‘Jo.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He comes over to me, plucks the sponge out of my hand and tosses it in the sink.
‘What would happen?’ he says simply.
We both know what he means, but I pretend not to.
‘What would happen if what?’ I say.
His expression darkens. He looks thin. Has he lost weight? He’s always been slender, but I can see his collarbones behind his T-shirt, jutting out ever so slightly. I have gained weight, eating as though they will starve me in prison.
‘You know what,’ he says quietly.
‘No, I don’t,’ I say, taking the theoretical stance: I might not; therefore, I don’t. It almost seems irrelevant that I do. Why do I do these things?
‘What will happen if you get sent down?’ he says softly. ‘I want to discuss it so … if it happens. We don’t have to discuss it then, in the court. We have time now. Alone. Together.’
The words shock me. Sent down. They’re so colloquial. So inappropriate.
‘You heard Sarah. Mistake and self-defence.’
Reuben scrunches his nose up, makes a kind of moue with his mouth. As if to say, That won’t work. But he can’t mean that. Surely not.
He’s never done denial. Not like I have. Ripped-up, hidden car parking fines simply don’t exist for me, but he doesn’t think that way. He confronts issues head on, like this. Calmly, not hysterically, not the way I eventually tackle things I’ve been avoiding for years, taking deep, dramatic breaths and pulling a fine that’s become a court summons out from under the bed, and looking at it in horror.
But I can’t do it. It feels like facing an oncoming train.
‘I can’t talk to you about the rent as you’re being led away,’ he says. ‘We need to … to strategize.’
‘Strategize. We’re not at a conference,’ I say, but actually all I am thinking is, Led away.
Will I be led away? I can’t handle it. He thinks I might be, like an animal to the slaughterhouse, and what’s the difference, really? I am still staring down at the counter, not looking at him. I miss his arms around me and the way we used to list our favourite things about the other in bed. I miss the way Reuben’s face would curve into a reluctant smile as I got him chatting. I miss it all. I miss our movie nights. That time we watched Kind Hearts and Coronets (number ninety) and Reuben turned to me halfway through and said, ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on, have you?’
‘There are articles. Online. Have you seen?’ he says.
‘No,’ I say sharply.
‘Defending you. Feminist articles. You know?’
‘I don’t look,’ I say, and raise my head.
The briefest of expressions flickers across his face like poor reception on an old television. It’s not annoyance, exactly; more recognition. Of course you don’t, it says.
I grab the sponge again and recommence scrubbing.
‘Okay, well, if you want to discuss it, let me know …’ he says.
And it’s a tone I’ve not heard before. Not directed at me, anyway. I have heard it said down the phone, when clients call at weekends. Difficult clients. Clients who are making poor choices.
I glance up at him, and he’s staring at me, like a well-meaning counsellor or head teacher who knows a student’s done something and won’t confess.
I scrub harder, at stains on the work surface that aren’t really there, hoping I can erase them entirely.
19
Conceal
It’s late January before I can get a set of keys with nobody seeing. Somebody left theirs in the kitchen, by the tea machine, and I swipe them, quickly.
After that, it’s easy.
I text Reuben and tell him I’m seeing Laura and, after Ed drops me home, I walk back to the library, the bitter January air hurting my lungs. It’s after eight, and there won’t be anybody there, but I look left and right before letting myself in. I look up, too, checking for CCTV. At least I have learnt something.
I slide the key into the lock. Attached to the set of keys is a pink pompom dirtied on its ends, the fur turned grey.
The alarm goes off but I silence it with the four-digit code I’ve watched Ed put in so often – everyone knows it, even the cleaner – and then it is noiseless, and I am alone inside.
Everything looks eerily different at night. Like an abandoned hospital or jail. The office desks are cast in a strange glow from the street lamps outside and the cupboard creaks as I slide the key in and open it.
The lost property basket is almost full, and I get my items out and add them, right at the bottom. It takes twice as long as it should because of my bad hand.
I can’t bear to put the clothes and shoes in a random skip, in someone else’s rubbish. It may be crazy, but I want to know where they are. And to be able to check that they are still here – that they haven’t been found. That my beautiful shoes are here, and their tread cannot be traced back to me. Nobody I worked with ever saw them. They’ll never know they’re mine.
I leave shortly after, hurrying across the car park, my head bowed just in case.
Reuben appears in the hallway as I arrive through the door in an old trench coat I took out to wear home with me.
‘I’ve lost my coat,’ I say pre-emptively. I am the worst liar in the world.
‘You’ve lost your coat?’ Reuben says.
His tone is a blend of incredulity and judgement. I know it well.
‘Yeah, I …’ I try to think but I can’t. ‘I have no idea. It was here and then it wasn’t.’
‘Did you have it this morning?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Have you seen it?’ I add, which must seem strange. It should have been the first question I asked.
Oh God. I am an amateur. They are going to find me.
‘Oh – but it’s your thirty coat,’ he says. ‘I’ll check the car.’ He opens the door and strides out on to the street where the car is parked.
I stand at the door, still shivering in the dark, watching him. Our security light has gone on. I look up at it. It is strung with dirty cobwebs, the inside lined with dead flies.
I look at Reuben rooting through the car, picking up Sainsbury’s bags for life, sweet wrappers and my wellington boots. He hardly ever uses the car and so it’s filled with my crap.
He closes the boot, turns to me, and frowns, looking baffled. ‘I don’t understand how you could have lost a coat,’ he says, walking back towards me.
I cringe, not looking at him. This is the sort of thing that drives Reuben mad. Not just my messiness, my disorder, but the illogicality of it. Why didn’t I just say I left it when I was out with Laura? Come home without one? I should have thought more carefully. But there’s no room in my head; not for these things. Getting away with murder is all I can think of.
Reuben looks back into the flat, a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Have you checked the spare room?’ he says. ‘Sometimes you get in and just dump stuff in random places …’
‘I’ve checked everywhere, Reuben,’ I say, my tone short.
‘There’s no need for that,’ he says mildly.
I catch his surprised expression. I have wounded our relationship with the crime I committed, and now the collateral damage is materializing in front of us. ‘Please leave it,’ I say desperately. I’ll tell him if he pushes me. I’ll tell him. I shake my head violently from side to side. I’ve got to get away. My secret is sitting right in the centre of my mouth, ready to leap out if I utter another word.
I have killed.
I have hidden evidence.
I have broken into my place of work.
My crimes are stacking up.
His eyes darken. He doesn’t deserve this. But neither do I. He reaches for me. His right hand trailing upwards, the left instinctively moving towards my waist. It’s a movement we make often, almost like a dance, but I step out of it. I can’t. I can’t be near him, my head on his shoulder, smelling our shared fabric conditioner. I can’t stand with
my waist pressed to his, my mouth against his ear. I would tell him. I would tell him where my coat is, and why. It wouldn’t be absolution. It would be a selfish, sordid confession that would ruin his life. I’ve already ruined my own, but it must stop there.
‘I thought you loved that coat,’ he murmurs.
‘I did,’ I say.
‘But you lost it.’
In Reuben’s world, things are simple. If you like your possessions, you take care of them. People are never negligent, or reckless, or unthinkingly careless.
I turn away from him and walk back into the flat. I can feel his hurt gaze on the back of my neck like the warm coat I am missing.
The next day, the Chiswick stop has nobody waiting. Ed parks up, and opens the door, but then gets back into the driver’s seat. He’s wearing a fleece, and he tucks his slim hands in its front pouch, crossing his legs. My trench coat flaps around my waist. It could fit twice around me, now. The weight keeps falling off.
These days are the slowest. I’m never happy, no matter where I am. Not at home and not at work – but in each location, I think I will be happy in the other.
Ed starts making up the library cards for the recent joiners. He sticks their photographs down, then passes them to me to seal with sticky-back plastic. I hate doing it, usually; I mess them up with little air bubbles and misaligned plastic that collects fluff and hairs, but today I quite like the meditative quality of it.
Until he passes me Ayesha’s.
My hands become still, hovering over it, as if they are passing through a force field. My thumb seals the plastic over her face, but then remains there as I stare and stare.
Ed brushes past me as I am turning it over in my hands, looking at her library card number, the barcode, scrutinizing her photograph.
‘Getting a good look at that,’ Ed says, his tone impassive.
I drop the card immediately.
20
Reveal
It is late January and it seems everybody has an opinion about me on the Internet. Reuben was right – it’s become a thing, somehow. In the Daily Mail. The Express. The Huffington Post. Some of them say that we have all been there. That every woman has felt her heart speed up when she’s heard footsteps behind her on a night out, or when simply walking alone. Some of them say Little Venice has become dodgy, run-down. Others say the effect of men frightening women is cumulative; that the catcalls, the thrown insults, the mansplaining, all add up, and many women are merely waiting to be attacked. Of course we appear to overreact, the women on Twitter say, because it is always bubbling under the surface. Provocation over decades.
I saw an article about myself, recommended to me on Facebook. I clicked it instinctively, then closed the tab, then reopened it. I couldn’t avoid it forever. My trial was approaching. I’d started reading, just the first few sentences. After all, some of the commentators might – as Reuben said – be nice.
I must have used more force than was reasonable. That’s what one woman – a lawyer – is saying. I can’t possibly have only intended to defend myself. Nobody defending themselves lashes out first, and with such initial force. They do not know that he was already running, already heading for the steps, already had some momentum. They do not know and they do not care. Was it really possible to make such a mistake? she goes on to ask. Isn’t it the job of the reasonable person to check?
There’s an article with a photograph of me inserted into the right-hand side. I haven’t seen it for years. It must have been taken from my Facebook account. I’m staring moodily into the distance, holding a Starbucks Christmas cup, the winter sunlight behind me.
And, further down, there’s one of Imran. I gasp, looking into his eyes for the very first time. They’re set widely apart, almost bulbous. He’s grinning, a lopsided, self-conscious grin. His distinctive bone structure cuts shadows into his cheeks. He was handsome, undoubtedly.
I scroll past, unable to look at him any longer.
I’m everywhere: on crappy Internet journalist sites and in articles by women for The Pool – a woman called Caroline writes so sympathetically about my plight – and the comments section of the Guardian. Was I right to lash out? Can self-defence be pre-emptive? Did I have a duty to check? Is it a feminist issue?
There are reams of articles about how women are always being accused of lying in court, and yet rarely do so. We never accuse people who have been mugged of making it up or berate them for having brought it on themselves. Let’s believe Joanna, one woman writes passionately. She rescued the man immediately. Let’s trust that she made an honest mistake; that if it had been the man from the bar, she would have been justified. Let’s stop vilifying women, presuming them guilty, and not innocent.
I stare at the article in shock. I have goosebumps all over my arms and back. My face is lit up, blue, by the computer screen. I can see it reflected in the window.
The article is sympathetic and passionate and well written. Only, a small voice speaks up inside me: I have lied. I am lying. I left him there in the puddle while I was procrastinating. While I was deciding what to do. Does just one lie, annexed to the main story like a distasteful extension to a period property, invalidate my main defence? I don’t know. I’ll never know. I don’t know the legal position. I can’t ask Sarah.
I close my laptop, and my face falls into darkness, disappearing entirely from the window.
Sarah calls me later.
‘I’m meeting Sadiq next week,’ she says. ‘I’ll get a statement from him.’
‘Good,’ I say.
21
Conceal
January passes. I hardly remember it. The news is filled only with weather – how much snow there’s been, how consistently cold it is, every single day – and Reuben sometimes tries to talk to me about that most banal of subjects but I can’t bring myself to discuss even the weather with him. I can’t remember the last time I looked him in the eye. I don’t sleep, and I certainly don’t sleep with him. I lie awake most nights, listening for sirens, listening out for the doorbell or the thrum of a text message vibrating on my bedside table. And, lately, reliving it all. The moment I pushed him. The moment I left. But others, too. Reliving it from his perspective. What he might’ve been thinking as he was innocently running behind me. How it felt to feel his life ending, there in Little Venice, as his murderer stood a few feet away, not caring, not helping.
It’s a white February day and Ed is telling me in great detail about his house extension. ‘We couldn’t just convert the loft,’ he is saying. ‘Some bureaucracy, you know …’
My wrist splint is off, but my hand is not quite the same. I suppose it is because of the delay in seeing my doctor. It still feels stiff and strange.
I stop listening when Ayesha arrives. She materializes just as I am thinking about her, tuning Ed out, thinking about how much I would like to see her.
She looks different. Or maybe she’s changed only in my mind. She’s more beautiful than I remember. That wide, smooth forehead.
‘These are so late,’ she says, gesturing to the stack of books she’s holding. ‘They’re the ones I … man, it was months ago. I almost nicked off with them, I was so embarrassed,’ she says, putting a hand in front of her mouth, ‘but then I thought “No, Ayesha. Take them back!”’
She is wearing rose-gold bangles up both of her arms. They jangle as she brings her hands up to stop Bilal climbing the steps. ‘Sorry, hi,’ she says to me.
She tilts her head as she looks at me, remembering. Wilf. That lie.
‘Hi,’ I say.
Bilal is taller, his limbs having moved from toddler to child in only a few weeks, and he waves at me. His hands are still dimpled, though, little rings of fat around the base of each wrist.
‘What’s the damage?’ she says, waving the books.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I say vaguely. How could I ever fine her?
She and Bilal head to the back of the bus and, like I am an orbiting moon, I follow them. I am powerless to stop.
The heating’s on in the bus and it’s at its loudest right next to the vent, at the back. She stands next to it. She’s slim, must feel the cold, but all I can think is that I am pleased; nobody can hear us here – the noise will obscure our words. I can ask her … things.
Bilal sits on the floor and pulls a Julia Donaldson title off the bottom shelf and splays it open like a butterfly in his lap.
‘Bil,’ she says softly, then turns to me, crossing her legs as she stands, so her right and left feet are the wrong way around.
‘How are you doing?’ I say.
‘Knackered. This parenting lark … Hey, how’s your brother?’
I shrug, trying not to look blasé. ‘He’ll be okay. He is okay,’ I say. ‘Better.’
‘I wish I was,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘Everyone’s so angry,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t help.’
‘Who’s angry?’ I say sharply.
‘No one cares. You know?’ She blinks, then seems to hear my question, on a few seconds’ delay, and answers. ‘The Internet, I guess. People on forums. Organizations. They think maybe the police didn’t investigate it enough – because he was a Muslim. We had a little protest sort of thing, outside the mosque, but only eight people came.’ Her expression twists into a bitter smile.
‘What’re the police doing now?’ I say, my tone strangely proprietary, as though I am an interested party. An aunt or a friendly GP, rather than what she believes me to be: a librarian who is sympathetic that her brother died. I’m desperate to know so many things. To know that Bilal is okay. That she is okay. And underneath all of that is something self-serving: I am desperate to know that they do not suspect.
I glance down at Bilal. Is his new slenderness just growing up, or is it something else? He is running his fingers along the tops of the books, lining them up so all of the spines are exactly level. I feel a wave of nostalgia as I recall my childhood trips to the library. Age five, ten, fifteen. When it was all still to play for. Wilf would head to the sci-fi section and I’d go for Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club. We’d reconvene, out the front of the bus, stacks of books teetering in our arms. We walked home that way. We never thought to bring a bag. We’d read one a day, all week. Occasionally lend the other a particularly good one. My brother is still alive. I could call him up right now. I look at Ayesha and wonder how I’d feel if it were me.
Anything You Do Say Page 16
