by Liz Lawler
The writing filled only half a page. Tess turned the page to read more.
I should have started this story at the beginning instead of at the end. But I am aware of how quickly things have changed recently and needed to make it known I am in danger. Would he kill me? Possibly. Probably. But it will not look like a death by his hand. He is capable of making it look natural. I should never have married him. I ignored the warnings. My father warned me not to mistake charm for grace. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. It’s what you do when you’re in love. Ignore what you don’t want to see.
Tess felt as if her heart had just been squeezed. It’s what she had been doing in the run-up to that operation. Trying to ignore the truth about him. Her world had imploded that day. To go from loving someone so deeply to a feeling of abrupt abandonment had destroyed something inside her forever. She would never heal from this.
She saw his car on the drive and her heart sank. He was already home. She had not wanted to face him while feeling this low. She had wanted to sit quietly for a bit to calm her anxiety and disappointment. She had found no evidence of a first wife at the flat. Nothing to prove the old lady was telling the truth. She even quizzed his old neighbours on the off chance that they might know her. But none of them had. None of them had heard any mention of a wife.
Had the old lady just imagined a first wife? She had been fairly certain, though, and used Daniel’s name. Strongly hinting that something happened to the woman.
Without proof of her existence Tess was back to square one. Facing something which was rapidly racing towards her. The reality of her future life. A man was dead. Had died in a hospital because of a nurse. Her name would be in the papers. Everyone would know. And there would be nowhere to hide but here.
She felt a knot inside her stomach as she opened the front door.
He was in the kitchen and was fixing himself a coffee from a machine that would more likely be seen in a smart café with all its gadgets for pressing and grinding and frothing drinks.
‘Would you like one?’ he asked.
‘Please,’ she said, taking a seat at the table. He set about making a second one and wiped the counter while the cup was filling. The brown marble tops were old and needed professional buffing to bring back their original shine, the shaker style cabinets below and above worn of their cream colour. Everything in the kitchen looked a little shabby and could do with replacing.
He set a cup and saucer down on the table in front of her. The coffee was black, how he liked it. She’d wait a moment before getting up for some milk.
‘You met Vivien Porter on the train this morning.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. On the platform actually. She said she was going to London too. I thanked her for a lovely evening.’
‘She had an accident and was splashed with boiling coffee.’
‘Yes!’ she said, looking at him in surprise for knowing this.
‘Did you go to her aid?’
Tess’s eyes fixed on him like a startled deer. ‘She was gone before I could help.’
‘You mean, gone off the train?’
‘No. I mean, gone to the bathroom.’
‘And what did you do? I mean, while our friend was burning and trying to salvage the damage to her clothes?’
‘Well, I waited.’
‘Ah, I see,’ he said quietly, moving towards the table, carefully blowing his black coffee. ‘You waited. And then when she returned to her seat, you what? Offered her comfort?’
‘Sh-she didn’t return,’ Tess replied, beginning to stutter. ‘Someone else sat in her seat.’
‘A rather selfish act, wouldn’t you think? To make someone stand after they’ve been injured?’
‘Yes. A woman sat down before I could stop her. I—’
‘I’m talking about you!’ he said, in a honeyed tone. ‘You,’ he repeated, and without warning tipped his hot coffee straight into her lap.
She screamed in shock and tried to jump up but his hands were on her shoulders. She writhed in pain and gritted her teeth as the liquid burned her thighs.
‘Ever,’ he whispered unpleasantly in her ear, ‘ever embarrass me like that again and I’ll bathe you in boiling coffee.’
In the bathroom she soothed the red areas with cold flannels before covering the small blisters with Sudocrem. She didn’t want to go back downstairs. She wanted to crawl into bed and hide.
The banging on the bathroom door jolted her. Then his voice shivered her.
‘Come on, Tess. It doesn’t need a trip to A & E. Splash it with cold water and then come join me in the kitchen. If you’re good I’ll make you a dessert.’
‘I’m coming,’ she managed to say. ‘Just making myself presentable.’
She heard him walking away and slumped down on the edge of the bath, her skin covered in goosebumps. He was terrorising her as if he had permission to do what he liked now she was under his control. If he yelled or shouted while he was hurting her, she wondered if her fear would be less. His voices – his tones, the timbre, the smallest intake of breath, the half beats measured between words, the utter control he kept when speaking – didn’t alert her to his change of mood.
He was a Jekyll and Hyde, but it was only she who saw Hyde. To everyone else he was seen as some sort of god. A very nice man. A brilliant doctor. She’d heard the awe in Vivien’s voice, who clearly had told him what had happened. He couldn’t have known otherwise, unless he was on the train and saw it happen.
She couldn’t go on like this. She just couldn’t. She had to know where she stood. She went downstairs to find him. She had to face him and ask him what her future held. Otherwise she would go mad.
He looked up from his newspaper as she came towards him. She had to say what was on her mind before she let him speak.
‘Why did you say I cut too short? You know I didn’t, so what was the reason for saying that?’
He leaned back in his chair. Then gave a small shrug. ‘Are you going to make a fuss about this? You’ll get a slap on the wrist and then it will be over.’
She shook her head at him. ‘So you’re never going to admit to the nod you gave. You’re never going to admit I didn’t cut short. What future do you see for us, Daniel, after this?’
He stood up. ‘I see you happy in this place. Happy to be a wife. Happy to be a mother. All the things you should have wanted to be happy about out if you’d let yourself see that.’
He spread his hands wide. ‘I have given you a beautiful home. All you have to do is commit yourself.’
‘You mean to you! Don’t you? So you can change me into someone who meets your standards.’
A calculating look darkened his eyes. ‘You do have other choices. Though what that will be like for you I don’t know. Difficulty in getting a new job, I imagine. References, accommodation, money, of course. I believe they hold off doling out benefits if you have a record of gross misconduct. But the door’s there if you want it, Tess.’
Tess slowly backed away. This torment was never going to end. He had mapped her future and now she knew what it held. Bleakness.
Chapter Thirty
The train was seventeen minutes late. The passengers standing on the platform had their eyes fixed on the orange writing scrolling on the information board for updates. They stayed still in their places; guarded, aware the platform was becoming increasingly busy with people now arriving for a later service. Anyone newly arrived would be thinking to try and board the earlier train, if it came. Some began positioning themselves where they thought the doors might open, ready to ignore etiquette and just grab a seat, leaving it to the train manager to deal with the arguments over reserved seats. It was going to be a crush on board and the late train was going to leave the platform full and with passengers standing.
Tess gazed at the people around her and saw some edging closer to the yellow line to form a human barrier in an attempt to prevent those arriving after them boarding first.
She felt some
relief at standing there able to inhale a different air after breathing in so many lies. He had never loved her. He had only pretended. Everything she’d thought real was a lie.
The small relief she felt was in knowing it would soon end. He was not the man she had married, the one who promised to love and cherish her. Without warning he had stopped. Instead he had chosen to unlove, uncherish, and do his best to break her into a million pieces…
He could never have loved her.
An announcement coming over the PA system had mobiles leaving the waiting passengers’ ears as they raised heads to listen to the rushed and nasally voice of the speaker. ‘The train shortly arriving on platform two is the delayed service to London Paddington. Passengers are advised to use all the carriages when boarding and move quickly away from the doors to allow others to board.’
Tess stared to her right and slowly began walking along the platform, her eyes on the horizon. They were stealthy, these great long tubes of steel, coming upon you sometimes before you caught sight of them, before you even heard them.
The crowd towards the end of the platform thinned, leaving it more peaceful away from the crowds and the noise, and she looked along the track to the point where it curved away out of sight, watching for the train’s green-and-yellow nose to appear. She imagined the smooth sloping head, with its shiny dark green-and-yellow-coated skin as the sleek head of a mallard duck, swooping in low and fast along the track to take her away. It would be coming very soon. Travelling fast. It would reach this point of the platform still fast enough to do serious damage to anything that got in its way.
She’d heard it wasn’t always a sure thing, which was why announcements sometimes said, ‘A person had been hit by a train.’ The person under the train was still alive, and not a body. If you jumped right into its path you would surely get it right. Maybe those who survived hadn’t taken the full brunt of the rushing steel, were the ones who slipped down through the gap and only partially mangled.
She breathed deeply and thought of there being no more tomorrow. No more her. No more thinking of the future. She took a step over the yellow line. It would be quick. And it would be over. The pain merely imagined. She would be dead before her body had the chance to feel it. She would not suffer. Nor know fear anymore.
Her head, the house of her fear, would smash open like a watermelon dropped from high, letting all the locked-in terrors leak away. A soothing river of blood draining away all feeling. The pain would be gone.
She heard an underbelly rumble vibrating in the distance, an enfolding whooshing noise growing stronger, then sweet musical notes trilled in the air; a hiss, a squeal, a wire-drum brush stroking against cymbals – the voices of the train calling. She took another step closer to the edge, breathed air and held the breath as if preparing for a dive into water. Her body tingled in preparation. She pressed her feet on the very edge. She was ready.
The shove that propelled her back came from nowhere. She stumbled and saw bright orange material flash before her eyes, heard a deep warning bellowed in her ear.
‘Stand back!’
The dispatcher in hi-vis stared at her with shock in his eyes. ‘Not funny, miss. Not funny at all.’
She gazed at him astonished. Betrayed. Shocked. She had lost her chance. She was still standing and now people were pushing past her to get onto the train. She lagged behind until a press of bodies propelled her forward, moving her closer to the steps, and all the while she was waiting to be stopped, expecting a hand to land on her shoulder preventing her leaving, but the platform man was busy boarding others. At the door she stared down at the gap between the train and the platform, imagining seeing her body lying there, but saw only the blackened ballast stones on the track.
She should have been down there mixed with the stones, been blood and bone on the track. Instead, somehow, sometime today, after travelling on this train, she was going to have to return to him.
She collapsed into the first seat she found by a window, trembling with reaction, and in a daze watched commuters get laptops and tablets and smart phones at the ready. Clicking keyboards and multiple voices thrummed in her ears as beginning right then, as if synchronised, they all spoke at once, uncaring of sharing their conversations with people seated beside them because these people, after all, were only strangers.
Tess squeezed her eyelids together to shut out the normality. Only minutes ago she had tried to kill herself, and having failed, now sat there hoping to find sanity.
She felt wetness on her cheeks and wiped away the tears before anyone noticed. She shoved her hands into the deep pockets of her coat and felt relief at finding a pair of sunglasses. Her misty eyes rested on the city she was leaving behind. It reminded her of Rome with its surrounding hills, its Roman Baths and Roman Temple. She had thought this place was her home now forever…
Her chest ached, recalling how ridiculously happy she had been. She held onto the sob rising in her throat and concentrated hard on the scenery passing by her window. She could not break down in front of strangers. She had to hold on until she was alone. They would wonder what she was crying about. Have fleeting thoughts of it being a death, a break-up, a mental health problem, catching sight of her footwear, one black, one navy flat court shoe.
They would never guess at the real reason. That life had dealt a deadly blow. That her husband asked her to sign her name to a truth that hid a lie. A lie she would have to live with her entire life. Confirming she unwittingly killed a man. If these strangers beside her knew this, they would say she had good reason to cry. They might even say she had reason to be afraid. And she would reply that this was not something new. She had been afraid all of her life.
Even when her parents were alive she was afraid to find them dead. Afraid the needles and the special medicines they put into themselves would put them to sleep forever. That she would wake up and find them no longer able to pat her head, break her a piece of chocolate, or pass her some cooling chips. When it eventually did happen, she was five years of age. Alone, without relatives, and afraid of what was to happen.
Not wanted, was what happened. She was neither pleasing nor appealing. She has a look about her that says junkie child, she heard someone say. By the time she was seven she knew all the rules of her new home and learned that sometimes a friendly face was hiding a different face for only her to see when alone at night with no other grown-ups around. And she learned the unwritten rule she mustn’t break – never tell.
By the time she was ten she had built herself a safe wall that made her invisible so fear couldn’t find her. When she left the children’s home she left her safe wall behind, believing she no longer needed it now that she was an adult… Such foolishness to have believed that. The panther still pounced.
She leaned her head against the window and felt the motion of the train. She let the thought take hold that if tomorrow life was still as unbearable she could try again.
Tess opened her eyes and saw passengers outside her window hurrying by on the platform. The train had stopped, the carriage was emptying fast, and cleaners were on the platform making ready to board and do their job. The London Paddington train was at its destination.
She picked up her purse, to put back in her rucksack, and saw a white card had been placed beside it. It was a business postcard. A small angel or a butterfly was squiggled in blue biro in the top right corner where a stamp would go. Two words centred in capitals read: FOR YOU. Her neighbour was gathering an assortment of objects from the table into a cloth bag and Tess held it out to her.
‘Is this yours?’
The large lady smiled, and shook her head. Her floaty kaftan with all the colours of the rainbow billowed out around her as she stood and rooted inside her large bag in search of something.
‘No, dear, it’s not mine. But thankfully these are,’ she said as she held aloft a fan of train tickets.
Tess turned the card over and read a handwritten blue-penned message:
I saw you today st
anding there. Death nearly took you away. From someone who has seen death you should know there is no coming back from it. Remember, next time you step over the perilous line you may not get a second chance…
She shook the card from her hand fast and it landed on the table. Breath caught in her throat. Someone had seen what she’d tried to do and was letting her know.
‘Did you see who put it there?’ she asked fretfully.
The woman’s dark brown eyes studied her now. ‘Seen no one, honey. I slept like you.’
Tess breathed raggedly.
‘Hey, you OK?’
Tess stared at the woman’s kind face through her sunglasses and saw her deepening concern. She forced herself to nod, and appear less frantic. ‘I’m fine. Just wondering if I left an iron on.’
A wrist full of bangles jangled as the woman raised a hand in despair. ‘Oh, dear. Ring the neighbour, honey. Get them to check on it.’
Tess nodded and stood up. She picked up the white card, folded it in two and tucked it inside her purse. She hoped the passenger who left it was long gone, not anywhere nearby. The message unnerved her. That something so private had been seen. She felt exposed.
She stared at the people passing by the window. It could be one of them out there who saw her. She felt a tingling brush down her neck as if a pair of eyes was boring into her. She was now eager to get off the train and get away from this message person. They didn’t sound normal. A normal person would have spoken to her if they were concerned instead of leaving her a sanctimonious message. Or maybe even a warning. She hurried off the train.
Chapter Thirty-One
At just gone nine she entered the flat. Relieved she’d had her rucksack on her back before running from that house, otherwise she’d have been without keys. It had been the sound of the front door closing after him that darted her upstairs to shove on her shoes and have her pelt out the door as if running for her life. Her husband would never know his wife attempted to take her life that morning, would never know she left the house in mismatched shoes. She would put them back in the wardrobe, and put on the red slippers before he got home.
