I get back to my office and begin my day, making a to-do list.
At the bottom are the words: Clear out office.
Scary.
A thought assails me…
There’s one thing I have to do before I begin work, so I switch on my computer and google Ruben’s mother. I get a few hits but when I click on her website, I see nothing special. In fact, Ruben’s charity people could have made this bloody thing.
I wipe my search history and begin working through my emails. That reminds me… I’ll have to wipe this whole computer, just in case, before I leave tonight.
So, Fred is a gangster, huh?
I should’ve known.
It almost pleases me, because it means Ruben’s a little bit tarnished, just like me.
Chapter Twenty-One
Common Knowledge
At ten, it’s time to go. I leave the hotel one last time, wobbling on shaky legs towards Ruben’s waiting Range Rover. I’m carrying a box under one arm, a few bags too. I haven’t got much, just a few items I bought for my office that I don’t think anyone else should enjoy. I open the rear passenger door and slide the box along the backseat before jumping in beside Ruben. He leans across and gives me a big hug and a kiss, taking my breath away.
“Homework?” he asks, gesturing at my stuff.
I hold his face in my hands and smile. “Let’s go and get a drink. Close by.”
“Oxford Blue?” he asks.
“Where else?” I put my belt on and urge him to hurry, even though he’s trying to figure out what it is that I’ve been up to today. “Let’s do a drive by, too. One, last time. While we’re at it.”
“Okay…”
The man smells delicious and knows how to handle a juggernaut such as this. I wonder what he spent his time doing today… maybe I don’t want to know.
Soon, we find ourselves creeping along the road outside my mum and dad’s house. He kills the lights and even switches off the engine, pulling up just beside some bushes where we can spy on my family. The curtains are open and all the lights are on inside. Nobody along this lane ever shuts their curtains, but I guess they don’t expect strangers to stop and stare, especially with all the houses so tucked away.
My breath catches in my throat when I see the light go on in the loft room. Adam will be getting ready for bed, then he’ll be playing videogames in the dark once he thinks Mum and Dad have dropped off. I used to know because I could hear the electricity cables fizzing, well into the early hours of the morning. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a slob, entirely dependent on his parents. Perhaps they’d like that—they won’t have to deal with empty nest syndrome that way and Mum will never have to live alone with my father.
My father’s in the front room doing a crossword and listening to music, an obligatory glass of red nearby. He may finish that crossword tonight, or it may take him a week, just so long as he doesn’t have to hold a conversation with my mother, I’m sure.
I feel I know where my mother might be.
“Would you wait for me, Ruben? I want to say goodbye to her.”
“Is everything all right, Freya?”
“Trust me,” I promise, turning to kiss his cheek. “It’s going to be.”
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay?”
“I will. Watch.”
I leave the vehicle and carefully shut the door so it doesn’t make a noise. My father has his back to the window but his senses are as acute as a cat’s so I need to be careful. The squeaky gate has been left open, which is good. I was the only one who used to shut it. Sometimes I feared characters from my former life would come back to haunt me… and if they swung the creaky gate open in the middle of the night, we’d have prior warning of their arrival, or at least that’s what I used to tell myself in order to feel better—safer. Mum, Dad and Adam don’t fear or ever expect trouble and never shut the gate themselves.
I make sure to walk along the grass instead of crunching over gravel as I traverse the driveway. Swerving the front door, I go around the side and venture to the back of the house. Sure enough, I see my mother through the blinds, pottering around in the kitchen. This is her way of keeping it together when she feels like she’s about to go mad.
There are hopefully two sound barriers between her and my father: the kitchen door and the one on the room he’s currently occupying. I’m assuming both doors are shut, as per usual, which means two huge wooden panes to muffle any noise if I should scare her half to death right now.
He won’t hear… fingers crossed…
I tap my fingers lightly on the window and she spins around, thinking it’s maybe a bird or something. Her eyes gaze to see beyond the glow of the kitchen and out into the dark. Then she squints and there’s realisation. I press a finger to my lips to motion she be quiet.
Almost silently, I hope, she walks across the room and to the backdoor. On a windy day you can hear the backdoor slam even from the attic, so she’s careful to turn the handle and exit the building, gently closing it behind her.
“Oh, Freya,” she whispers, pulling me in tight. “I knew you were okay. I knew it. When you cashed the cheque, I knew you were okay or you wouldn’t have made it to the bank.”
Something like a seed of uneasiness settles in my gut, then germinates, until I feel suffocated by vines of uncertainty.
“What are you talking about, Mum?”
Her spindly hands wrap around mine and she squints even harder, though her eyes should’ve adjusted to the dark by now. “Ruben. You do know who he is?”
“Yes, Mum. I know who he is.”
She frowns. “But you don’t, do you?”
“What are you talking about, Mum? You’re scaring me.” There’s something between a mother and a daughter, an unspoken connection that means even when one of you is hiding a secret, the other knows immediately—or when there’s something wrong, even if they’re putting a smile on it, you see through that, too.
“Your father won’t have you in the house while you’re with Ruben. I thought all for the best… I hoped… you’d found happiness, finally. I thought, finally, this was it… a new beginning for my little girl. But then your father told me the truth.”
I knew my father must have somehow persuaded my mother that I deserved to be kicked out, but it hurts to hear it from her mouth, the way she just believes whatever he says. Likely he sold her a pack of lies.
“What truth, Mother?” I almost bark.
“You know, don’t you? You must. Who his father is.”
I take a deep breath. If I have to hear or even think about Fred one more time today…
“It doesn’t matter who his father is, I’m not in a relationship with Fred.”
She does that thing where her chin sort of lifts and wrinkles and her neck partially disappears, as if she’s trying to stop her bottom lip trembling.
Hateful.
“You do know he’s got an illegitimate child, don’t you? You do realise what sort of family your boyfriend comes from?”
Here we go again… with the Hail Marys and the praying for mercy mumbo jumbo.
Then it hits me like a sledgehammer.
No.
It can’t be.
Is this why we met? Is this how our worlds converged, forcing us together?
“Freddie,” I whisper, the guy who married Debbie, Dad’s cousin’s daughter.
“Freddie is dodgy, we all know that,” she says, “but where do you think he gets it from, eh?”
Fury boils over inside me, and even though I’ve tried to protect her from the truth on a number of occasions in the past, now I can’t stop myself spitting out exactly what I think. “Is this why you allowed my own father to chuck me out on the streets, is it? Is this why, Mum? Because I’m with a man whose father is a criminal. Or is the real reason you let him chuck me out that you just cannot stand to admit that your own daughter has found the sort of happiness you will never, ever have, not with him.”
Her eyes glow with shock and she hold
s her hand up between us, biting her lip, as if she’d hit me if she had it in her to do so, but she doesn’t. She’s weak from so many years of strumming a violin, her fingers and wrists knackered.
“You’re upset and I forgive you, but you know the truth, Freya. His family is bad news and we won’t be associated with that.”
“Ruben is not the same.”
“Oh, yeah? Really? Because I heard differently.”
Breath catches in my throat and my mum can see I’m freaking out, so she takes me by the shoulders and looks directly into my eyes. “I figured it out when you said you’d been friends for two years. I figured out he was the one you went missing with the night of Debbie’s wedding, am I right?”
I nod my head.
“This isn’t your father talking now by the way, Freya. It’s me. Your father didn’t even know you went walkabouts for two hours at the wedding, I covered for you. Anyway, think about why Ruben was at the wedding that night when he didn’t even get an invite. According to Freddie, who will tell anyone who listens, he and his half-brother Laurie or someone, they were really friendly at school. Each as clever as the other. Then Laurie dies or something and Freddie is ostracised by Fred, who withdraws Freddie’s funding for university and all sorts.”
Fuck. No. God, no.
“Freddie is Fred’s lovechild by some woman he still sleeps with on the side. Everyone knows about it. The man who thought he was Freddie’s dad left years ago when he found out his best mate and wife were having it off. Everyone was talking about it at the wedding, your father said so. It’s common knowledge.”
I start panicking. Does Ruben know he has a half-brother? Does he care? Why did he never mention it?
“You’ve got to ask yourself why Ruben showed up, Freya. To a wedding he wasn’t invited to. You’ve got to ask why Fred wasn’t there but Ruben was. It’s not hard to imagine Ruben only turned up at the wedding because he wanted to cause a scene. Or worse. You’ve got to ask yourself whether Ruben is anything like his father. You’ve got to ask yourself whether the rumours about Fred Kitchener’s ruthlessness, his women and his friends turning up dead have rubbed off on Ruben in any way. If I were you, I wouldn’t even stick around for the answers. I’d just leave.”
I stare at her and see no war inside her eyes. She absolutely believes this story and doesn’t doubt this is what happened, not for a second. However, she doesn’t know Ruben like I do.
“I trust Ruben. I know who he is. Maybe he wanted to have words with Freddie that night. Clear the air, I don’t know. All I know is that Ruben despises his father and isn’t the same man. He’s his own man. He became a footballer to escape his dad’s way of life. He lives with guilt every day because he took his escape route even though it meant leaving his little brother behind.”
She shakes her head, looking suddenly weary. “Haven’t we been here before, Freya, remember? You can’t hope to save him, darling. Only to save yourself.”
She makes a move to go inside, but before she turns away from me, I put my hand on her arm and have my say. “Condemning other people you don’t even know is easier than facing what’s going on, right under your nose, in your very own house. Adam is up all hours playing computer games and probably smoking stuff to stay awake, going by his bloodshot eyes every morning. He’s that stressed out trying to living up to Dad’s expectations, he’ll be sectioned with a nervous breakdown before you know it. As for me, I never told you, but Dad once called me on my mobile and I had to drive your car to go and pick him up, one night when you were in London with the orchestra. I took him to hospital and the next day he told you he’d been mugged, didn’t he? That excused the cuts and bruises he’d sustained down at the Blue, which he’s barred from by the way. Go and ask Russell, anytime, who’s a good mate of mine actually and always sees me right, unlike my own father who’d happily turf me out onto the street using any excuse to do so, just because I dared seek a shred of happiness for myself. As for you, Mother… you’re the worst. You saw what he did to me. You saw how he treated me and you did nothing. You made your bed when you chose Dad over me. Now, you can lie in it. You can also rest assured I’ll donate that ten grand to charity. I won’t be needing it. I’ve got money of my own. And there was me, thinking you’d given me that money because you were happy for me, when it was really just guilt money, because you knew he was going to find any excuse to sling me out, didn’t you? And you knew you were just going to stand by and let him do it.”
I watch her carefully as she displays no reaction to anything I just said, as if she wasn’t really listening—couldn’t allow herself to, self-preservation maybe.
It seems there’s nothing else to say as she opens the door, goes back inside and recommences pottering around the room. I’m left in shock, my heart shattering into a million pieces yet again—because she’s willing to let me go, just the same as before.
As she said, I have to save myself.
Our fates are set.
Time to pull my socks up.
I tiptoe around the back of the house and contemplate throwing a brick through the window or something, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I’ve been here, because that would mean him knowing that I actually care.
I run down towards the car and jump into the passenger seat. “Change of plan, hun. Let’s go home.”
“Sure?” he asks, turning over the engine and squealing away, without any stealth at all this time.
“I quit my job today, so I had better be sure, hadn’t I?”
His face lights up. “Wow, let’s go home so we can properly celebrate.”
I turn my face towards the window next to me, hiding the inner turmoil my expression must show.
If only he knew…
As soon as I walk through the front door, I dash up the stairs shouting over my shoulder, “Let me wash that place off me first!”
I fly into the bathroom and set the taps running, pouring half a bottle of bubbles in at the same time. After undressing I plonk my arse on the toilet and try to think.
Why does my mother see things so black and white when it comes to other people’s behaviour, yet in her own personal life she’s blind to all sorts? She’s convinced I’m with another bad guy, when she can talk, seriously. With Ruben it’s not simple. He’s not whiter than white, but I know he loves me. I want to believe that so much. As for Freddie and Laurent and all that… the wedding… I don’t want to think about that right now. All those connections, coincidences… my head feels like it’s about to pop.
Then there’s Fred Kitchener.
How humiliating it was to stand in that staff room earlier and hear those rumours from people I don’t even care about—my supposed fiancé having delivered a barefaced lie not many hours before about where his family’s money comes from. I still wonder if Saskia would have found a way to get rid of me if I hadn’t handed my notice in; maybe she finds my association with Ruben and his mobster family distasteful and that’s why I was packed off so generously.
After using the loo, I climb into the bath and not ten seconds later, Ruben walks in carrying a glass of wine.
“Thank you,” I gush, grinning.
It won’t be hard to pretend for a while. I used to pretend for a living, after all. It’s like a familiar old pair of slippers, acting—you just slide back into it and wear it like an invisibility cloak. Nobody can see the real me as long as I’m pretending to be someone I’m not.
He watches me take a few sips, then swipes the glass out of my hand and puts it on a shelf I can’t reach.
“Mind if I join you?” he asks, taking off his sweater before I’ve even agreed.
I sit up in the bath and try not to grin as I stare at his gorgeous body, which is even more beautiful when he’s relaxed, like right now. That familiar fire inside me begins to kindle again, though sharing a bath doesn’t seem to be something he views as sexual. This is about him connecting with me, I decide.
He gets in behind me and rests his chin on my sh
oulder, wrapping his arms around my chest. The bubbles are ridiculous and some spill over the side but it doesn’t seem to concern him.
Emotion wells up from deep inside me and I shudder, even with his body close to mine and the hot bathwater enveloping my limbs in warmth.
“Do you want to tell me what happened today?” His question sounds more of a command than a conversation starter.
I don’t reply at first. This is tricky. How do I get him to open up? How do I navigate this rough terrain we’ve both surrounded ourselves with in order to stop people getting to the truth?
I roll over and rest on his chest, looking up into his eyes. He’s the same man I’ve always known. The same, absolutely beautiful guy I’ve always loved, since the moment he said hello.
“I’ll tell you everything,” I promise, “but you have to tell me about your father first.”
He’s soon wearing a scowl and I feel his heartbeat quicken through the chest I’m currently lying on.
“I’ll tell you about today, about my past, about my father. I’ll tell you absolutely everything. You can ask me anything, and I’ll give you the god’s honest truth.” I don’t know where the words sputter from, but sputter they do. “In return, you must do the same, and you must go first. And if you lie, I’ll know, but in exchange for your truth—no matter what that is—I will tell you everything you want to know. I mean it. I swear.”
From the look in his eyes, I can tell this is going to be a long night. Either he will argue with me about this until the sun comes up, or he will actually tell me the truth and that will take all night, too.
“What do you swear on?” he demands, his eyes red and glistening with unshed tears.
“My love for you.” I take his hand and put it over my heart. “Which is the truest, most genuine and painful thing I have ever known, or will ever know.”
Kismet Page 18
