Marshmallows for Breakfast

by Dorothy Koomson

  Janene nodded.

  “Good.” I lowered my eyes to the newspaper in front of me. Shaking. I was shaking. I couldn't read, couldn't move, in fact. Had those words just come out of my mouth. My mouth? Did I say that? I had left my body for a few moments, had watched myself from a distance. Now I was back and I was horrified. That was not me. I did not do things like that.

  “So, now that it's clear that Janene is never to speak to Kendra again, does anyone want to tell me what's going on?” Gabrielle asked.

  Mrs. Traveno stood in the doorway, her black leather briefcase in one hand, her square, flat cardboard box of Office Wonders mugs, magnets and mouse mats balanced on the palm of the other. Her eyes were fixed on me. They burnt into me with the same intensity and heat that a branding machine scorched the flesh of an animal.

  When neither Janene nor I spoke, she moved stiffly across the office to her desk beside the large sash window, placed the box on her desk, dropped her briefcase on the floor, threw her handbag onto her chair. She seemed to do it all without taking her eyes off me. Without turning even a fraction, she opened her red lipsticked mouth. “Janene. Leave.” Janene didn't need to be told twice. She didn't even look triumphant as she gathered her bag and coat and left. As soon as the door shut behind her, my boss, dressed in a navy-blue skirt suit, went and flipped the lock. No one was coming in or leaving without her say-so. She folded her arms across her chest, planted her feet in the middle of the floor and glared at me.

  Under her gaze, with every passing minute, I crumbled a little more. I shouldn't have said what I said. I couldn't believe I'd said what I said.

  “What happened?” she eventually asked, her voice soft enough to be kind.

  I tried to breathe but I couldn't, not fully. I tried to moisten my lips but my mouth was dry. “I can't tell you,” I replied.

  Her chest moved up and down in controlled breaths, she was struggling to keep calm. To remain professional. “Anyone could have walked in like I did. A potential employee, Teri, a client. They would have had to witness what I did. I know you wouldn't have said what you said without good reason. But I can't help you if you won't tell me. I'd like you to think very carefully before you answer me this time. Kendra, what did she say to you?”

  I knew I should say, should explain it all. Let her know that what Janene had said was too close to home. I knew I should tell her because if there was one person on the earth I was sure would understand it was Gabrielle. But I couldn't, wouldn't repeat it. Not even in abstract. “I can't tell you,” I replied.

  “Are you sure?” She was offering me one last chance to save myself.

  I nodded.

  “OK.” She nodded. “Kendra Tamale, I am placing you on suspension from your position as head of temp recruitment with basic pay until you can give me a proper reason for your behavior today. This suspension is effective immediately.”

  As she spoke my teeth gritted together, clenching into each other until my jaw hurt. Tears built up behind the lump, which worked like a dam in my throat.

  I mumbled, “Thank you,” got up, turned off my computer, dropped my mobile and diary into my bag, picked up my coat and left without another word being said between us.

  CHAPTER 33

  Gabrielle and I sat in the corner of a pub, nearer to my flat than to the office.

  It was a proper British pub with dark wood, paisley carpet and wallpaper. We had a little table, where we sat opposite each other. A large glass of white wine sat in front of her, a glass of cranberry and soda waited in front of me.

  I'd got there first and found the table through the throng of bodies. More than once during the time I sat there, I'd been tempted to text Gabrielle and tell her something had come up and I couldn't make it. I didn't want to see her. Not after what had happened. I was desperately ashamed of myself and didn't want to face anyone. That's why I hadn't been in touch with her for the whole week. But she'd called me yesterday, asked if I would meet her for a drink after she'd finished work and I'd hesitated.

  “As your friend, not your boss,” she'd said to my pause. “We won't talk about work.”

  I'd still hesitated.

  “Don't make me beg,” she'd said quietly. “I'm your friend, don't make me beg.” I'd agreed.

  Kyle and the kids didn't know about my suspension. I left extra early every morning and came back very late every night. During the day I took a train to central London, walked around, sat in the library near Leicester Square and read books and newspapers. One day I caught the tube out to west London and walked past the house where I grew up. None of my family had lived there in years, but I'd wanted to see it now that I was back in England. Another day I went to the flat in north London where I'd lived when I returned to London from university in Leeds. Visiting them was a way of reminding myself where I'd come from. How far I'd come. How far I'd gone just to come back.

  Part of being suspended probably meant I was supposed to sit in my house and reflect upon my actions, but then the Gadsboroughs would know and I didn't want them to know. I didn't want anyone to know. I was so ashamed.

  Gabrielle took a drink of her wine, put her glass down on the table and looked up at me. I was probably radiating “leave me alone” vibes. And not because I was cross with her for suspending me, but because I was mortified that she'd had to. That wasn't who I was. I wasn't someone who caused trouble. I wasn't someone who threatened people. I didn't want to talk to Gabrielle because I'd let her down.

  She looked tired. Her wavy black hair was shiny and glossy as it framed her face, but her complexion was the grey of the sea after a storm, dark shadows haunted the areas under her eyes, her features were pinched and drawn, as though simply looking normal was an effort. “We miss you,” Gabrielle said.

  Involuntarily the muscles in my body stiffened and recoiled slightly from her.

  “I know I said no work, but I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “So, are you going to come back?”

  “We said no work talk,” I replied.

  “Yeah, we did.”

  Gabrielle knocked back half her wine in one go, then put her glass down on the table with a forcefulness that said she'd made an important decision.

  “I was raped when I was twenty-five,” she said, staring straight into my eyes.

  My body snapped back in my seat, recoiling from her again.

  “I knew him. He was a friend of the family. Our parents knew each other—they'd all come over from Australia around the same time when I was sixteen and we moved to Cornwall. He was slightly older than me so I didn't see much of him, but when I came up to London to work he kind of took me under his wing, you know, as a favor to my parents. He took me out a few times, showed me a few places, introduced me to his friends. He was nice, fun, like an older brother, almost. Nothing like that ever happened between us until one day, we're meant to be meeting some friends down the pub for Sunday lunch. He comes over … We don't get to Sunday lunch. Well, I didn't. He did. As far as he was concerned nothing important happened that day.”

  She sat scrunched up in the hallway, holding herself, shaking, staring blankly at the wall opposite. What happened? She kept asking herself. What happened? The door had clicked shut a few minutes ago. Or was it seconds ago? Or was it hours ago? The door had clicked shut and she was alone. She couldn't move and she couldn't talk. What happened?

  The door opened again and she scrunched herself up tighter, afraid he was back. But it was a woman's voice, asking her what had happened. I don't know, Gabrielle wanted to say, but she couldn't speak. She looked up at the woman with the voice and it was her flatmate. And then there were police, asking her questions. And then she was in the hospital. More questions. She answered them. But all the while, in her mind, she was asking, What happened? All the while, in her mind, she knew she wasn't going to get an answer.

  “He was arrested and, long story short, all hell broke loose. My parents fell out with his parents. My parents tried to get me t
o move back to Cornwall. Our relationship went through a nosedive. My brothers went after him—thankfully, they never found him. It went to court, he was found guilty, but got a suspended sentence because the judge said he hadn't hurt me that badly. I had to move out of my flat, I slept with the lights on, I lived in the shower but he hadn't hurt me, right?

  “I'm thirty-nine now and that's about how long it's taken me to get to this point. Where I can talk about it. I don't talk to many people about it, obviously, only the ones I know will understand, but before I didn't talk about it at all. Even though everyone knew, I kept my true feelings to myself because most people thought I should get over it. That a bit of counseling and a bit of positive thinking would ‘sort me out.’

  “And it kind of became this unspoken thing lurking in the background of our family closet. I always think that somewhere in the future someone will come searching for stuff about our family history and they'll discover there's a hideous secret. And that secret is me. And what I let happen to me.” Gabrielle smiled with the lights put out in her eyes. “Don't get me wrong, my family never blamed me; it's taken me this long to realize that they didn't understand. They were doing the best they could. I mean this huge thing had been dumped on them—what happened to me affected them, too. They had their lives upended, too. Course they never blamed me.

  “Anyways, we all moved on. I had that bit of counseling, got on with my life. Or so I told myself and everyone else. I even got married. Which is a very strange thing to do when you have a pathological fear of trusting people.” She took another gulp of wine. “I reached a turning point about seven years ago when I went to see Thelma & Louise at a movie retrospective down at the National. I must have been the only woman over thirty who hadn't seen it, didn't know what it was about. Didn't realize about that scene.

  “When it started, I lost it. Ran out of the cinema, threw up outside, spent the night crying. That's when I realized I had to get help. Properly this time. I called a help line. Then I went to see a counselor and then I went to see the chiropractor I recommended to you that you didn't go to see.

  “He doesn't just adjust your back, he helps to release all the memories that are physically trapped in your body, the ones that keep you stuck in a situation. He'd explain it better if you went to see him, but everything that ever happens to you is trapped in your body and when you talk it through with him and he adjusts your spine it releases the memory from your body. Helps you to let that physical part of it go.

  “If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be talking to you like this. I wouldn't be feeling as comfortable with myself as I am now. I'm not saying I'm ‘over it.’ I still see my counselor every so often, and I became a counselor and I'm doing my master's in trauma psychology because I want a better understanding of what happened to me, but I've learned to deal with it.

  “I'm back. Well, I'm Gabrielle again. The Gabrielle before what happened is gone forever, and I'll never ‘get over it.’ I'm just in a different place. I don't let it define me any longer. I'm not the scared woman trapped in that moment— unable to move forwards, unable to go back to who she was. Stuck in this never- ending loop of terror… You know what I mean, don't you?”

  Gabrielle changed her line of sight from her wineglass to me as she repeated, “Don't you?”

  I said nothing, did nothing. I hadn't been prepared for this, for this horror, this exercise in butchery. How do you respond when someone slices open their heart and gives you a guided tour of their pain? Now I knew why she looked at me like that back in the woods, now I knew virtually everything about Gabrielle and I had no idea what to say. What she expected me to say.

  Her eyes searched mine. “Now, Kennie, I've just told you all that about me for one reason. I want you to tell me what Janene said to you. I have a pretty good idea what it was, which is why I can understand your reaction. I've told her that the second you tell me what she said I'm going to sack her. Tell me, I need an official explanation, and then I can help you.”

  I looked down at my hands, clinging to each other in my lap. “It was nothing,” I said. It was everything. Words are sometimes everything. And those ones would not come out of my mouth. Especially not after what Gabrielle had just shared. I wasn't going to do that to her.

  “I can't let you come back to work until you give me a good reason for what I witnessed,” Gabrielle said.

  “I can't come back to work, then,” I said.

  “Kendra,” Gabrielle said, frustrated. “Why are you fighting me? Do you want to lose your job?”

  “No, but I'm not repeating what she said. Not for you, not to save my job.”

  Gabrielle gritted her teeth, inhaled deeply through her nose, exhaled deeply. “OK, tell me what happened to you,” she said. “Why have you come back from the conference a different person? I saw it on your face when I walked in on Monday. Something happened.”

  I stared off across the bar, watched a man in dirty jeans and a hoodie feed coin after coin into a fruit machine. The lights flashed as he slipped in money and pushed the colored buttons. I grabbed my glass intending to drink, but my hand, trembling and unsteady, shook half its contents all over the table. I put the glass down and hunted around my bag for a tissue. I was breathing hard. If I didn't, if I didn't take in as much oxygen as possible, I'd lose my grip. This state I was in, the one where I could talk to someone else, was fragile. Any more pressure and it would crack; I would shatter.

  “Sweetheart, talk to me.”

  “What about?” I wiped off my hand.

  “About what happened to you,” she said.

  “Your skin is still as smooth as silk. I love your skin.”

  “There's nothing to tell,” I said to Gabrielle.

  “I'd believe that if you weren't the poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder,” Gabrielle replied. “For as long as I've known you you've exhibited all the classic symptoms— jumpiness, isolation, the ability to talk about what happened to you as though it happened to someone else but still react like it happened to you. The way you always dress down or wear multiple layers. And you have flashbacks, don't you? Feeling as though you're reliving the event over and over? It's all normal. And it'll get easier to handle if you talk about it. Let me in, tell me about it.”

  “Please stop this, Gabrielle. I can't…” That was all I could manage, my surface was thinning out like the overstretched plastic of an overinflated balloon. Another press or two and it would come apart.

  “Did you see him? Is that it?” she asked.

  I closed my eyes. I was so tired. Suddenly very, very tired. I couldn't stay any longer. I slipped my bag strap over my shoulder, moved to get up.

  “Don't go, Kennie,” she said desperately, reaching out to stop me. “I'm sorry, we'll talk about something else. OK? Don't go.”

  I stayed in my seat, slipped my bag handle off my shoulder, resettled myself on the seat and the bag in my lap.

  “I can't cope at the moment without you, so you can come back to work on Monday, but I'll have to give you a verbal warning. It'll go on your record,” Gabrielle said.

  I nodded. That sounded more than fair. I'd behaved badly and I deserved to be punished.

  “Consider yourself warned. But what I said to Janene still stands: if you tell me what she said I'll sack her.”

  “So,” I said, using every last molecule of strength to inject sunshine into my tone, “I'll get the next round in, shall I? Same again?”

  “Yes, Kendra, same again,” she said. And I pretended I thought she was talking about the drinks.

  CHAPTER 34

  You're doing it wrong!” Summer proclaimed. She stared with despair, genuine, deep despair at her plate. It was all wrong. It was just a bowl of cornflakes.

  “What do you mean?” Kyle asked.

  “You're doing it wrong!” she shrieked in reply.

  That sound, the shriek, cut through Kyle's head, set his teeth on edge and ignited his temper. He looked at Jaxon. He was staring at his plate with an identi
cal look of despair.

  This is Kendra's fault, Kyle thought. He didn't know how or why, but he knew she was behind this.

  “How can I be doing it wrong. It's cornflakes.”

  “It's Saturday,” Jaxon said quietly.

  “I'm well aware that it's Saturday. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You're doing it wrong!” his daughter repeated. “I want Kendie to do it.”

  I knew it! Kyle thought.

  “Kendie does it properly. Kendie makes Saturday breakfast properly. You're doing it wrong.”

  Kendra. What had life been like before Kendra?

  The woman coaxed out new behaviors in both his kids. They'd latched onto her and hadn't let go. At first he'd thought it was the novelty factor, the fact there was someone new to play with, then he realized that it was because Kendra was constant. They knew she'd always be there. In the midst of Ashlyn's drinking, none of them had known whom they would be dealing with from one day to the next. Sometimes she was fun and buoyant, other days she wouldn't stop crying. Some days she would love them all, other days she'd tell them they'd ruined her life.

  She would say unbelievable things to him. None of it she remembered. He'd thought, at first, that it was shame and regret that made her act as if nothing had happened; then he discovered she genuinely didn't remember. She didn't remember saying he was the worst lover she'd ever had. She didn't recall telling him it was a good thing they had two children at once because even the thought of having him rutting on top her was more than she could stomach. She didn't remember crying in his arms saying she'd kill herself if he ever left her. He dreaded to think what she said to the twins when he wasn't there. When Ashlyn was drinking, they never knew who was going to walk through the door in the morning.