I pulled on my jeans and a jumper, yanking my charger from the socket and throwing it into my leather holdall. I had bought it for Jonathan as a Christmas gift the year before he died. I took a few things from the pile of clean clothing on the chair in the corner of my room—underwear, a spare T-shirt, a small towel—and packed them as well. I grabbed my washbag from the bathroom. I tucked my toothbrush into the front pouch and found all manner of other products there, too—shampoo samples and a comb with missing teeth and an array of tampons in colorful plastic packaging and mascara with black paste crusted around the seal—and I zipped it up and threw it all into the bag as well.
I darted down the stairs—two at a time, smelling my stale breath as my breathing came quicker—and I arrived at Marnie’s in less than half an hour, shiny with sweat and pink-cheeked, but delighted to see relief spreading across her face as she opened the door.
A man walked past us in a suit and an animal-print tie, his hair still damp and a briefcase swinging from his fist. He must have seen me, marathon red and panting heavily, and Marnie, heavily pregnant and standing in the doorway in a calf-length peach nightdress. He turned his head away quickly. “Morning,” he muttered.
“Morning,” sang Marnie.
As he disappeared around the corner, Marnie’s hands shot out to the side and grabbed the door frame.
“Oh, not again,” she murmured.
She stepped backward, cradling her stomach in her arms.
The flat fell into chaos around her. I could see the TV screen dancing in the living room, and the radio in the kitchen was turned up and music was filtering down the stairs. The hallway was littered with clothing: cardigans over the banister and scarves piled in a corner and the pegs on the wall overflowing with jackets and coats. There were endless trails of things in all directions: tea-stained mugs and empty water glasses heading toward the kitchen, and half-eaten biscuits and sweet wrappers and unopened crisp packets through to the living room, and muslins and onesies and miniature socks scattered on the stairs.
I contorted my shock into a huge grin.
“It’s happening,” I said in a sort of singsong way and I did an awkward jig, shifting my weight between my two feet and clapping my hands together without ever really separating them.
Marnie groaned.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. You’re having a contraction.”
“No shit,” she hissed, waddling back toward the lounge.
I watched her walk away, her feet turned outward, her hands pressed into her lower back, and I felt immediately overwhelmed. I tried to remind myself that this was all entirely normal and that women did this every day, all over the world and at all hours. But it felt far from ordinary. We had first known each other as children, and then as young women, and as wives, but with her as a mother? The magnitude of that felt impossible.
Marnie yelped.
I rushed after her.
She was lowering herself onto a gigantic blue inflatable ball.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. Yes. Deep breathing. That’s the way. In. Out. In. And then—”
“Are you joking?” she said. “Stop that. Shut up.”
“Okay. Yes.” I said. “I’ll just wait here.”
I perched on the edge of the sofa, holding my leather bag between my legs. She bounced vigorously, up and down, fiercely blowing air through her pursed lips. Eventually, she leaned backward, stretching her chest and stomach up and out, and then she sighed. She began gently bouncing, lifting and lowering her considerable weight.
“Should we be going to—”
“The hospital?” she said. “No, not yet. But they are getting longer. “How are you doing, anyway? Sorry about that. And for getting you up so early. Just”—she waved her arm at the surrounding madness— “everything’s got a bit out of hand.”
Marnie abhors mess; she categorically cannot stand it. This, curiously, is one of the very few things on which we absolutely agree. We work in very different ways. We are our bests in very different situations. I like silence or just the quiet murmur of voices. She likes the radio or music or the television, preferably all three. I am introverted: I need my own space and my own company and to be alone. And she is a textbook extrovert, confident and outgoing and thriving off other people’s conversations and opinions and those interactions that drain me so quickly.
I’ve said it already, haven’t I? She is light and I am dark. But untidiness made us both useless.
I think she could probably have handled the pain and the discomfort and the fear of labor itself—I wonder now if she really needed me there for those things—but she simply couldn’t function amid that much disarray.
“I can see that,” I said. “What happened?”
“I know,” she said. “The place is a state. I was trying to go with the flow, eat what I needed, and focus only on the contraction, and then I thought I might just tidy up a bit, just to get ready, you know, and then everything got a bit intense, and, well”—she circled her hand over her head again—“it all looks like this now.”
“Right,” I said.
I knew what she wanted from me. I knew what she needed. I always had. And she had always known that I would deliver it, whatever it was that she wanted: without question, without complaint.
“How about you stay there,” I said, “and I’ll do just a quick tidy-up?”
Marnie smiled, and it felt nice that at this precipice, at the beginning of yet another stage of our lives, it was time again for “just a quick tidy-up.” I think it reassured me—wrongly, as it happens—that things weren’t going to change, that there was no reason to feel overwhelmed by the significance of this moment, that everything would be fine.
Marnie bounced on her ball and I flitted between the rooms, gathering and rehoming clothing, clearing litter into the bins, and folding the strangest, smallest, freshest-smelling blankets. I opened the windows. It was one of the first bright days of the year—I hadn’t needed a coat—and the breeze through the flat felt refreshing. When the flat was spotless, I had a quick shower and then made us cups of tea—hers with plenty of milk, mine with just a thimbleful—and sat down on the sofa to watch the twenty-four-hour news channel and hold her hand.
“Will you call my mum?” she asked.
I hadn’t expected that. “What?” I replied. “Why?”
“Perhaps she’ll want to be there? She might at least want to know what’s going on.”
“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“Well, all right, then.” I went into the hallway and I hovered there, and I neatened the coats on the pegs and kicked a feather into a gap beneath the skirting board and I called her mother and I felt relieved when she didn’t answer. I left a brief, mumbling message that probably wasn’t particularly clear and returned to Marnie a few minutes later.
* * *
By the early afternoon, Marnie’s contractions were three minutes apart and I called for a taxi to take us to the hospital. She changed into a light summer dress. She said that she was too hot and uncomfortable for anything else. We sat together in the back and she grunted as we went over the bumps, her eyes closed as though the darkness made the pain bearable.
We arrived at the hospital and she shuffled through the main reception to the elevator and I was surprised when we arrived at the maternity ward. It had all the trimmings of a normal hospital—the pale walls and a tiled floor and that smell of disinfectant—but something was different. Perhaps it was the lighting or the smiles on the faces of the staff or the pastel uniforms, but it didn’t feel quite so threatening.
We’d passed so many sick people on our way through the corridors; ghoulish elderly women being transported along hallways in beds that made them look tiny. And yet here the patients were all swollen and sweating and bursting—literally—with life.
A smiling midwif
e in a blue and white tunic led us to a side room.
“Here you go, pet,” she said. “Get yourself comfy and I’ll be back to check on you in five.”
Marnie held on to the bed frame and swayed from side to side, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes again closed.
“Will you stay?” she whispered. “For it all? Until the baby gets here?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course I’ll stay.”
Because where else would I have been?
* * *
Audrey Gregory-Smith was born at ten past seven in the evening on the twenty-fourth of April. She was small and angry and her face was red and her eyes were squeezed firmly shut, closed almost as tightly as her fists. She had thin tufts of fair hair on her scalp, wrinkles across her knees and elbows and knuckles, and pink pouting rosebud lips.
Marnie clutched her little girl to her chest, caught between joy and panic, insisting simultaneously that she might be sick and that she might drop the baby and then suddenly shouting, “Who’s in charge here?” to a bustling room.
I reached over to place my hand on top of hers. “You.” I didn’t want to frighten her, but wasn’t that the truth? “You’re in charge now.”
“Oh, fuck,” she replied and then grinned manically. “Well, that’s a worry, isn’t it?” And then she began to sob.
I shushed her and stroked her hair away from her face.
“Where’s my mum?” she asked. “Is she on her way?” She looked up at me.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t think that her mother deserved to be there for a moment that important.
“You did call her, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Yes?” she repeated.
“Definitely,” I said.
“And she said she’d come?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “She didn’t answer. I left a message. I guess she’s probably listened to it by now. I didn’t want to worry you. I thought that she’d come to the hospital. But I suppose . . . Shall I call her now? Let her know the good news?”
“No,” said Marnie. “I don’t think so.”
Which was exactly what I’d hoped she would say. Because this was a moment for the most important people in that child’s life.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Marnie was staying in the hospital overnight, and so I traveled home by myself. I was thinking, in the taxi, as we slipped through the backstreets of the city, how much had changed in the course of that one day. And how world-altering days must happen to different people each and every day. I was thinking that those days—the big days—are the junctures that define a life: when you gain someone, when you lose someone. I felt giddy at the new possibilities, the shape of my life in that moment, this new person who existed for me.
I had left home very early and hadn’t opened the blinds, and so it was dark when I stepped into my flat. I immediately noticed the red button flashing on my phone, a message waiting. I felt along the wall for the light switch.
I had plugged the landline back into the socket a few weeks earlier and discovered every single one of the messages that had been lingering there. I’d listened to a few: voices that seemed to speak from another world, from months earlier, when our newborn wasn’t yet born. But then the messages began to ask questions—about Jonathan, about Charles—and so I deleted them all.
I pressed my finger to the blinking triangle.
“One—new message,” said an automated female voice. “Received—today—at ten—twenty-three—p.m.”
“Hello,” said another woman’s voice, a human voice. It echoed through my hallway, ricocheting off the walls, a booming, elongated “Oh.” “I thought you’d like to know,” she said, and her voice was low and sort of husky, “that I’ve been looking into everything: everything you’ve said and everything that’s happened. And I’ve been finding things, too. I knew there was a story—I know that there is—and I’m going to get there eventually. I’ll find it, you know.”
She was slurring, her consonants weak, her vowels long and drawled, letters rolling together, as though she’d been drinking heavily all day. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock.
“So, whatever,” she said. “I know you were there for over an hour. I read the police report: waiting, you said. D’you know that the neighbor in the flat below reckons she might have heard someone shouting? Earlier in the day, she said, but shouting all the same. That’s strange, I reckon. Because he died straightaway, right? Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for screaming. And it’s more than that, isn’t it? That time you stayed there. Why spend such a long time in someone else’s home? And the week before. Just a walk in the rain? I don’t think so. There’s something, isn’t there? We both know that there is. There’s no need to call back.”
“You have—no—new messages,” said the automated voice, robotic and monotonous.
The steady joy that had filled me throughout the afternoon turned instantly, curdling like milk.
What had the neighbor heard? I walked into the kitchen and I turned on the tap. It splashed cold against my hand.
Who lived in the flat below? I took off my coat and hung it on the back of the stool tucked beneath the breakfast bar.
Was he loud in the hours that came after his fall? I turned on the radio and twisted the dial to turn up the volume. The room was engulfed in some song, some tune that meant nothing to me.
That would undermine his time of death.
I turned on the television. I’d lost the remote control a few months earlier and so I used the buttons at the side of the screen to increase the sound.
I sat on the sofa. An urgent panic was inflating itself inside of me, and my chest and my breath felt tight. She was getting closer; I could almost feel her behind me, in the tickle of my hair against the back of my neck and the rub of my clothes on my shoulders. I felt jittery, my body protesting the jump from joy to terror. It felt like there was something submerged within me and, desperate to expel it, I roared into the cacophony: the water, the music, the voices.
And then I sat silent.
I felt a little better then: cleaner, fresher, lighter, too.
I stood up and I turned off the tap and I turned off the radio and I turned off the television, and then I sat back down.
I needed to focus.
I told myself to stay calm.
So someone had heard something.
It wasn’t ideal.
But perhaps it wasn’t a catastrophe.
Because everyone who’s ever lived near others knows that people are loud, often very loud. And those few dozen apartments squeezed into a mansion house always felt very dense to me. We could all hear the babies crying, and the mothers shushing, and the music playing, and the dinner party laughter, and the washing machine vibrating wildly against the floor, and the doors slamming, and the stomping feet, and the ringing of an alarm clock or a telephone. We could all hear the insults creeping louder and louder, the generic grievances: the “you don’t listens” and the “if you weren’t always naggings” and the “why don’t you at least try to see it from my perspectives.”
It wasn’t impossible that someone had heard him screaming. But it didn’t matter. There was no tangible evidence that he didn’t die instantly. The scream of a falling man could quite easily be the squeal of a child playing or the rage of a disgruntled teen. The roar of his frustration, those pangs of anger, could comfortably be the clash of an overwrought couple, married too young and too long.
None of it was new. None of it was noteworthy.
None of her small discoveries had the power to effect any sort of change. Her evidence was circumstantial at best and would probably be deemed irrelevant. And so I wound down the last of my panic, piece by piece, taking it apart and dismissing each section in turn.
But the bigger issue—an
d the one that clearly needed addressing, that couldn’t be unpicked quite so easily—was her indomitable persistence. I needed to get rid of her, to find a way to silence her. I needed to ensure that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—find anything further, that she could never have anything that might threaten my friendship.
I rifled through my kitchen cupboards, looking for something to eat. It had been a very long day and I was feeling a little fraught and I had a headache that existed somewhere beyond my forehead, in the space in front of my face. I discovered a few slices of bread in the bottom of a bag. I picked off the mold and I toasted them—all four of them. I smeared them with butter, thick and yellow, and I watched as it melted translucent. I was in control; I could stay in control. I squeezed honey onto the top of each slice and I tilted the toast to spread it across the surface. Against the toast, speckled brown, the gold was rich and it made me think of Marnie.
I took my bread to bed and I ate it carefully, channeling Emma, cautious of crumbs. I sent a message to Peter, explaining my absence that day, and he replied congratulating me almost immediately. It made me excited, reignited a little of that joy that I, too, was deserving of congratulations.
I turned off the light and in the glow from my phone scrolled through some new photographs of Valerie. She’d uploaded a photograph of her and her flatmate holding lurid cocktails in a bustling restaurant, another of the sun setting beyond her balcony. There was an incredible video of her and five others dancing in a round. The caption beneath revealed that they were preparing for a performance later in the year, in the summer.
I set my alarm for the following morning and I told myself to be happy, to be brave, to be unafraid. Because I was going to find a way to end this.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I returned to the hospital early the following day, excited to see Marnie, excited to see Audrey. I asked for them at the entrance to the maternity wing and was directed to a ward at the other end of the corridor. I went toward bed seven, as instructed, and discovered that it was hidden behind a thin blue curtain. I found a break in the fabric and I opened it slightly and I spoke into the gap.
Seven Lies Page 23
