Wilf hasn’t answered, is looking vaguely behind me, so I say, ‘How’s your list?’
He told me about the list in the autumn. He was going to do ten big things a year. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover I am a different species from him, from people like him. People who go to Indonesia to build an orphanage or who start up their own newspaper when they’re twenty-five or join the UN.
‘Alright – Stonehenge is all booked,’ he says.
‘You’re going alone?’
He nods. ‘Why not?’ he adds after a moment. ‘It’s on my doorstep and I’ve never been.’
‘I didn’t think you’d be interested in Stonehenge,’ I say, thinking that perhaps I would like to go.
‘More up your street than mine,’ Wilf says with a ghost of a smile.
Mysticism was one of my very first fads (I bought twelve quartz crystals), and it’s been subsumed into the narrative of our family.
‘What’s after that, on your list?’ Reuben says. ‘You put us to shame. We’ve got no plans except a party, in July.’
And it’s just that sentence which starts it all. As though it’s an ignition, a catalyst.
‘Laura’s boat thing?’ I say. ‘I haven’t been invited.’ I remember last year, and the year before – always this time of year. They’ll come over and invite us, in person.
But he had been invited already. And he didn’t tell me.
‘They texted me. I said we were both going,’ Reuben says quickly, but his tone is off.
His eyes meet mine, for the first time in weeks and weeks, and I see clearly what he’s thinking; the error he’s made in speaking without thinking. His brow wrinkles.
He doesn’t know where we’ll be in a few months’ time, even though we are married, even though we promised to stay together forever. He’s not sure.
Wilf turns and orders another drink, moving a few feet down the bar. He always drinks quickly. He does everything quickly. It leaves me alone with Reuben.
Perhaps he feels more able to confront me in a bar, because he says, ‘Did you see my message? On the blackboard.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but it said … if I rubbed it off that would be that.’
‘So you rubbed it off,’ he says, looking across the crowds of people clustered near a set of high tables.
Two of them are holding hands, tightly, under the table, and I gaze at them wistfully.
I nod, though he’s not looking, and when he turns his gaze back to me it is imploring.
‘What’s going on with you?’ he says, and the sentence, and the context – when Wilf is only a few feet away, due to turn back any second – is so not like the considered Reuben I know that I overreact.
‘Nothing’s going on with me,’ I say.
I intended my tone to be final, as though the conversation is closed, but it comes out hysterically. I thought I was putting on a better front of remaining the same. Just the other week I went out for coffee with Reuben’s father – he brought me some political history tome to lend to Reuben – and he couldn’t seem to tell. I thought I was holding up okay.
‘You’ve changed – overnight,’ he says. ‘I know I said … I know I said you could just rub it off.’ He looks at me. ‘But I didn’t think you would.’
‘I haven’t changed.’
‘You’re totally different. You used to be … affectionate and happy and … cool. You’re so thin now. Skeletal.’
‘Cool?’ I say, my tone imbued with distaste.
Reuben considers me. The hand he’s holding his red wine in is shaking ever so slightly, the liquid rippling. ‘Yeah – cool,’ he says. ‘Happy with life. Not uptight and secretive.’
‘I’m not secretive,’ I say, though the animal on my chest is shifting again.
It disappears, for a while, when I am with people, when I am distracted. But it’s back now. It comes back every night, like a domestic pet with a bedtime, a curfew.
And then Reuben says it: the sentence I have been waiting for, second only to ‘Joanna Oliva, you do not have to say anything … but anything you do say may be given in evidence …’
He says, ‘Is there someone?’
He says it quietly, his eyes on me. He isn’t looking for Wilf. He isn’t sipping his wine. He’s looking straight at me, the lights of the bar reflected like candlelight in his eyes.
‘Someone?’ I say, embarrassed by his directness, and by my lies, my deceit.
They are exponential, my lies. They began with a single breath, the deep breath I took before I walked away. And with that puff, like a dandelion’s seeds, my lies scattered everywhere that December night, even though I thought it would be too cold for them to grow. But here we are, in the almost-spring, and they are popping up everywhere. I am lying to Ed. To Laura. And to Reuben.
Two policemen walk by the window, uniformed, wearing fluorescent jackets that shine eerily in the night like bioluminescence. I cannot help but flinch. As if they might be about to point at me, through the window. They have visited me twice. The third time will surely be soon. I am done for. I am wanted.
One of them pushes open the door, and my bowels turn to liquid. I dart a glance at Reuben, who hasn’t noticed them. At least he will know now. Why I am the way I am. Once again, I find myself thinking how amazing it is that he doesn’t know, that he doesn’t notice my gaze on the police officers, unable to look away. That he can’t tell that every thought is taken up with the crime; the memories of it, burying the evidence, breaking into the library’s offices. I feel as though I have been branded, right across my skin, like a farm animal, but nobody knows. Nobody in the world.
They walk to the bar. One meets my eyes momentarily. They speak to the man at the bar, then leave again. They are talking about me. I am sure of it.
‘You know what I mean,’ Reuben says quietly.
I don’t answer him. Can’t answer him. I’m staring at the police as they leave, thinking, I have been so foolish with those stupid clothes. It’s too late to go and get them. But of course my colleagues will recognize my coat and scarf. I should have been brave enough to hide them somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Buried. I wanted them close, but the sense of security it gave me was false. And of course they will see me, imminently, on the CCTV. I haven’t heard anything further from Ed, but surely it’s only a matter of time.
And then Wilf is back, and Reuben looks away, but under the lights, his eyes look glassy.
26
Reveal
Reuben is unbuttoning his shirt. He’s been in court. I don’t know why – he observes client confidentiality fastidiously, so I would never ask. I am wearing jeans and a jumper and wondering whether this will be the last time I wear this particular combination. I am forever doing things like this, these days.
I am counting down the weeks to my trial.
The light from the hallway illuminates a slice of the bedroom where he stands, as if he is an actor about to give a soliloquy on a stage. The rest is in darkness.
It’s been weeks since I have looked properly at his body, but something makes me look now, my eyes roving over him. I sometimes used to pretend Reuben and I were just friends, or new colleagues, or on our first date, and try to see him through fresh eyes. I do it now. Perhaps he’s somebody who I can see through an open window on a summer night, undressing. I feel a bloom in my chest, as though I’ve been struck by Cupid’s arrow, as I look.
He catches me staring; his green eyes are raised to me. ‘You alright?’ he says softly.
I nod, saying nothing. I close the bedroom door softly. The light from the hallway is shut off, extinguished, and we are in darkness. Reuben discards his shirt like it is a sheet blowing in a summer wind.
‘I’ve seen the stuff online,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says, his voice short. He continues to undo his trousers, sliding them off and standing in front of me in his boxers in the darkness. I can only make his legs out because they’re so pale. He says nothing more.
‘What do you t
hink?’ I say.
‘About …’
‘About us advancing the defence of mistake. The feminism.’
‘It was a mistake,’ he says, his tone perfectly walking a tightrope between a question and a statement.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Of course it was.’
‘Well,’ he says, reaching behind me for a T-shirt.
I catch his scent. It’s changed, but my brain, my body, they remember how it used to be, as if I have been prescribed nostalgia. Tobacco, from when he used to smoke. His deodorant. Mints. He brushes past me, grabbing a pair of loose-fitting jeans, and pulls the flies up, his back to me. He smells of different deodorant now. No cigarettes.
I wait.
He speaks, eventually. ‘Isn’t that kind of worse?’ he says.
The long-sleeved T-shirt doesn’t sit well on his frame. It hangs, looking skewed. I have always loved that about Reuben – that he looks scruffy even when he’s dressed up; that he will often leave his shirt untucked; that as soon as he forgets to shave he looks like a hippy. But tonight he looks strange.
‘What?’
‘That it was a mistake.’
I frown, confused. ‘Worse than what?’
‘You mixed them up.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what?’ Reuben says. ‘Actually, forget it.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, what?’ I say.
Everything since that night is bubbling away, heating up to a high broil. That I was harassed, in a bar, by a man who felt like I was his property. That I wasn’t merely acting on one night’s vulnerability, but against the background of every walk home alone I’ve ever taken, every time a builder has yelled something profane at me, every time a man has stood too close to me on the tube.
‘Well,’ he says, and then, to my astonishment, he turns around and points at me. ‘Why did you think they were the same?’ he says.
‘I …’ I say.
What was it, exactly? The fear. The assumption. The assumption that came from a stupid pair of identical red trainers. Seeing a shadow leaving the bar, as I did, and panicking. That’s all. That’s all it was.
‘They were. I don’t know. Alike.’
‘I work for an Islamic charity,’ he says simply.
I have no idea what he means, until I do. I feel my body curl inwards, in shame, as though his words are things he’s throwing at me, and I can keep them out by shrinking. And then I feel it. The first real spark of anger at my husband. Not because of his accusation, but because of how he’s doing it. The indirectness. The passive aggression. I have no right of reply, because he hasn’t said what he means. He’s never usually like this. It is one of the many reasons I chose him: because I’d never have to guess how things were between us. Reuben has never not let me know where we stand.
‘No … no,’ I say, instead of saying all of the above. I can’t stand up for myself. I don’t deserve it.
If I were more like Reuben, I would be indignant. Don’t be ridiculous, he can say of people who hold negative opinions of him. He will shrug them off, like a rain-soaked coat, and get on with his day. And, likewise, he will blink mildly at praise, but not let it go to his ego. For me, it is as though he has taken my very sense of self and poked his pointing finger right through it.
‘Do you actually even know how it’s been for me?’ he says, wrenching open the door to our bedroom so hard that it swings wide and hits the wall.
I blink as the light floods in. We bought the copper lamp that’s dangling above him in IKEA, thinking ourselves very trendy. Only, it hangs too low, and swings dangerously. Shabby chic just looks shabby when you live in a shithole, Reuben said sadly the day we hung it up.
Yep, I had said, and I’d loved to walk past it, would smile at it looking huge and orange and tacky. Now, I want him to look at me, to look at it, the way we always do when we’re both in the hallway together. One of us would say, Does it seem bright in here to you? Or, Is it me or does it feel a bit industrial-chic in here? But he doesn’t; he avoids my eyes.
‘What?’ I say, my heart jolting just like it did when Sadiq grabbed my hand in the club.
‘It’s been a fucking nightmare. And I know, I know, I know that it’s worse for you …’ he says, as though reading my mind, ‘but it’s shit. It’s shit for me. And you’ve not asked.’
I say nothing, shocked at his upright body language, the door still vibrating after it banged against the wall, his accusatory, wide stare.
‘You haven’t even asked,’ he adds sadly.
It’s true, I think, swallowing hard, the hole in my chest opening up as though it is a cavity. In my own trauma, I have ignored Reuben’s.
‘Tell me …’ I say.
‘I’ll tell you. I’m ridiculed at work. Or people ignore it entirely. They’re embarrassed for me. Because of what you’ve done …’
I hear the ellipsis. His tone isn’t harsh. It’s sad, drawn-out. The drawl I used to love so much. No. Not used to: still do.
‘I …’ I say, gesturing stupidly, my hands flapping by my sides like a child’s. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I add. ‘It’s hard for me. It’s hard for everyone. I know.’ I raise my eyes to meet his, even though it embarrasses me. ‘I’m sorry. It’s shit luck, and I’m sorry.’
His jaw is clenched, the way it is when he’s building flat-pack furniture and doesn’t understand the instruction manuals.
‘I work for the muslim community,’ he repeats.
‘You said that.’
He looks away, towards the door, running a hand through his spiked-up hair. I should have said, I knew what you meant by that, but I don’t. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for the man whose gaze didn’t leave mine as he slid my wedding bracelet on to my wrist to accuse me of being a racist.
‘It’s not just that,’ he says, sidestepping it too. ‘I feel …’
‘What?’
‘I feel irrelevant,’ he says simply.
The hollow feeling is back in my chest.
‘Reuben will be fine. Reuben’s always fine,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, feeling like his problems are heaping on top of mine, like a teetering tower.
‘I can’t cope with this,’ he says simply.
I blink, stunned. It’s not a sentence I’ve ever known him utter. He can cope with anything. Is always calm, measured, capable. I’ve never known him become incensed by life; only by injustice.
‘Do you think about him?’ he says, shooting me a look.
‘Yes. He’s got a bloody brain injury. He doesn’t know what drinks he likes,’ I say. It was the most important detail to me and yet here, under the beam of my husband’s inexplicable criticism, it sounds trite. Like I don’t care, like I am trivializing his problems.
‘Because of you,’ Reuben adds.
‘Yes, because of me.’
‘Did he bleed?’
‘No.’
‘How hard did you push him?’
‘Hard enough, Reuben,’ I say softly.
‘I could cope with it, you know. When you would hide congestion charges and overdue bills.’
‘Could cope with what?’ I say.
‘You. And your avoidance.’ He spreads his arms wide in the bedroom, like an eagle squaring up to its prey. ‘But now it’s – don’t you see? You won’t let me discuss it.’
‘Then discuss it.’
‘How did it make you feel?’ he asks.
‘Horrendous. I regret it every day,’ I say. I sound crackly, like my voice is being played on a gramophone.
‘You’ve never said.’ He looks at me through narrowed green eyes, like I am a curious specimen to him; a mystery. Like meeting someone with whom you get along well and then find out that they believe in the death penalty, or live in a yurt. ‘Throughout all of this … you’ve never, ever said.’
‘Well, I do think about him. All the time. I regret it. All the time. But I’m – I’m being charged. So my focus is … in def
ence of myself.’
I don’t add that I didn’t want to worry him; that I didn’t want to moan all the time or make our entire life together about my trial. My crime. I should add it, but I don’t. He should know, I find myself thinking. Doesn’t he know me to be good? Why is he presuming my silence is to do with a lack of remorse, and not the landmine that’s been detonated in the middle of my life?
‘You had so much going for you, Jo,’ he says, sounding sad, mournful. His voice is full of broken glass and he’s not looking at me. His wedding bracelet slides down his arm. The red hairs have tangled around it and they catch the hall light, shining a strawberry blond.
‘I didn’t have anything going for me,’ I say. ‘A third-class degree. No career. All I had was you.’
He doesn’t dispute the past tense.
‘You need to bloody well get over that,’ he says. ‘So what if you got a third? You were twenty-one. Plenty of people stuff up their life at twenty-one. Look at my young people.’
I swallow. I can still remember the moment when I found out my grade. There seemed to me to be an ocean of difference between a 2:2 and a third. A whole universe. Nobody got thirds. Plenty of people got 2:2s; laughingly called them Desmonds. A third was a joke. I went out, told Wilf and my parents the next day, when my hair smelt of smoke and my breath of wine. None of them said the kind thing; that it was still a degree, and a degree from Oxford. That I still mattered to them.
Nobody, that is, until Reuben.
‘I know,’ I say quietly. He’s said this to me a hundred times before. ‘But it was all that … potential.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ he says, waving the arm with the bracelet on again. ‘Your school plays and your A-stars and your prizes for the best maths score.’
‘Yeah, those,’ I say, moving backwards, hurt by his words, his dismissive tone. As though my achievements are nothing at all. And, anyway, aren’t they? They’re relics. They could be uncovered by archaeologists, they’re so irrelevant. Literally covered in dust in my parents’ attic: the A-level results transcript I was so proud of; the reams of naturally gifted written on my school reports. They all turned to nothing. They didn’t materialize, like hundreds of seeds that failed to sprout, to grow.
Anything You Do Say Page 19
