The girls are with my parents in London, staying for the weekend, maybe longer. That depends on what happens next. I wanted them away from here when I did this. If they keep me in, I will call Scott and tell him. And even though he’s only partway along his journey to being a good man again, he’ll have to move back into the house and take care of the girls. Live his life around them as I’ve had to do all these years.
I suppose I am a ‘flight risk’ so it’s unlikely I’ll be released on bail. I am not under arrest, so I have not been formally advised of my rights to say nothing that may be later used against me in a court of law, but I have been told that if I am later arrested and charged, anything I say now will be used to build the case against me. Basically, they are telling me I’m allowed to ‘incriminate’ myself as much as I want right now and I can’t say they didn’t warn me when I decide to do the wise thing and get a solicitor.
‘I was very drunk that night. I don’t often drink, so more than two bottles of expensive wine on an empty stomach and frazzled nerves went straight to my head,’ I say by way of a beginning. I’m not sure how I’m meant to begin this so I’m starting here. I may need to go back, I may need to skip very far forward, but this is where I am starting this: my confession.
Tami
I’m not sure how I’m meant to begin this so I’m starting here. I may need to go back, I may need to skip very far forward, but this is where I am starting this: my confession.
I was very drunk that night. I don’t often drink, so more than two bottles of expensive wine on an empty stomach and frazzled nerves went straight to my head.
I only mention it was expensive wine because it came from Scott’s personal collection. It’s obscenely expensive and rare, and I opened both bottles at the same time because he had hurt me and I knew the quickest way to hurt him was through his pocket. I didn’t intend to drink both bottles, I just wanted him to see them there on the table and know his precious wine hadn’t gone on an important person but little old me. The stupid, clueless wife he’d been cheating on. Even better if it was left out and spoiled.
I was so angry. I suppose I should admit that. I thought at the time that Mirabelle had betrayed me. We were meant to be friends, really close friends, I’d trusted her with so much of myself – things I didn’t even tell Scott, nor Beatrix. I genuinely thought Mirabelle had had an affair with my husband and she wanted him to leave me. It was all Scott’s fault, but he was trying. Or that’s how he painted it to me – he was trying, we were trying to fix our relationship, mainly for the sake of the children. I was deluding myself, I’ve accepted that now. But Mirabelle had suddenly been the reason for everything going wrong.
I know that’s not right. It wasn’t her fault, even if she had been sleeping with him, it was all down to Scott. There’s a particular kind of hatred that grows inside you, though, when the other woman has made herself a part of your lives. When she has insinuated herself into your heart and mind, into the hearts, minds and lives of your children, and all along has been laughing at you behind your back. What else would she have been doing but laughing at me if she had the capacity to betray me like that?
I sat in the kitchen drinking and brooding and obsessing, that rage building until I was out of my chair and creeping out of the house without any shoes on.
I wanted to talk to her, to see if she could make me understand why she had done it. It was stupid to go there because I wasn’t rational, I wasn’t sober, and if I am honest I wanted to hurt her as much as she’d hurt me. I’m talking about then, of course, all that I knew then, not what I know now.
What I remember most is the feel of the pavement under my feet. It’d been raining earlier in the day so the pavement was still that earthy damp of not quite evaporated rain. I felt every stone underfoot, but I must have been sober enough to avoid stepping in any bird droppings, which are rife in our road.
She opened the door and I was awestruck as I often was when I saw her. You’ve met her, you know that she’s that special kind of beautiful woman who is completely comfortable in her skin. She was in her silk dressing gown, with her big fluffy slippers on, her hair was bunched up on top of her head.
She looked so normal. She’d been sleeping with my husband for months and months and yet she looked so normal. Serene. Beautiful. She shouldn’t look so normal and balanced and everything I wasn’t. I wasn’t jealous so much as angry for being made to feel second-best, if that makes sense. She didn’t do that, I just felt like that after everything – after all the time we’d spent together, talking and sharing and being friends. After she’d encouraged me to take up running, and put myself first every once in a while, and have the confidence to be myself despite what the world around me was saying about being a mother and a wife and a woman, all along she’d been after my husband. She’d been worming her way into my life.
She sighed when she saw me, then looked away over my shoulder as if seeing if there was something more interesting out on the street. ‘Yes? What do you want?’ she asked, hostility in her tone. She was being hostile to me?
‘I want you to tell me why you did it,’ I slurred.
She stopped looking over my shoulder and concentrated on me. ‘You’ve been drinking?’ she said, suddenly full of concern. And then she looked down at my feet. ‘And you’ve got no shoes on. Oh God, Tami, what are you doing to yourself?’
‘Stop pretending you care,’ I said to her, I was swaying at that point.
‘Come in here,’ she said and before I could properly protest, she took hold of my arm, pulled me into the house.
‘Get off me!’ I screeched at her, pushing her off. ‘Don’t touch me ever again!’
She let me go and I fell into the wall, which I was glad of because it was solid and I could hold onto it to keep me steady.
‘I need to know why you stabbed me in the back,’ I remember saying.
‘You can believe whatever else you like about me, but I wouldn’t do that to you,’ she said. ‘Especially not with him.’
‘Why would he lie?’ I said. That was when standing became too much and I collapsed.
She shook her head at me, looking so sad.
‘Maybe he’s not lying about what he’s been up to,’ she said, ‘just who with? Maybe that’s why you’re so willing to believe what he’s told you because deep down you know he’s got someone else?’
‘I saw the text messages,’ I said to her.
‘What text messages? I never sent him any text messages. If you knew how much I hated him, you would know that I wanted nothing to do with him so there’s no way on Earth I’d send him text messages.’
‘“I know it’s wrong but I can’t help feeling how I do. I know you’re married, but I’m willing to wait. I’d wait a lifetime for you to be ready to be with me properly. It’ll cause a lot of hurt, and I’m not proud of that, but I love you”,’ I said to her. ‘You wrote that, didn’t you?’
She stood there blinking at me, obviously shocked that I’d seen the text messages, horrified that I remembered it enough to quote them; she didn’t know they were burned into the very fabric of my being.
‘You need to leave, right now,’ she said and started to pick me up.
I didn’t really want to be picked up, I was drunk and I felt perfectly happy sitting on the floor with the world not spinning. ‘Get off me, get off! I told you not to touch me!’ I was hitting back at her, kicking out so she would leave me alone. ‘Don’t come near me! Go away! Don’t touch me!’
That was where the memories ended originally. The next thing I could remember, the next memory I could hold onto with any certainty, was waking up in bed fully clothed with no shoes or socks, a raging headache, cuts and bruises on my hands and forearms and the sense that something very bad had happened.
When I heard about the violence involved in her death, and remembered the rage in my body and mind, recalling that the last thing I knew for definite was that I’d hit out and kicked at her, I thought I’d done it. Then the m
emories came back, in flashes and feelings and déjà vu-like moments. As they came back I stopped being scared of them and instead grabbed at them, held them close and added them to the other patches in my memory until I could recall whole chunks of time. I don’t remember all of it. I do remember that after a while she stopped trying to get me up, she stood back and looked down at me in abject despair.
‘I don’t like to see you like this,’ she said.
‘How am I supposed to be when it’s all gone wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Tell me why you did it in words that I can understand and I’ll feel better. This hit by a truck feeling will go away, I know it will. I just need to understand why.’
She sat down next to me. I rolled my head along the wall, my neck felt very bendy because I was so relaxed, and looked at her. She looked back at me. ‘I can’t tell you that, because I didn’t do it.’
Mirabelle was a kindred spirit. I think we both felt lost in the world sometimes. What’s to say I wouldn’t do what she did if I fell in love? I always thought I knew what I would do in any given situation, but when I found out my husband had cheated on me I hadn’t chucked him out. What’s to say if I met someone I fancied enough, I wouldn’t break my wedding vows, decide that getting laid was more important than staying faithful to my husband? Maybe I would have been Mirabelle in that situation?
I stared into her eyes and she into mine. No, I wouldn’t do that.
‘Let’s, for argument’s sake, go along with this ridiculous idea that I had an … “affair” with him. Why are you willing to accept something so hurtful and deeply disrespectful? Why would you stay with him? Especially when it’s someone you know. You’re teaching your daughters damaging things about relationships.’
‘Don’t talk about my daughters, they’re nothing to you.’
‘They’re everything, actually,’ she replied. ‘They’re the reason I … He did it, Tami, and I’m sorry you can’t see that. But I retracted my statement because I knew it would take the hardest toll on Anansy and Cora. They don’t deserve to have their lives ruined by everyone knowing their father is a rapist, but hey, should I have bothered if they’re being forced to live within what must be a hideous atmosphere?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Actually, I do. I completely know what I’m talking about. Did you grow up in a family where your parents showed each other they loved and respected each other or did you grow up with parents who slept in separate rooms, hardly spoke to each other, made nasty little comments about each other, would glare at each other, and would remind you every day with their relationship that when one person in the marriage is selfish and self-serving and entitled, everyone has to kow-tow to them because that’s easier than upsetting the status quo?’
Mirabelle knew which type of home I grew up in because I trusted her with that. I opened up to her like I hadn’t done in many, many years and told her the truth about what growing up was like. I told her about my father who could be lovely to us but would fly into uncontrollable rages; I explained about my mother who could be so caring and nurturing but would just as quickly become cold and unavailable. I opened up to her with things I hadn’t even told Scott because Scott’s home life trumped all others; no one’s home life could be worse than the Challey home life.
Mirabelle knew this, she had understood this and had constantly told me that it wasn’t my fault. It was things like that that made me trust her, and which made her betrayal so total.
‘Do you remember how you swore you’d never put your children through what you went through?’ she said to me. ‘Do you remember how you promised yourself that you’d teach your girls that being a single parent is better than being a marginalised, unhappily married one?’
‘Please stop talking.’
‘OK, I will. But you stop talking, too. And we can sit here, and pretend for a few minutes that none of this has happened, that you don’t think me capable of betraying your trust, and I can pretend I don’t mind you not believing I was almost raped. Let’s sit here and be two friends who can sit in silence and not mind.’
We sat in that near silence, both of us staring at the wall opposite.
‘Do you remember that time that woman asked us if we were sisters?’ I asked her. ‘And you told her we were actually lovers and she nearly fainted in shock?’
She gave a small giggle, one of those ones that would always set me off and we would end up incapacitated with laughter. ‘Why did you think about that?’
‘At the time, it seemed funny, now it’s just an example of how easily you can lie and sound plausible.’
Her silence was shocked. It’s hard to explain but she was clearly hurt by what I said, and that should have given me a little satisfaction but it didn’t – I felt wretched.
‘You know, I did sort of lie to you about something,’ she admits. ‘If you think of me not having the chance to tell you everything as lying.’
My head swung to look at her.
‘He stopped,’ she continues. ‘He’d ripped my clothes, and was fumbling with …’ She paused and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. ‘It wasn’t only the phone ringing that helped me get away, he stopped himself. It was as if something snapped back in place and he came back to himself. His eyes, all the while he’d been … They’d been glazed over and vacant. Then he was there again. And he looked … I don’t know, shocked with himself. Then the phone rang. He took his eyes off me for a second and I kicked him and ran.’
‘He stopped?’ I said. ‘Did you tell that to the police?’
‘Yes, of course I did. But it didn’t negate what he did to me. He still hurt me, terrified me, he still penetrated me with his fingers – which is sexual assault. And which is why the police arrested him.’
I covered my mouth with my hands as bile mixed with expensive wine came rushing up my throat. I knew she was telling the truth. I just knew. And my whole reality started to cave in. He’d done it.
That was the terrible thing that happened, that was probably why my memory abandoned me, I didn’t want to face that. I didn’t want it to be true, so I turned my thoughts away from it, I escaped back into the drunk haze I was in and tried not to leave.
‘You believe me now, don’t you?’ she said because Mirabelle was like that. She could see into my soul sometimes. It often felt she knew me better than I knew myself, and that she had known me all my life. That’s why I had been drawn to her, I think. For how she made me feel.
I concentrated on breathing through my nose, getting oxygen in so I wouldn’t throw up.
‘I’m so sorry for what he did to you,’ I said when I could get myself under control. ‘And I’m sorry I didn’t believe you straight away.’
Even as I was speaking, my mind was screaming about the text messages. They must have been having an affair, I realised. And then he got rough, he did that to her and she ended it. Or maybe she finished it because she felt so guilty, her text messages did say she felt guilty, and he didn’t like it. Tried to get her back with seduction but things got out of hand, he got too rough and almost ended up … He didn’t finish it, she did. He still did it, but then so did she. She still had an affair with him.
‘I have to go,’ I said, wondering how I was going to get up when I felt like throwing up, plus my legs were made of sponge and my arms were made of jelly.
She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘You still think I slept with him, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Even though you believe he did what he did, you still think we were having an affair.’
‘I saw the messages.’
‘There were no—’ She broke off from what she was about to snap at me and was suddenly on her feet and then dragging me upright. ‘You know, Tami, there were all these things I wanted to tell you about myself that I haven’t. I’ve felt so guilty keeping them from you. But now … I’m glad I didn’t tell you. And you’re right, you have to go.’
I held onto the wall for support and watched her through the haze that was
descending.
‘Go,’ she said, sternly. ‘Nothing I say is going to change your mind, so go.’
‘Why won’t you explain about the messages? If you weren’t sleeping with him, then why won’t you tell me about the messages? I know you wrote them. If not to him, then who?’
She glared at me. ‘Goodbye, Tami,’ she said, then turned and swept up the stairs in that imperial manner she had. ‘Shut the door on the way out.’
I wanted to go up after her. I wanted to get her to explain about the messages because they were the only thing that didn’t make sense in her version of events. And they were the only things that made sense in his version of events. Why wouldn’t she explain?
But then a wave of drunken tiredness crashed over me and I couldn’t stop myself from swaying, nearly toppling over in the process. I needed to leave. I could talk to her another time.
I hadn’t even thought about how I was going to deal with Scott now I knew that he had done it. Like I said, I think I shut that horror away so as not to have a complete breakdown.
I don’t remember how long I was there. I do remember tripping over the doorstep on the way out and instead of putting my hands out, I put them up to my face so I scraped the back of my hands and bruised my forearms. I cried with the pain and the anger and the hurt of everything, I remember that, but I picked myself up. After that, I don’t remember much at all. I don’t remember how I got home. The next thing I do recall is waking up in bed fully clothed and barefoot, like I said. I had a sense that I had seen Mirabelle the night before, but I couldn’t remember it clearly. And I had a newfound revulsion for Scott. Even though we were waiting for counselling that he had never actually arranged, I could barely stand to be near him but I didn’t know why.
And that’s it. That’s what happened that night. I’ve only just remembered so many of the details. As soon as I recalled almost everything, I knew I had to come in and tell you.
I can’t control what happens next, if you want to formally arrest me then that’s what’s going to happen.
The Rose Petal Beach Page 40
