Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel

by Dorothy Koomson

  CHAPTER 24

  W here’ve you been?” I asked Mal in a whisper.

  I’d heard the front door open and close a few minutes before and had expected him to come up to bed, given the hour. But I’d waited and waited and nothing, no foot on the stairs, not even the sudden blast of sound as he switched on the TV and then sat down to watch the soccer highlights that I’d taped earlier (a sure sign that he was drunk). But nothing. For a few terrified seconds I wondered if it was a burglar, but then dismissed this because I’d definitely heard a key being used. I found him in the dark kitchen, leaning over the counter, staring down at the circular wooden chopping block as though it was giving him an important lecture on the theory of evolution.

  “At Nova’s,” he replied, just as quietly.

  “All this time?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she have gone to bed hours ago?”

  He turned his head to me then, confused, baffled. “Why? What time is it?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  He frowned. “In the morning?”

  I nodded, worried. He seemed genuinely surprised. He seemed to have not only lost track of time, but everything: who he was, where he was, what he was.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said, turning back to the chopping board, “it was so late.”

  I watched my husband, with his head bowed, like a man bent in prayer, and searched in the gloom for what was different about him. He was still wearing the suit he was wearing this morning. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers, he hadn’t worn a tie so his top button was open, his hair was all in place. But something was different. Something had changed. He reeked. That was what had changed, his smell. He reeked of her. Of Nova. Not of sex, not of anything physical, but he was drenched in her; I could almost see her flowing over him, like a slow-moving, powerful waterfall, dousing every part of him in her. Nova had been the one who was always going on about auras and energy fields and us giving off vibes and how simply being around someone could significantly alter your aura and therefore your mood. Which was why you had such strong physical reactions—good and bad—to certain people. Which was why you seemed to glow when you first fell in love. She had been trying to teach me how to read people, to see beyond their words, to look at them without your eyes, to tune in to how they made you feel when they did the things they did. I’d always had severe problems with it, because, basically, it was a load of nonsense—not that I’d ever tell her that.

  Now I understood. Every lesson she’d tried to pass on suddenly came into sharp focus in the semidarkness of our kitchen: Mal reeked of Nova. It was all around him. All over him: Nova. Nova. Nova. The woman who was carrying his child. The woman who was doing the one thing I couldn’t.

  “You know I love you, right?” he said, spinning to me all of a sudden.

  It was like a sharp, invisible knife being slipped into the center of my heart. He hadn’t said “I love you” like usual. It was a question, and one he didn’t need to ask. Of course I knew. We wouldn’t be together if I didn’t know. And this question sounded like the preamble to him telling me he was leaving me: “You know I love you, right? But she’s having my baby. She’s the one I’ve wanted all along.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked, my voice wavering.

  He reached out, grabbed me into his arms, held me close. So close I felt the buttons from his jacket pressing through the thin fabric of my nightshirt, marking my skin. I realized after a few seconds he was unbuckling his belt, unzipping his trousers and then he was tugging me down onto the floor, encouraging me onto my back. We hadn’t done this in an age. Why would we when we had three perfectly good bedrooms upstairs? And a comfy sofa in the next room. We even had thick carpet in the corridor, which would be more comfortable than this. In the early days of owning this place, sex anywhere and everywhere was fun. Now it was stupid. Especially if I was the one lying on the cold lino, not completely seduced to the point where I didn’t care where we were as long as we were. His mouth covered mine in a deep kiss and then we were beyond the moment of relocating.… I closed my eyes, arched my body, trying to relax into it. Enjoy it for what it was—an unexpected moment of passion. The type of thing that newly attached people did all the time and married people often complained about not being able to do. And when the baby came, we’d rarely have the chance to do this.

  He was different. I could feel it. He was somewhere else while right there with me. I opened my eyes and his dark russet-brown eyes were focused through me, not on me. He couldn’t see me. He wasn’t with me. He was … I knew where he was. Who he was with.

  “You know I love you, right?” he said again afterwards. We were lying side by side, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for our breathing to normalize.

  I said nothing, felt the invisible knife twist, gouging out the center of my heart.

  He turned onto his side, his shirt rucked around his waist, and he was still hanging out of his splayed-open trousers. “Right?” he asked, stroking a strand of my hair away from my face.

  I could have told him right there that I knew. That I’d seen the look on his face, that I’d felt her on him. That I knew he was falling back in love with her. But I didn’t. I rolled onto my side to face him.

  “Course,” I said. “Of course I know.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I was exhausted, but I could not close my eyes and go to sleep.

  My mind was still swirling with what we had said, what I had discovered, what he had discovered, how the two of us, as close as we were, had managed to miss what was probably obvious to anyone on the outside.

  In a daze he had left, and I had climbed into bed fully dressed because I was too tired to change my clothes, and tried to sleep.

  Bleep-bleep. Bleep-bleep, sounded my mobile on the nightstand.

  Without bothering to flick on the light, I picked up my mobile and called up the text message, knowing who it would be from.

  Goodnight, beautiful.

  It was over now.

  We wouldn’t talk about this again. I’d have this baby, I would go traveling and they would bring him up, and Mal and I would never talk about this again. We would bury it. I shut my phone, slipped it under my pillow and clung to it, like a precious jewel that I had found but had to return to its rightful owner. In the morning, I would delete the message. In the morning, when it was daylight, I’d return that precious jewel to whence it came. But for now: I’d cling to the first time in my whole life that Mal had called me beautiful.

  CHAPTER 26

  I t’s much harder looking for evidence of an affair that isn’t happening physically.

  There’s no telltale lipstick on the collar, no smell of her perfume, no unexplained absences or sudden preening. When it’s a case of being unfaithful with your heart and mind, it’s much easier to hide; it’s much harder to uncover.

  I took to watching him: noticing if he wandered off into a trance. If he did, I would bring him out of it by asking him something about Nova and the baby. See if he would blush and look alarmed or guilty before he replied. He did sometimes, and I’d know that’s where he was when he was in the trance. Other times he’d reply without guilt or a blush and I would know that he hadn’t been with her mentally. If we made love, I kept my eyes open, watching for that moment when he would glaze over, lose himself inside the thought of another woman for a few seconds. He always came back to me, came with me, but I could tell when he indulged himself in her.

  From her, I found out something had happened. It was on her face the moment she opened the door to me when I went for a visit two days later. She smiled at me, said it was nice to see me as always, but now my senses had been opened to how to see someone without looking at them, I could feel that her aura had changed. She had changed. She didn’t reek of Mal, like he had done of her, but she was saturated in guilt.

  “Are you OK?” I asked her, after she’d thrown up for the third time since I’d arrived half an hour earlier.

  “Yeah,” she said, tucking her hair, wh
ich she’d put back into braids, behind her ears and slumping in the sofa next to me. She did not look OK. Her face was pinched, her skin a sallow shade of its usual dark brown. “Remember how I said that it wasn’t morning sickness, it was any-time-of-the-day-it-pleases sickness?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it’s that,” she said. “I feel wrung out. And the more tired I am, the more sick I feel. It’s not good when a restaurant manager keeps bolting to the loo to throw up. Hardly inspires confidence in the food. I thought it would have gone by now, but it’s still here. Going strong.”

  “What I wouldn’t give to be able to feel all that,” I said. It was an evil thing to say, I knew that. But I had to know. Had to see how she would react to me hitting that particular emotional button. I hadn’t even gone near it, hadn’t thought I’d needed to. Now it was going to act like a lie detector.

  I saw her stomach turn, the energy around her light up: guilt. Pure, concentrated guilt. I knew all about guilt. And I knew it when I saw it.

  She clamped her hand over her mouth and ran for the toilet. I got up, went to the kitchen, slipped two pieces of bread into the toaster, flicked on the kettle, removed a white mug from the cupboard and dropped in a ginger and lemon teabag.

  As I waited for her toast to brown and for the kettle to boil to make stomach-settling tea, I folded my arms and wondered how many times she had kissed my husband. How many times she’d stroked and caressed him. When she was planning to make love to him. How many ways she’d told him she loved him. How many times she’d listened to him say it back.

  And as I doused the teabag in boiling water, the browned bread popping up out of the toaster, I wondered how I was going to make her pay.

  I hated myself for it, but it was necessary, going through his things.

  Through his pockets, his car, his desk at home. I took to turning up unexpectedly at her place when I knew he would be there, when I knew he shouldn’t be there. Nothing. In three weeks, nothing. If I showed up at her flat when I knew he said he’d be there, they didn’t look surprised. They didn’t look like they’d just struggled into their clothes, nor as if they’d been planning on taking them off. She would always put my hand on her stomach, same as his. If I turned up when he said he was working late, he was never there—he was always working late.

  But I knew something was going on. He was still zoning into trances, drifting into her arms when making love to me. She was still wearing her guilt like a metaphorical hair shirt when we were alone together.

  There was an affair. Or, the thought had been playing around my mind for a while, but was becoming more real with every passing day: they were going to keep my baby for themselves. They were biding their time; waiting for the baby to be born and then they’d run away together. Or move into my house. Him, her, my baby, my home.

  He forgot his mobile twenty-six days after I realized they were making plans behind my back. He called me at work to ask if I’d check when I got home if it was there because if it wasn’t, then he’d have to cancel it and get a new phone. It was there on the bedside table, all sleek and black and shiny. Holder of his secrets. I sat on the bed, holding it in my hand, and called him to let him know it was safe. “Thank God,” he breathed.

  “No, thank me,” I replied. “I’m the one who found it.”

  “OK, thank God, and thank you, especially, Stephanie, light of my life, keeper of my heart.”

  “That’s better,” I replied, wondering how many times he’d called her that.

  I put the phone down and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. It was what I did in stressful moments such as this. I moved from one foot to the other, moving the toothbrush over my teeth and gums, carefully avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. All the other places I had searched could, conceivably, have been done with the best motives: doing the washing, sorting the dry cleaning, clearing out his car. But going through his phone, something he usually kept with him at all times? That was crossing the line. That was admitting to myself that I did think he was unfaithful. I felt it, I knew it on many levels, but if I searched his phone and found something … that would mean I had been looking. That would mean he would know that I didn’t trust him.

  Maybe you should leave well enough alone, I told myself.

  Alone is what you’re going to be if he is in love with her again, I replied.

  Trust him, I told myself.

  His face as he made love to me the night all this started flashed so vividly in my mind: his eyes elsewhere, his soul entwined with another. Using me as a vessel to make love to her; using my body to connect with her heart.

  The phone was in my hand and I was pressing buttons in seconds. He had missed calls—almost all from me. The same with received calls. I opened the folder of little envelopes, text messages he called them, a bit like emails but on your phone. I didn’t have a mobile. I wanted to avoid for as long as possible being tied down like that. And what if no one called? What if someone did call and I didn’t want to speak to them? It was all far too stressful for me.

  There was nothing unusual in his inbox. No text messages from Nova, only a couple from the lads he had shared a house with before he met me. Nothing. There was nothing. I put the phone down. My heart had been racing, my palms sweaty and my breath short. Like I was about to face the biggest horror of my life. But it was fine. There was nothing there to prove that he was with Nova. That they were in love and planning a life without me.

  I don’t know what made me think of it: she hadn’t sent him anything.…

  Moving slowly and carefully, I picked up the phone again, went back to the text messages, and went to the outbox. There were seven messages, one to her. Sent that night. My heart palpitating in irregular beats in my ears, I opened it. I read it.

  Goodnight, beautiful.

  CHAPTER 27

  A fter Meredith leaves, I sit on the back step and smoke three cigarettes in quick succession, the only pause between them being the moments of stubbing one out and lighting the next.

  Mal is working very late on a project, so I have the house to myself.

  I have been so wrong about Meredith. She isn’t the weak, fragile person to be secretly pitied that I thought she was. She is strong, calm, fair. I suppose I have assumed, like everyone else, that being labeled as mentally ill makes you somehow less of a person. Someone to feel sorry for. That’s always been my fear, why I want no one to know. I don’t want to be labeled.

  I light my fourth cigarette and rub my eyes.

  I expected her to react, but not like that. I close my eyes and replay the moment: she had waited a few minutes after I finished speaking—confessing, really—before she placed her hand on my shoulder and said, “It must have been so difficult for you.” I had told her the truth, even the bits in between that Mal doesn’t know. I told her what I did, what I said, how I made it impossible for Mal to see his son, and her first thoughts were of me.

  I didn’t think it was possible to feel any worse than I have done all these years, but I do. If the people around me weren’t so damn noble and nice and guileless, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty all the time.

  Inhaling deeply on my cigarette, I hold the smoke down in my lungs, trapping my breath like I would if I was submerged in the bath. I needed to do that when I was younger, especially after my mother sent me to stay with her sister so what needed to be done could be done without my father finding out. Mary thought it was incredibly unfair, of course, that I was getting sent on “holiday” when I’d done nothing but bring pain and gossip and shame on the family. Even after our mother explained that I was a different type of ill, she still resented me. When I came back from my aunt’s, the only place I could be truly alone was in the bathroom. I would run a bath, lock the door and immerse myself in the water. I’d feel weightless, as though I was floating in space and there was no sound, no feelings, no big gaping hole inside me where something had once existed that had been ripped out against my will. I probabl
y would have made the same choice, but no one—not even the doctor, who had been so nice about everything else—ever asked. They just did. They just made me.

  I got very good at holding my breath. At being weightless and not existing, until my father broke down the door because I had been so quiet in the bathroom for so long. Then I was ripped out of space, there was screaming, and shouting, and the water was red and I ended up in one of those places for the first time.

  I was never allowed to lock a door after that. I started to live like a prisoner, where they held me hostage with open doors.

  When I finally got to university, it took me a while to believe I was allowed to lock the door on my room and the bathrooms in halls.

  I grind out the cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray.

  Will she let me see him? In the flesh, will Nova let me see him?

  I reach for my cigarettes again.

  Every time I close my eyes, I can see the easy loop of his smile, the sparkle of intelligence in his eyes, the joy he must bring to everyone around him.

  I’d love to see him in the flesh. Maybe she will. That’s the sort of person Nova is. Fair. I know that now, of course. Now. I know that she would never …

  Maybe if not me, then Mal. And if he sees him, then maybe he’ll tell me about him. I’ll get to know him through Mal.

  I stop before lighting the next cigarette, resheathe it in the pack. I stand up, empty the ashtray into the wheelie bin, and then carefully hide it behind the evergreen bush and the fishing garden gnome that Nova’s sister had given us as a moving-in present. Mal had laughed and laughed at the gnome, but I didn’t get it. “There’s no joke,” he had said, “it’s just the most hideous thing and she knows I’ll never throw it out because it’s a present.” Now it helps to hide my secret. One of my secrets.

  I sometimes wonder if other people are like me. If other people have so many secrets that they’re not entirely sure all the time who they really are.