by Karen Perry
‘What’s got into me? What about you? Cosying up to that weedy drip. Fucking love’s young dream.’
‘So? It’s got absolutely nothing to do with you, who I see.’
‘Oh, well jeez, I thought we were friends –’
‘We’re not friends. I haven’t seen or heard from you for weeks – months, even.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. There’s been stuff going on. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I needed to see you.’
He makes a halt gesture with his hands, momentarily closing his eyes while he shakes his head. ‘No. I’m done with this, Amy. I can’t be the person you use whenever you feel lonely or get into trouble.’
‘But –’
‘I can’t do it any more.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you unless I had nowhere else to turn.’
He chews his lip, his eyes flicking over my face.
‘Please, Sean,’ I say, hating myself for the wheedling tone. We’re standing some way off from Margot, but I can feel her gaze pinned to us, tracking every gesture, reading something into every lean and glance. I put my hand out to gently touch his waist.
He flinches like he’s been burned. ‘No!’ The word flies out of him. ‘I’m sick of being used by you, Amy. I can’t help you with your problems any more. Find someone else.’
And then he turns from me and goes back to her, and it’s crazy how much this cuts me. All the time we were together, we never once sat in a pub or across from each other at a restaurant. The sum total of all our contacts took place in the confines of his house, and even then, now that I think back on it, he was always anxious to scuttle me off to his room, not wanting to hang out with me in front of the others. It comes to me now that he was ashamed of me. Like his attraction to me was something dark and shadowy, something he would disavow in the daylight. And I think again of Connie, how she was the morning after we kissed, her lips curling into a sneer of disgust, the husk in her voice, saying, ‘What in hell are you talking about, Amy?’ like I was crazy. Like I’d just made the whole thing up.
And I’m standing here now watching Sean squeezing back behind the little table and sitting down, her scooching in close beside him, and I feel the great screaming unfairness of it. So I go up to them one last time, ignoring the heave of angry impatience in his breath, instead focusing on her, eagerly putting my hand out again for her to shake, saying, ‘Well, goodbye, Margot. It was nice meeting you.’ I’m aware of how manic I sound, how wound-up and erratic my behaviour must seem.
She keeps her hands in her lap, shooting me a bitter, pitying look. People at the next table have stopped talking and are looking over.
Sean says, ‘Just fuck off, would you?’ his voice a rising note.
And then I reach forward, so quickly she hasn’t time to react. My hand finds that single earring and I yank it down, feeling it tear through the lobe. The scream she gives is more a yelp of surprise, and then she’s leaning forward, both hands going to the wound, blood streaked between her fingers.
He’s still yelling at me as I whirl out the door into the night, high-pitched anger or terror in his good-boy voice. ‘You’re fucking crazy, d’you know that, Amy? Crazy!’
But I’m laughing now, the earring still in my hand, and Connie’s laughing along inside me.
I sit in a Wetherspoon’s drinking beer until midnight when they throw me out. At a Burger King near Leicester Square, I buy a coffee and make it last, scrolling through arguments on various online forums, feeding the angry hollow inside me. After an hour, I call Monica – that’s how desperate I am. The phone rings three times and then cuts out, and I imagine her seeing my name flash up on the screen, the startled puff of anger it elicits before she decisively rejects the call. I don’t like the way the security guard by the door is staring at me and the thought of being cut off like that makes my spirits plummet, and all of a sudden, I’m crying again – great heaving, wracking sobs that bring the woman out from behind the counter, a heavy-set, Slavic-looking woman with purple hair and a nose ring, who asks, ‘You alright, miss?’ But she sounds more pissed-off than concerned, so I blow my nose on a serviette, and leave.
A light rain is falling now. There’s a crowd outside the Underground station, but I don’t feel like going down there. I don’t have the money for a cab but I need to get back to Battersea, even if it means sleeping on a park bench. I’ve nowhere else to go. The first car that stops is a silver Renault – one of those people carriers moms use to cart their broods to soccer matches and swimming lessons. It’s not a mom, but an older man with a paunch and wire-rimmed glasses who sits up very straight behind the steering wheel.
‘Used to live near Battersea myself,’ he says after I’ve told him where I want to go. ‘Had a girlfriend lived just off the Burns Road. Nice boozer near there – the Duke? The Earl? Something like that. Do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe it’s called something else now. This would have been, what? Twenty years ago. You’d only have been a baby. American, are you?’
‘Look, can we not talk? Please.’
He shoots me a swift assessing glance. There’s a nip of aggression in it.
‘Suit yourself.’
I should be nervous. Getting into a car with a strange man in the middle of the night. What’s he even doing, driving around alone at this hour? He’s not a cabbie – I don’t know what the fuck he does for a living. But I’m too tired to care, buoyed and lulled at the same time by the heat of the car, and I close my eyes and half-doze.
In the lidded darkness, the strobe of street lights echoing the shadows in my mind, I hear her voice in my head. Amy, Amy, I hear her call to me from the tunnel of memory, luring me back down there after her, to a night tucked deep in my past, unearthing it now like a treasure, long buried in the garden.
When I was little, sometimes I’d wake in the night to hear my mom and Elaine fighting. A voice raised in anger, a smashed plate. Their feelings made raw by one too many screwdrivers and the proximity of everyday living. When I was little, it frightened me when they fought. Sometimes I’d cry, and Connie would sit up in her bed, and say, ‘Hey, wanna come over for a visit?’ and I’d scoot across the room and curl in alongside her, smelling the warm fug of her breath. Later, when I was older and other things were biting in on me – a teacher who’d made fun of me in front of the class, some burning humiliation inflicted by a friend or stranger – I’d still find my solace there beside her, the steadiness of her breathing lulling me to sleep. And when I’d wake in the morning, a tangle of limbs and bedclothes, I’d feel like everything had been made new in the night.
And then Connie met Ray and moved out.
‘The whole place to yourself now,’ Elaine had commented, looking at the space where Connie’s clothes, shoes and army of cosmetics had once been strewn, now a barren plain. All of her belongings filling another room on the other side of town, her bed shared with a Polish builder who played the saxophone and smoked rollies and promised to marry her and take her back to Krakow to meet his mother. Love’s young dream. Until he threw his cellphone at her face one night and chipped a front tooth, and she walked the whole five clicks to Elaine’s, crying all the way.
And there she was, back in her bed, like the year and a half had been nothing – an aberration, a blip – everything made right. I lay awake, listening to her crying, and this time I was the one who sat up and said, ‘Want to come over for a visit?’
She let me hold her until she fell asleep, turning in my arms so that the back of her was spooned into me, the chamomile scent of her shampoo filling my nostrils. It seemed strange to have her there like that, and yet it felt like the clicking together of two lost pieces eventually joined. It made me breathless and peaceful at the same time. In her sleep, I felt the fullness of her breast beneath her T-shirt, filling my hand as I gently found it. The thrill of the hard little raspberry nipple grazing my palm. Excitement bore me along, until she shifted next to me, half-raised on her elbow, the rising tide
of curious revulsion in her voice as she said, ‘Amy? What are you doing?’ I drew my hand away. She was on her feet, staring down at me, words hissed into the darkness: sick, pervert, dyke. I’d pushed my face into the pillow to suppress the sounds of my pleasure, and now I kept it there to bury the shame.
I felt the nausea rising as she switched on the light and dressed in a hurried huff of incredulous fury. The door banged shut behind her, and seconds later I heard the scuff of her heeled boots on the asphalt, carrying her away from the house, away from me, everything we had ever shared broken, making what we had seem smutty and cheap when I knew it was something special. Something beautiful. She would forgive Ray the chipped tooth and then she would tell him what I had done. She would tell everyone, and all the kids I’d gone to school with would know, the guys in the grocery store would know, people in bars, people at church. It was a small town. Eventually, Elaine would find out, and I just couldn’t bear it.
‘This alright for you?’ a voice says, and my eyes snap open.
The car has stopped. Outside, a grey street, a shopfront.
The man is looking at me, waiting for something. He’s turned on the little roof light, and his face looms beneath the ghostly glow of it.
‘What?’ I say, fear coming on me suddenly. ‘What is it you want?’
His brows curl with confusion.
‘Battersea. That’s where you said, right?’
I fumble for the handle and almost fall on to the kerb.
‘You alright?’ he calls after me.
But I slam the door and his voice is cut off, and I stagger away from it into the night.
19.
Cara
We talk over the weekend, about the picture. Jeff’s feelings of shock and revulsion are tempered with reason and objective thought. He understands this is not something I intended to happen, but even though he doesn’t articulate the thought, even though it happened years ago, I can tell he thinks that letting myself be photographed like that shows a serious lapse in judgement.
‘What I don’t understand is why he would send it now?’ Jeff asks, and I feel myself swallow, my mouth dry. ‘What possessed him to resurrect that photograph in such a malicious way?’
I mumble something about Finn’s unpredictability, feeling the rising pressure in my chest. Finn knows about Mabel. The knowledge of this hovers in the background like a device primed to explode. Perhaps now is the time to tell Jeff. A shot of fear goes through me at the thought.
‘After all these years,’ Jeff says. ‘You’d think his vindictive gaze might have fallen on someone else by now.’
‘You would think,’ I agree.
On Saturday, there are two missed calls on my phone, both of them from Amy. She doesn’t leave a message and I don’t call her back. I am actively trying not to think about her, about what passed between us. Every time I’m brushed by a rogue memory of that night, a shudder of revulsion goes through me. The bruising on my thighs is fading, and I resist looking as much as I can, or even thinking about it. I have always been good at compartmentalizing the various aspects and episodes of my life. That night is a small dark attic room, the door to it firmly locked. Besides, I have bigger things to worry about, chief among them what I should do about Finn.
On Saturday night, Jeff and I go for dinner at Graham and Jenny’s house. The food is good, and the other guests are all people we know well. The conversation around me is lively. But even though I am among friends, I cannot seem to relax and get into it. As we pass from one course to another, I replay the angry exchange with Finn over and over in my head. The words he spat at me, his eyes lit up with righteous indignation.
‘You were very quiet tonight,’ Jeff remarks in the taxi on the way home. ‘Is anything wrong?’
How to explain to him the events that have been set in train? The creeping feeling of foreboding that has come over me?
‘Just tired,’ I say, offering an apologetic smile.
On Sunday the rain comes down all day. I duck out of the apartment for a couple of hours to buy a present for Jeff. It will be his birthday in a few days’ time. I’m in a bookshop near the Tate Modern, searching for a book on Vanessa Bell. Jeff had mentioned an exhibition of her work in the Dulwich Picture Gallery that he’d enjoyed. I’m looking for an illustrated biography, when I get a prickling sensation, like all the nerve endings along the back of my neck are suddenly brushed awake. I turn around and feel a swish of air, the movement of a person who’s just disappeared behind a bookcase. I cannot account for the sudden apprehension I feel, nor the urge I have to follow them – an urge I act upon, rounding the corner and hurrying towards the closing door.
Outside on the street, I look one way and then another. Pedestrians move in different directions – women, men, a courier on a bicycle, a mother pushing a child in a stroller – but no one I recognize. There is a figure hurrying away at the far end of the street, wearing a grey parka with the hood pulled up, but they’re too distant for me to identify them, too far ahead for me to catch up.
I don’t go back into the bookshop, and all the way home I mull over that grey parka – does Finn wear something like that? – and I feel apprehension inside me like the low hum of a detuned radio, barely audible but troubling nonetheless.
It stays with me. The murmur of fear. And when I come into work on Monday morning and there’s a letter waiting for me in a crisp white envelope bearing the embossed insignia of the legal firm Waters and Slater, it roars to the surface. I scan the contents, baffled by the onslaught of all that the letter promises: paternity tests, litigation, custody battles, court. A tide of fear rises within me. I look at the letter in my hands and see it tremble and think to myself: I cannot do this. I cannot cope.
All weekend, I have been trying to convince myself that Finn’s anger was just a passing reaction. That if I remain calm and wait it out, he’ll get over it and move on. At the sight of this legal letter, I realize how foolish I’ve been, trying to kid myself. I know him better than that. I know he’s not one to let things go.
I pick up the phone. After two rings, he answers.
‘Can you meet with me?’ I ask. ‘I need to talk.’
I wait while Vic reads the letter, the tufts of his eyebrows lowered as he concentrates.
We’re in his club not far from work. It’s a wood-panelled affair, all leather chairs and plush carpets, with a lingering odour of cigars. I sip my coffee and look at the sheaf of papers in his hand, thinking: Someone composed all that just for me, constructed those threats couched in legalese and then aimed them directly at me. I’m trying to picture Finn sitting in a solicitor’s office, discussing this – discussing me, my daughter – trussing up his anger and spite into a list of grievances, giving them my name, my place of work.
Vic puts down the letter, removes his glasses and breathes out heavily through his nose.
‘Christ,’ he says. ‘He’s some piece of work.’ He looks up at me with his inquisitor’s gaze. ‘I have to ask, is it true?’
I put my cup down, answer in a small voice.
‘It might be.’
‘Well then, you really are in the shit,’ he remarks, not unkindly. ‘Does Jeff know?’
I shake my head.
‘He’s going to find out, you know. Now that the bloodhounds are on the case.’
Having gone through two divorces, Vic is no fan of the legal profession.
‘I have to say I’m surprised,’ he admits. ‘I hadn’t thought you’d be the type to get yourself into a scrape like this.’
‘It’s complicated –’
‘It’s always complicated.’
‘Finn and I … it’s hard to explain.’
‘Try,’ he urges, but his voice is kind.
‘I’ve always been vulnerable to him,’ I say. ‘When my mother died, he was there. It helped take the pain away. He’s always been able to do that – make me feel better.’
‘Apart from when he was making you feel like shit,’ he reminds me.
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‘We had this agreement,’ I begin, tentatively, because this is something I don’t tell people, ‘that every year, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, we would do something together. Something fun, celebratory. Life-affirming.’
‘Even after you broke up?’
‘No. Just this one time after we broke up. I was with Jeff by then and things were getting serious between us. There were a few problems in the relationship though – Jeff’s daughter, Olivia, was making things difficult and I wasn’t happy with the support I was getting from him. So when Finn rang me up and suggested we meet for the anniversary, I thought: Fuck it. Why not?’
‘Let me guess,’ Vic says. ‘You met up, had too much wine, got carried away reminiscing about the good times, starlight and violins, and hey presto, you’re in bed together.’
He sits back, takes a slurp of his coffee. There’s no judgement in his tone, but the summation stings a little.
‘You wake up the next morning,’ he goes on, ‘wallow in remorse for a while before putting it behind you. Then you discover you’re pregnant, do the maths but persuade yourself that, in all likelihood, it’s the product of your marriage bed, not this extra-marital coitus. You have the baby, don’t say a word, put it from your mind. Am I right?’
I nod.
‘So, then what? How did this all erupt?’
I lean on the elbow of my chair, my voice lowered.
‘The night of the Shoreditch attack,’ I begin, ‘back in August, I was with Finn. It was my mother’s anniversary, you see, and we’d met for a drink. During the course of the evening, he made various overtures. He wanted to start things up again between us. I was unhappy, Vic, at the time. I can see that now. I might have encouraged him. It was just so easy – so comfortable – being in his company again. Nothing happened. I walked away – stumbled into that terrifying night – but later …’
