  “Oh, and did I mention he’s not bad in the sack either!” she added, with a bawdy wink.

  A burst of nervous laughter told Sara that she was not the only one for whom this was a confidence too far. Lou started clearing the dishes away and Claudia sprang up to help her, scraping and stacking like a dinner monitor on the head girl’s table.

  “That was gorgeous, Lou,” she said, “I must get the recipe from you.”

  Gavin changed the music and topped up their glasses, and when Lou had finished clearing up, she bought a platter of cheese to the table and introduced each one, in turn.

  “…And this one’s Grazalema,” she said, loading a cracker with a generous portion and passing it to Claudia, “from Andalucia, where we lived in Spain. I don’t buy it very often, because it makes me homesick, but it’s a special occasion, so…”

  “That is divine,” said Claudia, holding her fingertips discreetly over her crumb-filled mouth. She swallowed, and sighed. “England does seem rather narrow, doesn’t it? When one’s lived abroad.”

  There was a wistful silence.

  “Oh, now while I remember,” Sara said, keeping her tone deceptively friendly, “remember that guy, Steve?”

  Neil shot her a warning glance.

  “Steve?” Gav narrowed his eyes, thoughtfully.

  “You know, Neil’s mate from work. The surveyor?”

  “Do we want to do this now?” murmured Neil.

  “I do,” she shot back, fiercely.

  “Steve…” Gavin narrowed his eyes. “Steve, Steve, Steve… Oh, the hi-vis guy, Lou, remember? With all the kit?”

  Lou wrinkled her nose in amusement.

  “Oh, yeah – he was like a Lego man, wasn’t he? With his hard hat and his little bag of tricks.”

  “That’s him,” said Sara, cheerfully, “well, so, hi-vis. Steve reckons we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

  “Which we maybe don’t want to go into right now,” repeated Neil, widening his eyes at her.

  “Hey, man, let her get it off her chest,” Gav said, turning towards Sara and resting one arm, complacently, along the back of her chair. “What’s the problem, Sara?”

  “Thank you,” Sara said, “sorry about this, Claudia and…”

  “Chris,” Chris reminded her.

  “Yeah. Only, once you’re homeowners, I’m sure you’ll appreciate, that, you know, the place you live very quickly stops being just bricks and mortar and becomes something more than that. You invest in it emotionally. We have done anyway. We’ve lived here nine and half years now. Patrick, my youngest was born here. It feels like the place we were always meant to be.”

  “Jesus, Sara!” said Neil.

  “Well, if you’d brought it up, like you said you would.”

  “It’s subsidence!” snapped Neil. He said it like a swear word and threw Sara a furious glance afterwards.

  “Well, I think we knew that much,” said Gav, looking only slightly less pleased with himself than before, “but you expect a bit of movement, don’t you? With old houses?”

  “It’s more than a bit of movement, mate,” mumbled Neil grimly.

  “The work you had done,” Sara said, warming to her theme, “has undermined the foundations of the building. I don’t know who drew up your plans, but they’ve botched it. Your studio, where you make all your beautiful, inspiring, important artwork, has fucked up our ordinary, uninspiring home in a major way. That’s what Hi-vis Steve figured out, with his…” She drew inverted commas in the air. “…little bag of tricks.”

  Backs grew a little straighter, smiles a little more fixed. Lou stood up abruptly and walked over to the fridge. She opened the door, but seemed to forget what it was she was looking for, and closing it again, returned to stand behind Gav, rubbing her hands briskly back and forth across his shoulders, as if he were a talisman.

  “I don’t think that can be right,” she said, with a twisted little smile, “that can’t be right, can it, Gav? Because it was supervised by a really good mate of ours, Jerome.” Correctly apprehending that name-dropping was no longer likely to cut any ice with Sara, she turned to Claudia instead. “He did the Pebble Gallery in Bury St Edmunds. So I think we can assume he knows his stuff.”

  “Didn’t that one win an award?” offered Claudia, helpfully.

  “Look,” said Neil, gesturing downwards with his hands, “let’s not have kittens here. We’re mates, aren’t we?”

  They all tried to look as if this were the case.

  “Steve’s preliminary investigations suggest that your building works might have contributed—”

  “Ninety-nine per cent likely—” murmured Sara.

  “That it’s probable your building works contributed to the, er…”

  “Yep! Okay, okay,” said Gavin, slapping his thighs, “I think we get the message. Obviously, we’re as keen as you are to investigate further, so we can rule out that possibility.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Sara, earning herself a look of pure hatred from Gavin, which, despite her having courted it, still wounded her.

  “So, please, just tell us what you need from us,” he finished.

  “Great!” said Neil. “Thanks. It’s not complicated, really. Steve just needs to see the original drawings, plus a copy of the planning consent, and if you can tell him what system you used for the underpinning.”

  “The underpinning?” said Gavin.

  Sara lay in the dark beside Neil. His eyes were closed and his face was turned implacably to the ceiling, like a figure carved on a medieval tomb. She knew he wasn’t asleep, because his body was tense with resentment, but he wasn’t letting on. He hated unpleasantness, always had, but this unpleasantness was not of her making. She didn’t see why she should get it in the neck for Gavin and Lou’s colossal negligence. And that was how it felt. As though he was on their side, instead of hers.

  She put out a hand in the darkness and touched his hand. He twitched away, as though in fear of leprosy.

  “It had to be said, Neil,” she whispered, “there was never going to be a right time.”

  Silence. Well, then, she would find forgiveness how she may. She trailed her hand gently over his thigh. He went tense at her touch, but didn’t stop her. Slowly, now, she tilted her body towards him. His erection bobbed up, and she made to touch it, but he pushed her hand out of the way.

  With no preamble, and no tenderness, he clambered over her, supporting himself on one hand, while he wrenched up her nightie with the other. His eyes were dark hollows in his face. He handled her roughly. This was not like Neil. To Sara’s dismay, she grew wet with the unexpectedness, the difference of it. He licked his thumb and rubbed it matter-of-factly over the end of his erection. There was to be no kissing then, nor any of the usual nuzzling or ear biting. Certainly breast licking was off. He positioned the end of his cock and, pausing briefly to gather momentum, thrust inside her without making a sound. She gasped in shock. Their usual call and response was dispensed with. The interrogative pushing and gyrating that were supposed to pleasure both of them, yet hadn’t, for years, really pleasured either of them, were now replaced by greedy, priapic thrusts. And. It. Felt. Good. Her bottom chafed against the sheet, air rushed in her ears, her hair slithered against the pillow, up down, up down, faster and faster. And then a sharp pain made her yelp in surprise. Something – it felt like a fishhook – had embedded itself in the soft flesh at the base of her buttock, and with every thrust, was digging i
tself a little deeper.

  “Ouch! Jesus. Jesus, stop!” she yelped. But Neil was oblivious. One, two, three more thrusts and he was finished.

  “Get off,” Sara whispered. “Can you get off ? I’ve got a… something’s stuck in me.” He rolled off her and she fumbled for the offending article and wincing, unhooked it from her flesh. She grasped it between thumb and forefinger, and held it out in the dark. It was hard to believe that something so tiny had caused her such pain.

  “Christ!” said Neil, angrily. He leaned across her and turned on the bedside light.

  They blinked at each other in the unaccustomed brightness and she held the object under the lampshade, to get a good look at it. It was a hinged silver hoop, about the size of a split pea. She frowned in incomprehension and looked at Neil, just in time to see him recognise it, and then pretend not to.

  Neil shook his head, slowly at first, and then urgently, emphatically.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Not what I think? Lou’s nose ring turns up in my bed and it’s not what I think? How the fuck did it get here then? Was she reading you a bedtime story or what? No! No!” She pushed both hands over his mouth. “Don’t make it worse. Oh I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.”

  She keeled over on the bed. The pain was visceral, astonishing. She heard a guttural groan, scarcely aware that it was coming from her own mouth.

  “Sara, listen. It was nothing. It meant nothing!”

  He wittered on for a while, ‘accident … meaningless… lonely… so very ashamed.’

  At last, when he had finished, she raised her head, slowly, as if from a swamp, and looked at him, this man who had betrayed her, this man whom she no longer knew.

  “When?” she said. “When were you even alone with her? Oh. God. I know. Taekwondo. I was at the leisure centre, looking after her kids. Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s perfect.”

  Neil continued to shake his head, eyes shut, like a little boy denying that he had raided the biscuit tin.

  Sara looked again at the tiny shred of silver still clamped between her thumb and fingernail. It was almost nothing. And yet it was everything. Absence and presence, both. A little O, a hole through which their marriage had all but leached away.

  “Perfect, perfect, perfect,” she kept repeating, rocking back and forth, until the words elided into a continuous keening wail.

  27

  Eighteen months later

  It was one of those winter mornings when the sea, shrouded in mist, heaved its surf onto the pebbles with a muffled splash. The land felt clean, anaesthetised by cold. Even the rubbish, blown into the corner of a shelter on the esplanade, looked like pop art. The dog skittered about, yanking Sara this way and that, cocking its leg on the rusty iron balusters and yapping after seagulls. She hadn’t wanted a dog at all, let alone this needy little mongrel, but she could see that it was A Good Thing. It compensated the boys, in some small measure, for the upheaval of the move and provided some welcome noise and chaos in a household that had become uncharacteristically subdued. The requirement to take it for a shit, onerous as it was, got Sara out of bed in the mornings, which was preferable to lying there waiting for the dawn to reacquaint her, gradually, with the strange contours of her new bedroom.

  She still dreamed of the old house. She would be standing on its doorstep, turning her key ineffectually in the lock, or walking downstairs only to find herself teetering on the edge of a precipice. Once, she dreamed she opened the airing cupboard and discovered a hidden wing, with a ballroom and a Wurlitzer organ. She’d woken up happy, until she remembered that there was no ballroom and, in fact, no house. Not for her, not any more.

  They were further along the promenade than usual – way past the bingo hall – before the dog condescended to open its bowels. Sara stooped to wriggle the still-steaming turd into the plastic bag she had brought for the purpose. Yet even this act of self-abasement could not quite take away the day’s wide, blue optimistic sheen. She felt, not happy, no, but reconciled. This, she had discovered, was the only realistic aspiration. Yet even this, until very recently, had seemed wildly ambitious. You could not afford to look back. You could not afford to compare. It was as if a new regime had swept away the customs of the old country. You had to turn amnesiac; let it all slip away. If you got out the accoutrements of the old way of life – started to recall its rituals, you would go mad with grief and resentment.

  Caleb claimed not to like his new school, but at least he wasn’t being bullied. That had been Sara’s fear. On the contrary, as far as she could tell by hacking his Facebook account, his disaffected air and world-weary cockney swagger had turned him into a bit of a cult hero. At the weekends, though, he would mope in his room, only emerging to pour himself a huge bowl of cornflakes and disparage whoever was in the kitchen at the time. He tended to reserve particular scorn for Neil, who was only there at weekends and whose attempts to ingratiate himself, during these brief, tense sojourns, were heartbreaking. He had always been the better parent. His instinct had been sound, his love had been steady, his authority – stemming, as it did, from his integrity – had been respected. Now, that integrity was shattered, and his authority gone. His instinct was all over the place. He made bad call after bad call. Only his love remained but that, it seemed, was not enough for Caleb.

  She hated to see Neil brought so low in the eyes of his eldest son, and yet she struggled not to feel slightly smug. He had, after all, brought it on himself. He had admitted as much during the counselling. He had looked Sara in the eye and apologised, and then he had begun to weep quietly. She had wanted to forgive him, had reached out her hand, but inside, her heart had been stony. The counsellor had heard the whole sorry tale, minus one salient fact on Sara’s side, which would have cast her in an altogether less favourable light. Over the course of several weeks, Sara had striven to disentangle her anger with Gavin and Lou, from her anger with her husband. Work had been done.

  Eight months living next to her sworn enemies had been enough. Eight months of hiding behind the hedge, waiting for the Humber to pull away, before she braved the street. Eight months of telling the postman that no, actually, it wouldn’t be convenient to take in an Amazon order for number nine. Eight months of remembering that the kids were just kids, and that Arlo must still be congratulated for performing an excellent manouevre on his skateboard, even if such congratulation met with a hostile stare.

  ***

  The anger, the stigma, the paranoia, had turned Sara from gregarious neighbour into social pariah. She crossed the street, now, rather than face awkward questions from well-meaning acquaintances, but she could tell, by the way people looked at her, that they knew. Meanwhile, Gavin and Lou seemed to have no shame. Sara could not say for sure that they were recruiting allies, but over the course of a few months, they seemed to have transformed themselves from enigmatic outsiders into pillars of the community. They were now the takers-in of parcels, the cat feeders and plant waterers, the signers of petitions, the hosts of Boxing Day drinks parties.

  That had been a tough one. Sitting in the front room, among the debris of Christmas, The Snowman turned up full blast on the telly to drown out the sounds of partying next door. Sara had been unable to resist glancing up every time Gavin and Lou’s garden gate squeaked. All the usual suspects had come and gone that day – sharp-suited Hoxton types, grizzled intellectuals – and harder still to witness, neighbours like Bronte and Mac, Marlene, Sandra from across the road, with her new baby, all apparently, happy enough to transfer their allegiance, for the sake of a tot of whisky and a mince pie, from Neil and Sara to the arty newcomers, who had only just bothered to learn their names.

  When the house had been on the market for six months, and a property developer with an instinct for desperation, had offered them six fifty for it, they’d snapped it up. It was worth it to get the hell out. It meant that they couldn’t afford Brighton – or not a four bed anyway, and as the train service from Hastings didn’t allow for dai
ly commuting, Neil would only be able to visit at weekends. This had seemed an apt punishment to Sara at the time. For even though she had conceded that the subsidence was not his fault, his behaviour had contributed in no small part to the toxic atmosphere, which had made living next door to Gavin and Lou untenable, and thus precipitated the untimely and therefore unprofitable move. In view of this, allowing him to sleep on a futon in the box room three nights a week seemed downright generous.

  The dog was pulling again, trying to get round to the business end of a Labrador whose owner had been too busy looking at his mobile to give them a wide berth. He raised his eyes from the screen now, and a vague flicker of interest crossed his face that told Sara, despite her early morning dishevelment, she was still recognisably female. She didn’t acknowledge him, only called the dog and tugged gently on its lead until it scurried unwillingly after her, but the subliminal message of the encounter added, incrementally, to the auspiciousness of the day.

  Not that she was interested in men, not at all. If there was one thing that the whole sorry episode had taught her, it was that; to keep your eyes on the pavement – not to look up. She and Neil had been just fine the way they were. More than fine, actually. Unpacking after the move, she had come across a wallet of holiday snaps. One had shown her and Caleb sitting on the steps of a caravan in the Dordogne, sharing a salami-filled baguette – she had been heavily pregnant with Patrick at the time and Neil had counselled against unpasteurised cheese.

  Just looking at herself in that photo, recalling the feel of the nubbly, sun-baked aluminium beneath her feet, the complacent weight of her belly, the slight discomfort of squinting into the light, as she waited for Neil to frame the shot, she yearned to be that person again. Even in the mild exasperation of the moment, she had been, she now saw, sublimely content. There had been love in the wry smile, which urged Neil to get a move on, love in the air of exaggerated patience with which she maintained the pose. Love was everywhere in the photograph – filtered through the weave of the canvas umbrella, bouncing off the moulded plastic furniture, leaking through the photographer’s lens.