To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  Veronica felt a bitterness surge inside her. George was relaxed that evening not because of a nascent restoration between them, not because he missed her as much as she missed him, but because of the lateness of the night, the demands of sleep that afforded him, the protection from intimacy, from failure, from her. When, testing him, she snuggled up to him in bed, though it was barely perceptible, she felt his back brace against her.

  “Is it time?” he whispered dutifully into the darkness.

  “No,” she whispered back.

  And then she felt his muscles ease.

  Three minutes later, music blared through the bedroom wall.

  “Absolutely no fucking way.” George exploded from bed and over to the wall that adjoined the offending neighbours’ flat. He banged with a fist on the brick, but the music was so loud that even with twice the force, nobody would have heard him.

  “George,” Veronica soothed. “George, stop, don’t bang.”

  “Oh, okay, I won’t bang, I’ll just let this idiot destroy our sleep, again.”

  “I’m not saying that,” said Veronica. “Just don’t bang. What’s the point? All it does is make things louder, and annoy me.”

  “I annoy you? Not him? He doesn’t?”

  “Of course he annoys me.” Apparently they were on different sides again, this time of an argument she hadn’t even realised they were having. “Maybe we should call the noise people? Or the police? After last night…”

  George rolled his eyes and banged the wall. His anger was engulfing. It was as though the reoccurrence of noise, the proof of it, gave proof too to all his other unspoken suspicions: proof of abysmal neighbours, proof of dashed hopes; proof of the state between themselves.

  “Or what then?” demanded Veronica.

  “I’m going round.”

  Already George was pulling on his tracksuit bottoms and t-shirt, and stuffing his phone into his pocket, and despite Veronica’s irritation with him, a flash of fear flew suddenly through her throat.

  “Don’t,” she choked. “What are you going to say?”

  “I’m going to be nice.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m just going to ask him to turn it down.”

  By this point, George was already out of the room and halfway down the stairs, but even if he’d been within grasping distance, Veronica knew there was no way she would have been able to dissuade her husband. He, like she, was a determined, unflinching animal. She, like he, could never have chosen anybody otherwise.

  “Be careful!” she called after him, before moving to the window where she peeked out from behind the thick, double-lined curtain onto the street below.

  Veronica’s heart pounded in her throat. It was unusual for her to feel so acutely on the cusp of danger, and despite the immediacy of it, she noticed her own distress with a strange, detached observation. There was a sepia sensation to it, as though she was in a movie-style bar brawl, or a thriller, the music low and suspenseful. Not that she really expected George to start anything physical. He was a strong, well-built man, gifted with both height and muscle, the kind of chaperone you might wish to walk you home on a dark night; but he wasn’t a fighter. George was far too sensible and pragmatic to either land himself in trouble with the law, or to endanger his, or her, safety. Still, they were yet to meet the man next door, and the irritation she’d felt with George minutes earlier dissolved into an urgent, consuming concern.

  Veronica opened the window in an effort to hear the exchange below, and held her breath. The thought of George getting hurt seemed to constrict her lungs, and the longer she waited, the more she realised that it wasn’t actually like a bar brawl at all, because this fight was not in a beer-stained building somewhere, it was here, on their doorstep, where adversaries could not simply be thrown out and sent packing. Whatever the outcome, they would all have to live with it, each day, staring at each other as they left the house in the morning and as they came home at night. Why had George been so reckless? Down at the street, he had already rung the bell and somebody had come to the door. She prayed it was the woman. She could see George gesticulating up to their bedroom. She couldn’t make out his words with clarity, but thank goodness there was a conciliatory tone to his voice, and the exchange lasted only a minute. Before he turned away, George offered his hand, and somebody shook it. A few minutes later, he was back in the bedroom.

  “Well?” she asked as soon as he entered, stifling a desire to throw her arms around him and squeeze him tight.

  “He’s a pipsqueak,” he smiled, triumph on his tongue, the rage evaporated. “You could take him.”

  Veronica smiled, lungs releasing. “What did he say? What did you say?”

  “I just introduced myself, nicely, explained that the music was very loud, and asked if he could turn it down a little, and he said no problem, they’d just gotten used to living next to an empty house. Then we shook hands.”

  “Wow. Okay,” said Veronica. “What a relief. Well done.”

  It was a relief. A victory. A reason again for hope. Perhaps the man wasn’t as aggressive as he’d sounded. Perhaps the woman was fine. Perhaps their own clean slate wasn’t already dirty and tainted; though Veronica would not test this theory with further attempts at intimacy. George removed his tracksuit and t-shirt and climbed back into bed. He plugged his phone back in and rested it on his bedside table. Veronica switched off the lights. She pulled the covers over them. In unison, they lay down.

  Minutes passed.

  Slowly, George’s breathing returned to a resting state. Slowly, so did her own. Slowly, she counted more ticking seconds.

  663 seconds later, she reached across the bed and put her hand tentatively to George’s shoulder. “George,” she spoke softly. “George.”

  “What?”

  “The music’s exactly the same.”

  He didn’t answer. Even after a long time, he didn’t answer.

  Veronica didn’t speak again. Her legs were itching unbearably and she allowed herself to scratch, savouring the respite, overlooking the soreness she knew would follow. George didn’t notice. In the darkness, she could see that he was restless too, his chest moving rapidly up and down, his breathing more shallow than normal, his face buried as far as he could press it into his pillow. She paused her scratching. Was he crying? She had never seen George cry. Veronica listened, but suddenly, as though sensing George’s desolation, from the other side of the wall, the baby they had heard the previous night began to cry again. Not a whimper, not a moan, but a loud, inconsolable wail that continued for the next thirty minutes, unheeded, unattended, as though, like George and Veronica’s own child, it wasn’t there at all.

  Simone

  On the street below, summer is bursting forth in grand displays of colour. It drips extravagantly from window boxes and swishes with bohemian confidence around corners. Flyers appear on lampposts to announce a local street fair, a farmer’s market, a concert in the park. Children whizz past on balance bikes and scooters and two-wheelers, graduating with age, decorated with bells and spokes and streamers. Parents saunter behind with unbranded cups of ethically sourced coffee. The air smells of cut grass.

  It is the shame that keeps Simone inside. She sits for a long time at the window, smoking a series of cigs, watching Veronica dismount from her bike and glance upwards. There is a part of her that longs, irrationally, to dart out onto the street and somehow befriend this woman, to find a way to create that imagined casual conversation against railings. But the shame throbs. There is a spongy, purple-redness to it.

  They would never have been friends anyway. It was a stupid fantasy. Somebody like Veronica would never have been fooled; sooner or later the grime and ugliness would have seeped out of her. What was the difference then if it crashed through walls? The foolishness was only in her caring.

  She can’t go to work. The bruise by her mouth is too visible for standing on reception, but at least she hasn’t lost the gym job altogether. She told her manager t
hat she was ill with a vomiting bug and he allowed, nay encouraged, her to delay her start.

  Dominic didn’t say a word. She can’t help feeling hurt by this, let down, though she realises that her son has neither the power nor the imagination nor the motivation to do anything. And much of that is her fault.

  Jasmine can survive for a few days without going outside.

  Back on the estate, Simone wouldn’t have cared. She would have covered the bruise with make-up and got on with life and nobody would have said anything. But here, people were bound to spot the darkened patch of skin and concoct a conclusion about how it must have been formed, what sort of person she therefore is, and he is, and they are. They would look at Dominic then. And they would look at her. And they would judge. The idea of this makes Simone’s stomach turn – pity and condescension as sickening as each other. She can’t bear to picture her neighbours thinking those things. She can’t stand the idea of them looking at her that way. So maybe Terry’s right. Maybe she does care too much about the poshos. Maybe she has got carried away in this street, imagining she’s something she isn’t, or isn’t any longer. Maybe she is forgetting what’s important, forgetting him. Why does she need a job anyway?

  It’s funny now to think that when they first met, she believed Terry liked her ‘poshness’. Of course, by then it had felt ridiculous to her that anyone would imagine she possessed even the faintest scrap of gentility. When she thought back to the clean flat she’d grown up in, and the grammar school she’d attended, and the academic parents who’d raised her, her overriding sensation was of an untouchable cleanliness, wholesome and unsoiled. And there was little left to suggest she could be either. But it was a mistaken notion in any case. She’d never felt wholesome really. She’d seen first-hand how toxic and tainted the lives of even the most ‘upright’ could be. She knew how false the lines of division were. Still, after all the passed years, she felt an unbridgeable separation from even that sullied existence. If an ‘us’ and ‘them’ did exist, she stood on the estate, walled in.

  Still, Terry had told his friends: Know where she grew up? Posh flat on Croftdown Road. (It wasn’t posh, it just wasn’t an estate – a distinction her parents had always made clear too. They had both grown up in council housing, but had ‘worked hard’ and ‘had ambition’ and made the leap. There was a big difference, they said, between the aspirational working class – them – and those living off others.) Or he’d ask, with what she’d mistaken then for pride: How many GCSEs d’you think she’s got then? Eleven. And what d’you think – Ds, Cs? Bloody As and Bs mate, this one. He’d gently taken the piss out of the way she spoke and the clothes she wore, and she’d confused that with admiration. It was only later that she began to understand that Terry’s obsession with her grades was less to do with appreciation, and more because when she was stupid or needy or weak, it made him feel doubly strong. He, the one with no grades to speak of, better after all.

  He was the fourth son, the only one not to at least get a few GCSEs. His eldest brother had gone the whole hog through university, and the others went straight to the trading floor – not in a bank like their father, but on the street where the money grew faster and, they said, was only equally dirty. They all dangled these achievements over him. But even when they were younger, there was a pecking order, and he was right at the bottom of it, a fact exacerbated because of what Simone suspects is a severe, undiagnosed dyslexia, preventing his academic achievements from ever matching what to her is clear cleverness, and because he never grew bigger than anyone, not even his mother whose expanding width made up for what she was lacking in height. Simone would never use a word like ‘exacerbated’ to Terry. He took complicated vocabulary as a jab, a book word, another way in which people tried to keep him there at the bottom. Like when his mother had locked him in his room when he asked for help with homework, throwing the book at his head, her patience gone, her fancy friends too, drained away with her gin. Or like the time he wet his bed and so the following night was strapped naked to a toilet. Or the way his father, before he left, had never called him Terry, but Runt, accompanied often by an unpredictable blow from the back of his hand that would send him across the room, to prove it. Or the way that later, with his dad gone, his mother had been too intoxicated to get up and notice when older, bigger brothers working out their own demons, pushed him around with that same ease and amusement as their father had done, frequently holding his face for too long against a pillow and, once, forcing him to eat on his knees out of the dog’s bowl. As adults, they still punch him too hard on the arm when they see him, though his years boxing have set the limit there, and they tell these stories about their childhood, with a jocular hilarity that disgusts Simone, and that Terry takes as a joke, because it is the only way not to sink even lower. Still, his brothers think they are hard done by too. Many years earlier their father had flashed his cash at their young, once-beautiful mother, lifting her off her estate and into a Marylebone apartment where he adorned her with designer clothes, and jewels, and fake friends, and alcohol, and impregnated her four times in seven years, and got the boys believing they would live that life and be like him; but in the end took off with his cash just as fast as he had flashed it. Terry was six then. There was an article in the paper, and rumours of dodgy dealings. And their dad was long gone out of the country before anybody realised he’d left them all with nothing. Whose fault is that, the brothers often demanded, two out of the three of them back on the estate in the flat their mother had been forced to return to, the third stuck at an entry level marketing job, none of them, including Terry, mentioning the wads of money that turn up occasionally, unpredictably, in their accounts from somewhere offshore. The big lawyers and the big bankers and the big politicians making the decisions, that’s whose fault. The Eton boys, like their father, in their ivory towers. The neighbours Simone spent too long watching as they unloaded boxes into the house next door.

  Terry had told her that to be honest, he couldn’t really remember it, the life his brothers described, but it was true – he’d been middle class once, upper-middle class even, way richer than her, with a father who liked and bought the best of everything. Terry’s mum had even held on to one sparkling ring as proof, proof of what she’d been tricked by. But Terry didn’t feel tricked. As a teen, he’d wished only that she’d stop talking about it, stop trying to make out that they were different from everyone else around them. He felt embarrassed by the way she tried to be ‘better’. Was ‘better’ a father who abused and left them? He didn’t want to be like that. He didn’t want to be rich. He didn’t want a job. A job to join the great turning wheel, the foolish race, the structure that feeds the fat cats, like his father? The disgusting symbol against which he measured everything? She could understand that.

  It’s why he lost it with her. She can understand that too.

  What Simone cannot understand, is exactly what she did to make things go so spectacularly wrong. It’s the worst fight they’ve had in months and for the past three days she has been thinking about it. Clearly, she hit a nerve when she told him about the job, and she feels so stupid because she’d been aware of that probability. Yet for all her preparations she’d still chosen the wrong words, or the wrong tone, or maybe it was the timing. You’d think that by now she’d be better attuned to his sensitivities, but she always seems to make him flip eventually, she always does something.

  The problem is, she wants the job. She does. Even though it’s small. Even though it’s barely anything. And no matter how sympathetic she tries to be to Terry, she can’t see anything so terrible about it. So she had to tell him. Plus, there is an unfamiliar new emotion brewing in the bruised aftermath of this time. There is still remorse, guilt, and a knowledge of her own idiocy. There is still fear of further reprisal. But there is also, this time, a rage of her own. Not large enough to match Terry’s, but there nonetheless. A slow, festering rage carved from that deep, disturbing shame.

  Because all she could thin
k about, this time, was that Veronica was hearing it. Prim, perfect Veronica, and the rugby husband she hasn’t yet met. They were hearing her head thudding against the wall. They were hearing the blow of her shoulder against brick as Terry flipped her around and pressed her forward. They were hearing her inexorable wail as he ploughed into her. Beneath their clean, new sheets they were hearing everything. And most likely clasping to each other in grateful response, caressing one another tenderly, whispering congratulations that they themselves were not as animalistic as him or as stupid and slutty as her, and consoling each other on the pity of having such neighbours.

  At least they would not have been able to hear his hand pressing down on her face, or the force of his teeth on her breast. And they would not have seen her lying there afterwards, her nose bleeding, her pyjamas still around her ankles.

  Dominic saw.

  In the years before Terry, it was Dominic who would have picked her up from such collapse. If she was throwing up, he brought her a towel and some water, helped her into bed, and whenever she didn’t have a boyfriend, he slept there with her, pretending not to be disturbed by her retching into the night. She liked to feel the warmth of his skin nearby, the sound of his breathing, and on the hazy mornings that followed, she would fondle his hair for a while, trying not to notice how needy and grateful his face was, before propping herself up in bed for a spliff, remembering halfway through that it was a school day. In the realisation of that she would throw on some tracksuit bottoms and a coat, and she would tear with him across the Concourse, fingers interlinked, laughing together at their flying frames. Then later he’d tell her what dress to wear for her date, and hold her cig while she tried it on, and when she got home, if she was still standing, he would stay up late with her watching TV.