by Tamar Cohen
Sitting up, I feel ridiculous and self-conscious of my fifty-one-year-old body on this seedy hotel bed. My bra and knickers are twisted up in the sheet. When I liberate them, I notice they look ashen in the glaring light of the bedside lamp. Impossible to believe I used to wash my whites with special detergent I ordered off the internet that makes them come out looking like new. How long has it been since I bothered with that?
“I’m not this person,” I say out loud, fumbling with my bra clasp, and instantly regret it.
Idiot! He’ll think I’m quite mad. But Greg looks pensive. “We’re none of us these people,” he says. For a change, there’s no trace of a smile on his face. “We just became them by mistake.”
The cramped hotel lift in which, just a couple of hours ago, Greg and I kissed like teenagers, is garishly lit and paneled in plastic laminate made to look like wood. The hotel lobby is full of foreign students, sleeping on their luggage. We are jarringly old and well-dressed. They all know, I think to myself. They all know what we’ve been doing upstairs.
I say goodbye to Greg outside on the pavement in the fading light. He tries to kiss me on the lips, but I turn at the last minute so his lips land—smack—on my ear. I have the strangest feeling, suddenly, that someone is watching us. I peer along the street but don’t see anyone.
“I’ll call you,” says Greg. I hope that he doesn’t.
My car is on a meter around the corner. Am I okay to drive? I’ve never felt so sober in my life. In the driving seat I check my mirror out of habit. There I am. For some reason I thought that, like an overexposed photograph, I might not show up at all.
When I turn on my phone, I have a few missed calls. I listen to the messages, most of them loan companies, as I expected, though a couple are from voices I recognize.
Selina? It’s Petra here. I know this might sound odd, but I wonder if we could meet? For a chat?
Meet Petra for a chat? What a bizarre idea! What on earth would we find to say? I try to remember any occasion in the three years she’s been seeing Felix when we’ve met up on our own or even chatted over the phone, but there is none. Well, we’ve never exactly been close.
“You’re jealous of her,” Simon accused me once. Preposterous idea. Petra is perfectly nice, and obviously very beautiful, just not terribly sparky. I always thought Felix would go out with someone with more substance, someone with something more about her. Although is that actually true? When I try to picture this ideal daughter-in-law of my imagination, my mind is resoundingly blank.
The second familiar voice on my voice mail is hollow and scooped out, and I am immediately alert.
DI Bowles here. I wonder if you’d like to pop in. There’s something I’d like you to take a look at. I’ll be here quite late so come by anytime.
The traffic is horrible, but eventually I arrive at the station and am seated in a dark room with a few small television screens and computers. They’ve got a video recording playing for me, and they are watching me intently as I try to make out what I’m seeing.
The figures in the highlighted circle on the screen are black-and-white and grainy, and they move as jerkily as puppets through a misted landscape. But the width of the taller figure’s chest, the thrust of his hands in his jacket pockets and the tilt of his jaw reveals this to be Simon.
The CCTV footage of Southwark Street on a rainy night in September emerged “out of the blue,” according to the police. The main cameras in the area where Simon was last seen had been checked, but this one was assumed to be out of order.
Though the quality is poor, there’s something truly terrible about seeing someone walking around, knowing that in just a few hours he’ll be dead. “Stop!” I long to shout at the oblivious Simon. “Turn back! Run!”
“Is there anything about this person you recognize?” asks DI Bowles, pointing at the second figure, slightly shorter and squatter than Simon, dressed in what appears to be a bulky dark coat with some kind of hood or hat pulled well down over his face. Dark trousers, dark shoes. No face visible, no identifying features. Even the walk is disguised by the camera’s jerky frames.
“I don’t recognize him,” I say.
“Or her.”
I glance sharply at the policeman, who doesn’t seem to be joking, although he has one of those unfortunate faces that makes it difficult to tell. I haven’t seen him since right after the funeral. The memory of the state I was in at that time sits awkwardly between us like an uninvited third person. It’s like trying to do business with someone who’s seen you naked. Can the figure really be a woman? I peer at the screen, willing it to come into focus, but the images remain infuriatingly blurred.
“We’ve traced those three women you see behind them,” says DI Bowles, pointing out three indistinct shapes walking close together. “They didn’t notice anything strange. We have yet to track down him,” he says as another person crosses the screen, this time a man in a pale raincoat. “Or them.” He pointed to a couple laden with shopping bags.
“And no one has come forward to say they were with him the night he died?” I ask. I suspect the police investigations have been largely halfhearted, that they’ve been privately convinced all along that Simon killed himself, unable to take the strain of his double life. There’s no CCTV footage for the pub Simon was reported to be in, or for the section of the riverfront where he was thought to be seen.
DI Bowles shrugs. “When you divide up your life into strict compartments, some people are bound to fall through the gaps in between,” he says. “Your husband seems to have had some friends for one life and some for the other. Maybe he needed to keep a few that overlapped with neither, just to stay sane?”
I realize now that I don’t like this policeman. I don’t like that he saw me at my most raw; I don’t like what he thinks he knows about me and about Simon, when actually he knows nothing. I want to hear him say he was wrong. I want him to admit he doesn’t know us, after all.
“But surely this proves he didn’t kill himself,” I persevere. “There was someone else with him. Surely anyone who didn’t have something to hide would come forward?”
DI Bowles looks at me then looks away.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. Busfield, that everyone has secrets, and there could be any number of reasons why someone would want to keep quiet about where they were that night. But yes, I can confirm we are including the possibility of murder among our several lines of inquiry.”
* * *
The journey home is endless. I’m hoping to have the house to myself after the day I’ve had, but when I arrive back, Josh is home, sitting in the den, half swallowed by a soft leather beanbag, wearing headphones with a mouthpiece attached and clutching a PlayStation controller.
“Die,” he says into the mouthpiece as I walk in. “Die, you pussy!”
“Charming,” I say.
Josh pauses the game. “Wanna cup of tea?” he asks.
I stare at him. Hooded sweatshirt, bare feet, shorts (for heaven’s sake!) although outside it has started snowing again. I notice the fuzz of black hair on his calves—my baby boy—and I want to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him. “Why are you offering me tea?” His eyes—beautiful hazel eyes, thick black lashes—widen in mock affront then drop to the floor. “I met her today,” he says, fiddling with the wire of his controller. “Sadie.”
“Josh, I told you... Her mother said...”
“Fuck’s sake, Mum.” Josh rarely gets cross, but now his face is scarlet. “We just went for a burger. It’s no big deal.”
I remind myself that it’s natural he should want to find out more about the girl. She’s his half sister, after all. That woman, with her soap-star mentality, has got us all overdramatizing.
“Anyway, she had some news about her mum I think you should probably know.”
I breathe in deeply, closing my eyes for a moment, and then breathe out. Whatever it is, this new drama that’s been plastered on top of the existing one like a fresh billboard ad, I don’t want to hear it. I’m tired of emotion. I’d give anything, anything, for things to be normal and boring again. “What now?” I ask Josh. “Not another suicide attempt, please, God.”
He shakes his head. That silly, swept-to-the-side hair they all have now.
“She... I mean, the mum...Lottie... Well...she’s pregnant.”
A rushing inside. Blood whooshing around.
A baby. Simon’s baby.
She wins, then. He may have loved me first, but he loved her last. Her body proves it.
I won’t have more babies.
I won’t have another husband.
She wins.
Part Four
DEPRESSION
18
LOTTIE
I’m back in the hospital. It seems like only minutes ago I was discharged, and now here I am again. Same hospital, same sickly green-colored walls in the waiting room, different ward. Antenatal. Two weeks on, and it’s still as much of a shock as the first time I heard it. A baby—his baby. I’m not ready for this.
Look at the other women here. How much older am I than them? Years? Decades? The woman opposite has the biggest belly I’ve ever seen, I swear to God. Impossible to imagine my own body distended like that, puffed up like I’ve swallowed an enormous pouf.
The woman shifts in the uncomfortable plastic chair, manually heaving her mammoth belly over to one side.
“What ’ave I told you about ’itting?” she says to the bigger of the two small children who are sitting on the floor at her feet, fighting over a board book. “You ’it her one more time, and I’ll bloody well wallop ya!”
The little boy glares at her sullenly, digging around in his nose with his finger, which he then wipes on the book.
“Mrs. Busfield?” the nurse calls in a broad West Indian accent.
“I prefer Ms., actually,” I say, following her into a consulting room. Now that I’m a not-wife, a not-widow, I don’t feel comfortable being a Mrs.
The nurse raises her eyebrows. “We call all the ladies Mrs. Just easier. Y’know?”
I ought to protest. But the nurse is holding out her hand.
I’m confused for a moment, and then realize she’s waiting for me to hand her the little bottle of urine they had me fill when I arrived.
Mortified, I reach down into my bag and produce a specimen jar. The nurse snatches it impatiently. Now she’s wheeling out a huge tray of empty test tubes and a newly unwrapped syringe.
Oh, dear God. I’ve forgotten about this bit. The endless poking and prodding of pregnancy. The way your body is no longer your own.
“This won’t take a minute, dear,” the nurse says, yanking the sleeve of my red jumper out of the way. “Some ladies like to look away.”
Obediently, I look at the wall, where someone has stuck a poster advising women who speak only Swahili, Turkish, Urdu or any number of other languages how to go about finding an interpreter. I look down at the floor, where a box of brightly colored plastic toys stands out against the institutional gray of the carpet tiles. I look at the bed running along one wall, covered in a layer of kitchen roll. And all the time I’m looking away, the nurse is jabbing my arm with the syringe.
“Can’t find the vein,” she complains. “Some ladies, they got big veins just pop up like sausages. But some ladies, they got little biddy veins so small you can’t find ’em at all.”
It’s my fault. I’m to blame for having mean, anorexic veins. I’m too old to be having this baby. Too unmarried, too unwidowed, too betrayed, too poor, too ill-equipped.
I stare at the wall and try not to cry as the nurse jabs away furiously in the crook of my left arm before letting it fall and repeating the whole procedure on the right.
* * *
At the bus stop, there’s a young mother with a buggy waiting in stony-faced silence. Her child gazes up at me, solemn and huge-eyed behind the clear, heavy plastic of the buggy’s rain cover, and instinctively I put my hand over my belly. Is there really a baby in there, quietly swelling like one of those sea monkeys Sadie was once given for her birthday?
Back home, I crawl miserably into bed.
Jules comes and stands in the doorway. My sisters have put me back on Lottie Watch, taking it in turns to come and stay. I feel terrible for what I put them through.
“Are you sure they said everything’s okay?” Jules wants to know. She still thinks I ought to have let her come to the hospital, even though she’ll probably get the sack if she takes any more time off work.
“Everything’s fine,” I tell her.
I don’t tell her that sometimes now I’m filled with hate for what Simon did, and dream of digging the baby out with a rusty spoon. How big will it be now? The size of a gallstone? A small cyst? I’ve always wondered about how people describe tumors in grocery terms—as big as a grapefruit, the size of a small melon. As if danger can be quantified in fruit, in pulp and flesh and skin and juice. The baby will be the size of a large grape, I imagine. Or a shriveled plum left too long in the fruit bowl—the kind that splits horribly apart when you reach for it, leaving a pool of sticky orange juice and a cloud of fruit flies.
How fluid, in the end, is the line between love and hate. You keep riding the crest higher and higher and then suddenly, you’re plunged into a black sea where nothing exists except you and your hatred.
There was such love when Sadie was born. An ocean of love. Simon and I lying in cool white sheets, away from the glare of the Dubai sun, gazing at our daughter while she slept. How beautiful she is... We’ve made the most beautiful baby in the world.
How will it be for this poor grape baby? No money, no father, basket case mother.
My phone cuts through my self-pity. That jaunty little ringtone—legacy of a much happier time.
Emma, the caller display informs me.
“All fine,” I tell her before she can speak.
I love my sisters, but oh, please, God, they have to give me space. It’s so tempting to let them take me over, not to have to think, but to do that I have to surrender Simon—the Simon I still love, even while I hate him. They won’t allow love. Not after everything. I’m dreading telling them about my plans for Christmas this year. I want Sadie and me to be on our own... Just a small Christmas this year, I think... No matter how much I rehearse it, I still can’t say the words.
Emma is in a hurry.
“Good, but I’m not phoning about that. I’m phoning about money.” My middle sister has taken on the thankless job of trying to deal with my finances—my debts, more accurately.
“Em, I’m really not in the mood to hear this...”
“I think you will be. It seems someone has paid your mortgage—all ninety-five thousand pounds of it, and no one seems to be able to tell me who.”
SELINA and LOTTIE
SELINA: Hello?
LOTTIE: It’s me. Lottie.
(Pause.)
SELINA: Oh. (Pause.) If you’re ringing so I can congratulate you...
LOTTIE: Was it you?
SELINA: Pardon?
LOTTIE: It has to be you. Who else would it be?
SELINA: I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re—
LOTTIE: Paying my mortgage. It was you, wasn’t it?
SELINA: Pffffffff!
LOTTIE (over the top of Selina): Somebody paid it. It didn’t just pay itself.
SELINA: Why on earth would I pay your mortgage?
LOTTIE: Oh, let’s see. Because if I lose my home, you’ll lose yours? Because it suits you to have me in your debt? Because you can afford to, as you’ve been creaming money off Simon into a mystery offshore bank a
ccount? Because someone finally waved the “nice” stick over you while you slept...
SELINA: Pfffff! Sorry to disabuse you, but it wasn’t me. In case you haven’t noticed, my husband left me financially embarrassed. All his accounts are frozen anyway, because of probate, and even if I could get my hands on them, they’re empty. In fact, they’re in minus figures, thanks to you.
LOTTIE (riled): Hey, lady, I’m not the one who lives in a fucking mansion and stays home all day painting my nails. I bloody well go out and earn a living. I pay my way. You need to find out who those payments were going to. That’s the person who bankrupted everyone, not me.
SELINA: I’ve told you before. I have no clue where the sodding money went.
(Pause.)
LOTTIE: And disabuse?
SELINA: Pardon?
LOTTIE: Who says disabuse?
SELINA: Me, clearly. Anyway, while you’re on the line, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you...
19
SELINA
If anyone had told me last Christmas that in a year’s time I’d not only be a widow, but also preparing to play host to my husband’s pregnant mistress and their love child, I’d have thought them completely barking mad. Nevertheless, they’d have been right. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Preposterous, ludicrous, laughable, absurd, outlandish, not on your nelly, have you taken leave of your senses? Of all the... That takes the biscuit. Bizarre, unfathomable. Are you quite sure? Have you thought it through? Mad, crazy.
It was all Flora’s idea. Or Josh’s.
One or the other.
It was dinnertime last week, and Flora and Felix were here again. They seem to be here all the time at the moment. Are they doing it for me or for them, I wonder, all these visits home?
“Gonna be weird, innit?” said Josh, as we sat around the kitchen table eating a bland meatloaf.
We all stared, waiting for enlightenment. “Christmas this year. Gonna be weird.”
We had to agree it was indeed going to be weird. How could it not be with Simon dead and money worries hanging over our heads like a comic-book weight?
