Home Truths

by Tina Seskis

  ‘Daddy told me to shut up,’ said Jake.

  ‘Only under extreme provocation,’ Paul said. He raised his left eyebrow, but Christie looked unimpressed. Daisy appeared at the doorway now, an angelic look on her almost-ten-year-old face.

  ‘Well, that’s not on,’ Christie said.

  ‘Oh, come on, Christie.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He annoyed the coaches, then threw the ball at Rashid’s nuts, and then he wouldn’t stop bawling in the car. He needs to be told.’

  Christie didn’t look convinced. She took her son’s hand proprietorially, which didn’t help anything, especially as she was always going on to Paul about presenting a united front.

  ‘Come on, Jakey,’ she said, and Paul was convinced the little sod was full-on smirking at him now. ‘Let’s get you in that bath.’

  27

  CHRISTIE

  The bathroom floor was drenched after some over-vigorous wave-making on Jake’s part, and right now he was biting bits off the sponge and spitting them out into the bath, no matter how many times Christie told him not to, and he had never been anything different – if Daisy had been a difficult baby, then Jake must have qualified as a bona fide monster. But at least Christie hadn’t suffered from post-natal depression the second time around, and now that Jake was older he wasn’t quite as much hard work as he once was, and he could be adorable when it suited him. And Daisy herself had grown into a delightful little girl and so, apart from Paul’s occasional blow-up with Jake, Ingram family relations were generally OK. Christie even got on quite well with Paul’s father these days, the only person in the world who appeared to. He was a curmudgeonly old man, but he was the kids’ grandpa and, as she’d said to Paul, he hadn’t had the easiest of lives either.

  Christie was proud that she and Paul had managed to work through their issues, and their marriage was proof that people can get through the most difficult of times if they try hard enough. She’d long ago got over her insecurities about her husband and trusted him implicitly now, especially as he insisted on always calling her at the end of a work night away now, no matter how drunk he was. They were a team. Even the threat of redundancy and relocating the entire family down south hadn’t broken them. When Paul’s company had first announced they were shutting the Manchester office, but that he was being offered a job in London, she’d been against it. After all, Paul hadn’t much liked the job anyway and, as she’d told him, no money in the world was compensation for doing something you hated. Plus, she hadn’t wanted to disrupt the children, and she’d been sure that Paul would find another job locally, if he was patient enough – but Paul had insisted that decent jobs were hard to come by, and that he’d been offered a very generous relocation package, and that it would be insane to turn that down. And so he had quite uncharacteristically thrown himself into the idea of the move and had worked out they’d be able to afford to buy a house if they lived a little way out of London, and he’d even sussed out where the decent schools were, and so at last Christie had agreed. As long as he was sure that that was what he wanted, she’d said, and he’d insisted that it was, and so they’d ended up finding a house in somewhere called Ware.

  ‘Where?’ Alice had said, over and over again, when they’d told her, and although Paul had rolled his eyes, Christie had insisted afterwards that her sister was only trying to be funny.

  ‘Well, she’s trying, I’ll give you that,’ Paul had said in response, which Christie thought was a touch harsh, although he might have been joking. She knew Alice could be a bit eccentric at times, especially with her love of all things astrological, which Paul had always thought was completely ridiculous – and, as he pointed out frequently, potentially marriage-wrecking. But Christie had always insisted that their previous relationship problems hadn’t been Alice’s fault.

  Jake lay down in the bath and put his head under the water for so long Christie thought he would never come up. She tried to remain patient, knowing that he was looking for a reaction, and so it was only when he looked properly dead that she swept in, scooped him out and told him to stop being so bloody silly – but Jake just laughed and spat a mouthful of water at her. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply that he was still unsettled by the move and was missing his old friends in Manchester. After all, it was hard to tell with kids sometimes. Christie herself was happy down south. She’d met two or three nice friends at the school gates and had found a good job in a boys’ comprehensive that she enjoyed, despite southern teenagers seeming as impervious to the rollercoaster life of Henry the Eighth as were their Mancunian counterparts. Her only real worry these days was Paul and Jake’s relationship – but what could she do? She couldn’t make them get on. She did her best to give them father-and-son time, sent them off to the cricket club together, but it clearly wasn’t working. Paul had been fuming earlier about the cricket ball incident, which in truth Christie had found funny, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. But when she’d taken Jake off for a bath, purely to give Paul a break, it had only seemed to annoy her husband even more.

  As Christie bent down to mop up the ever-expanding puddle on the floor with Jake’s towel, she thought that maybe she’d get her mother to have a word with Paul about Jake, as, contrary to the usual stereotypes, Paul thought the world of his mother-in-law, and was more likely to listen to her than he was to his wife. It still made Christie sad that Paul’s own mother had died when he was so young, and in such circumstances. Christ, he might pretend to be fine about it, she thought, but no wonder he’d wanted to adopt hers.

  There was a creak on the landing. ‘Paul!’ Christie called. ‘Paul!’

  She heard the clatter of shoes on bare stairs, and then Paul stuck his head around the bathroom door. The house was nowhere near as big as they could have afforded in Manchester, and Paul seemed huge as he loomed above her. His glasses immediately steamed up and he peered over the top of them.

  ‘Eee-oop,’ he said, in a comedy voice, perhaps to atone for his earlier grouchiness.

  ‘Go away!’ yelled Jake, and Christie felt for Paul as his face dropped.

  ‘Be quiet, Jake!’ she said. ‘Sorry, Paul, I thought you were upstairs. Would you mind getting me a clean towel? I don’t trust Jake not to flood the bathroom even further if I leave him.’ She glared at her son, who merely looked triumphant.

  Paul nodded and disappeared off, before coming back with a frayed pink towel.

  ‘Go away!’ Jake shouted again.

  ‘With pleasure,’ Paul said, turning on his heel and stomping back down the stairs. Again Christie wondered what she could do about the tension between her husband and her son – until she was distracted by Jake pulling reams of paper off the toilet roll and stuffing it in the basin.

  ‘Just stop that, Jake!’ Christie yelled at her recalcitrant seven-year-old. ‘And don’t be so bloody rude to your father.’

  28

  ELEANOR

  Gavin Hewitson, to be fair, looked almost as appalled to see Eleanor as she was to see him. He had cut his hair and his face had filled out, but he retained the same peculiar air of gaucheness, as though he were trying to make himself invisible, and even all these years later it was still unmistakeably him. Eleanor was so flabbergasted she dropped the milk, but the carton was plastic, and it bounced, and she picked it up quickly and carried on walking, praying he wouldn’t follow her. Without even having time to think about why she was doing it, she found herself carrying on straight past her house and into the next street, trying her best to look confident, as though that was where she was meant to be going. After a minute or so of head-down, heart-thumping, breath-sapping walking, focused only on her white trainers and the cracks in the pavement, she finally risked a backward glance, but Gavin was gone.

  Eleanor was trembling, and somehow she felt even more unsafe now than she had back then. Now she didn’t have the choice to just up and flee back home to America – or anywhere else for that matter. This was her permanent home. She had a mortgage, a job, kids in the local schools. B
ut Gavin Hewitson had been on her street, possibly knew exactly where she and her kids lived. The very same man who had sent her death threats in the past, veiled or otherwise. As she leant against a low garden wall, she pulled out her mobile and found that her hands were shaking so much she could barely punch in the unlock code. Fortunately Alex was her top number, and as she heard the odd thrum-thrum of connection she felt as relieved as she ever had.

  The phone cut out after two rings, and so she immediately called back, but this time her husband’s phone didn’t even connect, and it seemed he’d turned it off now.

  ‘Alex!’ she almost howled, stamping her foot in frustration. And that was when it first occurred to her that his new job seriously pissed her off. It simply wasn’t good enough for the police to always come first and for her and the kids to come second. She’d married a policeman partly because he had saved her all those years ago, had protected her, but now he was no longer around to save her when it actually mattered.

  The next number Eleanor tried was also dialled without thinking, and yet this one was picked up straight away, which irrationally only made Eleanor more enraged at her husband, even if he was busy saving the nation.

  ‘Hi, Ellie, how’s things?’

  ‘Lizzie,’ Eleanor said, ‘it’s Gavin. I’ve just seen him on my street.’

  ‘What? Oh, you poor love. Are you OK? Did he try to talk to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, are you sure it was him? Or that it wasn’t just a coincidence?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Eleanor gulped a mouthful of air, held it, felt it reverberate in her chest, which was fluttering. ‘Lizzie, I’m scared.’

  ‘Where are you? At home?’

  ‘No, I didn’t want him to see where I live. I’m in Langley Avenue.’

  Lizzie didn’t miss a beat. ‘Look, just stay where you are,’ she said. ‘I’ll hop in the car and be there in five minutes.’

  The food is disgusting here. And yet still I look forward to it, if only to break up the monotony of the solitude. Sometimes I take a look into the inner world that I once knew, and it feels hot, too hot, as if I am burning into the ground, disappearing into a stump of a person. I knew life was getting too dangerous, and that I needed to do something about it. But I’m pretty sure I hadn’t meant to do that. And yet what else could I have done? I’d backed myself into a corner, and so perhaps it’s inevitable that it’s come to this. That I’m officially a criminal.

  I attempt some low, breathy intakes of air, try to cool down my thoughts, and I sound like a forties film star, and I see snippets from my early childhood, remember a woman with a fur coat and a cigarette holder, like Joan Crawford. I picture the myriad green of the trees as we crossed the road by the bus stop, remember having to reach up to hold her hand as she steered us towards the park and the swings, my absolute favourite. That feeling. I see in my mind’s eye a black cat bounding across the path and up the nearest tree, its tail flicking, my giggle of pure delight. I hadn’t known what it meant then. That it was a foreboding.

  I was happy back then, I’m sure I was. And then I found out. The world feels so much simpler when you don’t know, and maybe that was the problem. It’s hard to know you’ve killed somebody. You need to be engulfed in love, wrapped up like a precious doll. And yet instead I was kicked around, like a dirty rag doll. And so I railed and I raged and I fucking hated everybody. But not as much as I hated myself. And eventually the hate grew solid and shiny, like armour. I became a glossy, polished version of myself, and I was, to all intents and purposes, happy. For a while.

  PART THREE

  THE MIDDLE CONTINUED

  2012 TO 2016

  29

  ELEANOR

  The rain was spattering on Eleanor’s face, and it was freezing, almost literally, and the drops were thin and spitty, and the harder she ran the easier it felt to pretend that all the horrible things in the world weren’t happening. These days there seemed to be terror threats everywhere, and she could hardly believe that just this morning a policeman had died and several others had been injured after a so-called jihadist had rampaged through a central London street with a machete. Alex had been on shift, and she’d had to wait forty-five agonising minutes before he’d been able to contact her, and the relief in hearing his voice had made her cry, and it was only then that she’d realised Alex’s job was no longer merely conceptually dangerous. Now the threat of attack felt real and ever-present.

  Eleanor and the dog turned off the road and pounded up some steps, on to a path that in the summer ran, narrow and straight, through a wide green tunnel of leaves. At those times it felt like the trees were encircling her, as if nature were following her, swaddling her, protecting her from the city, as she passed by the gentrified back gardens that ran down to this old disused railway line. But today the trees were bare and bowed, and it felt as if her nerves were shrieking through her bones, and at first she couldn’t work out whether it was the general sense of terror permeating every crevice of the city today, or the latent fear that still lived inside of her, from past traumas.

  But no. Today most definitely did feel different. There was something about the grotesqueness of what had happened in town that made her feel the need to move. It was as if running away from herself, from the possibility of the city’s new reality, would enable her to escape it. She let Peanut off the lead and upped her pace, her heart roaring and clanging its protest, so much so that she hardly heard the low trill of her phone. She didn’t miss a step as she pulled out the phone to answer it.

  ‘Hey, Mum, how’s it going?’ Brianna spoke loudly, the smooth, confident tones of Eleanor’s eighteen-year-old daughter almost gliding through the ether, into her ears. It felt intrusive somehow.

  ‘I’m fine, love,’ she said. She stopped running, slowed to a walk. The sky was darkening, preparing for a winter sunset that no one in North London would see today. A single raindrop rolled down the centre of her nose and dangled, about to drip, from its tip. She let it.

  ‘What’s up? How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s fine, sweetie. Didn’t he text you?’

  ‘Yes, he did, but . . . look, was he involved today?’

  Eleanor’s natural tendency was to lie, to protect her daughter. The fact that she stopped herself, because it seemed too risky, made her feel worse.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Oh.’ The tone of the single word was noteworthy for its lack of confidence. Eleanor didn’t reply, and the silence was a nervy, jangling vibration between them.

  ‘Well, tell him I said hi and to stay safe,’ Brianna said, at last.

  ‘I will, sweetie. Don’t worry, Bree, it’s all fine.’

  ‘This time,’ said Brianna, and Eleanor had no answer to that.

  As Eleanor hung up, she felt a shiver, so extreme it was like something cold seeping through her head, down into her neck, her shoulder-blades, as if her blood had been frozen and now was slowly melting. She twisted her neck to look behind her, but there was no one there. And yet, when she turned her head to face forwards again, she saw a solitary man in a thick green anorak walking towards her, head down, and she had no idea where he’d appeared from, and it made her even more nervous. For the first time in years she thought of her stalker, and she felt a dull hum of disquietude. Was it him? Gavin Hewitson. He’d come back once before. Was he back again?

  Eleanor wasn’t in the mood to take a chance today. She turned on her heel and started to sprint in the other direction, away from the man. The rain had done its work and the ground was wet, and cold painful grit was throwing itself up at her bare calves. She turned and looked behind her, and the man was way behind her now. Of course it wouldn’t have been Gavin Hewitson. The one time she had seen him, over a decade ago, had surely been a coincidence. He’d looked as horrified as she had, perhaps regretting all the trouble he’d got himself into in his love-struck youth, not wanting to risk being arrested again. And afterwards, even though it was totally against the rules, Al
ex had found out that Gavin had moved to Norwich, and a grateful Eleanor had known better than to tell anyone that she knew.

  Eleanor upped her pace as she passed the graffiti-covered bridge and then, after a few more hundred yards, she stopped, panting, out of breath. She raked her hair off her forehead, pointed her face skywards and let the rain come at her. Trailing tangles of creepers were snaking their way through the bare branches above her. As she stared upwards it was almost as if she could see them sprouting and growing, moving towards her, in real time. Everything seemed freakish. She didn’t feel like a middle-aged policeman’s wife now. She felt like a scared young girl whose boyfriend has abandoned her. A need grew in her, burgeoning like the suckers above her, and it was one she hadn’t experienced in such an overtly intrusive way in years. A need for oblivion. Blank, unthinking, unfeeling oblivion. She was finding Alex’s job too stressful these days, even when she knew for sure where he was, that he was safe. It was something about the empty impotence. Watching the news and seeing flung body parts, and weeping, collapsing mothers whose daughters were missing, and, a day or two later, the bright hopeful faces of the slaughtered. It was too much at the best of times, but fear for Alex and her children was making her veins crawl and fester, and it was as if she were itching inside, and she couldn’t get at herself to scratch it. Her feelings were too trite, the words she knew the newscasters would conjure up equally so – unutterably sad . . . the loss of innocent lives . . . the malevolence of the attack. It was hard to know how to respond to it. It was the fact that people could be so full of hate that got to her. That’s why she couldn’t help but be proud of Alex, that he was a force for good amongst this horrific, ever-present threat that the world endured now. But it didn’t stop her wishing he did a different job.