Wilf catches us in the hall. Reuben’s hand is on the door, wrenching it open.
‘I meant because you’re a woman,’ Wilf says. ‘I know … I’ve seen those viral videos. The catcalling. Stuff like that. I know it’s different for you.’
‘I know,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘Thank you.’
I remember the fear I felt that night. Sadiq’s body pressed against mine in the bar. His hand shackled to mine against my will. I remember how it felt when I thought he was following me. Like feelings I’ve felt a thousand times before. But bigger, this time.
That everyday sexism. The builders who yell at you – abuse or flirtations – and the men who sit too close on the tube, spreading their legs suggestively. The bouncer who follows you down a side street, telling you what he’d like to do to you. The eager man at the party who thinks it’s romantic to repeatedly pursue you. Are women not always pleading self-defence? Are we not always provoked?
‘Thank you,’ I say to Wilf again. Reuben is standing outside, pointedly waiting – not unusual for him – and I turn again to my brother. ‘I had better go …’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Shame.’ He reaches out and punches my shoulder; something he’s never done before. ‘Was going to fill you in on my failed love life.’
It’s a rare moment for Wilf. Usually, he’s all about keeping up appearances. Complaining about capital gains tax. Worrying about having to sack his cleaner. That sort of thing. Things dressed up as complaints, but ones I can see behind. I have no idea what his hopes and dreams must really be. It’s impossible to see, with all that rubbish obscuring them.
‘What happened?’ I say, wanting distraction. Wanting, for just a moment, to judge someone else’s life, the way I used to. Before.
‘The latest binned me off. Said I must be posh to live in Wimbledon.’
I almost roll my eyes. Of course. Not a true love life disaster. Something else.
Wilf bought well in the London market and it’s changed his life. His flat made him £150,000 in just over a year. He now owns four London properties. Buy to lets. He whinges about his tenants.
‘But more another time,’ he says.
I close the door softly behind him. Reuben walks straight past the car.
‘What …?’ I say.
He doesn’t answer me, just keeps walking, reaching behind him for my hand. We walk together, to the end of my parents’ winding road, and he turns to face me and gestures towards me. I step into his embrace. His hands encircle my shoulders and I can feel the length of his body against mine. It’s a proper hug. The kind we couldn’t have in the car.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmurs. ‘I’m so sorry they’re such utter shits.’
‘Me, too,’ I say.
Later, on the way home, I turn to him. The heating’s on high and he drives so carefully, so slowly, that I feel utterly safe. Almost asleep.
‘I was unlucky, wasn’t I?’ I say. I can’t help myself.
‘No doubt,’ he says immediately.
‘Would you prosecute me?’ I say. ‘If you were the police?’ I can’t avoid asking that, either. Usually, I would prefer to never ask, to choose never to know, but something’s changing.
‘How could I?’ he says. ‘You’re my wife.’
Even after two years, the word sends a frisson up and down my spine. His wife. The only one he chose. For life.
‘But if I wasn’t?’ I say.
We’re approaching a roundabout. Reuben hates this junction. He hates driving in London. He doesn’t hear me, is navigating around the traffic island, checking his mirrors methodically. He looks over his shoulder as he changes lane, his gaze alighting on me. Just for an instant.
I tell Laura, too. Before she hears it somewhere else. It might be on the news, Reuben says. Depending on what happens to Imran in hospital. I press ‘call’ with shaking fingertips on my phone.
‘About Friday,’ I say as she answers. My tone is brusque, trying to cover the embarrassment of not having told her sooner, of having an incident involving her lead to one that’s just about me. Laura wouldn’t have done what I did. It is better I tell her now, anyway, before Sarah requests a statement from her.
‘What about Friday?’ she says.
‘I thought I was followed – after we left. By that bloke. Sadiq.’ I try to do it how Reuben did, but I fail. The edges of my vision darken as though somebody has dimmed the lights in our living room.
‘Yeah?’
‘And – I mean, it wasn’t. But I thought it was …’ I swallow. How am I going to be cross-examined on the witness stand if I can’t even cope with explaining it to my best friend?
Laura, as ever, says nothing, waiting. I can imagine her hand raking through her cropped hair, her eyes squinting as she tries to understand what I’m saying.
I tell her the rest. What I’ve told Reuben. What I told the police. Omitting my lie.
‘They can’t do that,’ Laura says. ‘Surely it’s just – surely it’s just an innocent mistake.’
‘It’s the law.’
‘Well, the law’s wrong. What should you have done? Wait to be killed?’
‘Apparently.’
‘God. I can’t believe it,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t the best night ever,’ I say with a weak laugh.
Laura doesn’t speak for a while. And then she says, ‘Well – I just went home and had a pizza.’
We both laugh, and I love her for that.
Reuben told my work, and they requested a meeting for the day I return. Today.
I’m only half aware of all of these things. They happen on the periphery of my vision, like planets orbiting the sun. Reuben asked if he should tell them, and I remember saying yes, but what I remember more vividly is eking the tea out of the teabag as I squeezed it against the white cup, and being struck with the notion that I might only have a finite number of cups of tea left in the outside world. In freedom. That, after a few hundred more, or maybe fewer, my next tea might be a prison cup of tea. I poured it down the sink, suddenly terrified.
News travels fast, and a colleague texted me. I’m outraged on your behalf, she had written. She went on to say she couldn’t believe I would ever be charged for that. I didn’t know what to say back.
We’re both silent as we approach the Hammersmith Library and the offices behind it. We both know. Of course the government library service isn’t going to let me work for them. The government is charging me with wounding with intent, after all.
Reuben stops, a hand on the door handle, his eyebrows raised. I nod. I want him with me.
It is quick and painful. I am suspended. I am not innocent until proven guilty. It is quite the opposite. Ed looks at me with what I first think is embarrassment, but later – in bed, at 4 p.m. – I realize was actually fear.
He is afraid of me. And of what I might do.
The next day, I report to the police station at noon. I have to go at noon every day.
It’s snowing again.
There is already somebody at the desk, wearing an ankle tag, and I sit down on a bank of grey chairs affixed to the wall. The tag is a wide, sturdy band, like a Fitbit. It has a grey face with an eye on it, like a webcam. His skinny jeans ruck up around it. Evidently it is new to him, because he asks how he’ll shower, gesturing down with his right hand, cocking his leg like a dancer. The woman at the desk tells him in a bored tone that it’s waterproof. He swears at her, and she threatens to report him.
He makes a loud phone call on the way out. ‘Finally done. Some bitch all up in me,’ he says.
I blink, trying to ignore him. I wonder if they prefer me, here, at the reception desk, sitting primly with my handbag.
I have no tag. No conditions except this reporting. This endless reporting. Every day. Even weekends. Just to prove that I am … here. It is tautological. Pointless.
Two women come in as I’m at the desk. They’re both skinny, ill looking.
‘This, then methadone, then to the shops,’ o
ne says to the other.
I start, my body jolting, then stare at them. And then I feel the strangest dart of emotion: envy. I am envious. That this is not shocking to them. That they don’t think their lives are ruined. That maybe court appearances and bail conditions are routine – a nuisance, an annoyance, like flies in the summer heat.
‘I heard about you,’ the woman behind the desk says to me. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m on your side. He deserved a lamping.’
I don’t correct her. I don’t remind her of my mistake. I simply nod, and say thank you.
‘Mum called,’ I say.
I am sitting by the breakfast bar while Reuben chops an onion. How many thousands of onions have I watched him chop, sauté, serve? I usually love it. The warmth of it. The distraction of the cooking. The smells and the creativity and his flair; that piano-playing flair he sometimes demonstrates. It’s one of the many reasons we won’t move: we love the closeness, the proximity our tiny flat affords.
He doesn’t answer. This is his way. He lets me talk, if I want to. Or not, if I don’t.
‘The landline,’ I say.
Reuben glances up, catches my eye, smiles briefly. ‘Of course.’
She always telephones the landline. I wish she would get the hang of emails, of texts, so that I could politely ignore them, or that she would call my mobile so that I could screen it, but she never does. I answered unthinkingly, hoping it was good news – from the police, from my lawyer, from the victim, saying he wanted to drop the charges – but it was her.
‘She didn’t apologize. But she invited us again, this weekend.’
He looks up at me at this. ‘Why would we go back to their house when they were rude to us?’
‘Because they’re my family. I might need them,’ I say uselessly, my mind spiralling over past news stories I have ignored, but whose details have entered my psyche somehow. Alienated prisoners, released with nowhere to go. Not just because the probation system has failed them, I bet, but because their families have, too. I can’t let it happen.
‘You don’t need them,’ he says. ‘Bunch of twats.’
‘I think she understands – a little bit.’
‘She’s a woman,’ Reuben says, nodding. He gets a second onion out of the bag.
I am sure he ordinarily wouldn’t, if he weren’t angry. It’ll be too strong, whatever he’s cooking. An onion husk skitters to the floor and he picks it up and puts it in the bin, then bends down and picks up a tiny, almost invisible piece and bins that too.
‘Don’t be such a misanthrope,’ I say. It comes from nowhere.
‘I am a misanthrope.’ He shrugs as he says it, the knife jarring in his grip.
Outside it’s sleeting. We have a round window in our kitchen. When Reuben’s not around I pretend our flat is a ship, narrate the shipping forecast as the kettle boils. I love to watch the weather through it, that portal. In the summer, the outside world looks like a terrarium, and I pretend I am a lizard.
He looks at me now, and adds, ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to. Do what you want.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ I say, though I don’t explain. Things are simple in his world. Things that are right are right and things that are wrong are wrong. Nothing is ever tangled. I look up at him as he tops and tails the onion.
He looks tired as he rubs his beard. On another day – in another life – I would have poked fun at that orange beard, said he looked like he’d been eating too many carrots. He would have smiled his small smile, shot me a mock-warning look.
‘Who have you told now?’ he says, sidestepping my irrationality like it is a smear on the pavement he wishes to avoid.
I am grateful for it, though it seems distasteful, somehow, too. His words remind me of a very specific period of my life, when I was seventeen.
Who shall we tell? Dad said when I got the letter. It was our favourite thing to do. He came up to my bedroom with the cordless home phone and his address book and we went through every contact he had. Joanna’s got into Oxford, he said, over and over again. It was nice, that night, that one tiny night in my teenage years that’s come to define them.
I look at Reuben now, his gaze wary, his body language braced. ‘Laura,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’
He nods, his mouth turned slightly down, his eyes on me.
He understands, I think. My shame.
‘What else did you do, today?’ he says, making small talk, so unlike him.
He’s moving the conversation along like it is a reluctant child who doesn’t want to go to school, who’s being hurried along against their will.
‘Went to the police station. That’s about it. It takes ages.’
His expression changes. It’s just a flash, but I see it. Judgement.
You know how he can be.
I turn away from him, unable to look at that expression any more. For the next six months I will have to check in. After we go out for brunch on a Sunday. Instead of work. It is where I will go every single day. Through winter colds and flu and vomiting bugs. And he will know about it.
I won’t be able to get up at eleven in the morning and have a shared bath. It has become the lynchpin of my day.
I go and sit in Reuben’s office, opening my laptop uselessly. It springs to life, and there’s an application for an arts grant open on it that I evidently couldn’t even finish. I was going to try to write a literary fiction novel. I had even opened Word, written a ‘1’ at the top of a blank page, and nothing more. It’s embarrassing, and I shut the laptop again, turning in the chair and looking at the spare bed. I can hear Reuben in the kitchen, and then I can hear him coming along the hallway to me.
‘Fancy a walk?’ he says. ‘While things cook?’
I catch his eye through the slice in the hinge of the door. One of his green eyes is visible, half an eyebrow, but nothing more.
‘Okay.’
‘It’s freezing,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
He opens the door. ‘Got your thirty coat?’ He looks past me at the laptop.
He has probably seen the arts grant. We use the same laptop. But he would never say, would never want to embarrass me, says he’s happy if I simply do sudoku for the rest of my life if I want to.
‘Forensics have it,’ I say. The coat he bought me for my birthday. That beautiful coat.
He winces, like he’s made an awkward faux pas at some work event, not offended his wife of two years, his partner of seven. ‘Sorry,’ he says, shifting imperceptibly away from me.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ I say, trying to reach out to him.
I step towards him, but he steps back further. His eyes are wary as they meet mine, his head tilted back slightly. I wonder if he fears me, too. If everybody does. If they are all secretly wondering what else I am capable of.
Suddenly, there in the spare room, I want to feel his skin on mine. His hands around the back of my waist in their protective way. His warm cheek against mine. His soft, full lips – I love those lips, the way he speaks right before he kisses me, sometimes, and it’s as if the gravelly, quiet words are just for me, breathing his air out into my mouth. I step towards him, placing a hand on his arm, wanting him to step forward, open his arms, his body, and hold me tight despite everything. For him to love me in spite of myself.
And he does hold me. But before that, there’s just a beat. It’s hardly noticeable, but I spot it. He hesitates. He doesn’t want to. But he weighs up his options and he knows that he should.
His body feels stiff against mine. Unimpressed. Unyielding. Conditional.
When he’s holding me, I feel his head moving. I can see it, too, in the mirror that hangs above the bed – the mirror I bought when I read it would make the room look much bigger, when I wanted to do up the spare room in a minimalist Scandi style after reading a spread in Elle about it.
‘What’s up?’ I say.
‘Nothing,’ he says, predictably. ‘Nothing.’
15
Conceal
&n
bsp; I am eight stone ten.
I have started weighing myself regularly, watching with a strange fascination as the secrets build up inside me and the weight falls off. I stop looking at the numbers and go to work, eventually.
It should be my dream job, being a librarian. I have loved reading forever – there is always a curled-up paperback on my bedside table – but I have always wanted something … more. Something more than books and checking people’s fines and remembering to fill the bus up with petrol at the end of the day. Loving books isn’t enough.
I have driven to work. The clothes are back in my car, transferred to the boot. I have decided I want to hide them in the library’s offices.
The coat. Scarf. Gloves. I have decided I am going to put them into the lost property, like laundering money through an otherwise clean system. Nobody checks the lost property; Daisy just bins it annually, every summer, without looking. As long as I bury them deep, nobody will know. My coat is warm, with its filling, but isn’t distinctive looking, and if they ask me if it’s mine, I will deny it. None of them has ever seen the shoes, so it doesn’t matter that they are distinctive. They were brand new. Are unconnected to me. So they’ll be thrown away eventually and, until then – well. I know exactly where they are, but they are not in my house, and not discoverable by someone with the ability to connect them to me. But I can keep an eye on them. I do not have to worry about them being discovered by a stranger, uncovered, found by the police: they are hidden in plain sight.
The winter is rushing by, but the animal on my chest isn’t diminishing. If anything, it is growing in size. Maturing. Becoming the biggest animal in the world. A blue whale on my chest.
It is the shortest day of the year, which I would be pleased about if it wasn’t also the longest night. The shortest day would be welcome, gone in a few seconds, and the next, and the next, too.
December’s always been a good month for me, and 21st December a good date in particular. Don’t we all have lucky dates? As each year wheels around, I spot them.
Good things seemed to happen time and time again. On 21st December, I passed my driving test – a sweaty, gung-ho girl on my fourth attempt. It was when I was good, back then. I was the straight-A student. Everybody knew me; I was off to Oxford the next year. I played Sandy in Grease at school, won the swimming competition, was captain of the hockey team. I was an all-rounder. Now, I am a jack of all trades, but a master of none. Everyone’s interests seem to have narrowed to one, except mine. Mine have widened, dispersed, to almost nothing. I do nothing. I am nothing.
Anything You Do Say Page 12
