The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  She knows that this is impossible and yet the evidence is right before her eyes.

  31

  Joe

  Joe goes back the next evening, as promised, with a drill and two heavy duty bolts.

  ‘How’ve you been today?’ he asks, as he follows her into the downstairs hall.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘The hanging tins were very reassuring.’

  He isn’t sure he believes her, Felicity doesn’t look like someone who has slept well. In her own home, he has noticed, she is less relaxed than when she comes to his consulting room. In her own house, she starts at sounds that he can’t hear, and seems constantly on edge.

  When the bolts are fixed to the loft hatch, the tin cans retired to the recycling bin, and Felicity has vacuumed the dust, she offers him a glass of wine and with a twinge of discomfort, because he knows it is probably unwise, he accepts. They sit at the island in her kitchen.

  ‘You mentioned a diary,’ he says. ‘Not the one you brought me last week. The other one.’

  ‘The one written by someone who hates me?’ she says. ‘It’s upstairs. Do you want to see it?’

  He tells her that he does and she goes to find it. When she comes back, he notices that her hair is different. Loose before, it’s scraped back behind her head and tucked into a scrunchie.

  ‘It’s not pleasant,’ she says, when the fold of black leather is on the counter in front of him.

  ‘So you said. Can you read it to me?’ He pushes it back towards her.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘It will help.’

  He waits. She begins to read.

  “‘Twenty-eighth of March. I can’t stand Felicity’s hair. I can’t stand the time she spends on it, washing, conditioning, combing, plaiting, weaving, twisting it this way and that. It’s only fucking hair.’”

  Joe isn’t sure what he expected. Not this.

  ‘“I hate the greasy mat it makes in the shower drain, catching scum and soap and pubes and toenail clippings. I hate finding it on clothes and even food. Felicity’s hair is disgusting.”’

  She glances up and meets his eyes. He motions for her to go on.

  ‘“One morning, I swear, she’ll wake up, lift her head off the pillow and – this is the good bit – her hair won’t come with her. She’ll leave it behind like sheared wool around a sheep.”’

  Joe is familiar with how Felicity speaks. In the few hours they have spent together, he has absorbed many of the rhythms and inflexions that are peculiar to her. He’d thought that if he heard her read the diary aloud, he would know whether or not she was its author.

  ‘“No, better than that, I’ll have taken it all away, and she won’t have a clue anything’s wrong until she sees the scissors on the bedroom carpet. She’ll realise then, maybe feel a draft on her neck and she’ll run into the bathroom and – hello, skinhead!”’

  Joe has never heard Felicity swear. Her vocabulary is more sophisticated than he is hearing now, but he isn’t sure.

  ‘You have absolutely no memory of writing this?’ he asks.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Is the handwriting yours?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ She meets his eyes and shrugs. ‘I’m – not ambidextrous exactly – but my left hand is quite agile. I can write with it if I have to. This is a bit like when I do that, but I can’t say for certain.’

  Joe thinks about this for a second. Handwriting can be analysed. It will be possible to find out for sure if Felicity has written the hostile journal.

  ‘And there’s more?’ he asks.

  ‘You want me to read it?’

  The act of reading is making her both embarrassed and miserable and he doesn’t want to put her through it again. He reaches out and she hands him the journal. The second entry is even angrier.

  6 April

  Why the fuck does the bitch have to be vegetarian? We have a fridge that’s always packed with food and never anything to fucking well eat. I don’t buy it, this refusing to eat meat shit. She doesn’t give a fuck about animal welfare, it’s all about Felicity’s non-stop campaign to prove to the world that she’s better than the rest of us.

  Oh, I’m Flawless Felicity, I don’t eat animals.

  Oh, I’m Faultless Felicity, I’m passionate about animal welfare.

  Hello, I’m Fabulous Felicity, and my body is a temple.

  Self-righteous bitch.

  A feeling of deep unease is stealing over Joe and he is more glad than he could put into words that he has bolted the loft hatch, that she is getting her locks changed. There is only one more entry in the diary.

  19 April

  The others have been on at me to say something nice about Felicity so, here goes – she’s kind. She found a young bird that couldn’t fly the other day and she was worried that the foxes would get it if she left it outside overnight, so she put it in a box with holes in the lid and put the box in her log store overnight. She even drove to the pet store to find some wild bird food so it wouldn’t starve. She was planning to let it out the next morning if it had recovered enough to fly away.

  I waited till she was asleep and then I crept into the courtyard. I opened the log store, and then the box. The bird looked up at me with big black eyes. I think it was on the verge of hopping out of the box when I grabbed it and broke its neck.

  I put the box back. She found the bird the next morning. Sentimental bitch actually cried.

  Felicity is kind. I’m not.

  * * *

  ‘Have you got to the bit about the bird?’ she asks him.

  He looks up. ‘Just finished.’

  ‘It was a young starling. I thought it died of cold or was too weak. But what if it was me? What if I got up in the night and I broke its neck. What the hell is wrong with me?’

  Her face creases into an expression of unbearable pain. She needs to cry, he realises. She needs to let out some of the tension she’s been holding back, but her fists are clenched and she’s biting down hard on her lower lip. And then, with a moan, she drops her face into her hands and begins to sob. After a few moments, he is worried that she will never stop.

  He wants nothing more than to cross to her and take her in his arms. No one should have to cry like this and not be comforted. He is even on the point of easing himself off his seat when he has a sudden vision of his mother.

  Delilah is standing at the foot of his hospital bed, the morning after he almost died. Her face is drained of colour and there are mascara smudges around her eyes. He knows she has been up all night, hunting down Ezzy Sheeran.

  He owes something to his mother, and he knows that Delilah wouldn’t want him even to be here. He cannot go anywhere near Felicity in her distress. All he can do is wait. And be practical. In the bathroom he finds a box of tissues.

  ‘I’m actually going bonkers, aren’t I?’ Felicity says, when he hands it to her.

  ‘That term is losing favour in clinical circles.’ He doesn’t resume his seat. ‘It’s late, I should leave you in peace.’

  She mutters something he doesn’t quite catch.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I hear voices too,’ she tells him.

  His heart sinks. Even so, he has to go.

  ‘We’ll talk about it next week. In the meantime, if anything happens, call me.’

  Joe makes himself leave. Before switching on the ignition he turns to wave at Felicity in the window of her spare room and is surprised to find it empty. He could have sworn, for a moment there, that someone was watching him getting into his car.

  So convinced is he that he waits for her to reappear. He lowers the car window so that he can hear the late birds, the distant traffic, the laughter of people at a nearby barbecue. The spare room window remains dark and empty.

  He gets out of the car and walks away from it. ‘Anyone there?’ he says, in a low voice.

  Silence answers him. Silence, not emptiness.

  He is some distance from the park bench where he first met Ezzy Sheeran
but his eyes are drawn to it all the same.

  ‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,’ he’d said to her, when she’d asked about coming home with him, and he’d walked swiftly away. She hadn’t followed him that time, and he hadn’t looked back, but the following Tuesday she’d been waiting in line for him at St Martin’s.

  In a safer environment, surrounded by other people, he’d felt comfortable enough to spend time with her. He’d liked her bright mind, her independence, even her sense of fun. He’d viewed her interest in him as nothing more than healthy empathy – so often the homeless were entirely self-absorbed – and he’d been convinced he could help her.

  His mother talked about boundaries, unfairly in Joe’s view. He’d tried so hard to draw them with Ezzy but she’d not so much sidestepped as bulldozed her way straight through them. Over the following weeks and months she’d become his shadow, to the point where he’d forgotten what it felt like to be alone.

  He is getting that same feeling now.

  More troubled than ever, Joe gets back into his car. He has made Felicity as secure as possible. He can do no more for tonight.

  He is almost back in the city when something occurs to him. He should have thought of it before. The third diary entry.

  The others have been on at me to say something nice about Felicity …

  Who the hell are ‘the others’?

  32

  Felicity

  ‘Hello.’

  Felicity’s voice cuts through the quiet of the darkened room. She is lying on her bed and it is twilight outside. Her mobile phone is in her hand, pressed to her ear. Outside, someone on roller skates glides past the house.

  ‘It’s Joe,’ the voice on the phone says. ‘Hope this isn’t a bad time.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ She makes no attempt to move as she flicks through pages in her recent memory. It is Saturday – she hopes to God it is still Saturday – and she remembers shopping and doing chores in the morning. She remembers going for a run at lunchtime, a little earlier than usual, because she had to get back to take a Skype call from South Georgia.

  So, did she talk to the woman on South Georgia? Yes, she can picture her face on the computer screen, and behind her a window overlooking a huge and turbulent sea. The two of them talked about a blue lake on one of the glaciers that fills over the course of the summer and then suddenly, and without warning, drains until it leaves behind an empty basin on the ice. Yes, she can remember the Skype interview very clearly, but after that…?

  Joe is speaking and Felicity forces herself to listen. ‘So, the results of the CAT scan are back and the good news is there’s no sign of anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘I don’t have cancer,’ she says. ‘What about dementia?’

  ‘Nothing. And no sign of stroke damage. Your brain is perfectly healthy.’

  ‘Right.’

  She hears an exhalation that could be a soft laugh. ‘You sound disappointed.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Maybe she is.

  ‘We should get blood results in the next week or so,’ Joe is saying. ‘In the meantime, I wonder if we can increase the number of sessions? After what happened on Tuesday I feel as though we have a lot to explore.’ A short pause. ‘If there’s a problem with payment, most companies have insurance schemes that can cover it.’

  ‘There’s no problem.’ She isn’t short of money and she really doesn’t want her company to know she is still in therapy. Once they know, the people on South Georgia will inevitably find out.

  ‘I’ve got a slot on Fridays at six,’ Joe says. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I can make that.’ She gets up off the bed.

  ‘And I’d quite like to try hypnotherapy,’ Joe says. ‘Would you be OK with that?’

  A voice inside her screams, No, no, don’t even think about it!

  Out loud she says, ‘You want to hypnotise me?’

  ‘It’s a common therapeutic technique,’ Joe says. ‘It’s really just about putting you in a very relaxed state so that you can allow some hidden memories to come to the surface. You’d be conscious and aware at all times.’

  No, she cannot be hypnotised.

  ‘Can I give it some thought?’ she says.

  ‘Of course. How’ve you been since I saw you? Anything else happen I should know about?’

  Felicity finds that she can remember the Skype call ending. Susan Brindle, her potential new boss, has offered her the job but stressed the need to think carefully. ‘South Georgia is a very long way from just about anywhere,’ she’d said. ‘And two years is a long time with only a dozen other people for company.’

  Still holding the phone to her ear, Felicity goes into her office and activates her laptop. The Skype call finished at two forty-five in the afternoon. It is now after nine and the light outside is starting to fade. Six hours have gone.

  Outside the skater is back, performing some sort of manoeuvre directly in front of her door. There is something about the sound that is annoying, even aggressive.

  ‘Felicity?’ Joe sounds anxious.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Nothing else. Situation normal.’

  The situation is very far from normal. She has lost six hours out of her day.

  ‘No more lost time?’ Joe says.

  She steps to the window to draw the curtains.

  ‘Felicity?’ Joe prompts.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I got the job in South Georgia. They’ve given me a couple of weeks to let them know.’

  She is on the point of closing the curtains when she sees the vacant space where she usually parks her car. Her car is missing.

  ‘Congratulations.’ He sounds more concerned than pleased.

  ‘Joe, I should go, I’m expecting a Skype call,’ she lies. ‘Thanks for letting me know about the scan. I’ll see you Tuesday.’

  She puts the phone down before he can ask her anything else and runs downstairs. There is no sign of her car keys on the hall table and she is about to check the kitchen when she spots a small padded envelope that must have arrived in the post while she was out running.

  She has an idea of what’s inside, and finds her hands trembling as she rips the seal apart. A pair of small keys fall out, an identical pair fastened together with a thin steel loop. They are the ones she found online and ordered two days ago. She realises, as she balances their flimsy weight in her hand, that she has been hoping they wouldn’t arrive.

  Pushing thoughts of her missing car to one side, she finds her torch and enters the loft. She crawls along the loft floor thinking, perhaps the keys won’t work. She searched the exact make of the trunk and even the model number, but there is no guarantee.

  They work. The locks spring apart and she has no choice but to open the lid.

  The scent of violets steals out before she can properly see inside, surprising her. Sweetness is not what she expected. She shines the torch inside and sees a large, decorative box covered in roses and with plaited silk handles. Wondering if this is some weird version of Russian dolls, that she might have to open box after box, she pulls the lid up.

  And the surprises keep on coming.

  She is looking at a wedding dress, carefully folded, the lace bodice lying neatly upon the heavy folds of the skirt. A glimpse of the hemline shows her that it is slightly soiled, and there are flakes of dried confetti scattered around the box.

  Opposite the scalloped neckline is a pair of white satin shoes, the soles and thin heel stained green. Size seven. As though moving in a dream, Felicity removes the slipper from her left foot. The satin shoe fits her perfectly. She pulls it off, as though it has burned her foot, and tucks it back into the box.

  There is more to discover in the trunk. She spots a leather-bound photograph album that she doesn’t quite dare look at yet, and a small jewellery box. This feels safer so she opens it to find two items inside.

  The first is a wedding ring, simple, gold, inscribed on the inside. F & F, for now, for always. She tries it on the t
hird finger of her hand and feels sick. It slips on as though it knows where it belongs. She rips it off so fast that she hurts her knuckle. The other item in the box is almost worse. A silver lily on a chain that she recognises instantly. It is the emblem of her Cambridge college, and this is a piece of jewellery that is only available to members of the college. Several of her friends were given it on graduation by parents or boyfriends, but she’d had neither and hadn’t wanted to buy her own. The chain is fastened around a folded note. She opens it to read: From Freddie, for now, for always.

  She has no idea who Freddie is, and at the same time, knows the name means something to her. No, it means everything.

  She is going to have to look at the album. She lifts it and spots what might be a reprieve. Beneath is what looks like a single photograph, framed and wrapped in a protective black cotton. A single photograph feels easier than an album, and so she unfolds the cotton and shines the torch.

  It is a stylish, silver-framed, black and white wedding photograph, taken from the back of the church. The veiled bride and a tall, fair-haired groom are small figures in the distance at the chancel rail. Both are looking back over their shoulders, a little startled, towards the focus of the photograph, a tiny blonde bridesmaid, hardly two years old, who is running for the church door with a look of joy on her face.

  It is a charming picture, and yet Felicity can find no pleasure in it. She shines the torch on the face of the groom and knows, with an instinct she can’t explain, that this man is Freddie. She knows that she has loved him with all her heart and that he has caused her unbearable pain. She knows, from the trembling in her hands, and the sickness in her stomach that she doesn’t feel will ever leave her now, that she is terrified of him.

  She almost doesn’t need to look at the bride, but she shines the torch all the same. The woman’s face is difficult to make out behind the veil, but Felicity can see a hint of blonde hair swept back into a graceful bun, the curve of the cheekbone, the full lips and arched brows. She is looking at a photograph of herself on her wedding day.