by Lucy Dawson
‘I’d better do something with these, too,’ Imogen says, lifting up her basket. ‘Have you got a cake stand?’
If I’d had even the slightest idea that Claudine was capable of this…
‘Sophie?’
I don’t look up. ‘No, Gen, I haven’t. Sorry.’
‘Oh,’ says Imogen uncertainly. ‘Well, never mind. A plate will do, I suppose.’ She disappears off after Mum.
Alice comes over and sits down next to me. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ she whispers.
My mouth falls open, and I turn to her, terrified. How on earth does she—
‘I don’t understand why you can’t you just be straight with me? You’re blatantly still seeing him. He was supposed to meet you here and us arriving has messed it all up.’
‘Al. It wasn’t Rich at the door. You think if we were having an affair he wouldn’t have told me what Marc had planned for today? He’d never have come here the morning of my wedding!’
‘Unless he’s planning something to mess it up. I was watching you – you looked scared shitless. You weren’t just trying to find out who the flowers were from because you were curious, or you thought maybe the card had got lost. You were on a mission. And how am I supposed to help you unless you’re honest with me?’
I hesitate. Should I just let her believe she’s right? Isn’t it better that way? It might be safer to let Alice think she’s worked it all out – especially given that that bastard really was outside my house, talking to Imogen, just moments ago.
I’m convinced it was him. I know there’s a slight chance that it was all perfectly innocent – Imogen might well have told some delivery bloke that it was my significant birthday, and he simply answered with a stock phrase that everyone uses all the time. And any number of my friends could have sent me flowers today; someone who can’t come tonight, perhaps? The florist could have been in a rush, got distracted when she was about to write the message on the inside of the card and just sealed it up accidentally without actually doing it. I could well be reading too much into something that has a very simple and logical explanation.
But I know I’m not.
First the man ‘fixing’ the car. Now this. He is just as real as the letter sitting in my bag.
‘Everything considered, I think it’s just a lot safer if Rich doesn’t come tonight.’ Alice chews her lip.
‘Oh, you think?’
‘Don’t be like that. I’m trying to help. I could call Lou and tell her you’re ill or something and the wedding’s off? By the time she finds out it was bullshit, it’ll be too late.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, to placate her. ‘Let me think about it for a bit.’
She nods with determination, ready to leap in and do battle for me, to protect her big sister. It brings a lump to my throat and I reach out suddenly to take her hand. ‘Love you, Al.’
‘I love you too!’ she says, surprised. ‘Hey, don’t worry, Soph, we will sort it – I promise.’ She squeezes my hand. ‘You wait till you find out where Marc’s taking you on honeymoon…’
‘Don’t tell me!’ I try to smile through tears, which I quickly wipe away.
‘I won’t, but you’re going to love it.’ Alice looks at me, bewildered. ‘Please don’t cry. I’ve got something for you.’ She reaches into her pocket and pulls out an old mobile. ‘For your SIM. It should work fine – it’s all charged up. You don’t think you might want to just—?’
The doorbell rings again. ‘I’ll get that,’ she says, shoving the phone into my hands. Jumping to her feet, she rushes out into the hall.
This time it really is the woman who has come to give me a home treatment. Within ten minutes I am lying face down in my living room, on a portable massage table, curtains drawn and lights on: I’m naked, apart from some paper knickers, with my thighs being smeared in the same cold, gluey goo that is plastered over the rest of my body. It smells revolting and isn’t improved by the beautician beginning to wrap me tightly in what appears to be cling film.
My mother and sisters are calmly sitting on the sofas beside and behind me, eating a selection of pastries and neon cupcakes, as if this is a perfectly normal way to spend a Saturday morning, while I am quietly going out of my mind, now that I finally have five seconds to think.
Can Claudine really have had me followed? In the cold light of day, that seems so extreme and outlandish, but I can’t see any other explanation.
‘So what are you going to wear tonight?’ twinkles my mother merrily. I can practically hear her thinking: ‘See? Look at me keeping up the act! Told you I’d do it!’
‘I bought a new dress last week,’ I mumble through the hole in the table, as I stare down at the carpet.
‘Where from?’ says Imogen. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Black, and Jaeger.’
‘Very nice,’ says my mother approvingly, as my sisters chorus, ‘Jaeger?’
‘Christ, Sophie! Did you get a matching jacket, shoes and structured handbag to go with it?’ says Alice, appalled.
‘Like the Queen!’ says Imogen. ‘Did you know that when the Queen wants to leave an event and go home, she puts her handbag on the table? That’s like her secret signal to her staff that she’s had enough. And when she’s bored of talking to someone, she moves her bag from one arm to the other?’
‘You need to stop reading the Daily Mail,’ says Alice.
‘I think your dress sounds super, darling!’ says Mum.
I suddenly feel my stomach ball up with frustration. Please shut up! All of you! What does it matter? We all know I won’t be wearing it anyway! I assume the dress Marc has bought for me is hidden in the house somewhere, ready for one of them to bring out later.
‘I don’t mean to be rude, um, Lydia,’ I say to the woman, who is now busily wrapping my right foot – surely the only weight issues my feet have is holding the rest of me up? – ‘but how much longer is this going to take?’
‘I’m going to cover you in a foil blanket, then the hot towels that I’m about to get out of your tumble dryer, and after thirty minutes under all of them, you’ll be done!’
Half an hour? My frustration twists over into panic. I don’t have time for this! I need to—
‘Lydia is going to give you a lovely manicure after that, too!’ says Mum from somewhere on my right side, whereas moments before she was sitting on the sofa to my left. I can hear her starting to pick things up and then setting them back down, which is unnerving. ‘What are you doing, Mum?’
‘I’m just looking at this wedding invitation up here, that’s all.’ She appears to be inspecting the contents of the mantelpiece. ‘Whoever wrote this is a very repressed person – and not to be trusted. It all slants to the left.’
‘You’re such a loony, Ma,’ says Alice from behind me, and I hear the flick of the page of a magazine.
‘Who is this Rupert and Harriet, anyway?’ says Mum. ‘I don’t remember you mentioning them.’
‘A bloke Marc knows from work.’
‘Lawyers as well?’
‘He is. She’s an accountant, I think.’
‘Well, there you are. Can’t be trusted, you see?’ she says.
I don’t say anything to that. I’m now worrying that I shouldn’t have put the letter – sitting upstairs in my underwear drawer after I was actually allowed to go to the loo, alone, before the treatment started – out of my sight. What was I thinking? I imagine Mum trotting off up there, opening the drawer, whistling while rummaging through the knickers and bras before calling down to me, ‘Sophie, darling! There’s a letter here for you – I’ll just open it for you, shall I?’ I swallow – which is not easy to do while lying face down. My pulse starts to speed up too. I want to go and check it’s still there.
‘Marc’s father has a very full head of hair, doesn’t he?’ Mum remarks. She’s obviously moved on to photographs now.
‘I’ve never really thought about it.’ In fact, I really want to sit up, full stop. The ridge I can feel forming on my skin whe
re my face is pressing down through the hole is starting to itch, and my nose is beginning to run.
‘Haven’t you?’ She sounds surprised. ‘It probably means you’ll have quite hairy babies—’
Oh, please stop! There is simply no question in my mother’s mind that I will have children. She has pointedly told me hundreds of times how much easier it was with Alice – when she was a much older mum – rather than with me and Imogen, because she was so much more confident as a person by then.
‘With genes like that on both sides, it’s a foregone conclusion. You had a full shock of black hair when you born. It was most disconcerting. Everyone told me it would fall out, but it didn’t – it just stuck straight up in the air. I couldn’t do a thing with it except tie a ribbon around it. You looked like a coconut. That reminds me, I have told you Grandpa can’t come tonight, haven’t I?’
I’m sniffing hard now in a frantic effort to stop my nose from actually dripping on the floor. ‘Someone please get me a tissue!’ I stick my left arm out and wiggle my hand around. The letter won’t have gone anywhere. It is still in the drawer. Calm down, calm down!
‘Here,’ says Imogen, and I feel a tissue push into my fingers. I stretch my arm around the massage table, but I can’t quite reach. It’s such a small thing, but the inability to wipe my own nose tips me over the edge. I try to get up, and simultaneously all four women shout, ‘Don’t!’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I explode, lying back down. ‘I need to wipe my nose!’
‘Sophie!’ says my mother, appalled. ‘There is absolutely no need for that kind of language.’
‘Here!’ Alice appears suddenly underneath the table, holding a tissue. ‘I’ll do it for you.’ She dabs at my nose ineffectually.
‘That hasn’t helped,’ I say through gritted teeth, and sniff loudly again.
‘Well, obviously it won’t if you do that.’ She pinches the tissue around either one of my nostrils. ‘Big blow – as Rich said to the bishop,’ she adds in a whisper.
I stare at her, shocked.
‘Oh, come on – they didn’t hear,’ she teases, and pulls back out from under the table.
But Alice, this isn’t funny at all. Despite the towels weighing me down and the fact that they all start shouting again, I begin to clamber up. One minute Alice is saying she isn’t going to let Rich ruin anything, and in the next breath she’s making stupid jokes like that? I can’t just lie here as if this is all somehow going to fix itself. It isn’t, time is running out, and all I want to do is go upstairs and make sure the letter is still there!
‘Get this off me, now!’ I say, trying to lift up my tightly bound arms. I feel crazily hot all of a sudden – my face is on fire, and my heart is thudding in my chest, practically pushing against the cling film, like it’s trying to escape my body.
‘She’s shaking.’ Imogen frowns. ‘Is that normal?’
‘Um…’ says Lydia uncertainly.
I try to swallow. ‘I can’t breathe properly. Everything is feeling really tight.’ I reach up instinctively and touch my neck.
‘She’s gone bright red,’ Alice says, alarmed. ‘I think we’d better get this off her.’
‘My throat feels like it’s closing up,’ I pant.
‘Oh my God.’ I hear Lydia’s voice behind me. ‘She’s having an anaphylactic reaction to the wrap!’
‘We need scissors,’ I hear Mum instructing. ‘It’ll be quicker to cut her out rather than unwrap her. Alice, look in the drawer there. Sophie, listen to me! Don’t panic. You’re going to be fine.’
‘I’m going to call 999,’ cries Imogen.
I think I start to laugh incredulously. This can’t actually be happening. My head suddenly becomes very, very light… I feel myself toppling to one side like a plastic tree, unable to bend my arms or legs properly to break my fall because they’re bound together…
And then there is nothing.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Sophie? Can you hear me?’ Mum’s face looms into view.
I stare at her. I appear to be lying on the floor or, more accurately, the large tarpaulin Lydia placed under the massage table before she began the treatment. I flap my newly freed limbs around, like the Little Mermaid, and attempt to sit up. Alice and Lydia have to help me but, when I finally manage it, a searing pain stabs through my head, just above my right eye.
‘Ow!’ I wince, and lift my hand up to my face. ‘What happened?’
‘Don’t.’ Mum pushes my hand away. ‘You fainted. Don’t touch! Just let me look.’ She peers closely at me.
Imogen and Alice are staring too. ‘She was unconscious,’ says Alice uncertainly. ‘She must have…’
‘I must have what?’ I ask.
Mum sighs crossly. ‘Alice and I were looking for scissors, Imogen was reaching for her phone, and Lydia,’ she says icily, ‘thinks you hit your head on the edge of the massage table, but she can’t be sure… I can’t actually see anything – there’s no obvious cut. I think you’re all right. At the very least you’re not in anaphylactic shock.’ She glares at Lydia, who is sitting rigidly on the edge of the sofa, mouth slightly open. ‘I think you had a panic attack, that’s all. You’re probably dehydrated too, and that didn’t help with the fainting. Any weight loss she has from the treatment would be water-based, wouldn’t it?’ Mum looks at Lydia, who nods mutely.
I don’t say anything either. My head is absolutely pounding.
‘Let’s go and get all this washed off you while Alice finds some paracetamol. Imogen, go and put the kettle on. Sophie needs sweet tea.’ Mum stands up. ‘Come on.’ She holds her hands out to me. ‘Try to keep the towel wrapped around you so you don’t drip everywhere.’
We start to pick our way up the stairs, me moving gingerly partly because everything aches, and also because I’m trying to do as Mum says and not splatter the stairs with foul-smelling gunk.
‘That’s it,’ Mum says encouragingly as we reach the upstairs landing. I brace myself for her inevitable questions – what is wrong with me? Why am I behaving like this? What is it she should know? – but, oddly, they don’t come, and I follow her obediently into the bathroom.
Once the shower is running, she leaves me to it, closing the door quietly behind her. I step under the hot needles of water, which bruise my newly delicate skin. I let my thumping head hang as the paste dislodges from my body, slips into the shower tray and whirls away down the plug hole.
What the hell am I going to do? I stare at the bland white tiles. I don’t see how I can do anything to prevent it all from coming crashing down around me.
At university, I had a friend who joined the graduate programme for the police. He and I carried on being good friends for about three or four years after we left, despite him being sent to various odd locations up and down the country on placements. I’d ask him how work was going whenever he was back and we met up for dinner in town, but he’d always cleverly dodge answering in specifics; apart from once, when he arrived looking exhausted, haunted and frightened. When I asked him if he was all right, he had shaken his head and said, ‘Not really. But I can’t talk about it, so please don’t ask.’
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I had promised. ‘You can trust me.’
He’d picked up his pint and said, ‘Soph, if I told you – if I really told you what goes on – you’d never sleep again.’ He drained it and said, ‘Ignorance is bliss, believe me.’ We lost touch eventually, but I can see now that he was right.
Ignorance is bliss.
I simply don’t know how to handle this. What the hell should I do?
‘You will not mention to a single living soul that I have visited you here… I will know, and I will find you.’
Suppose the police even bothered to come out – that man will see them and know instantly I’ve broken his ‘conditions’. Going to a police station won’t be any better. He’s already watching the house – he’ll simply follow me and find out that way.
What exactly would I say to the police
anyway? ‘A man was in my room last night. He threatened me – and left this letter.’ The first thing they will want to do, in the absence of any actual evidence of a break-in, is open it. And then what?
My head is throbbing so badly , it’s actually quite hard to concentrate, but something else occurs to me suddenly: suppose that I’m wrong, suppose it’s not about me, and Marc has done something – maybe illegal. If the police find out, Marc will be struck off. He’ll lose everything.
‘Sophie?’ Mum is calling outside the bathroom door. ‘Are you all right in there?’
The letter could be a trap for Marc. Does Claudine want me to show it to the police? No, that can’t be right – she’d have sent it straight to them herself. Why would she go to the trouble of involving, and threatening, me?
‘Sophie?’
Unless she deliberately intends me to be the person that ruins Marc? Wouldn’t that be satisfying for someone as toxic as she is? But that thug specifically said I had to be the one to open the letter, and it doesn’t make sense that Marc would have done something that could endanger his career. He’s fully aware of what a heat-of-the-moment reaction would cost him. No, this has to be about me and Rich. Claudine knows exactly what buttons will push Marc.
‘SOPHIE! Answer me!’
My confused thoughts scatter away like dandelion seeds on the breeze. ‘Mum, I’m fine!’ I call desperately. ‘Please, just give me two more minutes and I’ll be out. I promise I’m OK.’
‘You don’t sound it. Come out right now, please!’
I exhale in frustration as I turn the tap off, pull back the shower doors and, shivering, climb out onto the bath mat. Grabbing a towel off the rail, I wrap myself in it, then open the door.
Mum looks visibly relieved to see me standing in front of her. ‘Right, let’s get you sorted,’ she says, turning slightly so I can walk past her down the hall into my and Marc’s room.
I now really want to check the letter is still there. As I approach the chest of drawers, however, I’m overtaken by a wave of wooziness so intense I almost lose my balance completely, and have to sit down on the bed at once.
