‘Because then we’ll be inside, of course,’ Alison said. ‘I bet the doors inside aren’t double-glazed.
The three held their breath as the last set of lights switched on.
‘Now!’ Kirsty yelled, making one poor unsuspecting man jump out of his skin, gripping onto the door for dear life.
‘Please don’t hurt me, just take my wallet, plea—Kirsty, what the fuck are you doing here and why are you all covered in mud?’ Sam eyed Catherine and Alison warily. ‘Are you lot in some kind of coven?’
‘Oh, do you live here?’ Kirsty asked him. ‘What a coincidence. We were just out on the town having a carefree devil-may-care girls’ night out, like happy single women do, when Alison here lost her car keys and so we were looking for them.’
‘Here?’ Sam smiled at her. ‘She lost her car keys here? What were you doing with your car here and … I’m not being funny, but I don’t think any of you should be driving.’
‘I know,’ Alison said, tottering over to Sam, putting her arm around his neck and fluttering her lashes. ‘Which is why it’s your civic duty to make us all coffee.’
Sam laughed. ‘I haven’t got any milk,’ he said. ‘I was just off to the garage to get milk. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘That’s OK,’ Alison said in a husky voice. ‘We like it strong and dark.’
‘And bitter,’ Kirsty added.
‘And slutty,’ Catherine piped up.
Sam rubbed his hand over the top of his head. ‘I must be crazy but you’d better come in before you get arrested.’
‘Oh God, I love you,’ Kirsty gushed, before catching herself and saying, ‘I mean, thanks ever so. Most kind.’
‘Plus, you have a very nice arse,’ Catherine said as she walked in. It took her the four flights of stairs to believe what had just come out of her mouth.
‘Coffee was a bad idea,’ Alison said to Catherine, peering down at her ruined sweater. ‘Because now I’m starting to realise I’m in some strange man’s flat, covered in mud, with a jackhammer going off in my brain.’
Catherine leaned her forehead against the cool of the window she was looking out of, and sipped her coffee. ‘I don’t think I’ve stayed up this late since … since Jimmy played this gig at the Marquee in London. It was supposed to be his break supporting some American band. We all got excited and stayed out all night, watched the sun come up in Regent’s Park. Nothing came of it, of course, but I think that was the last time I stayed out this late, before Eloise was born.’ She paused and pinched her temple. ‘My eyes hurt. Is it possible for eyeballs to explode?’
She shifted her attention to the kitchen where Kirsty was helping Sam with the instant coffee.
‘Do you think they’re talking in there or having sex?’ she asked Alison blurrily. ‘Based on previous occasions I’d say having sex.’
But to her surprise Kirsty walked out of the kitchen fully dressed, and sat on the couch nursing a mug of steaming coffee.
‘I’m sorry about all this,’ she said to Sam as he sat down precisely one cushion apart from her. ‘We drank tequila and then they said we should come over and do stupid stuff.’ She pointed at Catherine and Alison. ‘They made me do it.’
‘We did,’ Alison said, winking at Catherine. ‘We’re evil, us.’
‘It’s the coven, you see,’ Catherine said. ‘It demands a sacrifice.’
‘We all just wanted to see you, all of us together,’ Kirsty attempted to explain. ‘To, you know, see how you are and that. How’s Sam? we wondered, and the next thing we knew we were here. That’s tequila for you, because you know I’d … we’d never do anything so stalkery without the demon tequila.’
‘You didn’t have to do mud wrestling to get my attention,’ Sam smiled. ‘If you wanted to see me you should have rung the bell. I was up anyway. Like I said, I couldn’t sleep.’
‘We didn’t know if you wanted to see us,’ Kirsty said with heavy emphasis on the plural. ‘We thought you might be with some other slut.’
‘Of course I wanted to see you,’ Sam said, looking puzzled. ‘You’re the reason I can’t sleep. I thought that you … lot … didn’t want to see me. You haven’t spoken to me since we spent the weekend together. I thought that you weren’t interested any more and that you’d had your fun and moved on. It’s been getting me down, actually, because I can’t stop thinking about you, by which I mean just you and not those two other scary women you brought with you, no offence.’
‘Ahhh,’ Catherine and Alison chorused, catching each other’s eye and giggling.
‘What – pardon?’ Kirsty asked him, rubbing her ear vigorously just in case she’d misheard.
‘I like you, Kirsty, a lot,’ Sam told her.
‘But you left without saying goodbye or anything,’ Kirsty said. ‘You just went. I thought that was your way of telling me it was a one-off.’
‘I had a run with a client,’ Sam explained. ‘Six a.m. every Monday, before he goes to work in the City, we run two miles further every week. He’s training for the London Marathon. I left you a note on the pillow next to you.’
‘Oh,’ Kirsty said. ‘I’m a very restless sleeper.’
‘You didn’t see it on the floor?’ Sam asked her.
‘There’re a lot of things on my floor,’ Kirsty said. ‘Sort of hard to pick one thing out from another if you don’t know what to look for.’
‘Oh, so he’s not a heartless philandering sex pest after all,’ Alison cut in happily. ‘Shame.’
‘So,’ Sam said. ‘What do you want to do now?’
‘Go to bed with you, please,’ Kirsty replied instantly.
‘And after that?’ Sam smiled.
‘I don’t know, maybe breakfast and then more bed …?’
‘No, I mean, do you want to go out with me? Be my … actual girlfriend?’
‘Oh.’ Kirsty looked thoughtful. ‘OK then. Can we go to bed now?’
‘A-hem,’ Catherine coughed loudly. ‘And what about us?’
‘Well, you know the way home, don’t you?’ Kirsty said, unable to take her eyes off Sam.
‘Actually, no,’ Alison said. ‘This block of flats wasn’t even here last time I lived here. I have no idea where I am.’
Kirsty looked pleadingly at Catherine.
Catherine sighed.
‘You can come back with me, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It will be morning soon, anyway.’
Kirsty got up and hugged both of the other women.
‘You see this evening has gone exactly as I planned. It’s gone perfectly. I so totally knew what I was doing. I never had a single doubt.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Catherine said to Kirsty in a low voice as Alison made her way out of the flat and gingerly began the descent of the stairs. ‘Just one more thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll deal with you later,’ Catherine promised.
‘Like I care,’ Kirsty said, and she slammed the flat door shut in her face.
Chapter Twenty
CATHERINE HANDED ALISON a cup of tea, conscious of her old ex-friend looking round her tiny front room.
‘Bit different from your place,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Alison admitted, taking the tea carefully as if she expected that at any second Catherine might throw it in her face. ‘But if anything it’s nicer – more homey. Marc picked out our house; sometimes it feels like a bit of a mausoleum. Sort of a fitting setting really for the death of our marriage.’
‘Homey is one word for it,’ Catherine said, glossing over Alison’s reference to her marriage. ‘Poky and tatty is another.’
The pair sipped their tea in silence for a few minutes, sitting at the small square oak table, the dry mud flaking on their hands, each trying to work out how to talk to the other, or even if either of them had anything to say.
‘This is not at all how I imagined meeting you again would be,’ Alison said suddenly, setting her mug down firmly and looking at Catherine. Catherine sat back in her chair and took
a steadying breath. The moment to talk had finally come.
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘I could never have imagined on our first proper meeting after fifteen years we’d be high on tequila and trying to break into some strange man’s flat. But that’s Kirsty for you. She’s got the brain of an eighteen-year-old inside the body of a thirty-year-old woman, although she would also insist she had the body of an eighteen-year-old if you asked her.’
‘But haven’t we all?’ Alison asked her. ‘I think I have, especially now. Especially in Farmington. I feel like I’ve been play-acting at being grown up for the last fifteen years, and now that I am actually a proper grown woman I don’t want to play any more.’
Catherine looked at her. ‘No,’ she said simply, half shaking her head. ‘I don’t feel like that. I feel more comfortable in my own skin now than I ever did when I was teenager. It’s taken me a long time to get here, but now I’m here I’m … strong.’
They watched each other for a moment. It was Alison who dropped her gaze first.
‘I thought that when we, if we, saw each other again that there would be a lot more shouting and tears. And a lot more bitterness and recrimination,’ Alison said.
‘I don’t really shout,’ Catherine said. ‘I hardly ever cry but I do still have some bitterness and recrimination. I do still feel … angry, Alison. I thought I didn’t, but then we spent tonight together, and it was fun and I liked being with you.’ She shrugged and glanced out of the window where the sunrise was bleeding into the sky. ‘So now I’m angry, don’t ask me why.’
‘I was only seventeen,’ Alison said quietly, offering a tentative excuse.
‘So was I,’ Catherine pointed out. ‘I look back now at what I was doing, getting involved with some older strange man I met in a park, when I’d never even kissed a boy, never mind had sex with one. Letting him take me home, and take me to bed. I think about that and I can’t believe that was me, that I did something so idiotic and dangerous. It makes me terrified for my daughters.’ Catherine shook her head in disbelief. ‘Marc told me on that first day that he would be no good for me but I didn’t care. It was almost as if I wanted to be hurt by him, I wanted to have my heart broken because then I’d feel something that was mine and only mine. It was like living in a dream. But I always knew he would have hurt me anyway. All the signs were there if I’d known where or how to look for them. We never once talked about using contraception; he told me that if he was careful we wouldn’t need it. He never spoke about a future beyond the summer holidays, about what would happen to our great love affair once his contract was finished and he had to move on. And he knew I was pregnant, Alison. The night he ran away with you he knew and he didn’t look back once, didn’t call, didn’t write, didn’t try to check what happened to me and his child. Not once.
‘I got involved with a bad lot, as my mother said. And I think that maybe that’s why I’m not angry with Marc. Because he never tried to hide who or what he was from me. He never put on an act, or made me promises he couldn’t keep. Even when he said he loved me I knew instinctively that it was a temporary emotion, one that might even vanish the second I left his sight, and I wasn’t too far wrong, was I? I was stupid enough and naïve enough to hope that he could be better than he was with me, but that was my fault and not his. So, rightly or wrongly, I’m not angry with him.’
Catherine paused, and Alison watched the muscles in her jaw tighten and her face tense. ‘But you … since we were eight years old you’d spent almost every day telling me to trust you, to follow your lead, that I could rely on you because you were my best friend, my family, my hero. And then in one second?’ Catherine snapped her fingers, making Alison start. ‘All of that went up in smoke and you sacrificed our friendship, you sacrificed me to get what you wanted. I don’t care if you were only seventeen and that we were both foolish girls caught up in a moment. What I care about is that, after everything, you left me. You left me all alone, too weak to be able to stand up for myself, because I’d never had to before. You always did it for me. I didn’t know how to cope without you. I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to my parents over the abortion. And if you’d have been there with me I would have been. So at the end of the day it’s not that you slept with Marc behind my back. It’s that you chose him over me. That’s why I’m angry at you, and at me, and I know that it’s not fair, but it’s how I feel, even now after all this time. We had fun tonight, even if it was fuelled by tequila and Kirsty’s neurosis. For a little while we felt close again and all I could think about was the last fifteen years I’ve had to go through without you.’
Gradually the morning sunlight seeped into the room, illuminating the condensation on the window, and creeping across the carpet, briefly turning it into a field of shimmering gold. Catherine stretched out her palms face down on the table and let the sun warm them.
‘For a while,’ Alison began hesitantly, ‘for years, actually, I was so convinced that I’d done the right thing, for me and for you. I honestly believed that I’d rescued you from Marc, and him from his life, and had won myself the only man I could ever love in the process.’ She glanced tentatively at Catherine’s face, trying to read her expression, but her features were locked. So Alison took a breath and went on.
‘It was horrible being away from home for those few weeks, truly awful. We stayed in hostel after hostel because we couldn’t afford any better, places that stank, were crawling with vermin and where you couldn’t leave anything lying around because the second you turned your back it would be gone. Every night I’d cry, but when Marc was asleep because I didn’t want him to know. I wanted to come back home so badly, have a bath, sleep in a clean bed, have my mum cook me tea. Those first couple of weeks were hard, but even though I wanted to go home and I missed Mum, I never once considered actually going because I was so convinced that I’d done the right thing. I thought I loved him – that’s what I told myself – it was love, pure and simple. But it was more than that. I was jealous of you, Catherine, and angry that you, the plain quiet mouse, had got him when it should have been me. I didn’t want you to have him so I took him, without realising what I was getting myself into. And then when I found out I was pregnant and I realised it was real life and not some little girl’s game I was terrified. I knew I couldn’t let him go. I knew I had to say anything, do anything to make him come with me. I knew he felt lonely, that he missed having a proper family. I knew that not because he told me, but because you had. Because you were the one that really knew him. So I used that to make him choose me. I told him I’d be his family, I’d look after him. But what I really meant was that I needed him to look after me. I didn’t tell him about the baby until after he left with me. I tricked him into going with me and I manipulated him into staying. Or at least I thought I did. Looking back now I don’t think he would have stayed with me if it hadn’t suited him, no matter what I said.
‘Eventually Marc got some casual work in a car dealership, washing the cars, cleaning up, and they let him watch them work, teaching him a few things. Once we got the cash together we rented this little bedsit in Camden. This one room, with a shitty little electric hob that didn’t get hot and a fridge that didn’t get cold. After about a month at the garage Marc told me that they agreed to apprentice him and help him go to college. He was so pleased with himself, so proud. And I looked at him and I thought, he feels like that because of me, because he’s doing all of that for me, and I think that’s when the jealousy and fear began to drain away and I realised that if I could hang on to him now, even though I’d won him so unfairly, then I would be able to love him and he would be able to love me. After about six weeks Dad found us. He’d been looking all that time, apparently, poor Dad, every day and all night, walking the streets, trying to spot me. Someone at one of the hostels we’d stayed in gave him our address.
‘He and Marc had a fight, a proper fist fight. You should’ve seen me, Cathy. I was on Marc’s back, trying to drag him off my dad, begging him not to hurt him.
But when I finally got in between them I told Dad to go home alone. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I missed him and Mum so much and I’d have given anything for a hug from him. But I couldn’t go home because by then I loved Marc and I was crazy about him. I just couldn’t get enough of him. I was always thirsty and hungry for him, always starving for his attention. He never left my side during those first couple of months, except when he was working. He never once suggested that I go back home, or get off his back, but he was distant, just a little bit removed from me. He was thinking of you, I expect, but I didn’t know that then, or want to know it.
‘He worked and worked and worked until finally he and I and our lives began to knit together. We felt close; I felt close to him. The years after Dominic was born were the happiest years with him. When we didn’t have much but we had enough and he was proud of himself, felt good about himself because he was improving our lives day by day, taking care of his son, and then after a few years his daughter too. If he was seeing other women back then, I didn’t know about it. Or I didn’t want to know about it. I was so happy.’
Alison paused. ‘I didn’t think about you much then. I blocked you out of my memory, cut you out of my life. And if you did ever cross my mind I told myself I’d done what was best and I’d look around at our flat, at Dom and Gemma and at how happy Marc and I were, and I’d tell myself, there’s the proof, there is the proof that I was right to do what I did.
‘It was while I was pregnant with Amy that I found out about the first woman – the first one I was aware of, anyway.’ Alison took a breath and rubbed her hands over her face. Catherine noticed that her fingers were trembling as she rested them back on the table.
‘It was a nursery nurse, from Gemma’s nursery. I couldn’t believe it when I found out because Marc never picked Gemma up from nursery except for this one time when I’d been so tired with the pregnancy that I’d begged him to leave work early and do it for me. And then a few days after that I began to notice that this girl – Lou, her name was – who’d always been so polite and friendly, began acting all off with me, and while once she would happily chat about Gemma with me, now would barely speak a word. I didn’t know what I’d done to upset her. She was only a young girl of about nineteen but you know, when you’re pregnant you become sensitive about everything. I was really worried about it. I even mentioned it to Marc and he told me it was my hormones playing up again. We even laughed about it.
The Accidental Wife Page 30
