by Niamh Greene
‘Alastair,’ Tanya says, frowning at him, ‘do you have to smoke? It’s so gross.’
Tanya is vehemently anti-smoking. She has been ever since she saw that ‘Smoking is not Cool’ video at school – the one where they split a diseased lung in half and all the black goo dripped out. Tanya threw up in the front row partway through the video, and she never really lived it down.
‘All cigarettes are disgusting, but menthol cigarettes are vile.’ She coughs and shifts away from him on the sofa.
‘Sorry,’ Al says, shrugging apologetically. ‘But smoking is cool again, so I have to do it. And menthols are really hot – they’re so retro.’
‘Smoking isn’t cool,’ Tanya sniffs, ‘and if I get cancer because of your idiotic lifestyle choices I’ll kill you.’
‘Haven’t you heard about smirting?’ Alastair sighs. ‘You’re no one if you haven’t flirted with a total stranger in the outside smoking area.’ He inhales again and tries to blow a smoke ring. ‘I don’t like it any more than you do, but I have to practise if I want to get any action. Do you think I look sexy enough?’ He angles the cigarette from his fingers and pouts suggestively at her.
‘Smoking isn’t sexy.’ Tanya glares at him. ‘It’s disgusting.’ She turns away from Al and leans in close to me, as if she doesn’t believe that she could have heard me right the first time and needs to listen again carefully, just to make sure. ‘Now, Moll,’ she says, ‘take a deep breath and tell us what happened – start over from the very beginning.’
I inhale and feel my chest shudder. I won’t panic. I need to stay calm. I’ll take a few big cleansing breaths – that’ll help. That’s what the feature in Her advised last month, and that advice was given by someone who really knew what she was talking about: the freelancer I commissioned to write it was trapped alone in a store toilet for ten and a half hours when the security man locked her in overnight by mistake. I don’t know what would be worse: being trapped in a store toilet all night or being so close to all the gorgeous designer goodies on the shop floor and not being able to get to them. Butter-soft leather handbags with dangly padlocks and buckles so big you’d get whiplash just from lifting them, one of a kind handcrafted jewels you’d have to employ a personal bodyguard to wear in public – that sort of stuff.
But I can’t think about handbags right now. Right now I need to concentrate on not having a heart attack. OK, so heart attacks are probably rare for women in their early thirties, but I’m sure they can happen. Especially if you’ve just had a massive shock, like I have. I could keel over any second. It definitely feels like my heart is about to burst out of my chest. And my arm… there’s a stabbing pain in my left arm – isn’t that one of the first signs of cardiac arrest? Maybe I should take an Anadin, that’s meant to help – or is that for blood clots? I can’t remember.
I try to breathe in and out as slowly and evenly as possible. There, I feel better already. I’m fine. Now all I have to do is remember to keep breathing. How hard can that be? I’ve been doing it for thirty-three years without even thinking about it. In, out, in, out, there’s nothing to it. I try to ignore the way my heart is violently hammering or the way my head feels like it’s going to explode. This is surreal. Charlie can’t have left me – we only got married a few weeks ago. We’re newlyweds, for goodness sake. We were happy… weren’t we?
‘Molly?’ Tanya softly prompts me to speak. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘I woke up,’ I hear myself croak, ‘and that note was next to me.’ I gesture feebly at the note that Al has managed to prise from my fingers.
‘OK…’ Tanya chews thoughtfully on her lip. ‘And Charlie hadn’t said anything to you before that? About, um, being unhappy?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ I feel myself start to shake again.
It’s so strange – it’s like I’m floating above my body and looking down at myself on the floor. From up here I don’t look like a deserted wife; I look perfectly normal. This can’t be happening. This must be some terrible nightmare and I’ll wake up any minute. I don’t deserve this. I’m a nice person. I brush my teeth, I say my prayers. OK, so I don’t exactly say my prayers, but I do donate to charity and I have a standing order to help a poor family in a Third World country – that has to count for something.
‘I’m telling you,’ Alastair says, ‘he’s gone mental. Maybe he’s had a nervous breakdown. They’re considered quite sexy now. All the best people are having them.’
He takes another drag and exhales elegantly through his nose. I know that in his head he’s pretending to be Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. He loves that movie – he watches it every three months or so and then spends the next week speaking like a Southern belle and trying to decide if growing a Clark Gable moustache would make him more handsome.
‘Let me see the letter,’ Tanya says. She’s using her ‘calm and in control’ voice. It makes me feel even sicker because it means she’s taking this seriously.
Al passes it back to her and she scans it again.
‘No, this isn’t the letter of a madman,’ she says eventually. ‘The spelling’s too good. If he’d gone mad his writing would be more scrawly – you know, spidery and kind of sinister.’
‘Yeahhhh.’ Alastair nods. ‘Like a proper mentalist.’
‘Exactly,’ Tanya says.
Then she takes my hand in hers and I feel her soft, beautifully moisturized skin against my clammy palm. Tanya loves to moisturize – she carries hand cream with her everywhere. She says it’s vital to massage it into the cuticles because they are an important indicator of a person’s self-worth. Her cuticles are smooth and translucent. I start to feel wobbly. This is really happening. I’m not having some awful nightmare – I’m not going to wake up soon.
‘Was Charlie acting strangely?’ Tanya asks slowly. ‘You know, out of character maybe?’
I try to think, but everything’s a blur. Maybe the jet lag is kicking in, maybe that’s why my brain feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and shake my head. But what if I’m wrong? Maybe he was acting strangely and I just didn’t see it.
‘Wasn’t there anything unusual? Even the smallest thing?’ Tanya’s blue eyes search my face. She’s wearing her extra-lengthening mascara. It’s funny the things you notice in a crisis.
‘He might have been a bit quieter than usual when we were away,’ I suggest eventually. ‘But we were unwinding. The wedding was so hectic, we were exhausted.’
I think I see Al and Tanya exchange a knowing glance, but I’m not sure.
‘Yes, the wedding was certainly eventful, I’ll give you that,’ Tanya says, smiling at me.
I know exactly what she’s talking about. The day had been pretty eventful. First there had been mad Aunt Nora, who’d successfully reminded anyone who hadn’t already noticed that I wasn’t marrying David, my ex, that I was marrying Charlie instead. The guy I’d just had the whirlwind romance with. The guy who had popped the question after just a few weeks of dating. That was a little awkward. And then the photographer forgot to recharge the battery on his digital camera and we had to reshoot most of the official photographs. It may have been a teeny mistake on my part to hire the photographer from Your Animal magazine, but I only did it because the staff photographer from Her was on holiday in Miami. How was I to know he was incompetent? His portfolio looked fine – even if it was mostly of cats. Anyway, it all worked out in the end – he even got a photo of us in Hiya! to make up for the inconvenience.
Then there was the meal. The soup was cold – and it wasn’t supposed to be one of those trendy chilled soups that you sometimes see being made on cooking programmes either – but who could have foreseen a power cut in the hotel kitchen? And the music was problematic because the swing band was a bit late. By an hour and a half. It really was so unfortunate that the lead singer got his willy caught in his zipper in a petrol station toilet on the motorway and had to be rushed to A&E.
&n
bsp; So, yes, there were a few little hiccups, but it was a beautiful day nevertheless. I can still remember how Charlie looked at me when he said, ‘I do.’ And I can still remember our first kiss as man and wife – no tongues, just chaste, closed lips, as we had agreed beforehand. French-kissing like teenagers in front of all our friends and family would have been too mortifying, despite Alastair’s attempt to convince me that all the best celebrity couples got down and dirty on the altar after being declared man and wife and if we wanted to add an extra pizzazz to the proceedings we should snog like it was going out of fashion.
I can, in fact, remember every single detail like it was yesterday. It’s all seared on my brain and it will be for ever. OK, so I suppose it’s not like time has had a chance to dim the memories – we’re only just back from our honeymoon. We haven’t even eaten the leftover wedding cake yet. Mind you, I don’t like fruit cake all that much. It’s the sultanas that make my stomach turn – they’re so slimy. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to my guns and got the chocolate fudge cake I really wanted, but Alastair persuaded me that it wouldn’t be traditional so I caved in. Tradition is vital – especially when it comes to the most important day in your life.
‘Did you have a row maybe?’ Tanya strokes my hand gently, like I’m a child again and she’s the kind big sister helping to pick me up after I’ve fallen and cut my knee. She was always really good at looking after me whenever I hurt myself. Mind you, she liked to give me the odd sly bruise as well, just so she could play nurse.
‘No, we didn’t,’ I say, clinging tightly to her hand. I see her wince. I realize I’m digging my nails into her skin.
‘Are you sure?’ Al gazes into my eyes. He’s doing the ‘I can see into your soul’ thing that he likes to think he’s so good at. Ever since he did that night course on psychic abilities he thinks he’s got ‘the gift’. He claims to have predicted the whole skinny jean phenomenon.
‘Maybe there’s something you’re blocking out?’ Tanya asks.
I try to remember. Had something major happened and I’ve forgotten? I can’t think of anything. Surely I would remember something really serious, like him wanting to run out on me? I couldn’t have missed those signs, could I? That couldn’t be possible.
‘Let’s go back,’ she says soothingly. ‘What was the last thing you had an argument about?’
Alastair pauses mid-drag and looks at me expectantly.
I try to think.
‘He wanted to watch a documentary about the ozone layer,’ I say eventually in a small voice. ‘I wanted to watch EastEnders instead.’
Charlie is really passionate about the environment. He’s always going on about reducing, reusing and recycling. I’m not that eco-friendly, to be honest. I did buy one of those ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ bags though, so I do try. I know it was only a fake one, but to get a real one I would’ve had to queue for hours, and standing in the pouring rain and freezing cold didn’t strike me as a fun way to pass a morning. The truth is, I’ve never been that good at the recycling thing, and since meeting Charlie I hadn’t needed to keep pretending that I was any more, because he started taking care of it all – the washing out of jam jars and making trips to the bottle banks: really boring stuff like that. Of course, we don’t usually have that many jam jars – I never could stand the way the little seedy bits get stuck between your teeth and you can’t get them out for days, even with floss. But I always have quite a few bottles, especially if Tanya and Alastair come to visit – then it can be more than a few. I used to hate going to the bottle bank because I’d had so many embarrassing incidents trying to shove all the empties into the great big tank while everyone stared at me. I always knew what they were thinking: that I was a total alco, personally responsible for most of the binge-drinking in the country. One time I tried to explain to an old lady who was looking at me in disgust that the bottles weren’t all mine, that Tanya and I had been keeping Al company because he’d had a fight with his boyfriend. But she turned her head away like I was scum and she couldn’t bear to be anywhere near me. So it was dead handy when Charlie took over complete responsibility for the environmental stuff. He even tried to get me to start using eco-friendly washing-up liquid, but I wouldn’t do it because I like the way the supermarket brand bubbles up and keeps your hands soft – that’s what the ad says, and why would advertisers lie? Maybe I should have listened to him, though. Maybe if I’d agreed to switch to an ecologically friendly product he wouldn’t have left me. Perhaps I should change. Perhaps I should go out right now and buy that eco washing-up liquid. Who cares if the grease is left on the frying pan or the glasses are still grubby? I probably won’t even notice. Not unless I get food poisoning or MRSA from the dirt of course. But I could do with losing some weight anyway. And I’ll get really good at recycling too. I’ll start that compost heap thing he’s always talking about. It will be smelly and disgusting, but I’ll put up with it because we’ll be together again and that’s all that counts. I’ll get wellies and wear a woolly jumper and pretend I really care about the planet. I’ll even give up hairspray. Charlie is always going on about toxicity and the ozone layer. I never really listened before, but I’m willing to listen now. I can just wear my hair in a ponytail every day so no one need ever know how grimy it really is. Who needs hairspray anyway? Well, maybe I won’t go that far. I mean, my hair gets really uncontrollable if I don’t give it a good coating occasionally. But otherwise I’ll be a green warrior – an eco angel. I’ll be the perfect, environmentally friendly wife.
Tanya blinks slowly. Al coughs and splutters on his cigarette.
‘What? What is it?’
Why are they looking at me like that?
They exchange another glance.
‘Um, arguing about watching a show on the ozone layer is hardly very… passionate, is it?’ Tanya says slowly.
‘I can’t help it if we don’t have blazing arguments,’ I say. ‘We don’t really fight that much.’
‘Well, you should try it. The sex is great afterwards,’ Al pipes up.
‘Oh yeah…’ Tanya’s face lights up. ‘Last week Connor and I had a massive row about who should get the toy in the cornflakes box. Then we ended up bonking on the kitchen table – it was amazing.’
Her eyes go all dreamy.
‘Oooh saucy!’ Alastair says, nudging her and giggling.
Then they see my face and compose themselves again.
‘Sorry, Molly.’ Tanya clears her throat. ‘So, after you found the note you called his mobile…’
‘And it went through to answerphone,’ I finish. We’ve been through that part already. I’ve called a dozen times, but Charlie’s not answering. I’ve left messages asking him to call me back, to tell me what all this means, but so far nothing.
‘So you have no idea what time he left?’
‘No.’ I realize this is true.
‘He could have gone in the middle of the night for all we know,’ Al suggests. ‘You know, under cover of darkness and all that.’
‘This isn’t a spy movie, Alastair,’ Tanya says. ‘He’ll probably be back in time for tea. Perhaps he just felt a little panicky and had to have some breathing space.’
I feel a ray of hope bubbling inside me. That sounds good – that sounds plausible. Maybe this is nothing to worry about. Maybe it’s just a little blip in married life. One of those things that happen to everyone.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Al interrupts. ‘I mean, really, you two should still be in the honeymoon period. It’s meant to last for a few months at least. Unless,’ his eyes brighten and he visibly perks up in his chair, ‘unless you’re having a celebrity marriage.’ He flicks ash from his cigarette and misses the saucer he’s using as a temporary ashtray by a mile.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
Is that good? Does that mean that everything will be fine in the end?
‘You know, you get married after knowing each other for a few weeks – you got that part almost right – the
n you split up and get divorced in the space of six months, sometimes less. It’s all the rage. You might swing an annulment if you’re lucky.’
He stubs his cigarette out in the saucer.
I feel weak. Divorced? We can’t get divorced. We’re barely married. We have wedding gifts to open. The remains of our three-tier cake are still in the fridge, for God’s sake.
‘Let’s face it,’ Al goes on, ‘everything happened so quickly. How well do you know Charlie really? I mean, it’s not like it was with you and David. You knew him inside out.’
Tanya gasps and suddenly the room is still and silent. It’s so quiet I can hear myself swallow. So quiet I can hear air rushing in my ears. I feel as cold as ice. Almost as cold as that time Charlie and I went ice-skating in Central Park.
That was such an amazing holiday – it was the trip when Charlie proposed. We’d only been dating for four weeks when he’d sprung it on me out of the blue. He was treating me to three days in New York just before Christmas – I’d been sick with excitement when I’d found out. I’d never been to New York before, but I just knew I was going to love it. It was going to be so romantic. Charlie and I were getting on brilliantly, and now we were going to the Big Apple together. We’d be just like Ross and Rachel in Friends, drinking skinny lattes and sharing hotdogs on street corners. We were going to stay in a gorgeous Park Avenue Hotel, take horse-drawn carriages through Central Park and go on shopping sprees in Bloomingdale’s. Of course I was a little nervous: it was a long way to go with someone you didn’t know that well. For one thing, I was going to have to do my ‘business’ in the en-suite bathroom while he was in the bedroom. That scared me. What if he could hear me weeing? That’d kill any mystery I was trying to preserve.
But I was also excited. I needed a break and Charlie was handsome, charming and had one of those black American Express cards, the kind you only get when you don’t have any trouble paying your bills at the end of the month. In the four weeks I’d been dating him I’d discovered that he really knew how to show a girl a good time. He was generous and flamboyant and sent massive bouquets of flowers to the office all the time. And he was totally smitten with me – he seemed to think I was the best thing since sliced bread. He kept telling me how amazing and unique I was and, thing is, I was starting to believe him. He said he’d never felt this way about anyone before, that I was special, that he was in love with me. It was intoxicating. So when he asked me to go to New York I hesitated for about half a second before throwing my arms around his neck and shouting yes! And the added advantage was that going to New York at that time of year meant I’d be away for the anniversary of Mum and Dad’s deaths, and that had to be good. Because maybe if I was in Manhattan with a gorgeous man I would be able to forget what had happened, maybe if I was in a foreign city I could blank the date and all those painful memories from my mind.
