by Jemma Wayne
“Your step-dad was round here the other day,” she said, watching Dominic for reaction. “Hammering on my door. Is he ever aggressive like that with you?”
But Dominic had only given her a look then, as if to say ‘don’t patronise’. He knew that she knew. It was why he was there, without words screaming for rescue.
“How’s your sister?” she tried again, a different angle. “You two are close, aren’t you?”
“Not always. Today she was crying and I left her in her cot, came here.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Let them look after her.”
“Them? Your mum and Terry?”
Dominic reverted to a shrug.
“You know, it’s not your job to look after her.”
Dominic said nothing.
“And it’s not your fault.”
Still nothing.
“Any of what happens at home, I mean. It’s not your–”
“What do you know?” Dominic interrupted, pushing the sandwich away from him. “You’re a fucking teacher. You’re all the same. You don’t know anything. It is my fault.”
“What is?”
Dominic said nothing.
“Something to do with your sister?”
Still nothing.
“Or your mother?”
Dominic looked up. “Sometimes, I only have to think things, you know, and they happen.”
Now Veronica was the one silent. The boy’s beady eyes were as dark and impenetrable as ever. And locked on her.
“I wanted my dad to die. And he did. And I wanted my mum to get hurt, I mean not really, not properly, but I was angry and I thought it. And then…”
“Then what, Dominic?”
He stopped.
“What?” Veronica moved closer to him, tried to touch his hand, but he drew it away.
“What do you know?” he repeated.
Veronica still wasn’t sure what exactly she knew, but she reported each of Dominic’s visits to the council. It wasn’t enough, but it felt important, necessary, for her as much as him. Besides, what else could she do? She was unable to scoop him, or his sister, into her arms and run.
Like she’d scooped up Harry.
She shook her head, chasing away that vision. She wasn’t sure why she had done it, or how she could have allowed herself. It wasn’t from spite, it really wasn’t. Since things had escalated with the neighbours, Sarah had all but slipped from her mind. She hadn’t even formulated a way to roll back the demand for a parents’ meeting. She wasn’t pilfering. If anything, she was fixing, she was fixing Dominic, concentrating on him. But more than that, she was finally concentrating on herself. Retaking control. Yet, the little boy had found his way into her empty arms.
That evening, while she was putting out the bin, Simone confronted her in the street: “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Sorry?”
“You got social workers involved, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
They were in front of their houses, Veronica alone and without even a phone in her hand. She reasoned, however, that Terry must be out otherwise Simone wouldn’t be talking to her, and it was still light, and the woman was hindered by babe on hip. “You saw some social workers?”
“Don’t pretend,” admonished Simone, spitting out the words as though the taste of them was disgusting, and all the while jiggling Jasmine who was reaching out for Veronica’s hair. “I’m not stupid.”
Veronica’s first thought was to reach for Jasmine. She couldn’t help it. Whenever she saw this child, the yearning inside her magnified. Just like it had with Harry, she supposed. It was as though her arms ached for a space to be filled, as though her body was only responding to a natural call. This time, however, Veronica kept her arms to herself.
Her second thought was to deny everything – the tentative disposition of the last year hard to shake. But instead, she found herself stepping forward, closer to her neighbour.
“Don’t you want to talk to social workers?” she asked Simone quietly. “You know that we hear things. Don’t you want to get out?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman hurried, just as Dominic had proclaimed.
“It’s not normal,” pressed Veronica.
“You have no idea about normal. I know you, you know.”
At this, Veronica felt a surge of caution. Often, she still felt that discomforting sensation of being watched, observed. Perhaps it wasn’t Terry after all. Perhaps it was Simone. “You don’t know me,” she ventured.
“Oh yes I do. I know all about your type. Whereas you know nothing – you don’t even know what you think you know. Terry’s a good guy really. You don’t understand. Besides, he adores me.”
“It doesn’t sound that way,” persisted Veronica.
“Then stop listening,” barked Simone. “Just stay away from us.”
“Well that’s a bit hard, isn’t it?” Veronica motioned towards their houses, seamlessly connected, except for the distinct dividing line of pristine paint versus peeling.
Jasmine lurched towards Veronica again, and roughly this time, Simone yanked her back. “You are so fucking condescending,” she laughed. “You have no idea. No idea. Just keep your nose out of our business, okay?”
She turned then, sharply, and strode for her door. Perhaps Veronica should have left it at that. Perhaps she should have stayed out of it. But instead, again, she found herself stepping closer, following. Simone’s shoulder felt hot under her touch.
“Get off me!”
Veronica lifted her hand. “I just want you to know that I’m here,” she said quietly. “If you need anything.”
She said this, and then she braced herself, half expecting to be slapped in the face. But instead, for the briefest of moments, the woman in front of her dissolved, and a different person passed through her. Veronica nodded with what she hoped was encouragement. Softly, she opened her mouth to speak again. But then, as quick as it had come, the calm intruder moved on, and now Simone shoved away the hand that Veronica had risked again on her shoulder, and muttering “fucking condescending”, bundled her wriggling daughter inside, slamming the door behind them.
At school the following day, Veronica watched the door for Sarah, hoping she wouldn’t appear. Part of her did want to apologise, to explain – about Harry, about Amelia. Part of her wanted to tell Sarah how often she’d thought about her and her family over the years, how precious that time, how jealous she had been. And still was. How that envy made her do things she regretted. But, the greater part of her decided that it was better to simply stay away. To detach herself from her own unravelling. Besides, more urgent matters were occupying her mind.
Veronica avoided David when he dropped Amelia off that morning. She avoided him at pick-up too. And then all at once it was Saturday, and no more avoidance was necessary because she and George were no longer in the busy bustle of London but sat sleepily outside, in the glorious garden terrace of the famous Colombe d’Or.
Their table was perfectly shaded. A vast Fernand Leger mural presided immediately over them, peeking through ivy, and as always they basked in the legend of it all. This was why they loved it here – not for the simple, rustic charm of what was in essence a small hotel/restaurant in the South of France; they came for the art, for the history, for the folklore. Nestled just outside the walled village of Saint-Paul de Vence, myth had it that almost every artistic icon of the last century had come to this hotel to meet and play and work, and often, paid for their meals or lodgings with a piece of their own art. Now, original works by Matisse, Chagall, Braque, Picasso, hung casually throughout – up-lit in the restaurant, suspended over white sheets in the bedrooms, offering visitors a nonchalant slice of the extraordinary. George and Veronica had visited the Colombe d’Or together on at least four previous occasions, and now, unfailingly, it filled them with all the promised stimulus that such rare brilliance beholds. They h
eld hands over the terrace table as they consumed Burgundy snails and rare-cooked steak, rich cheeses and dry wine. They allowed their legs to intertwine in the swimming pool beneath the Calder. They lay on fresh, soft sheets, staring up at a heavily gilded Chagall, and they felt their bodies turn towards each other like the easy brushstrokes of a master painter: confident, practised, surprising.
They felt like naughty schoolchildren. She was not ovulating, it would be another week until then, and the results of both hers and George’s tests had not yet arrived, but their hands crept over each other. The prospect of sex, unrequired, titillated them as though it was a fresh discovery, pleasure pulsing back and forth in the empowerment of choice. They lay afterwards, heads propped on plush pillows, secrets spilling out of their mouths: how isolated they had each felt, how guilty, how sad, how fresh each month’s disappointment, how strong remained the desire to grieve, how vivid their dreams of that room in the hospital and the blood on the floor of their old flat, how weak they felt in the wake of it all. Unpacked at last, their eyes met with the old openness, and in the air was a palpable scent of triumph: their childhoods did not rule them after all, they had proved it, there was always chance for escape.
They stretched unhurriedly into the expanse of white cotton. They raised their arms and pointed their toes, their limbs free from manacles. They exhaled onto each other’s lips.
Rejoicing in her liberation, only a few times Veronica felt her mind slipping back to London, to Simone, to Dominic, to the entrapment she envisaged there, to the continuous question of if they should be doing something more; but mostly she nudged such thoughts away, finding room instead for lazy games of boules in the sand at the foot of the walled city, salted frites at the café, and hikes up the hills, all the while colluding with her husband in fresh determination to be bound together, and free.
Simone
You can threaten somebody too many times. You can tell them you’ll kill them, you’ll kill them, you’ll kill them. And they’ll be scared. And they’ll be obedient. And they’ll cower in a corner. But there comes a day when something snaps. And it just doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no energy left to care.
“If you’re going to do it, do it already,” she tells him.
Dominic is out. It is Sunday and he had nudged her awake to tell her that he was going to Jakub’s, not meaning for Terry, next to her, curled into her body, to overhear. The result was an uninvited thirty-minute speech about the parasitical Poles, but she didn’t intervene in that one. Remaining in bed, she rolled her eyes in discreet sympathy with her son, but Terry’s lecturing was on this occasion verbose rather than aggressive, and it wasn’t worth tainting the good atmosphere between them. There had passed five days with barely a raised voice, five days of gentleness and talk and laughter. Laughter! Besides, she doesn’t think that Jakub’s is where Dominic was really headed. More than once that week she has noticed him hurrying off in the other direction, and she followed him one morning down the road, over the bridge by Chalk Farm, the route that would lead to her parents’ house. At first she was surprised that he remembered this route at all, he’d been so little, but he didn’t actually reach the house. He walked up and down a nearby road – not the right one, but similar enough looking – and he knocked on three different blue doors that could have been a match. She had, however, been careful over the years with what she told him. He doesn’t know her parents’ full names. She refused him their phone number.
Watching from a distance that morning, there was a part of her that hoped serendipity would intervene and he would, miraculously, find them. But in the end, Dominic had given up, trudging back without noticing her crouched in a café, and instead, Simone had begun her own pursuit. She’d gone to the estate.
It had taken only a few minutes to find the old family friend and get Lewa’s email address, and she’d sent the message immediately, from her phone, in a rush of determination before she could change her mind. She’d felt a little traitorous about doing this, particularly in the glow of Terry’s good mood, and she made sure to delete the message quickly. He’d always been tetchy about Noah. If he found out, the seed of insecurity would work its way through him until it destroyed everything. That would be her fault of course, he would say so, and he would be right.
She shouldn’t trust people with ‘motives’. Like her parents. Like Lewa. Like the social worker, whose card is wrapped in a pair of old knickers and buried at the bottom of a drawer.
What she should have done, was intervene in the rant. At the time it had felt harmless, but maybe it was this that wound Terry up, like revving an engine, or lighting the long tail of a firework. While he was showering, she had fed Jasmine breakfast, prepared some for Terry, and then dressed herself for work. She was supposed to be doing a four-hour morning shift at the gym and she had told Terry about it days earlier, but when he emerged from the bathroom, naked and motioning for Simone to follow him back to bed, he had clearly forgotten, or didn’t care.
“I’ll be late, Tel,” she’d smiled, carefully adding, “though you know I’d rather stay.”
“So stay. Fuck the gym.” He was smiling too, flirtatiously, but there was a rough tenor to his voice, just tracing itself around the edges.
“I can’t. You know I can’t. Jas is all ready though, you can take her out or something. I’ll be back by lunch.”
“Are you serious?” He’d asked this sharply, the edges closing in. “You’re gonna choose some dead-end job that pays a pittance over your husband? Don’t you see how you’re being manipulated? You’ve got to get your priorities right, my girl. Start making some better choices.”
“Tel,” she tried again. “It’s tempting, obviously, but—”
“Here,” he said, finding his wallet on the sofa. “Is it the money? Here, take this.” He threw a wad of notes at her, either a fresh influx from his father, or gained she didn’t know how. “Now, make the right choice.”
“It’s not just the money, Tel,” Simone tried again, gently. “It’s—”
“You’d be a mess without me,” Terry leered suddenly, stepping closer. “You know that, don’t you? You’re nothing on your own. I’m trying to help you. I don’t know why you don’t listen. Already your deviant son is messing around with scum. And you’re frolicking off to prostrate yourself for some wanky gym bunnies. Fuelling the system, both of you. Mindless. Idiotic. While you abandon us. Your husband. Your children. We need some family values in this house.”
“I’m doing it for our family,” she tried. But this was obviously the wrong thing to say.
“You’re gonna do something for us,” he growled, grabbing her abruptly by the hair. “You’re fucking gonna do something for me.”
Across the table, Simone noticed her daughter freezing, staring at them, unmoving. She felt her head being yanked backwards and couldn’t help but let out a scream, but as she was being dragged to the bedroom, she locked eyes with Jasmine, and blew her a kiss, and hoped that would be enough.
“Do it already then,” she spits at Terry.
He has finished fucking her. Her cheek is already puffing beneath her eye, and her arms are sore from being held behind her, but she is unable to submit as she usually would. He has promised to kill her, to kill Dominic too. At the mention of her son, her chest tightens and it is hard to breathe, but she cannot protect him, she cannot protect anybody. In that moment all she can do is submit or stand, and she is too bent already to stoop lower.
“If you’re gonna kill me, just kill me.”
She has never before said this to Terry and he seems unnerved by it, unsure how to respond, as though hearing his words repeated back to him has detached them from him somehow. His face clouds in puzzlement. But only for a moment. A new logic has worked its way into his mind. Grabbing first the belt of her dressing gown, and then the charger cable to her phone, he yanks her from the bed to her feet and then pushes her into a chair in the corner. “I don’t want to kill you, Simone,” he says wrapping th
e cable around her wrists and fastening it to the chair. “You think I like this? You think I didn’t see you the other day talking to that posh slut from next door? What were you saying? What are you planning? You push me to it. I only want you to do what’s right, I only want to help you, but you keep on doing these stupid, senseless things. You’re hurting us, Simone. You need to start listening to me, don’t you? I’m the one who’s sorted things. I’m the one who looks after this family.”
“You? You spend all your money on drugs or drink! Your father’s money, half of it. You think I don’t know? There must have been thousands of pounds of it by now – we could live a different life!” she explodes, struggling away from him.
“I don’t need his fucking money,” he spits.
“But you’re just like him. You steal my benefits and you piss that away too. What do you do?”
“I saved you,” he growls. “And don’t you forget it. You think you’re above me? You think you’re so clever? I made the decisions you couldn’t fathom. Me. I saved you from parents who treated you like the crap you are. I saved you from all that shit you were doing. So you can sit here and listen, to me, not your fucking friend next door, and think about that. And then we’ll see about killing you.” Her arms are bound tight now and Terry starts in on her legs. He has never done this before and despite no longer caring, she can feel herself starting to panic.
“Terry,” she says, but he puts his hand roughly over her lips.
“No, no, just listen.”
He presses his hand a little harder against her face, a gesture to hammer home his power, and then he crosses the room where he pulls out a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.
“Terry, please,” she says.
Her eyes feel as though they are burning, but she cannot look away from him. He runs a dollop of gel through his hair and slaps on some aftershave. “Right,” he grins at her, fresh, invigorated. “Wonder when Dom will be home. Maybe we’ll see if he’s any better at listening than his mother.”
