The Strangers We Know

by Pip Drysdale

  ‘Huh?’ the other girl asked, slurping her drink. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just—’ I started. ‘That looked a lot like Oliver.’

  Tess burst out laughing. ‘Charlie, don’t be silly,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one by the pool. Can we just check?’ Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. My vision was white at the edges and adrenaline pulsed through my veins. What was happening? But Tess shook her head again, her short dark pixie cut catching the light as she moved in what seemed like slow motion. ‘There’s no way to un-swipe, babes. Sorry.’

  I looked at her. Pleading.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said slowly, drawing out the syllables. Her brow was tensed in a concerned frown and she was touching my arm with reassurance. ‘Charlie, it wasn’t him. He’s a good guy.’

  And she was right: he was.

  But that didn’t change the fact that the walls were swaying towards me and my breathing had all but stopped.

  I needed to go home. I needed to talk to him. So I paid my part of the bill, said I was tired and, as I made my way out the doors into the cold night air, I remember feeling like my entire life was mid-implosion. Little did I know infidelity was the least of my problems.

  10.29 pm

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting in a cab, my stomach a tightly knit ball as we pulled away from the kerb and I stared out through the window: two friends hugged goodbye on the sidewalk, men in well-cut suits wandered down towards Piccadilly and a group of girls in high heels and short skirts made their way down the little alley I’d just come from.

  My mind was a tangled mess. Tess had said it wasn’t him and maybe she was right. Because there had been no other solid signs: no rogue hairs on sweaters, no perfume in his hair, no lipstick on his collar. Surely I’d know if he were cheating? I clenched my eyes shut as though to focus on the truth but then there it was again: that photograph. Branded onto my inner eyelids like I’d stared into the sun for too long.

  What the hell was I going to do – ask him?

  If it was true, wouldn’t he just lie? I’d have lied back then, if it were me.

  I’d learned the hard way that honesty was not always the best policy. Sometimes it just wasn’t worth the cost.

  But this was Oliver we were talking about: he was the best man I knew. Honourable. Strait-laced. And after seeing the pain his mother endured with his father before he left, he just wouldn’t do that to me. Would he? Besides the counter-argument was strong: I was the screensaver on his phone, I’d met his mother, I had a very expensive rock on my finger, our wedding photos were all over his Instagram wall; we had our own hashtag for fuck’s sake: #charlieandollieforever.

  No. Logically, it was extremely unlikely.

  If he is on there, it’s definitely Justin’s fault.

  I thought back to the night we met. To the bet. Justin had sworn that was simply a ‘one-time intervention’ – that he needed to ‘save’ Oliver from the clutches of his ‘miserable-psycho’ girlfriend. Oh, yes, that’s another thing: I didn’t realise it at the time, but Oliver wasn’t exactly single the night we met. He was still dating a girl named Alyssa, they’d been together for just over a year and she ‘had problems’. I told myself, when I first found out, that if Oliver was really in love with her he wouldn’t have taken the bait, agreed to the bet, no matter how unstable she might have been. No matter how much Justin pushed. I needed to believe that because that’s the Oliver I was falling in love with. Noble. Kind. Protective. And he was falling in love with me too. I knew that because he’d won the bet the moment I agreed to dinner. He could have excused himself right then. Right there. I could have met Tess as planned, and he could have gone home to ‘her’. But he didn’t. Instead he waited for Tess’s reply to come in – ‘Of course, woohoo’ – took me by the hand and led me outside into the frosty winter air.

  But after seeing that app, everything looked different. What if Justin’s turning on me now? Then came a flash of memory: Justin, tipsy, bragging to us about his date the previous night with a ‘brunette so hot she must be bonkers’ and his nocturnal rendezvous with a redhead later that night. Hadn’t he met them both on an app? Yes, yes he had. But in my recollection, Oliver hadn’t flinched. He hadn’t seemed that interested. Still, there was no escaping that awful truth: we were only together because he’d cheated on Alyssa.

  Was it my turn now?

  No. No. No.

  That was where my thoughts were by the time the cab pulled to a stop.

  I passed a twenty-pound note to the driver and as he fiddled around for my change I looked out the window at our building: a red brick mansion block, white trim, facing Battersea Park. It was just before midnight so only three lights were on: Natasha (our noisy upstairs neighbour who had a thing for Oliver), the flat to the upper far right of the building, and ours. Our flat was on the ground floor on the left hand side and there was a gentle glow creeping through the crack of the curtains. Which meant he was probably still up.

  We’d moved there just eight months before, straight after we got back from our honeymoon. Our old place was near Kensal Green, closer to my work, but we’d been broken into and Oliver’s car keyed up. He got nervous after that and insisted we move.

  This flat was our new start.

  The advert had said: cosy, park-facing sanctuary. And ‘cosy’ was right: it was teeny-weeny and overpriced, a two-bedroom where the second one was the size of a single bed. But Oliver used that as a study, so it was perfect for us. As the door closed behind me and I moved into the hallway, I thought of how happy we’d been to find it and my pulse sped up again: we had been happy, hadn’t we? I wasn’t one of those women blind to the latent misery of her husband, was I?

  I moved past the lifts and caught sight of my reflection in the metal doors: blonde hair to my shoulders, amber eyes, slim build and a naturally red mouth. In every indie film, every play, every commercial I’d ever been in, I was always cast the same way: as the token-blonde wife. You know the type: supportive, pretty, unblemished. I mean, sometimes they’d give me a quirk or flaw to make me more relatable, especially in more recent years, but that didn’t change the fact that I was only there for two reasons: (a) so we could learn about the hero via intimate dialogue with something other than a wall or a volleyball and (b) to keep the producers happy – ‘Romantic subplots win over female viewers’ after all.

  If this were a movie, the narrator would now say: Charlie was not, in fact, unblemished. And that narrator would be telling the truth. But in real life that didn’t matter, I was always cast that way because that’s what I looked like – on my headshot and in real life. I was the leading lady. The love interest. A sweet little ingénue life hadn’t left its fingerprints on yet. Which was intentional: that was the ‘me’ I’d recreated when I’d moved to London to start afresh at nineteen. I couldn’t change my interior monologue, my fears, nor my wounds, and so instead I changed what I showed people. I created an illusion and I wore it like armour.

  See: none of us are who we appear to be.

  Not even me.

  But here’s the sticky bit: even though ‘the love interest’ was my castable ‘type’ – the only type of role I’d ever successfully secured – just before we got married, Oliver asked me to stop accepting auditions that required me to be intimate with other men. I think he was just jealous but the official version was it was bad for his professional image to have his wife simulating sex scenes. And I’d agreed. I knew how hard he’d worked to get to where he was and how important his image was to him. And it wasn’t like I was being cast in blockbusters anyway; the biggest role I’d ever landed was my most recent one, a Netflix series, but they’d cancelled it after filming the pilot. Acting was so unpredictable and Oliver was like a song I wanted to keep on repeat. Like free drugs. And so I’d told myself we all had to choose between ‘us’ and ‘me’ eventually. That, if anyone was worth the sacrifice, Oliver was.

  But still, it was a sacrifice.

  It m
eant Clarence (my agent) rarely called me anymore. And Oliver knew that. So surely he wouldn’t have asked that of me if he were cheating. It would be hypocritical.

  But as I moved down the brown-carpeted hallway towards our front door, I now wondered if I’d missed a red flag there. Weren’t jealousy and a controlling nature the hallmark signs of a toxic relationship? Wasn’t a preoccupation with image the calling card of a narcissist? I was pretty sure that yes, I remembered those things from one of the many online quizzes I’d done with Tess to diagnose Marc after it all went down. How had I missed this? What if Oliver wasn’t who I thought he was? Or worse, what if he was – what if it wasn’t even him on that app – and I was letting my baggage take the reins and ruin things. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d jumped to conclusions.

  You see, that’s the problem with trust issues: eventually you find you can’t trust yourself either.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out the key, imagining how the rest of the night would run. Would he be waiting for me, watching TV? I couldn’t hear anything playing through the door. Maybe I should just ask him? But I’d asked him something similar before and so I knew how quickly his walls could go up. Trust was important to him too. I’d been so looking forward to seeing him and I didn’t want to ruin things.

  Fuck.

  I slid the key into the lock, held my breath and twisted.

  Episode 2

  TUESDAY, 5 JUNE (10.47 PM)

  The flat was empty when I opened the door: just the whoosh of the washing machine, the smell of pizza and the amber glow of the kitchen light that had been left on. I looked to the fruit bowl – pale blue ceramic, full of ripening bananas and a couple of wrinkling oranges. His keys glinted from their usual spot beside it. He was definitely home. But our bedroom door was shut. He must have gone to bed. My chest panged: he usually waited up for me. I pulled the door gently closed behind me, slipped off my shoes and moved over to the pizza box sitting in the middle of the white marble countertop. I opened it – one slice left – and took a bite.

  What the fuck was I going to do?

  The last time I’d asked him about something like this had been four months after we met. It was spurred on by his ex – Alyssa – that time. The one he’d left for me. The one I knew nothing about.

  I’d tried to gather intel about her. I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that they were wrong for each other, or she was at least mildly evil, to ease my guilt, but no matter how subtly I asked the question, Oliver never wanted to talk about her. It’s supposed to be a post-coital rite of passage – sharing war stories from past loves – but every time I started to talk about Josh or ask about Alyssa, Oliver would say: ‘I don’t want to know about your exes and I don’t want you to know about mine. Let’s pretend we’re each other’s first and last. Let’s stay in our “bubble”.’

  I’d nod. Snuggle into him. Pretend I agreed and try to be grateful that it let me keep my own secrets. But I’m not sure I’ll ever be spiritually evolved enough for that kind of blind faith. I like data. Lots of it. That’s how I feel safe.

  But with Alyssa, I didn’t even know what she looked like. I’d trawled through Oliver’s Facebook photographs searching for her as soon as I’d learnt of her existence – of course I had – but there was nothing: he’d deleted all traces of her. There was nothing on his Instagram page either. And so it was only via true tenacity – a Google image search for ‘Oliver Buchanan’ which, on page three, amid a lot of people who were definitely not my Oliver, offered up an old picture of the two of them together at an event – that I finally saw what she looked like and learned that her last name was Shaw. Now I could google.

  Not that it did me much good.

  She wasn’t on Twitter. I couldn’t find her on Instagram. She was on LinkedIn but I didn’t want to e-stalk her there because you can see who views your profile on that platform (and that would have been embarrassing). But eventually: hooray! She did have a Facebook page.

  Unfortunately, however, all her settings were super private. And so, while I’d found nothing to worry about on the internet, I’d found nothing to make me feel better about stealing her boyfriend either. And that, together with Oliver’s flat refusal to talk about her, meant Alyssa remained a dark question mark buzzing around me like a mosquito I just couldn’t swat.

  And then one day fate stepped in.

  Oliver and I were hand-in-hand, standing by the Sainsbury’s till on a Sunday afternoon, when it happened. He was joking about my crappy choice of movie the night before and I’m not sure who clocked who first – him or her – but it definitely wasn’t me. All I knew was one moment Oliver’s eyes were watering with amusement, and the next they changed, his spine stiffened, his hand grew limp and, instinctively, I turned to see what he was looking at. She had the same dark hair and almond-shaped eyes from the photographs I’d seen, but she was thinner now and taller than I’d have expected. Her eyes were puffy and her face was pale as cigarette ash. She was about four steps away from us, holding a basket containing a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and three big bottles of white wine. I thought she might make a scene; her eyes were welling with tears. But she didn’t. Instead, she gracefully laid down her basket in the middle of the floor and, the moment before she turned to walk out of the shop, she shot him this look I will never forget.

  It was harrowing.

  I’d never seen Oliver properly rattled before that encounter. We sat there in the parked car, orange shopping bags in the back, his eyes on the windscreen for a good ten minutes before he told me a secret: he’d been terrified to leave Alyssa in case she hurt herself. I squeezed his hand: she had seemed a bit fragile. I hugged him. And I left it at that. What choice did I have? Our relationship was so new; far too new to start dissecting his ex’s issues and demanding analysis.

  But that didn’t mean I could ignore it. I couldn’t. Because I’d had my heart broken, and I’d seen it happen to Tess, I knew what it looked like and it wasn’t Alyssa. She looked devastated. Which left me wondering: what had he done to her?

  A thought like that will jar you back into reality; I was falling for this man but how much did I really know about him? He’d been with Alyssa when he met me, he’d cheated on her with me. Was I the first? Would he cheat on me? Then: are they still in contact? Is that why she was so horrified to see us together?

  Our relationship was only four months old by then. I didn’t want to ask him outright because I knew I’d come across as jealous and insecure and I hadn’t wanted to have to explain all the reasons for my trust issues yet either. And so, I did the only thing available to me: I checked. One evening, when I was over at his apartment and he’d just nipped to the loo, I accessed his phone before it locked. The first thing I did was check his messages, but there was nothing suspect there, so I moved to his calendar, quickly flicking through the days, looking for god knows what.

  And then, just as I heard the loo flush, there it was: private meeting.

  It was to be held at the Mandarin Oriental hotel at 7 pm three days later. That sounded a lot like a rendezvous. Why else would it be ‘private’?

  Thus, on the night in question, there I was from 6.45, sitting cross-legged with a dry mouth and a pounding pulse on a sofa near the entry of the Mandarin Oriental. Waiting for him.

  All this might sound a bit bonkers to you but there’s a limit to how many times one heart can be broken. It had already happened to me a couple of times. I was keen to nip things in the bud before I got in any deeper.

  So from just before 7 pm my eyes remained glued to the door. Would they arrive together? Would he arrive alone and head straight upstairs in an elevator to the room? Or would he do neither of those things? Would he instead head straight past me, eyes down, into the restaurant and sit at a table with a man of around 55 he’d later identify as ‘a big client from South America’ whose last name was Machado?

  Yes, the last one.

  In the months that followed I’d hear the name Machado a few
more times when I was curled up with Oliver on the sofa, a documentary on pause, while he spoke to Justin on an ‘urgent’ call (all of Justin’s calls were urgent). I came to realise Machado was a name that invariably left Oliver’s expression in some sort of knot and I always wondered if that had something to do with the fact that he came with three big bodyguards (very much in evidence that first night I saw him).

  So there I was, having trailed my new-and-perfect boyfriend to a hotel only to find it was clearly a business thing. But it was still salvageable. All I needed to do was scurry on home and pretend it’d never happened. That I didn’t have next-level trust issues. And I would have done precisely that if Oliver hadn’t looked up just before I was out of view and seen me.

  It was horrible.

  And so I was forced to explain myself – it was that or have him think I was a proper out-and-out psycho who was following him for no good reason. And given the whole episode at Sainsbury’s with Alyssa, that didn’t seem wise.

  He denied it, of course, said there was no way he’d ever cheat on me, that it was ‘us’, forever. That he didn’t want anyone else. Machado was still waiting for him in the restaurant, and there was such pain in his eyes at my distrust; pain I’d caused.

  Despite all my certainty: I’d been wrong.

  So I made a choice: I chose to trust him.

  I stopped googling Alyssa, stopped checking his phone, and chose to be happy.

  But it wasn’t that simple. The damage, it seemed, had been done. Shortly after that accusation, a wall went up. It was transparent and flexible like plastic wrap, almost imperceptible. But it was there. I could sense it between us even when we made love. And there was a sadness that clung to him. I’d begun to think it would never get better; that I’d ruined things by being so fucking broken inside.

  Then three months later, we were sitting in the back of a cab. I thought we were heading to see Justin at a new bar he’d ‘discovered’ but I didn’t recognise anything out the window and we were getting further and further away from the sorts of places Justin liked to claim as his own. I leaned in towards Oliver and whispered: ‘Where are we going?’